Acts of faith part 1

[McDougall Designs]

Dull and monotonous clanking filled the air. It echoed off the ferrocrete walls of the hab block.  To the sisters of the Veraxan Order, their ceramite clad footfalls were like the pealing of the great bell of martyrs on their home world of Sanzio.

The squad of battle sisters, ten strong, advanced through the hab block. Godwyn pattern bolters barked in the darkness, followed by squelching explosions as they impacted.

 "Contact front, heretic neutralized. Advance." Sister Mira's voice was clear and without static. Sister superior Isabelle thanked the machine spirit of her armor with a silent prayer. 

"Stay vigilant, sisters. Purgatum protocols. Cleanse these blasphemous xenos worshippers." Isabelle commanded. 

The xenos worshippers in question was the cult of the spiral king, a foul group of Bazran VI PDF forces that had been enslaved to the will of the tyranids. The purple and grey of their uniforms rendered into bloody chunks by the sororitas weapons. The remains littered a hab-room, it's door ajar. Evidently they had been lying in ambush for any incoming imperial forces. 

The sisters of the Veraxan Order were engaged in purging the entire city, not just the hab block that Isabelle's squad was sweeping. The preceptory force accompanying Strike Force Leonine on its mission as a solblade fleet. Leviathans tendrils had reached Bazran and needed to be stopped.

Suddenly there was a scrabbling sound from Isabelle's left. She swung her power sword out in a blind slash. The blades power field sang as it carved a cultist from collar to groin. It had lunged with a knife from a shadowed portion of the hallway her sister's were advancing through. 

"Azarai, bathe this foul place in the fires of His wrath!" Isabelle commanded, motioning for one of her sisters to take point.

Azarai cut a striking figure as she swept past the rest of the squad. Her armor the cerulean metallic the order was known for, but her helmet was accented with gold. Her bone colored robes were marked by soot and ash, for she bore a holy flamer to purge His enemies. 

"Engaging. Blessed be His wrath." came Azarai's acknowledgement.  "Long may His foes burn" returned the rest of the squad. The hallway ahead of the squad erupted in a conflagration. Every inch of the ferrocrete surface scoured by the sanctified promethium from Azarai's weapon. Human and alien screams erupted as dark was turned to light, a mass of cultists roasting and thier corrupted souls purged.

The sisters advanced past the charred corpses, sanctum rosarium clinking from belts and wrists. Against armor plates. The hallway terminated in a rectangular auto-door. The food thick panel of steel had been torn like tissue paper. Great rents  had been torn into the metal.

The doorway opened onto one of the hab blocks open air exercise decks. The hab block was a hollow tower roughly 600 standard terrain levels tall. Each 20 levels had a deck area jutting into the open space, forming a kind of track for running, and with a larger extension into the central area for other equipment. Sets of weights lined the low walls. 

Bazras suns were out, and deep amber slight flooded off the semi reflective panels throught the inner walls of the hab block.

There was a scream. A scream unlike anything Isabelle had heard before, alien and primal. Ceras was dead in a flash of plasma, without time even to scream. 

Within a second, it was amongst them, charging through the plasma vapor where their sister had been. Mira was bisected at the waist before she had a chance to fire. Bolters barked in revenge, and Azarai sent a gout of promethium straight into the things face. It roared and reared upward.

Tessaria slackened as one of the things talons impacted with her skull, her bolter falling from her grasp as the things arm sheared through her body and into the the deck.

"For the Emperor, sisters! Slay the xenos!" Isabelle charged at the tyranids organism. Her armors auto-sensors identified it as a form of Carnifex. Large, and marked as secundus extremis purge signifiers.

The remaining members of the squad unloaded their weapons at the thing. Bolter rounds impacted against gard chitin and penetrated flesh alike, but the beast would not slow.

Sister Maribel attempted to throw a krak grenade into its gaping maw, and had her arm neatly severed above the elbow. She dropped to one knee but kept firing her bolter one handed while screaming.

"Purge the xenos, for the xenos is unclean in the eyes of The Emperor." The verse was from a voice Isabelle did not expect. Zephyrim superior Lea should have been deeper in the city by now.

Instead, like the angels of the God Emperor himself, she and her squad descended from on high. Using the momentum of her descent, Lea drove the adamantine poke of the Zephyrim pennant she bore straight into the beasts skull And the beast crumpled to the deck, dead.

The Sororitas tended to their dead and wounded. Locator beacons placed so that ministorum consecratori could find the bodies and retrieve them or what was left.

Maribel was calm, Isabelle could see her breathing slowly as she mouthed prayers to the throne.  One of the Zephyrim had applied combat stimms. There was a grunt of pain, as the sister cauterized Maribel's stump of an arm.

"Martyrs in His eyes" Lea's voice was solemn with grief for the fallen. Isabelle couldn't fault her moments weakness. Their squads had trained together in the Basillicae morticaes darkened vaults back on Sanzio.

"And martyrs beget miracles, sister. You arrived at just the moment to slay the xenos creature." Isabelle glanced at the thing. It's Brutish, massive head slack and maw agape upon the pennant's adamantine haft.