The cemetery is eerily quiet…
Alicia shivered in her armour has the team neared the cold iron gates that marked the entrance to the cemetery. In truth it was not the locale that made Alicia’s skin crawl, but the company that moved with them. Alongside their usual fair of a fire team of Battle Sisters, walked four Sisters-Repentia and their Superior. Their lithe unarmoured forms and oversized Eviscerator chainswords are a potent reminder of what awaits any Sister should she fail in her duties.
The undead strike before the Sisters have even entered the cemetery!
As the Adepta Sororitas task force approached the cemetery Superior Silvia, now cleared for active duty, ordered them to split into the two groups. The main bulk of the force heads towards the gate while Alicia follows Repentia-Superior Lethea and her charges around to the left. Just as they round on a stack of storage containers a half dozen undead horrors appear from a gap in the trees lining the edge of the cemetery. The Repentia need no encouragement from Lethea’s Neural Whip, they roar in anger and charge headlong at the undead. Holy fury meets unholy resilience as the two groups crash into each other. Eviscerators carve through flesh in bloody arcs but the undead feel no pain and strike back from injuries that would lay low any mortal foe. One Repentia cleaves a zombie apart from shoulder to hip but that does not stop it from lurching forward and sinking its teeth into her neck. Another has her face torn off by grasping claws before she’s dragged screaming to the ground. The remaining two Repentia rally with screams of anguish at their fallen comrades and stand their ground. The undead rush into them looking for more easy kills, but the Repentia have only hatred and fury for them. And this time they are not found wanting, brutally cutting down four of the undead horrors.
As the sounds of battle break out, Superior Silvia, Sister Jenine and the fire team reach the old iron gates that mark the formal entrance to the cemetery. The dark metal, pockmarked with spots of rust, offers little resists as it swings open. The Sisters enter the cemetery with purpose, their weapons ready to fire at a moment's notice. No sooner than they’re through the gate does a horde of nearly twenty undead monsters descend upon them. The Sister’s weapons speak with one voice: death. Bolt shells blow bodies apart and rune-inscribe stakes banish foul warp magicks. In the end, seven zombies lie in ruins on the ground.
The Repentia dispatch the single zombie remaining near the containers while Sister Alicia and Repentia-Superior Lethea make their way through the gap in the trees. As they make their way towards the objective, a half dozen undead pull themselves from the earth and make towards the Sororitas.
At the cemetery gate Silvia and Jenine continue their violent prosecution of the undead. Between Silvia’s condemnor bolter and Jenine’s boltgun they reap a bloody tally, sending five undead back to their graves. Their slaughter gives the fire team of Battle Sisters room to make their way towards their own objective. With precision shots from her condemnor-bolter Silvia puts down the rest of the horde, the mass-reactive bolts blowing heads from shoulders.
Lethea and Alicia fire in unison, their bolters ripping apart all but one of the half dozen undead that stand before them. With the threat mostly neutralised they, along with the two Repentia move towards the crypt at the end of the cemetery. The Repentia jump on the remaining zombie with wanton rage and brutally cut the warp-spawned horror down while Alicia scouts the ruins of the crypt. As expected, the crypt has long been raided of his inhabitants. Her objective completed she voxes as such to Silvia and returns to the Repentia and their Superior. The former are kneeling with their heads bowed and a fresh Neural Whip welt from the latter on their backs. Lethea catches Alicia’s glance.
Sister Alicia and Repentia-Superior Lethea cut through the undead.
“Sometimes they can be too willing to die. There is no redemption in suicide.” the Repentia-Superior explains as the four of them make their way to the centre of the cemetery and the rest of the Sister’s task force.
Jenine kicks in the rusted gate of the central crypt, eyes casting about for anything that might jump out of the dark. Like so many other burial crypts this one has also been ransacked of whoever’s bones had been placed here. Unlike other crypts, whoever had looted it had taken the time to also desecrate the place. In their blasphemous ecstasy, which appeared to be mostly smearing the walls with faeces, they had dropped a number of personal effects. One of which was a crude club that was little more than sharpened sticks tied to a length of wood. Jenine turned it over slowly in her hands. Swamp dwellers? Here? She knew of them, reclusive technophobes that lived in Eterna’s marshlands and swamps. Aside from harrying the occasional convoy they were fairly harmless but more importantly, Jenine knew them to be a pious people. They revered the God-Emperor as the Tree-Above-All, the mythical great oak that stood at the centre of the deepest swamplands. That they might have turned from His light was troubling. Trying not to touch the club too much, she slips it into her belt and makes to leave the crypt.
Outside, Superior Silvia moves towards the final crypt and their last objective with the fire team covering her. Taking advantage of the momentary lack of undead, she orders the task force to group up on Sister Jenine while she bursts into the last crypt. Unlike the others this one seems to be untouched; the remains of Edmund Sauthier, Fifteenth Lord of Varenmer miraculously still in their resting place. Silvia logged it in her dataslate, it was a mystery for command to solve. For now, she needed to get her team back to base without taking any more casualties.
Superior Silvia completes the objective just in time.
Outside the crypt, Silvia is pleased to see that the rest of the team is making moves to group up in the middle of the cemetery. She gets halfway back to them when a quartet of undead shambles out from behind the crypt that Silvia had just scouted. Sister Jenine, Repentia-Superior Lethea, and the fire team let loose a hail of bolter fire aimed at the zombies. Reanimated flesh explodes in wet chunks but the foul magicks of the warp keep the undead from falling. It does, however, keep them from advancing any further. As if to add insult to injury, a new group of undead join the first from behind the crypt.
Silvia is already shouting into her vox as she rejoins her Sisters, she doesn’t wait for confirmation before she pulls a signal flare from her belt. Hearing the crackled affirmation of their transport, Silvia presses the activator and chucks the flare into the middle of the Sisters. As the transport comes screaming in from its holding pattern, the assembled Sororitas gather around the flare and take potshots at the undead to keep them at bay. Lethea has to practically restrain her two Repentia to keep them from charging into the undead in an attempt to sell their lives for redemption.
Debrief
Sister Jenine’s discovery of the swamp dwellers club is dismissed as coincidence for about a day and a half, after which it suddenly becomes the most important thing on Eterna. The team’s brief period of R&R comes to a lurching halt as they’re thoroughly interrogated to ascertain the validity of the club and where it was found. Eventually, Silvia and Alicia are released from questioning and instructed to prepare for deployment. Jenine, it seems, has further answers to provide her interrogators.
Before they leave to whatever warp-spawned hell awaits them Superior Silvia summons Alicia to the armoury. Both armoured for war in their power armour, she joins her Superior at the armoury’s consecration altar. Silvia gestures to the weapon on the altar as two menials are busy carrying out final checks and blessings.
“Do you know what this is, Sister?”
It was a Godwyn-De'az pattern Storm Bolter. Effectively two boltguns joined by a single firing trigger it was a formidable assault weapon capable of laying down withering hails of fire. It might not have the stopping power of heavy bolter or the blessed promethium of a flamer but it was near unrivaled for firepower amongst the Sororitas’ sister-portable weapons. Alicia could list off technical and the Rites of Firing but was not the answer Silvia was looking for. Alicia furrowed her brow, she had been under Silvia’s command for nearly a year now and was used to her particular teaching methods. In truth the Superior wasn’t really asking what it is, of course it’s a storm bolter, she was asking what it meant.
But what did it mean?
It was a storm bolter, yes. It was also an assault weapon. Alicia chose her words carefully.
“It is a sign, if you have been blessed with such a holy weapon, surely the tide is turning.”
Silvia gives her charge a weak smile.
“Close, Sister. You will be wielding this blessed weapon.”