The Silent Vow survived the madness of the Immaterium and reached its destination. Atarine Hestia stood at the command platform. Her golden armour was etched with the grim litanies of her station. Beside her, Veyra Sol, the Questora, monitored the shifting auspex feeds as they transitioned into real-space.
As the Silent Vow turned off its Gellar field and breached the atmosphere of the planet below, they realised that they were not welcome. The sky was filled with the erratic welcome of Ork Dakkajets, Warkoptas and Deffkoptas. The Orks didn't have high-range sensors, but they had "da itch." The presence of the Sisters was like a bucket of ice water poured over the collective psychic gestalt of the Waaagh!
"DERE'S A BIG BLACK BOX IN DA SKY! GET IT!" a Kopta pilot roared.
The Dakkajet was an incredibly fast Ork aircraft propelled by a single, massive jet engine. It roared through the sky, guns blazing, a near constant stream of bullets from its Supa Shootas, tormenting the Silent Vow from all directions. Dakkajet pilots firmly believe in quantity over quality and commonly bolt as many guns as possible to their aircraft - some of those bullets are bound to hit the target.
Rokkits also slammed into the Silent Vow's hull, causing the ship to shudder, and the bridge filled with the sound of groaning metal.
Hestia didn't blink, though. Her fingers snapped through the air in sharp motions of Battlemark. Battlemark was less flexible than ThoughtMark, and also less ambiguous, and its larger gestures could be seen from farther away.
This made it a better choice for a command language on the field of battle.
'The vessel is compromised. Forced orbital insertion. Prepare for high-altitude grav-drop. We land in the Industrial Spires and use the explosion as cover.'
The Sisters moved with their usual, wordless synchronicity. They reached the launch bays just as a massive explosion tore through the ship's primary thrusters and caused it to shudder. Without a second's hesitation, the five golden figures stepped out.
As they had calculated it perfectly, they hit the ventilation spires of the Hive, just as the Silent Vow crashed into the side of the Hive and exploded. Grav-chutes softened the impact, but the landing was far from clean.
Sariel, the Vigilator, landed rather unfortunately. A structural beam sliced through the seal of her greave. Blood leaked onto the dusty gold of her armour, but she didn't make a sound. She simply rose, her Light Greatblade already in hand and ready for action.
Hestia sent her a look, which Sariel returned, assuring her that she was fine.
They were deep in the upper spires, which were a labyrinth of rusted pipes and clattering steam vents. The Sisters' aura showed itself, creating a psychic void that turned the ambient "Waaagh!" energy to nothing.
Veyra Sol held the Auspex in her hand and motioned in a direction. They moved furtively and quickly, not wanting to alert the obvious Ork presence any more than necessary.
They encountered their first obstacle near a primary coolant artery. A lone Ork stood guard, but to their luck, he wasn't watching the corridor. He was staring at his Shoota in his hand. His face was twisted with genuine Orky distress. The weapon, which was held together by wire and stubborn Ork belief, had simply died. The firing pin had snapped, the magazine had unspooled, and the "luck" that kept it functioning had suddenly vanished. What he didn't realise, because he couldn't, was that this was due to the Sisters' proximity.
He sniffed the air, as a cold, oily sensation crawled up his green spine. He didn't feel so orky right now. As he turned, his eyes widened at the sight of the golden wraiths, who had suddenly appeared before him.
Before he could draw breath to roar, Kaelen Voss's Executioner Greatblade slashed through the air.
Thud.
The Ork's head hit the floor with a wet thud. There was no battle cry, no warning, and to his dismay, he couldn't even fire his weapon... Just the silence of the merciless death of the Sisters.
'Move,' Hestia signed. 'The psychci gestalt-mind of the greenskins will notice the closer we move.'
As they descended through the Hive's labyrinthine interior, the "unease" they radiated became a problem for the most sensitive Orks.
The Sisters encountered a mob of twelve Goffs, who had, until a few minutes ago, been fighting amongst themselves in a narrow transit tunnel. Driven into a mindless, itchy rage, the Orks charged the golden Sisters blindly.
Liora Thorne, the Witchseeker of the group, stepped forward, her Witchseeker Flamer spat out a torrent of promethium, setting them all on fire.
To the Orks, the fire didn't feel as if it merely burned their bodies; it felt as if their very souls were being eroded, which made for a very painful and rather loud howling, much to the Sisters' concern.
Veyra Sol picked off the survivors who tried to flee with the Veridian Boltgun, knowing that the loud shouts had already revealed their position. Her shots echoed like explosions in the silent tunnels.
But the Orks were relentless. Now that they knew the Sisters, those humies that made them feel 'funny' were there, they were ready to kill them. They were even angrier than usual.
They no longer fled from the discomfort; instead, they tried to smash its source.
A jagged cleaver caught Kaelen's shoulder, biting through the Vratine armour, if only slightly. Another Sister took a stray, loud and powerful set of bullets to the thigh.
They were winning every skirmish, cutting and shooting through hordes of the Orks, but the Hive was a city of millions of Orks, and they were only five.
Even worse, they didn't realise that they were actually dealing with a Hive's minority, who hadn't been allowed to attend the 'bigger' event.
Slowly, the golden Vratine armour was painted with green gore and red blood. Their movements grew slower by picoseconds, as thousands of Orks rushed towards them like an endless tide, weighted by the ever-so-slow exhaustion and the relentless pressure of a Xenos and a Hive that seemed to want them dead.
That didn't mean that they were doing poorly, quite the opposite. They ploughed through the Xenos and kept a good pace towards their actual goal: the Underhive.
They made a tactical error. The Auspex told them the quickest way to the Underhive, but they failed to check the heat sources in the area they would have to move through.
They were led through a heavy blast door, which they thought was a service exit. Instead, they stepped out onto the green ocean of the Great Plaza.
The Sisters' eyes widened as they arrived and saw the several hundreds of thousands of Orks. They were gathered in a frenzy of anticipation, because it was the day of the "Third Meeting." Another month had passed since their second 'meeting', and they had prepared extensively since then.
Warboss Deffskull, a mountain of cybernetically-enhanced muscle, sat upon a throne made of crushed tanks. Big Meks were tuning Tellyporta Blasters, and Killa Kans were revving their saws. Deffskull had punched a lot of Bad Moons for their Teef, handing them to the Meks and making them build bigger machines of war for him to use against the humie. So much had they prepared that they even had a Gorkanaut ready.
When the Sisters appeared, the presence they had dropped onto the plaza like a physical weight. The "Waaagh!" field 'wobbled' and was affected.
The Orks stopped their cheering.
Hundreds of Thousands of heads turned upward, their eyes filling with a strange, sociopathic hatred for the "shiny gits" who were ruining their fun.
"KILL 'EM!" the Warboss roared and pointed at the Sisters.
The following slaughter was disastrous.
The Sisters leapt from the mezzanine into the fray, knowing there was no retreat, and if they wanted to make it out alive, they had to force themselves through half of the plaza.
Atarine Hestia did not wait for the Orks to attack. She raised the Adhratic Destructor, an archeotech relic of the Dark Age of Technology, and fired. A beam of agonisingly bright white light lanced out, striking a massive Meganob closest to them. There was no explosion, no gore or flashy sight, the dangerously unstable energy beam severed the internal bonds of the Ork and his massive armour, causing him to unravel in a spectacularly destructive manner, leaving only a flaring after-image of what was.
'Burn them,' Hestia's fingers signed in Battlemark.
Liora Thorne stepped into the gap created by the Adhratic blast. She braced her Witchseeker Flamer and pulled the trigger. A thirty-foot tongue of white-hot promethium flames shot out across the front rank of the Goff Boyz.
Two dozen Orks were turned into screaming pillars of fire, their psychic connection to the Warboss severed due to the Null field of the Sisters, and even those standing behind them fell to their knees, clutching their heads as their "gestalt" link shuddered.
Behind the wall of fire, the two Vigilators, Kaelen and Sariel, moved like two lethal spinning blades.
Kaelen Voss swung her Executioner Greatblade in a wide, horizontal arc. The blade, which was humming with a power field, sheared through the midsections of three Goffs at once. She didn't stop and stepped over the bisected corpses to thrust the tip of her blade through the throat of a Nob who was struggling to unjam his Twin-linked Shoota.
The Ork's reality-warping belief had failed him; the gun was just a heavy piece of dead iron in his hands, like it would be for any other race if it held the weapon.
Sariel was the fastest among them. She was a blur spinning her light Greatblade in her right hand while her Needle Pistol shot hyper-toxic darts into the eyes and joints of the larger Nobz. She moved with a lethal grace that was very hard to replicate, decapitating two Orks in a twin-stroke before leaping onto the shoulders of a third, using his head as a springboard to leap over a charging Squighog.
Veyra Sol acted as the group's guardian angel. Her Veridian Boltgun barked with double-taps. Each mass-reactive shell found its mark on a Mek's eye-lens, a Tankbusta's rokkit-pack and a Warbike's fuel line.
Explosions blossomed across the plaza, adding to the chaotic racket, but for the Sisters, the world remained as quiet as they were used to. Not physically, but otherwise.
In the first sixty seconds, the Sisters had killed nearly two hundred Orks.
"Dey's got da bad humie-shiver!" a Big Mek screamed, frantically trying to reset his Tellyporta Blasta.
"Krump 'em! Krump 'em all!" Warboss Deffskull roared.
The Warboss didn't feel fear, but he felt a strange irritation which made him even angrier than he usually was. He pointed his massive Power Klaw at the Sisters' position in the plaza.
The value of numbers began to show.
The Sisters were forced into a tight defensive circle, moving like a "star" of blades, bolters and fire. Hestia used her Archeotech Plasma Pistol, since the Adhratic Destructor was out, to fire at a Killa Kan. The blue plasma melted through a part of the walker's armour and killed some of the Orks too close. But for every Ork they killed, twenty... fifty... hundreds more stepped over the body of their bretheren.
Sariel, seeing a Killa Kan revving its massive buzz-saw as it ploughed toward Hestia, broke formation. She looked like a golden streak, as she dove low, slid between the walker's hydraulic legs and sought the delicate wiring of the hip joints with her massive Greatblade.
She even managed to shear through the primary fluid line, spraying black oil across her Vratine plate, and as the walker groaned and tilted ever so slightly, she was supported by her Sisters who fired their weapons into the pilot's viewing slit.
The Killa Kan shuddered, its pilot dying. But Sariel had moved too deep into enemy lines.
In the moment of her triumph, a mob of nearly fifty Orks, Grots and Squigs saw a lone, golden target.
"GOTCHA, SHINY LADY!" an Ork roared.
Sariel spun around, her blade severing limbs and heads, but there were too many, and she had drifted too far from the group; even the smallest of mistakes would prove fatal in such a battle. One Gretchin latched onto her wounded leg, driving a rusted blade into the gap in her greave, and an Ork punched her head with his broken Choppa. She stumbled, and in that picosecond of instability, the dying Killa Kan above collapsed.
The massive, multi-ton walker fell directly toward her.
Sariel looked up, her eyes calm even in the face of death, and fired her last Needle Pistol shot into the throat of a charging Goff Nob before the shadow of the machine engulfed her and brought an abrupt end.
CRUNCH
The sound of the Killa Kan crushing her golden form was the first noise the Sisters had truly acknowledged since the battle began.
Hestia let out a wordless, silent shout of fury as the light of one of her Sisters was snuffed out by the greenskin tide.
Sariel was the first to fall.
'Hold the line! Move to the exit!' Hestia signed.
Her Archeotech Plasma Pistol was turning a Nob's head to heat with a glowing glow.
But the Big Meks were ready, and the bigger cannons, deffkptas, and all the other larger weaponry were closing in, and while they damaged much of their own men as well, it was only a matter of time until one of the Sisters of Silence would be hit by them.
One Mek levelled a Kustom Mega-Blasta. Veyra Sol, seeing the buildup of unstable energy aimed at Hestia, threw herself forward and tackled her leader just in time. The blast caught her mid-torso and separated her upper half from her lower half, while the remains were affected by the blast that followed. She was erased from existence, leaving only a scorched smell behind.