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The Rose by Chris Cook, Part 6 @->--
Eventually we left the Schola Progenium. This was not the end
of our education, but it marked an important turning point for me, for
all of us I believe. When we had arrived, two and a half years earlier,
we had been children, nothing more - human potential waiting to be.
When we left we were, however naive and inexperienced, soldiers and
believers, holy warriors who asked nothing from life. You may have
heard the common misquote-quote: 'we ask nothing but to be allowed to do
the Emperor's work.' Not true, really - we had been taught to endure
any hardship, that much was true, from the most basic living conditions
to the horrors of the battlefield, so far as that could be taught
without experience. But being 'allowed' to do the Emperor's work? No,
as we left Delva Four we had become people who would not ask even that -
we would do the Emperor's work, and be damned to anyone who stood in our
way. We were becoming Sisters of Battle. So we thought, anyway. Every
newly-trained group of novices thinks this, so far as I know, and they
all learn the same way we did that the Schola is a place where children
are prepared for the real lessons up ahead. Well, there doesn't seem to
be any place other than the battlefield where it is possible to learn
those lessons, so you'll have to forgive a handful of hopeful young
girls who thought they knew what a Sister of Battle was. But we would
find out.
The Holy Sentinel was not a large ship, its passenger quarters
being on the cramped side, but those few of us who boarded her found
the accommodations more than we had hoped for. Sleeping on the cold stone
of the Schola's floor, with only a thin blanket beneath you, makes even
the roughest shipboard bunk seem a luxury. There were fifteen Sisters
on board, and about that number again of crew, women whose devotion came
from the Sisterhood but whose training was of the Imperial Navy. Then
there was this small, wide-eyes group of novices, five of us, who were
addressed by the Sister Superior who commanded the ship's Sisters as
soon as we had left Delva orbit. We weren't told much, initially - we
were novices in the care of the Order of Our Lady of the Rose, a subset
of the Order of the Bloody Rose, and we were to shut up, do as we were
told, and keep out of the way. That was our introduction to service in
the Sisterhood, so far as I remember - there may have been a few more
words here and there, but I doubt it. The next day, after we had jumped
to warp on our way to the Administratum world Central, we began training
with the Sisters themselves.
I had wondered what would happen while we were on board ship,
for Central was over three weeks away, even for our fast ship, but it
turned out that we wouldn't be wasting our time. The one area of the
ship not built to a scale slightly smaller than apparently necessary was
the training deck, in constant use whenever we were in transit, which
was often. Ships such as the Holy Sentinel are built to be almost
constantly en route to their next destination, where they remain only
long enough for their cargo of Sisters to disembark, administer the
purity control tests that are the life's work of many orders like ours,
and take whatever action is required. If the tests are positive then we
leave again, confident that we leave behind us true servants of the
Emperor. If the tests are negative, we cleanse - detain, incarcerate,
or just plain exterminate the deviants. I didn't really understand what
this meant until the third world where we put into port, after Central
and its nearby asteroid colony of Longreach, a large moon known to its
inhabitants as Redsky. The name's origin was obvious to us as soon as
we set down - the moon orbited a gas giant with a very diffuse upper
atmosphere, that actually enveloped the moon itself. Day and night the
sky had a reddish haze to it, as if it were being seen through a thin
film of blood. We landed at night, and the stars were twinkling like
rubies.
We split up and administered the tests, which consisted of
genetic scans, interviews conducted under hypnosis and serums, data
analysis - the material for this was relayed to the Sentinel, where its
crew processed and returned it - and checking and re-checking seemingly
of every word or deed spoken or done in the place in living memory. How
Sister Superior Monikka, who led my team personally, kept track of it
all I couldn't understand. She seemed to be able to merely glance at a
page and recall every detail, right down to a tiny ink-stain on its
corner that a normal reader wouldn't even have seen.
It was approximately five hours after we had landed and entered
the facility - a monitoring station for local shipping, watching and
reporting on the 'mining' of the gases in the lower atmospheres of the
gas giants that populated the system. The Sister Superior had, after
the preliminary tests, sent all her Sisters off individually to conduct
the full range of tests, assigning the novices to some of them as
observers and assistants wherever necessary. I was in the company of
Sister Melany, a tall woman whose pale skin looks positively white
against the red of her armour. As a novice I wore plain robes, not so
different to those of a Progena - we still trained in armour, the same
suits we had used at the Schola, but until we had finished our term as
novices we wouldn't have the opportunity to wear real battle armour.
Sister Melany was finishing her assigned tests, genetic
screening for the most part, when I heard the soft tone that indicated a
communication. Melany's armour, of course, had all the usual voice
channels, and she spoke quietly, to the Sister Superior I assumed, for a
moment as I busied myself returning the screening equipment to its
cases, making sure each piece was correctly disassembled and touched by
the Mars seal that accompanied each case.
"Follow," Melany ordered just as I had finished packing the
last device away. I hauled the various cases up by their straps and lumbered
after her as she quickly made her way through the facility, never
pausing, never looking anywhere but ahead. I caught up with her as she
stopped outside the door of an office, one of dozens of tiny work-spaces
in the lower floors of the building we were in. Nothing that I could
see served to identify this room from any of the others. Melany touched
the entry panel and stepped through the door as soon as it swung open.
By the time I came to stand in the doorway she was half-way around the
desk inside, drawing a slim tube from a pouch on her belt as the menial
inside the room began to stand. I saw his mouth form the first syllable
of 'praised,' as in 'praised be the Emperor,' the standard greeting the
menials used when confronted with one of us. Melany had come to his
side in two quick steps, her free arm going around his neck, the other
pressing the tube to his skull, just above and forward of his left ear.
There was a brief sound, between a hiss and a whirr, and when she
released him he slumped back into his chair. I saw a red circle on his
head, neatly cauterised, where the tube had touched him. We had learned
how to operate the variant on the apothecary's carnifex that we used,
and I had recognised it as soon as it appeared in Sister Melany's hand.
I had never seen one used before.
She took a step back, and her hand touched her armour, on her
chest just below the neck, and her shoulders - the sign of the Imperial
eagle. Without thinking I copied the motion - it had become almost
instinct for me to do so whenever required. To be honest I couldn't
have consciously thought about it to save my life, then. Melany said a
few quick words under her breath, and led me away, back through the
corridors to where the Sisters were converging, their tests complete.
Half-way back I began to comprehend what had happened, and I began
trembling. I'm sure Melany saw me, but she made no comment. On the
shuttle trip back I made myself think of nothing beyond keeping my hands
from shaking as I sat as still as I could in my seat, listening to the
dull, familiar sound of the shuttle's engines.
Even so the Sisters must have known that we had such a reaction
- from the eyes of a couple of my fellow novices I knew I had not been
the only witness to an execution, although we never talked about that
first time. Nor was our shock brought to the attention of the Sisters
in any significant way, but nevertheless the next time we were assembled
in the Holy Sentinel's briefing room for tuition Sister Superior Monikka
made sure to address the point.
"There are three enemies whose presence we detect, and whose
threat we eliminate," she said. "Firstly, there are those whose
character is of a nature prone to straying from the Emperor's way.
These are not malicious or evil people - most likely they simply have
not been taught correctly, and lack faith in Him. Their existence casts
more shame on us, His servants, than on they themselves, for it is we
who have failed when a child reaches adulthood without faith. Every
effort is made to correct these people, so that they may find the faith
that has eluded them." She went on to describe the methods by which
such people we educated - sermon and prayer, hypnotic suggestion and
psycho-training, and in the most extreme cases the attention of
Confessors.
"Then there are those whose soul is impure. They cannot be
saved by normal means, and so must be erased. No amount of education or
instruction can hide the stain of darkness on a deviant soul, and it
would be foolish of us to try. But even so there are ways such
unfortunates can serve the Emperor. Many are turned into mechanical
servants, servitors, so that their body, untouched as it is by the
impurity of their soul, may still perform some small service. Some are
suitable for the fate of sustaining the Emperor in His vigil on Terra,
where the untamed threat of their impurity becomes an asset to Him, akin
to the ways of drawing power from such seemingly wild forces as atomics.
Those who are suitable, we send to serve the Emperor in these ways, in
the hope that their service may cause Him to look favourably on their
souls when they come before Him to be judged for their sins." There
were no servitors on the Sentinel, but we had seen them on occasion at
the facilities we visited.
"Finally there are those whose bodies are impure, the mutants.
They cannot be allowed to taint our proud race with their presence, for
mutation is deviation from the sacred form of the Emperor himself.
These unfortunates are truly cursed, for their souls are often noble,
trapped inside a shell unworthy of them. But, to our shame, we cannot
erase the deviance of the mutant, and there is no way for a noble soul
in such a being to be freed of its curse. These poor creatures we
release from their mortal bondage, in the hope that the Emperor will
look kindly upon their souls when divorced from their malformed bodies,
and grant them the honour of purity in death which they were denied in
life."
I suppose it made sense in a way, but it was cold comfort. The
privations of the Schola had taught us, among other things, to take rest
wherever we could, regardless of the circumstances. But I lay awake
that night for a long time, silently wishing and praying that, against
the unrelenting realities of the galaxy, there could be a better way.
@->--
To be continued...
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TRANSLATOR: Chris Cook
TRANSMITTED: Alliance Heavy Cruiser Artemis
CROSSFILE: http://www.netspace.net.au/~alia/
AUTHOR: Sister Antonia
THOUGHT: To every life a light that shines.
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