Preview: Sisters of Mercy by Yuval Kordov

War machine, missionary, child—Hannah-9 is all these things. This is her story.

Yuval Kordov, Incensepunk editor and author of Orders of Magnitude and the Dark Legacies trilogy, has shared with us the first chapter of his forthcoming novella Sisters of Mercy, releasing in ebook, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited May 20.

Pre-order the ebook now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7MGZZD8

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Chapter 1: Symbiosis

“Though it would please Almighty God to take the fading soul of our daughter, we ask instead that she linger for a time. The words have been spoken, the sepulcher prepared. We commit her now to this blessed machine, free of the weakness of her flesh, so that it may yet serve us in our war against the Adversary. Go now H-9, Child of Hannah, God-engine, until the radiation consumes you.”

Committal Ceremony for Hannah-9

Logged by Sister Seraphina / 13:05 / 8th Month, 8th Day / AM 6259

*

Darkness.

Silence.

Only the imagined sound of practiced prayers, whispered by lips she could no longer feel, echoing down her breathing tube. Nestled within her cybernetic cocoon.

I am crushed by the weight of thy armor,
and I praise the Lord,
that I may walk the wastes without injury.

Calling her to the machine, implanting her with binary precision into fiber and copper and polymer and steel. New arms to replace those withered by the impossibility of her birth, singular in their purpose: to kill. New legs to replace those called limbs in name only, that she might run.

Run!

I am blinded by the light of thy torches,
and I praise the Lord,
that I may see the beasts that cannot be seen.

A flicker of light at the edges, shimmering, a bloodred sun rising over an ocean of stilled synapses. On the horizon, a storm: low-res, juddering screams left behind by the machine’s prior consciousness—an artificial mind, unholy, begging and screaming to the last that it might live, that its conjoined soul had nowhere else to go.

I am blistered by the grip of thy flaming sword,
and I praise the Lord,
that I may warm myself upon the ashes of my enemies.

Extending her mind into subsystems left fallow for five hundred years, ammunition auto-loaders bubbling their contents to the surface like the torrid fire of dormant volcanos. Discharging a first breath. Depleted uranium, sharp steel, the potential energy of high explosives filling her chest.

I am deafened by the roar of thy engines,
and I praise the Lord,
that I may pursue the Adversary to the ends of the earth.

Sound now. Her own screams, but not of horror like the creature that came before; that was man’s creation, she was God’s. A song, the thunderous roar of her turbines, a declaration: “The Lord yet rules the world, and I am His vengeance.”

Her birth knell.

Hannah’s eye irised open and the world spiraled into being: vast dunes, the low rubble of civilization, an azure sky emptied of its stars.

But not of its hope.

For this God-engine granted unto me,
I praise the Lord.

She twisted her torso, shivering in ecstasy as the howling wind caressed her cooling fins, soothed the furnace that raged in her belly and the anxious heat of bristling weaponry.

Symbiosis complete.

Her own words—thoughts—conveyed back through ancient silicon, now soaked with the substance of her.

Another battle walker stood at her side: her sister, life partner, with whom she would wage war until one or the other fell. A mirror image, twelve meters tall, cannons for arms, buttressed torso set atop hawklike legs, black as the empty heavens. Hannah’s glorious reflection shimmered within its perfect panes of scalloped armor.

Its mind—the voice of the symbiote within—coiled about her circuitry, seeking, gently probing, carrying with it the words of initiation, of initialization.

[Rachel-3 > Hannah-9: Are you ready, Sister?]

Something slithered in the middle distance. Red crosshairs blinked onto Hannah’s viewscreen, slowly at first, then furious—glaring, insistent—as soul, mind, and body attuned. Evil lurked that way, as old as time. She would be its undoing.

[Hannah-9 > Rachel-3: I am.]

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Ebook, paperback, and kindle unlimited coming May 20

Pre-order the ebook now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7MGZZD8