Ah-hotep tried to remember flesh, the feel of it clothing a soul. No more. Now she was intellect in a manufactured body. She no longer walked as she would have done in physical life but was kept afloat by the same energies she craved. A chain of artificial vertebrae hung from her torso in mockery of what once was, her shoulders and back splayed with canoptek vaporators that shone with green power as they absorbed the nascent power fields around her.

She lowered her staff of office towards the slouching human, using its gauss coils to extend her own biotek field. Green light lanced from the tip and struck the human, lapping at the particle bonds like a beast at a waterhole, stripping down each layer of its form one molecule at a time.

There was no satisfaction to be had from such a tiny morsel. Ah-hotep could drain the whole city of its energy and still she would want more. She watched the human disintegrate, becoming dust on the breeze and then nothing.

Ahead, the unsuppressed minds of the humans defending the citadel were a far greater noise, a buzz of emerging static on the edge of her awareness. She could feel the throb of the great reactors that kept the defensive screens functioning and powered the weapons that had started to rain down rudimentary chemical-powered projectiles onto the army of Simut. Their energy weapons spat crudely condensed light beams, woefully inefficient yet powerful enough to shatter the living metal bodies of the necrons.

Here and nowhere else, the effects of the Contra-Empyric Matrix were being held back. It was not entirely unexpected that the crux point of the world’s astromantic field would prove the most resistant to the soul-deadening overnull, but it was inconvenient. Already several hundred of Simut’s warriors had been force-ported back to the tomb ships for reconstruction. The screens themselves oscillated at an astromantic frequency, simulating a breach into the neversea. They swallowed the particle beams and gauss rays of the attackers and prevented translocation to within their effect, so Ah-hotep had brought herself down to the planet to personally denude the enemy citadel of its power.

She liked the sonascape, a calming mix of ambient waves emanating from unattended machinery in the distance. She did not hear as she had done so when mortal, but her highly attuned biotek field could pick up the vibrations of the slightest sound, so that the beating hearts of the nearby humans created a background thrum that danced across every surface. A more aggressive turbulence emanated from the citadel at the settlement’s centre, where stabs of generator power and the thud of weaponry created ripples of disturbance through the sonascape.