The enemy fortification was a grandiose structure at the centre of the city, rising above the buildings that surrounded it. Through the shimmer of the screens, Ah-hotep saw banked storeys of battlements and buttresses, broken by cannon turrets and embrasures. The double-headed eagle device of the Imperial humans was carved in relief on many walls and above the great gateways at ground level. That they even dared call their scattered colonies an empire was an affront to the necrons. It had no more claim on a galaxy than the microscopic organisms of a sea could claim to rule the waves. In time the dominion of the necrons would be restored and the child races either exploited properly or exterminated.

The route to the main barbican was littered with corpses as proof of the defenders’ reluctance to succumb, though only for a short distance outside the influence of the citadel’s astromantic footprint. The humans had learnt early on that if they strayed too far from their defensive line, they succumbed wholly to the overnull’s debilitating shadow. This was the weakness of the defence, which Simut had so far failed to exploit. He had despatched his great war engines and elite phalanxes to overwhelm the citadel with a single grandiose attack. This had played directly into the strength of the enemy, giving them valuable targets to destroy at distance.

Ah-hotep had another plan: overcome with attrition. Three thousand of Simut’s warriors marched with her along three intersecting routes, and would come upon the foe in such numbers that they would physi­cally breach the defensive screens. Once within, Ah-hotep would draw out the energy of the defenders and hunt down the astromancers whose powers kept the overnull at bay. Once the thought-strong were slain, the resonator would fog the minds of the survivors, leaving them unable to defend themselves as the plasmancer shut down their weapons and defences. Her army would occupy the citadel and the placement of the resonator could be completed.

The guns of the fortress opened fire again in response to the approach of the necron legion. Explosions ripped swathes through the advancing artificial warriors, scattering living metal amid blossoms of intense heat expansion. Where these detonations occurred nearby, Ah-hotep let free her energetic spirit, syphoning away the volatile reactions to channel the power back into the fractured bodies of Simut’s warriors. The process was harder than if she led her own troops but the overlord, ever jealous or suspicious of those around him, had forbidden the mobilisation of the phalanxes aboard Ah-hotep’s thrallship.

Bolts of star-stuff rained down, turning warriors to molten pools that Ah-hotep spun into renewed bodies with a simple extension of will. Around her the warriors could not die, sustained not only by their own superlative construction but also the energy-wielding abilities of the plasmancer. An emerald ghost-aura danced about her and the nearest echelons, swathing the advancing skeletal soldiers.