Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The only architecture of significant interest was a roadway over a hundred metres in width that led into the ground beneath the surface complex. Whatever colossal doors had once opened into the underground complex were long buried beneath the wasteland’s shifting tides. It would only be a handful of decades before the last evidence of the roadway itself was covered over.

  One of the bunker buildings contained nothing but a series of elevators. The bulkhead doors to each lift were sealed, and the machinery lining the walls and connected to the shafts was all powered down. Keypads with runic buttons of various colours were installed on the wall next to each closed door.

  ‘There is no power here,’ the Reclusiarch said as he looked around. ‘They left this place entirely devoid of energy?’ That would make reactivation – if this installation was even ever meant to be reactivated – an incredibly difficult operation.

  Jurisian walked around the interior of the bunker, his thudding tread making the floor tremble.

  ‘No,’ he said, his vox-voice a slow, considering drawl. ‘There is power. The installation sleeps, but does not lie dead. It is locked in hibernation. Power still beats through its veins. The resonance is low, the pulse is slow. I hear it, nevertheless.’

  Grimaldus stroked his fingertips along the closest keypad, staring at the unknown sigils that marked each button. The language of the runes was not High Gothic.

  ‘Can you open these doors?’ he asked. ‘Can you get us down into the complex?’

  Jurisian’s four machine-arms extended again, their claws articulating. Two of the servo-arms came over the Techmarine’s shoulders. The other two remained closely aligned with his true arms. The Master of the Forge approached one of the other elevator bulkheads, already reaching for his enhanced auspex scanner mag-locked to his belt. The arms reaching over his shoulders took Jurisian’s bolter and blade, gripping them in claw clamps and leaving the knight’s hands free.

  ‘Jurisian? Can you do this?’

  ‘It will necessitate a great deal of rerouting power from auxiliary sources, and those will be difficult to reach from a remote connection point here. A parasitic feed is required from–’

  ‘Jurisian. Answer the question.’

  ‘Forgive me, Reclusiarch. Yes. I will need one hour.’

  Grimaldus waited, statue-still, watching Jurisian work. Cyria quickly grew bored, and wandered through the complex, speaking with the storm-troopers on duty. Two were returning from their shift at a boundary post, and the adjutant waved them over as she stood in the avian shadow cast by the gunship.

  ‘Ma’am,’ the female trooper saluted. ‘Welcome to D-16 West.’

  ‘Now we have Helsreach brass coming to visit, okay?’ said the other. He made the sign of the aquila a moment later. ‘I told you it would be good.’

  Cyria returned their salutes, not even a little off-guard at their nonchalance. Storm-troopers were the best of the best, and their distance from regular troops often bred a little… uniqueness… into their attitudes.

  ‘I’m Adjutant Quintus Tyro.’

  ‘We know. We were told this on the vox. Digging for secrets in the sand, yes? That is not going to make the Mechanicus smile, I think.’

  Whether the Mechanicus would be pleased or not evidently didn’t matter to this man. He was smiling, either way.

  ‘A big risk,’ he added, nodding sagely as if this was some hidden truth he had worked out alone. ‘It may bring much trouble, eh?’ He still seemed entertained by the concept.

  ‘With respect,’ the female trooper – her stormcoat badge read DOMOSKA in flat black letters – said, looking uncomfortable, ‘Will this not anger the Legio Invigilata?’

  Tyro stroked a stray lock of her dark hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She repeated exactly what Grimaldus had said to her when she’d asked the same question during the Thunderhawk flight here.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘but it’s not like they can leave the city in protest, is it?’

  The doors opened.

  The motion was smooth, but the noise of resistant machine-innards was immense: a squealing, unlubricated whine that split the air. Inside the elevator, the spacious car had enough room for twenty humans. Its walls were a matte, gunmetal grey.

  Jurisian stepped back from the control console.

  ‘It was necessary to power down all other ascent/descent systems. This one shaft will function. The others are now soulless.’

  Grimaldus nodded. ‘Will we be able to return to the surface once we go down?’

  ‘There is a thirty-three point eight per cent chance, given current system destabilisation, that a return ascent will require additional maintenance and reconfiguring. There is a further twenty-nine per cent chance that no reconfiguring will restore function without access to the primary installation power network.’

  ‘The word you’re looking for, brother,’ Grimaldus stepped towards the open doors, ‘is “maybe”.’

  They wandered down there for hours.

  The underground complex was a silent – and initially lightless – series of labyrinthine corridors and deserted chambers. Jurisian brought the installation’s overhead lighting back online after several minutes at a wall console.

  Cyria clicked her torch off. Grimaldus cancelled his helm’s vision intensifier settings. With flickering reluctance, dull yellow lighting illuminated their surroundings.

  ‘I have resuscitated the spirits of the illuminatory array,’ Jurisian said. ‘They are weak from slumber, but should hold.’

  The bland greyness all around them soon grew uninspiring as they ventured deeper into the complex. Around corners, through silent chambers with inactive engines, motionless machinery and generators of unknowable purpose.

  Jurisian would occasionally pause and examine some of the Mechanicus’s abandoned technology.

  ‘This is a magnetic field stabiliser housing,’ he said at one point, walking around what looked to Cyria like an oversized tank engine as big as a Chimera APC.

  ‘What does it do?’ she made the mistake of asking.

  ‘It houses the stabilisers for a magnetic field generator.’

  Her fear of the Astartes had dimmed some way by this point. She fought the urge to sigh, but failed.

  ‘Do you mean,’ Jurisian enquired, ‘what application does this have in Imperial technology?’

  ‘That’s close to what I meant, yes. What is its purpose?’

  ‘Magnetic fields of significant size and intensity are difficult to create and a struggle to maintain. Many of these units would be required to work in synchronicity, stabilising a powerful field of magnetic force. Such standard constructs as this housing are used in anti-gravitational technology, much of which is kept sealed by Mechanicus secrecy. More commonly, the Imperial Navy would use these units in the construction and maintenance of starship-sized magnetic accelerator rings. Plasma weapon technology, on a grand scale.’

  ‘No,’ Cyria shook her head. ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘We shall see,’ Jurisian rumbled. ‘This is only the installation’s first level. From the angle of the buried roadway, I would conjecture that the complex proceeds beneath the earth for at least a kilometre. From my knowledge of template patterns used in Mechanicus facility construction, it is more likely to be two or three kilometres deep.’

  Nine hours after Grimaldus, Jurisian and Cyria had entered the installation, they reached the fourth sublevel. The third level had taken almost six hours to traverse, with sealed doors requiring more and more intensive manipulation to coax open. At one point, Grimaldus had been certain they were thwarted. He hefted his crozius in both hands, triggering it live, ready to vent his anger on the unopening door.

  ‘Don’t,’ Jurisian said, without looking up from the controls.

  ‘Why not? You said this might be impossible, and time is not our ally down here.’

  ‘Do not apply force to the doors. These are, as you have seen, each no less than four metres thick. While you will eventually
hammer through to the other side, it will not be a rapid endeavour, and such violence is likely to activate the installation’s significant defences.’

  Grimaldus lowered his mace. ‘I see no defences.’

  ‘No. That is their strength, and the primary reason no living and augmetic guards are required.’

  He still did not look away from his work as he spoke. Four of Jurisian’s six arms all worked at the console: hitting buttons, pulling clusters of wires and cables, tying them, fusing them together, replacing them, tuning dead screens. His lower servo-arms were now coiled close to his back-mounted power pack, carrying his bolter and power sword.

  ‘There are,’ Jurisian continued, ‘twelve hundred needle-thin holes in the walls, spaced ten centimetres apart, in this corridor alone.’

  Grimaldus examined the walls. His visor locked onto one immediately, now he knew they were there.

  ‘And these are…?’

  ‘A defence. Part of one. The application of force, no matter how righteous, brother, will trigger the machinery behind these holes – and the same holes in many other corridors and chambers throughout the complex – to release a toxic gas. It is my estimation that the gas would attack the nervous system and respiration above all, making it especially lethal to fully biological intruders.’

  The Master of the Forge nodded pointedly to Cyria.

  Grimaldus’s crozius went dead as he released the trigger. ‘Have there been other defences that escaped our attention?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jurisian said. ‘Many. From automated las-turrets to void-shield screens. Forgive me, Reclusiarch, this code manipulation requires my full attention.’

  That had been three hours ago.

  Finally, the doors opened to the fourth sublevel. To Cyria, the air was painfully cold, and she pulled her stormcoat tightly closed.

  Grimaldus failed to notice her discomfort. Jurisian merely commented, ‘The temperature is at a survivable level. You will not suffer lasting harm. This is common in Mechanicus facilities that are left on minimal power.’

  She nodded, her teeth chattering.

  Ahead of them, the corridor widened to end in a huge double doorway, sealed as every other door had been so far. On this one, etched into the dull, grey metal, was a single word in bold Gothic.

  - OBERON -

  This was why Grimaldus hadn’t noticed Cyria’s shivering. He could not take his eyes off the inscription, with each letter standing as tall as a Templar.

  ‘I was right,’ he breathed. ‘This is it.’

  Jurisian was already at the door. One of his human hands stroked the surface of the sealed portal, while the others accessed the wall terminal nearby. Its complexity was horrific compared to those stationed at the previous doors.

  ‘It is so beautiful…’ Jurisian sounded both hesitant and awed. ‘It is magnificent. This would survive orbital bombardment. Even the use of cyclonic torpedoes against nearby hives would barely harm the protection around this chamber. It is void-shielded, armoured like no bunker I have ever seen… and sealed with… with a billion or more individual codes.’

  ‘Can you do it?’ Grimaldus asked, his gauntleted fingertips brushing the ‘O’ in the inscribed name.

  ‘I have never witnessed anything so complex and incredible. It would be like mapping every particle within a star.’

  Grimaldus withdrew his hand. He seemed not to have heard.

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘Yes, Reclusiarch. But it will take between nine and eleven days. And I would like my servitors sent to me as soon as you return. ’

  ‘It will be done.’

  Cyria Tyro felt tears standing in her eyes as she stared at the name. ‘I don’t believe it. It can’t be here.’

  ‘It is,’ Grimaldus said, taking a last look at the doors. ‘This is where the Mechanicus hid the Ordinatus Armageddon after the First War. This is the tomb of Oberon.’

  As they returned to the surface, Cyria’s hand-vox crackled for her attention, and a signal rune pulsed on Grimaldus’s retinal display.

  ‘Tyro, here,’ she said into her communicator.

  ‘Grimaldus. Speak,’ he said within his helm.

  It was the same message, delivered by two different sources. Tyro had Colonel Sarren, his voice more of an exhausted sigh than anything else. Grimaldus heard the clipped, imperious tones of Champion Bayard.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ the champion said. ‘The Old Man’s predictions were correct, as you suspected. The enemy is annihilating Hades Hive from orbit. It is crudely done. Standard bombardment, with mass drivers to hurl asteroids at a defenceless city. A dark day’s work, brother. Will you return soon?’

  ‘We are on our way back now,’ he said, and killed the link.

  Tyro lowered her communicator, her face pale.

  ‘Yarrick was right,’ she said. ‘Hades is burning.’

  CHAPTER IX

  Gambits

  The enemy did not come on the second day.

  The defenders watched from the walls of Helsreach as the wastelands turned black with enemy vessels and clans of orks establishing their territory, making primitive camps and raising banners to the sky. More landers brought new floods of troops. Bulk cruisers disgorged fat-hulled wreck-Titans.

  Upon the enemy banners, thousands of crudely painted symbols faced the city, each one depicting a bloodline, a tribe, a xenos war-clan that would soon be hurling itself into battle.

  From the battlements, the Imperial soldiers marked these symbols, and responded in kind. Standards flew above the walls – one for every regiment serving inside the city. The Steel Legion banners flew in greatest number, ochre and orange and yellow and black.

  After he returned from D-16 West, Grimaldus himself planted the banner of the Black Templars among those already standing on the north wall. The Desert Vultures gathered to watch the knight ram the banner pole into the rockcrete, and swear an oath that Helsreach would never fall while one defender still lived.

  ‘Hades may burn,’ he called to the gathered soldiers, ‘but it burns because the enemy fears us. It burns to hide the enemy’s shame, so they need never look upon the place where they lost the last war. While the walls of Helsreach stand, so stands this banner. While one defender draws breath, the city will never be lost.’

  In echo of his gesture, Cyria Tyro persuaded a moderati to plant the banner of the Legio Invigilata nearby. Lacking a banner suitable for handling by humans rather than the huge standards that were borne by the god-machines, one of the weapon-arm pennants from the Warhound Titan Executor was used in absentia – mounted on a pole and driven into the wall between two Steel Legion banners.

  The soldiers on the wall cheered. Unused to such attention outside the cockpit of his beloved Warhound, the moderati seemed awkwardly pleased by the reaction. He made the sign of the cog to the officers present, and made the sign of the aquila a moment later, as if anxiously covering a mistake.

  At night, the winds blew harder and colder. It almost cleared the air of the sulphuric stench that was forever present and, at its strongest, it dragged the standard of the 91st Steel Legion from the battlements of the west wall. Preachers attached to the regiment warned that it was an omen – that the 91st would be the first to fall if they did not stand defiant when the true storm struck.

  As the sun was setting, Helsreach shook with thunder to match the maelstrom taking place on the wastelands. Stormherald was leading several of its metal kin to the walls, where the largest – the battle-class Titans – could fire over the battlements once the enemy came in range.

  The Guard were ordered to abandon the walls for hundreds of metres around the god-machines. The sound of their weapons discharging would be deafening to anyone too close, and even being near the gigantic guns could be lethal, with the amount of energy they unleashed as they fired.

  No one in Helsreach would be sleeping tonight.

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘Brother,’ a voice called to him. ‘The Crone of Invigilata requests your p
resence.’

  Grimaldus had returned to the city hours ago. He had been expecting this summons.

  ‘I am in prayer,’ he said into the vox.

  ‘I know, Reclusiarch.’ It was not like Artarion to be so formal.

  ‘Did she request my presence, Artarion?’

  ‘No, Reclusiarch. She, ah, “demanded” it.’

  ‘Inform Invigilata I will attend Princeps Zarha within the hour, once my ritual observations are complete.’

  ‘I do not believe she is in the mood to be kept waiting, Grimaldus.’

  ‘Nevertheless, waiting is what she will do.’

  The Chaplain closed his eyes again as he kneeled on the floor of the small, empty chamber in the command spire, and once more let his mouth form the whispered words of reverence.

  I approach the amniotic tank.

  My weapons are not in my hands, and this time, in the close confines of the Titan’s busy cockpit chamber, the tension from before is distilled into something altogether more fierce. The crewmen, the pilots, the tech-priests… they stare with unconcealed hostility. Several hands rest on belts close to sheathed blades or holstered firearms.

  I refrain from laughing at this display, though it is no easy feat. They command the greatest war machine in the entire city, yet they concern themselves with ceremonial daggers and autopistols.

  Zarha, the Crone of Invigilata, floats before me. Her lined, matronly face is twisted by emotion. Her limbs twitch in gentle spasm every few moments – feedback from the link with Stormherald’s soul.

  ‘You requested my presence?’ I say to her.

  The old woman suspended in the fluid licks her metallic teeth. ‘No. I summoned you.’

  ‘And that was your first mistake, princeps,’ I tell her. ‘You are granted permission to make only two more before this conversation is over.’