Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘My princeps, we are receiving requests for Communion.’

  There will be no Communion. I hunt. Communion with the Legio can come tonight.

  ‘There will be no Communion. We hunt. Communion with the Legio can come tonight.’

  With effort, Valian turned around in his restraint throne. The cables snaking from his skull’s implant sockets turned with him, like a beast’s many tails.

  ‘My princeps, Princeps Veragon is dead and the Legio demands Communion.’ In his voice was the edge of concern, but never panic, nor fear. The rest of the battle group desired the momentary sharing of focus and purpose – the unity of princeps and the souls of their engines – that was tradition in the aftermath of loss.

  The Legio will wait. I hunger.

  ‘The Legio will wait. We hunger.’

  Forwards. Ready main weapons. I smell the xenos from here.

  Her voice emerged as a crackle of static, but Stormherald marched on.

  While Carsomir was not a man prone to extremes of emotion, something cold and uncomfortable crawled through his thoughts as he turned back to watch the cityscape through the Titan’s huge eye lenses.

  He may not have been as connected to Stormherald’s burning heart as the princeps was, but his own bonds with the god-walker were not devoid of intimate familiarity. Through his weaker tie to the engine’s semi-sentient core, he felt a depth of fury that was almost addictive in its all-encompassing purity. The passion transferred through his empathic link into grim irritability, and he had to resist the urge to curse the inefficiency of those around him as he guided the Titan onwards. Knowing the cause of his distracted irritation was no balm for it.

  The Titan’s right foot came down on a street corner, pulverising a cargo conveyer truck into flat scrap. Stormherald turned with a majestic lack of speed, and hull-mounted pict-takers panned to show a wider avenue, and the afternoon sunlight glinting from Stormherald’s burnished iron skin. Valian was immersed, just for a moment, in the wash of exterior imagery fed through the mind-link. Hundreds of pict-takers, each one showing pristine silvery skin, or dense armour – cracked and pitted with its legacy of small arms fire.

  Ahead, down the wide avenue, was the enemy engine that blinked like a red-smeared migraine on the cockpit’s auspex scanners. Valian shuddered at the sight of it, breathing deeply of the scent-thick cockpit air. As always, living within Stormherald’s head smelled of oiled gears, ritual incense and the burning reek of crew members sweating and bleeding, their bodies exerted despite remaining motionless in their thrones.

  The enemy scrap-Titan was grotesque – unappealing on a level that went far beyond mere design distaste to Valian. Its junk metal appearance showed no reverence, no respect, no care in its construction. Stormherald’s iron bones were thrice-blessed by tech-ministers even before they were brought together as the skeleton of a god-machine. Each of the million cogs, gears, rivets and plates of armour used in the Imperator’s birth was honed to perfection and blessed before becoming part of the Titan’s body.

  This avatar of perfection incarnate faced its hideous opposite, and every crewmember piloting the Titan felt disgust flow through them. The enemy engine was fat, big-belled to hold troops and ammunition loaders for its random array of torso cannons. Its head, in opposition to the Gothic-style machine skull worn by Stormherald, was stunted and flat, with cracked eye lenses and a heavy-jawed underbite. It stared pugnaciously down the street at the larger Imperial walker, its cannons covering its body like spines, and roared a challenge of its own.

  It sounded exactly like what it was: an alien warleader within the cockpit head blaring into a vox-caster. Stormherald laughed in response, its warning sirens slamming back with a wall of sound.

  In her tank of fluids, Zarha raised her arms, her handless stumps facing forward.

  In the street, with an immense grinding of gear joints, Stormherald mirrored the motion.

  It never fired. The trap, as crude and simple as it was, exploded around the great Titan.

  ‘Your request for reinforcement is acknowledged,’ the voice crackled.

  Ryken lowered the vox-mic, readying his lasrifle again.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he hissed to Vantine. The other trooper was with him, crouched with her back to the wall, sharing his slice of cover. Her expression was unreadable, masked by her goggles and rebreather, but she gave the major a nod.

  ‘You said that half an hour ago.’

  ‘I know.’ Ryken slammed a fresh cell into his lasgun. ‘But they’re coming.’

  The wall behind them buckled as it took the brunt of another shell. Debris from the ceiling clattered down onto their helmets.

  Ryken’s platoon was up to their necks in trouble, and no amount of hard fighting alone was going to get them out of it. Most of his men, the ones that weren’t bleeding to death on the ground, were at the windows on the various floors of this hab-block, pouring their fire into the street outside. The rooms were still full of furniture, left by the families who were taking shelter in local underground bunkers. It was, as last stands went, a pretty terrible place to be holed up in, but their barricade had fallen half an hour before, and it was every squad for themselves until they could regroup at the next junction.

  The problem was that Ryken’s platoon was cut off much too fast when the last bastion fell. As rearguard covering the other squads’ escapes, they’d been encircled and forced to find whatever cover they could.

  ‘They’re climbing the damn walls!’ someone cried out. Ryken scrambled to the nearest window, keeping low and bracing to fire into the street again. As he rose to fire, he found himself face to face with a green-skinned creature hauling its way through the second-storey window. It reeked of mould and gunsmoke, and its piggish eyes were glazed by whatever alien emotions it felt in the heat of battle.

  Ryken bayoneted the beast in the throat, firing three shots even as he stabbed. The alien was hurled back from the window to fall on its companions below.

  They were indeed climbing the damn walls.

  Ryken ordered three of his men to cover the window, and raced for the stairs leading down to the ground floor. The snapping crack of lasrifles firing was even louder from downstairs, where the bulk of the platoon was entrenched.

  ‘Reinforcements are en route!’ he called down the stairs.

  ‘You said that half an hour ago!’ Sergeant Kalas called back up.

  Ryken caught a glimpse of the sergeant, his bolt pistol clutched in a two-handed grip, kneeling at a window and firing booming shots out into the road. He retreated back to a nearby window himself, adding his fire to the onslaught.

  In the street, a riot of alien flesh was taking place. Only the most foolish or bloodthirsty orks were seeking to race across the road and scale the building’s walls. Most of the xenos – and Ryken thanked the Emperor for small mercies – possessed enough intelligence to remain in cover themselves, behind their own junk-transports or shooting from windows of adjacent habitation blocks. They laughed and jeered as the barrage continued, and great howls of porcine laughter would rise up when another pack of baying aliens would charge across the street only to be cut down by the Steel Legion’s defences. Raucous enjoyment of their own kin’s death was a barbarous madness Ryken had long come to associate with this accursed xenos breed.

  There was no understanding such creatures.

  ‘We can’t hold here,’ Vantine crouched under cover again, whispering a rapid litany of devotion as she reloaded her rifle. ‘You hear those engines? More are coming, major.’

  ‘We’re not breaking out anytime soon,’ he spoke the words as a bitter curse, setting his rebreather straight. ‘So we will hold.’

  ‘Or we die.’

  ‘That’s not an option, and I’ll shoot you the next time you give voice to it.’

  She smiled behind her own gas mask, but Ryken saw none of it. He had risen to his feet and was leaning against the wall, his lasgun braced against his chest. He kept close to the wall, risking
a look out of the window. What he saw made him curse more colourfully than Vantine had ever heard before.

  ‘So,’ she rose close to him, taking position on the other side of the window, ‘not good news, then?’

  ‘Tanks. The bastards are rolling armour up the road.’

  Vantine chanced a look herself. Three tanks, Imperial Leman Russ chassis looted and ‘improved’ with crooked armour panels bolted on and painted in mismatched hues. The jagged fronts of the three tanks showed alien glyphs of allegiance that meant nothing to human eyes.

  ‘We’re dead,’ she shook her head. ‘And there’s no need to shoot me. They’ll shell this block to rubble and do it for you.’

  Ryken ignored her. ‘Nikov,’ he keyed his vox-bead live. ‘Nikov, how’s the launcher coming?’

  Nikov was on the hab-block’s top floor, where he’d retreated with his missile launcher ten minutes before. The weapon had taken a beating when the barricade had fallen earlier.

  ‘It’s still jammed,’ Nikov’s reply came over the vox in a crackling hiss. After a pause of several moments, he added, ‘Did I hear you shouting about reinforcements again?’

  ‘They’re coming! Throne, why is everyone whining about that?’

  ‘I think it’s because we’d rather not die, sir.’

  The west wall chose that moment to explode. Debris burst into the room, filling it with stone dust. Through his goggles, Ryken stared at a hole the size of three grown men in hab-block’s wall. Most of the soldiers nearby picked themselves up off the floor. Two stayed where they were, mangled and unmoving.

  ‘Get that launcher working,’ Ryken said in the moment of eerie calm. Vantine scrambled to her feet and ran from the gaping hole in the wall.

  Outside offered alien laughter, the grinding of tank treads and a distant thrum of racing engines.

  ‘More?’ Vantine called out.

  ‘That’s not the enemy,’ Ryken said. ‘Those aren’t tank engines.’

  And they weren’t. His vox-bead screeched a distorted chatter of mixed channels, but one voice broke through. ‘Your request for reinforcement,’ it said, much too deep to be human, ‘is acknowledged.’

  The room darkened as the gunship rattled past on whining turbines. It swooped low, strafing the street, opening up with its weapons. From its cruising angle, it clearly didn’t intend to stay long, but the pilot was inflicting all the punishment he could while the Thunderhawk remained.

  Heavy bolters mounted on its wings and cheeks spat a torrent of lethal shells into the visible groups of enemy warriors. Inhuman blood misted the air as packs of the creatures burst under the explosive ammunition. Snarling, the diminishing groups of survivors returned fire – their stubbers chattering, the solid shells raining off the black gunship’s hull like harmless hail.

  The tanks were another matter. The first shell crashed into the gunship’s side with a storm’s force, and Ryken flinched back from the detonation. It spun the gunship on its axis, sending burning wind breathing from its boosters as it turned. In reaction to the attack, the avian shape gained altitude in a sudden thrust, banked over the first of the tanks, and at last dropped its cargo.

  Dark figures clanged onto the surface of the tanks, as black as beetles crawling on the metal skin.

  The first to fall – a figure on the roof of the lead tank – wore a silver-faced helm and wielded a mace with a sparking power field around its eagle-winged head. The weapon descended in a slice to shatter the vehicle’s turret. It broke clean off and fell into the horde of aliens that mobbed the tanks from below.

  ‘Good morning, Reclusiarch,’ Ryken’s voice was breathless with relief.

  The knight didn’t answer at first. He and his standard bearer were already engaged by the greenskins swarming up over the useless tank’s hull, clambering higher in a desperate need to shed the blood of the black knights.

  Artarion’s bolter emitted its stuttering crash, blowing the aliens back down to the street. With the brilliance of a sun-flare, Grimaldus’s plasma pistol disintegrated two of the climbing beasts, letting their burning skeletal remains tumble in pieces back into the horde.

  The second tank was dead in its tracks, smoke pouring from vents and cracks in its armour. The Templars had dropped grenades into the interior, and Ryken saw two knights leaping clear, ignoring the slain vehicle as they waded into the aliens massing on the street.

  ‘Forgive the delay, major.’ The Reclusiarch wasn’t even out of breath. ‘We were required at the barricade breaches in south section ninety-two.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ Ryken replied. ‘The last word from central command suggested that Sarren’s plan in this sector was working better than almost all hololithic estimations. Are we getting redeployed for a counterattack?’

  On top of the tank, Grimaldus swung his mace in a vicious arc, pummelling an ork into ruined biological matter.

  ‘You are still breathing, major. Let that be enough for now.’

  Dawn brought nothing more than a continuation of the night’s bloodshed.

  The Helsreach Crusade begins its first bloody day. Across the city, millions of us now fight for our lives.

  The noise is like no other sound I have ever heard. In two centuries of life, I have waged war at the heels of god-machines whose weapons were louder than the death-cries of stars. I have stood against armies of thousands, while every soul that stood against us screamed their hatred. I have seen a ship the size of a hive tower crash into the open ocean on a far distant world. The plume of water it threw into the sky and the tidal wave that followed were like some divine judgement come to flood the land and erase all humanity beneath its salt-rich depths.

  Yet nothing has matched the sound of Helsreach’s defiance.

  In every street, humans and aliens clash, with their weapons and voices merging into a gestalt wave of senseless noise. On every rooftop, turrets and multi-barrelled defence cannons bark into the sky, their loaders never ceasing, their rate of fire never slowing. The machine-roars of Titans duelling can be heard from entire districts away.

  Never before have I heard an entire city fighting a war.

  As we fight to clear the streets of Major Ryken’s besiegers – and as the Legionnaires themselves leave their havens and join us in the slaughter – I keep an edge of focus for the general vox-channels.

  Ryken was not wrong. While we are locked in our planned fighting withdrawal across the entire hive, precious few sectors are in unplanned retreat.

  The wreck-Titans are in the city now. Coldly delivered kill ratios from Invigilata commanders are a recent addition to the chaos of communication traffic, but they are a welcome one. Helsreach stands defiant as the sun rides the sky into noon.

  My brothers remain scattered across the city, reinforcing the weakest parts of the Imperial chain, supporting the defences where the orkish tide breaks into the city with overwhelming force. I regret that we did not have the chance to gather together one last time. Such a lost opportunity is another of the failings I must atone for.

  The reports of their engagements reach me hourly. As yet, no casualties blacken our record. I cannot help but wonder who the first to fall will be, and how long the hundred of us will last as the hours become days, and the days become weeks.

  This city will die. All that remains to be learned is just how long we can defy fate. And above all, I want the weapon buried beneath the wasteland’s sands.

  I am drawing breath to recall our gunship when the vox explodes with panic. It is difficult to make any sense from the maelstrom of noise. Key words manage to break through the mess: Titan. Invigilata. Stormherald.

  And then, a voice so much stronger than all others, speaking a single word. She sounds in pain as she says it.

  ‘Grimaldus.’

  CHAPTER XII

  In a Primarch’s Shadow

  The gunship bursts across the sky, rattling around us in its ferocious race southward. It is all too easy to imagine the thick Armageddon clouds left in turmoil in our
wake.

  Wind roars into the crew compartment through the open bulkhead door. As is my right, I am first at the portal, gripping the edge of the airlock with one hand as the wind claws at my tabard and parchment scrolls. Beneath us, the city slides by – towers aiming up, streets laid flat. The former are aflame. The latter are flooded by ash and the enemy.

  Already, many of the city’s outermost sectors are burning. Helsreach is what it is: an industrial city devoted to the production of fuel. There is much that will burn, here.

  The flames choke the sky as the ring of fire swallowing the hive’s edges creeps ever inward. Reports of refugees spilling into the city’s core have increased tenfold. Housing them is no longer even the greatest problem; the trouble in the avenues where the civilians flock is that Sarren’s redeployment of his armour divisions suffers crippling congestion.

  I do not judge him for this. His mastery of the city after arriving in the final weeks – only barely before we did – has been as efficient as could be expected from a human mind under such duress. I recall the initial briefings, when he was stifled by large sections of the civilian populace refusing to abandon their homes even in the face of invasion. In truth, it is not as if the city was built with an abundance of bunkers to house refugees anyway. With reluctance, he had allowed them to remain where they were, knowing the problem was – in part – a self-correcting one. As districts fell to the invaders, the civilian death toll would be catastrophic.

  ‘Well,’ he had said one night to the gathered commanders, ‘it will mean fewer refugees in the siege itself.’

  I had admired him greatly in that moment. His merciless clarity was most commendable.

  With a lurch, the Thunderhawk begins its descent. I brace myself, whispering words of reverence to the machine-spirit within the propulsion engines now attached to my armour. The jump pack is bulky and ancient, the metal pitted and scarred and in dire need of repainting, but its link to my armour is without flaw. I blink-clink the activation rune, and the hum of the backpack’s internal systems joins the growl of my active armour.