Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Yes, sir,’ they chorused.

  ‘I could become used to that, oh yes. Now, listen with both ears my wonderful fellows. Aim for the bodies. It is the biggest target, and that is what counts if you are new to this.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ they said again.

  ‘There is a very beautiful woman I would like to marry after this war. She will almost certainly be saying no to my proposal, but hey, we will see. If she says yes, you are all invited to my wedding, which will be in the eastern territories where the weather is much less like being pissed on by the sky every day. Also, the drinks will be free. You have my word on this. I am always truthful, this being one of my many glorious virtues.’

  A few of the men smiled, despite themselves.

  The siren began to wail. A banshee’s keen across kilometres of docks, howling over tens of thousands of frightened Imperial souls. Muffled thumps started up in response as the Sabre-class defence platforms opened fire on the incoming fleet.

  ‘It is time,’ Andrej grinned again, ‘to earn some very shiny medals.’

  ‘For the Emperor,’ one man breathed the words like a mantra, his eyes closed. ‘For the Emperor.’

  ‘Oh, no. Not for Him.’ Andrej fastened his rebreather mask, but they could still hear the smile in his voice. ‘He is happy on His Golden Throne, a long way from here. This is for me, and it is for you, and that is more than enough.’

  The sirens began to fade, one by one, until a last lone wail sputtered out.

  ‘Any moment now,’ Andrej said, leaning up to aim over the top of the container he’d been kneeling behind. ‘We will have company.’

  The first vessels crashed into the docks with the noise of a storm wave breaking against the shore. With no finesse, without even slowing down, they crunched into the gangways and loading platforms, ferociously beaching themselves. Doors and portals immediately blasted open, disgorging a tide of foul alien flesh onto the docks.

  The very first of the alien beasts to spill from its underwater scrap-pod was a brute, easily half again the size of its lesser brethren, bearing a trophy rack on its hunched shoulders with human skulls and Astartes helms from other wars on other worlds. It had been leading its tribe across the edges of the Imperium for decades, and in a fight with all else even, would have been more than a match for a lone Astartes.

  Its face, shoulder and torso disintegrated in a ruthless volley of las-fire that sent the burning remains spinning off the edge of the docks and into the polluted water below. Less than a hundred metres away, Domoska shouted encouragement to the dockworkers she led, and ordered them to fire again. Many had missed, but more than enough had struck home. It was a pattern being repeated along the Helsreach docks now, as the first wave of xenos creatures howled and laughed their way into the city.

  From his makeshift cover within the den of loosely-stacked cargo containers, Maghernus fired shot after shot, feeling the rifle in his hands growing warmer with each crack of release. He lowered himself below the lip of the crate he knelt behind, and reloaded his lasgun with inexpert fingers. The bastard thing was stuck.

  ‘Use force,’ Andrej said from his place next to the dockmaster. The storm-trooper didn’t look at him, didn’t even glance away from where he was aiming and firing. Another migraine-bright beam of overcharged energy spat from the soldier’s hellgun. ‘The slides often jam on new rifles. This is a sad truth with the rifles of our home world. Their spirits take time to wake up.’

  Maghernus was amazed he could even hear the other man over the din of beaching vessels, alien roars and discharging lasguns filling the air with a scattered chorus of mechanical cracks.

  ‘I fired a Kantrael rifle once,’ Andrej was continuing, his words punctuated by slight shifts in his posture and aim as he tracked target after target, releasing round after round. ‘It was a very keen weapon, oh yes. That world forges eager guns.’

  Maghernus slotted the fresh power cell home and raised himself back into position. His back already ached from his first two minutes as a soldier. How the Steel Legion crouched like this for days on end and got used to battle was a mystery to him. He fired at distant figures, lumbering alien hulks that ran with almost no sense of direction or purpose, as if hunting for a scent – lost until they found it. Others in the emerging packs would race to the source of the las-fire being thrown at them, and were cut down in their headlong run. A few, clearly cunning by the standards of these creatures, remained back and loaded heavy weapons. These last beasts sent shrieking missiles into the entrenched Imperial lines, exploding stacks of cargo crates or pulverising the sides of warehouses.

  Slowly but surely, with an insidious creep, the docks were being enveloped by thick smoke from the destroyed submersibles and burning buildings.

  ‘We will have to move soon,’ Andrej called over his shoulder to the others. The words proved prophetic. With a crash of metal on stone and a wave of flooding water, a submersible beached itself on the docks not thirty metres from their position. Saltwater splashed down on the crouching dockworkers. Alien growls came from the wrecked sub as its doors blasted open.

  ‘That is far from good,’ the storm-trooper scowled behind his rebreather as he slammed back into his firing position, drawing a bead on the first creature to emerge. It dropped like a puppet with its strings cut as the harsh beam lanced through its face and blew out the back of its head.

  Maghernus and the others joined their fire to his. Still more beasts came spilling from the submersible. The greenskins were charging now, having sniffed out the nearby cluster of humans behind the barricade, and following the streams of laser fire.

  ‘Sir…’ one of the men stammered, his eyes wide and bloodshot. ‘Sir, they’re coming…’

  ‘That is a fact I am aware of,’ Andrej replied, not stopping his stream of fire for a moment.

  ‘Sir–’

  ‘Please shut up and keep firing, yes?’

  The beasts reached the cargo containers. They reeked of blood, smoke, bitter sweat and the alien stench of fungal corruption. Bunched muscles hauled the beasts over the barricades, and the brutes roared down at the humans – no longer in cover, but hemmed in by the cargo pods.

  Las-rounds sliced up, punching dozens of the scrambling beasts back. The remnants of the first wave were joined by the second, and the creatures dropped in amongst the dockworkers, scrap-pistols barking and heavy axes swinging.

  ‘Fall back!’ Andrej shouted, firing his hellgun at point-blank range, using it to slash a way through the erupting melee. ‘Run!’

  The dockworkers were already in a panicked flight. ‘With me, you idiots!’ the storm-trooper yelled, and for a wonder, it actually worked. The dockers with enough presence of mind to clutch their lasguns in the chaos moved with Andrej, adding their fire to his again.

  He left a third of his team in the shelter of the containers and crane struts. Screaming dockworkers, unable to escape the invaders. Andrej sensed a momentary hesitation in those that remained with him; a handful of seconds where they ceased against all logic, some freezing rather than open fire on their dying friends, and others mesmerised in astonished fear by the sight of such slaughter.

  ‘They’re already dead!’ Andrej slammed his gloved palm into the side of Maghernus’s head, jolting him back into the moment. ‘Fire!’

  It was enough to break the spell. Las-fire opened up again, streaming into the embattled aliens.

  ‘Fall back only when you must reload! Stand and fire until then!’

  Andrej swore under his breath after he gave the order. The orks were already scrambling closer in an avalanche of green flesh, axe blades and ragged armour. Around the retreating team, the docks burned and thundered with the sounds of more submersibles beaching themselves. Andrej caught a momentary glimpse of another team of dockworkers through the smoke some distance away, breaking into flight as they were chopped to pieces by the orks in their midst.

  The same was about to happen to his ragtag gang, and he swore again. He hoped Domoska was
faring better.

  What a stupid place to die.

  Kilometres away from Helsreach, beneath the sands of the wastelands to the north-west, there was a loud and unprecedented clunk of heavy machinery.

  Jurisian, Forgemaster of the Eternal Crusader, rose to his feet with a slowness born of exhaustion. Tears stood in his eyes – a rarity indeed for a being that had not wept in over twenty decades. His mind pulsed with a thundering ache, a dull and thudding heat that had nothing to do with physical weakness.

  He could smell his servitors now that his senses were returning from their focusless lock on his primary task. Turning to regard them where they lay, Jurisian could smell the decay setting into their organic parts. They had been dead for weeks, starved of sustenance. He hadn’t noticed. They had proven useless after the first few hours, over a month ago, their internal cognitive processors unable to keep up with the ever-evolving code. Jurisian had needed to work alone, cursing Grimaldus all the while.

  Another deep clunk of grinding machinery restored his attention to the present. His joints ached – both the mechanical ones and his still-human ones – from such a period of inactivity. He had been a statue in place for four weeks, his mind alive and his body in hunched, tense stasis by the console.

  He had not slept. He knew that on several occasions, as his closing, exhausted mind had drifted close to shutting down, he had almost lost grip on the code. With his thoughts moving sluggishly, the code had outpaced him just as it had done to his servitors. In these moments of panicked intensity, he had resisted by silencing sections of his mind with clinical meditation, operating at a lessened capacity, but at least he was still awake.

  Jurisian stared ahead at the vast doors.

  - OBERON -

  That word burned itself into his core, written in towering letters, more a warning than a tomb marker.

  A last resonant machine-sound signalled the grinding rollback of the final interior lock. Pressurised coolant vapour flushed into the corridor as the door’s seal systems vented it. It reeked of chlorine – not poisonous, but stale from being cold-cooked for so many years while the door remained silent and still. In a ballet of rumbling, shuddering technology, the portal began to open.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ Jurisian voxed, horrified at the dull scratchiness of his voice. ‘The defences are broken. I am in.’

  CHAPTER XV

  Balance

  The chamber offered nothing at first. Nothing except a powerless darkness that was blacker than black, even to Jurisian’s visor lenses. A whispered keyword cycled his vision filters through a thermal-seeking infrared, through to a crude echolocation that falsified an auspex scanner’s silent chimes to detect movement. He had made these modifications himself, with the proper respect to the machine-spirit of his wargear.

  It was this last sense that produced a response. A vague grey blur passed his vision, and with it, the whirring of internal mechanisms. Hinges. Cogs. Fibre muscles. The sound was as familiar to Jurisian as his own breathing, but brought with it an edge of disconcerting curiosity.

  Joints. He was hearing joints.

  Something was wrong. The suggestion of static interference at the edges of his vision display told a tale of interference, obfuscation, more than a darkness born from a lack of light. He was being jammed, and the manipulation was insidiously subtle.

  Jurisian’s bolter came up in steady hands, panning left and right in the darkness as his eye lenses continued to cycle through filters. At last, a targeting monocle slid over his right eye lens – the mechanical echo of a lizard’s nictitating membrane.

  Better. Not perfect, but better.

  ‘I am Jurisian,’ he said to the creature before him, as it resolved into focus. ‘Master of the Forge for the Eternal Crusader, flagship of the Black Templars.’

  The creature didn’t answer immediately. The size of a man, it smelled of ancient machinery and sour breath.

  It was likely the thing had once been human – or some part of it was organic, even if only the smallest aspect. Hunched, robed in a ruined cloak of woven fabric, misshapen lumps in its surface area suggested additional limbs or advanced modification. It remained faceless, either refusing to look up or unable to do so.

  Jurisian lowered his bolter. The servo-arms extending from his back-mounted power generator still clutched a host of weaponry, aiming it at the robed being before him. He voiced his next words through his helm’s vox-speakers, letting his armour’s spirit twist the human language into a universal, bluntly simple machine code – a basic program for communication which he had acquired during his long years of tuition and training on Mars, home world of the Mechanicus.

  ‘My identity is Jurisian,’ the code pulsed, ‘of the Astartes.’

  The reply came in a burst of snarled code, the words and meanings bleeding into each other. It was akin to machine-slang, evolved from the viral program that sealed the doors. This creature, whatever it was, had an accent born of hundreds of years of isolation here.

  ‘Affirmative,’ Jurisian responded in the foundation code. ‘I can see you. Your interference should be aborted. It is no longer relevant.’

  The creature raised itself higher, no longer lurking on all fours. It now reached Jurisian’s chestplate, though it came no closer, remaining a dozen metres away. The weapons in the Forgemaster’s servo-arms tracked the being’s movements.

  It pulsed another tangled mess of accented code.

  ‘Affirmative,’ Jurisian replied again. ‘I destroyed the sealant program.’

  This time, the creature’s response was rendered through a more simple code. Jurisian narrowed his eyes at this development. Like the chamber’s virus lock, the creature was adapting and working with new information at a faster rate than standard Mechanicus constructs.

  ‘This is the sanctuary of Oberon.’

  ‘I know.’ The Forgemaster risked a panning glance left and right, seeking any resolution in the artificial darkness. His targeting monocle couldn’t pierce the gloom more than a few metres ahead. Flickering static was beginning to crawl across his eye lenses. ‘Deactivate the interference,’ Jurisian raised his bolter again, ‘or I will destroy you.’

  Against his will, emotion coloured the code-spoken declaration. To be limited like this was an affront to his sense of honourable conduct – there was no glory or prudence in allowing oneself to be kept at an enemy’s mercy.

  ‘I am the guardian of Oberon. Your presence generates negligible threat to me.’

  Jurisian tasted anger on his tongue, bitter and metallic. His finger tensed on the thick trigger of his bolter.

  ‘Deactivate the interference. This is your final warning.’ Static mottled his vision now, like a thousand insects clustering on his eye lenses. He could make out no more than the barest silhouette as the Mechanicus warden moved closer.

  ‘Negative,’ it said.

  Jurisian’s servo-arms, answering his mind’s impulses a fraction of a second after his true limbs, had raised his axe and other weapons in a threatening display, almost akin to some feral world arachnid predator increasing its size to warn off prey.

  The knight’s final threat was spoken with conviction, the machine-cant laced with numerical equations indicating emphasis.

  ‘Then die.’

  Their saviour was one of the black knights.

  He charged the enemy from the sky with a whining howl of protesting thrusters. Fire streaked from his flight pack as he landed in the aliens’ midst, a dark blur of movement outlined in flame.

  Andrej immediately scrambled back, ordering his gang into the relative cover provided by an overturned cargo loader truck.

  ‘Do not dare cease fire,’ he shouted over the sound of alien bellowing and thousands of guns crying out. He doubted any of them heard him, but they went back to firing as soon as they slid into cover.

  The Templar cut left and right with his chainsword, ripping stinking green flesh from malformed orkish bones. His bolt pistol sang out in a thudding refrain, embedding
fist-sized bolts in alien bodies which detonated a moment later. Andrej, who had seen Astartes fight before, did all he could to keep up his rate of fire in support of the suicidal bravery taking place. Several of his dockworker crew lowered their guns in slack-jawed, frightened awe.

  Perhaps, Andrej cursed, they believed the Astartes would actually survive unaided.

  ‘Keep firing, damn you!’ the storm-trooper yelled. ‘He’s dying for us!’

  The ferocious advantage of surprise did not last long. The greenskins turned to the deadly threat among them, laying about with their crude axes and firing their clattering pistols at close range. Several of them hit each other in their fury, while stragglers and those on the edges of the melee were punched down by las-fire from Andrej’s gang.

  The Templar screamed – a vox-distorted cry of wrath that went crawling across the skin of every human in earshot. His chainblade fell from his black hand, hanging loose on the thick chain that bound the blade to his forearm.

  Behind the staggering warrior, one of the few remaining greenskins tore a crude spear back out from the knight’s lower spine. The beast had no more than a moment to enjoy its victory: a searing lance of headache-bright energy dissolved its face and blew the contents of its skull over the dying knight’s armour. Andrej recharged his weapon without even needing to look away from the melee.

  The Templar regained his balance, then recovered his grip on the revving chainsword a heartbeat after. He lasted for three more savage cuts, tearing gobbets of flesh and shattered armour from the orks closest to him, before the remnants of the alien pack impaled him on their spears and bore him to the ground. His flight pack crashed to the floor, rent from his body. They aimed with brutal efficiency, ramming blades into his armour joints and using their immense strength to force him to his knees. The Templar’s pistol came up one final time to hammer a bolt into the chest of the nearest beast, spraying those nearby with inhuman gore as it primed and exploded.

  The last three orks were scythed down by Andrej’s dock team, collapsing next to the Astartes they had slain. The scene before them was a slice of eerie calm, the heart of a storm, while the rest of the docks burned.