Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Throne,’ the storm-trooper hissed. ‘Stay here, yes?’

  Maghernus didn’t even have time to agree before the soldier was making a break across the rockcrete platform, crouched low, moving to the downed knight’s body.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked one of the dockworkers.

  Maghernus wanted to know that himself. He moved after the storm-trooper, doing his best to mimic the crouching run Andrej had just performed. Something hot and angry buzzed past his ear, like the passage of a poisonous insect. It took several seconds to realise he’d almost had his head taken off by a stray shot.

  ‘What are you doing?’ He knelt by the storm-trooper.

  What he was doing seemed obvious to Andrej. His gloved fingers quested under the chin of the knight’s helm, seeking some kind of catch, or lock, or release. Throne, there must be something…

  ‘Seeing if he lives,’ the soldier muttered, clearly distracted. ‘Ayah! Got you.’

  With a muted hiss almost drowned out by nearby gunfire, the helm’s seals parted and the expressionless helmet came loose. Andrej pulled it off, handing it to Maghernus. It was about three times as heavy as the dockmaster had been expecting, and he’d been expecting it to weigh a hell of a lot.

  The knight wasn’t dead. His face was awash in blood, the dark fluid filming over his eyes and darkening his features as it ran from his nose and clenched teeth. Astartes blood was supposed to clot within instants, so the tales told. It wasn’t happening here, and Andrej doubted that was a positive sign.

  ‘Can’t move,’ the Templar growled. His voice was wet from a burbling throat. ‘Spine. Hearts. Dying.’

  ‘There is something inside you, I know,’ Andrej spared a glance around, making sure they weren’t in immediate danger. ‘Something important inside you, that your brothers must reclaim, yes?’

  ‘Progenoid,’ the knight’s breathing was as raw as a chainsword’s snarl. The warrior’s oversized armoured hand gripped the front of Andrej’s armour. It was strengthless.

  ‘I do not know what that is, sir knight.’

  ‘Gene-seed,’ the Templar spat blood as he forced the words through numbing lips. His eyes were lolling now, half-closed and rolling back. It was clear he was blind. ‘Legacy.’

  Andrej nodded to Maghernus. ‘Help me move him. Do not argue. It is important that his brothers find his body. Important for their rituals.’

  ‘Emperor…’ the knight grunted, ‘Emperor protects.’

  With those words, the hand gripping Andrej’s chestguard went slack, thumping to rest on the heraldic cross on the warrior’s own breastplate.

  Their eyes met once, and the dockworker and the career soldier started dragging the dead knight.

  We are dying.

  We are dying, scattered across kilometres of docks, mixed in with the humans, torn from the unity of brotherhood.

  ‘Wear your helm,’ I say to Nero without looking over my shoulder at him. ‘Do not let the humans see you like this.’

  With tears in his eyes, our healer does as I order. The list of failing life signs is transferred from his wrist display to his retinal readouts. I hear him draw a shaking breath over the vox.

  ‘Anastus is dead,’ he says, adding another name to those that came before.

  I lean forward, the racing wind clawing over the surface of my armour, sending my parchment scrolls and tabard streaming in its grip. We are several hundred metres up, making ready to drop on the beasts below. The Thunderhawk’s turbines lower their growl as they throttle down.

  The docks below us are already in ruin. They burn – black and grey, amber and orange – making the view from the polluted skies like staring down into the mouth of some mythical dragon. Percussive thumps signal the crash landings of more submersibles, or our own munitions stores going up in flames.

  ‘Helsreach will fall tonight,’ Bastilan says, giving voice to something we must all be thinking. I have never, in over a century of waging war at his side, heard him speak such a thing.

  ‘And do not lie to me, Grimaldus,’ he says, sharing the bulkhead’s space with me. ‘Save your words for the others, brother.’

  I tolerate such familiarity from him.

  But he is wrong.

  ‘Not tonight,’ I tell him, and he doesn’t look away from the skull I wear as my face. ‘I swore to the humans that the sun would rise over an unconquered city. I do not mean to break that vow. And you, brother, will help me keep it.’

  Bastilan turns away at last. What closeness had been near to the surface cools fast, leaving us distant again. ‘As you command,’ he says.

  ‘Make ready to jump,’ I vox to the others. ‘Nero. Do you stand ready?’

  ‘What?’ He lowers his narthecium, retracting surgical saws and cutting blades. I see the empty sockets for gene-seed storage withdraw and lock under smooth armour plating.

  ‘I need you, Nero. Our brothers need you.’

  ‘Do not lecture me, Reclusiarch. I stand ready.’

  The others, Priamus especially, are taking note now. ‘Cador is dead. Two-thirds of the Helsreach Crusade will not live to see the coming dawn. You will carry their legacy, my brother. Grief has its place – none of us have suffered such losses before – but if you are lost in sorrow then you will be the death of us all.’

  ‘I said I stand ready! Why do you single me out like this? Priamus is likely to see us all dead because he cannot follow orders! Bastilan and Artarion are not half the fighters Cador was. Yet you lecture me about being the weak one, the crack in the blade?’

  My pistol is aimed at his head, at the faceplate marked white as a symbol of his expertise and valuable skills.

  ‘Bitterness is taking root within you, brother. Much longer, and it will bore through you, hollowing out your heart and soul, leaving naught but empty bones. When I tell you to focus and stand with your brothers, you respond with black words and treacherous thoughts. So I tell you again, one last time, that we need you. And you need us.’

  He doesn’t stare me down. When he looks away, it’s not in defeat or cowardice, but in shame.

  ‘Yes, Reclusiarch. My brothers, forgive me. My humours are unbalanced, and my mind has been adrift.’

  ‘“A mind without purpose will walk in dark places,”’ Artarion quotes. A human philosopher; one I don’t recognise.

  ‘It is fine, Nero,’ Bastilan grunts. ‘Cador was one of the Chapter’s finest. I miss him, just as you do.’

  ‘I forgive you, Nerovar,’ Priamus says, and I thank him on a private vox-channel for not sounding like he is sneering for once.

  The Thunderhawk slows, thrusters keeping it aloft as we make ready to jump. In the air around us, snapping explosions decorate the sky.

  ‘Anti-air fire? Already?’ Artarion asks.

  Whether they’ve beached several submersibles with surface-to-air weapons or taken control of wall defence cannons is irrelevant. The gunship swings violently, shaking as the armour plating takes its first hit. They’re firing up through the smoke, tracking the gunship through primitive methods that are apparently effective enough to work.

  ‘Incoming missiles,’ the pilot voxes to us. The Thunderhawk re-engages its forward thrust, boosting forward. ‘Dozens, too close to evade. Jump now or die with me.’

  Priamus goes. Artarion follows. Nero and Bastilan next, launching out of the airlock.

  The pilot, Troven, is not a warrior I know well. I cannot judge his temperament the way I can with my closest brothers, except to say that he is a Templar, with all the courage, pride and resolution that honour entails.

  In a human, I’d call such behaviour stubbornness.

  ‘There is no need to die here,’ I say as I enter the cockpit. I have no idea if I’m right to say such a thing, but if this hope can be forged into the truth, I will make it happen now.

  ‘Reclusiarch?’

  Troven has chosen to wrench the Thunderhawk through evasive manoeuvres, rather than disengage himself from the pilot’s throne and try to leap from
the gunship. Both choices, such as they are, are likely to fail. I still believe he chose wrong.

  ‘Disengage now.’ I haul him from the throne, power feeds snapping from connection ports in his armour. He spasms with the electrical feedback of an unsafe and flawed disconnect, half of his perception and consciousness still melded with the gunship’s machine-spirit. His protests are reduced to garbled, wordless grunts of pain as his armour’s power supply kicks back in and the union with the gunship’s systems dims.

  The Thunderhawk tilts, diving from the sky on dead engines. Nausea fades as soon as it threatens, balanced by the gene-forged organs replacing my standard human eyes and ears. Troven’s genetic compensators take a moment longer to adjust, ruined by the disorientation of the severed connection. I hear him grunting through his helm’s vox-speakers, swallowing his bile.

  This freefall will delay the missiles’ impact. I hope.

  In this weakened state, he’s easy to drag from the cockpit to the open bulkhead. The visible sky is twisting as the gunship plummets. Mag-locked step by mag-locked step, my boots adhere to the iron floor, preventing the spiralling death-dive from hurling us around the cabin.

  As I face the air-rushing portal, my targeting display overlays the spinning sky. I blink at a flashing rune of crossed blades pulsing in the centre. A propulsion gauge spills across my retinas, and the jump pack weighing my shoulders down whines into life.

  ‘You’ll kill us both,’ Troven almost laughs. I spare no more than a second’s thought for the two servitors operating the other flight stations.

  ‘Brace,’ is all I have time to say. The world around us dissolves into jagged metal and screaming fire.

  Once the noises had faded and the air reeked of the powdery, familiar scent of bolter fire, Jurisian hauled himself back to his feet.

  The immediate area around him was illuminated by flashing sparks and energy flares vented by his broken servo arm and savaged armour. The expulsions of electrical force from wounded metal were bright enough to leave violent smears across his sensitive eye lenses. Jurisian blanked the filters with a command word, restoring standard vision mode.

  A moan of pain emerged from his vox-speakers as a harsh crackle. Even with no one nearby, it shamed him to voice his weakness in such a way. He would seek out the Reclusiarch and perform penance when… Well, there would be no when. This war would never be won.

  Retinal displays showed in grim detail the damage to his internal biological and mechanical components. The Forgemaster spared several seconds to examine the flashing warning runes, indicating leaking vital oxygenated haemo-plasma from areas near several organs. Jurisian felt a grin steal over his face as his pain-drunk mind latched onto an altogether more human explanation.

  I’m bleeding.

  He barely cared. It wasn’t terminal damage, neither to his living components nor his augmetic modifications. He stepped forward, crushing underfoot one of the many segmented blade-arms the warden had deployed as it launched at him only minutes before.

  It lay in motionless repose, its internal power generators cycling down, descending into silence. In death, the truth was revealed with an almost melancholic clarity. The warden was no more than a shadow of what it had claimed to be.

  Certainly, the creature would have been a match for most intruders – be they alien or human. But with its robe parted to show the decrepit truth it had concealed, what was once a stalwart Mechanicus tech-guardian was revealed as little more than an ancient, degrading magos, long-starved of the supplies it needed to maintain itself. Once, it had been human. And in an era after that, it had been a powerful sentinel for the Mechanicus, watching over this most precious of secrets.

  Time had robbed it of a great deal.

  The ancient warden had leapt at Jurisian, its limb-blades snapping into life, stabbing and cutting as they descended on flailing mechadendrites.

  The knight’s own servo-arms had hit back, slower, weightier, inflicting pounding and lasting damage in opposition to the scrapes and gouges inflicted by the warden. By the time the sentinel creature had severed one of the knight’s machine-limbs, Jurisian’s bolter was hammering shot after shot into the guardian’s torso, detonating vital systems and rupturing the human organs that yet remained. Suspension fluid and chemical lubricants ran in place of blood that would no longer flow.

  Piercing pain signalled the moments that the warden punctured Jurisian’s ceramite armour. It still possessed enough of its attack routines to stab for his joints and armour’s weak points, but just as often as it struck a gouging hit, its efforts were deflected by the customised, revered war plate that Jurisian had modified himself so long ago on the surface of Mars.

  He rose after it had finally fallen. Damaged, but unashamed. Regretful, but with his conviction burning.

  Already, the creature – the sentinel that had come so close to ending his life – was forgotten. The interference had cleared with its destruction.

  Jurisian stared into the resolving darkness of the colossal chamber, and became the first living being in over five hundred years to see Oberon, the Ordinatus Armageddon.

  ‘Grimaldus,’ he whispered into the vox. ‘It’s true. It’s the holy lance of the Machine-God.’

  The thrusters kicked in with desperate force, arresting their insane descent. The jolt was savage – without his armour’s fibre bundle musculature, Grimaldus’s neck would have snapped as soon as the boosters fired to bring them both stable.

  They were still falling too fast, even with the jump-pack’s engines howling hot.

  ‘Acknowledged, Jurisian,’ the Reclusiarch breathed. Of all the accursed times…

  Grimaldus grunted at the weight of Troven’s armour. His pistol dangled on its wrist-bound chain, while he gripped the other knight’s vambrace. Troven, in turn, hung in the air, holding to Grimaldus’s own wrist. Their burning tabards slapped against their armour, caught in the wind.

  With retinal gauges flashing scarlet, the Reclusiarch and the prone knight descended into the atmosphere of black smoke rising from the docks. Before their vision was blocked entirely, Grimaldus saw Troven reaching with his free hand, drawing the gladius sheathed to his thigh.

  Interference crackled thick from the surrounding chaos, but Bastilan’s vox-voice made it through the distortion, coloured by brutal eagerness.

  ‘We saw that, Reclusiarch. Dorn’s blood, we all saw it.’

  ‘Then you are unfocussed on the battle, and will do penance for it’.

  He bunched his muscles, negating thrust in the moment before thudding into the ground with bone-shaking force. The two knights skidded across the rockcrete surface of the docks, sparks spraying from their armour.

  As they both regained their footing, the hulking silhouettes of alien beasts ambled through the surrounding smoke.

  ‘For Dorn and the Emperor!’ Troven cried, and brought his bolter to bear from where it hung at his side, forever bound to his armour by the ritual chains. Grimaldus twinned his cries with Troven’s, laying into the enemy.

  If these docks could be saved, then by the Throne, they would be.

  CHAPTER XVI

  A Turning Tide

  A wing of fighters bolted overhead, their engines leaving smoke-smears across the darkening sky. In pursuit, alien craft rattled after them, tracer rounds spitting across the clouds in futility as they tried to hunt the Imperial fighters back to one of the city’s few remaining airstrips.

  Beneath the aerial chase, Helsreach burned. Avenue by avenue, alley by alley, the invaders flooded through the docks district, gaining ground with the death of every defender.

  Where the fighting was fiercest, vox-contact was a broken, unreliable mess of lucky signals breaking through the interference. The Imperials fell back through the night, sector by sector, leaving thoroughfares packed with their dead. The city added new scents to its reek of sulphur and saltwater. Now, Helsreach had come to smell of blood and flame, of a hundred thousand lives ending in fire between a single sunrise and su
nset. Poets from the impious ages of Old Terra had written of a punitive afterlife, a hell beneath the world’s surface. Had that realm ever existed, it would have smelled like this industrial city, dying in fire on the shores of Armageddon Secundus.

  In unconnected catacombs below the ground, the citizens of Helsreach remained shielded from the slaughter above. They clustered together in the darkness, listening to the erratic drumbeat of factories, workshops, tanks and munitions stores exploding. Although the walls of the subterranean shelters shook with tremors that bled down through the ground, the booms and thumps on the surface echoed down like peals of thunder. Many parents told their young children that it was just a violent storm above.

  Across the embattled world, the besieged cities were visible from orbit as blackened patches scarring the planet’s surface. As the planetary assault entered its second month, Armageddon’s atmosphere was turning thick and sour with smoke from the burning hives.

  Helsreach itself no longer resembled a city. With the docks under siege, the last pristine sectors of the hive were aflame, wreathing the city in a black pall born of burning oil refineries.

  The hive’s spine, Hel’s Highway, was a wounded serpent winding through the city. Its skin was mottled with patches of light and dark: pale and grey where the fighting had ceased, leaving graveyards of silent tanks, and blackened where conflict still raged, pitting the armoured fist of the Steel Legion against the junk-tanks of the invading beasts.

  The city walls were half-fallen, resembling some archaeological ruin. Half of the hive was surrendered, abandoned to defeat’s lifeless silence. The other half, held by Imperial forces that diminished by the hour, burned in battle.

  And so dawned the thirty-seventh day.

  ‘Hey, no sleep for you.’

  Andrej kicked at Maghernus’s shin, jolting the dockmaster back to the waking world. ‘We must move soon, I am thinking. No time for sleeping.’

  Tomaz blinked the stickiness of exhaustion from his eyes. He’d not even realised he’d fallen asleep. The two of them were crouched behind a stack of crates in a warehouse with the remaining nine men of Maghernus’s dock gang. He met their faces now, each in turn, barely recognising any of them. A day of war had aged them all, gifting them with sunken eyes and soot-blackened skin that brought out the lines in their middle-aged faces.