Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Where are the Salamanders?’ he voxed, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  ‘They’re holding.’

  ‘They’re what?’

  Bastilan’s fist vibrated with the crashing judder of his bolter. Streaks of alien blood painted his battered armour yet again.

  Recriminations spilled out over the vox. The Salamanders weren’t advancing with the Templars. The Templars were pushing ahead too far, too fast.

  ‘Follow us, in the name of the Throne!’ Bastilan added his voice to the vox-chatter.

  ‘Fall back,’ came the staid voice of Sergeant V’reth. ‘Fall back to the eastern platform and be ready to engage the second wave.’

  ‘Advance! If we strike now, there will be no second wave. We’re at the warlord’s throat!’

  ‘Salamanders,’ V’reth spoke calmly, ‘Hold and be ready. Cut down any stragglers that seek to breach the shelter.’

  Bastilan kicked a hunched alien in the chest, breaking whatever passed for its rib structure. In the moment’s respite, he ejected his spent bolt magazine and slammed a fresh one home.

  They were advancing unsupported, away from the shelter, in pursuit of the fleeing orks. Ahead, through the crowd of panicking beasts, Bastilan could see the armoured warlord of this wretched tribe, its staggering gait made all the more pronounced by the ablative armour plating that seemed surgically bolted to its nerveless flesh.

  Bolts slashed after the retreating warleader, roaring from the muzzles of Templars fighting their way through a bestial and ferocious rearguard. Several shells detonated against the creature’s armour, while others smacked into the backs and shoulders of fleeing orks around their commander.

  ‘He’s getting away,’ Bastilan grunted. The words shamed him even to speak them.

  ‘Fall back,’ came the Reclusiarch’s growl.

  ‘Sir,’ Bastilan began, coupled with Priamus’s decidedly more annoyed ‘No!’

  ‘Fall back. This is not worth dying over. We do not have the numbers to spill the warlord’s blood now.’

  V’reth, to his credit, nods.

  ‘I see. You consider this a stain on your personal honour.’

  He does not see. ‘No, brother. I consider it a waste of time, ammunition, and life. Two of your own squad were killed in the successive waves that followed. Brother Kaedus and Brother Madoc from my own force were slain. If we had pursued in unity, we could have broken through to the enemy leader and taken his head. The rest of the beasts would have scattered, and the bulk could easily have been purged by kill-teams in the aftermath.’

  ‘It is tactically unsound, Reclusiarch. Pursuit would have left the shelter undefended and vulnerable to regrouping waves attacking from other sectors. Three thousand lives were saved by our defiance last night.’

  ‘There were no attacks from other sectors.’

  ‘There may have been, had we pursued. And there was still no guarantee we would have overpowered the rearguard quickly enough to reach the warlord.’

  ‘We weathered six further assaults, wasted seven hours, lost four warriors, and expended a hoard of ammunition that my knights can ill-afford to throw away.’

  ‘That is one way of seeing the final cost. I see it more simply: we won.’

  ‘I am finished with this… debate, Salamander.’ Again, I recall the grinding cut of Nero’s medicae-saw, and the puncturing retrieval of cutting tools extracting glistening gene-seed organs from the chests of the slain.

  ‘It grieves me to hear you speak this way, Reclusiarch.’

  Listen to him. So patient. So calm.

  So blind.

  ‘Get out of my city.’

  CHAPTER XIX

  Fate

  The giant stood above its worshippers in silence.

  Its skin and bones were harvested from crashed and salvaged ships, each column, gear, pylon, girder and plate of armour that went into its birth stolen from something else. Although the giant was not alive, living creatures served it in place of blood and organs. They clambered through the god’s form, insulated by the armour, hanging from the metal bones, moving like the blood cells in sluggish arteries.

  The giant had taken over two thousand labourers over a month to build. It had finally awoken outside the walls of Hive Stygia three days before, to great roars of praise from its devoted faithful.

  And then, in its first hours of life, it had wiped the hive city from the face of the planet. Stygia was a modest industrial city, defended by the Steel Legion and its own militia with little in the way of Astartes or Mechanicus support. From the moment the giant awoke to the moment the last vestiges of organised Imperial resistance was crushed, the city lasted a total of five hours and thirty-two minutes.

  And now, the giant stood silent, idle, making ready for its journey south.

  Its face was piggish and round-eyed, all jagged jaw and red-iron tusks. Behind the broken windows that served as its eyes, hunched crewmembers moved in loping gaits, attending to their bestial imitations of Imperial Titan command.

  The giant’s name, splattered across its ugly, fat-bellied hull in crude alien hieroglyphs, was Godbreaker.

  With a slow tread that shook the earth around it, Godbreaker began to move south, toward the coast.

  Toward Helsreach.

  If it could remain mobile without breaking down – a difficult feat given the skills of its creators – it would arrive by dawn the following day.

  In a fateful sense of opposed unity with the Godbreaker, another powerful war machine drew nearer to Helsreach. Its journey was a far longer one, and its progress was a melancholy fraction of what it might have been in a better age.

  Waves of ashy soil blew aside in the land train’s wake, as its gravity suppression field exerted its influence on the ground below the rattling, serpentine vehicle. Jurisian felt its resistance in every touch upon its controls. The soul of the machine was rising from its slumber now, finding itself disrespected and on the edge of lashing out at the living being responsible.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ he spoke into the vox again, once more receiving no answer.

  Oberon’s existence in his mind was akin to a beast alone in the woods. Jurisian could keep it at bay as long as he focussed on its presence, just as a traveller could face down a wolf in the wild if he kept watch for the beast and carried a torch of flame to ward it away. It was a game of focus, and despite his weariness, the Master of the Forge possessed focus in abundance. He was a conscientious and patient soul, devoted to each of his tasks like a predator hunting prey. This demeanour and dedication, coupled with his ability and deeds of honour, had seen him promoted to his rank aboard the Eternal Crusader nineteen years before.

  Jurisian had been present at Grimaldus’s induction into the inner circle, and though it shamed him to admit it now – even silently, even only to himself and the lurking soul of the war machine – he had cast his vote against the Chaplain ascending to Mordred’s role as Reclusiarch.

  ‘He is not ready,’ Jurisian had said, adding his voice to Champion Bayard’s. ‘He is a master of small engagements, and a warrior beyond peer. But he is a not a leader of the Chapter.’

  ‘The Forgemaster speaks the truth, High Marshal,’ Bayard had added. ‘Grimaldus is flawed by hesitation. A second’s delay in all he does, and it is no secret why. He holds himself to his master’s standards. Doubt clings to him, darkening his place in the Chapter.’

  ‘He is shaken by Mordred’s death,’ Jurisian had pressed. ‘He seeks his place in the Eternal Crusade.’

  Helbrecht had sat musing on his throne, his cold eyes lowering the temperature of the room.

  ‘In the coming war, I will give him the chance to find that place.’

  Jurisian had spoken no more, and inclined his head in a bow. The Emperor’s Champion was not so subdued, and had put forward his recommendations for warriors other than Grimaldus to succeed Mordred.

  The High Marshal had kept his own counsel, but the voices of the Sword Brethren around Helbrecht’s dais sound
ed out in jeers as fists crashed against shields. Grimaldus was the chosen of Mordred the Avenger, and skilled in personal combat beyond question. Two centuries of valour and glory; two hundred years of unrelenting courage and a host of enemy dead across a horde of worlds; his short years as the youngest Sword Brother in the history of the Chapter – there was no arguing with such truths.

  Jurisian and Bayard had relented. The following night, they watched Grimaldus accept Mordred’s mantle.

  Oberon tilted as it rose over an ash dune, the anti-grav field changing its tone to a more strained whine.

  On the horizon, a blanket of blackness rose from a burning city.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ he voxed, trying once more to speak with the warrior that did not deserve the title he now carried.

  Leaving the Titan had proved less of a trial than Asavan had feared.

  He’d managed it two days ago, and had been on the streets of the city ever since. All it had taken was a slow descent through the decks, and what felt like about eight million spiral staircases, each one shaped from dense bronze and riveted heavily to the walls.

  Well. Perhaps closer to four staircases. But by the time Asavan was approaching ground level, he was blinking sweat from his eyes and cursing his lack of fitness. On the Titan’s lower levels, all was emergency red lighting, narrow corridors, and stuffy air filled with the smell of sacred incense holy to the Machine-God, as well as His disciples chanting blessings in His name. Through their devotion was Stormherald empowered. Praise be.

  ‘Halt,’ a machine-voice barked, and Asavan did exactly as he was told. He even raised his hands in the air, mimicking some unnecessary surrender. ‘What are you doing here?’ the voice demanded.

  Here was at the base of the Titan’s pelvis, in one of the lowest accessible chambers, lit by a flickering yellow siren light. Six augmented skitarii stood stationed around a bulkhead in the floor. The room itself rocked back and forth, tilting with the Titan’s tread.

  ‘I’m leaving the Titan,’ the priest said.

  The skitarii glanced at each other with focus lenses instead of eyes. The air buzzed with inter-vox communication. They were confused. This… this made no sense.

  ‘You are leaving the Titan,’ one of them, apparently their leader, said. His eye lenses revolved, scanning the unaugmented human.

  ‘Yes.’

  More vox-chatter. The leader, his face noticeably more bionic than the others’, emitted a blurt of machine code. Asavan knew an error/abort complaint when he heard one.

  ‘Stormherald is engaged in locomotive activity.’

  Asavan was aware of this. The entire room was, after all, moving. ‘The Titan is walking. I know. I still wish to leave. This service maintenance ladder will take me down the left leg struts to the shin-fortress, will it not?’

  ‘It would,’ the skitarii leader allowed.

  ‘Then please excuse me. I must be going.’

  ‘Halt.’ Asavan did, again, but he was growing tired of this. ‘You wish to leave the Titan,’ the skitarii repeated. ‘But… why?’

  This was hardly the ideal setting for a debate on crises of faith and the sudden revelatory desire to walk among the city’s people and help them with one’s own hands.

  Asavan reached for the medallion around his neck, marking him as an honoured member of the Ecclesiarchy of Terra and a minister ordained to preach the word of the Emperor in His aspect as the Machine-God of Mars.

  The skitarii stared at the icon for several moments – the double-headed eagle and the divided skull backing it – and lowered their weapons.

  ‘My thanks,’ the sweating priest said. ‘Now if it’s not too much trouble, could you open that bulkhead for me?’

  His stomach lurched at the sight beyond the opened trapdoor. Beneath, the broken rockcrete of Hel’s Highway passed by, a good twenty-five metres down. Pudgy hands gripped the black iron service ladder as he descended, rung by rung, through the wind, hanging on to the Titan’s thigh. Above him, the bulkhead slammed with a chime of finality.

  So be it. Down, he went.

  Behind the god-machine’s knee, another bulkhead blocked his descent into the bulky lower leg section. Below, Asavan heard the servos of turrets mounted on the shin-walls panning back and forth, seeking targets.

  It took almost a full minute to work the bulkhead’s wheel lock, but he was energised now, drawing close to his objective. Once more, he descended into red-lit, downward spiralling corridors, avoiding the troop chambers where ranks of skitarii stood in tomb-like silence.

  The Titan’s movement now was almost unbearable, slamming him to the wall and rocking him from his feet on several occasions. This low, the gravitic stabilisers were little use against the sheer degree of movement necessary for each leg to make. His surroundings rumbled with sickening violence every eleven seconds, as the foot came down on the road below. Asavan vomited against a wall, and tried not to laugh. He was trying to keep his balance while walking through the steel bones in the ankle of a striding machine giant. Perhaps this wasn’t such a wonderful idea, after all.

  And now came the hardest part.

  This last bulkhead opened onto the Titan’s tiered claw-toes, which formed steps by which the skitarii battalions in the leg-fortresses could ascend and descend, when Stormherald was at rest.

  Disembarking with the Titan in motion was going to be… exciting.

  Asavan pulled the door open on squealing hinges, gripping a nearby handrail and watching the ground in bug-eyed horror, waiting for it to level out with the foot touching down. It did, with a bone-jarring rumble of thunder, and the fat priest ran, huffing and puffing, down the tiered stairs.

  The other foot came down, shaking the ground and sending Asavan tumbling down the last steps to land in a heap of overweight flesh and filthy robes on the dirty surface of the highway.

  A metre away, the stairs rose again as the great war machine lifted its foot to take another step. Squealing without even realising he was doing so, Asavan Tortellius sprinted, with his additional chins shaking, away from the leg’s ascent and inevitable descent. He hurled himself the last few metres, landing hard.

  As the Titan walked on, monstrous feet still pounding into the ground, the priest lay on his back, breathing in ragged gasps.

  And thus was completed the least dignified disembarkation from an Imperator Titan in the history of the Imperium.

  That had been two days ago.

  Since then, Asavan had not improved his situation by a great deal, but by the Throne, he was doing the Emperor’s work. And that was a start.

  His journey along the Hel’s Highway (which he was resolutely calling his ‘pilgrimage’) had begun on an uninspiring note. Hauling himself to his unsteady feet and recovering the shoe he had lost in his fall, he began to make his way down the wide road, clutching his bag of dehydrated foodstuffs and electrolyte fluid packs.

  Away from the Titan, with Stormherald thumping away in the far distance now, he realised how utterly silent a dead city could be. The crashing of weapons and war machines was a muted murmur, seeming a world away. His immediate surroundings were quiet almost to the point of eeriness.

  He left the highway to trudge through an abandoned commercia district that had been punished heavily weeks before. Slain tanks littered the central market zone, both Imperial and alien, and each one commanding its own mound of nearby bodies. Red flies – the bloated and oversized tropical vermin that bred like a plague in the jungles to the west – were here in swarms, blanketing the dead and feeding from them.

  He’d not been prepared for the smell of a city at war. On the back of a Titan, one strode the battlefield like a colossus, far from what the princeps, blessings upon her, referred to as the ‘distasteful biological carnage’.

  The smell was somewhere between untreated sewage and spoiled food. He vomited again halfway across the plaza, releasing a stringy ooze that stuck to his teeth. Fluid packs and dehydrated foodstuffs were not wonderful for the digestion.

 
That night, he’d camped in the broken shell of a Leman Russ. The tank was half-buried in a fallen wall, which evidently it had rammed. Whatever had become of its crew was a mystery Asavan didn’t feel like looking into. He was glad enough that they weren’t there, slouched and rotting in their seats like so many others had been.

  When he finally slept, he dreamed of everything he’d seen that day. After three hours of dreaming that every corpse he’d passed was staring at him, he gave up the attempt to find rest and instead pushed on deeper into the city.

  On the second day, he had found his first survivors. In the ground floor of a collapsed habitation block, movement drew his eye.

  He’d voiced a tremulous ‘Hello?’ before he’d even realised he might be calling out to one of the invaders. The sound of scampering footsteps emboldened him. Alien beasts would not run from a lone human’s cry. ‘I’ve come to help,’ he called.

  Silence was the only answer.

  ‘I have food,’ he tried.

  A filthy face rose from behind a pile of rubble. Narrowed eyes never left him – bright and quick like a scavenger’s gaze.

  ‘I have food,’ Asavan said again, lowering his voice this time. With no sudden movement, he unslung the satchel from his back and held up a dehydrated food pouch in its silver packaging. ‘It’s dehydrated. Rations. But it’s food.’

  The face became a person, a middle-aged woman, as she left her hiding place and drew closer. Gaunt and wild-eyed, she moved with the caution of the forever fearful. It took three attempts for her to speak. Before the words left her mouth in a scratchy whisper, she had to clear her throat repeatedly.

  ‘You’re a priest?’ she asked, still not coming within arm’s reach. She pointed at his white and violet robes, her gesture weak and dismissive.

  ‘I am. The God-Emperor sent me to you.’