Helsreach

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Void shields buckling,’ one of the tech-adepts called from a side terminal.

  ‘Enemy engine making ready to fire primary weapons,’ another said.

  ‘They’ll never get the chance…’ Valian Carsomir smiled with a wicked light in his eyes.

  Lonn’s shouted protest was drowned out in the roar of discharging sunfire. A beam of plasma – roiling, boiling and white-hot – vomited from the cannon’s focusing ring, blasting across the four hundred metres separating the two Titans. Stormherald stood rigid, defensive, no longer advancing after the first two minutes of punishing exchange. Godbreaker had not stopped its thunderous, slow charge.

  ‘You bastard!’ Lonn yelled. Carsomir had missed. The jet of plasma blanketed the ground to the left of the closing ork gargant, where it began to dissolve everything it touched in a vast pool of acidic corruption.

  Lonn had been right. The arm-weapon had strayed despite targeting locks, as the supreme force of its own firepower sent it veering off-centre.

  ‘I had the shot,’ Carsomir shook his head.

  ‘Void shields failing,’ the tech-adept announced without any emotion whatsoever.

  ‘I had the shot,’ Carsomir repeated, unable to look away from the wreck-Titan bearing down upon them. Behind the moderati thrones, Zarha floated in her suspension tank, slack and unconscious.

  ‘No, no, no…’ Lonn worked at his console, his brow furrowed. ‘This can’t be.’

  The Titan began to shudder around them as the void shields died again, the Imperator’s dense armour taking the brunt of the alien attack.

  Lonn had never worked like this before in his life. It was a flurry of effort, performed half in the flesh and half with the mind. He could feel the Titan falling into slumber, and its dimming consciousness dragged at his thoughts, slowing them to a crawl. Where he met resistance like this in the mind-link, he compensated by overrides on his command console.

  The command deck grew dark as he worked. The enemy gargant eclipsed all outside light, looming before the idle Stormherald.

  ‘Why hasn’t it fired?’ Carsomir worked as Lonn did, cooling essential systems, ordering repair teams to afflicted joints, feeding power from the coughing shield generators to the thirsty weapon energy cells.

  To Lonn, the reason was obvious. Like the savages that acted as the gargant’s puppeteers, the scrap-Titan was built to kill with its hands. Several of the thing’s weapon mounts were taken up by crude arms that ended in spears and claws of salvaged metal. It wanted to savour Stormherald’s death, like some many-armed daemon from the impure millennia of pre-Imperial Terra.

  Zarha’s augmetic eyes flicked back to active as the chamber grew dark. She awoke, seeing the doom bearing down on her, feeling secondary fire devastating her armour plating like she was being skinned alive.

  Through the bloody fluid and maddening pain, she raised her shivering arms. Stormherald mirrored the gesture as it was pummelled under Godbreaker’s guns. Jagged metal fell from the Mechanicus giant like rainfall, ripped from its body and crashing to the ground below. Many of the Imperator’s crew that had the sense of self-preservation to flee were killed by the falling chunks of armour plating.

  Zarha put the last of her strength, and the last of her life, into throwing both her arms forward. The plasma annihilator did not fire. Neither did the hellstorm cannon. Both were locked in the time-consuming process of recharging from depleted power generators.

  Both towering weapon-arms speared forward, hammering through the fat hull of Godbreaker and impaling it in place. The cry of tearing scrap metal was cacophonous as Stormherald’s cannons pushed deeper, stabbing like daggers through meat, seeking to grind and crush the enemy’s heart-reactor.

  Grimaldus. I stood until the end, as promised. Awaken Oberon. Awaken it, or die as we have.

  Perhaps her thoughts echoed across the empathic link to her moderati, for one of them voiced something of her sentiments.

  ‘We’re dead,’ Carsomir murmured. He wanted to rise from his throne, but the restraints and connection cables bound him too completely. He settled for closing his eyes.

  Lonn had sensed the Crone’s intent. He leaned all his weight on the control levers, adding his demands to Zarha’s, plunging the arms deeper into the enemy Titan’s chest with scraping, grinding slowness. He felt sick to stare up through the darkened viewports to see the bestial, tusked aliens clambering along the impaling arm-cannons, using them as bridges to board Stormherald as they bled from the wounds in their own Titan’s body.

  With no peaceful fade or foreshadowing, the power died, leaving him in darkness. He eased up on the levers, knowing without needing to look that the Crone was gone.

  Stormherald was a statue, joined to the war machine that was slowly carving it to pieces with great chops of its bladed limbs. As endings went, Lonn mused, this was neither grand nor glorious.

  As the command deck shook with rhythmic violence from the pound, pound, pounding of Godbreaker’s many weapon-arms, Lonn drew his laspistol, and watched the sealed doors, ready for the aliens to eventually breach them. His skin crawled at the gentle sound of Zarha’s corpse bumping against the glass front of her coffin, in time to the Titan’s shaking.

  ‘I… I had the shot,’ Carsomir stammered from the adjacent throne as he waited to die in the dark. ‘I had the shot…’

  The side of his head burst open as a las-beam slashed through his skull.

  ‘You bastard,’ Lonn said to the twitching body. Then he lowered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began the laborious process of disengaging himself from the control throne.

  There was something human in the way Stormherald died. The way it went slack, the way it staggered, the way it crashed to the ground, its heart-core cold, swarming with enemy bodies like insects feeding upon a corpse.

  The god-machine shook the earth when it finally toppled. The spined, spiked cathedral tumbled from its back in a spillage of priceless architecture, left as no more than rubble and scraps of armour plating in a mountain of wreckage by the Titan’s head. Stormherald’s arms were wrenched from the torso, squealing free of the ruptured shoulder joints when the ancient engine hammered into the ground with enough force to send tremors through the entire city.

  The head itself was torn free before the main body fell, leaving a socket of trailing power cables and interface feeds, like a nest of a million snakes. Gripped in the lifter-claw at the end of one of Godbreaker’s many arms, the Titan’s head was clamped and crushed, then hurled aside as a twisted ball of scrap metal. Its landing flattened a small manufactorum, as the armoured command chamber weighing several dozen tonnes blasted through the building’s side wall and pulverised several support pillars.

  On board Godbreaker, the bestial creature in charge ranted at its subordinates for destroying and discarding the Titan’s head in such a way. To the beast’s mind, it would have made a very impressive trophy to mount on their own god-machine.

  The few Legio crew members, skitarii defenders and tech-adepts that survived Stormherald’s fall scrabbled from exits and breaks in the behemoth’s skin. In the midday light of Armageddon’s weak sun, they were cut down by the ork reavers around the dead Titan.

  Miraculously, Moderati Secundus Lonn was one of these. He had managed to break free of the bindings and interface cables linking him to the dying god-machine, and make it out of the bridge by the time Godbreaker decapitated Stormherald. In the following fall, he broke his leg in two places, earned a concussion as the tilting corridor sent him falling down a flight of spiral stairs, and busted several of his teeth clear out of his gums when his head smacked off a handrail.

  On hands and knees, dragging his dead leg and half-drunk with concussion, Lonn hauled himself out of an emergency bulkhead to lie on the warm armour plating of Stormherald’s torso. There he remained, panting and bleeding in the thin sunlight for several seconds, before starting to crawl his slow way down the ground. He was killed less than a minute later by the marauding greenskins sw
arming over the downed Titan.

  Through the pain, he was laughing as he died.

  Grimaldus came at last to the inner sanctum.

  He was no longer a warrior here, but a pilgrim. Of this he was certain, though in the wake of his words with Nero, he felt certain of little else.

  It had taken very little time within the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant to bring about this certainty within him, but the feeling was undeniable. He felt home, on familiar and sacred ground, for the first time since he had left the Eternal Crusader.

  It was purifying.

  The cool air didn’t taste of fire and blood on a world he had no wish to walk upon. The silence wasn’t broken by the drumbeat of a war he had no stake in.

  Augmented infants – the lobotomised bodies of children kept eternally young through gene manipulation and hormone control – were enhanced by simple Mechanicus organs and pressed into service as winged cherub-servitors, hovering on anti-grav fields as they trailed prayer banners through the halls and arched chambers.

  In the myriad rooms of the basilica, the devoted and the faithful of Helsreach went about their daily reverence despite the war blackening their city. Grimaldus walked through a chamber of monks offering prayer through inscribing hundreds of saints’ names on thin parchments that would hang from the weapons of Temple guards. One of the holy men kneeled as the Astartes passed, imploring the ‘Angel of Death’ to wear the parchment on his armour. Touched by the man’s devotion, the knight had accepted, and voxed an order to the rest of his men scattered throughout the temple grounds to acquiesce to any similar charity.

  Grimaldus let the lay brother tie the scroll to his pauldron with twine. The offered parchment was a modest but appreciated replacement for the iconography, oathpapers and heraldry that had been scoured from his armour in the last five weeks of battle.

  The Reclusiarch had ventured alone into the undercroft, wishing to bear witness to the civilians there in his patrol to examine all defences and locations within the basilica. The subterranean expanse might once have been austere and solemn, featuring little more than infrequently-spaced sarcophagi of black stone. To the knight’s eyes, it was a refugee bunker, packed tight with humans that smelled both unwashed and afraid as they sat around in family clusters – some asleep; some speaking quietly; some comforting crying babies; some spreading out meagre possessions on dirty blankets, taking stock of everything they now owned in the world, which was all they had managed to carry with them as they’d fled their homes.

  Wordlessly, he’d walked among them. Every one of them had moved from his path; every one of them so openly awed by their first sighting of an Astartes warrior. Parents whispered to children, and children whispered more questions back.

  ‘Hello,’ a voice called from behind him as he was moving back up the wide marble stairs. The Reclusiarch turned. A girl-child stood at the bottom of the staircase, clad in an oversized shirt that clearly belonged to a parent or older sibling. Her ratty blonde hair was so dirty that it snarled quite naturally into accidental dreadlocks.

  Grimaldus descended again, ignoring the girl’s parents hissing at her, calling her back. She was no older than seven or eight. She stood up straight, and reached his knee.

  ‘Hail,’ he said to her. The crowd flinched back from the vox-voice, and several of those closest gasped in a breath.

  The girl blinked. ‘Father says you are a hero. Are you a hero?’

  Grimaldus’s gaze flicked across the crowd. His targeting cursor danced from face to face, seeking her parents.

  Nothing in two centuries of war had prepared him to answer this question. The gathered refugees looked on in silence.

  ‘There are many heroes here,’ the Chaplain replied.

  ‘You are very loud,’ the girl complained.

  ‘I am more used to shouting,’ the knight lowered his voice. ‘Do you require something from me?’

  ‘Will you save us?’

  He looked at the crowd again, and chose his words with great care.

  That had been an hour ago. The Reclusiarch stood with his closest brothers and the Emperor’s Champion in the basilica’s inner sanctum.

  The chamber was expansive, easily able to accommodate a thousand worshippers at once. For now, it stood bare, the hundreds of Steel Legionnaires that were bunking here in recent weeks currently out on their patrols through the graveyard and surrounding temple district.

  The few dozen that had been off-duty were ushered out by monks when the Astartes had entered. Almost immediately, the knights were joined by a new presence. An irritated presence, at that.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ the irritated presence said in her old woman’s voice. ‘The Emperor’s Chosen, come to stand with us at last.’

  The knights turned in the sunlit chamber, back to the entrance where a diminutive figure stood in contoured power armour. A bolter, cased in bronze with gold-leaf etchings, was mag-locked between her shoulders. The gun was a smaller calibre than Astartes weaponry, but still a rare firearm to see in the possession of a human.

  Her white power armour was bedecked in trappings that marked her rank in the Holy Order of the Argent Shroud. The old woman’s white hair was cut severely at her chin, framing a wrinkled face with icy eyes.

  ‘Hail, prioress,’ Bayard acknowledged her with a bow, as did the others. Grimaldus and Priamus made no obeisance, with the swordsman remaining unmoving and Grimaldus instead making the sign of the aquila.

  ‘I am Prioress Sindal, and in the name of Saint Silvana, I bid you welcome to the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.’

  Grimaldus stepped forward. ‘Reclusiarch Grimaldus of the Black Templars. I cannot help but notice that you do not sound welcoming.’

  ‘Should I be? Half of the Temple District has already fallen in the last week. Where were you then, hmm?’

  Priamus laughed. ‘We were at the docks, you ungrateful little harpy.’

  ‘Be at ease,’ Grimaldus warned. Priamus replied with a vox-click of acknowledgement.

  ‘We were, as my brother Priamus explained, engaged in the east of the hive. But we are here now, when the war is at its darkest, as the enemy approach the temple doors.’

  ‘I have fought with Astartes before,’ the prioress said, her armoured arms crossed over the fleur-de-lys symbol that marked her sculpted breastplate. ‘I have fought alongside warriors who would have given their lives for the Imperium’s ideals, and warriors that cared only for accruing glory, as if they could wear their honour like armour. Both breeds were Astartes.’

  ‘We are not here to be lectured on the state of our souls,’ Grimaldus tried to keep the irritation from his voice.

  ‘Whether you are or not doesn’t matter, Reclusiarch. Will you dismiss your fellow warriors from the chamber, please? There is much to speak of.’

  ‘We can speak of the temple’s defence in front of my brothers.’

  ‘Indeed we can, and when the time comes to speak of such things, they will be present. For now, please dismiss them.’

  ‘Did you cleanse yourself, by the Stoup of Elucidation?’

  This is the question she asks in the silence that descends once my brothers are gone, and the doors are closed.

  The stoup she speaks of is a huge bowl of black iron, mounted upon a low pedestal of what looks like wrought gold. It stands by the double doors, which are themselves bedecked in imagery of warlike angels with toothed swords, and saints bearing bolters.

  I confess to her that I did not.

  ‘Come then.’ She beckons me to the bowl. The water within reflects the painted ceiling and the stained glass windows above – a riot of colour in a liquid mirror.

  She dips a bare finger into the water after taking the time to detach and remove her gauntlets. ‘This water is thrice-blessed,’ she says, tracing her dripping fingertip across her forehead in a crescent moon. ‘It brings clarity of purpose, when anointed onto the doubting and the lost.’

  ‘I am not lost,’ I lie, and she smiles at the words.<
br />
  ‘I did not mean to imply that you were, Reclusiarch. But many who come here are.’

  ‘Why did you wish to speak with me alone? Time is short. The war will reach these walls in a matter of days. Preparations must be made.’

  She speaks, staring down into the perfect reflection offered by the bowl. ‘This basilica is a bastion. A castle. We can defend it for weeks, when the enemy finally gathers courage enough to besiege it.’

  ‘Answer the question.’ This time, I could not keep the irritation from my voice even if I had wished to.

  ‘Because you are not like your brothers.’

  I know that when she looks at my face, she does not see me. She sees the death mask of the Emperor, the skull helm of an Astartes Reclusiarch, the crimson eye lenses of humanity’s chosen. And yet our gazes meet in the water’s reflection, and I cannot completely fight the feeling she is seeing me, beneath the mask and the masquerade.

  What does she mean by those words? That she senses my doubts? That they drip from me like nervous sweat, visible and stinking to all who stand near me?

  ‘I am no different from them.’

  ‘Of course you are. You are a Chaplain, are you not? A Reclusiarch. A keeper of your Chapter’s lore, soul, traditions and purity.’

  My heart rate slows again. My rank. That is all she meant.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I am given to understand Astartes Chaplains are invested with their authority by the Ecclesiarchy?’

  Ah. She seeks common ground. Good luck to her in this doomed endeavour. She is a warrior of the Imperial Creed, and an officer in the Church of the God-Emperor.

  I am not.

  ‘The Ecclesiarchy of Terra supports our ancient rites, and the authority of every Chapter’s Reclusiam to train warrior-priests to guide the souls of its battle-brothers. They do not invest us with power. They recognise we already hold it.’

  ‘And you are given a gift by the Ecclesiarchy? A rosarius?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I see yours?’

  The few Astartes singled out for ascension into the Reclusiam are gifted with a rosarius medallion upon succeeding in the first trials of Chaplainhood. My talisman was beaten bronze and red iron, shaped into a heraldic cross.