Helsreach (warhammer 40000)

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Nerovar, Cador and Bastilan were altogether more graceful in their landings. The sergeant came down in the shadow of one of the tilted statues. Its stern face eclipsed the setting sun.

  'These are the primarchs,' he said to the others as they readied their weapons.

  All heads turned towards Bastilan. He was right.

  As representations of the primarchs went, they were plain to the point of almost being crude. The sons of the Emperor were usually depicted in grandeur and glory, rather than by sculptures so subtle and austere.

  There was Sanguinius, Lord of the Blood Angels, prominently unwinged, with a childlike face lowered in repose. And there, Guilliman of the Ultramarines, his robed form so much slenderer than any other depiction of him that the knights had seen before. In one hand, he clutched an open tome. The other was raised to the sky, as if he was caught and forever frozen in a moment of great oratory.

  Jaghatai Khan was bare-chested, bearing a curved blade in his hands and looking to the left, as if staring at the distant horizon. His hair was shaggy and long, whereas in so many masterpieces it was shaven but for a topknot. Next to him, Corax, the Prince of Ravens, wore a plain mask that was utterly featureless but for the eyes. It was as if he was unwilling to show his face in the company of his brothers, hiding his visage behind an actor's mask.

  Ferrus Manus and Vulkan shared a plinth. The brothers were bareheaded, and the only two primarchs sculpted here in armour. Both wore vests of mail, the fine links of chain on Manus's breast a counterpoint to the larger scales adorning Vulkan's. They stood back to back, facing in opposite directions, both carved to bear hammers in each hand.

  Leman Russ of the Wolves stood with legs apart, head cast back, facing the sky. Whereas the other sons of the Emperor wore robes or armour, Russ was clad in rags sculpted over his chiselled musculature. He was also the only primarch with tensed fists, as if he stared into the heavens, awaiting some grim arrival.

  A robed figure, hooded yet visibly slender to the point of emaciation, clutched the hilt of a winged blade, its tip between the statue's bare feet. Here was the Lion, depicted as a warrior-monk, eyes closed in silent contemplation.

  And, last of all, rising above Bastilan, was Rogal Dorn.

  Dorn stood apart from his brothers, neither facing his kin, nor looking into the skies above. His regal visage was aimed at the ground to his left, as if the primarch stared at something vital only he could see. The robe he wore was plainer that those adorning his brothers' icons, though it showed a cross on its breast, sculpted with care. Although he had been the Golden Lord, the commander of the Imperial Fists, his personal heraldry had inspired that of his Templar sons who followed.

  His hands were what drew the knights' eyes more than any other aspect in this gathering of demigods. One was held to his chest, the fingertips joined to the cross there, frozen in mid-stroke. The other was held out in the direction Dorn stared, palm up and kindly, as if offering aid to one who would rise from the floor.

  It was quite the most humble and exquisite rendition of their gene-father Grimaldus had ever laid eyes on. He fought the sudden burning urge to fall to his knees in reverent prayer.

  'This is an omen,' Bastilan continued. Grimaldus could barely believe only a handful of seconds had passed since the sergeant last spoke.

  'It is,' the Reclusiarch replied. 'We will purify this temple under the gaze of our forefather. Dorn watches us, brothers. Let us make him proud of the day he sired the first Templar.'

  We move withouthesitation, and without caution, through the cathedral.

  The angled floor is an irritation that I've managed to blank from my mind by the time the third alien is dead. Room by room, we move in unison. The cathedral is a divided into a series of chambers ringing the courtyard, each one with its own stained glass windows now shattered and gaping like missing teeth, each room reaching high up with a pointed ceiling ending in the spire above.

  The slaughter is easy, almost mindless. Priamus is like a wolf on the leash, eager to run ahead on his own.

  My patience is wearing thin with him.

  Each chamber also shows its own unique desecration. Tech-adepts and Ecclesiarchy priests lie dead and butchered, their bodies in pieces across the mosaic floors. Unarmed as they were, they offered little resistance to the rampaging invaders. Bookshelves are overturned, ceramic ornaments shattered… I would never put feral destruction past this xenos-breed, but it almost seems as if the greenskins sought something specific in their rabid assault.

  'The articulation structures are sealed. My bones are defended by internal forces. My heart-core is cut off from the parasites.'

  Ambush or not, it is disgusting that it took them even this long to achieve such basic necessities.

  'We are retaking the Cathedral of Sanctuary,' I tell her. 'Resistance is minimal, Zarha. But you must stand. They are still coming. Bring the cathedral out of range of boarders, or we will be overwhelmed.'

  'I cannot stand,' she says.

  What a sin it is, for such a majestic warrior to speak with such shameful defeat tainting her words. Were she one of my men, I would kill her for such dishonour. Slowly. By strangulation. Cowardice does not deserve the rush of a blade.

  'I have tried,' she intones.

  The emotion colouring her machine-voice brings my bile rising. For all I know, she could be weeping. My disgust is so powerful I must fight the need to vomit.

  'Try harder,' I breathe into the vox, and sever the link.

  We fight our way to the outer battlements at Stormherald's front, where the incline allows for easy boarding. An ork's fat hand slaps on the red metal of the battlement's edge, and the brute hauls itself up. My pistol meets its face, the heat exchanger vanes hissing against its skin. It has a moment to bawl its hatted at me before I pull the trigger. What remains of the alien falls from its handholds, tumbling to the ground, burning briefly on its way down as a living torch of white-hot fire.

  The battlements resemble a true siege in all respects. The last remaining tech-adepts and priests defend the cathedral against boarding aliens, though no more than a small cluster remain. Few humans, augmented or otherwise, are a match for one of these beasts.

  Priamus slips the leash of discipline. His charge carries him ahead, his sword flaring with light each time its power field saws into alien flesh. My brothers lay into the enemy along the besieged wall with bolter and blade. The few servitor-manned spire turrets that had been spitting solid shots into the mass of orks fall silent, not willing to risk striking any of us.

  'You will do penance for this, Priamus.'

  He doesn't answer. 'For the Emperor!' he cries into the vox. 'For Dorn!'

  In the pockets of battle where none of us stand, the turrets open fire once again. At least their servitors are worth something, then. The orks turn from butchering the few priests still standing. Their bestial faces are afire with brutish, eager emotion as they come for us.

  One of them… Throne of the Emperor… One of them dwarfs his piggish brethren. His armour makes him twice the size of us, looking like scrap metal and primitive, chugging power generators bolted onto an exoskeletal frame. His hands are industrial claws that look as if they could peel a tank apart without effort. He even kills his own kin as he strides towards us on the inclined floor. His claws swing, battering his lesser allies aside, hurling them against the cathedral wall or over the battlement's edge.

  I raise my crozius in a two-handed grip. 'That one is mine,' I tell my brothers. 'Dorn is watching this.'

  'You asked to see me, sir?'

  Tomaz didn't bother to straighten his crumpled work overalls as he stood at what could loosely be called attention. Around him, the command chamber was its usual bustling hive of activity. A junior staff officer bumped him as she passed.

  Tomaz said nothing. He'd worked fifteen hours straight today, on a dock backed up with dozens and dozens of ships, with almost no room to unload. Fifteen hours of shouting, of broken vox-casters and no techs spare t
o fix them, of cargo being dumped wherever it could be dumped - which was inevitably the wrong place (and the most inconvenient one for someone else) - necessitating its removal minutes later when another worker's already fouled-up work was fouled-up even further.

  Frankly, he didn't much care if he got shoved over onto the ground. Maybe he could curl up and get some damn sleep.

  'Sir,' he prompted.

  Sarren finally looked up from the hololithic table. The colonel had aged in the last week, Maghernus could see it clearly. He looked as tired and bone-achingly sick of it all as Tomaz felt.

  'What?' Sarren asked, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. 'Oh. Yes. Dockmaster.' Sarren looked back down at the hololithic display. 'I need your crews to speed up. Is that understood?'

  Maghernus blinked. 'I'm sorry, sir. I didn't quite hear you.'

  'I need,' Sarren didn't look up, 'your crews to speed up their work. The reports I'm getting from the docks show they are at a standstill. We are talking about significant portions of the north and east perimeters of the city, dockmaster. I need to move troops. I need to store materiel. I need you to do your job.'

  Maghernus looked around the room in disbelief, unsure how to respond.

  'What would you have me do, colonel? What is there that I can possibly do?'

  'Your job, Maghernus.'

  'Have you even seen the docks recently, colonel?'

  Sarren looked up again, laughing without even a shred of humour. 'Do I look like I have seen anything except casualty reports recently?'

  'I can't do anything about the docks,' Maghernus shook his head, a sense of unreality settling over him. 'I'm not a miracle worker.'

  'I appreciate you have an… intense… workload.'

  'That's not the half of it. We're dealing with a backlog of weeks, months even, and no room to handle anything.'

  'Nevertheless, I need more from you and your crews.'

  'Of course, sir. I'll be back in a moment, I feel the sudden need to piss expensive white wine and turn everything I touch into gold.'

  'This is no laughing matter.'

  'And I'm not laughing you pompous son of a bitch. ''Work harder''? ''Do more''? Are you insane? There's nothing I can do!'

  Nearby officers glanced his way. Sarren sighed and rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.

  'I respect the difficulties of your position, dockmaster, but this is the first week of the siege. This is only going to get worse. We are all going to sleep much less, and we are all going to work much harder. Furthermore, I understand that you are sweating blood in an underappreciated duty, but you are not the only one suffering. You, at least, are guaranteed to live longer than many of us. I have men and women in the streets, fighting and dying for your home, so that you may continue to complain at how I crack the whip over you. I have hundreds of thousands of citizens under arms, facing the greatest alien invasion force the world has ever seen.

  'Sir,' Maghernus took a breath. 'I will—'

  'You will shut up and let me finish, dockmaster. I have platoons of men and women lost behind the advancing enemy line, no doubt hacked to pieces by the axes of barbarous xenos monsters. I have armour divisions running out of fuel because of resupply difficulties in the embattled sectors. I have an Emperor-class Titan on its knees, because its commander was too angry to think clearly. I have a city with its edges on fire, and its population in rout with nowhere to run to. I have tens of thousands of soldiers dying to prevent the enemy from reaching the Hel's Highway - people dying for a road, dockmaster - because once the beasts reach the city's spine, we are all going to die a great deal faster.

  'Now, am I making myself perfectly clear when I tell you that while I have sympathy for your difficulties, I also expect you to work through them? We are, just to be sure, no longer speaking past one another? We are, for the record, now on the same page?'

  Maghernus swallowed and nodded.

  'Good,' Sarren smiled. 'That's good. What can you do for me, dockmaster?'

  'I'll… speak to my crews, colonel.'

  'My thanks for understanding the situation we are in, Tomaz. You are dismissed. Now, someone raise a reliable vox-signal to the Reclusiarch. I need to know how close he is to getting that Titan walking.'

  In the cognition chamber, Grimaldus stood before the crippled Zarha.

  His armour's calm, measured hum was marred by a mechanical ticking sound at random intervals. Something, some internal system linking the power pack to the suit of armour was malfunctioning. His skull helm with its silver faceplate was painted with alien blood. His armour's left knee joint clicked as he moved, the servos inside damaged and in need of reverent maintenance by Chapter artificers. Where scrolls of written oaths had hung from his pauldrons, the armour was burned, the ceramite cracked.

  But he was alive.

  At his side, Artarion looked similarly battered. The others remained in the cathedral above, maintaining a vigil now the orks were punished and slain for their blasphemy.

  'Your Titan,' Grimaldus uttered the words, 'is purged. Now stand, princeps.'

  Zarha floated in the milky waters, not hearing him, not even moving. She looked as if she had drowned.

  'Stormherald has taken her,' Moderati Carsomir said, his voice low. 'She was ancient, and had oppressed her will over the Titan's core for many years.'

  'She still lives,' the knight noted.

  'Only in the flesh, and not for much longer.' Carsomir looked pained even explaining this. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles. 'The machine-spirit of an Imperator is so much stronger than any soul you can imagine, Reclusiarch. These precious engines are born as lesser reflections of the Machine-God Himself. They carry His will and His strength.'

  'No machine-spirit is the equal of a living soul,' said Grimaldus. 'She was strong. I sensed it in her.'

  'You understand nothing of the metaphysics at work here! Who are you to lecture us in this way? We were linked to the Titan's core at the end. You are nothing, an… an outsider.'

  Grimaldus turned to the crewmembers in their control seats, his broken armour joints snarling.

  'I shed blood in the defence of your engine, as did my brothers. You would be torn from your thrones and buried in the rubble of your own failure, had I not saved your lives. The next time you call a Templar nothing is the moment I kill you where you sit, little man. You are nothing without your Titan, and your Titan lives because of me. Remember to whom you speak.'

  The crew shared uncomfortable glances.

  'He meant no offence,' one of the tech-priests mumbled through a facially-implanted vox-caster.

  'I do not care what he intended. I deal in realities. Now. Make this Titan walk.'

  'We… can't.'

  'Do it anyway. Stormherald was supposed to move in synergy with the 199th Steel Legion Armoured Division over an hour ago, and they are in full retreat due to being unsupported. The delay is finished with. Get back in the fight.'

  'Without a princeps? How are we to do that?' Carsomir shook his head. 'She is gone from us, Reclusiarch. The shame of it all, the rage of defeat. We all felt the Titan rush into her. Her mind has joined the union of all previous princeps, amalgamated in the Titan's core. Her soul is buried as surely as her body would be in a grave.'

  'She lives,' the knight narrowed his eyes.

  'For now. But this is how princeps die.'

  Grimaldus turned back to the amniotic coffin, and the unmoving woman within.

  'That is unacceptable.'

  'It is the truth.'

  'Then the truth,' the Reclusiarch growled, 'is unacceptable.'

  She wept in the silence - the way one weeps when truly alone, when there is no shame to be found in being seen by others.

  Around her was nothingness absolute. No sound. No movement. No colour. She floated in this nothingness, neither cold nor hot, with no reference of direction or sensation.

  And she wept.

  Upon opening her eyes moments before, a thrill of fear had sliced u
p her spine. She did not know who she was, where she was, or why she was here.

  Her memories - the fractured, flashing images that were all that kept her mind from being completely hollow - were of a hundred worlds she could not recall seeing, and a hundred wars she could not remember fighting.

  Worse, they were each tainted by an emotion she had never felt - something inhuman, abrasive, sinister… and partway between exaltation and terror. She saw these moments of memory, and felt the unnerving presence of another being's emotions instead of her own.

  It was like drowning. Drowning in someone else's dreams.

  Who had she been before? Did it even matter? She slipped deeper. What remaining sense of self existed began to break away and diminish, sacrificed to buy a peaceful, silent death.

  Then the voice came, and it ruined everything.

  'Zarha,' it said.

  With the word came a weak understanding, an awareness. She had memories of her own - at least, she had once possessed such things. It suddenly seemed wrong to no longer have access to her own recollections.

  As she resurfaced slowly, the infiltrating memories returned. The wars. The emotions. The fire and the fury. Instinctively, she pulled away again, preparing to return deeper within the nothingness. Anything to escape the memories belonging to another soul.

  'Zarha,' the voice clawed after her. 'You swore to me.'

  Another layer of comprehension returned. Within the revelation were her own emotions, waiting for her to reclaim them. The overwhelming sensory storm of the other mind's memories no longer frightened her. They angered her.

  She would not be so easily shackled. No false-soul's thoughts would conquer her like this.

  'You swore to me,' the voice said, 'that you would walk.'

  She smiled in the nothingness, rising through it now like an ascending angel. Stormherald's memories assailed her with renewed vigour, but she cast them aside like leaves in the wind.

  You are right, Grimaldus, she told the voice. I did swear I would walk.

  'Stand,' he demanded, stern and cold and glowering. 'Zarha. Stand.'