The need to turn around and pour its hatred into the enemy was fierce, a hunter’s urge, almost strong enough to overwhelm the Crone’s whispers in its mind.
The Crone. Her presence was a savage irritant. Again, Stormherald leaned as it walked, seeking to turn with its ponderous, striding slowness. And again, the Crone’s claws in its mind forced its body to comply with her intent.
We move, she whispered, to fight a greater battle soon.
Stormherald’s rage faded at her voice. There was something new in her words, something its predator’s mind clutched and recognised immediately. A fear. A doubt. A plea.
The Crone was weaker now than she ever had been before.
Stormherald knew nothing of pleasure or amusement. Its soul was forged in ancient rites of fire, molten metal, and plasmic energy that churned with the ferocity of a caged sun. The closest it came to an emotion approximating pleasure was the rush of awareness and the dimming of its painful anger as enemies died under its guns.
It felt a ghost of that sensation now. It complied with her urgings now, still bound to her control.
But the Crone was weaker.
Soon, she would be his.
Nightfall found Domoska with her storm trooper platoon holed up in the ruins of what had once been a hab-block.
Greenskin heavy armour had rolled through and changed all that. Now it was a tumbledown ruin of rockcrete and flakboard, and Domoska crouched behind a low wall, clutching her hellgun to her chest. Strapped to her back, her power pack hummed. The cable-feeds between her hellgun’s intake port and the backpack were vibrating and hot.
She was glad the skull-faced Astartes and that prissy adjutant quintus had ordered them back to the city. She didn’t want to admit it, but travelling in an Astartes gunship – even just in the bay with the racked jump packs and attack bikes – had been a thrill.
She was less delighted with her platoon’s assigned position in the urban war, but she was a storm trooper, the Legion’s finest, and she prided herself on her devotion to duty without raising a complaint.
With the bulk of Imperial forces in slow, fighting withdrawals and protracted holding actions, units across the city were tasked with lying in wait as the orks advanced, or stalking past undetected to take positions behind the enemy.
Across Helsreach, it was almost uniformly veteran outfits and storm trooper squads tasked with these movements. Colonel Sarren was using his best soldiers to achieve the most difficult operations.
And it was working.
Domoska would have preferred to be safely crouched behind a barricade, with Leman Russ tanks in support, but such was life.
‘Hey,’ Andrej whispered as he ducked next to her. ‘This is better than sitting on our arses in the desert, yes? Yes, it is, that’s what I think.’
‘Be quiet,’ she whispered back. Her auspex returns were coming back clear. No enemy heat signatures or movement nearby. Still, Andrej was being annoying.
‘The last one I gutted with my bayonet, eh? I am tempted to go back for his skull. Sand it down, wear it on my belt like a trophy. That would get me much attention, I think.’
‘It would get you shot first, most likely.’
‘Hm. Not the right kind of attention. You are too negative, okay? Yes, I said it. It is true.’
‘And I said to be quiet.’
Miraculously, he was. The two of them moved on, keeping crouched and low, moving from cover to cover. Sounds of battle were coming from the adjacent street – Domoska could hear the guttural roars and piggish snorts of embattled orks.
‘This is Domoska,’ she whispered into her hand-vox. ‘Contact ahead. Most likely the second group that passed us an hour ago.’
‘Acknowledged, Scout Team Three. Proceed as instructed, with all due caution.’
‘Yes, captain.’ Domoska clicked her vox off. ‘Ready, Andrej?’
Andrej nodded, crouched next to her once again. ‘I have three det-packs left, okay? Three more tanks must die. Then I get that caffeine the captain promised.’
The holographic table told its tale with reassuring accuracy. Sarren could not look away, despite how staring at the flickering light-images stung the eyes after a while.
The wave was breaking.
His bulwark units were digging in and holding their ground. Already, the pincer platoons were moving into position behind the first horde of invaders, ready to drive them forward and crush them between the hammer and anvil.
Sarren smiled. It had been a fine day.
Jurisian had not moved from his position in almost twenty-four hours.
He had said he would need over a week, and closer to two. He no longer believed this. This would take weeks, months… Perhaps even years.
The codes that kept the impenetrable bunker doors sealed were beautiful in their artistry – clearly the work of many masters of the Mechanicus. Jurisian feared no living being, and had slain in the name of the Emperor for twenty-three decades. This was the first time he had loathed his duty.
‘I need more time, Grimaldus,’ he had spoken into the vox several hours before.
‘You ask for the one thing I cannot give,’ the Reclusiarch had answered.
‘This might take me months. Perhaps years. As the code evolves, it breeds sub-ciphers that – in turn – require dedicated cracking. It breeds like an ecology, always changing, reacting to my intrusions by evolving into more complex systems.’
The pause had been laden with bitten-back anger. ‘I want that cannon, Jurisian. Bring it to me.’
‘As you will, Reclusiarch.’
Gone was the thrill of hoping to look upon Oberon, and being the soul to reawaken the great Ordinatus Armageddon. In its place was cold efficiency and undeniable disgust. This sealing code was one of the most complex creations humanity had pieced together from its various spheres of knowledge. Destroying it afflicted him with a pain akin to that which an artist would feel in destroying a priceless painting.
Runes spilled across his retinal display in green lettering. He solved six of the scrolling codes in the space of a single breath. The final five involved additional calculations based on the parameters established by the previous ones.
The code evolved. It reacted to his interference like a living thing, its ancient spirit fighting against his manipulations. So, so beautiful, Jurisian thought as he worked. Damn Grimaldus for asking this of him.
His servitors stood behind him, slack-jawed, dull-eyed and slowly starving to death.
Jurisian paid no heed.
He had a masterpiece to slay.
Chapter XI
The First Day
The shaking no longer bothered Asavan Tortellius.
His presence was an honour, and one he thanked the Mechanicus for in his daily prayers. In his eleven years of service, he’d quickly grown used to the shaking, the lurching tread, and even the rattling of weapons fire against the walls of his monastery. What Tortellius had never grown used to was the Shield.
In many ways, the Shield replaced the sky. He had been born on Jirrian – an unremarkable world in an unremarkable subsector a middling distance from Holy Terra. If Jirrian could be said to possess any attribute of note, it was its weather in the equatorial regions. The sky over the city of Handra-Lai was the deep, rich blue that poets spent so much time trying to capture in words, and imagists spent so much time trying to capture in picts. In a world of tedious tradition and the greyness of infinite societal equality – where everyone was just as poverty-stricken as everyone else – the skies above the slum hive Handra-Lai were the one aspect of his early life worth remembering.
The Shield had stolen that from him. He still had the memories, of course. But every year, they became duller, as if the Shield’s overreaching presence caused all else to fade.
It wasn’t that the Shield had any particular colour, because it didn’t. And it wasn’t that the Shield was brazenly oppressive, because it wasn’t.
Most of the time it wasn’t even visible, and at th
e best of times, it wasn’t even there.
And yet, in a way, it always was. It was oppressive. It was always there. It did discolour the sky. Its existence was betrayed by the abrasive electrical fizz in the air. Static would crackle between fingertips and metal surfaces. After a while, one’s teeth began to ache. It was most irritating.
And to think that it could be raised any moment. Looking up at alien skies held no pleasure at all, and it was all because of the Shield. It severed any real enjoyment of the heavens. Even when deactivated, there was forever the risk of it slamming up into life without notice, cutting Tortellius off from the outside world once more.
In moments of battle, the Shield was more beautiful than threatening. It would ripple like breaking waves, the colours of oil on water cascading across the sky. The smell of the Shield as it suffered attack was a heady clash of ozone and copper that, if one stood outside on the monastery’s battlements, would actually begin to make you feel light-headed after a time. Tortellius made a point of standing outside when the Shield was under siege, not for the stimulant effects of the Shield’s electrical charge, but because it was a dark pleasure to see his prison’s limits, rather than fear the invisible oppression.
Sometimes he would wonder if he was watching it in the secret hope it would fail. If the Shield came down… then what? Did he truly desire such a thing? No. No, of course not.
Still. He did wonder.
As he leaned on the battlements of the monastery, watching the city below, Tortellius reflected on the loathsomeness of this particular breed of xenos. The greenskins were filthy and bestial, their intelligence generously described as rudimentary, and more accurately as feral.
The mighty Stormherald, instrument of the God-Emperor’s divine will, had come to a halt. Tortellius noticed only because of the relative silence in the wake of its crashing tread.
His monastery, only part of the cathedral of spires and battlements adorning the Titan’s hunched shoulders, remained silent. Fifty metres below, he could hear the rattling of the leg turrets killing the aliens in the street. But the domed weapon mounts – each one bristling with granite gargoyles and stone representations of the angelic primarchs, those blessed slain sons of the God-Emperor – merely moved in their set alignments, their cannons ready.
Tortellius scratched his thinning hair (a curse he blamed entirely on the harsh electro-static charge of the Shield), and summoned his servo-skull. It hovered along the battlements towards him, its miniature suspension technology purring as it stayed aloft. The skull itself was human, sanded smooth and modified after it was removed from a corpse, now showing augmetic pict-takers and a voice-activated data-slate for recording sermons.
‘Hello, Tharvon,’ said Tortellius. The skull had once belonged to Tharvon Ushan, his favoured servant. How noble a fate, to serve the Ecclesiarchy even in death. How blessed Tharvon’s spirit must be, in the eternal light of the Golden Throne.
The skull probe said nothing. Its gravity suspensors hummed as it bobbed in the air.
‘Dictation,’ said Tortellius. The skull emitted an acknowledgement chime as its data-slate – no larger than a human palm and built into its augmented forehead – blinked active.
What little breeze penetrated the Shield wasn’t enough to cool his sweating face. The Armageddon sun might have been weak compared to the star that burned down on equatorial Jirrian, but it was stifling enough. Tortellius mopped his dark-skinned brow with a scented kerchief.
‘On this, the first day of the Siege of Hive Helsreach, the invaders have spilled into the city in unprecedented numbers. No, hold. Command word: Pause. Delete “unprecedented”. Replace with “overwhelming”. Command word: Unpause. The skies are clogged with pollution from the world’s industry, flak hanging in the clouds from the hive’s defences, and smoke from the outlying fires that ravage the outermost districts where the invaders have already conquered ground.
‘It is my belief that few chronicles of this immense war will survive to be interred in Imperial archives. I make this record now not out of a desire to spread my name in pomposity, but to accurately detail the holy bloodshed of this vast crusade.’
Here he hesitated. Tortellius struggled for the words, and as he chewed his lower lip, musing over dramatic description, the monastery shook beneath his feet again.
The Titan was moving.
Stormherald strode through the city, its passage unopposed.
Three enemy engines – the scrap-walkers that the aliens called gargants – had already died to its guns. In her prison of fluid, Zarha felt the stump at the end of her arm aching with a dull heat.
Once, she thought with an ugly smile, I had hands.
She aimed her next thought with care. The annihilator is overheating.
‘The annihilator is overheating.’
‘Understood, my princeps,’ replied Carsomir. He twitched in his restraint throne, accessing the status of the weapon through his hardwired link to the Titan’s heart-systems. ‘Confirmed. Chambers three through sixteen show rising temperature pressure.’
Zarha turned in her milky coffin, feeling instinctively what every other soul on board needed to perceive through calculations on monitors or slower hardwire links. She watched Carsomir twitch again, feeling the orders pulsing from his mind through willpower alone, reaching into the cognitive receptors at the Titan’s core. ‘Coolant flush, moderate intensity,’ he said. ‘Commencing in eight seconds.’
Zarha moved her right arm in the ooze, feeling pain in fingers that no longer existed.
‘Flushing coolant,’ said a nearby adept, hunched over his wall-mounted control panel.
The relief was immediate and blissful, like a sunburned hand plunged into a bucket of ice. She cancelled the vision feed from her photoreceptors, immersing herself in blackness as relief washed through her arm.
Thank you, Valian.
‘Thank you, Valian.’
Her vision flickered back into existence as she reactivated her optical implants. It was the work of a moment to readjust her perceptions, filtering out the immediacy of her surroundings. She took a breath, and stared out across the city with a god’s eyes.
The enemy, ant-like and amusing, swarmed in the street around her ankles. Zarha lifted her foot, feeling both the rush of air on her metallic skin and the swirling of fluid around her footless limb. The aliens fled from her crushing tread. A tank died, pounded into scrap.
Incidental fire from Stormherald’s leg battlements spilled into the road, cutting the orks down in droves.
‘My princeps,’ Moderati Secundus Lonn was twitching in his throne as he spoke, his muscles spasming in response to the flood of pulses from his connection to the Titan.
Speak, Lonn.
‘Speak, Lonn.’
‘We are venturing ahead of our skitarii support.’
Zarha was not blind to this. She hunched her shoulders, wasted muscles tensed and trembling, striding forward through the street.
I know. I sense… something.
‘I know. I sense something.’
The hab-towers on either side of the marching Titan were abandoned – this sector was one of the few lucky enough to be within easy range of the city’s scarce subterranean communal bunker complexes.
Inform Colonel Sarren I am pressing ahead with phase two.
‘Inform Colonel Sarren I am pressing ahead with phase two.’
‘Yes, my princeps.’
This sector, Omega-south-nineteen, had been one of the first to fall when the walls came down the day before. The aliens had been crawling through the area for many hours, but significant scrap-Titan strength was – as yet – unseen. It represented the perfect opportunity to slaughter legions of the enemy while their gargant groups were engaged elsewhere.
A feeling grew in the back of her head – something invasive and sharp, blooming through the webbing of veins in her brain. It was something she had not heard in many, many decades.
Someone was weeping.
Zarha
felt her face locked in a rictus as the feeling blossomed and grew fangs. The sharpness was jagged now, an acidic pulse through her skull.
‘My princeps?’
She didn’t hear at first.
‘My princeps?’
Yes, Valian.
‘Yes, Valian.’
‘We’re receiving word from Draconian. He’s dying, my princeps.’
I know… I feel him…
A moment later, Zarha felt the full shock grasp at her senses. The mortis-cry slashed through her cognitive link like a hurricane, shrieking at a soundless pitch of pain. Draconian was down. The princeps aboard her, Jacen Veragon, was screaming as the aliens scuttled over his corpse, pulling at his armoured metal skin as he lay prone.
How had he fallen?
And there it was. In the screaming cry was the memory she sought. The lurching of vision as the Reaver-class engine was dragged to its knees. The sense of infuriating immobility. He was a god… How could this happen… Why would his limbs no longer function…
Everywhere around was rubble and smoke. It was impossible to see clearly.
The scream was fading now. Draconian’s reactor-heart, a boiling cauldron of plasmic fusion, was growing cold and still.
‘We’ve lost contact,’ said Valian, a second after Zarha sensed it herself. She was weeping, though the saltwater secreted from her tear ducts was immediately dissolved in the fluid entombing her.
Lonn had his eyes closed, accessing an internal hololithic display within the cognitive link. ‘Draconian was in Omega-west-five.’ His dark eyes flicked open. ‘Reports show the site is the same as here: evacuated habitation towers, minimal engine resistance.’
The adept manning the scanning console, his mouth replaced by a scarab-like vocaliser, blurted a screed of machine code across the cockpit.
‘Confirmed,’ Carsomir said. ‘We’re getting an auspex return to the south. Significant heat signature. Almost definitely an enemy engine.’
Zarha heard almost none of this. Images of Draconian’s death played out behind her false eyes like scenes from a play, coloured by the stinking taint of black emotion beneath. She sobbed once, her heart aching like it would burst. Hearing only that an enemy was nearby, she walked in the fluid, her limbs moving.
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