Armageddon

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  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.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Maghernus whispered back. The storm trooper had removed his goggles to wipe his own aching eyes. They’d not slept – they’d barely even stopped fighting – in over twenty hours.

  ‘My captain wishes us to move west. There are civilian shelters above ground there.’

  One of the men hawked and spat on the ground. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. Andrej didn’t think any less of him for the fact he’d been weeping.

  ‘West?’ the man asked.

  ‘West,’ Andrej said again. ‘That is my captain’s order, and that is what we will do.’

  ‘But the beasts are already there. We saw them.’

  ‘I did not say the order was what I wished to do with my retirement years. I said it was an order, and obeying orders is what we are going to do.’

  ‘But if the aliens are already there…’ another worker piped up, snapping Andrej’s patience.

  ‘Then we will be behind enemy lines and see many dead civilians we were too late to save. Throne, you think I have good answers for you all? I do not. I have no good answers, not for you, not for anyone else. But my captain has ordered us to go there, and go there we most certainly shall. Yes? Yes.’

  It did the trick. A ghost of focus returned to their slack, weary gazes.

  ‘Let’s do it, then,’ Maghernus said, his knees clicking as he rose up. He was amazed he could still stand. ‘Blood of the Emperor, I’ve never ached like this.’

  ‘Why are you complaining, I wonder,’ the storm trooper refastened his goggles with a grin. ‘You worked insane shifts on these docks. This is surely no more tiring, I think.’

  ‘Yeah,’ one of the others grunted, ‘but we were getting paid then.’

  With muted laughter, the team moved back out onto the docks.

  Colonel Sarren’s injured arm was securely fastened in a makeshift sling. What annoyed him most was the loss of his right arm to gesture with to the hololithic display, but then, that was the price to pay for foolishly leaving the Grey Warrior in hostile territory. Shrapnel in the arm was a lucky break, all things considered. The enemy sniper team had killed four of his Baneblade’s command crew as they surfaced from the bowels of their tank for much-needed fresh air after countless hours breathing the rank, recycled fumes of the internal filtration scrubbers.

  Another sector cleared, only to be wormed through again by bestial scavengers mere hours later.

  In the low-ceilinged confines of the tank’s principal command chamber, Sarren sat on his well-worn throne, letting the tension ebb from him and trying to forget the column of pain that had been a perfectly normal arm only an hour before. The sawbones, Jerth, had already recommended amputation, citing the risk of infection from dirty shrapnel and the likelihood the limb would never return to – as he put it – ‘full functionality’.

  Bloody surgeons. Always so keen to graft on some cheap, jury-rigged bionic that would click every time he moved a muscle and seize up because of low-grade components. Sarren was no stranger to augmetics in the Guard, and they were a far cry from the modifications afforded to the rich and decadent.

  He stared at the hololithic table now, watching the docks recede from Imperial control with agonising, desperate slowness. Seeing the flickering regiment runes and location sigils, it was hard to translate the skeletal vision to the fierce fighting that was truly taking place.

  More and more Steel Legion infantry units were reaching the docks, but it was like holding the sea back with a bucket. The Guardsmen being sent in did little but bolster the general retreat. Reclaiming ground was a distant fiction.

  ‘Sir?’ the vox-officer called out. Sarren looked over to him, drawn from his reverie, not realising the man had been trying to get his attention for almost a minute.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Word from orbit. The Imperial fleet is reengaging again.’

  Sarren made the sign of the aquila – at least, he tried to, and ended with a grunt of pain as his bound arm flared up in pained protest. One-handed, he made a single wing of the Imperial eagle instead.

  ‘Acknowledged. May the Emperor be with them all.’

  This scarce acknowledgement made, he lapsed back into watching the deployment of his forces throughout the city. Around him, the tank’s crew worked at their stations.

  So the Imperial fleet was reengaging.

  Again.

  Every few days, the same story played out. The joint Astartes and Naval fleet would break from the warp close to the planet, and hurl themselves at the ork vessels ringing the embattled world. The engagement would hold for several hours as both sides inflicted horrendous losses on the other, but the Imperials would inevitably be hurled back into a fighting retreat by the immense opposition.

  Once they’d fallen back to the safety of a nearby system, they’d regroup over time, under the command of Admiral Parol and High Marshal Helbrecht, and make ready for another assault. It was blunt, and crudely effective. In a void war of such magnitude, there was little place for finesse. Sarren wasn’t blind to the tactics at play – lance strikes into the heart of the enemy fleet, bleed them for all that was possible before a retreat back to safety. It was a necessary grind, a war of attrition.

  It was also hardly inspiring. The hive cities were on the edge now. Without reinforcements in the coming weeks, many would fall outright. The infrequent transmissions from Tartarus, Infernus and Acheron were all increasingly grim, as were Sarren’s reports of Helsreach to them.

  If there was no–

  ‘Sir?’

  Sarren glanced to his left, to where the vox-officer sat at his station. The man held his headphone receivers to his ear with one hand. He looked pale.

  ‘Emergency signal from the Serpentine in orbit. She requests immediate cessation of all anti-air weaponry in the docks district.’

  Sarren sat forward in his chair. There was barely any anti-air firepower left in the docks district, but that wasn’t the point.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The Serpentine, Astartes strike cruiser, sir. She requests–’

  ‘Throne, send the order. Send the order! Deactivate all remaining anti-air turrets in the docks district!’

  Around him, the tank’s crew was silent. Waiting, watching.

  Sarren breathed a single word, almost fearful giving voice to it would shatter the possibility it was true.

  ‘Reinforcements…’

  One ship.

  The Serpentine.

  Sea green and charcoal black, it dived like a dragon of myth through the enemy fleet while the rest of the Imperial warships hammered into the orkish invaders, breaking against the ring of alien cruisers surrounding the planet.

  One ship broke through, running a gauntlet of enemy fire, its shields crackling into lifelessness and its
hull aflame. The Serpentine hadn’t come to fight. As the Astartes vessel tore through the upper atmosphere, drop pods and Thunderhawks rained from its ironclad belly, streaming down to the world below.

  Its duty complete, the Serpentine powered its way back into the fight. Its captain gritted his teeth against a screed of damage reports signalling the death of his beloved ship, but there was no shame in dying with such a vital duty done. He had acted under the orders of the highest authority – a warrior on the surface below whose deeds were already inscribed in a hundred annals of Imperial glory. That warrior had demanded this risk be taken, and that reinforcements be hurled down to Armageddon no matter the odds facing them.

  His name was Tu’Shan, Lord of the Fire-born, and the Serpentine did his will.

  The Serpentine’s end never came. A black shape eclipsed the fat-hulled orkish destroyers cutting the Astartes vessel to pieces. Another ship, a far greater ship, pounded the alien attackers into wreckage with overwhelming broadside fire, buying the Serpentine the precious moments it needed to escape the gauntlet it had run a second time.

  As they broke clear, the Serpentine’s captain breathed out a prayer, and signalled across the bridge to the master of communications.

  ‘Send word to the Eternal Crusader,’ he said. ‘Give them the sincerest thanks of our Chapter.’

  The response from the Eternal Crusader came back almost immediately. The grim voice of High Marshal Helbrecht echoed across the Serpentine’s bridge.

  ‘It is the Black Templars that thank you, Salamander.’

  The beasts have cracked open another of the above-ground civilian shelters.

  Like blood spilling from a wound, humans flood into the streets through the destroyed wall. When the choices are to die cowering, or die fleeing to a safety that may not even exist, any human can be forgiven for giving in to panic. I tell myself this as I watch them dying, and do all I can not to judge them, to hold them to the exalted standards of honour I would demand of my brothers. They’re just human. My disgust is unfair, unwarranted. And yet it remains.

  As they die, families and souls of all ages, they squeal like butchered swine.

  This war is poisonous. Trapped here, locked away from my Chapter, my mind echoes with bleak prejudices. It is becoming hard to accept that I must die for these people to live.

  ‘Attack,’ I tell my brothers, my voice barely carrying over the ranting of the engine. Together, we run from the moving Rhino transport, smashing into the enemy’s rearguard.

  My crozius rises and falls, as it has risen and fallen ten thousand times in the last month. The adamantium eagle chimes as it cuts through the air. It flares with unleashed energy as its power field connects with flesh and armour. The brazier orb built into the weapon’s pommel breathes sacred incense in a grey mist, like coils of smoke weaving between us all – friend and foe.

  The weariness ebbs. The grudges fade. Hatred is the greatest purifier, the truest emotion overriding all others. Blood, stinking and inhuman, rains across my armour in discoloured spurts. As it marks the black cross I wear on my chest, my revulsion flares anew.

  Crunch. The crozius maul ends another alien’s life. Crunch. Another. My mentor, the great Mordred the Black, wielded this weapon in battle against mankind’s foes for almost four centuries. It sickens me to know it may never be recovered from Helsreach. Nor our armour. Nor our gene-seed. What legacy will we leave once the last of us falls to the filthy blades of these beasts?

  One of them roars into my face, spattering my visor with its unclean saliva. Less than a second later, my crozius annihilates its features, silencing whatever pathetic alien challenge I was supposed to be answering.

  My secondary heart has joined the primary. I feel them thudding in concert, but not in unison. My human heart pounds like a tribal drum, fast and hot. Twinned to it in my chest, my gene-grown heart supports it in a slow, heavy thud.

  They swarm over each other in their mindless fervour to claw at us. Fistfuls of scrap metal that have no right to function as weapons cough solid rounds that clang off our armour. Each shot tears more of the black paint from our war-plate but sheds none of Dorn’s holy blood.

  At last, they recognise the threat we represent. The aliens abandon their wanton slaughter of the fleeing civilians that still spill from the shell-broken wall. The mob of beasts, flooding the street, has turned to more tempting prey. Us.

  Our banner falls.

  Artarion’s cry of pain carries across the close-range vox as a roar of distortion, but I hear his voice beneath the interference.

  Priamus is with him before the rest of us can react. Throne, he can fight. His blade lunges and cuts, every gesture a killing blow.

  ‘Get up,’ he snarls at Artarion without even looking.

  I crash the faceplate of my helm into the barking maw of the alien before me, shattering its jaw and the rows of shark-like teeth. As it falls back, my crozius crunches into its throat, hammering its wrecked corpse to the ground.

  The banner rises again, though Artarion favours his left leg. The right is mauled, his thigh punctured by an alien spear. Curse the fact these beasts have the strength to violate Astartes war-plate.

  Another vox-distorted growl signifies Artarion has pulled the lance free from his leg. I have no time to witness his recovery. More beasts shriek before me – a thrashing wall of sick, jade flesh.

  ‘We’re losing this road,’ Bastilan grunts, his signal marred by the sound of weapons crashing against his armour. ‘We are but six, against a legion.’

  ‘Five.’ Nerovar’s voice is strained as he fights with his chainblade two-handed, hewing down the beasts with none of Priamus’s artistry but no less fury. ‘Cador is dead.’

  ‘Forgive me, brother,’ Bastilan’s voice breaks off as he fires a stream of bolter shells at point-blank range. ‘A moment’s lack of focus.’

  Ahead, our targets – three junkyard tanks that have long since ceased to resemble their original Imperial Guard hulls – continue shelling the shelter block. These have none of the security offered by the subterranean shelters, for they are not civilian evacuation shelters at all. Each of these squat domes houses a thousand at capacity, designed to resist violent sandstorms and the tropical cyclones all too common on the equatorial coast – not sustained shelling from enemy armour. They are used now because there is nothing else to use, with the city grown far beyond its capacity to shelter all its citizens beneath the ground.

  The beasts know us well. They seek to draw the city’s forces into the most fevered fighting, so they hurl themselves at our defenceless civilians with sick cunning, knowing we will do all we can to defend these sites above any others.

  How easy it is, to despise them.

  ‘Gnnh,’ Nerovar voxes, his voice wet and ruined by pain. I vault the falling corpse of the alien closest to me, and stand by his side – maul swinging with relentless motion – as our Apothecary struggles to rise again.

  He fails. The beasts have brought him to his knees.

  ‘Gnnnnnh. Not coming out,’ he coughs. His hands clutch weakly at the axe hammered into his stomach. His gauntlets stroke without strength along the haft, gaining no grip. Blood from the sunder in his armour is painting his tabard scarlet. ‘Can’t do it.’

  ‘In the name of the Emperor,’ my chastisement comes forth as no more than a low growl, ‘stand and fight, or we all die.’

  With Nerovar wounded and prone, he becomes a lodestone for the creatures desperate to deliver the death blow to one of the Emperor’s knights. They bellow and charge.

  My crozius kills one. A kick to the sternum sends another staggering back long enough for me to bring the maul down on its head. A third is claimed by plasma fire, tumbling back as a blur of white-hot flame. Stinging ash, all that remains of the wretched alien, blasts back into the eyes of its bestial comrades.

  Too many.

  Even for us, this is too many.

  I have a momentary glimpse of human families fleeing in all directions down t
he burning streets, able to escape while the horde focuses its fury on us. Several of the civilians are cut down by sponson fire from the junk-tanks, but many more survive – even if only to run blind into the unsafe labyrinth of their dying city. Before this war, I would never have counted such a thing to be a victory.

  With a cry that mixes anger and pain, Nero tears the axe blade from his abdomen. Any relief I feel is swallowed, for he has no time to rise before the beasts are on us.

  ‘I see some knights,’ Andrej said. This announcement was followed by a whispered ‘Damn it,’ and the humming of his hellgun powering up again.

  The work gang kept their backs to the rooftop’s low wall, with only Andrej peering over the edge to look down into the street. ‘Everybody, load rifles and be very ready.’

  ‘How many?’ Maghernus asked. ‘How many knights?’

  ‘Four. No, five. One is injured. I also see thirty of the enemy, and three tanks that were once our Leman Russes. Now, no more talking. Everybody take aim.’

  The dockworkers did as ordered, drawing beads on the melee unfolding below.

  ‘Aim low,’ Maghernus told his men, drawing a silent smile from Andrej. ‘Aim for legs and torsos.’ No one needed to be told to be careful with their fire and not hit the Templars.

  The storm trooper fired first, his bright lance of laser the signal for the others to join in. Lasguns bucked in increasingly sure hands, focusing lenses burning as they spat their lethal energy into the street below. The tearing laser fire punched into shoulders, legs, backs and arms, and the Imperials had managed three volleys before the beasts ripped their hungry attention from the knights and returned fire up at the men crouching on the warehouse rooftop.

  ‘Down!’ Andrej ordered the others. They obeyed, sinking back into cover. The storm trooper hunched lower, but remained where he was. He risked another shot, and another, splitting two aliens through the skull with pinpoint fire.

  Around him, around them all, the low wall edging the roof was shredding under the surviving aliens’ fire, but it didn’t matter. The knights were free. Andrej crouched at last, after seeing the figure of one Templar, the knight’s armour more gunmetal grey than black now from battle damage, hurl aside three attackers and lay waste to them with his monstrous, crackling relic hammer.