Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  The entire promethium output of Tempestora’s refineries had been diverted. It flowed back into the hive now, and through perforated pipelines. The crude fuel arriving from the Fire Wastes joined it. Black rivers and fountains filled the streets. Sources that should have provided drinking water delivered more of the promethium. It was everywhere, running down corridors and façades, falling in cascades from walkways, its fumes making the atmosphere almost unbreathable. On the outside wall, the winds blowing towards the Ash Wastelands kept the worst of the poison from our lungs. I hoped they would also spare us from the cataclysm. With every step, I waited for the spark.

  So much reliance on luck.

  It was several minutes before the inevitable happened. We had made good progress towards the Morpheus plant. The manufactorum and its environs, on the south side of the hive, was the one region we had been careful to spare from the promethium flood. We were still a distance away, but at least we had put space between ourselves and the gate.

  The fire began to the north. I guessed the orks had used open flame near the north gate. There were still citizens fleeing the city. Millions still. I reminded myself that they were doomed to brutal deaths no matter what action we took. Setheno would have remarked that their continued presence in the city was useful. They gave the orks something to kill. A reason to use their weapons deep in the city. An invitation to flame.

  Whumpf whumpf whumpf whumpf behind me. Fire exploded into being, triggered more fire, and more, and more. Explosions built on explosions. I heard them, and then I felt the heat as the conflagration raced from its origin and reached across the city. Light came. It burned the night away. It spread faster than any being could run, but several minutes passed before the flames drew abreast of my position. Minutes that brought us that much closer to Morpheus.

  The roar of the fire reached me. The city came to violent life as it died. On my right, the streets ran with liquid flame as if the upper spires had become a volcano. Fire spewed from the windows of hab blocks. It embraced the towers. It rose higher by the second. The flames reached for the heavens. They became a tortured, roaring, writhing wall. The side of my face burned with a stabbing pain.

  The orks howled with rage and pain. So many were caught, so many were dying, that their cries were even louder than the rising thunder of the firestorm. We had bloodied the foe. Our first solid blow.

  All it had taken was the sacrifice of an entire city.

  The towers were torches now. The conflagration generated its own wind. The city was becoming a vortex, and it pulled at us. A powerful gust hit us, and the trooper in front of me stumbled. Off-balance, he was pushed towards the inside edge of the wall. I reached out and grabbed him by the trench coat before he fell. He gave me a nod of thanks. Like most of his comrades, he had pulled off his rebreather in reaction to the heat, and the fire shone in his eyes. He kept glancing towards the destruction as if it were an act of sacrilege.

  ‘We have done good work on this day, soldier,’ I told him. ‘The xenos is burning.’

  He looked even more grateful now, and we ran on, keeping close to the crenallations.

  My lungs were burning from heat and exhaustion. They felt like bags of blood and embers. Augmetic surgery and juvenat treatments kept me in the battlefield, but I was an old man, and every step reminded me of that. I wanted to stop and catch my breath, but there would be no breath to catch. There was only the heat, and if I paused long enough, even on the wall, I would become part of the city’s cremation.

  Setheno caught up to me just as a massive explosion shook a spire midway up the bulk of the hive. It collapsed into the flames, its rumble lost in the roar of the storm.

  ‘It was necessary,’ the canoness said. She kept up a steady pace in her power armour.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, speaking between breaths. ‘It was necessary. But the destruction is ours. We will carry a stain.’

  ‘We have before. Our hands are dark with blood, commissar. That is our lot.’

  ‘We have spread the blood widely.’

  ‘That was inevitable.’

  ‘Yes, but there will be consequences. We must be mindful of them. We can carry the burden. Not every member of the regiment will be able to.’

  ‘Some will break.’

  ‘They might,’ I said.

  Flames billowed close, and the heat made it too painful to speak.

  We ran. On and on. Slower, the distance between us and our destination becoming greater as the fire grew stronger. Eventually none of us could run any longer. There were too many kilometres to cover, and we were trying to flee the rage of a newborn sun.

  At least it was only the fire that pursued us. Our retreat from the orks appeared to be successful. There was no way to know how many had been caught in the trap. The numbers were high, to judge from the howls we had heard at the start. But what proportion of the army? And what were they doing now? The fire obliterated knowledge as it did Tempestora.

  At last, the wall ahead began to curve. We were almost at the south-east end of the hive. I thought I saw darkness beyond the flames. Perhaps we were fortunate, and our efforts to preserve the Morpheus complex had been successful.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ I muttered.

  Then it seemed His eye turned from us. The winds of the firestorm spun with such violence that they formed a funnel of flame. Twisting and sinuous, it filled our ears with the din of a gigantic engine. It passed between towering hab blocks and hurled its wrath against the wall just ahead of me. It swept troopers up with fire and wind. They flew like burning angels. I dropped and rolled against the parapet. So did all the other legionnaires in my vicinity. I turned my face into the rockcrete. Setheno crouched one pace ahead, helmet on, a ceramite barrier. The heat was an agony, shrivelling my lungs. The wall was an oven, cooking me through my uniform.

  The great, hollow, raging shriek of the fire vortex came closer. There was nowhere to run. There was no counter to this force we had unleashed. There was only luck now. Or the benevolence of the Emperor.

  We were calling too much on his help. We were not serving as we should.

  The roar came closer. The agony covered my body. The smoke had the stink of charred flesh. I could believe it was my own. I braced for the greatest pain, and my fists clenched with my own anger. My duty to the Emperor was not yet done. To die so pointlessly, with so much work left unfinished, was intolerable.

  If the flames reached me, I would stand and fight. I would not die on my knees.

  4. Thulin

  He waited until he reached the top of the next dune to look back. The light grew stronger, and soon he didn’t need his torch to light his way. Ahead, other refugees had stopped to stare. Even with the ork slaughter machine drawing close, they paused. When Thulin turned around, he too was mesmerised. The sight turned him to stone.

  Tempestora blazed. The mountain of manufactorum chimneys, cathedrals, hab towers and Administratum spires was alight. Its entire height roiled with flame. The destruction struck Thulin with religious awe. His hand was in this horror, but he saw only divine wrath. The event was too gigantic, a single fire that burned the clouds. The shapes of the city poked through the flame, black on red, like the bones of an immolated corpse. The holocaust dwarfed everything. For a few moments, the massacre became trivial. The orks’ vehicles were insignificant objects moving through a carpet of insects. The death cry of Tempestora swept across the Ash Wastelands like a great tide. It washed over Thulin and kept coming. He stared at the end of his city. The event was so huge, it should have stopped time.

  But orks smashed that illusion too. The battlewagons kept coming. Their engines made themselves heard over the great fire. So did the screams of the dying. Thulin blinked as the line of vehicles crested a dune less than a thousand metres away. Their approach made no sense. Didn’t they see what was happening? How could they still be intent on such meaningless carnage?
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  The machines came on. Unwavering, unstoppable. They were close enough now for Thulin to see the orks riding on their roofs. They shouted with gleeful savagery. And now the scything line seemed even longer to Thulin. A second tide was racing towards him, a tide of blood and severed limbs, driven forward by the wall of grotesque vehicles and an inescapable net of killing steel.

  The flames of Tempestora burned higher. The city was disappearing into the inferno. The orks ignored it. Their casualties must have been high, Thulin had to believe that. He needed some meaning left to his final moments. But the orks did not turn back, and they did not look at the fire. They advanced, celebrating, as they exterminated the population of Tempestora.

  Thulin broke free of his hypnosis. The burning hive receded to the background of his consciousness. The grinding machines and the sea of blood were closer yet. There was no hope of escape, no point in running, but he ran anyway. He turned his back on the ork line and fled. He moved with the current of the panic. He was surrounded by fellow refugees, and he was alone. He had lost track of Zelenko while he gazed at Tempestora. She might have been running beside him, but he didn’t know and didn’t look. The only thing that mattered was his own terror.

  As long as he didn’t look, he could believe that he would still be alive in the next second. He could believe he could keep running, that as long as he did, the battlewagons wouldn’t catch up.

  Shadows beside him and before him. They were other people, and they were screaming. He tuned them out. His perception narrowed to the next few metres, and then the metres after that. His world became a small portion of ash. All he had to do was cross it. He sank to his ankles in the grit. Each step kicked up more fine, choking powder. Every step felt like the last he could take. But he kept running. He would run to the shores of the Boiling Sea, and he would swim the waters, because he would never look back, and he would never cease his flight as long as he heard the terrible engines behind him.

  Louder. Louder. He could hear the orks shouting to each other. His feet splashed through muck as the blood flowed past him over the ash. Louder. The engines were so close they were in his head.

  He would not look back. He must look back.

  But they were so loud, and the snarls of the orks were beside him now, and that could not be because he had been good, and he had not slowed down, and he had kept running, but he broke the rule and looked back now.

  The shadows of mechanised horrors on either side, rollers puncturing and crushing bodies. And coming at him, so fast, the weave of razored iron.

  There was no time to pray. No time to scream. But there was so much time for pain as the taut metal cut through flesh and severed bone.

  5. Yarrick

  The bellow of the vortex faded. I looked up, staring into the blaze. I only managed a second before I had to look away again. The funnel was losing coherence against the wall, the wind blowing inward to the city again. The flames lapped at the battlements, then withdrew. We stood and moved forwards over scorched rockcrete. The fiery tempest had not thrown all its victims into the air. Carbonised bodies lay in contorted positions.

  More losses. This time not at the hands of the orks.

  I told myself that the sacrifice was not in vain. That the orks had taken heavier casualties. That we were doing what must be done to save Armageddon.

  A stretch of the Morpheus river was within the outer wall. On its banks was the Morpheus manufactorum complex. It was a cathedral of industry. A dome sixty metres wide, and one hundred and fifty high rose from its centre. Eight chimneys, almost as tall, surrounded it. There was no smoke from the chimneys, no lights coming from the open bay doors. The manufactorum had its own power plant, but there could be no reason to attract the orks. The Morpheus had gone dark shortly before the greenskins had arrived. The complex was one of Armageddon’s main production centres for the Chimera. Tempestora didn’t have the means to arm all its citizens, but it could provide its defenders with the means to depart at speed.

  This is not a true retreat, I told myself. This is a reorganisation of the battlefield. We do this to hit the orks all the harder. The truth had rarely felt more false. It was brittle, thin. It would gain strength only if it was justified by future events.

  The Chimeras were ready. Their drivers had started the engines as soon as the fire had begun. They were lined up on the bridge crossing the river and on the road leading to the south gate. We came down from the wall and boarded the vehicles. After the losses in the lifter disaster, and the warbike raid, and the siege, we finally had a gain. There were enough Chimeras available for every surviving trooper. We had become a mechanised infantry.

  I spoke to the companies over the vox as the armoured carriers started forward and our exodus began. I told them what I had been telling myself. I did so with more conviction. ‘This is not a retreat. We have struck a first great blow, and shown the enemy there is nothing we will not do to safeguard the Imperium. Now we look forward. Forward to Volcanus!’

  I rode in the roof hatch of the second Chimera. Stahl was in the lead one. He was looking back. I shook my head at him and gestured for him to face forward. He hesitated, then did as I said.

  He had given the orders, but the stain of Tempestora’s death was mine and Setheno’s. I would relieve the captain of as much of it as I could. To command, he had to look forward. He must not let the decisions of the past cast a shadow over the choices to come.

  I turned around. Setheno was in the next vehicle. She faced forward, a silhouette of dark sanctity. She was shouldering the burden of the fire as though she felt nothing. Many believed that to be the truth. I think, rather, that the burdens she already carried were so great that one more mattered little.

  I watched the blaze. I took in its full enormity. I counted the cost, and accepted all responsibility. Now that you know what it is to destroy a city of the Imperium, I thought, do you stand by your choice?

  Yes, I decided.

  Yes. It was the only option. We had hurt the enemy. We had bought ourselves time.

  But this sacrifice would not be necessary again. We had done this terrible thing to ensure the defence of the other hives.

  I stared at the city I had turned into a pyre.

  We passed through the gates, onto the plain. The convoy headed south towards Volcanus. A few minutes beyond the wall, we saw a single ork battlewagon by the side of the road. It was quiet, its engine off. It seemed abandoned. Our guns were trained on it, but Stahl ordered fire to be held. We did not want to announce our position by engaging in combat with an empty vehicle. We drew even with the battlewagon, and its crew appeared. They jumped up on its roof. Instead of firing, they did something far more damaging.

  They laughed.

  The turret of Stahl’s Chimera fired its heavy bolter, splattering the orks.

  Ghazghkull had struck back, and hit hard. We had burned Tempestora and thousands of his troops. He had anticipated our next move, and sent us a message.

  He was amused.

  1. Yarrick

  We rode hard. There would be no rest until Volcanus, and none then either. The troopers slept on their benches. Drivers took shifts. The convoy travelled without stopping. The flames of Tempestora followed us through the rest of the night and were still bright in the dim morning. Before the hive disappeared over the horizon, a cloud of dust rose next to it. The orks were on the move again. Our lead was a small one.

  Setheno and I met with Stahl and the other captains in the lead Chimera. We examined the map of Armageddon Prime on his data-slate, and raised Brenken on the vox.

  ‘How are the defences?’ I asked.

  ‘Progressing well,’ she said.

  ‘Will they be finished?’

  ‘I could do with an extra year. But they’ll be as finished as time permits. Your actions bought us several new tunnels and a completed redoubt. That’s valuable. You have my thanks.’
She knew there were other soldiers present, and was speaking for their benefit. ‘Captain Stahl,’ she added, ‘well done.’

  Mora, a florid-faced officer with greying stubble, frowned but held his peace. The rest of the officers did not react to Brenken’s reminder of which captain had command. I made a note to watch Mora.

  ‘Thank you, colonel,’ said Stahl. ‘What are your orders? We are currently making all speed to reinforce your position.’

  The vox spat static while she thought.

  ‘The Chimeras will be welcome,’ she said. ‘But given our casualties, we have to consider what will be the most effective use of our strength.’

  ‘A few hundred bodies added to the main force won’t make a significant difference,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll rely on your judgement,’ said Brenken. ‘Can you slow them down still further with harrying attacks? More time at this end would help.’

  I exchanged glances with Setheno and Stahl. They looked as doubtful as I felt.

  ‘We still don’t have a clear idea of the enemy’s strength,’ the captain pointed out.

  ‘Beyond the fact that it is considerable,’ Setheno said.

  ‘The ork warlord held back much of his strength at Tempestora,’ I said.

  ‘He did what?’ Brenken sounded as alarmed as she should be. ‘What kind of ork does that?’

  ‘He is called Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka,’ I said. ‘We would do well to remember that name. His destruction will be key to ending this threat. The danger he represents is something we have never encountered before.’

  ‘Then reconnaissance is our best move,’ said Brenken.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Captain,’ she told Stahl, ‘learn what you can of the enemy heading for Volcanus. We’ll decide on our course of action based on what you learn.’

  Surveillance meant giving up our lead. The loss wasn’t a great one. We were a few hours ahead of the orks, a few hours that had no clear tactical value, and that could be taken from us if it turned out that the orks had any form of air support.