Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  Somner was pointing in horror to the right, east of the Kasadya complex. I looked. One of the stompas had broken through the wall, and it was shouldering its way between the towers, heading our way. The street was too narrow. It pushed between the buildings, caving their walls in. It left a wake of collapsing structures, mountains of rockcrete falling against each other, breaking apart to rubble and clouds of dust. The crack and roar of shattering buried the screams of the thousands who died with every step. Rubble bounced off armour the colour of old blood. The wrecking ball limb smashed the walkways that blocked its path. Our balcony was level with its shoulders.

  Its right limb was a cannon half as long as the stompa was high. The barrel came up. It pointed at the balcony.

  We started to run.

  The weapon powered up with a hum so great it shook the walls of the manufactorum. My teeth vibrated. I tasted blood.

  There was a great flash. It tore the world asunder.

  2. Setheno

  She was to the west of the gates when they were destroyed. Brenken was on the other side. The energy discharge of the tractor beams scrambled the vox in the immediate area, and Setheno lost track of the colonel. But the regiment responded quickly. It fought back hard. It made the orks pay.

  Yarrick’s voice rang from every tower. His call to action became the voice of Volcanus itself.

  Heroic gestures. Handfuls of water scooped from an ocean. The fall of the hive had begun. Determination and luck might see the resistance hold out as much as another day. No more. She was in the midst of an effort grandiose in its futility. She could see the end coming with the certainty of nightfall and dawn. Not for the first time, she envied Yarrick. He was not blind. He could read the signs as well as she did. But he could hope, even when that hope was a form of denial.

  She could appreciate the confrontation with the impossible. She valued the miraculous.

  There would be no miracles in Volcanus on this day.

  Even so, she fought. She battled the orks with as much fury as she would if she felt hope. She had a role to play on Armageddon. The planet must be saved, and she must follow the dictates of fate. She could not see where her path led, but it had brought her here. The crucible of another defeat might show the way. In loss there might be a key, as yet obscure, to victory.

  So she killed the orks, and bought Volcanus what time she could. She was not hoping, but she was seeking, and that was enough. It was what had sustained her since the end of the Piercing Thorn.

  She was still on the ramparts, firing down at infantry as it passed through the gap in the wall. She placed the bolt pistol shots with precision, drilling through the skulls of the greenskins. Many of the most heavily armoured orks wore no helmets. They were taller than any human. As if they feared no attack from above, only their throats and lower jaws were protected by huge, fanged gorgets. Setheno punished their arrogance, splattering their brains across their massive piston-driven armour. When they fell, their followers howled and fired wildly, disoriented by the sudden death of their chieftains.

  She slowed the tide by an infinitesimal degree. But there were more of the beasts, always more, and the tide still rose.

  A great thunder from uphill. A stompa had reached the Kasadya manufactorum. There was a flash, and a massive concussion blast. Then the long, rolling, escalating crash of an edifice falling.

  Yarrick’s voice was silent.

  Something hit the wall behind her, shaking the ramparts hard. Setheno turned. One of the stompas had not ventured into the city. It was advancing along the wall, smashing more of it down with every step. For the moment, the orks were bottlenecked by the width of the breaches. The stompa was removing even that limitation.

  Clarity. Her curse and her blessing. The ork menace was so vast, the developing war so gigantic, the contingencies too many. So much of her path was dark.

  But not now. Not in this instant.

  She holstered her pistol and ran towards the stompa. She prepared for each strike of the wrecking ball, adjusting her balance. She did not stagger or lose a step. She eyed the stompa’s arms, evaluating. The confusion of the battle receded, the din and smoke fading to the rear of her consciousness, to resurface only in the event of a more immediate threat.

  She moved through a crystalline series of elements. Her speed. The rhythm of the stompa’s movements. The swing of the ball. The threat of the right limb, a flamer whose jets shot over the wall and drenched the faces of the hab towers with liquid fire.

  She knew what she must do. She knew when to do it. This was her gift of perfect clarity, and before her were mere orks.

  No, she thought, seconds now from her encounter with the stompa. Not mere. These orks were led by a power that, if it were not stopped, could shake the Imperium.

  She was in the shadow of the stompa. Its wrecking arm came down. The spiked sphere slammed into the ramparts a few metres in front of Setheno. The crash was deafening. A storm of debris struck her armour, but she kept her footing. The ball buried itself deep into the wall. The surface beneath Setheno’s feet heaved and cracked. Another collapse began.

  Setheno leapt forward. She landed on the wrecking ball. Now a few seconds marked the difference between success and death. She took three steps towards the huge chain. It grew taut. She jumped again and wrapped her arms around a link.

  The arm began to rise. She climbed from link to link. The arm lifted the ball free from the wall and it began its swing upwards. The chain flew outwards. It was horizontal. Then it was vertical.

  She released the chain. She dropped towards the upper segment of the limb. She hit, landing in a tangle of cables wrapped around a piston two metres thick. She seized the cables. The arm began its descent. She braced herself. Above her, orks on the stompa’s shoulder turrets tried to shoot her down, but their vehicle’s own movements made her too erratic a target.

  The wrecking ball hit the wall again. The impact travelled up the arm. It shook her every bone. The mass of her power armour gave her enough inertia to keep her grip. If she had still been on the chain, she would have been snapped in half.

  In the brief pause before the arm rose, she climbed. As the limb reached the horizontal, she stood and ran the rest of the length, balancing on the pistons. At the moment of descent, she made still another leap, and landed on the stompa’s shoulder plating. The metal was smooth. She was on a slope. Her boots slipped. She dropped to her knees and in a single movement drew Skarprattar and stuck the blade through the plate. It arrested her fall. She yanked herself forwards and up, stabbed into the shielding again, and timed her next lunge with the lateral rocking of the stompa as it took another heavy step. Momentum propelled her to the top of the shoulder. A boxy turret rose from the surface of the shield. Metal struts supported it. Setheno used them to work her way towards the head. The turret’s heavy stubber rotated back and forth, angling down, strafing the ramparts. Setheno paused at the right-hand strut, pulled out her pistol and fired into the stubber’s barrel until her shells punched through, distorting the bore. The gunner kept shooting until the weapon exploded. The turret bulged along the seams from the force of an internal blast.

  The head of the stompa was surrounded by a crown-shaped collar. Setheno climbed over it. A huge, grotesque metal face in yellow and crimson towered before her. In the centre of its jaws, on an elevated turret, an ork sat at the trigger of a cannon whose barrel protruded over the collar. The greenskin snarled when it saw her. She put three shells in its skull before it could bring the cannon around.

  Sword and pistol drawn, she ran past the turret and through the gaping jaws of the idol. She entered a dim, clanking, superheated space overflowing with levers, valves and wheels, stinking of promethium and ork bodies. Beyond the weak light entering from the graven image’s eyes and jaws, the only illumination came from sparking machinery and momentary jets of burning gas. In the centre, a greenskin engineer stood on
a raised platform and roared orders at its minions. Menial orks and gretchin scrambled over the controls, rushing back and forth to pull levers, release pressure, throw switches and turn the grinding wheels. There was no sense to what Setheno saw. There was only a mechanical frenzy, an ecstasy of invention and violence.

  The engineer saw her. It howled and pointed. The massive harness it wore, sparking with diodes and electrical coils, lit up, casting a shimmering force field around the ork. A horde of greenskins swarmed her. When the orks abandoned their controls, the stompa’s movements became more jerky and erratic. The deck heaved back and forth. Setheno took a wide stance, shifting her centre of gravity with the wild sways. She fired her bolt pistol into the attacking crew, shooting to kill, but also to damage mechanisms. Orks fell. Control surfaces erupted. The engineer howled and stamped its feet with anger. She swept Skarprattar wide and gutted the clutch of gretchin that were trying to scuttle around her back. Two larger orks slammed into her, wielding wrenches big enough to crush a human skull with a single blow. The blows rebounded off her power armour, but they drove her back and to the side.

  Something large, heavy, metallic and edged began to grind against her armour’s power pack. The two orks were pushing her into the huge gears to the right of the idol’s jaw.

  Setheno drove her blade through the neck of the ork on her right. It gurgled and slumped against her. The other took a step back and charged. She shoved at the corpse and fell to the side with it. The attacking ork’s momentum carried it over her and into the huge cog wheels behind. It screamed, eaten by the machinery it had served.

  Before Setheno could rise, an explosion lifted her and threw her into a tangle of levers. The orks near her were torn apart by shrapnel. The engineer raised another grenade. She jerked free of the metal just as the frag weapon went off. The blast knocked her forwards, teeth of metal digging deep into her armour. She fired at the engineer. The bolts ricocheted off the force field and smacked explosively into the walls and gears.

  Smoke filled the idol’s skull. The stompa walked on, its rocking becoming more and more violent.

  The engineer threw another grenade, killing more of its crew and setting cables on fire as it sought to destroy the invader. Setheno ducked around a half-exposed cog wheel that protruded from the deck and was almost as tall as she was. The ork hurled another grenade. She raced out of shelter and forward, inside the arc of the throw, charging the engineer with Skarprattar before her. The explosion at her back lit the crowded space with flame. Machinery screamed. The wild rocking of the stompa propelled her forward and she vaulted onto the engineer’s platform. Her relic blade and her power armoured momentum crashed her through the ork’s force field. The feedback of energy blew up the coils on the ork’s back. Energy lashed out, surrounding the ork, striking every corner of the stompa’s skull. The engineer’s eyes widened in distress.

  The blast smashed Setheno through the jaws of the idol and propelled her through the metal shielding. She slammed up against the teeth of the collar, all that kept her from taking a twenty metre fall. Before her, the skull blew up, the greatest force shooting straight up like an incandescent geyser.

  The stompa was decapitated. Elsewhere in the huge body, orks still operated limbs and pulled triggers, but all direction was gone. The huge flamer spread destruction in a circle as the stompa whirled. The turrets fired in at every point on the compass. The wrecking ball went wild. Out of control, it came flying back at the body and battered its way through the stompa’s midsection. The frame shook with more explosions. The rocking became even more severe. As they panicked, the orks created more and more extreme movements. The arms waved. The stompa took a step first one way, then another.

  The balance tipped.

  Setheno shook off the stun and pulled herself to her feet. The stompa leaned forward. She looked over the collar. The ramparts were below.

  The stompa began to rock back.

  She jumped, sliding down the front of the stompa’s skirt. As she reached the level of its chest, she pushed out with her legs. She fell away from the stompa, dropping through the air. She hit the top of the wall and rolled. The battering stopped just short of shattering her bones. She came to a halt, straightened out of a ball of pain and forced herself to her feet.

  She ran.

  Behind her, the huge war engine screamed with madness and anger. The shadow of the stompa loomed over her. It stretched further and further ahead.

  The stompa did not rock back this time.

  Explosions behind her. The shriek and crack of something very large and vital being severed. The shadow growing, spreading night.

  She ran faster, ceramite boots cracking rockcrete with every step, racing for the edge of the shadow. It pulled further ahead. Through pain and raw lungs, she gasped prayers of faith and service to the Emperor. The prayers granted her the speed she needed. She ran out from the shadow moments before the stompa crashed down atop the wall.

  The barrier held the body up for a few seconds. Then, weakened by blows and the gaps in its integrity, it collapsed. Stone and metal fell together, embracing their mutual destruction. Inside the stompa, power sources, munitions and fuel reserves were crushed and breached. Explosions wracked the length of the vast body. The largest bathed the wall in fireballs and hurled giant metal plates hundreds of metres.

  Setheno staggered forwards until she reached the smashed gates. She looked around. The stompa was down, but the damage to the wall was enormous. More and more and more orks were storming into Volcanus. Tanks and stompas brought havoc to the streets.

  She began to climb down a slope of wreckage. Below, the Steel Legion was leaving the wall for the interior of the city.

  There was nothing more to defend here.

  3. Yarrick

  The stompa’s cannon took out the front half of the manufactorum. Facade and walls and floors disintegrated. I had a wall behind me when the orks fired. That was as far as I had run in the few seconds granted to me. That was as much as I accomplished in the aid of my survival. The rest was in the hands of the Emperor.

  The Emperor protects.

  Force and stone hurled me forwards. Something splashed against my back. Beneath my feet, the floor dropped away. I moved forwards and down, a leaf of flesh in the grip of wind and gravity. Sound and flame filled my senses. I put my arms over my face and held my head. I did not fight my trajectory. My body went loose and took the blows, but my will was iron.

  Do not die. Not now. Not here. Your work is not yet done.

  My thoughts were not so coherent. They were a wordless roar of refusal. But it had meaning.

  I flew and I fell through heat and dust and battering stone. I tumbled and bounced, dropping with the collapse of the manufactorum. Time shattered into nonsense. I fell for an eternity and for mere seconds. Then there was a blow that felt like a power fist to my spine, and I was still.

  Several seconds of sheet lightning agony passed before I could draw a breath. I coughed. I spat out dirt-clogged phlegm. The air was thick with dust, but enough weak daylight reached me that I could see where I was. I had landed on a large, canted slab of rockcrete. Below me was a jumble of rubble sloping towards the street. Beneath it, hundreds of thousands of citizens had been crushed to nothing. I looked up and saw jagged floors and twisted rebar. The lower half of the Kasadya complex, reaching far into its heart, had undergone a total collapse. The upper tower still stood for now, but I could see it sway.

  I sat up. I left a bloody smear on the slab. The blood was not mine. Somner, I realised. He had been a few steps behind me and been disintegrated by the blast. Of the tech-priest there was no sign.

  The stompa took a step backwards. Then another. It was going to fire again and finish the job.

  I stood and made my way down the rubble. I moved with speed that would have been reckless if hesitation hadn’t been even more lethal. I leapt from slab to slab. I angl
ed my way towards the feet of the stompa. I was placing my faith in the orks’ skill. I was trusting them not to bring the tower down on their heads. It was a weak form of trust. It was the only move open to me.

  The rubble shook with the tread of the stompa. The curtain of dust turned the stompa into a mountainous silhouette. I reached the ground. I became aware of other shapes in the dust running in every direction. ‘With me!’ I shouted. My voice was raw and cracked. Some of the shadows heard me. They followed, perhaps blindly, on instinct, obeying the first voice they heard. No matter. They might survive. I called again. More figures ran beside and before me through the maelstrom of grey.

  The stompa’s feet were a few dozen metres ahead. The monster stopped walking. Its turrets chattered in the gloom above, attacking the walkways that were still intact in the vicinity. The orks ignored the fleeing insects on the ground.

  I was close enough. Still shouting, though it took precious breaths to do so, I angled to the right, where, beyond the stompa, I saw the dark path of a narrow alleyway between towers. I called once more before the cannon fired again.

  The earth shook. The deep, harsh, broken shout of the dying tower washed over me. A huge wind blew, as from the throat of a mythical beast. The dust roiled, thickened, became blinding. I choked. I could no longer see the shapes of the other runners. My voice was buried beneath the monstrous sound. My alley goal vanished. I kept moving, slowing just enough to avoid breaking an ankle on the broken surface of the street.

  The alley reappeared a few steps before me. I plunged into the shadow. Other bodies followed me. I moved in deeper, to where the dust was less thick. I stopped to catch my breath. Perhaps twenty civilians had joined me. There were also two Steel Legionnaires. They approached me and saluted, identifying themselves as troopers Wyda and Delschaft.

  ‘The rest of your squads?’ I asked. I coughed again, and envied the soldiers their rebreathers.