Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  She withstood the heat. She stared through the inferno. The conflagration was more intense than the death of Tempestora. This was a single, raging eruption, all the fuel combusting at once. Setheno saw nothing but the roil of flame. Helsreach had vanished, consumed in light and heat.

  Setheno walked forward through the fire, back onto the balcony. She advanced until she bumped against the parapet. She met the flame with the ice of her rage. Von Strab had doomed Helsreach. But there could be no further retreating. The fight for the hive was foredoomed, but it would be long. It would cost the orks. She would make certain of that.

  ‘Canoness?’ Brenken’s voice came over her suit’s vox. ‘What is happening? We’re seeing flames and I’ve lost all contact with the eastern division.’

  So the clouds had not covered all of Helsreach. There was a battle yet to be had. Good.

  ‘We have lost the east, colonel,’ Setheno said. ‘Von Strab has taken it from us with virus bombs.’

  There was a long pause during which Setheno watched the storm and billow of the flames. So much was burning there. So much had been burned. Her existence since Mistral had been a series of pyres, an endless purgatory where hope and illusion burned together, and in their ashes were revealed to be one and the same. And here was another pyre, another cremation, and did fate think it had anything left with which to surprise her? The fires were all one to her now. They had been since the one that had consumed the Order of the Piercing Thorn.

  The flames were nothing. The screams had been nothing. The losses were just another vector in the flight of war.

  ‘Why are we still alive?’ Brenken asked finally.

  ‘I can only speculate the virus has lost strength with age. The missiles were not launched from orbit, colonel. For von Strab to have access to such weapons, their existence had to be a secret, and so they must have been here a very long time.’

  ‘You’re sure it was von Strab?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brenken said after a moment.

  The flames began to die.

  ‘Make ready,’ Setheno said. ‘The orks are coming now. There will be no siege.’

  ‘We’re ready,’ said Brenken.

  The shape of the city became visible again. So did what was at the gates. The gargants had arrived, and there was no one on the wall to oppose them. The guns were silent. Without slowing, the first of the gargants smashed through the gates. Its war horns sounded. They were the triumphant roar of a great beast. Behind it, more of the huge engines marched into Helsreach. At their feet, the green tide surged.

  Setheno turned from the balcony. She descended the steps of the spire. Her path was as clear as it had ever been. She would douse the flames with greenskin blood.

  3. Yarrick

  We waited beneath the surface. The rumble of the missile blasts passed. The vibration in the stone did not return. After a few minutes, before restlessness set in, I started back. Both contingents followed. Captain Genath caught up to me. So did Lanner. The sergeant was grinning.

  ‘You look pleased,’ I said to Lanner.

  ‘Just looking forward to what’s next, commissar,’ he replied.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Won’t be dull.’

  I laughed. ‘No, I don’t believe it will.’ To Genath I said, ‘Have you had contact with the other positions?’ Ours was but one portion of the ambush. The operation was a large one. We had been preparing it since the day after my arrival in Hades.

  ‘I have,’ Genath said. ‘All but one company reporting back. They survived whatever that attack was.’

  ‘Have them get into position.’

  We returned to the near-surface cave. I climbed the ladder once more. I grasped the hatch. I listened. I heard the movement of troops once more. It was the first time in my life the sound of orks meant a danger was over. I opened the hatch.

  The terrain was covered by a stinking, dark green muck. I recognised it as organic. Part of my mind understood what that meant, and filed that knowledge away for later wrath. The rest of my consciousness focused on the actions of the enemy.

  The orks were marching forward with even more energy. They had been bloodied, and hungered for retaliation. They splashed through the morass that had been their fellows. They were chanting again – Ugulhard, Ugulhard, Ugulhard. Faster, louder, riding the energy of ferocity. More infantry, more vehicles. Mobile artillery too, pounding the walls with shells and explosive energy blasts. A fallen stompa was an obstacle to the advance, but a platoon of battlewagons was shoving it to the side with their siege blades. Other stompas were taking their ponderous steps towards the wall. To my right, gargants twice their size rocked forward. There were three of them, a mountain chain advancing earthquake by earthquake. Flames gouted from chimneys on their shoulders, distant torches in the eternal red night. I was an ant at their feet, beneath notice, irrelevant.

  I smiled.

  I climbed a few rungs down and called to Genath. ‘Alert the other positions. It’s time.’

  I moved back up. With Lanner in the lead, troopers climbed the ladder behind me. I heard Genath giving orders. We were ready. More than ready. I watched the gargants, and they couldn’t come fast enough. The orks loved war, but so could we. I drew my bolt pistol, and it seemed to me I was holding the lever of a huge machine.

  The first of the gargants drew level with my position. I waited, my finger tightening on the trigger. Then the second. I counted the steps. I counted the seconds. Each huge boom of the gargant’s strides was a pendulum swinging closer to vengeance.

  I savoured those moments. I was not above bloodthirsty anticipation. I feel no shame in that memory. I take pride in it.

  I raised my pistol. The target didn’t matter. I gave myself the luxury of aiming at a chieftain standing atop a battlewagon driving on the highway’s edge, keeping even with the gargants. The beast’s armour was redolent of savage arrogance. Plates were piled upon plates. Joints sprouted saw blades. The ork wore a necklace of human skulls, and it had the temerity to leave its own unprotected.

  The third gargant was one stride away.

  ‘Now!’ I shouted. I leaped out of the shaft and fired. The bolt shell blew off the top of the ork’s head. The brute’s eyes widened in surprise at the sudden loss of its brain. Rigid as a statue, the corpse toppled from the battlewagon.

  A few seconds passed between my command and its effect. It had to be relayed. Actions had to be taken. Fuses lit. The blow came at the precise moment I had anticipated. That it occurred as the ork boss hit the ground was a pleasing coincidence.

  In the caverns beneath the highway, clusters of meltabombs went off. Rock turned molten. A stretch of road hundreds of metres long fell into the earth, into the abyssal crevasse below. The demolition was colossal. We had planted bombs along the cavern walls too, making the collapse even greater, widening the gap into a ­canyon. The middle gargant dropped into the void. Huge as the war machine was, the crevasse swallowed it whole. It had taken centuries to exhaust the ore here. The fall was thousands of metres.

  The first and third gargants were caught at the edges of the ­collapse. They teetered back and forth. On the weapon platforms, orks gesticulated in alarm. The crews inside panicked, as I had known they would. Instead of immobilising the gargants, they tried to move forward or back, away from the danger. Each gargant raised a foot. The loss of stability was fatal. Gravity won. They toppled to their dooms.

  The colossus at the far end of the gap from my position somer­saulted down. The sight of a construction so huge dropping that way was awe-inspiring. A mountain fell as if it were a tree. It pushed a strong wind my way. Then it too vanished. A cacophony of crashes and explosions accompanied it all the way down, the sound of a hurricane made of metal. The earth shook. Further tonnes of rock followed the gargant, widening the pit even more, crushing the dying machines below.r />
  An even bigger explosion followed and the deep reverberation knocked me off my feet. I stood as the last gargant fell forward. The crevasse was not as wide here. The monster wedged itself partway down. It was lying on its side, tilting down, its head suspended over the pit. Its right flank and limb were still above the surface. The arm, a claw twenty metres long, flailed. The crew was trying to use it to find purchase, a futile attempt to raise that gigantic mass out of the trap. The movement created the disturbing illusion of life, as if a death world behemoth were struggling in the grips of a tar pit. The vast sweeps of the arm did even more damage to the enemy. Where it hit the ground, it caught infantry and vehicles. A giant scythe, it carried them over the edge and into the dark. Hundreds of footsoldiers and dozens of vehicles had fallen in the initial moments of the collapse, and the gargant’s throes created a continuous rain of tumbling greenskins.

  And as they fell, so we rose. On either side of the pit, the Armageddon Steel Legion burst from concealed mining shafts. Troopers took up positions behind the shelter offered by the boulder-strewn terrain. We lined the highway and caught the orks in a kill zone too long to flee. Enfilading las, stubber and rocket fire cut the greenskins down or forced them into the pit. Genath’s company concentrated its fire on the gargant. A missile platform was partially visible from our angle. We fired down at the rockets, hammering them with hundreds of hits in only a few seconds. Either we damaged a launch mechanism, or an enraged ork did the most foolish thing in its power. The missiles fired straight into the canyon wall. The fireballs washed back over the gargant and a huge rockslide pounded the machine, setting off more blasts. More and more of the wall fell away. The pit widened. Burning, venting black smoke, wracked by internal detonations, the monster finally dropped into the darkness. Its monolithic claw grasped at air to the last.

  To the west, the forward elements of the orks were trapped between the walls of Hades and the pit where the highway had been. Even with stompas, they didn’t have the strength to punch through the defences. This was not the fragmented force they had faced at Tempestora and Volcanus. There was no betrayal from within as at Infernus. Hades stood united and determined against the xenos invader. The entire 33rd infantry regiment of the Steel Legion, supported by the Hades Hive Defence Militia, punished the ork footsoldiers with a hail of las so intense it resembled a continuous barrage of sheet lighting. Earthshaker and Demolisher cannons combined their fire on first one stompa, then another. The impact of that many shells overwhelmed the stompas’ power fields and blasted through their armour. The stompas died explosively, blown apart by our ordnance and their own. As each died, it took battlewagons down with it. Waves of flame rolled over the green tide.

  At the ambush point, we directed our fire at the orks on the other side of the gap. They were caught in their own bottleneck. The Eumenides Bridge narrowed their formation, slowing the advance. Once over the bridge, they had to stick to the highway. The ground was treacherous. It was porous with mines and traps. Our defences there were simple – rough camouflage concealing deep gullies. In some spots, all that had been necessary was to sabotage the structural supports of shallow tunnels. The closer the mines were to Hades, the more likely they were to have been exhausted, but not before becoming highly dangerous. The orks wandering off the safe route of the highway fell prey to the dangers that had killed hundreds of thousands of serfs. Already, numerous greenskin tanks were caught, upended, wheels and treads spinning in helpless anger.

  From behind the hive’s wall, the Basilisks of all four regiments rained shells on the narrow strip of land. They cratered the highway, threw body parts aloft and turned vehicles into rolling firebombs. Our horizontal fire chewed into the advancing lines. The orks retaliated ferociously, but at last the advantage was ours. The smoke, fire, dust and bursts of the artillery blinded them. Their fire was wild, undisciplined, random. It was powerful, and it was devastating when it struck home. But we never let the orks zero in.

  I was surrounded by weapons fire. The world was a violent mosaic of energy bursts, las scars and explosions etching the red blackness, a storm of fire raging in through a night made of war. My eyes were dazzled. When I blinked, I saw the negative image of the battlefield. The orks seemed to advance in a rapid succession of still tableaux. I found my targets all the same. I put shells into skull after skull. Every time I pulled the trigger, I exacted a measure of justice for the dead of Armageddon.

  I was shouting too. In the roar of battle, only those nearby could hear. ‘Strike with fury!’ I cried. ‘Burn the xenos with the justice of our guns. The Emperor’s spirit marches with us. We have smashed the greenskins’ idolatrous engines. Now smash the orks themselves. Drive them back into the void and the flame. Let them learn the price of defiling Armageddon.’

  The miracle began slowly. At first, I didn’t realise it was happening. I was too consumed by the slaughter. On the other side of the Eumenides, several kilometres distant, were the broad, conical shapes of more gargants. They had stopped advancing. And then, as I began to understand what I was seeing, they turned around.

  Heedless of the enemy fire, I stood up and leapt to the top of the boulder before me.

  ‘The enemy retreats!’ I yelled. I pointed forward with my sword. ‘Behold the works of faith and steel! Comrades, we have humbled mountains!’ I jumped from boulder to boulder, racing after the orks as if I would harry them into the Eumenides gorge myself.

  My actions in those moments were as conscious as they were driven by instinct. When I had executed Tritten, I had in effect taken his place as the ruler of Hades Hive. To do what had to be done, it was crucial that I be seen not just as the leader by default, but as the leader Hades needed. So I would make use of the power of the commissariat. I had to be the symbol to rally the people. When I spoke, they must obey.

  To become the symbol, I had to be seen, and be seen to inspire.

  So I stood tall in the face of ork fire. I led the charge, an old man transformed into retaliation itself.

  So I knew what I was doing. But I was also transported. I was transformed. I had endured defeat and defeat and defeat. We had been outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and outthought by Ghazghkull Thraka at every turn. Now, at last, we turned the orks back. At last, they tasted defeat. The burning air of Armageddon, the stink of fyceline and promethium, and the unrelenting gale of our fire pushed me forward. My age fell away. I had the strength of a Titan. I pursued the orks, and they fled before my wrath.

  The enemy’s covering shots dropped away as the army pulled further away. I stopped in the middle of the highway, pistol out, sword held high. I was vaguely aware of dull throbs in my ribs and my shoulder, and burning on the side of my neck. I was injured.

  A trivial fact.

  The shelling and the gunfire stopped, but there was still a huge noise. It had a two-beat rhythm. It kept repeating.

  It was a shout from thousands of throats.

  It was my name.

  1. Yarrick

  We had a breathing space. Yet I felt time slipping away even more quickly than before. There had been many days between my arrival at Hades and the first attack. We had used that gift of time well. The trap had worked better than I could have hoped, but the great blow was not one we could replicate easily. I had controlled the narrative of the opening act of the siege. I had anticipated how the orks would approach, and despite the disaster von Strab had unleashed, used their tactics against them.

  Now I had to envision the orks’ counterattack, and how to block it. I didn’t have days. I might have hours. But I didn’t know. The orks had retreated out of sight of the walls, behind the curve of the hills of ejecta. The new eruption could come at any time. I had to be ready.

  The breathing space was a lie. It was a held breath. An exhalation of fire was imminent and unpredictable.

  I had to be ready. I was thinking more and more in those terms: I. I had to plan. I had to anticipate. I h
ad taken on a duty by executing Tritten, affirmed it by devising the strategy we had employed, and consolidated it during the ambush. I had control of Hades, and Helm was backing me by deferring to my tactical decisions. Any leader is symbolic, and a commissar is a symbolic leader even when the chain of command is intact and functioning well. My role in Hades was evolving rapidly. Capitalising on it was imperative. I had vowed Hades would not fall. Its responses to the ork siege would have to be quick, nimble, decisive, unified.

  Tens of millions would have to act with one will.

  My word had to be law.

  I was taking steps to making this necessity a reality. I prayed I was moving fast enough. I feared I wasn’t. I wanted to be everywhere. I could not.

  After the ambush, I joined Genath and the other captains at the head of the Steel Legion companies. We marched back to the gates, triumphant. The victory was a brief one, I knew this. I did nothing to check the celebration. Not yet. I let the spirits rise. As we came closer to the wall, the voices of my comrades joined those of the defenders on the ramparts.

  And there was my name again, turned into a chant, into a shout of defiance aimed at the enemy. I let that happen too. It was necessary. I had to become something greater than Sebastian Yarrick. The hand and the eye of Commissar Yarrick had to be felt at every height and every depth of the hive.

  The celebration had spread far beyond the wall by the time I met up with Helm. He and his fellow colonels greeted me atop the main gate, where I was visible to as many troops and civilians as could gather in the streets below, and at the windows of the hab blocks.