Armageddon Saint - Gav Thorpe

by Warhammer 40K

  Another twenty metres brings me to the end of the duct and out into a broad hall. There’s daylight coming from the left, filtered through what were once ornate windows, now shattered by either the ork attack or the Imperial siege. There’s little left of the furniture but for splinters, a crater at the far end of the rectangular hall, the wall collapsed beyond cutting off any further advance.

  ‘Emperor’s teeth!’ I swear, pulling myself fully out of the drift of dirt. I look around, but the windows are too far up to reach.

  ‘Trapped,’ says Harla, spitting dust.

  For an instant it seems like the clouds shift overhead, illuminating the broken remains of steps leading up.

  ‘A sign,’ Karste calls out from behind me. ‘See how the Emperor does light your path, Burned Man.’

  ‘Go!’ I say, giving Karste a shove. More folks come out of the crawlway, bloodied and bruised, streaked with sweat and dirt, and I send them on. Grot scampers out, baring sharp little fangs in a grin. Nazrek emerges just after, broad shoulders almost trapped where the crush of fallen masonry has pinched the metal close. I grab its arm and drag the ork out. The Colonel is just behind.

  ‘I don’t think abyssal spectres need to crawl through ducts,’ I say, trying to look everywhere at once.

  ‘No, they do not,’ Schaeffer replies. Without agreement we stand almost back to back, weapons trained on the crumbling brick wall we’ve just tunnelled under. A few others stay with us, weapons ready, pointing at various routes into the hall. The clatter of more people coming from the duct makes me jump, and a few seconds later Oahebs appears, eyes wide, face almost feverish with sweat while his gaze flicks around, not focusing on anything.

  ‘Right behind me,’ he croaks. ‘Right behind me. Right…’

  He seems to relax, an odd smile on his face, and then collapses. I can hear scraping, but it doesn’t seem to be getting closer.

  ‘Nobody else is coming.’

  ‘Fight here,’ grunts Nazrek, pacing like a caged beast, choppa and pistol swaying.

  ‘Can you feel the blood in the big green?’

  It stops, head tilted like it’s listening.

  ‘Nah. No big green. Not big. Small green. Me and Grot.’ The ork shakes its cumbersome head. ‘No bloodboys.’

  ‘Grab him,’ I say, pointing with my pistol at Oahebs.

  I head up the steps after the others. A couple of minutes later, after negotiating the winding, debris-choked stairs, I find myself on a flat roof between two square towers, crooked but intact, smoggy sky smudged with red cloud above. I turn, seeing two more towers at the other end of the hall, built out of the incline of the hive. Acheron stretches kilometres above us and to either side, as massive as a mountain, jagged and spire-broken. But I recognise where we are, the outline of the jutting building and the buttresses that support it.

  A chapel. A shrine of the Emperor.

  ‘Frag me, it really is a miracle,’ I say to nobody in particular.

  The chapel is part of an outcrop about two kilometres long protruding from the southern slopes of Acheron. It’s hard to see much of anything, the smog of industry and war shrouds everything, broken only by erratic gusts of wind. Looking at the debris that’s piled up to either side, it seems a whole chunk of hive skin slipped down from a few ­kilometres up, burying nearly everything, but somehow the shrine survived. Other than the wind, the only sound is the distant boom of artillery and occasional shriek of jet engines far above, hidden by the ruddy clouds.

  What there isn’t, much to everyone’s relief, is any sign of the daemons.

  ‘Nothing over here,’ Karste shouts from the furthest extent of the roof, over what would have once been the preacher’s robing chambers, I think. The whole building is shaped from above as a stylised ‘I’ with broken flying buttresses that once formed cross-bars at the middle. The four steeples are close to toppling, scatters of brick and chunks of mortar lying over the cracked ferrocrete of the roof between. Even so, Harla has dared to climb up one near the main entrance, back over the pitted cladding of the hive. Cupping his hands around his mouth he calls back down.

  ‘Can’t see any warpborn from here!’

  I give him a thumbs up and signal for him to begin the precarious climb down.

  ‘No abyssal servants,’ I say to the Colonel. We’re stood on a walkway near to the roof’s edge, looking down into a fracture-chasm a few hundred metres deep. No sign of anything moving down there. ‘Some power of the shrine, maybe?’

  ‘It is possible.’ He straightens, brow slightly creased. ‘There must be more to it than that. The structure of the hive means little obstacle to the warp-spawned. Why can we not see them emerging around us?’

  I stroke the back of my neck, feeling the cooling breeze on skin that hasn’t been touched by open air in more than a year. There’s no heat, no prickling sensation.

  ‘I can’t feel them, can you?’

  Schaeffer shakes his head.

  ‘No oppressive presence,’ he agrees.

  I look up at the shadowy vastness of the hive, wondering at the scenes of butchery within.

  ‘The fighting’s still going on inside,’ I say, scratching a scar on my chin. ‘There’s a lot of orks and humans still in the hive city and upper spire. The messenger that hitched a ride in my brain seemed to feed on… Misery and violence, it stirred them up, did terrible things to fuel itself, I think. Maybe the daemons are drawn to the bloodshed. If we keep out of trouble…’

  The heavy thud of boots draws our attention to the approach of Nazrek. The ork looks miserable.

  ‘No green here,’ it rumbles. ‘Just planet green. What plan, boss?’

  ‘You don’t feel the blood in the green?’ I ask, confirming my suspicions.

  ‘No blood, no green.’

  ‘We cannot go back into Acheron,’ says the Colonel. I dart him a warning look, to remind him that I need to be in charge. He takes my meaning with a sour look. ‘Where do you want to go? The Imperial line, such as it is, lies about ten kilometres further out. There is little presence in this area – Acheron is a campaign of containment, nothing more.’

  Forty-three survivors have made it to the chapel, including me, most of them sitting huddled with each other in the lee of the towers at the front. Some of the more coherent ones are stationed around the roof to keep watch. A few others gather closer to hear the discussion. Karste steps out. She’s a sorry sight, her hair matted with dirt and flopping over her face, studded jacket torn, a bloodied bandage around her left arm. But her expression is anything but sorry. There’s fire in her eyes I’ve not seen before. Catastrophe breaks some people and makes others.

  ‘We should warn someone what’s happening,’ she says. ‘About the… attack?’

  ‘I think the Imperial authorities already know,’ says Schaeffer, and he looks up pointedly.

  Above us, somehow visible through the murk, the sky is dominated by what looks like a scrawled spiral, a pulsating opening in reality itself. Wherever I look up, it’s there in the centre of my vision. I can almost feel malign energies seeping from it, settling on Armageddon like psychic fallout.

  ‘We have to get everyone to sanctuary,’ I say, casting my gaze at the forlorn crowd of my followers. ‘Orks, wasters, abyssal warriors… One of them’s going to get us, sooner or later.’ I take a deep breath, ready­ing myself, and look at the Colonel. ‘I can’t think of anywhere we’ll find safety except with the Imperial forces.’

  There are some calls of argument, some of relief. I turn to Nazrek.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know what’ll happen to you. If you want to go and find some more orks, you should go and do that.’

  ‘Nazrek not leave yet. Still fight to have.’ Grot snarls something from near Nazrek’s feet and is answered by a metal-capped boot, sending it leaping away across the roof screeching like a wounded bird. ‘Still follow Burned Man bos
s.’

  I peer out into the shifting banks of smoke and noxious vapours that pool and break around the foothill-like hive foundations. In the gloom of distance, I fancy I see patches of brightness, maybe artillery flare, though it could be anything really. Ten kilometres doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s across pure grit drifts and ash dunes. A person can get lost in minutes, or fall into an acid pit, or get swallowed by a sinkhole. I offer up a silent prayer that there’s no acid cloudburst, and that we don’t run into a pocket of mutagenic gas or toxic effluent cloud.

  And let’s not forget the daemons, wasters and orks.

  ‘Good times,’ I say to the others. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  Six

  INTO THE WASTES

  Have you ever tried swallowing a mouthful of salt and then washed it down with hot sand? That’s every breath as we forge our way into the wastes. After a few minutes Acheron Hive is just a darker blur in the fog, while overhead the abyssal rift continues to writhe and stir, staring down at us from everywhere. The understrata of the hive foundations gives way to the ash flows, a grey sea of constantly moving dunes and waves. Particles glitter in the wind, almost beautiful as they catch light – lethal if inhaled in any large quantity.

  Millennia of construction and collapse have made it impossible to know where the hive city stops and the wastes begin. What the turn of centuries started, the war with the orks has finished. Crumbling ferrocrete cliffs cut through with drainage rivers that gleam with their own sickly light, tumbling over falls created by broken, half-melted plastek beams, spilling into plasma crater pools. Here and there a familiar shape juts from pitted slag hills, like a battlement of an old watchtower or the high, narrow windows of some ancient mill or manufactory. Old incinerators and the skeletal remains of looted furnace works break plateaus of cracked ceramic tiles, their patterns long since ground away by the airborne dust. Acid rivulets carve haphazard paths down the artificial mountainside and we cover our eyes against the vapours, burying our faces in whatever we can to avoid the stinging mist. Bent girders provide bridges over disused mineworkings, stones dislodged by our passage falling for an impossibly long time before the noise of their landing echoes back to us.

  Slowly, structure gives way to undulating hillocks of debris, marked with drill scars and pick holes where scavvies have tried to lever out a few precious nuggets of smelted metal. We come across occasional gates and doorways, prised open like the tombs of old kings I’ve heard about, and equally looted, though for archeotech rather than royal treasures. Remnants of old towns, barter stations that maybe lasted hundreds of years now swept away by wind and corrosive rain, broken apart by the Imperial Guard’s shells and the torpedoes of Navy ships in orbit.

  Here and there we come upon holes seemingly drilled perfectly into the hard surface, about three metres across, their circular sides glassy smooth.

  ‘Lance beams,’ explains the Colonel, referring to the massive laser batteries of the Emperor’s warships. Who knows what they were aiming at, if anything at all, amongst the indistinguishable ruin of past generations. Orks on the move? A sensor blip? A miscommunicated coordinate?

  It reminds me of Coritanorum and that crazy bastard Striden. The only person I know that volunteered for one of the Colonel’s one-way missions. And the Emperor must have blessed him because he walked out the other side with life and limb intact. I bet I could count on one hand, maybe two, the people that have ever returned from a Last Chan­cers mission. The Colonel, of course. And I’ve somehow got through three tours with him, though I really don’t know whether to count the assassination of von Strab as a survival or not. I should be dead. Really, truly, burned-to-ashes dead. I wanted to be dead, but that wasn’t to be.

  Maybe Armageddon will get me still, I think, as we clamber down from tumbled rockcrete blocks into the wastes proper.

  Nobody is prepared for this. It’s colder as we move away from the last outskirts of Acheron, the wind really biting on bare flesh. No scarves to cover our mouths, no coats to shield bodies and arms, no hats except for a few helmets between us. Only half of us have weapons, and that’s if we count some small shivs and improvised mauls. No water, no food.

  Ten kilometres, I keep telling myself. Ten kilometres and we’ll be near the Imperial camps. So the Colonel thinks. Ten kilometres. Three hours? Maybe four in these conditions. If we run into a picket or patrol, perhaps even sooner.

  Despite the apparent simplicity of the task at hand, in my gut I know it’s never that easy. If the Emperor really has a path laid out for me, He sure as anything is having a good chuckle on the Golden Throne, throwing hilarious, life-threatening obstacles in my path every chance He has.

  I have plenty of time to think about that, because nobody wants to talk. Just opening your mouth is an invitation to suck in a lungful of razor-rain – metal and plastek blown into the atmosphere by the war, turned into needle-slivers by constant motion and plasmic discharge, sucked into the upper air by detonation thermals and then lovingly deposited across the wastes on the downdraughts of orbital bombardments.

  Armageddon. Probably the worst place His Divine Majesty could have deposited me, barring a trip to Catachan. It’s been a shithole for thousands of years already, the hive industries belching out pollution for so long that nobody knows what it was like before. Only the equatorial jungles have any semblance of native life, everything else is ash wastes or the blistering tar seas and acid geysers of the polar regions.

  But that was just your everyday hell to live on. Bearable if not nice. When the Beast Ghazghkull came back, it got a lot worse, really quickly. That mean ork bastard didn’t like that he’d been beaten before, and he remembered who was one of the main reasons for that – Yarrick, commissar, Hero of the Imperium. Hades Hive had halted the orks before, so the Beast dropped an asteroid on it this time. The geotherm­als exploded, creating this twilit smog, a volcanic winter enveloping most of the continent. The Emperor alone knows what sorts of toxins, ordnance and special munitions have been expended to drive the orks out, but from rad-zones to promethium rivers, there’s barely a square kilometre of the land that hasn’t been scarred by the conflict. The air, the weather, everything is touched by it.

  And inside the ork areas, like Acheron and parts of the jungle, that might be even worse. Orkified territories like the one we passed through, but on a massive scale.

  Suddenly I remember the prisoners we freed. I can’t recall when I last saw them. When the Neverborn came, I guess the folks carrying them decided to lose the weight, and I can’t say I blame them. What was I thinking? Just trying to prove the Colonel wrong? Stupid, wasteful. Could have got even more of us killed. Probably did.

  Wrapped in these glum thoughts, I almost miss the movement in the curling mists. A hushed warning from the Colonel and sudden activity around me draws my attention to the others readying their weapons.

  I can’t feel the daemon-heat, so my first thought is orks. Pulling up my pistol, I get ready to fire the moment I see a fanged face.

  Harla shouts from behind, alerting us to the presence of more indistinct silhouettes following. Half-seen figures appear and disappear in ruddy eddies of smog. Not directly behind us but coming at an angle. Smart, good ambush pattern. Orks sometimes attack you from the front and back and end up hitting each other with their missed shots. These folks know what they’re doing.

  So not orks. They can be cunning, but rarely patient. If it was orks they would have started the attack by now.

  ‘Wait,’ I say, trying to keep calm.

  Maybe it is daemons? Not enough of them to cause the prickling sensation, but maybe starting to manifest outside Acheron? I glance up, unable to stop myself, eyes drawn to the menacing circle of energy pulsing in the skies.

  The thought that it might be a patrol brings a flutter of hope to my heart. It’s short-lived as I see some of the vague shadows resolve into more definite shapes. Figures swathed i
n coats and scarves, faces hidden behind masks and tinted goggles, brightly coloured streamers and pennants tied to their long-barrelled lasguns and the hilts of blades at their belts. Not just decoration, the flashes of colour amid the numbing drabness of the wastes helps them keep track of each other.

  Wasters.

  Judging by their organisation and numbers, not just some scav-gang hanging around the hive base hoping to find a way in. Proper ash wastes nomads, born and raised out here, plying their trade and their attacks from one grit bowl to the next. I count thirty, with more in the distance. Shorter, probably children. There will be others close at hand, guarding the caravan.

  We’re technically not outnumbered but we’re certainly outgunned, and in a poor position.

  ‘Fragging waste-rats,’ someone snarls to my right.

  ‘Nobody does anything,’ I snap, dipping my pistol slightly. ‘Lower your weapons.’

  Some of them hesitate. Harla turns a sour look at me.

  ‘I’m not giving them first shot, Burned Man. You know what these savages do to people? Better dead than traded.’

  ‘If they were going to attack us, they would have opened fire already,’ says the Colonel, as if reading my thoughts. ‘They have had plenty of opportunity to get the first strike but have not taken it. That suggests they desire parley, not a fight.’

  ‘Which means you put your fragging gun down and don’t start anything,’ I add. I throw a look at Nazrek. ‘You understand? No fight yet. Maybe allies.’

  The ork eyes the strangers with open hostility, but its arms drop to its sides, cleaver and pistol in hand.

  A crunch of footfalls has us all turning around, to see a trio of wasters approaching, their rifles slung on their backs, hands held out from their sides to show their peaceful intent. Judging by build, which is tricky given the conditions and clothes, I’d say two women and a much taller man, but it’s just a guess really. Underneath the layers of protect­ive robes, wraps and capes they could be anything. The others hold back, visible but as shifting as the concealing fog banks, keeping us unsure of their exact positions.