He didn’t recognise the voice that eventually answered. It sounded both bitter and disgusted, but it still made Ryken grin.
‘Engaging.’
‘Hello? Identify yourself!’
‘I am Princeps Amasat of the Warlord Titan Bane-Sidhe.’
The Bane-Sidhe, named for a shrieking monster from ancient Terran mythology, did everything in its power to gain the Godbreaker’s attention. Opening salvoes from its arm-cannons and shoulder-mounted weapon batteries lashed against the larger Titan’s force fields. Siren horns, used to warn loyal infantry of the Titan’s passing close – or even through – their regiments, blared now at the enemy engine. Whatever primitive communications array passed for a vox system on board the Godbreaker was scrambled into white noise by a focussed spike of machine-code from Bane-Sidhe’s tech-adepts.
All of this was enough to drag the towering beast-machine away from its intent to flatten the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant.
The Warlord, thirty-three metres of armour plating and city-killing weaponry forged into an iconic image of the Machine-God Himself, began its shameful retreat. All guns fired at will as it clanked backwards, drawing the Godbreaker away from the last Imperials alive in the hive’s most sacred sector.
‘May I have a weapon, please?’
Andrej shrugged as he cleaned his goggles with a dirty cloth. ‘I have no other pistol, fat priest. For this, I apologise.’
Tomaz Maghernus shook his head when Asavan looked his way. ‘I don’t, either.’
Several maidens of the Order of the Argent Shroud came down the wide stairs into the undercroft. Prioress Sindal led them, carrying her bolter with ease due to the machine-muscles of her power armour.
‘It is time to seal the undercroft,’ the old woman said, her voice low. She, at least, knew the merits of not panicking the refugees gathered in the sublevel. ‘The beasts have reached the inner grounds.’
‘May I have a weapon, please?’ Asavan asked her.
‘Have you ever fired a bolter?’
‘Until this month, I had never even seen a bolter. Nevertheless, I would like a weapon with which to defend these people.’
‘Father, with the greatest respect, it would do you no good. My thanks for comforting the flock, but it is time to prepare for the end. Everyone who is staying behind, be ready to be sealed down here within the next three minutes. The oxygen should last a month, as long as the xenos do not destroy the air filtration systems above ground.’
Andrej raised a singed eyebrow. ‘And if they do?’
‘Use your imagination, Guardsman. And return to the surface, quickly. Every able body is needed in defence of the temple.’
‘A moment, please.’ Andrej turned back to Asavan. ‘Fat priest. You are destined to either survive this, or die at least some time later than I.’ He handed the holy man a small leather pouch. Asavan took it, clutching it tight in fingers that would have trembled in this moment only weeks before.
‘What is this?’
‘My mother’s wedding ring, and a letter of explanation. Once this is over, if you are still drawing breath, please find Trooper Natalina Domoska of the 91st Steel Elite. You will recognise her – this, I promise to you. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. Every man says so.’
‘Move, young man,’ the prioress insisted.
Andrej snapped a crisp salute to the overweight priest, and made his way back up the stairs, his laspistol held in both hands. Maghernus followed him, casting a lingering look back at Asavan and the refugees. He waved as the underground bulkheads slammed closed. Asavan didn’t seem to see, preoccupied with the refugees who were rising to their feet in panic and protest.
Several of the battle-sisters remained at the base of the stairs, entering codes to seal the doors and imprison the civilians away from harm. The prioress managed to keep up with Andrej and Maghernus. The dockmaster smiled at her, knowing the gesture was meaningless and filled with melancholy. She returned the smile, her expression carrying the same emotions as his. The temple was shaking as the orks battered at its walls.
The next time Maghernus would see Prioress Sindal of the Order of the Argent Shroud, she would be a mangled corpse in three pieces, spread across the floor of the inner sanctum.
That would be in less than one hour’s time, and her body would be one of the last things he saw before he was killed by a bolt-round in the back.
Bane-Sidhe tore clean through the Hel’s Highway when it fell.
The Warlord had made it half a kilometre before its void shields burst out of existence and its front-facing armour began to suffer the assault from the Godbreaker’s guns. No matter how thick the ceramite and adamantium plating covering the Warlord’s vital systems, the sheer level of firepower hurled at Bane-Sidhe meant that once its shields died, its existence was measured in minutes.
It was perhaps unfair that such a noble example of the Invigilata’s god-machines met its end as a sacrificial lure, but within the Legio’s archives, both Bane-Sidhe and her command crew were given the highest honours. The wreckage of the Titan would come to be salvaged by the Mechanicus in the following weeks, and restored to working order fourteen months later. Its destruction at Helsreach was marked upon its carapace with a six-metre square engraved image upon its right shin, depicting a weeping angel over a burning, metallic skeleton.
Unable to withstand any more punishment, with flames pouring from its bridge, the great Warlord fell backwards on howling joints. Its immense weight was enough to break the rockcrete columns holding up the Hel’s Highway, sending the Bane-Sidhe and a significant section of the main road crashing down to land in a mountain of rubble.
The Godbreaker stood over the crater of broken road, as if staring down at the body of its latest kill.
Fourteen seconds after the Warlord’s shattered remains came to a rest, a flare of sun-bright and fusion-hot energy screamed across the Hel’s Highway. It was the shape of a newborn star, flaring with arcing coils of plasma light and surrounded by a blinding corona.
The Godbreaker’s shields disintegrated at the sunfire’s touch. Its armour disintegrated mere seconds later, as did its crew, skeletal structure, and all evidence that it had ever existed.
Jurisian drooled through clenched teeth, feeling the untamed machine-spirit’s quivering rage at being used without being ritually blessed and activated via the correct rituals. As the knifing pain in his skull faded to tolerable levels, he opened a vox-link to Grimaldus, and breathed two words.
They were laden with both agony and meaning – symbolising the completion of his duty, and a final farewell.
‘Engine kill,’ he said.
‘The Godbreaker is dead,’ Grimaldus voxed to anyone still listening to the comms channels. The news brought no relief to him, and no joy, even for thought of Jurisian’s glory. There was nothing now beyond the next second of battle. Step by step, the Reclusiarch and his last brothers were pushed backwards through the basilica, room by room, hall by hall.
The air reeked of alien breath, spilled innards and the sharp overcooked ozone scent of las-fire.
The walls still shook as xenos tanks shelled the holy temple even while their own forces stormed through it.
A young girl in Argent Shroud battle armour was cut down, wailing as she was disembowelled by the horde. Artarion’s two blades, both inactive from meat-clogging and no more use than jagged clubs, ripped across the face and throat of the girl’s killer. Then he too was beaten back by the four beasts that took the dead brute’s place.
A voice rose above the carnage – harsh and enraged.
‘Kill them all! Let none survive! Never has an alien defiled this holiest of places!’
Grimaldus dragged the closest ork against him, gripping its throat and thudding his skulled helm against its face to shatter its hideous bone structure. The voice was the prioress’s, and he realised now where he was.
No.
No, how could it all be over already?
We have been b
eaten back to the inner sanctum in mere hours. Sindal’s cries of defiance have the worst effect: they awaken everyone from the mindless heat of battle and bloodshed, dragging us back to face the truth.
The inner sanctum is a gore-slick mess of heaving, slashing, shooting humans and orks. We are beaten. No one in this room is going to survive more than a few more minutes. Already, others have sensed this and I see them through the crowd, trying to run from the room, seeking a way past the orks rather than lay down their lives at the last stand.
Militia. Civilians. Guard. Even several storm troopers. Half of our pathetic remaining force is breaking from the battle and trying to run.
With my hand still at the ork’s throat, I drag the kicking beast up with me, standing atop the Major Altar. The beast struggles, but its clawing is weak with its skull broken and its senses disoriented by pain.
My plasma pistol is long gone, torn from me at some point in the last two days of battle. The chain remains. I wrap it around the beast’s throat, and roar my words to the painted ceiling as I strangle the creature in full view of everyone in the room.
‘Take heart, brothers! Fight in the Emperor’s name!’ The beast thrashes as it dies, claws scraping in futility at my ruined armour. I tense my grip, feeling the creature’s thick spinal bones begin to click and break. Its piggish eyes are wide with terror, and this… this makes me laugh.
‘I have dug my grave in this place…’ An explosive round detonates on my shoulder, blasting shards of armour free. I see Priamus kill the shooter with the Black Sword in a one-handed grip.
‘I have dug my grave in this place, and I will either triumph or I will die!’
Five knights still live, and they roar as I roar.
‘No pity! No remorse! No fear!’
The walls shudder as if kicked by a Titan. For a moment, still laughing, I wonder if the Godbreaker has returned.
‘Until the end, brothers!’
The cry is taken up by those of us that yet draw breath, and we fight on.
‘They’re bringing the temple down!’ Priamus calls, and there is something wrong with his voice. I realise what it is when I see my brother is missing an arm and his leg armour is pierced in three places.
I have never heard him in pain before.
‘Nero!’ he screams. ‘Nerovar!’
The beasts are primitive, but they are not devoid of intelligence and cunning. Nero’s white markings signal him as an Apothecary, and they know of his value to humanity. Priamus sees him first, two dozen metres away through the melee. An alien spear has punched its way through his stomach, and several of the beasts are lifting him from the ground, raising him like a war banner above the carnage.
Nerovar dies like no warrior I have ever seen before. Even as I try to kill my way closer to him, I see him gripping the spear in his fists, hauling himself down the weapon, impaling himself deeper on it in an attempt to reach the aliens below.
He has no bolter, no chainblade. His last act in life is to draw his gladius from its sheath at his thigh and hurl it down with a Templar’s vengeance at the ork with the best grip on the spear. He’d dragged himself down to get close enough to ensure he wouldn’t miss. The short sword bit true, sinking into the beast’s gaping maw and rewarding the xenos with an agonising death, choking on a sword blade that had ravaged its throat, tongue and lungs. With the beast unable to keep hold, the spear falls and Nero plunges into a seething mass of greenskins.
I never see him again.
Priamus, one-armed and faltering now, staggers ahead of me. A detonating round crashes against his helm, spinning him back to face me.
‘Grimaldus,’ he says, before falling to his knees. ‘Brother…’
Flames engulf him from the side – clinging chemical fire that washes over his armour, eating into the soft joints and dissolving the flesh beneath. The ork with the flamer pans the weapon left and right, dousing Priamus in corrosive fire.
I am hammering my way with painful slowness to avenge him when Artarion’s blade bursts from the ork’s chest. He kicks the dying ork from his broken chainsword. With vengeance taken, my standard bearer turns with as much grace as can be salvaged in this butchery, and his back slams against mine.
‘Goodbye, brother.’ He’s laughing as he says the words, and I do not know why, but it brings out my own laughter.
Blocks of the ceiling are falling now, crushing those beneath. The orks in here with us, paying for every human life with five of their own, pay no heed to their kin outside damning them by destroying the temple with them still inside.
Not far from the altar, I catch a final glimpse of the storm trooper and the dockmaster. The former stands above the dying latter, Andrej defending the gut-shot Maghernus while he tries to comprehend what to do with his bowels looping across his lap and the floor nearby.
‘Artarion,’ I call to him, to return the farewell, but there is no answer. The presence against my back is not my brother.
I turn, laughing at the madness before me. Artarion is dead at my feet, headless, defiled. The enemy drive me to my knees, but even this is no more than a bad joke. They are doomed as surely as I am.
I am still laughing when the temple finally falls.
Epilogue
Ashes
They call it the Season of Fire.
The Ash Wastes are choking with dust from roaring volcanoes. Planet-wide, the picts show the same images, over and over. Our vessels in orbit watch Armageddon breathe fire, and send the images back to the surface, so that those there might witness the world’s anger in its entirety.
Fighting across most of the world is ceasing, not because of victory or defeat, but because there can be no arguing with Armageddon itself. The ash deserts are already turning dark. In a handful of days, no man or xenos beast will be able to breathe in the wastelands. Their lungs would fill with ashes and embers; their war machines would grind to a halt, fouled beyond use.
So the war ceases for now. It does not end. There is no tale of triumph and victory to tell.
The beasts stagger and crawl back to cities they have managed to hold, there to hide away from the Season of Fire. Imperial forces consolidate the territories to which they still lay claim, and drive the invaders out from those where the orks have managed to grasp no more than a weak hold.
Helsreach is one of these places. That necropolis, in which one hundred of my brothers lie dead alongside hundreds of thousands of loyal souls…
That tomb-city, so much of which is flattened by the devastation of two months’ road-by-road warfare, with no industrial output left at all…
Imperial tacticians are hailing it as a victory.
I will never again understand the humanity I left behind when I ascended to the ranks of the Templars. The perceptions of humans remain alien to me since the moment I swore my first oaths to Dorn.
But I will let the people of this blighted world claim their triumph. I will let the survivors of Helsreach cheer and celebrate a drawn-out defeat that masquerades as victory.
And, as they have requested, I will return to the surface once more.
I have something of theirs in my possession.
They cheer in the streets, and line Hel’s Highway as if in anticipation of a parade. Several hundred civilians, and an equal number of off-duty Guard. They stand in crowds, clustered either side of the Grey Warrior.
My helm’s aural receptors filter the noise of their cheering to less irritating levels, the way it would do if an artillery battery was shelling the ground around me.
I try not to stare at them, at their flushed faces, at their bright and joyous eyes. The war is over to them. They care nothing for the orbital images that show entire ork armies taking root in other hives. For the people of Helsreach, the war is over. They are alive, so they have won.
It is hard not to admire such simple purity. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. And in truth, I have never seen a city resist invasion so fiercely. The people here have earned the lives they stil
l have.
This part of the city, not far from the accursed docks, is relatively unscathed. It remained a stronghold firmly in Imperial control. I am given to understand that Sarren and his 101st fought here to the last day.
A gathering of figures clusters by the Grey Warrior. Most wear the ochre uniforms of the Steel Legion. One of them, a man known to me, beckons me over.
I walk to him, and the crowd erupts into more cheers. It is the first time I have moved in almost an hour.
An hour of listening to tedious speeches transmitted from the gathered group, over to a vox-tower nearby that blares the words across the sector.
‘Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Templars,’ the vox-voice booms. More cheers as I draw close. The soldier that beckoned to me offers quiet greetings.
Major, or rather, Colonel Ryken has regained much of his face since I last saw him. Burn scars spread across much of the remaining skin, but over half of his features are dull-metalled augmetics, including significant reconstruction to his skull. He makes the sign of the aquila, and only one of his hands is his own. The other is a skeletal bionic, not yet sheathed in synthetic skin.
I return the salute. The vox-speech – the speaker is a member of General Kurov’s staff I have never met before – drones on about my own heroism alongside the Steel Legion. As my name is shouted by thousands of humans, I raise my fist in salute to them all.
And all the while, I am thinking how my brothers died here.
Died for them.
‘Did Adjutant Quintus Tyro survive?’ I ask.
He nods, his ruined face trying to make a smile. ‘Cyria made it.’
Good. I am pleased for him, and for her.
‘Hello, sir,’ another of the Legionnaires says. I glance behind Ryken, to a man several places down the line. My targeting reticule locks on him – onto his grinning face. He is unscarred, and despite his youth, has laugh lines at the corner of his eyes.
So. He’s not dead, either.
This does not surprise me. Some men are born with luck in their blood.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 64