Helsreach (warhammer 40000) Read online

  Helsreach

  ( Warhammer 40000 )

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  When the world of Armageddon is attacked by orks, the Black Templars Space Marine Chapter are amongst those sent to liberate it. Chaplain Grimaldus and a band of Black Templars are charged with the defence of Hive Helsreach from the xenos invaders in one of many battlezones. But as the ork numbers grow and the Space Marines dwindle, Grimaldus faces a desperate last stand in an Imperial temple. Determined to sell their lives dearly, will the Black Templars hold on long enough to be reinforced, or will their sacrifice ultimately be in vain?

  PART ONE

  The Exiled Knight

  PROLOGUE

  Knight of the Inner Circle

  I will die on this world.

  I cannot tell where this conviction comes from. Whatever birthed it is a mystery to me, and yet the thought clings like a virus, blooming behind my eyes and taking deep root within my mind. It almost feels real enough to spread corruption to the rest of my body, like a true sickness.

  It will happen soon, within the coming nights of blood and fire. I will draw my last breath, and when my brothers return to the stars, my ashes will be scattered over the priceless earth of this accursed world.

  Armageddon.

  Even the name twists my blood until burning oil beats through my veins. I feel anger now, hot and heavy, flowing through my heart and filtering into my limbs like boiling poison.

  When the sensation - and it is a physical sensation - reaches my fingertips, my hands curl into fists. I do not make them adopt this shape, it simply happens. Fury is as natural to me as breathing. I neither fear nor resent its influence on my actions.

  I am strong, born only to slay for the Emperor and the Imperium. I am pure, wearing the blackest of the black, trained to serve as a spiritual guide as well as a warleader. I am wrath incarnate, living only to kill until finally killed.

  I am a weapon in the Eternal Crusade to forge humanity's mastership of the stars.

  Yet strength, purity and wrath will not be enough. I will die on this world. I will die on Armageddon.

  Soon, my brothers will ask me to consecrate the war that will be my death.

  The thought plagues me not because I fear death, but because a futile death is anathema to me.

  But this is no night to think such things. My lords, masters and brothers have gathered to honour me.

  I am not sure I deserve this, but as with my sick sense of foreboding, this is a thought I keep to myself. I wear the black, and glare from behind the skulled visage of the immortal Emperor. It is not for one such as I to show doubt, to show weakness, to show even the whispering edges of blasphemy.

  In the holiest chamber of our ancient flagship, I lower myself to one knee and bow my head, because this is what is asked of me. The time has come after a century and a half, and I wish it had not.

  My mentor - the warrior who was my brother, father, teacher and master - is dead. After one hundred and sixty-six years of his guidance, I am on the edge of inheriting his mantle.

  These are my thoughts as I kneel before my commanders, this bleak mesh of my master's death and my own yet to come. This is the blackness that festers unspoken.

  At last, unaware of my secret torments, the High Marshal speaks my name.

  'Grimaldus,' High Marshal Helbrecht intoned. His voice was a guttural rumble, rendered harsh from yelling orders and battle cries in a hundred wars on a hundred worlds.

  Grimaldus did not raise his head. The knight closed his disquietingly gentle eyes, as if this gesture could seal the doubts within his skull.

  'Yes, my liege.'

  'We have brought you here to honour you, just as you have honoured us for so many years.'

  Grimaldus said nothing, sensing it was not his time to speak. He knew why they were honouring him now, of course, and the knowledge was bitter. Mordred - Grimaldus's mentor, a Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade - was dead.

  After the ritual, Grimaldus would take his place.

  It was an honour he had waited one hundred and sixty-six years to receive.

  A century and a half of wrath, courage and pain since the Battle of Fire and Blood, when he drew the eye of the revered Mordred - who was a lready ancient but unbowed, and who saw within the young Grimaldus a burning core of potential.

  A century and a half since he was inducted into the lowest ranks of the Chaplain brotherhood, rising through the tiers in his master's shadow, knowing that he was being forged in war to replace his ageing guardian.

  Over a century and a half of believing he would not deserve the title when it finally rested upon his shoulders.

  Now the time had come, and his conviction had not changed.

  'We have summoned you,' Helbrecht said, 'to be judged.'

  'I have answered the summons,' Grimaldus said in the silence of the Reclusiam. 'I submit myself before your judgement, my liege.'

  Helbrecht wore no armour, but his bulk was barely diminished. Clad in layered robes of bone-white and bearing his personal black heraldry, the High Marshal stood in the Temple of Dorn, his hands clutching an ornate helm with all due respect.

  'Mordred is dead,' Helbrecht's voice was a deep murmur. 'Slain by the Archenemy. You, Grimaldus, have lost a master. We have all of us lost a brother.'

  The Temple of Dorn, a museum, a Reclusiam, a sanctuary of hanging banners from ten thousand years of crusading, briefly came alive as the knights in the shadows intoned their agreement with their liege lord's words.

  Silence returned, and Grimaldus kept his gaze on the floor.

  'We mourn his loss,' the High Marshal said, 'but honour his wisdom in this, his final order.'

  It comes to this. Grimaldus tensed. Show no weakness. Show no doubt.

  'Grimaldus - warrior-priest of the Eternal Crusade. It was the belief of Reclusiarch Mordred that upon his death, you would be worthiest of our Brother-Chaplains to stand in his stead. His final decree before the returning of his gene-seed to the Chapter was that you, of all your brethren, would be the one to rise to the rank of Reclusiarch.'

  Grimaldus opened his eyes and licked lips that had suddenly turned dry. Slowly he raised his head, facing the High Marshal, seeing Mordred's helm - a grinning steel skull - in the commander's scarred hands.

  'Grimaldus,' Helbrecht spoke again, no hint of emotion colouring his voice. 'You are a veteran in your own right, and once stood as the youngest Sword Brother in the history of the Black Templars. As a Chaplain, your life has been without cowardice or shame, your ferocity and faith without equal. It is my belief, not merely the wish of your fallen master, that you should take the honour we offer you now.'

  Grimaldus nodded, but uttered no words. His eyes, so deceptively soft in their gaze, did not waver from their stare. The helm's slanted eye lenses were the rich, deep red of arterial blood. The death mask was utterly familiar to him - the face of his master when the knights went to war, making it the face of his master for most of his life.

  Its skullish visage smiled.

  'Rise, if you would refuse this honour,' Helbrecht finished. 'Rise and walk from this sacred chamber, if you wish no place in the hierarchy of our most noble Chapter.'

  He tells me to rise if I want to turn my back on the great honour being offered to me. Leave if I wish no place among the commanders of the Eternal Crusade.

  I don't move. Despite my doubts, my muscles remain locked. The steel mask sneers, a dark leer that is soothing for its brutal familiarity. From beyond the grave, Mordred grins at me.

  He believed I was worthy of this. That is all that matters. I had never known him to be wrong.

  I feel the edge of a smile creeping across my own lips. It will not fade, no
matter how I try to quell it. As I kneel in this hallowed hall, I know I'm smiling, but it's a private moment despite the dozens of fellow warriors watching from the banner-lined walls.

  Perhaps they mistake my smile for confidence?

  I will never ask, because I do not care.

  Helbrecht approaches at last, and with the silken rasp of steel stroking steel, he draws the holiest blade in the Imperium of Man.

  The sword was as ancient as human relics could be, given form and purpose in the forges of Terra after the great Heresy. In those nights of saga and legend, it was carried into battle by Sigismund, the first Emperor's Champion, favoured son of the Primarch Rogal Dorn.

  The blade itself, as long as a mortal man is tall, was wrought from the broken remains of Lord Dorn's own sword. In this temple, where the Chapter's greatest artefacts are kept in reverently maintained stasis fields to ward off the corrosive touch of time, the High Marshal held the most sacred treasure in the Black Templar armoury.

  'You will have your own rituals within the Chaplain brotherhood,' Helbrecht said, his voice solemn with respect. 'For now, I recognise you as the inheritor to your master's mantle.'

  The blade's silver tip lowered, pointing directly at Grimaldus's throat. 'You have waged war at my side for two hundred years, Grimaldus. Will you stand at my side as Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade?'

  'Yes, my liege.'

  Helbrecht nodded, sheathing the blade. Grimaldus tensed again, turning his head and baring his cheek.

  With the force of a hammer, the back of Helbrecht's fist crashed into the Chaplain's jaw. Grimaldus grunted, tasting the coppery vitality of his own blood - his primarch's blood - and he grinned up at his commander through blood-pinked teeth. Helbrecht spoke again.

  'I dub thee Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade. You are now a leader of our blessed Chapter.' The High Marshal raised his hand, showing the flecks of Grimaldus's blood marking his curled fingers. 'As a knight of the inner circle, let that be the last blow you receive unanswered.'

  Grimaldus nodded, unclenching his jaw, calming his heart and fighting the sudden flood of his killing urge. Even expecting the ritual strike, his instincts cried at him to respond in kind.

  'It… will be so, my liege.'

  'As it should be,' said Helbrecht. 'Rise, Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade.'

  CHAPTER I

  Arrival

  For some hours after his ritual entrance into the highest echelons of the Chapter, Grimaldus stood alone in the Temple of Dorn.

  Without a breeze to breathe life into the austere chamber, the great banners hung unmoving, some faded with the years, others brightly woven, still others even bearing dried bloodstains. Grimaldus looked upon the heraldry of his brothers' crusades.

  Lastrati, piles of skulls and burning braziers depicting the war of attrition on the surface of that accursed heretic world…

  Apostasy, showing the aquila chained to the globe, when the Templars were recalled to Holy Terra for the first time in thousands of years, to shed the blood of the false High Lord Vandire…

  And on into the more recent wars in which Grimaldus himself had played a part - Vinculus, with the sword impaling a daemon, where the knights had crashed against the tainted followers of the Archenemy in the great Battle of Fire and Blood - when Grimaldus himself had been taken from the ranks of the Sword Brethren and begun his gruelling rise through the tiers of the Chaplain brotherhood.

  Dozens of banners hung in the still air, descending from the ornately carved ceiling, telling the tales of the glories won and the lives lost in each single facet of the Eternal Crusade.

  The only noise except for Grimaldus's own breathing was the crackling hum of stasis fields enclosing Templar relics. Grimaldus passed one, a blurry field of smoky blue force revealing through its milky surface a bolter that had once belonged to Castellan Duron two thousand years before. The kill-markings scratched into the firearm's surface, etched in the tiniest Gothic lettering, covered the entire weapon like holy scripture.

  Grimaldus stood by the plinth displaying the bolter for some time, his fingers itching to enter the release code on the keypad built into the shield's column. Such secrets were the purview of the Chaplain brotherhood that maintained this shrine, and even before he had risen to his current rank, Grimaldus had honoured the machine-spirits of the chamber's relics through ritual blessings and reconsecrations.

  There was great succour in bearing the weapons of champions, even if only to cleanse and purify them after a warp jump.

  Only one of the plinths - and in the Temple of Dorn, there were over a hundred occupied displays - bore what Grimaldus had come for. He stood before the short column, reading the silver plaque beneath the pulsing stasis shield.

  Mordred Reclusiarch.

  'We are judged in life for the evil we destroy.'

  Beneath the words was a keypad, each key bearing a Gothic sigil in gold leaf. Grimaldus entered the nineteen-digit code for this specific column, and the stasis field powered down with a grinding of ancient engines inside the stone plinth.

  Upon the flat surface of the white stone column, a weapon rested, deactivated and silent, freed of the blue illumination that had protected it.

  Without any ceremony at all, Grimaldus clutched the maul's haft and raised it in his sure grip. The head was a hammer of holy gold and blessed adamantium fashioned into the shape of eagle wings over a stylised Templar cross. The haft was darkened metal as long as the knight's own arm.

  The weapon's ornate head caught the dim glow from the lume-globes ensconced in the walls, and was painted briefly in flashes of reflected light as he turned it in his hands.

  The warrior-priest stood like this for some time.

  'Brother,' came a voice from behind. Grimaldus turned, instinct bringing the weapon to bear.

  Despite never holding the relic before, his scarred fingertips found the activation rune along its handle before his heart could even beat once. The eagle-winged hammerhead flared with threatening brightness, serpents of hissing electricity flickering over the gold and silver metal.

  The figure smiled to be revealed in such stark illumination. In a face pockmarked and crevassed by decades of battle, Grimaldus saw the amusement in the younger knight's pale eyes.

  'Reclusiarch,' the figure inclined his head in greeting.

  'Artarion.'

  'We draw near to our destination. Estimates put translation back into realspace within the hour. I took the liberty of readying the squad for planetfall.'

  Artarion's grin, much like Artarion himself, was ugly to look upon. In contrast, Grimaldus finally returned the smile, but as with his eyes there was an unsuspected gentleness in the expression.

  'This world will burn,' the warrior-priest said, not even a shadow of doubt creeping into his voice.

  'It will not be the first.' Artarion's scratched lips parted to reveal steel teeth - implanted replacements due to a sniper shot fifteen years before. The rifle round had taken him in the side of the face, shattering his jaw. The mess of scar tissue webbing the flesh around the left side of his lips added to the thin, sneering image he projected when his helm was removed. 'It will not be the first,' he said again, 'nor the last.'

  'Have you seen the projections? The fleet auguries, the number of vessels in the local systems already, the reports of those yet to arrive?'

  'I lost interest when the numbers became too high for me to count on my fingers.' Artarion snorted at his own weak jest. 'We will fight and win, or fight and die. All that ever changes is the colour of the sky we fight under, and the shade of the blood on our blades.'

  Grimaldus lowered the crozius hammer, as if only then realising he still held it at the ready. A rich darkness settled over their sight as the relic's crackling illumination faded. In the wake of the brightness, the sharp scent of ozone - that strange freshness after a storm - filled the air. The power cells within the maul's haft whined as they reluctantly cooled down. The weapon's spirit hungered for war.<
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  'You speak with a soldier's heart, but you are wrong to be so dismissive. This campaign… This has the weight of history about it. It would be the gravest of errors to consider this merely another conflict to add to the honour rolls.'

  The softness had left Grimaldus's voice now. When he spoke, it was with the bitter passion Artarion was all too familiar with, fierce and thick with anticipation - the growled challenge of a caged animal. 'The surface of this world will burn until all of mankind's great achievements upon it are naught but ash and memory.'

  'I have never heard you claim we would lose before, brother.'

  Grimaldus shook his head, his voice still low and fevered. 'The planet will burn regardless of our triumph or defeat. I speak of the coming crusade's underpinning truth.'

  'You are so certain?'

  'I feel it in my blood. Win or lose,' the Chaplain said, 'come the final day on Armageddon, those of us that still stand will realise no war has ever cost us so dearly.'

  'Have you shared these concerns with the High Marshal?' Artarion scratched the back of his neck, his fingertips soothing the itching skin around a spinal socket.

  Grimaldus chuckled, momentarily blindsided by his brother's naivety.

  'You think he needs me to tell him?'

  Few ships in the Imperium of Man matched the lethal grandeur of The Eternal Crusader.

  Some ships sailed the heavens like the seaborne vessels of ancient Terra, journeying between the stars with solemnity and a measured grace. The Eternal Crusader was not one of these. Like a spear hurled into the void by the hand of Rogal Dorn himself, the flagship of the Templars had been slicing through space for ten thousand years of war. Its engines raged, streaming plasma contrails in their wake as they powered the vessel from world to world in echo of the Emperor's Great Crusade.

  And the Crusader was not alone.

  At her back, the capital vessels Night's Vigil and Majesty burned their engines hard, striving to keep pace and fall into a lance formation with their flagship. In the wake of these heavy cruisers - a battle-barge and smaller strike cruiser respectively - a wing of support frigates formed the rest of the lance. Seven in total, each of these faster interceptor vessels powered forward with less of a struggle to maintain formation with the Crusader.