Helsreach Read online

  In the tight confines of his Lightning’s cockpit, he was more than just comfortable. He was home. Both control sticks in his hands were extensions of his own body. They said infantry felt the same about their rifles, but by the Holy Throne, there was no comparison. A rifle to a Lightning was like a spear to an angel of iron and steel.

  The mass of the alien invasion darkened the ground beneath them.

  ‘Need I remind anyone,’ he said over the squadron’s vox, ‘that bailing out over this mess is extremely ill-advised?’

  A volley of ‘No sirs’ was his answer.

  ‘If you’re hit – and by the Throne, some of us will be – then bring your bird down into one of their fat-arsed god-walkers. Take as many of the bastards with you as you can.’

  ‘Gargants, sir.’ That was Helika’s voice. ‘The orks call their Titans “gargants”.’

  ‘Duly noted, Helika. Fifty-Eighty-Twos, on my mark, you will break formation and open fire. The Emperor is with us, boys and girls. And the Templars are watching. Let’s show them how we earned the knights’ crosses painted on our hulls.

  ‘For Armageddon,’ he narrowed his eyes, breathing in a lungful of the recycled oxygen offered by his facemask, ‘and Helsreach.’

  CHAPTER X

  Siege

  When the wall is first breached, it dies in an avalanche of pulverised rockcrete.

  Dark powdery dust blasts into the air, thicker than smoke and expanding like a stormcloud, blinding in its density.

  I watch this from hundreds of metres away, standing with my brothers and the soldiers of the Desert Vultures. At the end of the street, the wall is no more. Our defences are broken, and behind the dust cloud, the breach gapes wide.

  The true siege has begun. On every rooftop, in every alley, on every street and from every window – for kilometres around – Imperial guns stand ready, clutched in loyal hands, ready to slay the invaders.

  Road by road, home by home. This was always how the Battle of Helsreach would be fought, and it is what every soul in the city stands ready for.

  The great figures of the Titans begin to withdraw. Their first duty is done; they stood at the walls and pounded the enemy forces with their immense artillery. Invigilata’s engines fall back now, not in defeat, nor even willingly – but because they must reload for the true battle. The Crone updated the commanders’ shared tactical grid with the locations of the Mechanicus landers within the city limits that serve as Invigilata’s rearming stations. Her Titans trudge back to the closest ones now, their tread shaking the city around them. They are tall enough to darken the rising sun as they pass, even though they walk through distant streets.

  Reports filter in from across the vox-network. The wall is falling to pieces, crumbling under the insane firepower of so many tanks and wreck-Titans. Around me, the smell of fear rises from the human soldiers. It is a foul musk; the sourness of breath, the tangy reek of liquid waste, and the rich, stinging scent of cold sweat. This fear-smell emanates from several of them, and while I do not hold them to the standards of Astartes, while I acknowledge the fact the human body will always react in this way even with the bravest of souls inhabiting it, it is still hard to stand in their presence. Their fear disgusts me.

  Above the dust cloud, the head and shoulders of a wreck-Titan emerge, its bulbous head of scrap metal shaped into a roaring alien maw. Throne of the Emperor, it would have towered above the wall even if our insignificant barricade was still there. Glass shatters in every window along the street as its slow march brings it closer.

  A moment later, the street thunders beneath our feet. Every one of the human soldiers with us falls to the ground, their curses lost amid the noise. I maintain my balance only because of my armour’s joint stabilisers compensating for the tremors. With the brightness of a flaring sun, the wreck-Titan’s head detonates, showering debris into the dust cloud below.

  The cheer that rises around me is the loudest sound yet.

  ‘Engine kill,’ comes Zarha’s voice over the vox, sounding amused despite the interference. ‘You owe me for that, Grimaldus.’

  I do not answer. The shot must have been a truly difficult challenge, but I do not care where Stormherald is, nor that it is retreating. My focus is here and now. Tension burns through my body like superheated blood. I feel it in my brothers, as well. Twenty of us, our breathing fast, our hands clutching weapons that are ritually chained to our armour. Chainswords complain as they rev, cutting only air. Last-minute oaths are whispered, or sworn to the sky.

  Emerging from the dust cloud, snorting their porcine war cries, come the hunched silhouettes of the enemy.

  Hundreds of them, flooding into the street.

  ‘Fire at will!’ calls one of the Steel Legion officers.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ I scream, my helm’s vocalisers piercing the surrounding noise.

  ‘They’re in range!’ the officer, Major Oros, yells back.

  ‘Hold your fire!’

  I am already running, sprinting, my armour joints snarling as I leave the humans behind. Proximity runes, my brothers’ life-markers, flicker on my retinal display, but I have no need for them. I know who follows me.

  ‘Sons of Dorn! Knights of the Emperor! Charge!’

  The first of the aliens runs from the dust, its green skin plastered grey from the cloud. It raises a junk weapon in its brutish fists, and dies with my crozius annihilating its malformed face a moment later.

  The two battle lines meet with a discordant crunch of weapon against weapon and flesh against armour. The sick, fungal stench of ork blood fills the air. Chainswords chew through xenos flesh. Bolters discharge their lethal loads – the crashing bangs of release followed by the muffled thumps of shells detonating within bodies.

  The creatures howl and laugh as they die.

  My knights remain silent as they slaughter.

  Perception fades, as it always does in war, to flickering images that come moment to moment. Concentration is impossible, anathema to the holy rage that fills my senses. I grip my master’s relic weapon in both hands, and swing at three aliens before me. They are hurled back from the mace’s crackling power field, all three slain by the impact with their chests shattered, each of them tumbling across the road to end in limp, lifeless heaps.

  I kill, and kill, and kill. It does not concern me that there is no end to this horde. The enemy fall before us, thrown to the floor by the righteous arcs of sacred weapons, and all that matters is how much blood flows before we are forced to retreat.

  Over the vox, I hear Oros and the men cheering. It is an easy sound to ignore.

  Artarion suffers more than the rest of us. He sacrifices one hand to hold my banner aloft, his chainblade held in his other. The standard draws the enemy to him. They want our banner. They always do. Without even a grunt of effort, he hacks left and right, parries clumsy strikes and lashes back with vicious ripostes.

  Priamus saw the danger first. I see one of the aliens behind Artarion fall in two pieces, the young knight’s sword splitting the creature in twain through the torso. He kicks the biological wreckage from his blade and cleaves his way to fight side by side with Artarion.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ Nerovar is still with me, tearing his sword free from the belly of a disembowelled greenskin. His boots crush the viscous, stinking ropes of intestine that spill to the road. ‘We are being overwhelmed.’

  A spear crashes against my helm, reducing my visor display to static for a moment. I swing back at the creature that hurled it, and my sight flickers back online to see the beast’s skull demolished beneath my crozius. More discoloured blood spatters over my armour in a light rainfall.

  Two more orks fall, one to Nero’s chainsword ripping across its throat, the other to my maul, hammered into its chest and sending it flying against the wall of a nearby building. Blood of Dorn, Mordred’s weapon is an incredible gift. It slays with effortless ease.

  I can feel its charge and release with each alien that dies. There is a split second be
fore every impact as the energy field around the head pulses in a low growl, conflicted by the closeness of other material, before it unleashes its force in a snapping burst of kinetic power.

  The enemy have encircled us, but that is little worry. Fighting our way free will be no effort.

  ‘Oros,’ I breathe into the vox. ‘We are preparing to fall back to you.’

  ‘Give me the mark,’ he says. ‘We’re itching for a turn ourselves.’

  With the true siege underway, the Imperial forces fell into their prepared defensive strategies.

  Every road had a barricade, where Steel Legion soldiers arrayed in ranks would unleash las-fire at the swarming foe. Snipers worked their deadly duties from rooftops. Battle tanks of every pattern and class ground their way down streets, shelling the first waves of enemy infantry pouring into the outlying sectors of the city.

  Every road and building had its assigned piece to play in the battle. Every section had its orders to hold and inflict as much punishment upon the advancing foe as possible, before falling back to the next barricade.

  Rearmed Titans stood as vigilant sentinels over entire city blocks, their weapons reaping life from the creatures that swarmed around their feet. The enemy gargants were still engaged in pulling down and breaking through the wall. In these first hours, Invigilata was unrivalled in its destruction.

  The invaders spilled into Helsreach, and died in their thousands. Every metre they took was bought with foul alien blood.

  Colonel Sarren watched the battle unfolding on the hololithic table. Stuttering images relayed the position of Imperial forces at the very edges of the city, inexorably withdrawing from the walls. Larger locator runes showed the position of Invigilata’s engines, or battalions of Steel Legion tanks. He had formulated this endless, relentless fighting withdrawal over the course of the past weeks, and by the Emperor, it was a fine thing to see it in action.

  In this first phase, it was imperative that casualties be kept to a minimum. The grind of army against army would come in time. For now, losses must be kept light and the death toll suffered by the enemy must be kept high. Let the invaders claim the outlying city sectors. Let them purchase these abandoned, worthless zones with their lives. It was all part of the plan.

  The wave would break soon.

  Sarren watched the flickering icons depicting his forces across the immense map. It would come soon, that perfect moment in the shifting winds of battle when the enemy’s first push would falter and slow as the advance elements outpaced their slower support units. The initial hordes of infantry would crash against Steel Legion resistance in the outer city streets that they could never break without support from their tanks and wreck-Titans.

  And at that moment, the wave would break like the tide against the shore. With the ferocious momentum of the first attack lost, the defence would begin in earnest.

  Counterattacks would be mounted in some streets, especially those close to Invigilata’s engines or Legion armour units. In other zones, the Guard would stand fast, unable to take ground back but entrenched well enough to hold it.

  All that mattered was keeping the enemy from reaching Hel’s Highway.

  At the last meeting, when the commanders had gathered in their battle armour, Sarren had outlined once more the necessity to holding the highway.

  ‘It is the key to the siege,’ he’d said. ‘Once they reach Hel’s Highway, the city becomes twice as difficult to defend. They will have access to the entire hive. Think of it as an artery, ladies and gentlemen. The artery. Once it is severed, the body will bleed out. Once the enemy takes the highway, the city is lost.’

  Grave expressions had answered this statement.

  The colonel hunched over the table now, his squinting eyes taking the scene in, road by road, building by building, unit by unit.

  He watched the war in silence, waiting for the wave to break.

  Barasath had hit the ground hard.

  He’d seen Helika fall from the sky – and heard her, too. That’d been difficult to deal with. The night they’d spent together sharing a bunk had been almost three years ago now, when they’d both pretended to be drunker than they were, but Korten had never forgotten it, nor had he wished it to be the only one. Hearing her die had chilled his blood, and he had to fight not to deactivate his vox as she screamed on the way down, her engine trailing fire.

  Her Lightning, with its white-painted wings, had ploughed into the chest of an alien god-walker. The Titan had shuddered for a moment, then vented flames and wreckage from its spine as Helika’s bird – now nothing more than spinning debris – burst through its back.

  The gargant kept walking as if unharmed, even with a hole blown clear through it.

  That had been in the first run. Helika didn’t even get time to fire.

  A wicked, weaving scrap of a battle through the alien fighters saw most of them spiralling groundward on dying engines. He’d taken cannon-fire along his hull, but a lucky shot saw him bleeding fuel instead of turned into a fireball in the sky. With the way clear and only a handful of his flyers down, Barasath’s second and third waves were inbound.

  That’s when things had gotten really nasty.

  The enemy god-walkers weren’t marching idly. Turrets on their shoulders and heads aimed up into the sky spat both laser fire and solid shells at the Imperial fighters. Dodging these alone would have been a chore. Dodging these when they were joined by more ork scrap-flyers and anti-air fire from the tanks below turned the situation into the nightmare that Colonel Sarren had promised.

  Barasath’s first wave scattered, boosting toward the primitive landing strips the enemy had formed in the desert.

  Hundreds of ork fighters still waited on the ground, unable to take off yet, consigned to waiting their turn on the scraped-flat runways. A more pessimistic man might have noted there was little he could do to such a massive, grounded force when he led the remaining birds of an air superiority squadron. A more pessimistic man might also have circled the enemy airbase and waited for his Thunderbolt bombers in the second wave.

  Korten Barasath was not a pessimistic man, and his patience took a backseat when it came to necessity. In graceful arcing dives and strafing runs, he unloaded his autocannons and drained his lascannon power packs, hurling everything he could down at the grounded fighters below. Dozens sought to take to the skies in panicked defence – most of these crashed during their ill-attempted takeoffs as their landing gear became fouled in the sandy wasteland soil. Those few that managed to get airborne were easy prey for Imperial cannons.

  His second wave arrived, unleashing their payloads. Thunderbolts, much larger and heavier armed than the Lightnings, sent great plumes of smoke and dust rising from the wasteland’s surface as their incendiaries impacted.

  ‘Bomb this place to ashes,’ Barasath voxed, and watched his pilots do exactly that.

  Fire ripped across the wastelands in hungry trails, consuming the ragged airstrips that would never be allowed to take shape after this. Grounded junk-fighters exploded in succession.

  Of course, the site wasn’t completely defenceless, even with most of it in flames. A few tanks fired gamely up at the strafing Imperial flyers, with all the grace and accuracy of old men trying to swat flies.

  He’d taken fire on his last banking swoop over the airbase. A lucky – or unlucky, as Barasath saw it – shot sheared off the best part of his left wing. There would be no climbing from this death-dive. No aiming for a wreck-Titan as Helika and a handful of others had done.

  He pulled the cockpit release as the fighter started to spin, ditching above the burning site. There was a moment of disorientation, the push of the wind, the world coming into focus after the twisting plunge of the falling fighter… and then he was falling into black smoke and dust clouds.

  Darkness embraced him. His respirator saved him having to breathe the choking smog, but his flight goggles were unenhanced and couldn’t pierce the smoke. Barasath pulled his cord, feeling himself jerked upwar
d as his grav-chute opened.

  With no idea where the ground was, he was lucky to hit the earth without breaking both of his legs. His ankle flared up in protest, but he considered that to be getting off lightly.

  Cautiously, aware of the fact that the smoke hid him as much as it hid the enemy, he pulled his laspistol and moved through the blinding darkness. It was hot, a savage heat all around him that spoke of burning planes and landers nearby, yet not enough light to offer direction.

  When he finally broke through the black cloud, pistol in his sure grip, he blinked once at what stood before him, and started to fire.

  ‘Oh Throne,’ he said with surprising politeness, right before the orks lumbering ahead shot him through the chest.

  Stormherald hungered.

  It ached with each pounding step, its roiling plasma core burning in its chest as it reluctantly turned its back on the enemy and marched through the streets.

  Its way was clear, its path already set. Buildings had been demolished earlier in the week – their foundations blown up and the hab-blocks themselves fallen to rubble – to make way for its passage.

  The need to turn around and pour its hatred into the enemy was fierce, a hunter’s urge, almost strong enough to overwhelm the Crone’s whispers in its mind.

  The Crone. Her presence was a savage irritant. Again, Stormherald leaned as it walked, seeking to turn with its ponderous, striding slowness. And again, the Crone’s claws in its mind forced its body to comply with her intent.

  We move, she whispered, to fight a greater battle soon.

  Stormherald’s rage faded at her voice. There was something new in her words, something its predator’s mind clutched and recognised immediately. A fear. A doubt. A plea.

  The Crone was weaker now than she ever had been before.

  Stormherald knew nothing of pleasure or amusement. Its soul was forged in ancient rites of fire, molten metal, and plasmic energy that churned with the ferocity of a caged sun. The closest it came to an emotion approximating pleasure was the rush of awareness and the dimming of its painful anger as enemies died under its guns.