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The human officers of Sarren’s staff shared a worried look. Grimaldus paid no attention at all. The seconds passed with sickening slowness.

  ‘The Eternal Crusader is making ready to engage the enemy fleet,’ the officer replied. ‘I can send a message, but their two-way communications are in lockdown without the proper command codes. D-do you have the codes, my lord?’

  Grimaldus did indeed have the codes. He looked at the frightened human, then back at the worried faces of the command staff as they sat at the table.

  I am being a fool. My fury is blinding me to my sworn duty. What did he expect, truly? That Helbrecht would send down a Thunderhawk and allow him to take part in the glorious orbital war above? No. He was consigned here, to Helsreach, and there would be no other fate beyond this.

  I will die on this world, he thought once more.

  ‘I have the codes,’ the knight replied, ‘but this is not an emergency. Simply send the following message to their incoming logs, with no need for a reply: “Fight well, brothers.”.’

  ‘Sent, lord.’

  Grimaldus nodded. ‘My thanks.’ He turned to the gathered officers, and leaned over the hololithic display, his gauntleted knuckles on the table’s surface.

  ‘Forgive me a moment’s choler. We have a war to plan,’ the knight said, and breathed out the most difficult words he had ever spoken. ‘And a city to defend.’

  Until their dying nights, the warriors of the Helsreach Crusade bore their lamentations and rage with all the dignity that could be expected of them. But it was no easy feat. No easy feat to be consigned to a city of several million frightened souls while above the stained clouds, hundreds upon hundreds of their battle-brothers were carving their glory from the steel and flesh of an ancient and hated foe. The Black Templars across the city looked skyward, as if their helms’ red eye lenses could pierce the wretched clouds and see the holy war above.

  Grimaldus’s own anger was a physical ache. It burned behind his eyes, and beat acid through his veins. But he mastered it, as was his duty. He sat at the table with the human planners, and agreed with them, disagreed, nodded and argued.

  At one point, a whisper made its way through the room. It was serpentine thing, as if it threaded its way from human mouths to human ears seeking to avoid enraging the black-clad Astartes knight. When Colonel Sarren cleared his throat and announced that the two fleets had engaged, Grimaldus simply nodded. He’d heard the very first whispers thirty seconds before, of crackled voices coming over the vox-headsets of those at the communication stations.

  It was beginning.

  ‘We should give the order,’ Sarren said quietly, to murmured agreement among the officer cadre.

  Grimaldus turned to the vox-officer he had spoken to before. This time, he glanced at the man’s rank badge. The officer saw the silver skull helm nod once in his direction.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ the knight said.

  ‘Yes, Reclusiarch?’

  ‘Give the order to Imperial forces throughout Helsreach. Martial law is in immediate effect.’ He felt his throat dry at the gravity of what he was saying.

  ‘Seal the city.’

  Four thousand anti-air turrets along the hive’s towering walls primed and aimed their multiple barrels into the sky.

  Atop countless spires and manufactory rooftops, secondary defence lasers did the same. Hangars and warehouses converted for use by the Naval air squadrons readied the short rockcrete runways necessary for STOL fighters. Grey-uniformed Naval armsmen patrolled their bases’ perimeters, keeping their sites enclosed and operating almost independently of the rest of the hive.

  Across the city, recently-established makeshift roadway checkpoints became barricades and outposts of defence in readiness for the walls falling to the enemy. Thousands of buildings that had been serving as barracks for the Imperial Guard and militia forces sealed themselves with flakboard-reinforced doors and windows.

  Announcements from vox-towers ordered the citizens of the hive who weren’t engaged in vital industrial duty to remain in their homes until summoned by Guard squads and escorted to the underground shelters.

  Hel’s Highway, lifeline of the hive, was strangled by Guard checkpoints clearing the way of civilian traffic, making room for processions of tanks and Sentinel walkers, a rattling, grinding parade stretching over a kilometre. Clusters of the war machines veered off as they dispersed across the hive.

  Helsreach was locked down, and its defenders clutched their weapons as they stared into the bleak sky.

  Unseen by any of the humans within the city, one hundred knights – separated by distance but united by the blood of a demigod in their veins – knelt in silent prayer.

  Eighteen minutes after the sirens started to wail, the first serious problem with force deployment began. Representatives of Legio Invigilata demanded to speak with the hive’s commanders.

  Forty-two minutes later, born entirely of panic, the first civilian riot broke out.

  I ask Sarren a reasonable question, and he responds with the very answer I have no wish to hear.

  ‘Three days,’ he says.

  Invigilata needs three days. Three days to finish the fitting and arming of their Titans out in the wastelands before they can be deployed within the city. Three days before they can walk through the immense gates in the hive’s impenetrable walls, and station themselves within the city limits according to the agreed upon plan.

  And then Sarren makes it worse.

  ‘In three days, they will decide if they are to come to our aid, or deploy along the Hemlock River with the rest of their Legio.’

  I quench the rush of fury through a moment’s significant effort. ‘There is a chance they will not even walk in our defence?’

  ‘So it seems,’ Sarren nods.

  ‘Projections have the enemy breaching the orbital defences in four to nine days,’ one of the other Steel Legion colonels – his name is Hargus – speaks from across the table. ‘So we have time to allow them the largesse they require.’

  None of us are seated now. The siren’s drone has been lowered to less inconvenient levels, and speech is a realistic possibility for the unenhanced human officers once again.

  ‘I am going to the view-tower,’ I inform them. ‘I wish to look upon this problem with my own eyes. Is the moderati primus still within the hive?’

  ‘Yes, Reclusiarch.’

  ‘Tell him meet to me there.’ I pause as I stride from the room, and look back over my shoulder. ‘Be polite, but do not ask. Tell him.’

  CHAPTER IV

  Invigilata

  Moderati Primus Valian Carsomir scratched at the greying stubble that darkened his jawline. His time was limited, and he had made that clear.

  ‘You are not alone in that position,’ Grimaldus pointed out.

  Carsomir smiled darkly, though not without empathy. ‘The difference, Reclusiarch, is that I do not intend to die here. My princeps majoris is still in doubt if Invigilata will walk for Helsreach.’

  The knight moved to the railing, his armour joints humming with the gentle motions. The viewing platform was a modest space atop the central spire of the command fortress, but Grimaldus had spent much of his time up here each night, staring over the hive as it made ready for war.

  In the faded distance, over the city walls, his gene-enhanced sight could make out the skeletal details of Titans on the horizon. There, in the wastelands, Invigilata’s engines also made ready. Fat-hulled landers made the wallowing journey back into orbit as part of the final phase of Imperial deployment. Soon, within a matter of days, there would be no hope of landing anything more on the planet’s surface.

  ‘This is the greatest of Armageddon’s port cities. We are about to be assaulted by the largest greenskin-breed xenos invasion ever endured by the Imperium of Man.’ The Astartes did not turn to the Titan pilot. He watched the gigantic war machines, blurred by the sandy mist of distant dust storms. ‘We must have Titans, Carsomir.’

  The officer stepped alongside the Astart
es, his bionic eyes – both with lenses of multifaceted jade set in bronze mountings – clicking and whirring as he followed the knight’s gaze over the city and beyond.

  ‘I am aware of your need.’

  ‘My need? It is the hive’s need. Armageddon’s need.’

  ‘As you say, the hive’s need. But I am not the princeps majoris. I report on the hive’s defences to her, and the decision is hers to make. Invigilata has received strong petitions from other cities, and other forces.’

  Grimaldus closed his eyes in thought. Unblinking, his skulled helm continued to stare at the distant Titans.

  ‘I must speak with her.’

  ‘I am her eyes, ears and voice, Reclusiarch. What I know, she knows; what I say, she has bid me speak. If you wish, I could – perhaps – arrange a conversation over the vox. But I am here – a man of not inconsiderable station myself – to show that Invigilata is earnest in its dealings with you.’

  Grimaldus said nothing for several seconds.

  ‘I appreciate that. I am not blind to your rank. Tell me, moderati, is it permissible to speak with your princeps majoris in person?’

  ‘No, Reclusiarch. That would be a violation of Invigilata tradition.’

  Grimaldus’s brown eyes opened once more, drinking in the scarce detail of the war machines on the horizon.

  ‘Your objection is noted,’ the knight said, ‘and duly ignored.’

  ‘What?’ the Titan pilot said, not sure he heard correctly.

  Grimaldus didn’t answer. He was already speaking into the vox.

  ‘Artarion, ready the Land Raider. We’re going out into the wastelands.’

  Four hours later, Grimaldus and his brothers stood in the shadows cast by giants.

  A light dust storm sent grit rattling against their war plate, which they ignored as easily as Grimaldus had ignored Carsomir’s offended protests about the nature of this mission.

  Crews of servitors laboured at the ground level, and while they were mind-wiped never to process or acknowledge physical discomfort, the abrasive wasteland grit was rubbing their exposed skin raw, and crudely sandblasting mechanical parts.

  The Titans themselves stood watch over the wastelands in austere vigil – nineteen of them in total, ranging from the smaller twelve-crew Warhound-classes, to the larger Reaver- and Warlord-classes. Godlike, immune to the elements, the Titans were bedecked in the crawling forms of tech-adepts and maintenance drones performing the rites of awakening.

  Despite their slumber, it was anything but silent. The grinding, deafening machine-whine of internal plasma reactors trying to start was a sound from primordial nightmare, ripped right from worlds where humans feared gigantic reptilian predators and their ground-shaking roars.

  It was all too easy to imagine hundreds of robed tech-priests within the fleet of Titans, chanting and praying to their Machine-God and the spirits of these slumbering war-giants. As Grimaldus and his brothers walked in the shade cast by one Warlord, the relentless grind of metal on metal became a full-throated thunderclap that broke the air like a sonic boom. Heated air blasted outwards from the Titan’s hull, and around the site, thousands of men instantly fell to their knees in the sand, facing the Titan and murmuring their reverence in the aftershock of its rebirth.

  The Titan’s birth cry rang out through its warning sirens. The sound was somewhere between pure mechanical sound and organic exultation; as loud as a hundred manufactories with a full workforce, and as terrible as the wrath of a newborn god.

  It moved. Not with speed, but with the halting, unsure strides of a man that has not used his muscles in many months. One splayed claw of a foot, easily huge enough to crush a Land Raider, rose several metres off the ground. It crashed back to earth a moment later, blasting dust in all directions.

  ‘Sacrosanct awakens!’ came the cry from hundreds of vox-altered voices. ‘Sacrosanct walks!’

  The Titan answered the worshipful cries of its cult below. It roared again, the cry blaring from its speaker horns and echoing across the wastelands.

  As impressive as the sight was, it was not why Grimaldus had led his men out here. Their goal was larger still, dwarfing even these mighty Warlords, paying them no heed as they stood or walked around at the height of its weapon-arms.

  It was called Stormherald.

  The battle-class Titans were walking weapons platforms, capable of levelling hive blocks. Stormherald was a walking fortress. Its weapons could level cities. Its legs, capable of supporting the weight of this colossal sixty-metre war machine, were bastions – barracks – with turrets and arched windows for the troops transported within to fire at the foe even as their Titan crushed them underfoot. Upon its hunched back, Stormherald carried crenellated battlements and the seven spires of a sacred, armoured cathedral devoted to the Emperor in His aspect as the Machine-God. Gargoyles clung to the edges of the architecture, carved around defence turrets and stained glass windows, their hideous mouths open as they wailed silently at the enemy from their holy castle above the ground.

  Banners hung from its cannon arms and the battlements themselves, listing the names of enemy war machines it had slain in the millennia since its birth. As the birth cry of Sacrosanct faded, the knights could hear the sound of religious communion in the fortress-cathedral on Stormherald’s giant shoulders, as pious souls no doubt beseeched their ethereal master for the blessing of the greatest god-machine waking once more.

  The Titan’s clawed feet were tiered stairs leading into the armoured chambers of its lower legs. With the immense structure still unmoving, Grimaldus made his way through scores of scurrying menial tech-priests and servitors. As his booted foot thudded down on the first stair layer, the resistant welcome he was expecting finally made itself known.

  ‘Hold,’ he said to his brothers. Troops, their features covered, filed from the archways into the Titan’s limb-innards. The knights’ attempted entrance was blocked by Mechanicus minions.

  The soldiers facing them were called skitarii. These were the elite of the Adeptus Mechanicus infantry forces – a fusion of integrated weapon augmetics and the human form. Grimaldus, like many Astartes, regarded their unsubtle flesh-manipulation and the crude surgeries bestowing weapons upon their limbs as making them little more than glorified servitors, and equally wretched in their own way.

  Twelve of these bionic creatures, their skin robed against the wind, levelled thrumming plasma weapons at the five knights.

  ‘I am Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Tem–’

  —Your identity is known to us— they all spoke at once. There was little unity in the chorus of voices, with some sounding unnaturally deep, others inhuman and mechanical, still others perfectly human.

  ‘The next time I am interrupted,’ the knight warned, ‘I will kill one of you.’

  —We are not to be threatened— all twelve said, still in unison, still in a chorus of unmatching voices.

  ‘Neither are you to be addressed. You are nothing; slaves, all of you, barely above servitors. Now move aside. I have business with your mistress.’

  —We are not to be ordered into submission. We are to remain as duty demands—

  A human would have missed the division within their unified speech, but Grimaldus’s senses could trace the minute deviations in the way they spoke. Four of them started and finished words a fraction of a second later than the others. Whatever mind-link bound the twelve warriors, it was more efficient in some than others. While his experience with the servants of the Machine-God was limited, he found this a curious flaw.

  ‘I will speak with the princeps majoris of Invigilata, even if I have to shout up to the cathedral itself.’

  They had no orders pertaining to such an action, and lacked the cognition to make an assessment of how it would matter to their superiors, so they remained silent.

  ‘Reclusiarch…’ Priamus voxed. ‘Must we bear this foolish indignity?’

  ‘No.’ The skull helm scanned the skitarii each in turn, its red eyes unblin
king. ‘Kill them.’

  She floated, as she had floated for seventy-nine years, in a coffin-like tank of milky amniotic fluid. The metallic, chemical tang of the watery, oxygen-rich ooze had been the only constant in almost a century of life, and its taste, its feel, its intrusion into her lungs and its replacement of air in her respiration had never ceased to feel somewhat alien.

  That was not to say she found it uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. It was forever unsettling, but not unnatural.

  In moments of battle, which always seemed too few and far between, Princeps Majoris Zarha believed with cold certainty that this was what gestation within the womb must have felt like. The cooling fluid supporting her would become warm in sympathy with the plasma reactor at Stormherald’s core. The pounding, world-shaking tread echoed around her, magnified like the beat of a mighty heart.

  A feeling of absolute power coupled with being utterly protected. It was all she needed to focus on to remain herself in those frantic, bladed moments when Stormherald’s broken, violent mind knifed into her consciousness with sudden strength, seeking to overpower her.

  She knew that there would come a day when her assistants unplugged her for the last time – when she would be denied a return to the machine’s soul, for fear its ingrained temperament and personality would swallow her weaker, too-human sense of identity.

  But that was not now. Not today.

  No, Zarha focussed on her simulated regression to the womb, and it was all she ever needed to push aside the clinging insistency of Stormherald’s blunt and primal advances.

  Voices from the outside always reached her with a muffled dullness, despite the vox-receivers implanted where the cartilage of her inner ears once were, and the receptors built into the sides of her confinement tank.

  They spoke, those voices, of intrusion.

  Princeps Majoris Zarha did not share their appraisal of the situation. She turned in her milky fluid, as graceful as a sea-nymph from the tales of the impious Ancient Terra, though the augmented, wrinkled, hairless creature within the spacious coffin was anything but lovely. Her feet had been removed, for she would never need them again. Her bones were weak and soft, and her body curled and hunched.