Helsreach, page 17
‘Sir,’ he prompted.
Sarren finally looked up from the hololithic table. The colonel had aged in the last week, Maghernus could see it clearly. He looked as tired and bone-achingly sick of it all as Tomaz felt.
‘What?’ Sarren asked, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. ‘Oh. Yes. Dockmaster.’ Sarren looked back down at the hololithic display. ‘I need your crews to speed up. Is that understood?’
Maghernus blinked. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t quite hear you.’
‘I need,’ Sarren didn’t look up, ‘your crews to speed up their work. The reports I’m getting from the docks show they are at a standstill. We are talking about significant portions of the north and east perimeters of the city, dockmaster. I need to move troops. I need to store materiel. I need you to do your job.’
Maghernus looked around the room in disbelief, unsure how to respond.
‘What would you have me do, colonel? What is there that I can possibly do?’
‘Your job, Maghernus.’
‘Have you even seen the docks recently, colonel?’
Sarren looked up again, laughing without even a shred of humour. ‘Do I look like I have seen anything except casualty reports recently?’
‘I can’t do anything about the docks,’ Maghernus shook his head, a sense of unreality settling over him. ‘I’m not a miracle worker.’
‘I appreciate you have an… intense… workload.’
‘That’s not the half of it. We’re dealing with a backlog of weeks, months even, and no room to handle anything.’
‘Nevertheless, I need more from you and your crews.’
‘Of course, sir. I’ll be back in a moment, I feel the sudden need to piss expensive white wine and turn everything I touch into gold.’
‘This is no laughing matter.’
‘And I’m not laughing, you pompous son of a bitch. “Work harder”? “Do more”? Are you insane? There’s nothing I can do!’
Nearby officers glanced his way. Sarren sighed and rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.
‘I respect the difficulties of your position, dockmaster, but this is the first week of the siege. This is only going to get worse. We are all going to sleep much less, and we are all going to work much harder.
‘Furthermore, I understand that you are sweating blood in an underappreciated duty, but you are not the only one suffering. You, at least, are guaranteed to live longer than many of us. I have men and women in the streets, fighting and dying for your home, so that you may continue to complain at how I crack the whip over you. I have hundreds of thousands of citizens under arms, facing the greatest alien invasion force the world has ever seen.
‘Sir,’ Maghernus took a breath. ‘I will–’
‘You will shut up and let me finish, dockmaster. I have platoons of men and women lost behind the advancing enemy line, no doubt hacked to pieces by the axes of barbarous xenos monsters. I have armour divisions running out of fuel because of resupply difficulties in the embattled sectors. I have an Emperor-class Titan on its knees, because its commander was too angry to think clearly. I have a city with its edges on fire, and its population in rout with nowhere to run to. I have tens of thousands of soldiers dying to prevent the enemy from reaching the Hel’s Highway – people dying for a road, dockmaster – because once the beasts reach the city’s spine, we are all going to die a great deal faster.
‘Now, am I making myself perfectly clear when I tell you that while I have sympathy for your difficulties, I also expect you to work through them? We are, just to be sure, no longer speaking past one another? We are, for the record, now on the same page?’
Maghernus swallowed and nodded.
‘Good,’ Sarren smiled. ‘That’s good. What can you do for me, dockmaster?’
‘I’ll… speak to my crews, colonel.’
‘My thanks for understanding the situation we are in, Tomaz. You are dismissed. Now, someone raise a reliable vox-signal to the Reclusiarch. I need to know how close he is to getting that Titan walking.’
In the cognition chamber, Grimaldus stood before the crippled Zarha.
His armour’s calm, measured hum was marred by a mechanical ticking sound at random intervals. Something, some internal system linking the power pack to the suit of armour was malfunctioning. His skull helm with its silver faceplate was painted with alien blood. His armour’s left knee joint clicked as he moved, the servos inside damaged and in need of reverent maintenance by Chapter artificers. Where scrolls of written oaths had hung from his pauldrons, the armour was burned, the ceramite cracked.
But he was alive.
At his side, Artarion looked similarly battered. The others remained in the cathedral above, maintaining a vigil now the orks were punished and slain for their blasphemy.
‘Your Titan,’ Grimaldus uttered the words, ‘is purged. Now stand, princeps.’
Zarha floated in the milky waters, not hearing him, not even moving. She looked as if she had drowned.
‘Stormherald has taken her,’ Moderati Carsomir said, his voice low. ‘She was ancient, and had oppressed her will over the Titan’s core for many years.’
‘She still lives,’ the knight noted.
‘Only in the flesh, and not for much longer.’ Carsomir looked pained even explaining this. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles. ‘The machine-spirit of an Imperator is so much stronger than any soul you can imagine, Reclusiarch. These precious engines are born as lesser reflections of the Machine-God Himself. They carry His will and His strength.’
‘No machine-spirit is the equal of a living soul,’ said Grimaldus. ‘She was strong. I sensed it in her.’
‘You understand nothing of the metaphysics at work here! Who are you to lecture us in this way? We were linked to the Titan’s core at the end. You are nothing, an… an outsider.’
Grimaldus turned to the crewmembers in their control seats, his broken armour joints snarling.
‘I shed blood in the defence of your engine, as did my brothers. You would be torn from your thrones and buried in the rubble of your own failure, had I not saved your lives. The next time you call a Templar nothing is the moment I kill you where you sit, little man. You are nothing without your Titan, and your Titan lives because of me. Remember to whom you speak.’
The crew shared uncomfortable glances.
‘He meant no offence,’ one of the tech-priests mumbled through a facially-implanted vox-caster.
‘I do not care what he intended. I deal in realities. Now. Make this Titan walk.’
‘We… can’t.’
‘Do it anyway. Stormherald was supposed to move in synergy with the 199th Steel Legion Armoured Division over an hour ago, and they are in full retreat due to being unsupported. The delay is finished with. Get back in the fight.’
‘Without a princeps? How are we to do that?’ Carsomir shook his head. ‘She is gone from us, Reclusiarch. The shame of it all, the rage of defeat. We all felt the Titan rush into her. Her mind has joined the union of all previous princeps, amalgamated in the Titan’s core. Her soul is buried as surely as her body would be in a grave.’
‘She lives,’ the knight narrowed his eyes.
‘For now. But this is how princeps die.’
Grimaldus turned back to the amniotic coffin, and the unmoving woman within. ‘That is unacceptable.’
‘It is the truth.’
‘Then the truth,’ the Reclusiarch growled, ‘is unacceptable.’
She wept in the silence – the way one weeps when truly alone, when there is no shame to be found in being seen by others.
Around her was nothingness absolute. No sound. No movement. No colour. She floated in this nothingness, neither cold nor hot, with no reference of direction or sensation.
And she wept.
Upon opening her eyes moments before, a thrill of fear had sliced up her spine. She did not know who she was, where she was, or why she was here.
Her memories – the fractured, flashing images that were all that kept her mind from being completely hollow – were of a hundred worlds she could not recall seeing, and a hundred wars she could not remember fighting.
Worse, they were each tainted by an emotion she had never felt – something inhuman, abrasive, sinister… and partway between exaltation and terror. She saw these moments of memory, and felt the unnerving presence of another being’s emotions instead of her own.
It was like drowning. Drowning in someone else’s dreams.
Who had she been before? Did it even matter? She slipped deeper. What remaining sense of self existed began to break away and diminish, sacrificed to buy a peaceful, silent death.
Then the voice came, and it ruined everything.
‘Zarha,’ it said.
With the word came a weak understanding, an awareness. She had memories of her own – at least, she had once possessed such things. It suddenly seemed wrong to no longer have access to her own recollections.
As she resurfaced slowly, the infiltrating memories returned. The wars. The emotions. The fire and the fury. Instinctively, she pulled away again, preparing to return deeper within the nothingness. Anything to escape the memories belonging to another soul.
‘Zarha,’ the voice clawed after her. ‘You swore to me.’
Another layer of comprehension returned. Within the revelation were her own emotions, waiting for her to reclaim them. The overwhelming sensory storm of the other mind’s memories no longer frightened her. They angered her.
She would not be so easily shackled. No false-soul’s thoughts would conquer her like this.
‘You swore to me,’ the voice said, ‘that you would walk.’
She smiled in the nothingness, rising through it now like an ascending angel. Stormherald’s memories assailed her with renewed vigour, but she cast them aside like leaves in the wind.
You are right, Grimaldus, she told the voice. I did swear I would walk.
‘Stand,’ he demanded, stern and cold and glowering. ‘Zarha. Stand.’
I will.
The voice came without warning, emerging from the vox-speakers on the coffin.
‘I will.’
Crew members flinched back from the sound, their hands white-knuckled as they clutched the backrests of their thrones. Only Grimaldus remained where he was, face to face with the glass sarcophagus, his blood-smeared skull mask glaring into the milky depths.
The old woman’s body twitched once, and her head rose. She looked around slowly, her augmetic gaze at last coming to rest on the knight before her.
Rubble scattered in an avalanche, and a dust cloud rose again as the wreckage of fallen buildings went tumbling aside. With a thunderous grinding of gears and the clanging-hammering of a multitude of tank-sized pistons in its iron bones, Stormherald raised its immense bulk, metre by painful machine-squealing metre.
The avenue shuddered as its bastion of a right foot pounded onto the road. The sound was loud enough that the nearby buildings still untouched by orkish demolition charges lost their windows in a blizzard of breaking glass.
As the crystal rain fell to the scarred streets below, the Imperator raised its weapons, standing – once more – defiant.
‘Shields up,’ the Crone of Invigilata demanded.
‘Void shields active, my princeps,’ responded Valian Carsomir.
‘Make ready the heart.’
‘Plasma reactor reports all systems at viable integrity, my princeps.’
‘Then we move.’
The chamber shuddered with a familiar rhythm as the god-machine took its first step. Then a second. Then a third. Throughout the metal giant’s bones, hundreds of crew members cheered.
‘We walk.’ The ancient woman turned in her tank, looking at the tall knight once more. ‘I heard you,’ she told him. ‘As I was dying, I heard you calling me.’
Grimaldus removed his filthy helm. Although he didn’t look a day over thirty, his eyes told his true age. Like windows into his thoughts, they showed the weight of his wars.
‘There is a story of my father,’ he said to Zarha.
‘Your father?’
‘Rogal Dorn, the Emperor’s son.’
‘The primarch. I see.’
‘It is a tale of a once-strong brotherhood, broken by Horus the Betrayer. Rogal Dorn and Horus were close before the Great Heresy. None of the Emperor’s sons were bonded as truly in the years before the malignant darkness took hold of Horus and his kin.’
‘I am listening,’ she smiled, knowing how rare this moment was. To hear a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes speak of their gene-sire’s life outside of their Chapter’s secret rituals.
‘It has always been told among the Black Templars that when the two brothers crusaded together, they would compete for the greater glory. Horus was legendarily hungry for triumph, while my father was – it is told – a more reserved and quiet soul. Each time they made war together, they were said to have made an oath in blood. Clasping hands, they would each swear that they would stand until the final day dawned. “Until the end”, they would say.’
‘That is a touching legend.’
‘More than that, princeps. Tradition. It is our most binding oath, spoken only between brothers who know they will never see another war. When a Templar knows he will die, it is the promise he gives to his brothers that he will stand with honour until he can no longer stand at all.’
She said nothing, but she smiled.
‘Yes, I called you back to this war.’ He nodded, his gentle eyes fixed upon her bionic replacements. ‘Because you made a similar oath to me. Promises like that – they matter more than anything else in life. I could not let you die in shame.’
‘Until the end, then.’
‘Until the end, Zarha.’
PART TWO
Knightfall
Chapter XIII
The Thirty-Sixth Day
DARGRAVIAN.
The 5th day. Meritorious defence of the Torshav refuelling complex.
Gene-seed: Recovered.
FARUS.
The 7th day. Discovered in the Kurule Junction surrounded by no fewer than twelve of the slain enemy.
Gene-seed: Recovered.
THALIAR.
The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.
Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.
KORITH.
The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.
Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.
TORAVAN.
The 10th day. Lost in the petrochemical explosions at White Star Point.
Gene-seed: Unfound / Unrecovered.
AMARDES.
The 11th day. Unable to survive 83% body tissue immolation suffered at White Star Point. Granted the Emperor’s Peace.
Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.
HALRIK.
The 13th day. Eyewitness reports from Armageddon 101st Steel Legion relate intense personal courage and heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. Awarded posthumous Crusade Mark of Valiant Conduct for rallying Guard forces at the fall of Cargo Bridge Thirty.
Gene-seed: Recovered.
ANGRAD.
The 18th day. Single-handedly destroyed five enemy tanks at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse. Brought down by alien treachery and lost beneath enemy tank treads.
Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.
VORENTHAR.
The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse.
Gene-seed: Recovered.
ERIAS.
The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse.
Gene-seed: Recovered.
MARKOSIAN.
The 18th day. Fought at the Breach of the Amalas Concourse. Notably slew an enemy warlord in single combat, atop the alien’s command tank. Awarded posthumous Crusade Mark of Unbroken Courage. Body was incinerated by the enemy in wrathful response.
Gene-seed: Ruined / Unrecovered.
It was always going to happen.
That did not make the reality any easier to bear, or the defeat any less bitter. But preparations were in place. When it happened, the Imperials were ready.
It happened first on the eighteenth day, at the Amalas Concourse, Junction Omega-9b-34. That was its assigned identifier according to the Imperial hololithic displays.
Colonel Sarren was watching through heavy, fatigue-dulled eyes as the flickering holo-images moved silently back from the location of their barricade. It was such a small thing – no more than a few marking runes blinking back a few centimetres, moving away from the point of the map marked Amalas Concourse, Junction Omega-9b-34.
Behind the flickering holo-runes was an illusory ramp, which in turn threaded into a much, much, much wider road. Sarren watched the runes falling back along this ramp, and tried to breathe in. In took four attempts, his breath catching in his throat on the first three.
‘This is Colonel Sarren,’ he spoke into his hand-vox. ‘All units in Omega Sector, Subsector Nine. All units, prepare to retreat. Cancel assigned fallback locations, repeat: cancel withdrawal to assigned fallback locations. When the order comes, you will retreat, retreat, retreat to contingency positions.’
He ignored the storm of demands for confirmation, letting his vox-officers respond on his behalf.
‘We did well,’ he said to himself. ‘We did damn well to keep the bastards away for this long.’ Eighteen days – over half a month of siege warfare. He had every reason to colour his bitterness with that fierce core of pride.
The minutes passed in unblinking slowness. An aide came to his side, and quietly asked for his attention.
‘Sir, your Baneblade stands ready.’
‘Thank you, sergeant.’
She saluted and moved away. Finally, Sarren reached for his vox-mic again.
‘All units in Omega Sector, Subsector Nine. Retreat, retreat, retreat. The enemy has reached Hel’s Highway.’
