The Eternal Crusader - Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Vosper! Vosper!’ shouted Helbrecht, seeking out the Champion of the Emperor. The Champion was walking towards a part of the line that seemed no worse and no better than any other. Helbrecht cast a wary glance at the leader orks and saw one felled by a flaring burst of the Master of Sanctity’s crozius. That part was holding, for now.

  ‘This way,’ replied Vosper’s voice, a slow and somnolent as that of a dreamer. ‘This way my doom lies.’

  Helbrecht muttered a quick prayer. Putting his trust in the Emperor, he followed Vosper into the press of orks.

  There was nothing dreamlike about Vosper in combat. He fought with unsurpassed skill, the mark of a warrior of many centuries, not a barely trained neophyte. Body parts flew high as he carved a bloody path forwards. Helbrecht followed, his command squad behind him, stopping the sea of orks closing around the Champion.

  ‘High Marshal, we are ready to deploy the device,’ Hexil informed him.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Four minutes, no more.’

  Helbrecht grunted as he forced his ancient weapon through an ork’s chest-plate, the banging of the power field deafening as it shattered matter at the atomic level deafening. The sounds of battle retreated as his auto-senses dampened the din.

  ‘Gulvein, what is your status?’

  ‘Poor, my liege – we cannot break through the orks to join with you.’

  ‘We will soon be done here. Fall back, if you can. Make for the transports.’ He was panting now, fully occupied by the efforts of fighting and of directing his men. ‘Light of Purity.’

  ‘High Marshal?’

  ‘Inform the Master of Translocation to prepare the teleport bays. Multiple signal locks required.’

  ‘Yes, my liege. You are aware that we will struggle with so many. The plan was to return via the transports.’

  ‘Plans change. The Eternal Crusader?’

  Silence as his operations commander conferred with someone Helbrecht could not hear.

  ‘The Eternal Crusader is out of teleport range, my liege, and will be for another quarter hour.’

  ‘Very well. Tell the transports to wait to the last moment, then cast off. See to it that as many of our brothers are saved as can be. But nothing, I repeat nothing, is too high a price to pay for this victory.’

  ‘As you will it, my liege.’

  Helbrecht cut his vox-channel and screamed, a howl of fanatical hatred. If an ork stepped before him, it died. Invigorated by his dauntless ferocity, the Black Templars line pushed forwards, drawn on by their champions.

  So it went – the orks were pushed back to the midway point between the two ships, the Black Templars so successful that their line bent like a drawn bow, so much they were in danger of exposing their flanks.

  Then the orks parted, and a new threat emerged: the ork king of the hulk.

  It was an enormous monster, the biggest ork Helbrecht had ever seen. In height, it was taller than two lesser orks, and massed as much as five. Its head was the size of Helbrecht’s torso and a tall iron totem depicting a leering ork rose from its back, decorated with human skulls and twists of hair.

  Unlike so many orks Helbrecht had recently seen, the king had no clanking warsuit, only thick plates threaded onto leather straps to protect it. Consequently, it moved with terrifying speed. It came bursting through the press of its fellows, pushing them over and indiscriminately slaughtering them to get at the foe. Hurling two of its own warriors aside, the king reached the front of the line. It slammed into an Initiate, sending him down onto the heaped dead. A blow from its chainaxe, a huge, crudely made thing as big as Helbrecht, ended the Initiate Black Templar’s life. Roaring with laughter, the ork king laid about it, hewing apart the battle-brothers as easily as if they were made of glass. Another brother died, then a third, and a fourth. The ork’s fist shattered helmets, and its chainaxe parted limbs from their bodies. It strode towards the Champion, seeing him as a worthy enemy.

  The king’s axe could not break the black sword. The ork’s weapon stopped dead as Vosper intercepted its blow, the chainaxe held in place by the sacred blade, its teeth churning sparks from black solarite.

  With an oath to the Emperor, Vosper twisted and disengaged, throwing the ork’s axe wide and pressing home his attack with a deadly overhead strike.

  The warboss caught the attack, and the next, but Vosper was unstoppable, driving the towering beast back, its minions spreading away from this embodiment of the Emperor’s wrath until a circle had formed around the combatants. The Black Templars took advantage of the orks’ cowardice to gun down many, but always there was a quiet prayer on their lips, willing the Champion to victory.

  The ork king slipped on the guts of a fallen ork warrior, going down. Vosper delivered the final blow without hesitation, the black sword whistling down with unstoppable power.

  The warboss caught the blow on the haft of its axe. The weapon was cloven in two, the heavy head spinning off into the press of orks. The black sword’s tip continued downwards, scraping against the ork king’s armour. Robbed of much of its power, it only wounded the creature. It did not kill.

  Bellowing with primal rage at this humiliation, the ork launched itself from the floor at Vosper, knocking him off balance. It drew another axe from its belt to hammer over and again at the Champion. Vosper stumbled backwards. The ork shoulder barged him, knocking the black sword back. With a triumphant roar, the greenskin swung his axe at Vosper’s head, splitting helmet and skull.

  The black sword dropped from his lifeless grip. Vosper fell. A moan of despair went up from the Space Marines to see the Champion fall. They faltered, if only for an instant, but it was enough.

  The orks surged forwards. Helbrecht bellowed and waded into them, slashing and slaying. But the press of thick green arms was too much, and he was pulled down to the ground; only his oath-lanyard prevented the loss of Sigismund’s sword.

  Huge fists grabbed his wrists and ankles. He jerked his limbs, trying to wrench them free. Massively fanged jaws snapped at his helmet, coating his eye-lenses in drool. Then the orks drew back, and he was pulled tight.

  A big ork stepped forwards, hefting a massive axe. It raised the weapon over its head and swung hard, burying it in Helbrecht’s chest-plate. Helbrecht roared as his reinforced ribcage cracked, the pain overwhelming him before his superhuman body adjusted. The ork snarled, tugging to free its axe so it might finish the High Marshal. The pain was unbearable.

  The ork gripped the axe haft and leered at him, preparing to yank hard. Helbrecht gritted his teeth, but the pain never came. The ork disappeared in a blast of superheated steam.

  Bolt-rounds felled a broad swathe of orks all around Helbrecht. Chainswords flashed. A meltagun vapourised another ork. The grips Helbrecht’s limbs were released as his command squad drove the orks away from him. Hands grabbed him under his armpits. Apothecary Vargen looked down at him.

  ‘Perhaps this time you will not push me away, my liege.’

  Helbrecht grasped his Apothecary’s forearm. His hand would not grip; he was weak. His limbs grew cold. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘My liege! We are falling! We cannot hold them!’ shouted Theoderic.

  ‘Hexil…’ Helbrecht said groggily.

  ‘One minute.’ Hexil paused. ‘Leave us here. I will see the job through to the end, as is my sacred duty.’

  Helbrecht struggled up on shaking legs. The Black Templars line was in pieces. His men had been broken up into small knots, fighting back to back, small islands of black in a sea of green.

  ‘Hexil!’

  ‘It is not ready, my liege! Retreat, Brother Helbrecht. My brothers in arms protect me. They will see my task is completed. Pray for me, brother. Tell the Emperor of my loyalty.’

  Helbrecht opened a vox-channel to the Light of Purity with a thought.

  ‘Activate teleport. All units. Get us out of here.’

  His final view of the hulk interior was bright light, oily wisps of smoke curling up from the centre as his brot
hers were spirited away and the crashing rage of the orks at the disappearance of their foes.

  Bright light. The clap of displaced air. Helbrecht fell forwards into the dimness of the teleport chamber, colliding with hissing pipes. The axe buried in his chest jarred in his ribcage, bringing forth an unmoderated roar of pain. Frantic hands beat at the chamber door in response to his cries. Cleansing vapours gushed over him and he reeled. The door seal whispered, and the door clanked aside. Strong hands dragged him from the teleport pod, supporting him as he rolled out.

  ‘Send word to the apothecarion!’ shouted Brother-Apothecary Vargen. ‘The High Marshal is injured! Thralls! Bring a bier!’

  Cries went up. ‘The High Marshal! The High Marshal is wounded!’

  Men and knights pulled at him, dragging him onto the bier. Helbrecht no longer had the strength to stand.

  ‘Destroy the hulk,’ said Helbrecht, rasping horribly through his grille, his throat congested with blood. The axe was buried deep in his sternum. The pain was overcoming the best efforts of his pharmocopeia and body.

  ‘My liege!’ protested the Master of Translocation, a high-ranking forge-thrall. ‘There are dozens of brothers unaccounted for and at this moment we cannot retrieve them because our systems have overloaded and we have multiple teleport failures! Give me minutes, my liege, and they will be saved. I beg you!’

  Hexil’s voice came to him, blurred by static. ‘The orks are disabling the devices, my liege.’ Bolters cracked in the background. Battle hymns competed with the howl of orks. ‘We must do this now or our deaths will be in vain.’

  How many were going to die? thought Helbrecht. How many?

  Faith. The Emperor ordained this. It could not be any other way. It cannot be wrong. I cannot be wrong. I am the chosen of the God-Emperor of Man.

  ‘Destroy the hulk,’ he said through gritted teeth. Blood bubbled up from his broken innards, running down his chin and pooling in his helmet. ‘Fidelis, Brother Hexil. Your memory will be honoured.’

  ‘Order received,’ responded Brother Hexil dispassionately. ‘For the Emperor. For the Omnissiah. Praise be. No pity! No remorse! No fear!’ he shouted, and triggered the thermic charges.

  The Malevolent Dread died spectacularly. A series of internal explosions blasted out from strategic junctures, wrenching apart the rough joining of the two ships. They split, finally free from one another after their millennia-long embrace, shedding fire and detritus that glittered outwards in an ever-expanding ball. The explosion pushed the alien half of the hulk straight into Armageddon’s grasp, where days later it would fall from the sky in fiery ruin. The Imperial half was jolted away from the planet, debris trails sparkling behind it.

  Helbrecht saw none of this. The death of the hulk was coolly relayed to him against a background of lamentation.

  The Malevolent Dread was destroyed, but at great cost. With it one hundred and seven Black Templars, living and dead, were annihilated.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Aftermath

  Helbrecht watched the war-strewn void from his sanctum. A puckered scar ran at a slight diagonal up the centre of his chest, a reminder of the wound he had taken a year ago. Ten Terran months had passed since the Malevolent Dread had been destroyed; a blow against his Chapter, and one that effectively ended the Black Templars solo efforts against the ork fleet. Grievous to them, but to the orks also; in the months following, many more hulks had been destroyed by the combined actions of the Adeptus Astartes and Imperial Navy.

  The war’s second Season of Fire wracked Armageddon, bringing another cessation of hostilities. The volcanoes belching out their plumes of ash were hidden beneath palls of their own ejecta, the choking storms they engendered sweeping around the ravaged world like stirred-up silt muddies water.

  The orb of detritus around the planet was thicker than it had been. Not one of Armageddon’s orbital stations or satellites was intact. The shattered hulls of dozens of Imperial ships drifted there, along with hundreds of wrecked ork vessels too. Every night, the sky glowed with stars falling from this new constellation, streaking the darkness with smoke and fire. These war meteors were a blessing in their way, a reminder to those below that the war above was won, even though they brought more misery when they hit the ground.

  The door spoke.

  ‘The Most Honoured Commissar Sebastian Yarrick requests humbly to enter into my liege’s chambers,’ said the servitor. ‘Accept, deny?’

  ‘I am expecting him. Allow him entry.’

  Helbrecht watched the door open. The cadaverous commissar came within. Gaunt before, he had aged more than a year since they had last met, his face pale and dry beneath his vast commissar’s cap and high collars. He wore his armour, from which no amount of polish could remove the scratches, and his famous ork-claw prosthetic, cut from the monster that had taken his original arm during the first ork invasion.

  ‘High Marshal,’ said Yarrick. A strong, commanding voice still, issuing though from age-puckered lips blued with poor circulation. ‘You are admiring Armageddon’s new night sky? The people of the system thank you for its creation.’

  Helbrecht made a little noise in his throat, part way between acknowledgement and dismissal.

  ‘They should thank me, and every Black Templar. I have lost nearly five hundred Initiates fighting here,’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘And yet you have victory,’ said Yarrick.

  ‘I do,’ said Helbrecht approvingly. ‘A worthy one at that, bought though it was with half the number of my Chapter. Two most holy Champions of the Emperor died here, and still the price was not too high.’

  ‘You are not alone,’ said Yarrick. ‘Several other Chapters report similar losses.’

  ‘And worse besides, I am a warrior of faith, commissar. The Emperor ordained this, and so it must be.’

  ‘You believe the Emperor to have a plan?’

  ‘You do not?’

  Yarrick smiled grimly.

  ‘We do,’ continued Helbrecht. ‘The Emperor is all seeing, all knowing. This war here must form part of His intentions.’

  ‘You think so? This carnage, so many dead, so many members of the Adeptus Astartes gone. It is unprecedented,’ said Yarrick.

  ‘We live in unprecedented times, commissar,’ said Helbrecht. ‘This war is cataclysmic, but there are worse being fought across the galaxy as we speak.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Yarrick, turning to the High Marshal. ‘You are a man after my own heart, High Marshal Helbrecht. Now more than ever, the Imperium demands sacrifice. And your order lives on to fight another day. Others will not. The Celestial Lions, I hear, have been almost destroyed.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helbrecht. ‘My Reclusiarch, Grimaldus, has requested leave to investigate this tragedy. The Celestial Lions are the sons of Dorn, as are we. It is our duty to help them, as it was our duty to help you. But no price is too high to pay for victory.’

  ‘You are leaving,’ said Yarrick.

  Helbrecht nodded. ‘The Third War for Armageddon is done.’

  Yarrick laughed, a rattling dry chuckle. ‘The war here will never be done. It will be the work of generations to purge the system, and still the orks come.’

  ‘True. But our part in it is over. I declare this crusade a success. The ork fleet is shattered. Their advances on the surface have been arrested. The Great Beast has fled the system. I swore an oath to kill him myself. The remnants of Amalrich’s fighting company will stay, as will the Virtue of Kings, but I will not. Last night, I renewed my oath in the Temple of Dorn before the sarcophagus of our founder, my brothers as witnesses. In three days we will depart. I will hunt him down wherever he might be, and by Sigismund’s sword he will die.’ He growled this last. ‘I said the war is done, but a new task beckons, a new chapter in the annals of the Endless Crusade.’

  ‘You know what I have come to ask.’

  The two warriors, an ageless giant and a broken old man living on borrowed time, looked through the windows of the Eternal Crusader, past the gl
int of the orbital debris field to the stars shining beyond.

  ‘I do. You wish to do what any follower of the Emperor would wish. You wish what I wish. You would see Ghazghkull dead.’

  ‘I am an old man, High Marshal – very old, by the standards of mere mortals. I am resigned to never retiring. I could, I am sure, go back to my garden and my writing with all honours, and not look back.’ His mouth quirked wryly. ‘But I tried that before, and it did not suit me. I am going to die. Not long now, I think. When I do, I want to know that at least one threat to our embattled Imperium has been removed, and if I cannot be there when it happens, I want to travel with the warrior who I know can see it through to the end.’

  Helbrecht’s stony face displayed some emotion for once: a hint of understanding. He looked down at the Old Man of Armageddon.

  ‘It will be an honour to host you, commissar. You and your men will be welcome aboard the Eternal Crusader for as long as our mission takes. I ask of you only one thing.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘When the moment comes to slay the Great Beast, stay out of my way.’

  ‘As you wish, High Marshal,’ said the old man.

  They stayed unspeaking together for a while, lost in their singular thoughts yet united by common purpose.

  Under their feet the Eternal Crusader bustled with activity as the new crusade was prepared.

  Lost amid all the preparations for departure, amid the clanking of foundries, the roar and buzz of the myriad machine processes required to keep the ship and its inhabitants alive, the chanting of monks, the rumble of the reactor and its subsidiaries, the comings and goings of lesser craft, the efforts of repair crews to heal the riven hull and a million more sources of noise, was a tremor of unalloyed, vicious pleasure.