The ruined cathedral around him was altogether harder to ignore. It still appeared much as it had over thirty days ago, when the alien brutes had brought the god-machine to its knees. The statues still lay as alabaster corpses in broken, facedown repose, limbs cracked off to lie several metres distant. The walls were still decorated by gunfire holes and ugly cracks that cobwebbed outwards from impact points. The stained glass windows - his only succour from the irritation of the Shield above - were still gaping holes in the war-blackened architecture, as unpleasant to look upon as missing teeth in the smile of a saint.
Day in, day out, Asavan sat in the lonely, contemplative quiet of the cathedral, and composed what he knew full well were poorly-worded poems commemorating the coming victory in Hive Helsreach. He would destroy well over half of what he wrote, sometimes wincing as he reread the words he'd brought into being.
But of course, there was no one else to witness them. Not here.
The cathedral had stood almost empty since it had been besieged. The Templars had come, ''in purity, protecting us; in wrath, indefatigable'', Asavan had written (before deleting the cringe-worthy words forever), but they had come too late to do much more than preserve the wounded, hollow bones of Stormherald's monastery. Weeks had passed since. Weeks during which nothing had changed, nothing had been repaired.
Asavan was one of the few people still living in the cathedral. His fellows consisted mainly of servitors hardwired into the battlement turrets, slaved to the targeting and reloading systems along the walls. He saw these wretches often, because it had become his duty to keep them alive. The lobotomised, augmented once-humans were little more than limbless and slack-jawed automatons installed in life support cradles next to their turret cannons, and had no means to sustain their own existences. Several had lost their feed/waste bio connection cables with the damage taken in the siege, and even all these weeks later, the remaining magi in Stormherald's main body had not reached repairs so minor on the long list of abuses in need of correcting. Key systems took priority, and few enough Mechanicus adepts remained alive as it was. The fighting had been fierce below, as well.
So it fell to Asavan, as one of the few cathedral survivors, to spoonfeed these mindless creatures with soft protein-rich paste in order to keep them from dying, and flush their waste filters once a week.
He did this not because he was ordered to, or because he particularly cared about the continuing functionality of the handful of battlement cannons that were still unscathed. He did it because he was bored, and because he was lonely. It was the second week when he started talking to the unresponsive servitors. By the fourth, they all had names and backstories.
At first, Asavan had sought to order one of the seven medial servitors still patrolling the cathedral to perform these actions, but their programming was cripplingly limited. One was mono-tasked with walking from room to room, broom in hand, sweeping up any dust from the boots of the faithful.
Well, there were no faithful anymore. And the servitor had no broom. Asavan had known the servitor before his augmentation, as a particularly dull-witted acolyte that earned his fate for stealing coins from his lay-brothers. His punishment was to be rendered into a bionic slave, and Asavan had shed no tears at the time. Still, it was no joy to see the simple creature stagger from chamber to chamber, clacking the broken end of a brushless broomstick against the rubble-strewn ground, never getting closer to cleaning up the mess, and unable to rest until its duty was done. It refused orders to cease work, and Asavan suspected what was left of its mind had been broken at some point during the battle. An unnoticed head wound, perhaps.
Six weeks in, the servitor had collapsed in the middle of a row of broken pews, its human parts no longer able to function without rest. Asavan had done with it as he'd done with all of the slain. He and the handful of survivors threw the body overboard. A morbid curiosity (and one that he always regretted afterwards) compelled him to watch as the bodies fell fifty metres to rupture on the ground below. Asavan took no thrill or amusement from such sights, but found he could never look away. In work he quickly erased, he confessed to himself that seeing the bodies fall was a means of reminding himself he was still alive. Whatever the truth of the situation, the sights gave him nightmares. He wondered how soldiers could get used to such things, and why they would ever want to.
His main concern this past week was the cold.
With the Titan committed to battle for this prolonged engagement, the damage it had sustained in the ambush weeks ago was forever being repaired, compensated for, and re-aggravated by new war wounds sustained in the conflict. The command crew ('blessings be upon them as they lead us to triumph,' Asavan still whispered) were drawing ever-increasing maintenance attention and power from secondary systems throughout the Titan.
Minor systems went unrepaired by the adept tech-teams that were already spread thin throughout the gigantic construct and dealing with the vital systems. Some systems even went powerless as energy feeds were drained and disconnected, their thrumming fuel flooded to the plasma cells used to power the Shield and the main weapons.
A week ago, the heating systems to the cathedral had been drained to the point of no longer functioning. With typical Mechanicus efficiency, there were secondary and tertiary fallback options in the case of such a development. Unfortunately for Asavan and the few acolytes left alive up there, both the secondary and tertiary contingencies were lost. The secondary fallback had been a smaller, self-sustaining generator that fed itself from a power source reserve that was linked to nothing else, and could therefore never be drained for other purposes. The generator was now no more than scrap metal in the ruined mess that had once been the cathedral's maintenance deck.
The generator's destruction also annihilated the tertiary contingency plan, which was for four mono-tasked servitors - good for nothing else - to be activated and set to turn the generator's manual pumps by hand. Even if the generator had been fully functional, all four of the servitors were killed in the battle five weeks ago.
Asavan had gamely tried to turn the first of the hand-cranks himself, but lacking a servitor's strength meant all he achieved was a sore back. The crank never moved a centimetre.
So now, here he sat on a fallen pillar, trying to compose something to describe how bone-achingly cold he was, and how bone-achingly cold he had been for the last six days.
In place of organs, Stormherald possessed a generator core of intensely radioactive and fusion-hot plasma. Asavan found it a curious paradox that the heart of a sun was hermetically sealed and insulated many decks below him, yet here he was, on the edge of freezing to death.
These were the kinds of observations that he would write down, and then destroy in shame at daring to complain while so many innocent Imperial souls were out there in the burning city, dying moment by moment.
It was in that moment Asavan Tortellius decided he would change fate himself. He would not freeze to death on the Titan's back, in this hollow monastery. Nor would he gripe about the cold while thousands of deserving and loyal people died in their droves.
His fellow acolytes had never been kind to him regarding his intelligence, but people could say what they wished about his wits, slow or otherwise - Asavan liked to believe he always arrived at the right answer eventually. And now he had.
Yes. It was time to make a difference to the people of Helsreach.
It was time to leave the Titan.
CHAPTER XVIII
Consolidation
Three more nights passed as every day had passed before them. The docks were lost at dawn on the sixth day after the submersible assault.
The defeat was unusual enough to bring the Imperial commanders together again. Around the battle-damaged hull of the Grey Warrior, Sarren gathered the leaders. In the dawn gloom, most of the Guard colonels were dead on their feet with fatigue, several showing telltale signs of combat narcotics to keep them going - a twitch here, a shiver there. Overtaxed minds and muscles could only be kept ac
tive for so long, even with stimulants.
Sarren wouldn't reprimand them for this. In times of need, men did as they must in order to hold the line.
'We've lost the docks,' he said, and his voice was as tired and scratchy as he felt. This was not news to any of the gathered officers. As the colonel outlined the details of what little remained of the dock districts, a Chimera rumbled up to park in the Grey Warrior's shadow. The crew ramp slammed down, and two people disembarked. The first was Cyria Tyro, her uniform still clean but clearly ruffled from constant wear. The second was dressed in a pilot's grey flightsuit.
'I've found him,' Tyro said, leading the pilot to the gathered commanders.
'Captain Melius reporting,' the pilot saluted Sarren. 'Commander Jenzen died two nights ago, sir.'
Third in line, after Jenzen and Barasath? They were lucky to have any flyers left.
'A pleasure, captain.'
'As you say, sir.'
Sarren nodded, returning the aquila salute with his wounded arm still aching like a jungle wildfire. A morning breeze, chilling and unwelcome, gusted across the stretch of the Hel's Highway. The Baneblade's hull blocked most of the wind, but not enough as far as Sarren was concerned. Throne, he was tired of aching all over.
'Remaining forces?'
'Three airstrips, though it looks like the Gamma Road will fall today; it's been besieged for days now. At last count, we had twenty-six Lightnings remaining. Only seven Thunderbolts. Gamma Road is already being evacuated and the fighters are landing on the Vancia Chi Avenue.'
Sarren made a grumbling noise. He still lamented the loss of Barasath and the majority of his air power, even after all this time.
'Intentions?'
'Currently, no change from Jenzen's orders. Provide air support for embattled Titan forces and armour battalions. The enemy are still showing next to no offensive capacity in the air. It's reasonable to suggest that, this far in, they've simply got nothing left.'
'Was that a barb, captain?'
Helius saluted again. 'By no means, sir.'
Sarren smiled, the indulgent grin ruined by weariness. 'If it was, it's forgiven. Barasath was right, and he sold his life at great cost to give us an edge in the air. The beasts have thrown up nothing but a handful of scrap-fighters since the siege began, and I've already noted on the campaign record - as well as Barsath's personal file - that he made the right call.'
'Yes, sir.'
'I'm sorry to hear about Jenzen. She was an asset we'll greatly miss: solid, reliable, steady.'
And she had been. Commander Carylin Jenzen, for better or worse, had been a by-the-book flyer, dependable and constant, if rather uninspired. Under her, the city's air forces had maintained a campaign of reliable defensive support for over a month. The Crone of Invigilata herself had commended Jenzen's endeavours in recent weeks.
'Sir—' Helius began.
Here it comes… Sarren thought.
'I had hoped to discuss the possibility of a more aggressive tactical pattern.'
Yes. Yes, of course you had hoped to discuss that.
'In good time. For now, the docks.'
Sarren nodded back to the gathered officers. Cyria Tyro and Captain Helius joined them, standing next to one another. Major Ryken scowled at the pilot, and Sarren resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Bloody Throne, Ryken. Now is hardly the time for schoolyard jealousy.
'We did not lose the docks,' one of the Astartes argued, his vox-voice laden with resonant calm. Colonel Sarren had not met Sergeant V'reth of the Salamanders before this morning. He knew from vox-traffic that the green-armoured warriors had deployed close to the remaining civilian shelters and their valour was directly responsible for a great many lives spared.
But it seemed his tactical outlook varied wildly from the colonel's.
'I'm not sure I understand, sir,' Sarren offered.
Vreth's armour was dented and scratched, but remained pristine in comparison to the wreckage worn by the Reclusiarch at his side. A golden-eyed helm glared down at the human officers.
'I am merely stating, Colonel Sarren, that we did not lose the docks. The enemy is beaten. The seaborne invasion was denied, for the city still stands. The invaders lie dead at the docks.'
This was and wasn't true, from the way Sarren looked at it. The disparity was the reason the colonel had called this gathering.
'Allow me to amend my appraisal. The docks are gone. As an industrial factor in Armageddon's collective output, Helsreach no longer exists. We're receiving reports now of ninety-one per cent harm to the city's refinery infrastructure, taking into account the loss of the offshore oil platforms.'
The soldiers shared uncomfortable glances. The Imperium demanded heavy tithes of materiel from Armageddon. If the other hive cities suffered as Helsreach had, the grade of Exactis Extremis would be lowered significantly. Certainly to Solutio Tertius, and perhaps to Aptus Non. If Armageddon provided nothing it would be offered little in return. The Imperium would turn away. Without the support and finances to recover after the war, the world might never recover.
'However, all is not dark. As the noble Sergeant V'reth makes clear, thanks to the tenacity of the dockworker population, our own storm-troopers, and our Astartes allies, the xenos were repelled.'
At insane cost, he decided not to add. Tens of thousands dead in four days. The city's industry reduced to a worthless husk.
'We have received further word from the Crone of Invigilata,' the colonel continued. What he had to say next almost caught in his throat. 'The most honourable Legio Invigilata has been petitioned by outside forces to leave the city.'
'She will stay.' The Reclusiarch's tone was cold even through his helm's vox-speakers. 'She swore to fight.'
'As I understand it, the Imperial advances along the length of the Hemlock River are grinding to a halt. The settlements there, protected by the Salamanders and regiments of the Cadian Shock, are now considered a higher priority than the city.' Sarren let the words resonate for a few moments. 'This is from the Old Man himself. It came over the vox an hour ago.'
Grimaldus snarled as he spoke, 'I do not care. Our mandate is to defend Helsreach.'
'Our mandate, yes. But Princeps Zarha's mandate was to deploy where she desired. Most of the Legio Invigilata is already stationed along the Hemlock and across the wastelands, alongside elements from Ignatum and Metalica.'
'She will not leave,' Grimaldus snorted. 'She is here until the end.'
Sarren felt his ire rising at the way the Reclusiarch dismissed his concerns with such blase finality. On another day, another morning, after any other week of fighting, he would have reined in his emotions better. As it was, he sighed and closed his gritty eyes.
'Enough, please, Reclusiarch. Stormherald is embattled seven kilometres down the Hel's Highway, with an enemy scrap-Titan battalion in the Rostorik Ironworks. She has given no further word of her decision.'
Grimaldus crossed his arms over his ruined heraldry. 'Tartarus Hive and the battles along the shores of the Hemlock will be won and lost without us. This war has taken everything from the city, and we are reduced to fighting like desert jackals over Helsreach's bones. The only question that matters to us is: What can we still save?'
Ryken removed his rebreather and took a deep breath. 'It may be time to consider the last fallback point.'
Sarren nodded. 'That's why we're here. We stand in the heart of a dying city, and the time has come to decide where we will make our final stand. What of the… weapon, Reclusiarch?'
'A fool's hope. The Master of the Forge is a single soul. Without Mechanicus support, Jurisian has been able to do nothing more than activate Oberon's core systems. He can certainly not crew it alone. As of four nights ago, the Ordinatus has locomotion, and on his own the Forge-master is able to fire the Oberon Cannon once every twenty-two minutes. But that is all. It cannot be defended by a lone pilot. It is worthless in battle.'
The colonel's ire rose again. 'You waited four days to tell me of this? Th
at the Ordinatus has power once more?'
'I have not waited. I filed coded confirmation across the command network the same night I learned Oberon was operational. Yet as I said, it is almost worthless to us.'
'Is your Forgemaster bringing the weapon to the city?'
'Of course.'
'Has the Mechanicus been informed we are defiling their weapon and dragging it into a warzone, almost certain to lose it in its first engagement against the enemy?'
'Of course not. Are you insane, human? The best weapons are those that remain secret until wielded. This truth would force Invigilata to act against us, or to leave the city.'
'You are not the commander of this city. You surrendered that honour to me. This is information I have been eagerly awaiting, only to find it denied to me because of broken vox-traffic?'
The silver skull breathed out a mechanical growl.
'I was knee-deep in alien dead at the docks, Sarren, selling the lives of my brothers to ensure the people of your home world lived to see another sunrise. You are tired. I understand the limitations of the human form, and you have my sympathies for them. But remember to whom you are speaking.'
Sarren bit back his disappointment. It wasn't supposed to be like this, yet with the Astartes, it always was. Compliant and valuable one moment, superior and distant the next, shaped as much by their fierce independence as they were by their loyalty to the Imperium.
It felt… petty. That was the only word that encapsulated it in the colonel's mind. An awkward divide between humans fighting for their home, and once-humans fighting for intangible ideals and heroic codes of conduct.
'Well…' Sarren began, but knew he had nowhere to go with the words.
'I am not to blame for your malfunctioning vox. It is a plague upon the city's defence, and a burden we must bear. I was not about to abandon the docks to deliver the news into your ears like some enslaved courier, nor would I entrust such a development to any other soul. If the Mechanicus learns of this, we lose Invigilata.'
Helsreach (warhammer 40000) Page 24
