Helsreach (warhammer 40000)

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Warhound-class. And it suited the name, lone wolfing its way through the wrecked industrial sector, striding around the shells of tanks destroyed in the week-long straggle for the Rostorik Ironyard. Sometimes, its hooved feet would crunch down on the soft meat of burned bodies and render them into pulped smears along the ground. Dead skitarii, Guardsmen, factorum workers and greenskins littered the district.

  Ivory Fang was commanded most ably by a princeps by name of Haven Havelock. Princeps Havelock dreamed, as did most of his ilk, of one day mastering a great battle-Titan, and perhaps even one of Invigilata's precious few Imperators. His fellow princeps - equals and superiors alike - spoke well of him, and he knew his place in the Legio as a solid, reliable scout-Titan commander was assured, valued, and deserved.

  Patience was foremost among his virtues - patience and cunning. That reasoned, meticulous hunting instinct bled through the mind-bond into Ivory Fang. Twinned, man and machine were past masters at the kind of deep-urban stalks where Warhound Titans most excelled.

  The rough link between Titan commanders maintained throughout the city had suffered just as Imperial vox had suffered, but Havelock was reassured by the fragments of meaning that pulsed through the chaos. If there truly was an enemy scrap-Titan out there, it was nothing the battle group could not deal with. Stormherald was no more than two kilometres to the south, and with it were Danol's Retribution and The Ghoul, both Reavers with victory banners descending from their armour plating that would put mid-range Titan princeps from any other Legio to shame.

  Nothing the beasts could hurl at them would break such a formation. Even the largest gargant would fall to Stormherald.

  I see nothing, came the aggravated spurt of machine code from his fellow princeps, Feerna of Regal.

  Havelock spent a quarter of a second consulting his internal tracking runes. The link to his Titan's auspex sensors formed a rough, instinctive knowledge of his kin's locations in his mind.

  Regal was a half-kilometre to the north-east, moving at speed through a small cluster of iron smelteries. It would have been in visual range, had the space between the two Titans not been obstructed by ruined manufactories.

  I see nothing, either.

  It's the heat, she complained. Hunting for thermal signatures in this inferno is like seeking black in the night sky. My auspex readers show nothing but thermal disruption. Horus himself could be hiding in here, and I would not kn—

  Feerna? Feerna?

  'Registering energy discharge of significant size to the north-east,' Havelock's moderati called out.

  'Confirmed,' murmured the tech-adept that hunched in a station behind the princeps throne.

  Feerna? Havelock tried once more. 'Bring us about and move north-east at aggressive intent speed. Everyone be ready.' He twitched in his restraint throne as the Titan obeyed his pilot's urgings. The connection feeds were alive with subtle static, itching at his nerves. Ivory Fang was keen. It had sensed something.

  And then it hit Havelock, too.

  'Hnnngh,' he drooled through clenched teeth, shuddering against the leather bindings that restrained him in place. 'Hnn… Hw…'

  The pain of Regal's mortis-cry faded, and Havelock breathed again. Feerna was gone, as was her Titan. She'd been a Warhound, and her link to the others was tenuous and weak in comparison to the strength of a bond to the greater god-machines. The pain bled away fast, bringing relief in its wake.

  The Titan clanked its way down a subsidiary alley, its weapon-arms rising in readiness. Havelock sent several mental urgings in quick succession, triggering autoloaders, coolant valves and bracing pistons into activity. Ivory Fang rounded the corner at the alley's end, stalking out into the main street. As it had been since this morning, this sector was still aflame because of the destroyed refineries and petrochemical stores, with about half the buildings finally quieting into smouldering ruins.

  But the fighting was done here.

  'Where is the bastard?' Havelock whispered.

  The auspex chimed - once, weak.

  'We have movement,' the tech-adept grumbled, not looking up from his scanner console. 'There is—'

  'I see, it, I see it. Back away now!'

  It came from the black clouds, rumbling forward on a clumsy mess of tank treads and crushing feet. Its body was slanted, tapering to a head that was all brutal jaw and piggish, alien eye-windows. Every metre of its scrap metal torso bristled with tiered weapons platforms.

  It was quite the ugliest and most offensive thing Havelock had ever seen, and that was more than simply because it was an affront to the purity of Mechanicus god-machine creation. No, more than that, it offended him because its manifestation before him made no sense. It… dwarfed Stormherald.

  It seemed impossibility given form, striding, limping from the oily smoke that blanketed the district.

  Havelock pulsed a digitally-translated pict of the enemy gargant across the mind-bond to Princeps Zarha and any other Titan commander in range. It was all the warning he would be allowed to send, for Godbreaker opened fire the very moment its main armaments cleared the smoke.

  Ivory Fang was pulverised beneath enough solid, laser and plasma weapon fire to level a city block. Its demise, and the end of Havelock's mediocre career, was marked by a vast crater that would remain for decades after the war had bled the whole world almost dry.

  Godbreaker moved onward.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Stormherald Down

  The two engines faced one another across the burning ironyard, as alike in power as they were unlike in dignity. Both were ablaze, both bleeding fire and smoke into the clouded air.

  The air between them was a blizzard of weapon fire as secondary turrets and battlement guns spat anti-infantry firepower at each other in the hopes of inflicting as much damage as possible. Inside both Titans, it sounded like a flood of pebbles clattering against the armour-plated hulls.

  Inside Stormherald, the sirens were wailing long and loud.

  Zarha writhed in her fluid-filled tomb, her limbs pushing through the blood-pinked water. Psychostigmata was ravaging her, as Stormherald's wounds played out in a map across her naked body. Where the Titan was battered, she was discoloured by bruising or bent by broken bones. Where the god-machine was rent and torn, her flesh smiled and bled in open wounds. Where Stormherald burned, she was haemorrhaging internally.

  The Titan's command deck smelled of burning oil and rancid sweat.

  'Primary shield layer restored,' Carsomir announced, his hands working at his console with a near-furious focus. 'Core containment holding.'

  Raise… raise shields…

  'Krrrsssshhhhh.'

  RAISE THE SHIELDS.

  'Raise the shields.'

  'Already done, my princeps.'

  She was slowing down. The pain stole so much of her attention now. With a moan that was swallowed into silence by the water, she pulsed orders to the various decks and pushed both of her arms forward through the pinkish ooze.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, screaming into the oxygen-rich fluid, the stumps of her hands thumping against the front of her coffin.

  Nothing.

  'Plasma annihilator venting for sixteen more seconds, my princeps. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.'

  Fire the… the… other arm. Fire it.

  'Krrrsssssshh.'

  FIRE THE HELLSTORM CANNON. Her stunted right limb thudded over and over against the glass side of her amniotic tank.

  'Fire the hellstorm cannon.'

  'As soon as it has recharged, my princeps,' Lonn replied, half-ignoring her now. She'd given the order to fire at will several minutes before. Drifting in her pain as the Titan fell to pieces, she was barely trustworthy now. Carsomir and Lonn worked almost independently of their princeps's wishes. They only had one more shot at walking away from this - the enemy Titan was already advancing over the mangled body of The Ghoul, which had lasted less than a minute beneath the Godbreaker's initial volleys.

  The sc
rap-Titan was capable of a merciless amount of firepower. None of Stormherald's command crew had seen anything like it before, let alone suffered on the receiving end. Only a few minutes into the god-machines' duel, and the Imperator was wreathed in flame, temperature gauges whining and warning lights flashing throughout the confined corridors threading through the giant's steel bones.

  The multitude of layered energy screens that served the Titan as void shields had been torn apart with insane, laughable speed by the ork walker.

  'I'm ready,' Carsomir announced. 'Firing.'

  'Wait for the stabilisers to come back online!' Lonn yelled. 'They only need another minute.'

  Carsomir thought his fellow pilot's faith in the tech-crews working in the shoulder joints was admirable, but unbelievably misguided given the circumstances. He blinked once, wasting precious seconds to even think about listening to Lonn's plea.

  'The arm isn't badly damaged. I'm taking the shot. I can make it.'

  'You'll miss, Val! Give them thirty seconds, just thirty more seconds.'

  'Firing.'

  'You son of a bitch!'

  Stormherald's knees locked in preparation and the plasma annihilator tower that served as its left arm began its air-sucking inhalation of coolant.

  'You've killed us,' Lonn breathed, watching the enemy Titan through the steamed-up view windows. An unremitting torrent of incidental fire rained against Stormherald's shields, turning them violet with strain.

  'Void shields buckling,' one of the tech-adepts called from a side terminal.

  'Enemy engine making ready to fire primary weapons,' another said.

  'They'll never get the chance…' Valian Carsomir smiled with a wicked light in his eyes.

  Lonn's shouted protest was drowned out in the roar of discharging sunfire. A beam of plasma - roiling, boiling and white-hot - vomited from the cannon's focusing ring, blasting across the four hundred metres separating the two Titans. Stormherald stood rigid, defensive, no longer advancing after the first two minutes of punishing exchange. Godbreaker had not stopped its thunderous, slow charge.

  'You bastard!' Lonn yelled. Carsomir had missed. The jet of plasma blanketed the ground to the left of the closing ork gargant, where it began to dissolve everything it touched in a vast pool of acidic corruption.

  Lonn had been right. The arm-weapon had strayed despite targeting locks, as the supreme force of its own firepower sent it veering off-centre.

  'I had the shot,' Carsomir shook his head.

  'Void shields failing,' the tech-adept announced without any emotion whatsoever.

  'I had the shot,' Carsomir repeated, unable to look away from the wreck-Titan bearing down upon them. Behind the moderati thrones, Zarha floated in her suspension tank, slack and unconscious.

  'No, no, no…' Lonn worked at his console, his brow furrowed. 'This can't be.'

  The Titan began to shudder around them as the void shields died again, the Imperator's dense armour taking the brunt of the alien attack.

  Lonn had never worked like this before in his life. It was a flurry of effort, performed half in the flesh and half with the mind. He could feel the Titan falling into slumber, and its dimming consciousness dragged at his thoughts, slowing them to a crawl. Where he met resistance like this in the mind-link, he compensated by overrides on his command console.

  The command deck grew dark as he worked. The enemy gargant eclipsed all outside light, looming before the idle Stormherald.

  'Why hasn't it fired?' Carsomir worked as Lonn did, cooling essential systems, ordering repair teams to afflicted joints, feeding power from the coughing shield generators to the thirsty weapon energy cells.

  To Lonn, the reason was obvious. Like the savages that acted as the gargant's puppeteers, the scrap-Titan was built to kill with its hands. Several of the thing's weapon mounts were taken up by crude arms that ended in spears and claws of salvaged metal. It wanted to savour Stormherald's death, like some many-armed daemon from the impure millennia of pre-Imperial Terra.

  Zarha's augmetic eyes flicked back to active as the chamber grew dark. She awoke, seeing the doom bearing down on her, feeling secondary fire devastating her armour plating like she was being skinned alive.

  Through the bloody fluid and maddening pain, she raised her shivering arms. Stormherald mirrored the gesture as it was pummelled under Godbreaker's guns. Jagged metal fell from the Mechanicus giant like rainfall, ripped from its body and crashing to the ground below. Many of the Imperator's crew that had the sense of self-preservation to flee were killed by the falling chunks of armour plating.

  Zarha put the last of her strength, and the last of her life, into throwing both her arms forward. The plasma annihilator did not fire. Neither did the hellstorm cannon. Both were locked in the time-consuming process of recharging from depleted power generators.

  Both towering weapon-arms speared forward, hammering through the fat hull of Godbreaker and impaling it in place. The cry of tearing scrap metal was cacophonous as Stormherald's cannons pushed deeper, stabbing like daggers through meat, seeking to grind and crush the enemy's heart-reactor.

  Grimaldus. I stood until the end, as promised. Awaken Oberon. Awaken it, or die as we have.

  Perhaps her thoughts echoed across the empathic link to her moderati, for one of them voiced something of her sentiments.

  'We're dead,' Carsomir murmured. He wanted to rise from his throne, but the restraints and connection cables bound him too completely. He settled for closing his eyes.

  Lonn had sensed the Crone's intent. He leaned all his weight on the control levers, adding his demands to Zarha's, plunging the arms deeper into the enemy Titan's chest with scraping, grinding slowness. He felt sick to stare up through the darkened viewports to see the bestial, tusked aliens clambering along the impaling arm-cannons, using them as bridges to board Stormherald as they bled from the wounds in their own Titan's body.

  With no peaceful fade or foreshadowing, the power died, leaving him in darkness. He eased up on the levers, knowing without needing to look that the Crone was gone.

  Stormherald was a statue, joined to the war machine that was slowly carving it to pieces with great chops of its bladed limbs. As endings went, Lonn mused, this was neither grand nor glorious.

  As the command deck shook with rhythmic violence from the pound, pound, pounding of Godbreaker's many weapon-arms, Lonn drew his laspistol, and watched the sealed doors, ready for the aliens to eventually breach them. His skin crawled at the gentle sound of Zarha's corpse bumping against the glass front of her coffin, in time to the Titan's shaking.

  'I… I had the shot,' Carsomir stammered from the adjacent throne as he waited to die in the dark. 'I had the shot…'

  The side of his head burst open as a las-beam slashed through his skull.

  'You bastard,' Lonn said to the twitching body. Then he lowered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began the laborious process of disengaging himself from the control throne.

  There was something human in the way Stormherald died. The way it went slack, the way it staggered, the way it crashed to the ground, its heart-core cold, swarming with enemy bodies like insects feeding upon a corpse.

  The god-machine shook the earth when it finally toppled. The spined, spiked cathedral tumbled from its back in a spillage of priceless architecture, left as no more than rubble and scraps of armour plating in a mountain of wreckage by the Titan's head. Stormherald's arms were wrenched from the torso, squealing free of the ruptured shoulder joints when the ancient engine hammered into the ground with enough force to send tremors through the entire city.

  The head itself was torn free before the main body fell, leaving a socket of trailing power cables and interface feeds, like a nest of a million snakes. Gripped in the lifter-claw at the end of one of Godbreaker's many arms, the Titan's head was clamped and crushed, then hurled aside as a twisted ball of scrap metal. Its landing flattened a small manufactorum, as the armoured command chamber weighing several dozen tonnes blasted thr
ough the building's side wall and pulverised several support pillars.

  On board Godbreaker, the bestial creature in charge ranted at its subordinates for destroying and discarding the Titan's head in such a way. To the beast's mind, it would have made a very impressive trophy to mount on their own god-machine.

  The few Legio crew members, skitarii defenders and tech-adepts that survived Stormherald's fall scrabbled from exits and breaks in the behemoth's skin. In the midday light of Armageddon's weak sun, they were cut down by the ork reavers around the dead Titan.

  Miraculously, Moderati Secundus Lonn was one of these. He had managed to break free of the bindings and interface cables linking him to the dying god-machine, and make it out of the bridge by the time Godbreaker decapitated Stormherald. In the following fall, he broke his leg in two places, earned a concussion as the tilting corridor sent him falling down a flight of spiral stairs, and busted several of his teeth clear out of his gums when his head smacked off a handrail.

  On hands and knees, dragging his dead leg and half-drunk with concussion, Lonn hauled himself out of an emergency bulkhead to lie on the warm armour plating of Stormherald's torso. There he remained, panting and bleeding in the thin sunlight for several seconds, before starting to crawl his slow way down the ground. He was killed less than a minute later by the marauding greenskins swarming over the downed Titan.

  Through the pain, he was laughing as he died.

  Grimaldus came at last to the inner sanctum.

  He was no longer a warrior here, but a pilgrim. Of this he was certain, though in the wake of his words with Nero, he felt certain of little else.

  It had taken very little time within the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant to bring about this certainty within him, but the feeling was undeniable. He felt home, on familiar and sacred ground, for the first time since he had left the Eternal Crusader. It was purifying.

  The cool air didn't taste of fire and blood on a world he had no wish to walk upon. The silence wasn't broken by the drumbeat of a war he had no stake in.