Armageddon

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The 36th day. Ambush along enemy-controlled portions of Hel’s Highway.

  Gene-seed: Recovered.

  The thirty-sixth day.

  Thirty-six days of gruelling siege. Thirty-six days of retreat, of falling back, of holding positions for as long as we are able until inevitably overwhelmed by the insane, impossible numbers arrayed against us.

  The entire city smells of blood. The coppery, stinging scent of human life, and the sickening fungal reek of the foulness purged from orkish veins. Beneath the blood-scent is the stench of burning wood, melted metal, and blasted stone – a city’s death in smells. At the last gathering of commanders in the shadow of Colonel Sarren’s Baneblade, the Grey Warrior, it was estimated that the foe controlled forty-six per cent of the city. That was four nights ago.

  Almost half of Helsreach, gone. Lost to smoke and flame in bitter, galling defeat.

  I am told we lack the force to take anything back. Reinforcements are not coming from the other hives, and the majority of the Guard and militia that still fight are exhausted remnants of the regiments, forever falling back, time and again, road by road. Hold a junction for a few nights, then withdraw to the next position when it finally falls.

  Truly, we are fated to die in the most uninspired crusade ever to blight the name of the Black Templars.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ the vox calls me.

  ‘Not now.’ I kneel by Cador’s defiled body, seeing the holes in his armour and flesh – some from alien gunfire, two from the ritual surgery of Nerovar’s flesh-boring tools.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ the voice comes again. The rune blinking at the edge of my retinal display signifies it as from the Grey Warrior. I suspect I am to be begged, again, to fall back to Imperial lines and help in the defence of some meaningless roadway junction.

  ‘I am administering the rites of the fallen to a slain knight. Now is not the time, colonel.’

  At first, the colonel had replied to such words with the worthless, polite insistence that he was sorry for my loss. Sarren no longer says such things. The tens of thousands of lives lost in the last four weeks have utterly numbed him to such personal sentiment. That, too, is almost admirable. I see the strength in the way he has changed.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ Sarren’s voice betrays how ruined by exhaustion he is. Were I in the room with him, I know I would feel the weariness in his bones like an aura around where he stands. ‘When you return from your scouting run, your presence is required in the Forthright Five district.’

  Forthright sector. The southernmost docks.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We are receiving anomalous reports from the Valdez Oil Platforms. The coastal auspex readers are suffering from offshore storms, but there are no storms off the coast. We suspect something is happening at sea.’

  ‘We will be there in an hour,’ I tell him. ‘What anomalies are we speaking of?’

  ‘If I could give you specifics, Reclusiarch, I would. The auspex readers look to be suffering some kind of directed interference. We believe they’re being jammed.’

  ‘One hour, colonel.’ Then, ‘Mount up,’ I say to my brothers. It is not a short ride down the Hel’s Highway, especially when it crawls with the enemy. Scouting teams are more often mounted on motorcycles now – the risk of Thunderhawks being shot down in enemy territory is too great.

  ‘It is strange,’ Nero says, cradling Cador’s helm in his hands, as if the old warrior merely slept. ‘I do not wish to leave him.’

  ‘That is not Cador.’ I rise from where I have been kneeling next to the body, anointing the tabard with sacred oils, before tearing it from the war-plate. In better times, the tabard would be enshrined on the Eternal Crusader. In this time, here and now, I rip it from my brother’s body and tie it around my bracer, carrying it with me as a token to honour him. ‘Cador is gone. You are leaving nothing behind.’

  ‘You are heartless, brother,’ Nero tells me. Standing here, in this annihilated city, with the bodies of so many dead aliens around us, I almost burst out laughing. ‘But even for you,’ Nero continues, ‘even for one who wears the Black, that is a cold thing to say.’

  ‘I loved him as one can love any warrior that fights by your side for two hundred years, boy. The bonds that form from decade upon decade of shared allegiance and united war are not to be ignored. I will miss Cador for the few days that remain to me, before this war kills me, as well. But no, I do not grieve. There is nothing to grieve over when a life has been led in service to the Throne.’

  The Apothecary hangs his head. In shame? In thought?

  ‘I see,’ he says, apropos of nothing.

  ‘We will speak of this again, Nero. Now mount up, brothers. We ride south.’

  Half of the city was a wasteland, one way or the other. Some of it burned, some of it was silent in death now that the xenos had moved on to other sectors, and some of it was simply abandoned. Habitation towers stood under Armageddon’s yellow sky, lifeless and deserted. Manufactories no longer churned out weapons of war, or breathed smoke into the heavens.

  Packs of orks – the jackal-like stragglers who had fallen behind the main advance – looted through the empty sectors of the city. While there was little of calculated malice in the beasts’ minds, what few human civilian survivors remained were slain without mercy when they were found.

  Five armoured bikes growled their way down Hel’s Highway. Their sloped armour plating was as black as the war-plate worn by each rider. Their engines emitted healthy, throaty roars that told of a thirst for promethium fuel. The boltguns mounted on the motorcycles were linked to belt-feeding ammunition boxes contained within the vehicles’ main bulks.

  Priamus throttled back, falling into formation alongside Nerovar. Neither warrior looked at the other as they rode, weaving through a shattered convoy of motionless, burned-out tank hulls spread across the dark rockcrete of the highway.

  ‘His death,’ the swordsman began, his vox-voice crackling from the distortion of the engines. ‘Does it trouble you?’

  ‘I do not wish to speak of this, Priamus.’

  Priamus banked around the charred skeleton of what had once been a Chimera trooper carrier. His sword, chained to his back, rattled against his armour with the bike’s vibrations.

  ‘He did not die well.’

  ‘I said I have no desire to speak of this, brother. Leave me be.’

  ‘I only say this because if I were as close to him as you were, it would have grieved me, also. He died badly. An ugly, ugly death.’

  ‘He killed several before he fell.’

  ‘He did,’ the swordsman allowed, ‘but his death-wound was in the back. That would shame me beyond measure.’

  ‘Priamus,’ Nerovar’s voice was ice cold and heavy with both emotion and threat. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘You are impossible, Nero.’ Priamus revved his engine and accelerated away. ‘I try to sympathise with you. I try to connect, and you rebuke me. I will remember this, brother.’

  Nerovar said nothing. He just watched the road.

  The Jahannam Platform.

  Six hundred and nineteen workers stationed on an offshore industrial base. Its skyline was a mess of cranes and storage silos. Beneath it, only the deep of the ocean and the richness of the crude oil that could be refined into promethium.

  A new shadow entered the depths.

  Like a black wave under the water’s surface, it drifted closer to the support struts that held the gigantic platform above the water. Lesser shadows, fish-like and sharp, spilled ahead of the main darkness like rainfall falling from a storm cloud.

  The platform shuddered at first, as if shivering in the chill winds that always howled this far from shore.

  And then, with majestic slowness, it began to fall. A town-sized, multi-layered platform fell into the ocean, crashing down into the water. The ships around it began, one by one, to explode. Each one, once breached, sank alongside the Jahannam Platform.

  Six hundred and nineteen workers, and one thousand
and twenty-one crewmembers from the ships died in the freezing waters over the course of the following three hours. The few men and women that managed to reach vox-casters shouted into their machines, little realising their voices were carrying no further.

  The platform was eventually submerged except for a fleet of floating detritus. The ocean no longer teemed with potential profit, but the scrap metal of destroyed enterprise.

  Helsreach heard nothing of this.

  The Sheol Platform.

  In a central spire, nestled between tall, stacked container silos, Technical Officer Nayra Racinov cast an annoyed look at her green screen, and the sudden fuzzy wash of distortion it was displaying for her.

  ‘You’re joking,’ she said to the screen. It replied with white noise.

  She thumped the thick glass with the bottom of her fist. It replied with slightly angrier white noise. Technical Officer Nayra Racinov decided not to try that again.

  ‘My screen’s just died,’ she called out to the rest of the office. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the ‘rest of the office’, which usually consisted of an overweight ex-crane driver called Gruli who monitored the communications system, had gone for a mug of caffeine.

  She looked back at her console. Warning lights were flickering cheerily around the confused screen. One moment, the green wash showed a chaotic burst of incoming presences on the sonar. Hundreds of them. The next, it showed a clear ocean. And the next, nothing but distortion again.

  The room shuddered. The entire platform shuddered, as if in the grip of an earthquake.

  Nayra swallowed, watching the screen again. The presences under the water, hundreds of them, were back once again.

  She dived across the shaking room, hammering the vox-station’s transmit button with the heel of her hand.

  She managed to say ‘Helsreach, Helsreach, come in…’ before the world dropped out from under her and the second of the Valdez Oil Platforms was brought down, with its steel bones burning, bending and screaming, into the icy sea.

  The Lucifus Platform.

  The largest of the three offshore installations was manned by a permanent work crew population twice the size of those at Jahannam and Sheol. While they were powerless to prevent their own destruction, they at least saw it coming.

  Across the platform, sonar auspex readers were suddenly captured by the storm of distortion that had preceded the deaths of Sheol and Jahannam. Here, a fully-staffed control office reacted quicker, with a low-ranking tech-acolyte managing to restore a semblance of clarity to the screens.

  Technical Officer Marvek Kolovas was on the vox-network immediately, his gravelly voice carrying directly to the mainland.

  ‘Helsreach, this is Lucifus.’ Massive, repeat, massive incoming enemy fleet. At least three hundred submersibles. We can’t raise Sheol or Jahannam. Neither platform is responding. Helsreach? Helsreach, come in.’

  ‘Uh…’

  Kolovas blinked at the receiver in his hand. ‘Helsreach?’ he said again.

  ‘Uh, this is Dock Officer Nylien. You’re under attack?’

  ‘Throne, are you deaf, you stupid bastard? There’s a fleet of enemy submersibles launching all kinds of hell at our support gantries. We need rescue craft immediately. Airborne rescue craft. Lucifus Platform is going down.’

  ‘I… I…’

  ‘Helsreach? Helsreach? Do you hear me?’

  A new voice broke over the vox-channel. ‘This is Dockmaster Tomaz Maghernus. Helsreach hears and acknowledges.’

  Kolovas finally let out the breath he’d been holding. Around him, the world shook as it began to end.

  ‘Good luck, Lucifus,’ the dockmaster’s voice finished, a moment before the link went dead.

  ‘This is the situation,’ Colonel Sarren began.

  The Forthright Sector dockmaster’s office was, putting it politely, a pit. Maghernus was not a tidy man at the best of times, and a recent divorce wasn’t helping his state of cleanliness. The sizeable room was a hovel of old caffeine mugs that were growing furry mould-masses in their depths, and unfiled stacks of papers were scattered everywhere. Here and there were some of Maghernus’s cast-off clothing from the nights he’d slept in his office rather than go back to his depressing bachelor hab – and before that, back to the woman he’d taken to calling The Cheating Bitch.

  The Cheating Bitch was a memory now, and not a pleasant one. He found himself worrying against his will. Had she already died in the war? He wasn’t sure his bitterness stretched quite far enough to wish something like that.

  His dawdling thoughts were dragged back in line by the arrival of the Reclusiarch. In battered black war-plate, the knight stalked into the room, sending menials and Guard officers scurrying aside.

  ‘I was summoned.’ The words blasted rough from his helm’s vox-speakers.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ Sarren nodded. The colonel’s bone-tiredness bled from him in a slow drip. In his weary majesty, he moved like he was underwater. The officers gathered around the room’s messy table, poring over a crinkled paper map of the city and the surrounding coast.

  Room was made at the table as Grimaldus approached.

  ‘Speak to me,’ he said.

  ‘This is the situation,’ Colonel Sarren began again. ‘Exactly fifty-four minutes ago, we received a distress call from the Lucifus Platform. They reported they were under attack by an overwhelming submersible fleet numbering at least three hundred enemy vessels.’

  The gathered officers and dock leaders variously swore, made notes on the map, or looked to Sarren to provide an answer to this latest development.

  ‘How long until they reach–’

  ‘…must move the reserve garrisons–’

  ‘…storm trooper battalions to assemble–’

  Cyria Tyro stood alongside the colonel. ‘This is what the bastards were doing in the southern Dead Lands. It’s why they touched down there. They were taking their landing ships to pieces and building this fleet.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Sarren gestured to the portable hololithic table with a control wand, zooming out from the city and showing a much wider spread of the southern coast of the Armageddon Secundus landmass.

  ‘Tempestus Hive,’ several officers muttered.

  Enemy runes flickered as they drew nearer to the other coastal hive. Almost as many as those bearing down on Helsreach.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Tyro said. ‘Tempestus will fall, no matter what we do. A hive half our size, and with half our defences.’

  ‘We’re all dead,’ a voice spoke out.

  ‘What did you say?’ Commissar Falkov sneered.

  ‘We have done all that can be done.’ The protests came from an overweight lieutenant in the uniform of the conscripted militia forces. He was calm, sanguine even, speaking with what he hoped was measured wisdom. ‘Throne, three hundred enemy vessels? My men are stationed at the docks, and we know what we can do there. But the defences are as thin as… as… Damn it, there are no defences there. We must evacuate the city, surely. We’ve done all we can.’

  Commissar Falkov’s dark stormcoat swished as he reached for his sidearm. He never got the chance to execute the lieutenant for cowardice. A snarling, immense blur of blackness sliced across the room. With a crash, the lieutenant was slammed back against the wall, held a metre off the ground, short legs kicking, as the Reclusiarch gripped his throat in one hand.

  ‘Thirty-six days, you wretched worm. Thirty-six days of defiance, and thousands upon thousands of heroes lie dead. You dare speak of retreat when the day finally comes for you to spill the enemy’s blood?’

  The lieutenant gagged as he was strangled. Colonel Sarren, Cyria Tyro and the other officers watched in silence. No one turned away.

  ‘Hnk. Agh. Ss.’ He fought for breath that wouldn’t come as he stared into the silver replica of the God-Emperor’s death mask. Grimaldus leaned closer, his skulled face leering, blocking out all other sight.

  ‘Where would you run, coward? Where would you hid
e that the Emperor would not see your shame and spit on your soul when your worthless life is finally at an end?’

  ‘Pl-Please.’

  ‘Do not shame yourself further by begging for a life you do not deserve.’ Grimaldus tensed his hand, his fingers snapping closed with wet snaps. In his grip, the lieutenant went into spasms, then thumped to the floor as the knight released his grip. The Reclusiarch strode back to the table, ignoring the fallen body.

  It took several seconds for conversation to resume. When it did, Falkov saluted the Reclusiarch. Grimaldus ignored it.

  Maghernus tried to make sense of the lines being drawn across the map showing troop disposition, but it might as well have been in another language to him. He cleared his throat and said, above the din, ‘Colonel.’

  ‘Dockmaster.’

  ‘What does this mean? In the simplest terms, please. All of these lines and numbers mean nothing to me.’

  It was Grimaldus who answered. The knight spoke low, staring down at the map with his helm’s unblinking scarlet eyes.

  ‘Today is the thirty-sixth day of the siege,’ the Templar said, ‘and unless we defend the docks against the tens of thousands of enemy that will arrive in under two hours, we will lose the city by nightfall.’

  Cyria Tyro nodded as she stared at the map. ‘We need to evacuate the dockworkers in the most efficient manner possible, allowing for the arrival of troops.’

  ‘No,’ Maghernus said, though no one was listening.

  ‘These avenues,’ Colonel Sarren pointed out, ‘are already clogged by inbound/outbound supply traffic. We will struggle to get all of the dock menials – no offence, Dockmaster – out in time. Let alone get troops in.’

  ‘No,’ Maghernus said again, louder this time. Still, no one paid him any attention.

  One of the Steel Legion majors present, a storm trooper set apart by his dark uniform and shoulder insignia, traced a finger along a central spine road leading from Hel’s Highway.’

  ‘Evacuate the drones down the other paths and leave the highway route clear. That’ll be enough to fill the central docks with trained bodies.’

  ‘That still leaves almost two-thirds of the dock districts,’ Sarren frowned, ‘with no defence except the garrisoned militia. And the militia will suffer from the fleeing dock menials being in their way.’