Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [24]
The city was finally sealed. Helsreach was ready.
And as night fell, the sky caught fire.
CHAPTER V
Fire in the Sky
Its name had been, in nobler years, The Purest Intent.
A strike cruiser, constructed on the minor forge world Shevilar and granted to the Shadow Wolves Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. It had been lost with all hands, captured by xenos raiders, thirty-two years before the Third War for Armageddon.
When a huge and shapeless amalgamation of scrap and flame came burning through the cloud cover above the fortified city, warning sirens sounded once more across the hive. The squadron of fighters in the air – commanded by Korten Barasath – voxed their inability to engage. The hulk was burning up already, and far out of their capability to damage with their Lightnings’ lascannons and long-barrelled autocannons.
The wing of fighters broke away as the hulk burned through the sky.
Thousands of soldiers manning the immense walls watched as the wreckage blazed its way overhead. The air itself shook with its passage, a palpable tremor from the thrum of overworked, dying engines.
Exactly eighteen seconds after it cleared the city walls, The Purest Intent ended its spaceborne life as it ploughed a new scar into Armageddon’s war-torn face. All of Helsreach shook to its foundations as the massive cruiser hammered into the ground and carved a blackened canyon in its wake.
It took a further two minutes for the crippling damage inflicted by the impact to kill the immense, howling engines. Several booster rings still roared gaseous plasma and fire as they tried to propel the vessel through the stars, unaware it was half-buried in the stinging sulphuric sands that would be its grave.
But the engines failed.
The flames cooled.
At last, there was silence.
The Purest Intent was dead, its bones strewn across the wastelands of Armageddon.
‘The ship registers as The Purest Intent,’ Colonel Sarren read out from the data-slate to the crowded war room. ‘An Astartes vessel, strike cruiser-class, belonging to the–’
‘Shadow Wolves,’ Grimaldus cut him off. The knight’s vox-voice was harsh and mechanical, betraying no emotion. ‘The Black Templars were with them at the end.’
‘The end?’ asked Cyria Tyro.
‘They fell at the Battle of Varadon eleven years ago. Their last companies were annihilated by the tyranid-breed xenos.’
Grimaldus closed his eyes and relished the momentary drift of focus into memory. Varadon. Blood of Dorn, it had been beautiful. No purer war had ever been fought. The enemy was endless, soulless, merciless… utterly alien, utterly hated, utterly without right to exist.
The knights had tried to fight their way to join up with the last of their brother Chapter, but the enemy tide was unrelenting in its ferocity. The aliens were viciously cunning, their swarming tides of claws and flesh-hooked appendages smashing into the two Astartes forces and keeping them isolated from each other. The Wolves were there in full force. Varadon was their home world. Distress calls had been screamed into the warp by astropaths weeks before, when their fortress-monastery fell to the enemy.
Grimaldus had been there at the very end. The last handful of Wolves, their blades broken and their bolters empty, had intoned the Litanies of Hate into the vox-channel they shared with the Black Templars. Such a death! They chanted their bitter fury at the foes even as they were slain. Grimaldus would never, could never, forget the Chapter’s final moment. A lone warrior, a mere battle-brother, horrendously wounded and on his knees beneath the Chapter’s standard, keeping the banner proud and upright even as the xenos creatures tore into him.
The war banner would never be allowed to fall while one of the Wolves yet lived.
Such a moment. Such honour. Such glory, to inspire warriors to remember your deeds for the rest of their own lives, and to fight harder in the hopes of matching such a beautiful death.
Grimaldus breathed out, restoring his senses to the present with irritated reluctance. How filthy this war would be by comparison.