Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [5]
Nowhere were the words of these seers and prophets more evident than the ravaged – yet rebuilt – Armageddon subsector, named for its greatest world, a world responsible for production and consumption on an immense and unmatched level.
Armageddon itself stood as a bastion of Imperial strength, churning out regiments of tanks from manufactories that never ceased activity by day or night. Millions of men and women wore the ochre armour of Armageddon’s Steel Legions, their features hidden behind the traditional respirator masks of this honoured and renowned division of the Imperial Guard.
The hives of this defiant planet reached into the pollution-rich cloud cover that wreathed the world in perpetual twilight. No wildlife howled on Armageddon. No beasts stalked their prey outside the ever-growing hive-cities. The call of the wild was the rattle and clank of ten thousand ammunition manufactories that never halted production. The stalking of animals was the grinding of tank treads across the world’s rockcrete surfaces, awaiting transport into the sky to serve in a hundred and more distant conflicts.
It was a world devoted to war in every way imaginable, made bitter by the scars of the past, soured by the wounds gouged into its face by humanity’s enemies. Armageddon always rebuilt after each devastation, but it was never permitted to forget.
The first and foremost reminder of the last war, the almighty Second War that saw billions dead, was a deep space installation named for one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death.
Dante, they called it.
It was from there that the mortals of Armageddon stared into the blackness of space, watching, waiting, praying that nothing stared back.
For fifty-seven years, those prayers had been answered.
But no longer. Imperial tacticians already had reliable figures from early engagements that confirmed the greenskin fleet bearing down on Armageddon as the largest xenos invasion force in the history of the segmentum. As the alien fleets closed around the system, Imperial reinforcements raced to break the blockaded sectors and land their troops on Armageddon before the invasion fleet arrived in the heavens above the doomed world.
A battle-barge of no standard design, the Crusader was a princely fortress-monastery, charcoal-black and bristling with gothic cathedral spires like a beast’s spines along its back. Weapons capable of pounding cities into dust – the claws of this night-stalking predator – aimed into the void. Along the ship’s length and clustered across its prow, hundreds of weapons batteries and lance cannons stood with mouths open to the silent darkness of space.
Aboard the ships, a thousand warriors cast off the shackles of training, preparation and meditation. At last, after weeks of passage through the Sea of Souls, Armageddon, beating heart-world of the subsector, was finally in sight.
My brothers’ names are Artarion, Priamus, Cador, Nerovar and Bastilan.
These are the knights that have waged war beside me for decades.
I watch them, each in turn, as we make ready for planetfall. Our arming chamber is a cell devoid of decoration, bare of sentiment, alive now with the methodical movements of dead-minded servitors machining our armour into place. The chamber is thick with the scholarly scent of fresh vellum from our armour scrolls, coppery oils from our ritually-cleansed weapons, and the ever-present cloying salty reek of sweating servitors.
I flex my arm, feeling my war plate’s false muscles of cable and fibre buzz with smooth vibration at the cycle of motion. Papyrus scrolls are draped over the angles of my armour, their delicate runic lettering listing the details of battles I could never forget. This paper, of good quality by Imperial standards, is manufactured on board the Crusader by serfs who pass the technique down generation to generation. Every role on the ship is vital. Every duty has its own honour.
My tabard, the white of sun-bleached bone, offers a stark contrast to the blacker than black plate beneath. The heraldic cross stands proud on my chest, where Astartes