Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [65]
The reports of their engagements reach me hourly. As yet, no casualties blacken our record. I cannot help but wonder who the first to fall will be, and how long the hundred of us will last as the hours become days, and the days become weeks.
This city will die. All that remains to be learned is just how long we can defy fate. And above all, I want the weapon buried beneath the wasteland’s sands.
I am drawing breath to recall our gunship when the vox explodes with panic. It is difficult to make any sense from the maelstrom of noise. Key words manage to break through the mess: Titan. Invigilata. Stormherald.
And then, a voice so much stronger than all others, speaking a single word. She sounds in pain as she says it.
‘Grimaldus.’
CHAPTER XII
In a Primarch’s Shadow
The gunship bursts across the sky, rattling around us in its ferocious race southward. It is all too easy to imagine the thick Armageddon clouds left in turmoil in our wake.
Wind roars into the crew compartment through the open bulkhead door. As is my right, I am first at the portal, gripping the edge of the airlock with one hand as the wind claws at my tabard and parchment scrolls. Beneath us, the city slides by – towers aiming up, streets laid flat. The former are aflame. The latter are flooded by ash and the enemy.
Already, many of the city’s outermost sectors are burning. Helsreach is what it is: an industrial city devoted to the production of fuel. There is much that will burn, here.
The flames choke the sky as the ring of fire swallowing the hive’s edges creeps ever inward. Reports of refugees spilling into the city’s core have increased tenfold. Housing them is no longer even the greatest problem; the trouble in the avenues where the civilians flock is that Sarren’s redeployment of his armour divisions suffers crippling congestion.
I do not judge him for this. His mastery of the city after arriving in the final weeks – only barely before we did – has been as efficient as could be expected from a human mind under such duress. I recall the initial briefings, when he was stifled by large sections of the civilian populace refusing to abandon their homes even in the face of invasion. In truth, it is not as if the city was built with an abundance of bunkers to house refugees anyway. With reluctance, he had allowed them to remain where they were, knowing the problem was – in part – a self-correcting one. As districts fell to the invaders, the civilian death toll would be catastrophic.
‘Well,’ he had said one night to the gathered commanders, ‘it will mean fewer refugees in the siege itself.’
I had admired him greatly in that moment. His merciless clarity was most commendable.
With a lurch, the Thunderhawk begins its descent. I brace myself, whispering words of reverence to the machine-spirit within the propulsion engines now attached to my armour. The jump pack is bulky and ancient, the metal pitted and scarred and in dire need of repainting, but its link to my armour is without flaw. I blink-clink the activation rune, and the hum of the backpack’s internal systems joins the growl of my active armour.
I see Stormherald.
Over my shoulder, Artarion sees the same. ‘Blood of Dorn,’ he says, his voice uncharacteristically soft.
The entire scene is tainted by the grey dust clouds in the air from fallen buildings. In this cloud of grey, half-buried in the debris of the exploded buildings, the Titan kneels in the street.
Sixty metres of walking lethality – an unstoppable weapons platform with the ornate cathedral adorning its shoulders – kneels in the street, defeated. Around it is the devastation of several fallen habitation towers. The invaders, curse their soulless lives, had set the surrounding hab-blocks to detonate and collapse on the Titan.
‘They