Helsreach

PROLOGUE Knight of the Inner Circle

I will die on this world.

I cannot tell where this conviction comes from. Whatever birthed it is a mystery to me, and yet the thought clings like a virus, blooming behind my eyes and taking deep root within my mind. It almost feels real enough to spread corruption to the rest of my body, like a true sickness.

It will happen soon, within the coming nights of blood and fire. I will draw my last breath, and when my brothers return to the stars, my ashes will be scattered over the priceless earth of this accursed world.

Armageddon.

Even the name twists my blood until burning oil beats through my veins. I feel anger now, hot and heavy, flowing through my heart and filtering into my limbs like boiling poison.

When the sensation - and it is a physical sensation - reaches my fingertips, my hands curl into fists. I do not make them adopt this shape, it simply happens. Fury is as natural to me as breathing. I neither fear nor resent its influence on my actions.

I am strong, born only to slay for the Emperor and the Imperium. I am pure, wearing the blackest of the black, trained to serve as a spiritual guide as well as a warleader. I am wrath incarnate, living only to kill until finally killed.

I am a weapon in the Eternal Crusade to forge humanity's mastership of the stars.

Yet strength, purity and wrath will not be enough. I will die on this world. I will die on Armageddon.

Soon, my brothers will ask me to consecrate the war that will be my death.

The thought plagues me not because I fear death, but because a futile death is anathema to me.

But this is no night to think such things. My lords, masters and brothers have gathered to honour me.

I am not sure I deserve this, but as with my sick sense of foreboding, this is a thought I keep to myself. I wear the black, and glare from behind the skulled visage of the immortal Emperor. It is not for one such as I to show doubt, to show weakness, to show even the whispering edges of blasphemy.

In the holiest chamber of our ancient flagship, I lower myself to one knee and bow my head, because this is what is asked of me. The time has come after a century and a half, and I wish it had not.

My mentor - the warrior who was my brother, father, teacher and master - is dead. After one hundred and sixty-six years of his guidance, I am on the edge of inheriting his mantle.

These are my thoughts as I kneel before my commanders, this bleak mesh of my master's death and my own yet to come. This is the blackness that festers unspoken.

At last, unaware of my secret torments, the High Marshal speaks my name.

'Grimaldus,' High Marshal Helbrecht intoned. His voice was a guttural rumble, rendered harsh from yelling orders and battle cries in a hundred wars on a hundred worlds.

Grimaldus did not raise his head. The knight closed his disquietingly gentle eyes, as if this gesture could seal the doubts within his skull.

'Yes, my liege.'

'We have brought you here to honour you, just as you have honoured us for so many years.'

Grimaldus said nothing, sensing it was not his time to speak. He knew why they were honouring him now, of course, and the knowledge was bitter. Mordred - Grimaldus's mentor, a Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade - was dead.

After the ritual, Grimaldus would take his place.

It was an honour he had waited one hundred and sixty-six years to receive.

A century and a half of wrath, courage and pain since the Battle of Fire and Blood, when he drew the eye of the revered Mordred - who was a lready ancient but unbowed, and who saw within the young Grimaldus a burning core of potential.

A century and a half since he was inducted into the lowest ranks of the Chaplain brotherhood, rising through the tiers in his master's shadow, knowing that he was being forged in war to replace his ageing guardian.

Over a century and a half of believing he would not deserve the title when it finally rested upon his shoulders.

Now the time had come, and his conviction had not changed.

'We have summoned you,' Helbrecht said, 'to be judged.'

'I have answered the summons,' Grimaldus said in the silence of the Reclusiam. 'I submit myself before your judgement, my liege.'

Helbrecht wore no armour, but his bulk was barely diminished. Clad in layered robes of bone-white and bearing his personal black heraldry, the High Marshal stood in the Temple of Dorn, his hands clutching an ornate helm with all due respect.

'Mordred is dead,' Helbrecht's voice was a deep murmur. 'Slain by the Archenemy. You, Grimaldus, have lost a master. We have all of us lost a brother.'

The Temple of Dorn, a museum, a Reclusiam, a sanctuary of hanging banners from ten thousand years of crusading, briefly came alive as the knights in the shadows intoned their agreement with their liege lord's words.

Silence returned, and Grimaldus kept his gaze on the floor.

'We mourn his loss,' the High Marshal said, 'but honour his wisdom in this, his final order.'

It comes to this. Grimaldus tensed. Show no weakness. Show no doubt.

'Grimaldus - warrior-priest of the Eternal Crusade. It was the belief of Reclusiarch Mordred that upon his death, you would be worthiest of our Brother-Chaplains to stand in his stead. His final decree before the returning of his gene-seed to the Chapter was that you, of all your brethren, would be the one to rise to the rank of Reclusiarch.'

Grimaldus opened his eyes and licked lips that had suddenly turned dry. Slowly he raised his head, facing the High Marshal, seeing Mordred's helm - a grinning steel skull - in the commander's scarred hands.

'Grimaldus,' Helbrecht spoke again, no hint of emotion colouring his voice. 'You are a veteran in your own right, and once stood as the youngest Sword Brother in the history of the Black Templars. As a Chaplain, your life has been without cowardice or shame, your ferocity and faith without equal. It is my belief, not merely the wish of your fallen master, that you should take the honour we offer you now.'

Grimaldus nodded, but uttered no words. His eyes, so deceptively soft in their gaze, did not waver from their stare. The helm's slanted eye lenses were the rich, deep red of arterial blood. The death mask was utterly familiar to him - the face of his master when the knights went to war, making it the face of his master for most of his life.

Its skullish visage smiled.

'Rise, if you would refuse this honour,' Helbrecht finished. 'Rise and walk from this sacred chamber, if you wish no place in the hierarchy of our most noble Chapter.'

He tells me to rise if I want to turn my back on the great honour being offered to me. Leave if I wish no place among the commanders of the Eternal Crusade.

I don't move. Despite my doubts, my muscles remain locked. The steel mask sneers, a dark leer that is soothing for its brutal familiarity. From beyond the grave, Mordred grins at me.

He believed I was worthy of this. That is all that matters. I had never known him to be wrong.

I feel the edge of a smile creeping across my own lips. It will not fade, no matter how I try to quell it. As I kneel in this hallowed hall, I know I'm smiling, but it's a private moment despite the dozens of fellow warriors watching from the banner-lined walls.

Perhaps they mistake my smile for confidence?

I will never ask, because I do not care.

Helbrecht approaches at last, and with the silken rasp of steel stroking steel, he draws the holiest blade in the Imperium of Man.

The sword was as ancient as human relics could be, given form and purpose in the forges of Terra after the great Heresy. In those nights of saga and legend, it was carried into battle by Sigismund, the first Emperor's Champion, favoured son of the Primarch Rogal Dorn.

The blade itself, as long as a mortal man is tall, was wrought from the broken remains of Lord Dorn's own sword. In this temple, where the Chapter's greatest artefacts are kept in reverently maintained stasis fields to ward off the corrosive touch of time, the High Marshal held the most sacred treasure in the Black Templar armoury.

'You will have your own rituals within the Chaplain brotherhood,' Helbrecht said, his voice solemn with respect. 'For now, I recognise you as the inheritor to your master's mantle.'

The blade's silver tip lowered, pointing directly at Grimaldus's throat. 'You have waged war at my side for two hundred years, Grimaldus. Will you stand at my side as Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade?'

'Yes, my liege.'

Helbrecht nodded, sheathing the blade. Grimaldus tensed again, turning his head and baring his cheek.

With the force of a hammer, the back of Helbrecht's fist crashed into the Chaplain's jaw. Grimaldus grunted, tasting the coppery vitality of his own blood - his primarch's blood - and he grinned up at his commander through blood-pinked teeth. Helbrecht spoke again.

'I dub thee Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade. You are now a leader of our blessed Chapter.' The High Marshal raised his hand, showing the flecks of Grimaldus's blood marking his curled fingers. 'As a knight of the inner circle, let that be the last blow you receive unanswered.'

Grimaldus nodded, unclenching his jaw, calming his heart and fighting the sudden flood of his killing urge. Even expecting the ritual strike, his instincts cried at him to respond in kind.

'It… will be so, my liege.'

'As it should be,' said Helbrecht. 'Rise, Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade.'

CHAPTER I Arrival

For some hours after his ritual entrance into the highest echelons of the Chapter, Grimaldus stood alone in the Temple of Dorn.

Without a breeze to breathe life into the austere chamber, the great banners hung unmoving, some faded with the years, others brightly woven, still others even bearing dried bloodstains. Grimaldus looked upon the heraldry of his brothers' crusades.

Lastrati, piles of skulls and burning braziers depicting the war of attrition on the surface of that accursed heretic world…

Apostasy, showing the aquila chained to the globe, when the Templars were recalled to Holy Terra for the first time in thousands of years, to shed the blood of the false High Lord Vandire…

And on into the more recent wars in which Grimaldus himself had played a part - Vinculus, with the sword impaling a daemon, where the knights had crashed against the tainted followers of the Archenemy in the great Battle of Fire and Blood - when Grimaldus himself had been taken from the ranks of the Sword Brethren and begun his gruelling rise through the tiers of the Chaplain brotherhood.

Dozens of banners hung in the still air, descending from the ornately carved ceiling, telling the tales of the glories won and the lives lost in each single facet of the Eternal Crusade.

The only noise except for Grimaldus's own breathing was the crackling hum of stasis fields enclosing Templar relics. Grimaldus passed one, a blurry field of smoky blue force revealing through its milky surface a bolter that had once belonged to Castellan Duron two thousand years before. The kill-markings scratched into the firearm's surface, etched in the tiniest Gothic lettering, covered the entire weapon like holy scripture.

Grimaldus stood by the plinth displaying the bolter for some time, his fingers itching to enter the release code on the keypad built into the shield's column. Such secrets were the purview of the Chaplain brotherhood that maintained this shrine, and even before he had risen to his current rank, Grimaldus had honoured the machine-spirits of the chamber's relics through ritual blessings and reconsecrations.

There was great succour in bearing the weapons of champions, even if only to cleanse and purify them after a warp jump.

Only one of the plinths - and in the Temple of Dorn, there were over a hundred occupied displays - bore what Grimaldus had come for. He stood before the short column, reading the silver plaque beneath the pulsing stasis shield.

Mordred Reclusiarch.

'We are judged in life for the evil we destroy.'

Beneath the words was a keypad, each key bearing a Gothic sigil in gold leaf. Grimaldus entered the nineteen-digit code for this specific column, and the stasis field powered down with a grinding of ancient engines inside the stone plinth.

Upon the flat surface of the white stone column, a weapon rested, deactivated and silent, freed of the blue illumination that had protected it.

Without any ceremony at all, Grimaldus clutched the maul's haft and raised it in his sure grip. The head was a hammer of holy gold and blessed adamantium fashioned into the shape of eagle wings over a stylised Templar cross. The haft was darkened metal as long as the knight's own arm.

The weapon's ornate head caught the dim glow from the lume-globes ensconced in the walls, and was painted briefly in flashes of reflected light as he turned it in his hands.

The warrior-priest stood like this for some time.

'Brother,' came a voice from behind. Grimaldus turned, instinct bringing the weapon to bear.

Despite never holding the relic before, his scarred fingertips found the activation rune along its handle before his heart could even beat once. The eagle-winged hammerhead flared with threatening brightness, serpents of hissing electricity flickering over the gold and silver metal.

The figure smiled to be revealed in such stark illumination. In a face pockmarked and crevassed by decades of battle, Grimaldus saw the amusement in the younger knight's pale eyes.

'Reclusiarch,' the figure inclined his head in greeting.

'Artarion.'

'We draw near to our destination. Estimates put translation back into realspace within the hour. I took the liberty of readying the squad for planetfall.'

Artarion's grin, much like Artarion himself, was ugly to look upon. In contrast, Grimaldus finally returned the smile, but as with his eyes there was an unsuspected gentleness in the expression.

'This world will burn,' the warrior-priest said, not even a shadow of doubt creeping into his voice.

'It will not be the first.' Artarion's scratched lips parted to reveal steel teeth - implanted replacements due to a sniper shot fifteen years before. The rifle round had taken him in the side of the face, shattering his jaw. The mess of scar tissue webbing the flesh around the left side of his lips added to the thin, sneering image he projected when his helm was removed. 'It will not be the first,' he said again, 'nor the last.'

'Have you seen the projections? The fleet auguries, the number of vessels in the local systems already, the reports of those yet to arrive?'

'I lost interest when the numbers became too high for me to count on my fingers.' Artarion snorted at his own weak jest. 'We will fight and win, or fight and die. All that ever changes is the colour of the sky we fight under, and the shade of the blood on our blades.'

Grimaldus lowered the crozius hammer, as if only then realising he still held it at the ready. A rich darkness settled over their sight as the relic's crackling illumination faded. In the wake of the brightness, the sharp scent of ozone - that strange freshness after a storm - filled the air. The power cells within the maul's haft whined as they reluctantly cooled down. The weapon's spirit hungered for war.

'You speak with a soldier's heart, but you are wrong to be so dismissive. This campaign… This has the weight of history about it. It would be the gravest of errors to consider this merely another conflict to add to the honour rolls.'

The softness had left Grimaldus's voice now. When he spoke, it was with the bitter passion Artarion was all too familiar with, fierce and thick with anticipation - the growled challenge of a caged animal. 'The surface of this world will burn until all of mankind's great achievements upon it are naught but ash and memory.'

'I have never heard you claim we would lose before, brother.'

Grimaldus shook his head, his voice still low and fevered. 'The planet will burn regardless of our triumph or defeat. I speak of the coming crusade's underpinning truth.'

'You are so certain?'

'I feel it in my blood. Win or lose,' the Chaplain said, 'come the final day on Armageddon, those of us that still stand will realise no war has ever cost us so dearly.'

'Have you shared these concerns with the High Marshal?' Artarion scratched the back of his neck, his fingertips soothing the itching skin around a spinal socket.

Grimaldus chuckled, momentarily blindsided by his brother's naivety.

'You think he needs me to tell him?'

Few ships in the Imperium of Man matched the lethal grandeur of The Eternal Crusader.

Some ships sailed the heavens like the seaborne vessels of ancient Terra, journeying between the stars with solemnity and a measured grace. The Eternal Crusader was not one of these. Like a spear hurled into the void by the hand of Rogal Dorn himself, the flagship of the Templars had been slicing through space for ten thousand years of war. Its engines raged, streaming plasma contrails in their wake as they powered the vessel from world to world in echo of the Emperor's Great Crusade.

And the Crusader was not alone.

At her back, the capital vessels Night's Vigil and Majesty burned their engines hard, striving to keep pace and fall into a lance formation with their flagship. In the wake of these heavy cruisers - a battle-barge and smaller strike cruiser respectively - a wing of support frigates formed the rest of the lance. Seven in total, each of these faster interceptor vessels powered forward with less of a struggle to maintain formation with the Crusader.

The ship burst back into reality, trailing discoloured warp-smog from its protesting Geller field, the brilliance of its plasma drives flaring with gaseous leakage that misted around the void shields of the vessels which slammed back into realspace just behind.

Ahead of them lay an ashen globe, darkened by unclean cloud cover, strangely at peace despite the turmoil surrounding it.

If one were to look into the void around the bitter, punished world of Armageddon, one would see a thriving subsector of Imperial space where even the most prosperous hive planets bore more than their fair share of slowly-healing wounds.

It was a region of space where the worlds themselves were scarred. War, and the fear of another colossal sector-wide conflict, hung over the trillions of loyal Imperial souls like the threat of a storm forever on the edge of breaking.

It was always said by some that the Imperium of Man was dying. These heretical voices spoke of mankind's endless wars against its manifold foes, and decreed that humanity's ultimate fate was being decided in the fires of a million, million battlefields across the countless stars within the God-Emperor's grip.

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 green-skin 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 of lesser Chapters wear the Emperor's aquila. We do not wear His symbol. We are His symbol.

My fingers twitch as my gauntlet locks into place. That was not intentional - a nerve-spasm, a pain response. An invasive but familiar coldness settles over my forearm as my gauntlet's neural linkage spike sinks into my wrist to bond with the bones and true muscles there.

I make a fist with my hand armoured in black ceramite, then release it. Each finger flexes in turn, as if pulling a trigger. Satisfied, its dead eyes flashing with an acknowledgement of a job complete, an arming servitor moves away to bring my second gauntlet.

My brothers go through the same rituals of checking and rechecking. A curious sense of unease descends upon me, but I refuse to give it voice. I watch them now because I believe this is the last time we will go through this ritual together.

I will not be the only one to die upon Armageddon.

Artarion, Priamus, Cador, Nerovar and Bastilan. We are the knights of Squad Grimaldus.

Within his veins, Cador carries the blessed blood of Rogal Dorn with what seems like weary honour. His face is shattered and his body tormented - now half-bionic due to untreatable wounds - but he remains defiant, even indefatigable. He is older than I, older by far. His decades within the Sword Brethren are behind him now; he was released with all honour when his advancing age and increasing bionics left him less than the exemplar he had been before.

Priamus is the rising sun to Cador's dusk. He is aware of his skills in the unsubtle and undignified way of many young warriors. Without even the ghost of humility, his roars of triumph on the battlefield sound like cries for attention, a braggart's declarations. A blademaster, he calls himself. Yet he is not mistaken.

Artarion is… Artarion. My shadow, just as I am his. It is rare among our number for any knight to lay aside personal glory, yet Artarion is the one who carries my banner into battle. He has joked more times than I care to remember that he does so only to provide the enemy with a target lock on my location. For all his great courage, he is not a man blessed with a skilful sense of humour. The mangling wound that fouled his face was a sniper shot meant for me. I carry that knowledge with me each time we go to war.

Nerovar is the newest among us. He holds the dubious honour of being the only knight I chose to stand with me, while all others were appointed to fight by my side. The squad required the presence of an Apothecary. In the trials, only Nerovar impressed the rest of us with his quiet endurance. He labours now over his arm-mounted narthecium, blue eyes narrowed as he tests the flickering snap of surgical blades and cutting lasers. A sickening clack! sounds as he fires his reductor. The giver of merciful death, the extractor of gene-seed - its impaling component snaps from its housing, then retracts with sinister slowness.

Bastilan is last. Bastilan, always the best and least of us all. A leader but not a commander - an inspiring presence, but not a strategist - forever a sergeant, never fated to rise as a castellan or marshal. He has always said his role as such is all he desires. I pray he speaks the truth, for if he is deceiving us, he hides the lie well behind his dark eyes.

He is the one who speaks to me now. What he says chills my blood.

'I have heard from Geraint and Lograine of the Sword Brethren,' he chooses his words carefully, 'that there is talk of the High Marshal nominating you to lead a crusade.'

And for a moment, everyone stops moving.

The skies over Armageddon were rich and thick with a sick, greyish-yellow cast. Sulphurous cloud cover was nothing new to the population, with their hive walls treated and shielded against the storm season's downpours of acid rain.

Around each hive-city across the planet's surface, vast landing fields were cleared, either hurriedly paved with rockcrete or simply ground flat under the treads of hundreds of landscaper trucks. Around Hades Hive, rain scythed down onto the cleared areas and sparked off the dense heat-shimmer of the city's protective void shields. Across the world, the heavens were in turmoil, weather patterns ravaged by the atmospheric disturbance caused by countless ships breaking cloud cover every day.

Yet at Hades Hive, the storms were especially fierce. Hundreds of troop carriers, their paint already melted to reveal bare, dull metal in places, endured the rainfall as they rested on the landing fields. Some were disgorging columns of men into the hastily-erected campsites that were spreading across the wastelands between the hives, while others sat in silence, awaiting clearance to return to orbit.

Hades itself was little more than industrial scar tissue blighting Armageddon's face. Despite efforts to repair the city after the last war over half a century before, it still bore a ragged share of memories. Toppled spires, broken domes, shattered cathedrals - this was the skyline after the death of a hive.

A squadron of Thunderhawk gunships pierced the caul of cloud cover. To those manning the battlements of Hades, they were a flock of crows winging down from the darkening sky.

Mordechai Ryken scanned the gunships through his magnoculars. After several seconds of zoom-blur, green reticules locked onto the streaking avian hulls and transcribed an analysis in dim white text alongside the image.

Ryken lowered the viewfinder scope. It hung on a leather cord around his neck, resting on the ochre jacket he wore as part of his uniform. His breath was hot on his face, recycled and filtered through the cheap rebreather mask he wore over his mouth and nose.

The air still tasted like a latrine, though. And it didn't exactly smell any better. The joys of high sulphur content in the atmosphere. Ryken was still waiting for the day he would be used to it, and he'd been stuck on this rock so far for every day of his thirty-seven years of life.

A way down the battlements, working on getting an anti-air turret operational, a team of his men clustered with a robed tech-priest. The multi-barrelled monstrosity dwarfed the half a dozen soldiers standing in its shadow.

'Sir?' one of them voxed. Ryken knew who it was despite the shapeless overcoats they all wore. Only one of them was female.

'What is it, Vantine?'

'Those are Astartes gunships, aren't they?'

'Good eyes.' And they were, at that. Vantine would've made sniper a long time ago if she could aim worth a damn. Alas, there was more to sniping than just seeing.

'Which ones?' she pressed.

'Does it matter? Astartes are Astartes. Reinforcements are reinforcements.'

'Yes, but which ones?'

'Black Templars.' Ryken took a breath, tonguing a sore cut on his lip as he watched the fleet of Thunderhawks touching down in the distance. 'Hundreds of them.'

An Imperial Guard column rolled out from Hades to meet the newest arrivals. A command Chimera, flying no shortage of impressive flags, led six Leman Russ battle tanks, their collective passage chewing into the newly laid rockcrete.

Bulky troop landers were still setting down elsewhere on the landing field, the wash from their engines blasting wind and gritty dust in all directions, but General Kurov of the Armageddon Steel Legion did not make personal appearances to greet just anyone.

Despite his advancing age, Kurov cut a straight-backed figure in his grimy uniform of ochre fatigues and black webbing, with flak padding on the torso. No sign of his many medals, not a hint of gold, silver, ribbon, or the other trappings of pomp. Here was the man that had led the Council of Armageddon for decades, and earned the respect of his people by wading knee-deep in the sulphur marshes and bracken forests after the last war, hunting xenos survivors in the infamous Ork Hunter platoons.

He stomped down the ramp, setting his cap to guard his eyes against the heatless, yet annoyingly bright, afternoon sunlight. A team of Guardsmen, each as raggedly attired as their commanding officer, clanged down the ramp after the general. As they moved, misshapen skulls clacked and rattled together from where they hung on belts and bandoliers. Across their chests, they gripped lasguns that hadn't resembled standard-issue for some time - each bore its own display of modifications and accoutrements.

Kurov marched his ramshackle gang of bodyguards in decent parade order, yet without any conscious effort. He led them to the waiting Thunderhawks, each of which was still emitting a dull machine-whine as their boosters cycled into inactivity.

Eighteen gunships. Kurov knew that from the initial auspex report as the Templars had landed. They sat now in disorganised unmoving ranks, ramps withdrawn and bulkheads sealed. Their undersides, blunt noses and wing edges still showed a glimmer of cooling heat shields with the after-effects of planetfall.

Three Astartes stood before the gunship fleet, still as statues, with no evidence of which vessels they'd disembarked from.

Only one wore a helm. It stared through ruby eye lenses, its faceplate a skull of steel.

'Are you Kurov?' one of the Astartes demanded.

'I am,' the general replied. 'It is my h—'

In unison, the three inhuman warriors drew their weapons. Kurov took an involuntary step back, not out of fear but surprise. The knights' weapons went live in a humming chorus of wakening power cells. Lightning, controlled and rippling coated the killing edges of the three artefacts.

The first was a giant clad in armour of bronze and gold against black, the surface of his war plate inscribed with retellings of his deeds in miniscule Gothic runes, as well as trinkets, trophies and honour badges of red wax seals and papyrus strips. He clutched a two-handed sword, its blade longer than Kurov was tall, and drove its point into the ground. The knight's face was shaped by the wars he had fought - square-jawed, scarred, blunt-featured and expressionless.

The second Astartes, clad in plainer black war plate, wore a cloak of dark weave and scarlet lining. His sword in no way matched the grandeur of the first knight's relic, but the long blade of darkened iron was no less lethal for its simplicity. This knight's face lacked the expressionless ease of the first. He fought not to sneer as he drove his own sword tip into the ground.

And the last, the knight who still wore his helm, carried no blade. The rockcrete beneath their feet shivered slightly under the pounding of his war-mace thudding onto the ground. The mace's head, a stylised knightly cross atop Imperial eagle wings, flared in protest, lightning crackling as the metal kissed the ground.

The three knights knelt, heads lowered. All of this happened at once, in the space of no more than three seconds since Kurov last spoke.

'We are the Emperor's knights,' the giant in bronze and gold intoned. 'We are the warriors of the Eternal Crusade, and the sons of Rogal Dorn. I am Helbrecht, High Marshal of the Black Templars. With me is Bayard, Emperor's Champion, and Grimaldus, Reclusiarch.'

At their names, both knights nodded in turn.

Helbrecht continued, his voice a growled drawl. 'Aboard our vessels in orbit are Marshals Ricard and Amalrich. We come to offer you our blades, our service, and the lives of over nine hundred warriors in the defence of your world.'

Kurov stood in silence. Nine hundred Astartes… Entire star systems were conquered with a fraction of that. He had greeted a dozen Astartes commanders in recent weeks, but few had brought such significant strength with them.

'High Marshal,' the general said at last. 'There is a war council forming tonight. You and your warriors are welcome there.'

'It will be done,' the High Marshal said.

'I'm glad to hear it,' Kurov replied. 'Welcome to Armageddon.'

CHAPTER II The Abandoned Crusade

Ryken was not smiling.

He'd been a lifelong believer in not shooting the messenger, but today that tradition was in danger of expiring. Behind him loomed an anti-air turret, blanketing them all in its shadow and shielding them from the dim glare of the morning sun. A squad of his men worked on this turret, as they had worked on countless others along the walls in the space of the last two months. It was almost operational. They weren't techs, by any means, but they knew the basic maintenance rites and calibration rituals.

'One minute to test fire,' Vantine said, her voice muffled by her rebreather mask.

And that was when the messenger showed up. It was also when Ryken stopped smiling, despite the fact the messenger was easy on the eyes, as over-starched, narrowed-eyed tactica types went.

'I want these orders rechecked,' he demanded - calmly, but a demand nevertheless.

'With all due respect, sir,' the messenger straightened her own ochre uniform, 'these orders come from the Old Man himself. He's reorganising the disposition of all our forces, and the Steel Legion are honoured to be first in that reappraisal.'

The words stole Ryken's desire to argue. So it was true, then. The Old Man was back.

'But Helsreach is half a continent away,' he tried. 'We've been working on the Hades wall-guns for months.'

'Thirty seconds to test fire,' Vantine called.

The messenger, whose name was Cyria Tyro, wasn't smiling either. In her position as adjutant quintus to General Kurov, grunts and plebeians were forever questioning the orders she relayed, as if she would ever dare alter a single word of the general's instructions. The other adjutants had no difficulties in this area, she was sure of it. For some unknown reason, these lowborn dregs just simply didn't take well to her. Perhaps they were jealous of her position? If so, then they were more foolish than she'd have given them credence for.

'I have long been entrusted with certain aspects of the general's plans,' Tyro lied, 'that frontliners such as yourself are only now being made aware of. I apologise if this is a surprise to you, major, but orders are orders. And these orders come with the highest mandate imaginable.'

'Are we not even going to defend the damn hive?'

At that moment, Vantine test-fired the turret. The floor beneath their feet shook as four cannon barrels blared their anger up at the empty sky. Ryken swore, though it was drowned out in the ear-ringing thunder of the gun's echo. Tyro also swore, though unlike Ryken's general lament, hers was aimed at Vantine and the gun crew.

The major was close to yelling over the ache in his ears. It was fading, but not fast.

'I said, are we not even going to defend the damn hive?'

'You are not,' Tyro almost pouted, her mouth compressed in restrained irritation. 'You are going to Helsreach with your regiment. Your transports leave tonight. All of the 101st Steel Legion is to be aboard and ready for transport by sunset in six point five hours.'

Ryken paused. Six and a half hours to get three thousand men and women into heavy lifter transports, gunships and land trains. It was the kind of bad news that made the major feel the need to be overwhelmingly honest.

'Colonel Sarren is going to be furious.'

'Colonel Sarren has dealt with this assignment with grace and solemn devotion to his duty, major. Your commanding officer still has much to teach you in that regard, I see.'

'Cute. Now tell me why it's us being sent all the way to Helsreach. I thought Insan and the 121st were kings of that shitpile.'

'Colonel Insan had a terminal failure of his augmetic heart infusers this morning. His second officer requested Sarren by name, and General Kurov agreed.'

'That old bastard's finally dead? That'll teach him to lay off the garage-brewed sauce. Ha! All those expensive augmetics he had done, and he keels over six months later. I like that. That's delicious.'

'Major! Some respect, if you please.'

Ryken frowned. 'I don't like you,' he told Tyro.

'How grievous,' the general's assistant replied, and there was no mistaking the dark, unamused scowl on her face. 'For you have been appointed a liaison to aid in dealings with the Astartes and the conscripted militia.' She looked as if she'd eaten something sour and it was still wriggling on her tongue. 'So… I will be coming with you.'

A moment of curious kinship passed between them, almost going unspoken. They were being exiled to the same place, after all. Their eyes met in that moment, and the foundations of something like a reluctant friendship almost bloomed between them.

It was broken when Ryken walked away.

'I still don't like you.'

'Hades Hive will not survive the first week.'

The man speaking is ancient, and he looks every hour of his age. What keeps him on his feet is a mixture of minimal rejuvenat chem-surgeries, crude bionics, and a faith in the Emperor founded in hatred for the enemies of Man.

I liked him the moment my visor's targeting reticules locked onto him. Both piety and hate echo in his every word.

He should not hold rank here - not to the degree he does. He is merely a commissar in the Imperial Guard, and such a title does not tend to make generals, colonels, Astartes captains and Chapter Masters remain in polite silence when it comes to tactical planning. Yet to the humans at this war council, and the citizens of Armageddon, he is the Old Man, a beloved hero of the Second War fifty-seven years ago.

Not just a hero. The hero.

His name is Sebastian Yarrick. Even we Astartes must respect that name.

And when he tells us all that Hades Hive will be destroyed within a matter of days, a hundred Imperial commanders, human and Astartes alike, hang on his every word.

I am one of them. This will be my first true command.

Commissar Sebastian Yarrick leans over the edge of a hololithic display table. With his remaining hand - the other arm is nothing but a stump - he keys in coordinates on the numeric datapad, and the hololith projection of Hades Hive widens with flickering impatience to display both of the planet's hemispheres in insignificant detail.

The Old Man, a gaunt and wizened human of sharp features and skeletally-obvious facial bones, gestures to the blip on the map that represents Hades Hive and its surrounding territories. Wastelands, in the main.

'Six decades ago,' he says, 'the Great Enemy met his defeat at Hades. Our defence here was what won us that war.'

There are general murmurs of assent. The commissar's voice carries around the expansive chamber through floating skull drones equipped with vox-speakers where their jaws had once been.

I am surrounded by the familiar hum of active power armour, though the scents and faces that meet my eyes are new to me. Standing to my left at a respectful distance, his face raggedly proud around extensive bionics, is Chapter Master Seth of the Flesh Tearers - known to his men as the Guardian of the Rage. He smells of sacred weapon oils, his primarch's potent blood running beneath his weathered skin, and the spicy, unwholesome reptilian scent of the lizard predator-kings that stalk the jungles of his home world. Seth is flanked by his own officers, each one bareheaded and with faces as pitted and cracked as their master's. Whatever wars have occupied the Flesh Tearers in recent decades, the conflicts have not been kind to them.

To my left, my liege Helbrecht stands resplendent in his battle armour of black and bronze. Bayard, the Emperor's Champion, is by his side. Both rest their helmets on the table's surface, the stern helms distorting the edge of the hololithic display, and give their full attention to the ancient commissar.

I cross my arms over my chest and do the same.

'Why?' someone asks. Their voice is low, too low to be human, and carries over the chamber without the need of vox-amplification. A hundred heads turn to regard an Astartes in the bright red-orange of a lesser Chapter, one unknown to me. He steps forward, leaning his knuckles on the table, facing Yarrick from almost twenty metres distance.

'We recognise Brother-Captain Amaras,' an Imperial herald announces from his position at Yarrick's side, smoothing the formal blue robes of his office. He bangs the butt of his staff on the ground three times. 'Commander of the Angels of Fire.'

Amaras nods in thanks, and fixes Yarrick with his unblinking gaze.

'Why would the greenskin warlord simply annihilate the greatest battlefield of the last war? Surely our forces should muster at Hades and stand ready to defend against the largest assault.'

Murmurs of agreement ripple throughout the gathered commanders. Emboldened, Amaras smiles at Yarrick.

'We are the Emperor's Chosen, mortal. We are His Angels of Death. We have centuries of battle experience compared to these human commanders at your side.'

'No,' another voice replies. This one is distorted into a vox-born snarl, filtered through a helm's speakers. I swallow as the herald bangs the staff another three times.

I had not realised I'd spoken out loud.

'We recognise Brother-Chaplain Grimaldus,' he calls out. 'Reclusiarch of the Black Templars.'

Grimaldus shook his head at the gathered commanders. Over a hundred, human and Astartes, all standing around the huge table in this converted auditorium once used for whatever dreary theatre performances occurred on a manufactory world. A riot of colours, heraldry, symbols of unity, varied uniforms, regimental designations and iconography. General Kurov stood at the commissar's shoulder, deferring to the Old Man in all things.

'The xenos do not think as we do,' Grimaldus said. 'The greenskins do not come to Armageddon for vengeance, or to seek to bleed us for the defeats they have suffered at Imperial hands in the past. They come for the pleasure of violence.'

Yarrick, a skeleton wreathed in pale flesh and a dark uniform, watched the knight in silence. Amaras pounded his fist onto the table and pointed at the Templar. For a moment of deathly calm, Grimaldus considered drawing his pistol and slaying him where he stood.

'That lends credence to ray belief,' Amaras almost snarled.

'Not at all. Have you inspected what remains of Hades Hive? It is a ruin. There is nothing to fight over, nothing to defend. The Great Enemy knows this. He will be aware that Imperial forces will put up no more than a token resistance here, and fall back to defend hives that are still worth defending. It is likely the warlord will obliterate Hades from orbit, rather than seek to take it.'

'We cannot let this hive fall! It is a symbol of mankind's defiance! With respect, Chaplain—'

'Enough,' Yarrick said. 'Peace, Brother-Captain Amaras. Grimaldus speaks with wisdom.'

Grimaldus inclined his head in thanks.

'I will not be silenced by a mortal,' Amaras growled, but the fight was gone from him. Yarrick - the thin, ancient commissar - just stared at the Astartes captain. After several moments, Amaras looked back to the hololithic topography around the hive. Yarrick turned back to the gathered officers, his one human eye stern and his augmetic one whirring in its socket as it refocussed on the faces before him.

'Hades will not survive the first week,' he said again, this time shaking his head. 'We must abandon the hive and spread the forces here to other bastions of strength. This is not the Second War. What is coming in-system now far exceeds what has laid waste to the planet before. The other hives must be reinforced a thousand times over.' He took a moment to clear his throat, and a cough stole over him, dry and hoarse. When it subsided, the Old Man smiled without even the ghost of humour.

'Hades will burn. We must make our stand elsewhere.'

At this cue, General Kurov stepped forward with a data-slate.

'We come to the divisions of command.' He took a breath, and pressed on. 'The fleet that will besiege Armageddon is too vast to repel.'

A chorus of jeers rose. Kurov rode them out. Grimaldus, Helbrecht and Bayard were among those that remained absolutely silent.

'Hear me, friends and brothers,' Kurov sighed. 'And hear me well. Those of you who insist this war will be anything more than a conflict of bitter attrition are deceiving yourselves. At current estimates, we have over fifty thousand Astartes in the Armageddon subsector, and thirty times the number of Imperial Guardsmen. And it will still not be enough to secure a clean victory. At our best estimations, Battlefleet Armageddon, the orbital defences, and the Astartes fleets remaining in the void will be able to deny the enemy landing for nine days. These are our best estimates.'

'And the worst?' asked an Astartes officer bedecked in white wolf furs, wearing the grey war plate of the Space Wolves. His body language betrayed his impatience. He almost paced, like a canine in a cage.

'Four days,' the Old Man said through his grim smile.

Silence descended again. Kurov didn't waste it.

'Admiral Parol of Battlefleet Armageddon has outlined his plan and uploaded it to the tactical network for all commanders to review. Once the orbital war is lost, be it four days or nine, our fleets will break from the planet in a fighting withdrawal. From then on, Armageddon will be defenceless beyond what is already entrenched upon the surface. The orks will be free to land whatever and wherever they wish. Admiral Parol will lead the remaining Naval ships of the fleet in repeated guerrilla strikes against the invaders' vessels still in orbit.'

'Who will lead the Astartes vessels?' Captain Amaras spoke up again.

There was another pause, before Commissar Yarrick nodded to a dark-armoured cluster of warriors across the table.

'Given his seniority and the expertise of his Chapter, High Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars will take overall command of the Astartes fleets.'

And once more, there was uproar, several Astartes commanders demanding that the glory be theirs. The knights ignored it.

'We are to remain in orbit?' Grimaldus leaned closer to his commander and voiced the question.

The High Marshal didn't take his eyes from Yarrick. 'We are the obvious choice to command the Astartes elements in the orbital battles.'

The Chaplain looked across the chamber, at the various leaders and officers of a hundred different forces.

I was wrong, he thought. I will not die in futility on this world. Eagerness, hot and urgent, flushed through his system, as real and vital as a flood of adrenaline gushing through his two hearts.

'The Crusader will plunge like a lance into the core of their fleet. High Marshal, we can slaughter the greenskin tyrant before he even sets foot on the world below us.'

Helbrecht lifted his gaze from the ancient commissar as his Chaplain spoke. He turned to Grimaldus, his dark eyes piercing the other knight's skull mask with their intensity.

'I have already spoken with the other marshals, my brother. We must leave a contingent on the surface. I will lead the orbital crusade. Amalrich and Ricard will lead the forces in the Ash Wastes. All that remains is a single crusade, to defend one of the hive cities that yet remains ungarrisoned by Astartes.'

Grimaldus shook his head. 'That is not our duty, my liege. Both Amalrich and Ricard have a host of honours inscribed upon their armour. Each has led greater crusades alone. Neither will relish an exile to a filthy manufactorum hive while a thousand of their brothers wage a glorious war in the heavens. You would shame them.'

'And yet,' Helbrecht was implacable, his features set in stone, 'a commander must remain.'

'Don't.' The knight's blood ran cold. 'Don't do this.'

'It is already done.'

'No,' he said, and meant it with every fibre of his being. 'No.'

'This is not the time. The decision is made, Grimaldus. I know you, as I knew Mordred. You will not refuse this honour.'

'No,' Grimaldus said again, loud enough that other commanders began to stare.

Helbrecht said nothing. Grimaldus stepped closer to him.

'I would burst the Great Enemy's black heart in my hand, and cast his blasphemous flagship to the surface of Armageddon wreathed in holy fire. Do not leave me here, Helbrecht. Do not deny me this glory.'

'You will not refuse this honour,' the High Marshal said, his voice as stony as his face.

Grimaldus wanted no further part in the proceedings. Worse, he knew he was irrelevant here. As deliberations and tactics were discussed for the coming orbital defence, he turned from the hololithic display.

'Wait, brother.' Helbrecht's voice made it a request, not an order, and that made it easy to refuse.

Grimaldus stalked from the chamber without another word.

Their destination was called, with bleakness so typical of this world, Helsreach.

'Blood of Dorn,' Artarion swore with feeling. 'Now that's a sight.'

'This is… huge,' Nerovar whispered.

The four Thunderhawks tore across the sulphurous sky, parting sick yellow clouds that drifted apart in their wake. From the cockpit of the lead aircraft, six knights watched the expansive city below.

And expansive barely covered it.

The four gunships, boosters howling, veered in graceful unison around one of the tallest industrial spires. It was slate-grey, belching thick smoke into the dirty sky, merely one of hundreds.

A wing of escorts, small and manoeuvrable Lightning-pattern air superiority fighters, coasted alongside the Astartes Thunderhawks. They were neither welcome nor unwelcome, merely ignored.

'We cannot be the only Astartes strength sent to this city.' Nerovar removed his white helmet with a hiss of venting air pressure and stared with naked eyes at the metropolis flashing beneath. 'How can we hold this alone?'

'We will not be alone,' Sergeant Bastilan said. 'The Guard is with us. And militia forces.'

'Humans,' Priamus sneered.

'The Legio Invigilata has landed to the east of the city,' Bastilan said to the swordsman. 'Titans, my brother. I don't see you sneering at that.'

Priamus didn't answer. But nor did he agree.

'What is that?'

The knights leaned forward at their leader's words. Grimaldus gestured down at a vast stretch of rockcreted roadway, wide enough to accommodate the landing of a bulk cruiser or a wallowing Imperial Guard troop carrier.

'A highway, sir,' the pilot said. He checked his instruments. 'Hel's Highway.'

Grimaldus was silent for several moments, just watching the colossal road and the thousands upon thousands of conveyances making their way along it in both directions.

'This roadway splits the city like a spine. I see hundreds of capillary roads and byways leading from it.'

'So?' Priamus asked, his tone indicating just how little he cared about the answer.

'So,' Grimaldus turned back to the squad, 'whoever holds Hel's Highway holds the beating heart of the city in their hands. They will have unprecedented, unstoppable ability to manoeuvre troops and armour. Even Titans will move faster, at perhaps twice the speed than if they had to stalk through hive towers and city blocks.'

Nerovar shook his head. He was the only one without his helm covering his features. Insofar as it was possible for an Astartes to look uncertain, he was doing so now.

'Reclusiarch.' He spoke Grimaldus's new title with hesitancy. 'How can we defend… all this? An endless road that leads into to a thousand others.'

'Withblade and bolter,' said Bastilan. 'With faith and fire.'

Grimaldus recognised his own words spoken from the sergeant's mouth. He looked down in silence at the city below, at the insane stretch of road that left the entire hive open, accessible.

Vulnerable.

CHAPTER III Hive Helsreach

The Thunderhawks touched down on a landing pad that was clearly designed for freight use. Cranes moved and servitors droned out of their way as the gunships came down in a hovering shower of engine wash and heat shimmer.

Ramps clanged onto the landing pad's surface and the four gunships disgorged their living cargo - one hundred knights in orderly ranks, marching into formation before their Thunderhawks.

Watching this display, and desperately trying not to show how impressed he felt, was Colonel Sarren of the Armageddon 101st Steel Legion. He stood with his hands clasped together, fingers interlaced, over his not inconsiderable stomach. Flanking him were a dozen men, some soldiers, some civilians, and all nervous - to varying degrees - about the hundred giants in black armour forming up before them.

He cleared his throat, checked the buttons on his ochre greatcoat were fastened in correct order, and marched to the giants.

One of the giants, wearing a helm shaped into a grinning skull mask of shining silver and steel, stepped forward to meet the colonel. With him came five other knights, each carrying swords and massive bolters, but for one who bore a towering standard. Upon the banner, which waved lazily in the dull breeze, a scene of red and black depicted the skull-helmed knight bathed in the golden purity of a flaming aquila overhead.

'I am Grimaldus,' the first knight said, his gem-like eye lenses staring down at the portly colonel. 'Reclusiarch of the Helsreach Crusade.'

The colonel drew breath to make his own greeting, when the hundred knights in formation cried out a chant in skin-crawling unity.

'Imperator Vult!'

Sarren glanced at the ranks of knights, formed up in five ranks of twenty warriors. None of them seemed to have moved, despite their cry in High Gothic: The Emperor wills it.

'I am Colonel Sarren of the 101st Steel Legion, and overall commander of the Imperial Guard forces defending the hive.' He offered a hand to the towering knight, and turned the gesture quite smartly into a salute when it became clear the knight was not going to shake hands.

Muted clicks could be heard every few seconds from the helms of the knights standing closest to him. Sarren knew full well they were speaking with each other over a shared vox-channel. He didn't like it, not at all.

'Who are these others?' the first knight asked. With a war maul of brutal size and weight, he gestured to Sarren's staff arrayed in a loose crescent behind the colonel. 'I would meet every commander of this hive, if they are present.'

'They are present, sir,' Sarren said. 'Allow me to make introductions.'

'Reclusiarch,' Grimaldus growled. 'Not 'sir'.'

'As you wish, Reclusiarch. This is Cyria Tyro, adjutant quintus to General Kurov.' Grimaldus looked down at the slender, dark-haired female. She made no effort to salute. Instead, she spoke.

'I am to act as liaison between off-planet forces - such as yours, Reclusiarch, and the Titan Legion - and the soldiers of Hive Helsreach. Simply summon me if you require my aid,' she finished.

'I will,' Grimaldus said, knowing he would not.

'This is Commissar Falkov, of my command staff,' Colonel Sarren resumed.

The officer named clicked his heels together and made an immaculate sign of the aquila over his chest. The commissar's dark uniform singled him out with absolute clarity among the ochre-wearing Steel Legion officers.

'This is Major Mordechai Ryken, second officer of the 101st and XO of the city defence.'

Ryken made the aquila himself, and offered a cautious nod of greeting.

'Commander Korten Barasath,' Sarren introduced the next man, 'of the Imperial 5082nd Naval Wing.'

Korten, a lean figure still dressed in his grey flightsuit, saluted smartly.

'My men were in the Lightnings that guided you down, Reclusiarch. A pleasure to serve with the Black Templars again.'

Grimaldus narrowed his eyes behind his helm's false grin. 'You have served with the Knights of Dorn before?'

'I have personally - nine years ago on Dathax - and the Fifty-Eighty-Twos have on no fewer than four separate occasions. Sixteen of our fighters are marked with the heraldic cross, with permission given by Marshal Tarrison of the Dathax Crusade.'

Grimaldus inclined his head, his respect solemn and obvious, despite the helm.

'I am honoured, Barasath,' he said.

The squadron leader suppressed a pleased smile and saluted again.

And on it went, through the ranks of senior Steel Legion officers. At the end of the line stood two men, one in a clean and decorated uniform of azure blue, the shade of skies on worlds much cleaner than this one, and the other in oil-stained overalls.

Colonel Sarren gestured to the thin man in the immaculate uniform.

'The most honourable Moderati Primus Valian Carsomir of the Legio Invigilata, crewman of the blessed engine Stormherald.'

Grimaldus nodded, but made no other outward show of respect. The Titan pilot inclined his gaunt face in turn, utterly emotionless.

'Moderati,' the knight said. 'You speak with the voice of your Legion?'

'A full battle group,' the man replied. 'I am the voice of Princeps Majoris Zarha Mancion. The rest of Invigilata is committed to other engagements.'

'Fortune favours us that you still remain,' the knight said. The Titan pilot made the cog sign of the Mechanicus, his knuckles interlinked over his chest, and Sarren finished the final introduction.

'And here is Dockmaster Tomaz Maghernus, lead foreman of the Helsreach Dockers' Union.'

The knight hesitated, and nodded again, just as he had for the soldiers. 'We have much to discuss,' Grimaldus said to the colonel, who was sweating faintly in the stifling afternoon air.

'Indeed we do. This way, if you please.'

Tomaz Maghernus wasn't sure what to think.

Back at the docks, as soon as he walked into the warehouse, his crew flocked around him, barraging him with questions. How many Astartes were there? How tall were they? What was it like to see one? Were all the stories true?

Tomaz wasn't sure what to say. There had been little grandeur in the meeting. The towering warrior with his skull face had seemed more dismissive than anything else. The ranks of knights in their black armour were silent and inhuman, utterly separate from the hive's delegation and not interacting at all.

He answered the questions with a level of vagueness lessened by a convincing false smile.

An hour later, he was back in his crane's command cabin, strapped to the creaking leather seat and turning the axis wheel to bring the loading claw around again. Levers controlled the claw's vertical position and the grip of its magnetic talons. Tomaz slammed the claw onto the deck of the tanker ship closest to his station, and hauled a cargo crate into the air. The markings alongside the sturdy metal crate marked it as volatile. More promethium, he knew. The final imports of fuel for the Imperial Guard's tanks were arriving this week. Dried food rations and shipments of fuel were all they'd been unloading on the docks for months now.

He tried not to dwell on his meeting with the Astartes. He'd been expecting a rousing speech from a warrior armoured in gold. He'd expected plans and promises, oaths and oratory.

All in all, he decided, it had been a disappointing day.

A city.

I am in command of a city.

Preparations have been underway for months, but estimates pit the Great Enemy arriving in-system within a handful of days. My men, the precious few knights that remain with me on the surface of Armageddon, are spread across the sprawling hive. They are to serve as inspiration to the human soldiers when the fighting becomes thickest.

I recognise the tactical validity of this, yet lament their absence. This is not how a holy crusade should be fought.

The hours pass in a blur of statistical outlays, charts, hololithic projections and graphs.

The food supplies for the entire city. How long they will last once nothing can be brought in from outside the hive. Where the food is stored. The durability of these silos, buildings and granaries. What weapons they can withstand. How they appear from the air. Ration projections. Sustainable food ration planning. Unsustainable food ration planning, with appended lists of estimated sacrificial casualties. Where food riots are likely to break out once starvation is a reality.

Water filtration centres. How many are required to be fully operational in order to supply the entire population. Which ones are likely to be destroyed first, once the city walls fall. Underground bunkers where water is currently stored. Ancient wellsprings that might be tapped in times of great need.

Estimates of disease once the city is shelled and civilian casualties are too heavy to be dealt with efficiently. Types of disease. Symptoms. Severity. Risk of contagion. Compatibility with the ork genus.

Lists of medical facilities. Endless, endless screeds of how each one is supplied as of the most recent stock reports, to the most minute detail. New stock-checks are constantly performed. Updated information cycles in all the while, even as we review the previous batch.

Militia numbers, conscripted and volunteer. Training regimes and training schedules. Weapon supplies.

Ammunition supplies for the civilian population currently under arms. Projections for how long those supplies will last.

Hive Defence Forces, straddling the line between militia and Guard. Who leads the individual sector forces. Their weapons. Their ammunition. Their proximity to significant industrial targets.

Imperial Guard numbers. Throne, what numbers. Regiments, their officers, their live fire training accuracy records, their citations, their shames, their moments of greatest glory and ignominy on a host of distant worlds. Their insignia. Their weapon and ammunition supplies. Their access to armour units, ranging from light scout vehicles such as Sentinels and Chimeras, through to super-heavy Baneblades and Stormswords.

The Guard figures alone take two days to file through. And this, they say, is merely the overview.

Landing platforms come next. Hive Defence landing platforms, civilian sites already in use by the Guard, and civilian sites currently in use for the importation of essential supplies, either from Navy vessels, traders in orbit, or elsewhere on the planet. The access to and from these sites is critical, regarding reinforcements making it into the hive, refugees making their way out, and the enemy capturing them as bases when the siege begins.

Air superiority. The numbers of light fighters, heavy fighters, and bombers at our disposal. The records of every pilot and officer among the Imperial 5082nd Skyborne. These, I skip past. If they wear the Templar cross with permission of a marshal, then there is little need to review their acts of valour. It is already clear. The projections move on to simulated displays of how long our air forces can prevent enemy landings, and what situations would merit the use of bombers beyond the city walls. On and on, the simulations roll in flickering hololithic imagery. Barasath is relieved to go when it is complete, complaining of a dozen headaches at once. I smile, though I let none of the humans witness it.

Helsreach heavy defence emplacements. What anti-air turrets are stationed on the walls, and where they are. Their optimal firing arcs. The make and calibre of each barrel and shell. The number of crew appointed to man these positions. Estimated projections on damage they can inflict upon the enemy, run through countless scenarios of varying greenskin offensive strength. The teams resupplying their ammunition, and from where that ammunition comes. Freight routes from manufactories.

And the manufactories themselves. Industrial plants churning out legions of tanks, all of various classes. Other manufactories where shells are made and dispatched for use. Which industrial sites are the most valuable, the most profitable, the most reliable and the most likely to suffer assault in a protracted siege.

The Titan Legion, most noble and glorious Invigilata. What engines they have on the Ash Wastes outside the city. Which ones will walk in the defence of Helsreach, and which ones are promised to reinforce the hordes of Cadian Shock and our brother Astartes, the Salamanders, out in the wilds of Armageddon.

Invigilata keeps its internal records from our sight, but we are fed enough information to thread into yet more hololithic charts and simulations, adding the might of Titans - of various grades and sizes - to the potential carnage.

The docks. The Helsreach Docks, greatest port on the planet. Coastal defences - walls and turrets and anti-air towers - and trade requirements and union complaints and petitions arguing over docking rights and warehouses appropriated as barracks for soldiers and complaints from merchants and dock-officers and…

And I endure this for nine days. Nine. Days.

On the tenth day, I rise from my chair in Sarren's command centre. Around me in the colonel's armoured fortress at the heart of the city, three hundred servitors and junior officers work at stations: calculating, collating, transmitting, receiving, talking, shouting, and sometimes quietly panicking, begging for aid from those around them.

Sarren and several of his officers and aides watch me. Their necks crane up as they follow my movement. It is the first time I have moved in seven hours. Indeed, the first time I have moved since I sat down this morning at dawn.

'Is something wrong?' Sarren asks me.

I look at the sweating, porcine commander; this man unable to shape his body into a warrior's fitness, confined as he is - and totally at home - with this relentless trial of a million, million numbers.

What kind of question is that? Are they blind? I am one of the Emperor's Chosen. I am a knight of Dorn's blood, and a warrior-priest of the Black Templars. Issomething wrong?

'Yes,' I say to him, to them all. 'Something is wrong.'

'But… what?'

I do not answer that question. Instead, I move to walk from the room, not caring that uniformed humans scatter before me like frightened vermin.

With a volume that would put a peal of overhead thunder to shame, a siren starts to wail.

I turn back to the table.

'What is that?'

They flinch at the rough bark from my helm's vocaliser. The siren keeps whining.

'Throne of the God-Emperor,' Sarren whispers.

Hive Helsreach did not have city walls. It had battlements.

When the citywide siren began to ring, Artarion was standing in the shadow of a towering cannon, its linked barrels aiming into the sick sky. Several metres away, the human crew worked at its base, performing the daily rituals of maintenance. They hesitated at the sound of the siren, and talked among themselves.

Artarion briefly looked back in the direction of the tower fortress in the city's centre, blocked as it was from view by distance and the forest-like mess of hive spires between here and there.

He felt the humans casting occasional glances his way. Knowing he was distracting them from their necessary mechanical rites, he moved away, walking further down the wall. His gaze fell, as it did almost every hour since coming to the hive a week before, on the endless expanse of wasteland that reached to the horizon and beyond.

Blink-clicking a communication rune on his visor display, he opened a vox-channel. The siren rang on. Artarion knew what it signalled.

'About time.'

From vox-towers across the city, an announcement was spoken in deceptively colourless tones. Colonel Sarren, not wishing to incite the populace to unrest, had tasked a lobotomised servitor to speak the words to the people.

'People of Hive Helsreach. Across the planet, the first sirens are sounding. Do not be alarmed. Do not be alarmed. The enemy fleet has translated in-system. The might of Battlefleet Armageddon and the greatest Astartes fleet in Imperial history stands between our world and the foe's forces. Do not be alarmed. Maintain your daily rites of faith. Trust in the God-Emperor of Mankind. That is all.'

In the control centre, Grimaldus turned to the closest human officer sat at a vox-station.

'You. Hail the Black Templar flagship Eternal Crusader, immediately.'

The man swallowed, his skin paling at being spoken to so directly and with such force by an Astartes.

'I… my lord, I am coordinating the—'

The knight's black fist pounded into the table. 'Do it now.'

'Y-yes, my lord. A moment, please.'

The human officers of Sarren's staff shared a worried look. Grimaldus paid no attention at all. The seconds passed with sickening slowness.

'The Eternal Crusader is making ready to engage the enemy fleet,' the officer replied. 'I can send a message, but their two-way communications are in lockdown without the proper command codes. D-do you have the codes, my lord?'

Grimaldus did indeed have the codes. He looked at the frightened human, then back at the worried faces of the command staff as they sat at the table.

I am being a fool. My fury is blinding me to my sworn duty. What did he expect, truly? That Helbrecht would send down a Thunderhawk and allow him to take part in the glorious orbital war above? No. He was consigned here, to Helsreach, and there would be no other fate beyond this.

I will die on this world, he thought once more.

'I have the codes,' the knight replied, 'but this is not an emergency. Simply send the following message to their incoming logs, with no need for a reply: ''Fight well, brothers''.

'Sent, lord.'

Grimaldus nodded. 'My thanks.' He turned to the gathered officers, and leaned over the hololithic display, his gauntleted knuckles on the table's surface.

'Forgive me a moment's choler. We have a war to plan,' the knight said, and breathed out the most difficult words he had ever spoken. 'And a city to defend.'

Until their dying nights, the warriors of the Helsreach Crusade bore their lamentations and rage with all the dignity that could be expected of them. But it was no easy feat. No easy feat to be consigned to a city of several million frightened souls while above the stained clouds, hundreds upon hundreds of their battle-brothers were carving their glory from the steel and flesh of an ancient and hated foe. The Black Templars across the city looked skyward, as if their helms' red eye lenses could pierce the wretched clouds and see the holy war above.

Grimaldus's own anger was a physical ache. It burned behind his eyes, and beat acid through his veins. But he mastered it, as was his duty. He sat at the table with the human planners, and agreed with them, disagreed, nodded and argued.

At one point, a whisper made its way through the room. It was serpentine thing, as if it threaded its way from human mouths to human ears seeking to avoid enraging the black-clad Astartes knight. When Colonel Sarren cleared his throat and announced that the two fleets had engaged, Grimaldus simply nodded. He'd heard the very first whispers thirty seconds before, of crackled voices coming over the vox-headsets of those at the communication stations.

It was beginning.

'We should give the order,' Sarren said quietly, to murmured agreement among the officer cadre.

Grimaldus turned to the vox-officer he had spoken to before. This time, he glanced at the man's rank badge. The officer saw the silver skull helm nod once in his direction.

'Lieutenant,' the knight said.

'Yes, Reclusiarch?'

'Give the order to Imperial forces throughout Helsreach. Martial law is in immediate effect.' He felt his throat dry at the gravity of what he was saying.

'Seal the city.'

Four thousand anti-air turrets along the hive's towering walls primed and aimed their multiple barrels into the sky.

Atop countless spires and manufactory rooftops, secondary defence lasers did the same. Hangars and warehouses converted for use by the Naval air squadrons readied the short rockcrete runways necessary for STOL fighters. Grey-uniformed Naval armsmen patrolled their bases' perimeters, keeping their sites enclosed and operating almost independently of the rest of the hive.

Across the city, recently-established makeshift roadway checkpoints became barricades and outposts of defence in readiness for the walls falling to the enemy. Thousands of buildings that had been serving as barracks for the Imperial Guard and militia forces sealed themselves with flakboard-reinforced doors and windows.

Announcements from vox-towers ordered the citizens of the hive who weren't engaged in vital industrial duty to remain in their homes until summoned by Guard squads and escorted to the underground shelters.

Hel's Highway, lifeline of the hive, was strangled by Guard checkpoints clearing the way of civilian traffic, making room for processions of tanks and Sentinel walkers, a rattling, grinding parade stretching over a kilometre. Clusters of the war machines veered off as they dispersed across the hive.

Helsreach was locked down, and its defenders clutched their weapons as they stared into the bleak sky.

Unseen by any of the humans within the city, one hundred knights - separated by distance but united by the blood of a demigod in their veins - knelt in silent prayer.

Eighteen minutes after the sirens started to wail, the first serious problem with force deployment began. Representatives of Legio Invigilata demanded to speak with the hive's commanders.

Forty-two minutes later, born entirely of panic, the first civilian riot broke out.

I ask Sarren a reasonable question, and he responds with the very answer I have no wish to hear. 'Three days,' he says.

Invigilata needs three days. Three days to finish the fitting and arming of their Titans out in the wastelands before they can be deployed within the city. Three days before they can walk through the immense gates in the hive's impenetrable walls, and station themselves within the city limits according to the agreed upon plan.

And then Sarren makes it worse.

'In three days, they will decide if they are to come to our aid, or deploy along the Hemlock River with the rest of their Legio.'

I quench the rush of fury through a moment's significant effort. 'There is a chance they will not even walk in our defence?'

'So it seems,' Sarren nods.

'Projections have the enemy breaching the orbital defences in four to nine days,' one of the other Steel Legion colonels - his name is Hargus - speaks from across the table. 'So we have time to allow them the largesse they require.'

None of us are seated now. The siren's drone has been lowered to less inconvenient levels, and speech is a realistic possibility for the unenhanced human officers once again.

'I am going to the view-tower,' I inform them. 'I wish to look upon this problem with my own eyes. Is the moderati primus still within the hive?'

'Yes, Reclusiarch.'

'Tell him meet to me there.' I pause as I stride from the room, and look back over my shoulder. 'Be polite, but do not ask. Tell him.'

CHAPTER IV Invigilata

Moderati Primus Valian Carsomir scratched at the greying stubble that darkened his jawline. His time was limited, and he had made that clear.

'Youare not alone in that position,' Grimaldus pointed out.

Carsomir smiled darkly, though not without empathy. 'The difference, Reclusiarch, is that I do not intend to die here. My princeps majoris is still in doubt if Invigilata will walk for Helsreach.'

The knight moved to the railing, his armour joints humming with the gentle motions. The viewing platform was a modest space atop the central spire of the command fortress, but Grimaldus had spent much of his time up here each night, staring over the hive as it made ready for war.

In the faded distance, over the city walls, his gene-enhanced sight could make out the skeletal details of Titans on the horizon. There, in the wastelands, Invigilata's engines also made ready. Fat-hulled landers made the wallowing journey back into orbit as part of the final phase of Imperial deployment. Soon, within a matter of days, there would be no hope of landing anything more on the planet's surface.

'This is the greatest of Armageddon's port cities. We are about to be assaulted by the largest greenskin-breed xenos invasion ever endured by the Imperium of Man.' The Astartes did not turn to the Titan pilot. He watched the gigantic war machines, blurred by the sandy mist of distant dust storms. 'We must have Titans, Carsomir.'

The officer stepped alongside the Astartes, his bionic eyes - both with lenses of multifaceted jade set in bronze mountings - clicking and whirring as he followed the knight's gaze over the city and beyond.

'I am aware of your need.'

'Myneed? It is the hive's need. Armageddon's need.'

'As you say, the hive's need. But I am not the princeps majoris. I report on the hive's defences to her, and the decision is hers to make. Invigilata has received strong petitions from other cities, and other forces.'

Grimaldus closed his eyes in thought. Unblinking, his skulled helm continued to stare at the distant Titans.

'I must speak with her.'

'I am her eyes, ears and voice, Reclusiarch. What I know, she knows; what I say, she has bid me speak. If you wish, I could - perhaps - arrange a conversation over the vox. But I am here - a man of not inconsiderable station myself - to show that Invigilata is earnest in its dealings with you.'

Grimaldus said nothing for several seconds.

'I appreciate that. I am not blind to your rank. Tell me, moderati, is it permissible to speak with your princeps majoris in person?'

'No, Reclusiarch. That would be a violation of Invigilata tradition.'

Grimaldus's brown eyes opened once more, drinking in the scarce detail of the war machines on the horizon.

'You objection is noted,' the knight said, 'and duly ignored.'

'What?' the Titan pilot said, not sure he heard correctly.

Grimaldus didn't answer. He was already speaking into the vox.

'Artarion, ready the Land Raider. We're going out into the wastelands.'

Four hours later, Grimaldus and his brothers stood in the shadows cast by giants.

A light dust storm sent grit rattling against their war plate, which they ignored as easily as Grimaldus had ignored Carsomir's offended protests about the nature of this mission.

Crews of servitors laboured at the ground level, and while they were mind-wiped never to process or acknowledge physical discomfort, the abrasive wasteland grit was rubbing their exposed skin raw, and crudely sandblasting mechanical parts.

The Titans themselves stood watch over the wastelands in austere vigil - nineteen of them in total, ranging from the smaller twelve-crew Warhound-classes, to the larger Reaver- and Warlord-classes. Godlike, immune to the elements, the Titans were bedecked in the crawling forms of tech-adepts and maintenance drones performing the rites of awakening.

Despite their slumber, it was anything but silent. The grinding, deafening machine-whine of internal plasma reactors trying to start was a sound from primordial nightmare, ripped right from worlds where humans feared gigantic reptilian predators and their ground-shaking roars.

It was all too easy to imagine hundreds of robed tech-priests within the fleet of Titans, chanting and praying to their Machine-God and the spirits of these slumbering war-giants. As Grimaldus and his brothers walked in the shade cast by one Warlord, the relentless grind of metal on metal became a full-throated thunderclap that broke the air like a sonic boom. Heated air blasted outwards from the Titan's hull, and around the site, thousands of men instantly fell to their knees in the sand, facing the Titan and murmuring their reverence in the aftershock of its rebirth.

The Titan's birth cry rang out through its warning sirens. The sound was somewhere between pure mechanical sound and organic exultation; as loud as a hundred manufactories with a full workforce, and as terrible as the wrath of a newborn god.

It moved. Not with speed, but with the halting, unsure strides of a man that has not used his muscles in many months. One splayed claw of a foot, easily huge enough to crush a Land Raider, rose several metres off the ground. It crashed back to earth a moment later, blasting dust in all directions.

'Sacrosanct awakens!' came the cry from hundreds of vox-altered voices. 'Sacrosanct walks!'

The Titan answered the worshipful cries of its cult below. It roared again, the cry blaring from its speaker horns and echoing across the wastelands.

As impressive as the sight was, it was not why Grimaldus had led his men out here. Their goal was larger still, dwarfing even these mighty Warlords, paying them no heed as they stood or walked around at the height of its weapon-arms.

It was called Stormherald.

The battle-class Titans were walking weapons platforms, capable of levelling hive blocks. Stormherald was a walking fortress. Its weapons could level cities. Its legs, capable of supporting the weight of this colossal sixty-metre war machine, were bastions - barracks - with turrets and arched windows for the troops transported within to fire at the foe even as their Titan crushed them underfoot. Upon its hunched back, Stormherald carried crenellated battlements and the seven spires of a sacred, armoured cathedral devoted to the Emperor in His aspect as the Machine-God. Gargoyles clung to the edges of the architecture, carved around defence turrets and stained glass windows, their hideous mouths open as they wailed silently at the enemy from their holy castle above the ground.

Banners hung from its cannon arms and the battlements themselves, listing the names of enemy war machines it had slain in the millennia since its birth. As the birth cry of Sacrosanct faded, the knights could hear the sound of religious communion in the fortress-cathedral on Stormherald's giant shoulders, as pious souls no doubt beseeched their ethereal master for the blessing of the greatest god-machine waking once more.

The Titan's clawed feet were tiered stairs leading into the armoured chambers of its lower legs. With the immense structure still unmoving, Grimaldus made his way through scores of scurrying menial tech-priests and servitors. As his booted foot thudded down on the first stair layer, the resistant welcome he was expecting finally made itself known.

'Hold,' he said to his brothers. Troops, their features covered, filed from the archways into the Titan's limb-innards. The knights' attempted entrance was blocked by Mechanicus minions.

The soldiers facing them were called skitarii. These were the elite of the Adeptus Mechanicus infantry forces - a fusion of integrated weapon augmetics and the human form. Grimaldus, like many Astartes, regarded their unsubtle flesh-manipulation and the crude surgeries bestowing weapons upon their limbs as making them little more than glorified servitors, and equally wretched in their own way.

Twelve of these bionic creatures, their skin robed against the wind, levelled thrumming plasma weapons at the five knights.

'I am Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Tem—'

—Your identity is known to us— they all spoke at once. There was little unity in the chorus of voices, with some sounding unnaturally deep, others inhuman and mechanical, still others perfectly human.

'The next time I am interrupted,' the knight warned, 'I will kill one of you.'

—We are not to be threatened— all twelve said, still in unison, still in a chorus of unmatching voices.

'Neither are you to be addressed. You are nothing; slaves, all of you, barely above servitors. Now move aside. I have business with your mistress.'

—We are not to be ordered into submission. We are to remain as duty demands—

A human would have missed the division within their unified speech, but Grimaldus's senses could trace the minute deviations in the way they spoke. Four of them started and finished words a fraction of a second later than the others. Whatever mind-link bound the twelve warriors, it was more efficient in some than others. While his experience with the servants of the Machine-God was limited, he found this a curious flaw.

'I will speak with the princeps majoris of Invigilata, even if I have to shout up to the cathedral itself.'

They had no orders pertaining to such an action, and lacked the cognition to make an assessment of how it would matter to their superiors, so they remained silent.

'Reclusiarch…' Priamus voxed. 'Must we bear this foolish indignity?'

'No.' The skull helm scanned the skitarii each in turn, its red eyes unblinking. 'Kill them.'

She floated, as she had floated for seventy-nine years, in a coffin-like tank of milky amniotic fluid. The metallic, chemical tang of the watery, oxygen-rich ooze had been the only constant in almost a century of life, and its taste, its feel, its intrusion into her lungs and its replacement of air in her respiration had never ceased to feel somewhat alien.

That was not to say she found it uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. It was forever unsettling, but not unnatural.

In moments of battle, which always seemed too few and far between, Princeps Majoris Zarha believed with cold certainty that this was what gestation within the womb must have felt like. The cooling fluid supporting her would become warm in sympathy with the plasma reactor at Stormherald's core. The pounding, world-shaking tread echoed around her, magnified like the beat of a mighty heart.

A feeling of absolute power coupled with being utterly protected. It was all she needed to focus on to remain herself in those frantic, bladed moments when Stormherald's broken, violent mind knifed into her consciousness with sudden strength, seeking to overpower her.

She knew that there would come a day when her assistants unplugged her for the last time - when she would be denied a return to the machine's soul, for fear its ingrained temperament and personality would swallow her weaker, too-human sense of identity.

But that was not now. Not today.

No, Zarha focussed on her simulated regression to the womb, and it was all she ever needed to push aside the clinging insistency of Stormherald's blunt and primal advances.

Voices from the outside always reached her with a muffled dullness, despite the vox-receivers implanted where the cartilage of her inner ears once were, and the receptors built into the sides of her confinement tank.

They spoke, those voices, of intrusion.

Princeps Majoris Zarha did not share their appraisal of the situation. She turned in her milky fluid, as graceful as a sea-nymph from the tales of the impious Ancient Terra, though the augmented, wrinkled, hairless creature within the spacious coffin was anything but lovely. Her feet had been removed, for she would never need them again. Her bones were weak and soft, and her body curled and hunched.

She replied to them, to her minions and brothers and sisters, with a stab of thought.

I wish to speak with the intruders.

'I wish to speak with the intruders,' the vox-emitters on her coffin droned in a toneless echo of her silent words.

One of them came closer to the clear walls of her amniotic chamber, looking in at the floating husk with great respect.

'My princeps,' it was Lonn speaking, and though she liked Lonn, he was not her favourite.

Hello, Lonn. Where is Valian?

'Hello, Lonn. Where is Valian?'

'Moderati Carsomir is returning from the hive, my princeps. We thought you would still sleep for some time.'

With all this noise? What was left of her face turned into a smile.

'With all this noise?'

'My princeps, Astartes are seeking to gain entrance.'

I heard.

'I heard.'

I know.

'I know.'

'Your orders, my princeps?'

She twisted in the water again, in her own way as graceful as a seaborne mammal, despite the cables, wires and cords running from the coffin's mechanical generators into her spine, skull and limbs. She was an ancient, withered marionette in the water, serene and smiling.

Access granted.

'Access granted.'

—Access granted— said twelve voices at once.

The crackling edge of the maul remained motionless, no more than a finger's thickness above the lead skitarii's skull. A small spark of electrical force snapped at the soldier's face from the armed power weapon, forcing him to recoil.

—Access granted— they all intoned a second time. Grimaldus deactivated his crozius hammer and shoved the augmented human soldiers aside. 'That is what I thought you would say.'

The journey was short and uneventful, through narrow corridors and ascending in elevator shafts, until they stood outside the sealed bulkhead doors of the bridge. The process of reaching the control deck involved a great deal of silently staring tech-adepts, their green-lens replacement eyes rotating and refocusing, either scanning or in some eerie mimicry of human facial expressions.

The interior of the Titan was dark, too dark for unaugmented humans to work by, lit by the kind of emergency-red lighting the knights had only seen before in bunkers and ships at war. Their gene-enhanced eyes would have pierced the gloom with ease, even without the vision filters of their helm's visors.

No guards stood outside the large double bulkhead leading onto the command deck, and the doors themselves slid open on clunking rails as the knights waited.

Artarion gripped Grimaldus's scroll-draped pauldron.

'Make this count, brother.'

The Chaplain looked at the bearer of his war banner through the silver face of his slain master. 'Trust me.'

The command deck was a circular bay, with a raised dais in the centre surrounded by five ornate and heavily-cabled thrones. At the edges of the chamber, robed tech-adepts worked at consoles filled with a dizzying array of levers, dials and buttons.

Two vast windows offered a grand view across the harsh landscape. With a shiver of realisation, Grimaldus knew he was looking out from the god-machine's eyes.

Upon the dais itself, a huge, clear-glass tank stood supported by humming machinery. Within its milky depths floated a naked crone, ravaged by her years and the bionics necessary to sustain her life under such conditions. She stared through bug-eyed augmetic replacements where her human eyes once were.

'Greetings, Astartes,' the vox-speakers built into her coffin spoke.

'Princeps Majoris,' Grimaldus nodded to the swimming husk. 'An honour to stand in your presence.'

There was a distinct pause before she replied, though her gaze never left him. 'You are keen to speak with me. Waste no time on pleasantries. Stormherald wakes, and soon I must walk. Speak.'

'I am told by one of this Titan's pilots, as an ambassador to Helsreach, that Invigilata may not walk in our defence.'

Again, the pause.

'This is so. I command one-third of this Legio. The rest already walks in defence of the Hemlock region, many with your brothers, the Salamanders. Do you come to petition me for my portion of mighty Invigilata?'

'I do not beg, princeps. I came to see you with my own eyes and ask you, face to face, to fight and die with us.'

The withered woman smiled, the expression both maternal and amused.

'But you have not yet completed your intended duty, Astartes.'

'Is that so?'

This time, the pause was longer. The old woman laughed within her bubbling tank. 'We are not face to face.'

The knight reached up to his armoured collar, disengaging the seals there.

Without my helm, the scent of sacred oils and the chemical-rich tang of her amniotic tank are much stronger. The first thing she says to me is something I am not sure how to respond to.

'You have very kind eyes.'

Her own eyes are long-removed from her skull, the sockets covered by these bulbous lenses that twist as she watches me. I cannot return the comment she made, and I do not know what else I could say.

So I say nothing.

'What is your name?'

'Grimaldus of the Black Templars.'

'Now we are face to face, Grimaldus of the Black Templars. You have been bold enough to come here, and honour me with your face. I am no fool. I know how rare it is for a Chaplain to reveal his human features to one not of his brotherhood. Ask what you came to ask, and I will answer.'

I step closer and press my palm against the casket's surface. The vibration is twinned with that of my armour. I can feel the eyes of the Mechanicus minions upon me, upon my dark ceramite, their reverent gazes showing their longing to touch the perfection of the machinesmith's craft represented by Astartes war plate.

And I look into the mechanical eyes of the princeps as she floats in the milky waters.

'Princeps Zarha. Helsreach calls for you. Will you walk?'

She smiles again, a blind grandmother with rotten teeth, as she presses her own palm against mine. Only the reinforced glass separates us.

'Invigilata will walk.'

Seven hours later, the people of the city heard a distant mechanical howl from the wastelands, eclipsing the cries of the lesser Titans. It echoed through the streets and around the spiretops, chilling the blood of every soul in the hive. Street dogs barked in response, as if sensing a larger predator nearby.

Colonel Sarren shivered, though he smiled at the others in his command meeting. Through bloodshot eyes, heavy with sleeplessness, he regarded them all.

'Stormherald has awoken,' he said.

Three days, just as promised, and the city shook with the tread of the god-machines.

Invigilata's engines walked, and the great gates in the northern wall rumbled open to welcome them.

Grimaldus and the hive's command staff watched from atop the viewing platform. The knight blink-clicked a rune on his retinal display, accessing a coded channel.

'Good morning, princeps,' he said softly. 'Welcome to Helsreach.'

In the distance, a walking cathedral-fortress pounded its slow, stately way through the first city blocks.

'Hail, Chaplain.' The crone's voice was laden with barely-contained energy. 'I was born in a hive like this, you know.'

'It is fitting then, that you'll be dying here, Zarha.'

'Do you say so, sir knight? Have you seen me today?'

Grimaldus watched the distant form of Stormherald, as tall as the towers surrounding it.

'It is impossible not to see you, princeps.'

'It's impossible to kill me, as well. Remember that, Grimaldus.'

No human had ever dared use his name so informally before. The knight smiled for the first time in days. 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.

Sarren continued. 'The latest report from the fleet lists thirty-seven enemy ships have breached the blockade. Thirty-one were annihilated by the orbital defence array. Six have crashed onto the surface.'

'What is the status of Battlefleet Armageddon?' the knight asked.

'Holding. But we have a greater comprehension of enemy numbers now. The four to nine day estimate has been abandoned, as of thirty minutes ago. This is the greatest greenskin fleet ever to face the Imperium. The fleet's casualties are approaching a million souls. One or two more days, at best.'

'Throne of the Emperor,' one of the militia colonels swore in a whisper.

'Focus,' Grimaldus warned. 'The crashed ship.'

Here, the colonel paused and gestured to Grimaldus. 'I suggest we hold, Reclusiarch. A handful of greenskin survivors cannot hope to survive an assault against the walls. They would be insane - even for orks - to try.'

'We are comfortable letting these survivors add their numbers to their brethren when the enemy's main forces make planetfall?' This, from Cyria Tyro.

'A handful of additional foes will make no difference,' Sarren pointed out. 'We all saw the Intent hit. Not many of its crew are walking away from that.'

'I have fought the greenskins before, sir,' Major Ryken put in. 'They're tougher than a marsh lizard's hide. Almost unbreakable. There'll be plenty who survived that crash, I promise you.'

'Send a Titan,' Commissar Falkov smiled without any humour whatsoever, and the room fell quiet. 'I am not making a jest. Send a Titan to obliterate the wreckage. Inspire the men. Give them an overwhelming victory before the true battle is even joined. Morale among the Steel Legion is mediocre at best. It is lower still among the volunteer militia, and barely existent among the conscripts. So send a Titan. We need first blood in this war.'

'At least get Barasath's fighters to scan for life readings,' Tyro added, 'before we commit to sending any troops outside the city.'

Throughout all of this, Grimaldus had remained silent. It was his silence that eventually killed all talk, and had faces turning towards him.

The knight rose to his feet. Despite the slowness of his movement, his armour's joints emitted a low snarl.

'The commissar is correct,' he said. 'Helsreach needs an overwhelming victory. The benefit to morale among the human forces would be considerable.'

Sarren swallowed. No one around the table enjoyed Grimaldus pointing out the difference in species between the humans and the genetically-forged Astartes.

'It is time my knights took to the field,' the Reclusiarch said, his deep, soft voice coming out from his skull helm as a machine-growl. 'The humans may need first blood, but my knights hunger for it. We will give you your victory.'

'How many of your Astartes will you take?' Sarren asked after a moment's thought.

'All of them.'

The colonel paled. 'But surely you don't need—'

'Of course not. But this is for appearances. You wanted an overwhelming display of Imperial force. I am giving you that.'

'We can make this even better,' Cyria said. 'If you can have your men stand in formation before they move out of the city, long enough for us to arrange live pict-feeds to all visual terminals across Helsreach…' she trailed off, a pleased smile brightening her features.

Falkov slammed a fist on the table. 'Let's get started. The first charge of the black knights!' He smiled a thin, nasty grin. 'If that doesn't light a fire in the heart of every man breathing, nothing will.'

Priamus twisted the blade, widening the wound before wrenching the sword clear. Stinking blood gushed from the creature's chest, and the alien died with its filthy claws scratching at the knight's armour.

Within the crashed ship, stalking from room to room, corridor by corridor, the Templars hunted mongrels in the name of purification.

'This is bad comedy,' he breathed into the vox.

The reply he received was punctuated by the dull clang of weapons clashing together. Artarion, some way behind.

'Fall back, damn it.'

Priamus sensed another lecture about vainglory in his future. He walked on, his precious blade held at the ready, moving deeper into the darkness that his red visor pierced with consummate ease.

Like vermin, the orks scrambled through the tunnels of the wrecked ship, springing ambushes with their crude weapons and snorting their piggish war cries. Priamus's contempt burned hot on his tongue. They were above this. They were Black Templars, and the morale of the puling humans was none of their concern.

Grimaldus was spending too much time among the mortals. The Reclusiarch was beginning to think like them. It had galled Priamus to stand in ranked formation for the pict-drones to hover around and capture the knights' images, just as it galled him now to hunt the scarce survivors of this wreck. It was beneath him, beneath them all. This was work for the Imperial Guard. Perhaps even the militia.

'We will draw first blood,' Grimaldus had said to them all, as if it was something to care about - as if it would affect the final battle in any way at all. 'Join me, brothers. Join me as I shake off this disgust at the stasis gripping my bones, and slake my bloodthirst in holy slaughter.'

The others, as they stood in their foolish ranks for the benefit of the mortals, had cheered. They had cheered.

Priamus remained silent, swallowing the rise of bile in his throat. He had known in that moment, with clarity sharper than ever before, that he was unlike his brothers. They cared about shedding blood now, as if this pathetic gesture mattered.

These warriors who called him vainglorious were blind to the truth: there was nothing vain in glory. He was not rash, he merely trusted in his skills to carry him through any challenge, just as the great Sigismund, First High Marshal of the Black Templars, had trusted his skills to do the same. Was that a weakness? Was it a flaw to exemplify the fury of the Chapter's founder and the favoured son of Rogal Dorn? How could it be considered so, when Priamus's deeds and glories were already rising to eclipse those of his brothers?

Movement ahead.

Priamus narrowed his eyes, his pupils flicking across his field of vision to lock targeting reticules on the brutish shapes swarming in the darkness of the wide, lightless corridor.

Three greenskins, their xenos flesh exuding a greasy, fungal scent that reached the knight from a dozen metres away. They lay waiting in a puerile ambush, believing themselves hidden by fallen gantries and a half-destroyed bulkhead door.

Priamus heard them grunting to one another in what passed for whispers in their foul tongue.

This was the best they could do. This was their cunning ambush against warriors made in the Emperor's image. The knight swore under his breath, the curse never leaving his helm, and charged.

Artarion licked his steel teeth. I heard him doing it, even though he wears his helm.

'Priamus?' he asks. The vox answers with silence.

Unlike the swordsman, I am not alone. I walked with Artarion, the two of us slaying our way through the enginarium decks. Resistance is light. Most of our venture so far has consisted of kicking xenos corpses out of our path, or butchering lone stragglers.

Most of the Templars were sent across the wastelands in their Rhinos and Land Raiders, chasing down the crash survivors who sought to hide in the wilderness. I have given them their head, and let them hunt. Better the greenskins die now, rather than allow them to lie in wait and rejoin their bestial kin in the true invasion. I took only a handful of warriors into the downed cruiser to purge whatever remains.

'Leave him be,' I say to Artarion. 'Let him hunt. He needs to stand alone for now.'

Artarion pauses before answering. I know him well enough to know he is scowling. 'He needs discipline.'

'He needs our trust.' My tone brooks no further argument.

The ship is in pieces. The floor is uneven, torn and wrenched from the crash. We turn a corner, our boots clinging to the sloping decking as we head into a plasma generator's coolant chamber. As huge as a cathedral's prayer chamber, the expansive room is largely taken up by the cylindrical metal housing that encases the temperamental and arcane technology used for cooling the ship's engines.

I see nothing alive. I hear nothing alive. And yet…

'I smell fresh blood,' I vox to Artarion. 'A survivor, still bleeding.' I gesture to the vast coolant tower with my crozius. The mace flashes with lightning as I squeeze the trigger rune. 'The alien lurks beneath there.'

The survivor is barely deserving of the description. It lies pinned under metal debris, impaled through the stomach and pinned to the floor. As we approach, it barks in its rudimentary command of the Gothic tongue. Judging from the pool of cooling blood spreading from its sundered form, the alien's life will end in mere minutes. Feral red eyes glare at us. Its porcine face is curled in a rictus of anger.

Artarion raises his chainsword, gunning the motor. The saw-teeth whine as they cut through the air.

'No.'

Artarion freezes. At first, my brother knight isn't sure what he'd heard. His glance flicks to me. 'What did you say?'

'I said,' I'm stepping closer to the dying alien even as I speak, looking down through my skulled mask, '…no.'

Artarion lowers his sword. Its teeth stutter to a halt.

'They always seem so immune to pain,' I tell him, and I feel my voice fall to a whisper. I place a boot upon the creature's bleeding chest. The ork snaps its jaws at me, choking on the blood that runs into its burst lungs.

Artarion must surely hear the smile in my voice. 'But no. Look into its eyes, brother.'

Artarion complies. I can tell from his hesitation that he does not see what I see. He looks down and sees nothing but impotent rage.

'I see fury,' he tells me. 'Frustration. Not even hatred. Just wrath.'

'Then look harder.' I press down with my boot. Ribs crunch with the sound of dry twigs snapping, one after the other, as the weight descends harder. The ork bellows, drooling and snarling.

'Do you see?' I ask, knowing the smile is still evident in my voice.

'No, brother,' Artarion grunts. 'If there is a lesson in this, I am blind to it.'

I lift the boot, letting the ork cough its lifeblood through its blood-streaked maw.

'I see it in the creature's eyes. Defeat is pain. Its nerves may be dead to torment, but whatever passes for its soul knows how to suffer. To be at an enemy's mercy… Look at its face, brother. See how it dies in agony because we are here to watch such a shameful end.'

Artarion watches, and I think perhaps he sees it, as well. However, it does not fascinate him the way it does me. 'Let me end it,' he says. 'Its existence offends me.'

I shake my head. That would not do at all.

'No. Its life's span is measured in moments.' I feel the dying alien's gaze lock with my red eye lenses. 'Let it die in this pain.'

Nerovar hesitated.

'Nero?' Cador called over his shoulder. 'Do you see something?'

The Apothecary blink-clicked several visualiser runes on his retinal display. 'Yes. Something.'

The two of them were searching the ruined enginarium chambers on the level beneath Grimaldus and Artarion. Nerovar frowned at what the digital readouts across his eye lenses were telling him. He looked to the bulky narthecium unit built into his left bracer.

'So enlighten me,' Cador said, his voice as gruff as always.

Nerovar tapped a code into the multicoloured buttons next to the display screen on his armoured forearm. Runic text scrolled in a blur.

'It's Priamus.'

Cador grunted in agreement. Nothing but trouble, that one. 'Isn't it always?'

'I've lost his life signs.'

'That cannot be,' Cador laughed. 'Here? Among this rabble?'

'I do not make mistakes,' Nerovar replied. He activated the squad's shared channel. 'Reclusiarch?'

'Speak.' The Chaplain sounded distracted, and faintly amused. 'What is it?'

'I've lost Priamus's life signs, sir. No heightened returns, just an immediate severance.'

'Confirm at once.'

'Confirmed, Reclusiarch. I verified it before contacting you.'

'Brothers,' the Chaplain said, his voice suddenly ice. 'Maintain search and destroy orders.'

'What?' Artarion drew breath to object. 'We need—'

'Be silent. I will find Priamus.'

He wasn't sure what they hit him with.

The greenskins had melted from their hiding places in the darkness, one of them carrying a weighty amalgamation of scrap that only loosely resembled a weapon. Priamus had slain one, laughing at its porcine snorting as it fell to the deck, and launched at the next.

The scrap-weapon bucked in the greenskin's hands. A claw of charged, crackling metal fired from the alien device and crunched into the knight's chest. There was a moment of stinging pain as his suit's interface tendrils, the connection spikes lodged in his muscles and bones, crackled with an overload of power.

Then his vision went black. His armour fell silent, and became heavier on his shoulders and limbs. Out of power. They'd deactivated his armour.

'Dorn's blood…'

Priamus tore his helm clear just in time to see the alien racking his scrap-weapon like a primitive solid-slug launcher. The claw embedded in his chest armour, defiling the Templar cross there, was still connected to the device by a cable of chains and wires. Priamus raised his blade to sever the bond even as the alien laughed and pulled a second trigger.

This time, the channelled force didn't just overload his armour's electrical systems. It burned through the neural connections and muscle interfaces, blasting agony through the swordsman's body.

Priamus, gene-forged like all Astartes to tolerate any pain the enemies of mankind could inflict upon him, would have screamed if he could. His muscles locked, his teeth clamped together, and his attempt to cry out left his clenched jaw as an ululating, shuddering ''Hnn-hnn-hnn''.

Priamus crashed to the ground fourteen seconds later, when the agony finally ceased.

The greenskins hunch over his prone form.

Now they have managed to bring him down, they seem to have no idea what to do with their prize. One of them turns my brother's black helm over in its fat-knuckled hands. If it means to turn Priamus's armour into a trophy, it is about to pay for such blasphemy.

As I walk down the darkened corridor, I drag my mace along the wall - the ornate head clangs against the steel arches. I have no wish to be subtle.

'Greetings.' I breathe the word from my skulled face.

They raise their hideous alien faces, their jaws slack and filled with rows of grinding teeth. One of them hefts a heavy composite of detritus and debris that apparently serves as a weapon.

It fires… something… at me. I do not care what. It's smashed from the air with a single swing of my inactive maul. The clang of metal on metal echoes throughout the corridor, and I thumb the trigger rune on the haft of my crozius. The mace flares into crackling life as I aim it at the aliens.

'You dare exist in humanity's domain? You dare spread your cancerous touch to our worlds?'

They do not answer this challenge with words. Instead, they come at me in a lumbering run, raising cleaver swords; primitive weapons to suit primitive beings.

I am laughing when they reach me.

Grimaldus swung his mace two-handed, pounding the first alien back. The sparking force field around the weapon's head flashed as it reacted with opposing kinetic force, and amplified the already inhuman strike to insane levels of strength. The greenskin was already dead, its skull obliterated, as it flew twenty metres back down the corridor to smash into a damaged bulkhead.

The second tried to run. It turned its back and ran, hunched and ape-like, back in the direction it had come.

Grimaldus was faster. He caught the creature in a handful of heartbeats, hooked his gauntleted fingers in the ork's armoured collar to halt its flight, and smashed it against the corridor wall.

The alien grunted a stream of curses in Gothic as it struggled in the knight's grip.

Grimaldus clutched at the creature's throat, black gauntlets squeezing, choking, crunching bone beneath his grip.

'You dare defile the language of the pure race…' He slammed the alien back, breaking its head open on the steel wall behind. Foetid breath steamed across Grimaldus's faceplate as the ork's attempt to roar came out as a panicked whine. The Astartes would not be appeased. His grip tightened.

'You dare desecrate our tongue?'

Again, he bashed the greenskin back, the alien's head splitting wide as it struck a girder.

The ork's struggles died immediately. Grimaldus let the creature fall to the metal decking, where it hit and folded with a muffled thud.

Priamus.

The fury was fading now. Reality asserted itself with cold, unwanted clarity. Priamus lay on the deck, head to the side, bleeding from his ears and open mouth. Grimaldus came to his side, kneeling there in the darkness.

'Nero,' he said quietly.

'Reclusiarch,' the younger knight returned.

'I have found Priamus. Aft, deck four, tertiary spine corridor.'

'On my way. Assessment?'

Grimaldus's targeting reticule flicked over his brother's prone body, then locked onto the scrap-weapon carried by the orks he'd killed.

'Some kind of force-discharging weapon. His armour is powered down, but he's still breathing. Both his hearts are beating.' This last part was the most serious aspect of the downed knight's condition. If his reserve heart had begun to beat, there must have been significant trauma done to Priamus's body.

'Three minutes, Reclusiarch.' There was the dampened suggestion of bolter fire.

'Resistance, Cador?' Grimaldus asked.

'Nothing of consequence.'

'Stragglers,' Nerovar clarified. 'Three minutes, Reclusiarch. No more than that.'

It was closer to two minutes. When Nerovar and Cador arrived at a run, they smelled of the chemical combat stimulants in their blood and the acrid tang of discharged bolters.

The Apothecary knelt by Priamus, scanning his fallen brother with the medical auspex bio-scanner built into his arm-mounted narthecium.

Grimaldus looked at Cador. The oldest member of the squad was reloading his bolt pistol, and muttering into the vox.

'Speak,' the Chaplain said. 'I would hear your thoughts.'

'Nothing, sir.'

Grimaldus felt his eyes narrow and teeth grind together. He almost repeated his words at an order. What held him back was not tact, but discipline. His rage still boiled beneath the surface. He was no mere knight, to give in to his emotion and remain flooded by it. As a Chaplain, he held himself to a higher standard. Putting the chill of normality into his voice, he said simply: 'We will speak of this later. I am not blind to your tensions of late.'

'As you wish, Reclusiarch,' Cador replied.

Priamus opened his eyes, and did two things at once. He reached for his sword - still chained to his wrist - and he said through tight lips, 'Those whoresons. They shot me.'

'Some kind of nerve weapon.' Nerovar was still scanning him. 'It attacked your nervous system through the interface feeds from your armour.'

'Get away from me,' the swordsman said, rising to his feet. Nerovar offered a hand, which Priamus knocked aside. 'I said get away!'

Grimaldus handed the knight his helm.

'If you are finished with your lone reconnaissance, perhaps you can stay with Nero and Cador this time.'

The pause that followed the Chaplain's words was pregnant with Priamus's bitterness.

'As you wish. My lord.'

When we emerge from the wrecked ship, the weak sun is rising, spreading its worthlessly dim light across the clouded heavens.

The rest of my force, the hundred knights of the Helsreach Crusade, is assembling in the wastelands around the broken ship's metal bones.

Three Land Raiders, six Rhinos, the air around them all thrumming with the chuckle of idling engines. I think, for a strange moment, that even our tanks are amused at the pathetic hunting on offer last night.

Kill-totals scroll across my visor display as squad leaders report the success of their hunts. A paltry night's work, all in all, but the mortals behind the city walls have the first blood they so ardently desired.

'You're not cheering,' Artarion voxes to me, and only me.

'Little was cleansed. Little was purified.'

'Duty is not always glorious,' he says, and I wonder if he refers to our exile on the planet's surface with those words.

'I presume that is a barbed reference for my benefit?'

'Perhaps.' He clambers aboard our Land Raider, still speaking from within. 'Brother, you have changed since inheriting Mordred's mantle.'

'You are speaking foolishness.'

'No. Hear me. We have spoken: Cador, Nero, Bastilan, Priamus and myself. And we have listened to the talk among the others. We must all deal with these changes, and we must all face this duty. Your darkness is spreading to the entire Crusade. One hundred warriors all fearing that the fire in your heart is naught but embers now.'

And for a moment, his words ring true. My blood runs cold. My heart chills in my chest.

'Reclusiarch,' a voice crackles over the vox. I do not immediately recognise it - Artarion's words have stolen my thoughts.

'Grimaldus. Speak.'

'Reclusiarch. Throne of the God-Emperor… It's truly beginning.' Colonel Sarren sounds awed, almost eager. 'Elaborate,' I tell him.

'Battlefleet Armageddon is in full retreat. The Astartes fleet is withdrawing alongside them.' The colonel's voice broke up in a storm of vox-feedback, only to return a moment later, '…breaking against the orbital defence array. Breaking through, already. It's beginning.'

'We are returning to the city at once. Has there been any communication from The Eternal Crusader?'

'Yes. The planetary vox-network is struggling to cope with the influx. Shall I have the message relayed to you?'

'At once, colonel.'

I embark and slam the Land Raider's side hatch closed. Within the tank, all is suffused in the muted darkness of emergency lighting. I stand with my squad, gripping the overhead rail as the tank starts with a lurch.

At last, after the vox-clicking of several channels being linked together, I hear the words of High Marshal Helbrecht, the brother I have fought beside for so many decades. His voice, even on a low-quality recording, is filled with his presence.

'Helsreach, this is the Crusader. We are breaking from the planet. The orbital war is lost. Repeat: the orbital war is lost. Grimaldus… once you hear these words, stand ready. You are Mordred's heir, and my trust rides with you. Hell is coming, brother. The Great Enemy's fleet is without number, but faith and fury will see your duty done.'

I curse him, without giving voice to my spite. A silent oath that I will never forgive him for this exile… For damning me to die in futility.

Behind his words, I hear the cacophony of a ship enduring colossal assault. Dull explosions, horrendous and thunderous shaking - The Eternal Crusader's shields were down when he sent me this message. I cannot conceive of any enemy in history that has managed to inflict such damage to our flagship.

'Grimaldus,' he says my name with cold, raw solemnity, and his final words knife into me like a bitter blade.

'Die well.'

CHAPTER VI Planetfall

Grimaldus watched Helsreach erupting in fury.

They came through the morning clouds, fat-bellied troop landers that streaked with fire from atmospheric entry and the damage they had sustained breaking through the orbital defences.

Burning hulks juddered as their boosters fired, slowing them before they ploughed into the ground. They came from the horizon, or descended from stretches of cloud cover far from the city. Those few that sailed overhead, close enough for the city's defence platforms to reach, were subjected to horrendous battery fire, destroyed with such swift force that flaming wreckage rained upon the city below.

He stood with his command squad, fists resting on the edge of the battlements, watching the bulk landers coming down in the northern wastelands. Imperial fighters of all classes and designs flitted between the sedate troop ships, unleashing their payloads to minimal effect. The ships were too big for fighter-scale weapons to make any significant difference. As more alien scrapships broke the poison-yellow cloud cover, xenos fighter craft descended with their motherships. Barasath and his Lightning squadrons engaged these, punching them out of the air like buzzing insects.

Across the city, almost drowned out by the booming rage of the battlement guns, a siren wailed between automated announcements that demanded every soul take up arms and man their appointed positions.

The walls.

During the opening phase, Helsreach's defenders would stand upon the city's walls and be ready to repel an archaic siege. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and militia, standing vigil on walls that were as tall as a Titan.

Several bold ork drop-ships sought to land within the city. Spiretop platforms, wall guns and cannon batteries mounted upon the tops of towers annihilated those that made the attempt. The luckier failures managed to climb with enough altitude to escape the city's reach and crash on the wastelands. Most were torn apart by unrelenting weapons fire, pulled apart and cast to the ground in flames.

Guard units stationed throughout the hive and preselected for the duty moved in on the downed hulks, slaughtering any alien survivors. Across the city, fire containment teams worked to put out blazes that spread from the crashing junkers.

Grimaldus looked along the walls to either side, where thousands of uniformed men stood in loose groups, every one clad in the ochre of the Armageddon Steel Legion. These were not Sarren's own 101st. The colonel's regiment remained at the command centre, as well as being spread across the city in platoons to defend key areas.

Artarion's words still burned behind the Chaplain's eyes.

'Brothers,' he spoke into the vox. 'To me.'

The knights drew closer - Nerovar watching the distant landings without a word; Priamus, his blade already in his hands, resting on one pauldron; Cador, projecting a sense of implacable patience; Bastilan, grim and silent; and Artarion, holding Grimaldus's banner, the only one of them without his helmet. He seemed to enjoy the uncomfortable glances he received from the human soldiers as they saw his shattered face. Occasionally, he'd grin at them, baring his metal teeth.

'Helm on,' Grimaldus said, the words emerging from his vocaliser as a low growl. Artarion complied with a chuckle.

'We must speak,' Grimaldus said.

'You have chosen a curious moment to realise that,' Artarion said. The wall shivered beneath their feet again as the turrets unleashed another volley at an alien scrap-cruiser shaking the sky overhead.

'The city has awoken to its duty,' Grimaldus intoned. 'It is time I did the same.'

The knights stood and watched as xenos landers touched down on the plains several kilometres from the city. Even from this distance, the Templars could make out hordes of greenskins spilling from the grounded ships, mustering on the wastelands.

Reports clashed with each other over the vox, telling of similar landings being made to the east and west of the city.

'Speak,' Grimaldus demanded in the face of his brothers' silence.

'What would have us say, Reclusiarch?' asked Bastilan.

'The truth. Your perceptions of this doomed crusade, and the way it is being led.'

The ork ship that had passed overhead minutes before now came down in the wasteland with slow, grinding, earthshaking force. It ploughed into the dusty ground, throwing up a trail of dust in its wake, and Helsreach shook to its foundations.

A cheer went up along the wall - thousands of soldiers crying out at the sight.

'We hold the largest city on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers,' Cador said, 'as well as countless experienced Guard and militia officers. And we have Invigilata.'

'Your point?' Grimaldus asked, watching the crashed ship burn. 'Do you think that will be even half of what we would need to repel the siege that we'll soon suffer?'

'No,' Cador replied. 'We are going to die here, but that is not my point. My point, brother, is that the city has a command structure already in place.'

Bastilan pitched in. 'You are not a general, Grimaldus. And you were not sent here to be one.'

Grimaldus nodded, his mind flashing back from the fire on the wastelands, snapping into recollections of the endless command staff meetings when the mortals had requested his presence.

He had thought it was his duty to be present, to grasp the full situation facing the hive. When he said these words to his brothers, he was answered with curses and smiles.

The Chaplain watched the greenskin swarm growing in size as more landers came down. The alien vessels darkened the sky, such was their number. Like steel beetles, they infested the wastelands in every direction, disgorging hosts of xenos warriors.

'It was my duty to study every soul, every weapon, every metre of this hive. But I have erred, brothers. The High Marshal did not send me here to command.'

'We know,' Artarion said softly, his skin tingling at the change in Grimaldus's tone. He sounded almost himself again.

'Until this moment, until I looked upon the enemy myself, I had not resigned myself to dying here. I was… enraged… with Helbrecht for damning me to this exile.'

'As were we all,' Priamus said, his voice rich with the sneer he wore on his face. 'But we will carve a legend here, Reclusiarch. We will make the High Marshal remember the day he sent us here to die.'

Good words, Grimaldus thought. Fine words.

'He will always recall that day. It is not he who must be forced to remember the Helsreach Crusade.' The Chaplain nodded out to the massing army. 'It is them.'

Grimaldus looked to his left, then his right. The Steel Legion stood in organised ranks, watching the mass of enemies coming together on the plains. When his own gaze returned to the foe, he couldn't help a smile creeping its way across his features.

'This is Grimaldus of the Black Templars,' he voxed. 'Colonel Sarren, answer me.'

'I am here, Reclusiarch. Commander Barasath reports—'

'Later, colonel. Later. I am looking at the enemy, tens of thousands, with more landing each moment. They will not wait for their wreck-Titans to be landed. These beasts are hungry for bloodshed. The first strike will come at the north wall, within the next two hours.'

'With respect, Reclusiarch, how will they reach the wall without Titans to breach it?'

'Propulsion packs to gain the battlements. Ladders to climb. Artillery to pound holes in the walls. They will do whatever they can, and as soon as they are able. These creatures have been imprisoned on bulk ships for weeks, and in some cases, months. Do not expect sense. Expect madness and rage.'

'Understood. I will have Barasath's squadrons ready for bombing runs on enemy artillery.'

'I would have suggested the same, colonel. The gates, Sarren. We must watch the gates. A wall is only as strong as its weakest point, and they will come at the north gate with everything they have.'

'Reinforcements are already being rerouted to—'

'No.'

'Pardon me?'

'You heard me. I will not require reinforcement. I have fifteen of my knights with me, and an entire Steel Legion regiment. I will provide updates as the situation evolves.' Grimaldus killed the vox-link before Sarren could argue more.

The Templar watched the enemy massing in the distance for several more minutes, listening to the chatter of the Guard soldiers nearby. The men around him wore the insignia of the 273rd Steel Legion. Their shoulder badges showed a black carrion bird, clutching the Imperial aquila in its claws.

The Reclusiarch closed his eyes, recalling the personnel data meetings he'd endured. The 273rd. The Desert Vultures. Their commanding officer was Colonel F. Nathett. His second officers were Major K. Johan, and Major V. Oros.

In the distance, a great cry was raised. It barely reached the defenders' ears over the powerful refrain of wall-guns firing, but it was there nevertheless. Thousands upon thousands of orks bellowing their racial war cry.

They were charging.

Charging alongside grumbling, rickety vehicles; troop-carriers stolen from the Imperium and subsequently junked in the spirit of alien ''improvement''; growling tanks that already lobbed shells that fell far short of the city walls; even great beasts of burden, the size of scout-class Titans, with scrap-metal howdahs on their rocking backs, filled with howling orks.

'We have sixteen minutes before they reach the range of the wall-guns,' Nerovar said. 'Twenty-two before they reach the gates, if their rate of advance remains unaltered.'

Grimaldus opened his eyes, and took a breath. The humans were muttering amongst themselves, and even though they were trained veterans, Grimaldus's gene-enhanced senses could scent the reek of sudden sweat and fear-soured breath through their respirators. No mortal could fail to be moved by the horde of devastation rumbling their way. Even without their greater war machines, the first ork assault was vast.

The city was ready. The enemy was coming. It was time to face up to why he was exiled here.

Grimaldus took a step up onto the battlements.

The wind was strong - an atmospheric disturbance from so many heavy craft making planetfall - but despite the powerful gale that whipped the greatcoats of the human soldiers, Grimaldus remained steady.

He walked along the edge of the wall, his weapons drawn and activated. The generator coils on the back of his plasma pistol burned with fierce light, and his crozius maul sparked with lethal force. As he moved, the eyes of the soldiers followed him. The wind tore at his tabard and the parchment scrolls fastened to his armour. He paid no heed to the anger of the elements.

'Do you see that?' he asked quietly.

At first, only silence followed. Hesitantly, the Guard soldiers began to cast glances to each other, uncomfortable with the Chaplain's presence and confused by his behaviour.

All eyes were on him now. Grimaldus aimed his mace out at the advancing hordes. Thousands. Tens of thousands. And only the very beginning.

'Do you see that?' he roared at the humans. The closest ranks flinched back from the mechanical bark that issued almost deafeningly loud from his skull helm.

'Answer me!'

He received several trembling nods. 'Yes, sir…' uttered a handful of them, the speakers faceless within the masses behind their rebreather masks.

Grimaldus turned back to the wasteland, already dark with the teeming, chaotic ranks of the enemy. At first, his helm emitted a low, vox-distorted chuckle. Within a few seconds, he was laughing, laughing up at the burning sky while aiming his crozius hammer at the enemy.

'Are you all as insulted as I am? This is what they send against us?'

He turned back to the men, the laughter fading, but amused contempt filling his voice even through the inhumanising vocalisers of his helm.

'This is what they send? This rabble? We hold one of the mightiest cities on the face of the planet. The fury of its guns sends all skyborne enemies to the ground in flames. We stand united in our thousands - our weapons without number, our purity without question, and our hearts beating courage through our blood. And this is how they attack us?

'Brothers and sisters… A legion of beggars and alien dregs wheezes its way across the plains. Forgive me when the moment comes that they whine and weep against our walls. Forgive me that I must order you to waste ammunition upon their worthless bodies.'

Grimaldus paused, lowering his weapon at last, turning his back on the invaders as if bored by their very existence. His entire attention was focussed upon the soldiers below him.

'I have heard many souls speak my name in whispers since I came to Helsreach. I ask you now: Do you know me?'

'Yes,' several voices replied, several among the hundreds.

'Do you know me?' he bellowed at them over the firing of the wall-guns.

'Yes!' a chorus answered now.

'Iam Grimaldus of the Black Templars! A brother to the Steel Legions of this defiant world!'

A muted cheer greeted his words. It wasn't enough, not even close.

'Never again in life will your actions carry such consequence. Never again will you serve as you serve now. No duty will matter as much, and no glory will taste as true. We are the defenders of Helsreach. On this day, we carve our legend in the flesh of every alien we slay. Will you stand with me?'

Now the cheers came in truth. They thundered in the air around him.

'Will you stand with me?'

Again, a roar.

'Sons and daughters of the Imperium! Our blood is the blood of heroes and martyrs! The xenos dare defile our city? They dare tread the sacred soil of our world? We will throw their bodies from these walls when the final day dawns!'

A wave of noise crashed against his armour as they cheered. Grimaldus raised his war maul, aiming it to the embattled heavens.

'This is our city! This is our world! Say it! Say it! Cry it out so the bastards in orbit will hear our fury! Our city! Our world!'

'OUR CITY! OUR WORLD!'

Laughing again, Grimaldus turned to face the oncoming horde. 'Run, alien dogs! Come to me! Come to us all! Come and die in blood and fire!'

'BLOOD AND FIRE!'

The Reclusiarch cut the air with his crozius, as if ordering his men forward. 'For the Templars! For the Steel Legion! For Helsreach!'

'FOR HELSREACH!'

'Louder!'

'FOR HELSREACH!'

'They cannot hear you, brothers!'

'FOR HELSREACH!'

'Hurl yourselves at these walls, inhuman filth! Die on our blades! I am Grimaldus of the Black Templars, and I will cast your carcasses from these holy walls!'

'GRIMALDUS! GRIMALDUS! GRIMALDUS!'

Grimaldus nodded, still staring out over the wastelands, letting the cheering chant mix with the howling wind, knowing it would carry to the advancing enemy.

A vox-voice pulled him from his reverie. 'That is the first time since we landed,' said Artarion, 'that you have sounded like yourself.'

'We have a war to fight,' the Chaplain replied. 'The past is done with. Nero, how long?'

The Apothecary tilted his head, watching the horde for several moments.

'Six minutes until they are within range of the wall-guns.'

Grimaldus stepped down from the edge of the wall, standing among the Guard. They backed away from him, even as they all still cheered his name.

'Vultures!' he called, 'I must speak with Colonel Nathett, and Majors Oros and Johan. Where are your officers?'

A great deal can happen in six minutes, especially when one has the resources of a fortress-city to call upon.

Dozens of fighters in the gunmetal grey of the 5082nd Naval Skyborne streaked over the advancing horde, punishing them from above with strafing runs. Autocannons chattered, spitting into the tide of enemy flesh. Lascannons beamed with eye-aching brilliance, destroying dozens of the few heavy tanks present in this initial ork host.

Grimaldus stood upon the battlements, weapons in hands, watching Commander Barasath's Lightnings and Thunderbolts unleashing devastation from the sky. He was a veteran of two hundred years. He knew, with cold clarity, when something was wasted effort.

Every death counts, he thought, seeking to force himself to believe it as the immense sea of foes came crashing closer.

Priamus was similarly unmoved. 'Barasath's best attempt is no more than spitting into a tidal wave.'

'Every death counts,' Grimaldus growled. 'Every life lost out there is one less enemy assailing our walls.'

A great beast, some kind of stomping mammoth covered in scales, cried out as it went down, lanced through its legs and belly by a volley of lascannon fire. The orks fell from the howdah on its back, vanishing into the swarm of warriors. Grimaldus prayed they were crushed underfoot by their allies.

On his retinal display, a runic countdown began to flicker red.

He raised his crozius.

Along the north wall, hundreds of multi-barrelled turrets begin their realignment. On grinding joints, they cycled down to aim at the wastelands, leaving the city vulnerable from above.

Around each turret, a cluster of soldiers stood ready - loaders, sighters, vox-officers, adjutants, all ready for the order.

'Wall-guns,' Nero voxed to Grimaldus. 'Wall-guns, now.' Grimaldus sliced the air with his blazing maul, screaming a single word.

'Fire!'

Craters appeared in the enemy horde. Huge explosions of dirt, scrap metal, bodies and gore erupted from the army. With the numbers facing them, the gunners on Helsreach's walls couldn't miss.

Thousands died in the first barrage. Thousands more came on.

'Reload!' a lone figure, armoured in black, shouted into the vox.

The walls themselves shook again, tremors pulsing through the rockcrete as the second volley fired. And the third. And the fourth. In a sane army, the annihilation inflicted upon them would be catastrophic. Entire legions would be breaking and running in fear.

The aliens, blood-maddened and howling their throaty war cries, didn't even slow down. They ignored their dead, trampled their wounded, and crashed against the towering walls like a peal of thunder.

With nothing capable of breaching the metres-thick sealed gates in the northern wall, the berserk aliens began to climb.

I have always believed there is something beautiful in the very first moments of a battle. Here are the moments of highest emotion; the fear of mortal men, the frustrated bloodlust and screaming overconfidence of mankind's enemies. In the moments when a battle is joined, the purity of the human species is first revealed to the foe.

In organised union, the hundreds of Steel Legion soldiers step forward. They move like different limbs of the same being. Like a reflection stretching into infinity, every man and woman down the line aims their lasguns over the wall, down at the greenskins howling and clambering. The aliens drag themselves up by their own claws; they climb on ladders and poles; they boost up on the whining thrusters of jump-packs.

And all of it so delightfully futile.

The crack! of thousands of lasguns discharging in a chorus is a strangely evocative song. It sings of discipline, defiance, strength and courage. More than that, it's a furious response - the first time the defenders can vent their rage at the invaders. Every soldier in the line squeezes their triggers, letting their lasrifles shout for them, spitting death down at the foe. Las-bolts tear into green flesh, ripping orks open, throwing them to the ground far below to be pulped under the boots of their kin.

Barasath's fighters streak overhead, their weapons still stuttering into the massed horde. Their targets have changed - more often than not, they rain their viciousness upon the artillery tanks that were unloaded last from the landers, and are only now catching up to the back to the besieging army.

I watch as the first of our fighters is brought down. Anti-air fire rattles up from a junked Hydra, its two remaining turrets tracking a group of Lightnings. The explosion is almost ignorable - a crumpled pop of fuel tanks detonating, and the protests of engines as the fighter spirals down.

It impacts in a burning wreck, wings shorn off, spinning and crashing through the ranks of the enemy. Some might consider it tragic that the pilot likely killed more of the enemy with his death than he did in life. I care only that more of the invaders are dead.

The first of the enemy to gain the ramparts does so alone. A hundred metres and more down the wall, a lone ork crashes down with his back-mounted propulsion pack streaming smoky fire. The others that were with him are either dead or dying, falling from their ascent as their bodies and thruster fuel tanks are riddled with las-fire. The one alien that touches down on the wall lasts less than a heartbeat. The creature is bayoneted in the throat, the eye, the chest and both legs by half a dozen soldiers, and their rifles blast the beast back over the edge.

First blood to Helsreach.

The minutes became hours.

The orks hurled themselves against the walls, still lacking any ability to secure a hold there, clambering up the hulls of wrecked tanks, mounds of their own dead, and ladders of twisted metal in a vain effort to reach the battlements.

Word was filtering through the wall commanders now; the east and west walls were enduring similar sieges. In the wasteland around the city, more landers were making planetfall, unloading fresh warriors and legions of tanks. While plenty of these new forces committed themselves immediately to the first attack already in progress, many more remained far from the city, making camps, clearing more landing zones and organising for a far more coordinated assault in the future.

The hive's defenders could make out individual banners among the ork swarm - clans and tribes united under the Great Enemy - many of which were now holding back rather than hurl themselves into this first, doomed attack.

Grimaldus remained with the Steel Legion troops on the northern wall, his knights spread out among the Guard's ranks, the Astartes' own squad unity suspended.

Occasionally, greenskins would manage to reach the battlements rather than being slaughtered as they climbed. In those rare moments, Templar chainblades would shear through stinking alien flesh, before Guard-issue lasrifles would finish the job with precision beams of laser light.

At some point during the endless firing downward, Major Oros had voxed Grimaldus in bemusement.

'They're just lining up to die,' he'd laughed.

'These are the most foolish, and the least in control of themselves. They hunger to fight, no matter the odds or the war being waged. Look out onto the plains, major. Witness the gathering of our real enemies.'

'Understood, Reclusiarch.'

Grimaldus heard the Legion officers shouting to their men then, ordering another change of rank. The soldiers at the battlements fell back to reload, to clean their weapons and cool down overheating power-packs. The next line advanced to take their comrades' vacated positions, stepping up to the ramparts and immediately opening fire on the climbing orks.

The smell of the siege was drifting into the city now. Mountains of alien dead lay at the foot of the walls, their bodies ruptured and their tainted fluids leaking into the ashy soil. While the Templars and the Legionnaires were spared the worst of the stench by their helms and rebreathers, within the city itself, the civilians and militia forces were getting their first, foul taste of war against the ork-breed xenos. It was an unpleasant revelation.

Night was threatening to fall before the aliens finally fled.

Whether the mountain of their own dead had turned their fury to futility, or whether some cognition finally dawned over them all that the true battles were yet to come, the green tide retreated en masse. Horns sounded across the wasteland, hundreds of them, signalling a retreat that otherwise lacked even a hint of cohesion. Las-bolts flashed down from the walls as the Legion kept up a savage rate of fire, punishing the orks for their cowardice now just as they had punished them for their eager madness before. Hundreds more of the xenos collapsed to the ground, slain by the day's last, bitterest volley.

Soon, even the stragglers were out of range, limping their way behind the horde back to their landing sites.

Ork ships covered the wasteland now from horizon to horizon. The largest ships, almost as tall as hive spires themselves, were opening to release colossal, stomping scrap-Titans. Like hunched, fat-bellied aliens in shape, the junk-giants crashed across the plains, their pounding tread raising dust clouds in their wake.

These were the weapons that would bring the wall down. These were the foes that Invigilata had to destroy.

'That,' Artarion nodded at the sight as the knights remained on the wall, 'is a bleak picture.'

'The real battle begins tomorrow,' Cador grunted. 'At least we will not be bored.'

'I believe they will wait.' It was Grimaldus who spoke, his voice less bitter now the war cries and speeches were over. 'They will wait until they have overwhelming force with which to crush us, and they will strike like a hammer.'

The Chaplain paused, leaning on the battlements and staring at the army as sunset claimed the surrounded city.

'I requested we withdraw all Guard forces from the wasteland installations across all of southern Armageddon Secundus. The colonel agreed in principle.'

Bastilan joined the Reclusiarch at the wall. The sergeant disengaged his helm's seals and stood barefaced, ignoring the cool wind that prickled at his unshaven scalp.

'What's worth guarding out there?'

The Reclusiarch smiled, his expression hidden.

'The days and days of briefings were a necessary evil to answer questions like that. Munitions,' Grimaldus said. 'A great deal of munitions, to be used when the hive cities fall and need to be reclaimed. But that is not all. The Desert Vultures spoke of a curious legend. Something buried beneath the sands. A weapon.'

'We are involving ourselves in this world's mythology now?'

'Do not dismiss this. I heard something today that gave me hope.' He took a breath, narrowing his eyes as he watched the sea of enemy banners. 'And I have an idea. Where is Forgemaster Jurisian?'

CHAPTER VII Ancient Secrets

Cyria Tyro leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes to rid her vision of the numbers she'd been staring at.

Casualties from the first day's engagement were light, and damage to the wall was minimal. Flamer teams had been lowered to drag the alien dead away from the city walls and burn them in massive pyres. It was a volunteer-only duty, and one that came with an element of risk - if the orks decided to attack in the night, there was no guarantee the hundreds of pyre-lighters outside could be brought back in time.

The funeral fires burned now, an hour before dawn, and though there were far too many bodies to complete the duty in a single night, the mounds of xenos dead were at least reduced.

For now, she sighed.

The ammunition expended on the first day alone had been… Well, she'd seen the numbers and could scarcely believe her eyes. The city was a fortress and its weapon reserves had seemed inexhaustible, but on a day of relatively sporadic fighting with only three regiments engaged, the logistical nightmare soon to be facing them was all too apparent. Their ammunition stocks would last months, but supplying it to regiments scattered throughout the city, ensuring they were aware of boltholes, weapons caches and…

I'm tired, she thought with a dry smile. She'd not even fought today.

Tyro signed a few data-slates with her thumbprint, authorising the transferral of reports to Lord General Kurov and Commissar Yarrick, far off in distant hives, already engaged in their own sieges.

The door's proximity chime pulsed once.

'Enter,' she called out.

Major Ryken walked in. His greatcoat was unbuttoned, his rebreather mask was hanging from its cord around his neck, and his black hair was scruffy from the rain.

'It's hurling it down out there,' he grumbled. He'd come all the way from the east wall. 'You wouldn't believe what the orbital disturbance has done to the atmosphere. What did you want that couldn't be done over the vox?'

'I couldn't reach Colonel Sarren.'

'He'd not slept in over sixty hours. I think Falkov threatened to shoot him unless he got some rest.' Ryken narrowed his eyes. 'There are other colonels. Dozens of them.'

'True, but none of those are the city commander's executive officer.'

The major scratched the back of his neck. His skin was cold, itching and grimy with the faintly acidic rainwater.

'Miss Tyro,' he began.

'Actually, given my rank as adjutant quintus to the planetary leader, I'll settle for ''ma'am'' or ''advisor''. Not ''Miss Tyro''. This is not a society function, and if it were, I would not be spending it talking to a drowned rat like you, major.'

Ryken grinned. Tyro didn't.

'Very well, ma'am, how may this lowly rodent be of service? I have a storm to get back out into before dawn.'

She looked around her own cramped but warm office in the central command tower, hiding her guilty flush by faking a cough.

'We received these from Acheron Hive an hour ago.' She gestured at several printed sheets of paper featuring topographic images. Ryken picked them up from her messy desk, flipping through them.

'These are orbital picts,' he said.

'I know what they are.'

'I thought the enemy fleet had destroyed all our satellites.'

'They have. These were among the last images our orbital defence array was able to send. Acheron received them, and sent them on to the other cities.'

Ryken turned one of the images to face her. 'This one has a caffeine stain on it. Did Acheron send that?'

Tyro scowled at him. 'Grow up, major.'

He spent a few more moments regarding the printed picts. 'What am I looking for here?'

'These are picts of the Dead Lands to the south. Far to the south, across the ocean.'

'I paid attention in basic geography, thank you, ma'am.' Ryken went through the picts a second time, lingering over the images of massive ork planetfall discolouring the landscape. 'This makes no sense,' he said at last.

'I know.'

'There's nothing in the Dead Lands. Not a thing.'

'I know, major.'

'So do we have any idea why they landed a force there that looks large enough to take a city?'

'Tacticians suggest the enemy is establishing a spaceport there. Or a colony.'

Ryken snorted, letting the picts drop back onto her desk.

'The tacticians are drunk,' he said. 'Every man, woman and child knows why the xenos come here: to fight. To fight until either they're all dead, or we are. They don't raise the greatest armada in history just to pitch tents at the south pole and raise ugly alien babies.'

'The fact remains,' Tyro gestured to the prints, 'that the enemy is there. Their distance across the ocean puts them out of reach for air strikes. No flyers would reach us without needing to refuel several times. They could just as easily set up airstrips in the wastelands much nearer the hive cities. In fact, we can already see they're doing just that.'

'What about the oil platforms?' he asked.

'The platforms?' she shook her head, not sure where he was leading with this.

'You're kidding me,' Ryken said. 'The Valdez oil platforms. Didn't you study Helsreach before you were posted here? Where do you think half of the hive cities in Armageddon Secundus get their fuel from? They take it in here from the offshore platforms and cook it into promethium for the rest of the continent.'

Tyro already knew this. She let him have his moment of feigned indignity.

'I paid attention,' she smiled, 'in basic economics. The platforms are protected from these southernmost raiders by the same virtue we are. It's just too far to strike at them.'

'Then with all due respect, ma'am, why did you pull me off the wall? I have duties to perform.'

And here it was. She had to deal with this matter delicately.

'I… would appreciate your assistance. First, I must disseminate this information among the other officers.'

'You don't need my help for that. You need access to a vox-caster, and you're sitting in a building full of them. Why should they care, anyway? What does a potential colony of the enemy on the polar cap have to do with the defence of the hive?'

'High Command has informed me that the matter is to be considered Helsreach's problem. We are - relatively speaking - the closest city.'

Ryken laughed. 'Would they like us to invade? I'll get the men ready and tell them to wrap up warm and lay siege to the south pole. I hope the orks outside the city respect the fact we'll be absent for the rest of the siege. They look like sporting gentlemen. I'm sure they'll wait for us to return to the hive before attacking again.'

'Major.'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'High Command has informed me to spread the information and let all officers be aware of the concern. That is all. No invasions. And it is not what I require your aid with.'

'Then what is it?'

'Grimaldus,' she said.

'Is that a fact? Problems with the Emperor's finest?'

'This is a serious matter,' Tyro frowned.

'Fair enough. But talk from the Vultures said that he was finally getting involved. They apparently got one hell of a speech.'

'He performed his duties on the wall with great skill and devotion.' She still wasn't smiling. 'That is not the problem at hand.'

Ryken let his raised eyebrow do the talking.

Tyro sighed. 'The problem is one of contact and mediation. He refuses to talk to me.' She paused, as if considering something for the first time. 'Perhaps because I'm female.'

'You're serious,' Ryken said. 'You truly believe that.'

'Well… He has bonded with the male officers, hasn't he?'

Ryken thought that was debatable. He'd heard that the only commander in the city Grimaldus had treated with anything more than disdainful impatience was the ancient woman that led the Legio Invigilata. And even that was just rumour.

'It's not because you're female,' the major said. 'It's because you're useless.'

The pause lasted several seconds, during which Cyria Tyro's face hardened with each passing moment.

'Excuse me?' she asked.

'Useless to them, shall we say. It's simple. You're the liaison between a High Command that is too busy to care what happens here, too distant to make much difference even if it did care, and offworld forces that have no need or interest in playing nice with the grunts of the Guard. Does the Crone of Invigilata need to pass orders through you? Does Grimaldus? No. Neither group cares.'

'The chain of command…' she started, but trailed off.

'The chain of command is a system both the Legio and the Templars are outside. And above, if they choose to be.'

'I feel useless,' she finally said. 'And not just to them.'

He could see how much that admission cost her. He could also see that she didn't seem such a haughty bitch when her defences were down. Just as Ryken drew breath to speak - and tell her a more polite version of his current thoughts - her desk vox-speaker buzzed.

'Adjutant Quintus Cyria Tyro?' asked a deep, resonant male voice.

'Yes. Who is this?'

'Reclusiarch Grimaldus of the Black Templars. I must speak with you.'

The Crone of Invigilata floated in her fluid-filled coffin, appearing to listen to the muffled sounds outside.

In truth, she was paying little attention. The muted sounds of speech and movement belonged to a world of physicality that she barely remembered. Linked with Stormherald, the god-machine's ever-present rumbling anger infected her like a chemical injected into her mind. Even in moments of peace, it was difficult to focus on anything but wrath.

To share a mind with Stormherald was to dwell within a maze of memories that were not her own. Stormherald had looked upon countless battlefields for hundreds of years before Princeps Zarha was even born. She had only to shut down the imagefinders that now served as her eyes, and as the hazy image of her milky surroundings faded to nothing, she could remember deserts she had never seen, wars she had never fought, glories she had never won.

Stormherald's voice in her mind was an unrelenting murmur, a hum of quiet tension, like a low-burning fire. It challenged her, with wordless growls, to taste of the victories it had tasted for so long - to swim beneath the surface memories and surrender to them. Its spirit was a proud and indefatigable machine-soul, and it hungered not only for the fiery maelstrom of war, but also the cold exaltation of triumph. It felt the banners of past wars that hung from its metal skin, and it knew fierce, unbreakable pride.

'My princeps,' came a muffled voice.

Zarha activated her photoreceptors. Borrowed memories faded and vision returned. Strange, how the former were so much clearer than the latter, these days.

Hello, Valian.

'Hello, Valian.'

'My princeps, the adepts of the soul are reporting discontent within Stormherald's heart. We are getting anomalous readings of ill-temper from the reactor core.'

We are angry, moderati. We yearn to bring the thunder down upon our foes.

'We are angry, moderati. We yearn to bring the thunder down upon our foes.'

'That is understandable, my princeps. You are… operating at peak capacity? You are sanguine?'

Are you querying if I am at risk of being consumed by Stormherald's heart?

'Are you querying if I am at risk of bekkrrssshhhhh heart?'

'Maintenance adept,' Valian Carsomir called to a robed tech-priest. 'Attend to the princeps's vocaliser unit.' He turned back to his commander. 'I trust you, my princeps. Forgive me for troubling you.'

There is nothing to forgive, Valian.

'There is nothkkkrrrrrsssssssssh!'

That would become annoying after a while, she thought, but did not pulse the sentiment to her vocaliser. Your concern touches me, Valian.

'Your concern touches me, Valian.'

But I am well.

'Bkrsh I am well.'

The tech-adept stood by the side of Zarha's amniotic tank. Mechanical arms slid from his robe and began to do their work.

Moderati Primus Valian Carsomir hesitated, before making the sign of the cog and returning to his station.

We will see battle soon, Valian. Grimaldus has promised it to us.

'We will see battle soon, Valian. Grimaldus has promised it to us.'

Valian didn't reply at first. If the enemy was going to amass its numbers first, shelling the foe from the safety of the city walls was hardly seeing battle, in his eyes.

'We are all ready, my princeps.'

Tomaz couldn't sleep.

He sat up in bed, swallowing another stinging mouthful of amasec, the cheap, thin stuff that Heddon brewed in one of the back warehouses down at the docks. The stuff tasted more than a little of engine oil. It wouldn't have surprised Tomaz to learn that was one of the ingredients.

He swallowed another burning gulp that itched its way down his throat. There was, he realised, a more than good chance he was going to throw this stuff back up soon. It had a habit of not sitting too well on an empty stomach once it went down, but he didn't think he could manage another dry meal of preserved rations. Tomaz glanced at several packets of unopened, densely packed grain tablets on the table.

Maybe later.

He'd not been anywhere near the north and eastern walls. At the south docks, there was little difference between today and any other day. The grinding joints of his crane drowned out any of the distant sounds of the war, and he'd spent his twelve-hour shift unloading tankers and organising distribution from the warehouses in his district - just as he spent every shift.

The backlog of docked tankers, and those awaiting docking clearance, was beyond a joke. Half of Tomaz's crew was gone, conscripted into the militia reserves and sent across the city to play at being Guardsmen, kilometres away from where they were really needed. He was the elected representative of the Dockers' Union, and he knew every other foreman was suffering the same lack of manpower. It made a difficult job completely laughable, except none of them were smiling.

There had been talk of limiting the flow of crude coming in from the Valdez platforms once the orbital defences fell, under fears the orks would bombard the shipping lanes.

Necessity outweighed the risk of tanker crews dying, of course. Helsreach needed fuel. The flow continued. Even with the city sealed, the docks remained open.

And they were somehow busier than before, despite the fact there was only half the manpower on the crews. Teams of Steel Legionnaires and menial servitors manned the many anti-air turrets along the dockside and the warehouse rooftops. Hundreds upon hundreds of warehouses were now used to house tanks, converted into maintenance terminals and garages for war machine repair. Convoys of Leman Russ battle tanks shuddered through the docks, strangling thoroughfares with their slow processions.

Half-crewed and slowed by constant interference, the Helsreach docks were almost at a standstill.

And still the tankers arrived.

Tomaz checked his wrist chronometer. Just over two hours until dawn.

He resigned himself to not getting any sleep before his shift began, and took another drink from the bottle of disgusting amasec.

Heddon really should be shot for brewing this rat piss.

She stood in the storm, her Steel Legion greatcoat heavy around her shoulders.

The lashing rainfall did little to clean the streets. The reek of sulphur rose from the wet buildings around her as the acidic rain mixed with the pollution coating the stonework and rockcrete across the city.

Not a good time to forget your rebreather, Cyria…

Major Ryken escorted her along the north wall. In the dim distance to the east, the sun was already bringing dawn's first glimmer to the sky. Cyria didn't want to look over the wall's edge, but couldn't help herself. The dim illumination revealed the enemy's army, a tide of darkness that reached from horizon to horizon.

'Throne of the God-Emperor,' she whispered.

'It could be worse,' Ryken said, guiding her onward after she'd frozen at the sight.

'There must be millions of them out there.'

'Without a doubt.'

'Hundreds of tribes… You can make out their banners…'

'I try not to. Eyes ahead, ma'am.'

Cyria turned with reluctance. Ahead of her, fifty metres down the wall, a group of giant black statues stood in the rainfall, the deluge making the edges of their armour shine.

One of the giants moved, his boots thudding on the wall as he walked towards her. The harsh wind whipped the soaked scrolls tied to his armour, and drenched his tabard with its black cross upon the chest.

His face was a grinning silver skull, the eyes staring a soulless red, right through her.

'Cyria Tyro,' he said in a deep, vox-crackling voice, 'greetings.' The Astartes made the sign of the aquila, his dark gauntlets banging against his chestplate as they formed the symbol. 'And Major Ryken of the 101st. Welcome to the north wall.'

Ryken returned the salute. 'I heard you gave the Vultures a speech earlier, Reclusiarch,' he said.

'They are fine warriors, all,' Grimaldus said. 'They needed none of my words, but it was a pleasure to share them, nevertheless.'

Ryken was caught momentarily off-guard. He'd not expected an answer, let alone this unnerving humility. Before he could reply, Cyria spoke up. She looked up at Grimaldus, shielding her eyes from the downpour. The hum of his armour made her gums itch. The sound seemed to be louder than before, as if reacting to the bad weather.

'How may I be of service, Reclusiarch?'

'That is the wrong question,' the knight said, his vox-voice a low growl. The rain scythed onto his armour, hissing as it hit the dark ceramite. 'The question is one you must answer, not one you must ask.'

'As you wish,' she said. His formality was making her uncomfortable. In fact, everything about him was making her uncomfortable.

'We have defensive positions in the wastelands, manned by the Steel Legion. Platoons of the Desert Vultures, among other regiments, have dug in to hold these against the enemy. Small towns, coastal depots, weapons caches, fuel dumps, listening stations.'

Tyro nodded. Most of these outposts, and their relative strategic value, had been covered in the command meetings.

'Yes,' she said, for want of anything else to say.

'Yes,' he repeated her reply, sounding amused. 'I was informed today exactly what is stored in the underground hangar of the D16-West outpost, ninety-eight kilometres to the north-west of the city. None of our briefings mentioned it was a sealed Mechanicus facility.'

Tyro and Ryken exchanged a glance. The major shrugged a shoulder. Although most of his face was masked by his rebreather, his eyes showed he had no idea what the Chaplain was inferring. Cyria's glance fell back to the towering knight's crimson gaze.

'I've seen little data on D-16 West's storage consignments, Reclusiarch. All I know is that a deactivated relic from the era of the First War is stored in the sub-level compound. No Guard personnel are permitted access to the innards of the facility. It is considered sovereign Mechanicus territory.'

'I learned the same today. That does not intrigue you?' the Astartes asked.

It was a fair question. In truth, no, it didn't interest her at all. The First War had been won almost six hundred years ago, and the planet's face was one of different cities and different armies now.

'Whether I find it fascinating or not is hardly of consequence,' she said. 'Whatever is stored there is impounded under orders of the Adeptus Mechanicus - I suspect for a damn good reason - and is a secret even from Planetary High Command. Even our Guard force there is a token battle group. They are not expected to survive the first month.'

'Do you know your history, Adjutant Tyro?' Grimaldus's voice was calm, low and composed. 'Before we made planetfall here, a great deal was committed to our memories. All lore is useful in the right hands. All information can be a weapon against the enemy.'

'I have studied several of the decisive battles of the First War,' she said. All Steel Legion officers had.

'Then you will know what Mechanicus weapon was designed and first deployed here.'

'Throne,' Ryken whispered. 'Holy Throne of Terra.'

'I… don't think you can be right…' Tyro told the Astartes.

'Perhaps not,' Grimaldus conceded, 'but I intend to learn the truth for myself. One of our gunships will carry a small group to D-16 West in one hour.'

'But it's sealed!'

'It will not be sealed for long.'

'It's Mechanicus territory!'

'I do not care. If I am right in my suspicions, there is a weapon there. I want that weapon, Cyria Tyro. And I will have it.'

She pulled her greatcoat tighter around her body as the storm intensified.

'If it was something that would help with the war,' she said, 'the Mechanicus would have deployed it by now.'

'I do not believe that, and I am surprised that you do. The Mechanicus has committed a great deal in the defence of Armageddon. That does not mean they have the same stake in the war that we do. I have battled alongside the Cult of Mars many times. They breathe secrecy instead of air.'

'You can't leave the city before dawn. The enemy—'

'The enemy will not break the city walls in the first day. And Bayard, Emperor's Champion of the Helsreach Crusade, will command the Templars in my absence.'

'I can't allow you to do this. It will enrage the Mechanicus.'

'I am not asking for your permission, adjutant.' Grimaldus paused, and she swore she could hear a smile in his next words. 'I am asking if you wish to come with us.'

'I…I…'

'You informed me upon my arrival that you were here to facilitate interaction between the offworld forces and those of Armageddon.'

'I know, but—'

'Mark my words, Cyria Tyro. If the Mechanicus has reasons for not deploying that weapon, they may not be reasons that other Imperial commanders will find acceptable. I do not care about those reasons. I care about winning this war.'

'I'll accompany you,' she almost choked on the words. Throne, what was she doing…

'I thought you would,' said Grimaldus. 'The sun is rising. Come, to the Thunderhawk. My brothers already wait.'

The gunship shuddered as its boosters lifted it from the landing platform.

The pilot, an Initiate knight with few honour markings on his armour, guided the ship skyward.

'Try not to get us shot down,' Artarion said to him, standing behind the pilot's throne in the cockpit. They were set to fly above the clouds anyway, and take a course over the ocean and the coast before veering inland once they were clear of the besieging army and its fighter support.

'Brother,' the Initiate said, watching the city falling below as he applied vertical thrust, 'does anyone ever laugh at your jokes?'

'Humans sometimes do.'

The pilot didn't reply to that. Artarion's answer said it all. The gunship gave a kick as its velocity boosters fired, and through the cockpit window, the toxic cloud cover began to slide past.

CHAPTER VIII Oberon

Domoska muttered theLitany of Focus as she looked through the sight of her lasrifle. She blinked behind her sunglare goggles, then raised them to look through the gunsight again without the tinted lenses darkening her vision.

'Uh, Andrej?' she called over her shoulder.

The two soldiers were at their modest camp on the perimeter of D-16's boundaries. Sat on the desert sands, cleaning their rifles, the fact they were away from the main base also set them apart from the other forty-eight Steel Legionnaires assigned to this pointless, suicidal duty.

Andrej didn't look up from his lap, where he was wiping laspistol power cell packs with an oily rag.

'What is it now, eh? I'm busy, okay?'

'Is that a gunship?'

'What are you talking about, eh?' Andrej was from Armageddon Prime, on the far side of the world. His accent always made Domoska grin. Almost everything he said sounded like a question.

'That,' she pointed into the sky, close to the horizon. Nothing was visible to the naked eye, and Andrej groped on the coat laid out on the ground, reaching for his detached gunsight.

'Listen, okay, I am trying to respect the spirit of my weapon, yes? What is this you want? I see no gunship.' He stared through his sight, squinting.

'A few degrees above the horizon.'

'Oh, hey, yes that is a gunship, okay? You must report it at once.'

'This is Domoska, at Boundary Three. Contact, contact, contact. Imperial gunship inbound.'

'That is the Black Templars, yes? They are from Helsreach. I know this. I listen to my briefings. I do not sleep, like you.'

'Be quiet,' she murmured, waiting for confirmation over the vox.

'I will be the one with so many medals, I think. You have nothing, eh?'

'Be quiet!'

'Acknowledged,' the reply finally came. Andrej took that as his cue to speak again.

'I hope they are saying we may return to the city, okay? That would be good news. High walls! Titans! We might even survive this war, eh?'

Neither of them had ever seen a Thunderhawk gunship before. As it came in on howling thrusters, slowing down and hovering over the almost abandoned facility of empty warehouses and storage bunkers, Domoska had a sinking sensation in her stomach.

'This can't be good.' She bit her lower lip.

'I do not agree, you know? This is Astartes business. It will be good. Good for us, bad for the enemy.' She just looked at him.

'What? It will be good. You will see, eh? I am always right.'

Storm-trooper CaptainInsa Rashevska glanced at the soldiers on either side of her as the gunship's front ramp lowered on hissing hydraulics.

One thought had been rattling around her mind in the five minutes since Domoska had voxed in the sighting, and that was a very simple, clear: Why in the hells are the Astartes here?

She was about to get her answer.

'Should we… salute?' one of her men asked from his position at Rashevska's side. 'Is that what you're supposed to do?'

'I don't know,' she replied. 'Just stand at attention.'

The gang ramp clanged as boots descended. A human - from the Legion, no less - and two Templars.

Both Astartes wore the black of their Chapter. One was draped in a tabard showing personal heraldry, and his helm showed an ornate death mask as the faceplate. The other wore much bulkier armour, with additional layers of ablative plating, and the war plate whirred and clanked as its false-muscles moved.

'Captain,' the Legion officer said. 'I'm Adjutant Quintus Tyro, seconded to Hive Helsreach from the Lord General's command staff. With me are Reclusiarch Grimaldus and Master of the Forge Jurisian, of the Black Templars Chapter.'

Rashevska made the sign of the aquila, trying not to show her unease in the presence of the towering warriors. Four machine-arms, their servo-joints grinding, unlocked from Jurisian's thrumming back-mounted power pack. Their metal claws clicked open and snapped closed while the arms themselves extended as if stretching.

'Greetings,' Jurisian rumbled.

'Captain,' Grimaldus said.

'We have come to enter the installation,' Cyria Tyro smiled.

Rashevska said nothing for almost ten seconds. When she did speak, it was with a stunned and disbelieving laugh.

'Forgive me, is this a joke?'

'Far from it,' Grimaldus said, striding past her.

On the surface, D-16 West wasn't a particularly grand site. Rising from the wasteland's sandy soil were a cluster of buildings, all of which were solidly built and armoured - almost bunker-like in their squat construction. 'All were empty, save for those now occupied by the small Steel Legion force stationed here. In those buildings, bedrolls and equipment were arranged in an order that spoke of discipline. Two expansive landing platforms, easily big enough for the bulky Mechanicus cruisers that could even carry Titans, were half-buried in sand, as the desert slowly reclaimed the facility.

The only architecture of significant interest was a roadway over a hundred metres in width that led into the ground beneath the surface complex. Whatever colossal doors had once opened into the underground complex were long buried beneath the wasteland's shifting tides. It would only be a handful of decades before the last evidence of the roadway itself was covered over.

One of the bunker buildings contained nothing but a series of elevators. The bulkhead doors to each lift were sealed, and the machinery lining the walls and connected to the shafts was all powered down. Keypads with runic buttons of various colours were installed on the wall next to each closed door.

'There is no power here,' the Reclusiarch said as he looked around. 'They left this place entirely devoid of energy?' That would make reactivation - if this installation was even ever meant to be reactivated - an incredibly difficult operation.

Jurisian walked around the interior of the bunker, his thudding tread making the floor tremble.

'No,' he said, his vox-voice a slow, considering drawl. 'There is power. The installation sleeps, but does not lie dead. It is locked in hibernation. Power still beats through its veins. The resonance is low, the pulse is slow. I hear it, nevertheless.'

Grimaldus stroked his fingertips along the closest keypad, staring at the unknown sigils that marked each button. The language of the runes was not High Gothic.

'Can you open these doors?' he asked. 'Can you get us down into the complex?'

Jurisian's four machine-arms extended again, their claws articulating. Two of the servo-arms came over the Techmarine's shoulders. The other two remained closely aligned with his true arms. The Master of the Forge approached one of the other elevator bulkheads, already reaching for his enhanced auspex scanner mag-locked to his belt. The arms reaching over his shoulders took Jurisian's bolter and blade, gripping them in claw clamps and leaving the knight's hands free.

'Jurisian? Can you do this?'

'It will necessitate a great deal of rerouting power from auxiliary sources, and those will be difficult to reach from a remote connection point here. A parasitic feed is required from—'

'Jurisian. Answer the question.'

'Forgive me, Reclusiarch. Yes. I will need one hour.'

Grimaldus waited, statue-still, watching Jurisian work. Cyria quickly grew bored, and wandered through the complex, speaking with the storm-troopers on duty. Two were returning from their shift at a boundary post, and the adjutant waved them over as she stood in the avian shadow cast by the gunship.

'Ma'am,' the female trooper saluted. 'Welcome to D-16 West.'

'Now we have Helsreach brass coming to visit, okay?' said the other. He made the sign of the aquila a moment later. 'I told you it would be good.'

Cyria returned their salutes, not even a little off-guard at their nonchalance. Storm-troopers were the best of the best, and their distance from regular troops often bred a little… uniqueness… into their attitudes.

'I'm Adjutant Quintus Tyro.'

'We know. We were told this on the vox. Digging for secrets in the sand, yes? That is not going to make the Mechanicus smile, I think.'

Whether the Mechanicus would be pleased or not evidently didn't matter to this man. He was smiling, either way.

'A big risk,' he added, nodding sagely as if this was some hidden truth he had worked out alone. 'It may bring much trouble, eh?' He still seemed entertained by the concept.

'With respect,' the female trooper - her stormcoat badge read DOMOSKA in flat black letters - said, looking uncomfortable, 'Will this not anger the Legio Invigilata?'

Tyro stroked a stray lock of her dark hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She repeated exactly what Grimaldus had said to her when she'd asked the same question during the Thunderhawk flight here.

'Perhaps,' she said, 'but it's not like they can leave the city in protest, is it?'

The doors opened.

The motion was smooth, but the noise of resistant machine-innards was immense: a squealing, unlubricated whine that split the air. Inside the elevator, the spacious car had enough room for twenty humans. Its walls were a matte, gunmetal grey.

Jurisian stepped back from the control console.

'It was necessary to power down all other ascent/descent systems. This one shaft will function. The others are now soulless.'

Grimaldus nodded. 'Will we be able to return to the surface once we go down?'

'There is a thirty-three point eight per cent chance, given current system destabilisation, that a return ascent will require additional maintenance and reconfiguring. There is a further twenty-nine per cent chance that no reconfiguring will restore function without access to the primary installation power network.'

'The word you're looking for, brother,' Grimaldus stepped towards the open doors, 'is ''maybe''.'

They wandered downthere for hours.

The underground complex was a silent - and initially lightless - series of labyrinthine corridors and deserted chambers. Jurisian brought the installation's overhead lighting back online after several minutes at a wall console.

Cyria clicked her torch off. Grimaldus cancelled his helm's vision intensifier settings. With flickering reluctance, dull yellow lighting illuminated their surroundings.

'I have resuscitated the spirits of the illuminatory array,' Jurisian said. 'They are weak from slumber, but should hold.'

The bland greyness all around them soon grew uninspiring as they ventured deeper into the complex. Around corners, through silent chambers with inactive engines, motionless machinery and generators of unknowable purpose.

Jurisian would occasionally pause and examine some of the Mechanicus's abandoned technology.

'This is a magnetic field stabiliser housing,' he said at one point, walking around what looked to Cyria like an oversized tank engine as big as a Chimera APC.

'What does it do?' she made the mistake of asking.

'It houses the stabilisers for a magnetic field generator.'

Her fear of the Astartes had dimmed some way by this point. She fought the urge to sigh, but failed.

'Do you mean,' Jurisian enquired, 'what application does this have in Imperial technology?'

'That's close to what I meant, yes. What is its purpose?'

'Magnetic fields of significant size and intensity are difficult to create and a struggle to maintain. Many of these units would be required to work in synchronicity, stabilising a powerful field of magnetic force. Such standard constructs as this housing are used in anti-gravitational technology, much of which is kept sealed by Mechanicus secrecy. More commonly, the Imperial Navy would use these units in the construction and maintenance of starship-sized magnetic accelerator rings. Plasma weapon technology, on a grand scale.'

'No,' Cyria shook her head. 'It can't be.'

'We shall see,' Jurisian rumbled. 'This is only the installation's first level. From the angle of the buried roadway, I would conjecture that the complex proceeds beneath the earth for at least a kilometre. From my knowledge of template patterns used in Mechanicus facility construction, it is more likely to be two or three kilometres deep.'

Nine hours afterGrimaldus, Jurisian and Cyria had entered the installation, they reached the fourth sublevel. The third level had taken almost six hours to traverse, with sealed doors requiring more and more intensive manipulation to coax open. At one point, Grimaldus had been certain they were thwarted. He hefted his crozius in both hands, triggering it live, ready to vent his anger on the unopening door.

'Don't,' Jurisian said, without looking up from the controls.

'Why not? You said this might be impossible, and time is not our ally down here.'

'Do not apply force to the doors. These are, as you have seen, each no less than four metres thick. While you will eventually hammer through to the other side, it will not be a rapid endeavour, and such violence is likely to activate the installation's significant defences.'

Grimaldus lowered his mace. 'I see no defences.'

'No. That is their strength, and the primary reason no living and augmetic guards are required.'

He still did not look away from his work as he spoke. Four of Jurisian's six arms all worked at the console: hitting buttons, pulling clusters of wires and cables, tying them, fusing them together, replacing them, tuning dead screens. His lower servo-arms were now coiled close to his back-mounted power pack, carrying his bolter and power sword.

'There are,' Jurisian continued, 'twelve hundred needle-thin holes in the walls, spaced ten centimetres apart, in this corridor alone.'

Grimaldus examined the walls. His visor locked onto one immediately, now he knew they were there.

'And these are…?'

'A defence. Part of one. The application of force, no matter how righteous, brother, will trigger the machinery behind these holes - and the same holes in many other corridors and chambers throughout the complex - to release a toxic gas. It is my estimation that the gas would attack the nervous system and respiration above all, making it especially lethal to fully biological intruders.'

The Master of the Forge nodded pointedly to Cyria.

Grimaldus's crozius went dead as he released the trigger. 'Have there been other defences that escaped our attention?'

'Yes,' Jurisian said. 'Many. From automated las-turrets to void-shield screens. Forgive me, Reclusiarch, this code manipulation requires my full attention.'

That had been three hours ago.

Finally, the doors opened to the fourth sublevel. To Cyria, the air was painfully cold, and she pulled her stormcoat tightly closed.

Grimaldus failed to notice her discomfort. Jurisian merely commented, 'The temperature is at a survivable level. You will not suffer lasting harm. This is common in Mechanicus facilities that are left on minimal power.'

She nodded, her teeth chattering.

Ahead of them, the corridor widened to end in a huge double doorway, sealed as every other door had been so far. On this one, etched into the dull, grey metal, was a single word in bold Gothic.

- OBERON -

This was why Grimaldus hadn't noticed Cyria's shivering. He could not take his eyes off the inscription, with each letter standing as tall as a Templar.

'I was right,' he breathed. 'This is it.'

Jurisian was already at the door. One of his human hands stroked the surface of the sealed portal, while the others accessed the wall terminal nearby Its complexity was horrific compared to those stationed at the previous doors.

'It is so beautiful…' Jurisian sounded both hesitant and awed. 'It is magnificent. This would survive orbital bombardment. Even the use of cyclonic torpedoes against nearby hives would barely harm the protection around this chamber. It is void-shielded, armoured like no bunker I have ever seen… and sealed with… with a billion or more individual codes.'

'Can you do it?' Grimaldus asked, his gauntleted fingertips brushing the ''O'' in the inscribed name.

'I have never witnessed anything so complex and incredible. It would be like mapping every particle within a star.'

Grimaldus withdrew his hand. He seemed not to have heard.

'Can you do it?'

'Yes, Reclusiarch. But it will take between nine and eleven days. And I would like my servitors sent to me as soon as you return.'

'It will be done.'

Cyria Tyro felt tears standing in her eyes as she stared at the name. 'I don't believe it. It can't be here.'

'It is,' Grimaldus said, taking a last look at the doors. 'This is where the Mechanicus hid the Ordinatus Armageddon after the First War. This is the tomb of Oberon.'

As they returned to the surface, Cyria's hand-vox crackled for her attention, and a signal rune pulsed on Grimaldus's retinal display.

'Tyro, here,' she said into her communicator.

'Grimaldus. Speak,' he said within his helm.

It was the same message, delivered by two different sources. Tyro had Colonel Sarren, his voice more of an exhausted sigh than anything else. Grimaldus heard the clipped, imperious tones of Champion Bayard.

'Reclusiarch,' the champion said. 'The Old Man's predictions were correct, as you suspected. The enemy is annihilating Hades Hive from orbit. It is crudely done. Standard bombardment, with mass drivers to hurl asteroids at a defenceless city. A dark day's work, brother. Will you return soon?'

'We are on our way back now,' he said, and killed the link.

Tyro lowered her communicator, her face pale. 'Yarrick was right,' she said. 'Hades is burning.'

CHAPTER IX Gambits

The enemy didnot come on the second day.

The defenders watched from the walls of Helsreach as the wastelands turned black with enemy vessels and clans of orks establishing their territory, making primitive camps and raising banners to the sky. More landers brought new floods of troops. Bulk cruisers disgorged fat-hulled wreck-Titans.

Upon the enemy banners, thousands of crudely painted symbols faced the city, each one depicting a bloodline, a tribe, a xenos war-clan that would soon be hurling itself into battle.

From the battlements, the Imperial soldiers marked these symbols, and responded in kind. Standards flew above the walls - one for every regiment serving inside the city. The Steel Legion banners flew in greatest number, ochre and orange and yellow and black.

After he returned from D-16 West, Grimaldus himself planted the banner of the Black Templars among those already standing on the north wall. The Desert Vultures gathered to watch the knight ram the banner pole into the rockcrete, and swear an oath that Helsreach would never fall while one defender still lived.

'Hades may burn,' he called to the gathered soldiers, 'but it burns because the enemy fears us. It burns to hide the enemy's shame, so they need never look upon the place where they lost the last war. While the walls of Helsreach stand, so stands this banner. While one defender draws breath, the city will never be lost.'

In echo of his gesture, Cyria Tyro persuaded a moderati to plant the banner of the Legio Invigilata nearby. Lacking a banner suitable for handling by humans rather than the huge standards that were borne by the god-machines, one of the weapon-arm pennants from the Warhound Titan Executor was used in absentia - mounted on a pole and driven into the wall between two Steel Legion banners.

The soldiers on the wall cheered. Unused to such attention outside the cockpit of his beloved Warhound, the moderati seemed awkwardly pleased by the reaction. He made the sign of the cog to the officers present, and made the sign of the aquila a moment later, as if anxiously covering a mistake.

At night, the winds blew harder and colder. It almost cleared the air of the sulphuric stench that was forever present and, at its strongest, it dragged the standard of the 91st Steel Legion from the battlements of the west wall. Preachers attached to the regiment warned that it was an omen - that the 91st would be the first to fall if they did not stand defiant when the true storm struck.

As the sun was setting, Helsreach shook with thunder to match the maelstrom taking place on the wastelands. Stormherald was leading several of its metal kin to the walls, where the largest - the battle-class Titans - could fire over the battlements once the enemy came in range.

The Guard were ordered to abandon the walls for hundreds of metres around the god-machines. The sound of their weapons discharging would be deafening to anyone too close, and even being near the gigantic guns could be lethal, with the amount of energy they unleashed as they fired.

No one in Helsreach would be sleeping tonight.

He opened hiseyes.

'Brother,' a voice called to him. 'The Crone of Invigilata requests your presence.'

Grimaldus had returned to the city hours ago. He had been expecting this summons.

'I am in prayer,' he said into the vox.

'I know, Reclusiarch.' It was not like Artarion to be so formal.

'Did she request my presence, Artarion?'

'No, Reclusiarch. She, ah, ''demanded'' it.'

'Inform Invigilata I will attend Princeps Zarha within the hour, once my ritual observations are complete.'

'I do not believe she is in the mood to be kept waiting, Grimaldus.'

'Nevertheless, waiting is what she will do.'

The Chaplain closed his eyes again as he kneeled on the floor of the small, empty chamber in the command spire, and once more let his mouth form the whispered words of reverence.

I approach the amniotic tank.

My weapons are not in my hands, and this time, in the close confines of the Titan's busy cockpit chamber, the tension from before is distilled into something altogether more fierce. The crewmen, the pilots, the tech-priests… they stare with unconcealed hostility. Several hands rest on belts close to sheathed blades or holstered firearms.

I refrain from laughing at this display, though it is no easy feat. They command the greatest war machine in the entire city, yet they concern themselves with ceremonial daggers and autopistols.

Zarha, the Crone of Invigilata, floats before me. Her lined, matronly face is twisted by emotion. Her limbs twitch in gentle spasm every few moments - feedback from the link with Stormherald's soul.

'You requested my presence?' I say to her.

The old woman suspended in the fluid licks her metallic teeth. 'No. I summoned you.'

'And that was your first mistake, princeps,' I tell her. 'You are granted permission to make only two more before this conversation is over.'

She snarls, her face hideous in the milky fluids. 'Enough of your posturing, Astartes. You should be slain where you stand.'

I look around the cockpit, at the nine souls in here with me. My targeting reticule locks onto all visible weapons, before returning to focus on the Crone's withered features.

'That would be an unwise solution,' I tell her. 'No one in this room is capable of wounding me. Should you call the eight skitarii waiting outside the doors, I would still leave this chamber a charnel house. And you, princeps, would be the last to die. Could you run from me? I think not. I would tear you from your artificial womb, and as you choked in the air, I would hurl you from the eye-windows of your precious Titan, to die naked and alone on the cold ground of the city you were too proud to defend. Now, if you are quite finished with the exchange of threats, I would ask you to move on to more important matters.'

She smiles, but the hatred curling her lips is all I see. It is, in its own way, beautiful. Nothing is purer than hatred. With hatred, humanity was forged. Through hatred, we have brought the galaxy to its knees.

'I see you do not show your face this time, knight. You see me revealed, yet you hide behind the death mask of your Emperor.'

'Our Emperor,' I remind her. 'You have just made your second mistake, Zarha.'

I disengage my helm's collar seals and lift the mask clear. The air smells of sweat, oil, fear and chemical-rich fluids. I ignore the others, ignore all but her. Despite the bitterness around me that deepens with each moment, it is comfortable to stand without my senses enclosed by my helm. Since planetfall, the only time I have removed my helm in the company of others has been on the two occasions I have spoken with the Crone.

'I said when last we met,' she watches me carefully, 'that you had kind eyes.'

'I remember.'

'It is true. But I regret it. I regret ever speaking a fair word to you, blasphemer.'

For a moment, I am not sure how to respond to that.

'You stand on difficult ground, Zarha. I am a Chaplain of the Adeptus Astartes, sworn into my position with the grace of the Ecclesiarchy of Terra. In my presence, you have just expressed the notion that the Emperor of Mankind is not your god, as He is for the entire glorious Imperium. While I am not blind to the… separatist… elements within the Mechanicus, the fact remains that you are speaking heresy before a Reclusiarch of the Emperor's Chosen. You are speaking heresy, and I am charged with the responsibility of ending any heresy I encounter in the Eternal Crusade. So let us tread carefully, you and I. You will not insult me with false accusations of blasphemy, and I will answer the questions you have regarding D-16-West. This is not a request. Agree, or I will execute you for heresy before your crew can even soil themselves in fear.'

I see her swallow, and despite herself, her smile shows her amusement.

'It is entertaining to be spoken to in this manner,' she says, almost thoughtful.

'I can imagine that your perceptions offer a much grander view than mine,' I meet her optic augments with my own gaze. 'But the time for misunderstandings is over. Speak, Zarha. I will answer what you ask. This must be resolved, for the good of Helsreach.'

She turns in her tank, swimming slowly in the fluid-filled coffin before eventually coming back to face me.

'Tell me why,' she says. 'Tell me why you have done this.'

I had not expected such a base question. 'It is the Ordinatus Armageddon. It is one of the greatest weapons ever wielded by Man. This is a war, Zarha. I need weapons to win it.'

She shakes her head. 'Necessity is not enough. You may not harness Oberon on a whim, Grimaldus.' She floats closer, pressing her forehead to the glass. Throne, she looks tired. Withered, tired and without hope. 'It is sealed now because it must be sealed. It is not used now because it cannot be used.'

'The Master of the Forge will determine that for himself,' I tell her.

'No. Grimaldus, please stop this. You will tear the Mechanicus forces on the world apart. It is a matter of the greatest import to the servants of the Machine-God. Oberon cannot be reactivated. It would be blasphemy to use it in battle.'

'I will not lose this war because of Martian tradition. When Jurisian accesses the final chamber, he will examine the Ordinatus Armageddon and evaluate the trials ahead in awakening the spirit within the machine. Help us, Zarha. We do not have to die here in futility. Throne of the Emperor, Oberon would win us this war. Are you too blind to see that?'

She twists in the fluid again, seeming lost in thought.

'No,' she says at last. 'It cannot, and will not, be reawakened.'

'It grieves me to ignore your wishes, princeps. But I will not have Jurisian cease his ministrations. Perhaps Oberon's reactivation is far beyond his skills. I am prepared to die with that as an acceptable truth. But I will not die here until I have done all in my power to save this city.'

'Grimaldus.' She smiles again, looking much as she did at our first meeting. 'I am ordered by my superiors to see you dead before you continue this course of action. This can only end one way. I ask you now, before the final threats must be spoken. Please do not do this. The insult to the Mechanicus would be infinite.'

I reach to my armoured collar and trigger the vox-link there. A single pulse answers - an acknowledgement signal.

'You have made your third mistake by threatening me, Zarha. I am leaving.'

From the pilots' thrones, voices begin to chatter. 'My princeps?' one calls.

'Yes, Valian.'

'We're getting auspex returns. Four heat signatures inbound. From directly above. The city's wall-guns are not tracking them.'

'No,' I say, without taking my eyes from Zarha. 'The city defences wouldn't shoot down four of my Thunderhawks.'

'Grimaldus… No…'

'My princeps!' Valian Carsomir screams. 'Forget him! We demand orders at once!'

It is too late. Already, the chamber starts to shake. The noise from outside is muted by the Titan's immense armour plating, but remains nevertheless: four gunships on hover, their boosters roaring, black hulls eclipsing the moonlight that had beamed in through the eye-windows.

I look over my shoulder, seeing the four gunships align their heavy bolter turrets and wing-mounted missiles.

'Raise shields!'

'Don't,' I say softly. 'If you try to raise the shields and prevent my attempt to leave, I will order my gunships to open fire on this bridge. Your void shields will never rise in time.'

'You would kill yourself.'

'I would. And you. And your Titan.'

'Keep the shields down,' she says, the bitterness returning to her visage. Her bridge crew comply, reluctance evident in their every movement and whispered word. 'You do not understand. It would be blasphemy for Oberon to enter battle. The sacred war platforms must be blessed by the Lord of the Centurio Ordinatus. Their machine-spirits would be enraged without this appeasement. Oberon will never function. Do you not see?'

I see.

But what I see is a compromise.

'The only reason the Mechanicus is not committing one of its greatest weapons to the war to save this world is because it remains unblessed?'

'Yes. The soul of the machine will rebel. If it even awakens, it will be wrathful.'

Within these words, I see the way through our stalemate. If their rites require a blessing that is impossible to give, then we must alter our demands to the most basic, viable needs.

'I understand, Zarha. Jurisian will not reactivate the Ordinatus Armageddon and bring it to Helsreach,' I tell her. She watches me closely, her visual receptors clicking and whirring in poor mimicry of human expression.

'He will not?'

'No.' The pause lasts several heartbeats, until I say, 'We will remove the nova cannon and bring it to Helsreach. It is all we needed, anyway.'

'You are not permitted to defile Oberon's body. To remove the cannon would be to sever its head or remove its heart.'

'Consider this, Zarha, for I am finished with standing here and posturing over Mechanicus banalities. The Master of the Forge was trained on Mars, under the guidance of the Machine Cult and in accordance with the most ancient oath between the Astartes and the Mechanicus. He reveres this weapon, and counts his role in its reawakening as the greatest honour of his life.'

'If he was true to our principles, he would not do this.'

'And if you were true to the Imperium, you would. Think on that, Zarha. We need this weapon.'

'The Lord of the Centurio Ordinatus is en route from Terra. If he arrives in time, and if his vessel can break the blockade, then there is a chance Helsreach will see Oberon deployed. I can give you no more support than that.'

'For now, that is all I need.'

I thought that would end it. Not end it well, by any means. But end it nevertheless.

Yet as I walk away, she calls me back.

'Stop for a moment. Answer me this one question: Why are you here, Grimaldus?'

I face her once more, this twisted, ancient creature in her coffin of fluids, watching me with machine-eyes.

'Clarify the question, Zarha. I do not believe you speak of this moment.'

She smiles. 'No. I do not. Why are you here, at Helsreach?'

Strange to be asked such a thing, and I see no reason to lie. Not to her.

'I am here because one who was brother to my dead master has sent me to die on this world. High Marshal Helbrecht demanded that one Templar commander stay to inspire the defence. He chose me.'

'Why you? Have you not asked yourself that question? Why did he choose you?'

'I do not know. All I know for certain, princeps, is that I am taking that cannon.'

'I find it difficult to countenance,' Artarion said, 'that your plan actually worked.' The knights stood together on the wall, watching the enemy. The aliens were massing, forming into clusters and chaotic regiments. It still resembled a swarm of vermin more than anything else, Grimaldus thought, but he could make out distinct clan markings and the unity of tribal groups standing apart from others.

It would be dawn soon. Whether or not that was the signal the xenos were waiting for didn't matter. The flow of landers had fallen to a trickle, no more than one every hour now. The wastelands were already home to millions of orks. The attack would come today. The overwhelming force they needed to take the city was here.

'It has not worked yet,' Grimaldus replied. 'Ultimately, it comes down to what they will allow. We need their cooperation.' The Chaplain nodded to the gathering horde. 'If we do not have Mechanicus aid in reactivating the cannon, these alien dogs will already be gnawing on our bones within a handful of months.'

A cry went up from further down the wall. Few Guardsmen remained posted on the battlements, and those that were served mainly as sentries. Two more of them shouted, and the call was taken up along the entire northern wall. The general vox-channel came alive with eager voices. The city's siren once more began to wail.

Grimaldus said nothing at first. He watched the horde sweeping closer like a slow tide. What little order had been evident within the enemy's ranks was broken now, and in the sea of jagged metal and green flesh, scrap-tanks and wreck-Titans powered forward - the former dense with aliens clinging to their sides and howling, the latter shaking the wastelands with their waddling tread.

'I have heard it said,' Artarion noted, 'that the greenskins raise their Titans as idols to their strange, piggish gods.'

Priamus grunted. 'That would explain why they are so hideous. Look at that one. How can that be a god?'

He had a point. The wreck-Titan was an iron effigy of a corpulent alien, its distended belly used to house the arming chambers for the proliferation of cannons thrusting from its gut.

'I would laugh,' Nero said, 'if there weren't so many of them. They outnumber Invigilata's engines at a ratio of six-to-one. '

'I see bombers,' Cador noted, neither interested nor disinterested, merely stating a fact. A wing of ugly aircraft, over forty of them, rose from landing platforms hidden behind the landers of the main force. Grimaldus could hear their engines from here, labouring like a sick elder ascending the stairs.

'We should abandon the walls, brothers.' Nero turned to watch the last Guardsmen making their way down the ramps and ladders leading from the battlements. 'The Titans will be firing soon.'

'So will theirs,' Priamus smiled within his helm. 'And these mighty walls will be reduced to so much powder.'

At that moment, a squadron of fighters soared overheard - the sleek metal hulls of Barasath's Lightnings turned silver by the reflections of the rising sun.

'Now that is courage,' said Cador.

Commander Barasath hadargued long and hard for permission to make his first attack run. This was principally because anyone with even a vague grasp of tactics could see full well it would almost definitely be not only his first attack run, but also his last.

Colonel Sarren had been against it. Adjutant Tyro had been against it. Even the Emperor-damned dockmaster had been against it. Barasath was a patient man; he prided himself on tact and the willingness to deliberate being among his chief virtues, but to have to sit there and listen to a civilian complaining and questioning his tactical expertise was beyond galling.

'Won't we need your planes to protect the tankers still coming from the Valdez platforms?' the dockmaster, Maghernus, had asked. Barasath gave the man a feigned smile and a nod of acknowledgement.

'It is unlikely the orks have the presence of mind to seek to cut our supplies of fuel, and even if they have, they would need to take the long route around the city, and risk running out of fuel themselves long before they reached our shipping lanes over the ocean.'

'It is still not worth the risk,' Sarren said, shaking his head and seeking to conclude the matter.

'With all due respect,' he said, none of his inner turmoil showing through to his demeanour, 'This attack run offers us too much to merely dismiss out of hand.'

'The risks are too great,' Tyro said, and Barasath was fast coming to hate her. A petulant little princess from the Lord General's staff - she should go back to her clerical duties and leave war to the men and women who were trained to deal with it.

'War,' Barasath mastered his temper, 'is nothing but risk. If I take three-quarters of my squadron, we can destroy the enemy's first waves of bombers and fighter support. They will never even reach the city.'

'That is exactly why this is a fool's errand,' Tyro argued. She was less skilled at controlling her agitation. 'The city's defences will annihilate any aerial attack. We don't even need to risk a single one of our fighters.'

My fighters, Barasath said silently.

'Adjutant, I would ask you to consider the practicalities.'

'I am,' she scoffed.

Uppity hitch, he added to the previous thought.

'This is a two-bladed attack that I suggest.' Barasath looked at his fellow commanders gathered here in the briefing room. While the chamber itself was a bustling hive of activity, with staff and servitors manning vox-consoles, scanner decks and tactical displays, the main table that had once seated the entire city's command section was almost deserted. Almost every regimental leader was with his or her soldiers now, standing ready.

'I'm listening,' Colonel Sarren said.

'If we engage the enemy above the city, a great deal of burning wreckage will fall to the streets and spires below. Add to that the fact we will be under fire from our own defensive guns. Anti-air turrets on spires will be firing up at the sky battle, and have a significant chance of hitting my pilots with their flak-bursts. But if we take the fight to them, their precious junk-fighters will rain down upon their own troops in flames. Once my first wave has pierced their formation, send a second and a third. We can cut overhead to perform strafing runs on their airstrips.'

Silence met this statement. Barasath capitalised on it. 'Their aerial capabilities will be butchered in a single hour. You cannot tell me, colonel, that such a victory isn't worth the risk. This is how we must strike.'

He could tell the colonel wasn't convinced. Tempted, yes, but not convinced. Tyro shook her head slightly, half in thought, half already preparing her advised refusal.

'I have spoken with the Reclusiarch,' Barasath said suddenly.

'What?' from both Sarren and Tyro.

'This plan. I have discussed it with the Reclusiarch. He commended me on it, and assured me that city command would allow it.'

Of course, Barasath had done no such thing. The last he'd heard of the knight leader was that Grimaldus was evidently involved in some sort of difficult negotiation with the Crone of Invigilata. But it turned Tyro's head, and that was all he needed. A wedge of doubt. A sliver of her interest.

'If Grimaldus advises this…' she said.

'Grimaldus?' Sarren arched an eyebrow. His jowly face was caught between amusement and alarm. 'A trifle familiar of you to use his name like that.'

'The Reclusiarch,' she swallowed. 'If he believes this is a sound plan, perhaps we should take that into consideration.'

Barasath was adept at hiding all emotion, not just the negative ones. He battled down the urge to grin now.

'Colonel,' he said, 'and Adjutant Tyro. I can see why you wish to hold as much of our forces in reserve as is tactically viable. This is a defensive war, and aggressive attacks will play little part in it. But my pilots and I are useless once the walls are breached and the enemy floods the city. Even the hololithic simulations made that clear, did they not?'

Sarren sighed as he linked his fingers over his belly.

'Do it,' he'd said. And Barasath had. His squadron was airborne an hour later, tearing over the city streets below before powering low over the wastelands.

In the tight confines of his Lightning's cockpit, he was more than just comfortable. He was home. Both control sticks in his hands were extensions of his own body. They said infantry felt the same about their rifles, but by the Holy Throne, there was no comparison. A rifle to a Lightning was like a spear to an angel of iron and steel.

The mass of the alien invasion darkened the ground beneath them.

'Need I remind anyone,' he said over the squadron's vox, 'that bailing out over this mess is extremely ill-advised?'

A volley of ''No sirs'' was his answer.

'If you're hit - and by the Throne, some of us will be - then bring your bird down into one of their fat-arsed god-walkers. Take as many of the bastards with you as you can.'

'Gargants, sir.' That was Helika's voice. 'The orks call their Titans ''gargants''.'

'Duly noted, Helika. Fifty-Eighty-Twos, on my mark, you will break formation and open fire. The Emperor is with us, boys and girls. And the Templars are watching. Let's show them how we earned the knights' crosses painted on our hulls.

'For Armageddon,' he narrowed his eyes, breathing in a lungful of the recycled oxygen offered by his facemask, 'and Helsreach.'

CHAPTER X Siege

When the wallis first breached, it dies in an avalanche of pulverised rockcrete.

Dark powdery dust blasts into the air, thicker than smoke and expanding like a stormcloud, blinding in its density.

I watch this from hundreds of metres away, standing with my brothers and the soldiers of the Desert Vultures. At the end of the street, the wall is no more. Our defences are broken, and behind the dust cloud, the breach gapes wide.

The true siege has begun. On every rooftop, in every alley, on every street and from every window - for kilometres around - Imperial guns stand ready, clutched in loyal hands, ready to slay the invaders.

Road by road, home by home. This was always how the Battle of Helsreach would be fought, and it is what every soul in the city stands ready for.

The great figures of the Titans begin to withdraw. Their first duty is done; they stood at the walls and pounded the enemy forces with their immense artillery. Invigilata's engines fall back now, not in defeat, nor even willingly - but because they must reload for the true battle. The Crone updated ''the commanders'' shared tactical grid with the locations of the Mechanicus landers within the city limits that serve as Invigilata's rearming stations. Her Titans trudge back to the closest ones now, their tread shaking the city around them. They are tall enough to darken the rising sun as they pass, even though they walk through distant streets.

Reports filter in from across the vox-network. The wall is falling to pieces, crumbling under the insane firepower of so many tanks and wreck-Titans. Around me, the smell of fear rises from the human soldiers. It is a foul musk; the sourness of breath, the tangy reek of liquid waste, and the rich, stinging scent of cold sweat. This fear-smell emanates from several of them, and while I do not hold them to the standards of Astartes, while I acknowledge the fact the human body will always react in this way even with the bravest of souls inhabiting it, it is still hard to stand in their presence. Their fear disgusts me.

Above the dust cloud, the head and shoulders of a wreck-Titan emerge, its bulbous head of scrap metal shaped into a roaring alien maw. Throne of the Emperor, it would have towered above the wall even if our insignificant barricade was still there. Glass shatters in every window along the street as its slow march brings it closer.

A moment later, the street thunders beneath our feet. Every one of the human soldiers with us falls to the ground, their curses lost amid the noise. I maintain my balance only because of my armour's joint stabilisers compensating for the tremors. With the brightness of a flaring sun, the wreck-Titan's head detonates, showering debris into the dust cloud below.

The cheer that rises around me is the loudest sound yet.

'Engine kill,' comes Zarha's voice over the vox, sounding amused despite the interference. 'You owe me for that, Grimaldus.'

I do not answer. The shot must have been a truly difficult challenge, but I do not care where Stormherald is, nor that it is retreating. My focus is here and now. Tension burns through my body like superheated blood. I feel it in my brothers, as well. Twenty of us, our breathing fast, our hands clutching weapons that are ritually chained to our armour. Chainswords complain as they rev, cutting only air. Last-minute oaths are whispered, or sworn to the sky.

Emerging from the dust cloud, snorting their porcine war cries, come the hunched silhouettes of the enemy.

Hundreds of them, flooding into the street.

'Fire at will!' calls one of the Steel Legion officers.

'Hold your fire!' I scream, my helm's vocalisers piercing the surrounding noise.

'They're in range!' the officer, Major Oros, yells back.

'Hold your fire!'

I am already running, sprinting, my armour joints snarling as I leave the humans behind. Proximity runes, my brothers' life-markers, flicker on my retinal display, but I have no need for them. I know who follows me.

'Sons of Dorn! Knights of the Emperor! Charge!'

The first of the aliens runs from the dust, its green skin plastered grey from the cloud. It raises a junk weapon in its brutish fists, and dies with my crozius annihilating its malformed face a moment later.

The two battle lines meet with a discordant crunch of weapon against weapon and flesh against armour. The sick, fungal stench of ork blood fills the air. Chainswords chew through xenos flesh. Bolters discharge their lethal loads - the crashing bangs of release followed by the muffled thumps of shells detonating within bodies.

The creatures howl and laugh as they die.

My knights remain silent as they slaughter.

Perception fades, as it always does in war, to flickering images that come moment to moment. Concentration is impossible, anathema to the holy rage that fills my senses. I grip my master's relic weapon in both hands, and swing at three aliens before me. They are hurled back from the mace's crackling power field, all three slain by the impact with their chests shattered, each of them tumbling across the road to end in limp, lifeless heaps.

I kill, and kill, and kill. It does not concern me that there is no end to this horde. The enemy fall before us, thrown to the floor by the righteous arcs of sacred weapons, and all that matters is how much blood flows before we are forced to retreat.

Over the vox, I hear Oros and the men cheering. It is an easy sound to ignore.

Artarion suffers more than the rest of us. He sacrifices one hand to hold my banner aloft, his chainblade held in his other. The standard draws the enemy to him. They want our banner. They always do. Without even a grunt of effort, he hacks left and right, parries clumsy strikes and lashes back with vicious ripostes.

Priamus saw the danger first. I see one of the aliens behind Artarion fall in two pieces, the young knight's sword splitting the creature in twain through the torso. He kicks the biological wreckage from his blade and cleaves his way to fight side by side with Artarion.

'Reclusiarch,' Nerovar is still with me, tearing his sword free from the belly of a disembowelled greenskin. His boots crush the viscous, stinking ropes of intestine that spill to the road. 'We are being overwhelmed.'

A spear crashes against my helm, reducing my visor display to static for a moment. I swing back at the creature that hurled it, and my sight flickers back online to see the beast's skull demolished beneath my crozius. More discoloured blood spatters over my armour in a light rainfall.

Two more orks fall, one to Nero's chainsword ripping across its throat, the other to my maul, hammered into its chest and sending it flying against the wall of a nearby building. Blood of Dorn, Mordred's weapon is an incredible gift. It slays with effortless ease.

I can feel its charge and release with each alien that dies. There is a split second before every impact as the energy field around the head pulses in a low growl, conflicted by the closeness of other material, before it unleashes its force in a snapping burst of kinetic power.

The enemy have encircled us, but that is little worry. Fighting our way free will be no effort.

'Oros,' I breathe into the vox. 'We are preparing to fall back to you.'

'Give me the mark,' he says. 'We're itching for a turn ourselves.'

With the truesiege underway, the Imperial forces fell into their prepared defensive strategies.

Every road had a barricade, where Steel Legion soldiers arrayed in ranks would unleash las-fire at the swarming foe. Snipers worked their deadly duties from rooftops. Battle tanks of every pattern and class ground their way down streets, shelling the first waves of enemy infantry pouring into the outlying sectors of the city.

Every road and building had its assigned piece to play in the battle. Every section had its orders to hold and inflict as much punishment upon the advancing foe as possible, before falling back to the next barricade.

Rearmed Titans stood as vigilant sentinels over entire city blocks, their weapons reaping life from the creatures that swarmed around their feet. The enemy gargants were still engaged in pulling down and breaking through the wall. In these first hours, Invigilata was unrivalled in its destruction.

The invaders spilled into Helsreach, and died in their thousands. Every metre they took was bought with foul alien blood.

Colonel Sarren watched the battle unfolding on the hololithic table. Stuttering images relayed the position of Imperial forces at the very edges of the city, inexorably withdrawing from the walls. Larger locator runes showed the position of Invigilata's engines, or battalions of Steel Legion tanks. He had formulated this endless, relentless fighting withdrawal over the course of the past weeks, and by the Emperor, it was a fine thing to see it in action.

In this first phase, it was imperative that casualties be kept to a minimum. The grind of army against army would come in time. For now, losses must be kept light and the death toll suffered by the enemy must be kept high. Let the invaders claim the outlying city sectors. Let them purchase these abandoned, worthless zones with their lives. It was all part of the plan.

The wave would break soon.

Sarren watched the flickering icons depicting his forces across the immense map. It would come soon, that perfect moment in the shifting winds of battle when the enemy's first push would falter and slow as the advance elements outpaced their slower support units. The initial hordes of infantry would crash against Steel Legion resistance in the outer city streets that they could never break without support from their tanks and wreck-Titans.

And at that moment, the wave would break like the tide against the shore. With the ferocious momentum of the first attack lost, the defence would begin in earnest.

Counterattacks would be mounted in some streets, especially those close to Invigilata's engines or Legion armour units. In other zones, the Guard would stand fast, unable to take ground back but entrenched well enough to hold it.

All that mattered was keeping the enemy from reaching Hel's Highway.

At the last meeting, when the commanders had gathered in their battle armour, Sarren had outlined once more the necessity to holding the highway.

'It is the key to the siege,' he'd said. 'Once they reach Hel's Highway, the city becomes twice as difficult to defend. They will have access to the entire hive. Think of it as an artery, ladies and gentlemen. The artery. Once it is severed, the body will bleed out. Once the enemy takes the highway, the city is lost.'

Grave expressions had answered this statement.

The colonel hunched over the table now, his squinting eyes taking the scene in, road by road, building by building, unit by unit.

He watched the war in silence, waiting for the wave to break.

Barasath had hitthe ground hard.

He'd seen Helika fall from the sky - and heard her, too. That'd been difficult to deal with. The night they'd spent together sharing a bunk had been almost three years ago now, when they'd both pretended to be drunker than they were, but Korten had never forgotten it, nor had he wished it to be the only one. Hearing her die had chilled his blood, and he had to fight not to deactivate his vox as she screamed on the way down, her engine trailing fire.

Her Lightning, with its white-painted wings, had ploughed into the chest of an alien god-walker. The Titan had shuddered for a moment, then vented flames and wreckage from its spine as Helika's bird - now nothing more than spinning debris - burst through its back.

The gargant kept walking as if unharmed, even with a hole blown clear through it.

That had been in the first run. Helika didn't even get time to fire.

A wicked, weaving scrap of a battle through the alien fighters saw most of them spiralling groundward on dying engines. He'd taken cannon-fire along his hull, but a lucky shot saw him bleeding fuel instead of turned into a fireball in the sky. With the way clear and only a handful of his flyers down, Barasath's second and third waves were inbound.

That's when things had gotten really nasty.

The enemy god-walkers weren't marching idly. Turrets on their shoulders and heads aimed up into the sky spat both laser fire and solid shells at the Imperial fighters. Dodging these alone would have been a chore. Dodging these when they were joined by more ork scrap-flyers and anti-air fire from the tanks below turned the situation into the nightmare that Colonel Sarren had promised.

Barasath's first wave scattered, boosting toward the primitive landing strips the enemy had formed in the desert.

Hundreds of ork fighters still waited on the ground, unable to take off yet, consigned to waiting their turn on the scraped-flat runways. A more pessimistic man might have noted there was little he could do to such a massive, grounded force when he led the remaining birds of an air superiority squadron. A more pessimistic man might also have circled the enemy airbase and waited for his Thunderbolt bombers in the second wave.

Korten Barasath was not a pessimistic man, and his patience took a backseat when it came to necessity. In graceful arcing dives and strafing runs, he unloaded his autocannons and drained his lascannon power packs, hurling everything he could down at the grounded fighters below. Dozens sought to take to the skies in panicked defence - most of these crashed during their ill-attempted takeoffs as their landing gear became fouled in the sandy wasteland soil. Those few that managed to get airborne were easy prey for Imperial cannons.

His second wave arrived, unleashing their payloads. Thunderbolts, much larger and heavier armed than the Lightnings, sent great plumes of smoke and dust rising from the wasteland's surface as their incendiaries impacted.

'Bomb this place to ashes,' Barasath voxed, and watched his pilots do exactly that.

Fire ripped across the wastelands in hungry trails, consuming the ragged airstrips that would never be allowed to take shape after this. Grounded junk-fighters exploded in succession.

Of course, the site wasn't completely defenceless, even with most of it in flames. A few tanks fired gamely up at the strafing Imperial flyers, with all the grace and accuracy of old men trying to swat flies.

He'd taken fire on his last banking swoop over the airbase. A lucky - or unlucky, as Barasath saw it - shot sheared off the best part of his left wing. There would be no climbing from this death-dive. No aiming for a wreck-Titan as Helika and a handful of others had done.

He pulled the cockpit release as the fighter started to spin, ditching above the burning site. There was a moment of disorientation, the push of the wind, the world coming into focus after the twisting plunge of the falling fighter… and then he was falling into black smoke and dust clouds.

Darkness embraced him. His respirator saved him having to breathe the choking smog, but his flight goggles were unenhanced and couldn't pierce the smoke.

Barasath pulled his cord, feeling himself jerked upward as his grav-chute opened.

With no idea where the ground was, he was lucky to hit the earth without breaking both of his legs. His ankle flared up in protest, but he considered that to be getting off lightly.

Cautiously, aware of the fact that the smoke hid him as much as it hid the enemy, he pulled his laspistol and moved through the blinding darkness. It was hot, a savage heat all around him that spoke of burning planes and landers nearby, yet not enough light to offer direction.

When he finally broke through the black cloud, pistol in his sure grip, he blinked once at what stood before him, and started to fire.

'Oh Throne,' he said with surprising politeness, right before the orks lumbering ahead shot him through the chest.

Stormherald hungered.

It ached with each pounding step, its roiling plasma core burning in its chest as it reluctantly turned its back on the enemy and marched through the streets.

Its way was clear, its path already set. Buildings had been demolished earlier in the week - their foundations blown up and the hab-blocks themselves fallen to rubble - to make way for its passage.

The need to turn around and pour its hatred into the enemy was fierce, a hunter's urge, almost strong enough to overwhelm the Crone's whispers in its mind.

The Crone. Her presence was a savage irritant. Again, Stormherald leaned as it walked, seeking to turn with its ponderous, striding slowness. And again, the Crone's claws in its mind forced its body to comply with her intent.

We move, she whispered, to fight a greater battle soon.

Stormherald's rage faded at her voice. There was something new in her words, something its predator's mind clutched and recognised immediately. A fear. A doubt. A plea.

The Crone was weaker now than she ever had been before.

Stormherald knew nothing of pleasure or amusement. Its soul was forged in ancient rites of fire, molten metal, and plasmic energy that churned with the ferocity of a caged sun. The closest it came to an emotion approximating pleasure was the rush of awareness and the dimming of its painful anger as enemies died under its guns.

It felt a ghost of that sensation now. It complied with her urgings now, still bound to her control.

But the Crone was weaker.

Soon, she would be his.

Nightfall found Domoskawith her storm-trooper platoon holed up in the ruins of what had once been a hab-block.

Greenskin heavy armour had rolled through and changed all that. Now it was a tumbledown ruin of rockcrete and flakboard, and Domoska crouched behind a low wall, clutching her hellgun to her chest. Strapped to her back, her power pack hummed. The cable-feeds between her hellgun's intake port and the backpack were vibrating and hot.

She was glad the skull-faced Astartes and that prissy adjutant quintus had ordered them back to the city. She didn't want to admit it, but travelling in an Astartes gunship - even just in the bay with the racked jump-packs and attack bikes - had been a thrill.

She was less delighted with her platoon's assigned position in the urban war, but she was a storm-trooper, the Legion's finest, and she prided herself on her devotion to duty without raising a complaint.

With the bulk of Imperial forces in slow, fighting withdrawals and protracted holding actions, units across the city were tasked with lying in wait as the orks advanced, or stalking past undetected to take positions behind the enemy.

Across Helsreach, it was almost uniformly veteran outfits and storm-trooper squads tasked with these movements. Colonel Sarren was using his best soldiers to achieve the most difficult operations.

And it was working.

Domoska would have preferred to be safely crouched behind a barricade, with Leman Russ tanks in support, but such was life.

'Hey,' Andrej whispered as he ducked next to her. 'This is better than sitting on our arses in the desert, yes? Yes, it is, that's what I think.'

'Be quiet,' she whispered back. Her auspex returns were coming back clear. No enemy heat signatures or movement nearby. Still, Andrej was being annoying.

'The last one I gutted with my bayonet, eh? I am tempted to go back for his skull. Sand it down, wear it on my belt like a trophy. That would get me much attention, I think.'

'It would get you shot first, most likely.'

'Hm. Not the right kind of attention. You are too negative, okay? Yes, I said it. It is true.'

'And I said to be quiet.'

Miraculously, he was. The two of them moved on, keeping crouched and low, moving from cover to cover. Sounds of battle were coming from the adjacent street - Domoska could hear the guttural roars and piggish snorts of embattled orks.

'This is Domoska,' she whispered into her hand-vox. 'Contact ahead. Most likely the second group that passed us an hour ago.'

'Acknowledged, Scout Team Three. Proceed as instructed, with all due caution.'

'Yes, captain.' Domoska clicked her vox off. 'Ready, Andrej?'

Andrej nodded, crouched next to her once again. 'I have three det-packs left, okay? Three more tanks must die. Then I get that caffeine the captain promised.'

The holographictable told its tale with reassuring accuracy. Sarren could not look away, despite how staring at the flickering light-images stung the eyes after a while.

The wave was breaking.

His bulwark units were digging in and holding their ground. Already, the pincer platoons were moving into position behind the first horde of invaders, ready to drive them forward and crush them between the hammer and anvil.

Sarren smiled. It had been a fine day.

Jurisian had notmoved from his position in almost twenty-four hours.

He had said he would need over a week, and closer to two. He no longer believed this. This would take weeks, months… perhaps even years.

The codes that kept the impenetrable bunker doors sealed were beautiful in their artistry - clearly the work of many masters of the Mechanicus. Jurisian feared no living being, and had slain in the name of the Emperor for twenty-three decades. This was the first time he had loathed his duty.

'I need more time, Grimaldus,' he had spoken into the vox several hours before.

'You ask for the one thing I cannot give,' the Reclusiarch had answered.

'This might take me months. Perhaps years. As the code evolves, it breeds sub-ciphers that - in turn - require dedicated cracking. It breeds like an ecology, always changing, reacting to my intrusions by evolving into more complex systems.'

The pause had been laden with bitten-back anger. 'I want that cannon, Jurisian. Bring it to me.'

'As you will, Reclusiarch.'

Gone was the thrill of hoping to look upon Oberon, and being the soul to reawaken the great Ordinatus Armageddon. In its place was cold efficiency and undeniable disgust. This sealing code was one of the most complex creations humanity had pieced together from its various spheres of knowledge. Destroying it afflicted him with a pain akin to that which an artist would feel in destroying a priceless painting.

Runes spilled across his retinal display in green lettering. He solved six of the scrolling codes in the space of a single breath. The final five involved additional calculations based on the parameters established by the previous ones.

The code evolved. It reacted to his interference like a living thing, its ancient spirit fighting against his manipulations. So, so beautiful, Jurisian thought as he worked. Damn Grimaldus for asking this of him.

His servitors stood behind him, slack-jawed, dull-eyed and slowly starving to death.

Jurisian paid no heed.

He had a masterpiece to slay.

CHAPTER XI The First Day

The shaking nolonger bothered Asavan Tortellius.

His presence was an honour, and one he thanked the Mechanicus for in his daily prayers. In his eleven years of service, he'd quickly grown used to the shaking, the lurching tread, and even the rattling of weapons fire against the walls of his monastery. What Tortellius had never grown used to was the Shield.

In many ways, the Shield replaced the sky. He had been born on Jirrian - an unremarkable world in an unremarkable subsector a middling distance from Holy Terra. If Jirrian could be said to possess any attribute of note, it was its weather in the equatorial regions. The sky over the city of Handra-Lai was the deep, rich blue that poets spent so much time trying to capture in words, and imagists spent so much time trying to capture in picts. In a world of tedious tradition and the greyness of infinite societal equality - where everyone was just as poverty-stricken as everyone else - the skies above the slum hive Handra-Lai were the one aspect of his early life worth remembering.

The Shield had stolen that from him. He still had the memories, of course. But every year, they became duller, as if the Shield's overreaching presence caused all else to fade.

It wasn't that the Shield had any particular colour, because it didn't. And it wasn't that the Shield was brazenly oppressive, because it wasn't.

Most of the time it wasn't even visible, and at the best of times, it wasn't even there.

And yet, in a way, it always was. It was oppressive. It was always there. It did discolour the sky. Its existence was betrayed by the abrasive electrical fizz in the air. Static would crackle between fingertips and metal surfaces. After a while, one's teeth began to ache. It was most irritating.

And to think that it could be raised any moment. Looking up at alien skies held no pleasure at all, and it was all because of the Shield. It severed any real enjoyment of the heavens. Even when deactivated, there was forever the risk of it slamming up into life without notice, cutting Tortellius off from the outside world once more.

In moments of battle, the Shield was more beautiful than threatening. It would ripple like breaking waves, the colours of oil on water cascading across the sky. The smell of the Shield as it suffered attack was a heady clash of ozone and copper that, if one stood outside on the monastery's battlements, would actually begin to make you feel light-headed after a time. Tortellius made a point of standing outside when the Shield was under siege, not for the stimulant effects of the Shield's electrical charge, but because it was a dark pleasure to see his prison's limits, rather than fear the invisible oppression.

Sometimes he would wonder if he was watching it in the secret hope it would fail. If the Shield came down… then what? Did he truly desire such a thing? No. No, of course not.

Still. He did wonder.

As he leaned on the battlements of the monastery, watching the city below, Tortellius reflected on the loathsomeness of this particular breed of xenos. The greenskins were filthy and bestial, their intelligence generously described as rudimentary, and more accurately as feral.

The mighty Stormherald, instrument of the God-Emperor's divine will, had come to a halt. Tortellius noticed only because of the relative silence in the wake of its crashing tread.

His monastery, only part of the cathedral of spires and battlements adorning the Titan's hunched shoulders, remained silent. Fifty metres below, he could hear the rattling of the leg turrets killing the aliens in the street. But the domed weapon mounts - each one bristling with granite gargoyles and stone representations of the angelic primarchs, those blessed slain sons of the God-Emperor - merely moved in their set alignments, their cannons ready.

Tortellius scratched his thinning hair (a curse he blamed entirely on the harsh electro-static charge of the Shield), and summoned his servo-skull. It hovered along the battlements towards him, its miniature suspension technology purring as it stayed aloft. The skull itself was human, sanded smooth and modified after it was removed from a corpse, now showing augmetic pict-takers and a voice-activated data-slate for recording sermons.

'Hello, Tharvon,' said Tortellius. The skull had once belonged to Tharvon Ushan, his favoured servant. How noble a fate, to serve the Ecclesiarchy even in death. How blessed Tharvon's spirit must be, in the eternal light of the Golden Throne.

The skull probe said nothing. Its gravity suspensors hummed as it bobbed in the air.

'Dictation,' said Tortellius. The skull emitted an acknowledgement chime as its data-slate - no larger than a human palm and built into its augmented forehead - blinked active.

What little breeze penetrated the Shield wasn't enough to cool his sweating face. The Armageddon sun might have been weak compared to the star that burned down on equatorial Jirrian, but it was stifling enough. Tortellius mopped his dark-skinned brow with a scented kerchief.

'On this, the first day of the Siege of Hive Helsreach, the invaders have spilled into the city in unprecedented numbers. No, hold. Command word: Pause. Delete ''unprecedented''. Replace with ''overwhelming''. Command word: Unpause. The skies are clogged with pollution from the world's industry, flak hanging in the clouds from the hive's defences, and smoke from the outlying fires that ravage the outermost districts where the invaders have already conquered ground. It is my belief that few chronicles of this immense war will survive to be interred in Imperial archives. I make this record now not out of a desire to spread my name in pomposity, but to accurately detail the holy bloodshed of this vast crusade.'

Here he hesitated. Tortellius struggled for the words, and as he chewed his lower lip, musing over dramatic description, the monastery shook beneath his feet again.

The Titan was moving.

Stormherald strode throughthe city, its passage unopposed.

Three enemy engines - the scrap-walkers that the aliens called gargants - had already died to its guns. In her prison of fluid, Zarha felt the stump at the end of her arm aching with a dull heat.

Once, she thought with an ugly smile, I had hands.

She aimed her next thought with care.

The annihilator is overheating.

'The annihilator is overheating.'

'Understood, my princeps,' replied Carsomir. He twitched in his restraint throne, accessing the status of the weapon through his hardwired link to the Titan's heart-systems. 'Confirmed. Chambers three through sixteen show rising temperature pressure.'

Zarha turned in her milky coffin, feeling instinctively what every other soul on board needed to perceive through calculations on monitors or slower hardwire links. She watched Carsomir twitch again, feeling the orders pulsing from his mind through willpower alone, reaching into the cognitive receptors at the Titan's core. 'Coolant flush, moderate intensity,' he said. 'Commencing in eight seconds.'

Zarha moved her right arm in the ooze, feeling pain in fingers that no longer existed.

'Flushing coolant,' said a nearby adept, hunched over his wall-mounted control panel.

The relief was immediate and blissful, like a sunburned hand plunged into a bucket of ice. She cancelled the vision feed from her photoreceptors, immersing herself in blackness as relief washed through her arm.

Thank you, Valian.

'Thank you, Valian.'

Her vision flickered back into existence as she reactivated her optical implants. It was the work of a moment to readjust her perceptions, filtering out the immediacy of her surroundings. She took a breath, and stared out across the city with a god's eyes.

The enemy, ant-like and amusing, swarmed in the street around her ankles. Zarha lifted her foot, feeling both the rush of air on her metallic skin and the swirling of fluid around her footless limb. The aliens fled from her crushing tread. A tank died, pounded into scrap.

Incidental fire from Stormherald's leg battlements spilled into the road, cutting the orks down in droves.

'My princeps,' Moderati Secundus Lonn was twitching in his throne as he spoke, his muscles spasming in response to the flood of pulses from his connection to the Titan.

Speak, Lonn.

'Speak, Lonn.'

'We are venturing ahead of our skitarii support.'

Zarha was not blind to this. She hunched her shoulders, wasted muscles tensed and trembling, striding forward through the street.

I know. I sense… something.

'I know. I sense something.'

The hab-towers on either side of the marching Titan were abandoned - this sector was one of the few lucky enough to be within easy range of the city's scarce subterranean communal bunker complexes.

Inform Colonel Sarren I am pressing ahead with phase two.

'Inform Colonel Sarren I am pressing ahead with phase two.'

'Yes, my princeps.'

This sector, Omega-south-nineteen, had been one of the first to fall when the walls came down the day before. The aliens had been crawling through the area for many hours, but significant scrap-Titan strength was - as yet - unseen. It represented the perfect opportunity to slaughter legions of the enemy while their gargant groups were engaged elsewhere.

A feeling grew in the back of her head - something invasive and sharp, blooming through the webbing of veins in her brain. It was something she had not heard in many, many decades.

Someone was weeping.

Zarha felt her face locked in a rictus as the feeling blossomed and grew fangs. The sharpness was jagged now, an acidic pulse through her skull.

'My princeps?'

She didn't hear at first.

'My princeps?'

Yes, Valian.

'Yes, Valian.'

'We're receiving word from Draconian. He's dying, my princeps.'

I know… I feel him…

A moment later, Zarha felt the full shock grasp at her senses. The mortis-cry slashed through her cognitive link like a hurricane, shrieking at a soundless pitch of pain. Draconian was down. The princeps aboard her, Jacen Veragon, was screaming as the aliens scuttled over his corpse, pulling at his armoured metal skin as he lay prone.

How had he fallen?

And there it was. In the screaming cry was the memory she sought. The lurching of vision as the Reaver-class engine was dragged to its knees. The sense of infuriating immobility. He was a god… How could this happen… Why would his limbs no longer function…

Everywhere around was rubble and smoke. It was impossible to see clearly.

The scream was fading now. Draconian's reactor-heart, a boiling cauldron of plasmic fusion, was growing cold and still.

'We've lost contact,' said Valian, a second after Zarha sensed it herself. She was weeping, though the saltwater secreted from her tear ducts was immediately dissolved in the fluid entombing her.

Lonn had his eyes closed, accessing an internal hololithic display within the cognitive link. 'Draconian was in omega-west-five.' His dark eyes flicked open. 'Reports show the site is the same as here: evacuated habitation towers, minimal engine resistance.'

The adept manning the scanning console, his mouth replaced by a scarab-like vocaliser, blurted a screed of machine code across the cockpit.

'Confirmed,' Carsomir said. 'We're getting an auspex return to the south. Significant heat signature. Almost definitely an enemy engine.'

Zarha heard almost none of this. Images of Draconian's death played out behind her false eyes like scenes from a play, coloured by the stinking taint of black emotion beneath. She sobbed once, her heart aching like it would burst. Hearing only that an enemy was nearby, she walked in the fluid, her limbs moving.

The Titan shook as it took another step.

'My princeps?' both moderati said at once.

I will have vengeance. Even in her own mind, she could barely hear herself in the words. A mechanical overtone twinned with her thoughts – and it was protective in its overwhelming rage.

I will have vengeance.

'We will have vengeance.'

Tower blocks passed by its shoulders as the Titan strode on.

'My princeps,' began Carsomir, 'I recommend we hold here and wait for the skitarii to scout ahead.'

No. I will avenge Jacen.

'No,' the vox-voice was harsh. 'We will avenge Draconian.'

Blind to the disparity between her thoughts and the emerging voice, Zarha pushed onward. Voices assailed her, but these she cast aside with a brush of willpower. Never before had she felt it so easy to disregard the chattering, needy voices of her lesser kin. Valian's voice, coming from the cockpit chamber rather than the cognitive link, was another matter.

'My princeps, we are receiving requests for Communion.'

There will be no Communion. I hunt. Communion with the Legio can come tonight.

'There will be no Communion. We hunt. Communion with the Legio can come tonight.'

With effort, Valian turned around in his restraint throne. The cables snaking from his skull's implant sockets turned with him, like a beast's many tails.

'My princeps, Princeps Veragon is dead and the Legio demands Communion.' In his voice was the edge of concern, but never panic, nor fear. The rest of the battle group desired the momentary sharing of focus and purpose - the unity of princeps and the souls of their engines - that was tradition in the aftermath of loss.

The Legio will wait. I hunger.

'The Legio will wait. We hunger.'

Forwards. Ready main weapons. I smell the xenos from here.

Her voice emerged as a crackle of static, but Stormherald marched on.

While Carsomir was not a man prone to extremes of emotion, something cold and uncomfortable crawled through his thoughts as he turned back to watch the cityscape through the Titan's huge eye lenses.

He may not have been as connected to Stormherald's burning heart as the princeps was, but his own bonds with the god-walker were not devoid of intimate familiarity. Through his weaker tie to the engine's semi-sentient core, he felt a depth of fury that was almost addictive in its all-encompassing purity. The passion transferred through his empathic link into grim irritability, and he had to resist the urge to curse the inefficiency of those around him as he guided the Titan onwards. Knowing the cause of his distracted irritation was no balm for it.

The Titan's right foot came down on a street corner, pulverising a cargo conveyer truck into flat scrap. Stormherald turned with a majestic lack of speed, and hull-mounted pict-takers panned to show a wider avenue, and the afternoon sunlight glinting from Stormherald's burnished iron skin. Valian was immersed, just for a moment, in the wash of exterior imagery fed through the mind-link. Hundreds of pict-takers, each one showing pristine silvery skin, or dense armour - cracked and pitted with its legacy of small arms fire.

Ahead, down the wide avenue, was the enemy engine that blinked like a red-smeared migraine on the cockpit's auspex scanners. Valian shuddered at the sight of it, breathing deeply of the scent-thick cockpit air. As always, living within Stormherald's head smelled of oiled gears, ritual incense and the burning reek of crew members sweating and bleeding, their bodies exerted despite remaining motionless in their thrones.

The enemy scrap-Titan was grotesque - unappealing on a level that went far beyond mere design distaste to Valian. Its junk metal appearance showed no reverence, no respect, no care in its construction. Stormherald's iron bones were thrice-blessed by tech-ministers even before they were brought together as the skeleton of a god-machine. Each of the million cogs, gears, rivets and plates of armour used in the Imperator's birth was honed to perfection and blessed before becoming part of the Titan's body.

This avatar of perfection incarnate faced its hideous opposite, and every crewmember piloting the Titan felt disgust flow through them. The enemy engine was fat, big-belled to hold troops and ammunition loaders for its random array of torso cannons. Its head, in opposition to the Gothic-style machine skull worn by Stormherald, was stunted and flat, with cracked eye lenses and a heavy-jawed underbite. It stared pugnaciously down the street at the larger Imperial walker, its cannons covering its body like spines, and roared a challenge of its own.

It sounded exactly like what it was: an alien warleader within the cockpit head blaring into a vox-caster. Stormherald laughed in response, its warning sirens slamming back with a wall of sound.

In her tank of fluids, Zarha raised her arms, her hand-less stumps facing forward.

In the street, with an immense grinding of gear joints, Stormherald mirrored the motion.

It never fired. The trap, as crude and simple as it was, exploded around the great Titan.

'Your request forreinforcement is acknowledged,' the voice crackled.

Ryken lowered the vox-mic, readying his lasrifle again.

'They're coming,' he hissed to Vantine. The other trooper was with him, crouched with her back to the wall, sharing his slice of cover. Her expression was unreadable, masked by her goggles and rebreather, but she gave the major a nod.

'You said that half an hour ago.'

'I know.' Ryken slammed a fresh cell into his lasgun. 'But they're coming.'

The wall behind them buckled as it took the brunt of another shell. Debris from the ceiling clattered down onto their helmets.

Ryken's platoon was up to their necks in trouble, and no amount of hard fighting alone was going to get them out of it. Most of his men, the ones that weren't bleeding to death on the ground, were at the windows on the various floors of this hab-block, pouring their fire into the street outside. The rooms were still full of furniture, left by the families who were taking shelter in local underground bunkers. It was, as last stands went, a pretty terrible place to be holed up in, but their barricade had fallen half an hour before, and it was every squad for themselves until they could regroup at the next junction.

The problem was that Ryken's platoon was cut off much too fast when the last bastion fell. As rearguard covering the other squads' escapes, they'd been encircled and forced to find whatever cover they could.

'They're climbing the damn walls!' someone cried out. Ryken scrambled to the nearest window, keeping low and bracing to fire into the street again. As he rose to fire, he found himself face to face with a green-skinned creature hauling its way through the second-storey window. It reeked of mould and gunsmoke, and its piggish eyes were glazed by whatever alien emotions it felt in the heat of battle.

Ryken bayoneted the beast in the throat, firing three shots even as he stabbed. The alien was hurled back from the window to fall on its companions below.

They were indeed climbing the damn walls.

Ryken ordered three of his men to cover the window, and raced for the stairs leading down to the ground floor. The snapping crack of lasrifles firing was even louder from downstairs, where the bulk of the platoon was entrenched.

'Reinforcements are en route!' he called down the stairs.

'You said that half an hour ago!' Sergeant Kalas called back up.

Ryken caught a glimpse of the sergeant, his bolt pistol clutched in a two-handed grip, kneeling at a window and firing booming shots out into the road. He retreated back to a nearby window himself, adding his fire to the onslaught.

In the street, a riot of alien flesh was taking place. Only the most foolish or bloodthirsty orks were seeking to race across the road and scale the building's walls. Most of the xenos - and Ryken thanked the Emperor for small mercies - possessed enough intelligence to remain in cover themselves, behind their own junk-transports or shooting from windows of adjacent habitation blocks. They laughed and jeered as the barrage continued, and great howls of porcine laughter would rise up when another pack of baying aliens would charge across the street only to be cut down by the Steel Legion's defences. Raucous enjoyment of their own kin's death was a barbarous madness Ryken had long come to associate with this accursed xenos breed.

There was no understanding such creatures.

'Wecan't hold here,' Vantine crouched under cover again, whispering a rapid litany of devotion as she reloaded her rifle. 'You hear those engines? More are coming, major.'

'We're not breaking out anytime soon,' he spoke the words as a bitter curse, setting his rebreather straight. 'So we will hold.'

'Or we die.'

'That's not an option, and I'll shoot you the next time you give voice to it.'

She smiled behind her own gas mask, but Ryken saw none of it. He had risen to his feet and was leaning against the wall, his lasgun braced against his chest. He kept close to the wall, risking a look out of the window. What he saw made him curse more colourfully than Vantine had ever heard before.

'So,' she rose close to him, taking position on the other side of the window, 'not good news, then?'

'Tanks. The bastards are rolling armour up the road.'

Vantine chanced a look herself. Three tanks, Imperial Leman Russ chassis looted and ''improved'' with crooked armour panels bolted on and painted in mismatched hues. The jagged fronts of the three tanks showed alien glyphs of allegiance that meant nothing to human eyes.

'We're dead,' she shook her head. 'And there's no need to shoot me. They'll shell this block to rubble and do it for you.'

Ryken ignored her. 'Nikov,' he keyed his vox-bead live. 'Nikov, how's the launcher coming?'

Nikov was on the hab-block's top floor, where he'd retreated with his missile launcher ten minutes before. The weapon had taken a beating when the barricade had fallen earlier.

'It's still jammed,' Nikov's reply came over the vox in a crackling hiss. After a pause of several moments, he added, 'Did I hear you shouting about reinforcements again?'

'They're coming! Throne, why is everyone whining about that?'

'I think it's because we'd rather not die, sir.'

The west wall chose that moment to explode. Debris burst into the room, filling it with stone dust. Through his goggles, Ryken stared at a hole the size of three grown men in hab-block's wall. Most of the soldiers nearby picked themselves up off the floor. Two stayed where they were, mangled and unmoving.

'Get that launcher working,' Ryken said in the moment of eerie calm. Vantine scrambled to her feet and ran from the gaping hole in the wall.

Outside offered alien laughter, the grinding of tank treads and a distant thrum of racing engines.

'More?' Vantine called out.

'That's not the enemy,' Ryken said. 'Those aren't tank engines.'

And they weren't. His vox-bead screeched a distorted chatter of mixed channels, but one voice broke through. 'Your request for reinforcement,' it said, much too deep to be human, 'is acknowledged.'

The room darkened as the gunship rattled past on whining turbines. It swooped low, strafing the street, opening up with its weapons. From its cruising angle, it clearly didn't intend to stay long, but the pilot was inflicting all the punishment he could while the Thunderhawk remained.

Heavy bolters mounted on its wings and cheeks spat a torrent of lethal shells into the visible groups of enemy warriors. Inhuman blood misted the air as packs of the creatures burst under the explosive ammunition. Snarling, the diminishing groups of survivors returned fire - their stubbers chattering, the solid shells raining off the black gunship's hull like harmless hail.

The tanks were another matter. The first shell crashed into the gunship's side with a storm's force, and Ryken flinched back from the detonation. It spun the gunship on its axis, sending burning wind breathing from its boosters as it turned. In reaction to the attack, the avian shape gained altitude in a sudden thrust, banked over the first of the tanks, and at last dropped its cargo.

Dark figures clanged onto the surface of the tanks, as black as beetles crawling on the metal skin.

The first to fall - a figure on the roof of the lead tank - wore a silver-faced helm and wielded a mace with a sparking power field around its eagle-winged head. The weapon descended in a slice to shatter the vehicle's turret. It broke clean off and fell into the horde of aliens that mobbed the tanks from below.

'Good morning, Reclusiarch,' Ryken's voice was breathless with relief.

The knight didn't answer at first. He and his standard bearer were already engaged by the greenskins swarming up over the useless tank's hull, clambering higher in a desperate need to shed the blood of the black knights.

Artarion's bolter emitted its stuttering crash, blowing the aliens back down to the street. With the brilliance of a sun-flare, Grimaldus's plasma pistol disintegrated two of the climbing beasts, letting their burning skeletal remains tumble in pieces back into the horde.

The second tank was dead in its tracks, smoke pouring from vents and cracks in its armour. The Templars had dropped grenades into the interior, and Ryken saw two knights leaping clear, ignoring the slain vehicle as they waded into the aliens massing on the street.

'Forgive the delay, major.' The Reclusiarch wasn't even out of breath. 'We were required at the barricade breaches in south section ninety-two.'

'Better late than never,' Ryken replied. 'The last word from central command suggested that Sarren's plan in this sector was working better than almost all hololithic estimations. Are we getting redeployed for a counterattack?'

On top of the tank, Grimaldus swung his mace in a vicious arc, pummelling an ork into ruined biological matter.

'You are still breathing, major. Let that be enough for now.'

Dawn brought nothingmore than a continuation of the night's bloodshed.

The Helsreach Crusade begins its first bloody day. Across the city, millions of us now fight for our lives.

The noise is like no other sound I have ever heard. In two centuries of life, I have waged war at the heels of god-machines whose weapons were louder than the death-cries of stars. I have stood against armies of thousands, while every soul that stood against us screamed their hatred. I have seen a ship the size of a hive tower crash into the open ocean on a far distant world. The plume of water it threw into the sky and the tidal wave that followed were like some divine judgement come to flood the land and erase all humanity beneath its salt-rich depths.

Yet nothing has matched the sound of Helsreach's defiance.

In every street, humans and aliens clash, with their weapons and voices merging into a gestalt wave of senseless noise. On every rooftop, turrets and multi-barrelled defence cannons bark into the sky, their loaders never ceasing, their rate of fire never slowing. The machine-roars of Titans duelling can be heard from entire districts away.

Never before have I heard an entire city fighting a war.

As we fight to clear the streets of Major Ryken's besiegers - and as the Legionnaires themselves leave their havens and join us in the slaughter - I keep an edge of focus for the general vox-channels.

Ryken was not wrong. While we are locked in our planned fighting withdrawal across the entire hive, precious few sectors are in unplanned retreat.

The wreck-Titans are in the city now. Coldly delivered kill ratios from Invigilata commanders are a recent addition to the chaos of communication traffic, but they are a welcome one. Helsreach stands defiant as the sun rides the sky into noon.

My brothers remain scattered across the city, reinforcing the weakest parts of the Imperial chain, supporting the defences where the orkish tide breaks into the city with overwhelming force. I regret that we did not have the chance to gather together one last time. Such a lost opportunity is another of the failings I must atone for.

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. Keywords 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 burstsacross 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 gready 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 have brought an Emperor-class Titan to its knees,' Artarion says. 'I never thought I would live to see such a thing.'

Hundreds of them swarm the streets now, climbing onto the defeated god-machine's back with grappling hooks and boosting up there on burning thruster packs. They crawl across its dust-coated armour like insectile vermin.

'Grimaldus,' the Titan hails me, and suddenly it is so obvious why the voice is pained. Not from agony. From shame. She has advanced ahead of her skitarii phalanxes, and is undefended against this massed infantry assault.

'I am here, Zarha.'

'I feel them, like a million spiders across my skin. I… cannot stand. I cannot rise.'

'Make ready,' I vox to my brothers. Then, to the humbled princeps, 'We are about to engage the enemy.'

'I feel them,' she says again, and I cannot tell from her machine-voice if she is bitter, delirious, or both. 'They are killing my people. My prayer-speakers… my faithful adepts…'

I am not blind to the meaning in her words. To the Machine Cult, each death was more than a mortal tragedy - it was the loss of knowledge and perspective that might never be recovered.

'They are inside me, Grimaldus. Like parasites. Violating the Cathedral of Sanctuary. Climbing inside my bones. Drilling toward my heart.'

I do not reply to her as I watch the crumbled cityscape below Instead, I tense myself for a moment's sensory dislocation, and hurl myself out into the sky.

Grimaldus was firstto leap from the circling Thunderhawk.

Artarion, ever his shadow and still bearing his banner, was only seconds behind. Priamus, his blade in hand, came next. Nerovar and Cador followed, the first of them leaping into a dive, the latter merely stepping out in an uncomplicated plummet. Last of all was Bastilan, the sergeant's insignia on his helm catching the dull evening light. He voxed to the pilot, wishing him well, and drew his weapons before falling into air.

Altitude gauges on retinal displays showed fast-falling numbers, the digital readouts a blur as the knights dropped from the sky. Beneath them, the kneeling god-machine presented a huge target. The multi-levelled cathedral on its shoulders was like a city in miniature - a city of spires - bristling with weapons batteries and crawling with alien vermin.

The knights saw the aliens as they descended: the beasts clambering up on tethered lanyards, or flying up on primitive rocket packs, laying siege to the stricken Titan. Stormherald itself was a pathetic statue depicting its own failure. It was driven to one knee, buried to the waist in the debris of six or seven fallen hab-block towers. The avenue was in ruin around it, where the detonated buildings had collapsed and levelled the city flat. The Titan's arm-guns, as large as some habitation towers themselves, were grey-white with dust and resting on the mounds of broken brick, twisted steel supports, and rockcrete stone.

Grimaldus held off firing his boosters to slow his freefall.

'Come down in the courtyard in the centre of the cathedral,' he voxed to the others. Their acknowledgements came immediately. In turn, each of them engaged their jump packs, arresting their dives into more controlled descents.

Grimaldus was the last to fire his boosters, and the first to hit the ground.

His boots thudded onto the paved courtyard, smashing the precious mosaics into gravel beneath his feet. Immediately, he leaned to the side, compensating for the angle of the ground. Stormherald's defeated posture was tilting the entire cathedral forward almost thirty degrees.

The courtyard was modest, ringed by nine plain marble statues that each stood four metres tall. In each of the cardinal directions, a set of open doors led into the cathedral itself. The mosaic tiles on the floor depicted the black and white bisected, cyborged skull of the Machine Cult of Mars. Grimaldus had come down onto the dark eye socket of the skull's human side, crashing the black tiles to powder underfoot.

Nothing moved nearby. The sounds of battle, of looting, of desecration - these all came from within the surrounding building.

Priamus landed with a skid, his armoured boots tearing at the mosaics and shearing them off in a wave of broken pebbles. His blade, chained to his wrist, crackled into life.

Nerovar, Cador and Bastilan were altogether more graceful in their landings. The sergeant came down in the shadow of one of the tilted statues. Its stern face eclipsed the setting sun.

'These are the primarchs,' he said to the others as they readied their weapons.

All heads turned towards Bastilan. He was right.

As representations of the primarchs went, they were plain to the point of almost being crude. The sons of the Emperor were usually depicted in grandeur and glory, rather than by sculptures so subtle and austere.

There was Sanguinius, Lord of the Blood Angels, prominently unwinged, with a childlike face lowered in repose. And there, Guilliman of the Ultramarines, his robed form so much slenderer than any other depiction of him that the knights had seen before. In one hand, he clutched an open tome. The other was raised to the sky, as if he was caught and forever frozen in a moment of great oratory.

Jaghatai Khan was bare-chested, bearing a curved blade in his hands and looking to the left, as if staring at the distant horizon. His hair was shaggy and long, whereas in so many masterpieces it was shaven but for a topknot. Next to him, Corax, the Prince of Ravens, wore a plain mask that was utterly featureless but for the eyes. It was as if he was unwilling to show his face in the company of his brothers, hiding his visage behind an actor's mask.

Ferrus Manus and Vulkan shared a plinth. The brothers were bareheaded, and the only two primarchs sculpted here in armour. Both wore vests of mail, the fine links of chain on Manus's breast a counterpoint to the larger scales adorning Vulkan's. They stood back to back, facing in opposite directions, both carved to bear hammers in each hand.

Leman Russ of the Wolves stood with legs apart, head cast back, facing the sky. Whereas the other sons of the Emperor wore robes or armour, Russ was clad in rags sculpted over his chiselled musculature. He was also the only primarch with tensed fists, as if he stared into the heavens, awaiting some grim arrival.

A robed figure, hooded yet visibly slender to the point of emaciation, clutched the hilt of a winged blade, its tip between the statue's bare feet. Here was the Lion, depicted as a warrior-monk, eyes closed in silent contemplation.

And, last of all, rising above Bastilan, was Rogal Dorn.

Dorn stood apart from his brothers, neither facing his kin, nor looking into the skies above. His regal visage was aimed at the ground to his left, as if the primarch stared at something vital only he could see. The robe he wore was plainer that those adorning his brothers' icons, though it showed a cross on its breast, sculpted with care. Although he had been the Golden Lord, the commander of the Imperial Fists, his personal heraldry had inspired that of his Templar sons who followed.

His hands were what drew the knights' eyes more than any other aspect in this gathering of demigods. One was held to his chest, the fingertips joined to the cross there, frozen in mid-stroke. The other was held out in the direction Dorn stared, palm up and kindly, as if offering aid to one who would rise from the floor.

It was quite the most humble and exquisite rendition of their gene-father Grimaldus had ever laid eyes on. He fought the sudden burning urge to fall to his knees in reverent prayer.

'This is an omen,' Bastilan continued. Grimaldus could barely believe only a handful of seconds had passed since the sergeant last spoke.

'It is,' the Reclusiarch replied. 'We will purify this temple under the gaze of our forefather. Dorn watches us, brothers. Let us make him proud of the day he sired the first Templar.'

We move withouthesitation, and without caution, through the cathedral.

The angled floor is an irritation that I've managed to blank from my mind by the time the third alien is dead. Room by room, we move in unison. The cathedral is a divided into a series of chambers ringing the courtyard, each one with its own stained glass windows now shattered and gaping like missing teeth, each room reaching high up with a pointed ceiling ending in the spire above.

The slaughter is easy, almost mindless. Priamus is like a wolf on the leash, eager to run ahead on his own.

My patience is wearing thin with him.

Each chamber also shows its own unique desecration. Tech-adepts and Ecclesiarchy priests lie dead and butchered, their bodies in pieces across the mosaic floors. Unarmed as they were, they offered little resistance to the rampaging invaders. Bookshelves are overturned, ceramic ornaments shattered… I would never put feral destruction past this xenos-breed, but it almost seems as if the greenskins sought something specific in their rabid assault.

'The articulation structures are sealed. My bones are defended by internal forces. My heart-core is cut off from the parasites.'

Ambush or not, it is disgusting that it took them even this long to achieve such basic necessities.

'We are retaking the Cathedral of Sanctuary,' I tell her. 'Resistance is minimal, Zarha. But you must stand. They are still coming. Bring the cathedral out of range of boarders, or we will be overwhelmed.'

'I cannot stand,' she says.

What a sin it is, for such a majestic warrior to speak with such shameful defeat tainting her words. Were she one of my men, I would kill her for such dishonour. Slowly. By strangulation. Cowardice does not deserve the rush of a blade.

'I have tried,' she intones.

The emotion colouring her machine-voice brings my bile rising. For all I know, she could be weeping. My disgust is so powerful I must fight the need to vomit.

'Try harder,' I breathe into the vox, and sever the link.

We fight our way to the outer battlements at Stormherald's front, where the incline allows for easy boarding. An ork's fat hand slaps on the red metal of the battlement's edge, and the brute hauls itself up. My pistol meets its face, the heat exchanger vanes hissing against its skin. It has a moment to bawl its hatted at me before I pull the trigger. What remains of the alien falls from its handholds, tumbling to the ground, burning briefly on its way down as a living torch of white-hot fire.

The battlements resemble a true siege in all respects. The last remaining tech-adepts and priests defend the cathedral against boarding aliens, though no more than a small cluster remain. Few humans, augmented or otherwise, are a match for one of these beasts.

Priamus slips the leash of discipline. His charge carries him ahead, his sword flaring with light each time its power field saws into alien flesh. My brothers lay into the enemy along the besieged wall with bolter and blade. The few servitor-manned spire turrets that had been spitting solid shots into the mass of orks fall silent, not willing to risk striking any of us.

'You will do penance for this, Priamus.'

He doesn't answer. 'For the Emperor!' he cries into the vox. 'For Dorn!'

In the pockets of battle where none of us stand, the turrets open fire once again. At least their servitors are worth something, then. The orks turn from butchering the few priests still standing. Their bestial faces are afire with brutish, eager emotion as they come for us.

One of them… Throne of the Emperor… One of them dwarfs his piggish brethren. His armour makes him twice the size of us, looking like scrap metal and primitive, chugging power generators bolted onto an exoskeletal frame. His hands are industrial claws that look as if they could peel a tank apart without effort. He even kills his own kin as he strides towards us on the inclined floor. His claws swing, battering his lesser allies aside, hurling them against the cathedral wall or over the battlement's edge.

I raise my crozius in a two-handed grip. 'That one is mine,' I tell my brothers. 'Dorn is watching this.'

'You asked to see me, sir?'

Tomaz didn't bother to straighten his crumpled work overalls as he stood at what could loosely be called attention. Around him, the command chamber was its usual bustling hive of activity. A junior staff officer bumped him as she passed.

Tomaz said nothing. He'd worked fifteen hours straight today, on a dock backed up with dozens and dozens of ships, with almost no room to unload. Fifteen hours of shouting, of broken vox-casters and no techs spare to fix them, of cargo being dumped wherever it could be dumped - which was inevitably the wrong place (and the most inconvenient one for someone else) - necessitating its removal minutes later when another worker's already fouled-up work was fouled-up even further.

Frankly, he didn't much care if he got shoved over onto the ground. Maybe he could curl up and get some damn sleep.

'Sir,' he prompted.

Sarren finally looked up from the hololithic table. The colonel had aged in the last week, Maghernus could see it clearly. He looked as tired and bone-achingly sick of it all as Tomaz felt.

'What?' Sarren asked, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. 'Oh. Yes. Dockmaster.' Sarren looked back down at the hololithic display. 'I need your crews to speed up. Is that understood?'

Maghernus blinked. 'I'm sorry, sir. I didn't quite hear you.'

'I need,' Sarren didn't look up, 'your crews to speed up their work. The reports I'm getting from the docks show they are at a standstill. We are talking about significant portions of the north and east perimeters of the city, dockmaster. I need to move troops. I need to store materiel. I need you to do your job.'

Maghernus looked around the room in disbelief, unsure how to respond.

'What would you have me do, colonel? What is there that I can possibly do?'

'Your job, Maghernus.'

'Have you even seen the docks recently, colonel?'

Sarren looked up again, laughing without even a shred of humour. 'Do I look like I have seen anything except casualty reports recently?'

'I can't do anything about the docks,' Maghernus shook his head, a sense of unreality settling over him. 'I'm not a miracle worker.'

'I appreciate you have an… intense… workload.'

'That's not the half of it. We're dealing with a backlog of weeks, months even, and no room to handle anything.'

'Nevertheless, I need more from you and your crews.'

'Of course, sir. I'll be back in a moment, I feel the sudden need to piss expensive white wine and turn everything I touch into gold.'

'This is no laughing matter.'

'And I'm not laughing you pompous son of a bitch. ''Work harder''? ''Do more''? Are you insane? There's nothing I can do!'

Nearby officers glanced his way. Sarren sighed and rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.

'I respect the difficulties of your position, dockmaster, but this is the first week of the siege. This is only going to get worse. We are all going to sleep much less, and we are all going to work much harder. Furthermore, I understand that you are sweating blood in an underappreciated duty, but you are not the only one suffering. You, at least, are guaranteed to live longer than many of us. I have men and women in the streets, fighting and dying for your home, so that you may continue to complain at how I crack the whip over you. I have hundreds of thousands of citizens under arms, facing the greatest alien invasion force the world has ever seen.

'Sir,' Maghernus took a breath. 'I will—'

'You will shut up and let me finish, dockmaster. I have platoons of men and women lost behind the advancing enemy line, no doubt hacked to pieces by the axes of barbarous xenos monsters. I have armour divisions running out of fuel because of resupply difficulties in the embattled sectors. I have an Emperor-class Titan on its knees, because its commander was too angry to think clearly. I have a city with its edges on fire, and its population in rout with nowhere to run to. I have tens of thousands of soldiers dying to prevent the enemy from reaching the Hel's Highway - people dying for a road, dockmaster - because once the beasts reach the city's spine, we are all going to die a great deal faster.

'Now, am I making myself perfectly clear when I tell you that while I have sympathy for your difficulties, I also expect you to work through them? We are, just to be sure, no longer speaking past one another? We are, for the record, now on the same page?'

Maghernus swallowed and nodded.

'Good,' Sarren smiled. 'That's good. What can you do for me, dockmaster?'

'I'll… speak to my crews, colonel.'

'My thanks for understanding the situation we are in, Tomaz. You are dismissed. Now, someone raise a reliable vox-signal to the Reclusiarch. I need to know how close he is to getting that Titan walking.'

In the cognition chamber, Grimaldus stood before the crippled Zarha.

His armour's calm, measured hum was marred by a mechanical ticking sound at random intervals. Something, some internal system linking the power pack to the suit of armour was malfunctioning. His skull helm with its silver faceplate was painted with alien blood. His armour's left knee joint clicked as he moved, the servos inside damaged and in need of reverent maintenance by Chapter artificers. Where scrolls of written oaths had hung from his pauldrons, the armour was burned, the ceramite cracked.

But he was alive.

At his side, Artarion looked similarly battered. The others remained in the cathedral above, maintaining a vigil now the orks were punished and slain for their blasphemy.

'Your Titan,' Grimaldus uttered the words, 'is purged. Now stand, princeps.'

Zarha floated in the milky waters, not hearing him, not even moving. She looked as if she had drowned.

'Stormherald has taken her,' Moderati Carsomir said, his voice low. 'She was ancient, and had oppressed her will over the Titan's core for many years.'

'She still lives,' the knight noted.

'Only in the flesh, and not for much longer.' Carsomir looked pained even explaining this. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles. 'The machine-spirit of an Imperator is so much stronger than any soul you can imagine, Reclusiarch. These precious engines are born as lesser reflections of the Machine-God Himself. They carry His will and His strength.'

'No machine-spirit is the equal of a living soul,' said Grimaldus. 'She was strong. I sensed it in her.'

'You understand nothing of the metaphysics at work here! Who are you to lecture us in this way? We were linked to the Titan's core at the end. You are nothing, an… an outsider.'

Grimaldus turned to the crewmembers in their control seats, his broken armour joints snarling.

'I shed blood in the defence of your engine, as did my brothers. You would be torn from your thrones and buried in the rubble of your own failure, had I not saved your lives. The next time you call a Templar nothing is the moment I kill you where you sit, little man. You are nothing without your Titan, and your Titan lives because of me. Remember to whom you speak.'

The crew shared uncomfortable glances.

'He meant no offence,' one of the tech-priests mumbled through a facially-implanted vox-caster.

'I do not care what he intended. I deal in realities. Now. Make this Titan walk.'

'We… can't.'

'Do it anyway. Stormherald was supposed to move in synergy with the 199th Steel Legion Armoured Division over an hour ago, and they are in full retreat due to being unsupported. The delay is finished with. Get back in the fight.'

'Without a princeps? How are we to do that?' Carsomir shook his head. 'She is gone from us, Reclusiarch. The shame of it all, the rage of defeat. We all felt the Titan rush into her. Her mind has joined the union of all previous princeps, amalgamated in the Titan's core. Her soul is buried as surely as her body would be in a grave.'

'She lives,' the knight narrowed his eyes.

'For now. But this is how princeps die.'

Grimaldus turned back to the amniotic coffin, and the unmoving woman within.

'That is unacceptable.'

'It is the truth.'

'Then the truth,' the Reclusiarch growled, 'is unacceptable.'

She wept in the silence - the way one weeps when truly alone, when there is no shame to be found in being seen by others.

Around her was nothingness absolute. No sound. No movement. No colour. She floated in this nothingness, neither cold nor hot, with no reference of direction or sensation.

And she wept.

Upon opening her eyes moments before, a thrill of fear had sliced up her spine. She did not know who she was, where she was, or why she was here.

Her memories - the fractured, flashing images that were all that kept her mind from being completely hollow - were of a hundred worlds she could not recall seeing, and a hundred wars she could not remember fighting.

Worse, they were each tainted by an emotion she had never felt - something inhuman, abrasive, sinister… and partway between exaltation and terror. She saw these moments of memory, and felt the unnerving presence of another being's emotions instead of her own.

It was like drowning. Drowning in someone else's dreams.

Who had she been before? Did it even matter? She slipped deeper. What remaining sense of self existed began to break away and diminish, sacrificed to buy a peaceful, silent death.

Then the voice came, and it ruined everything.

'Zarha,' it said.

With the word came a weak understanding, an awareness. She had memories of her own - at least, she had once possessed such things. It suddenly seemed wrong to no longer have access to her own recollections.

As she resurfaced slowly, the infiltrating memories returned. The wars. The emotions. The fire and the fury. Instinctively, she pulled away again, preparing to return deeper within the nothingness. Anything to escape the memories belonging to another soul.

'Zarha,' the voice clawed after her. 'You swore to me.'

Another layer of comprehension returned. Within the revelation were her own emotions, waiting for her to reclaim them. The overwhelming sensory storm of the other mind's memories no longer frightened her. They angered her.

She would not be so easily shackled. No false-soul's thoughts would conquer her like this.

'You swore to me,' the voice said, 'that you would walk.'

She smiled in the nothingness, rising through it now like an ascending angel. Stormherald's memories assailed her with renewed vigour, but she cast them aside like leaves in the wind.

You are right, Grimaldus, she told the voice. I did swear I would walk.

'Stand,' he demanded, stern and cold and glowering. 'Zarha. Stand.'

I will.

The voice came without warning, emerging from the vox-speakers on the coffin.

'I will.'

Crew members flinched back from the sound, their hands white-knuckled as they clutched the backrests of their thrones. Only Grimaldus remained where he was, face to face with the glass sarcophagus, his blood-smeared skull mask glaring into the milky depths.

The old woman's body twitched once, and her head rose. She looked around slowly, her augmetic gaze at last coming to rest on the knight before her.

Rubble scattered in an avalanche, and a dust cloud rose again as the wreckage of fallen buildings went tumbling aside. With a thunderous grinding of gears and the clanging-hammering of a multitude of tank-sized pistons in its iron bones, Stormherald raised its immense bulk, metre by painful machine-squealing metre.

The avenue shuddered as its bastion of a right foot pounded onto the road. The sound was loud enough that the nearby buildings still untouched by orkish demolition charges lost their windows in a blizzard of breaking glass.

As the crystal rain fell to the scarred streets below, the Imperator raised its weapons, standing - once more - defiant.

'Shields up,' the Crone of Invigilata demanded.

'Void shields active, my princeps,' responded Valian Carsomir.

'Make ready the heart.'

'Plasma reactor reports all systems at viable integrity, my princeps.'

'Then we move.'

The chamber shuddered with a familiar rhythm as the god-machine took its first step. Then a second. Then a third. Throughout the metal giant's bones, hundreds of crew members cheered.

'We walk.' The ancient woman turned in her tank, looking at the tall knight once more. 'I heard you,' she told him. 'As I was dying, I heard you calling me.'

Grimaldus removed his filthy helm. Although he didn't look a day over thirty his eyes told his true age. Like windows into his thoughts, they showed the weight of his wars.

'There is a story of my father,' he said to Zarha.

'Your father?'

'Rogal Dorn, the Emperor's son.'

'The primarch. I see.'

'It is a tale of a once-strong brotherhood, broken by Horus the Betrayer. Rogal Dorn and Horus were close before the Great Heresy. None of the Emperor's sons were bonded as truly in the years before the malignant darkness took hold of Horus and his kin.'

'I am listening,' she smiled, knowing how rare this moment was. To hear a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes speak of their gene-sire's life outside of their Chapter's secret rituals.

'It has always been told among the Black Templars that when the two brothers crusaded together, they would compete for the greater glory. Horus was legendarily hungry for triumph, while my father was - it is told - a more reserved and quiet soul. Each time they made war together, they were said to have made an oath in blood. Clasping hands, they would each swear that they would stand until the final day dawned. ''Until the end'', they would say.'

'That is a touching legend.'

'More than that, princeps. Tradition. It is our most binding oath, spoken only between brothers who know they will never see another war. When a Templar knows he will die, it is the promise he gives to his brothers that he will stand with honour until he can no longer stand at all.'

She said nothing, but she smiled.

'Yes, I called you back to this war.' He nodded, his gentle eyes fixed upon her bionic replacements. 'Because you made a similar oath to me. Promises like that - they matter more than anything else in life. I could not let you die in shame.'

'Until the end, then.'

'Until the end, Zarha.'