Helsreach Read Free

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