Helsreach Read Online Free PDF Page A

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