Space Marines 02 - Helsreach by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer [Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIV

The Docks

They came as the sun began its downward arc in the sky.

The Helsreach docks took up almost a third of the hive’s perimeter. Thousands of uninspiring warehouses and harbour office towers stood watch over an expansive bay which featured an endless number of quays and piers that stabbed out into the sloshing, filthy greyish water.

The air across the entire world might have always reeked of something faintly sulphuric, but here – at the heart of Helsreach’s industry – the reek bordered on petrochemically unhealthy. It only took an hour for a person’s clothes and hair to become saturated with the greasy, heavy stink of spilled oil and ammoniac seawater. Lifers, the dockworkers who spent their entire careers here, hacked up a fair share of blackness when they hawked and spat. Respiratory tumours were the second-largest cause of death among the populace, only behind industrial accidents by a small margin.

The chaos of the docks was a natural deterrent to the enemy assault, but not a true defence. The first sign of the enemy came as crews leaped from their vessels, risking a kilometre-long swim through pollution-foul waters to reach the docks. On dry land, the defenders of Helsreach watched as the hundreds of undocked tankers, lurking offshore with their volatile manifests, began to explode.

The men and women of Helsreach stood together on cargo crates, on the paved groundways, on steel piers, all eyes turned to the seas and the fleet of enemy vessels breaching the surface of the water, powering closer to the city. A horde of humanity, looking out to sea.

Maghernus was close to the front of one crowd, leading his worker gang in their filthy overalls, clutching a newly-forged lasgun to his chest. They were being handed out by Guard officers from weapon crates stored in warehouses across the dock districts. Every dock gang was treated to a short, simple talk on how a lasrifle was loaded, unloaded, set to safety and fired after aiming. Maghernus had felt his palms sweating as he collected the rifle and extra power cells, which now sat in a small sack hanging from the side of his belt. The hurried Guard sergeant had shouted his way through a quick demonstration, and now here Maghernus was, gun in hand, dry-mouthed.

‘Follow your assigned leaders,’ the sergeant had yelled above the noise of so many men and women gathered in one place. ‘Every dock gang, and every group of fifty people, will have a storm-trooper with them. Follow that storm-trooper the way you’d follow the Emperor Himself if He descended from the sky and told you what to do with your sorry arses. He will tell you when to fight, when to run, when to hide and when to move. If you do what this trooper tells you to do, you’ve got a much greater chance of getting through this in one piece, and not messing up another unit’s movements. If you don’t listen, there’s a greater chance you’ll be fouling it up for everyone else, and getting your friends killed.

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