War for Armageddon: The Omnibus by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-27T14:59:33+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

ARMAGEDDON

The Eternal Crusader speared back into the mortal realm to find a system readying itself for war. Vox-traffic, squealing with star-born interference, echoed over the comms channels, bringing the rumour of battles done days past at the edge of the system, orders long since fulfilled and the screams of dying men whose corpses were hours cold. Interspersed with Imperial signals were the invaders’ broadcasts, carrying the deep, inhumanly guttural utterances of orks.

There were two weeks, maybe less, until the orks made their way to Armageddon. The Black Templars fleet was swifter, cutting in from the Mandeville point to the heart of the system in a matter of days. Hel­brecht remained on the command deck of the Eternal Crusader for most of that time, retreating only for prayer, and rarely resting. He consulted often with his shipmaster, Baloster, but allowed his serfs to attend to their duties without comment. His eyes were forever on the oculus. When not staring into the sparse voidscape of interplanetary space, he could be found at the holo tables, running the system’s planetary orbits months ahead, plotting all manner of strategic situations again and again. Scribes from the Hall of Records came to him in a constant stream, bringing every scrap of information they could find on the Second War and the ork warlord who had brought Armageddon to its knees once before.

They coasted round the gravity well of Pelucidar. As they used the planet’s gravitative attraction to slingshot themselves to greater speed, scattered wreckage annihilated itself on the void shields of the Eternal Crusader and her sisters. Fresh isotopes tickled the Crusader’s auspexes from recently destroyed vessels and spent munitions. A battle had been fought there recently. They saw no other sign of the orks. For all the crowded nature of the Armageddon System, the cosmos remained big enough to swallow them all.

Finally, Armageddon itself: it grew from a glint of sickly yellow to a grey ball of poisoned skies and poisoned seas, its diseased surface scabbed by the metallic growths of human hives. Whether man could be entirely to blame for Armageddon’s deadly nature was moot; its own volcanic systems blasted out a thousand years’ worth of industrial pollution every year, but the actions of mankind lay heavily on the world.

And this, thought Helbrecht, surveying the grubby planet, is what we must fight for. Such is the will of the Emperor.

The activity around Armageddon was frantic, thousands of ships dropping from orbit to surface, giving no time for their ticking hulls to cool before soaring skywards again. When night’s Terminator crept around the globe, the light trails of spacecraft coming to and from orbit in queues thousands of kilometres long lit up the dark. Millions of men and billions of tonnes of war materiel came down endlessly from the sky. Adeptus Mechanicus coffin ships, Astra Militarum landers, tank transports, freighters, Naval lighters, dual void/atmospheric fighter squadrons, barques, heavy lifters, resupply galleasses, tugs – every kind of vessel imaginable, stirring the skies of Armageddon into unseasonal storm through their constant activity.

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