Free Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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