WH40K - Jonathan Green - Conquest of Armageddon.pdf - Other - siemszak

A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

CONQUEST OF

ARMAGEDDON

Jonathan Green

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For Jake, one day .

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PART I

NO PITY

ONE

.1!(2 "' .3("

Five hundred years agoÈ

H ROTHQAR F UROR , R AVAGER of Worlds, Champion of Khorne, threw back his head and bellowed his fury to the burning sky. The

howl reverberated across the clearing over the heads of the warriors of his seething warband.

The planet had been theirs for the taking. A new prize for the daemon primarch he had served in the name of Khorne Î the

awesome daemon-entity the Imperial dogs had so disrespectfully called the Fallen One. A new daemon world.

And now it had all gone to hell, only it was not the hell that Furor had imagined or that his dark lord had longed for. And now

even the unconquerable primarch was gone, his daemon blood slaking the inestimable thirsts of the Warrior God of Chaos.

How could it have gone so wrong? How could they have failed?

I T HAD ALL BEGUN with the Devourer of Stars .

The Daemon Prince Angron, primarch of the World Eaters Legion, had erupted from the warp-realspace maelstrom of the Eye of

Terror in a blitzkrieg of slaughter and bloodshed. With his daemonic entourage and chosen Berzerker warriors at his side, and

accompanied by a mighty horde of foul mutants, blasphemous daemonhosts and traitorous renegades, Angron had been ready to

sate his hunger for blood and his thirst for revenge on the crumbling dominion of the False Emperor of Mankind.

It had been as if the ancient, drifting wreck Î in fact several wrecks that had become bound together within the warp Î had been

sent by He Who Hungers to carry his servants to war; an infernal chariot of the Dark Gods. The Khornate host had taken

advantage of the great hulk, using it to move under cover into the Armageddon system.

The gargantuan vessel, now named the Devourer of Stars , emerged from the warp in a screaming blaze of sick white light at the

furthest reaches of the Armageddon system. Appearing there in the coldest reaches of space beyond the ringed gas giant Iandai, its

presence was immediately detected by the system's perimeter monitoring stations.

As the unnatural agglomeration had drifted through the outer regions of the system, blotting out the light of distant stars like an

unholy shadow on the face of the universe, in a panic defence craft had been scrambled from the naval facility of St Jowen's Dock.

Those same ships made contact with the derelict as it passed the strange, uninhabitable world of Pelucidar, five days after it had

first appeared within the Armageddon system. And those same ships, along with the thousands of damned souls trapped aboard

them, were obliterated as Î pathetic in their defiance Î they attempted to halt the approach of the primarch's new flagship.

But the Imperial attack had, incredibly, dealt the Devourer a dolorous blow. The propulsion drive of an ancient vessel that made

up part of the hulk's gargantuan bulk had been blasted free. As this city-sized section tore free from the rest of the hulk, the

resulting plasma eruption had incinerated thousands of Lord Angron's troops, before the propulsion unit was caught in Pelucidar's

gravity well and dragged down towards the planet's surface.

The loss of the drive section slowed the progress of the derelict so dramatically that the Devourer of Stars did not reach

Armageddon until after another month of drifting relentlessly through the planetary system.

The attack on the Devourer of Stars had bought the forces of Armageddon valuable time in which to prepare for what everyone on

the planet's surface now knew was the inevitable invasion to come. Nevertheless, when that hour came, despite the sacrifices made

by the Imperial Navy in the space-borne battles they had fought against the vast hulk, the Devourer of Stars overcame

Armageddon's orbital defences all too quickly.

As Angron's unholy vessel entered orbit above the planet and the primarch's forces prepared to make planetfall, treachery and

sedition showed its blasphemous face in hive-cities across the planet. Nearly half the Planetary Defence Force had turned on their

ignorant brethren, now revealed to be followers of the true masters of mankind, their numbers swollen by hordes of cultists who

had kept the worship of their secret masters alive in clandestine cells, right under the noses of the Imperial faithful.

Inevitably, and just as the devotees of the Dark Gods had intended, anarchy and mayhem had swept through the hives of

Armageddon. In the wake of such planet-wide sedition, Angron's forces were able to make planetfall practically uncontested.

Within a matter of days, all-out war engulfed the hives of Armageddon Prime. The death toll spiralled astronomically. Creatures

that should never have existed beyond the realm of Chaos that was warp space Î the red-skinned, behorned, daemonic

manifestations of violence, slaughter and bloodshed Î rampaged through the factory and hab-districts of the massive mountain-

cities. In their hellish wake, mutants and renegades massacred the civilian population. Monstrous hell-titans Î more daemon than

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Mechanicus creation, being an amalgam of war-machine and warp-spawned entity Î stalked the ash wastes battling those feeble-

minded princeps and their land battleships that remained loyal to the corpse enshrined within the Golden Throne of Earth.

Angron's unified forces steadily drove the Imperial forces back towards the equatorial jungles and the landmass of Armageddon

Secundus. In their wake death, madness and the warp held dominion. The daemon primarch's followers constructed crude, but

effective, abattoirs. The blood of Angron's victims was offered up to glorious Khorne in depraved rituals enacted by his loyal

devotees, a thousand at a time. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished.

Great was the bloodshed carried out in veneration of the god of blood and death, and many were the blood rites carried out to his

greater glory by Angron's World Eaters. So great was the slaughter that in the days that followed, it was said that the very rivers

had been corrupted and choked with the carcasses of the slain.

But there had been more to the massacre than just the veneration of the Lord of Skulls. The sheer scale of the slaughter committed

in the Blood God's name lent power to Angron and his daemon horde, enabling more and more of the offal-drenched creatures to

manifest within the physical realm.

As Angron's invasion was taking place, warp storms of terrifying strength and ferocity blew up around the Armageddon system.

In the initial phase of the battle for Armageddon, the presence of the warp storms gave potency to Angron and his daemonic

horde, enabling the warp-creatures to maintain their physical corporality all the more easily. However, such power always comes

at a price, and the surging energy of warp storms is always unpredictable. Angron was playing a game with time, racing to

complete his conquest.

But the nature of Chaos is fickle, and before he could finally bring Armageddon to its knees, the warp storms, unable to maintain

such ferocity and magnitude indefinitely, began to abate. As they blew themselves out, so Angron's power diminished.

And so it was that the primarch's advance mired amidst the stinking swamps and sweltering jungles of Armageddon's equatorial

belt. The daemon primarch, a being of such power that he had been on the verge of conquering one of the most strategically vital

worlds in the Segmentum Solar, found himself on the verge of losing all the advances he had made, so tied to the fluctuating

power of the warp was he.

Unless he could somehow establish a permanent link to the immaterium, without the unnatural vigour of the warp to empower

him and sustain his equally unnatural army, all his efforts would be for naught.

F UROR RECALLED THE past with bitter hatred, tasting the gall of defeat like ash in his mouth. He spat the foul taste away with a

snarl, the gobbet of acidic phlegm hissing as it spattered against the knotted skin of a twisted vine-tree. A deep growl rumbling in

the depths of his barrel-caged chest, the Chaos Berzerker pushed on towards the foetid heart of the jungle, trailing branches

snapping off as his implacable mass barged past. The spikes and cruel ornamentations of his armour scraped gouges through the

bark of the enclosing, creeper-wound trunks.

The green gloom closed in around the advancing World Eaters as they left the scorched earth of the burning jungle belt behind

them. The vermilion flames licked the petrochemical-polluted skies before disappearing behind the veil of the impenetrable

canopy shrouding the rainforest. And they were advancing, Furor's anger-maddened mind kept telling him. Warriors of the World

Eaters Legion Î the chosen sons of Angron Î did not retreat. They were advancing towards whatever battles awaited them in the

blood-drenched name of Khorne in another arena of the Long War.

It was then that he saw the first of the warp-channelling stones Î a roughly sculpted rock ten metres tall, carved with the snarling

features of some ravening daemon-beast Î and Furor was minded of what Angron had ordered following the dissipation of the

inconstant warp storms.

T HE PRIMARCH HAD immediately decreed the construction of a monstrous monolith, an esoteric creation of stone and warp

essence, that would feed his armies with the energy they needed to sustain their existence in the physical universe.

The building of Angron's monolith had taken many weeks and thousands died in its construction. First there were the bodies spent

by the brutal, backbreaking labour. Then there were the thousands more Î cultists, mutants and prisoners alike Î butchered to

consecrate the megalithic structure to the Lord of Skulls, that Khorne might grant them a boon, and Angron's hordes might

complete that which the daemon primarch had undertaken in his murderous name. The power of Chaos was certainly growing in

that auspicious place now, as acres of jungle withered, blackened and died, or flourished once more with new, unnatural life,

drawn to the blasphemous, arcane construction.

At the same time, other smaller, yet similar, structures were erected throughout the jungle Î sometimes singly, sometimes as stone

circles, as decreed by warp-seer cultists of the Blood God in light of the blood rites they had enacted and the reading of augury-

spilled intestines. But all had been constructed with the sole purpose of channelling the energies of the shifting Sea of Souls and

containing them on Armageddon, so that Angron might complete his conquest of the benighted hive-world.

The monolith raised in Angron's name already pulsated with dark power, as infernal energies flooded from it in waves to re-

energise the primarch's hellish hordes.

During the weeks taken up with the megalithic structure's construction, Angron's armies were forced to engage with the Imperial

forces harrying at their heels. The Imperial dogs! They didn't know when they had suffered enough losses, and Furor, along with

his fellow Berzerkers, had taken great pleasure in granting them what they so obviously desired, by spilling their blood,

decapitating them, dismembering them and gutting them for the blood-hungry Lord of Skulls.

And yet still the forces of the daemon primarch were held at an impasse, trapped within the rotting jungles that divided the

landmasses of Armageddon Prime and Armageddon Secundus.

Furor riled at the memory, genetically enhanced muscles bunching at the thought, as if his very flesh rebelled at the concept that

Berzerkers of the Blood God could be beaten in open battle.

WH40K - Jonathan Green - Conquest of Armageddon.pdf

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