Chronicle, entry number seventy-three.
I brought the helmet.
Good call.
On the first day on the world with the nuclear bomb, a helicopter crashed forty meters from me.
On the second day, a sniper shot my hat off.
On the third day, a mustachioed British captain offered me a cigar and said: “Relax, lad. If they wanted you dead, you’d already be dead.” He said it as if it were meant to be comforting.
I.
The Countdown
In a Middle Eastern country whose name was never mentioned in the reports, a dictator named Khaled Al-Asad had seized power in a coup.
Behind him, in the shadows, a Russian ultranationalist named Imran Zakhaev was pulling the strings.
And in the center of the capital, hidden in a warehouse, there was a nuclear bomb.
The American Marines didn’t know.
The British SAS suspected it.
Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the XVI Legion, knew it for certain, because the Mechanicus had detected the radioactive signature from orbit.
“Three minutes,” reported the Tech-priest Vultarion, plugged into the augurs.
“The bomb will detonate in three minutes.”
“Can you disarm it?”
“Not from here, my lord. I need direct contact.”
Horus did not hesitate.
“Abaddon. A Thunderhawk. Now.”
* * *
The Thunderhawk landed on the warehouse roof with two minutes and ten seconds on the clock.
Vultarion came down the ramp at a speed surprising for someone with more metal parts than flesh.
He opened the warehouse door with a drill.
He found the bomb.
One minute forty.
He connected to it with six mechadendrite cables that sprouted from his back.
He began reciting binary litanies at top speed.
One minute.
“Everything all right?” Abaddon asked over the vox.
“The machine spirit is hostile,” Vultarion replied.
“It was assembled without blessings. Without incense. Without respect. It is an orphaned, furious spirit.”
“Can you calm it down?”
“I am trying.”
Thirty seconds.
“Vultarion!”
“I am trying!”
Ten seconds.
Five.
Four.
Vultarion gave the bomb’s casing a pat.
An affectionate one.
Three.
The counter stopped.
On the screen, in red letters, it stood frozen: 0:03.
There was a long silence.
Then Vultarion disconnected from the bomb, brushed the dust off his robe and activated the vox.
“Machine spirit pacified, my lord. It just needed someone to tell it that it was a good bomb.”
II.
The Captain with the Mustache
On the other side of the city, a British SAS team was watching all of this from a ruined building.
Captain John Price lowered his binoculars.
He lit a cigar.
He took a long drag.
“Well,” he said.
“Didn’t see that one coming.”
Beside him, Sergeant John “Soap” MacTavish, a young Scot with a mohawk, was still staring through his binoculars with his mouth open.
“Captain, are those… Marines? American?”
“No, lad. Americans aren’t that tall.”
“Russians?”
“Not the Russians either.” Price exhaled the smoke.
“I think they’re something new.”
Gaz, the team’s sergeant, leaned out the window.
“Captain, one of the big ones is headed this way.”
It was Horus.
He was walking down the middle of the street, unhurried, without cover, his white-and-green armor gleaming in the sun.
He stopped in front of the building where they were hiding and looked straight at the window.
“Captain Price,” he said.
“Do you have a moment?”
Price went very still.
Then he took another drag on his cigar.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know many things. For example, I know you have spent months hunting a man named Zakhaev. And I know I can help you catch him.”
Price looked at Soap.
Soap looked at Gaz.
Gaz shrugged.
“Well,” said Price, flicking his ash out the window, “it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made a deal with someone stranger than me.”
* * *
The collaboration between the Luna Wolves and the SAS was, in Horus’s own words, “the most productive of the entire crusade.”
Captain Lorkhan and Duel-Brother Kaerus accompanied Price’s team on all its operations.
Soap learned to fire a bolter, although the first time the recoil threw him two meters backward.
Gaz learned that Astartes didn’t drink tea, which he took as a personal insult.
And Price learned that Horus had a surprisingly British sense of humor.
“You know what you are, Lupercal?” Price said to him one night in camp as they shared a cigar.
Horus didn’t smoke, but he held the cigar out of courtesy.
“You’re a messiah with orbital weaponry.”
Horus considered this.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
III.
Al-Asad
Khaled Al-Asad was captured in a safe house in Azerbaijan, hiding in a closet.
Kaerus dragged him out by his shirt collar.
They took him to an empty room with a single chair.
Price went in alone.
He closed the door.
Horus waited in silence on the other side.
Abaddon, beside him, growled.
“Shouldn’t we be the ones interrogating him, my lord?”
“It is his war, Ezekyle. Let him finish it.”
A phone could be heard ringing inside the room.
A voice in Russian.
Then, a gunshot. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Price came out with Al-Asad’s phone in his hand.
“Zakhaev,” he said.
“I know where he is.”
IV.
The Missile Base
Imran Zakhaev was at a missile base in the mountains of Russia, surrounded by his ultranationalist army.
And he had something worse than a bomb: the launch codes for nuclear missiles aimed at the east coast of the United States.
His son, Viktor, guarded him with an elite force.
Price and Soap found him on a rooftop, in the middle of an ambush.
Viktor found himself cornered, surrounded by Space Marines and British commandos, with no way out.
“Give it up, lad,” said Price.
“It’s over.”
Viktor looked around.
He looked at the sky, where the ships of the XVI Legion blotted out the clouds.
And he lowered his weapon.
“My father…” he began.
“Your father’s about to have a very bad day,” Price replied.
* * *
The missile base fell in an hour.
The Luna Wolves went in through the front gate.
The SAS went in through the ventilation.
Vultarion, the Tech-priest, went in through the control room and spent ten minutes whispering with the launch computers until, one by one, the missiles self-destructed in their silos.
“Russian machine spirits,” he remarked afterward.
“Very stubborn. Very sad. They like poetry.”
Zakhaev didn’t stay to see the end.
He escaped in a helicopter, heading for the border, with the last of his men.
Price ran to the edge of the helipad.
He raised his rifle.
Too far.
“Dammit! He’s getting away!”
Horus, behind him, raised his eyes to the sky.
“No.”
In orbit, the battle barge Gloriana adjusted its position.
A single lance shot, thin as a needle and bright as a sun, pierced the atmosphere and the overcast Russian sky.
Zakhaev’s helicopter ceased to exist.
There was a long silence on the helipad.
Price lowered his rifle.
Soap looked at the sky.
Gaz looked at the spot where the helicopter had been.
Horus adjusted his cape.
“No one escapes Imperial justice,” he said.
It took Gaz a few seconds to react.
“Bloody hell.”
Chronicle, entry number seventy-four.
Captain Price has accepted Horus’s offer to join the auxiliaries of the XVI Legion, along with Soap, Gaz and a masked sergeant called Ghost whose face I have not managed to see.
I asked Ghost why he wore a mask.
He told me: “For the same reason you wear that helmet.” I told him I wore it because I was scared.
He told me: “Exactly.”
V.
Nazis on the Moon
Horus’s next world was one in which the Nazis had won the Second World War.
Thanks to technology stolen from an ancient secret society, the Third Reich had conquered the entire planet by 1948.
It had giant combat robots, mechanical dogs, a base on the Moon and entire cities turned into labor camps.
Horus’s new auxiliaries read the report in the ship’s strategium.
“Nazis,” said Price.
“With robots.”
“And a base on the Moon,” Soap added.
“I was expecting aliens,” said Gaz.
“Or elves. Or something. Not space Nazis.”
Ghost said nothing.
But he loaded his rifle.
“There is a resistance,” Horus explained.
“Small. Desperate. Led by a man named William Joseph Blazkowicz. The Nazis call him ‘Terror-Billy.’ He has spent years killing them without pause.”
Price raised an eyebrow.
“I like this man.”
VI.
Götterdämmerung Base
The first operation was the capture of the Nazi lunar base, which the Germans called Götterdämmerung, “the twilight of the gods.” The XVI Legion landed on the Moon with twelve companies, forty Land Raiders and a veteran Sergeant named Arkhon who spent the entire operation repeating the same thing.
“This is not a war, brothers,” he said every time he opened a door.
“It is a historical correction.”
The Nazi soldiers defending the base had never seen anything like it.
Their laser weapons, the pride of the Reich, bounced off the ceramite armor.
Their combat robots—gigantic, heavy, armored—were brought down by a single lascannon shot.
In less than a day, the Imperial banner was flying over the lunar base.
And the codes to every nuclear weapon in the Reich were in Horus’s hands.
Horus then did something he had not done on any other world: a personal broadcast to the entire planet.
He appeared on every screen in the Reich, on every radio, on every loudspeaker in the labor camps.
“People of Earth,” he said.
“My name is Horus Lupercal. I have taken your lunar base. I have taken your nuclear weapons. And I am coming for your tyrants.”
* * *
In a headquarters in Berlin, SS General Irene Engel, a cruel, histrionic woman with a fondness for mechanical dogs, watched the broadcast with bloodshot eyes.
“I want that baldy’s head!” she screamed.
“On a platter! A silver one!”
“Frau Engel,” said her assistant, trembling, “that man just took the Moon.”
“I don’t care! I want his head!”
“And how do you intend to get it?”
Engel looked at him with a terrible smile.
“With everything we have.”
VII.
The Resistance
B.J.
Blazkowicz was hiding in a stolen submarine called Eva’s Hammer when the broadcast reached him.
He stood staring at the screen with his arms crossed.
He was an enormous man, blond, stone-jawed, scarred all over, with the look of someone who had spent too many years at war.
Anya Oliwa, his partner, sat down beside him.
“Do you think it’s true?”
“I think it’s too good to be true,” said B.J.
“And I think we’ve got nothing to lose.”
Set Roth, the Jewish scientist who had invented half the technology the Nazis had stolen, peered over his shoulder.
“That armor,” he said, “is fascinating. The alloy. The life-support system. I want to take it apart.”
“You can’t take apart a giant, Set.”
“I can try.”
“If that fella’s come to kill Nazis, I’ll stand him a whisky. If not, I’ll put a bullet in him.”
Grace Walker, the leader of the resistance in New York, was more practical.
“Call him.”
* * *
The meeting between the resistance and the Luna Wolves took place in the submarine.
Horus came in stooping, because the hatch was far too small for him.
Price came in behind him, with his cigar.
B.J.
and Price looked at each other for a long while.
Two big men, bearded, with the faces of men who had seen it all, with the same look in their eyes.
“I like you, Beardy,” said Price.
“Likewise, Mustache,” B.J.
replied.
They shook hands.
And so was born one of the loudest friendships in the Imperium.
Set Roth, meanwhile, had found Vultarion in the corridor and was bombarding him with questions about the machine spirit.
“So you people believe machines have souls?”
“We believe machines deserve respect.”
“So do I! I’ve always thought you have to talk sweetly to engines!”
Vultarion looked at him with something resembling tenderness.
“You are a scientist,” he said.
“And a bastard.”
“Thank you.”
“It was a compliment.”
“I know.”
VIII.
UR-943
In the depths of a Nazi laboratory, the resistance found something the Mechanicus deemed the greatest heresy on the planet: a Nazi artificial intelligence, designated UR-943, which controlled every combat robot in the Reich.
The AI spoke over the laboratory loudspeakers in a sweet, motherly voice.
“Welcome. May I help you with anything?”
“She sounds nice,” said Soap.
“It’s a Nazi machine that controls an army of killer robots,” said Ghost.
“But she sounds nice.”
Vultarion was already pulling out the flamer.
“Potential heresy detected.”
“Potential?” asked Price.
“I am restraining myself, Captain.”
UR-943 was shut down.
With it, every combat robot of the Reich stopped at once, all over the planet, in the middle of whatever they were doing.
Some froze in the middle of the street.
Others toppled to the ground.
One, in Paris, stopped mid-stride with one leg raised, and the Parisians hung garlands on it.
IX.
Berlin, Again
Frau Engel sent her last weapon against the Legion: a Kriegsknecht, a giant combat robot the size of a five-story building, piloted by her personally.
The Dreadnought Venerable Brother Astenor faced it in the center of Berlin.
It was an epic battle, broadcast live to the whole planet by the Luna Wolves’ cameras.
The Kriegsknecht fired cannons and flamethrowers.
Astenor dodged.
The Kriegsknecht stomped.
Astenor rolled.
And then, at the most unexpected moment, the Dreadnought did something no Dreadnought had ever done in the Legion’s records.
It jumped.
Sixty tons of armored sarcophagus rose into the air, came down on the Kriegsknecht’s chest and knocked it flat on its back against the Brandenburg Gate.
Astenor landed on top, tore off the cockpit with his power fist and pulled out a furious, kicking Frau Engel.
“This is impossible! We are the master race!”
Astenor held her up in the air, in front of the cameras.
“Negative,” he said.
* * *
Paris was liberated.
Rome was liberated.
London, Warsaw, Moscow.
In every city in Europe, the banners of the Reich were lowered and burned.
And in a bunker beneath Berlin, surrounded by guards who had fled, the resistance found Adolf Hitler.
He was an old man.
He was sick, pathetic, sitting in a wheelchair and talking to himself.
When he saw B.J.
and Horus come in, he wet himself.
Horus looked at him for a long moment.
“Is this all?” he said.
“Is this what terrorized an entire planet?”
“This is all,” said B.J.
“Then he is yours.”
B.J.
Blazkowicz stood looking at the man who had destroyed his world.
He raised his weapon.
Horus left the bunker and closed the door behind him.
A gunshot rang out.
* * *
That night, aboard the submarine Eva’s Hammer, the resistance celebrated the victory with all the alcohol they could find.
Fergus brought out his whisky.
Set Roth brought out a kosher wine he had been saving for years.
Anya and B.J.
danced.
Price and Soap sang an SAS song nobody else understood.
The Luna Wolves watched from the corners, not joining in, but not leaving either.
Ghost was the last to speak.
He lifted his mask halfway, just enough to drink, and raised an empty glass.
“Somebody bring vodka,” he said.
“This deserves vodka.”
Chronicle, entry number seventy-five.
Nobody brought vodka.
But the next day, a crate arrived from the VII Legion with a handwritten note: “For the resistance. With the compliments of Lieutenant Reznov. Drink in moderation. Or don’t.” I don’t know how he found out.
I think Reznov always finds out.
The Primarch Perturabo has requested my presence.
He hasn’t written me a letter.
He has sent me a blueprint.
It is a blueprint of my cabin on his ship, with exact measurements, the spot where I must leave my boots and a note in the margin: “Do not touch anything.” I believe this is how he says welcome.
I’m an aspiring writer with many stories still waiting to be told and a deep passion for Warhammer.
I love creating dark worlds, epic battles, and flawed characters.
I write to learn and grow.