Helsreach

'He killed several before he fell.'

'He did,' the swordsman allowed, 'but his death-wound was in the back. That would shame me beyond measure.'

'Priamus,' Nerovar's voice was ice cold and heavy with both emotion and threat. 'Leave me alone.'

'You are impossible, Nero.' Priamus revved his engine and accelerated away. 'I try to sympathise with you. I try to connect, and you rebuke me. I will remember this, brother.'

Nerovar said nothing. He just watched the road.

T

he

J

ahannam

P

latform.

Six hundred and nineteen workers stationed on an offshore industrial base. Its skyline was a mess of cranes and storage silos. Beneath it, only the deep of the ocean and the richness of the crude oil that could be refined into promethium.

A new shadow entered the depths.

Like a black wave under the water's surface, it drifted closer to the support struts that held the gigantic platform above the water. Lesser shadows, fish-like and sharp, spilled ahead of the main darkness like rainfall falling from a storm cloud.

The platform shuddered at first, as if shivering in the chill winds that always howled this far from shore.

And then, with majestic slowness, it began to fall. A town-sized, multi-layered platform fell into the ocean, crashing down into the water. The ships around it began, one by one, to explode. Each one, once breached, sank alongside the Jahannam Platform.

Six hundred and nineteen workers, and one thousand and twenty-one crewmembers from the ships died in the freezing waters over the course of the following three hours. The few men and women that managed to reach vox-casters shouted into their machines, little realising their voices were carrying no further.

The platform was eventually submerged except for a fleet of floating detritus. The ocean no longer teemed with potential profit, but the scrap metal of destroyed enterprise.

Helsreach heard nothing of this.

T

he

S

heol

P

latform.

In a central spire, nestled between tall, stacked container silos, Technical Officer Nayra Racinov cast an annoyed look at her green screen, and the sudden fuzzy wash of distortion it was displaying for her.

'You're joking,' she said to the screen. It replied with white noise.

She thumped the thick glass with the bottom of her fist. It replied with slightly angrier white noise. Technical Officer Nayra Racinov decided not to try that again.

'My screen's just died,' she called out to the rest of the office. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the ''rest of the office'', which usually consisted of an overweight ex-crane driver called Gruli who monitored the communications system, had gone for a mug of caffeine.

She looked back at her console. Warning lights were flickering cheerily around the confused screen. One moment, the green wash showed a chaotic burst of incoming presences on the sonar. Hundreds of them. The next, it showed a clear ocean. And the next, nothing but distortion again.

The room shuddered. The entire platform shuddered, as if in the grip of an earthquake.

Nayra swallowed, watching the screen again. The presences under the water, hundreds of them, were back once again.

She dived across the shaking room, hammering the vox-station's transmit button with the heel of her hand.

She managed to say ''Helsreach, Helsreach, come in…'' before the world dropped out from under her and the second of the Valdez Oil Platforms was brought down, with its steel bones burning, bending and screaming, into the icy sea.

T

he

L

ucifus

P

latform.

The largest of the three offshore installations was manned by a permanent work crew population twice the size of those at Jahannam and Sheol. While they were powerless to prevent their own destruction, they at least saw it coming.

Across the platform, sonar auspex readers were suddenly captured by the storm of distortion that had preceded the deaths of Sheol and Jahannam. Here, a fully-staffed control office reacted quicker, with a low-ranking tech-acolyte managing to restore a semblance of clarity to the screens.

Technical Officer Marvek Kolovas was on the vox-network immediately, his gravelly voice carrying directly to the mainland.

'Helsreach, this is Lucifus. Massive, repeat, massive incoming enemy fleet. At least three hundred sub-mersibles. We can't raise Sheol or Jahannam. Neither platform is responding. Helsreach? Helsreach, come in.'

'Uh…'

Kolovas blinked at the receiver in his hand. 'Helsreach?' he said again.

'Uh, this is Dock Officer Nylien. You're under attack?'

'Throne, are you deaf, you stupid bastard? There's a fleet of enemy submersibles launching all kinds of hell at our support gantries. We need rescue craft immediately.

Airborne

rescue craft. Lucifus Platform is going down.'

'

I… I…'

'

Helsreach? Helsreach? Do you hear me?'

A new voice broke over the vox-channel. 'This is Dockmaster Tomaz Maghernus. Helsreach hears and acknowledges.'

Kolovas finally let out the breath he'd been holding. Around him, the world shook as it began to end.

'Good luck, Lucifus,' the dockmaster's voiced finished, a moment before the link went dead.

'T

his is the

situation,' Colonel Sarren began.

The Forthright Sector dockmaster's office was, putting it politely, a pit. Maghernus was not a tidy man at the best of times, and a recent divorce wasn't helping his state of cleanliness. The sizeable room was a hovel of old caffeine mugs that were growing furry mould-masses in their depths, and unfiled stacks of papers were scattered everywhere. Here and there were some of Maghernus's cast-off clothing from the nights he'd slept in his office rather than go back to his depressing bachelor hab - and before that, back to the woman he'd taken to calling The Cheating Bitch.

The Cheating Bitch was a memory now, and not a pleasant one. He found