Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  Three more vessels were crippled in quick succession; Devine Right, Cthonia Rising, and Reaper of Barbarus. A pair of ‘fist-to-finger’ impacts penetrated the Imperial vessel’s prow armour and a superhot plasma jet roared the length of its long axis. Gutted by searing fires, Devine Right exploded moments later as its weapon stores cooked off. The Death Guard destroyer was reduced to a radioactive hulk and critical reactor emissions that lit up the Imperial threat auspex like a beacon fire. The Sons of Horus frigate simply vanished, dead in the water as its power and life supporting mechanisms failed in the first instant of impact.

  Both vanguards had been savaged, but the traitor ships had taken the worst of the engagement. Four vessels remained battle worthy in the Warmaster’s vanguard, though all had taken hits in the opening shots of the engagement.

  Their captains were hungry for blood, and they fired their ship’s engines, eager to tear into the enemy at close range. Behind them, the fleets of the Death Guard and Sons of Horus followed suit.

  Battle would be joined and the dead avenged.

  The Imperial ships would learn what it meant to face the Warmaster.

  But Battlefleet Molech had no intention of going head to head with a vastly superior fleet. No sooner had the ordnance struck the traitor vanguard than Captain Argaun issued orders to turn the provocateur fleet around. His remaining ships raced back to Molech and the cover of its orbital weapon platforms.

  And, just as Lord Admiral Semper had planned, the blooded fleet of the Warmaster gave chase.

  ‘Remember the moon, he says,’ grunted Abaddon. ‘As if any Cthonian even took part in that fight.’

  Unable to make any sound within the frozen vacuum of the tomb ship, the First Captain’s voice sounded in Kalus Ekaddon’s helmet over the vox.

  He didn’t answer. Strict vox-silence protocols were in force, but when had something as trivial as a direct order from the Warmaster troubled Ezekyle Abaddon?

  ‘Remember the moon,’ repeated Abaddon. ‘For two hundred years, we’ve tried to forget the moon.’

  On the flag bridge of the Guardian of Aquinas, Lord Admiral Brython Semper watched the unfolding engagement in the central hololith with a measured sense of satisfaction. He paced with his hands laced behind his back. A cohort of nine Thallax followed him on hissing, piston-driven legs, the low hum of their lightning guns ruffling hairs on the back of his neck.

  At least, he told himself it was their strange weaponry.

  Semper didn’t like the blank-faced cybernetics, as it always unnerved him to know there was some scrap of a living being within that sarcophagus armour.

  Still, at least they didn’t speak unless you spoke to them, unlike Proximo Tarchon of the vessel’s assigned complement of Ultramarines, who proffered unasked-for tactical advice like he were the one who’d spent most of his life aboard a warship.

  Tarchon was only a centurion, for Throne’s sake, but still he acted as though the Guardian of Aquinas was his own Legion warship.

  To the Mechanicum and the fleet, Semper’s flagship was an Avenger-class grand cruiser, which captured something of the vessel’s majesty, but nothing of its savagery. A part of the Guardian’s crew since his recruitment on Cypra Mundi, Brython Semper knew just how ferocious a machine of war it was.

  Its mode of attack was not subtle. It owed nothing to finesse and was bloody in the way two starving rats locked in a box was bloody. Guardian of Aquinas was a gunboat, a sledgehammer vessel that waited for the enemy line to widen before surging into the gap and unleashing hellish broadsides from multiple gun decks.

  ‘Good hunting indeed, Argaun,’ hissed Semper, as the wounded vessels of the provocateur fleet limped back into range of the orbital weapons platforms. ‘Gave those traitor bastards a bloody nose and then some. By Mars and all his red blades, you did!’

  That was overstating the damage caused by the provocateur fleet, but his lavish estimation of it would fire the blood of his crew. The Thallax straightened at the mention of the Red Planet. In pride or some conditioned reflex, he couldn’t tell.

  As impressive as Argaun’s attack had been, it was just the prelude to the real fight. Semper cast his critical gaze over the disposition of his fleet, and was content.

  Forty-two Imperial vessels were spread between three attack formations; a strong centre of frigates and destroyers, with fast-attack cruisers on the flanks. Two Gothics sailed abeam of the flagship, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory. Both had fought in the reclamation of the birth system and, like the Guardian of Aquinas, they were linebreakers, armed with broadside lances that were sure to wreak fearful havoc among the traitor ships.

  Sailing in the leftmost battlegroup was Semper’s mailed fist.

  Adranus was a Dominator, and its nova cannon was going to create the gap Semper and the Gothics would rip wide open.

  The combined Sons of Horus and Death Guard fleets were in wrathful pursuit of the vessels that had hurt them. As Argaun had communicated, the enemy fleets were moving to englobe Molech, but retained a centre mass to engage the orbital defences and Battlefleet Molech.

  Semper saw a textbook planetary assault formation, one any first-year cadet would recognise from the works of de Ruyter, Duilius or Yi Sun Shin.

  ‘They must not think very highly of us to come at us with so basic an attack,’ said Semper, loud enough for the deck crews to hear. ‘So much for Captain Salicar’s fears of us being outfought.’

  Yet for all his outward bluster, Semper was under no illusions that the enemy approaching Molech was supremely dangerous. He’d studied the Warmaster’s tactics during the Great Crusade. His assaults were brutal, without mercy and the enemy almost never saw their doom coming.

  This assault felt almost comically simple and direct.

  What was he not seeing?

  The Warmaster’s fleets would be in range of the orbitals at his back in less than three minutes. The hololith flickered with confirmed firing solutions received from their master gunners.

  He’d already authorised captain’s discretion for each of the platform’s commanders. They knew their trade, and needed no direction from him to punish the traitors.

  Yet the nagging doubt that wormed its way into his thoughts at the sight of so basic an assault formation wouldn’t go away.

  What am I missing?

  Platform Master Panrik had a surfeit of weapons aboard the Var Sohn orbital station; torpedo racks, missile tubes, close-range defence cannon, ion shields, mass drivers and battery after battery of macro-cannons.

  All were eager to be unleashed.

  ‘Weapon systems at full readiness,’ reported the deck officer. ‘Command authority transfer on your mark.’

  Panrik nodded. They’d achieved full readiness a little slower than he’d have liked. Still within acceptable tolerances, so no sense in making a scene just now.

  ‘Mark,’ said Panrik, inserting the silver command ring on his right index finger into the slot on his throne. He turned and sub-vocally recited his authority signifiers.

  Clamps locked his neck in place, and a whirring, rotating connector plug slotted into the mind impulse unit socket drilled through into his spine.

  Information flooded him.

  Every surveyor and auspex on the great, crescent shaped platform was now his to access. His organic vision faded, replaced with a sensorium suite of approach vectors, closure speeds, deflection angles and targeting solutions.

  In a very real sense, Panrik became Orbital Platform Var Sohn.

  A potent sense of might surged through him. Connection burn and inload surge made him wince, but it faded as cognition-enhancing stims flooded his thalamus and occipital lobe.

  Implanted vents at the back of Panrik’s skull opened, allowing the heat generated by his over-clocked brain to dissipate.

  ‘I have command authority, aye,’ replied Panrik, alternating between the local auspex and the feed coming in from the attack logisters of the Guardian of Aquinas. The enemy fleet was coming i
n hard and fast, looking to roll straight over the orbital defences and break through before suffering too much damage.

  A bold strategy, but a risky one.

  Too risky, thought Panrik, glancing down at the staggered line of orbitals and the haze of minefields strung between them like glittering jewels.

  Panrik cricked his neck and flexed his fingers.

  Weapon systems armed in response.

  ‘Come ahead then,’ he said to the advancing fleets. ‘Give it your best shot.’

  00:12

  Aximand watched the mottled grey and green marble of Molech rotate below him. Close, so very close. Ice limned the kinetic bracing and frost webbed the plate of his fellow warriors. For the last sixteen hours, he’d been watching the timer in the corner of his visor count down to zero.

  00:09

  Inaction didn’t suit him. It didn’t suit any of them, but he at least had learned to deal with it. Ezekyle and Falkus were prowling hounds who savoured the swift kill. Not for them the patient hunt. In contrast, Aximand was a bowstring that lost nothing of its power by being kept taut. Yet even he’d found this long, frozen vigil testing.

  00:05

  Noctua, he suspected, could outlast them all.

  Aximand almost smiled as he wondered how long it had taken before Ezekyle broke the vox-silence protocol. Not long. He’d be too full of hubris to resist letting his mouth run away from him.

  Aximand remembered the tales of the moon’s fall.

  00:02

  He remembered chimeric monsters of the Selenar cults; gene-spliced bioweapons, killing machines of flesh and acid and gibbering insanity. He remembered tales of slaughter. Unrestrained, wild, savage and yet to be tempered by Lupercal’s discipline.

  But most famous of all was the cry of surrender.

  Call off your wolves!

  00:00

  ‘Speartip,’ said Aximand. ‘Light them up.’

  ‘Contacts!’ shouted the deck officer.

  Panrik had seen them no more than a fraction of a second before, but had disregarded them due to their position behind and below Var Sohn. They were faint, no more than flickers.

  They couldn’t possibly be hostile.

  But they were growing stronger with every passing moment.

  ‘Malfunctioning mines?’ suggested the auspex master. ‘Or hyper-accelerated debris caught in the flare of a surveyor sweep.’

  Panrik didn’t need cognition-enhancing drugs to hear the desperate hope in the man’s voice. He knew fine well what these returns were. He just didn’t know how the hell they’d gotten there.

  ‘Tomb ships! Throne, they’re tomb ships!’ said the auspex master. ‘I’ve heard of the tactic, but thought it was just a myth.’

  ‘What in the name of Hellblade’s balls are tomb ships?’

  ‘Tomb ships,’ repeated the auspex master. ‘Vessels shot into the void and then completely shut down, emptied of atmosphere and left to fly towards their target. There’s no power emissions, so they’re virtually impossible to detect until they fire up their reactors. It’s also next to impossible to pull off.’

  ‘Clearly not impossible enough,’ said Panrik, each dart of his ocular implant shifting fire-priorities. ‘Retask batteries Theta through Lambda to low orbit echelon fire. Atmospheric bursts only, I don’t want any of our munitions hitting the surface. Ventral torpedo bays recalculate firing solutions and someone get me the Lord Admiral.’

  Two ships were right on top of him, a dozen more spread behind the network of orbital platforms. They’d appeared from nowhere, the surveyor returns from their hulls growing stronger as dormant reactors were quick-cycled to readiness and targeting auspex trawled his platform for weak points.

  He felt the shudder of point-blank torpedo impacts on the hull through the mind impulse unit link with Var Sohn’s surface systems. He grimaced in sympathetic pain. Armour penetrators, not explosive warheads.

  The sensorium came alive with hull-breach warnings and system failures as the newly-revealed ships lashed them with terrifyingly accurate gunfire.

  Var Sohn’s defence systems blew apart, one by one.

  ‘They mean to board us,’ he said with a sick jolt of horror.

  This was just the fight he was bred for.

  Head hunched low behind a breacher’s shield, moving forward, Mourn-it-all’s enhanced edge cutting through meat and bone and armour with ease. The boarding torpedo smoked and howled in the splintered underside of the orbital plate. Melting ice streamed from its superheated hull, and Sons of Horus breachers poured from its interior.

  The rapid reaction force sent to intercept them were dead. Exo-armoured mortals. Highly trained and well armoured. Now nothing more than offal and butcher meat scattered like abattoir refuse.

  Yade Durso, second Captain of the Fifth Company, together with five warriors in heavily reinforced battleplate and shields formed a wedge with him at its point. Tactical overlays appeared on his visor; schematics, objectives, kill boxes. Another timer. This one even more crucial than the last.

  Remember the moon, Grael Noctua had said.

  Aximand threw back his head and howled.

  And let raw savagery take him.

  A flicker of ignis fatuus was the first warning. Crackling blue teleport flare arced between the primary stanchions of the Var Zerba orbital plate’s command centre. Ear canals crackled in the seconds before a hard bang of displaced air shattered every data-slate within twenty metres of the transloc point.

  Ezekyle Abaddon, Kalus Ekaddon and six Justaerin stood in an outward facing ring, their armour glossy and black, trailing vapour ghosts of teleporter flare. A hooded priest of the Mechanicum stood in the centre of the ring of Terminators, a hunched thing of multiple limbs, glowing eye lenses and hissing pneumatics.

  The junior officers barely had time to register the presence of the hulking killers before a blitzing storm of combi-bolter fire mowed them down.

  ‘Kill them all,’ said Abaddon.

  The Justaerin spread out, spewing shots that looked indiscriminate, but were in fact, preternaturally exact. The Warmaster’s orders had been unambiguous. The defence platforms were to be captured intact.

  Within moments, it was done.

  Abaddon marched to the throne at the heart of the control centre. A mewling wretch sat there, soiled and weeping. His eyes were screwed shut. As if that would save him. Abaddon broke his neck and wrenched the limp sack of bones from the throne without bothering to undo the neck clamp. The Platform Master’s head tore off and bounced over the deck before coming to rest by an armaments panel.

  ‘You,’ barked Abaddon, waving the Mechanicum priest forward. ‘Sit your arse down and get this thing shooting.’

  The fight through the Mausolytica had been bloody, but its outcome had, knew Grael Noctua, been a foregone conclusion. The fight through the heart of Var Crixia was just the same. Its defenders were well trained, well armed and disciplined.

  But they had never fought transhumans before.

  The Warlocked were eternal, a squad never omitted from the 25th Company’s order of battle. Death occasionally altered its composition, but a line of continuity could be traced from its current makeup all the way back to its inception.

  Noctua fought along the starboard axial, a gently curved transit way that ran from one tip of the crescent shaped station to the other. Herringbone passageways branched from the main axial like ribs, and it was from these raked corridors that the exo-armoured mortals were attempting to hold them off.

  It wasn’t working.

  Breachers went in hard and fast, running at the low-crouch. Shields up, heads down, bolters locked into the slotted upper edge. Braying streaks of miniature rockets rammed down the main axial, killing anything that dared to show itself. Automated gun carriages pummelled the advancing legionaries, but were quickly bracketed and shredded by bolter fire.

  Static emplacements unmasked from ceiling mounts and hidden wall caskets. Grenade dispensers dumped frags and krak bombs. B
attleplate withstood the bulk of it. Legion warriors stomped on through the acrid broil of aerosolised blood and yellow smoke.

  Noctua advanced behind the wall of shields, bolter pulled in tight to his shoulder. Ahead, a barricade of hard plasteel and light-distorting refractors extruded from a choke point in the corridor. Bulky shapes moved through the haze.

  Sawing blasts of autocannon fire punched into shields. Ceramite and steel splintered. Other weapons fired. Louder, harder and with a bigger, more lethal muzzle sound. A legionary grunted in pain as a shot found a gap in the shields and blew out his kneecap.

  Mass-reactives.

  The shell ricocheted from hardened bone and travelled down the length of the warrior’s shin. It detonated at his ankle and obliterated his foot. Trailing the shredded remains on a rope of mangled tendons like a grotesque form of penitentiary ball and chain, the warrior kept up with his fellow shieldbearers.

  Over the upper edges of the shields, Noctua saw hints of the defenders. It was like looking through a pane of fat-smeared glass. They were big, bigger than even the largest mortal exo-suit, and Noctua was confused until chance light through the refractors granted him a fleeting impression of cobalt-blue and gold plate. An Ultima rendered in mother-of-pearl.

  ‘Legion foe!’ he shouted. ‘Ultramarines.’

  Another volley of hard, echoing shots. Two of the breachers went down. One with the back of his helm a smoking, ruined crater. The other with his head lolling over his back and his throat blown out to the spine.

  The advance faltered, but didn’t stop. Legionaries following behind swept up the fallen shields and dressed ranks. One died before he could bring the shield up completely, his shoulders and ribs separated by a pair of bolter shells. Another pitched over without a head as a round slotted neatly through the bolter notch.

  Noctua took his turn, bending to grab the shield before it hit the ground. A shot punched the lip of the shield and he felt the blazing edge of the shell score a line across his brow where his Mournival mark was graven.

  He slid home his bolter.

  ‘Onwards,’ he said. ‘We stop, we die.’

  Gunshots sounded from one of the herringbone corridors. Stubber fire, cannon blasts and whickering volleys of flechettes.