Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  Pin us in place with Legion forces then overwhelm us with mortal units shooting from the flanks and rear. Clever. Practical.

  They could fight their way clear. Retreat, regroup. Find a workaround. But that would take time. Time the fleet didn’t have if it wasn’t going to be savaged by Var Crixia’s guns.

  No, retreat wasn’t an option.

  Suddenly it didn’t need to be.

  An ululating howl came from one of the herringbone corridors, and a pack of dark-armoured warriors charged into the fray. They moved like sprinting acrobats, using the walls as well as the deck to propel themselves forward.

  They hit the barricade like a shell from a demolisher cannon, smashing it to splinters with the ferocity of impact. Some fired bolters and wielded blades, others simply tore into their foes with what looked like implanted claws. Blood arced up in cataclysmic geysers and the savagery was beyond anything Noctua had ever seen. Refractors blew out with squalling shrieks and what had previously been hidden was now revealed.

  Noctua had thought his reinforcements to be another squad of the 25th Company, but such was not the case. They were still Sons of Horus, or had been once – their armour was a mix of swamp green, soot black and flaked blood. Some went without helms, their faces protean and scabbed with wounds cut into their faces.

  The stench of burned meat attended them, and though the refractors were no more, Noctua still felt as though the air between them was somehow polluted. Inhuman strength, beyond even that of a trans-human tore the Ultramarines apart. Limbs were rent from shoulder guards, clawed fists punched through plastrons and thickly-muscled hearts ripped from splintered rib sheaths.

  Noctua watched as one of the smoking warriors twisted a helm from a gorget with the head and spinal column still attached. He swung this like a spike-headed flail, battering another of the XIII Legion to death with it.

  The warrior spread his arms wide and roared, his maw a red furnace into hell. Scars covered his neck and cheeks, and he bled toxic smoke from two old wounds in his chest.

  Shock pinned Noctua in place.

  Ger Gerradon, whose fighting days ended on Dwell.

  Noctua’s eyes met those of Gerradon, and he saw madness behind that gaze – malignant fire and a soul that burned in its chains. The moment lasted an instant only, and Noctua threw off his horror at what Gerradon had become.

  The Ultramarines were dead, no longer a threat.

  Time to deal with the enemies that were.

  ‘Come about,’ ordered Noctua, and the shields lifted high, their bearers turning on the spot as the warriors behind them pushed past. In one fluid manoeuvre, the entire formation of the Warlocked was reversed.

  Bolter fire flayed the mortal soldiers, and they balked in the face of sudden reversal. With their Legion allies dead, the mortals knew that the fight was over, and fled.

  It went against the grain to let them go, but this plan was of his devising, and he was already behind. Var Crixia’s guns needed to be firing at the right targets.

  Noctua turned to see what Ger Gerradon and his warriors were doing, reluctant to let them out of his sight, even for a second.

  They were on their knees.

  Feasting on the Ultramarines they had killed.

  TEN

  I want that ship

  Warmaster

  Stowaway

  Horus returned to the bridge. As the tomb ships closed on the orbitals, he’d retired to his personal chambers and left the observation of the coming attack to Maloghurst.

  The strategium was a large space, airy and vaulted, but with the return of the Warmaster arrayed in the full panoply of battle, it seemed cramped. Nor had he returned alone, Falkus Kibre and twenty of the Justaerin carrying breacher shields came with him.

  Kibre’s helmet hung at his belt. His face was a picture in rapture. Such a change from the bitter resentment he’d worn when the Warmaster removed him from the assault elements. Now he was going into battle at the Warmaster’s side, and no greater honour existed within the Sons of Horus.

  ‘You’re still set on doing this then?’ asked Maloghurst.

  ‘I want that ship, Mal,’ replied Horus, rolling his shoulders in a clatter of plate to loosen the muscles beneath. ‘And I’m out of practice.’

  ‘I counsel you again, sir, you should not do this.’

  ‘Worried I’ll get hurt, Mal?’ asked Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from his belt. The haft of the mace was the length of a mortal man. Lethal against a Legion foe, absurd overkill against baseline humans.

  ‘It’s an unnecessary risk.’

  Horus slapped a mailed fist on the Widowmaker’s shoulder, a booming clang of metal that echoed through the strategium like rolling thunder.

  ‘I have Falkus here to protect me,’ said Horus, unhooking his battle helm and hauling it down onto his gorget. The lenses flared red as its auto-senses were activated.

  Maloghurst felt a tremor of awe travel the length of his twisted spine. Horus was an avenging angel, an avatar of battle incarnate and the master of war. So terrible and powerful. Maloghurst was horrified his quotidian dealings with the primarch had rendered the miraculous almost banal.

  ‘I’ve sat on the sidelines for too long, Mal. It’s time everyone remembered that this fight is my fight. It will be my deeds that ensure it’s my name that echoes down through the ages. I won’t have my warriors win my war without me.’

  Maloghurst nodded, convinced the moment Horus had secured his helm. He dropped to his knees, though the movement sent a jolt of searing pain through his fused hips.

  ‘My lord,’ said Maloghurst.

  ‘No kneeling, not from you,’ said Horus, hauling his equerry to his feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Maloghurst. ‘Old habits.’

  Horus nodded, as though people kneeling to him were an everyday occurrence. Which, of course, it was.

  ‘Bloody the Spirit for me, Mal,’ said Horus, turning and leading the Justaerin to the embarkation deck where his Stormbird awaited. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be gone long.’

  This is it. This is what I missed.

  ‘Tomb ships,’ hissed Admiral Semper, seeing notations on an instructional primer from his cadet days writ large in reality on the hololith. ‘Throne, bloody almighty, tomb ships. They’re fighting the subjugation of the moon all over again. The thrice damned bloody moon.’

  The hololith told a tale of horror. Of a plan in tatters, of arrogance and, ultimately, death.

  ‘If it had been anyone else but the Sons of Horus, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ whispered Semper. ‘Who but the Warmaster would have the audacity to launch a full quarter of his fleet into the void and hope they arrived in time and at the right location?’

  Except, of course, the Warmaster hadn’t hoped the tomb ships would arrive where he needed them. He’d known. Known with a certainty that chilled Semper to the bone.

  ‘The orbital platforms are gone,’ said his Master of Surveyors, hardly daring to believe the evidence of the hololith. Semper shared the man’s disbelief.

  ‘They’re worse than gone, the enemy has them,’ he replied, watching as the most powerful platforms, Var Crixia and Var Zerba, cracked open the orbitals that the enemy assault forces hadn’t seized. Var Sohn had launched – and was still launching – spreads of torpedoes into his hopelessly scattered fleet.

  ‘Is the day lost, Lord Admiral?’

  The answer was surely obvious, but the man deserved a considered answer. The Lord Admiral swept his gaze over the catastrophic ruin of what had begun as an ironclad stratagem.

  He laughed and the nearby Thallax rotated their torsos at the unfamiliar sound. Semper shook his head. He’d forgotten the first rule of war regarding contact with the enemy.

  Semper’s rightmost battlegroup was no more. Every vessel gutted by treacherous fire from the captured orbitals. As the warships foundered in the wake of the shocking reversal, the Death Guard surged into them like ambush predators picking off herd stragglers. Alone and overwhelmed,
each Imperial ship was brutalised until it was no more than a smouldering ruin.

  The crippled hulks were then driven into the gravitational clutches of Molech by snub-nosed ram-ships. Wrecks plunged through the atmosphere. Blazing re-entry plumes followed them down.

  Semper had traced the trajectories, hoping against hope that the wrecks would hit the atmosphere too sharply and burn to ash before reaching the surface. Or be too shallow and bounce off, careening into deep space.

  But whoever had calculated the angle of re-entry had been precise, and every missile of wreckage was going to strike Molech with the kinetic force of heavy battlefield atomics.

  The Sons of Horus swarmed the Adranus, its nova cannon useless at close quarters and its broadsides unable to hold off the raptor packs of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds and Dreadclaw assault pods slamming into its flanks.

  With its escorts crippled by the orbitals, the Dominator was easy prey and was being gutted by vultures. An ignoble death, a bloody death. The Dominator was going down hard.

  Screaming vox blurts told of thousands of Legion warriors and things of howling darkness ripping it apart from within. He’d ordered the vox shut off, the screams of the Adranus’s crew too terrible to be borne.

  Only the centre yet endured.

  Admonishment in Fire had been manoeuvring when the first assault teams hit the orbitals. Its captain ordered an emergency burst of the engines which undoubtedly saved her ship. For now. Its lance broadsides had demolished Var Uncad and reduced it to a smouldering ruin.

  Solar’s Glory was ablaze, but still in the fight. With the destruction of Var Uncad, it had been spared the full force of the fire intended to cripple it. A handful of light cruisers had weathered the swarms of torpedoes, but none were in any condition to take the fight to the traitors. At least six would be dead in the void within minutes, and the remaining four could barely manoeuvre or muster a firing line.

  There would be no crossing-the-T this day.

  ‘Yes, the day is lost,’ said Lord Admiral Semper. ‘The rest is silence.’

  Five Stormbirds flew the flaming gauntlet from the Vengeful Spirit on an assault run. Four streaked forward to take up position alongside the fifth. They peeled away from the Warmaster’s flagship as its vast engines fired, manoeuvring it towards the mighty form of Guardian of Aquinas as it swung in.

  The two flag vessels were closing like champions in the crucible of combat, seeking one another out in the midst of slaughter.

  It would be an unequal fight. The Vengeful Spirit was old and tough, its marrow seasoned and its blackened soul ready to taste blood. Collimated blinks of light streamed between the two ships, high-energy pulse lasers intended to strip shields and ablative coatings of ice.

  Deck after deck of guns boomed silently in the void, hurling monstrous projectiles through the space between them. In void terms, the two warships were at point-blank range. Two swordsmen too close to use their main blades and reduced to stabbing at one another with punch daggers.

  They moved in opposition like stately galleons, sliding through clouds of molten debris and listing wrecks with impunity. Bright hurricanes of light streamed back and forth, explosions, premature detonations of intercepted munitions, crackling arcs of squalling, scraping void shields. Hull plates buckled and blew out as both ships traded blows like punch-drunk pugilists.

  In their wake, streams of molten debris and shimmer-trails of frozen oxygen glittered in the star’s light. The escorting Gothics attending Guardian of Aquinas came in hard beside her, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory hurling thousands of tonnes of explosive ordnance at the Vengeful Spirit.

  The Warmaster’s ship shuddered under the impacts, but it was built to take punishment, built to bully its way through harsher storms than this.

  The Endurance came in low, oblique. Shadowed by burning orbitals and pulsing reactor detonations. Its prow weapons savaged the Admonishment in Fire and crumpled its hull as if with a fiery sledgehammer. The stricken ship’s gun decks burned and its weapons stuttered in the face of the Endurance’s assault.

  It kept shooting even as the Death Guard vessel rammed it amidships. Millions of tonnes of iron and adamantium moving at speed had unstoppable momentum. The Endurance’s reinforced frontal ram ripped through the weakened armour of its target and drove its grey bulk through the very heart of the Admonishment in Fire.

  The Gothic simply ceased to exist, its keel shattered and its exposed interior compartments raked by unending broadsides. The wreckage spun away, spiralling clouds of flash-freezing atmosphere blooming from its shorn halves.

  The Solar’s Glory, already ablaze and choking on its own blood had already stopped shooting and its rear quarters vanished in the light of a newborn star. A reactor breach or deliberate overload, it didn’t matter. A white-hot sphere of plasma bloomed from the vessel and engulfed the flanks of the Endurance.

  Almost as soon as the fiery explosion flared to life it began to diminish. An inverted hemisphere was gouged in the Endurance’s hull and intense oxygen fires burned with raging intensity before the void snuffed them out.

  Any other vessel would have been hopelessly crippled, left wheezing and dying by so grievous a wound. But even more than the Vengeful Spirit, the Endurance was built to take pain. Damage control mechanisms had already sealed off the ruptured decks and it heeled around to rake the engine decks of the Guardian of Aquinas.

  Lord Admiral Brython Semper’s flagship was a gutsy fighter, and though it was ablaze from prow to stern, it kept hurting its attackers with murderous broadsides. Through burning fire decks, its master gunners whipped their choking crews to load one last salvo, one final shell, one parting broadside.

  Guardian of Aquinas was doomed, but the killing blow would not come from without, it would come from within.

  Two of the gauntlet-running Stormbirds were obliterated before they began their attack run. Simply swatted out of existence by the blitzing storm of detonations filling the space between the grappling warships. Another had its trajectory fatally altered by the close passage of a torpedo, sending it into the hot zone of laser bursts where it immediately exploded.

  The final pair swooped low over the topside superstructure of the Guardian of Aquinas. They weaved evasion patterns between close-in defence turrets and barrage lines. Raptors on the hunt, they flew almost suicidally close to the gnarled structure of Semper’s flagship.

  The hull breach behind the bridge was exactly where it was expected, and both Stormbirds flared their wings as vectored thrust suddenly reversed to match their forward velocity with that of the Guardian of Aquinas. Assault ramps opened and streams of heavily armed warriors dropped from their troop compartments.

  Terminators, breachers and assaulters. Hard fighters all and equipped to fight in the kind of war Space Marines were bred to win. Brutal, close-quarter, barging, blade work. Blazing scrum-fights of bolters, stabbing blades and full-contact bloodwork.

  First into the Guardian of Aquinas was the Warmaster.

  Bolter shells hosed the ten metre transit in horizontal spears of fire. The shooting was disciplined. He’d expect no less from warriors of the XIII Legion. Horus felt the hot breath of near-misses, and the kinetic force of their passage battered the plates of his armour.

  Shields hunched before them, scraping the deck, Sons of Horus breachers advanced through the banging fury of the defence. Explosions and gunfire rang from the walls. Metallic coughs of grenade detonations filled its volume with scything shrapnel.

  To Horus’s left, Falkus Kibre fired his combi-bolter over the edge of his shield. A Terminator hardly needed a shield, but Falkus hadn’t brought it for his own protection.

  ‘Maloghurst does love to nanny me,’ Horus had advised the Widowmaker in the instant before launching the assault. ‘Keep it for yourself.’

  Never one to gainsay an order if it stood to keep him alive and safe, Falkus had done just that.

  The defenders were coming at them from all sides; Ultramarine
s to the front, a mix of carapace-armoured storm troopers, Army and skitarii to the flanks. The Justaerin advanced in a salient wedge, pushed out in a segmented formation of bolters, blades and shields.

  Chaingun fire pummelled the shields and beam cutters sliced through them in white-edged lines. Even Terminator armour was vulnerable. A powerhouse of armoured might, the only thing that could resist a warrior encased in Tactical Dreadnought armour was an identically equipped warrior.

  Or so Horus had thought.

  Argonaddu went down, the Hero of Ullanor bisected through the chest by a sizzling beam cutter that left a nasty stink of cauterised meat. His killers struggled to reset their weapon, ratcheting cranks and pumping charge-bellows. Horus raised his gauntlet-mounted bolters, their proportions outlandish to any other, but perfectly suited to his primarch’s scale.

  A continuous stream of shells briefly linked muzzle flare and target. The beam gunners exploded in a confetti of shredded, scorched meat tissue and volcanic blood.

  The skitarii launched an assault into the flanks of their advance. The heavies came first. Combat-augs with grossly swollen musculature who wielded motorised saw blades and polearms with photonic edges.

  ‘Ware left!’ shouted Kibre, and the Justaerin on the edge of the formation halted and braced for impact. Skitarii were hellish fighters, chosen for aggressive, almost psychopathic tendencies that could be yoked by cybernetics. These were, if anything, more feral than any Horus had seen.

  Warriors of the wasteland, post-apocalyptic killers. Reminiscent of the barbarian tribes Horus had last seen as stasis-preserved specimens of pre-Unity. Bedecked in fanged amulets, furred cloaks and scaled breastplates, they charged like men possessed.

  A Terminator was a tank in humanoid form, more a war machine than a suit of armour. Only the very best could adapt to its use and only the best of the best fought alongside the Warmaster. A volley of combi-bolters sawed into the skitarii. A dozen fell, two dozen more came on.

  They slammed into the Terminators in a flurry of roaring blades and unsubtle firearms. High-load shells exploded against bonded ceramite and plasteel, caroming from deflective angles and ricocheting wildly.