Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  Kibre waded in among them, shooting the head from the nearest skitarii killer. His shield bludgeoned the next, caving his face to a fragmented pulp of liquid flesh and bone. This was the work Kibre loved best. Batter kills, armour blows. Feeling the blood spray your visor, feeling the bones break beneath your fists.

  Horus left him to it and jabbed his clawed fist at Hargun, Ultar and Parthaan.

  ‘Keep the right clear,’ he said. ‘They’ll come from that side next.’

  His words were prophetic.

  Cloaked in power-fields, ion-bucklers and photon-disruptors, blue cloaked warriors of the Forlorn Spartaks threw themselves at the Sons of Horus. Despite himself, Horus was struck by admiration for the Spartaks’ courage. Transhuman dread could freeze even the bravest warrior in place, but they came anyway.

  Ultar swung his rotor cannon to bear and the deafening bray of its spinning barrels filled the transit. Hargun chugged shells from his combi-bolter. Power-fields shrieked under the hammer blow impacts and photon-disruptors were no protection against the detonation of the fat shells.

  Parthaan broke formation and closed the distance far faster than anything his size ought to be able to move. A shieldwall could only hold for as long as it remained solid, but rotor cannon and combi-bolter had broken this one open. Parthaan went in head down, like a battering ram, striking left and right with his oversized fist. Crumpled forms were hurled about like refuse, bent in ways no body was meant to bend. They shattered on impact, leaving bright red spray patterns on the wall.

  The Spartaks fought a thing that could not be fought, tried to kill he who could not be killed. A dozen fell to Parthaan’s fist, then a dozen more. They threw themselves at him as though eager to join their comrades in death. The warrior of the Justaerin waded through blood and bodies, trampling them to gory mud beneath his armoured boots. Gunfire and blades tore at his armour, tearing the ocean green paint from its surfaces, but doing no harm.

  On the opposite flank, Kibre’s warriors were having a harder time against the skitarii. Cauterised fear centres blunted them to the terror of Terminators. Implanted aggression boosters made them wild. Horus was mildly surprised to see two Justaerin on their knees, armour carved open and wet organs flopping out onto the deck.

  He hadn’t seen that, hadn’t incorporated it into his plans.

  After Ullanor, many claimed the title of Warmaster was simply a recognition of Horus’s rank within the Great Crusade. A bellicose thing, fit only for the purposes of conquest. Something to be set aside when the fighting was done.

  To his lasting regret, Horus knew better.

  Warmaster was not a title, it was what he was.

  The flow of battle was music to him, a virtuoso performance that could be read and anticipated like the perfect arrangement of notes. Battle was a chaotic, unpredictable maelstrom of chance, a random imbroglio where death played no favours. Horus knew war, knew battle as intimately as a lover. Horus knew what would come next as clearly as if he had lived it before.

  Now.

  Parthaan’s rampage was ended as a coruscating beam of hyper-dense light struck the back of his armour. For an instant it played harmlessly over the blood-matted plate. Then the Justaerin’s armour buckled as though an invisible giant was crushing him in its fist. Plates ruptured as a rising whine of building power split the air over Parthaan’s screams of agony.

  A thunderclap of discharge and Parthaan died as he imploded at the subatomic level, and every particle of his being turned inwards and crushed by its own mass. Shattered plates collapsed as though the man within them had simply vaporised and Horus smelled a stink-wind of misted blood and bone.

  A beat as the Justaerin struggled to comprehend what had just happened.

  ‘Ultar!’ shouted Horus. ‘Rapier platform. Conversion beamer.’

  The rotor cannon turned on the gun carriage. Ultar walked his shells into it and reduced it to scrap metal.

  ‘Now they’ll come,’ whispered Horus and swung Worldbreaker from his shoulder. He kept the weapon moving. Even for a being of his stature, it took time to build speed and power with so heavy a weapon.

  A warrior with a transverse crest of ivory led the Ultramarines.

  A centurion. Visor tags identified him as Proximo Tarchon and Horus assimilated his available service record instantaneously.

  Ambitious, honourable, practical.

  Gladius, of course. Energised combat-buckler on the opposite arm. Bolt pistol, expected.

  Tarchon fired as he ran. The thirty Ultramarines at his back did likewise, maintaining their rate of fire even as they charged.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Horus. ‘You do my brother much honour.’

  Two Justaerin nearest the charging Ultramarines went down, carefully bracketed by the warriors in cobalt-blue. With enough mass-reactives brought to bear, even Tactical Dreadnought armour could be penetrated. Return fire punched half a dozen Ultramarines from their feet. Armour cracked open, flesh detonated.

  Horus didn’t give the XIII Legion a chance to fire again.

  Without seeming to move, he was suddenly among them. Worldbreaker swung and three Ultramarines exploded as though siege mines had detonated within their chest cavities. A copious volume of blood wetted the air. The flanged mace swung back again, one-handed. Low on an upward arc. Another four warriors died. Their bodies slammed against the walls with bone shattering force, their outlines punched into the steelwork.

  Tarchon came at him, gladius arcing towards his throat.

  The haft of Worldbreaker deflected the blade. Tarchon kicked him in the midriff, firing his bolter one-handed into his chest. Explosions ripped across the Warmaster’s breastplate and the amber eye at its centre split down the middle.

  Horus caught the bolter between the talons of his gauntlet. A twist of the wrist and the weapon snapped just behind the magazine. Horus stepped inside Tarchon’s guard and took hold of his gorget.

  Tarchon stabbed with his gladius. Horus felt blood well from the cut. He lifted Tarchon from the deck as though he was a child and clubbed his fist into the centurion’s chest.

  The impact drove him back through his men, felling them like corn before the scythe. Horus kept going, sometimes bludgeoning, sometimes disembowelling. Gore boiled on his talons, clotted on Worldbreaker. Dripped from the cracked amber eye upon his breast.

  He pushed into the Ultramarines. Surrounded on all sides by transhuman warriors. Honourable men who, only a short few years ago, would have called him lord. They might have balked at his naked ambition, resented his appointment to Warmaster over their own primarch, but still they loved and respected him. And now he had to kill them. They stabbed and shot, undaunted in the face of the might of the demigod in their midst. Blades scored furrows in his armour, bolt shells exploded. Fire and fury surrounded the Warmaster.

  Against so many sublime warriors, even a primarch could be brought down. Primarchs were functionally immortal, but they weren’t invulnerable. People often forgot the difference.

  In a fight like this, the skill was to find the moments of stillness, the places between the blades and bullets. A chainblade sailed past his head. Horus removed its owner’s. Bolter shells ricocheted from his thigh plate. Horus punched his taloned fist through a warrior’s hearts and lungs.

  Always in motion, talons and mace killing with every stroke.

  Twenty-three seconds later, the transit was a charnel house. Hundreds dead and every drop of blood wrung to paint the walls.

  Horus let out a cathartic breath.

  He felt someone approach and reined in a violent reaction.

  ‘Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘Get me the centurion’s gladius.’

  Horus enters the bridge of the Guardian of Aquinas

  The blast door to the command bridge was bulging inwards. The first blow had hit it like a Titan’s fist. The second buckled the metal and tore its upper corners from the frame. Lord Admiral Brython Semper stood with his duelling sabre unsheathed and the captain’s twin-barrelled Bo
yer held loosely at his thigh.

  The upper barrel was an ancient beam weapon – a volkite, some called it – the underslung portion a one-shot plasma jet. It was a Space Marine killer, but could it kill a primarch?

  Would he get the chance to find out?

  He’d be lucky to get even a single shot off with the Boyer.

  Perhaps a hundred people stood with him; surveyor readers, aides, juniors, scriveners and battle-techs, deckhands. None were combat-trained worth a damn. Only a single squad of armsmen with shotcannons and the nine Thallaxii Ferrox had any hope of inflicting real damage.

  Banks of acrid smoke filled the bridge, and the only light was from a few stuttering lumens. The hololith had failed, and hydraulic fluids drizzled from ruptured pipework. Nothing remained of the command network. The vox crackled with screams.

  ‘We’ll make them pay for this, admiral,’ said a crewman, Semper couldn’t see who.

  He wanted to say something suitably heroic. A valedictory speech to inspire his crew and earn them an ending worthy of the Guardian of Aquinas. All that filled his thoughts were the last words Vitus Salicar had said to him.

  We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.

  The blast door finally tore free of its mounting and fell into the bridge like a profane monolith toppled by iconoclasts. A towering figure was revealed, a giant of legend.

  Haloed by flames of murder and dripping with blood.

  A mantle of stiffened fur wreathed the war god’s shoulders. His armour was the colour of night and gleamed with the fire of dying empires.

  Semper had expected a charge, bursts of gunfire.

  The god threw something at his feet. Semper looked down.

  An Ultramarines gladius, the blade coated in vivid crimson. Its handle was wrapped in red leather. The hemispherical pommel was ivory, inlaid with the wreath-enclosed company number.

  ‘That belonged to Proximo Tarchon,’ said the god. ‘Centurion of the Ninth Division, Battle Group Two, Legiones Astartes Ultramarines.’

  Semper knew he should spit in the traitor’s face or at least raise his weapon. His crew deserved to be led into their last battle by their captain. Yet the idea of raising a weapon against a being so perfectly formed, so sublime, seemed abhorrent.

  He knew he faced a betrayer – an enemy, the enemy – yet Semper felt enraptured by his sheer magnificence.

  The Warmaster took a step onto the bridge, and it took every ounce of Semper’s willpower not to kneel. ‘Proximo Tarchon and his warriors faced me without fear, for they were trained by my brother on Macragge, and such men are uniquely skilled at death dealing. But Proximo Tarchon and his warriors could not stop me.’

  Semper tried to answer the Warmaster, but he couldn’t long hold his gaze and his tongue felt leaden.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he managed at last.

  ‘Because you fought honourably,’ said the Warmaster. ‘And you deserve to know how futile it would be to waste your lives in pointless defiance at this point.’

  Semper felt the paralysing awe he’d felt of the Warmaster diminish in the face of so arrogant a statement. He wished he’d had the chance to return to Cypra Mundi and watch his son grow to manhood. He wished the blast shutters weren’t down over the viewing bay so he might see the stars one last time.

  He wished he could be the one to kill this god.

  Semper lifted his duelling sabre to his lips and kissed its blade. He thumbed the activation clasp on the Boyer gun.

  ‘For the Imperium!’ shouted Semper as he charged the Warmaster.

  Horus stood in the midst of carnage. One hundred and eleven people dead in less than a minute. A corpse lay at the Warmaster’s feet, divided into long sections by a diagonal stroke of energised talons.

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Mortarion, his holographic form wavering on the temporary floating disc projector the Mechanicum had rigged. Beyond the Death Lord’s image, faint impressions of Deathshroud could be seen, trailing their master like ghosts. The disc maintained a constant distance of three metres from Horus, closer than Falkus Kibre would have liked – even for a hologram – but exceptions had to be made for the primarch’s brothers.

  ‘Lord Admiral Brython Semper,’ said Horus.

  ‘A Lord Admiral,’ said the Death Lord. ‘Looks like you were right. Our father really does value this world.’

  Horus nodded absently and knelt by Brython’s corpse. ‘A pointless death,’ said Horus.

  ‘He tried to kill you,’ pointed out Falkus Kibre, taking position at the Warmaster’s right hand.

  ‘He didn’t have to.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Kibre. ‘You know he had to. He might actually have surrendered until you said what you did at the end.’

  Horus rose to his full, towering height. ‘You think I wanted him to attack me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kibre, puzzled the Warmaster would even ask.

  ‘Tell me, then – why did I provoke the Lord Admiral?’

  Kibre looked up at Lupercal, and saw a fractional tilt to the corner of his mouth. A test, then. Aximand had warned him that the Warmaster liked to play these little games. Kibre took a moment to marshal his response. Quick answers were for Aximand or Noctua.

  ‘Because the Lord Admiral’s name would have been reviled forever if he’d surrendered his vessel,’ offered Kibre. ‘He’d fought hard and done all that honour demanded, but to surrender would have cursed his line from here till the end of time.’

  Mortarion grinned. ‘What’s this? Insight from the Widowmaker?’

  Kibre shrugged, hearing derision.

  ‘I’m a simple warrior, my lord,’ he said. ‘Not a stupid one.’

  ‘Which is why I was pleased when Ezekyle put your name forward for the Mournival,’ said Horus. ‘Things have become complex, Falkus, far more so than I thought. And far quicker. It’s good to have a simple man at your side in such times, don’t you agree, brother?’

  ‘If you say so,’ grunted Mortarion, and Kibre smiled. The gesture was so unfamiliar to him he didn’t at first know what his facial muscles were doing.

  The Warmaster placed a hand on his shoulder and walked him to the command throne of Guardian of Aquinas. The hololith had been returned to life, painting a grim portrait of Molech’s future.

  ‘Tell me what my simple warrior sees, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘You’re Mournival now, so you need to be more than just a shock trooper. Simple or otherwise.’

  Kibre studied the shimmering globe of Molech. He took his time, and it was an effort not to advocate a full drop pod assault immediately. How long was it since he’d had to employ anything other than the directness of breacher tactics?

  ‘The battle for space is won,’ said Kibre. ‘The weapon platforms are ours, and the enemy ships are crippled or captured.’

  ‘Tell me about the orbitals,’ asked Horus.

  ‘They’re manoeuvring to new positions, but we can’t rely on them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Molech’s adepts will be re-tasking the surface missile batteries to destroy the platforms. We’ll take out some before they fire, but they were never intended to resist fire from the ground. At best, we’ll get a few salvoes away before the platforms are inoperable.’

  ‘Hardly worth the effort to capture them,’ said Mortarion.

  ‘A few salvoes from orbit is worth a whole battalion of legionaries,’ said Kibre. ‘Calth taught the Seventeenth Legion that much.’

  ‘He’s right, brother,’ said Horus, zooming in from the view of Molech’s orbital volume to its planetary zones. Four continental masses, only two of which were inhabited or defended to any degree. One heavily industrialised, the other pastoral.

  The Sons of Horus and the Death Guard forces would direct the main thrust of their attack upon the latter continent. Molech’s primary seat of command lay within a mountain valley, at a city named for Horus himself, Lupercalia.

  The Warmaster jabbed a talon at Lupercalia and traced
a route across the continent, over verdant plains, past cities, through mountain valleys, before ending up at a ruined citadel on a storm-lashed island virtually clinging to the coastline.

  ‘The Fulgurine Path,’ said Horus. ‘That’s the road I need to walk, and this citadel is where we’ll begin.’

  ‘And the rest of Molech?’ said Mortarion.

  ‘Unleash your Eater of Lives,’ ordered Horus. ‘Lay waste.’

  Loken moved down the corridor with Bror Tyrfingr to his left, Ares Voitek to his right. He kept the shotcannon pulled in tight, looking down the unfamiliar iron sight as he moved smoothly into the drive chamber. He hadn’t used a weapon like this since his time in the Scout Auxilia, but firing bolt weapons aboard a thin-skinned starship was generally frowned upon.

  Tarnhelm wasn’t a large ship, so when Banu Rassuah informed Loken she’d detected an unauthorised bio-sign during her final calculations for Mandeville translation, it didn’t take long to narrow down the potential hiding places in which a stowaway could be hiding.

  While the rest of the pathfinders secured the frontal areas of the ship, Loken, Tyrfingr and Voitek swept back to the drives.

  ‘Someone from that grim fortress orbiting Titan?’ asked Voitek, his upper servo-arms clicking with restraint cuffs. ‘That Oliton girl you saw?’

  Loken shook his head. ‘No. It’s not her.’

  ‘Then a warp-thing?’ offered Tyrfingr. ‘Something shat out by the Warmaster’s maleficarum?’

  The former Space Wolf had eschewed a shotcannon in favour of his combat blade and knotted leather cestus gauntlet. Its night-bladed claws tapped on his thigh plate in a rhythmic tattoo.

  None of them answered Tyrfingr’s question. Each of them knew too much to lightly dismiss such speculation. The drive chamber was the only place left on the ship where anyone could realistically conceal themselves, but so far they had found nothing.

  The engine spaces were elliptical in section, with a raised floor and suspended ceiling, flanked on both sides by two enormous cylinders that thrummed with barely contained power. Looped cables encircled narrowed portions of the main drives, and hardwired calculus-servitors with shimmering eyes mumbled binaric plainsong.