As he looked over the jungle canopy, a growing illumination bathed the clouds pressing down on the jungle canopy.
‘What’s that?’ asked Robard. ‘Another bombardment?’
Lord Donar didn’t answer, watching as thousands of black objects streaked from the clouds and arced over the eastern horizon.
‘Too slow to be orbital munitions,’ he said. ‘And too regimented to be wreckage.’
‘They’re too fast and steeply angled for assault carriers,’ said Robard. ‘What are they?’
‘They’re drop pods,’ said Lord Donar.
Three of Ophir’s fuel silos were ablaze.
A lake of flaming promethium engulfed the city’s southern outskirts and was slowly spreading north. The city’s Mechanicum adepts had locked the pumping stations into emergency shutdown. No flames jetted from the vent towers and the ever-present heartbeat of drilling rigs had stilled.
A coaling station at the eastern tip of the continent on the far side of the Kushite jungle, Ophir lay nine thousand kilometres east of the Preceptor Line. Cargo tankers from across the ocean paused here to gorge on the promethium wells before continuing around the northern coastline to the commercia distribution hub of Hvitha or the starports at Loqash and Larsa.
No one called Ophir by its given name. Once it had been called the City of Gold, but centuries of exhaust gases, promethium discharge and oily runoff that stained every structure with a persistent black residue had earned it another name. The soldiers of the Karnatic Lancers knew it as ‘the city without shadows’.
Lieutenant Skander of Seventh Brigade had been enjoying a particularly erotic dream when the alarm klaxons went off. Instantly awake, he bounded upright and grabbed his flak jacket from the footlocker at the end of his bed. He could feel the pulse of void shield generators beneath him. Hydra batteries were firing, the rhythmic thud of their shells unmistakable, even through reinforced plascrete.
Skander dragged on his boots and snapped on his shoulder rig, holstering his bolt pistol and checking the safety. He grabbed his sword belt as he ran to the main vehicle hangar. There wasn’t much use for a sword in a Stormhammer, but he’d sooner go into battle naked than leave his blade behind.
Five hundred Karnatic armoured vehicles filled the chamber, a mix of Chimera variants, Malcador-pattern assault tanks, Minotaurs and a few superheavies. Each flew pennants bearing the emerald and silver pyramid of lances. His own vehicle was a Stormhammer dubbed The Reaper. Drivers, gunners, and enginseers swarmed their vehicles. Shell loaders and fuel trucks sped through the cavernous space.
Distant explosions shook the chamber. Dust fell from the vaulted roof. The planetary assault every Army grunt had fully expected the fleet to spectacularly fail to prevent was now upon them.
An enormously augmented enginseer in oil-stained robes implemented manoeuvre operations quickly and methodically, multiple limbs directing the optimal deployment order. Tanks rolled from their berths, and the throaty bellow of their engines was music to his ears.
Sergeant Hondo waved to him from the front cupola as he ran over. Skander had long believed Hondo lived in the tank, and this only seemed to confirm that suspicion.
‘Guess the admiral got beat,’ said Hondo over the din of sirens.
‘And you’re surprised why?’ replied Skander, hauling himself up the crew ladder to the colossal tank’s roof. ‘Where’s Vari?’
‘Already in place, lieutenant,’ Vari replied from the cramped driver’s compartment. Skander scrambled onto the tank’s forward twin battle cannon turret and dropped into the commander’s hatch. Helmet on, he plugged in to the onboard attack-logister.
Information cascaded; deployment rates, ammunition levels, core temperature and hull integrity.
All in the green.
The enginseer gave them clearance, but before Skander could give the order to move out, something powerful struck the subterranean hangar.
The chamber roof split wide open.
Colossal chunks of sheared plascrete slammed down throughout the chamber. Dust-smeared pillars of sunlight stabbed inside. A squadron of Baneblades was flattened by debris, their hulls smashed open like toymaker’s models.
Skander was slammed forward as a falling chunk of rock struck his helmet. Blood ran down his face and he blinked away tears of sudden pain. Static fogged his visor. He tore the helmet off. It was useless now, split down the middle.
The noise and confusion was unbelievable. The regiment’s tanks in the hangar’s centre had taken the worst of the barrage, pulverised by hundreds of tonnes of debris and high explosives. Detonations ripped across the ready line as follow-on shells found their marks in exposed Malcadors and Chimeras. The main roadway was engulfed in flames, burning pools of fuel spewing thick black smoke. Regimental pennants burned in the fires.
The heat from an exploding Minotaur rolled over him, and Skander looked up through the smashed roof of the hanger to see a sky red with flames and black with smoke. Once a refuge for his tanks, the hangar was now a deathtrap.
‘Get us out of here!’ he shouted and The Reaper lurched forward as Vari fed power to the engines. A clattering, screeching howl of protest told him they’d sheared a track in the barrage. They were ripping the hangar floor apart, but that was the least of Skander’s worries.
Something hammered down in the flaming heart of the hangar, a pair of tapered oblongs. Pale steel and scorched black with re-entry burn. Scalding exhaust vapour billowed from burned out retros. Locking bolts blasted off and the shielded sides of the drop pod dropped like unfolding prop-drives.
Powerful figures emerged from two of the pods, giants in pale armour bearing a spiked skull icon on their shoulder guards. The warriors of the Death Guard waded through wreckage and rubble, but weren’t slowed.
A towering figure in battle armour of bare metal, brass and ivory stepped from his drop pod and into the blazing ruin of the hangar. A giant come to rend their flesh and grind their bones. Framed by fire and a billowing cloak of fibrous mesh, the primarch of the XIV Legion bore a great scythe that shimmered with corpse-light.
Mortarion was attended by cowled Terminators in slab-like armour. They too carried oversized scythes and unquestioningly followed their liege-lord into the fire. Sprays of gunshots reached out to the Death Guard, sparking from impenetrable plates. Shells burst among them, but they marched through their fury without pause.
Their guns were firing. Explosive rounds slaughtered the tank crews who’d survived the initial shelling, pulping them to shredded meat mass. Another pod slammed down behind the first wave. Then another, and another. They fell in pairs, one after the other, each reverberating impact bearing more Death Guard.
The Reaper tried to turn towards Mortarion, but with a snapped track, that wasn’t happening any time soon. Skander engaged his commander’s override, slewing the twin battle cannon turret around. Men were screaming over the fires and continuous sound of falling masonry.
The primarch of the Death Guard saw him, and Skander almost let go of the controls as he stared into the face of his executioner – pale skinned, with the coldest eyes he had ever seen.
He heard the familiar double reverberation of shells ramming home in the breech. A hiss of locking mechanisms and the whine of accelerator drives.
‘Throne, yes,’ he hissed, mashing the firing trigger.
All three hundred and twenty tonnes of The Reaper’s armoured might rocked under the enormous recoil. The twin muzzle flashes all but blinded him. The conjoined pressure waves punched the air from his lungs and the thunder of discharge blew out his eardrums.
Skander fought to take a breath, concussed by the simultaneous detonations of point-blank battle cannon shells. He blinked away after-images as a rain of plascrete dust rained down. Acrid smoke fogged the air, slashed by cherry red fyceline fires.
He dragged in hot, metallic breath and shouted for a reload, though he knew no one would hear and they’d not get another shot off. Skander ducked down into the Stormhamm
er, cupping his hands over his mouth.
‘Reload! Reload! Throne, give me one more shot at that bastard!’
He repeated his order. He had no idea who was still alive inside The Reaper. Until the main gun was loaded, all Skander could directly control was the cupola’s point-defence gun. It wasn’t a twin battle cannon turret, but it would have to do.
Skander rose up and saw the cloaked figure of the Death Lord standing on his tank. Mortarion’s armour looked to have been tenderised by a forge hammer and his cloak was a ragged scrap. The primarch was a grotesque waxwork, a flesh-slick deathmask.
‘One shot’s all you get,’ gurgled Mortarion, swinging Silence and carving Skander and his Stormhammer apart.
Similar stories played out all across Molech.
The air defence batteries were completely overwhelmed. Two Legion fleets in close orbit were an impossible force to defeat, and the punishing broadsides turned entire regions of Molech into glassy deserts.
Mount Torger was targeted by a mass impact of bunker penetrators, and not even its many point defences could keep the holdfast of the Ordo Reductor from being gutted by an inferno. Fires raged beneath the mountain, fires that would burn for another seventy years before finally bringing it down.
Goshen, Imperatum and the twin fortress cities of Leosta and Luthre were bombed, as were the coastal cities of Desqua and Hvitha. Known as the City of Winds due to its location at the farthest extreme of the Aenatep peninsula, Hvitha all but fell into the ocean as the rock upon which it was built crumbled under the weight of the barrage.
A red rain fell on Khanis, molten iron and micro-debris falling from the fighting in orbit like burning bullets.
People out in the open went up like vent flares, instantly ablaze. They screamed until the heat sucked the air from their lungs. They ran for shelter, but the molten rain soon ate through the canvas awnings and corrugated roofs.
With the bombardment finished for now, the fleets opened their embarkation decks and wave after wave of the Warmaster’s invasion force launched into the upper atmosphere.
They arced down like grains of sand running through a philosopher’s fingers; Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, Fire Raptors and Storm Eagles. Coffin ships and bulk landers. Shoals of matte-black Army transports. Armoured trans-loaders and munitions carriers.
Alert horns howled in every city.
Molech was screaming.
TWELVE
Breakout
Decapitation
Twin Flames
A tidal wave of ocean green crashed onto the beaches at Avadon, but this one didn’t recede, it just kept pushing higher. An armoured fist of firepower and transhuman endurance, this was to be a breakout achieved at maximum speed.
Two hundred Sons of Horus Land Raiders led the speartip’s thrust.
No grace, no finesse, just a thunderous hammer blow to the heart.
Edoraki Hakon, Marshal of the Northern Oceanic, awaited Lupercal’s army with a line of strongpoints, deep trenches, six full regiments of Army and a company of dug-in superheavies. Her defences lined the coastal cliffs and encircled the landward end of the causeway. If the Sons of Horus wanted to reach the mainland, they were going to have to fight their way off Damesek.
Quite why a tactician as superlative as Horus would establish a bridgehead on an island that’s only viable egress point was a slender causeway was beyond her understanding.
It made no sense, but that was what the Warmaster had done.
No one in her command staff could adequately explain Horus’s reasoning, but the opportunity to punish the traitors for their mistake was there for the taking.
Holst Lithonan’s artillery companies on the island’s high bluffs had spent the night duelling with Hakon’s guns, and the Marshal had reluctantly been forced to withdraw her heavier pieces as dawn’s light crept over the horizon.
Freed from suppressive battery fire, traitor guns dumped barrage after barrage of shroud missiles on the Imperials. Banks of glittering electromagnetic fog spewed from spinning shells, breaking firing solutions and disrupting carefully calibrated range-finders.
While Imperial gunners struggled to penetrate the occluding mist, Sons of Horus Land Raiders raced along the last stretch of the causeway to the mainland. Scorpius Whirlwinds sent arcing streams of missiles ahead of them. Their warheads wrecked the emplaced tank traps and ripped up fields of entangling razorwire in a storm of subterranean explosions.
The first Land Raiders slammed down off the causeway into a fury of heavy autocannons, crew-served weapon mounts and emplaced lascannons. Hakon’s superheavy tanks crashed back in their berms as volleys of battle cannons and demolishers added their thunder to the day. Siege mortars and bombards, culverin and howitzers coughed their explosive loads skyward.
The end of the causeway vanished in an earthshaking blizzard of explosions. Deafening hammer blows slammed down, one after the other. So quick and so continuous they merged into one unending concussive procession of detonation. Energy weapons boiled ocean waves to geysers of steam. High explosives churned the beach into hurricanes of glassy shrapnel.
The air reeked of salt and burning metal. Seared meat and blood.
Twenty Land Raiders died instantly. Cored and twisted inside out, they slewed around like disembowelled grazer beasts. Sons of Horus legionaries spilled from the smoke-belching wrecks. Blistering crossfires cut them to pieces. Oxy-phosphor warheads seared the agonised cries from their lungs. Armour shredded and disassembled. Flesh vaporised.
Hakon’s remaining artillery lobbed explosives onto the causeway, hoping to deny the tanks on the beach reinforcements and strangle the breakout at birth. Atlas recovery tanks by the dozen drove wrecks into the ocean as modified Trojans worked nonstop to keep the causeway viable; nothing could be allowed to slow the flood of troop carriers onto the mainland.
More Land Raiders plunged into the maelstrom. Another half dozen, then a dozen more, spreading out as they hit the shell-torn beach. They ground over the corpses of their Legion brothers, finding cover in blood and fuel-filled craters. Return fire blitzed uphill.
The Scorpius barged past gutted Land Raiders, peeling left and right at the causeway’s end. Rotating launchers unleashed rippling salvoes of warheads at the linked strongpoints. Three exploded in quick succession, brought down by implosive warheads that blew out their structural members.
Storm Eagles and Thunderhawks roared overhead, missiles and shells streaming from their wing and nose mounts. Sheets of fire blossomed along the Imperial line, but Edoraki Hakon’s regiments were dug in well, and dug in deep.
Hydra batteries slewed to follow the aircraft. Manticore batteries locked their targeting cogitators onto engine flares. Sky-eagle missiles and rapid firing autocannon shells stitched the sky. Half a dozen gunships were brought down in quick succession, smashing into the cliffs like faulty triumphal fireworks.
Sons of Horus bolters punched spiralling contrails through the shroud smoke. Their missiles arced over and slammed down on gun emplacements. Solid hits were announced by mushrooming flares of white light. Dreadnought talons moved through the heart of the attack like giants. Assault cannons too heavy even for a legionary brayed, and rocket after rocket streaked from rotary launchers.
Whickering storms of gunfire, missiles, energy weapons and gouts of flame burned back and forth across kilometres of beach.
The dead and dying were crushed beneath the roaring tracks of the Land Raiders. Rhinos followed them to the assigned high water mark, and the icy sand was churned to gritty, red paste.
The Land Raider rocked on its tracks as a nearby explosion slammed it to the side. Aximand gripped tight to a stanchion as the heavy vehicle pitched forward into a crater. Its engine roared as it clawed its way out the opposite side. The assault carrier’s armour attenuated most of the noise of battle, but the thrumming bass note of the percussive shock waves were thudding with increasing regularity and force.
‘Getting closer,’ said Yade Durso, line captai
n of Fifth Company.
‘Getting worried?’ Aximand asked.
‘No,’ said Durso, and Aximand believed him. It took more than emplaced strongpoints, companies of superheavies and regiments of Army to rattle a veteran like Durso.
Aximand’s subordinate turned something over in his hand, dextrously moving it between his fingers like a sleight of hand barker.
‘What’s that?’
Durso looked down, as though unaware of what he’d been doing.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just an affectation.’
‘Show me.’
Durso shrugged and opened his palm. A golden icon on the end of a chain to be worn around the neck. The Eye of Horus shone red in the light of the compartment.
‘Superstitious, Yade?’
‘Turns out I can be now, Little Horus,’ said Durso.
Aximand nodded, conceding the point. Not so long ago, such behaviour would have been grounds for censure. Now it seemed only natural. Aximand looked back at his warriors, ten Sons of Horus bearing heavy breacher shields and multi-spectral helmet attachments. Each warrior’s armour bore Cthonian gang sigils etched into the plates. Their bolters were decorated with kill markings and grisly trophies hung from every belt.
The Quiet Order had reinstituted the old practices of the home world. Serghar Targost, his throat bound in counterseptic wraps, had advocated the reinstatement of Cthonian iconography and the Warmaster had agreed.
‘I thought we were done with savage totems,’ he said.
‘Just like the old days,’ said Durso. ‘It’s good.’
‘But these aren’t the old days,’ snapped Aximand.
Durso shook his head. ‘You really want to get into this now?’
‘No,’ said Aximand, strangely disquieted at the new tribalistic mien of his warriors. He had thought that with Erebus gone, the XVI Legion was to re-establish itself. It seemed it had, just not in the image he’d expected. Edges worn smooth by centuries of compliance were being made rough again.
Vengeful Spirit Page 21
