Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  He spat black mouthfuls and rose from the water in time to see Abaddon pinned in place by blazing tridents of lightning. Light poured from the First Captain’s mouth. Kibre’s gunfire sprayed the angel of fire, surrounding it in swarms of phosphor embers. Enough mass-reactive shells to put down a bull-grox achieved precisely nothing against the blazing sentinel.

  Horus marched from the lake, whips of fire arcing from his talon. Noctua plunged his sword into the angel’s back. The blade melted in an instant and Noctua cried in pain, clutching his ruined hand. Aximand crawled towards the fight, spine cracked, legs useless.

  Horus didn’t bother to shoot the angel. He killed the power to his talons with a thought. Its essence was godly and mortal weapons were useless. He reached for his only other option.

  The angel spun to face him, releasing Abaddon from its crackling barbs. The First Captain fell to his front, broiled near death by divine fire.

  The angel descended on Horus, wings of bright flame erupting from its back. The swords of lightning became elongated claws. Furnace heat blazed from its body.

  Horus stepped to meet it.

  He swung Worldbreaker in an upward arc, like a hammer thrower from an ancient age. A weapon forged by the Emperor’s own hand, Worldbreaker was a gift from a god. Its killing head buried itself in the flaming body of the angel.

  Only one thing could end this creature, and that was the power that had birthed it.

  The angel exploded. Streamers of fire arced from its death like blazing promethium. It shrieked as the power binding it to this place was shattered. By the time the Warmaster’s maul had completed its swing, the angel was no more.

  Its scream lingered long, echoing throughout the mountain, all across Molech and through uncounted angles of space and time. The embers of its sun-hot core drifted to the cavern floor like grave-bound fireflies.

  And with its death, Horus remembered Molech.

  He remembered everything.

  SIXTEEN

  Flagship

  Exogenesis

  Infiltration

  Even after everything that had happened, the betrayal, the massacre and all that came later, the sight of the Vengeful Spirit still had the power to take Loken’s breath away. She was monstrous and beautiful, a gilded engine whose only purpose was to destroy.

  ‘We should have known it would end this way,’ he whispered, as the image of his former flagship shimmered on the slate.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Rassuah.

  ‘We set out from Terra to make war,’ said Loken. ‘That’s all. Sigismund was right. The war will never be over, but what else should we have expected when we crossed the stars in ships like that?’

  ‘It was a crusade,’ said Rassuah. ‘And you don’t set out to reclaim the galaxy with kind words and good intentions.’

  ‘Ezekyle had a similar argument with Lupercal before we reached Xenobia. He wanted to make war with the Interex straight away. The Warmaster told him that the Great Crusade had evolved, that since the human race was no longer on the edge of extinction the nature of the Crusade had to change. We had to change.’

  ‘Change is hard,’ said Rassuah. ‘Especially for people like us.’

  Loken nodded. ‘We were created to fight, to kill, and it’s hard to change what you were born to do. But we were capable of so much more.’

  He sighed. ‘Whatever else we might have achieved, we’ll never get the chance. From now on there is only war for us.’

  ‘It’s all there is for any of us,’ said Rassuah.

  They’d translated into Molech’s system space on the very inner edge of the Mandeville point. A risky manoeuvre, but with a ship as fine as Tarnhelm and a pilot of finesse, it was worth the risk.

  The approach to Molech was made in near silence, with Tarnhelm’s systems running at their lowest ebb. A brief burst of powerful acceleration during a moment of sunspot activity hurled the stealth ship towards Molech. Momentum would do the rest.

  In the three days since, the pathfinders had spent their time in solitary reflection, preparing their wargear and running through individual preparations. For Rubio that involved meditation, for Varren and Severian the obsessive dismantling and reassembly of weaponry. Voitek and Qruze played Regicide every hour, while Callion Zaven honed the monomolecular edge of his hewclaw blade. Alten Nohai spent his time teaching Rama Karayan a form of martial art that looked curiously peaceful. Only Bror Tyrfingr was restless, pacing the deck like a rutting stag in mating season.

  Loken spent the time alone, trying to ignore the shadowed suggestion of a hooded figure in the corner of his bunk-alcove. He knew it wasn’t there, that it was just a memory given form, but that didn’t make it go away.

  It spoke to him, though he knew the words were all in his mind.

  Kill me. When you see me, kill me.

  ‘She’s been hurt,’ said Qruze, as the wallowing form of the Vengeful Spirit hovered over the table. He pointed to blackened portions of the hull, impact craters along the spinal fortresses and sagging buttresses made molten by concentrated laser fire. ‘Someone made her pay for victory.’

  ‘It was a scrappy fight,’ said Varren, pointing out the drifting wrecks of numerous light cruisers and orbital platforms. ‘They got up close and bloody.’

  The image of the Warmaster’s flagship was being projected by the device Tubal Cayne had brought. A compact logic engine of some kind, around the size of a small ammo crate. Loken had watched the former Iron Warrior run a portion of the device over the Scyllan shipwrights’ plans in Yasu Nagasena’s villa.

  Those schemata were now displayed in three-dimensional holographic form, every structural member and compartment rendered in the finest detail. The image flickered as inloads from Tarnhelm’s forward surveyors updated the ship’s appearance from what had been built to what was approaching.

  Tubal Cayne made adjustments to the device, zooming in on various parts of the ship with an architect’s precision. Too quick for the rest of them to follow his working, the former Iron Warrior hunted out weaknesses in the structure, gaps in the defences for them to exploit.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Tyrfingr, tapping his fingers on the table.

  ‘Ventral spine on the portside looks good,’ said Severian.

  ‘If you want to die,’ replied Cayne.

  ‘What?’ said Severian, his voice low and threatening.

  ‘Look at the internal structure beyond,’ said Cayne, highlighting a section of transverse bracing. ‘The Vengeful Spirit is Gloriana-class, not Circe. We’d pass too close to a main transit arterial. There will be automated defences here, here and here, with warden-sentinels at these junctions.’

  ‘I could get past them.’

  ‘But you’re not doing this alone, are you?’

  Severian shrugged and sat back. ‘Where would you suggest?’

  ‘As I told Loken, the lower decks are always the weakest point in most ships’ defences. Just as I suspected, it’s not presented to the planet below.’

  ‘So?’ asked Varren.

  ‘You people,’ said Cayne with a shake of his head. ‘So fixated with putting an axe in someone’s head.’

  ‘I’ll put one in your head soon,’ said Varren.

  ‘Why? I am simply telling you of a better way to infiltrate our target.’

  ‘Explain how,’ said Loken.

  Cayne zoomed in on the lower decks, to a portion of the hull ravaged by torpedo impacts and broadsides. From what Loken remembered of those sections, Cayne was showing them dormitory spaces and magazine chambers.

  ‘These areas on a Scylla-pattern Gloriana were designed for menials, gun-crews and whatever lagan has sunk to the ship’s bowels,’ said Cayne. ‘They are not Legion spaces, so it is highly unlikely any repair work has been undertaken.’

  ‘That one,’ said Rama Karayan, pointing to an impact crater in the shadow of a collapsed deflector array. Almost invisible, even to Cayne’s device, it was a deep gouge in the Vengeful Spirit’s flank. ‘A wound e
asily large enough allow Tarnhelm entry.’

  ‘A good choice, Master Karayan,’ said Cayne.

  ‘Exload that to Rassuah,’ said Loken.

  ‘I already have,’ replied Cayne.

  Rassuah let Cayne’s device and the motion of Tarnhelm guide her, allowing the ship to feel its way through the maze of destroyers, frigates, system monitors and orbital patrol boats. Cayne’s device was plugged into the ship’s avionics panel and was plotting a constantly-updating route.

  The traitor fleet was enormous, many hundreds of vessels moored at high anchor. The bigger ships kept themselves geostationary, but didn’t otherwise move. The light cruisers and destroyers were the ones Rassuah needed to worry about. They patrolled the void above Molech, vigilant hunters and guard dogs all in one. Threat auspex lashed orbital space in search of prey. Even if a search sweep passed right over the Tarnhelm, Rassuah didn’t think they’d sniff out the stealthy infiltrator.

  But in case they enemy got lucky, she ghosted the Tarnhelm between scads of orbital junk, keeping as many drifting wrecks between her and the hunters as possible.

  Just the kind of delicate, hyper-intricate flying only one schooled and augmented by the surgeons of the clade masters could achieve. Even so, a fine sheen of perspiration beaded her brow.

  ‘You let me know the instant any of those destroyers so much as changes a micron of its course,’ she said.

  Cayne nodded, but gave her a look of patronising indulgence.

  She didn’t know exactly what his device was, but Cayne asserted it could pick a path through even the most densely layered defences, and so far it hadn’t let them down. Retroactively-emplaced mines, electromagnetic pulsars and passive auspex had been seeded through high orbit, but the device had sniffed every one of them out and provided course corrections to avoid them.

  When she’d asked him where it had come from, all he had said was that it was a confection designed by the Lord of Iron in one of his more introspective moments. She’d laughed at that, telling him she hadn’t figured his primarch being one prone to introspection.

  He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards solitude.’

  Leaving her with an assurance that the device would function perfectly well without him, Cayne returned to the crew spaces and Ares Voitek had taken his place. While Rassuah would pilot the ship, Voitek would crew its weapons. Any significant weapons’ fire would likely announce their presence as surely as a vox-hail, but better to be prepared. Voitek had plugged into the console, his senses meshed with the passive auspex.

  ‘Servitor-crewed one-shot,’ he said picking up the active surveyors of a torpedo with an implanted servitor to fire it upon detection of a target. ‘Nine hundred kilometres high on your ten.’

  ‘I see it,’ said Rassuah, angling their course to avoid its arc of coverage.

  ‘Overlapping sentinel array dead ahead,’ said Voitek.

  ‘Can you burn out its auspex with a tight-focus volkite beam?’

  ‘I can. Generating micro-burst solution.’

  ‘Ares, wait,’ said Rubio, appearing at the hatch behind them, his face lined with effort. ‘Don’t shoot it.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Voitek. ‘I have a perfect firing solution.’

  ‘Destroy it and you will alert our enemies.’

  ‘I don’t intend to destroy it, simply blind its main auspex.’

  ‘It’s not the auspex you need to worry about.’

  ‘We take this one down and we open the largest gap,’ explained Voitek. ‘The only time these things register with the command ship is when they detect something. Its going dark won’t be noticed.’

  ‘Open fire and you’ll find out just how wrong it’s possible to be,’ said Rubio. ‘There is a corrupt Mechanicum sentience onboard, something analogous to a Thallax, but tasked only with maintaining a link in an auspex chain. Break that chain and the enemy will know of our presence.’

  ‘We need that gap,’ said Rassuah. ‘Cayne’s toy can only find a way to the Vengeful Spirit if there’s a gap.’

  Rubio nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I will give you your gap, Rassuah. Be ready, Ares. Shoot when I give the word.’

  Witchlight hazed Rubio’s eyelids, and his crystalline hood pulsed with corposant. Rassuah felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Rubio’s eyes darted back and forth, as though following a tortuous maze where one wrong turn meant disaster. His lips parted and a breath of frozen mist sighed out.

  ‘Shoot,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  Rassuah didn’t see anything happen. Voitek’s control of the weapons was via an implanted servo-arm and the volkite beam was too quick and too precise. Even so, she held her breath.

  Rubio opened his eyes, but his hood still glowed. His skin was pale and he looked like he’d just eaten something unpleasant.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Rassuah.

  ‘I implanted an image of dead space within its polluted mind,’ said Rubio. ‘Voitek destroyed its eyes, but it is seeing what I want it to see. It believes it is still part of the auspex chain.’

  ‘How long will it believe that?’

  ‘As long as I keep the image strong in its consciousness,’ said Rubio, holding firm to the door stanchions. The strain of holding false thoughts in a deviant cyborg’s mind was taking its toll.

  Cayne’s logister chimed as it registered a newly opened gap and offered up a path. Rassuah was already easing Tarnhelm through with a twitch of manoeuvring jets.

  ‘Fly steady, and fly smooth,’ cautioned Rubio.

  ‘It’s the only way I fly,’ Rassuah assured him.

  The Vengeful Spirit loomed ahead of Tarnhelm, a vast edifice of black metal, two hundred kilometres and closing. Rassuah shivered at the sight of the Warmaster’s flagship, as though it were a voracious oceanic predator and they a bleeding morsel swimming heedlessly towards it.

  Everything about the Vengeful Spirit was threatening.

  Each gun port was a snarling maw, every cloistered broadside array a serrated cluster of gargoyles and daemons. The huge amber eyes on its flanks, none smaller than a hundred metres across, were actively staring at her. The blade of its prow was an assassin’s dagger whose sole purpose was to cut her throat.

  Rassuah tried to shake off the creeping horror of the vessel. Throne, it was just a starship! Steel and stone, an engine and a crew. She whispered clade mantras to clear her thoughts. She fixed on Tarnhelm’s displays and controls, but always found her gaze dawn back to the Vengeful Spirit’s hellforged eyes.

  The impact crater yawned before Tarnhelm like a gateway to the abyss, a black hole into the unknown.

  ‘Starships have machine-spirits, yes?’ asked Rassuah.

  Voitek looked up from the console, his half-machine face showing puzzlement at the timing of her question.

  ‘A gift of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Every complex machine has one bestowed upon it at the moment of its activation. The larger the machine, the greater the spirit.’

  ‘So what kind of spirit does this ship have?’

  ‘You know its name, what do you think?’

  ‘I think that any ship built to rule over a world of toxins and murder has a spirit best avoided.’

  ‘And yet we must fly into the heart of this one,’ said Voitek as the Vengeful Spirit swallowed the Tarnhelm whole.

  They met on an island at the centre of an artificial lake. Reflected moonlight wavered on its gently rippling surface. The location spoke of earlier times in the Legion’s history, before ritual had replaced tradition. When things had been simpler.

  Now it seemed that even that simplicity had been a lie.

  A flaming spear rammed into the ground at the centre of the island burned with orange light, bathing the features of those assembled in a ruddy glow of health that belied their true condition.

  Abaddon’s skin was waxy with regenerative balms and fresh-grafted skin. Noctua now boasted a clicking augmetic for a
right hand, while Aximand was supported by a spinal armature while his shattered vertebrae regrew. Only Falkus Kibre had fought the angel of fire and emerged unscathed.

  Maloghurst stood with the Mournival, for once looking like the least wounded among them. Ger Gerradon and his growing band of Luperci also gathered to hear of the invasion’s next phase.

  ‘We have achieved great things, my sons, but the hardest fight is yet to come,’ began Horus, circling the burning spear and placing a hand over the amber eye at his chest. ‘The enemy mass before us, an unbroken host of men and armour stretching all the way to Iron Fist Mountain. Armies from all across Molech are gathering, but they will not stop us from reaching Lupercalia.’

  Aximand stepped from the circle.

  Of course it would be Aximand. He would have fought the coming battle a hundred times already in his head. Of all his sons, Little Horus Aximand was the most fastidious, the most conscientious. The one whose thoughts came closest to his own.

  ‘The numbers do not favour us, my lord,’ said Aximand.

  ‘Numbers aren’t all that decide a battle,’ pointed out Kibre.

  ‘I know that, Falkus, but even so, we’re outnumbered nearly fifty to one. Perhaps if the Death Guard fought with us…’

  ‘Our brothers of the Fourteenth Legion are poised to be the anvil upon which the hammer of the Sons of Horus will break the Imperials,’ said Horus.

  ‘They’ll be with us for the coming fight?’ said Aximand. ‘We can count on that?’

  ‘Have you ever known Mortarion’s sloggers to fail?’ said Horus.

  Aximand nodded, conceding the point. ‘What are your orders?’

  ‘Simple. We fight for the living and kill for the dead. Isn’t that what you say?’

  ‘Something like that,’ grinned Aximand.

  ‘What’s at Lupercalia?’ asked Abaddon, his voice forever burned down to a scorched rasp. ‘What did you learn from the thing in the cave’s death?’

  Horus nodded and said, ‘I remembered why the Emperor came here, what He found and why He didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Lupercalia is where I’ll find what we need to win this long war.’