Vengeful Spirit
Page 39
The Shadowswords were firing, the bright spears of their volcano cannons bursting shields and overloading the pylons.
‘The voids are taking hits,’ said Ashur, as though she wouldn’t already know that.
said Kalonice, issuing an engagement order to every weapon section.
Kalonice let each of her weapons systems have its head, allowing the moderati and techs to wreak their own devastation. They all deserved a measure of the spoils of vengeance. The recoil from so many vast weapon systems was dampened by multiple suspensor webs and pneumatic compensators, but still shook the command bridge with the force of so many discharges.
Enemy icons vanished from the Manifold, dozens at a time.
But she kept the plasma annihilator for herself, zeroing in on a towering engine of bronze and brass worked with skulls and lurching towards her on spiked wheels. A corrupted engine of the Mechanicum, a hateful reminder of treachery within her own order.
Kalonice drew power from the boiling reactor core at her heart. The heat was immense, and she drew and drew from the well of plasma fire until the screaming agony in her right fist was almost too much to bear.
The pain broke her hold on the plasma fury encased in her fist and the arm vanished in a furious supernova of white fire that rocked the Imperator back on its heels. Kalonice screamed, the resonators having no problem rendering the depths of her agony.
Her Thallax body fell to the deck, bio-feedback bathing her machine-wrapped spinal column in pain signals. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Kalonice fought to shut herself off to the sensations, but Paragon of Terra’s pain was hers now. The reactor at her heart convulsed. Armour plating buckled, atomic bleed-off vented explosively from cycling louvres on the Titan’s rear quarters.
Alarms blared. Binaric horns screamed their agonies into the command bridge. Damage controls blew out in overload and the red light of anger became a blood light of horrifying pain. Kalonice struggled to hold on, to not let the loss of her arm break her grip on the Manifold. She heard the machine-spirit of the Titan howling, an animal vocalisation of impossible pain.
‘Etana!’ cried a voice. A flesh voice. One she knew.
‘It’s me,’ he said, hauling her to her feet. She looked down at her right arm, expecting to see it as a mangled, molten mess. But, of course, it was undamaged. Paragon of Terra had borne the hurt, but she had felt it. Oh, how she had felt it!
‘They hit us,’ said Ashur. ‘The bastards hit us hard.’
‘It came from inside the voids,’ said Ashur, flinching as the Imperator rocked with the force of impacts.
Kalonice felt the impacts. Searing, stabbing blades plunging into her machine body.
‘It’s House Devine!’ said Ashur.
‘The bastards have betrayed us,’ hissed Ashur.
The dragon was screaming. It bled smoke and light from its wounds, and the Stormlord closed for the kill. He rammed his lance into the beast’s flanks, hearing the splinter of bones and the hiss of slicing flesh. His other arm was a crackling whip, useless against such a towering beast, but lethal to the tiny, scurrying things that spilled from its legs.
He circled around again, bringing his lance to bear as a storm of spines blasted from the beast’s carapace. A knight fell, pierced through by one such barb and he came apart in an explosion of blood and horsemeat.
The towering beast staggered. Their sudden attack had caught it off guard and almost brought it to its knees. But he had not thought to humble it with one strike. Already it was reacting to them, but the Stormlord had not earned himself that name without good reason.
He wheeled around the crashing footfall of the beast. The thunderous impact shook the ground for kilometres in all directions. His horse reared in panic, but he quelled it with the force of his will.
His knights circled back and forth, closing in time and again to deliver thrusts of their lances and stabbing cuts from their reapers. They were hurting it, but it was too big to be brought down by such wounds.
He looked up and saw the beast’s wounded heart, a pulsing shimmer of light where the source of its power lay. Thick scales of draconic armour protected its heart from a frontal attack, but from behind...
From behind it was vulnerable. Even more so now. The Stormlord’s first thrust had hurt the beast and exposed its greatest weakness.
‘Warriors of Molech!’ shouted the Stormlord. ‘No one lance can pierce this beast’s armour. We must be as one in our ardour, as one in our thrust into its heart.’
A breath of fire incinerated another of his vajras. If the killing blow was not struck soon, the beast would overwhelm them. It was already turning its wounded heart away.
‘Your lances!’ screamed the Stormlord. ‘Unite them with mine!’
His knights formed up around him as they rode with all possible speed to chase the dragon’s wounded heart. It bled light and steam, the exhalations of a monster the world needed slain.
The Stormlord laughed as he felt the strength of his knights fill him. Their lance arms were now his. What he stabbed, they stabbed. What he killed, they would kill.
The leavings of the beast still streamed from its gigantic legs. Ants and bacterium shed from a desperate creature that knew its ending was at hand, but still clung to life. Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps. The vajras fought and killed them with their battle blades alone, for their lance arms were now his to command.
His armour shuddered with impacts, his shield arm was just as strong as his lance arm. He felt the heat of the conjoined lances in his fingers, the potency of a weapon on the brink of release.
The dragon knew what he was doing.
It knew he had the power to kill it.
He was too fast for it, the fleetness of his steed more than a match for its cumbersome power. No matter how fast it tried to turn, he would be quicker. It spat a breath of fire to the ground, incinerating a host of its own defenders in its desperation. The Stormlord felt one of his vajras die, and cried out as he felt the righteous fury of the knight fill him.
The spirits of the dead flowed into him, filling his skull with their death screams. Any other man would have been driven mad by now, but he was the Stormlord. He was the hero, the saviour of Molech and he would end this beast.
And then he saw it exposed, the beast’s one weakness.
The Stormlord thrust his lance deep into the exposed heart of his prey.
And where he stabbed, so too did his warriors.
What remained of the XIII Legion forces followed pre-prepared evacuation routes down the Untar Mesas. Three Rhinos with little of the cobalt-blue of Ultramar left on their structure after the devastating barrages of plasma fire.
Barely a handful had survived the slaughter. The Sons of Horus had the left flank, and were pouring in heavy armour. Army units of artillery were racing to occupy the high ground and more Interfector engines were pushing to complete the flank’s collapse.
The slate before Arcadon Kyro completed its auspex sweep, but came up empty. No Ultramarines armour locators that weren’t already aboard the withdrawing Rhinos.
‘Are there any more?’ asked Castor Alcade, and the desperate hope Kyro heard was a whip to an already bloodied back.
‘No, sir,’ he replied, his voice strained and hoarse. A breath of superheated air had scalded the inside of his lungs. If he survived this battle, they’d need replacing. ‘This is it.’
‘Three damn squads!’ hissed Alcade, slamming a fist against the buckled interior of the Rhino. ‘How can that be all that’s left?’
‘We were hit by T
itans,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re Thirteenth Legion, but even we can’t soak up that kind of firepower.’
‘Keep looking,’ insisted Alcade.
‘If anyone else made it out, I’d know by now,’ said Kyro.
‘Keep looking, damn you. I want more of my men found.’
‘Sir, there’s no one left,’ said Kyro. ‘It’s just us.’
Alcade sagged and Kyro hated that he had to be the bearer of yet another turn of fate that saw his legate further humiliated.
He’d lost his helmet in the fighting, and his armour was blackened all over where a backwash of plasma had caught him. He’d suffered burns to most of his exposed flesh, and could feel the puckering tightness of wounds that would never heal.
Hot winds rammed into the Rhino through a gaping wound in the glacis. Virtually the entire frontal section had been sheared off in an explosion, leaving the driver’s compartment exposed. Instead of seeing the battlefield through external pict-feeds or a slender vision block, Kyro had a gaping hole large enough for two legionaries to climb through abreast of one another.
‘Any word from Salicar?’ asked Alcade. ‘We should link with the Blood Angels, pool our resources.’
Kyro didn’t answer, his attention snared by the hideous sight far across the battlefield. Even the intervening smoke of battle couldn’t obscure the horror of what he was seeing.
‘What in Guilliman’s name is going on over there?’ said Alcade.
Kyro shook his head. What it looked like was impossible.
The Knights of House Devine were attacking Paragon of Terra. Something had already wounded it. One arm was missing, and it staggered with shrieking feedback agonies. It bled corrosive fogs and fire. It had been hurt badly.
The Knights’ battle cannon punched craters in its legs. Their reapers were cutting down the skitarii and Army troops stationed in its leg bastions by the hundred. They darted in to fire thermal lances into its upper sections, peeling back its rear armour like foil paper.
‘What do they think they’re doing?’ demanded Alcade.
‘They’re traitors,’ hissed Kyro, unwilling to believe it, despite the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Raeven Devine has been with Horus this whole time!’
‘Then his life is mine,’ said Alcade.
Kyro ignored the legate’s bombasts, and fixed his attention on the lead Knight. A red gold machine with a golden banner streaming from its carapace and a crackling energy lash whipping at its side. He knew it as Banelash.
It skidded to a halt behind the Imperator and braced its legs.
‘They can’t hurt it can they?’ said Alcade. ‘They’re too small, surely. An Imperator’s far too big to–’
Raeven Devine’s Knight unleashed a stream of white-hot fire from his thermal lance. And for a fleeting second, Arcadon Kyro believed his legate might be correct.
Then that hope was dashed as every Knight of House Devine combined their lance fire into one incandescent beam of killing light. Combined to hideous effect, the lance fire punched through the weakened armour of Paragon of Terra.
Kyro’s senses were enhanced. He saw in spectra beyond those of unaugmented mortals, and knew immediately that the Imperator was doomed. He read the breaching of the vast reactor at the heart of Paragon of Terra as clear as the slate before him. Soaring temperature increases, coupled with spewing gouts of radioactive fire throughout the Titan’s superstructure told a cascading tale of the Imperator’s death.
The Knights knew it too and were already fleeing from their murder. Banelash led the Knights of House Devine towards the rear of the Imperial army, sprinting for all they were worth.
Paragon of Terra stood unmoving, and Kyro wept to see so magnificent an icon of mankind’s mastery of technology brought low.
‘Come on, come on,’ he hissed, willing the Mechanicum adepts and their servitors to vent the reactor, to eject what they could and save the rest, even though he already knew it was too late.
The thermal auspex blew out in a haze of sparks.
Kyro turned away and his auto-senses dimmed in response.
‘Don’t look at it,’ he warned.
Castor Alcade was more or less correct when he surmised that the Knights were far too insignificant to do more than inconvenience an Imperator. Their uncannily concentrated fire had caused a cascading series of reactor breaches within the engineering decks, but even that damage could have been contained.
As the adepts aboard Paragon of Terra initiated damage aversion protocols to avert a catastrophic reactor breach they were betrayed from within as well as without. Many of the Sacristans they had been forced to employ within the reactor spaces were those belonging to the Knight Households.
And by some considerable margin, the majority of these men had come from House Devine.
Quiet sabotage of venting systems, disabling of the coolant mechanisms and, in the end, the brutal murder of senior adepts, made an apocalyptic reactor breach inevitable.
The reactor empowering a Titan was a caged star.
Not a tamed one, never that.
And the reactor at the heart of an Imperator was orders of magnitude greater than all others.
The breach vaporised the entirety of Paragon of Terra in the blink of an eye and a seething eruption of plasma blew out in a cloud of expanding white heat.
The flash blinded all who looked upon it, burning the eyes from their skulls. Everything within a fifteen hundred metre radius of the Imperator simply vanished, incinerated to ash or reduced to molten metal in the blink of an eye.
Nightmarish temperatures and pressures at the point of detonation turned the earth to glass and blasted hot gaseous residue from the centre of the explosion at ferocious velocities. Contained within a dense hydrodynamic front, the explosion was a hammering piston compressing the surrounding air and smashing apart everything it struck. A hemispherically expanding blast wave raced after the roaring plasmic fireball, but quickly eclipsed its blazing fury.
The overpressure at ground zero was enormous, gouging a crater deep into the surface of Molech and hurling even the largest of war machines through the air like grains of wheat blown from a farmer’s palm.
In the first instant of detonation, the death toll on both sides was in the tens of thousands. It rose exponentially in the following seconds. Mere mortals within four kilometres of the explosion were killed almost instantly, pulped by the overpressure as it rolled outwards.
Beyond that, those soldiers in cover or within reinforced blockhouses survived a few seconds longer until thunderous blast waves hammered down. Every strongpoint and trench system collapsed, and only the very fortunate or heavily armoured survived this stage of the explosion.
Towards the flanks, the seismic force swatted soldiers to the ground and halted the fighting as the enormity of what had just happened hit home.
A smoke-hazed mushroom cloud of plasma bled into the sky, reaching up to a height of thirteen kilometres and surrounded by ever-expanding coronas of blue-hot fire. Searing winds roared across the agri-plains north of Lupercalia, searing them of vegetation and life.
Those that survived would have plasma burns to rival any mark earned on other worlds torn apart by war. The centre of the Imperial line was gone, but thousands of soldiers and armoured vehicles remained to fight.
The destruction of Paragon of Terra was only the beginning of the end for Molech.
To the north and south, just beyond the farthest extent of the blast wave, dust clouds hazed the horizon as fresh forces were drawn to the vortex of battle.
Castor Alcade gripped tight to the battered flank of his Rhino, disbelief warring with horror at the sight of the Imperator’s destruction. The field of battle was in disarray, men and women crawling from the wreckage and trying to make sense of what had just happened.
Virtually the entire muster of Imperial war engines had fought in the shadow of Paragon of Terra, and were little more than smouldering wrecks, barely enough of them remaining to identify which engine was whi
ch.
‘It’s over,’ said Didacus Theron, stepping down from his Rhino.
‘No,’ said Alcade, pointing to where scattered command sections struggled to impose a semblance of order on what was left of their forces. ‘We march for Molech.’
‘But we don’t have to die for it,’ said Theron.
‘Hold your damn tongue,’ said Kyro.
‘And remember your place,’ snapped Theron, coming over to stand beside Alcade. ‘Legate, we don’t have to die here, not when Ultramar is at war and the Avenging Son needs us at his side.’
Alcade said nothing, for once in his life at a loss of what to do. Theoretical was everything, but what was the theoretical when every practical ended in death?
Amid the raging fire-swept wasteland below, Alcade saw the enemy had not been spared the horror of the explosion either. Their numbers were just as devastated. Only the enemy Titans had survived the blast intact, though even they had suffered heinous damage.
They stalked as shadows through the wall of dust and smoke thrown up by the explosion. Giant killers with nothing to oppose them. Even if the Imperial commanders below could rally their troops, what weapon did they have remaining that could fight traitor war engines?
‘We need to go back to Lupercalia,’ said Theron.
‘And then what?’ demanded Kyro.
‘We leave Molech,’ said Theron.
‘How? We have no ship.’
‘Then we take one from the enemy by force,’ said Theron. ‘We find an isolated vessel and storm it. Then we blast out-system and get back to the Five Hundred Worlds.’
‘You already censured a dozen legionaries that dared to voice that sentiment, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘I see a few red helmets among our pitiful survivors.’
‘That was before the war was ended at a single stroke,’ countered Theron, turning his attention back to Alcade. ‘Sir, we can’t stay here. Dying on Molech will achieve nothing. There’s no practical to it. We need to go home and fight in a battle we can actually win.’