The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

The psyker turned around, addressing them all. ‘Whatever you think you’re hearing, it’s not real. Low-level psychic energy is simmering beneath the surface. It’s like background radiation, but within the mind.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ said Nohai. ‘I’m showing elevated adrenal levels and combat responses in every single one of you.’

‘Because he just told us we’re under the effect of maleficarum!’ hissed Bror Tyrfingr, baring his canines.

Macer Varren unhooked his axe, finger hovering over the activation stud. The noise of its chained teeth would be heard for hundreds of metres in all directions.

Rubio’s fists clenched and ghostlights danced in the crystalline matrix of his hood. The whispering in Loken’s helmet drifted away, as if carried on a stiff breeze. Soon it was gone, leaving only the percussive hammering of the gun deck. He let out a breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Tyrfingr asked Rubio.

‘Shielding you all from the psychic bleed-off that permeates this ship,’ said the psyker, and Loken heard the strain in his voice. ‘Everything you hear from now on will be the truth.’

The thought gave Loken no comfort.

SEVENTEEN Beasts of Molech / Mission-critical / No perfection without imperfection

1

The horizon had been burning for days. Jungle fires were nothing new, but in all his life, Lord Balmorn Donar hadn’t seen anything to match the scale of this conflagration. Worse, the leading edge of the blazing jungle was no more than a day away at best.

‘Is it the Death Guard?’ asked Robard, marching his Knight onto the wall to join his father. The leg of Robard’s Knight had been repaired, but it was a patch-job by second-rate apprentices. With the main axis of enemy advance coming from the north, the Preceptor Line had been stripped of its Mechanicum adepts and most of its Sacristans. Every one of them had been seconded to Iron Fist Mountain to service the God-Machines of Legio Crucius.

‘It can’t be the Death Guard,’ he said. ‘It can’t be anyone. Even the most potent fire-throwers, chem-flayers or rad-bombs would take months or years to cut a viable path without destroying your own army.’

‘Then what is it?’

Lord Donar took his time before answering. His sensorium rendered the sky as a flat black smudge, but sometimes – just for a fraction of a second – it broke apart into buzzing static, like an unimaginably vast swarm of flies.

‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said at last, ‘but I’m damn sure it isn’t a fire.’

‘My thermal auspex says otherwise,’ said Robard. ‘So do the wall guns.’

‘Aye, but the readings are spiking hard then dying away almost to nothing before repeating the cycle,’ pointed out Lord Donar. ‘I’m not a bloody expert, but even I know fires don’t behave like that. I don’t know anything that behaves like that.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘What we always do, boy,’ said Lord Donar. ‘We hold the Line.’

The beast packs hit the wall an hour later.

2

The azhdarchid came first. The fleetest of the great beasts, they raced ahead of the black tide engulfing the jungle. Their long necks were scaled and feathered, their crocodilian beaks stretched and snapping in animal panic.

The wall guns opened up when they came within a thousand metres of the Preceptor Line. The noise was tremendous, even encased within the armour of a Knight. Lord Donar filtered out their cries and watched the flocks charge through a streaming hurricane of rotor cannon fire. Heedless of the carnage, the loping, flightless birds screamed as the shells cut them down without mercy.

At six hundred metres, the seven Knights of House Donar opened fire. Battle cannon shells left five metre craters and flying, disassembled bodies in their wake. Stubber cannons carved bloody trenches through the horde. Scores fell, trampled to pulp by those behind them. The killing ground was a quagmire of blood-soaked earth and unrecognisable meat. The air misted red, tasted of metal shavings.

Xenosmilus packs came next, hundreds of the monstrous quadrupeds charging for the wall in snarling desperation. The guns pulped them. Flesh and bone shredded in thousands of bloody explosions. Basilisks and Medusa of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade lobbed shells over the wall with their gun barrels at maximum elevation.

Seismic shock waves and pulverising overpressure from close-range detonations shook the wall and the facing stonework split with sharp cracks. Entire swathes of the Preceptor Line visibly sagged.

Massacre wasn’t a big enough word to encompass the slaughter, but the rampaging flocks soon found gaps where the Preceptor Line’s wall guns were non-functional. Too close for the artillery to engage, streams of the predator beasts surged towards the wall.