The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Salicar used an oiling cloth to clean his power sword of dirt, and Acorah saw the ident-tags swing from the blood drop pommel. Acorah needed no psyker powers to feel the weight of guilt attached to them. The rust and unmistakable tang of mortal blood told its own tale.

Salicar saw him looking and sheathed the blade. The ident-tags rattled against the iron and leather scabbard.

‘You are still set on this course?’ asked Acorah.

‘I am,’ confirmed Salicar. He made a fist and lifted his arm, bent at the elbow. Ten Rhino armoured carriers fired their engines, jetting oilsmoke and setting the ground atremble.

‘You should not seek to dissuade me, Acorah. I would not sully this moment with having to discipline you.’

‘I seek to do no such thing,’ he said, though the rebellious thought had already crossed his mind. He’d dismissed it immediately. His powers were strong, but not so strong that he could alter a will so set in stone.

‘Do you believe this is penance?’ he asked.

‘I do,’ said Salicar.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Acorah, placing his hand on the partly obscured Legion symbol at his commander’s shoulder guard. A familiar gesture, almost too familiar. He and Salicar were battle-brothers, but they were far from friends.

Salicar looked down at Acorah’s hand. ‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s justice.’

4

‘Go!’ shouted Aximand.

Third Squad broke from cover, moving and firing as Ungerran Dreadnought Talon opened fire with their cannons and missile launchers. Streaming salvoes of high-calibre shells and spiralling missiles hammered the line of mesh fortifications. Filled with rubble and stacked like children’s blocks, they were ideal temporary fortifications.

Temporary or not, they were going to be bloody to overrun.

Behind him, the Stormbirds smoked in the flames of impact and hard burn landings. Nearly five hundred Sons of Horus poured onto the rugged landscape of the Untar Mesas, less than a hundred metres from the stepped defences.

No matter whether an assault came by land, sea or air, that last hundred metres would always need to be crossed by warriors willing to face the enemy head on.

This flank of the Imperial line rested on the mountain foothills, stretching away in a gentle crescent until it reached the towering peak of Iron Fist Mountain.

The twenty kilometres between here and there was an unbroken line of Imperial tanks and infantry. Well dug in, well positioned and, by the looks of things, well led. Jaundiced clouds of smoke drifted across the lines, the ejecta of Imperial guns mixed with the explosions of Lupercal’s heavy artillery.

Titans duelled with city-levelling ordnance, the thunder of their steps felt even from here. The Imperator at the centre of the line wasn’t marching. Its upper section turned only enough for it to bring its apocalyptic weaponry to bear. Its guns were tearing bloody wounds in the Warmaster’s army with every shot. Hundreds were dying with every blast of its hellstorm cannon and hundreds more to the plasmic fury of the annihilator. Missiles, laser blasts and hurricanes of bolter fire wreathed its upper towers and bastions in smoke.

Single-handedly, the Imperator was gutting Lupercal’s army.

Or at least the mortal portion of it.

Aximand’s attention was drawn from the destroyer Titan to a flash of brightness at the Titan’s base. Crimson-painted Rhinos surged forward in a wedge to split the attack in two. A glorious charge into the enemy ranks, the kind that only Legion warriors would dare.

‘Bold, but foolish,’ hissed Aximand. The enemy host was too vast for so few warriors to break apart, even warriors of the quality of the Blood Angels.

The hiss of a passing las-bolt brought him back to his own fight.

‘There,’ shouted Aximand, pointing at the base of a stepped salient where a flurry of Stormbird rockets had split the reinforced mesh. Rubble threatened to pour out. All it needed was a little encouragement. ‘Squad Orius, bring that wall down! Baelar, take it when it’s open.’

A burst of missile contrails arced from a patch of rocks to Aximand’s left. A towering explosion of rubble detonated from the defences. Blasted rocks fell in a rain of shattered stone and debris. Even before the dust of the explosion blew out, Squad Baelar were moving. Jump packs flared from the cliff above, where Aximand’s pure assault elements had landed.

Gunfire reached out to them. Six were blasted from the air before they reached the apex of their powered leap.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Yade Durso.

‘I did,’ said Aximand.

‘No mortal shooters did that.’

‘Agreed, that’s Legion.’

Thudd guns punished the defences where the shots had come from, but Aximand knew they’d hit nothing. If he was right in who was there, they would have already displaced. Squad Baelar landed just before the emplaced blocks and braced their legs for another leap.

The ground erupted in a sheet of fire as a line of remote-activated melta mines detonated.