The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Aximand ducked back as his auto-senses shut down to protect him from the brightness. Squad Baelar were all but incinerated. A single warrior got airborne, but only his upper half. Stuttering jets carried his corpse over the wall.

‘Just far enough away to need two jumps,’ hissed Aximand. ‘They knew assaulters would need to land there.’

‘Definitely Legion,’ said Durso.

‘Not Blood Angels,’ replied Aximand, which left only one possibility. ‘The Ultramarines are here.’

‘Third Squad is in position,’ Durso voxed. ‘Ungerran are ready.’

‘Hit them with everything,’ said Aximand. ‘Maximum suppression. We’re taking this wall ourselves.’

5

A pressure within Abaddon’s helmet was the first sign of the incoming barrage. His teeth ached and his visor dimmed in anticipation of impact.

‘You’re looking up?’ asked Kibre. ‘Do you want to be blinded?’

‘How often do you get to be this close to such awesomely destructive firepower?’

‘Even once is too often.’

Abaddon grinned, an unusual enough occurrence for him that he surprised himself. Since his injury he’d had precious little to laugh about. The angel’s fire had done more than take his voice, it left him with a constant smoulder in his bones. Like an underground fire that never goes out, but burns and burns even when no fuel remains to sustain it.

‘Think of it this way,’ said Abaddon. ‘When it hits, we’ll either walk right through the ruins or we’ll be dead. Anyway, if I die, Lupercal will need someone to be First Captain.’

‘I don’t want it earned this way.’

Anger touched Abaddon at Kibre’s sentimentality. ‘How else do you think you’ll get it?’

Kibre didn’t answer, and Abaddon turned his gaze to the heavens. Molech’s skies had been ripped with electrical storms and raging atmospheric disturbances since the invasion began. Low-hanging clouds seethed like overloading generators. Finally they burst apart, unable to contain the rampant energies within them.

Forking traceries of blue light arced between them and the mountain’s highest peaks, as though the holdfast were a vast lightning rod. Squalling clashes of expending void shields filled the sky with blooming oilspills of light. The lightning danced on the invisible barrier, stripping it back with every strike.

And with every screeching blast, the void shields grew closer to their extreme tolerances. Like a bubble stretched to its maximum expansion, they screamed as they blew out. A micro-storm blasted skyward as feedback detonated the generators and explosions geysered around the throat of the mountain.

But this was just the precursor.

Glassy rods of laser fire touched the mountain peak, coring deep into the rock. Superheated steam blasted skyward. Spurts of molten rock garlanded the high peak in a fiery golden crown.

Yet even this was a prelude.

Torpedo volleys and macro-cannon shells launched from Var Zerba at hyperfast velocities punched through the clouds on the coat-tails of the lasers. The mountain’s defensive guns sought to bring them down, but the catastrophic detonations of the void shield array had blown out almost every targeting cogitator.

Orbital munitions designed to penetrate subterranean bunker complexes slammed into the mountain, punching into the shafts bored by the orbital lasers. Iron Fist Mountain was hardened to resist aerial bombardment and ground based artillery, but an orbital barrage was many orders of magnitude greater than anything the builders of Legio Crucius had envisioned.

The top five hundred metres of the mountain simply vanished.

Warheads just short of atomic power struck deep into its heart, tearing apart the internal structure of the hollowed out mountain in a hellish firestorm. Vast buttresses of adamantium buckled and melted in temperatures normally found in the cores of stars. Bracing beams and load-bearing archways collapsed and a cascade of structural instability shook the entire mountain.

A flaming caldera formed as the weight of the mountain’s exterior fell inwards. Iron Fist Mountain crumbled like a sand sculpture, every second of collapse adding to the speed of its dissolution. Kilometres-high plumes of explosive gases and dust clouds billowed in a fire-shot mushroom cloud.

The shock wave of impacts and the instantaneous destruction of an entire mountain raced outwards in a pulsing series of seismic pressure waves. Abaddon gripped tightly to the rock as though the earth sought to shake him loose. Explosions of rock and flame shot from the mouth of the newly-formed volcano.

An avalanche of debris spilled downwards, millions of tonnes of shattered rock and steel. A tidal wave of destruction that buried the Imperial defences clustered around the mountain under hundreds of metres of rubble.

‘First Company,’ said Abaddon, as the shock waves began to dissipate.

Five hundred Terminators rose from cover and marched into the hellstorm surrounding the mountain’s destruction.

6