The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘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.

18

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.

19

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 which.

‘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?