The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Every surveyor and auspex on the great, crescent shaped platform was now his to access. His organic vision faded, replaced with a sensorium suite of approach vectors, closure speeds, deflection angles and targeting solutions.

In a very real sense, Panrik became Orbital Platform Var Sohn.

A potent sense of might surged through him. Connection burn and inload surge made him wince, but it faded as cognition-enhancing stims flooded his thalamus and occipital lobe.

Implanted vents at the back of Panrik’s skull opened, allowing the heat generated by his over-clocked brain to dissipate.

‘I have command authority, aye,’ replied Panrik, alternating between the local auspex and the feed coming in from the attack logisters of the Guardian of Aquinas. The enemy fleet was coming in hard and fast, looking to roll straight over the orbital defences and break through before suffering too much damage.

A bold strategy, but a risky one.

Too risky, thought Panrik, glancing down at the staggered line of orbitals and the haze of minefields strung between them like glittering jewels.

Panrik cricked his neck and flexed his fingers.

Weapon systems armed in response.

‘Come ahead then,’ he said to the advancing fleets. ‘Give it your best shot.’

8

00:12

Aximand watched the mottled grey and green marble of Molech rotate below him. Close, so very close. Ice limned the kinetic bracing and frost webbed the plate of his fellow warriors. For the last sixteen hours, he’d been watching the timer in the corner of his visor count down to zero.

00:09

Inaction didn’t suit him. It didn’t suit any of them, but he at least had learned to deal with it. Ezekyle and Falkus were prowling hounds who savoured the swift kill. Not for them the patient hunt. In contrast, Aximand was a bowstring that lost nothing of its power by being kept taut. Yet even he’d found this long, frozen vigil testing.

00:05

Noctua, he suspected, could outlast them all.

Aximand almost smiled as he wondered how long it had taken before Ezekyle broke the vox-silence protocol. Not long. He’d be too full of hubris to resist letting his mouth run away from him.

Aximand remembered the tales of the moon’s fall.

00:02

He remembered chimeric monsters of the Selenar cults; gene-spliced bioweapons, killing machines of flesh and acid and gibbering insanity. He remembered tales of slaughter. Unrestrained, wild, savage and yet to be tempered by Lupercal’s discipline.

But most famous of all was the cry of surrender.

Call off your wolves!

00:00

‘Speartip,’ said Aximand. ‘Light them up.’

9

‘Contacts!’ shouted the deck officer.

Panrik had seen them no more than a fraction of a second before, but had disregarded them due to their position behind and below Var Sohn. They were faint, no more than flickers.

They couldn’t possibly be hostile.

But they were growing stronger with every passing moment.

‘Malfunctioning mines?’ suggested the auspex master. ‘Or hyper-accelerated debris caught in the flare of a surveyor sweep.’

Panrik didn’t need cognition-enhancing drugs to hear the desperate hope in the man’s voice. He knew fine well what these returns were. He just didn’t know how the hell they’d gotten there.

‘Tomb ships! Throne, they’re tomb ships!’ said the auspex master. ‘I’ve heard of the tactic, but thought it was just a myth.’

‘What in the name of Hellblade’s balls are tomb ships?’

‘Tomb ships,’ repeated the auspex master. ‘Vessels shot into the void and then completely shut down, emptied of atmosphere and left to fly towards their target. There’s no power emissions, so they’re virtually impossible to detect until they fire up their reactors. It’s also next to impossible to pull off.’

‘Clearly not impossible enough,’ said Panrik, each dart of his ocular implant shifting fire-priorities. ‘Retask batteries Theta through Lambda to low orbit echelon fire. Atmospheric bursts only, I don’t want any of our munitions hitting the surface. Ventral torpedo bays recalculate firing solutions and someone get me the Lord Admiral.’

Two ships were right on top of him, a dozen more spread behind the network of orbital platforms. They’d appeared from nowhere, the surveyor returns from their hulls growing stronger as dormant reactors were quick-cycled to readiness and targeting auspex trawled his platform for weak points.

He felt the shudder of point-blank torpedo impacts on the hull through the mind impulse unit link with Var Sohn’s surface systems. He grimaced in sympathetic pain. Armour penetrators, not explosive warheads.

The sensorium came alive with hull-breach warnings and system failures as the newly-revealed ships lashed them with terrifyingly accurate gunfire.

Var Sohn’s defence systems blew apart, one by one.

‘They mean to board us,’ he said with a sick jolt of horror.

10

This was just the fight he was bred for.