The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

The strategium was a large space, airy and vaulted, but with the return of the Warmaster arrayed in the full panoply of battle, it seemed cramped. Nor had he returned alone, Falkus Kibre and twenty of the Justaerin carrying breacher shields came with him.

Kibre’s helmet hung at his belt. His face was a picture in rapture. Such a change from the bitter resentment he’d worn when the Warmaster removed him from the assault elements. Now he was going into battle at the Warmaster’s side, and no greater honour existed within the Sons of Horus.

‘You’re still set on doing this then?’ asked Maloghurst.

‘I want that ship, Mal,’ replied Horus, rolling his shoulders in a clatter of plate to loosen the muscles beneath. ‘And I’m out of practice.’

‘I counsel you again, sir, you should not do this.’

‘Worried I’ll get hurt, Mal?’ asked Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from his belt. The haft of the mace was the length of a mortal man. Lethal against a Legion foe, absurd overkill against baseline humans.

‘It’s an unnecessary risk.’

Horus slapped a mailed fist on the Widowmaker’s shoulder, a booming clang of metal that echoed through the strategium like rolling thunder.

‘I have Falkus here to protect me,’ said Horus, unhooking his battle helm and hauling it down onto his gorget. The lenses flared red as its auto-senses were activated.

Maloghurst felt a tremor of awe travel the length of his twisted spine. Horus was an avenging angel, an avatar of battle incarnate and the master of war. So terrible and powerful. Maloghurst was horrified his quotidian dealings with the primarch had rendered the miraculous almost banal.

‘I’ve sat on the sidelines for too long, Mal. It’s time everyone remembered that this fight is my fight. It will be my deeds that ensure it’s my name that echoes down through the ages. I won’t have my warriors win my war without me.’

Maloghurst nodded, convinced the moment Horus had secured his helm. He dropped to his knees, though the movement sent a jolt of searing pain through his fused hips.

‘My lord,’ said Maloghurst.

‘No kneeling, not from you,’ said Horus, hauling his equerry to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ said Maloghurst. ‘Old habits.’

Horus nodded, as though people kneeling to him were an everyday occurrence. Which, of course, it was.

‘Bloody the Spirit for me, Mal,’ said Horus, turning and leading the Justaerin to the embarkation deck where his Stormbird awaited. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be gone long.’

2

This is it. This is what I missed.

‘Tomb ships,’ hissed Admiral Semper, seeing notations on an instructional primer from his cadet days writ large in reality on the hololith. ‘Throne, bloody almighty, tomb ships. They’re fighting the subjugation of the moon all over again. The thrice damned bloody moon.’

The hololith told a tale of horror. Of a plan in tatters, of arrogance and, ultimately, death.

‘If it had been anyone else but the Sons of Horus, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ whispered Semper. ‘Who but the Warmaster would have the audacity to launch a full quarter of his fleet into the void and hope they arrived in time and at the right location?’

Except, of course, the Warmaster hadn’t hoped the tomb ships would arrive where he needed them. He’d known. Known with a certainty that chilled Semper to the bone.

‘The orbital platforms are gone,’ said his Master of Surveyors, hardly daring to believe the evidence of the hololith. Semper shared the man’s disbelief.

‘They’re worse than gone, the enemy has them,’ he replied, watching as the most powerful platforms, Var Crixia and Var Zerba, cracked open the orbitals that the enemy assault forces hadn’t seized. Var Sohn had launched – and was still launching – spreads of torpedoes into his hopelessly scattered fleet.

‘Is the day lost, Lord Admiral?’

The answer was surely obvious, but the man deserved a considered answer. The Lord Admiral swept his gaze over the catastrophic ruin of what had begun as an ironclad stratagem.

He laughed and the nearby Thallax rotated their torsos at the unfamiliar sound. Semper shook his head. He’d forgotten the first rule of war regarding contact with the enemy.

Semper’s rightmost battlegroup was no more. Every vessel gutted by treacherous fire from the captured orbitals. As the warships foundered in the wake of the shocking reversal, the Death Guard surged into them like ambush predators picking off herd stragglers. Alone and overwhelmed, each Imperial ship was brutalised until it was no more than a smouldering ruin.

The crippled hulks were then driven into the gravitational clutches of Molech by snub-nosed ram-ships. Wrecks plunged through the atmosphere. Blazing re-entry plumes followed them down.

Semper had traced the trajectories, hoping against hope that the wrecks would hit the atmosphere too sharply and burn to ash before reaching the surface. Or be too shallow and bounce off, careening into deep space.