The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Noctua saw a pair of blank-helmed, piston-legged Thallaxii detach from sentinel alcoves at each of the cardinal entrances. Lightning guns fired, buckling the air, but Noctua rode his jump pack over the coruscating blast. He landed between the Thallaxii, beheading one with his sword, exploding the other’s with an executioner’s bolt-round.

Two more were felled by a mob of Sons of Horus, another pair shot down before they’d taken a single step. Noctua braced himself against a bank of hissing valves and crackling cogitator domes. His jump pack fired, leaving a canyon of scorched flesh in his wake. He came down at the sprint, driving his heel into the chest of the remaining Thallax as he landed.

It slammed back into the wall, the Lorica Thallax unit shattering like glass and spilling the steel-encased spinal cord and skull to the rubble-strewn floor. The last of them swung its plasma blaster around and managed a snap shot that cut a searing groove in his shoulder guard.

Angry now, Noctua carved his sword down through its shoulder.

The blade tore free from its pelvis, and the stricken cyborg died with a burst of machine pain and flood of stinking amniotics.

Noctua rolled his shoulders, irritated the cyborg thing had managed to get so close to him. The flesh beneath was burned, and only now did he feel the pain of it. Thinking of pain, he looked down to see a rolled steel reinforcement bar jutting from his thigh and a Thallax combat blade buried in his plastron.

The latter hadn’t penetrated his armour, but the rebar went right through from the front of his leg to the back. Strange that he hadn’t felt it. He yanked it out, watching the blood flow for a moment, enjoying the novel sensation of being wounded.

He tossed the bar and nodded to his Master of Signal.

‘Get the beacon set up,’ he ordered, pointing to the centre of the ruined hololithic table. ‘There seems appropriate.’

Noctua heard a wheezing breath and looked down to see that one of the stronghold’s command staff was still alive. A dying woman with an ornamented laspistol. Archaic and over-elaborate, but then Imperial officers did so like to embellish their wargear.

Clad in a drakescale burnoose and a golden eye-mask like some desert raider, Noctua saw rank pins on the breast of the uniform beneath. He hadn’t bothered to study the military hierarchy of Molech’s armed forces as Aximand had, but she was clearly high on the food chain. The burnoose was soaked in blood, and the mask had come loose, hanging over one cheek and exposing a withered, disease-wasted eye.

Still enjoying the feeling of pain, Noctua spread his arms.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Take your best shot.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Edoraki Hakon, and put her volkite shot right through Grael Noctua’s heart.

4

The din of battle pounded Aximand like Contemptor fists. Detonation shock waves battered him, solid impacts shook his shield. Constant shellfire made every step perilous. Unimaginable volumes of blood pooled in the base of craters. The passage of fighting vehicles had ground it into sticky red mortar.

Scything blasts of heavy bolters and autocannons tore across the beach. The shields of the Sons of Horus line bore the brunt of the incoming fire, but not all of it. Legion warriors were falling in greater numbers than Aximand had known since Isstvan.

They marched over the dead, scorched plate cracking beneath them and pulped corpses sucking at their feet as they advanced. Apothecaries and serfs dragged away those too wounded to fight. There was little point in such mercies. A Space Marine too wounded to keep going was a burden the Legion could do without.

Let them die, thought Aximand.

Land Raiders overtaking them on either side threw up sprays of gritty black sand and sprays of stagnant blood. Revving gun platforms on tracks blitzed shells and smoking casings. A Dreadnought with one arm missing staggered in circles as though looking for it. Missiles streaked overhead, breath was snatched from lungs by the overpressure.

The air tasted of overworked batteries and smelting steel, burned meat and opened bowels.

The Imperial line was invisible behind a twitching bank of gunsmoke. Muzzle flare from hundreds of weapon slits flickered like picter flashes at a parade. Explosions painted the sky, and weeping arcs of smoke told where dozens of gunships had died.

‘Tough going,’ said Yade Durso, his helmet cracked down the middle by an autocannon impact on his shield that had slammed it straight back in his face. Blood welled in the crack, but the eye lenses had survived.

‘It’ll get tougher yet,’ he answered.

Something fell from the sky and broke apart as it cartwheeled down the beach, shedding structure and bodies in equal measure. Aximand thought it was a Stormbird but it exploded before he could be sure.