The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Her fingers closed on the torn blood vessel, and hair-fine suture clamps extruded from her medicae gauntlet to seal it shut.

‘Got you,’ she said, pinning the artery in place with deft twists of her fingertips. Noama stood straight and, satisfied the worst of the boy’s life-threatening injuries was dealt with for now, brought over the implanted nursing servitor with a sub-vocal command.

‘Seal him up and wrap those burns in counterseptic gels,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting the bleeding stopped just for him to die from a damned infection, you understand? Right, now watch his blood pressure too, and let me know if he starts spiking. Clear?’

The servitor acknowledged her orders and set to work.

Noama moved onto the next hideously wounded soldier.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars have we?’

4

The twin Warlords of Legio Fortidus strode from the gloomy caverns of the Zanark Deeps side by side followed by the last of their Legio. Princeps Uta-Dagon’s force numbered two Warlords and four Warhounds. On most battlefields that would be enough firepower to easily carry the day.

Against the force on Uta-Dagon’s threat auspex it would be spitting in the eye of the tempest.

When word had come of the civil war on Mars, Uta-Dagon had assumed his Titanicus brothers would be at the heart of the fighting, standing with those loyal to the Emperor. Only later, as more details emerged of the catastrophe engulfing the Red Planet had the truth emerged.

They were all that remained of Legio Fortidus.

In the end, though, it changed nothing.

Molech was at war, and the architect of his Legio’s doom was before him.

Uta-Dagon floated within his amniotic casket within the head section of Red Vengeance, the Warlord Titan he had piloted for eighty years and whose name he had changed after a vivid waking dream in the Manifold. His sister-princeps, Utu-Lerna had likewise been compelled to rename her engine, a Warlord whose new designation was Bloodgeld.

Uta-Dagon had long since sacrificed his organic eyes to the service of the Legio, but Red Vengeance’s auto-senses interpreted the sky a vivid crimson.

said Utu-Lerna, reading his thoughts through the Manifold as she so often did. Twins whose cords had been cut in the rains of Pax Olympus, their birth was seen as auspicious. And so it had proved when both were taken as babes by the Collegia Titanicus.

<Red Vengeance and a red sky.>

finished Utu-Lerna.

Burning starships streaked the sky. Had his brothers on Mars seen skies like this before they died? He hoped so, for it had been under such a sky the Legio had been born, fighting in the Dyzan Valley against the resurgent Terrawatt Clan.

said Utu-Lerna. Bloodgeld’s warsight was keener than that of Red Vengeance and Uta-Dagon had learnt to trust his twin’s interpretations of her engine’s senses.

Moments later Uta-Dagon saw them too. Fifteen engines on the static-laced horizon, striding south in pursuit of the survivors of Avadon. A great column of armoured vehicles swarmed the Titan’s feet. Scavengers following apex predators.

In three minutes or less, the enemy Titans would be in range of the retreating Imperial forces. Thousands would die unless the pursuers could be given a more tempting target.

Uta-Dagon heard an intake of breath behind him and twisted his withered form around in the fluid-filled casket. Ur-Nammu had seen them too, her almost human face underlit by the soft glow of the threat auspex. Like Uta-Dagon, the Warmonger was Mechanicum. She was not engine-capable, yet had chosen to die with her brothers and sisters.

said the princeps.

‘I do not fear death, my princeps,’ said Ur-Nammu, before correcting herself and presenting her answer in the Manifold.

said Uta-Dagon. executor fetial, since you can move between the Legios freely. You have no need to die in my engine.>

asked Ur-Nammu and the simple honesty of her cant needed no reply.

The princeps returned his attention to the approaching battlescape, its vector contours and salient features forming in the interface within his skull. Manifold records quickly identified the traitor engines.

Reavers: Dread Wake, Hand of Ruin and Myrmidion Rex of Legio Mortis; Silence of Death and Pax Ascerbus of Legio Interfector, dubbed the Murder Lords after Isstvan III. Nightmaw of Legio Vulcanum.