The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

While the Warlords of Fortidus were killing the Teratus’s Scouts, theirs were sprinting forward, heads down and weapons blazing. Jackals hoping to bring down a land leviathan. Turbo fire, gatling fire and streaking missiles stripped the Teratus’s void shields in squalling flares of discharge.

But Scout Titans didn’t take on a Battle Titan and live.

The Teratus turned the gatling blaster on its nearest attacker. Warhounds were fast and agile, but nothing could outrun gunfire.

A storm of incendiary shells burst its voids and staggered it in a ferocious cannonade. Stripped of its shields and speed it was dead in the water. A shock-pulse of melta reduced its princeps canopy to subatomic slag.

Self-guiding missiles streaked from the Teratus’s upper carapace and swatted another Warhound into the ground. Its legs flailed as it tried to right itself. The Teratus slammed its vast foot down. The Warlord’s enormous bulk crushed it flat.

The Teratus fed on the death scream of its victim, drawing the binaric energy into its corrupted Manifold. Its horns blasted a triumphal roar. Its shields were failing, peeled back by niggling fire from the two remaining Warhounds. The Reaver took a backward step as a combined barrage of Hellstorm cannon from the advancing Warlords blew out the last of its protection.

Warhounds were consummate lone predators, but they were also superlative pack hunters. They darted in, weapons punishing the Reaver’s vulnerable rear section. The armour on its reactor housing began peeling back.

Warning sigils flashed through its mind. Coolant leaks, plasma venting. It took another backward step, knowing it needed to link with the Warlord Titans it had tried so hard to outpace. Its right leg locked up, fused by repeated fire from the two Warhounds. The joints and servos there were on fire, and no amount of damage control would free it.

The Teratus watched the two Warlords of Legio Fortidus close.

It felt their weapons lock Pax Ascerbus in their sights, felt the power that had infused it in the blood-soaked hangar temples flee its iron flesh.

It locked its own weapons in return.

said the Teratus.

6

The threat of two Warlords in the flank now became too serious to ignore, and the traitor Titans broke off their pursuit of Avadon’s defenders to crush the Imperial engines.

Leaving the blazing corpses of the Teratus and the Warhounds in their wake, Red Vengeance and Bloodgeld limped into the teeth of Talismanik, Phantom Lord, Myrmidion Rex and Mask of Ruin.

In the end, it took another three hours for the last engine of Legio Fortidus to fall.

Red Vengeance and a red sky.

For the Red Planet.

7

Cebella Devine had long since lost any pleasure she might once have taken in tormenting her stepson. Albard’s hope had died first, then his expectation of death. He knew they could keep him alive indefinitely.

The nightmare of his continued existence eroded his sanity to the point where her icily-constructed barbs fell on deaf ears. She would have killed him long ago, but a firstborn son carried the bloodline. Shargali-Shi’s treatments would only work with the vital fluids of the bloodline.

Cebella dismissed the Sacristans at Albard’s door.

Some intimacies were for a mother alone.

The holographic fire burned in the hearth, casting its fictive heat and illumination around the gloomy chamber. She had come here so often she could pick out individual flame shapes and tell how long remained before the cycle would repeat.

She turned from the phantom light as a line of blood teared in the corner of her eye. Brightness hurt, and only regular injections of complex elastins and glassine meshes within her eyeballs allowed her to see at all. The droplet ran down the drum-tight skin of Cebella’s face, but she didn’t feel it. Her skin had been grafted, stretched and injected so many times it was deadened to virtually all sensation.

The stench within Albard’s chambers was undoubtedly noisome, but like her tactile perceptions, her olfactory senses had also atrophied. Shargali-Shi had promised to restore and enhance her faculties, and each procedure brought her closer to the perfection she had once possessed.

The silver of her exo-skeleton glittered in the firelight, and Albard looked up from his chair of furs and putrescence. Saliva leaked from the side of his mouth and matted his unkempt beard, but his organic eye was clearer than it had been for a long time.

Raeven’s visit had galvanised him.

Good. She had need to vent the pain of her grief upon another.

A blunt, wedge-shaped head rose from behind Albard’s chair and a forked tongue tasted the air. Shesha, her former husband’s naga. It hissed and sank back to its slumbers, as decrepit and useless as its current master.

‘Hello, Cebella,’ said Albard. ‘Is it that time already?’