‘How often do you get to be this close to such awesomely destructive firepower?’
‘Even once is too often.’
Abaddon grinned, an unusual enough occurrence for him that he surprised himself. Since his injury he’d had precious little to laugh about. The angel’s fire had done more than take his voice, it left him with a constant smoulder in his bones. Like an underground fire that never goes out, but burns and burns even when no fuel remains to sustain it.
‘Think of it this way,’ said Abaddon. ‘When it hits, we’ll either walk right through the ruins or we’ll be dead. Anyway, if I die, Lupercal will need someone to be First Captain.’
‘I don’t want it earned this way.’
Anger touched Abaddon at Kibre’s sentimentality. ‘How else do you think you’ll get it?’
Kibre didn’t answer, and Abaddon turned his gaze to the heavens. Molech’s skies had been ripped with electrical storms and raging atmospheric disturbances since the invasion began. Low-hanging clouds seethed like overloading generators. Finally they burst apart, unable to contain the rampant energies within them.
Forking traceries of blue light arced between them and the mountain’s highest peaks, as though the holdfast were a vast lightning rod. Squalling clashes of expending void shields filled the sky with blooming oilspills of light. The lightning danced on the invisible barrier, stripping it back with every strike.
And with every screeching blast, the void shields grew closer to their extreme tolerances. Like a bubble stretched to its maximum expansion, they screamed as they blew out. A micro-storm blasted skyward as feedback detonated the generators and explosions geysered around the throat of the mountain.
But this was just the precursor.
Glassy rods of laser fire touched the mountain peak, coring deep into the rock. Superheated steam blasted skyward. Spurts of molten rock garlanded the high peak in a fiery golden crown.
Yet even this was a prelude.
Torpedo volleys and macro-cannon shells launched from Var Zerba at hyperfast velocities punched through the clouds on the coat-tails of the lasers. The mountain’s defensive guns sought to bring them down, but the catastrophic detonations of the void shield array had blown out almost every targeting cogitator.
Orbital munitions designed to penetrate subterranean bunker complexes slammed into the mountain, punching into the shafts bored by the orbital lasers. Iron Fist Mountain was hardened to resist aerial bombardment and ground based artillery, but an orbital barrage was many orders of magnitude greater than anything the builders of Legio Crucius had envisioned.
The top five hundred metres of the mountain simply vanished.
Warheads just short of atomic power struck deep into its heart, tearing apart the internal structure of the hollowed out mountain in a hellish firestorm. Vast buttresses of adamantium buckled and melted in temperatures normally found in the cores of stars. Bracing beams and load-bearing archways collapsed and a cascade of structural instability shook the entire mountain.
A flaming caldera formed as the weight of the mountain’s exterior fell inwards. Iron Fist Mountain crumbled like a sand sculpture, every second of collapse adding to the speed of its dissolution. Kilometres-high plumes of explosive gases and dust clouds billowed in a fire-shot mushroom cloud.
The shock wave of impacts and the instantaneous destruction of an entire mountain raced outwards in a pulsing series of seismic pressure waves. Abaddon gripped tightly to the rock as though the earth sought to shake him loose. Explosions of rock and flame shot from the mouth of the newly-formed volcano.
An avalanche of debris spilled downwards, millions of tonnes of shattered rock and steel. A tidal wave of destruction that buried the Imperial defences clustered around the mountain under hundreds of metres of rubble.
‘First Company,’ said Abaddon, as the shock waves began to dissipate.
Five hundred Terminators rose from cover and marched into the hellstorm surrounding the mountain’s destruction.
Vitus Salicar rode at the head of the Blood Angels, his crimson Rhino’s engines roaring like a mesoscorpion in heat. He’d ordered the Techmarines to overcharge the engines. They’d burn out within minutes, metal grinding on metal and erupting in flames as oil feeds burst under pressure. It wouldn’t matter. These Rhinos would never need to move again once this task was done.
‘An end for all of us,’ he said.
They left burning trails behind them where fuel manifolds had already cracked. The flames spread quickly through the fields, and a wall of smoke and fire rose behind them.
There could be no retreat now, even if they desired one.
The traitor line was an unbroken wall of flesh and iron, tanks and marching soldiers as far as the eye could see. Smoke banks from booming artillery obscured the rear ranks. Gunfire snapped and explosions cratered the ground.
Shots punched the up-armoured glacis of his Rhino, but didn’t penetrate. A las-round clipped his shoulder guard, vitrifying the ash and dirt smeared over his Legion symbol. A glassy scab formed over the blood drop.
He looked left and right. Like him, Drazen Acorah and Apothecary Vastern rode in the cupola of their Rhinos, while Warden Serkan squatted atop his vehicle like the savage tribal chiefs of Baal Secundus atop their chariots in ages past.
‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ shouted Salicar as linked bolters on the roof of the Rhino opened fire. A few traitors in deliberately ripped Army fatigues and fetishised helms were punched from their feet.
He picked his target. Army Chimera with the Eye of Horus daubed in umber on the frontal glacis. A banner of ragged cloth streaming behind it with a bleeding eagle upon it. A vehicle for a commander or soldier of rank.
The engine behind Salicar blew out with a hard bang and a solid, concussive thud. He tasted burning promethium and lubricant. The vehicle gave one last spurt of power to the tracks before seizing with a dreadful clash of splintering metal and ripping gears.
The Rhino slammed head on into the painted Chimera. Metal buckled and deformed. The heavier Space Marine vehicle smashed the Chimera’s frontal section like foil paper. Salicar vaulted from the Rhino’s roof, using the collision to propel him deep into the enemy ranks.
His scaled cloak billowing behind him like golden pinions, the captain of the Bloodsworn sailed through the air and crashed down in the midst of the charging traitors. His sword swept out, its edges blazing with amber fire. Men died.
Behind him, the Rhino’s spiked bull bar had disembowelled the enemy vehicle like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. Black smoke billowed as the assault doors opened and the Blood Angels poured out. They slammed into the scattered traitors, bludgeoning them from their path with kite shields and short, stabbing thrusts of their swords.
Salicar moved and killed with grace and beauty, like a dancer whose every move was choreographed to match those of his foes. Mortals tried to cut him down, but his movements were too fast, too supple and too beautiful. His flame-lit edge opened their bodies, his gold-chased pistol spat headshots with every pull of the trigger.
Gun fire struck him on the chest and shoulders. Some of it even cut down the soldiers he was fighting. They knew they couldn’t fight Salicar on an equal footing and were looking to kill him any way they could. He kept moving, putting as many of the enemy around him as he could. If they planned to shoot him down, they would kill their own men to do it.
The Blood Angels formed arrowheads of red-armoured killers around their war-leaders. Warden Serkan smashed through a knot of bare-chested warriors with their flesh scarified by knife blades. His eagle-winged symbol of office carved them new wounds, but none that would ever heal.
Alix Vastern, the Apothecary who knew every inch of human physiology and who had spent a lifetime repairing it, now bent his every effort to destroying it. Drazen Acorah fought with a monstrous twin-bladed axe, hewing a red path through to a squad of augmented soldiers adorned in blood-lined flesh cloaks and whose weapons were those of the techno-barbarians
that once warred over the ruined hellscapes of Old Earth.
Salicar pushed through the masses of packed soldiery to link with him. No blade touched him, but las-rounds and solid slugs gouged and bit his plate. In any other fight, the goal was to make space. To move, to find the gaps between the foe and drink deep of the killing thirst. Here, the aim was to fill that space with their flesh, to make them his shields.
All around, the charge of the enemy continued unabated. Chimeras roared past towards Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech. For all their trappings of savagery, the Warmaster’s army was disciplined.
Salicar beheaded a pair of mortals bearing a heavy bolter and kicked another with a demolition charge in the chest. The man’s ribs shattered and he flew back through the air. The charge he’d carried detonated and tore the sponson from a nearby battle tank. It slewed around and exploded a moment later.
Salicar knelt as the shock wave washed over him.
He rose to his feet and pushed on, his honour guard finally catching up with him. They had discarded their shields. Defence was now irrelevant, attack was all that mattered.
The bladed formations of the Blood Angels converged to form a single spear thrust right through the centre of the enemy. Perhaps a quarter of Salicar’s warriors were dead. Sheer weight of fire had done what the enemy’s individual prowess could not. They fled before his wetted blade. Gunshots smacked his arms and legs.
His visor display flickered with warnings, but he cared nothing for them. He was to die this day, and no warning would change that.
Drazen Acorah now fought at his side, his axe blades gleaming red and wet. His lieutenant saw him and gave a curt nod. All that could be spared in the fight’s fury. Salicar returned the gesture as he saw a hellish fire silhouette the mortals before him.
Acorah cried out and dropped to his knees, the axe falling from his grip. The press of bodies closed on him, knives and rifles and swords stabbing for him. Salicar thrust and cut, keeping the rabble back. A shot smacked into his back, a heavier round. He staggered. Another clipped his helmet and he fell to one knee.
He reached out and gripped Acorah’s shoulder guard.
‘Stand, brother!’ he ordered.
Acorah looked up.
Crackling lines of power hazed his helmet, and the lenses shone with inner light. A blood-red radiance of arterial wonder.
‘It’s here!’ cried Acorah. ‘Throne save us, it’s here!’
Salicar sprang to his feet as a towering fury surged through him, a killing rage like nothing he had ever known.
No, that wasn’t true.
He had known this once before.
Months before in the Kushite jungle. A red mist of unimaginable hatred and rage, the unbridled anger of a million souls. Every hostile thought and primal impulse given free rein.
Salicar gasped, an exhalation of feral savagery.
A figure moved through the flames before him, a warrior of transhuman scale. Its armour was blackened red and wreathed in fire.
Worse, it was armoured as he was. Wreathed by flames that seared the eye, the winged blood drop on its shoulder guard was unmistakable.
Whatever this thing was, it had once been a Blood Angel.
Chains dragged behind it and it hovered a full metre above the bloody ground. Its face was a scorched horror of eternally burning meat, fire-blackened and pulled tight in a rictus grin of horrified anger. In one hand it carried a severed head, that of Warden Agana Serkan.
‘Behold our kin,’ it said, and Salicar felt his ears bleed within his helm.
The mortals gathered around him fell to their knees. No longer seeking him dead, but supplicating themselves to the monstrous hellspawn. Salicar wanted to murder every one of them. Not fight them, not kill them, but slaughter them. He wanted to bathe in their blood, to strip himself of armour and slather his naked flesh with their entrails.
Their hearts he would devour. From their bones he would suck the marrow. Their eyes would be sweet, their blood ambrosia. Salicar’s every civilised move was stripped away as he saw himself drowning in the blood of his kills, each skull taken paving the way for his immortality.
‘This is what you all want, Vitus,’ said the fallen angel, reaching out to him. ‘Accept it. Your brothers have already drunk from the bloody chalice I offered them on Signus. They now slay in my name. They slake their thirst for blood without remorse. I know you felt the echoes of that moment in your own slaughters, Vitus. Feel no guilt for that, embrace the killer angel within. Join your brothers. Join me.’
Salicar felt a presence beside him and reluctantly averted his gaze from the daemon-thing. Drazen Acorah stood at his side, one hand holding his axe before him like a talisman.
‘I name you warp spawn!’ cried Acorah, the witch-light within his helm spreading over his body to envelop the blades of his axe.
‘I am the Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel!’ cried the fire-wreathed abomination as a pair of flaming swords erupted from its gauntlets. ‘Bow down before me!’
Apothecary Vastern moved to stand between the Red Angel and his captain. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You are Meros of the Blood Angels! My battle-brother of the Helix Primus, now and always. No power in the galaxy can break that bond!’
‘I am the ragefire, I am the sinister urge, the red right hand and the ender of lives!’ said the warp-thing. ‘Meros is long gone. He and Tagas lit the soulfires within me, but the soul of your primarch and his corruption is the blood in my veins.’
Salicar fought to contain his rage and resist surrendering to its red temptation. Every fibre of his willpower was fraying, searing to ash within his mind. To give in would be easy, to submit and accept the bloodlust within him.
Acorah reached out and placed a hand on Salicar’s shoulder guard. The fulgurite lightning bolt carved through the ash flickered and danced with golden light. Salicar drew a great draught of air into his lungs, like a drowning man finally reaching the surface.
He blinked away the bloody haze that had fallen across his vision. He ripped off his helmet and threw it aside. The fetor of the battlefield waxed strong in his sense. Blood and opened meat, urine and mud.
His Blood Angels knelt in the dirt around him, looking to him for guidance. Traitors surrounded them, looking to them as avatars of murder and slaughter, as newfound gods to worship. The thought sickened him, that they might be venerated by such dregs.
Firelight reflected on the ident-tags wrapped around the pommel of Salicar’s sword. And what had once been guilt became the promise of salvation.
We are the Blood Angels.
We are killers, reapers of flesh.
But we are not murderers, we are not savages.
Vitus Salicar turned so that every one of his warriors could see him. He reversed his grip on his sword. They met his gaze. They knew. They understood. They aligned their blades as he did.
‘Join me,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Be my blood-letters.’
‘Never,’ said Salicar, driving his gladius up through the base of his jaw and out through the top of his skull.
Two Warhounds of Interfector, a snapping engine named Lochon and a limping beast dubbed Bloodveil, gave covering fire. Aximand and the Fifth Company charged under a blitzing hurricane of turbo fire and vulcan shells. Portions of the mesh-block wall had already given way. The new-birthed volcanic explosion on the far flank had toppled loose blocks from the top of the makeshift barricade, and the fire from the two Warhounds did the rest.
‘Over it,’ shouted Aximand. ‘Take the fight to them.’
The Sons of Horus wove a path through the rubble, some firing from the hip, others pausing to aim. Aximand did neither. He kept his weapon pulled tight to his chest. Speed was his best hope of reaching the defences alive.
Ten Scimitar jetbikes flashed overhead, strafing the defenders with heavy bolter fire. Detonations rippled behind the blocks. The jetbikes turned hard, bleeding off speed for a quick turnaround.
A mistake, Aximand knew. As below, so abo
ve.
Speed was survival.
Shots from something rapid firing reached up and tore half the Scimitars from the sky, but a trio of larger attack speeders followed up with barking lascannon fire. An explosion clawed skyward, quickly followed by another. Gunfire chased the speeders, but by now the Scimitars were back on station and let rip over the defenders.
The crash of Titans made Aximand look up in time to see Lochon stamp down on a distant section of the walls. Debris spilled out and Sons of Horus swarmed over the breach. Bloodveil shadowed its impulsive cousin, firing controlled bursts of vulcan fire. Ejected shells spat from the rear of the weapon in a waterfall of scrap metal.
Behind the Warhounds came Silence of Death, a Reaver with deep gouges burned into its carapace. It had been wounded in the fight for Molech and one particular burn scar imparted a lopsided grimace to its pilot’s canopy.
The Titan braced its legs, appearing to squat slightly, like an animal about to defecate.
‘Down!’ shouted Aximand, dropping to a crouch with his helmet tucked into his chest as far as it would go. The Reaver’s blastgun and melta cannon fired with a shriek of rupturing air. The path of the weapons ignited, an instantaneous flashburn of light.
Aximand’s armour warned of a cataclysmic spike in temperature that vanished almost as soon as it registered. Thunderclaps of superheated air washed over him in a thermal shock wave.
Paint blistered on his back and shoulders.
Aximand pushed himself upright. The middle of the wall was gone. Apocalyptic explosions had tossed what remained around, leaving the way open for the infantry.
Aximand ran towards the flaming ruin of the wall, threading a path through the blistering heat haze. The rock underfoot was molten and glassy. His auto-senses were lousy with thermals, just a bleeding mass of false target readings.
A series of ferocious explosions hurled Aximand into the air.
Massed battle cannon fire.
He came down hard on the fused remains of a block that had once been part of the defences. He rolled, his armour cracked open in a dozen places. His helmet was split down the middle. He tore it off, and struggled to find his feet. His innards felt like they’d been compressed in a Warlord Titan’s assault fist. Concussive trauma. His lungs fought to take a breath. When they did it was searing hot, painful. He tasted burned meat, scorched metal and stone.