TWELVE

Breakout
Decapitation
Twin Flames

A tidal wave of ocean green crashed onto the beaches at Avadon, but this one didn’t recede, it just kept pushing higher. An armoured fist of firepower and transhuman endurance, this was to be a breakout achieved at maximum speed.

Two hundred Sons of Horus Land Raiders led the speartip’s thrust.

No grace, no finesse, just a thunderous hammer blow to the heart.

Edoraki Hakon, Marshal of the Northern Oceanic, awaited Lupercal’s army with a line of strongpoints, deep trenches, six full regiments of Army and a company of dug-in superheavies. Her defences lined the coastal cliffs and encircled the landward end of the causeway. If the Sons of Horus wanted to reach the mainland, they were going to have to fight their way off Damesek.

Quite why a tactician as superlative as Horus would establish a bridgehead on an island that’s only viable egress point was a slender causeway was beyond her understanding.

It made no sense, but that was what the Warmaster had done.

No one in her command staff could adequately explain Horus’s reasoning, but the opportunity to punish the traitors for their mistake was there for the taking.

Holst Lithonan’s artillery companies on the island’s high bluffs had spent the night duelling with Hakon’s guns, and the Marshal had reluctantly been forced to withdraw her heavier pieces as dawn’s light crept over the horizon.

Freed from suppressive battery fire, traitor guns dumped barrage after barrage of shroud missiles on the Imperials. Banks of glittering electromagnetic fog spewed from spinning shells, breaking firing solutions and disrupting carefully calibrated range-finders.

While Imperial gunners struggled to penetrate the occluding mist, Sons of Horus Land Raiders raced along the last stretch of the causeway to the mainland. Scorpius Whirlwinds sent arcing streams of missiles ahead of them. Their warheads wrecked the emplaced tank traps and ripped up fields of entangling razorwire in a storm of subterranean explosions.

The first Land Raiders slammed down off the causeway into a fury of heavy autocannons, crew-served weapon mounts and emplaced lascannons. Hakon’s superheavy tanks crashed back in their berms as volleys of battle cannons and demolishers added their thunder to the day. Siege mortars and bombards, culverin and howitzers coughed their explosive loads skyward.

The end of the causeway vanished in an earthshaking blizzard of explosions. Deafening hammer blows slammed down, one after the other. So quick and so continuous they merged into one unending concussive procession of detonation. Energy weapons boiled ocean waves to geysers of steam. High explosives churned the beach into hurricanes of glassy shrapnel.

The air reeked of salt and burning metal. Seared meat and blood.

Twenty Land Raiders died instantly. Cored and twisted inside out, they slewed around like disembowelled grazer beasts. Sons of Horus legionaries spilled from the smoke-belching wrecks. Blistering crossfires cut them to pieces. Oxy-phosphor warheads seared the agonised cries from their lungs. Armour shredded and disassembled. Flesh vaporised.

Hakon’s remaining artillery lobbed explosives onto the causeway, hoping to deny the tanks on the beach reinforcements and strangle the breakout at birth. Atlas recovery tanks by the dozen drove wrecks into the ocean as modified Trojans worked nonstop to keep the causeway viable; nothing could be allowed to slow the flood of troop carriers onto the mainland.

More Land Raiders plunged into the maelstrom. Another half dozen, then a dozen more, spreading out as they hit the shell-torn beach. They ground over the corpses of their Legion brothers, finding cover in blood and fuel-filled craters. Return fire blitzed uphill.

The Scorpius barged past gutted Land Raiders, peeling left and right at the causeway’s end. Rotating launchers unleashed rippling salvoes of warheads at the linked strongpoints. Three exploded in quick succession, brought down by implosive warheads that blew out their structural members.

Storm Eagles and Thunderhawks roared overhead, missiles and shells streaming from their wing and nose mounts. Sheets of fire blossomed along the Imperial line, but Edoraki Hakon’s regiments were dug in well, and dug in deep.

Hydra batteries slewed to follow the aircraft. Manticore batteries locked their targeting cogitators onto engine flares. Sky-eagle missiles and rapid firing autocannon shells stitched the sky. Half a dozen gunships were brought down in quick succession, smashing into the cliffs like faulty triumphal fireworks.

Sons of Horus bolters punched spiralling contrails through the shroud smoke. Their missiles arced over and slammed down on gun emplacements. Solid hits were announced by mushrooming flares of white light. Dreadnought talons moved through the heart of the attack like giants. Assault cannons too heavy even for a legionary brayed, and rocket after rocket streaked from rotary launchers.

Whickering storms of gunfire, missiles, energy weapons and gouts of flame burned back and forth across kilometres of beach.

The dead and dying were crushed beneath the roaring tracks of the Land Raiders. Rhinos followed them to the assigned high water mark, and the icy sand was churned to gritty, red paste.

The Land Raider rocked on its tracks as a nearby explosion slammed it to the side. Aximand gripped tight to a stanchion as the heavy vehicle pitched forward into a crater. Its engine roared as it clawed its way out the opposite side. The assault carrier’s armour attenuated most of the noise of battle, but the thrumming bass note of the percussive shock waves were thudding with increasing regularity and force.

‘Getting closer,’ said Yade Durso, line captain of Fifth Company.

‘Getting worried?’ Aximand asked.

‘No,’ said Durso, and Aximand believed him. It took more than emplaced strongpoints, companies of superheavies and regiments of Army to rattle a veteran like Durso.

Aximand’s subordinate turned something over in his hand, dextrously moving it between his fingers like a sleight of hand barker.

‘What’s that?’

Durso looked down, as though unaware of what he’d been doing.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just an affectation.’

‘Show me.’

Durso shrugged and opened his palm. A golden icon on the end of a chain to be worn around the neck. The Eye of Horus shone red in the light of the compartment.

‘Superstitious, Yade?’

‘Turns out I can be now, Little Horus,’ said Durso.

Aximand nodded, conceding the point. Not so long ago, such behaviour would have been grounds for censure. Now it seemed only natural. Aximand looked back at his warriors, ten Sons of Horus bearing heavy breacher shields and multi-spectral helmet attachments. Each warrior’s armour bore Cthonian gang sigils etched into the plates. Their bolters were decorated with kill markings and grisly trophies hung from every belt.

The Quiet Order had reinstituted the old practices of the home world. Serghar Targost, his throat bound in counterseptic wraps, had advocated the reinstatement of Cthonian iconography and the Warmaster had agreed.

‘I thought we were done with savage totems,’ he said.

‘Just like the old days,’ said Durso. ‘It’s good.’

‘But these aren’t the old days,’ snapped Aximand.

Durso shook his head. ‘You really want to get into this now?’

‘No,’ said Aximand, strangely disquieted at the new tribalistic mien of his warriors. He had thought that with Erebus gone, the XVI Legion was to re-establish itself. It seemed it had, just not in the image he’d expected. Edges worn smooth by centuries of compliance were being made rough again.

Aximand patched his helmet’s visual link to the Land Raider’s external pict-feeds.

There wasn’t much to see.

Shroud bombs blanketed the shale beaches and granite cliffs ahead of them in waves of electromagnetic distortion. Flattened tank traps ghosted from the fog alongside acres of shell-ruined razorwire. Static fizzed the display as muzzle flares from cliff-top artillery fired. Seconds later, the Land Raider shook from a nearby impact of high explosive shells. The vehicle juddered over the wreckage of something that might once have been a Rhino.

Aximand silently urged the driver to hurry up.

The Dwell campaign had spoiled him. The urgent, body slamming fury of that fight was a throwback to the earliest days of the Great Crusade, when the Legions were still developing their modus operandi. It had been a testing time, re-learning lessons taught by wars that were only just evolving from the hell of techno-barbarian tribes hacking at one another in two amorphous hosts of flesh and sweat.

New weapons, new technologies, new transhuman physiques and new brothers to fight alongside. It was one thing to build a Legion, another to learn how to fight as a Legion.

‘Ten seconds,’ called the driver.

Aximand nodded, checking the load on his bolter and moved Mourn-it-all’s scabbard at his shoulder. Full load, and just right. Just like last time. He shifted on the ready line. He rolled his shoulders and pulled his shield in tight. He clenched and unclenched his jaw.

‘Five seconds!’

The pitch of the engine increased, the driver wringing another few dozen metres for the warriors he carried. An explosion rocked the vehicle up onto one track. It landed flat with a crashing boom of grinding stone and protesting metal.

‘Go, go, go!’

The Land Raider came to a grinding halt. The assault ramp hammered down and a roaring crescendo of noise rammed inside. Explosions, gunfire, screams and metal banging on metal. The volume on the world spun into the red.

Aximand heard a breath at his ear and shouted, ‘Kill for the living, and kill for the dead!’

The old war cry sprang unbidden from his lips as he charged into the maelstrom.

His warriors roared in answer.

Thanks to Lyx, Raeven had marched Banelash almost into the ground to get to Avadon, but right now wished he hadn’t bothered. She had woken him in the night, leading him to believe that some carnal adventure was in the offing, but instead she’d offered him entrails and prophecy.

‘The Great Wolf comes to Avadon,’ she’d said, dumping the warm, wet handful of organs in his lap. ‘His throat will bare when the twin wolves of fire are upon you. Cut it and the White Naga of legend will come to you with revelation.’

Raeven gagged on the stench of rotten meat, ready to push her away when he saw her eyes were milky white and without pupil. His mother’s had done that when he was young and what she’d said always came true. Instead of beating her, he asked, ‘Horus? Horus will be at Avadon?’

But she’d gone limp and neither salts nor slaps could rouse her.

Over Tyana Kourion and Castor Alcade’s misgivings, Raeven had immediately mustered his household and marched north to Avadon with ten of his Knights. Two of his sons came with him, Egelic and Banan, while his middle son, Osgar, remained in Lupercalia to retain a ruling presence.

And after a full night’s gruelling march around the spur of the Untar Mesas, and over unending vistas of agricultural land…

Nothing.

Their honourable machines waited like common footsoldiers, awaiting word from Edoraki Hakon on when they might deploy. Denied a place in the order of battle by that humourless Army sow sent spasms of disgust along his spine.

Banelash reacted to his anger by pawing the ground with its clawed feet. Its threat auspex bathed his sensorium in red, and its weapons powered up with a whine of servos. Nearby Army reserve forces backed away from the Knights as their warhorns blared.

‘We should be over that ridge, father,’ said Egelic, Raeven’s oldest son. ‘Why are we not fighting?’

‘Because outsiders have taken Molech,’ hissed Banan, Raeven’s youngest. ‘When the Imperium came, they cut our House’s balls off.’

‘Enough,’ snapped Raeven. Banan was almost thirty and should know better, but his mother doted on him and denied him nothing. His manners were boorish, his arrogance as monstrous as his sense of entitlement.

He reminded Raeven a lot of his younger self, except Banan had none of the charm and charisma he’d had to carry off arrogance and make it look like confidence.

But in this case, Banan was also right.

‘Come with me,’ he said, marching from the area they’d been apportioned and striding through the trenchlines and redoubts. Approaching the forward edge of battle, Raeven linked to the battle cogitators in Edoraki Hakon’s command bunker. Inloading data swarmed the sensorium, and Banelash growled in anticipation.

It could smell the blood and hear the crash of gunfire. This was war, real war, a chance to test itself against a foe more interesting than a rogue mallahgra or a pack of xenosmilus. Raeven felt the echoes of all the warriors who’d piloted Banelash before him, heard the mingled whispers of their battle hunger pump through his body like a shot of ‘slaught.

Raeven doubted he could have turned back even if he wanted to.

He strode through the jumble of ammo depots, Trojans, artillery pits and rear echelon troops. His Knights followed behind, boasting of the enemies they would kill. The ground rose sharply towards the front and the sky raged as though a phantasmagorical storm blazed like gods in battle in the heavens.

Insistent warnings sounded in the sensorium, tagged with Marshal Hakon’s personal signifier. He ignored them and pushed on, striding on to the edge of the cliff.

The end of the causeway was half a kilometre distant, and the space between it and the cliffs was a shattered graveyard of twisted metal and fire. A hellscape of blazing craters, scores of wrecked tanks and hundreds of dismembered bodies.

Thousands of giant warriors pushed forward behind heavy breacher shields. Against small-arms fire and even medium gauge weapons they offered effective protection, but against the kinds of guns Hakon had trained on them, they just weren’t up to the job. Each advance left a trail of bodies, limbless corpses and tributaries of blood to fill craters with red lakes.

Raeven had never seen so many Space Marines, hadn’t even conceived there could be so many at all. Banelash tugged at his mind, urging him to commit, to ride out in glory and smash one of those advancing shield-wedges apart.

‘Come on, father,’ urged Banan. ‘Let’s break them! Smash each one apart in turn until we roll the entire line up.’

He wanted to give the order. Oh, how he wanted to give that order.

‘Yes, we could break one, probably two, maybe even three of the shieldwalls, but that will be all,’ he said, feeling Banelash’s ire at his refusal to ride. ‘Then we would be overwhelmed by the artillery and dragged down by infantry. An ignoble death. Hardly knightly.’

His Knight sent a spasm of neural feedback through his spine at his resistance, and Raeven winced at the severity of it. When he opened his eyes, they were immediately drawn to an up-armoured Land Raider as it smashed through a rockcrete tidal wall, slamming down on bollard tank traps and crushing them beneath its weight.

A banner streamed from the rear of both track guards, each bearing a rearing wolf insignia. Gunfire sparked from the Land Raider’s armour and Raeven saw the direct hit of a lascannon strike its flank where the right-side sponson had been sheared off. It should have blown a hole right into the vehicle.

Instead, the energy of the shot dissipated at the moment of impact and a bloom of fire enveloped the tank, setting the twin wolf banners ablaze.

‘Flare shield,’ he said, recognising similar tech to the ion shields of Banelash.

His throat will bare when the twin wolves of fire are upon you.

‘Lupercal,’ said Raeven.

The deck beneath Grael Noctua shuddered with impacts, rounded arrowheads forming in the plates beneath his boots. The Thunderhawk was a utilitarian design, a workhorse craft that had the virtue of being quick and easy to manufacture.

It was also, relatively speaking, disposable.

Which was scant comfort to the men being carried within it.

Squatting by the rear ramp with the bulky weight of a jump pack smouldering at his back, Noctua felt every impact on the gunship’s hull. He heard every snap of tension cables and creak of press-bolted wings as the pilot made desperate evasion manoeuvres.

Streams of gunfire reached up to the gunship, weaving through the air as the gunners tried to anticipate its movement. Flak pounded the air like drumbeats. Six warriors dropped as armour-piercing shells ripped up through the fuselage and split them like humanoid-shaped bags of blood.

The line of tracer fire intersected with the starboard wing. The engine took the brunt of the impact, then the aileron sheared off.

‘On me!’ shouted Noctua.

The jump light was still amber, but if they didn’t get off this doomed bird, they were going down with it. The Thunderhawk slipped sideways through the air, heeling over to the side as the starboard engine blew out.

He bent his legs and pushed himself out and down, pulling his arms in tight to his sides. He didn’t look back to see if his men were following him. They were or they weren’t. He’d know when he hit the ground.

He felt the explosion of the Thunderhawk above him. He hoped its burning carcass wasn’t about to fall on him. He grinned at what Ezekyle and Falkus would make of that. Three Thunderhawks went up in flames, probably more. It didn’t matter. Everyone knew the aircraft were expendable. Assault legionaries filled the sky.

He ignored them and fixed his attention on the uprushing ground.

His battle-brothers on the beach were embroiled in a quagmire of shelling and interlocking fields of fire. The black shale of the beach reminded Noctua of the massacre on Isstvan V, but this time it was the Sons of Horus doing the dying.

Noctua angled his descent towards the objective given to him by Lupercal himself. The arrangement of strongpoints, trenches and redoubts was exactly as the Warmaster had predicted.

Mortals. So predictable.

An icon in the shape of the new moon, matching the one etched on his helm, overlaid a heavily fortified strongpoint. Layered in outworks, protected by point-defence guns, it was defended by hundreds of soldiers and its placement in the line.

Noctua swung his legs down so he was falling boots first. A pulse of thought fired the jump pack with a shrieking hurricane of blue-hot fire. He’d specially modified the intake/outlet jets to scream as he fired it.

His hurtling descent slowed. Noctua landed with a crash of splitting stone. His knees bent and the burners of his jump pack scorched the strongpoint’s roof. Seconds later the crash of boots on stone surrounded him. By the time he freed the two melta charges from his plastron, he counted twenty-six further impacts.

More than enough.

He slammed the meltas down to either side and bounded back into the air, firing a short burst from the jump pack. His warriors followed suit and no sooner were they in the air then fifty-eight melta bombs exploded virtually simultaneously.

Cutting his burners, Noctua drew his sword and bolt pistol and dropped through the smoking ruin of the strongpoint’s roof. The upper level was utterly destroyed, a howling, screaming mass of dying flesh. He dropped onto the floor below, crashing through its weakened structure and landing in the centre of what had once been a projector table.

Stunned mortals surrounded him with faces like landed fish. Mouths opened in terrified, uncomprehending ‘O’ shapes. He leapt among them, sword cutting three officers down with a single sweep as he shot two more in the face. Before the corpses hit the floor he was moving. Powerful impacts smashed through the ceiling, spilling rock dust and iron beams into what had, only moments before, been a fully functioning command centre.

Dust-covered statues of warrior gods rose up from the debris and slaughtered every living person within reach. Bolter rounds exploded flak-armoured bodies like over-pressurised fuel canisters. Arterial spray painted the walls in criss-crossing arcs. Roaring chainblades hewed limbs and spines, made jigsaws of flesh.

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.

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.

Another gunship crashed. A Thunderhawk this time. It went in hard, nose first. A fan of hard, wet shale sprayed out before it like bullets. A dozen legionaries dropped, killed as cleanly as if by sniper fire. A sharp-edged shard smashed Aximand’s visor. The left lens cracked. His vision blurred.

The gunship’s wing dipped and ploughed the shale, flipping the aircraft over onto its back. The other wing snapped like tinder as it careened along the sand, coming apart with every bouncing impact. The spinning, burning wreckage crashed into a knot of Sons of Horus and they vanished in a sheeting fireball as its engines exploded. Turbine blades flew like swords.

‘Lupercal’s oath!’ swore Aximand.

‘Never thought I’d be glad to be a footslogger in an assault,’ said Durso, lifting the golden icon tied to his shield grip.

Aximand shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Look.’

The three Land Raiders before them looked like they had been struck by the fists of a Titan’s demolition hammer. One was entirely gutted, a blackened skeleton that held only molten corpses. A handful of warriors staggered from the second. Their armour was black – originally so, not scorched by the fires.

‘Aren’t the Justaerin with the First Captain?’ said Durso, recognising the heavy plates of the Terminators.

‘Not all of them,’ said Aximand.

The third Land Raider’s lupine pennants were ablaze, and it had been split open by a ferocious impact.

Horus was down on one knee, his taloned hand pressed to the side of his Land Raider, as though mourning its passing. Blood slicked one side of his dark battleplate and a length of pipework pierced his side like a spear.

‘Lupercal,’ said Durso, awed by a single warrior in the midst of such industrial-scale slaughter. But what a warrior.

‘Sons of Horus!’ shouted Aximand, pushing onward. ‘Rally to me!’

Smoke billowed from the Land Raider’s interior. Twisted warriors stepped through it, their bodies on fire. The lenses of their helms shone the bleached white of bone left in dusty tombs.

Not Justaerin, something far worse.

What had Maloghurst called them?

Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.

Serghar Targost had called them something else as the narthecium servitors finally removed the sutures holding his throat together.

Twin Flames.

Now Aximand knew why. Their armour was utterly black. Not painted black like the Justaerin and not from the vehicle’s destruction, but from the infernal warpfires burning within them.

Ger Gerradon was first out. Aximand could still picture the two swords plunging into his chest, the lake of blood that formed around him as he bled out on the floor of the Mausolytic. Gerradon cared nothing for the fires lapping his armour. Nor did the seven other figures clambering from the wreckage.

Sons of Horus formed up on Aximand, a hundred warriors at least. He couldn’t be sure because of the smoke. Each legionary saw what he saw. The Warmaster threatened.

The Mechanicum had proofed Lupercal’s vehicle against all but a Titan’s fury, and every piece of intelligence suggested that none of the Imperial Legios had any gross-displacement engines yet in the field. So what had done this?

The answer wasn’t long in coming.

They rode out of the smoke, articulated giants in crimson and gold, banners streaming gloriously from their segmented carapaces. The ground shook with the pounding beat of their clawed feet and the ululating skirl of their hunting horns.

Crackling lances and screaming swords held before them, the Knights of Molech charged the Warmaster.