Eye of Terra Read online

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘Not enough even for an Apothecary.’

  ‘He will be avenged,’ promised Sejanus.

  ‘How?’ demanded Gorthoi, belligerent to the point of requiring admonishment.

  ‘In blood. In death,’ said Sejanus. ‘Our mission is unchanged. We move out and kill anything we find. Does anyone have a problem with that plan?’

  None of them did.

  Dymos looked up at the ragged hole their drop pod had torn.

  ‘The rest of the company’s got to be hundreds of kilometres above us,’ he said. ‘We’re on our own down here.’

  ‘No,’ said Sejanus, ‘we’re not.’

  His armour’s systems were picking up an Imperial presence.

  ‘Who else is this deep?’ asked Malsandar.

  Sejanus had never seen this kind of signature, but whoever it was, not even the electromagnetic junk fouling the air and the hostile emissions from the ork machinery at scrapworld’s core could obscure his presence.

  Only one person would be visible this deep in Gorro.

  Sejanus grinned. ‘It’s the Emperor.’

  Horus dropped down through the scrapworld’s interior, a pearl-white angel trailing wings of fire as he fell. He’d jumped without a second’s hesitation, blind to any thought other than following his father.

  The quake had ripped the structure of Gorro apart. Its sedi­mentary levels of agglomerated junk were coming undone. Layers were separating and compacted debris was crumbling as its structural integrity collapsed at an exponential rate.

  That meant two things.

  Firstly, Horus was able to follow roughly the same route his father had fallen.

  And secondly, the spaces opening up below him were getting wider, meaning his descent was getting faster. He smashed down through warrens of dwelling caves, stinking feeding pits and laby­rinthine workshops that blazed with emerald fire.

  Horus endured impacts that would have killed even a legionary as the scrapworld’s death throes tossed him around like a leaf in a hurricane. He looked up, seeing tiny figures in black and gold falling after him.

  Justaerin and Legio Custodes.

  They’d followed him down, heroic and selfless.

  But, ultimately, doomed.

  They weren’t primarchs. They could not endure what he could.

  He saw Justaerin incinerated by a gout of plasmic fire billowing from a ruptured conduit. Custodians who dropped in arcing dives were smashed by falling debris or deforming structural elements. Their limp, lifeless bodies followed him down into the depths.

  Eruptions flared up from the depths in kilometres-long forks of lightning. Ork war-machines exploded and swirling contrails of wildly corkscrewing ammunition ricocheted from every surface. Some of it struck him, scorching his armour and blistering his flesh.

  Horus dropped through cavernous spaces filled with towering engines that no adept of Mars would ever dare build, let alone get to function. The world spun around him as Gorro’s structure twisted and screamed with its imminent destruction. Cliff-like walls slammed together, giant girders wrought from the keels of wrecked starships bent like wire, and gouts of molten metal poured from collapsing foundries.

  Horus slammed into a wall that might once have been a deck plate. Angled enough to slow his descent, but only just. The ground below was a nightmarish mass of cascading debris and fire. Horus punched his fist through the metal, ripping a jagged furrow in his wake to slow his descent.

  Even with his speed reduced, Horus still slammed into the ground too hard. He bent his knees and rolled through the flames, feeling the heat of them scorch his armour and reach through to his flesh.

  The deck plate shuddered and tore free of its moorings.

  It tipped him over a yawning abyss limned in blue-white radiance from below. For a second, Horus was held aloft in an incandescently bright void of competing gravitational forces, wrenched in a thousand directions at once. Then one force, stronger than all the others combined, took hold of him and drew him down.

  Horus fell and only at the last instant managed to right himself. He slammed down, bending his knee and punching a crater into the ground with the force of his impact.

  For an instant he couldn’t believe his senses.

  The space in which he’d landed was a vast, spherical chamber where endlessly reconfiguring gravimetric forces were at play. There was no up or down, no cardinal direction in which gravity would act. Lightning leapt from enormous brass orbs spaced at random intervals around its inner surfaces, and a dizzyingly complex series of impossibly inverted walkways and gantries surrounded a colossal vortex of energy. At least a thousand metres wide, it seethed like a caged beast of plasma fire. Lashing silver fire forked from its expanding mass, tearing at Gorro’s structure and breaking it apart.

  As blinding and mesmerising as the runaway plasma reaction was at the scrapworld’s heart, it was to a beleaguered golden light that Horus’ eye was drawn.

  The Emperor was fighting his way through a howling mob of the largest greenskins Horus had ever seen. Most were the equal of a primarch in stature. One even dwarfed the Emperor himself.

  His father fought to reach a fragmenting ring of iron surrounding the blinding plasma core, but the greenskins had him surrounded.

  This was a fight not even the Emperor could win alone.

  But he was not alone.

  Sejanus and his Glory Squad fought through the disintegrating ruins of the scrapworld in the old way. No subtlety, no finesse. Like a raid on a rival warlord’s territory back in the day, when all that mattered was brute force and shocking violence. Where you stabbed and bludgeoned and shot until you either killed everyone in front of you or were dragged down in blood.

  His armour was pearl-white no more, but slathered in viscera. He’d been forced to discard his pistol when a mechanised slug creature had latched onto it and tried to detonate the ammunition. His sword broke on the armoured skull of another ironclad, spilling its disembodied, fungal brain to the deck.

  None of that mattered.

  His fists were weapons.

  His mass was a weapon.

  Enkanus and Ulsaar were gone, murdered with motorised cleavers and energised hooks.

  All that mattered was that they reach the Emperor.

  Sejanus had settled into a rhythm of battle, that cold void within a warrior where his world shrinks to a sphere of engagement. Where the truly great are separated from the merely skilled by virtue of their ability to be aware of everything around them.

  Dymos fought on his left, Gorthoi his right.

  They pushed ever onwards, wading knee deep in greenskin blood and flesh. The stench of the abattoir and offal pit was overpowering, but Sejanus blocked it out. The raging tide of orks was a mass of green flesh clad in beaten armour. They saw more of the ironclads, and many other technological abominations that made them seem almost comprehensible.

  In the course of the Great Crusade, Sejanus had seen many examples of the crudely effective greenskin technology, but what lay beneath the surface of the scrapworld were orders of magnitude more advanced and abhorrent.

  The Emperor’s signal never once wavered in his visor, though every other return fizzed and screamed with distortion.

  Ahead, Sejanus saw a ragged archway through which spilled blazing white light. The Emperor lay beyond it.

  ‘We’re here,’ he gasped, even his phenomenal transhuman physique pushed to the limits of endurance by this fight.

  He stormed through the archway and into a vast, spherical chamber with the brightest sun at its heart.

  ‘Lupercal…’ breathed Sejanus.

  Horus’ sword was broken, his twin bolters empty of shells. The sword had snapped halfway along its length, the edge dulled from hewing countless greenskin bodies. He’d fought his way onto a stepped bridge, killing scores
of monstrously swollen orks to reach a crumbling ledge just below the Emperor.

  Blood drenched him, his own and that of the orks.

  His helmet was long gone, torn away in a grappling, gouging duel with an iron-tusked giant with motorised crusher claws for arms and a fire-belching maw. He’d broken the beast over his knee and hurled its corpse from the bridge. Rogue gravity vortices hurled it up and away.

  More of the greenskins followed him onto the bridge, grunting and laughing as they stalked him. Their grim amusement was a mystery to Horus. They were going to die, whether he killed them or they were burned to ash by the colossal plasma reactor’s inevitable destruction.

  Who would laugh in the face of their death?

  The Emperor fought an armoured giant twice his height and breadth. Its skull was a vast, iron-helmed boulder with elephantine tusks and chisel-like teeth that gleamed dully. Its eyes were coal-red slits of such vicious intelligence that it stole Horus’ breath.

  Horus had never seen its equal. No bestiary would include its description for fear of being ridiculed, no magos of the Mechanicum would accept such a specimen could exist.

  Six clanking, mechanised limbs bolted through its flesh bore grinding, crackling, sawing, snapping, flame-belching weapons of murder. The Emperor’s armour was burning, the golden wreath now ashes around his neck.

  Chugging rotor cannons battered the Emperor’s armour even as claws of lightning tore portions of it away. It was taking every screed of the Emperor’s warrior skill and psychic might to keep the mech-warlord’s weaponry from killing him.

  ‘Father!’ shouted Horus.

  The greenskin turned and saw Horus. It saw the desperation in his face and laughed. A fist like a Reductor siege hammer smashed the Emperor’s sword aside and a fist of green flesh lifted him into the air. It crushed the life from him with its inhuman power.

  ‘No!’ yelled Horus, battering his way through the last of the greenskins to reach his father’s side. The mech-warlord turned his spinal weapons on Horus, and a blistering series of lightning strikes hammered the walkway.

  Horus dodged them all, a wolf on the hunt amid the ash and fire of the world’s ending. He had no weapon, and where that wasn’t normally a handicap to a warrior of the Legions, against this foe it was a definite disadvantage.

  No weapon of his would hurt this beast anyway.

  But one of its own…

  Horus gripped one of the warlord’s mechanised arms, one bearing the spinning brass spheres and crackling tines of its lightning weapon. The arm’s strength was prodigious, but centi­metre by centi­metre Horus forced it around.

  Lightning blasted from the weapon, burning Horus’ hands black. Bone gleamed through the ruin of his flesh, but what was that pain when set against the loss of a father?

  With one last herculean effort, Horus wrenched the arm up as a sawing blast of white-edged lightning erupted from the weapon. A searing burst of fire impacted on the mech-warlord’s forearm and the limb exploded from the elbow down in a welter of blackened bone and boiling blood. The beast grunted in surprise, dropping the Emperor and staring in dumb fascination at the ruin of its arm.

  Seizing the chance he had been given, the Emperor bent low and surged upwards with his bluesteel sword extended. The tip ripped into the mech-warlord’s belly and burst from its back in a shower of sparks.

  ‘Now you die,’ said the Emperor, and ripped his blade up.

  It was an awful, agonising, mortal wound. Electrical fire vented from hideous metal organs within the wreckage of the greenskin’s body. It was a murderous wound that not even a beast of such unimaginable proportions could take and live.

  Yet that was not the worst of it.

  Horus felt the build up of colossal psychic energies and shielded his eyes as a furious light built within the Emperor. Power like nothing he had ever seen his father wield, or even suspected he possessed. All consuming, all powerful, it was the power to extinguish life in every sphere of its existence. Physical flesh turned to ash before it and what ancient faiths had once called a soul was burned out of existence, never to cohere again.

  Nothing would ever remain of he who suffered such a fate.

  Their body and soul would pass from the finite energy of the universe, to fade into memory and have all that they were wiped from the canvas of existence.

  This was as complete a death as it was possible to suffer.

  That power blazed along the Emperor’s sword, filling the greenskin with killing light. It erupted in a bellowing golden explosion, and lightning blazed from the coruscating after­image of its death, arcing from ork to ork as it sought out all those who were kin to the master of Gorro. Unimaginable energies poured from the Emperor, reaching throughout the entirety of the chamber and burning every last shred of alien flesh to a mist of drifting golden ash.

  Horus watched as the power of life and death coursed through the Emperor, saw him swell in stature until he was like unto a god. Wreathed in pellucid amber flames, towering and majestic.

  His father never claimed to be a god, and refuted such notions with a vengeance. He had even castigated a son for believing what Horus now saw before him with his very own eyes…

  Horus dropped to his knees, overcome with the wonder of what he was witnessing.

  ‘Lupercal!’

  He turned at the sound of his name.

  And there he was, his wolf on the hunt.

  Sprinting along the bridge was Hastur, howling his name over and over while pumping a fist in the air. He had fought beyond the limits of endurance and sanity to stand at the side of his primarch and his Emperor.

  The wondrous light behind him was eclipsed by blue-white plasma, and Horus turned to see the Emperor silhouetted in the cold fire of Gorro’s seething core.

  His back was to Horus, sword sheathed at his hip and arms raised high. The same golden fire that had so comprehensively destroyed the greenskin warlord dripped from his spread finger­tips like immaterial fire.

  Horus had no knowledge of the insane mechanics behind the greenskin power core, but any fool could see that it was spiralling to destruction. The powerful tremors shaking Gorro apart was evidence enough of that, but to see the bound starfire straining against its bonds was to know it for certain. Had the death of the Mech-Warlord been the final straw in breaking whatever bonds of belief held its monstrous power in check?

  How long would it be before it exploded? Horus had no idea, but suspected it would be long before any of them could escape the depths of the scrapworld.

  ‘This can’t be how it ends,’ whispered Horus.

  ‘No, my son,’ said his father, gathering the golden light within him once again. ‘It is not.’

  The Emperor clenched his fists and the air around the seething plasma ball folded. It turned sickeningly inwards, as though reality was merely a backdrop against which the dramas of the galaxy were played out.

  And where it folded, the spaces behind were horribly revealed, great abysses of crawling chaos and unlimited potential. Howling voids where the combined lives of this galaxy were but motes reflected in the cosmic dust storm. An empyrean realm of the never-born, where nightmares were birthed in the foetid womb of mortal lust. Things of void-cold form writhed in the darkness, like a million snakes of ebon glass coiled in endless, slithering knots.

  Horus stared deep into the abyss, repulsed and fascinated by the secret workings of the universe. Even as he watched, the Emperor drew the fabric of the world together, sealing them around the greenskin plasma core. The effort was costing him dear, the golden light at his heart waning with every passing second.

  And then it was done.

  A thunderous bang of air rushed to fill the void left by the plasma fire, and the backwash blew back into the chamber in a gale of sulphurous wind.

  The Emperor fell to one knee, his head bowed.

  Horu
s was at his side a heartbeat later.

  ‘What did you do?’ said Horus, helping his father to his feet. The Emperor looked up, colour already returning to his wondrous features.

  ‘Sent the plasma core into the aether,’ said the Emperor, ‘but it will not last long. We must withdraw before the warp fold implodes and takes everything with it. The entire mass of this scrapworld will be soon crushed as surely as if it had fallen into the grip of a black hole.’

  ‘Then let’s get off this damn thing,’ said Horus.

  They watched the final death agonies of Gorro from the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit. With the Mournival before them, the Emperor and Horus stood at the ouslite disc from which he had planned the void war against the scraphulk fleet.

  ‘The greenskins will never recover from this,’ said Horus. ‘Their power is broken. It will be thousands of years before the beast arises again.’

  The Emperor shook his head, drawing a shimmering orrery of light from the disc. Gently glowing points of light rotated around the edge of the disc, scores of systems, hundreds of worlds.

  ‘Would that you were right, my son,’ said the Emperor. ‘But the greenskin is a cancer upon this galaxy. For every one of their ramshackle empires we burn to the ground, another arises, even greater and ever more deeply entrenched. Such is the nature of the ork – and this is why their race is so hard to destroy. They must be eradicated wholesale or they will return all the stronger, time and time again, until they come at us in numbers too great to defeat.’

  ‘Then we are to be cursed by the greenskin for all time?’

  ‘Not if we act swiftly and without mercy.’

  ‘I am your sword,’ said Horus. ‘Show me where to strike.’

  The Emperor smiled, and Horus felt his heart swell in pride.

  ‘The Telon Reach was but a satrapy of the largest empire we have ever encountered, one that must fall before the Crusade can continue,’ said the Emperor. ‘It will be magnificent, the war we will wage to destroy this empire. You will earn much honour in its prosecution, and men will speak of it until the stars themselves go out.’