With a rough chuckle, the Garantine let his kill drop and licked his lips. The room was silent, but outside the crowd cried for the Sons of Horus.
And then they came.
A knot of coruscating blue-white energy emerged from the air and grew in an instant to a glowing sphere of lightning. Tortured air molecules screamed as the teleporter effect briefly twisted the laws of physics to breaking point; in the next second, the blaze of light and noise evaporated and in its place there were five angels of death.
Adeptus Astartes. Most of the people in the plaza had never seen one before, only knowing them from the statues they had seen and the picts in history books and museums. The real thing was, if anything, far more impressive than the legends had ever said.
The cries of adulation were silenced with a shocked gasp from a thousand throats; when Horus had come to liberate Dagonet all those years ago, he had come with his Luna Wolves, the XVI Legiones Astartes. They had stood resplendent in their flawless moon-white armour, trimmed with ebony, and it was this image that was embedded in the collective mind of the Dagoneti people.
But the Astartes standing here, now, were clad in menacing steel-grey from helmet to boot, armour trimmed in bright shining silver. They were gigantic shadows, menacing all who looked upon them. Their heavy armour, the planes of the pauldrons and chest plates, the fierce visages of the red-eyed helms, all of it was as awesome as it was terrifying. And there, clear as the sun in the sky, on their shoulders was the symbol of the great open eye – the mark of Horus Lupercal.
The tallest of the warriors, his battle gear decked with more finery than the others, stepped forward. He was covered with honour-chains and combat laurels, and about his shoulders he wore a metal dolman made from metals mined in the depths of Cthon; the Mantle of the Warmaster, forged by Horus’s captains as a symbol of his might and unbreakable will.
He drew a gold-chased bolt pistol, raising it up high above his head; and then he fired a single shot into the air, the round crashing like thunder. The same sound that rang about Dagonet on the day they were liberated. Before the empty shell casing could strike the marble at his feet, the crowd were shouting their fealty.
Glory to Horus.
The towering warrior holstered his gun and unsealed his helmet, drawing it up so the world might see his face.
There could be no hesitation. No margin for error. Such a chance would never come again.
Kell’s crosshairs rested on the centre of the scowling grille of the Astartes helmet. The shimmering interference of distance seemed to melt away; now there was only the weapon and the target. He was a part of the weapon, the trigger. The final piece of the mechanism.
Time slowed. Through the scope, Kell saw armoured hands clasp the sides of the helmet, flexing to lift it up from the neck ring. In a moment more, flesh would be exposed, a neck bared. A clear target.
And if he did this, what then? What ripples would spread from the assassination of Horus Lupercal? How would the future shift in this moment? What lives would be saved? What lives would be lost? Kell could almost hear the sound of the gears of history turning about him.
He fired.
The hammer falls. The single shot in the chamber is a .75 calibre bullet manufactured on the Shenlong forge world to the exacting tolerances of the Clade Vindicare. The percussion cap is impacted, the propellant inside combusts. Exhaust gases funnel into the pressure centre of a boat-tail round, projecting it down the nitrogen-cooled barrel at supersonic velocities. The sound of the discharge is swallowed by suppression systems that reduce the aural footprint of the weapon to a hollow cough.
As the round leaves the barrel, the Exitus longrifle sends a signal to the Lance; the two weapons are in perfect synchrony. The Lance marshals its energy to expend it for the first and only time. It will burn itself out after one shot.
The round crosses the distance in seconds, dropping in exactly the expected arc towards the figure in the plaza. Windage is nominal, and does not alter its course. Then, with a flash, the bullet strikes the force wall. Any conventional ballistic round would disintegrate at this moment; but the Exitus has fired a Shield-Breaker.
Energised fragments imbued with anti-spinward quantum particles fracture the force wall’s structure, and collapse it; but the barrier is on a cycling circuit and will reactivate in less than two-tenths of a second.
It is not enough. The energy of the Lance follows the Shield-Breaker in as the force wall falls; the Lance is a single-use X-ray laser, slaved to Kell’s rifle, to shoot where he shoots. The stream of radiation converges on the exact same point, with nothing to stop it. The shot strikes the target in the throat, reducing flesh to atoms, superheating fluids into steam, boiling skin, vaporising bone.
The only sound is the fall of the headless corpse as it crashes to the ground, blood jetting across the white marble and the Warmaster’s shining mantle.
FIFTEEN
Rapture / Aftershock / Retribution
There was something exhilarating about taking kills in this fashion.
The many murders that lay at Spear’s feet were usually silent, intimate affairs. Just the killer and the victim, together in a dance that connected them both in a way far more real, far more honest than any other relationship. No one was really naked until the moment of their death.
But this; Spear had never killed more than three people at once because the need had never arisen. Now he was giddy with the blood-rush, wondering why he had never done this before. The joy of the frenzy was all-consuming and it was glorious.
Throwing off all pretence at stealth and subterfuge was liberating in its own way. He was being truthful, baring himself for everyone to see; and they ran screaming when they witnessed it.
Through the low howl of the sandstorm, the refugees were crying out and scattering. He sprinted after them, hooting with laughter.
He had never been so open. Even as a child, he had hidden himself away, afraid of what he was. And then when the women in gold and silver came for him aboard their Black Ship, he concealed himself still deeper. Even the men with eyes of metal and glass who had cut upon him, plumbing the depths of his anomalous, deviant mind, even they had not seen this face of him.
Spear was a whirling torrent of claws and talons, teeth and horns, the daemonskin blurring as it shifted and reformed itself to end the life of each victim in a new and brutal way. Gasping mouths opened up all over him where vitae spattered his bare flesh, drinking it in.
The last of the soldiers was shooting at him, and he felt bursts of burning pain as thick, high-calibre shots impacted his back and legs. The daemonskin screeched as it shunted away the majority of the impact force, preventing the rounds from ever penetrating Spear’s actual flesh. He spun on his heel, pivoting like a dancer, flipping over though the air. The other soldiers were lying in pools of their own fluids, the sand drinking in their last where heads had been torn open, hearts crushed. Spear skipped over the soldier’s comrades and ignored the burn of a shot that caressed his face. He came close and angled on one leg, bringing his other foot up in a speeding black arc. Talons flicked out and the impact point was the man’s nasal cavity. Bone splintered with a wet crunch, jagged fragments entering his brain like daggers.