The Beast Arises Omnibus Volume 2 (Warhammer 40,000) by Guy Haley & David Guymer & David Annandale & Gav Thorpe

Author:Guy Haley & David Guymer & David Annandale & Gav Thorpe [Haley, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2018-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-two

Prax – orbital

Zerberyn stood at the viewport of Palimodes’ starboard observation gallery, a hand’s width from his own dead-eyed reflection, and forced himself to watch the planet die.

Grey-brown continents and green seas were now wreathed in smoky black. The stratosphere had already burnt off as surface temperatures passed a hundred Celsius and carried on climbing. The thin band of residual atmosphere stuck to the riven crust like tar. A hex-like grid of magmic fractures smouldered through the pall, fault lines, the crust splitting, less a world now than rocky islands floating apart from one another on a molten sea. Bouts of volcanism racked the major continents on which mountains still stood, each an event of epochal destruction rendered into a non-event by the periodic eruptions that ejected billions of tonnes of mantle into orbital space. A glowing cloud shrouded the planet, metals, minerals, voidship fragments, churned by its hundred-thousand-kilometres-per-hour flight and its own increasingly erratic spin. Its nickel-iron core was destabilising. Magnetic distortions caused rocky accretions to blast apart at random, like targets on a practice range, and sent the massive ork container ships caught up in the destruction spiralling between orbits with plasma tails streaming in their wake.

Kalkator had spared no detail of the likely progression. Had he not been as forthcoming, then Zerberyn would have insisted.

The planet-cracker had been fired directly into the planet’s mantle through a kilometres-long shaft sunk a thouand years before for this sole purpose. From there the warhead had slowed, drilling through a further thousand kilometres of semi-molten rock to its long-programmed detonation site at the interstitial layer between core and mantle.

Within that narrow variance of pressure and density, it had detonated.

Zerberyn had never devoted much prior thought to the complete destruction of a planetary body, but he could see that it had been enacted with a ruthlessness and a precision of detail the equal of anything that he could have brought to the task. A detonation within the core itself would only have wrecked the world’s magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for decades, while at a shallower site in the mantle the resultant tectonic recoil would have been a slap on the wrist compared to what was taking place now.

The boundary layer. It had to be there. And it had taken exactly the thirty minutes that Kalkator had said it would.

The core’s greater density reflected the seismic shockwaves back upwards like sunlight hitting an ocean’s waves. The effect on the surface was cataclysmic. Tremors had become quakes and quakes upheavals that tore the world asunder, crust and core between them amplifying the seismic waves and rebounding them until the entire globe rang like a bell and the crust was a shattered ruin.

That was what Zerberyn was watching now: the penultimate phase.

He wondered how many souls had been on Prax. Ten billion? A hundred billion? It was the one variable amongst the specifics of time and forces, and it ate at him.

‘Back from me, abomination,’ he snarled, kicking back with the stump of his leg.

The

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