Ultra Marines 02 - Warriors of Ultramar by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer [Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the inability of the Imperial fleet to hold back the tyranid invaders, Tarsis

Ultra was not without defences of her own. Ground-based batteries of defence lasers

fired skyward and hundreds of orbital torpedoes roared into the upper atmosphere on

blazing tail plumes.

The defence lasers slashed through the sky, but the rapidly mutating content of

the air had one more adaptive surprise for the defenders of Tarsis Ultra.

One of the greatest problems for ground-based laser weapons was the reduction

in power they suffered over long distances, called “thermal blooming”. As a laser

beam travels through the air, small quantities of its energy are lost to the surrounding

atmosphere as heat, which causes disturbances in the air and disrupts the optical path

of the beam. Not only does this impair accuracy, but it spreads the beam wider, thus

weakening the energy delivered to its target. For the colossal energies produced by

the defence lasers, this was not normally a problem, but each beam was passing

through dozens of rapidly fluctuating temperature patches in the air, causing them to

impact with greatly reduced power.

Many of the smaller organisms suffered at the hands of the defence lasers, but the

majority of the tyranid creatures had little to fear from them.

But torpedoes have no such barriers to performance and these weapons reaped a

fearful tally amongst the gathering predators. Hundreds of torpedoes exploded

amongst the bloated spore ships of the tyranid fleet, destroying some and fatally

wounding others. Scores of alien creatures perished and fell through the atmosphere

as bright, fleshy meteors, haemorrhaging their lifeblood like comets’ tails.

The skies above Tarsis Ultra were what Imperial strategos referred to as “target-

heavy” and every torpedo found its mark in a tyranid creature. Within two hours,

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