Post
by Laurel » 15 Mar 2011 12:36
I'm always puzzled why aliens would target USofA ... and now even single cities in the USofA ... why not just do it this way:
It was screaming.
It was the song of the Choral City's death.
The first virus bombs detonated high above the Choral City, the huge explosions spreading the deadly payloads far and wide into the atmosphere. Designed to kill every living thing on the surface of a planet, the viral strains released on Isstvan III were the most efficient killers in the Warmaster's arsenal. The bombs had a high enough yield to murder the planet a hundred times over and were set to burst at numerous differing altitudes and locations across the surface of the planet.
The virus leapt through forests and plains, sweeping along algal blooms and riding air currents across the globe. It crossed mountains, forded rivers, burrowed through glaciers. The Imperium's deadliest weapons, the Emperor himself had been loath to use them.
The bombs fell all across Isstvan III, but most of all, they fell on the Choral City.
The World Eaters were the furthest from cover and suffered the worst of the initial bombardment. Some had reached the safety of the bunkers, but many more had not. Warriors fell to their knees as the virus penetrated their armoured bodies, deadly corrosive agents laced into the viral structure of the weapons dissolving exposed pipes and armour joints, or finding their way inside through battle damage.
Astartes screamed. The sound was all the more shocking for its very existence rather than for the horror of its tone. The virus broke down cellular bonds at the molecular level and its victims literally dissolved into a soup of rancid meat within minutes of exposure, leaving little but sloshing suits of rotted armour. Even many of those who reached the safety of the sealed bunkers died in agony as they shut the doors only to find they had brought the lethal virus inside with them.
The virus spread through the civilian populace of Isstvan III at the speed of thought, leaping from victim to victim in the time it took to breathe in its foul contagion. People dropped where they stood, the flesh sloughing from their skeletons as their nervous systems collapsed and their bones turned to the consistency of jelly.
Bright explosions fed the viral feast, perpetuating the fatal reactions of corruption. The very lethality of the virus was its own worst enemy, for without a host organism to carry it from victim to victim, the virus quickly consumed itself.
However, the bombardment from orbit was unrelenting, smothering the entire planet in a precisely targeted array of overlapping fire plans that ensured that nothing would escape the virus.
Entire kingdoms and vassal states across the surface were obliterated in minutes. Ancient cultures that had survived Old Night and endured the horror of invasion a dozen times over fell without even knowing why, millions dying in screaming agony as their bodies betrayed them and fell apart, reducing them to rotted, decaying matter.
(...)
All it took was a single spark.
An entire planet's worth of decaying matter wreathed the atmosphere of Isstvan III in a thick shawl of combustible gasses. The lance strike from the Vengeful Spirit burned through the upper atmosphere into the choking miasma and its searing beam ignited the gas with a dull whoosh that seemed to suck the oxygen from the air.
In a second, the air itself caught light, ripping across the landscape in a howling maelstrom of fire and noise. Entire continents were laid bare, their landscapes seared to bare rock, their decayed populations vaporised in seconds as winds of fire swept across their surfaces in a deadly gale of blazing destruction.
Cities exploded as gas lines went up, blazing towers of fire whipping madly in the deadly firestorm. Nothing could survive and flesh, stone and metal were vitrified or melted in the unimaginable temperatures. Entire sprawls of buildings collapsed, the bodies of their former occupants reduced to ashen waste on the wind, palaces of marble and industrial heartlands destroyed in gigantic mushroom clouds as the storm of destruction swept around Isstvan III with relentless, mindless destruction until it seemed as though the entire globe was ablaze.