Recap / Horus Heresy Know No Fear

Still in the dark about the Heresy, the Ultramarines are mustering at Calth, one of the great worlds of Ultramar, in preparation for a joint campaign with the Word Bearers. Roboute Guilliman hopes to repair the severed bonds between the two Legions, while Lorgar, Erebus, and Kor Phaeron are planning to destroy the XIII Legion and use the death of Calth to fuel the Ruinstorm, a powerful warp storm that will cut Ultramar off from the rest of the Imperium while Horus and his legions move on Terra. They unleash a devastating surprise attack on the planet, and the Ultramarines find themselves in a desperate battle for survival.

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• Action Survivor: Oll Persson’s band of survivors. Oll, Krank, and Rane have at least had combat training, but the others are just farm workers.

• Actually Pretty Funny: At one point, Guilliman vents to Aeonid Thiel about his frustrations with Lorgar, winding up by saying that he’d get rid of him if he weren’t his brother. Thiel says that he could demonstrate how, then winces when he realizes that he’s just joked about killing a primarch. Guilliman still says it was funny.

• An Arm and a Leg: Marius Gage loses half his right arm to a daemon. Tetrarch Eikos Lamiad also loses an arm when the area around the Holophusikon is bombarded.

• And Show It to You: Guilliman tells Lorgar that he's going to rip his heart out and show it to him. He ends up doing it to Kor Phaeron instead.

• Apocalypse How: Class 6. The Word Bearers devastate Calth’s surface so thoroughly that it is left completely unable to support life. The survivors are forced to retreat into the planet’s caverns to survive.

• Apocalypse Wow: Damned if Dan Abnett doesn’t make the destruction of an entire planet look awesome. The entire sky erupts with fire, tanks fall from above like rain, falling starships cause earthquakes and tsunamis, and then the Word Bearers attack.

• Awesome by Analysis: Thiel recognizes that bladed weapons and flames work better against daemons because of their ritual significance, and also works out the ingress points that the Word Bearers will be using to board Macragge’s Honour.

• Badass Boast: Guilliman delivers a pretty good one to Lorgar.
  Guilliman: I will find you, I will kill you, and I will hurl your toxic corpse into hell’s mouth.

• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Guilliman gets blown off the bridge into space without a helmet by a daemonic attack. The ship is big enough to generate its own gravity envelope and have a very thin atmosphere on its hull, which is enough for him to survive for ten hours and still have enough stamina to punch some Word Bearers to death.

• Big Badass Battle Sequence: The entire book, since it’s a narrative of the Battle of Calth.

• Big Damn Heroes: Early on in the battle, Guilliman is blown into space by a daemon, but later reappears to save Thiel and his men from a being killed by a boarding party of Word Bearers. As it turns out, his flagship is big enough to trap a thin atmospheric envelope around its hull, and Guilliman's transhuman constitution allows him to breathe in it.
  • Arook Serotid and his skitarii come to Ventanus and Selaton’s rescue when they’re cornered by Word Bearer forces in the ruins of Numinus City.
  • Not too long after, Ventanus’ company comes to his rescue at Leptius Numinus, breaking the back of a Word Bearers assault that’s just about to overrun his position.
  • Ultramarines forces come thundering in from all over the planet to bail out Ventanus and Sydance’s assault force in Lanshear.

• Bittersweet Ending: Calth is devastated and the Ultramarines suffer catastrophic losses, but they manage to repel the Word Bearers and the troops and population on the surface still live on defiantly in the face of annihilation.

• Bond Villain Stupidity: Kor Phaeron manages to defeat Guilliman and has him at his mercy, but instead of killing him, he decides to try and corrupt him with his athame and monologues about how Guilliman will thank him for what he’s doing. The primarch takes the chance to rip one of Phaeron’s hearts out.

• Boom, Headshot!: Several characters are killed via headshot, including Captain Phrastorex.

• Captured on Purpose: The Word Bearer Morpal Cxir lets himself be taken prisoner by Ventanus’ forces, ostensibly to offer them terms of surrender. He’s actually hoping to provoke one of them into killing him so that Samus can manifest.

• The Cavalry: When Captain Ventanus and the Fourth Company are on the verge of being overwhelmed by Hol Beloth in Lanshear, reinforcements show up, and by reinforcements, we mean the 19th Company under Captain Aethon, the remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies under Sergeant Anchise, three Titans under Tetrarch Tauro Nicodemus, and Army forces under Tetrarch Eikos Lamiad. They are pissed.

• Death from Above: The Word Bearers hit Calth’s southern hemisphere with an orbital bombardment so intense that it vaporizes the oceans, incinerates the forests and grasslands, turns deserts to glass, flattens mountain ranges, and fractures the planet’s tectonic plates.

• Deus Exit Machina: At the beginning of the battle, Guilliman is stranded on his flagship's hull when Lorgar summons a daemon that destroys the primary bridge of the Macragge's Honour. It leaves the Ultramarines leaderless for ten crucial hours.

• Didn't See That Coming: Guilliman, famed for his ability to predict the unexpected, still manages to miss the signs that the Word Bearers are up to something until it’s too late. The book’s narration notes that there were plenty of clues that something was amiss, but the Ultramarines simply didn’t understand what to look for because they weren’t expecting treachery.

• Distant Finale: The book ends 25 years (or over 219,000 hours on the Mark of Calth), after the end of the Heresy, with Captain Ventanus participating in the Exterminatus of Colchis during the Great Scouring.

• Dramatic Irony: Sergeant Aeonid Thiel is facing punishment for an unspecified transgression so severe that he’s been referred to his chapter master for discipline, and Guilliman himself decides to have a word with him. Late in the novel, Marius Gage asks another Ultramarine if he knows what Thiel was under censure for, and the man tells him that Thiel had been caught running scenarios on Astartes vs. Astartes combat. For context, this is ten hours into the Word Bearers’ attack and tens of thousands of Ultramarines are dead.
  Marius Gage: That was his infraction?
  Apothecary Jaer: Looks bloody pitiful from where we're standing, doesn't it?

• Evil Costume Switch: The Ultramarines are surprised to find out that the Word Bearers have started painting their armor crimson. The narration makes it clear that the Word Bearers have done this as a mark of their commitment to Chaos.

• Evil Former Friend: Sorot Tchure betrays Honorius Luciel, a man he genuinely considered a friend, as part of the Word Bearers’ ritual sacrifice of Calth.

• Exact Words: Several Ultramarines characters tell their opposite numbers in the Word Bearers that they hope the forthcoming campaign will heal the rift between the two Legions. The Word Bearers assure them that this will indeed be the case.
  Luciel: I would know great joy if our brothers on both sides could come to celebrate their common differences the way we have.
  Sorot Tchure: I have no doubt that this conjunction will bring an end to the hostility between our Legions.
  Guilliman: We will be the best of allies, Lorgar. You and I, our mighty Legions. Horus will be pleased, and the Emperor our father will smile, and old slights will be forgotten.
  Lorgar: They will be forgotten completely. They will be put to rest.

• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: Everyone on Calth who is still alive at the end of the story is forced to retreat into the planet’s underground arcologies to survive now that the planet’s surface is a devastated ruin.

• Genuine Human Hide: It’s offhandedly mentioned that Lorgar is having copies of his magnum opus, the Book of Lorgar, made for Fulgrim and Horus that will be bound in living flesh and the tanned skins of murdered Space Marines, respectively.

• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: An Ultramarines ship crashes into Calth’s southern ocean, triggering a tsunami that devastates the coast up to a distance of four kilometers inland. Given that the entire planet is being destroyed, this passes almost unnoticed.

• It's Personal: The Ultramarines in general and Guilliman in particular are so enraged by the Word Bearers’ betrayal that the Mark of Calth is to be left running until every single Word Bearer in the galaxy is dead.

• Mercy Kill: When Guilliman’s strike team teleports onto the Zetsun Verid Yard, one of the Ultramarines winds up fused into the deck from the waist down. Guilliman kills him to end his pain.

• Not So Stoic: As soon as Guilliman works out that the Word Bearers attacked Calth deliberately, he vows to kill Lorgar personally. When his brother calls him up a few minutes later, Guilliman starts hurling threats at him.

• Oh, Crap!: When Luciel finally realizes what Sorot Tchure has been trying to tell him with his talk of treachery and betrayal, he is so stunned that it takes him a few extra seconds to go for his sidearm. Tchure shoots him before he can draw it.

• One-Man Army: Guilliman spends ten hours running around on the hull of Macragge’s Honour punching Word Bearers to death without a helmet. When he and his team teleport onto Zetsun Verid, he tears through the Word Bearers like they aren’t even there.

• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Some of the Ultramarines debate what they should call the warp-spawned monsters that are infesting Macragge’s Honour. When Aeonid Thiel calls them daemons, Marius Gage notes that they aren’t supposed to believe in daemons anymore.

• Outside-Context Problem: The Word Bearers’ betrayal is presented as one for the Ultramarines. The narration notes that there were plenty of clues that something was amiss, but the Ultramarines simply didn’t know what to look for because such an act of treachery was unthinkable to them.

• The Power of Blood: The Word Bearers are planning to shed as much blood as possible to help stoke the fury of the Ruinstorm. They start by sacrificing many of their own cultist auxiliaries, then kill over 150,000 Ultramarines and countless millions of civilians.

• The Purge: Lorgar is using the Calth campaign to eliminate the Word Bearers who are too unstable or obsessed with revenge against the Ultramarines to be trusted.

• Pyrrhic Victory: The Ultramarines technically win the battle, but Calth’s surface is permanently ruined, the rest of the system has been devastated, and the Legion’s casualties are so severe that it will never fully recover.

• Ramming Always Works: Spectacularly so in this case. The Word Bearers hijack a fleet tender and slam it through Calth's main orbital dockyard at forty percent of lightspeed, obliterating the yard, crippling the Ultramarines fleet, and raining wrecked ships and debris down on the planet.

• Revenge Before Reason: When Guilliman learns that Lorgar deliberately orchestrated the Campanile crash, Guilliman informs his subordinates that the Macragge's Honour is going straight for the Fidelitas Lex. When Marius Gage calls him on it, Guilliman tells him that he knows that it's tactically stupid to try and board the enemy's flagship this early, but he just doesn't care.

• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Guilliman goes absolutely wild on the Word Bearers trying to board his flagship, beating them to death with nothing but his fists. That's right, no Gauntlets of Ultramar! He does all this while on the hull of the ship without wearing a helmet.

• Scenery Gorn: Calth’s devastation is described in exacting, brutal detail.

• Set the World on Fire: The Word Bearers’ bombardment of Calth is so intense that large sections of the planet are set afire.

• Star Killing: The Word Bearers blast Calth’s sun until it goes nova, causing it to scour the system with intense solar flares and radiation and rendering Calth’s surface unable to support life.

• Stuff Blowing Up: The initial phase of the battle has Dan Abnett channeling Michael Bay, with a commandeered ship utterly destroying Calth's main space dock, a twelve-kilometer grand cruiser crashing into a city and demolishing it, and the destruction of a low-orbit depot causing a group of Ultramarines to experience a rain of main battle tanks. It's all described in loving detail, and it is awesome.

• Tele-Frag: Several Ultramarines are killed this way when Guilliman takes a strike team over to the Zetsun Verid Yard. One of them is turned into sludge by reformation failure, two are fused into a bulkhead, and one is fused into the deck from the waist down.

• This Cannot Be!: The Ultramarines take longer than they should to properly respond to the Word Bearers’ attack because they simply cannot comprehend the idea of a galaxy where Space Marines are killing each other.

• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Sorot Tchure discusses the trope with Honorius Luciel, explaining that during the recent pacification campaign in the Istvaan system, the Imperial forces had encountered an enemy (meaning the Word Bearers) who believed that acts of treachery could be used to invoke great ritual power. He even suggests that, if such a thing were to happen at Calth, the greatest possible betrayal that could occur would be for him to murder Luciel, since they are the only two Astartes in their Legions who consider each other a friend. Luciel doesn’t grasp what Tchure is trying to tell him until it’s too late.

• Trust Password: Ventanus sets one up with Captain Sydance after Sergeant Selaton points out that they can't trust the comms, given how thoroughly the Word Bearers have compromised Calth's noosphere. They settle on the number of the painted eldar, referencing an inside joke between the two captains.

• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Captain Ventanus notes that Sergeant Anchise's efforts to rally and redirect the remnants of the Ultramarines' 111th and 112th Companies would normally become the stuff of legend, but in the middle of Calth’s devastation it's simply another man's struggle before his death. It becomes much more interesting when those two companies become the backbone of the group that ends up reinforcing Ventanus in the end of the book.

• World Gone Mad: When Lorgar reveals the Heresy to him, Guilliman says that either Lorgar is insane, or the universe has gone mad. The sad thing about Warhammer 40,000 is that the first part of Guilliman's statement is true; the scary thing is that the second part of Guilliman's statement might be true.

• You're Insane!: When Lorgar tells him about the extent of the Heresy, Guilliman declares that either Lorgar’s lost his mind or the galaxy’s gone mad. He intends to kill his brother either way.