The Imperium has multiple ways to carry out Exterminatus.
One method is orbital bombardment—using the Imperial Navy's conventional firepower to blanket the surface.
The power of that strike can be adjusted, and it can also be made precise enough to hit every corner.
But that kind of extermination requires an enormous fleet.
And besides carpet-bombing with a massive armada, there are also special weapons.
First: the virus bomb. When deployed, it releases a specially engineered pathogen known as the Life-eater Virus. Its genome is designed to spread rapidly and destroy the cellular structure of all organic life it infects, reducing every living thing on the planet—animal and plant alike—into undifferentiated organic sludge, along with byproducts of biochemical matter and flammable organic gases.
After that, all you have to do is ignite those gases—turning the entire atmosphere into a prison of fire, subjecting the world to a final, searing punishment that kills anything that might still be alive.
Second: the Cyclonic Torpedo. There are multiple patterns of this large-scale, catastrophic weapon.
One variant triggers a thermonuclear chain reaction that ignites all free oxygen in the atmosphere, burning the planet's air down into vacuum. Oceans are fully boiled away, leaving nothing but the barren bedrock of a dead world.
Put simply, it's a planet-killing incendiary.
In the end, the ground can be burned into glass—seen from above, the planet looks like a bleached giant whale, still burning.
And that "burning" is on a level beyond the follow-up ignition from a virus bomb. The virus bomb's atmospheric fire doesn't necessarily glass a world into a polished sphere.
There are also specialized melta-pattern torpedoes that punch through the crust and mantle, directly affecting the core—melting a planet from the inside and cracking it apart.
Beyond those, there are other methods as well.
Right now, what Kain was witnessing didn't clearly match any single category.
All he could see was the dead sea still glowing, still boiling away—like a massive thermite charge burning continuously at the bottom, vaporizing liquid without pause.
Other than that, nothing else looked abnormal.
Wait.
Was this… steaming the planet to death?
Cooking every living thing on the surface until flesh rotted off the bone?
He could see that aside from the obvious steam eruption over the dead sea, mist was also beginning to seep out from the ground in other regions.
But with only this level of power, it couldn't possibly blanket the entire surface with lethal effect.
Maybe most humans would be steamed and ruined, but how could certain specialized Tyranid organisms be boiled so easily?
No—now the hive had basically been torn out, too.
Which meant this was aimed at the daemons that had forced their way into realspace.
To cleanse the daemons, was he really going to pay any price—boiling every human on the planet into mush along with them?
But if the goal was to cook daemons into immobility, there was no way three hundred degrees could be enough.
And to keep driving steam temperatures higher, you'd also need sufficiently high atmospheric pressure.
…Huh?
A pop-up window from the ship made Kain's pupils tighten.
The ship was reporting that it was being affected by the planet's gravity—and that pull was gradually increasing.
The planet's gravity was rising.
If that was true, then as gravity increased, the density of the atmosphere would also shift.
Which would, in turn, amplify the lethality of the steam.
So it really was going to boil the planet's surface life into ruin.
Of course, increased gravity would also impose crushing load on living bodies.
Once it rose high enough, even humans would start to suffer internal pressure effects.
So that special warhead from earlier wasn't just releasing extreme heat—it was also causing changes in the planetary core.
And the planet's rotation was being affected as well—accelerating.
For now, the acceleration wouldn't cause immediate catastrophic deformation, but at this rate, if it continued, within a day the planet's surface would be distorted beyond recognition.
"Are you carrying out Exterminatus? The hive is gone—didn't you confirm that?"
A voice came through Kain's comm-bead, suppressed fury barely kept under control—the captain of the Salamanders detachment.
The moment he realized what was happening, the captain had tried to contact another Astartes, and only now had the line finally connected.
"Exterminatus is underway," the other side replied. "And yes—we detected the hive's destruction immediately."
"Then why are you still doing it? Do you have any idea how many people you're killing?"
The Salamanders captain cut him off with a low snarl.
The other side fell silent.
After several seconds—
"Sorry," the captain said, clearly forcing himself calmer. "What's the situation, exactly?"
"You sure you're calm?"
"Talk."
"Look for yourself."
Look at what?
A data packet, obviously.
Kain saw it too—he'd received the same intel, and it clearly hadn't come from the Deathwatch. It was a forward from Captain Ayret, copied to him.
It was information on that warp rift.
The gist: traitor Night Lords were behind it, using some kind of device to expand the breach.
By the projected calculations, if it wasn't destroyed quickly, the warp rift would rapidly grow.
The eventual scale was unknown, but tearing apart the entire star system wouldn't be a problem.
And that raised the nightmare: the fear of yet another warp mega-rift.
It probably wouldn't reach the point of truly "ripping the galaxy" again—but even a gaping hole between realspace and the warp, a second, smaller Eye of Terror, would be disastrous.
It could easily become the last straw that finally broke the Imperium.
In that context, authorizing Exterminatus wasn't excessive at all.
And the weapon being used for extermination was indeed a variant of the Cyclonic Torpedo.
Part of its effect was heating and flashing off the planet's water.
Another part bored deeper, altering the planet's gravity—so the surface could be boiled under rising pressure.
They couldn't use a more overtly destructive weapon, because the released energy might be absorbed and exploited—there was a real risk they wouldn't destroy the rift at all…
…and might even help it.
That was also why they couldn't just drive a warship into the atmosphere and force entry.
A warship carried massive power output, plus ammunition stores—if they plunged in and the mortal troops inside were corrupted by daemons and turned, it would become a disaster of its own.
The objective now was to boil the surface daemons into ruin, eliminating more than ninety-nine percent of them, so the Deathwatch could punch straight in.
Otherwise, that tidal wave of daemonic hordes would bog them down completely.
Now, the Deathwatch was preparing to fire a second Cyclonic Torpedo—
—and on the far side of the comms, fury turned ice-cold.
(End of Chapter)
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