If Horus wanted to destroy rather than conquer?

[Valkyrion]

Could he have done? Would it have been within his means to destroy Terra from orbit, and if so, is there any way to be certain it would have killed the Emperor?

[Karhedron]

I suppose he could have unleashed the flesh-eater virus like at Istvaan III. I don't think that there is much Dorn's defenses could have done against that. But as you say, there is no guarantee that the Emperor would not have found a way to escape such an indiscriminate weapon and it would have destroyed everything on Terra that Horus would have needed to rule the Imperium once the Emperor was beaten.

 

My guess is that there was enough of Lupercal left, even at the end, that he would not risk destroying his prize while there was a chance of taking it intact. You could argue it is a bit of a fudge but the HH lore and novels had already established that Exterminatus-grade weaponry was part of the Crusade fleets' arsenals so there needed to be a, in-Universe reason (however tenuous) for Horus not to use them against Terra.

[Noserenda]

Leaving out that things played out the way they did partially because thats what Chaos wanted....

Terra and the Inner palace especially are rife with dark age tech and weirdness, and Horus would be well placed to understand that and to suspect the depths of what he doesn't know about that. 

He also on a clock and knows messing around with wonder weapons is going to be wasting time Perturabo needs to crack the palace conventionally.

[OttoVonAwesome]

Can't imagine they had any life eater virus left or they would have used it again at some point. Cracking planets is not an easy task either Abbadon needed a super weapon of doom to do that and more traditional means of exterminatus takes total space superiority and alot of nukes and time. The emperor's fortress is so vast and deep it's unlikely any of that would have killed him for sure either but it's more than likely also with the pace of destruction the Heresy required and the amount of worlds that needed to be culled out that niether side had a ton of WMD's left by the end.

 

Exterminatus wasn't exactly standard practice in the later days of the Crusade with everything winding down and the focus on re-unification and having already conquered the major xenos threats out there alot of these weapons were becoming taboo and decommissioned as well.

[BadgersinHills]

9 hours ago, Valkyrion said:

Could he have done? Would it have been within his means to destroy Terra from orbit, and if so, is there any way to be certain it would have killed the Emperor?

 

Sanguinius notes that he could do so. I think he says that he could crash ships into Terra and destroy it.

[MARK0SIAN]

I think there’s an element of Horus needing to defeat the Emperor in a standard battle to prove his superiority as the rightful ruler of mankind, not just to the loyalists but to his own side. Using exterminatus might’ve been seen as a hollow or cheap victory that wasn’t earned because he was a better general/warrior but just because he had this super weapon.

 

I think this would also be a factor in Perturabo’s planning. We have seen that he was prepared to use such weapons without a second thought, but he desperately needed to prove himself superior to Dorn in conventional warfare that I don’t think he would’ve countenanced their use as it would’ve robbed him of that victory.

[Gorgoff]

They do say so in the Siege books that Horus have to beat the Emperor to succeed. 

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

Horus wanted to kill his own father withs his own hands, to gain properly the place of new Emperor of Humankind.

(Spoiler ahead)

As he gained his own name when he killed his adopted father in Cthonia.

(End of Spoiler)

 

And remember what he told to Eidolon in Galaxy in flames (pag 73): people are vermin. And when you stamp out vermin for afar...some of them invariably survives. So, to get the job properly done you must get your hands dirty and eliminate them in one feel swoop.

Conquer of itself is so messy, isn't it?

 

[WARMASTER_]

I’ll disagree with some here and say yes he could of destroyed the planet! The palace was warded but the rest of the planet wasn’t it’ll be Caliban all over again with the palace being a large shielded rock but ultimately a ruined broken planet

 

That would be a hollow victory though as we all know so it played out as it did 

[Marshal Rohr]

The Aegis Shield is part void shield, part something special so even if they Virus Bombed Terra you’d have a little bubble with all the important stuff in it. 

[Castlerook]

I would imagine that Terra needed to remain intact. It needed to be Horus' prize. It needed to be the monument to his victory over the Emperor. Just parking in orbit over Terra and wiping it out would have been incredibly damaging for Horus and his cause. Frankly, it would have been a rallying call across the Imperium to rise against Horus. More importantly, it would have painted a massive target on Horus, not just from the surviving Loyalist legions, but from those that followed him. The Traitor Primarchs each had their own agendas for following Horus and for some of them, those reasons were on Terra. Perturabo wanted to prove his was the superior siegemaster compared to Dorn. Angron joined because of his desire for vengeance when the Emperor left his fellow gladiators to die on Nuceria. Fulgrim would have been denied a prize. Mortarion wanted revenge for when the Emperor stole the kill of Mortarion's adoptive father. Magnus, because of his own feelings of love and hate to the Emperor. The list goes on.

 

Seeing the Emperor cast down by one of their hands, there's something worthwhile in that, revenge or justice by proxy, just for that look in their Father's eyes before he died. There's something valuable. But not if Horus just committed exterminatus on Terra, its cold and impersonal and none of them would have gotten their pound of flesh from the old man. Which would just leave one person that they could extract their personal revenge against. Horus.

 

If Horus destroyed Terra from orbit, he'd have won the war...and plunged what was left humanity into a very quick extinction through civil war. 

[lost_angel]

Horus also notes in Path of Heaven that

Spoiler

he can only be sure he’s killed the Emp if he kills him face to face. Anything else prob won’t do the trick 

 

Edited October 22, 2023 by lost_angel

[RoadRunna]

There is also mention in the Seige book series of the escape plans by Dorn with the use of the WhiteScars to teleport the Emperor off the planet into a nearby fleet if this was needed