Vulkan Lord of Drakes Read online

  The chieftain shouted in impotent rage at the Termite. But just before the machine entered the wall, the beast stopped and Vulkan thought he saw the glint of animal cunning in the huge ork’s eyes. Then it began to run with a purpose, leaping up to the galleries.

  Vulkan dropped back inside the pilot’s hatch as the avalanche crushed the orks. The Spear of Fire descended quickly through the rubble and was tunnelling through the matter of the attack moon once more.

  ‘There are some minor breaches to the integrity of the hull,’ T’kell reported as the primarch rejoined him. ‘And the orks’ cursed flesh is in the gears, slowing us down.’

  ‘We are still moving,’ said Vulkan, grasping the turret controls once more. ‘While we move, we come closer to victory.’

  T’kell angled the Termite downwards through the walls, and now the machine was descending almost vertically again, breaking through roofs and floors of corridors and chambers. It ruptured pipes carrying the filthy promethium of the orks and ignited it. Fires spread behind and about. The orks raged as their base burned and floors collapsed.

  Whether through instinct or some brutish version of strategy, the orks were tracking the Termite with greater accuracy now. Explosives went off in its path, and walls fell in. Whenever it emerged in a wider space, it was caught in a crossfire of shelling and booby-trapped floors.

  But the Spear of Fire dropped deeper yet. Orks attacked in swarms, and Vulkan caught glimpses on the pict screens of caverns beyond the shaft with ever greater hordes. There were hundreds of thousands of orks in the attack moon, waiting their turn to be unleashed on Antaeum, to destroy the remains of the XVIII Legion then sweep on to the annihilation of the Taras System.

  Their greatest strength, he thought again. Their greatest weakness. The destruction of the attack moon would end the orks’ threat in a single blow.

  The Termite hit a wall that was dense with explosives. The blast was enormous. It was more than a single bomb. It was bombs and shells and built-up gas. It was as if the orks were trying to destroy their own base. The structure of the planetoid erupted and forced the Termite off its track, down another route where the ground suddenly collapsed between the treads, forming a sharp slope.

  They are herding us, Vulkan thought as the Termite crashed through the lower wall of the chamber the orks had prepared.

  For a moment, as he jumped out of the hatch once again, Vulkan thought the space was a mustering hall. There must have been a hundred thousand orks present. Then he saw the crane and the immense claw that hung from the girders that criss-crossed the ceiling.

  The immense army hurled itself against the Termite. The orks hit with such force on the port side that they turned the vehicle over. Vulkan strode easily to the new top of the hull. The presence of treads on all sides meant the Spear of Fire could fight and advance from any position, but the shock of the impact slowed it, and the jaws of the crane dropped from above. The jaws were monumental, more than fifteen metres high and so thick they seemed more designed to crush than to carry. They closed over the Termite and slammed shut a short distance aft of the drill head. The force was so great the hull cracked.

  The jaws hauled back. The girders cried out in protest and began to bend. One pulled out of the wall and fell to the floor below, crushing orks beneath it.

  The Termite rose, drill head spinning fruitlessly, the treads from its forward half grinding in mid-air, those in the rear pushing against the floor but with insufficient force to break free from the ork device.

  Perched on the girders, the huge ork chieftain laughed as it stopped the Legion’s advance.

  The turrets unleashed las and bolt shells against the claw. The impacts scored and dented the metal, but the construction was so thick, it absorbed the shots. Vulkan sheathed his weapons and vaulted off the hull, onto the claw. He used shell holes and ragged metal construction for handholds and climbed, fast as sprinting, towards the chieftain’s position. The ork roared at him and fired its massive shotgun. The shells smacked into Vulkan’s armour with heavy blows, but he kept his grip and did not slow.

  A few metres from the top, he yanked upwards with such force that he flew up at the ork, drawing Nightforged at the same instant. The greenskin jumped at him and they clashed, Vulkan’s sword cutting the shotgun in half, the ork bringing a chainaxe against Vulkan’s shoulder. The weapon’s blade was a metre and a half across, and the ork was so strong that the teeth cut into the primarch’s magnificent armour.

  The ork grabbed Vulkan’s sword arm, the fingers of its enormous hand wrapping all the way around. Vulkan slammed his fist into the ork’s face. Bone cracked and the beast staggered back, releasing him. Its malignant, alien eyes glowered at Vulkan. Then, for a split second, it glanced away, as if waiting for something. An expression like fear crossed its face. It was not afraid of Vulkan, but of the thing that was driving it on.

  ‘You are full of pride, xenos savage, and you are wrong,’ Vulkan said. The ork would not understand his words, but it would hear the contempt in his voice. ‘There is no art in this construct, no craft, and neither does it have the honesty of stone. It and you are fit only to be smashed.’

  The ork responded to his taunt with fury, but there was a desperation in its charge, and again Vulkan thought it was the fear of something else, rather than anger at him, that pushed it forwards. It swung the chainaxe wildly, blue smoke billowing from the weapon’s engine.

  Vulkan ducked beneath the swings and stabbed at the chieftain. Nightforged cut through the ork’s armour and into its chest. Its next swing struck him on the gorget. The blow was stunning, and the ork hit him again as he began to reach for Anvil’s Light, forcing him to grab hold of the girders instead to keep from falling.

  The ork came in again, smashing relentlessly. The beast was as fast as it was strong. Vulkan lurched into the blows, pushing back against them, and he slashed at the chieftain’s face. He cut deep into flesh and muscle and bone. Blood poured down the ork’s features. Its mouth was split in two vertically. Its lower jaws hung loosely. It screamed at him and dropped its weapon as it lunged forwards, seizing him in a death grip and pushing off from the girders, seeking to bring them both down thirty metres to the floor. Vulkan saw the attack coming and grounded himself. He took the force of the ork’s rush and held fast. The chieftain could not topple him, and he brought Nightforged up with a jerk and sank it deeply into the ork’s guts. He hauled upwards, feeling things give way in the creature’s body.

  The hateful fire in its eyes dimmed. But even as it died, its last roar sounded like laughter.

  Then the thunder of artillery rocked the cavern.

  Six

  severed artery / warlord / the furnace

  Despair has never been in the blood of the Legion. There was a time, however, when hope seemed as alien. Hope is ours, and it must be as tempered and tested as every other facet of our identity. It is our right through forging. We are formed upon the anvil, through fire and ­hammer. The creation is painful, and the pain is necessary. What emerges is stronger and wiser for the tempering, and by its own existence justifies the reality of hope.

  – Vulkan, Lessons of the Anvil

  The explosion hurled Numeon up, through ork bodies, towards the cavern wall. For a few seconds his auto-senses were as disrupted as his own thoughts were from the concussion.

  ‘Squad, call out,’ he shouted, as much to clear his head as to know who was alive. He rose to his feet, still blind, as the other four responded.

  ‘Form on my position,’ he called. He almost fell again. He couldn’t seem to find his feet. Then his vision cleared. The roar was not in his ears, and the unsteadiness was not his own. The explosion seemed to be unending. There were deep, reverberating cracks, and the grind of rock against rock. Beneath his feet, the dome was rising and falling.

  ‘I rejoice that I am still alive,’ Caelius said dryly.

  ‘They did no
t mean to, but the orks shielded us from the worst of the blast,’ Numeon said. The seismic charge had thrown Numeon and his brothers free of the crater. The orks at the centre had been turned into an indistinguishable mass of burned and crushed bodies.

  The centre of the crater fell in, and the chamber filled with lethal orange light. The heat spiked.

  ‘Then let us honour their sacrifice and leave,’ said Orasus.

  There were still hundreds of orks in the cavern. They were howling in confusion as the ground gave way. The deep fissures opened, and the molten rock pushed through. The ground fell, then rose again, chunks of the dome floating on the rising magma like ice floes.

  ‘We have very few seconds,’ Numeon shouted. ‘Let us use them well.’ At any moment, the cavern and everything in it might vanish in a single blast.

  The orks were distressed, but they could still see an enemy. They tried to attack. As they charged, chunks of rock split beneath them and tipped them into the magma, and they died, screaming, burning and drowning.

  The rock Numeon was standing on upended. He scrambled up the sudden incline, away from the magma. He jumped to the next rock, then to the next, moving quickly. Everything was changing in the cavern. There was nothing to judge, only seconds to make the decisions that each moment demanded, even if the next proved that decision to be fatal.

  He was almost at the wall when he realised the cavern’s ceiling was closer. The fragmenting dome was rising.

  Caelius had noticed too. ‘We don’t have as far to climb,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing,’ Numeon answered. Then, with another leap, he was at the wall. Caelius landed a metre to his right an instant later.

  Numeon found handholds and started to climb. The others followed, and they ascended six metres in seconds.

  A huge tremor shook the cavern. The walls felt as insubstantial as a dream, and they crumbled. Orks had still been coming into the cavern. Now some were climbing down and others were trying to escape, torn between the love of battle and their terror. Now they fell like leaves into the rising heat.

  Caelius cursed as the section of wall he was holding broke away. Numeon snatched for him. He caught Caelius’ gauntlet, but the sudden jerk pulled him free and they both dropped. Numeon grasped desperately at the wall and grabbed a ledge, stopping their fall only a metre from the rising inferno.

  Orasus and the others began to climb back down. ‘Keep climbing!’ Numeon yelled. ‘That is an order!’

  The inside of the wall had fallen away beneath him, turning the cliff face concave. Caelius hung in the air, unable to haul himself up.

  The magma came higher, and the air passing through Numeon’s rebreather was a harsh burning in his lungs.

  ‘I have you, brother,’ Numeon said to Caelius. With a grunt, he lifted the weight of the other Space Marine with one arm.

  ‘I rejoiced too soon,’ said Caelius.

  Beneath him, magma gouted upwards suddenly. A fountain of it engulfed Caelius. His body shielded Numeon to a degree. A chunk of rock slammed into him, knocking him free of Numeon’s grip.

  Numeon cried out, his arm clutching at air. The fountain subsided, and Caelius fell with it, disappearing under the magma. He resurfaced briefly, his struggle as heroic as it was futile, his hand reaching for aid that was too far away, and he went down again. Seconds later, his roar on the vox was silenced.

  The entire heaving mass of rock and magma rose closer to Numeon. Cursing, he climbed again, racing to catch up with the others.

  The tremors increased in intensity, and more of the walls came down. Orks crowded near the cavern ceiling, holding fast and bellowing as everything disintegrated. Still the instinct to fight was there, and the ones nearest the squad were scrabbling across the shaking cliff face to reach the legionaries. Orasus paused long enough to pull a krak grenade from his belt. He hurled it at a point just ahead of the orks. They kept coming, and the grenade went off as they passed over where it had stuck to the rock. It melted the hands of one and the brute fell, screaming. The blast weakened a wide portion of the cliff and a huge chunk broke away, hundreds of tonnes of rock plunging down, taking a score of the enemy with it. The slab smacked into the rising fury, smashing through the thin, tattered skin of stone. A pillar of magma shot up from the site of the impact with such violence that it slammed against the ceiling, spreading liquid fire across the cavern.

  Molten rock fell on the squad. Numeon blinked off the warning runes of his auto-senses. He knew how bad things were. He climbed moment by moment, dragging himself upwards, reaching for handholds he barely saw before he grasped them. The world of the cavern was about to split wide open. There was nothing substantial here, nothing real except the glowing death.

  ‘Go!’ Numeon shouted. His brothers had looked down at him and hesitated, as if they might wait for him. He climbed faster.

  The entrance to the cavern was much larger now. The ceiling was cracking, and rents were opening all across it. A mob of greenskins on the far side of the opening shouted and fired at the legionaries. Blasius was closest to the top of the wall and he returned fire one-handed, the placing of his shots precise despite the tremors. His first few bursts exploded savage skulls. Then Saluran and Orasus joined him. Three streams of bolt shells blasted the orks.

  The ceiling split wider. A huge, wedge-shaped piece fell from the opening, and the surviving orks retreated from the spreading catastrophe.

  Climb, Numeon thought. Climb. He focused on the opening as if it were salvation, as if it meant the end of the race. As if it meant victory. He did not look down. To do so was meaningless. Whether the magma continued to rise, or the entire bottom third of the cone exploded, each instant did not predict the next.

  The rumble of cracking, breaking rock drowned out the screams of the burning orks. Numeon caught up with the squad as the others crossed the boundary into the narrower region of the fissure. They were still firing, and the orks were in full retreat, chased by bolters and the knowledge that here and now Antaeum was their enemy, and it could not be fought.

  The four legionaries climbed again. The shaking never stopped. Rocks fell at them constantly, bouncing off helms and pauldrons. The exit from the fissure was impossibly far.

  ‘What odds we get to the top?’ said Blasius.

  ‘What odds that it matters?’ Orasus asked.

  It doesn’t, Numeon thought. The purpose of what they had done was to destroy everything on the other side of that opening. There was no safety there. The legionaries were the harbingers of doom.

  They climbed, notwithstanding, taking the moments and knowing each might be the last. But every moment, getting another metre up the shaft. Another moment, another moment, another moment.

  And then there were no moments to come.

  The rumble became a cataclysmic crack that swallowed all sound. It was so huge, it was the final sound. The mountain rose up and struck Numeon.

  He was smashed, he was burned, and he was flying.

  He should have blacked out. There should have been oblivion. How could an event this immense leave room for consciousness? He remained aware, but his reality broke down into fragments, an infernal mosaic of disaster.

  The opening of the fissure rushing towards him.

  No sense of anything except fire and rock.

  Movement again, and blows, and always movement – terrible, killing movement.

  The exit from the fissure rushing closer, then suddenly growing wide, exploding and vanishing in dust and ash and flame.

  Still flying, caught in a cloud of burning gas. The heat beyond measure, the lava enraged at liberty, claiming the ground and the war as its own.

  A instant of limbo in the reddish grey, a blessed instant when nothing was striking him.

  And then he was arcing down, down through the storm, ­buffeted by winds and explosions and flying stone. Cohere
nt thought was impossible, but a ragged wish tore across his mind, the wish that he not fall into the embrace of lava. Not now. Not after this flight.

  He had no taste for such irony.

  The impact came so suddenly, he did not have time to prepare for it. There was just the jolting, brutal crash to earth. It registered first as an explosion of agony across his entire frame. He did not know what the pain meant. It simply consumed him, blocking all other sensory impressions. He could not see or hear or taste anything except the pain.

  Numeon groaned, pushing the pain back, parting its crimson curtain to see again. Think again. Act again.

  He pushed himself up. His armour was still working, but the gears of the servo-motors were slipping throughout the joints, creating resistance. The arms and legs wanted to move in random directions. Given a chance, the vibrations would take over the motion of the power armour. He forced it to behave, his strength enough to hold the tremors at bay, but his actions had become slower, more deliberate. He felt as if he were moving through water.

  There were fractures in the armour and fractures in his body, deep ones, with splinters of bone stabbing inwards to wound the organs they should have protected. He was mobile, though, and he could fight. The rest was irrelevant for now. It was entirely possible it would never matter. He had not heard the voice that had spoken to Vaughn. He did not share the lord commander’s desire to hope. What he knew was his duty, and that was enough. Every ork he killed was one less that would reach the populations of the inner planets.

  Yes, that would have to be enough. And he had killed many orks this night.

  ‘Brothers,’ he voxed, his voice sounding strangely battered in his ears.