The Hunt for Vulkan Read online

  The walker took another step back. This time, it was too slow. The surface of the road collapsed beneath it. The walker plunged head-first, firing one more time as it dropped. The wild shell punched another crater behind Thane.

  The canyon roared and echoed as the leviathan’s fall triggered another avalanche of rock and gravel. The monster came to a stop at the base of the canyon, half-buried by the slide. Its cannon arm was immobile. The left arm waved its gigantic saw. The blade buzzed in the air, hungry for targets. The body shook with internal explosions, but still lived.

  ‘Finish it,’ Thane ordered.

  The guns of the Fists Exemplar lowered their aim. They fired as one, a choir of rage and vengeance. They targeted the head, which protruded well beyond the rock fall. The walker’s armour could not withstand such a concentrated assault, and the head blew apart. The devastated neck opened into an abyss of darkness and monstrous engineering. An inferno billowed out of the chasm as the machinery tore itself apart. The walker shook harder and harder as something vital and tremendously powerful was breached. Thane took cover behind a boulder.

  The monster’s death shattered the night of the gorge, killing the dark with burning day. It pulverised the rock that had buried the walker. Stone shards flew across the canyon with hurricane velocity. They whined over Thane’s position like a swarm of insects.

  Thane rose when the glow of the blast faded. Still more of the cliff face had collapsed. There was a slope now to the north. Too steep for Citadel’s End, but not, perhaps, for the Dreadnought.

  ‘Venerable Brother Otho,’ Thane called.

  ‘I am with you, Chapter Master.’

  Aloysian and the other battle-brothers who had manned the guns left the vehicles. Together with Thane, they mounted the slope. When they reached the top, they found the rest of the company already engaged. In the midst of the broken city, the Fists Exemplar hammered the front ranks of the orks while the Mechanicus attacked the flanks. The orks pulled back, infantry falling, vehicles destroyed. The battlefortresses were more powerful than any single one of the Imperial vehicles deployed on Caldera, but they were not invulnerable. A line of Kataphron Breachers closed with the fortress on the eastern side of the avenue. Their torsion cannons turned the matter of its armour against itself, three simultaneous hits tearing its flank open. Brother Scaevola launched a rocket through the gap. The battlefortress died, fire pouring from the viewing slits of its turrets.

  The command network was a cacophony of voices. The heaviest ork force was before Thane, but the army was so massive it was fighting across the city. There was desperation in the communications from the Astra Militarum. The mortals were fighting building to building. They were being taken apart.

  They are still serving, Thane told himself. They are slowing the enemy.

  And here, now, in this sector of Laccolith, the orks were losing ground. This was no feigned retreat. The orks raged. They hurled themselves at the Imperials, but it was their turn to find themselves in the kill-zone. The street hampered the movement of their massed numbers. The fire from in front, from the sides and above broke each wave of assault.

  Thane saw a real victory taking form.

  And then the form changed, dissolved, became terrible. At the far end of the avenue, ork reinforcements arrived. More battlefortresses. Two walkers.

  The earth shook with their approach.

  Seven

  Caldera – Beyond Torrens

  The Thunderhawks Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia flew over the city. Koorland sat with Preco in the cockpit of Honour’s Spear. Through the viewing blocks, he had a disturbingly complete view of Laccolith’s agony. Rocket contrails, interlocking las-fire and explosions lit the night. The eroded skyline crumbled more with every second. The orks purged entrenched positions by razing entire regions. Preco avoided the walkers and the heaviest concentrations of enemy forces, and Koorland saw how much the manoeuvre cost him.

  ‘You believe you are abandoning your brothers,’ Koorland said.

  ‘I understand the importance of the mission.’

  ‘Your understanding has no bearing on your instincts, brother.’

  ‘No,’ Preco said after a minute. ‘It does not.’

  ‘You are not abandoning them. They are buying us the chance of victory. If we fought for them now, we would be throwing away their effort.’

  ‘Their sacrifice, you mean.’

  ‘Yes. Their sacrifice. A price your Chapter Master is willing to pay. If we are successful, I hope we will bring an end to the cost. Whatever happens, he has my thanks, as do you.’

  Preco gave him a curt nod. ‘As I said, I understand the necessity of this course of action. It is still difficult.’

  I know what it is to lose brothers, Koorland thought. He said nothing. His losses did not matter in this moment. It was important that Preco express his unease in leaving the field while his company fought. Important to acknowledge that pain, so the Exemplar could focus all the more keenly on the goal ahead.

  Take us to the primarch, Koorland thought, and we will end this war.

  The Thunderhawks climbed. The inferno of Laccolith dropped away. Preco swung around the worst of the struggles, and even then, crackling anti-aircraft energy slashed at the gunship.

  ‘They want us contained as badly as we wish to hold them,’ Koorland said.

  ‘A good sign,’ said Preco.

  They left Laccolith behind. They flew east, then angled north as they approached a plateau. Fires guttered below. Koorland caught a glimpse of a ruined wall. Another settlement below, then, passed too quickly to tell if anything remained of it.

  Preco used the twin volcanoes as beacons. Sporadic fire continued to track them from the jungle.

  ‘They’ve left sentries,’ Preco said, veering sharply to starboard as another gun targeted them. ‘Since when do orks stay behind when the main army moves?’

  ‘Since Ardamantua. Since these greenskins arose. Expect the worst always, brother. I’ve seen the worst, and I still underestimate their tactical acumen.’

  Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia passed over the scarred jungle and onto the rocky terrain beyond. Ahead, the night raged. Gun and cannon fire. Bursts of flame. There was war there, on a smaller scale than in Laccolith. But no less brutal. No less desperate.

  Koorland hoped the orks were as desperate as they seemed. The force left behind would have been enough on its own to take a militia-defended city. When the flames rose high, Koorland saw the silhouettes of tanks, the rush of warbikes. A large mass of infantry.

  The Thunderhawks drew nearer. The confused actions of the orks became clear. There was no front line. There was no position they were attacking, and no opposing army. There were circular movements. The orks centred their attacks on a point, and the point kept moving. It cut slashes of destruction through the ork formations. Massive concussions, greater than any artillery shell, rippled out from that point.

  ‘Is that…?’ Preco began. He spoke softly, awed by something that could not yet be seen.

  ‘It must be,’ Koorland said, just as quiet. ‘That is where we must strike.’

  ‘We can’t land.’

  ‘We are prepared.’ Koorland had ordered the two squads of the Last Wall to equip jump packs. ‘Come in as close and low as you can. We’ve had enough of attacking them from the outside. This is the epicentre. The enemy has expended great effort to keep us from there. Let the orks’ defeat begin with that failure.’

  Preco dropped the nose of the gunship. The black shapes of the foothills rushed in.

  Koorland voxed orders to the troops in both Thunderhawks. ‘Open the side doors. We jump into the midst of the cauldron.’

  A line of energy cannons opened up at the foot of the last slope. They put up a coruscating wall of destruction.

  ‘They really don’t want us here,’ Preco grunted.
Beams cut into the port side of the hull. Honour’s Spear slewed away, engines howling as Preco strained against the controls.

  Smoke entered the cockpit. Koorland blinked through the squad readouts on his lenses. The runes were steady green across the board. To port, the Triumph of Himalazia was too close to the barrage. With no room to evade, it flew straight through the beams. Flames haloed its engines. It was flying, but dropping fast.

  Preco looped the Spear around and pummelled the ground with autocannon rounds. A bright flash on the ground created a narrow gap. Preco took it. The gunship flew through the curtain of anti-air fire. It shuddered violently in flight. Koorland watched the yoke buck in Preco’s hands.

  ‘How long can you stay aloft?’

  ‘For as long as necessary. You’ll have air support.’

  ‘My thanks again, Brother Preco,’ Koorland said. He pulled the door of the cockpit open and joined the squad for the leap.

  The Last Wall plunged to earth. The two squads leapt from the Thunderhawks, jet packs streaking fire. Their bolters were on full burst all the way down. They cut orks down during their flight, and landed with the force of vengeance. Koorland shattered the spine of a greenskin warrior, the impact of his mass and velocity snapping the brute’s armour. He stomped on the struggling ork’s head, crushing it against jagged volcanic rock.

  The Last Wall created a crater of flesh. The squads stood in a hole in the midst of the horde. The orks had been charging a few dozen metres to the north. For a moment, there was still a wall of xenos might between Koorland and the moving target. Confusion took hold as the orks came under attack from two points in their midst. Some of them turned to face the Last Wall. Others stayed focused on their first enemy.

  For a moment.

  A few seconds during which Koorland knew, but could not see, that he had reached his target. He knew what he was about to encounter, but the knowledge had no true weight. There was no visceral understanding. There could not be. He was still on one side of the barrier that separates belief in a legend from its experience.

  He fired into the orks separating him from the legend. He and his brothers charged into the mass.

  Koorland began to cross the barrier.

  The moments passed. Belief met reality, and the shockwave killed dozens of orks.

  Something struck a battlewagon. Koorland could see the upper portions of the hull from his position. There was

  the sound of a single blow and the vehicle stopped dead. The rear jerked upwards, as if the forward section had been driven into the ground. A concussion wave radiated outwards from the tank’s position. The battlewagon exploded. Orks flew through the air. Koorland staggered as the wave hit him, a sudden hurricane. The blow scythed the enemy before him.

  The space ahead of the Last Wall was clear. Surrounded by bodies, lit by the flames of the burning tank, the legend was there.

  Time stuttered. Koorland’s senses grappled with awe. His existence before his transformation into a Space Marine was a blank. The history of that earlier being was lost. So now, for the first time in his memory, he experienced what an unenhanced mortal felt at the sight of the Adeptus Astartes.

  Vulkan was a colossus, more pillar than man. He was an icon carved of granite and night, immovable as a mountain, ferocious as lava. The deep green of his armour’s scales made him a reptile sprung from the dreams and fears of humanity’s past. The forged flames of its design made him the fire of a planet’s core. The skull of one beast adorned his shoulder guard. His cloak was the hide of another. He was a slayer of myth, and he was myth incarnate. His massive hammer pulsed and crackled with energy. Koorland could not imagine lifting it, never mind wielding it. He found it even more impossible to picture anything, be it ork, voidship or world, that could survive its strike.

  It was all Koorland could do not to fall to his knees. He was not alone. He was surrounded by the stunned immobility of his battle-brothers.

  They did not forget their training and leave themselves vulnerable to the enemy. They were frozen for the space of a single intake of breath, and the orks in their vicinity that still lived were incapacitated for much longer. But oh, the time of that breath stretched to infinity. Though Koorland had witnessed a moon open its jaws and roar, it was only now that he felt the true touch of the sublime. A breath, and his life was in a point of culmination. His existence was already divided into two irreconcilable halves by the destruction of the Imperial Fists. Now it broke in two again. This time, the far side of the crevasse was filled with the fiery light of glory.

  The breath, and then war.

  No words passed between Vulkan and the Last Wall. They would come later. Now there was the necessity of battle. Koorland looked up at the drake-helm and the infernal red of its lenses. Vulkan inclined his head in a nod. Then destruction came to the foothills of Caldera once more.

  The orks closed in. They fought against a storm. The Last Wall formed a circle. They became a fist, a mailed gauntlet. The horde broke itself upon its spikes. Bolter shells punched through armour and flesh. Streams from flamers incinerated brutes who tried to close within melee distance. Monsters in piston-driven armour burned in their metal shells. They died standing, and became obstacles in the path of their kin.

  Vulkan swung his hammer. Each blow was a meteor impact. The night flashed with the weapon’s wrath. The earth trembled before its power. Braced now, Koorland kept his footing. The orks struggled forwards but were swept back again and again, and each time their ranks thinned. The terrain itself began to change. The battle shattered hard ridges to dust. Rivers of blood poured over arid stone. The softer lines of broken bodies covered the jagged shapes of rock. The stench of death, burned and wet, reached through Koorland’s grille. His frame vibrated with the pounding beat of the hammer. His blood rejoiced, caught by the rhythm of righteous annihilation.

  ‘More!’ Vulkan bellowed at the orks. ‘Send more! Still more! Will you never be enough?’

  The strength of twenty Space Marines and a single primarch shattered the orks’ assault. The force that had remained to fight Vulkan had contained him, but no more. The orks had been unable to achieve victory. Now they could not avoid defeat. As the infantry numbers diminished, the greenskins tried to conquer through swiftness. The vehicles had more room to move. They could pick up speed, or as much as the rough terrain would allow.

  They died all the more quickly.

  Squads of bikers roared by in strafing runs. Koorland and the Last Wall lowered their aim, stitching the sides of the bikes with shells. They blasted through wheels, exploded fuel tanks. They turned the bikes into somersaulting death traps. Rolling balls of steel and fire collided with other drivers. It was destruction built on destruction. Vulkan swung his hammer sideways. The blow went through a bike and its rider without stopping. The ork machine might have been made of air.

  To Koorland’s astonishment, mortals joined in the fight. They were a small group, no more than a score. They wore ragged mining clothes and wielded lasrifles. They used the folds in the earth as cover, ducking down each time the hammer came down. They clutched the ground, weathering the wind and the shockwave, then popped up again to shoot at the orks. The few greenskins they brought down had no impact on the struggle. Their presence and their survival was a miracle. They fought for their planet when the only hope of victory lay in the hands of others.

  They were a wonder.

  Koorland looked at them with a kind of joy.

  Four battlewagons circled the fight. Then they converged, riding over the ridges at such speed they almost overturned. Their turrets blazed at Vulkan. They were in each other’s line of fire, and stray shells fountained earth before them. Two of them were burning as they closed in. Koorland pulled a krak grenade from his belt. He turned his attention from the slaughtered infantry to assist, but the tanks were already there.

  Vulkan disappeared in the nexus of shell bursts. The glar
e faded, revealing his massive form leaping at the nearest battle­wagon. A mountain sailed through the air. He landed on the front of the tank and his boots drove through its armour. The vehicle veered to the left. Vulkan raised his hammer over his head with both hands and brought it down, crushing the upper turret. The shockwave made Koorland’s head ring. Metal cried in agony, and Vulkan was already charging at the next tank as the first exploded.

  Koorland fought. He brought the enemy down. He was not distracted by Vulkan’s actions. Yet he bore witness. And afterwards, when he thought of the battle, he could barely remember his own role. There was room in his memories only for the sight of a primarch’s wrath.

  Vulkan ran into a battlewagon at full speed. The impact halted the tank and its forward hull crumpled. The giant of myth took the vehicle apart with two blows, and their thunder was so huge, the ammunition blasts that followed were mere echoes.

  The orks did not retreat. The last two battlewagons hurled themselves at the legend, and to oblivion. The legend was indestructible. The legend was bedrock and magma. He was tectonic strength and tectonic fury. Koorland had a vision of this world having given birth to its champion, of Caldera itself striking back at the orks in retaliation for the wounds it had suffered at their hands.

  The storm passed. The enemy lay dead. The rounded, wide peak of the hill and the slopes on all sides were a vast open tomb. For the first time since the war began, Koorland looked upon defeated orks. The first small measure of justice for his slaughtered brothers had been exacted. Shattered and broken bones, all burned black, blended with each other in twists of pain. The flames in the corpses of vehicles burned low. Night returned, but not full dark. With the glare of war gone, a dimmer, more diffuse glow asserted itself. It came from the clouds. They reflected the glower from the craters of the volcanoes to the north.

  And beyond them, much further, was the great bleeding of Caldera. The stolen crust still rose to the skies. At this distance, the huge masses were little more than angry red sparks falling upwards. But the light of their blood still reached this far.