Vulkan Lord of Drakes Read online

  Seven

  from the depths / the pyre / from the skies

  Fire tempers us. Fire shapes us. And we become what we are because we know too that fire destroys. Let us embrace this destruction and harness it to our purpose. To protect our charge, the annihilation of the enemy must be absolute.

  – Vulkan, The Gift of Desolation

  Unto the anvil of war, Sho’mar thought, his blood still blazing from Vulkan’s call to brotherhood. The primarch’s words fell like the tempering blows of a hammer. He and his company had passed through the furnace, as Vulkan had done, and brought destruction to the orks at the moment the xenos had believed their victory in hand.

  The company had not left the cargo bay far behind when Ven’tal said, ‘Here, captain. We are far enough. Two thousand metres.’

  The passageway leading from the bay was even more irregular than the one before. Sho’mar was moving through a cleavage between wrecks, and the company had paused in a region that was a tangle of metal plates and frameworks so haphazardly welded together, it resembled a frozen explosion.

  There were more orks further ahead. Sho’mar could hear their growling thunder, but there was some distance yet between them and the legionaries, and there were no intersection passages here. ‘Good,’ said Sho’mar. ‘Place the charge and conceal it.’

  Ven’tal and Shendrak Nal’kor used melta bombs to eat through the criss-crossing girders that formed the wall, creating a space large enough for the seismic charge. When they had it in place, they used more grenades to collapse the structure around the bomb. It would wait in its nest of metal undisturbed until its death cry was summoned.

  Ru’than said, ‘This is the longest we have gone without being attacked.’

  Sho’mar listened again to the sound of orks ahead. With the noise bouncing and echoing off the metal of the zigzagging passage­ways, it was difficult to get a fix on distance. The sound was fainter than it had been, though. He was sure of that.

  It was time to go. With the Termite destroyed, the final stages of the campaign were heavily dependent on precise coordination and all the companies being in position at the critical juncture. But it was unlikely the orks did not know where the Sixth Company was. The fact that they were not attacking was more than strange. ‘I do not like the enemy’s anomalous behaviour,’ said Sho’mar. He turned to Ven’tal. ‘Take the company. Are the coordinates clear?’

  ‘They are, captain. The journey will be a short one.’

  ‘Good. Then be where we must be at the appointed time. I will join you by then.’ To Ru’than, he said, ‘One squad with me. I want to know what the enemy is doing.’

  As the rest of his legionaries headed back in the direction of the cargo bay, Sho’mar’s squad of five moved forwards. Sho’mar set a rapid pace, less concerned with stealth than with catching up. The sound had decreased again in just a few seconds. The orks were heading somewhere quickly.

  A few minutes into the pursuit, the din of another large group of orks rose from below. That sound grew louder, and then the passage­way passed over a larger open area. The deck here was riven by crevasses, and Sho’mar crouched to look down. Beneath the passage was a huge tunnel. It was clearly one of the major arteries of the attack moon, and it was full. A horde of shouting orks stampeded through it, rushing with purpose and in the opposite direction of the great hall. Over the noise of stampeding feet came the piercing wail of bestial horns.

  ‘Where are they fleeing to?’ Ru’than wondered.

  ‘They are not fleeing,’ said Sho’mar. He heard no panic in the rumble of alien voices. The chieftains he saw below were shouting and pointing forwards. These orks were not routed. They had a goal. Directions were untrustworthy in the grotesque patchwork of the ork base, but the upward slope of the tunnel told Sho’mar what he needed to know. ‘They’re heading towards the exterior.’

  ‘Where they would have loading bays,’ said Ru’than.

  ‘Precisely. This is their full mobilisation.’

  Kal’ma swore under his breath as he returned the orks’ fire. Below the deck, there was a sharp drop of about six metres to the slope of the lower bowl of the cavern. His legionaries could make the descent, but they would be completely exposed, and the orks were under cover.

  Then horns sounded through the halls of the attack moon, their cries long, wailing and ugly. They repeated and echoed, overlapping with the urgency of their call. They shook the platform, and the orks in the galleries suddenly hesitated in their attack. After the first cycle of cries from the horns, most of the greenskins started moving again, but there was confusion in their ranks. Some resumed their rush towards the core. Others turned the other way, heading outwards. Only a few remained, too eager to kill the present enemy than obey the conflicting demands of challenge and klaxon.

  ‘Now is our chance!’ Kal’ma shouted. ‘Finish the beasts above the target zone.’

  Nocturnean rockets slammed into the galleries, collapsing arches that were so crude, they might have been natural formations. The rubble blocked the orks’ paths in and out of the cavern. It crushed the greenskins directly over the site where the seismic charge would sit and created a mound of debris in which to conceal it.

  Kal’ma led the run to the edge of the platform and leapt down, drawing the diminishing fire from the orks, racing to complete the mission before the enemy answered its new call.

  Rhy’tan never hesitated as he fought. He and his brothers held their positions at the edge of the huge ruin. Through flame and shell they fired at the orks. Not once did Rhy’tan break from killing the greenskins. And yet, as Vulkan killed the warlord and turned to smite the lesser orks below, Rhy’tan felt as if his consciousness had been seized, detached from his body to bear witness to the overwhelming force of the primarch. He thought that the orks felt it too. Every aspect of the war in the hall that was not centred on Vulkan became thin, insignificant, a pantomime background to the true conflict, the main event. Vulkan’s presence filled the hall.

  The shelling faltered, then stopped. Rhy’tan was surprised that the orks would lose their will to fight to that degree. Dimly, through the smoke, he saw cannons begin to withdraw.

  ‘They are retreating,’ said T’kell.

  ‘No,’ said Vulkan, his voice reverberating above the diminished clamour of the battle. ‘Orks do not surrender. They do not retreat unless forced to. This is something else.’

  Vulkan leapt from the top of the wreckage and came down amid the orks with the force of thunder, and the greenskins fell back before him. They quailed before the being who had slain their unstoppable leader, and the ripples of panic spread out around the primarch as orks scrambled away from the dark colossus. Then he cut two down with a stroke of Nightforged and burned a ­furrow through their ranks with Anvil’s Light. Burned corpses toppled, their heads and upper torsos vaporised.

  The orks screamed at Vulkan and charged back. He met their attack with one whose ferocity dwarfed theirs, and Rhy’tan almost laughed with exhilaration to see the orks outnumbered by a single warrior. The greenskins surrounded Vulkan, stabbing and shooting wildly. Vulkan marched into the tide and slew orks as if he were reaping grain. The horde could not slow him. The faster they attacked, the more quickly they gave themselves up to death.

  ‘To the primarch!’ Rhy’tan shouted. ‘Into the fires of battle!’

  ‘Unto the anvil of war!’ his brothers answered, and they charged out of their shelter.

  The orks had begun to ignore the legionaries, turning their attention instead to the greater threat in their midst. They paid for their mistake, gunned down by the dozen, and it was several seconds before enough of the aliens understood what they had turned their backs on to try to fight back. The mob fought with itself, trying to attack Vulkan and the legionaries at the same time, and failing at both.

  The five legionaries made for Vulkan, intending to fight at his side, bu
t they moved through the orks slowly. They fought as a unit, covering each other’s flanks, Rhy’tan and T’kell at the fore, cutting down the brutes with bolter shells to the head. They marched over the corpses of the fallen, crunching bones beneath ceramite boots, surrounded by the stench of smoke and foul ork bodies. And though they advanced through the hall with purpose and without pause, they could not catch up with Vulkan.

  The primarch tore through the space of the battlefield with a speed approaching a sprint. He ripped through the orks as though they were air. They swarmed up his frame, attempting to bring him down by any means, even the mindless application of sheer mass. At times, Vulkan disappeared from Rhy’tan’s view, but he always reappeared moments later, hurling his attackers to the ground and gutting them with his blade.

  Discordant horns began to sound. The orks howled with them, and their movements became confused, torn between the imperatives to answer the call and to kill Vulkan.

  ‘The companies are reporting in,’ Ber’han voxed. ‘All seven seismic charges have been set. But the greenskins are heading towards the surface of the base. They are preparing to invade.’

  ‘We must hold them, my sons,’ Vulkan declared without pausing in his slaughter of the orks. ‘A short while longer. Fight them with me. Kill them. Fill the horde with our presence and our challenge. I have sent word to the fleet. Make the orks tarry, and soon their defeat will be inevitable.’

  Anvil’s Light blazed again, a star suddenly born in the gloom of the hall, and ork bodies disintegrated. Rhy’tan saw the flare of the plasma pistol as the light of an infallibility forged through the work of a cosmic furnace. Vulkan had achieved the perfection every warrior of Nocturne sought to embody and, by his example, inspired all to the ideals he made manifest. Rhy’tan threw himself into the battle with renewed energy and ferocious joy.

  They were six against thousands. The primarch had already done the impossible. It would be a small matter to force the thousands to turn from the goal the subordinates of the great warlord demanded they perform, to turn their savage instincts his way, and slaughter them.

  He followed in the footsteps of his primarch, and no enemy was too powerful, no odds were too great.

  A greenskin crouched beneath Rhy’tan’s arc of fire lunged up and grabbed his helm with massive claws. It shrieked at him and hurled him into T’kell. Three more orks leapt in to take advantage. So’bak turned his flamer on the trio. The flames washed over Rhy’tan and T’kell, and Rhy’tan welcomed the rush of purifying fire. He and T’kell blasted the attackers to pulp, and then, the flames still streaming from their armour, they rushed even more fiercely into the horde. T’kell was laughing, and it took Rhy’tan a second to realise that he was too. It was the laughter of triumph.

  The war had spread a graveyard of ships through the void stretching from the near orbit of Antaeum out towards the edge of the system, an attenuated comet tail of debris that would orbit Taras forever, a thousand broken monuments to the struggle for a world of death. There were wrecks that were relatively intact. The frigate Dragonspine had broken in half, its stern and bow drifting slowly apart, spreading frozen gas and tumbling corpses in their wake. When the ork ships died, most of them disintegrated, as if reality had suddenly awakened to the affront of these vessels and torn them into shreds.

  Separated from the strength of the attack moon, the swarm of ork vessels was unable to overwhelm the ships of Nocturne. Large numbers of greenskin ships were still at anchor over Antaeum, still sending down their troops to the planet. Now, as the Flamewrought took the fleet in towards the ork base once more, some of the attacking ships broke away, racing ahead to the heart of the ork invasion.

  On the bridge of the Flamewrought, the auspex operator noted their departure. ‘Why make things easier for us?’ she asked.

  An ork ram ship blew up under fire from the battleship’s broadsides. Its detonating mass careened forwards and collided with the Flamewrought on her starboard flank. The impact was close to the bow, but was strong enough to shake the bridge. Och’hi glanced at the damage report as it arrived on a pict screen next to his command throne. He had ordered the alarm klaxons silenced hours ago. The ship’s crew was more than aware of what was being done to the hull. Easier, he thought. That is a matter of debate.

  ‘They are increasing the pressure on us,’ he said to the bridge officers. ‘They are rushing to aid the mass descent from the attack moon. They represent the real danger.’

  The Flamewrought drew closer to the ork base. It shuddered again as a hundred ork cannon shells hit simultaneously. The void shields managed to repulse the worst of the damage, but the arrival of each bombardment was eroding the leviathan’s defensive strength. The process was as gradual as waves crashing against rock, and as inexorable.

  ‘Launch bays,’ Och’hi voxed, ‘what is your status?’

  ‘Standing by for your command.’

  Och’hi nodded to himself. The operation was delicate. The Flamewrought and its escorts were coming in an unnaturally tight formation. In the oculus, the strike cruiser Drakelord was nudging into view to port and starboard. If even one ship underwent a cata­clysmic plasma explosion, its death would devastate the rest of the fleet. And the vessels were going to have so many launch bays open at the same time. The risk was enormous. With the destruction of the Termite, it was also necessary. The Legion was courting one disaster in order to avert a greater one.

  The situation did not please Och’hi, but it did not surprise him.

  ‘Approaching target,’ the auspex officer called out.

  ‘Overlay,’ said Och’hi.

  Diagrammatic runes appeared on the oculus. A bright red icon flashed over the Klostzatz’s crash site. The scar was bigger now, marked by the fresh burns where the ork ram ship had destroyed itself. The wound was profound too. The icon was centred over the shaft drilled into the attack moon by the Spear of Fire.

  Och’hi spoke to the fleet. ‘Concentrate fire to the fore. Aim for the ships in low orbit and in proximity to the greenskin base. Direct the enemy’s attention to that threat.’ He did not think of the orks responding logically to his feint. Instead, he was leading a dangerous animal to the slaughter.

  The huge barrage began. ‘Enemy responding,’ the auspex officer said a few moments later. ‘They are evading and moving towards an attack position above the ecliptic.’

  ‘Track them. Keep them blinded with our fire.’ He paused, watching the icon flash, watching the coordinates next to it align. Now, he thought. ‘All ships, open bay doors. Gunships, launch, launch, launch!’

  The tacticarium screens lit up with one green rune after another. Och’hi could not feel the effect of the launches, but he imagined he did, a distant, rhythmic, determined thrum in the hull, a hopeful one this time, a steady pulse as Thunder­hawks streamed from the Flamewrought and the other large ships of the fleet. One hundred gunships left their berths. They would be easy prey for the orks as they crossed the void, but only if the enemy saw them. Next to the threats presented by the battleship and cruisers, they were insignificant.

  They were small glints streaking through the dark. There was nothing they could do against a weapon like the attack moon. Except that they were also small enough to follow the path of the Spear of Fire. Under the camouflage of the barrage, while the great ships hurled themselves into the full rage of the insect swarm of the orks, some made for the hulks boarded by the other companies of the Legion, while the rest descended into the shaft bored into the attack moon by the Termite, racing to retrieve the hundreds of legionaries before the full immensity of the ork numbers fell on Antaeum.

  The seven companies of Nocturne, having secured the death of the attack moon, charged back towards the shaft to ensure its death had meaning and would not be the hollow destruction of an empty abode. Vulkan had foreseen the possibility that the Termite would not make a return journey, and he had carefully planned the positions
of the seismic charges relative to each other. The charges were directional, and while the companies had radiated out with Vulkan as the centre, they had also moved back up towards the surface. The distance was negligible with respect to the impact of the explosives, so close to the core of the base, but it was strategically vital. The companies could make their way back to the shaft, whether through passages or by forcing their way with demolition charges, faster than heading back to the Termite’s position, and if they were a few hundred metres closer to the surface they would gain valuable seconds as the Thunderhawks gathered them and reversed their course back up the shaft.

  Sho’mar barrelled along the last stretch of the ragged corridor leading to the Termite’s shaft. He and his squad had followed the trail marked by the rest of the Sixth Company. He passed through a wall whose opening bore molten edges, the mark of a melta bomb used to defeat the barrier. The legionaries came to a stop on a ledge of splayed metal. A wind roared up the great shaft, the atmosphere of the attack moon rushing out into the void.

  Sho’mar’s company had just finished boarding and the Thunderhawk Hand of Fire hovered close to the gap in the wall, its side door open. To Sho’mar’s right, he saw a stream of gunships, some descending the shaft, others heading back up. Enemy fire began about three-quarters of the way towards the top. The orks had noticed the presence of the Thunderhawks and were trying to bring them down. The gunships weaved, doing their best to evade, but they had little room to manoeuvre. There was barely space in the shaft for two to pass each other.

  Ork rockets shot out from the side. They flew into the exhaust of a Thunderhawk’s starboard engine and exploded. The gunship went out of control and into the path of another that was accelerating towards the void. The two ships collided, and more ork rockets lanced out into the developing wreck. A fireball bloomed in the shaft, spreading out to all sides, driving other gunships into desperate evasions to prevent a chain reaction. The craft nearest to the collision flew above the wreck and sent Hellstrike missiles at the ork position. The blasts faded, and there was no more fire from that portion of the shaft.