Vulkan Lord of Drakes Page 14

  The wreckage of the gunships tumbled down towards the centre of the attack moon, careening off the walls. There was a grace to the fall and a terrible kind of silence. From this distance, there was also the illusion of slow movement.

  Sho’mar leapt into the Hand of Fire. The squad followed, and he slammed the side door shut. The pilot turned the Thunder­hawk around, aiming its nose back up the shaft. Sho’mar watched through a viewing block as the ricocheting wreckage came closer, growing large, shedding grace and gaining vicious speed. It bounced back and forth across the shaft, the movements unpredictable.

  The pilot gunned the Thunderhawk’s engines and aimed it up the middle of the tunnel. He had a clear run for space. There were no other gunships coming the other way. There was only the wreck.

  Beside Sho’mar, Ru’than said, ‘Will fate be this capricious?’

  ‘I choose to think not,’ said Sho’mar.

  Hand of Fire raced upwards. The wreckage came closer, a cascade of metal and flame. It smacked off the sides of the shaft again and passed across the path of the Thunderhawk. The gunship jerked upwards and clipped the edge of a spinning tail. The impact juddered through the hull. Hand of Fire veered to the side, one wing scraping against the walls, sparking flame. Then the wreckage was past, and the Thunderhawk flew on.

  ‘We will not bow to fate,’ Sho’mar said. ‘It may bloody us, but we will bring it to heel.’

  The reports of the extraction’s progress came to Vulkan over the vox. He threw himself into his final battle on the attack moon, making himself the threat the orks could not ignore. The more of the greenskin horde he kept here, the more he drew away from his troops and from the enemy’s embarkation points. If he held the orks long enough, he would save the mission. If he saved the mission, he would save Antaeum. If he saved Antaeum, he would save the Taras System.

  The orks swarmed around him, rushing to their annihilation. Their weapons were feeble mockeries compared to the warlord’s hammer. They slashed at the damage in his armour. They drew blood, but every wound was a spur to greater fury. If the orks were a tide, then he broke it, he smashed it and taught it fear. The greenskins rushed him in their anger, and he took them apart.

  Closer to the centre of the room, Rhy’tan and the others fought on. Vulkan could see the fire in their struggle. He knew it was more than personal loyalty to him that drove them. They had seen, they had heard and they had understood. There, Vulkan thought, the alloy is forged. With a determination born of hope, he killed the orks anew.

  ‘Come to me!’ he shouted at the greenskins. ‘I have taken your leader! I am taking all of you to the grave! Come and stop me!’

  Time, he thought. Come and give me a bit more time.

  Now it seemed the orks declined his invitation. He unleashed another withering blast with the plasma pistol and after the flash, he saw that the horde had thinned. The orks nearest him had not given up, but further away they were streaming out of the hall. Some greater instinct or a greater call was summoning them. They were rushing to the prey that was Antaeum.

  No more time, then.

  ‘Nomus,’ Vulkan called, ‘we are done here. Now we must finish our task.’

  In four strides, he cut through the shrinking army of greenskins and was halfway to the squad. The legionaries blasted their way to meet him, then they all turned for the entrance to the shaft. Ork fire followed them, a last attempt to punish the invaders.

  Outside the hall, at the end of the shaft, the Thunderhawk Eye of the Furnace was hovering, its engines firing short bursts back to the left and right as it held its position. ‘You are the last, lord primarch,’ the pilot, Ran’kon, voxed.

  ‘Are the other ships clear of the attack moon?’ Vulkan asked.

  ‘The last few are just exiting the tunnel.’

  Vulkan jumped up into the troop compartment. ‘Then we shall not tarry.’ When the last of his sons was aboard, he said, ‘Let us go.’

  As the Thunderhawk rose, he voxed Och’hi on the Flamewrought. ‘Have the orks launched?’ he asked.

  ‘They are beginning to,’ said Och’hi. ‘The first ships have departed. I am seeing bays opening up across the greenskin base. Do you wish the Thunderhawks to engage?’

  ‘No,’ said Vulkan. ‘Get them clear and recover them.’

  Eye of the Furnace roared up the shaft. It travelled much faster than the Termite had descended, but the distance seemed much greater now as the seconds vanished and choices disappeared.

  ‘Send the warning to all ships,’ Vulkan told Och’hi. ‘Prepare for the destruction of the attack moon. This will be the only warning.’

  Ork gunfire clanged against the sides of the Thunderhawk. A rocket flashed over the nose. Another came in a diagonal approach, missing its target but exploding as it grazed the top of the Thunder­hawk. The ship bucked in the explosion but kept going.

  Then they were through, pulling out, passing once more through the tomb that was the Klostzatz, the surface of the ork base pulling away so slowly, too slowly. Vulkan saw the hatches too, sudden craters opening like plague boils across the face of the attack moon. Ork drop-ships rose from them, blocky, improbable machines capable of perhaps a single flight. But that would be enough. That would be too much.

  ‘We kill the beast now,’ Vulkan declared. He blinked through the auto-senses of his helm and sent the detonation command. The signal travelled from his armour to the seismic charges.

  Seconds passed. The bombs went off so deep inside it seemed, at first, that nothing had changed. Then agony wracked the attack moon’s form. Crevasses spider-webbed across the surface. The crust vibrated. A drop-ship climbed unsteadily from a tremor-gripped launch bay, slammed into the side, overturned and fell back in.

  The shaking increased. The ork base trembled like a madman’s fist. Fire erupted from the fissures. Vulkan sensed the unheard groan convulsing the great monster. And then the leviathan exploded.

  The planetoid became a meteor swarm. Huge chunks of debris smashed through the ork fleet, turning ships into gas.

  The surface suddenly rose towards Eye of the Furnace, the attack moon grasping for the gunship in the instant of its death. As it rose, it parted. The crust became a storm of rubble. Fragments the size of frigates rushed for the Thunderhawk. Behind them came the expanding fireball of the base’s destruction.

  The gunship jerked, and the pilot fought to manoeuvre away from the rocks. A vast piece soared past within metres of Eye of the Furnace. It came so close Vulkan could see the tunnels bored into it like those of an anthill. Orks fell from the tunnels. Some still lived and clung to the edges, their mouths gaping in horror and shock.

  For long moments, the Thunderhawk was inside the maelstrom of debris, in the depths of racing destruction. The pilot showed the skill that Vulkan had trained into his Legion and threaded the gunship through the catastrophe.

  Then the meteors were past. Eye of the Furnace was clear, and it had outrun the fire. It flew on, heading for the fleet. The rippling of void shields showed the warships weathering the impacts of the dead attack moon, their guns blasting away the larger fragments of the planetoid. The ork fleet could not do the same. Its ships were too slow, too clumsy, too makeshift. They had come together around a monster, and now they died with it.

  And below, the atmosphere of Antaeum burned with the fires of the rain of stones.

  Numeon was firing from the top of the narrow peak into the orks that were swarming around the narrow base. He risked a moment to look up, the same moment that the orks shouted in confusion, and saw that the sky had turned red.

  The clouds were on fire.

  Saluran laughed. ‘The orks are coming in for a hard landing,’ he said.

  The blaze turned the night into the interior of a furnace. And now, heated by re-entry, the burning, incandescent rubble of the greenskin base streaked to the ground. Smaller fragments landed on th
e lava plain. The earth shook under an orbital bombardment. Wherever a meteor struck, orks died.

  Thunder had come to the surface of Antaeum, and it roared and roared without cease. Numeon still fired his bolter, but he had to grasp hold of the peak to keep from being shaken off.

  Beyond the southern volcanic range, something big came down. Suddenly, it was as bright as day. A sun rose over the mountains, ugly and raging at its birth. The light blinded, then a pillar of fire kilometres wide bellowed up to the sky.

  The legionaries crouched down, auto-senses slamming shut as the shock wave arrived. It flattened the army on the plain. But over the mountains, the fire climbed and spread, and the planet shook from yet more impacts. If there had been a civilisation on Antaeum, it would have died on this day. Perhaps if the orks had managed to spread their full numbers over the land, they would have withstood the storm. But they had not landed. Their greatest number had perished with the attack moon.

  Numeon could see again. The mountains to the south had vanished in the dust. The clouds burned and the rocks fell yet, but the sky was beginning to blacken once more. Another kind of night was gathering over all of Antaeum, a night that would not pass for centuries.

  The volcanoes roared, shocked to life again by the hammer blows from the sky.

  ‘Artellus,’ a voice croaked on the vox. It was Vaughn. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘It is, lord commander,’ said Numeon. ‘The greenskin base has fallen. The orks will have nothing left to the south. There is only the army of the plain, and it is badly hurt.’

  ‘Good. Good,’ said Vaughn, the words heavy with meaning and emotion.

  There was a rumble to the north.

  ‘The cone,’ said Orasus. ‘It’s going to erupt again.’

  ‘Lord commander,’ Numeon began.

  ‘We know,’ said Vaughn. ‘We cannot stay here. And the orks are at our door again. We will not let the planet do the work for us this time. One more charge, then. If this night is the end of it, the glory will be real.’

  There were new lights now descending from the sky. They came more slowly, more deliberately. They left the contrails of engines.

  ‘Brothers,’ Orasus said.

  ‘It is not night,’ Numeon told Vaughn. ‘It is dawn.’

  On the plain, the surviving orks screamed at the sky. The chieftain howled and shook its claw at the descending ships. Then it turned to the three legionaries and charged them, frothing in its desperate wrath to attack an enemy it could kill even when the skies themselves had turned on it. Its minions still numbered in the tens of thousands, but they were confused now, unsure where to turn.

  Over the vox, Numeon heard the battle cries as the defenders of the Cauldron swept out of the gates to meet the enemy one last time. ‘Come, brothers,’ he said to Orasus and Saluran. ‘Shall we see the end of this war?’

  They opened fire on the chieftain. As it raced forwards, it too seemed to know that the end had come.

  Eight

  claw / fusion / baptism

  A name is not simply a marker, a means of differentiating one thing from another. A name, a true name, is an essence. It must be chosen with care, because a name and the Legion it designates will become each other. It holds up the essence to the light. It reveals the nature of strength. The name, in another age, would be called the soul.

  – Vulkan, Ontology

  Eye of the Furnace soared over the lava plain, racing north towards the XVIII’s stronghold. The heavy lifters were bringing in the Legion’s tanks, and the drive to push the orks north had begun. Already, the new eruptions were trapping the orks. Between the advancing lava and heavy armour, the enemy was being confined to an ever narrower portion of the plain.

  Kilometres before the lone volcano, where the remains of the Terran XVIII were striking out ahead of another eruption, Vulkan saw the orks swirling around a small column of rock. A single Thunderhawk circled the position, strafing the greenskins with heavy bolters, but he could see no immediate reason for the orks or the gunship to be focused on this location. He voxed Ran’kon and drew his attention to the anomaly. ‘Take us closer,’ he said.

  Ran’kon obeyed, Eye of the Furnace closed in, and Vulkan saw three legionaries engaging the orks, fighting them with enough fury that they had slowed the aliens’ advance towards the Cauldron. A huge chieftain with a massive power claw was upon them now. It was smaller than the monster that had commanded the attack moon, but it was large enough to overwhelm legionaries already hard-pressed by greenskins on all sides.

  ‘Eye of the Furnace will drop us here,’ Vulkan voxed the pilots. ‘It will remain to support the attacks of that Thunderhawk. All other gunships, proceed north and clear the path for your brothers­ leaving the stronghold. Help them get ahead of the lava so they can finally deliver long-awaited judgement upon the foe.’

  As Vulkan pulled open the side door, Rhy’tan stepped up beside him. Vulkan looked at the Igniax. ‘How fare your doubts?’ he asked.

  ‘There are none, lord primarch.’

  ‘You no longer think the Terrans are doomed to extinction.’

  Rhy’tan shook his head. ‘It shames me that I ever thought so about my brothers.’

  ‘I suspect they also shared your opinion,’ Vulkan said.

  There was no fatalism in the battle he saw below. As they struggled against the giant, they fought with a fire that would leave no room for despair.

  ‘They believe they can win,’ Vulkan said. ‘Let us prove them right.’

  Six metres above the struggle, he jumped.

  The huge chieftain shrugged off the bolt shells. They punched uselessly into the monster’s armour, the shots that did get through to flesh failing to even slow the ork. It aimed its massive gun at Numeon. He jumped out of the way just before it fired, and the shell smacked into a greenskin coming up behind him with the force of a grenade.

  As a Thunderhawk arrived overhead, Saluran came at the chieftain from the side, melta bomb in hand. The monster whirled on him and snapped its power claw down over his left shoulder. The crushing vice snapped through Saluran’s armour. His arm went limp and he dropped the bomb. The ork lifted him high and smashed him to the ground. It released him and he lay still, a broken figure on the rocky plain. It lifted the claw again, the jaws closed ready to impale the legionary.

  A cluster of orks surrounded Orasus, forcing him to fight them, blocking him from reaching his fallen brother. Numeon charged at the chieftain, firing continuously, but the beast ignored him.

  Then a demi-god dropped from the sky.

  The warrior hit the ground, and his sudden presence had the power of an orbital bombardment. Massive as he was, he was smaller than the ork chieftain, but the force of his being made him seem taller. The ork paused, uncertain. The others ­stumbled back, thrown by their leader’s hesitation and even more disturbed by the new arrival’s aura of implacable majesty. It was as if the stones of the planet themselves had declared war on the greenskins and had taken on the form of this unforgiving warrior.

  For Numeon, the second of Vulkan’s arrival seared itself forever into his consciousness. Though the pause in the struggle was momentary, the moment would, in his memory, stretch to eternity, the war frozen forever. He stared at Vulkan, overcome with the awe and gratitude of one knelt before a revealed truth.

  Other legionaries dropped from the gunship. They opened fire on the orks, and two made their way towards Orasus and Numeon. As they drew near, Numeon saw the markings on their pauldrons. He made out the names Rhy’tan and T’kell. They wore mantles of a thick animal scale, but it was the Legion number on their left pauldrons that astonished him.

  XVIII.

  They cut down the press of orks around Orasus, and the four legionaries formed up on instinct, shoulder to shoulder. The impossibility of what Numeon was witnessing fell away before the rightness of the action. He could not under
stand how these were his brother legionaries, yet somehow he knew, with the certainty of the stone beneath his feet, that they were.

  As they slew the orks in a widening circle, Vulkan lunged at the chieftain. The ork was much larger than the primarch, but it seemed diminished before him. When Vulkan struck, it was as if rock and fire had taken human form, and the blow staggered the ork. The chieftain roared, but its bellow sounded defensive.

  It raised its gun to fire, but Vulkan was faster with his plasma pistol. The blinding fireball enveloped the ork’s weapon. The gun exploded, taking the ork’s hand with it, leaving the chieftain with a jagged stump dripping melted flesh. Then, with a flash of dark light, Vulkan’s blade sliced through the ork’s armour at its left shoulder. The plates parted with a hiss, and so did flesh, muscle and bone.

  The ork’s arm fell to the ground.

  The bane of Lord Commander Cassian Vaughn stood motionless before Vulkan. Its weapons gone with its limbs, it was nothing now except a mountain of impotent rage. It screamed at Vulkan and stumbled towards him, still in denial.

  Vulkan cut the ork’s power claw off the severed arm and sheathed his sword. He picked up the claw and plunged its open jaws into the greenskin’s chest. With the beast impaled, he fired the plasma pistol into its face. There was a solemn anger to his actions. He was not killing with contempt: this was judgement, a sentence carried out for the crimes that had been committed.

  The carcass of the ork chieftain collapsed and with its fall, every witness present, human and ork, knew that the war was over. Except it was not. The final steps of its terrible dance still had to be carried out.

  Numeon’s instinct was to bend the knee to his primarch. He did not even have to think, for that was surely who Vulkan was. Numeon knew this rationally, instinctively, with every cell of his being. He knew this was his father and the father of every battle-brother of the XVIII Legion.