Vulkan Lord of Drakes Read online

  ‘Is this what you believe?’ Vulkan asked.

  ‘I do not know,’ Rhy’tan confessed. ‘It is a thought that grows and refuses to be dismissed.’

  ‘Have you shared this thought with others?’

  ‘I have not broached it, but they have with me.’

  Vulkan nodded. ‘I see.’ The task you have given me is a heavy one, Father. ‘I’m glad you have told me of this, Nomus,’ he said. ‘I will tell you now that we will put the lie to this belief. The legion­aries of Terra are my sons as much as the legionaries of Nocturne. They are your kin. There is a reason why we are as yet separated from them. But it is not to wait out their extinction.’

  Rhy’tan bowed his head. ‘I am glad of it, lord,’ he said.

  But do you believe it? Vulkan wondered if Rhy’tan was convinced.

  He also wondered when the sign from the Emperor would come. He knew it was time for this half of the Legion to play its part in the Crusade. What troubled him was that he did not know what time had come for the other half.

  The bombardment blasted down the mountain pass towards the space port of Sybota. The barrage was undisciplined, the ordnance was primitive, and it was devastating. There was no skill in the ork attack, but there was overwhelming abundance. It was as if the sky had turned to stone and then collapsed, falling to earth in a ­hammering avalanche. The air screamed with the unending whistles of the shells. The ground erupted and erupted and erupted, craters overlapping each other, and the pass was choked with flame and dust.

  ‘Total loss of visibility, lord commander,’ Artellus Numeon voxed from his Typhon siege tank, Victor of the Caucasus.

  Encased in his battle-scarred Terminator armour, riding in the top hatch of the Fellblade Ethnarch’s Doom, Cassian Vaughn wiped the dust from his helm’s lenses. ‘I am well aware of that, first captain.’ Before him was nothing but tumultuous darkness lit by blinding flashes of dirty orange fire.

  ‘We cannot see the targets to shoot them.’

  Despite Numeon’s frustration, the Typhon’s Dreadhammer cannon boomed, the sound reaching Vaughn through the air and over the vox. The flare of the muzzle seared the darkness of the pass, revealing the tank’s position, a hundred metres to Doom’s right. The enormous shell streaked into the tempest of blasts. Moments later, the deep rumble of an entire cliff face collapsing rolled back to Cassian.

  ‘We know where they were, and where they must be,’ Vaughn said. The range of the ork guns was poor. The artillery barrage was effective only because there were hundreds of the cannons further up the pass and on the lower peaks.

  ‘The long-range auspex readings show a uniform heat bloom,’ Numeon reported.

  ‘Then we’ll manage with that.’ Vaughn switched vox-channels, broadcasting to the entire force in the pass. ‘All units, maintain fire. Their storm will not move us. They advance no further.’

  Fool, he thought. How many times have you said the same thing this past year? How many lines were we going to hold? How many times have we been driven back?

  Once was too often, an insult to the reputation of the XVIII Legion, and the orks had repeated the insult again and again since they had come to the Taras Division. A million of the greenskins, descending upon human systems in a collection of vessels that could not be dignified by the term fleet. They were a swarm, a pestilential wave of hundreds of wrecks, hulks and crude assemblages barely recognisable as ships surrounding a single, central mass the size of a planetoid. In a year of war, Vaughn had not yet been able to determine precisely how large the enemy’s force was. There were more than a million orks, that much the XVIII had been able to estimate. Their numbers might as well have been infinite. A million against the nineteen thousand of the XVIII Legion.

  And that was at the start of the war. Vaughn’s legionaries had slowed the ork advance, but they could not stop it. The filthy waves upon waves of greenskin ships and ground troops robbed ­honour, duty, determination, bravery and self-sacrifice of meaning. All Vaughn had to show for a year of struggle was a diminished Legion and a string of burning, abandoned planets.

  Corcyra would soon add its name to the tally of lost worlds in the Anteros System. The XVIII was holding the ground in the pass, but it would not be long before there was no more ground to hold.

  Vaughn had deployed the full strength of the XVIII’s heavy armour. The choke point was also the primary approach to Sybota’s east. The north and south were shielded by the embrace of the mountain chain, and to the west lay the ocean that surrounded Corcyra’s single inhabited land mass. The XVIII had used Sybota’s geographic isolation against the greenskin hordes. The Legion had bought time. Now the time was almost gone. The pressure of the invasion was becoming irresistible. Vaughn might as well be trying to hold back tectonic plates.

  ‘They’re coming closer,’ said Numeon.

  ‘Then they’ll be harder to miss,’ Vaughn said. But he thought, They will not stop.

  The full fury of the bombardment fell on the Legion’s tanks, then beyond. There was no consistency to the power of the greenskin ordnance. Some of the shells failed to explode at all. The ablative armour of the tanks shrugged off many others, their force too weak to cut through the powerful Imperial war machines. But there were just as many that were dangerous, huge masses of densely packed high explosive. They should have blown up inside the cannons that fired them, but instead they arced down to shatter the earth and unleash their fury on the XVIII.

  A sudden cluster of massive ordnance struck the tank ahead of Ethnarch’s Doom. The Typhon Bane of the Tempest Galleries weathered the first few impacts, but they kept coming, a ­hammering of mad destruction, and at last the anvil cracked. Bane’s hull split open, then its ammunition erupted. The Typhon vanished. The fireball expanded through the storm, washing over nearby tanks. Vaughn squinted as the flames reached him, even though his auto-lenses adjusted to the sudden flare. A twisted, glowing chunk of Bane’s hull cartwheeled past him, one corner clanging against the turret of the Fellblade. Vaughn whirled in the hatch and looked back. The trailing flames and the flying ­rubble stretched ragged fingers in the direction of Sybota’s space port. The bombardment storm hid the skyline of the city from view. Vaughn could see nothing but boiling grey and the burn. But then he heard another thunder, a welcome one, continuous and growing. He saw a glow, the light of a pillar of fire so huge it could shine through the storm. It rose, slowly at first, then faster, climbing higher and higher.

  It was the sign of the closest thing to victory the XVIII could still hope to achieve on Corcyra.

  ‘Orasus,’ Vaughn called over a channel to the space port. ‘What is our status?’

  ‘The last of the heavy lifters has departed, lord commander,’ Tactical Legionary Maraeus Orasus answered. He was the vox-operator for his squad, one of those detached to oversee the exodus from Corcyra.

  ‘Have any further refugees reached the space port?’

  ‘None.’

  Then the evacuation was complete. The human population of Corcyra was in orbit and beyond, fleeing the system while the XVIII held the attention of the orks.

  ‘All units,’ said Vaughn, ‘our mission is complete.’ Only this should never have been our mission. We are forced to consider total retreat a victory. ‘Pull back to the space port.’

  ‘Lord commander,’ said Orasus, ‘shells have begun to fall on the city.’

  Vaughn bit back a curse. ‘From what direction?’

  ‘From everywhere but the east. They are encircling Sybota.’

  We barely slowed them, Vaughn thought. There were so many greenskins, they were pouring over the mountain peaks like a wind-borne plague. ‘All possible speed to the space port,’ he ordered the Legion. ‘Cannons, keep firing on the advance of the foe. We have only a short time to depart. Our duty on Corcyra is complete, but our war is not.’

  It never will be, he thought. Not until the last
of us lies dead. He no longer imagined an end to the struggle that saw the orks destroyed. Every strategy he used now would do nothing more than gain the XVIII a bit of time.

  Ethnarch’s Doom’s engine rumbled into a higher pitch as Legionary Blasius turned the Fellblade around. Vaughn’s perspective did not change as, inside the tank, gunner Caelius swung the turret through one hundred and eighty degrees. Caelius fired the Fellblade’s twin-linked accelerator cannons. From one barrel came a high-explosive shell designed to turn infantry into bloody mist. From the other came an armour-piercing projectile that could smash the strongest walls. The double punch of the Doom’s accelerators could lay an army to waste. Caelius kept sending out its wrath, cutting through the bombardment to unseen targets.

  ‘They’re dying out there,’ Caelius shouted into the vox. The tumult of the barrage was so constant, so omnipresent, that there was no other way to communicate, even for crews in a single tank. ‘We punish them for every step they take.’

  ‘That we do, legionary,’ Vaughn answered. Not enough of them die. Not nearly enough. But we can punish them all the same.

  The ranks of heavy armour retreated from the pass. The bombardment followed. There was no respite from the pounding explosions. The craters slowed the formation down as the tanks crawled in and out of them. Now and then, Vaughn made out the flash of ork guns, sometimes from elevated positions, sometimes advancing through the pass. The enemy was closer yet. He could almost imagine he heard the snarl of the infantry. Perhaps he was not imagining it at all. The greenskins would not hesitate to rush through their own bombardment in their eagerness to engage with their foe.

  It took Vaughn several attempts to pierce the static and reach Shipmaster Vathea Resalt aboard the battleship Klostzatz. ‘We are done here, shipmaster,’ he said when he got through.

  ‘So I surmised, lord commander. The captain of that lifter is boasting about being the last to leave Corcyra.’

  How very brave of him, Vaughn thought. But in the next instant, he felt a surge of relief. Bravado was a good sign. That meant the ship of civilians had cleared the atmosphere and was out of immediate danger. His delaying action against the orks had succeeded.

  All that remained now was for the Legion to escape extinction.

  And then fight again.

  ‘I have sent all transports to Sybota, lord commander,’ Resalt said.

  ‘Thank you, shipmaster. It is time for us to leave.’

  Sybota was on fire as the XVIII Legion reached the space port. What little discipline the orks had demonstrated with their bombardment of the mountain pass had vanished, and their guns were now firing indiscriminately, every tower of the city an inviting target. The hordes closing in from north and south had broken through the walls. The entire city was within range of the artillery, and the greenskins’ infantry were rampaging through the streets. In the wide ferrocrete expanse of the space port’s launching pads, the wind quickly blew away the smoke and dust of the shell impacts, and Vaughn looked up into a sky reddened by the conflagrations and the bloody streaks of falling shells. From a way off came a roar like the pounding of surf, its note of savagery becoming clearer as the tide approached. A hundred thousand guttural cries made that roar.

  ‘This is a poor spectacle of victory,’ Vaughn admitted to Numeon. Now that there was no more action to take on Corcyra, Vaughn felt free to express his frustrations privately with his friend.

  They stood on the vast rockcrete apron of the space port, before the regiments of legionaries awaiting evacuation. The shadow of the abandoned control tower fell over them. Smoke drifted upwards from shell holes in the walls, shrouding the tower. The air over the apron was sharp with expended fuel. Heavy lifters had already taken most of the tanks off-planet. Squadrons of Stormbirds were transporting the Legiones Astartes to the fleet waiting at low anchor.

  ‘It is an empty spectacle,’ said Numeon. ‘The greenskins are wasting their energy. There is nothing left here for them to kill. We did kill many.’

  ‘We always kill many. We will kill many more. And they will keep coming. They will not stop at the Taras Division.’

  There was an eruption of fire a few kilometres from the outskirts of the space port. Stormbirds were making strafing runs over the approaching orks.

  ‘Not much time,’ said Numeon.

  Vaughn eyed the remaining ranks of legionaries. ‘Time enough.’ Even as the flight of gunships departed, he could see another angling in from the north-west. This would be the last. ‘We are done here,’ he said. ‘Now we depart to fight and hold them. Again.’

  ‘As we did for Sybota.’

  ‘You still have a taste for irony, Artellus. Well done.’

  Numeon grunted. ‘We’re always holding them back, aren’t we? We cannot advance. Whether we like it or not, we are losing ground.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘And when they move to the Taras System?’

  Vaughn shook his head. There could not be another evacuation. The populations of the Taras worlds were too large. There was no way for any fleet to get so many billions away, and there was nowhere for them to go.

  There were sudden flashes high in the sky. Small, distant, but bright: the flares of combat in the void.

  ‘Lord commander,’ Resalt voxed, ‘there’s a ship incoming to your position.’

  ‘They’re attempting a landing?’ Vaughn asked in disbelief.

  ‘Not a landing,’ said Resalt. ‘We’ve crippled them. They’re turning their ship into an orbital bomb.’

  The squadron of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, the last that would be needed, was almost there.

  ‘End strafing runs,’ Vaughn ordered. ‘All aircraft not involved in transport, make for orbit.’

  One of the flares in the sky grew brighter.

  The gunships came in, their ramps slamming down even before they had fully landed.

  ‘On board now!’ Vaughn cried, and the legionaries stormed up the ramps. Vaughn waited until the end, heading for the Stormbird Stoic with Numeon. He looked up as he boarded. The bright flare was a constant, becoming blinding, becoming flame, becoming a solid object.

  ‘Go!’ Vaughn was shouting, barely conscious that he was doing so.

  The order was unnecessary. The gunships were taking off. The space port shook with the roar of a dozen gunship engines screaming for speed and height.

  ‘Go!’ Vaughn shouted again, as if his command could urge the aircraft to greater velocity.

  The deck heaved under his feet as Stoic thundered upwards. He snatched at the grav-web and pulled himself against the bulkhead, strapping himself in. ‘Wide dispersal,’ he ordered. ‘Pull away from the space port. Get out of the target zone.’

  The fire in the sky drew closer still. Stoic raced on a diagonal path away from the coming apocalypse. Its engines shrieked with strain. The fireball filled Vaughn’s vision, a misshapen, monstrous, grotesquery of a ship. It should never have flown, it should never have been voidworthy, and now it was conceding to the impossibility of its design and was coming to earth, trailing fire, hungry for its final immolation.

  It glowed with the heat of re-entry.

  Stoic streaked away and the ship dropped past it. The hulk clipped the Thunderhawks Resilience and Unbroken and the Stormbird Flamebringer, shearing off wings and tails. The gunships tumbled, out of control, gravity pulling them back to follow the ork monster to its doom.

  The hulk smashed into the space port. The fireball engulfed entire square kilometres of the city. Towers vanished beneath the huge sea of flame. The shock wave chased Stoic, then overtook it. A monstrous fist shook the gunship. The hull groaned. The craft struggled to maintain its momentum, and for several seconds its speed bled away. But it survived the blow and kept climbing through an atmosphere wracked by turbulent fire.

  Vaughn gazed down through the viewing block at the destruction below. The str
icken gunships had vanished in the holocaust. More men gone, his Legion diminished again, and for what?

  ‘This is what we have died for,’ he said to Numeon.

  The fireball was dimming from incandescence to an angry red. The shattered spires of Sybota stuck out of the flames like the splinters of a huge beast’s skeleton.

  ‘We did save the population,’ Numeon said.

  ‘You know we didn’t. We only delayed their destruction.’

  Numeon said nothing for a moment. ‘You truly believe we cannot win?’

  It was Vaughn’s turn to pause. The answer to Numeon’s question was obvious, but to speak it would be too shameful. ‘We can fight,’ he said, as if that were a sufficient answer. ‘We will fight.’

  Outside the Stormbird, the air was growing dark as the gunship passed through the upper atmosphere. The battle in low orbit came into focus. The disciplined broadsides of the XVIII’s ships slashed through the poorly constructed ork vessels. Greenskin fire flashed fruitlessly back against flaring void shields.

  ‘We have a free hand now,’ Vaughn said, glimpsing hope. ‘There are no worlds to defend. We can throw everything into keeping the orks here, away from the Taras System.’

  Vaughn held on to that hope as the gunships of the XVIII left Corcyra behind. They made for the Klostzatz. The battleship was surrounded by much smaller ork attackers. The greenskins’ ships did not have the firepower to pierce the Imperial vessel’s void shields, and they were trying to ram the Klostzatz instead. Shipmaster Resalt was holding them back with dense defensive firepower. Converging lance and cannon fire forward of the battleship had cleared enemy ships from the immediate region of the bow, opening the way for the returning gunships.

  Numeon said, ‘What about their attack moon?’ The term designated the immense accretion of planetoids and ruined ships at the centre of the ork fleet. The construction was as monstrous as it was primitive. It looked like a frozen collision, a mad fusion of wrecks that should have destroyed each other but had instead cohered. It was grotesque, more gargoyle than vessel, a physical expression of the greenskins’ relentless savagery. ‘Can we keep it in the Anteros System if they decide to take it elsewhere?’ Numeon asked.