Vulkan Lord of Drakes Page 3

  ‘We have to change the orks’ minds,’ said Vaughn. ‘They must prefer to remain here, at war with a true enemy. We will be the irresistible challenge.’

  The landing bays of the Klostzatz opened to receive the gunships. The Stormbirds made short work of the ork fighters that sought to interfere with their return to the battleship. One on one, the ork craft were helpless before the Imperium’s tech­nology of war. They needed overwhelming numbers to tilt the battle in their favour, and for now, Resalt had succeeded in carving out a space for her vessel.

  By the time Vaughn had disembarked and made his way to the bridge, accompanied by Numeon, the attack moon was looming large in the primary oculus. The ork base had been in close orbit of Corcyra, its mere presence enough to change the world’s tides. Resalt had moved what still remained of the XVIII’s fleet away from it, to a position on the other side of Corcyra’s moon. Now the monster was moving again, as if the orks had tired of the invasion as soon as their worthy foes had left. The rest of the ork ships moved with it, insects swarming around a leviathan. The strike cruiser Khalkeus was silhouetted against the attack moon as it manoeuvred back towards the battleship.

  ‘Lord commander,’ Resalt greeted him. Dark-skinned, her head clean-shaven, she had held command of the battleship for the length of the Great Crusade. Vaughn found it easier to imagine the bridge shorn of its oculus and its control surfaces than without its formidable shipmaster. ‘As you can see, our position is becoming untenable.’

  ‘And we have no need to hold it any longer, shipmaster. Take us out. Contact the Khalkeus. We draw the orks back to the worlds they have already burned. We’ll have them chasing…’

  He trailed off, staring at the oculus. Resalt followed his gaze. At the same moment, the bridge’s vox crackled with the voice of Captain Gerhardt Vallorn aboard the Khalkeus.

  A huge wave of ork vessels had whipped out around their base like the spiral arm of a galaxy. Now they rushed towards the strike cruiser, a storm of metal and xenos hate. The orks’ guns were still no match for the Khalkeus, but its void shields were strained to the limit as hundreds of shells pounded against them. The vessel was surrounded by a violent aura. The enemy ships came on at ramming speed.

  The first ones hit. They were smaller than the majestic Imperial vessel, but they broke through its overburdened void shields, slamming hard into the hull. The strike cruiser blazed with counter-fire, turning one ork ship after another into clouds of burning fuel and dissipating shrapnel. Still the orks came on with a suicidal singleness of purpose, as though they were the unthinking limb of the attack moon.

  As the swarm closed around the Khalkeus, the outer edge of the arm reached towards the Klostzatz. Resalt directed covering fire towards the strike cruiser. More ork ships exploded, and the void was no longer black. It was a boiling, burning, convulsing tempest.

  The ork base drew nearer. Even though the Khalkeus continued to make for the Klostzatz, it seemed to grow smaller and smaller as the base expanded, becoming the only world in the oculus’ universe of flame.

  The frigate Guardian of Flame was the first to go. The largest of the ork hulks were almost its equal in size. Its hull withstood several collisions, and then a brutish fist of a shape, all ­reinforced prow and engine, cut it in half. The huge ram kept going, leaking atmosphere and flame. It was badly damaged, but still it hunted. It went straight on at the Khalkeus and struck at the same instant as two other, smaller ram ships. They broke through the void shields again just as the strike cruiser’s defences were coming back online. The big ship punched through the Khalkeus’ starboard flank and exploded, a torpedo half a kilometre long.

  Amidships of the strike cruiser, flame blossomed. Cracks, ­shining white with heat, spread along the hull. The Khalkeus was still moving forwards, still heading for the Klostzatz, but its course had been knocked off true.

  Vallorn’s crew managed to restore vox communications, which had momentarily been consumed by static. ‘We’ve lost steering,’ the captain said, his voice ragged with pain. ‘Engines are not responding. Readings say they’re going–’

  A savage dawn tore through the void and cut him off once more. The Khalkeus became its own pyre. The conflagration swallowed a score of ork ships, but hundreds more raced through the flames, charging like hungry carnivores towards their next prey. Behind them, the attack moon advanced. Its gravity pulled the destroyed greenskin and Imperial ships to its surface. Their wreckage punched craters on impact but did nothing more than scar the face of the xenos beast, rendering its image even more brutal.

  ‘Take us out,’ Vaughn ordered.

  Another retreat. Again, there was no choice. Any reason to fight in the Anteros System had evaporated. The orks controlled it. The only hope now was to find a new, more favourable battlefield.

  The Klostzatz hummed as its engines accelerated. The prow turned away from the attack moon and pointed towards the system’s Mandeville point.

  ‘Take us to Taras,’ Vaughn said. ‘Take us to Taras, and we’ll burn them there.’

  He turned away from the pulpit overlooking the bridge and stood over the tacticarium table. He did not have to stare at the shameful sight of the new retreat. He trusted Resalt to do as he had commanded. She knew the ship and its capabilities better than he did. If it was possible to escape from the orks, she would do so without his interference.

  As the ork cannons and the fastest of their ships struck the Klostzatz’s void shields, and the hull began to quake, Vaughn stared at the star chart of the Taras System. He would find the battlefield. He would strip the initiative from the orks. He would set the terms of the next battle.

  Two

  antaeum / firefall / revelations

  War is the forge of new alloys. It creates those who will withstand it.

  – Vulkan, Maxims

  The Klostzatz and its escorts transitioned into the Taras System. The battleship trailed smoke. Adamantine fragments, some as large as Land Raiders, tumbled from rents in the hull. In the strategium above the bridge, Vaughn flicked his eyes down the pict screen displaying constantly updating damage report data. Entire decks of the battleship were inaccessible. A score of legionaries had perished in the run to the Anteros Mandeville point. More than a thousand of the mortal crew had died. The remaining escorts had not fared much better. The XVIII’s fleet was a shadow of the already diminished force that had arrived at the Taras Division a year ago. It was a shadow of ­tatters and blood.

  Our fate is written.

  Vaughn pushed the thought away. Better to accept as a near-miracle the fact that the Geller field of every Legion vessel had held. There had been no further casualties in the warp.

  We have accomplished that much, he told himself. And we will do more.

  He turned his attention back to his Praetors and Resalt, who were gathered around the primary tacticarium table.

  ‘The orks will follow us,’ said Numeon.

  ‘They would be coming to Taras regardless of our presence,’ Vaughn said. ‘The system lies on the path of their invasion. We are the defence, not the lure. But if we are to stop them, if we are to protect the inhabited planets of Taras, and if we are not to abandon the refugees who arrived here thanks to us, then we must become a lure.’

  ‘That should not be difficult,’ said Numeon. ‘They seem to enjoy our company.’ There was no humour in his eyes. He ran a hand over his scalp, bare except for an aggressive ridge of hair that ran down the centre. The gesture was abrupt, frustrated, as if he were trying to contain his anger before the prospect of an unwinnable war. He was rough-edged next to Vaughn, who was a scion of a noble house in northern Afrik, and was taller and slimmer than most of his battle-brothers.

  ‘We are in no better a position to fight them here than we were in Anteros,’ said Resalt. ‘The Klostzatz will go to war, lord commander, but please have no illusions about what she can do. Or what she can survive.�
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  ‘I have none,’ Vaughn told her. ‘We will fight them on the ground, where we can use the strength of our legionaries. Let them come to us here.’ He pointed to Antaeum on the table’s hololithic display. ‘A death world,’ he went on. ‘No human popu­lation, and all the inhabited worlds lie sunward. The ground we will hold by making our stand on Antaeum is the rest of the system.’

  ‘At least we will have a free hand against them there,’ said Numeon. He paused, then gave Vaughn a sardonic look.

  ‘Dare I ask whether there will be reinforcements?’

  ‘There will be none. The astropathic choir has sent word, but all the other Legions are too far from Taras, their forces fully engaged in the Great Crusade. We are all there is.’

  Vaughn looked around the table at his officers. No illusions, Resalt had said, and he saw none. All of them knew the scale of what would be coming for them, and they also knew what they could do against the greenskins.

  When Vaughn ended the briefing a few minutes later, Numeon lingered in the strategium. Vaughn waited until Resalt had returned to the bridge pulpit to oversee the approach to Antaeum, then joined Numeon where he stood near the holo­lith of the planet. ‘What is it?’ Vaughn asked.

  ‘I’m curious. Is Antaeum our last stand?’

  There was a hint of a grin in Numeon’s expression. Vaughn couldn’t tell if the first captain’s sense of irony was breaking out again, or if he meant the question seriously.

  ‘How many last stands have we fought as a Legion?’ Vaughn said. His evasion didn’t fool either of them.

  ‘This time feels different,’ Numeon said.

  The grin was still there.

  Antaeum was far from the system’s star. From this distance, Taras was little more than a bright pinprick. The light that reached the planet was weak and cold. Yet Antaeum burned. The planet heaved with tectonic activity. Its mottled red surface was split by incessant lava flows. Chains of volcanoes sent huge sulphur plumes over the landscape. The atmosphere was toxic, corrosive and thick with ash. Hurricane winds warred with each other.

  ‘A fitting place,’ Vaughn said as the Stormbird dropped lower.

  Turbulence battered the gunship. For a second, it was in free fall. Then the engines caught the air again and the pilot, Carvanon, regained control of the descent.

  ‘This world will try to kill us as much as it will the greenskins,’ said Numeon.

  ‘It can try,’ said Vaughn.

  Ash streaked the air dark grey. A red tinge spread outwards from the lava flows. In the distance was the hint of yellow from one of the sulphur eruptions.

  ‘We are approaching the coordinates you indicated, lord commander,’ Carvanon voxed.

  ‘Good,’ said Vaughn. He nodded, pleased, as the volcano came into view. ‘A fitting place,’ he said again. ‘We will let the land fight for us. We will make it kill many greenskins.’ He had studied the long-range auspex scans carefully before selecting the location of the stronghold. He knew what he planned was at the limits of what was possible, but the reality of the site looked far more formidable than inexpressive data suggested.

  The volcano was an isolated cone rising from a flooded lava plain. The flows of the eruption had turned the plain once more into a glowing sea. Fresh lava slid over the old, glaring red covering the sullen dark. The slopes of the volcano were steep, but midway up the southern flank, the grade lessened for a few thousand metres.

  Carvanon circled the region once, then pulled back to make way for the heavy lifters.

  The mountain’s crater was more built up on this side, protecting the flank. There were few lava flows running down the target area.

  ‘Too steep for landing,’ said Numeon.

  ‘We won’t have any yet,’ Vaughn told him. ‘We’ll construct the landing pads and any other level surfaces we need on top of the modular fortifications once they’re down.’

  A massive wind gust hurled itself against the Stormbird. The gunship shuddered. Its port wing lifted as if the ship might roll onto its back, then dropped back down. At the other end of the plain, the centre volcano of a chain erupted so violently, it blew up the top quarter of its peak. A monstrous pyroclastic surge roared across the flatlands.

  Vaughn cursed. Antaeum was trying to kill them. There was no possibility of delaying construction. The action had begun, and they must complete it.

  The gunships and lifters could not depart in time, so they continued with their tasks, as if a holocaust were not racing towards them.

  ‘Defy this world!’ Vaughn commanded. ‘Show it that what we have claimed, we hold!’

  The first of the prefabricated fortress units dropped from a heavy lifter and slammed into the slope of the mountain. The Stormbirds came in at angles and paused, engines blasting down to hold them in a brief hovering position. Legionaries leapt from the side doors and rushed to anchor the walls into the mountain face. Vaughn joined his troops. The surge was coming at hundreds of kilometres an hour, and Vaughn’s lips pulled back in a grim smile as he triggered the adamantine harpoon at the corner of a wall section’s base. The three-metre-wide cylinder thrummed, and an explosive charge shot the enormous harpoon into the mountainside with the force of a torpedo. It dug into rock before its head expanded, holding fast.

  ‘This is our ground!’ he voxed. ‘We claim it, and we will hold it!’

  A minute later, the surge was upon the Legion. The ash cloud blasted the ground as if it would scour it to the bedrock. Burning gas engulfed the landing site, and lava bombs fell on all sides. Ash struck Vaughn’s Terminator armour like a hail of bullets, and threatened to clog his rebreather. The air was black and grey with fury, the whine of struggling engines fading behind the roar of the burning cloud.

  The ships were shadows above Vaughn. They had no shape until they came within a hundred metres of his position. Engines screamed past, stuttered, roared again, and then there was fire everywhere. Flaming matter had scored a direct hit on a Thunderhawk’s engines as it came in to drop more legionaries. For an instant the winds seized the gunship as the pilot struggled to right it, but its tail clipped the mountainside and it began to roll. Its nose hit too, sending the Thunderhawk tumbling away from the relative safety of the stronghold’s site. Then a wing sank into a lava flow, momentum bled off and the gunship was down, molten rock sweeping over it, carrying it away and into oblivion.

  The surge raged. It was as if the world had cracked open and the Legion had fallen into its core. Visibility dropped to nothing. Vaughn’s auto-senses flashed red across all readings. The heat was overwhelming. His power pack’s ability to vent it failed. Soon he would cook inside his own armour. There was nothing before him except the wall of the fortress he had decreed should be here.

  ‘I stand and I do not fall!’ he shouted. ‘I stand and I do not fall!’ It was the only coherence he could manage as pain ripped through his body.

  The vox was nothing but static and broken fragments of shouting. It seemed the wall before him should be melting. But it remained solid, and he held it. Touching it confirmed he was real. By placing his palms upon it, he claimed the fortress and the land as his own. He would not fall, he would not fail. Not here. There would be no further retreat.

  There were more explosions, more ships going down. There was a deep, all-encompassing boom that Vaughn realised was one of the heavy lifters. But then the fire faded. Gradually, he could see again. Vaughn and the other legionaries on the slope were buried in ash up to their waists. He struggled free and looked around. The wreckage of a huge vessel lay at the foot of the mountain, flames leaping up from the crumpled hull. He counted the ships still in the air and was dismayed to find four more were missing. But there were also more warriors on the mountainside. They had survived dropping in the worst of the surge.

  The walls of the fortress had held, Vaughn saw. The structure’s basic skeleton was in place. And as the as
h fall diminished, more ships now arrived from the Klostzatz, dropping modules into position, while legionaries cemented their hold on Antaeum.

  Later, when the dark day of the planet gave way to the thick blackness of night, the essentials of the fortress were in place, though the Legion would continue to strengthen it until the orks arrived. It had a name now, the Cauldron. The bulk of the legionaries were inside, sheltered. On the downslope threshold to the stronghold, Vaughn looked out at the land that had tried and failed to kill him, planning how he would put it to use.

  ‘A costly arrival,’ he said to Numeon, who stood beside him.

  ‘It is a victory, though. It feels real. We needed this one.’

  ‘This was our last retreat,’ Vaughn said. ‘The orks will not push us from Antaeum. We leave here victorious or not at all.’

  The land in the shadow of Mount Deathfire groaned. The volcano stirred in uneasy slumber, and the plain cracked as if in the throes of a nightmare. Fissures opened up, deep wounds in the flesh of the earth. They glowed red with the molten blood of Nocturne. Clouds of sulphur spread across the plain. Gases ignited, and billows of fire rolled over Vulkan as he marched towards the obelisk.

  The monolith of basalt reached fifteen metres into the air, but its roots went far deeper. Vulkan had carved it and brought it here himself, then plunged it deep into the roots of Nocturne, where it would stand through all the upheavals of the Times of Trial: a beacon stone on the great plain, a shadow within a shadow, pointing back at Deathfire, which had consumed the ashes of the warrior the obelisk memorialised.

  Vulkan reached the monument to N’bel. Since one father was silent, he had come to speak to the other.