The Hunt for Vulkan Read online

  Thane hurled a frag grenade. The skitarii had little flesh for the shrapnel to pierce, but the blast fountained metal over them, melting joints and incinerating circuits. A ruststalker leaped in front of him, slashing at his helmet with its chordclaw. He jerked his head back. The claws scraped across his grille. With his right arm, he swung his chainsword diagonally down through the assassin’s neck, cutting through cables. It severed a cybernetic spine. The ruststalker’s head flew off, and Thane trampled over the body.

  The Fists Exemplar collided with the infiltrators. They attacked with fury and with sheer mass, turning the Sicarians into scrap metal. The remaining ruststalkers retreated, vanishing back into the shadows.

  ‘Are you still holding, Thamarius?’ Thane voxed.

  ‘Barely,’ the sergeant answered. He sounded winded. ‘Still not through the Gate.’

  ‘We are almost with you.’ There was a doorway ahead. Beyond it, a narrow corridor, and the Martian daylight. The end of the manufactorium and a short run to the rear of the Mechanicus lines and the Tharsis gate.

  The huge fist kept moving.

  ‘Our losses–’ 7-Galliax began.

  ‘Are known and registered,’ Van Auken interrupted.

  ‘We have been unable to stop the Adeptus Astartes advance through the Dolentes complex.’

  ‘We are fully aware.’ Van Auken’s optics skipped from vid-screen to vid-screen, processing the unfolding disaster. Extrapolated results were even grimmer. He had to shut the conflict down and do it quickly. The long-term consequences were as uncertain as the near-future ones were definite. They were also coming no matter what steps he took to stop the Fists Exemplar. There was no peace to preserve now. The political ramifications were beyond his concern. He was sending constant updates to Terra, for the use of the Fabricator General, but whatever Kubik decided had no bearing on the immediate situation. ‘Reinforcements are arriving,’ Van Auken told 7-Galliax. ‘Expect significant structural and personnel impacts.’

  ‘Acknowledged. We are the Machine. Let it be inevitable and manifest.’

  Short-term collateral losses to the Mechanicus were regrettable. They were also ongoing. The war had to be stopped by a massive concentration of force. Sufficient escalation would stop uncontrollable escalation.

  There was pure certainty in the move he had to make. Its success was less certain.

  He watched the vid-screens, processing the data of the war he was trying to stop.

  He realised he was experiencing desperation.

  ‘Your query’s answer is self-evident,’ Kubik said. ‘If I were not a High Lord, I would not be present. We would not be having this conversation.’

  The Fabricator General’s answer was somewhere between being literal in the most mechanistic sense and an equivocation. Koorland hoped Kubik’s cold evasion was a sign of uncertainty. You still have nerves in there, Koorland thought. I think I struck one.

  He pressed harder. ‘Your actions force my question. You have every right and duty to act in the defence of Mars, but not at the expense of the Imperium. We are not two powers. We are one. Or are you really contemplating secession?’

  ‘The speculation is absurd,’ Kubik said.

  Koorland did not expect emotion in Kubik’s voice, so he was not surprised by the flat absence of outrage or passion. What surprised him was the momentary pause. A single metallic finger tapped once against the right arm of the throne. Something Koorland had said had jolted the Fabricator General. He had hit too close to home.

  Secession? The Mechanicus wouldn’t be that mad.

  And if they were?

  Koorland leaned closer to Kubik. ‘What do you think is happening on Mars?’ he asked. ‘What do you think will be the consequences of the path you have chosen?’

  ‘The Mechanicus does not walk this path alone, Lord Commander. You are the one who sent an armed force to Mars.’

  ‘You forced my choice. Fabricator General Kubik, there is war on Mars as we have this debate. Even now the damage must be considerable. It will be worse. If there is no ceasefire, the struggle will continue until there is victory. Think of the cost. Think how far the consequences will reach. Perhaps this will not be civil war.’ He shot a glance at Veritus, who glowered but kept silent. ‘But Mars will be weakened. The Imperium will be weakened. Is that your desire? How much destruction will you embrace?’

  No answer from Kubik, except in the tapping of his finger. It marked time, each click of metal on metal the passing of another second, another moment lost to the cascading destruction.

  Messengers burst into the Great Chamber from separate doors. One ran straight for Koorland. The other was a Mechanicus acolyte.

  Kubik’s finger stopped tapping. His telescoping optics flicked from the approaching acolyte and back to Koorland.

  They waited in silence for the news.

  More moments lost.

  A few metres from the exit of the corridor, Thane halted. At the same instant, Thamarius voxed, ‘Chapter Master! Mechanicus reinforcements!’

  ‘I see them, brother-sergeant.’

  Dunecrawlers – squadron after squadron of them, a swarm of massive arachnid walkers, moving in with a ponderous scuttle into the port area. Their eradication beamers were swinging towards the manufactorium.

  ‘They will leave nothing but a crater,’ said Aloysian.

  Van Auken’s voice resounded across the battlefield. ‘Adeptus Astartes, surrender immediately. You have thirty seconds.’

  Thane gestured the company back. He opened a channel to the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said. ‘I need a single bombardment cannon salvo with immediate effect at these coordinates.’

  The messages were subluminal reports. As Koorland learned the full details of the battle’s beginning, he received word on the vox of another astropathic communication. It was one whose translation had posed no difficulty. There had been too much urgency in the signal from the choir aboard the Alcazar Remembered, the message too brief and simple to permit misunderstanding.

  ‘An orbital attack has begun,’ Koorland said.

  Kubik rose. ‘End it,’ he demanded.

  ‘That lies with you,’ Koorland responded.

  Imperial Fist and Fabricator General faced each other. The seconds ticked by in silence. The rest of the High Lords watched and said nothing. Hundreds of millions of kilometres away, destruction rained from the Martian skies.

  The Dunecrawlers turned their beams on the manufactorium. The Fists Exemplar retreated from the disintegrating collapse. Walls evaporated behind them. The upper floors plummeted. The rubble that fell through the beams vanished. Tonnes of rockcrete and iron and plasteel made it through. Thane crouched against the side wal as slabs came down at an angle. Ruin pressed down on the company. He pushed upwards, straining against the weight that sought to crush him. The pressure grew as more and more of the upper structure fell.

  ‘Stand fast, brothers!’ he called, shouting over thunder. ‘Our retaliation approaches.’

  ‘It’s getting lighter,’ Kahagnis said.

  ‘Do not rejoice,’ Aloysian warned.

  The shrieking hum of the eradicator beams drew nearer. They were stripping away the layers of rubble. Soon there would be no shelter.

  Daylight appeared over Thane’s head.

  He roared and turned to face the Mechanicus armour. And so he was in time to see the streak from the sky. The bombardment cannon’s shot struck the centre of the Square of the Infinite Reach. Auto-senses shutting out the glare, Thane crouched in the vanishing ruins. The blast was light and fire and the concentrated wind of a thousand hurricanes. It blew over the Fists Exemplar., who sank into their positions, clutching shattered foundations. Torn and burned fragments of the Dunecrawlers flew overhead, leaves in the wind. The wind still blowing, the glare barely faded, Thane called the charge.

  Smoke and
dust everywhere. In the avenue, the heavy armour struggle continued, but the Mechanicus forces, closer to the blast, had been decimated. The Space Marine tanks gained ground. Before the Tharsis Gate, there was now a wasteland with a crater a dozen metres deep at its centre. Its slopes were a landscape of unrecognisable metal fragments and broken stone.

  ‘Thamarius,’ Thane called as the Fists Exemplar descended the slope.

  ‘Still here, Chapter Master. Just.’

  ‘Are you in?’

  ‘Almost.’

  Weylon Kale broke in. ‘Chapter Master,’ said the shipmaster, ‘we are under attack.’

  ‘How many Mechanicus vessels?’

  ‘Many.’

  Koorland took a step back from Kubik. He spread his arms, taking in the damage to the Great Chamber. ‘Is this what we are coming to?’ he asked. ‘Will we turn the Imperium into a broken, fractured, divided shadow of what it should be? Is this how we honour the Emperor?’ He filled his lungs with air. He filled his being with righteous anger. He bellowed his denial and his loyalty in a single word: ‘No!’

  The shout reverberated across the Chamber. The High Lords looked at him in silence. He saw terror in some, shame in others. Vangorich gave a slow nod of approval. Something glimmered in Veritus’ eyes and Koorland had the impression it was something like hope. He was surprised to see the old inquisitor was still capable of the emotion.

  Kubik was unreadable. He had no face in the human sense. He was perfectly still.

  I have your attention, Koorland thought.

  He spoke to the High Lords. His voice carried to the seating tiers, to the spectators who still came to the battered room. If the minor lords and functionaries were still jockeying for political favour, their efforts must have been the result of habit rather than belief by this point. Their numbers were greatly reduced. Many had died in the Proletarian Crusade. Others had been too terrified to return in the wake of eldar and orks being present so deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace.

  Koorland spoke to be heard by all. But most of all he spoke to Kubik. ‘The Imperium is tested as it has not been since the Emperor ascended to the Golden Throne,’ he said. ‘If we fail this test, we fail through disunity. We fail the trust the Emperor has placed in us. If division defeats us, we deserve no better. And if we fall, in the name of what? I stand for Terra, and I stand for Mars. Because I stand for the Emperor. I stand for the Imperium. I will walk the ramparts of the galaxy, I will repel all enemies. I know my duty.’ He dropped his voice so that only Kubik could hear. ‘Do you?’

  The Fists Exemplar melted their way through the final metres of steel, and the Tharsis Gate was breached at last. The passage was just wide and high enough for the battle-brothers to pass through in single file. To the rear, the tanks had broken the last of the Mechanicus lines and were forming a defensive perimeter around the Gate, preserving the egress once Urquidex had been located.

  ‘Taking fire,’ Kale reported from the Alcazar Remembered.

  ‘How long can you hold them off while remaining at anchor?’ Thane asked, pausing at the entrance to the breach.

  ‘As long as you need, Chapter Master.’ Kale’s answer was an acknowledgement that there was no choice if the mission was to succeed.

  ‘Our thanks, shipmaster.’

  A new wave of tocsins sounded. The wailing was desperate, the tone final.

  Standing at Thane’s shoulder, Aloysian said, ‘They will not let us profane Pavonis Mons. They will destroy the complex with us.’

  ‘I hope you’re wrong,’ Thane said. But as he spoke, immense turrets rose to the east and west, driven upwards by pistons thick as the limbs of Titans. They supported eradication beamer macro-cannons. With glacial majesty, barrels wider than Thunderhawks began to turn and angle downwards.

  Aloysian was right. The Mechanicus was ready to atomise the invaded quadrants of the Pavonis Mons complex layer by layer.

  The Predators and Whirlwinds unleashed salvoes of cannon fire and missile flights at the turrets. Void shields flared with the impacts.

  Thane voxed Kale as he followed Aloysian down the melted tunnel through the Gate.

  ‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘I need an area-wide bombardment.’

  Thane felt the mission goal recede into the mists of war. Closing in was only ever-more terrible destruction.

  ‘Duty,’ Kubik repeated. The Fabricator General spoke slowly, pausing between the syllables, as if anatomising the word. He stood.

  ‘I believe in the honour of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ Koorland said. ‘I believe in its fidelity to the Emperor.’

  Another silence. Not a total one. Koorland listened to the clicks and whirs and electronic humming of Kubik’s form. He imagined he was hearing the sounds of indecision, of logic circuits closing to form a pattern of choice.

  Kubik said, ‘Your belief is not misplaced. I am cognisant of all my duties.’ His words were as free of human inflection as ever. There was no trace of the organic in their buzzing enunciation.

  And they were filled with sudden resolution.

  Kubik turned to the Mechanicus acolyte. ‘Priority extremis message: cease fire.’

  Koorland tapped his vox-bead, connecting him to the master of the astropathic choir. It was no longer a question of stopping the war in time. The question was whether there was anything left to stop.

  ‘Target zone acquired,’ Shipmaster Kale voxed from the Alcazar Remembered. ‘Firing on your command.’

  Beyond the Tharsis Gate, the Fists Exemplar found themselves in a vast structure that was both hall of worship to the Omnissiah and pathway nexus – the Grand Passage of the Fulcrumite. Galleries beyond number rose toward a vault a thousand metres away. A web of maglev tracks, dozens of levels deep, led away in all directions. The main corridor, wide enough for a phalanx of Baneblades to travel down, split in the far distance, with the right-hand branch sloping beneath the surface of Mars. The air was dark with black, oily smoke.

  The rockcrete arches echoed with the bone-shaking heartbeat of machinery. The sharp, whistling crackle and thunder of energy discharges would have punctured mortal eardrums. The tocsins sounded here too, and yet the innumerable servants of the Omnissiah continued along their appointed tasks. They moved in their red robes on their insectile limbs, mechadendrites waving, travelling without panic, their goals unaltered by the fates decreed by their superiors.

  The order to fire caught in Thane’s throat. He was about to lay waste to a vast region of Pavonis Mons, the explosive destruction easier for the Fists Exemplar to survive than the absolute, surgical scouring of the eradicator beams. And if the attack took out the turrets, the Mechanicus would come back with an even more devastating attack. The conflict was a firestorm. It was nothing he could stop. It had caught the Fists Exemplar and the Adeptus Mechanicus in its consuming winds, and there was nothing anyone on Mars could do to stop it. All they could do was feed it.

  Fire, he thought. But he hesitated again. In the second he had delayed, the turrets had not fired. The towering walls of the Passage were intact. The region had not been stripped down to its component molecules.

  Someone else was hesitating.

  ‘Chapter Master?’ Kale asked.

  The Fists Exemplar pounded down the passage. They had no direction to pursue except down. The war had no direction except more.

  But there was hesitation.

  Thane had no choice. He had to seize the advantage before Van Auken did. Before the Mechanicus vessels overwhelmed the Alcazar Remembered.

  ‘Fire,’ he said.

  But then Kale was shouting something. It took a few seconds for the words to register. ‘Astropathic communication, Chapter Master! Immediate ceasefire! Cease fire!’

  The message Thane had abandoned hope of receiving. The message he wished for above all others. And for that reason, he had to distrust it.

  ‘A
uthenticate it,’ he said.

  ‘Authentication in progress.’

  He must fight until he knew the order truly came from Koorland. That was his duty.

  But Van Auken wasn’t firing either.

  He placed his trust in hope. ‘Hold fire,’ he told Kale.

  Three

  Terra – The Imperial Palace

  In the quarters he had taken for himself in the barracks of the Last Wall, Koorland played through the recording of Thane’s interrogation of Urquidex yet again. He had already watched it until he had memorised every moment of the encounter. The war had ended before the command to turn Urquidex into a servitor had been carried out, but only just. His left arm was missing. The digits on his right moved only very slightly. His skull bore the scars of preparatory procedures.

  But Urquidex spoke clearly. And his words shook Koorland. The first time he heard them, he thought he was dreaming. He replayed the vid-capture, and then did so again. And again, wishing he did not have to believe what was said.

  Kubik entered the Cerebrium. Koorland was already there. The Space Marine had chosen the location for their meeting, the room at the top of the Widdershins Tower having been virtually unused since the arrival of the ork moon. Most of the High Lords found the presence of the moon, visible from the casements, too much to bear. The Great Chamber preserved an illusion of security, though that mirage was now badly fractured.

  Kubik did not share the same reluctance. He welcomed the chance to observe the ork base. There was always the chance, if the air was clear enough, of witnessing an alteration on its surface, of processing some form of significant data.

  Kubik evaluated the stance of Koorland. He was not sitting at the circular table, but standing beside the casement that gave the best view of the ork moon. The smog was thick this evening, but the glow of the sphere was still bright. It was visible through the cover as a sickly smear. Kubik assessed the chamber and Koorland’s position in it as symbolic. This had been Udin Macht Udo’s preferred chamber of governance. The empty table, the abandoned room – signifiers of necessary changes. The sight of the moon – a reminder of the need for those changes. Koorland was demonstrating political acumen.