The Hunt for Vulkan Read online

‘You have an understanding of the problems, though. Of why there is no unity.’

  Vangorich nodded. ‘Too many egos. Too many agendas. Too many leaders, and too many of them weak. Their weakness infects the whole. Everyone struggling for supremacy, even when the situation makes that struggle an act of madness, even when we all know better. You were right to unseat Udo. The Council needs a clear leader. You can see the benefit already. You brought Kubik around.’

  ‘And what happens when I am not here?’

  ‘A reversion to form.’ Vangorich sounded disgusted. ‘Your influence won’t last without your presence, I’m afraid. You’ll be leading the attack on Ullanor, of course?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, the words sharp with doubt.

  ‘You don’t think you should?’

  ‘My position is already one based on great presumption. I pronounced myself leader of the united Successor Chapters of the Imperial Fists, declaring my right to command other armies when I am the only one of mine remaining. Now I propose to do the same for the sons of other primarchs. The overreach is stunning, isn’t it? And I don’t even know if the call will be answered.’

  ‘I think it will be.’ Vangorich paused. ‘Might I offer some advice?’

  ‘I’ll be pleased to hear it.’

  ‘Leadership is symbolic as much as anything else. You are not leading the united Successors despite being the last Imperial Fist. You are leading because you are the last.’

  ‘I doubt that will be enough to sway the Space Wolves.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Vangorich. ‘You will have to grow your symbolic worth.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Koorland looked between the columns, at the vast space to the floor below. I am elevated beyond my station, he thought. He had sought to ease Thane’s doubts while his own had been gnawing at him with greater and greater force. He was not a politician. He belonged in the battlefield. And now he was proposing to invade a legend, at the head of a coalition he had no claim to command.

  ‘I know,’ said Vangorich. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it?’

  Koorland grunted. He stopped walking. He gazed on the dais below. Twelve thrones, twelve competitions. He had, for the moment, beaten the High Lords’ attempts to co-opt him to their own ends. He wished he could say he had risen above them. He saw himself in one of the thrones, a small figure, dwarfed by the space of the Chamber, insignificant in the eyes of the colossal beings depicted in the fresco above him. ‘Thank you, Grand Master,’ he said to Vangorich. ‘What I have to do is clear.’

  ‘If not how to do so. I’m familiar with that burden. You have my sympathies and my hopes, Lord Commander.’ Vangorich walked away.

  Lord Commander. The title grated each time he heard it. It was a grimy necessity. Chapter Master was better, even though it had come to him drenched in tragic irony. Master of a Chapter of one.

  There was more than one, now. The Last Wall was a reality. The title did not fit as ill as it once had. He still doubted it would be enough.

  Movement to his left. He turned his head. A shadow approached, then resolved itself as Lastan Veritus stepped into the light coming between the pillars from the Chamber. ‘I don’t have to ask if you overheard,’ Koorland said.

  ‘It is my duty to do so.’

  Koorland bit back a retort. He would not give the inquisitor anything to use for his own purposes. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have made clear my concern that the attention given to the struggle against the orks is distracting us from the battle against the true enemy.’

  ‘Abundantly so.’ He controlled his temper. ‘I find it curious to consider a force capable of destroying an entire Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes a distraction.’

  ‘I have not come to argue. I concede that the ork occupation of Ullanor is troubling in the extreme. The threats may be more entwined than I suspected.’

  Now Koorland fought to master his surprise at the conciliatory tone.

  ‘Ullanor,’ Veritus repeated. His ancient face creased in pain. ‘The gravity of this…’ He trailed off.

  ‘Words are inadequate,’ said Koorland.

  ‘They are. I agree with your course of action, Chapter Master. You were right to send the call. But you are planning to attack a myth.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Maintaining unity of purpose and of force will require leadership the equal of the task. Only a myth can conquer a myth.’

  ‘I am well aware that I am no myth. Do you propose to make me one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I fail to see the point of this conversation. There is no myth to lead us.’

  ‘You are wrong. There is one.’

  ‘Oh?’ Koorland was sceptical. ‘Does this myth have a name?’

  ‘He does. Vulkan.’

  The dome of the Chamber began to spin. Koorland shifted his stance to steady himself. He looked up. There in the frozen image of the Great Crusade were the figures of the loyal primarchs. He saw Vulkan, hammer upraised. Reality was turning fluid. In his mind’s eye, Vulkan descended from the fresco, called into being by Veritus.

  Ullanor. Vulkan. The names of a cataclysmic past. Names that had been legends for a millennium. But one already had re-emerged into lived history.

  Koorland focused his gaze on Veritus with effort. By invoking myth, the old man seemed to have moved into its realm. He was less real, and more formidable. There were immense depths here, to be approached with extreme caution.

  ‘And where will I find him?’ He had no doubt Veritus would have an answer.

  ‘On Caldera. Fulfilling an ancient oath.’

  Four

  Across the Imperium, Caldera

  The warp convulsed. It shrieked around the Sanguinem Ignis. An agony of non-matter and raging nightmare clawed at the strike cruiser’s Geller field. The immaterium attacked with the fury of a wounded beast and the integrity of the field cracked.

  ‘Translating!’ Shipmaster Laeca warned. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

  ‘This is no Mandeville point,’ said Sergeant Marbas. He steadied himself against the port-side wall of the strategium.

  Captain Valefor grasped the command pulpit. ‘The immaterium has had enough of us,’ he said. On the pict screens that surrounded the pulpit, the cascading runes were angry red. To try to understand the warp was to try to reason with madness. But in jagged brushstrokes the image was forming of a wound in the warp, and the Sanguinem Ignis was the target of the immaterium’s vengeance.

  The translation was brutal. The vessel passed from the unreal to the material in a single, severing blow. Workstations across the bridge burst into flames. A shriek ran the length of the hull, an intertwined cry of the vessel, the warp and the void together. Another scream joined it, coming from the vox-casters, and Valefor knew it for the cry of the Navigator. He felt the jolt of the transition. The shadow of non-being slashed through him and was gone, as if a monomolecular blade had cut him in half, then healed him on the instant.

  Reality settled. The scream faded. The bridge was filled with the cacophony of alarms, but there was deeper silence. The engines had stilled.

  ‘Damage!’ Valefor demanded.

  ‘Warp drive integrity intact,’ Laeca answered. ‘But power to the engines–’

  She was cut off by the thunder of multiple impacts. They hammered the ship even as the auspex officer reported multiple hostiles.

  The oculus snapped open. The pict screens adjusted to the new inputs, and Valefor saw what was coming for them.

  The Sanguinem Ignis had translated in the wake of an ork attack moon. The greenskin base had suffered damage in its journey through the warp. A quarter of its southern hemisphere had been sheared away and an explosion like a solar prominence arced out of the wound. Molten fissures spread over the rest of the sphere. But it was still at war. Immense bays were open on all sides, and the ork fle
et emerged in a swarm. Three cruisers were closing with the Blood Angels, their forward guns firing. The shells were huge, dense, and solid. Mass and velocity were all they needed to tear a vessel apart. The Sanguinem Ignis’ void shields flared in protest.

  A second wave of cruisers was turning to follow the first. With them came a cloud of smaller vessels, insects zeroing in on carrion.

  ‘The enemy’s injuries are severe,’ said Marbas.

  ‘But its fleet is intact. Our fight is not here,’ Valefor said. ‘I want a retreat, shipmaster. Engines full. And recharge the warp drive. Gunners, weapons free on the nearest enemy vessel.’

  The engines powered up anew. The deck began to vibrate once more as the strike cruiser began its turn. The view in the oculus shifted with majestic slowness. The blunt-prowed, brutal predators closed, their fire crossing paths with that of the Blood Angels. A cross-hatching of destruction lit the void.

  ‘The greenskins might repair that moon,’ Marbas said.

  ‘They might,’ Valefor agreed. ‘I know we stand a chance of destroying it, brother-sergeant. I also know the price we would pay.’

  Ork shells pounded the starboard hull. A void shield collapsed.

  ‘Launch bay five destroyed,’ a servitor intoned.

  The screen on Valefor’s right began to list casualty reports.

  Marbas joined Valefor beside the pulpit. ‘We are paying a price now.’

  ‘I have no doubt we will pay more. Our duty is to reach Terra. Our sacrifices must be to that purpose. Sanguinius made his ultimate sacrifice there. Our duty and our tribute call us there in turn.’

  The Sanguinem Ignis gathered momentum. Valefor eyed the pict screens. He felt the fires racing down the corridors as if his own veins were burning. We do not end here, he thought. Not here, in the void between systems, cut down by a wounded enemy, in an encounter with no strategic meaning.

  Sacrifice must have meaning. Hope for more was a luxury the Blood Angels had banished long ago. But they would not accept less.

  The oculus image adjusted as the Sanguinem Ignis turned its back on its pursuers. Its torpedoes punched through the prow of the lead cruiser. The massive head of the beast appeared to swallow the explosions. Metal swelled, and chain reaction blasts burst through plate dozens of metres thick. The front half of the ork vessel became a volcanic eruption. Its engines drove it onwards into its own conflagration. A roiling comet of plate and incandescent gas rushed forwards, as if it would catch the Blood Angels in its expanding death. The other cruisers sailed through the lethal corona. The smaller, lighter ships sped past the behemoths and raced ahead of the Sanguinem Ignis.

  ‘Forward perspective,’ Valefor ordered.

  The oculus blinked, accepting the feed from the bow of the ship. The greenskins were establishing a cordon. Individually, the ships were no match for the Sanguinem Ignis. Together, they were a formidable barrier. Their guns unleashed a storm of fire. Brilliant, murderous day came to the void. The Blood Angels answered with a frontal bombardment. Ork ships were vaporised.

  More replaced them.

  The Sanguinem Ignis picked up speed. Guns firing on all sides, it plunged into the gauntlet.

  The city was slag. It had once covered half the surface of the moon, a hundred million citizens working the forges of its manufactoria. They were dead now. Habs and industry were gone. There was only an iron cemetery, a field of twisted wreckage and molten shapes that stretched to the horizon. The forms were the death of metal. The ground crunched and rang beneath Asger Warfist’s steps. All was black, except for the grey rain of ash from the sky.

  The northern half of Fabrikk was destroyed. There was nothing left here to fight over. But there had never been anything the orks wanted from the start. They had come to destroy. They had come to take the moon.

  ‘Is this what victory looks like?’ Hakon Icegrip asked the Wolf Lord.

  ‘I don’t care what it looks like. I care that the enemy never sees it.’

  The war had shattered Fabrikk. It was barely more than a ruin orbiting its gas giant. There were still some viable settlements near the southern pole, but their output would never be more than a shadow of what had once been. It would take very little for what small population remained to abandon the moon.

  They would not, though. Even if it took force, they would remain. Fabrikk’s true value was not the weapons and vehicles it produced, but its location. It was one of the systems ringing the Eye of Terror, a strategic base that could never fall from the Imperium’s grasp.

  The Space Wolves would not allow it.

  Asger brought his packs to a slag heap that had once been the lead manufactorium of Fabrikk. They could hear the tramp of feet and the rumble of ork vehicles on the other side. The hunt was almost over.

  ‘For Russ!’ Asger shouted.

  ‘For the Wolftime!’ the packs answered.

  They stormed over the rise. They descended on the ork horde, and they were fury and claw. They were the wind of Fenris, slashing into the ork flanks. To the south, the gunship attack continued, driving the orks forwards. To the north, Predator cannons held them back. And now Asger cut the enemy in half.

  The struggle had worn both forces down to ragged cores of rage. The attack moon in the region was two systems over, the target of multiple Great Companies. The invaders of Fabrikk had left the moon and come in a fleet of cruisers. Their numbers were huge, but they were not unlimited. The orks and the Space Wolves had pummelled each other with orbital bombardments. The front lines had raged back and forth over Fabrikk, until there was nothing left of the city and the forges. All that remained was the battered armies. And now it was time for one of them to be exterminated.

  The orks welcomed the Wolves. The two forces clashed as if this was their first encounter. Savagery met savagery. Asger fired bursts from his bolt pistol in a wide arc as he charged, punching through plate and muscle, crippling and maiming the brutes closing with him. He followed up with the wolf claw on his right fist, slashing throats, disembowelling. The orks pressed in harder, trampling over the bodies of their dead. They were all massive, blunt weapons of muscle and bone. The entire campaign had been against these orks, the largest Asger had ever encountered. Many of them dwarfed him. None were faster. He equalled them in ferocity and surpassed them in hate.

  At his sides, Grey Hunters tore into the xenos. Bolter and blade, bolter and blade, the alternating swipes of massive paws. The Space Wolves ripped apart the ork force. The greenskins turned inwards. They rushed to impale themselves on the claws of Asger’s attack.

  The numbers and the size of the orks worked against them. Everywhere the Space Wolves fired, there was a target. The greenskins could not offer massed fire in return without decimating their own ranks. As the packs tore deeper and deeper into the phalanx, the outermost ork chieftains brought heavy weapons to bear regardless of the cost and the battlefield exploded. Asger moved through fountains of flame and shrapnel and bodies in fragments. He roared, charging faster through the enemy. Directions ceased to have meaning. There was only eruption and blood. He knew the pack moved with him. Information about lost brothers flashed before his retinal lenses. The acknowledgement of loss would come later. For now the deaths were a goad.

  Fire in the air. Fire in Asger’s blood. He was a blur in armour. He was a maddened beast. His lips were pulled back, his teeth bared for the taste of the blood of prey. He smelled it through the filter of his battle-helm’s grille. He smelled butchery.

  ‘Yes, Brother Hakon!’ he yelled over the vox. ‘This is what victory looks like!’

  More fire, cleansing, liquid flame, pouring over the orks. The Space Wolves maintained close formation, tightening it when they took casualties. They were a cohesive blade in the maelstrom of violence. Overhead, the gunships closed in, cannons raking the ground. Asger abandoned himself to the kill, his world reduced to the roar of engines, the smoke of burni
ng flesh and vehicles, the crimson spray of severed arteries.

  It ended. The blood ceased to spurt. The smoke began to clear. Thunderhawks came in for a landing, and their engines cut out. Asger stood with his brothers on a field that was as dead as it had been before the battle. When he walked, he stepped on bone as well as slag. Torn flesh was draped over the jagged stumps of foundations.

  Now he processed the losses. He whispered the names of the fallen brothers. There were many, added to the even greater list taken by this campaign.

  This skirmish.

  Adrenaline and rage leaked away. His wounds throbbed. He registered the toll ork shells and blades had taken on his armour. Exhaustion pressed down on his shoulders with the weight of a mountain.

  But there was also the message. It had been transmitted during the battle. There had been no time to listen to it. No time to hear the name.

  Ullanor.

  The packs gathered the wounded and the dead. They stood before him, awaiting the next deployment. Asger’s exhaustion was mirrored before him in every warrior, yet they were all ready. They knew what he knew. They knew this had been a skirmish.

  ‘Will we be rejoining the Great Wolf?’ Hakon asked.

  ‘No. He is sending us to Terra. We are called to gather there, and then to make for Ullanor.’

  ‘Our brothers need us,’ Kaden Stormtree protested.

  ‘I know they do,’ Asger said. The outcome of the battle against the attack moon was far from assured. The Great Wolf’s reluctance to issue the command was clear in the tone of the voxmission.

  ‘Is Terra so helpless?’ Hakon was disgusted.

  ‘Our duty is to answer the call, and our duty is doubled,’ said Kagen Direfrost. The Wolf Priest stepped forwards, then turned to face the Great Company. ‘The true call is to Ullanor. The spirits of too many of our brothers have fallen in the shadow of the times spawned on that world.’

  ‘Perhaps there,’ Asger said, ‘we will rip out the heart of the Beast.’

  He was called away from the bridge. Adnachiel was surprised, but he kept his face neutral. The moment was a poor one to return to his quarters, but that was where the serf said he would receive the communication, and so the Master of the Fourth Battle Company of the Dark Angels nodded and strode from the bridge. The nod was mostly for the benefit of his brothers, assuring them that they would know what was necessary in due course.