by Nick Kyme
‘Take them down!’ shouted Esenzi, and Var’kir realised why she sounded so desperate.
The Death Guard had sent breachers, armoured behind their boarding shields. He could heard the ricochet of solid shot against them.
No weapon the defenders currently possessed could penetrate such defences.
Taking a hit to his right greave, Var’kir raised his crozius in salute of all those who had died to bring Vulkan back to Nocturne and prepared to charge blindly into the swell of combat.
A familiar war-cry stopped him, followed by the sound of heavy hand-to-hand fighting. Before Var’kir could pinpoint exactly what was happening, an explosion roared into being, heard and felt but not seen. He was thrown, the agony slow to build but burning by the time he landed.
Disorientated, Var’kir struggled to rise. Belatedly, he realised one of his legs had been severed by the blast. Hearing footsteps approach through the fire and the near-final destruction of the ship, he reached for his fallen crozius.
‘Shipmistress, are you–’ he began.
‘She’s dead, Var’kir.’
‘Xathen?’
‘They are all dead.’
He felt a gauntleted hand grasp his and hoist him into a sitting position.
‘Barring a few servitors, we are the last souls alive on this ship,’ said Xathen.
Var’kir could still feel the engines thrumming beneath him, slowly shaking the ship apart as if acting in concert with the Reaper’s Shroud’s guns.
‘Rek’or…’ he croaked, swallowing back the blood coming up like bile through his throat, ‘…did they make it?’
‘I don’t know, brother. I have hope, though.’
Var’kir gave him a bitter laugh. ‘You? I thought you said we were insane.’
‘You are, but we did breach the veil.’
The bridge was breaking, the entire ship surrendering to the fury of the Reaper’s Shroud.
Var’kir nodded, every movement causing him pain.
Xathen held him up, so he could at least face the viewport, even though he couldn’t see what was through it.
‘It is… incredible,’ Xathen breathed, his voice quaking with the violently trembling bridge.
‘Our world.’
Var’kir felt Xathen rest a hand on his shoulder.
‘Vulkan lives, Chaplain.’
Var’kir smiled, despite the pain.
‘In every deed we do from now until the time of ending.’
‘Not long now,’ said Xathen, as the cracking reached a crescendo and the fires of immolation drew near.
‘At least,’ said Var’kir, as the Charybdis broke apart, ‘I saw Nocturne one last time.’
Sixty-Three
Brought down to earth
Grand Cruiser Reaper’s Shroud, bridge
The death of the Charybdis sent a tremor through the void, sundering the shields of the Reaper’s Shroud and throwing a hail of wreckage into its unprotected flank.
Hundreds were slain in moments as entire decks were ripped open and exposed to the cold grasp of space. Labour gangs reacted as fast as they could, sealing blast doors and lowering bulkheads in an attempt to maintain the damaged ship’s integrity, but fires still tore through its close confines.
Worst affected were the aft decks, including the enginarium and a large number of port-side launch bays. A host of fighters and gunships in the midst of atmospheric deployment were ripped to shreds by the debris storm, thus denying the vanguard ships sent after the Salamanders any immediate reinforcement.
The suicidal act of wrath from the Charybdis had near crippled the Reaper’s Shroud, reducing its offensive capabilities, shields and onboard military strength. It had even reached as far as the bridge.
Laestygon heaved Rack’s corpse aside and the hololith flickered back into being. Obscured by smoke, the grainy render described the passage of three vessels through a welter of debris.
Two angular gunships led the hunt, arcing through drifts of saviour pod wreckage, with a troop transport close on their tails. Silent muzzle flares registered on the crackling feed as the pair of Fire Raptors unleashed their prow weapons.
Hot tracer fire from twin-mounted Avengers tore up the void and the pod fragments ricocheting from the fleeing vessel’s ablative armour, but couldn’t yet draw a bead on the Salamanders ship itself.
Laestygon ignored the desperate shouting of the first officer as he tried to restore order in the wake of Rack’s untimely death. He ignored the screams and the scent of burning. He barely heard the sirens and the buckling spars of the ship’s abused hull. All his attention was focused on the Salamanders careening towards Nocturne and the Raptors screaming after them.
Soon they would hit the atmosphere, and then a planetary assault became not just a possibility but a necessity. Despite the damage sustained by the Reaper’s Shroud, their chemical weaponry remained intact and operational.
‘Hunt them down. Wound them…’ ordered Laestygon, leaning forwards to get closer to the image as he saw the noose begin to close. ‘Then I shall scour the surface to nought but barren rock.’
As the gunship breached the upper atmosphere of Nocturne, the temperature inside the troop hold intensified and the interior hull began to shake against the rigours of fast re-entry.
The heat was enough to encourage wisps of steam to manifest as the chill of the void melted away, but it was nothing to a legionary and less than nothing to a Salamander.
The Drakes stayed silent throughout the descent, even Numeon, eyes down in vigil for their fallen lord.
A glancing hit against the port-side wing snapped them out of their reverie.
Numeon was first to his feet, disengaging his restraint harness and the mag-lock on his boots that had secured him to the deck during atmospheric transit. He reached the side hatch, racking it open with one hand, steadying himself with the other as the gunship pitched hard to avoid a second hit.
Smoke occluded his view at first as he hung out of the hatch. As the black cloud was swept away for a moment, he saw the predatory Raptors coursing after them and the staccato report of their nose-mounted Avenger bolt cannons.
In their wake, distorted by the heat haze, was a Storm Eagle.
Their intent was obvious.
The two Raptors would run them down and the Eagle would take the primarch.
He looked down and saw an ash plain speeding by beneath them through scads of pyroclastic cloud. Up ahead, although still distant, loomed a craggy mountain chain that Numeon knew well.
Deathfire.
The fount of life and death, the beating heart of Nocturne. Much more than a mountain, it was a symbol, a fiery beacon reminding all on the death world how fragile life truly was. Ever since the forming of the world, there had been Deathfire. And at the world’s ending, the mountain would be the last to fall.
Numeon’s vision came back to him, the one granted by Magnus the Red.
Standing in its shadow, the sky red with flame…
Feron’s voice broke through the memory, fighting against the warning klaxons resonating around the hold.
‘Hold on! Emergency evasive!’ shouted the pilot.
A pillar of flame burst from the desert, an eruption of magma forced to the surface that made the ship bank hard.
It was a salutary reminder of Nocturne’s deadly nature. Yes, it was the Salamanders’ home but it could kill them just as easily as an interloper, they just knew the dangers more intimately.
Numeon clung on, then tried to shout a warning as the Raptor fired again, but it was too late. A line of shells stitched through the gunship’s fuselage, tearing up the engine and setting the port turbofan ablaze. It exploded seconds later and the gunship pitched into an immediate dive.
The pilot’s voice returned.
‘Brace, brace, brace!’
Strong hands grasped Numeon by the shoulders, hurling him back before he was thrown from the gunship to his death.
His eyes met those of Zytos, who was clinging to the deck.
Numeon did the same. The others were still locked in their harnesses. At least five Salamanders were dead, cut apart by the brutal passage of the bolt cannon as it tore through the hull.
‘When they come for us!’ He had to shout against the engine scream and the roar of the wind, buffeting the troop hold through the open side hatch. ‘When they come for us… be ready to fight!’
The last thing he heard before they hit the earth was Feron’s voice, his pain evident as the cockpit burned around him.
‘Vulkan lives!’
Then came fire and a cacophony of tearing metal, before darkness took them.
Stultifying heat and the acerbic reek of the desert wafted through the ripped-up flank of the gunship.
Something was burning, the earth or the transport. Possibly both. The crash had taken them into a deep fire gorge; Numeon could see the dun-coloured flanks of the crags either side through coils of smoke.
He heard the crackle of flame towards the prow and saw it was embedded in an ash dune, scorched black and beyond recall.
‘Feron’s dead,’ he rasped, half choked by the thick ash drifting through the shattered fuselage and slowly swathing the ship’s interior. His armour now wore a thickening veneer of grey.
‘So are Mur’ak and Kadir,’ said Zytos, wrenching off his battered helm and letting it fall with a clang against the deck.
‘Xorn too,’ added Gargo, kneeling by the slain warrior who had been impaled by the shredded fuselage.
‘They are not the only ones,’ said Numeon sadly as he regarded the five killed by the Raptor’s guns. Twelve remained.
Engine drone thrummed on the air, resonating down into the deep gorge.
‘They’ll be hunting for us,’ said Abidemi, helping one of his brothers back to his feet.
‘All this smoke…’ said Numeon, a glance at Vulkan’s casket reassuring him that it was intact and unharmed. ‘They’ll be on us soon. We need to get free of this wreck.’
The ship had turned as it ploughed into the earth, leaving the side hatch overhead and the interior cramped with broken metal spars, hanging wires and lengths of cabling.
‘We can’t get the primarch out through that,’ said Numeon.
Abidemi had stopped to listen.
‘Getting closer…’
‘Gargo,’ Zytos called across the hold, gesturing to the ship’s gang ramp and their only viable egress, ‘can you rip out the locking clamp?’
The black-smiter nodded, carefully navigating the wreckage until he made it to the back of the troop hold. Once there, he punched through the housing block encasing the locking clamp with his bionic arm and crushed it.
‘Appreciated,’ said Zytos and smacked open the ramp with two strong hits, levering it like a swinging door.
Together, the Salamanders detached the casket from the hold and slowly manoeuvred it through the gaping rear hatch of the ship.
Abidemi took point, watching the clouded skies through his bolter’s scope.
Once beyond the immediate crash site, he beckoned the others.
Debris radiated from the gunship’s impact point in a slowly diminishing trail. The port wing had sheared off completely but was nowhere in sight. Chunks of torn fuselage had embedded in the earth, jutting up like broken metal teeth.
‘Where are we?’ asked Gargo as they consolidated behind one of the larger sections of broken fuselage.
‘Too far from Deathfire and on foot,’ Numeon replied grimly.
Dactylids circled above, briefly flocking as they sought out carrion before the roar of approaching engines scattered them.
A Death Guard Fire Raptor soared through parting cloud, a forbidding silhouette against an already blood-red sky.
Bolter rounds pranged harmlessly off its reinforced hull as the Salamanders opened fire, before it dipped its nose and sped up for a strafing run.
‘They’ll cut us down and take his body,’ said Zytos.
Without heavy weapons, they were dead. No chunk of fuselage would save them, but they held their ground anyway.
The bolt cannons in the Raptor’s nose cone began to cycle up as a missile struck its flank, pushing the gunship out of its strafing run and smashing it explosively against the canyon wall.
Three drake-green gunships hurtled overhead.
The Salamanders were on Nocturne, and they had come to the aid of their lord.
Through initial static, Numeon’s vox-bead activated.
‘Brothers, this is Nomus Rhy’tan. Whom do I address?’
Numeon could have wept with the relief he felt.
‘Artellus Numeon and eleven brothers of the Pyre, bearing an important burden. The primarch himself.’
‘Vulkan?’
Rhy’tan sounded hopeful, yet disbelieving. He paused as if letting the import of it sink in. Var’kir’s old mentor did not hesitate for long.
‘Hold fast, brothers. We are coming.’
The feed was cut, leaving Numeon and the other survivors watching the skies and listening to the distant sounds of battle echoing down into the gorge.
‘Nomus Rhy’tan?’ asked Zytos. ‘The Nomus Rhy’tan?’
‘Voice of Fire and Keeper of the Keys,’ Numeon replied. ‘I am sorry Var’kir is not here for this.’
They fell silent after that until the shadow of a gunship loomed through the smoke, making landfall inside the gorge on a flat slab of granite.
As the Pyre made their way to it, the gunship’s rear ramp swung open and a black-armoured Chaplain stepped forth with an honour guard of draconic warriors behind him.
Firedrakes.
Numeon had thought them all dead.
The two groups of Salamanders met amidst squalling eddies of dust kicked up by the downdraught of the Thunderhawk’s engines.
As they came face to face, Rhy’tan proffered his gauntleted hand to Numeon and they gripped each other’s forearm in the manner of warriors.
Though his trappings had many similarities to Var’kir’s, they were at once more regal and finely wrought. The immense double-handed obsidian hammer strapped to Rhy’tan’s back was regarded as a Legion relic.
‘Your arrival is timely, brother-captain,’ said Rhy’tan, as they broke apart again. Even through the respirator grille of his skull mask, his deep voice conveyed age and wisdom. ‘I had thought all the Pyre Guard slain at Isstvan.’
‘I am glad to disprove it, but many died during the massacre.’
Rhy’tan nodded grimly. ‘We’ve heard but snatches of the rebellion and the war. So little is known to us.’
He looked at the casket behind Numeon that was flanked by the Pyre captain’s warriors.
‘Vulkan…’ he murmured. ‘Is he…?’
‘He sleeps, Lord Chaplain.’
Rhy’tan turned sharply to face Numeon.
‘I had heard he was dead,’ he said, incredulous.
‘He can be revived, brought back. In fire.’
‘How can you know this, brother-captain?’
‘I believe it, just as I believed we would breach the Ruinstorm and find our way to Nocturne. There is much you do not know.’
Glancing at the ragged state of Numeon and his men, Rhy’tan assumed that was the case.
‘You endured fire to bring our father back,’ he said, as if he could agree on that much but nothing else. Not yet. ‘Time shall be made for talk. For now, we need to leave the ash plain. A ship has come into our upper atmosphere and is laying anchor.’
‘The Reaper’s Shroud. Death Guard,’ said Numeon. ‘It has hounded us since Macragge.’
Rhy’tan’s eyes widened as he looked to the casket again, as i
f imagining the journey it had been on to reach Nocturne.
‘A great undertaking indeed.’
‘I fear we brought war back with us, Lord Chaplain.’
As he faced Numeon again, Rhy’tan spoke as if he wore a feral smile.
‘Then they shall find we Salamanders still have teeth.’
‘There are warriors here still?’ asked Numeon as they began to walk.
‘Some. Neophytes mainly. I maintain a small honour guard, as you have seen.’
‘And what of the Legion fortress on Prometheus?’
‘Master T’kell has a modest garrison, but most went to Isstvan. Those who remain will take time to muster. We have ships but they won’t reach us soon enough,’ said Rhy’tan. ‘Gereon remains silent, although there could be Drakes there still. We have been blind and deaf for some time, Numeon.’
Numeon fell silent as they approached the gang ramp, knowing all too well what that felt like.
‘I will have need of your battle-hardened veterans, brother-captain,’ said Rhy’tan, once they were aboard.
‘We are yours, Lord Chaplain,’ Numeon replied, meeting Rhy’tan’s gaze across the hold. ‘But where do we make this stand?’
‘An outpost,’ said Rhy’tan, as the engines roared and the ship began to rise. ‘One of many that were fashioned after word of the rebellion reached us. The Draconius Gate.’
Numeon knew of the region, but nothing of the outpost. It would need to be formidable to withstand the Death Guard’s might, and so would the warriors that his Salamanders were meant to command.
As the gunship raced across the desert and the sun burned the sky to a bloody red, Numeon could not shake a deep sense of foreboding.
Against all odds, they had brought Vulkan back. He saw the questions in Rhy’tan’s eyes, the doubt. If Vulkan did rise, what would it mean for the Legion? What would it mean if he didn’t?
In his very soul, Numeon was convinced Vulkan would return. So devoted was he towards this aim, he had not stopped to think whether the primarch would be changed by his ordeal.