Vulkan Lord of Drakes

by David Annandale

  The walls of the crevasse shook and Numeon heard the hiss and crack of rock melting and falling below. He dropped back down. The melta bombs had created a gap leading into a wider portion of the crevasse. The walls were more than fifteen metres apart here, and the cavern extended for hundreds of metres in both directions from the access point. The drop was sheer, but there were just enough cracks and fissures in the wall to give the legionaries hand and footholds. The temperature climbed as they descended, a foretaste, Numeon hoped, of what he planned to unleash.

  Whenever possible, the squad fired back up. The legionaries had descended thirty metres when the greenskins broke past the bottle­neck. A dozen of the brutes immediately plummeted, howling, through the dark. A few paused and tried to shoot at the squad with crude guns. They did no more than chip the stone, then their fellows, pushing from behind, knocked them from their purchase and they too fell to their deaths. It was another few minutes before the creatures managed to understand that they had to climb down.

  The bottom of the shaft came into view. Numeon jumped from half a dozen metres up. The floor he landed on was sloped with the shape of the mountain, and there was a definite bulge in the centre.

  ‘Do you have our position?’ Numeon voxed Xerexenia.

  ‘I am receiving telemetry from your armour.’

  ‘Are we at the dome of the magma chamber?’

  ‘Positions are approximate. I cannot say with certainty.’

  ‘Estimate,’ said Numeon.

  ‘Can you go any further?’

  ‘No. The fissure ends here.’

  ‘Then there is a strong likelihood you have reached the best position possible.’

  That sounded like an equivocation to Numeon, but given the limited data, he knew this would be as definite an answer as the tech-priest was willing to give him.

  ‘We place the charges here,’ Numeon told the squad.

  ‘All of them?’ Orasus asked.

  Numeon thought for a moment. He did not know how thick the dome was. He did not want to risk spreading the force of the seismic charges too thinly. ‘We start in the centre,’ he said. ‘One charge. We hit this point until we break through.’

  Saluran ran forwards to prepare his seismic charge.

  The orks were now swarming down the walls. Some were still falling. The squad had to keep ducking out of the way of the bodies hurtling down to break themselves against the jagged floor of the crevasse. Brutes were leaping from the wall in their frenzy to get into battle. Numeon and his legionaries raked the cliffs with bolter fire, clearing the lower reaches of greenskins. But there were hundreds now inside the cavern, and the flood was just beginning.

  ‘Ready,’ said Saluran.

  ‘East wall,’ Numeon said, and the squad ran for the cliff. It was the one they had descended, and knew they could climb again if they had to.

  Or if they had the chance.

  A massive ork jumped from six metres up and landed beside Numeon as he reached the wall. He grabbed his gladius from his belt and plunged the blade through the greenskin’s left eye and into its brain before it had finished roaring its challenge.

  The seismic charge went off, blasting a crater in the centre of the dome. A wall of dust roared upwards and filled the cavern, choking the air. The crevasse trembled. Orks fell from the walls in a cataract of xenos flesh. Fissures raced up the cliffs, shearing off slabs of rock. The squad pressed close to the weak shelter of the wall, weathering the impact of the smaller shards, ducking away from the heavier rubble. A chunk of basalt the size of a Rhino missed Numeon by inches. It slammed into the floor, crushing orks.

  The tremors knocked greenskins off their feet, yet they tried to attack rather than avoid the hail of rock. They failed and they died, but there were so many now that the mass of bodies on the floor of the cavern was breaking the fall of others, and for every ork killed, three more landed.

  The cavern was still shaking, but the rock fall had diminished when Numeon led a charge through the dust towards the crater. The surface of the dome had become jaggedly uneven, fractures overlapping with each other and sharp ridges of rock thrusting up between the rubble and the bodies of orks. The crater was deep and riven by still-deeper fissures. The dome felt to Numeon like the shell of an egg, webbed by cracks but still holding together. For all the damage the seismic charge had wrought, there was a maddening stillness to the dome as the tremors eased. It was not going to die easily. Numeon had a vision of his squad futilely trying to blast through hundreds of metres of rock. That degree of barrier was impossible, yet it seemed in keeping with Antaeum’s determination to annihilate the XVIII Legion.

  ‘This planet refuses to cooperate,’ Caelius said, echoing Numeon’s thoughts as they charged into the crater.

  The orks followed, the horde spilling over the lip of the depression on all sides. Caelius moved down to the centre, stone giving way beneath his feet, to place his seismic charge while Numeon and the others gave him cover. The squad formed a square around their kneeling brother. Blasius unleashed the full force of his flamer, creating a continuous stream of fire, one flood against another. Numeon gunned down greenskin after greenskin, but the orks only became more numerous, as if far above, the surface had cracked open to pour the entire army into the crevasse. Within seconds, he was slicing throats and gutting bellies with his gladius while firing steady bursts with his bolter at point-blank range.

  ‘It’s done!’ Caelius shouted. He jumped up and started shooting too, the detonator in his other hand. The seismic charge looked like a crouching insect in the crater, a cylinder surrounded by angled legs, the shaped explosive ready to blast through the ground.

  The orks pressed in so tightly that they became a single, slavering, howling mass. They ran and leapt into the crater, piling up against one another, surrounding the squad. Claws, tusks and misshapen blades smashed against the Space Marines. The squad was a tight knot of ceramite at the centre of the vortex of savage muscle.

  ‘Is the charge secure?’ Numeon shouted.

  ‘As secure as it can be,’ said Caelius. ‘It won’t take them more than a few seconds to uproot it.’

  ‘We can use those seconds. Blasius,’ he ordered, ‘you take the lead. Squad, frag grenades ahead of the flames.’

  The legionaries formed up behind Blasius. They marched into the fire as he incinerated the orks before him. They hurled their grenades beyond the promethium. The orks were packed in so tightly that they muffled the blast. The attack created just enough give through the flesh to push forwards. The legionaries hurled themselves against the greenskins with gun and flame and blade, brute force against brute force. In the few seconds available, they fought their way several metres up the bowl of the crater. The orks poured into the gap behind them. Numeon could barely move now to swing his blade. He fired his bolter at an angle, the shells streaming just past Blasius’ shoulder, punching a bit more space, gaining the squad another metre up the slope, away from the seismic charge.

  ‘This is futile!’ Saluran growled.

  ‘We have to try,’ Orasus shouted back.

  If the explosive was enough and it broke through the dome to the magma chamber, it would be worth their lives for the time it might gain the rest of the Legion. But if the charge was not enough and another was needed, to die now, Numeon thought, would be the true futility.

  ‘They’re attacking the charge!’ Caelius warned.

  The five Space Marines were less than halfway up the bowl of the depression. Let this be enough, Numeon thought. ‘Detonate!’ he commanded, and he embraced the desperation of the moment. ‘Do it now!’

  The world erupted.

  The death of the ram ship chased the Spear of Fire through the tunnel it was boring into the crust of the attack moon. Exploding gas surrounded the vehicle and the pict screens showed nothing but the holocaust. The Termite trembled with the grind of its advance, an
d klaxons sounded heat warnings.

  In the pilot’s throne, T’kell was almost motionless, at one with the machine. He had urged the engines to greater speed through the void, and now he was focused on the fury of the drill head and the traction of the Termite’s land-based propulsion.

  Blinded by the fire, the pict screens did not show the transition from void ship to land destroyer, but Vulkan felt it. The flank engines ceased firing. They withdrew into the hull and tank treads emerged on all sides in their place. They pushed against the walls of the Termite’s shaft and drove it forwards.

  The fires dissipated, revealing the ram ship’s sacrifice to be meaningless. Now the pict screens showed the tunnel the Termite was carving through rock and metal. For several long heartbeats, the vehicle burrowed through the monotony of the crust, an agglomeration of plate and stone, destroyed ship and planetoid slammed together into a shield as crude as its brutal density made it effective. Then, with a crunch and a disorienting lurch, the Spear of Fire was through the crust and into the body of the monster.

  This region of the interior of the attack moon was hardly less dense than the crust. It was a maze of tunnels and constructs, a collision of the nonsensical work of the orks and the battered wreckage of the ships they had salvaged and welded into the massiveness that was their base. It was a madman’s idea of a hive, a visual cacophony of scrapyard, ruin and frenzied construction. The gravity here was incoherent. Inside the Spear of Fire, Vulkan felt himself pulled in different directions from moment to moment, as if the artificial gravity generators of dozens of ships were all functioning at once and at cross purposes. Orks streamed down the tunnels and corridors towards the huge intruder. They swarmed down scaffolding and the exposed skeletal frameworks of hulls. As the Termite tore through the attack moon, the pict screens picked up greenskin faces contorted in savage rage and disbelief. An enemy had come to them and had brought destruction, and this was incomprehensible. At the same time, the excitement of war was upon them. They did not have to descend to the planet to fight.

  I have brought you the gift of battle, Vulkan thought. It will not please you.

  From all sides, the orks charged the Termite. They appeared upright and upside down and sideways, depending on the zone of gravity through which they ran. The Spear of Fire jerked violently, pulled and pushed by the contradictory forces, but T’kell held it true to its course and it plunged deeper and deeper, heading for the distant heart of the attack moon.

  And now the Termite’s weaponry came into its own. Legionaries manned the squat lascannon and storm bolter turrets that hunkered, almost flat against the hull, between the treads. The Termite unleashed a three hundred and sixty-degree hail of fire. Vulkan took the storm bolter controls in the pilot’s compartment. He kept an eye on the pict screens, swinging the turret in whatever direction he saw a large concentration of greenskins.

  Here and there the orks managed to fire their own primitive turrets at the Termite as it tore past, but their primary assault was as it always was, and always had been, with the greenskins – monstrous waves of bodies throwing themselves at their enemy, whether they could hope to do it any harm or not.

  They landed in front of the drill head and disappeared into a green mist. They landed on the Termite, already dead, burned and mangled by the turrets. But always there were more. That, Vulkan thought, was the single overriding truth when it came to orks. As the floodgates opened from every corridor, they jumped at the vehicle, some managing to stay on the hull briefly before being scraped off by the stream of rubble or the sides of the shaft the Spear of Fire was boring through stone and metal. They hacked at the turrets and hatches with crude las-cutters. They stuck explosives to the sides. Their blows were futile vibrations against the impregnable plating of the Termite.

  The machine blasted through walls and floors. It churned through the nonsensical space of the orks, and the structure of the attack moon became less dense as the Termite went deeper. The chambers through which it stormed were greater, and they held more orks. Scores had been attacking the Termite every second. Now there were hundreds. The front of the machine became a continuous spray of green as the horde was caught by the drill head.

  ‘The xenos have not befouled the machinery yet,’ T’kell said. ‘We are making good time.’

  ‘Is our distance to target becoming more clear?’ Vulkan asked.

  ‘It is beginning to, lord primarch. We are getting useful readings on the base’s density and construction.’

  At last the Termite passed into a region of solid rock, and the walls of the shaft swept the hull clean of orks. Vulkan turned from the turret to the screens. The readouts were the attack moon speaking to him. It unveiled its secrets. It was an unnatural world, but it was still a world, and he could read it as he could any planet, moon or asteroid. No ground could conceal its truths from him.

  ‘We need to go deeper yet,’ Vulkan said. ‘The blasts must come from close to the core to have enough pressure to destroy this base.’ He watched the inflow of data a few seconds longer, reading the attack moon’s density, seeing its cracks and weaknesses, then opened a vox-channel to Sho’mar and Kal’ma. ‘I have the measure of this base’s strength,’ he told the Praetors. ‘When our journey to the core ends, the seismic charges will need to be placed on a radius at least two thousand metres from my position.’

  ‘Understood, lord primarch,’ the Praetors responded.

  ‘For a species so brutish, their work is resilient,’ said T’kell.

  ‘Nothing they build should function at all,’ said Vulkan. ‘But you are right. When they have constructed something that does not immediately destroy itself, it has the same strength as its creators.’

  The Spear of Fire broke through a roof and plunged into a chamber filled with tens of thousands of orks. They converged on the vehicle’s point of impact and jumped onto the hull.

  The tide covered the machine.

  The Termite ploughed through a sludge of green flesh, sliding back and forth over the remains of orks that were crushed beneath its treads, liquefied by the drill head, burned and blasted into nothing by the turrets. They were turning into a literal wave, and the Termite was not designed for an ocean. The treads spun in muscle and gristle, struggling to find a purchase. The vehicle slowed, the drill turning fruitlessly in the air as T’kell struggled to reach the next wall. The orks pressed in, wading through the filth of the dead. The turrets blasted them away as fast as they charged, and as fast as they were killed, more orks arrived.

  Vulkan opened the hatch from the pilot’s compartment and leapt out onto the hull of the Spear of Fire. He held two weapons of his own forging. One was a massive plasma pistol, Anvil’s Light, and it contained the fury of a sun. The other was Nightforged, a power­blade nearly as long as a mortal was tall. The iron of its blade was so dense and so dark, it glimmered midnight blue. A brighter, searing azure energy crackled down its length, ready to bring justice to the enemies of the Emperor.

  Vulkan meted out that justice.

  The gravity was consistent now, closer to the core of the attack moon. He did not feel the same jerks, his mass shifting upwards and to the side. Moving easily, he killed with devastating efficiency, every sword blow striking down three greenskins at a time, the nova blasts of the plasma pistol cremating the xenos.

  A full company of legionaries joined Vulkan on the roof of the hull. Their bolters, chainswords and flamers cut through the orks the turrets missed, but more greenskins came to replace every fallen enemy.

  The Termite slowed even more, and two huge orks, pushing their underlings on to sacrifice themselves beneath the treads, mounted the hull. Their weapons were so large, and their strength so great, that they began to break through the seams of the hull’s plating.

  Vulkan fell upon them with fury. His judgement was tectonic. As big as the orks were, they could not stand up to him any more than they could an earthquake. He sh
attered their piston-driven armour with Nightforged. A shot from Anvil’s Light melted the chest of one. The other lunged around Vulkan and seized him from behind. It tightened arms thick as tree trunks around his throat. It bit into his drake’s helmet, shattering its tusks as they sought purchase. Vulkan stabbed Nightforged back beside his left flank. At the first blow, the ork howled. At the second, it tightened its grip. At the third, the howls ceased. The beast released him and fell.

  The Spear of Fire slewed towards the wall, sending up a sheet of flesh. Ork reinforcements poured into the chamber from a gallery overhead, but of the tens of thousands that had been in the hall, more than half were gone. Vulkan and his gunners were slaughtering them faster than they could arrive.

  A huge chieftain to the rear bellowed, and the mass of the smaller orks rushed to the front of the Spear. Somehow, the greenskins feared the chieftain more than they did the certainty of annihilation. There was a sudden influx of bodies pressing against the machine. It slowed yet further. The treads spun and spun. The Termite was less than three metres from the wall but was close to stalling.

  Vulkan ran forwards, his sword parting the orks before him like sheaves of rotten grain. ‘Lascannons forward,’ he ordered. ‘Ignore the flanks. I want all our las ahead of us. Legionaries, pull back inside.’ He stopped just before the shrieking cone of the drill head. He changed the setting of Anvil’s Light and held the trigger down, aiming at the tidal surge of orks. The plasma pistol’s charge built up to the extent that the ornately wrought weapon trembled with the heat contained inside. It reached the point of self-destruction, but an instant before its end occurred, Vulkan unleashed the shot.

  Killing daylight erupted in the hall. A volcano roared in anger, and a fireball engulfed the orks before the Termite. It left nothing in its wake, reducing the very ash of the bodies to atoms.

  For a few seconds there was only fire, not xenos muscle, ahead of the Termite. The treads ground through bodies, found rock, and the machine surged forwards again. The drill shredded the wall, the cannons blasted upwards and Vulkan crouched low over the hull as the wall came down. Wreckage smashed against him but could not dislodge him. Rock and metal could not move him, for he was of them, and they were the mat­erials of his art.