Vulkan Lord of Drakes

by David Annandale

  The legionaries cut their triumph short with fire.

  Flame now filled the room as the other squads killed more vehicles. Casualties were mounting on both sides, though the orks had the worst of it. But now the xenos came together, united not by strategy but by instinct and battle fury. A solid line of vehicles roared across the cargo bay, cutting off lines of escape.

  A group of five legionaries had no chance at all to evade. They were in the centre of the cargo bay floor, too close to the trucks, and had seconds only to turn and stand their ground, hurling shells and grenades into the enemy. It was not enough. The vehicles rode over them, impaled them on spikes and smashed them flat with wrecking balls.

  The trucks came on, a solid wall of greenskin machinery, set on scraping the bay clear of the XVIII Legion.

  ‘Form a wedge!’ Sho’mar ordered, bracing for the impact. The truck bearing down on him had a blade that was taking all of his shots. And on the vox, all he heard from the chamber with the Spear of Fire was the shouts of more brothers, the thunder of explosions. Then he heard the steady beat of tremendous blows. It was the sound of a hammer against an anvil, and it renewed his determination.

  Sho’mar charged the truck. ‘Rockets!’ he yelled, and a cluster of missiles streaked into the centre vehicles, destroying them utterly. The blade rushing at Sho’mar went flying end over end above his head.

  The legionaries ran into the fireballs, passing through the flame to come out the other side of the furnace of their own making. They trained their fire on the rear of the trucks, and now the destruction began in earnest.

  The tunnel down which Kal’ma led his company was an ancient lava tube boring through a massive planetoid fragment. It descended abruptly, the surface so smooth the footing became treacherous. A horde of orks boiled up from below to meet the legionaries.

  ‘Seismic charge carriers, drop back,’ Kal’ma ordered, and the rest of the company spread out, wall-to-wall in the tube, their bolter fire scything into the orks.

  The beasts stumbled over each other, their uphill charge faltering under the attack, and then the company smashed into them with the force of a maglev train. Kal’ma held his bolt pistol before him, trigger depressed and slashed with his chainsword. Xenos flesh parted, and bones shattered from his battering ram charge.

  ‘Less than five hundred metres,’ the call came over the vox.

  ‘We are nearly there, brothers,’ Kal’ma shouted, and he shot his way through the last of the orks before him. The way to the end of the tunnel was clear.

  Kal’ma pounded down the slope. It was so steep and his momentum was so strong, it would have been difficult to stop. The tunnel ended at a wide opening, and the floor changed from stone to metal. The company ran out onto a sixty metre-long piece of ragged decking that jutted into the midst of a spherical cavern.

  The walls were honeycombed with dozens of galleries, their layers running its entire height. The cavern was an intersection of tunnels. Every gallery was a pathway to other regions of the greenskin base, and the orks were passing through in their thousands, most of them heading inwards, answering Vulkan’s challenge and the call of their warlord. Some, however, stopped when they saw the company.

  Fire that was undisciplined but dense as a hailstorm erupted from the height and breadth of the cavern. It battered the company’s position, pinning the legionaries where they stood.

  The far wall was in the target range. Kal’ma cursed to see it so close yet denied to them by fire.

  The Thunderhawk Volcanic flew by again but could not make a landing. Winds screamed over the peak of cooled rock, clutching at Numeon, Orasus and Saluran with talons that tried to hurl them into the air. The jutting protrusion they clung to was shaped like a claw and some ten metres high. Already it was less a shelter than a prison.

  The lava flowed past the claw, blocking any move to the north for Numeon and the others. To the south, it was losing its strength and the orks were coming back. In their thousands, they fired at the Volcanic. Their reinforcements had arrived from over the mountain chain now, and there was artillery with them. The anti-air fire was as erratic as it was intense. At that volume, if the gunship paused long enough to pick up the three legionaries, it would surely be brought down.

  A hulking silhouette appeared in the distance. It raised a mechanical claw, exhorting its followers to head back towards the Cauldron.

  ‘Lord Commander Vaughn’s bane has returned,’ said Numeon.

  ‘How long do you think we can hold them off?’ Orasus asked.

  ‘Do you mean can we do it until Volcanic can attempt a landing?’

  Orasus looked up at the streaks of ork fire. They formed a jagged web above the rock claw.

  ‘I do not think the landing is very likely,’ said Saluran.

  ‘Then we fight with no end in sight,’ Numeon declared. ‘It will not be the first time we have done so.’

  ‘I need no end of killing orks,’ said Orasus.

  Saluran nodded. ‘They will tire of this war before I do,’ he said, looking down the sights of his bolter at the encroaching horde.

  The warlord was closer now. Its very form was the destroyer of hope. It urged its followers forwards. They confronted the lava, mounting the crawling, half-congealed flood. The ones that broke through the crust and burned were mocked by the others who ran on.

  Volcanic attempted another pass at the claw but was again frustrated by wind and enemy. ‘I am sorry, brothers. Your rescue is still beyond my reach,’ Carvanon voxed.

  ‘You are here to fight with us,’ Numeon said. ‘We ask no more than that. Join us in the slaughter of our foe, brother.’

  The Thunderhawk flew south, guns and rockets roaring into the orks.

  The greenskins were in range now, and Numeon opened fire. Every pull of the trigger was a denial of odds, a refusal of defeat.

  Every expended shell was a defiance of the end that roared towards him.

  Once the explosions began, they never stopped. The shells had finally broken the strength of the Spear of Fire, and when that strength went, it went all at once. Armaments and fuel erupted in concert with the endlessly falling shells. Vulkan and the ork warlord disappeared in the cataclysm. A huge fireball rose to the ceiling of the hall and roiled over the orks attacking the Termite. The force of the blast knocked Rhy’tan down, and his armour sealed itself tightly against the first heat of the explosions. But the shutters dropped from his auto-senses before the fire dissipated, and for a few seconds he was moving through a world aflame.

  ‘Lord Vulkan!’ Rhy’tan shouted, and he tried to move towards the centre of the blast. When the fireball faded at last, the combined wreckage of the Termite, the girders and the claw formed a mound of smoking, guttering scrap that rose halfway to the ceiling.

  The company had been scattered by the destruction of the Spear of Fire, but Rhy’tan could see T’kell and the others, and he made his way to them, killing stunned orks as he did.

  ‘Where is he?’ said T’kell over the vox. It was the only way they could communicate over the artillery barrage. The shells kept coming down on the wreckage. Continuing internal explosions reshaped it, and its silhouette looked slightly different each time it emerged from behind the smoke and din of the bombardment.

  ‘Listen!’ Rhy’tan shouted. ‘Listen to the interior!’

  What he had thought were secondary explosions were blows. The two giants were fighting within the furnace of the wreckage. For a dizzying moment, Rhy’tan saw the duel as a mirror to the war the Legion was fighting within the attack moon, and he knew with the certitude of illumination that both conflicts would end with triumphant eruptions.

  A shell landed only a few feet from Rhy’tan. He staggered under the blow but kept his feet.

  ‘Regroup at the Spear of Fire,’ Captain Ber’han voxed. ‘Our task is the same. We must draw the orks to us. Keep them here
. Give the seven companies the chance to plant the charges. We hold the line.’

  Rhy’tan moved through a pounding hell. The deck buckled and shook. It was several metres thick, but there were now craters that punched all the way through to deeper levels of the attack moon. He and his brothers were going deeper into a boiling cauldron of war to make their stand in the centre of the madness. The mount was a metallic volcano. The shells falling around it seemed to come from it now, hurled out like lava bombs. As the legionaries formed up in front of the mound, dodging incoming shells and hunkering down and holding the line, blasting at the orks that came near, becoming that which would not move, Rhy’tan realised this battle was not a cauldron. It was a forge. They stood upon the anvil, and the hammer was falling.

  And because they would not move, they were being tempered. Each shell that fell only made them stronger, more determined. They would not move. Five of them would keep this ground. Five of them would act for one. They would act as one, and trap the orks here in this battle until the death blow came to the attack moon.

  The orks charged forwards in the midst of their shelling.

  ‘Their calling is as strong as ours,’ said So’bak.

  ‘Ours is stronger,’ said Rhy’tan. ‘They only have instinct and the fear of their leader. We have faith in ours, and we have purpose.’

  Purpose. There was great truth in that. Rhy’tan felt a sense of purpose that was the same in spirit as the one he had always known on Nocturne, only far greater. He saw the threat the orks represented. He saw what the human galaxy struggled against. He understood now that the duty to protect was not limited to Nocturne. He knew that truth viscerally. He gazed upon the orks with fury. This was what the Terrans had been fighting for a year, and at the thought, a rush of brotherhood spread through his veins like fire.

  ‘We came here to forge a beginning,’ Rhy’tan declared, ‘and we shall!’

  The orks came on, wave building upon wave. The squad backed up and fired from the wreckage. The legionaries were in the midst of flame. The rubble shifted and shook.

  T’kell said, ‘This is no defensive position.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Rhy’tan. ‘It is the anvil, and it is ours.’ He blew the chest out of an ork. The brute flipped back, landing on its kin behind. They stumbled, and Rhy’tan punched holes through their bodies too.

  The squad turned the wave back, and the wave came again, stronger yet, the orks pouring ceaselessly into the hall.

  ‘Look what we do, brothers!’ Rhy’tan shouted. ‘This is our primarch’s example! We are the rock against which the enemy must break!’

  We will not be defeated, Rhy’tan thought. The impossibility of victory was before him, but he was untroubled. He and his brothers could not win, yet they would. He refused any other possibility.

  The mound heaved. The mound roared. The mound erupted. At its peak, wreckage exploded aside, flames shooting upwards. And from the top, burned and scorched and roaring thunder, came a monster of nightmare and the hero that was its doom.

  Vulkan’s armour was scorched from being at the heart of explosions. Shrapnel of a mass and velocity that would have cut a Chimera in two had left rents and gouged him to the bone. The ork warlord’s hammer had cracked the chest-plate and driven shards of ceramite deep into his muscle.

  The armour bore the scars of battle and fire, and so did Vulkan, but they were not disfigured. They were being shaped on the anvil of war. He was in the centre of a furnace, even now, as he and the warlord had emerged on top of the wreckage. And it was now, when the material was malleable to the craftsman’s hammer, that the most crucial blows would be struck.

  The battle had marked the ork warlord too. The firestorm of explosions and Vulkan’s blows had shattered the pistons on its left leg and torn away the plating of its right arm and shoulder. The massive helmet was shorn of its horns, and Vulkan had driven the spikes of its lower guard into the ork’s jaws. Metal and bone were fused, and the ork spat rivers of blood every time it roared. The pain enraged it, and the beast seemed neither weakened nor slowed. If anything, its blows, driven by fury, were even more powerful.

  But they were more undisciplined too, more erratic.

  Vulkan moved the instant before the hammer came down, too late for the ork to change its aim. He smashed through a twisted girder on his right and came around the warlord’s flank. He stabbed Nightforged into the grinding gears of the ork’s armour. The mechanism melted and smoked, and the blade plunged between the plates and into the body of the monster. The warlord turned into the pain. Vulkan stood his ground as the ork’s movement dragged Nightforged through its flesh, severing muscle and machinery. Dark, malodorous blood sprayed over Vulkan’s arms. The stench was the thick, lung-squeezing smell of rotting fungus.

  The ork turned faster, ignoring the gaping wound and using the momentum to swing the hammer around in a lightning strike. Vulkan saw it coming, but this time the attack was too fast. He pulled Nightforged, but a mesh of collapsing gears held it fast for a moment. He jerked it free as the hammer smashed into his side.

  Every blow of the ork’s weapon was like being struck by a mechanised wall. The head’s whirring chains had teeth as long as a man’s finger. They stuck out at all angles, and they tore around the hammer’s head at blinding speed. The weapon shredded as it crushed, and when the ork hit with its full strength, the effect was devastating.

  Vulkan was moving right when the ork hit him, and that allowed him to absorb part of the force of the strike, but the monstrous head crushed the side of his armour and shattered his ribs. He stopped himself from flying off the mound by throwing all his weight onto his right leg. It sank into the wreckage, anchoring him. Lightning flares of pain exploded down the entire length of his left flank, but he kept his focus and fired a quick shot with Anvil’s Light. The warlord recoiled from the plasma burst. More of its helm hung as molten slag, but though its flesh was crisped black, it was as if the beast were made of savagery itself, and it was no more than burned.

  The ork glared at Vulkan and swung the hammer again. Vulkan ducked and blocked, slashing at the monster’s arms, breaking down the armour. But no matter how much he damaged it, the ork barely slowed. The armour began to seem ornamental, a cage that could barely contain the unstoppable body within.

  The ork roared with desperate fury, as if at an instinctual level it understood the kind of hope Vulkan and his Legion represented, and in retaliation sought to teach the XVIII a different lesson, one of futility and extinction. It slammed the hammer down, deliberately missing Vulkan and striking the peak of the wreckage. The impact was tremendous, and the entire mound shifted. New pillars of flame erupted from within, surrounding the combatants. Vulkan kept his feet and launched himself at the ork, blasting at the colossal armour with Anvil’s Light and slashing at the arms with Nightforged, forcing the warlord onto the defensive.

  The beast fought on, but it had already lost. The duel had accomplished its end. The great mass of the orks had followed the wrath of their leader. The focus of the greenskin invasion had shifted inwards, to the centre, to this point within the attack moon, leaving the base vulnerable to Vulkan’s strategy.

  Did his sons see? Did they understand? Did they realise that what he did here, his fight against this monster and the internal paroxysm he had caused in the ork base, was not suicidal? It was planned, strategic and necessary. It was the means to victory.

  Below him, a company of his legionaries surrounded the blazing furnace of the wreckage and fought the overwhelming waves of orks with such a fury of purpose that it seemed as if it were the orks that were on the defensive.

  Vulkan rejoiced. His sons understood.

  The ork swung past his guard and hit him on the shoulder, stunning him and driving him down into the ruins past his knees. It hit him again before he could recover, catching his left arm as he raised it, the meteoric blow smashing Anvil’s Light fr
om his grasp. It bellowed in triumph and raised the hammer for the death blow.

  Vulkan grabbed the shaft of the hammer with one hand. The shock of the impact pushed him further into the ruin. Metal heated to red by the raging furnace at the mound’s centre compacted around him, burning through the rents in his armour. Snarling, the ork pressed down. Pushing back was like trying to lift an entire world. The warlord brayed in its barbaric tongue, cursing Vulkan as it shoved him down and down, burying him once again in the volcanic cone of metal.

  Vulkan strained against the beast’s strength, his arm on the verge of breaking. He found purchase for his feet on more stable debris, while flames enveloped his legs. He braced himself. The pain was irrelevant. There was too much at stake. ‘You cannot finish me like this,’ he taunted, looking into the glinting yellow of the ork’s eyes. ‘You know it. You need to hit me again. You know that burying me is not enough. You believe you must shatter me. But I swear to you that even that will not suffice.’

  Suddenly, the ork yanked the hammer up. Vulkan let go. The ork hauled the immense weapon back far over its shoulders. It arched its back with the gathering force of the strike.

  Vulkan roared and leapt, pushing against the compacted wreckage and out of the furnace. He shot up inside the reach of the monstrous arms and drove Nightforged up through the slag of the ork’s helm, into its throat, and up and up, into its skull.

  The beast’s hands spasmed and it dropped the hammer. It remained standing, jaws slack, brain pierced and burned as Vulkan withdrew his blade, turned it on its side and, in a single blow, cut off the monster’s head.

  Standing astride the flaming destruction, defying the shells that still battered the remains of the Termite, he sheathed Nightforged and held the ork’s head high. ‘With me!’ he shouted, sending his triumph across the vox to every legionary in the ork base. ‘With each other! Into the fires of battle! UNTO THE ANVIL OF WAR!’

  The tens of thousands of orks in the smoke-filled hall beheld what he had done, and they howled in dismay.