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Vulkan: Lord of Drakes – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

forge / retreat / swarm

War cannot be waged in isolation. Every battle has consequences. Every battle has victims beyond the combatants.

Consequences are responsibilities. This is a fact of life on Nocturne. It is one that this Legion must never forget. It is not enough merely to know when to strike and when to hold ground. We of Nocturne know well what it means never to give way. The ground that we hold might as well be in our blood, for to yield it is to condemn those we would defend.

But when to strike? This is a more fraught question. To strike when the enemy is most vulnerable may also mean causing the most harm to the innocent. What is the purpose of any battle? Victory alone is insufficient. What are the consequences of that victory? More fully, what are the responsibilities of that victory? It may be more honourable – indeed it may be morally necessary – to strike not when the enemy is weakest but when the greatest number of innocents may be protected, even if that means taking further losses as warriors.

Knowing when that moment comes requires judgement as fine as observation. Once the moment is there, then resolution is called upon, and that is something this Legion has never lacked.

– Vulkan, Meditations

The air rippled with heat. Flames jetted from the exhaust pipes of immense forges. Tremors shook the walls of the cavern. The space was vast, but the work it contained was bigger yet. The underbelly of the machine’s hull extended along the entire length of the cavern. Fore and aft passed through openings that had been blasted through the rock, reaching into other caves just as huge, just as hot, where the echoes of the great labour were just as loud. The upper portions of the machine occupied other regions of the honeycomb of caverns beneath the surface of Nocturne. It was surrounded by a cluster of forges, each one worthy of legend, all of them labouring without cease.

Igniax Nomus Rhy’tan walked down the cavern, running his hand against the side of the machine’s hull. The shielding was the thickest he had ever seen on anything that was not a void ship. It was rich in monumental engravings. They celebrated the XVIII Legion and the history of the device. They were also representations of the forges that were bringing renewal to the huge body.

The old and the new, Rhy’tan thought, and wished the words did not trouble him.

A dozen metres away, Forgemaster T’kell had stepped away from a gantry crane and was looking up at the hull with the evaluating, proprietary eye of the true artisan. T’kell’s features looked as if they had been carved from a massive ingot of the same adamantine alloy as the hull. He had been tempered on the anvil of Nocturne long and hard before he had undergone the most honourable reforging of them all, the one that had made him a legionary of the XVIII and a true son of Vulkan.

‘This is fine work, Master T’kell,’ Rhy’tan said as he drew near. ‘A construction of rare strength.’

‘As it should be,’ T’kell muttered, speaking more to himself than to Rhy’tan. Then he turned his head to look at the Igniax. ‘My thanks, brother.’ He smiled, as if grudgingly allowing himself a flicker of pride. Then the smile faded, replaced by a frown. ‘I do still wonder about the weapon’s purpose. It has no conceivable use on Nocturne.’

‘Why would you have imagined it would?’

T’kell shook his head. ‘A momentary foolishness,’ he said. ‘I forget sometimes that we will, and must, leave.’

‘Our destiny lies in the Emperor’s Great Crusade.’

‘It does, it does. I know this. But, Nomus, when will we leave? Where will we go? And what will we use this for?’

‘When it is time, where we are needed and in the proper campaign.’ Rhy’tan spoke with more confidence than he felt.

T’kell looked around the booming cavern. ‘And so we will leave Nocturne,’ he said softly.

‘Leave, but not abandon.’

‘I do understand that. I do.’

‘But…?’

‘But do you really understand your purpose? Do you? I do not. Any more than I understand our work here.’ He slapped a palm against the hull. ‘I know what this can do. But I do not know its true purpose.’

Rhy’tan took a breath, searching for an answer he already knew was out of his reach. In the same instant, he felt a new rhythm in the vibrations shaking the floor. Steady, firm, powerful. He knew what it was even before he saw the look of chagrin in T’kell’s eyes.

I have failed, Rhy’tan thought. I have let my own uncertainty defeat me. His face burning with shame, he turned and bowed his head as the primarch strode towards them.

Vulkan wore the simple, hardened leathers of a smith. He had been labouring at the side of his sons, for the work being done on the machine was as much a produce of his hands as it was the design of his genius. Simple though his attire was, he walked in majesty. Its aura, invisible yet blinding, shone like the glow of a furnace. T’kell’s features were hard, but Vulkan’s were carved of something stronger than stone, invulnerable to erosion yet tempered by wisdom. Vulkan’s face was that of a veteran warrior, one who knew war and could not be broken by it. But it was also the face of one who knew the cost of war, who would never turn away from that cost and who would seek to be the shield against which the waves of conflict would shatter.

‘I’m sorry, lord,’ said T’kell.

‘For what?’ Vulkan asked. ‘For having perfectly understandable questions? For wondering what we are about and when we will be about it? We have always been honest with each other, since before we were a Legion. Will we stop now?’

‘No,’ T’kell said.

‘No,’ Vulkan repeated. ‘If you have questions, you must ask them. If I have answers, I must give them to you. If I don’t, I must tell you that too, and the simple fact is that I do not. Not yet. When we shall depart and where our duty will take us, I do not know. But I do know this – the Emperor has a task for us. Our role will be one for which we are eminently suited. As for this,’ he touched the side of the hull with a craftsman’s care, ‘it is a storied vehicle. It took part in one of the proudest moments of the Eighteenth Legion on Terra, long before my father found me again. The machine’s history is legend. And I believe its legend is unfinished. That is why I had it brought here from where it rested on Mars.’

Rhy’tan said, ‘When it sees action again, I have no doubt its legend will grow. Things could hardly be otherwise.’

Vulkan smiled at T’kell. ‘You do not have the answers you seek, but do the ones I have given suffice?’

‘They do, lord,’ T’kell said.

‘Then I will interrupt your work no further,’ said Vulkan. He looked at Rhy’tan. ‘Nomus, will you come with me?’

As Rhy’tan followed his primarch out of the forge chamber, he felt his hearts clench with renewed shame. Vulkan’s words with T’kell had not comforted him. His uncertainty was as strong as ever. And another thought had begun to trouble him. There was a possibility that would explain the new Legion being held back from joining the old one. He did not want to articulate it, especially not to Vulkan. Yet he could not put it from his mind.

The stone gallery ran along the northern end of the highest cavern in the complex. This region was more of a staging ground than a forge. In the centre of the gallery, Vulkan and Rhy’tan looked down upon the expanse of the rockcrete floor. Row upon row of tanks stood waiting to rumble up the ramp that passed beneath the gallery and led to the space port on the surface. Legionaries and Mechanicum tech-priests inspected individual vehicles, teams verifying and adjusting the weapons in preparation for an off-world assault that still hovered in the indefinite future.

The great forces of Vulkan’s Nocturnean Legion were ready for deployment. They had been for some time. The years spent training the legionaries were done. The warriors were ready, and their weapons were forged. Their transport and assault vehicles waited to be launched. The work on the huge machine in the caverns below was the last important task unfinished. When he saw it completed, he would at last lead his sons into battle in the Emperor’s name. In the time he had been absent from Nocturne, fighting and learning at the Emperor’s side, he had led contingents seconded from other Legions. He had been honoured to do so, and he had found true kinship with the Iron Hands of Ferrus Manus. But all of that had been mere prologue. These were his sons, shaped by the fires of Nocturne, and it was at their head that he belonged.

The legionaries of the XVIII would march as soon as he gave the order.

Only he had no order to give.

‘Does it trouble you,’ he asked Rhy’tan, ‘that I could not tell Forgemaster T’kell when we would depart Nocturne?’

The Igniax was silent for a short while, thinking through his answer. ‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘that does not trouble me.’

‘But something does.’

Rhy’tan was quiet again. Vulkan waited, patient. Rhy’tan always spoke carefully. Vulkan had never heard an outburst from him. That was one of the reasons he valued Rhy’tan. As Igniax, Rhy’tan taught the wisdom of Nocturne’s myths and traditions. The deep, vertical furrows of his cheeks were the marks of many years of experience, earned long before he had become a legionary. He did not act without careful thought. His deliberation also made him a sounding board. Vulkan trusted Rhy’tan to listen, to take to heart the new lessons Vulkan sought to impart and then to convey the lessons to others. Just as importantly, he knew he could trust Rhy’tan to speak with him honestly.

‘Are you troubled, lord?’ Rhy’tan asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are you troubled by not knowing when our march will begin? Do you not wonder why the Emperor has not told you where and how we are to rejoin the rest of the Eighteenth?’

Yes, Vulkan thought. It has troubled me since I first asked Him when that time would come, and He responded by keeping me near Him and away from my sons. He did not say all this to Rhy’tan. He said, ‘Yes.’ That was enough to begin with.

‘Do you know how it will become apparent that our time has come?’

‘I do not. But I have faith that I will know. Does this disturb you?’

Vulkan waited once more. Rhy’tan was staring, unseeing, at the floor beneath the gallery. Vulkan watched the Igniax wrestle with himself. It was clear that he would have preferred to keep these particular thoughts locked away, but Vulkan had asked him, and he would have to respond.

The silence stretched on. Vulkan murmured, ‘Remember that we must be honest between ourselves.’

Rhy’tan nodded. ‘I am disturbed by a theory that would explain why we are still not called to join our brothers.’

Vulkan caught Rhy’tan’s very slight hesitation before he used the words ‘our brothers’.

‘Go on,’ he said.

Rhy’tan sighed. ‘I have been wondering if the reason we have not joined our brothers yet is because we are not meant to.’

Vulkan consciously held his fists open and relaxed his fingers. Rhy’tan had hit close to the mark in a number of ways. ‘Go on,’ he said, though he could guess what Rhy’tan was about to say.

‘How does the rest of the Eighteenth fare at present?’ Rhy’tan asked.

‘I do not know.’

‘The reputation of our brothers…’ Rhy’tan hesitated again. ‘It is a point of concern,’ he finished, clearly dismayed with his own euphemism.

Vulkan grimaced. In the years of his service to the Emperor, when he had left Nocturne and fought by his father’s side, his face hidden by his helm, he had heard the muttered judgements about the XVIII. No one questioned the Legion’s valour. No one sought to diminish its victories. But it had thrown itself into so many desperate stands that self-sacrifice had begun, in the eyes of some, to look suicidal.

Vulkan had not ignored the whispers. He had studied the records of the XVIII’s engagements. All of them. He saw the strength and the bravery of the Legion, and its commitment to shield the innocent. He also saw the tally of losses, a tally that seemed to be growing exponentially over time. He had spoken to Rhy’tan of this. The Igniax needed to understand the vision Vulkan had for the Legion. If Rhy’tan was to help spread this vision, it could not be a matter simply of repeating Vulkan’s words. He had to see what the primarch saw.

And they had to speak honestly.

‘There are thoughts and words that oppress you,’ Vulkan said, ‘because you are reluctant to express them. You must speak them. And I must hear them.’

Rhy’tan took a breath, then said, ‘Perhaps we of Nocturne are fated to be the totality of the Eighteenth Legion.’

‘I know, by the hesitation in your voice, that arrogance has not brought you to this conclusion.’ Hear him out, Vulkan thought. This cannot and must not be true, but hear him out. This idea had come to him too, and it had never been welcome.

‘I hope it has not, lord,’ Rhy’tan said. ‘You were taken from Terra and destiny brought you to Nocturne. Your Legion, created without you, dwindles as if its warriors sense, somewhere in their being, its… its incompleteness. Perhaps the old Legion must vanish. Perhaps this is what the Emperor awaits.’

‘Is this what you believe?’ Vulkan asked.

‘I do not know,’ Rhy’tan confessed. ‘It is a thought that grows and refuses to be dismissed.’

‘Have you shared this thought with others?’

‘I have not broached it, but they have with me.’

Vulkan nodded. ‘I see.’ The task you have given me is a heavy one, Father. ‘I’m glad you have told me of this, Nomus,’ he said. ‘I will tell you now that we will put the lie to this belief. The legionaries of Terra are my sons as much as the legionaries of Nocturne. They are your kin. There is a reason why we are as yet separated from them. But it is not to wait out their extinction.’

Rhy’tan bowed his head. ‘I am glad of it, lord,’ he said.

But do you believe it? Vulkan wondered if Rhy’tan was convinced.

He also wondered when the sign from the Emperor would come. He knew it was time for this half of the Legion to play its part in the Crusade. What troubled him was that he did not know what time had come for the other half.

The bombardment blasted down the mountain pass towards the space port of Sybota. The barrage was undisciplined, the ordnance was primitive, and it was devastating. There was no skill in the ork attack, but there was overwhelming abundance. It was as if the sky had turned to stone and then collapsed, falling to earth in a hammering avalanche. The air screamed with the unending whistles of the shells. The ground erupted and erupted and erupted, craters overlapping each other, and the pass was choked with flame and dust.

‘Total loss of visibility, lord commander,’ Artellus Numeon voxed from his Typhon siege tank, Victor of the Caucasus.

Encased in his battle-scarred Terminator armour, riding in the top hatch of the Fellblade Ethnarch’s Doom, Cassian Vaughn wiped the dust from his helm’s lenses. ‘I am well aware of that, first captain.’ Before him was nothing but tumultuous darkness lit by blinding flashes of dirty orange fire.

‘We cannot see the targets to shoot them.’

Despite Numeon’s frustration, the Typhon’s Dreadhammer cannon boomed, the sound reaching Vaughn through the air and over the vox. The flare of the muzzle seared the darkness of the pass, revealing the tank’s position, a hundred metres to Doom’s right. The enormous shell streaked into the tempest of blasts. Moments later, the deep rumble of an entire cliff face collapsing rolled back to Cassian.

‘We know where they were, and where they must be,’ Vaughn said. The range of the ork guns was poor. The artillery barrage was effective only because there were hundreds of the cannons further up the pass and on the lower peaks.

‘The long-range auspex readings show a uniform heat bloom,’ Numeon reported.

‘Then we’ll manage with that.’ Vaughn switched vox-channels, broadcasting to the entire force in the pass. ‘All units, maintain fire. Their storm will not move us. They advance no further.’

Fool, he thought. How many times have you said the same thing this past year? How many lines were we going to hold? How many times have we been driven back?

Once was too often, an insult to the reputation of the XVIII Legion, and the orks had repeated the insult again and again since they had come to the Taras Division. A million of the greenskins, descending upon human systems in a collection of vessels that could not be dignified by the term fleet. They were a swarm, a pestilential wave of hundreds of wrecks, hulks and crude assemblages barely recognisable as ships surrounding a single, central mass the size of a planetoid. In a year of war, Vaughn had not yet been able to determine precisely how large the enemy’s force was. There were more than a million orks, that much the XVIII had been able to estimate. Their numbers might as well have been infinite. A million against the nineteen thousand of the XVIII Legion.

And that was at the start of the war. Vaughn’s legionaries had slowed the ork advance, but they could not stop it. The filthy waves upon waves of greenskin ships and ground troops robbed honour, duty, determination, bravery and self-sacrifice of meaning. All Vaughn had to show for a year of struggle was a diminished Legion and a string of burning, abandoned planets.

Corcyra would soon add its name to the tally of lost worlds in the Anteros System. The XVIII was holding the ground in the pass, but it would not be long before there was no more ground to hold.

Vaughn had deployed the full strength of the XVIII’s heavy armour. The choke point was also the primary approach to Sybota’s east. The north and south were shielded by the embrace of the mountain chain, and to the west lay the ocean that surrounded Corcyra’s single inhabited land mass. The XVIII had used Sybota’s geographic isolation against the greenskin hordes. The Legion had bought time. Now the time was almost gone. The pressure of the invasion was becoming irresistible. Vaughn might as well be trying to hold back tectonic plates.

‘They’re coming closer,’ said Numeon.

‘Then they’ll be harder to miss,’ Vaughn said. But he thought, They will not stop.

The full fury of the bombardment fell on the Legion’s tanks, then beyond. There was no consistency to the power of the greenskin ordnance. Some of the shells failed to explode at all. The ablative armour of the tanks shrugged off many others, their force too weak to cut through the powerful Imperial war machines. But there were just as many that were dangerous, huge masses of densely packed high explosive. They should have blown up inside the cannons that fired them, but instead they arced down to shatter the earth and unleash their fury on the XVIII.

A sudden cluster of massive ordnance struck the tank ahead of Ethnarch’s Doom. The Typhon Bane of the Tempest Galleries weathered the first few impacts, but they kept coming, a hammering of mad destruction, and at last the anvil cracked. Bane’s hull split open, then its ammunition erupted. The Typhon vanished. The fireball expanded through the storm, washing over nearby tanks. Vaughn squinted as the flames reached him, even though his auto-lenses adjusted to the sudden flare. A twisted, glowing chunk of Bane’s hull cartwheeled past him, one corner clanging against the turret of the Fellblade. Vaughn whirled in the hatch and looked back. The trailing flames and the flying rubble stretched ragged fingers in the direction of Sybota’s space port. The bombardment storm hid the skyline of the city from view. Vaughn could see nothing but boiling grey and the burn. But then he heard another thunder, a welcome one, continuous and growing. He saw a glow, the light of a pillar of fire so huge it could shine through the storm. It rose, slowly at first, then faster, climbing higher and higher.

It was the sign of the closest thing to victory the XVIII could still hope to achieve on Corcyra.

‘Orasus,’ Vaughn called over a channel to the space port. ‘What is our status?’

‘The last of the heavy lifters has departed, lord commander,’ Tactical Legionary Maraeus Orasus answered. He was the vox-operator for his squad, one of those detached to oversee the exodus from Corcyra.

‘Have any further refugees reached the space port?’

‘None.’

Then the evacuation was complete. The human population of Corcyra was in orbit and beyond, fleeing the system while the XVIII held the attention of the orks.

‘All units,’ said Vaughn, ‘our mission is complete.’ Only this should never have been our mission. We are forced to consider total retreat a victory. ‘Pull back to the space port.’

‘Lord commander,’ said Orasus, ‘shells have begun to fall on the city.’

Vaughn bit back a curse. ‘From what direction?’

‘From everywhere but the east. They are encircling Sybota.’

We barely slowed them, Vaughn thought. There were so many greenskins, they were pouring over the mountain peaks like a wind-borne plague. ‘All possible speed to the space port,’ he ordered the Legion. ‘Cannons, keep firing on the advance of the foe. We have only a short time to depart. Our duty on Corcyra is complete, but our war is not.’

It never will be, he thought. Not until the last of us lies dead. He no longer imagined an end to the struggle that saw the orks destroyed. Every strategy he used now would do nothing more than gain the XVIII a bit of time.

Ethnarch’s Doom’s engine rumbled into a higher pitch as Legionary Blasius turned the Fellblade around. Vaughn’s perspective did not change as, inside the tank, gunner Caelius swung the turret through one hundred and eighty degrees. Caelius fired the Fellblade’s twin-linked accelerator cannons. From one barrel came a high-explosive shell designed to turn infantry into bloody mist. From the other came an armour-piercing projectile that could smash the strongest walls. The double punch of the Doom’s accelerators could lay an army to waste. Caelius kept sending out its wrath, cutting through the bombardment to unseen targets.

‘They’re dying out there,’ Caelius shouted into the vox. The tumult of the barrage was so constant, so omnipresent, that there was no other way to communicate, even for crews in a single tank. ‘We punish them for every step they take.’

‘That we do, legionary,’ Vaughn answered. Not enough of them die. Not nearly enough. But we can punish them all the same.

The ranks of heavy armour retreated from the pass. The bombardment followed. There was no respite from the pounding explosions. The craters slowed the formation down as the tanks crawled in and out of them. Now and then, Vaughn made out the flash of ork guns, sometimes from elevated positions, sometimes advancing through the pass. The enemy was closer yet. He could almost imagine he heard the snarl of the infantry. Perhaps he was not imagining it at all. The greenskins would not hesitate to rush through their own bombardment in their eagerness to engage with their foe.

It took Vaughn several attempts to pierce the static and reach Shipmaster Vathea Resalt aboard the battleship Klostzatz. ‘We are done here, shipmaster,’ he said when he got through.

‘So I surmised, lord commander. The captain of that lifter is boasting about being the last to leave Corcyra.’

How very brave of him, Vaughn thought. But in the next instant, he felt a surge of relief. Bravado was a good sign. That meant the ship of civilians had cleared the atmosphere and was out of immediate danger. His delaying action against the orks had succeeded.

All that remained now was for the Legion to escape extinction.

And then fight again.

‘I have sent all transports to Sybota, lord commander,’ Resalt said.

‘Thank you, shipmaster. It is time for us to leave.’

Sybota was on fire as the XVIII Legion reached the space port. What little discipline the orks had demonstrated with their bombardment of the mountain pass had vanished, and their guns were now firing indiscriminately, every tower of the city an inviting target. The hordes closing in from north and south had broken through the walls. The entire city was within range of the artillery, and the greenskins’ infantry were rampaging through the streets. In the wide ferrocrete expanse of the space port’s launching pads, the wind quickly blew away the smoke and dust of the shell impacts, and Vaughn looked up into a sky reddened by the conflagrations and the bloody streaks of falling shells. From a way off came a roar like the pounding of surf, its note of savagery becoming clearer as the tide approached. A hundred thousand guttural cries made that roar.

‘This is a poor spectacle of victory,’ Vaughn admitted to Numeon. Now that there was no more action to take on Corcyra, Vaughn felt free to express his frustrations privately with his friend.

They stood on the vast rockcrete apron of the space port, before the regiments of legionaries awaiting evacuation. The shadow of the abandoned control tower fell over them. Smoke drifted upwards from shell holes in the walls, shrouding the tower. The air over the apron was sharp with expended fuel. Heavy lifters had already taken most of the tanks off-planet. Squadrons of Stormbirds were transporting the Legiones Astartes to the fleet waiting at low anchor.

‘It is an empty spectacle,’ said Numeon. ‘The greenskins are wasting their energy. There is nothing left here for them to kill. We did kill many.’

‘We always kill many. We will kill many more. And they will keep coming. They will not stop at the Taras Division.’

There was an eruption of fire a few kilometres from the outskirts of the space port. Stormbirds were making strafing runs over the approaching orks.

‘Not much time,’ said Numeon.

Vaughn eyed the remaining ranks of legionaries. ‘Time enough.’ Even as the flight of gunships departed, he could see another angling in from the north-west. This would be the last. ‘We are done here,’ he said. ‘Now we depart to fight and hold them. Again.’

‘As we did for Sybota.’

‘You still have a taste for irony, Artellus. Well done.’

Numeon grunted. ‘We’re always holding them back, aren’t we? We cannot advance. Whether we like it or not, we are losing ground.’

‘We are.’

‘And when they move to the Taras System?’

Vaughn shook his head. There could not be another evacuation. The populations of the Taras worlds were too large. There was no way for any fleet to get so many billions away, and there was nowhere for them to go.

There were sudden flashes high in the sky. Small, distant, but bright: the flares of combat in the void.

‘Lord commander,’ Resalt voxed, ‘there’s a ship incoming to your position.’

‘They’re attempting a landing?’ Vaughn asked in disbelief.

‘Not a landing,’ said Resalt. ‘We’ve crippled them. They’re turning their ship into an orbital bomb.’

The squadron of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, the last that would be needed, was almost there.

‘End strafing runs,’ Vaughn ordered. ‘All aircraft not involved in transport, make for orbit.’

One of the flares in the sky grew brighter.

The gunships came in, their ramps slamming down even before they had fully landed.

‘On board now!’ Vaughn cried, and the legionaries stormed up the ramps. Vaughn waited until the end, heading for the Stormbird Stoic with Numeon. He looked up as he boarded. The bright flare was a constant, becoming blinding, becoming flame, becoming a solid object.

‘Go!’ Vaughn was shouting, barely conscious that he was doing so.

The order was unnecessary. The gunships were taking off. The space port shook with the roar of a dozen gunship engines screaming for speed and height.

‘Go!’ Vaughn shouted again, as if his command could urge the aircraft to greater velocity.

The deck heaved under his feet as Stoic thundered upwards. He snatched at the grav-web and pulled himself against the bulkhead, strapping himself in. ‘Wide dispersal,’ he ordered. ‘Pull away from the space port. Get out of the target zone.’

The fire in the sky drew closer still. Stoic raced on a diagonal path away from the coming apocalypse. Its engines shrieked with strain. The fireball filled Vaughn’s vision, a misshapen, monstrous, grotesquery of a ship. It should never have flown, it should never have been voidworthy, and now it was conceding to the impossibility of its design and was coming to earth, trailing fire, hungry for its final immolation.

It glowed with the heat of re-entry.

Stoic streaked away and the ship dropped past it. The hulk clipped the Thunderhawks Resilience and Unbroken and the Stormbird Flamebringer, shearing off wings and tails. The gunships tumbled, out of control, gravity pulling them back to follow the ork monster to its doom.

The hulk smashed into the space port. The fireball engulfed entire square kilometres of the city. Towers vanished beneath the huge sea of flame. The shock wave chased Stoic, then overtook it. A monstrous fist shook the gunship. The hull groaned. The craft struggled to maintain its momentum, and for several seconds its speed bled away. But it survived the blow and kept climbing through an atmosphere wracked by turbulent fire.

Vaughn gazed down through the viewing block at the destruction below. The stricken gunships had vanished in the holocaust. More men gone, his Legion diminished again, and for what?

‘This is what we have died for,’ he said to Numeon.

The fireball was dimming from incandescence to an angry red. The shattered spires of Sybota stuck out of the flames like the splinters of a huge beast’s skeleton.

‘We did save the population,’ Numeon said.

‘You know we didn’t. We only delayed their destruction.’

Numeon said nothing for a moment. ‘You truly believe we cannot win?’

It was Vaughn’s turn to pause. The answer to Numeon’s question was obvious, but to speak it would be too shameful. ‘We can fight,’ he said, as if that were a sufficient answer. ‘We will fight.’

Outside the Stormbird, the air was growing dark as the gunship passed through the upper atmosphere. The battle in low orbit came into focus. The disciplined broadsides of the XVIII’s ships slashed through the poorly constructed ork vessels. Greenskin fire flashed fruitlessly back against flaring void shields.

‘We have a free hand now,’ Vaughn said, glimpsing hope. ‘There are no worlds to defend. We can throw everything into keeping the orks here, away from the Taras System.’

Vaughn held on to that hope as the gunships of the XVIII left Corcyra behind. They made for the Klostzatz. The battleship was surrounded by much smaller ork attackers. The greenskins’ ships did not have the firepower to pierce the Imperial vessel’s void shields, and they were trying to ram the Klostzatz instead. Shipmaster Resalt was holding them back with dense defensive firepower. Converging lance and cannon fire forward of the battleship had cleared enemy ships from the immediate region of the bow, opening the way for the returning gunships.

Numeon said, ‘What about their attack moon?’ The term designated the immense accretion of planetoids and ruined ships at the centre of the ork fleet. The construction was as monstrous as it was primitive. It looked like a frozen collision, a mad fusion of wrecks that should have destroyed each other but had instead cohered. It was grotesque, more gargoyle than vessel, a physical expression of the greenskins’ relentless savagery. ‘Can we keep it in the Anteros System if they decide to take it elsewhere?’ Numeon asked.

‘We have to change the orks’ minds,’ said Vaughn. ‘They must prefer to remain here, at war with a true enemy. We will be the irresistible challenge.’

The landing bays of the Klostzatz opened to receive the gunships. The Stormbirds made short work of the ork fighters that sought to interfere with their return to the battleship. One on one, the ork craft were helpless before the Imperium’s technology of war. They needed overwhelming numbers to tilt the battle in their favour, and for now, Resalt had succeeded in carving out a space for her vessel.

By the time Vaughn had disembarked and made his way to the bridge, accompanied by Numeon, the attack moon was looming large in the primary oculus. The ork base had been in close orbit of Corcyra, its mere presence enough to change the world’s tides. Resalt had moved what still remained of the XVIII’s fleet away from it, to a position on the other side of Corcyra’s moon. Now the monster was moving again, as if the orks had tired of the invasion as soon as their worthy foes had left. The rest of the ork ships moved with it, insects swarming around a leviathan. The strike cruiser Khalkeus was silhouetted against the attack moon as it manoeuvred back towards the battleship.

‘Lord commander,’ Resalt greeted him. Dark-skinned, her head clean-shaven, she had held command of the battleship for the length of the Great Crusade. Vaughn found it easier to imagine the bridge shorn of its oculus and its control surfaces than without its formidable shipmaster. ‘As you can see, our position is becoming untenable.’

‘And we have no need to hold it any longer, shipmaster. Take us out. Contact the Khalkeus. We draw the orks back to the worlds they have already burned. We’ll have them chasing…’

He trailed off, staring at the oculus. Resalt followed his gaze. At the same moment, the bridge’s vox crackled with the voice of Captain Gerhardt Vallorn aboard the Khalkeus.

A huge wave of ork vessels had whipped out around their base like the spiral arm of a galaxy. Now they rushed towards the strike cruiser, a storm of metal and xenos hate. The orks’ guns were still no match for the Khalkeus, but its void shields were strained to the limit as hundreds of shells pounded against them. The vessel was surrounded by a violent aura. The enemy ships came on at ramming speed.

The first ones hit. They were smaller than the majestic Imperial vessel, but they broke through its overburdened void shields, slamming hard into the hull. The strike cruiser blazed with counter-fire, turning one ork ship after another into clouds of burning fuel and dissipating shrapnel. Still the orks came on with a suicidal singleness of purpose, as though they were the unthinking limb of the attack moon.

As the swarm closed around the Khalkeus, the outer edge of the arm reached towards the Klostzatz. Resalt directed covering fire towards the strike cruiser. More ork ships exploded, and the void was no longer black. It was a boiling, burning, convulsing tempest.

The ork base drew nearer. Even though the Khalkeus continued to make for the Klostzatz, it seemed to grow smaller and smaller as the base expanded, becoming the only world in the oculus’ universe of flame.

The frigate Guardian of Flame was the first to go. The largest of the ork hulks were almost its equal in size. Its hull withstood several collisions, and then a brutish fist of a shape, all reinforced prow and engine, cut it in half. The huge ram kept going, leaking atmosphere and flame. It was badly damaged, but still it hunted. It went straight on at the Khalkeus and struck at the same instant as two other, smaller ram ships. They broke through the void shields again just as the strike cruiser’s defences were coming back online. The big ship punched through the Khalkeus’ starboard flank and exploded, a torpedo half a kilometre long.

Amidships of the strike cruiser, flame blossomed. Cracks, shining white with heat, spread along the hull. The Khalkeus was still moving forwards, still heading for the Klostzatz, but its course had been knocked off true.

Vallorn’s crew managed to restore vox communications, which had momentarily been consumed by static. ‘We’ve lost steering,’ the captain said, his voice ragged with pain. ‘Engines are not responding. Readings say they’re going–’

A savage dawn tore through the void and cut him off once more. The Khalkeus became its own pyre. The conflagration swallowed a score of ork ships, but hundreds more raced through the flames, charging like hungry carnivores towards their next prey. Behind them, the attack moon advanced. Its gravity pulled the destroyed greenskin and Imperial ships to its surface. Their wreckage punched craters on impact but did nothing more than scar the face of the xenos beast, rendering its image even more brutal.

‘Take us out,’ Vaughn ordered.

Another retreat. Again, there was no choice. Any reason to fight in the Anteros System had evaporated. The orks controlled it. The only hope now was to find a new, more favourable battlefield.

The Klostzatz hummed as its engines accelerated. The prow turned away from the attack moon and pointed towards the system’s Mandeville point.

‘Take us to Taras,’ Vaughn said. ‘Take us to Taras, and we’ll burn them there.’

He turned away from the pulpit overlooking the bridge and stood over the tacticarium table. He did not have to stare at the shameful sight of the new retreat. He trusted Resalt to do as he had commanded. She knew the ship and its capabilities better than he did. If it was possible to escape from the orks, she would do so without his interference.

As the ork cannons and the fastest of their ships struck the Klostzatz’s void shields, and the hull began to quake, Vaughn stared at the star chart of the Taras System. He would find the battlefield. He would strip the initiative from the orks. He would set the terms of the next battle.

Click here to buy Vulkan: Lord of Drakes.

For Margaux, in winter warmth and summer light.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-907-1

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