Vulkan waited. He thought about the main force of orks in Laccolith. He visualised the brutalised landscape between the city and the Ascia Rift. He pictured the news of the attack on the installation reaching the army. The response. The desperate drive back. He calculated the time of arrival. He listened to Koorland’s updates on the battle. Eventually, the orks would decide to bring down their wall. He found the balance between the charge coming from the south and the siege in the north. He located the fulcrum of the war. The point upon which a hammer would shatter a blade with a single blow.
Vulkan struck.
Nine
Vulkan rushed the gate of the command nexus. He held the great hammer Doomtremor high over his head. Alarms whooped with savage, rusted voices as he approached. The immense cone shimmered, its shape flickering and distorting as its protective force field pulsed and surged. Within the field, before the gate, a line of orks in heavy armour raised chainaxes. They braced for combat, but their jaws were open in mocking laughter. They did not expect a lone human to pass through the field.
Vulkan hit the invisible barrier with all his velocity, all his mass, and all the strength of his hammer. The orks learned that energy itself could scream. The force field flashed white. The shriek of a hundred tortured generators pierced the air. Vulkan raised Doomtremor with both hands then brought it down again before the glare had faded. The shield howled red, then violet. The orks at the gate covered their eyes, dazzled by the brutality of light.
Vulkan was relentless. With each blow of the hammer, the earth shook. Thunder cracked reality into hard, broken edges. The shockwave radiated across the installation. Conduits crumpled at its passage. They burst, spewing geysers of fire.
Boom. Boom. Boom. The beat of judgement, of the end of feral empires. Vulkan swung, channelling all his fury. He swung, and he was the anger of Caldera. His cloak billowed in the hurricane of his creation. He swung, and half a kilometre away, the tremors unleashed by his wrath felled a chimney. The tower swayed. At its base, stone crumbled and iron snapped. The chimney came down, dropping vertically and then forward, crushing generators below it. The night exploded with unleashed, coruscating energy. Lava flowed from the shattered base, spreading across the canyon floor. A dull orange-red glow lit the sides of surrounding structures.
The damage spread, but the nexus resisted. The power in the installation did not falter. Vulkan had not expected it would. Ork construction piled excess upon redundancy. It would take an even greater cataclysm than this to destroy the great machine. Control was what he would wrest from the hands of the orks.
Strike. Strike. Strike. A terrible accumulation, the rhythm unbreakable as the laws of the universe. At the edge of his vision, Vulkan saw orks rushing at him. The greater part of the defenders were at the wall, dealing with Koorland’s incursion. Perhaps now they had realised they had been diverted. Perhaps they would turn from that battle and head back towards the centre of the complex. They would be too late to disrupt his attack. Those who remained were too few to make a difference. They were not even a distraction. The shockwaves knocked them back. The tremors hurled them to the ground.
Doomtremor flashed, its rage the extension of Vulkan’s soul, and it shattered the force field. A prismatic explosion surrounded the nexus. The gigantic arms jerked, their energy arcs rising to the clouds in their agony. A cluster of explosions opened a rent along the top third of the cone. The night became a howling strobe of light and dark. The installation roared. An invader had breached its defences. A great danger had come.
Vulkan had come.
He strode forward. Each step was grounded. He felt the heart of Caldera reach up through his feet, through his body. The world embraced its avenger.
The orks charged. They were as tall as Vulkan and even more massive in their armour.
‘This world is under my protection,’ he snarled. ‘Trouble it no more.’
He swung the hammer sideways. One blow was enough. Armour shattered like eggshells. Bodies burst and burned.
Behind him, howls of distress and anger from more defenders, too few and too late. The chorus of alarm engulfed the complex. It was the fanfare of xenos defeat.
The primarch stood before the gate. He slammed the hammer against its centre. The iron slab, ten metres high, flew apart.
Vulkan entered the nexus. It was composed of a single vast space, a cathedral of riotous technology. Banks of coils the size of plasma drives rose toward the inner peak. Energy arced between them, creating a crackling web intense enough to fry half a continent. Huge cables from the exterior fuelled the banks with still more energy, while conduits fed the heat of Caldera’s mantle to the machine. At the centre of the cone was a pillar half the height of the structure, and fifty metres wide. It supported the control mechanisms. Scores of orks moved back and forth between monumental levers and dials. A huge greenskin engineer stood above them all on a dais, surrounded by a tangle of sparking machinery. There, Vulkan thought, was the heart of Caldera’s martyrdom. That was what he had come to destroy.
He took in the disposition of the nexus and his target in a fraction of a second. The ork engineer evaluated him in the same moment. Vulkan took a step forward, and the inner defences activated.
The turrets had a precision Vulkan had never encountered in orks before. The need to preserve the control nexus governed their function. They caused no damage to the machinery. There were dozens of them, and they all fired on the primarch. If their rotation brought the precious mechanisms within their line of fire, they fell silent until their guns had a clear bead on the primarch once more.
They hit him with a torrent of energy beams. The concentrated strength of a gas giant’s thunderstorm exploded against his chest. It forced him to take a full step back. He planted his legs and leaned into the attack. His breastplate began to glow. Lightning surrounded him as he moved forward against power that would have incinerated a Leman Russ. One step, then another. He held Doomtremor before him. It absorbed many of the hits, its head flaring and sending the excess energy outward. Vulkan directed it at the engineer. The ork’s personal force field flashed in turn. The beast raged as the onslaught did no more than slow the primarch.
Vulkan advanced. His armour’s interior temperature rocketed upward. He was inside an active volcano. A mortal’s flesh would have started to burn. He marched on, implacable, a continental plate on the move. He passed between the immense coils. He was midway towards the pillar.
He realised the ork engineer was not shouting. It was laughing. The beast pulled a lever.
The weight of a planet fell on his shoulders. He withstood the crushing force for several seconds, and then it brought him to his knees. The ork had turned the gravity weapon against him. The greenskin hurled mountains at the sky, and now it forced Vulkan down. His lungs flattened. Drawing a breath was an act of supreme strength. He growled, denying the force that sought to grind his bones to dust. He would not capitulate. He would rise. He would advance.
A power that had destroyed worlds held him fast.
Then it reversed.
He flew upward. The invisible hand whipped him against the slanted wall near the top of the cone and the impact dented the metal beneath him. Unseen mountain walls came together with him in between. His arms were flat against the surface. He strained to bring them forward. It was all he could do to keep his grip on Doomtremor. The ork laughed again, adjusted the controls, and slammed Vulkan to the floor, a meteor slaved to the greenskin’s will. Before Vulkan could get his bearings, he was flying once more. The battering and speed blurred his sense. Whether he was smashed against the wall or the floor, the crushing never relented. It grew stronger. He felt the crack of bones.