The enemy fears you.
You are a threat.
The assault grows more desperate.
Desperation is weakness.
Strike it.
Not the clapper of a bell, then. He was the hammer against the anvil. His core turned molten. The calm of the mountain became the anger of the volcano.
Erupt.
His consciousness exploded back into the full awareness of his body, and then transcended it. He observed his arc against the wall, and saw not the wound inflicted but the action he must take. And when the engineer hurled him to the floor again, he moved. He did not struggle against gravity. He acted in concert with it. He turned it into his own weapon. He punched forward with his left hand, hitting the floor, and drove his arm deep into the stone. He took root. He held Caldera. It held him back.
When gravity reversed, he remained in place.
The agony was a revelation. Forces sought to rip his body apart. He defied them. The ork had ceased to laugh, and now it froze. It stared at him, hands hovering uncertainly over its controls.
Tempered by the pain, guided by magmatic anger, Vulkan raised Doomtremor. The hammer’s wrath lit up the interior of the nexus with the blaze of a sun. Thunderhead, Dawnbringer, weapons long lost, were present to his spirit in that which he now held aloft. Their terrible strength demanded Vulkan rise. And with the reversed gravity, but against its current, he threw the hammer.
Its flight was true. A comet roared across the space between Vulkan and the pillar. It struck the platform, the impact released the energy of the throw, of the hammer, and of gravity itself. The explosion swallowed the top half of the pillar. The gravitic fist released him. He stood, and marched through a vortex of howling, chaotic lightning to retrieve Doomtremor.
The pillar ended in a jagged stump. The control mechanism was gone, vaporised along with its master. Around Vulkan, surviving orks ran in panic as their great mechanism lost all direction. The ground heaved and cracked.
Vulkan moved through a gathering storm. He picked up his hammer, braced his stance, and waited, fighting the instinct to destroy the abomination around him. If it did not find a new master within the next few moments, the storm would rip the planet open.
The shaking built.
Cracks became chasms.
The world groaned.
In the centre of the rift, the energy discharges were maddened. Arouar’s throne vibrated, presaging worse tremors to come.
‘Proceed,’ the dominus commanded.
The connections were made.
He screamed. His larynx was no longer capable of such a sound. His vocalisations had long been purged of any trace of emotion. Yet he screamed, emitting a wailing stream of binaric. His senses lit up with electric fire.
He became a god maddened by the pain of his own power.
Duty to the Omnissiah was his lodestone. His one focus was the coordinates of the ork attack moon.
In an act of prayer, he flexed his power.
And he lifted a mountain.
‘Admiral.’
The voice was distant. Rodolph could barely hear it. His body was growing cold and numb. He was dying along with his ship. He had to keep his attention on the oculus, on the sight of the moon. If his mind drifted, if his will failed, all would be lost.
‘Admiral.’
The voice was insistent. Then a hand shook his shoulder. The movement shot pain through his abdomen. He winced and looked away from the oculus.
Groth was beside him. The bridge was filled with smoke, but his crew was still on station. The Finality was still fighting. It was still approaching the moon.
‘What is it, captain?’ he managed.
‘Look, sir.’ She pointed to the auspex screen on his right.
Rodolph looked. The sensor array had picked up another mass rising from the planet towards the moon. Rodolph blinked. The mass was coming far too fast.
He grinned.
The mass became visible through the oculus a few moments later. It had risen with such velocity it was heated to red by its passage through the atmosphere. It spun end-over-end, thousands of metres long, trillions of tonnes of rock, a missile hurled at the exposed heart of the ork base. Rodolph watched it disappear into the uncompleted face of the assault moon.
It was small by comparison to the target, but so was a bullet fired into the body of a man. In the next instant, a fireball bloomed from the interior of the moon. It expanded far beyond the crescent edge, spreading until it was almost as wide as the moon. It was a sudden tumour, its uncontrollable growth killing the host. Fissures appeared across the partial globe. Fire leaked out of them. The moon was in agony.
‘Finish it,’ Rodolph said. ‘In the Emperor’s name, finish it.’
Much of the ork fleet had broken away from the Finality and formed a blockade around the open face. It was vaporised in the explosion. The path was clear for the battleship to complete its run and launch its full armament into the glowing interior.
Rodolph’s head cleared still further. He felt strength return to his body with the flush of victory.
But not all the orks had left. Those who remained kept on the attack. When the torpedoes slammed into the stern, Rodolph knew the worst before Groth told him. He felt the blow like a knife between the ribs.
‘The warp drive,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Groth answered. ‘Breached.’
‘How long?’
She spoke into the ship’s vox. Rodolph was surprised there were any survivors left in the enginarium to answer her.
Groth looked at the oculus, then back at Rodolph. ‘Not long,’ she said. ‘But long enough.’
Rodolph nodded. They understood each other. ‘Better than any ordnance,’ he said.
‘A definitive blow. A fine victory, admiral. Well fought.’
‘And you, captain. And you.’
‘Signal the Mechanicus vessels,’ Groth called. ‘They should rejoin the Alcazar Remembered. Helmsman,’ Groth called. ‘Take us in. For the Emperor!’
The crew echoed her. ‘For the Emperor!’
All batteries firing their last, marking the void with the purging light of the Imperial Navy’s power, the Finality plunged through the remaining ork vessels, completing its run, fulfilling its destiny. Rodolph watched the open face of the moon reveal itself. He saw a honeycomb of madness, construction on a gargantuan scale burning, shattered, pulsing with mortal fire. The Finality entered the maw of the wounded giant, warp reactors about to go critical. It travelled through an immensity of caves natural and artificial, of hangar bays for entire armadas, bearing with it a sun about to be born.
Rodolph gazed at what was about to be destroyed. The price he had paid for this vision seemed very little.
When the end came, in furious light, he was ecstatic.
He had taken one action. He had struck one blow. The power was building, raging, a beast about to slip its tether. Arouar’s grip on his omnipotence slipped. One more move, and then he must disengage. One more move, the one to bring an end to the power. The one Koorland had ordered him to make regardless of the situation in the canyon.
Arouar had no knowledge of the war below now. He had no knowledge of anything except the blinding absolute. So he took the action.
The Machine is all. Death to the blasphemy of the xenos machine.
Vulkan felt the change in the tremors. He felt how deep they went. He knew what was coming.
No more waiting, then. Culmination was at hand.
Koorland ducked beneath the ork dreadnought’s swing. The thing’s forearm was as long as he was tall, and it ended in a vice of revving killsaws. Another arm came in lower on the same side. Koorland stepped in closer, avoiding the saws but not the blow itself. It knocked him to the right, into the grasp of the two right arms. The claws seized him. The saws dug into his armour. He maglocked his bolter and with his free hand took a krak grenade from his belt, throwing it at the dreadnought’s viewing slit. The explosive attached itself to the metal and went off, damaging the ork’s shell.