by Gav Thorpe
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
The Great Beast was an elemental force. Vulkan could feel the pressure of its power lapping against him like heat, an embodiment of the raw and raging instincts of the orks. Although he remembered little of his almost ceaseless labours against the daemons of the Dark Gods during the Heresy War, the primarch recalled enough to know that one did not win such a fight. It was victory merely to sustain it.
He caught a claw with the haft of Doomtremor, muscles and armour fibre-bundles straining against the warlord’s brutal strength. Vulkan shifted his weight, widening his stride as he heaved off the Great Beast’s next attack, moving quickly to his other foot to avoid the monstrous ork’s return swing. He smashed Doomtremor against the greenskin’s armour, its fire-shrouded head bouncing from energy-charged plates.
‘In your ignorance, do you see what you have wrought?’ Vulkan said, swinging his hammer again. ‘Your kind should have stayed dead where we buried you.’
They exchanged more blows. Vulkan struggled to keep his footing against the hammering impact of every strike, but slowly circled to his left, manoeuvring the ork into position.
‘You moved too soon,’ Vulkan continued. ‘Had you but the patience of true intelligence you would have seen that another decade, perhaps two, and the Imperium would have crumbled easily. And to strike at the Throneworld… You have roused a different beast, one that will see you crushed.’
The Great Beast surprised him. It did not draw back its fist, but reached out and snatched him by the throat. War-plate groaned under the pressure of the ork’s fierce grip, tightening around Vulkan’s windpipe. He rained blows against its arm as the warlord pulled back its other fist for a blow that would take off the primarch’s head. As the claw powered towards his face, Vulkan switched the focus of his attack, slamming Doomtremor into the oncoming fist.
The explosion of competing powers parted the two combatants, flinging Vulkan into the wall and sending the Great Beast staggering across the floor, spiked boots gouging furrows in the stone.
The ork shook its arm and hand, numbed by the impact. Vulkan blinked hard to clear his spinning vision.
‘But you are not the real threat,’ the primarch snarled, pushing to his feet. He spun Doomtremor in his palms, sizing up his opponent. ‘You are the distraction that will allow the true enemy to surge forth again.’
The two giants hurled themselves at each other. The Great Beast crushed the bodies of fallen Chapter Masters underfoot. Vulkan threw Doomtremor at the last moment, casting the burning hammer into the Great Beast’s face. Armour buckled and split and the hammer whirled away across the chamber.
Vulkan wheeled past the stunned ork, but not so swiftly that he avoided its next punch, which caught him square in the gut and launched him a dozen metres through the air. Turning his crash into a roll, Vulkan regained his feet.
Its helm was a mess, but the ork now stood between the primarch and his weapon.
The flames around one of the Great Beast’s gauntlets flickered away. It reached up and tore free the remnants of its helmet, tossing the mangled armour aside. Its head was enormous, with tusks and fangs like swords. The Great Beast regarded Vulkan with deep red eyes, a permanent scowl furrowing its brow.
‘You are right, son of the Emperor,’ it said. The voice was deep, guttural, but unmistakably speaking Imperial Gothic.
Vulkan was so taken aback by this utterance that he barely dodged the blast of power that erupted from the Great Beast’s out-thrust fist.
‘Your empire is on its knees. We shall be its death.’ The Great Beast glanced over its shoulder and turned back to the primarch with what Vulkan believed was a smile. ‘And just like your Emperor, you have thrown away your most powerful weapon.’
The Great Beast lowered its head and charged with a roar, green flames bursting from its fists. Vulkan leapt aside and threw a hand out towards Doomtremor, activating the miniature teleport link he had fitted into its head and his gauntlet. With a crack of splitting air, the hammer appeared in his fist. He swung hard, aiming for the side of the Great Beast’s head.
The blow bounced from thick skull, Doomtremor’s power field ripping skin and flesh down to the bone, searing a streak across the Great Beast’s scalp.
The ork lumbered away. A pulse of power flooded from it in a shockwave, staggering Vulkan as he readied for his next strike.
The Great Beast straightened, thick blood pouring down its face, a visible crack in the side of its skull.
‘Are you feeling tired yet, son of the Emperor?’ it asked. Green coils of energy snaked up to its face, flowing over the wound, healing the gash in a few seconds. The Great Beast laughed. ‘Is that the hardest you can hit me?’
‘I don’t have to hit harder,’ Vulkan replied. ‘I just have to think quicker.’
Their last exchange had brought the Great Beast back in front of the massive throne alcove in the heart of the reactor. The primarch hurled himself full force, tackling the warlord in the midriff to take them both into the pulsating green aura of the energy field.
At the moment of entry, Vulkan felt the overwhelming nature of Ullanor pouring into him. He witnessed and participated in the unimaginable orkishness of Ullanor, feeling himself drawn out into a web of waaagh power stretching across many star systems, the pulsing tendrils feeding back into his being even as his presence radiated energy into those around him.
That power echoed back through time, past the Horus Heresy to the primordial origins of the orks themselves. He was one with the nature of the orks, and saw for the briefest moment two green-skinned behemoths battering each other with bare fists at the dawn of time before even mankind was born.
The sensation of something around his throat dragged Vulkan back to the present, staring into the rage-filled eyes of the Great Beast. Both claws were on his throat, squeezing the life from the primarch.
Having seen the nature of the waaagh-force that bound the orks together, guessing at its nature from his own dark experience of Chaos, Vulkan was struck by a revelation. All things were interconnected. The orks seemed random but they were not. They were emergent. Trial and error always began with wildness and accidental circumstance, but it honed and refined. It evolved.
As the orks had evolved of late – hyper-evolved in the accelerating presence of the Great Beast – so their strategy had evolved. From gargants to hulks, to attack moons, to Ullanor itself – a progression that, once revealed, could be followed back to its base in the most simple of ork constructions.
And the same was true of all their acts.
Learn through action. Trial and error.
The attack moons were not battle stations, or at least not merely battle stations. They were test shots, dry runs sent out into the void as the orks tinkered and improved their gravitic engines.
And once the technology had been proven they needed to find a target. The Great Beast had not struck early, it had struck a bargain. It would avenge the abused spirit of the orks, it would crush the Emperor that had humbled orkdom. On the crescendo of such a victory its power would be unlimited and it would ascend to rule of the galaxy.
And now, Vulkan realised in that instant of feverish thought, they had found Earth. They had located the Throneworld and humanity had proven itself incapable of fighting back.
The attack moon over Earth was a beacon as much as a vanguard. Ullanor, the whole world, was the same thinking writ on a planetary scale – a base of billions of orks. It had been armed and protected like an attack moon. Could it also be moved across star systems like one? If Terra was the target…
There really was no way to stop the Great Beast by any conventional mean
s.
Such power could not be destroyed, only diverted. Feeling the last gasps of breath escaping his body, Vulkan let his thoughts flow again. He reached out into the undulating waaagh, tapping into that warp-born part of himself that had been for every primarch a blessing and a curse. He allowed his primal essence to mix with that of the orks, his Emperor-created body absorbing the surge of energy like a sponge.
He allowed the pure orkishness that had killed so many Librarians to infuse his body. Vulkan felt the Great Beast tense, its thoughts moving to him with tectonic slowness as it realised something was amiss. It tried to pull back the waaagh, to wrest the raw orkish power from the mind of the primarch.
Vulkan only had a moment before he lost the battle, before the power of the orks and the last dregs of his life were both spent.
With failing muscles, he thrust Doomtremor into the face of the Great Beast and detonated the power field generator.
The last of the transports lifted away, a battered Thunderhawk in the livery of the Salamanders. Its original occupants had died in the fighting, determined to fight to the last close to their primarch. Now it carried the Lord Commander, two Chapter Masters and a wounded captain of the Blood Angels. High company in dire circumstances.
Koorland looked down at the dwindling city below from the open ramp, his thoughts at a standstill. His gaze roved over the mounds of dead and the broken ruins where tech-priests and skitarii, tanks and Guardsmen still battled for no reason other than survival. Drop-ships were coming for them, but few would get off Ullanor.
He could have done no more, he was certain of it. Had he done enough? Had he done the right thing? Koorland knew that only history would make that judgement, but he had to believe in the truth of Vulkan’s assertion.
‘Lord Commander! The temple-gargant!’
Thane’s call drew Koorland’s attention back to the inner city. A shuddering wave of green power flowed out from the temple-gargant. The floating citadel was listing heavily, its front bastions carving a ruinous path through what little remained of the city centre as it descended. The entire structure writhed with green flames, and at the heart of an inferno of raw energy Koorland thought he saw flickering images of two immense beings, locked together in an embrace of mutual destruction.
The bubbling shockwave crackled out for several kilometres, passing over and through everything. Koorland watched as it overtook the last remnants of Adeptus Mechanicus and Astra Militarum trying to flee the devastation. Tanks and cybernetica were tossed like grains of sand. Roaming ork mobs were taken up in the wave, borne up into the green cloud like flecks of flotsam on an incoming tide.
Stretching nearly a kilometre across, the detonation rapidly slowed and then stopped.
Koorland held his breath for several seconds as the immense green hemisphere wavered, balanced perfectly between expansion and retraction.
Then the field collapsed.
In seconds the implosion raced back to the temple-gargant, scouring clear everything that had been encompassed in its girth, ripping Gorkogrod down to the foundations and swallowing the pinnacle of the mountain with its ravening energy.
The temple-gargant split asunder, crashing into the scourged ground spouting pillars of green fire and storms of jade lightning, breaking apart into hundreds of hab-block sized chunks, scattering masonry and metal.
Just before the Thunderhawk passed into the cloud cover, Koorland could see the ork armies amassing around the capital, a ring of smoke and darkness several kilometres deep. Millions of orks from across Ullanor, poised just half a day from pouring into Gorkogrod. There was no chance of going back.
‘Is it dead?’ asked Thane, leaning around the Lord Commander to look at the devastation wrought by the temple-gargant’s destruction. ‘Did Vulkan kill it?’
‘Have faith,’ replied Koorland.
Epilogue
Terra – outer system
Koorland was in the strategium when the Alcazar Remembered broke warp back in the Sol System. Transit back to the Terran system had been swift, the warp-roar of the orks momentarily quelled. A few hundred Space Marines had made the journey with him. Perhaps ten times that number from the Astra Militarum, Imperial Navy and Cult Mechanicus had been lifted from the city before the orks had reclaimed it.
Nobody had felt like celebrating a victory.
The strategium was tense. There had been no confirmed contact with Terra. It was impossible to know whether the strike had been in time. Were they simply returning to the ashes of the Throneworld?
Koorland did not think so. When the time came, the Great Beast would have led the attack. He had learnt as much from the actions of Vulkan.
‘Any transmissions?’ he asked Kale.
The shipmaster shook his head.
Thane was with him. So many were not. The Exemplar remarked as much.
‘They will be honoured, each one,’ the last of the Imperial Fists replied. ‘They were all heroes of the Imperium, from the mighty such as Odaenathus who fell against the Great Beast itself to the first Guardsman who died in the planetstrike. And Vulkan, his passing shall be mourned for millennia. Without each and every one of them we could not have prevailed. It is our duty that their deaths are not squandered. We have shown what we can do, when united in ambition, and led with purpose. The orks have shown us how broken we had become. The wounds are still raw but it is not too late to tend them, brother.’
‘Lord Commander, I am detecting a powerful transmission,’ one of the deck officers announced. ‘Source origin is Terran orbit. Looped signal. All major channels. I’m going to–’
The officer stood up straight, face ashen, headset falling to his console. His terrified gaze moved to Koorland while his mouth continued to work silently, unable to form the words needed.
‘On audible,’ the Lord Commander snapped. The officer’s trembling finger activated a rune.
The speakers crackled into life, and from them issued a deep, grating voice, slowly repeating the same words.
‘I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter!’
About the Author
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight, Honour to the Dead and Raptor, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from Astra Militarum.
The cultists were like an oncoming wall. There must have been two hundred of them. They were armed mostly with laspistols and whatever heavy tools they had scrounged from the city’s now abandoned manufactoria. Still, through my magnoculars I could see some scavenged weapons of military grade – grenade launchers and flamers – and the ogryns too. I’ve always found them revolting, even when they were fighting on our side. These corrupted brutes were even worse. They led the attack, screaming and bellowing like possessed animals, waving axes, hammers and picks. On their heads they wore hoods made of sackcloth with evil sigils painted onto them.
We poured lasfire into them as they came, but it didn’t seem to affect them in the least. Even the shells of our heavy autocannons did little to slow them. For the thousandth time since coming to this planet, I wished that we still had at least one operational tank.
To my right, Velez, our primaris psyker, had his eyes squeezed shut and fingers planted forcefully against the side of his head. Tiny arcs of electricity danced across his brow as he surveyed all the possible futures that stemmed from this moment – he didn’t look particularly re
assured by any of them. On my left, the priest, Lantz, had his arms extended before him, palms open. He chanted loudly for all to hear, crying out for divine deliverance from both the lightning and the tempest. Both of them were Cadians, like myself, and therefore upstanding and capable men in their own right.
‘Options?’ I barked.
Velez answered first. He opened his eyes and stared at the oncoming mass of corrupted flesh that had once been the good people of the city of Rycklor. ‘I recommend we fall back,’ he said in his raspy voice.
I agreed completely. Behind us was the bridge, and if we regrouped on the far side then the enemy would be channelled into a compact column which would allow us to concentrate our firepower to greater effect, or failing that, blow the structure out from under them and send the whole lot into the flowing, corrosive acid of the Solray River.
However, before I could open my mouth to order a retreat, Major Leclair appeared by my side. Like the rest of Zhenya’s natives, he was pale and blond. His moustache, an affectation worn by all the men on this planet, was so thick that it covered the entirety of his upper lip. His sword was drawn.
‘I’m certain I didn’t hear that correctly, Captain Kervis,’ he said to me. ‘We must seize the initiative by charging the enemy ourselves.’
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Leclair had assembled all of the remaining members of the Zhenyan defence force. They had affixed bayonets to the ends of their lasrifles, and their red and blue uniforms stood out in sharp contrast to the bleak emptiness of the surrounding countryside.
