by Nick Kyme
'Send them now,' he bellowed, fighting against the roar of the flames. 'We can afford to wait no longer.'
After a few seconds, the first of several figures started to emerge. Tsu'gan felt the weight of their passage in his arms as he strained to keep the deck plate aloft. One slip and anyone crossing it would fall to their certain deaths. He had no desire to add that to his already troubled conscience.
A thought came unbidden into his mind at that, and he forced it down.
Vulkan's fire beats in my breast, he intoned in his head to steady himself. With it, I shall smite the foes of the Emperor. Tsu'gan clung to the mantra like a lifeline, as tenuous and jeopardous as the fragile bridge he clutched between his hands.
The first of the ''squads'' made it across without incident, hugging jackets over their heads to ward off the fire and smoke now issuing through the grille plate. A second group wandered through after them, their footing wary because of the poor visibility. All the while, the Vulkan's Wrath quaked and trembled as if it was a bird fighting against a tempest.
Too slow, too slow, thought Tsu'gan as the third ''squad'' reached the other side, choking back smoke fumes. The ship was tearing itself in half; they had to pick up the pace and get off the deck.
Dak'ir had realised the danger, too, and was ushering the crewmen across in larger and larger groups. He shouted at Armsmaster Vaeder, urging him to take the last of his men across. Screeching and shuddering, the deck plate held just long enough for the last of the crew to reach safety, before buckling and falling into the fiery abyss below.
'Now you,' Tsu'gan bellowed, getting to his feet as Dak'ir nodded in understanding. The Ignean took two steps back and was about to launch himself when a fierce tremor gripped the deck, knocking the humans off their feet. Dak'ir got caught up in it and misstepped, stumbling as he made his jump. He fell agonisingly short. Tsu'gan leant forward and outstretched a hand when he saw what was happening. He grasped Dak'ir's flailing arm and the weight of him dragged Tsu'gan to his knees. He hit the deck with a thunk of metal on metal, felt it jar all the way up his spine.
'Hold on,' he growled, fire still lapping around him - the edges of his armour that were exposed to the flames were already scorched black. He grunted and heaved - it was like hauling a dead weight with all that power armour - pulling Dak'ir up so he reached the lip of the jagged deck and dragged himself up.
'Thank you, brother,' he gasped, once he was safely on the semi-stable side and facing his rescuer.
Tsu'gan sneered.
'I do my duty. That's all. I wouldn't let a fellow Salamander die, even one that has not the right to bear the name. And I pay my debts, Ignean.' He turned his back, indicating it was the final word, and focused his attention on the human crew.
'Get them to the lifter, armsmaster,' he said sternly.
Vaeder was on his feet, barking orders, hoisting men up, kicking those who thought to wallow. In a few seconds, all fifty were trudging towards the faint light and the solace represented by the lifter.
Tsu'gan went after them, aware of Dak'ir following behind him. Again, he cursed at being shackled with him of all his battle-brothers. He hated being in the Ignean's presence. It was his fault that Kadai had died at Aura Hieron. Wasn't it Dak'ir that had sent Tsu'gan after Nihilan and exposed his captain's flank? Wasn't it Dak'ir that saw the danger but failed to reach Kadai in time to save him? Wasn't it Dak'ir that… Or was it? Tsu'gan felt the weight of guilt upon him like an anvil strapped to his back whenever he wasn't spilling blood in the Chapter's name; that guilt multiplied tenfold whenever he saw Dak'ir. It forced him to admit that perhaps the Ignean wasn't solely responsible, that maybe even he…
Armsmaster Vaeder was raking open the lifter's blast doors with the assistance of two of the other crewmen. The raucous screech of metal was welcome distraction. It didn't last long, as the Ignean spoke again.
'We need to get these men to a flight deck, abandon ship with as many hands as possible.'
Tsu'gan faced him as the humans were clambering aboard the lifter. Though large, the lifter reached capacity quickly and they would need to make several trips.
'It's too late for that,' he answered flatly. 'We must have entered Scoria's upper atmosphere by now. The ship will be at terminal velocity. Any escape would be suicide. We get them to the upper deck.'
Dak'ir leaned in and lowered his voice.
'The chances of these men surviving a crash are slim at best.'
Tsu'gan's response was cold and pragmatic. 'That can't be helped.'
The lifter was coming down again, chugging painfully on overworked cable hoists. Ten metres from the deck it lurched ungainly, emitting a high-pitched scream, until finally churning to an uneven stop.
Something approaching despair registered in the eyes of Vaeder and the ten crewmen yet to ascend. Compounding their misfortune, an orange glow lit up the Salamanders' armour from a rolling wave of fire spilling up from the chasm and over into the deck where the humans cowered.
'Meet it!' roared Tsu'gan, and the two Astartes formed a wall of ceramite between the brittle crew and the raging flames. Heat washed over the Salamanders, but they bore it without flinching.
When the backdraft had died down, sucked into the chasm like liquid escaping through a vent, Dak'ir turned to Tsu'gan again.
'So, what now?'
Tsu'gan eyed the crewmen in their charge. They were huddled together, crouched down against the recently dissipated blaze. Steam was issuing off the Salamander's armour and face, his view filtered through a heat haze.
'We are going to crash in a vessel that is not meant to land, deliberately or otherwise, on solid ground. We shield them,' he said. Wrenching metal resonated loudly in Tsu'gan's ears, as forbidding as a death knell. 'And hang on to something.'
CHAPTER SIX
I
Planetfall
The chitin-creature died amidst a welter of exploded bone-plates and shredded mandibles. Grey, sludge-like blood oozed from ragged wounds in its carapace. In its death throes, it flipped onto its armoured back, insectoid legs spasming once and then curled up to remain still.
'Death to the xenos!' spat Brother-Chaplain Elysius, unleashing a storm from his bolt pistol. 'Suffer not the alien to live!'
The Vulkan's Wrath had struck the surface of Scoria like a meteorite, its hull still burning from its rapid re-entry into the planet's atmosphere. Impelled by its momentum, the strike cruiser had dug a massive furrow into the earth, hull antennas, towers and engines ripped apart as they met against unyielding bedrock. Hundreds died in the crash, smashed to paste and broken as they were bounced against barrack rooms and hangars in the massive ship. Fires broke out instantly, burning those unlucky enough to be in their path to ash. Some were crushed as the fragile sinews holding up vast sections of damaged upper decks and ceilings capitulated, sending tons of metal debris crashing down onto their heads. Long swathes of armoured shielding had punched inwards, pulping hapless crewmen when the corridor they were clinging to became a single sheet of beaten metal. Others were tossed into chasms of fire and darkness, ripping open like yawning mouths in the deck and swallowing them whole.
In the aftermath, chainswords and cutting tools buzzed into life, the smoke and dust still clinging to the air in a veil, as crewmen sought to cleave escape routes through the bent metal. Hydraulic steam vented in a wave as saviour portals were opened in the hull in a staccato chorus of disengaging locking bars. Survivors spewed out sporadically, some carrying the injured, others forlornly dragging the dead. The Salamanders, who had sustained casualties of their own, organised the evacuation from the worst affected areas and soon a large body of men and servitors had gathered on Scoria's ash-grey soil.
The crash had lasted only minutes, yet they had stretched into hours, even lifetimes, for those aboard praying to the Emperor for deliverance. The furrow ploughed by the strike cruiser's prow ran for almost a kilometre and had disturbed something lurking beneath the ashen surface of Scoria.
Th
e creatures came from the below the earth, whorled emergence holes presaging their arrival. Screams from crewmen dragged under the ash plain were the first indication that they were being attacked. Hordes of the things came on after that, shaking their squat, solid bodies free of clinging ash before wading in with bone-pincers and clicking mandible teeth. Thirty-five crewmen died, swallowed into the earth, before the Salamanders mounted a counter-assault.
Brother-Chaplain Elysius led the Fire-born and he did so with zeal and unrestrained violence.
'Purge them!' he bellowed, his blood-curdling voice amplified by the vox-emitters in his battle-helm, 'With bolt, blade and flame, eradicate the xenos filth!' Barking fire erupted from his pistol, raking a chitin-beast's torso and blasting away one of its mandibles, before the Chaplain advanced and rammed his crackling crozius into its body, gutting it. Grey viscera flecked his skull-face, anointing him in the blood of war.
The bizarre, crustacean-like beasts reminded Dak'ir of the tyranid, as he slew them alongside his Chaplain. He imagined them as the product of some errant spore cluster vented by a stricken hive ship, only to drift into Scoria's orbit and infest the planet. Generations old, they were now an outmoded bio-form that had simply not evolved, but rather stagnated and propagated.
Dak'ir's squad, together with three others, had mustered to their Chaplain's side when Elysius had issued the call to battle. The Salamanders had adopted a wide perimeter, surrounding the horde of chitin-beasts and slowly corralling them with sustained bolter bursts. The creatures were big, almost as large as a Rhino APC, and their bony carapaces were hard, but not impregnable. Their bulk made them awkward, though, and they possessed a limited field of vision. By encircling them, the Salamanders attacked their blind sides and vulnerable flanks. The xenos reacted with confused and impotent aggression as they sought to attack a foe that was everywhere at once.
'Ba'ken,' yelled Dak'ir, as he vaporised a chitin-creature's bone-claw with a bolt of plasma, 'cleanse and burn!'
The hulking Salamander trudged forward as his sergeant retreated and sent a swathe of ignited promethium over the stricken xenos-beast. It keened and clicked in agony as the flames washed over it, the air trapped within its bone-plates escaping in a hissing scream.
Elsewhere, staccato bursts of sustained bolter fire became ever more clipped, indicating that the battle against the chitin-creatures was drawing to its end. The last of them had been enclosed within a circle of green battle-plate that was slowly tightening like a noose. Occasional, desperate assaults from the cornered beasts were met with explosive rounds that punctured alien bodies, rupturing them from within and sending gouts of sludge-viscera spitting from flapping mandible mouths. Flamer bursts harried the wretched creatures further, and they keened and clicked before the hot glare, evidently afraid of fire.
Finally, with only a half dozen remaining, the xenos burrowed back into the earth, away from the armoured giants who brought bellowing thunder and fire from the heavens.
Tsu'gan observed his distant battle-brothers with envious eyes. Behind him, the crash-landed strike cruiser loomed like a canted cityscape, bizarrely off-kilter. Even partially sunk into the ashen ground as it was, the Vulkan's Wrath was huge. Its span was the width of several hive blocks and it took several Astartes to guard it at kilometre intervals. The many decks, towers, platforms, superstructures, hangars, bays, even temples and cathedrals stretched like a dull green metropolis slowly smothered by grey falling snow.
As the battle raged, Techmarines, servitors and human labour crews toiled over the ship's storm-lashed surface. The solar flares had scorched fresh battle-scars down the old strike cruiser's flanks, and punctured its armoured skin with fire-fringed, meteor-sized apertures. Aboard grav-sleds, the worker crews made detailed reports of structural damage. Sparks cascaded from the ranks of heavy-duty welding rigs, fusing plates from ancillary sections of the ship over the most heinous of its wounds. A few areas were so bad that the wreckage had to be sheared away with cutting tools and patched over like an amputated limb.
It was demanding work, but Tsu'gan was concerned with other matters as he watched the combat with the chitin-creatures from afar. Blood pulsed in his veins as he lived the battle vicariously. His fists clenched of their own volition. Inwardly, he cursed his fellow sergeants Agatone, Vargo and Dak'ir. Had he not been ordered to remain with the bulk of the company to discuss tactics and set up a command post, he would have rushed joyously into combat. The chitin-beasts presented no challenge, of course, but after months without battle Tsu'gan was eager to shed blood in the Emperor's name.
'The Vulkan's Wrath has sustained major damage, my lord.' The metallic voice of Argos brought Tsu'gan back.
He was standing with the Techmarine, Brother-Captain N'keln and several of his fellow sergeants in a makeshift command post, attempting to impose some order and stability after the crash.
The command post itself was a prefabricated structure, little more than four walls, a canted roof and a hololith-projector slab displaying in grainy blue resolution what the sensorium and deep-augur probes had ascertained about the lay of the land. What they knew so far was precious little - Scoria was primarily flat, comprised of ash dunes and some basalt mountain ranges with an indigenous hostile life form akin to a giant Terran crab.
Beyond the command bunker, other prefab structures were being erected. In the main, these were medical tents to which the injured were ferried on stretchers and joined the system of triage set up by Brother Fugis. The Apothecary ministered to both human and Astartes, though the latter were few in number, and was ably assisted by Emek, loaned from Dak'ir's squad as a field surgeon. Human medics, those that had survived the crash, worked diligently alongside the Salamanders, but all had their work cut out for them. Fugis had also tasked rescue teams, comprising Salamanders and able-bodied serfs and servitors, to search the damaged areas of the ship for survivors. Though slow at first, as the ruined decks were gradually re-opened, more and more of the wounded flocked to the medical tents. The dead were also abundant. The pyreum was in constant use, shovel-handed servitors heaping piles of ash into huge storage vats for later interment.
'Can we achieve loft, Master Argos?' asked N'keln, his brow furrowed as the hololith switched to a rolling schematic of the Vulkan's Wrath. Red areas made up around sixty per cent of the total image and indicated damaged sections.
'To be brief: no,' the Techmarine replied, using a stylus to zone in on the lower portion of the strike cruiser. The image shifted again, this time incorporating Scoria's geography and the ship's relative position in it. A side view cutaway showed a large area of the Vulkan's Wrath below the earth-line, sunk deep into the planet's outer crust. 'As you can see, the ship is partially submerged within the ash plain. Basic geological analysis reveals that Scoria's surface is a mixture of ash and sand. The intense heat of our re-entry reacted with it, resulting in an endothermic metamorphosis. Essentially the ash-sand crystallised and hardened,' he added by way of explanation.
'Surely our engines are strong enough to pull us free,' offered the gravel-voiced Lok.
'Ordinarily, yes,' Argos returned. In addition to the repair crews, the Techmarine had already tasked excavation-servitors and human labour teams with digging out the sections of the ship that were buried deepest. 'But we are down to three banks of ventral engines. An operational minimum of four are needed to achieve loft.'
'What of our thrusters? Can we shake ourselves loose?' asked Brother-Sergeant Clovius, his squat form diminutive compared to the towering Praetor, who observed proceedings in silence.
'Not unless we want to burrow to the planet's core,' replied Argos without sarcasm. 'Our prow is angled downwards. Any thruster burst will simply push us further in that direction. The Adeptus Mechanicus did not build vessels such as this to take off from a grounded position.'
N'keln scowled, displeased at the developments.
'Do what you can, brother,' he said to Argos, switching off the hololith.
'I will,
my lord. But without the components I need to repair and rig a fourth ventral engine, we will not be leaving this planet in the Vulkan's Wrath.'
'We should reconnoitre,' offered Tsu'gan in a low voice. 'Try to ascertain the technological level of the planet and if it has indigenous human life. It's possible we'll be able to commandeer the materials we need to repair the ship,' he said, to Praetor's nodded approval. Tsu'gan went on, 'The prophecy brought us here for a reason. Securing our method of escape should be our secondary mission. Finding Vulkan or whatever the primarch may have left for us here is of paramount concern right now.'
'I'll warrant our near-destruction to a solar storm wasn't part of Vulkan's vision,' growled Lok. The veteran sergeant had sustained a gash to the forehead during the crash, adding to his numerous scars.
'And lo, they will be struck down by fire and their eyes opened to the truth.' The voice of Chaplain Elysius sermonised as he entered the command bunker. Dak'ir and Agatone were in tow. 'So speaks the Tome of Fire, Brother Lok.'
'This was predestined, Brother-Chaplain?' asked N'keln. Elysius nodded solemnly.
'A pity then, we could not have been warned,' grumbled Lok.
The Chaplain turned his bone-visage back on to the veteran sergeant.
'Destiny, if forewarned, ceases to be destiny at all,' he chided. 'We were meant to crash upon this world. It is merely an element of a much grander design, to which we are not privy. Such things should not be interfered with, lest the balance of destiny itself be thrown out of kilter.'
'And what of the lives of those lost?' Lok countered. 'How are we to balance that?'
'Sacrificed in the fires of battle,' Elysius returned. A cold light burned behind the lenses of his battle-helm. The Chaplain did not like to be challenged, especially on matters of spiritual divination.
