Текст книги "Vulkan Lives"

Автор книги: Ник Кайм

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Lightning fields

K’gosi was dead. The last burst had punched straight through his plastron and taken most of his upper torso with it.

‘Brother…’ Leodrakk snarled, firing back through the darkness and accumulated gun smoke. ‘Vulkan lives!’ he shouted, trying to be heard above the roar of automatic weapons. The remnants of his company were pinned. Blistering fire exploded overhead, showering the hunkered warriors with sparks and shrapnel from their slowly disintegrating cover.

A sub-entrance had got them this far, past the first patrols and through the outer gate. The space port was based on three concentric rings, each one diminishing towards the centre where the main landing apron resided. All the ships from the outskirts of the facility had been scuppered, leaving only those in the core.

Unfortunately, this area had proven to be the most heavily guarded, and the sub-entrance a lure to draw the shattered company inwards. A few hundred metres away, three shuttles as well as the Word Bearers’ own vessels stood ready for take-off.

Despite his defiance, Leodrakk knew they would never reach them. According to his retinal display, only six legionaries were still standing. The rest were down, or dead.

Firing off a snap-shot, he bellowed into the vox, ‘Ikrad, move your men up. The rest of you, covering fire!’

Three Salamanders advanced, inching along a corridor section overlooked by gantries that led onto the landing apron. G’orrn went down before he reached the next scrap of cover, a buttressed alcove with scarcely enough room for Ikrad and B’tarro.

Even with auto-senses it was hard to tell how many they were facing. Between bursts Leodrakk tried to count the power-armoured silhouettes jamming up the end of the corridor, but every time he did more were added to the horde.

The Word Bearers were holding and showed no signs of allowing the Salamanders to break through. Leodrakk emerged from cover for a second look. A shell whined near his head, the sound of it glancing off his helmet amplified by his auto-senses. Warning sigils cascaded across his failing retinal display. A close call, but his head was still attached. For now.

Ikrad’s voice crackled over the vox, ‘I can’t see the cleric.’

‘I can’t see much of anything,’ snapped Hur’vak.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Leodrakk replied. ‘Keep their attention focused on us. Hold them here.’

‘That may prove problematic, brother,’ said Kronor, gesturing behind them to where a second force of Word Bearers could be heard moving into position.

Beneath his faceplate, Leodrakk smiled. His ammo count was low. He suspected that his brothers’ were the same. Bolter fire was raining in from the end of the corridor now, accented by the occasional flash of a volkite. It chipped at the iron buttresses and the columns where the Salamanders were taking cover. Soon it would stitch them from either side and that would be an end to it.

Muttering an oath for Skatar’var, Leodrakk addressed what was left of his men.

‘How do Salamanders meet their enemies?’ he asked.

‘Eye-to-eye,’ came the response in unison.

‘And tooth-to-tooth,’ Leodrakk concluded, drawing his blade. He roared, and rose up. The others shouted after him, determined to die with their weapons in their hands and their wounds to the front. It was a glorious but short-lived charge.

‘Vulkan lives!’

Jags of lightning were dancing hard and fast across the desert. Buried under Numeon’s drake cloak, Grammaticus eyed them warily.

‘You’ll kill us all out here,’ he said, voice muffled through his rebreather. It was the one from the dig site, the only part of his original equipment he still carried, if not the persona they had formerly belonged to. As well as the lightning, which cracked the sky in a circulatory system of veins and arcing tributaries, ash storms raked the wastelands. The grit and mineral flecks were as abrasive as glass, and deadly when whipped up close to hurricane speeds. No barrier to an armoured legionary, they could prove fatal to a mortal.

Hriak warded off the worst of it with a psychic kine-shield he had thrown up and was taking painstaking effort to maintain in front of them. It was taxing the Librarian, and he hadn’t spoken since the three of them had entered the lightning fields.

‘ Out hereis what’s keeping us alive, John Grammaticus,’ Numeon replied.

Like Hriak, his armour was taking a battering out in the storm. Already, much of its green paintwork had been abraded by the gritty ash winds. Since planetfall the storms had worsened. Their initial march to the city proper was much less treacherous. There was but one small mercy – they had, as of yet, avoided the lightning. A bolt struck nearby, throwing up a gout of crystallised sand.

‘All evidence to the contrary,’ said Grammaticus, seeing the dark scar left in the wake of the lightning. ‘I think I would have preferred to be with our comrades at the space port.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Numeon darkly, and that was an end to it. ‘The ship isn’t far. And besides,’ he added, glancing away to the dunes rising far off on their right, ‘we aren’t unprotected.’

Pergellen knew it grated at Numeon to leave the others behind. In the end, it was Leodrakk who had volunteered to lead the rest of the company into the space port so that the Pyre captain and Raven Guard could reach an alternate means of escape. Assaulting the space port had never been viable. It was dismissed before being mooted, but their enemy didn’t know that. Intent on killing the interlopers who had interfered with their plans, the Word Bearers had concentrated their entire force on the team attacking the space port. No one would see the three lonely travellers insanely braving the lightning fields. At least, that was the theory. Pergellen would have stayed with the diversion group, too, were it not for the fact that further insurance in getting the human off-planet was deemed prudent. His scope would watch them and track the ash wastes for errant legionaries who had scented the ruse and decided to come hunting.

He was lying flat, the scouring ash wind raking his power generator and shoulders as he propped his rifle beneath his chin. His eye had not left the scope since he had found his position on the dune. It was a good vantage, high enough to allow for decent coverage but low so that he didn’t stick out. It was solid too, a ridge of bedrock sitting under all that ash.

He first tracked Hriak, then Numeon, and finally Grammaticus, allowing the crosshairs of his targeter to settle on the human’s hooded head. Then he moved the scope back across the wastes to see if they were being followed.

So far, so good…

By his reckoning, the landing site wasn’t far, and once there they would find the gunship they had secreted upon planetfall. The other operational vessel didn’t matter now. It was far from their reach, but Pergellen had plotted a return route to it in case an emergency exfiltration was still possible.

A brief blizzard of ash squalled across him, muddying the lens of the Iron Hand’s scope. He maintained position, but as he peered through the now occluded scope he thought he caught sight of three large humanoid shapes moving against the storm. Visibility was already poor, but it was made worse by the dirty lens. Pergellen considered raising the alarm but decided against it in case vox-traffic was being monitored in any way. He doubted it was Leodrakk or any of his men, but had to be sure if he was going to make a kill. Lifting his body up onto his elbows, he went to clear the lens when he heard the faintest crunch of displaced sand behind him.

‘Stand and turn, I won’t shoot you in the back,’ ordered a gruff voice. It was the first time he had heard it, but Pergellen knew instinctively who it belonged to. With that information in mind, he relaxed the grip on the bolt pistol strapped to his hip.

‘Honour?’ queried Pergellen, rising. ‘I understood that the Seventeenth had long abandoned such scruples.’

‘I serve my own code. Now turn.’

Pergellen did so and saw a warrior armoured in red and black. His trappings were battered and stained. He remembered him from the ambush site, the attack on the manufactorum and the skirmish at the outflow. Seemed the Word Bearer remembered him too.

‘You are the scout,’ he said, nodding.

Pergellen wondered if he’d done it out of respect.

‘And you the huntsman.’

The warrior nodded again.

‘Barthusa Narek.’

‘Verud Pergellen.’

‘Your skill is impressive, Pergellen,’ Narek admitted.

‘I don’t think we’re here to compare notes, though, are we?’

‘Correct. I would have preferred to match myself against you rifle to rifle, but there is no time for that now.’ He sounded almost regretful. ‘Instead, we are left with bolt pistol or blade.’

Upon first sight of him, Pergellen had logged and gauged the threat of each of the huntsman’s weapons. They seemed to consist mainly of blades, but he also had a bolt pistol and the sniper rifle currently aimed at the Iron Hand’s heart.

‘Are you agreeable to these terms?’ Narek asked.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I assume you’re not asking about the acts of my Legion, or my fealty to that Legion. If what I think you’re asking is why did I not just execute you where you lay and why now am I allowing you a chance to kill me, the answer is simple. I need to know… who is the better?’ Crouching down, his eyes never leaving Pergellen for a second, he unhooked the rifle’s strap from over his shoulder and set it down on the ridge in front of him. Then he stood. ‘Now we are even, so I shall repeat, bolt pistol or blade?’

The ash wind was howling and the grit lashing around the two legionaries facing one another across the dune. Pergellen estimated there was little more than four metres between them. He had to end it quickly. Enemies were converging on Numeon and the others. If nothing else, he had to issue a warning, but not before he dealt with this. He made up his mind.

‘A fair offer,’ said Pergellen. ‘Blades?’

‘Very well.’

Each legionary grabbed for his pistol, knowing that the other would do the same. A single shot rang out. Narek was faster.

Numeon looked over to the ridge, tracking the report of a pistol heard even above the storm. A lightning bolt cracked the earth in front of him and sent the Pyre captain crashing down onto his back, armour drooling smoke.

In the same instant he turned and saw the warriors behind them. He counted three, and they were moving swiftly through the churning ash. They flickered, like a mirage shimmer, first distant, then closer, and closer still. It was warp-craft.

‘Hriak!’ he bellowed, slow to rise. On the far ridge, the one where Pergellen was meant to be keeping watch, he saw a slumped shadow and another, this one standing, disappearing into the storm as it backed away.

‘Prepare yourself,’ the Librarian hissed at Grammaticus. Then he was running, but not to Numeon’s aid. He passed the Pyre captain without a second glance, having sensed the psyker in their midst. ‘It’s the cleric,’ he shouted. ‘I’m sorry, Artellus, he must have followed my psychic spoor into the wastes.’

Numeon was back on his feet and rushing over to Grammaticus, who was struggling through the storm. Without the kine-shield he was being battered, and only the drake hide was keeping him alive.

‘Where is your fugging ship?’ he snapped, irritated, from inside the cloak.

‘Close.’

‘You hid a ship out here?’ asked Grammaticus.

‘Not I – my brother Ravens,’ said Numeon. ‘It was undetectable.’ He turned his attention to Hriak, who had begun to describe arcane patterns in the air before him. ‘Brother?’ Numeon called out. He blink-clicked a proximity icon that had recently flashed up on the part of his retinal display that was still working, and gestured into the storm.

Looking in the direction that Numeon had pointed, Grammaticus noticed a bulky silhouette looming through the ash-haze.

Hidden in plain sight, using the storm as cover, thought Gramma-ticus. How like the XIX.

‘Go, get him out,’ said Hriak. ‘I’ll deal with this. The raven’s feast has been long overdue for me. Victorus aut Mortis.’

Numeon turned back to the human. ‘Are you all right, are you–’

Grammaticus aimed his fist at him. Something sparkled on the ring he wore.

‘Better than you, I’m afraid.’

The las-beam stabbed into Numeon’s retinal lens, burning out his eye and searing his face beneath. He cried out, clutching his eye, the trauma of it putting him on his knees. The bolt had struck him, and split part of his armour. It wasn’t clotting properly, Numeon’s enhanced physiology undone by something in the storm, something the cleric had incepted. It made the eye burn all the more painfully.

Half blind, he snatched for the human, meaning to crush him this time.

Grammaticus had hit him with a potent charge. Whilst the legionaries were plotting their assault on the space port and this cunning feint to get him to another ship, he had been altering the tech in his ring. The blast had exhausted it. The digital weapon was done and wouldn’t charge again, but it pierced the legionary’s defences and put him down long enough to scurry from the warrior’s grasp.

He snatched the fulgurite from Numeon’s scabbard, deftly avoiding the Salamander’s grab.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Grammaticus, his voice growing more distant the farther away he ran, ‘but you were in my way.’

Running hard against the storm, he reached the ship. The gentle throb of turbine engines was obvious up close. Now he was alongside the ship, he could see it more clearly. He looked back for any sign of his captors.

Lightning crackled in the distance that was not caused by the storm. It illuminated three figures, armoured in legionary battle-plate. One other, the Raven, opposed them. Numeon was still down but rising.

He could pilot this vessel without the Salamander’s help, but Grammaticus knew he didn’t have long to get aboard and get away. Moving around to the rear access ramp, he paused.

There was something dripping through the rear access hatch, as if someone had released a valve and filled the hold with water. It was dark, murky and reeked of stagnation. There was something wrongabout this place, this city. Grammaticus had felt it ever since he had made planetfall with Varteh and the others. He had no weapon – the ring was useless, and so he could only rely upon his own wits. At that precise moment they seemed more than a little fragile.

Hammering the hatch release icon, Grammaticus braced himself for what was within. He had wanted to leap up and onto the gunship’s still descending ramp, to rush to the cockpit and quit Traoris for good, but the figure standing before him was blocking his path.

Trapped for so long in the drainage basin, all those years… The water had not been kind. Grammaticus couldn’t remember his name, but the thing glaring at him through the strands of lank hair hanging down over its sunken face knewGrammaticus.

Instinctively, he backed away, his ankle throbbing where the five tiny weals still showed on his flesh.

‘You aren’t…’ he began, but how could he be sure? All the things he had seen, all the deeds he had done…

The drowned boy advanced towards Grammaticus, his gait shuffling and unsteady, leaving a trail of drain water behind him.

A childhood trauma, one from his first life; why did this horror eclipse all the others?

Grammaticus recoiled and found unyielding war-plate preventing further retreat. He turned to face his attacker, knowing the game had ended at last.

‘You’re headed the wrong way if you want to escape,’ said Numeon, one eye ablaze through his retinal lens.

Glancing back, Grammaticus saw that the drowned boy was gone. But the delay had cost him dearly.

‘Is this when you kill me?’ he asked, still a little shaken but shoring up his composure with each passing second.

‘I should have killed you when I saw you. Tell me this. Is what you said true, does Vulkan still live?’

‘As far as I know–’ Grammaticus’s answer was cut by the report of a bolt pistol.

In front of him, Numeon convulsed as the shell struck him in the torso and punched the Salamander off his feet.

‘You have proven remarkably elusive, John Grammaticus,’ said a cultured, yet terrifying voice. The dull click of a bolt pistol being primed to fire again froze Grammaticus in place. He turned, having made it halfway up the ramp, and saw the Word Bearers cleric drawing down on him. ‘But then you are quite remarkable, aren’t you?’

‘So I’m told,’ he said, fulgurite still in hand.

‘Give the spear to me,’ the Dark Apostle ordered. ‘Throw it onto the ground.’

Numeon was still down and not looking like he was going to get up. Grammaticus obeyed.

‘What now?’

‘Now you will come with me and I shall show you the true meaning of the warp.’

‘I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you.’

‘I didn’t say you had a choice, mortal.’ Elias wagged the pistol’s muzzle, gesturing for Grammaticus to step down from the ramp and out of the gunship’s waiting hold.

He hesitated. ‘I’ll be shredded out there.’

Elias briefly looked at the athame dagger sheathed at his belt.

‘You won’t be out here long enough for that. The shredding comes later, though.’

Grammaticus was taking his first steps back down the ramp, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, when a charge trembled the air. It wasn’t from the lightning field, it was nothing to do with the storm at all. Elias felt it, too, and began to turn.

Something was coming.

Numeon was dying. He didn’t need the failing biometric data relayed by his armour to tell him that. Red warning icons were flashing across his vision, a sputtering, static-crazed feed that did more to impede his senses than enhance them.

He discharged the locking clamps on his helmet and tore it off.

The Word Bearer, the cleric they had been seeking, who had undoubtably killed Hriak, paid him no heed. As he gazed into the storm, Numeon detected a change in the air. He felt heat, and imagined the trembling of atoms as the veil of reality was parting and being rewritten.

He reached out, ostensibly for a weapon, perhaps his pistol, as the glaive was now too far to grasp, but found himself clutching the sigil.

Vulkan’s sigil.

For his legionaries it had become an enigmatic symbol of hope, but for the primarch it held no such mystery. He had crafted it, imbued it with technologies beyond even his Legiones Astartes sons.

It was a beacon, a light to bring a stricken ship to shore or a lost traveller home.

For a few brief seconds the storm abated to a murmur, the last jag of lightning seemingly frozen in place and becoming a tear in reality that exuded light.

Gazing into that light, Numeon saw a figure limned in godlike power.

‘Vulkan lives…’ he breathed, emotion and blood both swelling up into his throat to choke him.

Elias holstered his pistol, realising it would have little effect on whatever was about to emerge into reality. He was reaching for his athame, intent on flight, when he recognised the figure that appeared before him.

‘My master,’ he murmured and fell to one knee, bowing his head before Erebus.

Erebus ignored him. Instead he regarded John Grammaticus, who was still standing on the ramp of the gunship, transfixed by what he had just witnessed.

The traveller was hooded. His dark robes swathed a power-armoured frame. There was no face beneath the cowl, only a silver mask fashioned to resemble one. In one hand Erebus held a ritual knife which he secreted back beneath his robes; the other was bionic, yet to be re-fleshed, and reached to retrieve the fulgurite.

‘Rise,’ he said to Elias, though he was looking at Grammaticus. His voice sounded old, but bitter and filled with the resonance of true power.

‘You have arrived at an auspicious moment–’ Elias began, before Erebus lashed out with the fulgurite and slit the other Dark Apostle’s throat.

‘Indeed I have,’ he said, allowing the blood fountaining from Elias’s ruptured arteries to paint the front of his robes.

Dying, unable to staunch the wound from a god-weapon, Elias was reduced to clawing at his former master. He managed to grasp the silver mask and tear it from his master’s face before Erebus seized his flailing hands and threw him back.

Grammaticus recoiled as Erebus faced him. Something akin to a daemon regarded him, one with a hideous flayed skull, blood-red and patched by scar tissue that wasn’t healing as ordinary flesh and skin. It was darker, incarnadine, and shimmered with an unearthly lustre. Several small horns protruded from his pate, little nubs of sharpened bone.

At Erebus’s feet, Elias was gasping like a fish without water. He was dying. His desperation seemed to draw Erebus’s attention, and Grammaticus was glad those hellish eyes were no longer focused on him.

Crouched down, Erebus addressed his former disciple.

‘You are as stupid as you are short-sighted, Valdrekk.’ He showed him the fulgurite, still glowing slightly, clenched in Erebus’s bionic hand. ‘This does not win wars, mere chunks of wood and metal cannot do that. It was never the weapon you were looking for. The primarchs, the god-born, are the weapons. Sharpen our own, blunt our enemy’s.’

Erebus leaned down and clamped his flesh hand over Elias’s gaping mouth. The struggle was brief and uneventful.

‘He goes to the Neverborn as a reward for trying to betray me.’

It took Grammaticus a couple of seconds to realise that Erebus was talking to him. He looked down and saw the fulgurite brandished towards him.

‘Take it,’ Erebus said. ‘No one will stop you.’ Now he looked up and there was terrible knowledge in his eyes. ‘Go to your task, John Grammaticus.’

Warily, Grammaticus took the spear. He then walked back up the ramp and pressed the icon to close it. When he looked back, both Erebus and Elias were gone.

Although he was no legionary, he could fly the ship. His abilities as a pilot were exemplary and there weren’t many vessels, human or xenos, that he couldn’t fly. Heading across the troop hold, Grammaticus opened the door that would allow him access to the cockpit. It was large, built to accommodate a legionary, but he managed well enough. It took him a few minutes but he got the ship’s systems online for atmospheric flight, and the engine turbines were already warmed up.

Through the glacis plate he noticed the sky over Ranos was changing. There were shapes in the storm clouds now, looming large and too distinct to be merely shadows. Erebus had done more than end the life of a rival when he had killed Elias. Grammaticus wasn’t about to stick around and find out what that was.

Engine ignition sent tremors through the ship as Grammaticus boosted forwards and then started to gain loft. A quick check of the sensor array revealed a path through the scattering of vessels in orbit. None of them were suitable; he’d need to find another space port and gain passage aboard a cruiser, preferably non-military.

It would be guarded, he knew that. But if he got there before Polux, he’d have a much better chance of slipping through their security nets.

Dark sky gave way to desolate, black void as the gunship streaked through the upper atmosphere and beyond.

A reflection in the glacis made Grammaticus start at first, the memory of the drowned boy still all too fresh, but he masked his sudden panic well. The eldar regarded him sternly.

‘You were successful, John Grammaticus?’ asked Slau Dha.

‘Yes, the fulgurite is in my possession.’

‘And you know what you must do?’

‘You still doubt my conviction?’

‘Just answer the question.’

Grammaticus sighed, deep and world-weary. ‘Yes, I know what must be done. Although killing a primarch won’t be easy.’

‘This has ever been your mission.’

‘I know, but even so…’

‘His grace is bound to the earth. Separated from it, he will be weak and can be slain like any of the others.’

‘Why him? Why not the Lion or that bastard Curze? Why does it have to be him?’

‘Because he is important and because he must not live to become the keeper of the gate. Do this and your pact with the Cabal is ended.’

‘I somehow doubt that.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, mon-keigh. All that matters is what you do next.’

‘Don’t worry, I know my mission and will carry it out as ordered.’

‘When you reach Macragge,’ said the autarch, threatening even though he was only flecting, ‘find him. He has been there some time already.’

‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘It will be harder than you think. He is not himself any more. You’ll need help.’

‘Another primarch, yes, I know. I suspect few will be lining up to be his executioner, however.’

‘You would be surprised.’

‘Your kind are full of them.’

Slau Dha ignored the slight, deeming it beneath his concern.

‘And then,’ he asked instead, ‘when the fulgurite is delivered?’

A sudden star flare forced Grammaticus to dim the glacis, effectively ending the flect, but he answered anyway.

‘Then, Vulkan dies.’