The Beast Arises

‘You have done nothing but accelerate an outcome considered inevitable since the inception of the Grand Experiment. The Imperium will come, and they will not find the legions of Mars unprepared.’

Somehow, Urquidex’s struggles freed an arm.

He lashed his digitools across the throat of the skitarius holding his other arm. Blood splashed his rebreather, and for a moment he was free. He spun around, screaming into the vid-recorder as cold hands dragged him away by his robes.

‘Ullanor! The Beast arises on Ullanor!’

David Annandale

The Hunt for Vulkan

Prologue

Caldera — Torrens

The horde was a lava flow. It was composed of muscle and machine, but it had all the power of molten rock. It covered the landscape. What it swallowed was destroyed forever. And it was unstoppable.

The jaws gaped. They were wide enough to engulf the world. And there was hunger in them to devour his family.

On the ramparts of Torrens, Emil Becker jerked the magnoculars back and forth. He saw jaws. He saw corded arms and snarling faces. He saw the tracks of huge machines. He saw the movement of titanic, brutal power. At full magnification, the lenses could only show fragments of the enemy’s bodies and weapons. Blurred hints of the totality of violence.

The orks were already that close.

Becker lowered the magnoculars, losing detail, seeing instead the size of the horror, a huge upheaval smashing through the jungle. He could feel the wave heading towards the wall. Towards his settlement. Towards his family.

Terror was a spike in his throat. He tried to swallow it down.

On his right, his daughter said, ‘So many.’

‘Yes.’ He glanced at Karla. Her face, like his, was covered in dust from work in the tunnels below — as good a form of camouflage in the night as any other.

Her teeth showed white in the dark as she smiled. ‘Caldera tests us again, father.’

Becker looked out at the howling, grinding night again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Caldera. Not this time.’

He understood the convulsions of the land. That was the birthright of every Calderan. The eruptions and earthquakes were the language of the planet, its sermons and its rages. Life was eternal vigilance, eternal expectation of the coming of flame, rock and ash. The pride that came with survival was the reward for being a citizen of this world.

Caldera destroyed its children, but it did so without malice. It was violently alive, and to die in its embrace was no tragedy. It was the basic reality of the world.

What advanced towards the settlement of Torrens was also violently alive. There were even sounds carried over the wind to Becker that resembled joy. It was a joy alien to Caldera and to humans. It was the joy of destruction. There was malice out there.

Approaching fast.

Torrens was a mining settlement built into the rocky western slope of a basalt plateau. At the base of the slope was jungle that stretched to the west almost as far as the capital, Laccolith. Much of Caldera was blasted rock, but here, after it had been destroyed before the coming of Imperial colonists a millennium ago, the jungle had returned, the ground fertilised by the ash from the twin volcanic peaks to the north that marked the beginning of the Ascia Rift valley.

Torrens was walled, its plasteel barrier more substantial than any of its housing. The fortifications kept the violent fauna of Caldera at bay. They would do nothing against the life that roared towards Torrens now.

The orks flattened the jungle in their advance. Their huge tanks and towering walkers smashed through trees, and behind them came the infantry. The beasts covered so vast an area that they must have numbered in the tens of thousands. The flames from the exhausts of their machines illuminated the undulations of an enormous mass. A flood of destructive muscle, come to butcher and burn.

There were still lights on in Laccolith. Becker could see the glow of the city at the horizon. It was dirty with smoke. The vox-transmissions from the capital were sporadic and filled with terror, but at least they were a sign of life. The greenskins had not razed the city and killed everyone there. Not yet. He didn’t understand why that was. What could have pulled the orks away from their prize? Not the trivial presence of Torrens.

Boredom? Becker wondered. Laccolith’s population was in the millions. Total eradication would slow the orks’ march of conquest.

The guess was a weak one. And what did it matter? The orks were coming here. Torrens would not delay them at all. It would afford the horde a diversion. An amusement.