The wolftime, p.28
The Wolftime, page 28
Maqoma thought it a good question but dared not look up to see her commander’s reaction. Her hands trembled as she adjusted the surveyor frequencies again. The targeting signal was intermittent, as though scanning a wide area, and the intensity fluctuated every few seconds. It was impossible to trace it back to a point on the ground, but they had narrowed down the region of origin to a hundred square miles. Once it achieved lock-on, back-tracing the signal would take several more seconds, during which the defences could open fire and potentially rip the ship apart with a single salvo.
‘Speculation is counterproductive,’ said Castallor. ‘I must deal with the present and obvious threat. One of your defence stations is trying to fix on our position so that it may open fire.’
‘Yes, and we lost communication with it a day ago. There are two packs there who will regain control in the next few minutes.’
‘We may not have minutes, nor a second chance. We are virtually defenceless. The only chance we have of survival is a pre-attack strike. The moment we have a confirmed lock and targeting solution we will open fire with our main battery. I have hundreds of Primaris Marines aboard, Lord Grimnar. Your troops, by right. Why are you willing to sacrifice them rather than allow me to act?’
‘You don’t understand,’ replied the leader of the Space Wolves. ‘Our defences are interconnected. If you open fire, other systems will take it as an attack and counter-fire. It is out of my hands.’
‘That may be true, Lord Grimnar, or it could be seen as reasonable grounds for doubt. Are you striving as hard to assuage the spirits of those systems as we are to stoke the spirit of our reactor? It seems you risk little but demand much, Lord Grimnar.’
‘No target lock detected, sir,’ announced Maqoma, hoping to reassure Lieutenant Castallor that the danger was not yet imminent. ‘The targeting signal is highly erratic.’
Maqoma turned her attention away from her screen for a few seconds, to check the main display for reactor readiness. The plasma load was at twenty per cent and rising but the preliminary power surge had been directed to the surveyors and main battery, as Castallor had instructed. It would require at least another twenty per cent power for the void shields, perhaps fifteen per cent to start to push out from low orbit. Neither was a sure defence. Which would the lieutenant choose?
The drifts were so deep against the side of the blocky station that the charging Greypelts sprayed white fans ahead of them like longship prows slashing through surf. Every few strides one of them would fire, putting a bolt through the door at the top of the steps ahead. No Prosperine dared show head or limb; the bodies of seven others dangled over the railings and littered the steps that led up to the entrance, blown apart by bolt impacts.
‘Bridge me,’ Ullr shouted, slowing his pace a few yards from the wall beneath the ferrocrete steps.
Forskad surged past, dropping to a knee just ahead of the pack leader. Pushing maximum power to his war-plate’s legs, Ullr placed a foot on the shoulder of the crouching Space Marine and bounded high, combat knife stabbing into the wall ahead at the apex of his jump. He was high enough to haul himself up to the ice-clad metal railing and swing over, pulling his bolter free as he came face to face with a hooded woman inside the doorway, a grenade in her hand.
Ullr’s hand flicked out, the knife burying itself to the hilt in her chest, pinning her to the back wall. Shouts echoed from the passageway as the grenade dropped from her dead fingers and rolled along the floor. Two seconds later, the woman’s corpse was flung sideways by the blast.
‘Good idea,’ growled Ullr. He plucked a frag bomb from his belt, primed it with his thumb and tossed it so that it bounced off the far wall and went right. Another followed a second later to the left.
The crash of boots behind him heralded the arrival of Garnr, followed by the others vaulting over the rail or pounding up the steps. Forskad was the last, given a hand up by Eirik, who half-hauled him over the rail behind the pack leader.
Ullr went through the door as the grenades went off, turning down the passage to the right as he headed for the control room. He knew without looking that Dethar followed, going left, and the Greypelts would alternate without any word spoken. The pack leader stepped past body parts, the walls smeared with a spray of blood and pitted with hot shrapnel, the smell of explosive hanging heavy in the air.
Steps led down just a few yards ahead, but there was a door on the landing, half-open. Ullr snapped a warning, bolter aimed at the door while Garnr went past, heading for the stairwell. His pack-brother took the whole flight in two strides, turning at the next landing. Garnr’s wurgen growls indicated that the stairs were clear of foes and he was holding position.
Ullr opened fire through the gap at the door, registering a split second later that there had been a flicker of movement. The crack of the bolt detonating was accompanied by a cry of pain and something slumped against the metal door, slamming it closed.
A deep snarl from behind announced that Eirik was going to breach. Ullr adjusted position, giving the Space Marine room to reach full speed before his shoulder hit the door, buckling the metal as it ripped from the hinges. In the passage beyond were a handful of fur-coated figures, las-spears levelled towards the Wolves of Fenris. Ullr saw an arm flail from beneath the door as another Prosperine was crushed by the weight of Eirik falling flat. The Greypelt opened fire from prone while Ullr put a bolt into the cowl of another enemy. Just a moment later the stairwell echoed to the boom of Garnr’s weapon, joined by the higher-pitched zip of las-blasts.
Foes in front and below. Ullr activated the vox.
‘Gaius, tell me you’ve secured the launch silo.’
Nearing the summit of the mound, Gaius and his companions disturbed a flock of black-feathered birds that shrieked away into the sky, while the snow was criss-crossed with animal tracks both large and small.
‘Rotting meat,’ said Garold just as the smell passed the mask filters of Gaius’ helm.
The source became obvious just a few seconds later: a ridge to the left was strewn with carcasses of birds, animals and Fenrisians in various states of decay and dismemberment. Gorged beasts and birds staggered away at the approach of the Space Marines. Looking closer, Gaius picked out las and blade wounds on every carcass. Rats and other small scavengers, slick with bodily fluids, unperturbed by human presence, pushed through ribcages and broken skulls, chewing at sinew and gnawing bones.
‘Trapped,’ announced Neiflur, pointing his bolter to the right and behind. ‘Corralled into a killing ground.’
The snow hid much of the earthworks, and to the Space Marines the small cliffs and ditches that had funnelled the other animals into the open had been no hindrance. Glancing behind, Gaius could see the path now, steadily heading up and to the left, culminating in the charnel pile.
‘Movement!’ Aegreus brought up his bolt rifle and fired as hooded heads appeared at the summit, blasting one apart with his first shot. A flurry of las-blasts answered, melting snow and punching through the low canopy to shower the Space Marines with water and pine needles.
The longer muzzle and barrel of a lascannon slid into view from behind a barricade of woven tree limbs and packed snow.
‘Heavy weapon, thirty degrees left,’ Gaius warned, stepping to his right to get a better angle on the crew. The barricade was more like a gun pit, perfectly situated about forty yards to the flank to guard against frontal assault. Gaius fired anyway, putting two rounds into the slit, but he could see their flicker against the huge doors of the silo beyond, having sped harmlessly past the weapon and crew.
The pack split, Neiflur, Aegreus and Doro charging up the hill into the increasing las-fire, while Gaius led Anfelis and Garold towards the lascannon.
‘Keep moving,’ the pack leader barked, dodging to the left and then the right, presenting no easy target as he powered across the snowdrifts.
A ruby beam speared down towards the Firstwolves. The shot was too high, slashing through the canopy above Anfelis’ head. Gaius opened fire one-handed, trying to spoil the aim of the gunners as he closed the distance. Bolts thudded into the snow ramp and cracked through the woven branches, exploding prematurely. For a split second Gaius found himself looking directly into the focusing lens of the weapon, seeing a small, inverted image of himself in the convex glass. Red brightness replaced the view, an instant before a ruddy flash struck him in the chest. He staggered, expecting to feel lancing pain a moment later, but nothing came. He glanced down to see a neat hole of molten ceramite an inch across and the same in depth, but nothing more.
‘Praise the Emperor!’ he cried, plunging forward again, now a couple of strides behind the others.
‘Praise cold weather for draining their energy pack,’ replied Garold with a laugh. ‘This permanent frost sapped the coils.’
Figures rose from the pit, glimpsed as purple hoods and furs. They disappeared beyond the gun pit before Gaius could shoot. He spared a look to the right in time to see the other Firstwolves mounting the last few yards to the flattened summit. About a dozen foes with spearlike las weapons shot a final volley point-blank, the blasts having as much effect on his companions’ Mark X armour as the depleted lascannon. In the following seconds, the Prosperines turned their weapons so that a small thicket of crackling spear tips confronted the Firstwolves. Neiflur paid them no heed, crashing through the improvised schiltron with knife in hand, breaking and buckling shafts.
Gaius vaulted over the front of the gun pit and landed next to the abandoned lascannon as cries of desperation and fear rang across the hilltop. Fresh tracks led across a short concourse of snow-covered ferrocrete, straight to a small outbuilding with a metal door. The pack leader opened fire at the last of the figures disappearing within, but his bolt hit the door as it swung half-closed, shrapnel exploding from the metal. A fur-wrapped hand reappeared to drag the door closed and Gaius fired again. The bolt detonation tore the wrist apart, leaving the door unsealed with a hand hanging from the lockwheel.
Reaching level ground, Gaius accelerated for the doorway, realising that he had total faith that his pack-brothers would deal with any foes behind him.
Every saga came easily to Njal’s lips, the slightest incident recalled without effort. He spoke of a group of kaerls, no more than fourteen years old, rejected by the first tests to become Wolves of Fenris. They allowed themselves to be captured by Bucharis’ soldiers, feigning interest in their false doctrine, twenty-two of them. Seeing them so pliant of will, and being ignorant to the skill and savagery of Fenrisian youth, the traitors escorted the kaerls into one of their camps. Presented to a preacher, one of Bucharis’ lieutenants, they threw off their sheepish guise and slew their captors, taking up their dead foes’ weapons to kill more. They slit open the body of the false priest and left him to die in the freezing snow before they were overwhelmed by the preacher’s followers. This the Wolves of Fenris learned from traitors who surrendered when Bucharis and his generals fled the Hearthworld.
With the spectres of his ancestors speaking through him, Njal understood why his wyrd had brought him to this point, and why it was important for the Imperials to hear this tale. He spoke of the spirit of the Fenrisians, of the power of the Wolves of Fenris, and how they would die to the last to defend their aett – not just the fortress of the Sky Warriors but the planet, its people, its star system. The tribes were rivals but they were also a great family spread across the planet, and would come together as one against any foe from without.
He relished the details of how the invaders were butchered; how their ships were boarded by returning Space Marines and their guns turned on those they had brought; of rivers running red through the following summer from the slaughter in the peaks; of nightraven flocks like storm clouds feasting on the dead.
The warning was made clear. There was no conquest of Fenris that would leave it anything but an empty rock. Not even the might of Guilliman and all of the Indomitus Crusade would break the Wolves of Fenris to their will by force. And no Great Wolf would shame himself and the memory of the Wolf King by bending knee to a false god.
Gaius had wondered why the Prosperines had been living in the forest, with all the perils of the elements that entailed, and found the answer as he descended the third flight of stairs into the bowels of the launch silo. The steps brought him out into the main missile chamber about fifty yards down from the open silo doors: a space a hundred yards square filled with forty-eight missiles, each capable of reaching orbit in less than two minutes. Olfactory sensors in his suit picked up the reek of promethium fuel – muspelfyr – and the lower reaches of the chamber, another hundred yards down, were swathed in billows of steam.
It was not the defence system that caught the eye but the changes wrought by the Prosperines. Makeshift bridges of cable and rope hung between the warheads, the tip of each missile decorated with a grotesque arrangement of bones and blood. Gaius saw human parts among the remains that had been wired to the nose cones, along with large predators, birds and other species he could not identify. Lines of angular symbols were painted down the sides of each missile, the blood dark against their unpainted metal skins.
More fetishes and talismans decorated the walkways around the walls and the stairs that linked them, criss-crossing the vast space with chains of body parts. Even the steps were marked with heretical symbols, vaguely reminding Gaius of the warding signs used on the Geller field generator chambers and warp drive engines aboard the Enduring Hate. But this was pure superstition. There was no sense of suppressed power here; no queasiness his superhuman physiology could not compensate for, or pressure in the back of his head and behind his eyes. This was a child scribing the contents of the Liber Ecclesiarchia in the hope of speaking directly with the Emperor.
Blue flashes of las-power crackled from below, flaring along the thin metal railings that lined the walkways.
‘Watch your fire angles,’ he told the pack. ‘We have warheads and fuel lines in here.’
‘Somebody going to tell them?’ replied Aegreus, pointing to more than two dozen figures below.
‘Gaius, tell me you’ve secured the launch silo.’ Ullr sounded impatient, understandably so.
‘Ongoing,’ Gaius replied. ‘I cannot say if we can prevent launch from here, even if we gain control. Missiles are active.’
‘Doesn’t matter anyway,’ added Doro. ‘If they lock on from the main control chamber the Enduring Hate is going to turn this place and everything within a mile into a crater.’
‘Do what you can, we are closing on the launch control chamber.’
‘Perhaps ground detonation might be better,’ said Neiflur. The Space Marine leaned over the gantry rail and fired a shot as he spoke. Garold and Anfelis had advanced to the next set of steps and were shooting bolts into the depths too.
‘While we’re still standing here?’ said Doro. ‘That’s an interesting concept.’
‘Neiflur’s right,’ said Gaius, realising what his pack-brother meant. ‘It’s more important that we stop the Enduring Hate from opening fire and starting a war.’
‘We’re almost ready to breach the control chamber,’ Ullr interrupted quickly. ‘Don’t do anything rash.’
Gaius didn’t reply, his eye drawn to the web of amulets and cable bridges between the missiles.
‘If one explodes, chain reaction will take care of the rest,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘No melta charges though.’
A fresh volley of blue flashed upwards, sparking from the cable-ladders and ferrocrete. Whatever they were going to do, it had to happen fast. Gaius realised that Neiflur, Garold and Anfelis had moved further down on their own initiative, the detonations of their bolts lost amid the gloom of the depths. He swept his gaze over the rest of the silo, switching visual register to penetrate the bank of steam.
‘Push on, secure the lower levels,’ he told the rest of the squad, pointing to the clusters of las-fire slashing up towards the pack.
Increasing magnification, Gaius examined the steam itself. Smell told him there were fuel droplets in the air. If there were promethium vapours escaping from somewhere, an unsealed valve most likely, there might be a much simpler way of destroying the missiles. He found it a few seconds later: a swirl of cooled air escaping from a fuelling point close to the bottom of the ferrocrete silo, about ten yards to his left. He traced it to a hose lazily coiled against the wall. If he could ignite the fumes, the flame would travel back to the storage tanks beneath the facility. That would be enough of a blast to cripple the rockets, if not outright destroy them.
The downside was that it could take off the whole top of the mountain.
Chapter Sixteen
MISSILES AND MYSTICISM
REVELATIONS FROM THE PAST
GAIUS ALONE
Ullr waited for affirmation from Hari, though he could hear the plasma gun cycling back to full charge. The other pack member stood on the opposite side of the passage so that the two of them flanked the junction leading to the last door between them and the control room. There couldn’t be more than a dozen Prosperines left, but time was a greater enemy. Magnus’ soldiers had locked the door from within, determined to fight to the last and prevent the Wolves of Fenris from gaining access. It was an attack out of pure spite, but it was impossible for the cultists to know they had the power to start a war between the Space Wolves and the Imperium, which would costs tens of thousands of lives if allowed to erupt.
‘I have a last-resort solution,’ Gaius announced over the vox. ‘Lord Krom, can we monitor whether the system is close to target lock on the Enduring Hate?’
‘We were alerted by loss of signal, no way of tracking from afar,’ the Wolf Lord replied.
‘Can’t you persuade the Great Wolf not to retaliate?’ said Ullr. ‘What difference does it make if we’re killed by bombardment or our own hand?’
