The wolftime, p.6
The Wolftime, page 6
‘Keep up,’ snarled Arjac, still pushing towards the blue icon in his display that marked the rendezvous with Logan Grimnar, the Lord of Fenris. ‘Full assault.’
The hearthegn’s first glance revealed twenty or thirty scrawny aliens running into the passage ahead, some of them stopping to skulk at a cross-junction about seventy yards away. Gunfire pattered down the tunnel, sporadic and ineffective, while a group of larger green-skinned xenos lumbered into sight.
Superimposed over the orks were the views from his squad-brothers, like ghostly after-images of the unfolding combat behind him. Skor turned aside into one of the shipping halls, his display whiting out as his heavy flamer engulfed the greenskins trying to break past. Flares of storm bolter fire lit up the views from Herjolf and Hrothgar, beyond which ork body parts tumbled from each other amid the welter of detonating ammunition.
‘Arjac!’ Anger threaded Skor’s tone as he backed into the main corridor, firing again. ‘You’re stretching us out.’
He ignored the other Wolf Guard and lumbered into a charge, the Anvil Shield raised before him to ward away the increasing torrent of bullets and energy bolts screaming down the corridor towards him.
‘We have to reach the Great Wolf,’ he snarled, sharply conscious of the spreading mass of signal returns around the rendezvous point.
‘We’ll not help him from the Upplands,’ Skor snapped back. ‘Do you think he would have us all dead in his place?’
It made no difference. Arjac was already at the first mob of orks, punching into them like a boarding torpedo hitting the side of a ship. The first went down under shield and boots, barely slowing the giant Space Marine. A second blasted away with its crude automatic weapon, spraying bullets from the gleaming storm shield before the hearthegn crushed it against a bulkhead. He swung Foehammer in a wide arc, smashing aside a third, the blazing field of the hammer head disintegrating thick studded jerkin, green flesh and alien bone.
More orks poured into the main thoroughfare between him and the other Wolf Guards, opening fire even before they had settled their aim. Las-blasts and solid rounds flared wildly in both directions, but Arjac’s armour was as thick to the rear as the front, the bulky power pack unharmed by the few shots that found him.
Lightning snaked from Torfin’s claws as he ploughed into the aliens. Well earned was his title of Daggerfist, each stroke to the left and right eviscerating or decapitating an alien. Against such wounds even the legendary hardiness of the orks was no defence. Beside Torfin arrived Sven Halfhelm, armed with thunder hammer and storm shield like Arjac, though his battle gear was smaller and of less renown than that of the Great Wolf’s Champion. Side by side, he and Torfin cleaved a path through the greenskins, splitting to hold a doorway to each side of the corridor while the other Wolf Guard passed between them.
The corridor was thick with foes around Arjac, such that it needed little skill to strike them down. A green flare among the press of alien attackers drew his eye to a larger xenos beast shouldering its way forward, left hand encased in a thrumming powered claw. Though he believed the Anvil Shield would be the match of the disruptive field, Arjac decided not to risk the confrontation. Batting aside the lesser orks around him, he lunged forward and met the oncoming monster with the head of his hammer, crushing its skull into a pulp.
After a last volley of storm bolter fire from Herjolf and Hrothgar, Skor filled the corridor with a wide sweep of raging promethium, forcing back the greenskins and barring further attack. Torfin slashed through the door controls with a claw, slamming a breach-barrier onto the orks trying to clamber over the bodies of their dead companions.
All of this burned through Arjac’s subconscious, the Champion aware of his companions’ actions and positions just as he was the placement of his feet as he smashed aside another ork, or the weight distribution across his armour as he powered forward again. The lethal rhythm of parry-sweep-stride that carried him onward was a product of instinct, training and decades of experience rather than conscious decision.
The hearthegn’s thoughts were filled with a singular concern, dismissive of his own safety or that of his Wolf Guard. Like a storm gathered around a mountaintop, the greenskins massed about the other detachment, thickening with every passing moment. At the centre would be Logan Grimnar. Chapter Master. The Great Wolf.
The warrior Arjac had sworn grand oaths to protect, and upon whose shoulders the future of the whole Chapter currently rested.
His saga doesn’t end, he told himself. Not today. Not like this. Not because of me.
Tyrnak prowled around the upper strategium deck of the Allfather’s Honour with all the air of an officer, watching over the many kaerls and servitors attending to the dozens of stations situated there. The immense wolf, as high at the shoulder as the heads of many of the mortals past which he softly padded, stopped and sniffed at a leak of fluids from a servitor casing. The half-machine was oblivious to the beast’s attention, eyes wired into the sensor arrays, all other nerves deadened by the attentions of the tech-priests that had created it. Other crew members paid Tyrnak no heed, stopping or moving around his erratic patrol without comment.
The other thunderwolf, Fenrir, sat beside his master’s command throne, head cocked to one side as the Great Wolf idly scratched behind an ear with thick fingers. Logan rested his chin on the fist of his other hand, elbow upon the arm of the throne as he regarded the image projected onto the screen before him. Upon his shoulders he wore a great pelt, its grey-and-white fur almost blending with the lord’s beard.
Around him were his senior counsellors. More distant were members of the Kingsguard, clad in Terminator armour, their weapons dulled for the moment. Completing his tour, Tyrnak stalked over to the line of veteran warriors, looking and sniffing at each in turn as if inspecting a parade in his honour.
Arjac moved to the other side of the throne to Fenrir so that he could see the vid-feed from the frigate approaching the space hulk. Like the Lord of Fenris, he was not in his armour, but dressed in a hide tunic and leggings, his arms banded with leather totem cords hung with fangs and bones, his thick belt riveted with iron honour badges. His freshly shaved scalp shone with the speckled starlight from the display. He dragged his fingers through his thick, newly trimmed beard.
‘It’s big,’ said the hearthegn.
Grimnar laughed. ‘They’re all big.’
‘Bigger than most,’ agreed Njal, he that was known as the Stormcaller. The wide collar of a heavy vest and long strands of red beard and hair framed sigil tattoos and branded wyrdmarks on his chest, more of the same coiled and knotted along his arms. Rune-scribed beads and fangs hung on thongs from a belt of twisted golden cord, rattling and tapping against the thick leather of his kilt as he moved. He held his staff to one side, its wolf-skull top serving as a perch for his psyber-raven. The modified creature stared at Fenrir with the ruby lens of a bionic eye while the Stormcaller regarded the view on the vid-projection with a solemn expression.
Scans had put the mishmash of compacted ships and cosmic flotsam in the region of seventy miles long, fourteen miles wide and nearly four and a half miles at its thickest. Surveyor feeds from the Ironjarl scrolled across the grey-and-black mass, flickering patches into orange life as reactors, engines and other active systems were detected.
Yet it was not these technical readings that drew the eye, for Arjac could see just as clearly what had caught the attention of his lord. Here and there plasma discharge was visible, as were several dome-like force field emissions of flickering green energy. The space hulk was certainly occupied, if not entirely under the control of its inhabitants. And the nature of those was revealed by large red glyphs, daubed nearly a hundred yards high along the nose plate of an embedded starship close to the approximate front of the interstellar vagrant. Though their exact meaning was unclear – blades, skulls and haphazard lines and crude faces – their import was immediate.
‘Orks,’ said Arjac, earning himself another look from the Great Wolf for speaking the obvious. It did not deter him from continuing, his gaze moving to Njal, who was watching the unfolding scene with furrowed brow. ‘This is the green monster that haunts your wyrd-dreams, Stormcaller?’
The Rune Priest simply grunted, lost in thought.
‘It is what we expected to find,’ said Logan, a finger stroking down one of his long canine teeth. ‘What we wanted to find.’
‘It is good to have the reports confirmed, all the same,’ added Gammalr Jarl-Taken, the ship’s non-Space Marine master.
A former aspirant to become one of the Wolf King’s gene-sons, Gammalr had once been a tall, proud youth. Now he was a twisted, bent-backed veteran, his bones slowly warping with the effect of the genhancements that should have strengthened them. Were it not for the exoskeletal supports the Wolf Priests had fused into his flesh, his chin would have been below his waist. As it was, his creased face was etched with the pain he felt every moment, yet the willpower that had endured – though his body had not – meant that he never uttered a word of complaint.
Though he could not serve the Allfather as a Space Marine, he had found his place among the fleet. His quarters were free from the artificial gravity of the rest of the ship; the weightlessness granted brief times of respite for his tortured bones. He had risen to master of the Gylfarheim over the many years of his thralldom and when the Great Wolf had transferred his standard to the Allfather’s Honour, Gammalr had been the only officer he had brought across.
‘The last sighting was by a deep Naval patrol at the Aelheim Gap, but before then it drifted through the Navinundum and Bryas systems,’ he continued. As he spoke his bony fingers manipulated the display controls, replacing a quarter of the screen with a star map of the surrounding systems. ‘That was twenty days and forty-three light years ago.’
‘It is slipping into and out of the Everdusk,’ said Njal, grimacing as he turned to face the Great Wolf. Golden motes glittered in his eyes and his breath came in a light mist as the temperature dropped around him. ‘This is the edgespace of the Rift, its grip weak and inconsistent, the rippling end of a tendril extending from the wyrdsea into our realm. I can feel it, but there is a power in the hulk that is responding. Something the orks have created or found is keeping them from being dragged deeper and deeper into the wyrdsea, like a wreck that keeps surfacing.’
Arjac was well aware of the swirl of unnatural energy that pulsed into and out of focus at the edge of the star system. At the moment it seemed nothing more than a heat haze that blurred the distant stars, but it was pregnant with terrible energy, likely to burst forth as a wyrdstorm without warning.
‘You mean they are steering this thing?’ said the Great Wolf, his hand falling to the arm of his throne as he leaned forward to stare at the growing stellar monstrosity on the display.
‘Perhaps “steer” is not the word,’ said Njal. the wyrdsign around him dissipating as he spoke. ‘Influence? Just as those engines we see burning can do only a little to alter its trajectory in realspace, the device I have felt is nothing like a warp engine. More a drag anchor, pulling the whole mess back into the universe, stopping it from straying too far into the wyrdsea.’
‘Even so, that marks them as a greater threat than most,’ said Logan. He wagged a finger at Gammalr. ‘Project a course from the previous sightings.’
‘Give me a moment, Great Wolf,’ said the shipmaster, turning to the controls. None spoke for a minute and more while servitors babbled the computations required. Gammalr directed their attention to the display. ‘These are very rough estimates, without any consultation with the astropaths or Navigators about warp conditions.’
The stellar schematic swelled to half the display, almost obscuring the drifting space hulk as it wallowed against the backdrop of half-seen energy. A broadening cone of deviation extended to the galactic east, towards the core. Grimnar stood up, fingers laced together as he took a pace to the left and then to the right, head slightly tilted as he examined the detail.
The Great Wolf cleared his throat.
‘Further south,’ he said, pointing. He indicated half a dozen previous star systems. ‘See, there’s almost a loop here, as if they were coming to a new heading each time.’
‘Heading somewhere on purpose?’ said Arjac.
‘Maybe,’ said Gammalr. He adjusted the controls and a new rune appeared – the symbol for Fenris, several thousand light years to the south-west. It seemed to be at the hub of the arc indicated by the Great Wolf.
‘Going around us?’ Grimnar laughed with incredulity. He turned to the master with a raised eyebrow. ‘You think they are avoiding Fenris?’
‘I couldn’t say, Great Wolf,’ confessed Gammalr. ‘Just an observation.’
A figure that had been silent for the whole council now stepped forward. Ulrik the Slayer, eldest and sternest of the Chapter’s Wolf Priests regarded the map with a curled lip, revealing a thick fang.
‘Like raiders keeping clear of the fort,’ he growled. ‘Picking off prey on the boundary.’
‘This is the limit of our reach,’ said Njal. ‘Unless you wish to plunge into the Everdusk itself, we cannot follow them further.’
‘We can, if we choose,’ said Ulrik. ‘If the Great Wolf commands it, it shall be done. This is not the only ork that crosses our territory. Whole fleets, not just raiders, and there will be more hulks that we haven’t found. Some are heading westwards, towards the traitors, probably to start wars. Others have been pushed eastwards and towards the core stars.’
‘The Ironhold bars their route to the west,’ said Gammalr. ‘House Kamidar and their allies guard that area of space.’
‘Oh, and you’ve received word from Kamidar, have you?’ Logan said quietly. ‘Some astropathic message that wasn’t brought to me?’
‘No, Great Wolf,’ replied Gammalr, casting his gaze down at the deck. ‘We’ve heard nothing.’
Fenrir whined in sympathy and lay on the deck, head on paws.
‘No. No word from the Black Templars that left to crusade along the Aerrfold Drift. Nothing from Kamidar. No clear message from the Palace of the Allfather.’ The Great Wolf’s wrinkles deepened as he frowned and he lifted a hand, examining his fingers as they closed into a fist. ‘All we have is what we see and touch. A handful of companies from scattered Chapters, no more than a score of Naval ships that have put themselves at my command, less than a dozen Imperial Guard regiments likewise. And ourselves.’
‘And if that is not enough?’ said Arjac. ‘Our fiercest and bravest are upon this ship, but even we have limits. Just as you cannot make a sword from an thimbleful of steel, you cannot defeat a foe with warriors that don’t exist.’
‘We have no choice,’ Ulrik snapped. ‘This is our battle.’
‘What guardians would you set at your wall, knowing they would let any foe past and instead trust to the gates of the keep?’ said Grimnar. ‘And standing at that wall, not knowing if the keep was held, would you do anything less than give your life to bar all attack?’
‘We cannot be everywhere,’ said Arjac. He looked at the space hulk, full of misgiving. ‘Our brotherhood, the word of our continuing fight that spreads hope and resistance, is all that stands between a hundred worlds and surrender to the enemy. We are one Great Company–’
‘We are the Champions of Fenris,’ said the Great Wolf. ‘We do not shirk battle. It is clear these orks meant to elude us, but they have failed and will now learn why they had good cause to wish us ignorant of them.’
‘There is not a foe I would not crush gladly at your side, but my concern is not for the enemy,’ the hearthegn insisted. He thrust a finger out, not towards the command display but the main oculus, a rectangle of yards-thick armaglass that framed the glitter of stars and the spark of the distant engines of the Ironjarl. The unnerving half-hue of the warp rift that had torn apart the galaxy fluttered across the distant starfield. ‘The Everdusk is right there. It could swallow the whole hulk in minutes, with us aboard. You want me to go and hit it with my hammer, perhaps?’
Rather than showing amusement, the Great Wolf’s expression soured further.
‘Death stalks us in many forms, my hearthegn.’
The way his lord inflected the title was like acid in Arjac’s chest. It was the first time his position as Champion had felt like a weapon used against him. Shamed, he could say nothing.
‘A laser blast, a shell, the claws of a tyranid screamer-killer,’ growled Ulrik. ‘Every time we breach the wyrdsea we risk an eternity of howling insanity. It is the duty of every Space Marine to put themselves between death and others. It is an honour as sons of Russ that we may do so!’
More than on any battlefield, with enemies uncounted coming to cut his thread, Arjac wished he was in the forges, working hammer and anvil alone. Yet what needed to be said had fallen to him, and to be afraid of the consequences of those words would make him more of a coward than fleeing battle.
‘I do not wish to appear craven, and I certainly mean no insult to the bravery of the Great Wolf,’ he said slowly, picking his words as he might select ingots of iron, examining each for any flaw that might cause it to later fail. ‘But it is not only my duty as your hearthegn to guard you against all peril, it is my honour to stand between you and catastrophe. Never have so many looked to the Great Wolf for leadership. There is not one among us that can bear that weight as well as you. We are the guards at the wall, there is nobody behind us, no keep, and you are our captain. I believe, I know, that if you fall, darkness will take everything we have sworn to protect.’
‘Yet still I must go, for if I do not face this battle, I can face none,’ Logan said, his gaze distant, as though seeing something beyond the display on the screen. ‘The Imperium is breaking, but our bonds to it, our oaths to those we fight alongside, must hold to the last. If I relent now, I am not the leader you claim I need to be. I will not let others fight my battles, whether the Queen of Kamidar… or my Champion.’
