The wolftime, p.7
The Wolftime, page 7
As he listened to the Great Wolf’s declaration, Arjac said nothing, accepting his lord’s judgement. He fixed his eyes upon Logan Grimnar to mask his discontent as the Lord of Fenris continued.
‘Night has fallen and I am the Wolf that Stalks Between Stars.’ His hand moved to the grip of the red-bladed weapon by the side of his throne – the Axe Morkai, forged of a traitor’s weapon and now turned against those that betrayed the Allfather. As though giving an oath, the Great Wolf stood, the axe held in both hands before him. ‘We stand upon the brink of the bottomless abyss. I hear the howling in the darkness. The Wolftime comes. When the Wolf King returns, I will stand proud in his presence for I will know I have been a worthy heir.’
And so plans had been laid, with Arjac placed in the flank force as a reminder that Logan Grimnar needed no Champion to fight for him.
Arjac smashed his hammer to the left and right, but trying to carve a path through the orks was like forging upriver in a firstspring flood. Notch-edged blades crashed and clattered from his armour while chugging engines powered ripping teeth that screeched over the curves of ceramite. The power stack inside the Anvil Shield grew hotter as near-constant scrawls of energy burned across its surface, flaring amid the blows. For every step Arjac pushed forward, half a dozen foes had to fall.
The scrum of combat barely registered in his conscious thought, the ebb and flow of snarling bestial faces secondary to the hovering blur of sensorium readings massed around the Great Wolf’s signal. Arjac checked the range meter. A quarter of a mile stood between him and Logan, yet it might as well have been a thousand for all the chance of him reaching the Great Wolf. While his hammer arm rose and fell without hesitation, as though beating upon the anvil in the forges of the Aett, Arjac surveyed his surrounds for some means to break free of the greenskins.
His attention fell on the sensorium subview of himself from one of his companions behind. For a split second, Arjac saw himself like a jutting rock in a frothing wave of broken ork bodies and swinging cleaver blades.
‘Skor!’ The hearthegn lunged sideways, crushing an ork against the bulkhead with his shoulder plate. ‘Burn me a path!’
In the display, Skor’s gaze panned left and right, scanning across the corridor. Arjac’s suit gleamed bright in the augmented view.
‘I have no clear target,’ the Wolf Guard replied.
‘My armour will protect me. The orks’ armour won’t!’ Arjac bludgeoned a pair of foes with a wide swing, giving himself room to turn. ‘Do it now!’
Swinging his shield towards the rest of the squad, Arjac braced himself. A heartbeat later a sheet of burning promethium washed past him, lapping at the Anvil Shield amid fronds of blue energy. The inferno splashed across the orks, igniting armour, melting flesh down to charred bone. For several seconds, Arjac’s view was nothing but the whiteout of his auto-senses, armour warnings shrieking as the temperature continued to rise.
But his warplate had been forged to withstand the fury of a plasma blast and did not yield to a heavy flamer. Bursting from a heap of smouldering alien corpses, Arjac powered into a run. Streams of molten ceramite slipped away into cooling droplets that rattled on the deck behind him.
Ahead of him more orks opened fire, their crude guns spitting such a hail of bullets that their lack of accuracy was no impediment to their effectiveness. Still superheated from the flamer burst, his armour cracked and splintered with impacts while heavier blasts from outlandish energy weapons scored deep wounds in its artificial skin.
The other konigard had abandoned any attempt at a formed withdrawal and were hurrying after Arjac, fifty yards behind. More projectiles, arcs of greenish lightning and sputtering rockets pursued them.
Still he was not fast enough. The corridor between the storage bay gave way to a cluster of wide hallways flanked by smaller chambers, thronged with alien foes. Everything was a clamour of overlapping noise, but through auto-senses and transhuman hearing Arjac could pick out the distinctive bark of bolters and the battle cries of his Chapter brothers.
A missile detonated on his chest, bringing his focus back to his immediate surroundings as pieces of shattered ceramite sprayed, the impact forcing him back a step. Gritting his teeth, he pulled up the Anvil Shield against another burst of fire. Pain speared along his left side as torn muscle extended. It was gone a moment later, washed away by a flood of war-plate-injected anaesthetic and his augmented body’s hormonal pain suppressors, but it was a stark reminder that he was not invulnerable.
Another came as a high-calibre shell struck the side of his helm from the right, with enough force to have snapped a lesser warrior’s spine and punctured their skull. Arjac rocked as more hits slammed into him while another missile burst against the Anvil Shield.
‘Keep going!’ bellowed Halfhelm, arriving beside Arjac with his own storm shield raised, catching the next volley of explosive shells on its broad surface.
Scything fire from Herjolf and Hrothgar snarled past the pair, cutting down a handful of orks in the vestibule between the Wolf Guard and the hall where the rendezvous point had been set. Torfin plunged forward on the left, armour alight with sparking ricochets as he hit the ork line like a harpoon piercing the skin of a whaler’s prey.
Heartened by his companions’ arrival, Arjac advanced with them. His body and armour was stiff on the left side, giving him a slight limp, but the hearthegn kept pace with the rest of the squad, pushing into the lessened enemy fire.
‘Going to rename you Arjac Rockhead,’ growled Hrothgar.
‘Stormcaller’s prophecy,’ said Arjac. ‘The green ogre devours the wolf. I can’t let that happen.’
‘We know,’ said Skor. ‘We know.’
Arjac caught a glimpse of himself in the other Terminator’s vid-feed. His helm was nearly cracked open, congealed blood sealing the rent along the side of his head. The rest of his armour was heavily marked by welts and craters, the adamantium skeleton showing in places.
So close to death. So close to failure.
Bullets flared from Sven’s shield beside Arjac. There was still time for both to find him.
Chapter Four
THE GREENSKIN MENACE
HORDES IN THE DEEP
WEIRDLORD
At times Orad wondered if he had died in the battle and this was the punishment the preachers had warned about. He had been dutiful, served without complaint, had said his prayers. But he could not shake the memory of his moment of surrender, reliving it over and over again. Perhaps the orks had chopped him up or blown holes in his body with their crude pistols after that fist had fallen.
It certainly felt like eternity. There was no day or night – not even the fake cycle of the Naval routine. Nobody spoke. The crack of whips, the crunch of debris, the shouts of the greenskins and the moans of the slaves were the only sounds. Even at the end of their labours everyone was too busy scoffing down mush given to them by their captors that made Navy-issue gruel seem like the height of officer cuisine, drinking cups of water that tasted of rust and piss. And then sleep. A few hours sometimes. The dreams – nightmares – hadn’t lasted long. Mental and physical exhaustion took such a toll that sometimes a person wouldn’t wake up. Comatose or dead, the orks didn’t care.
There were no chains and there were even a few iron bars, bracing rods and other implements lying around that could be improvised into weapons. Nobody even tried. It was clear there would be no escaping this hell. They were in the void: where could you escape to, even if you didn’t get killed straight away?
The warptime had been like nothing Orad had experienced before. The Geller fields had been working, but not very well. Even the orks didn’t disturb their captives during that part of the trip, leaving them to their screaming and bloody suicides. Orad had repeatedly dashed his head against the turret wall, trying to crack open his skull, but he had simply knocked himself out. When he had come round again the visions of screeching baby-faced crows and flaming symbols still tormented him, but he had no more strength to defy them and simply sat in the dark corner of the turret, cradling the decaying remains of Rossi for comfort, rocking back and forth, eyes shut. He must have drunk something somehow, driven by base animal need, but the gnawing in his stomach warned that he had not eaten. Having been well proportioned before the attack he fared better than lots of the remaining crew, many of them little more than bones wrapped in lesion-marked skin.
Leaving the warp had seemed like a blessing, but it only meant a return to the back-breaking labour. The ork ship had been set free but the huge wound had to be patched while wearing bulky environment suits, watched over by captors in heavy sealed armour. Other orkish alterations that made no sense were carried out around them, much of it just for the look, it seemed.
One day the routine changed. The orks forced them aft and down, towards the shuttle bays. There were shouts of anger and pain ahead and when he reached the bay Orad found small greenskins with smoking brands marking each of the slaves on chest, back or shoulder as they passed. Orad gritted his teeth as the mark – a crude glyph that looked something like a rocket – was seared into his left pectoral. He was thrust forward by an ork, into the bay. There were still Naval craft here as well as orkish landers. The slaves were herded upon these with more whip-cuts and crackling livestock prods, filling the holds of the atmocraft until no more could be fitted in. Orad found himself wedged next to the port of a former supply lighter, his neck crooked to the left, hand trapped against a bulkhead.
‘I hope these things are still sealed,’ muttered someone behind him. ‘If they’ve broken the atmolocks, we’re all dead.’
The clanking of the Rigorous’ outer doors drew the attention of those that could see. The massive plasteel shutters moved out of sight, revealing a starfield half-hidden by an orange-brown world. Quite clearly, just a few miles away, a grotesque moonlike space station hung above the planet.
The drop-ship lifted away, yawing too fast, rolling to one side as thrusters erratically spat plasma, throwing the living cargo towards the back of the compartment. Someone yelled in pain, bellowing that their ankle was broken amid growled complaints and threats. As the craft swung towards the station, Orad had a view of the Rigorous. He could see the gouge in the dorsal decks where the ork attack ship had slammed into the light cruiser – the same ship was actually attached to the Imperial vessel by hundreds of cables near the prow, acting as a tow-craft. Orad wouldn’t have believed it, once, but now he was so emotionally broken it barely registered as a surprise. More small craft like their own swarmed from the docking bays.
They passed the station and continued planetwards, glimpsing the artificial moon through the viewports, ork cruisers and escorts docked with dozens of gantries extended from its poles. Those that could watched the orb of the planet growing until it filled the viewports and flames of re-entry crackled across the fuselage. Fear had been crushed along with every other feeling in the long journey, but now it returned strongly as the touch of gravity started to pull on the packed slaves and a bright star shone through the viewports. Craning his neck, Orad could look below with one eye pressed against the armaglass as they passed through a thick bank of smog. They were only a few miles up and a huge city sprawled across ochre hills, ten or more miles across. Black smoke billowed from hundreds of works, and dust clouds choked the streets and rose from roadways and tracks leading out past the city limits. The rising sun glinted on metal battlements and half-built war engines that towered over the city.
Then the view was gone, obscured by cranes and immense quay-like platforms where blunt-nosed starships took shape and orbital craft landed in a stream.
The doors opened and the former crew of the Rigorous stumbled blinking onto the ork world, utterly lost and bewildered but welcomed by the familiar crack of whips and hoarse voices.
The beast will rise and the wolf will howl its rage.
Words softly spoken that would echo for centuries. Njal knew better than to think of prophecy as anything more solid than a stirring in the wyrd, a shifting of possible fates. Even so, such predictions had a different kind of power, to shape the wyrd itself so that outcome mirrored expectation.
There was a risk to those who followed the calling of the runethegn to delve deeper and deeper into the mysteries of wyrd, thinking that knowledge could bring greater control; that to understand a thing was to gain power over it. True wisdom, Njal had learnt from bitter experience, was to know that the wyrd was no more than an echo of things that might be, and to listen too intently was to drift from the here and now of the Verse. Here, where words were spoken and actions taken, that was where wyrd could be shaped. By forcing reality to their will a great person could forge their own wyrd, or at least nudge the vagaries of fate to their favour.
There was no better example of this than the township the orks had ripped into the bowels of the ancient starship. The orks did not synergise, did not reach compromise, did not attain symbiosis with their surroundings. They brought their orkishness to everything, bending and breaking the mould of a place until it suited them. Njal was the Stormcaller, a master of the elements, and recognised another elemental force writ on a galactic scale. Like a storm or tidal wave or earthquake, the orks tore down everything they encountered and left nothing but ruin behind. But while they lingered they were the centre of power and about them all other things revolved, including wyrd.
The orks had built a shanty fort with a curtain wall topped by a serrated-toothed rampart, amid a great void gouged into the hulk. In brutal cross-section the ragged ends of access pipes and upper decks, maintenance passages and crew dorms surrounded the artificial cavern, giving the place the air of a cathedral to destruction. It stretched credulity to find this fortress heaped upon the ruin in the midst of a starship, but to the orks it was as natural as if they had settled upon a world or moon.
A few hundred yards ahead of Njal, his psyber-raven, Nightwing, swept through the darkness unseen, its eyes showing the Stormcaller what lay beyond mortal sight. All around the former reactor and engines of the bulk hauler, the orks had ripped down walls and torn up decks. The wreckage of smashed bulkheads and plates of looted plasteel had been fashioned into new abodes to the preference of the aliens. Old power systems had been torn out and replaced with smog-belching generators so that the air was a fog of oily stench, lit through with sparks that cascaded from haphazard power lines and flickering pylons. Screeches and grunts mingled with a machine pounding and the bellows of the orks, echoing back from the broken walls of the cavern in unpredictable ways. Daubed in dried blood and oil-black glyphs, with ragged banners and fetish-hung icons standing proud, the fortress was their domain, an extension of the warlord that dwelt within.
Nightwing flitted above streets and roofs which teemed with orks and scores of smaller greenskins. Cannon blasts and energy beams greeted the company of the Great Wolf as they broke from the maze of corridors and chambers around the fortress cavern. The intent behind the orks’ forays into the passages beyond became immediately clear – to circle around and trap the intruders against the defences and prevent retreat.
Coming upon this stronghold, the squads of the Great Wolf slowed. Their uncertainty was like a haze in Njal’s thoughts, spreading across the force as each warrior reacted to the hesitation of his neighbours. The Great Wolf needed no wyrdsight to detect the subtle faltering and his vox-call carried his voice across the din of guns and orkish shouts.
‘Our foes have raised themselves an aett!’ he cried, laughter in his voice.
He thrust the Axe Morkai towards the ramshackle construction, its red-steel blades glinting as though freshly slicked with blood. Njal could sense the hungry spirit of the weapon bound within the runic metal, straining at its bonds, demanding its thirst be slaked with violence. Logan seemed unaffected by its pulsing desire and continued his mockery even as he headed towards the orks. The rest of the force came with him as though he was a beast pulling a chariot, the squads drawn forward by his unwavering advance.
‘Look upon that fearsome wall! Surely no other defence has ever borne such vicious fangs. Careful, sons of Fenris, this beast may bite!’
It was impossible to be sure of the orks’ numbers. Just as the ships’ augurs had not detected the fort through the mass of the hulk, so the density of fungal growths and sub-sentient orkoid creatures mocked any attempt at life scans. Fungal blooms larger than battle tanks encrusted the ragged walls, years old. Feral hunting things with snapping jaws launched themselves at the oncoming Space Marines, met with blades and chainswords to conserve ammunition for the greater challenge ahead.
Ulrik the Slayer strode alongside his lord, weapon coughing bolts, the winged wolf skull of his crozius blazing with disruptive energy. He lifted up the symbol of unity between Fenris and the Imperium, its gleam bright in the gloom of the ork domain.
‘Across the realm of the Allfather, the orks seek to prosper and breed again,’ he bellowed, using the external address rather than the vox, voice booming back from the fortress walls and the enclosing hulk. ‘They have issued forth from their starless lairs and squat in the ashes of their conquests on worlds that belong to the Allfather. Their grunts echo in our halls and their filth stinks in streets of human cities. These were worlds we swore to protect. This is a foe we swore to slay. Now the time is upon us to see those oaths fulfilled! This is the time of the great reckoning when we become the fire that burns down the old so that the new may grow. It is we, the Wolves of Fenris, that will be the ruinbringers today!’
Ork weapons at the battlement spat energy beams and shells. Returning fire, the warriors of Grimnar continued to advance, splitting their line to divide the enemy’s attention. Faced with heavier weaponry they used the remains of torn walls and heaped masonry to guard their approach, their progress through the dark-shrouded perimeter heralded by the flare of storm bolter fire and the gleam of power weapons. Terminators with their own heavy weapons were called to the fore and set up counter-fire. Streams of Cyclone missiles burst along the ramparts with blossoms of fire and iron, while screaming volleys of assault cannon rounds scythed down the aliens skulking beyond.
