by Various
The Keta Rho swam into the real-view portal, still powering along the same trajectory towards its target, and Bjorn unlocked the codes he needed. Hundreds of metres below him, the broadside batteries slammed open, primed for firing.
‘They have detected our course change,’ reported Godsmote.
‘Too late,’ said Bjorn, activating the gunnery release.
Iota Malephelos continued on its trajectory, flying clumsily now that the secondary guidance crews were all dead, and launched its full payload at the Keta Rho. The space around it sizzled with coruscation as the guns all fired at once, hurling a storm of ship-killing shells across the narrowing gap between them. Keta Rho attempted evasive action at the last moment, but it was too close to escape. In a series of sharp impacts, its facing flank was peppered with cannon bursts, shattering the void shields and penetrating down to the hull plates below.
Immediately, other Alpha Legion vessels started to home in on Iota Malephelos’ position, now alive to the switch of allegiance.
‘Come about for another pass,’ said Bjorn, watching the tactical display fill with enemy signals and wondering how long they’d last.
Godsmote made the adjustments just as the chronometer hit the two-hour mark. Almost instantly, the fallback order came over the fleet comm.
Lord Gunn had had enough – even he wouldn’t see the fleet ripped apart to salvage his pride. All across the battlesphere, assault rams, boarding boats and gunships would already be streaking back to their hangars, covered by whatever escorts had survived the initial melee.
The Keta Rho still lived, and was turning to bring its own weapons to bear. Six other enemy ships were hurrying up from the starboard nadir, all zeroing in on the Iota Malephelos.
‘What are your orders?’ asked Godsmote.
Bjorn didn’t need to look at the tactical displays to know what he needed to do. It made him sick to contemplate it, but there were no alternatives.
‘Broadcast the new ident,’ he snarled, tasting – again – the pain of retreat. ‘Then full-burn, back with the rest.’
Gunn remained at the helm of Ragnarok, glaring grimly out across the bridge of the enormous battleship. Below him, ranked across the dozens of terraces radiating out from the command dais, hundreds of mortals and servitors struggled to enact the withdrawal command without getting the ship destroyed. Alpha Legion vessels streaked in from every direction, now at full velocity, aiming to pierce the outer defensive shell and get in among the more damaged warships.
‘Maintain the perimeter,’ warned Gunn, flagging up a weakness in the sector held by Fenrysavar. ‘Get the gunships landed. Skítja, we need to pull those torpedoes out.’
The entire Wolves fleet was contracting, pulling in on itself and swivelling into retreat trajectories. It was a dangerous time, risking exposing the battleships’ flanks before they could power up to full speed again. Some captured vessels were responding to the command, but not enough to replace those lost in the fury of the counter-assault. The claustrophobic dimensions of the gas tunnel hindered them further, since straying into its margins would be as catastrophic as a full lance-battery strike, so everything was tight, constricted by the volume of incoming fire as well as the collapsing dimensions of the battlesphere.
Gunn glanced down at the full-range hololith, noting the positions of the battleships. The Hrafnkel had remained in the centre of the formation, somehow eking out even more ranged support from its ravaged gun batteries; it was the linchpin around which the rest of the fleet was turning.
He stared at the flickering image before him, feeling a kind of hatred for it. The primarch was aboard that ship, lurking in his chambers, lost in a surly indifference. He should have been here, leading the charge. Lord Gunn was a veteran of centuries of warfare, but was under no illusions about the disparity in shipmastery between the two of them. Perhaps Russ could have done it. He’d have summoned up something, dragged out from the depths and hurled into the enemy’s treacherous faces. That was what he was for – to do the impossible, to haul the Legion out of the mire and set it loping back into the hunt.
‘Lord, the fleet is pulling clear,’ reported Ragnarok’s navigation master. ‘Trajectory has been set – are we joining them?’
Even as the man spoke, fresh shudders radiated up from Ragnarok’s bowels. More impacts followed – solid rounds, torpedoes, las-bursts, all raking along shield-arcs that were already close to failing. If Gunn closed his eyes he could feel the ship’s agony, cut with a thousand wounds and bleeding into the vacuum.
He could order a final charge. He could send the battleship surging into the oncoming Alpha Legion vanguard, destroying as much of it as he could before they snapped the ship’s neck at last. They might even board before the end, and he’d die like a warrior, the corpses of his enemies piled high around him on the command bridge.
Then I would slay with a smile, he thought.
‘Pull away,’ Gunn ordered, forcing the words out. ‘Cover the retreat. Maintain ordnance barrage. We will be the last to fall back.’
Then he turned, his huge shoulders a fraction lower, and looked away from the forward oculus, sickened by it.
II
The runes.
Images carved into ever-firelit stone and iron, crude to the casual eye, but then they were never carved for the attention of casual eyes. Those of the Vlka Fenryka knew how to look at them, how to read them, how to mark the balance and the weight and the under-meaning.
No Fenrisian sigil had a horizontal stroke – every incision was vertical or diagonal, gouged out by the tip of a burin or a killing blade. The greatest shape-smiths of the ice world, the volundr, spent as long crafting their tools as they did etching the sacred sigils, for the tools were charged with marking the blank screens of wood, stone, metal or bone with devices that would last for eternity. The creators breathed out the name of the rune as they worked, hunched amid shadows, fixing the contour of it against the material, binding two souls together, creating something greater than the mark and the marked.
It could take a decade to complete an inscription. If an error was made, the wood would be burned, the stone smashed, the metal melted, the bone shattered. The volundr embellished the meaning-bearing script with knotwork patterns, traced in razor-slender lines around the ranked rows of sigils, calling up the souls of wyrms, of eyeless creatures from the Fenrisian deep-dark, of black-barked yews, of venerated blades of renown. No cut was made without deliberation and no symbol was idly chosen, for the lattice of sigils and emblems carried its own meaning.
The Fenryka knew, as they had always known, that the cuts warded against the soul-eaters, for the under-realm was made of ideas, and every idea was a word, and every word had its rune.
Thus the work was not decoration. It was metaphysics.
The primarch Leman Russ knew all this. He knew it as completely as any living soul, and understood more of the ways of the runes than even the greatest of his smiths, for he was made of the same stuff from which the tapestry of fate was woven, and the runes penetrated his being in a way that none of his warriors would ever truly understand.
And yet they had known of the rune-marks for longer than him. Fenrisians had understood the sacred forms for as long as men had lived on the death world, and men had lived on the death world for longer than the Imperium had been in existence. Runes had been carved on bone fragments out on the ever-moving ice long before Russ came among the vlka, when they were used to keep the worst of the cold from the flicker-circles of fire pits. The old gothi had mumbled eternal truths from under layers of cured hides, turning the bone-tokens over in gnarled hands, communing with the pulse and beat of the world-soul as their violent home churned its way through the sea of stars.
This was not always well understood, not even by the wise: the primarchs were strangers to their people. They had no home worlds, not even Terra; all they had to their names wer
e adoptive subjects, who moulded them, and were moulded in turn, until something new was created, something which might be strong or might be broken, but was always a hybrid, whose provenance was shrouded by the capricious games of labyrinthine deities.
Every gene-son of the Emperor, in the dark of the doubting night, could wonder how much of his psyche had been forged in the amniotic tanks of the Hearthworld, and how much on the plains and forests and deserts of the planets they had been scattered to. Every one of them could hear the corrosive whispers in their dreams: you are the stranger, you were not meant for this place, your people are not your own.
Even the Lord of Winter and War, the living embodiment of Fenris, clad in wolf pelts, his frost-blue eyes the colour of the arch of Asaheim, heard those whispers.
And he heard them strongly now, as he squatted fur-draped on the stone floor of his chamber, letting bone-tokens run through his scarred fingers. Those fingers had spent most of their time clasping an axe. They had never been used to craft or to caress, so they were broad fingers, the flesh as hard as boiled leather, underpinned by adamantium-like bones.
For a long time, knowing what he knew of his own strength, Russ had doubted whether it was possible for a primarch to be truly hurt, let alone killed. Now he knew that both were possible, for he had done it himself. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the look of startled horror in Magnus’ lone eye, moments before the screaming warp-hurricane had ripped his broken body into fragments.
In his dreams, he heard his brother’s final words before the end, just as the glass pyramids shattered.
You are a sword in the wrong hands, my brother. You have severed an innocent neck, and it will plague you forever.
Russ had given the words no thought at the time, for every man, legionary and demigod he had ever slain had pleaded for his life before the end – they always did, clawing at life like a starving whelp for the teat. In any case, he had hated Magnus. He had hated him completely for what he was and for what he pretended to be.
And yet. And yet.
He picked up the rune-tokens and cast them down again. They fell in a loose clatter, tracing out the swirl of future-lines graven on the stone. Some fell facedown, and were ignored. Others showed their mark to the sullen light of the fires.
Ahlwaz. Gugnir. Dag. Rizam. Izhad.
What did it mean? Russ relaxed his exhausted eyes, red-rimmed from two weeks without sleep, letting them lose focus as he attempted to peer beyond the material realm.
There is a pattern. They speak. The Allfather is silent, but the runes speak. There is a pattern.
If that were so, he could not see it. He persevered, opening his mind to possibility. There was a glimmer, for a moment, just on the edge of the senses, then nothing.
From the velvet shadows, Freki growled, a rumble that curled along the floor like spilled oil. The two true-wolves were slumped at the edge of the light-circle, barred from entering the runes’ ward. Geri, the wiser of the two, made no sound.
Russ looked up at them and cracked a dry smile. ‘Wasting my time?’ he asked, scratching the stubble on his chin. ‘Aye, perhaps.’
Then he looked up and around, tracing his gaze across the chamber. Old blades hung from chains, twisting gently. The braziers burned low, emitting only dull light and little heat. The place reeked of embers and old sweat – smells of confinement. The door had been locked for a long time, and none of his people would dare cross the threshold unless he summoned them.
One rune remained facedown, the one that always did so. However Russ threw the tokens, the Bear never showed itself.
‘I read one thing right, though,’ Russ mused. ‘We are beaten from the same ingot, he and I.’
Geri looked up at her master, golden eyes unblinking. Russ clambered to his knees. He stretched his huge arms out, feeling the muscles flex, missing the weight of Mjalnar. Then he paused, his hearts beating heavily, and listened.
There were no sounds, save for the ragged breath of wolves and the spit of the coals, underlaid by the ever-present grind of the colossal engines that drove Hrafnkel through the twists and shafts of the Alaxxes Nebula.
‘Deeper in,’ Russ breathed, knowing what the fleet was being driven to.
He could have gone back then. He could have taken command again, wresting it from Gunn, who only knew how to fight the old wars and whose soul was already half-dragged into the cold grip of Morkai. The others would have welcomed it. Their eyes would have shone again, for the Wolf King would be back among them, and surely he would have answers, and the pattern of war would swing around again, and the Wolves would go back to being the masters of their own fate, to being the feared, the killers.
They had been those things for so long: telling the stories to one another, building the psychology of invincibility, taking on the mantle of the exceptional. It had shielded them, for a time. What they believed, they had become. For a while, they had lived up to the impossible, and he had let them, sharing in the glory, watching as the galaxy learned terror from them.
He could have gone back. Sooner or later, he would have to.
Freki growled again, showing disdain. Geri remained silent.
Slowly, Leman Russ, primarch of the VI Legion, reached down for the runes again.
Gunn reached his own chambers at the summit of Ragnarok’s command spire later than he’d intended. Everything seared at his nerves, goading him, provoking the rage that made him superlative when the shape of war allowed it. All that rage was wasted now, locked inside the iron coffin of his starship, unable to find expression where it belonged – on the field of battle, his enemy within range of bolter or blade, close enough to smell.
Now the Wolves were retreating again, mauled again, piling deeper into the unknown, and the shame of it gnawed away at him. Twenty vessels, including the strike cruiser Runeblade, had been lost in the assault, and only seven successfully retrieved by boarding squads. Three more ships had been lost to the enemy on the retreat, unable to maintain the pace and swallowed up by Alpha Legion hunters snapping at their heels. Another had been enveloped in the acidic gas clouds during the full-about manoeuvre and had been dragged with agonising slowness into the metal-chewing heart of the clouds. The core of the Legion’s vessels remained intact, though savaged again, and now had to maintain full speed from damaged engines even as the routes into the cluster’s heart grew narrower and more perilous.
Damn the Khan, Gunn thought.
The White Scars had been in range during the first assault, and they had surely known the odds the VI Legion faced. It still wasn’t clear why they had chosen not to come to their aid – had they too turned from the Allfather’s side? It was easy enough to imagine that they had. Perhaps it was this that had snapped Russ’ resolve. Until the Khan’s failure, the primarch had been his old defiant self; afterwards, the fire had died.
Gunn slammed his fist against the door-release, and the iron panel slid open. The chamber beyond was just like all the others on Ragnarok – barely lit, thick with the aromas of coal ash and burnished metal, decked out sparsely with age-blackened wood and fittings of iron.
Two Wolves waited for him inside – his second-in-command Skrier Strikes-Slow, long dreadlocked hair framing a sharp face latticed with scars, and Aesir, whose augmetic chin line glistened metallically in the gloom.
Other figures flickered as hololiths, transmitted from their own ships, since inter-vessel transport at such speeds had become too insanely dangerous even for Fenrisian crews. Ogvai was the foremost of those, brooding in a luminous shroud of pale green.
Lord Gunn joined the circle. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Defeat, again, and now running.’ No one replied. The silence was damning in itself – running, the foulest word. ‘And where is he in all this? Has he spoken?’
Ogvai shook a weary head. The Nidhoggur had been in the thick of the fighting, and was still in flames across its lower levels.
‘We are all curs at the table now.’
‘Then what do we do?’ asked Gunn. ‘He will not hear me.’
‘He knows what you would say,’ said Ogvai.
‘We wait,’ said Skrier. The Strikes-Slow moniker was a piece of Wolves mordancy – he was the fastest blade in the Great Company and had a kill-tally of nineteen Alpha Legionnaires from both boarding actions. ‘He communes with the gothi. He searches for the wyrd-path.’
‘He is the primarch,’ muttered Aesir.
‘And what if he is?’
‘I did not swear my blade to a rune-reader,’ said Gunn. ‘I saw him fight on Shrike, and that was the Wolf King.’
‘None of us are the same now,’ said Ogvai. ‘Not like we were on Shrike.’
‘We can be. He should be fighting, not sulking on Hrafnkel.’
Aesir looked uneasy, as did some others. They all had their doubts, but Russ was still the Legion’s master.
‘So what do you say, Gunnar?’ asked Ogvai. ‘Just whining to ease your stomach, or do you have something for me to listen to?’
Gunn hesitated. Treachery had spread so far throughout the body of the Imperium that the slightest intimation of insubordination felt dangerous. In truth, he did not know what he wished for, other than to have things back the way they were: Russ with fire in his old belly and cursing the enemy from between spittle-laced fangs, and for he himself to be the old shield-bearer, at his master’s side, doing what they had all been gene-bred to do.
He tried to gauge how the others felt, what they would be ready to do, how to take them with him. He was aware of his inadequacy then – he was a warrior, a skull-taker, not a diplomat.
‘We cannot run forever,’ he said, sticking to what they all knew was true. ‘We have not mapped the inside of the cloud – the tunnels will close around us, and we will have to turn. There will be a reckoning, and we cannot fail a third time. We must find a way.’ A note of something like desperation entered his voice then. He heard it in himself, but could not suppress it. ‘There will be a way.’