by Various
Some heads nodded. A low murmur of approval, laced with throat-catching growls, echoed over the vox from those on other ships.
‘And the Wolf King?’ asked Ogvai.
Gunn gave him a steady look.
‘There is more to the Legion than the primarch,’ he said, hating the words as they spilled from his mouth, though not wishing to take them back. ‘Perhaps that is what fate is teaching us here.’
The captured Iota Malephelos rattled through the twisting capillaries along with the rest of the fleet, now flanked by corvettes bearing Space Wolves livery. In the final moments before the retreat had gathered full pace, a few transports of kaerls had been landed, giving the vessel a skeleton VI Legion crew. Bjorn’s pack had then gone through the rest of the ship methodically: killing the remaining senior Alpha Legion menials, securing mid-ranking mortals in the cells until they could be assessed and pressing the lowliest and the servitors into keeping the ship together. Sensor-carrying bomb-crews swept every deck, searching for booby traps left behind and disarming anything that looked remotely suspect.
And because this was an Alpha Legion vessel, everything was suspect, and everything was checked, and then checked again.
Bjorn remained on the command bridge, overseeing the hasty repair of guidance systems damaged during the assault. There was still much to do. The Navigator had sealed himself inside his blast-resistant blister at the summit of the ship’s topmost spire, and they would soon have to find a way to hammer their way inside without fatally compromising the ship’s warp capability. Every cogitator system had been protected by layers of encryption, making all but the most basic operations fiendishly difficult. All they could do for the moment was patch up the damage, hunt down the remainder of the crew and keep the ship on as close an approximation of the void-path as possible.
Bjorn glanced down at a mid-range augur display beamed onto a lens to the left of the command throne. The markers of Alpha Legion pursuers were stubbornly visible just beyond lance-range, never slackening their pace. They were impressively dogged.
Not for the first time, he found himself speculating over what their orders were. Had Alpharius been in communication with Magnus? Had the Khan followed him into treachery? There were plenty of other primarchs who hated the Wolves enough to support their culling – Angron, certainly. Lorgar, possibly. The Lion? An outside chance that he was part of it, though his honour would surely have demanded an open declaration of war.
The frustrating thing was not knowing. They needed to get to Terra, to hear the words of truth from the Allfather’s mouth – until then, all they had were rumours and shadows.
As Bjorn ran through the various scenarios for the hundredth time, a rune suddenly lit up on the close-range sensor array. He augmented the feed. Something was closing in on the Iota Malephelos, travelling fast, seemingly launched from one of the other Wolves ships. He switched to a true-vision monitor, and saw it come in, thrusters burning blue-white, powering hard just to keep pace with the hurtling behemoths around it. Immediately, Iota Malephelos’ anti-ship gunnery trained itself on the intruder, tracking its erratic inbound course.
‘Stand down,’ Bjorn voxed to the gun-crews, hoping that enough of a chain of command had been established for the signal to reach its destination. He pushed himself from the throne and moved from the dais, indicating to the mortal shipmaster, a kaerl taken from the Ragnarok’s complement, to assume command. He knew where the incoming ship would dock, for he had recognised the profile of the vessel – an inter-fleet crew lighter, containing a maximum of four passengers. He had no idea why in Hel they were trying to use one of those at such speeds when there was a functioning vox network available, or even teleporters if they were desperate. Clearly someone had thought it was important to come over in person.
Bjorn hurried down to the sub-bridge receiving hangar, a relatively modest hall in comparison with the cavernous main docking levels below. As he went, he smelled the subtle aromas of the Alpha Legion on every surface – a melange of fragrances, eluding definition, hard to eradicate even if he had been given the chem-teams to hose down the floors and walls.
By the time he reached the hangar’s apron, the void shields over the exit aperture had been withdrawn and the lighter was coming in to land. The vessel touched down heavily, bringing the stink of overheated engines with it. Steam boiled up from the wedge-shaped stabiliser vanes as the undercarriage flexed on the deck, and a blunt embarkation hatch hissed open.
The first two down the ramp were warriors in bone-white Mark II Legion armour, the overlapping plates covered in black-inked runes. They bore images of Morkai on their breastplates and carried long-handled, single-bladed axes the length of force halberds.
Behind them, clanging down the metal, came the third occupant, a massive figure decked in archaic plate. He went helmless, and Bjorn saw white-streaked and plaited hair piled over a lined, tattooed face. The skin was pierced with a dozen metal spikes. He carried a long staff with him, crowned by a slender animal skull and hung with jangling rune-totems.
The atmosphere across the hangar seemed to electrify, and Bjorn felt an itching sensation run down his spine. The two white-clad attendants fell back, allowing their master to limp more clearly into view. Though tall, the gothi seemed strangely withered, as if his body were wasting away within its containing brace of ceramite.
Bjorn knew the name of this one, just as all in the Legion knew it: Kva Who-Is-Divided, the Wolf King’s counsellor.
‘Then you are the Fell-Handed,’ the Rune Priest said, in a voice that sounded like claws scraping through coal shards.
‘One-Handed, jarl,’ Bjorn corrected. ‘Named that way since Prospero.’
Kva fixed him unsteadily with two black-pinned eyes, their irises as deep and rich as polished bronze. The Rune Priest looked unfocused, as if not sure where or when he was. A faint tang of ritual incense rose from his gorget collar. ‘For now,’ he said eventually, his cracked lips twitching. ‘You will come with me.’
Bjorn hesitated. He had much to do just to keep the Iota Malephelos from spinning apart into the void, and no warning had come in from the Hrafnkel. ‘On whose command?’ he demanded, holding his ground.
Kva shot him a wry look. ‘Whose do you think?’ A serpentine smile twisted across an ever-moving face. ‘He likes you. Consider that a blessing or a burden – your choice.’
He turned without waiting for a reply, and his honour guard fell in alongside him. Bjorn took a quick look around the hangar. It was his prize, one extracted in the face of defeat, and it would have been good to stamp his mark on it.
But orders were orders, and Rune Priests did not expect them to be questioned.
He started walking.
One standard hour after his infiltration, the intruder moved out.
Penetration of the Hrafnkel’s outer hull had been difficult. A Gloriana-class battleship was a vast thing, a sprawling city in space that housed tens of thousands of souls and played host to staged battles across its flanks that the battlefields of Old Terra would scarce have been able to match, but even so the Wolves had been vigilant about their perimeter. His one-man shadow-craft had been forced to dance and spin, running the gauntlet of ferocious flak-scatters while the energies of ship-killing lances blazed and roared through the void.
He’d gone eventually for a knuckle-shaped protuberance hanging below the main engines, a hulking mass of ironwork that had clung like a tumour to the vast cliff of Hrafnkel’s nadir-facing flank. There had been just the tiniest gap in anti-ship las-fire, just the faintest weakening of void-shield coverage – just enough, barely, for his void-sliver to slip into the shadow and break through.
His ship had never made it into the Hrafnkel’s interior. It had been designed to deliver him close enough to enact the boarding cycle and then pull away, back out into the maelstrom of las-beams. Its destruction, nineteen seconds after it had got him w
ithin a hundred metres of the flagship’s side, would register on Hrafnkel’s data recorders, erasing suspicion should the augury of his incoming strike ever be checked by an unusually diligent menial.
A hundred metres of empty void was trivial to traverse, and his power-armoured form had shot across the gap like a shell from a bolter. The steel-grey hull had raced towards him, lit up by the flash of incendiaries bursting across a metallic horizon. He’d slammed into the armour-plates, clamping on with mag-grips, then run a scan and crawled, spiderlike, to the nearest access hatch. Two breacher charges had been fixed, followed by a brief retreat, then a silent explosion.
Seconds after that he was inside, crawling through a metal-latticed interior, latching on to buttress rods and burrowing towards the pressurised zones. He’d located an angle between two brace-beams, perfectly dark, surrounded by thick metal plating. It was thirty metres in from the infiltration point, stinking of oils and foetid bilge-fluids, at least a hundred metres below the nearest inhabited deck.
There he waited. He rode out the shudders as the Hrafnkel took a pounding from the ranged ships beyond. The thought occurred to him more than once that the flagship might be destroyed in the barrage, in which case his mission would have proved both pointless and short. Soon, though, it became apparent that the Wolves’ offensive had failed, as it had always been destined to, and the boom of sub-warp engines powering to full-burn told him that the flagship was resuming its course back into the heart of the cluster.
So he waited until the hour had passed, listening to the countless creaks of the starship’s interior under transit-stress. During that period, he did three things.
First, he ran checks on the specialist equipment his armour was provided with: scan-resistant resonance emitters, enhanced augur-units, whisper-quiet power mechanisms. He was wearing Space Wolf grey – naturally – with pack-markings identifying him as a warrior of Hvarl Red-Blade’s Great Company. The disguise was not enough to withstand determined scrutiny, but sufficient to allow brief periods of movement out in the open.
Second, he fixed a loc-reading into his helm’s cogitator, which then plotted a route to his destination. Hrafnkel’s interior would no doubt differ significantly from those he was used to, but all Legion flagships were laid down to a similar template, allowing him some certainty.
Third, just before setting off, he activated the encrypted transmitter lodged underneath his power-unit backpack. He checked that the encrypted data burst was clearing the Hrafnkel’s void shields and getting to where it needed to be. It was all but undetectable to anything other than its partnered receiver array, but even if it was somehow intercepted then the encryption was designed to mimic the faulty output of a failing realspace augur node, something the Hrafnkel had hundreds of right now.
The hour clicked up on his chronometer, and he took a moment to gather himself. He was buried in the ironwork entrails of a vaster-than-vast starship, surrounded by warriors who would kill him as soon as they smelled him – isolated from any support, lightly armed, alone. By any standards, even those of his own secretive Legion, it was a dubious undertaking.
But then that was the shape of war, and in any case, he was psychologically incapable of being daunted by it, so he moved off on schedule, going silently, slipping into the shadows he had been born to traverse.
The transit over to the Hrafnkel was violent. The lighter was buffeted by the enormous engine-washes of an entire fleet at full-burn and still in close confinement. Bjorn, his body thrown around within his restraint harness, glanced out of the armourglass real-view portal and saw the leviathans all around him, their thrusters flaring like supernovae. Beyond the silhouettes of the great hulls lay the tortured interior of Alaxxes, glowing in petulant fury, as raw as any wound in the materium.
The Rune Priest sat opposite him, fingers drumming on his staff, eyes flickering, body never at rest. Every so often he’d mumble something unintelligible, before his expression snapped back into focus. When it did that, there was a terrifying intensity to it, though it only lasted moments before disappearing again. It was as if he were flitting between locations, one real, one hyper-real, never really alighting in either.
Bjorn did not scorn that, for gothi were gothi. The Rune Priests were one of the few constants that straddled the worlds of the Old Ice and the transformed Asaheim – the seers of the runes remained, peering into the chaos underpinning the senses, taking the cost onto their own souls so that the tribes they served could navigate and prosper.
Kva’s being, so they said, was shared between oververse and underverse. In another Legion no such deviance from orthodoxy would ever have been tolerated, but in this, as in so much else, the Wolves were the exception.
‘I do not understand,’ Bjorn said eventually.
Kva blinked at him twice, and his focus clarified. ‘Why the Wolf King wishes to see you? He is treading obscure paths now. He sees something, and now I see something. He will cling to what has been revealed.’
That did not make things much more obvious. The lighter veered sharply. The two white-armoured guards remained as silent as grave-markers, their faces hidden by slab-fronted helms.
‘Why does he hide?’ pressed Bjorn, knowing the short flight was the only opportunity he’d get for answers.
Kva snorted a laugh. ‘Hide? Is that what they’re saying?’ He shook his white-streaked head. ‘This Legion only knows how to do one thing. Remember – he is not one of us. He is better than that.’ The Rune Priest looked thoughtful suddenly, as if that idea had only just occurred to him. ‘He is not hiding. Not now. For the first time, he is listening.’
Listening to what? Bjorn almost asked, but thought better of it. The lighter ducked under the immense shadow of Hrafnkel’s docking apertures. Bjorn caught a fleeting glimpse of a battle-scarred wolf’s head device on the scorched flanks, almost erased from the metal by las-fire.
‘I do not know what to say to him,’ said Bjorn.
As the lighter entered Hrafnkel’s gravity bubble, Kva gave him a look that almost amounted to understanding – the strangest of all the Rune Priest’s chameleonic expressions. ‘Our old weapons are blunted,’ he said. ‘He sees it even if the others do not.’ The crooked smile returned, the glassy eyes, the impression that he was seeing things that were not really there. ‘We cannot get out of Alaxxes. We are not strong enough. What does that tell you?’
Bjorn did not know, but then he did not accept the verdict – there was nothing the VI Legion could not accomplish, given enough time and enough fervour. He made no attempt to gainsay the Rune Priest, though, for by then the lighter had entered the hangar, and the docking legs were already extending.
Kva slammed his restraint harness back, glad to be free of the shackles, and got, wincing, to his feet.
‘Come then, One-Handed,’ he said. ‘Time to see if his faith in you is well founded.’
Six hours after the abortive attempt to break out of the Alaxxes Nebula, Ragnarok assumed the vanguard position at the head of the fleet. The rest of the capital ships clustered in close, at times less than a thousand metres away from one another, thundering through the twisting cavities in the hellish maze like cattle jostling at a gate. Another escort ship was lost during that period: an outrider, sucked into the crimson fronds as it attempted to execute a tight turn through a ragged gap. The edges of the void tunnels were getting closer, and great plumes of matter continued to be ejected, raking across the already stressed void shields of the larger ships. And all the while, patiently, carefully, the Alpha Legion maintained their pursuit, never falling beyond the Wolves’ rear scopes, sticking to the task with relentless consistency.
Lord Gunn stood on his ship’s bridge, watching the fleet reports scroll in, one after the other. The tally of damage and loss was becoming maddening, and there was nothing he could do to staunch it – at least, not while remaining true to his orders not to engage again.
‘Hrafnkel is losing pace,’ he muttered, watching the fleet flagship gradually slip down the order. The massive battleship looked to be leaking atmosphere from several sections, and its sub-warp engines were glowing dangerously.
Aesir looked up from his station two metres away. ‘It is wounded, jarl. We send them messages, but they are not answered.’
Gunn watched the colossal Hrafnkel reel amid the gusts of rust-red. It had been the finest ship in the fleet, the equal of any boasted by another Legion, and now its rotten carcass was drifting into ruin, dragged along in the wake of lesser warships.
‘No word from the primarch?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.
Aesir shook his head.
Gunn slumped in the throne, pressing his chin against steepled fingers. If the Hrafnkel fell back further it would become a liability. Ragnarok would have to slow the pace just to provide ranged cover, and that would endanger the other ships of the fleet.
‘Who commands the ship now?’ he asked.
‘No clear word.’
Gunn stood up. ‘That is not good enough.’
Aesir looked up at him uncertainly. ‘Jarl?’
‘It is the flagship. If the primarch will not command it, others must.’ He started to walk, striding up from the command throne towards the heavy blast doors at the rear of the bridge’s observation tier. ‘Take command here. Ensure we remain at the biting edge, and allow no release of the pace.’
‘The fleet is at full-burn,’ warned Aesir.
Gunn turned to give him a withering look. ‘Tell Hrafnkel I’m coming. Tell them to have their teleporters ready, and tell them to lower their bridge shields or I will rip them clear myself.’
Russ had come to Fenris, so they told him afterwards, during a time of storms. The skjalds still spoke of them – the northern skies cracking open, lit by sheets of silver, and the earth of unbreakable Asaheim shifting for the first and last time in mortal memory.