The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  He moved on to the records of fleet movements, tallying them with the data he already had. From the Prospero warzone, to the rendezvous with a Legio Custodes reserve fleet on the system’s edge, to Heligar for secondary operations against three XV Legion outposts, to the deep void to refit, then to the Alaxxes. They had been driven hard, even before the commencement of the most recent hostilities. He studied the logs, updated his list of functional battle­ships, then sent all of it over the secure channel.

  He heard footsteps clunking past him in the corridor outside, and worked faster. He gained access to Hrafnkel’s battle schematics. He scanned across the other capital ships: Nidhoggur, Ragnarok, Fenrysavar, Russvangum. He calibrated their strengths and weaknesses, their damage reports, their combat readiness. He started work on trajectory information, tapping into course-change orders and extrapolating the routes still open to them.

  He knew, as the shipmasters of the Wolves fleet could not, what their options were now. Their ship commanders would have a choice soon. He did not know which course they would take, and neither was it essential to his mission to make such a prediction, but he found himself speculating what they would do in any case.

  He could take a guess. They had acted true to their natures thus far.

  As he filed the data for transmission, he heard noises outside the door. Footfalls halted.

  He paused, hunched over the cogitator, making no sound, no movement, listening.

  Something... sniffed. He heard the code panel being tried, and the door mechanism clang up against the brace-lock.

  He reached for his bolter, retreating silently across the chamber towards the column at its heart. Above him, the open shaft snarled with arcs of electricity, as if angered by his presence.

  A muffled explosion kicked out, followed by a ripple-impact along the metal-mesh floor. The doors slammed open, briefly silhouetting a power-armoured figure between them.

  He fired. Three bolts streaked across the gap, one aimed at the helm, two at the chest. By then – unbelievably – the Wolf had already moved, ducking down, firing blind, running while bent double.

  He retreated, firing again, using the massive comms-spike to shield himself. The legionary closed in fast, his bolter held one-handed, the other gauntlet clutching a short blade that burned with a cold blue fire. Reactive shells slammed and cracked from the walls around them, smashing the pict screens, making the vault echo with jarring impacts.

  There was nowhere to run. The Wolf stood between him and the only exit, backing him up against the far wall, closing in for the hand-to-hand clash.

  He drew his own sword, activating an energy-field as it slid from the scabbard. The Wolf leapt at him, and the blades locked. The two of them crashed against the far wall, weapons snarling as their disruptor fields intermingled.

  ‘What are you?’ the warrior hissed, and there was just a fragment of doubt in that voice. The Wolf knew something was wrong – enough to attack without giving challenge, but not enough to quell all his doubts.

  He pushed back hard, wrenching the Wolf’s blade-edge from his chest, pushing it wide. His other hand had already moved, jamming his bolter’s muzzle against the legionary’s belt.

  He fired at point-blank range. The reactive round exploded instantly, hurling the Wolf back through the air. He fired again, following up with two more hits to the torso, giving his opponent no time to recover. He ran over to where the warrior lay sprawled on his back and plunged his energised blade into his stomach. The point jarred through ceramite and into flesh, and he twisted it, leaning his whole weight into it.

  The Wolf’s blood spread across the floor. His blade-arm twitched, the sword clattered from his gauntlet and his helm clanged back.

  He sprang up again, his whole body now burning with hyperadrenalin. Had the Wolf voxed before launching the attack? Were there others within earshot of the combat? Time was now against him, and he was still a long way from the command bridge; his mission was only half complete, and already fate had crippled his plans.

  Fate? He smiled wryly. Since when did we believe in that?

  Then he was running, back out of the comms vault, skidding across the corridor beyond, caution now sacrificed for speed.

  Behind him, eight bodies lay on the floor of the chamber, blood mingling on the metal.

  Kva felt the death as a stab in his primary heart – a sharp pain, brief and over suddenly. His mind had been loosely bonded to the world of the senses, half roving in the plane below and free to move amid its mists and darknesses. He had seen the Alaxxes cloud part before him, its innards bifurcating, showing the way towards the empty void where they were doomed to die.

  He snapped back into focus, blinking heavily. He was in a scrying chamber, the air acrid with smoke, the carcasses of ravens open and glossy on the stone before him. His attendants, the bone-clad Runewatchers, stood on either side of him, just as they always did. They were like inverse shadows, subordinate and omnipresent.

  ‘Did you feel it?’ Kva asked them, reaching for his staff.

  They nodded, already moving. They were twins, those two, gene-brothers ripped from the ice and given into the care of the priesthood. Their armour was identical, the runes upon it studies in symmetry. That had always been the way on Fenris, for those gothi powerful enough to command it – two followers, one soul shared across two bodies, or so the old myths had it.

  ‘How could someone have got on board?’ Kva muttered. ‘Do they guard nothing on this ship?’

  The doors to the scrying chamber slid open, sending rolls of smoke tumbling across the deck beyond. Kva strode out, his staff heel clicking, the two Runewatchers falling in behind him with their long axes poised. He could have sounded the general alarm, but this way would be quicker, for he already knew where to go and who he was tracking, though it was strange that the killer’s soul had only now broken the surface of the warp’s skin.

  They dared to come here, to the flagship. I am impressed.

  ‘Guide me,’ rasped Kva, letting his mind skate across the fragile bond between worlds. He was after a creature of flesh and sinew, but the markers of the deed would hang in the aether like blood in water. ‘Warrior or no, he will squeal before I slit his throat.’

  Russ cast the bone-tokens to the ground, and they clattered across the stone. The runes fell among the swirls and intersections of stone-floor carving, some facedown, some exposed, all illuminated by the rust-glow of the nebula’s half light.

  Bjorn stared down at them, unsure what he was meant to make of it. He was no scryer, and the pattern looked random.

  Russ, however, pored over the scattering, his expression intent. He knelt down, looking closely at where the symbols lay in relation to one another. ‘Zhad,’ he murmured, letting a finger hover over the token but not touching it. ‘Khaman. Liwaz. So this one falls again.’

  Bjorn tried to see what his primarch was seeing, and failed.

  Russ looked up at him. ‘This is the way of it, every time,’ he said. ‘Variations, but the core is solid.’

  Bjorn swallowed his pride, knelt down on the stone and the two of them studied the circles together.

  ‘There are always choices,’ said Russ. ‘Fate never closes doors, just shows the cracks around them. This tells me what it has been telling me for days.’ He gave Bjorn a dry look. ‘That the Wolves will never escape the blood-well.’

  Bjorn looked at the circles again. For a brief moment, just as the primarch spoke, he did indeed see something there. Not an image, but a kind of certainty, conjured up by the formations below him. In the blink of an eye, the floor below became translucent, opening up over a gulf beneath – stars, falling away to infinity, marked only by a thousand glimmering paths through the void.

  The vision didn’t last, though it gave Bjorn some insight into what the primarch was seeing. Perhaps Russ was seeing those things even now. Perhaps he always sa
w them.

  ‘There must be a way,’ Bjorn said, retreating back into the old habit of dogged warrior-faith.

  Russ chuckled mordantly, and shrugged. ‘I throw these stones across the circle, and I ask two things. Can we run? Can we fight? In either case, it gives me the same answer.’

  He reached down for the token with the black wolf’s head: Morkai. Bjorn did not need to be told what that meant.

  He found himself growing impatient. The fleet was still in full retreat. Fighting would surely come again soon, and there were better preparations than scrabbling across the floor seeking guidance from the aether. ‘These answers are no use to us,’ Bjorn said, getting back to his feet. ‘What is the point in asking?’

  Russ clambered upright as well, his huge body rolling up from the floor. ‘We have to interpret.’ He ran a hand through his blond hair. ‘Sooner or later, Gunn will find a way out. He will make for it, doing what he has been trained to do. He will provoke a third battle, believing that the open void will give him the advantage he seeks. At least it will be fighting, he will think. If we are to die before reaching Terra, better to do it with a blade in our hands.’

  Russ rolled his shoulders, and for the first time Bjorn saw the fatigue in the primarch’s movements. How long had he been doing this, over and over again?

  ‘That, though, will kill us,’ Russ went on. ‘And it will kill us to keep running through these tunnels, for the Alpha Legion can go for longer than we can, and faster, and with more ships. So what remains? I have only this – to go deeper in.’

  Bjorn looked at him sceptically. ‘You said the Wolves will never escape the blood-well.’

  ‘If the wyrd has been written…’ Russ tried to crack a half-hearted smile. ‘Consider us, One-Handed. We have always fought the wars of others. We have chased down every renegade and xenos and ripped their throats out. We have broken ourselves on the altar stone of my father’s will, and we were glad to do it, for it cemented our place by his side. We started to believe the stories we spun out of nothing to bring terror to our enemies. We were the attack dogs, the sentries, the watchers of the unwatchable.’

  Bjorn didn’t like the sceptical tone in Russ’ voice. These were things that were true, things that defined the Legion.

  ‘Always working alone,’ Russ said, shaking his head as if in bemusement. ‘Dragging my brothers to task, letting it be known that we would do anything – anything – to keep the Great Crusade intact. Hel, I even went after Angron. My wrecked brother. What did I think – that I’d succeed with him? What kind of arrogance was that?’

  ‘We were necessary,’ said Bjorn evenly.

  ‘Yes, yes we were, but for whom? What other Legion would have cracked itself apart on Prospero when it could have been carving out new worlds for the dross of humanity to rut and mewl on? Enough of it!’

  The old anger rushed back. A low growl shuddered through the air, picked up by the supine true-wolves, who snarled in sympathy.

  ‘Jarl, I do not know what you are telling me,’ said Bjorn.

  ‘Just this,’ said Russ, impatiently. ‘It cannot go on. My brother has ripped the Imperium apart with lies, and if we do not change ourselves then we will deserve no better than the sorcerers we destroyed. I will no longer be the axeman of the Emperor. I will no longer see my sons crippled, shorn of allies, clinging to old myths of primacy. There is a path here. There is a road through the briars, and we have to learn to see it.’

  He reached down again. Three more runes still lay on the stone, all facedown. Russ picked them up, and showed Bjorn the first two of them.

  ‘The serpent, the many-headed beast,’ he said.

  ‘The Alpha Legion.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘What is the other?’

  Russ turned it over. ‘Bjorn. The Bear. It never falls faceup. Never. Why is that, do you think?’

  Bjorn looked at the scratched symbol, and something within him froze. For an instant, he had an unbidden sense of endless, grinding time, of cold shadows, of a loss that tore at him like a wound.

  ‘This was why you summoned me,’ Bjorn said.

  ‘You are a part of it. Every time I scry the path of the future, I see you there, on the edge, and so I want you by my side when I remake this Legion. I want you with me as we go deeper in.’

  Bjorn looked up at him, and the vice around his hearts did not ease. ‘This place hates us,’ he said. ‘It will crush us before the end.’

  ‘The whole galaxy hates us,’ said Russ, grinning with an edge of abandon. ‘Always has. If we wish to live, we must spite it a little further.’

  The uncanny rush of teleportation was mercifully brief. A shiver of the void, a stab of cold laced with the half-heard howls of emptiness, and it was over.

  Lord Gunn stood at the centre of a broken sphere of dissipating warpfrost. He strode through it, twisting his helm free, shaking the curls of aether residue from his armour. Skrier and Aesir had come across with him, scorning the extreme danger of riding the warp waves between two titanic vessels at full-burn.

  The command bridge yawned away in every direction, opening out onto the crimson void through a hundred armourglass portals. The throne – a massive pile of hewn granite, its arms carved in the likeness of two curved-backed hunting wolves – remained empty, a gap at the heart of the teeming spaces around it.

  ‘Who commands here?’ Gunn demanded, striding up towards the primarch’s seat.

  Mortal crewmembers held back, their faces torn between awe and relief. A dozen Wolves of the primarch’s own honour guard fell into formation before the empty throne, each one wearing a blackmane pelt over ridged armour-plate. They were led by Russ’ huscarl, the one-eyed Grimnr Blackblood.

  ‘You know the answer, jarl,’ Grimnr warned, taking his place between Lord Gunn and the place of command.

  ‘The fleet tears itself apart,’ said Gunn, squaring up to him, keeping his hands close to his belted weapons. ‘Or are you so blind you do not see what the old man is driving us to?’

  ‘This is his throne.’

  ‘I do not see him on it.’

  Grimnr’s face was like a grave-mask – unmoving, blank-eyed. ‘He will return. Until then, no other takes his place.’

  Gunn spat contemptuously on the ground and strode over to the main bank of tactical hololith projectors. As he approached, a cluster of robed Mechanicum magi scuttled to get out of his way. Gunn gestured at the flickering fleet-deployment runes hanging in the bridge’s command space. ‘You can see this?’ he asked, scornfully. ‘You can read these runes?’

  Little had changed since the retreat had begun. The Alpha Legion was still just out of lance range, still monitoring them, still pursuing. The Wolves flotilla had become dangerously compacted, still operating at full sub-warp speed, filling the tunnels from edge to treacherous edge. The ports above them were now a deep, dark red. The Wolves were running out of space.

  ‘My orders are not to engage,’ said Grimnr.

  ‘You can see where that is getting us.’

  As Lord Gunn spoke, Skrier and Aesir moved quietly, purposefully, around the edge of the command dais, watched all the while by Grimnr’s warriors. The rest of the bridge operated just as normal – hundreds of kaerls and Mechanicum thralls bent over their stations down in the pits – though when they dared they shot sidelong glances up at the demigods disputing above them.

  Grimnr’s dead gaze flickered up towards the high real-view portals through which Alaxxes’ turbulent matter boiled and seethed – they all knew what happened to ships driven into that poison. He looked back at Gunn, as implacable as before. ‘The primarch charged me. We keep moving.’

  Gunn narrowed his eyes; it looked like the veins in his neck would burst from frustration. ‘We need to turn,’ he snarled, the words swollen with fervour. ‘You must, surely, see this. Someone needs to grip this thing before
we are all destroyed. The flagship must command again – I cannot do it from Ragnarok.’

  Grimnr let a flicker of uncertainty mar his otherwise stony visage, just for a second. It was enough – Gunn seized on it, drawing up to him, fresh urgency in his commander’s voice. ‘We break no faith,’ he pressed. ‘You feel the same as I. We are warriors. If he will not do what is necessary, we must.’

  Grimnr still stood between the jarl and the command throne. He looked back at the hololiths, at the close formations of Alpha Legion outriders, at the heavy deployments just a few seconds behind them, and the yearning in him showed nakedly – to take them on again, even if it meant ruin; to die with honour, rather than seek escape with none.

  But the moment passed. Ice returned to his features, and his hand slipped to the shaft of his axe. ‘Come no closer,’ he growled.

  Skrier and Aesir drew bolters, as did the rest of Grimnr’s entourage. Lord Gunn glowered in the centre of it all, poised to move, his tattooed brow dark. For a split second, he remained static, ­unable to take the fateful step of drawing blood on the bridge. Once done, that act could never be undone; they all knew it, but still his hand stayed ready to draw.

  ‘Lords!’ called out Hrafnkel’s mortal sensorium master, shattering the tight silence. His station was a few metres down from the throne level, and his voice was almost ludicrously thin next to the bestial tones of his masters. ‘Forgive me – the cloud.’

  All heads turned. The real-view portals remained thick with the shifting blooms, just as impenetrable as before, pulling in close and scraping at the edges of the fleet’s outriders. The forward hololith projections, though, peered deeper into the oncoming clusters. They picked out the way forward as a wireframe tunnel, hanging in the vault of the bridge along with the tactical displays, twisting and turning as it coiled into the depths of the nebula. For hours it had been a single thread, narrowing like a clotted artery. Now it had changed: twenty-thousand kilometres down, the path branched, threading two separate lines between the dense plumes, one corkscrewing back on itself and plunging into the depths of the cluster, the other shooting straight ahead, widening, aiming true.