The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  They could all see what the long-range augurs were telling them about the second strand. Lord Gunnar Gunnhilt watched the data unfold and felt a sudden burst of joy – the first he had felt for a long time.

  ‘At last,’ he murmured, letting his gauntlet uncurl from his blade’s grip. ‘The way out.’

  He was running now, tearing along the narrow ways. Kaerls looked up at him, startled – they saw the blood on his armour, and the drawn blade, but shock stayed their hands.

  He wondered if he ran like a Wolf. In his mind’s eye, he had always imagined them loping, their shoulders rocking as they swept into contact, heads low, panting. The VI Legion would know him by his gait, if nothing else, but there was no time left to consider that, to mimic it, to learn by watching.

  He passed through hangar antechambers feverish with activity. Welders fizzed and snapped against the carcasses of las-blackened Stormbirds, all of them clustered with menials desperate to get them void-worthy again. He swept through deserted refectory halls, the metal slabs empty, the utensils kicked over and forgotten. He tried to find hidden ways – side routes between generator-housings and service gantries – but his course always forced him back into the open, under the lumens where his scent would be picked up.

  He had a constant mental image of the vastness above and below him – the caverns and the shafts and the lamplit halls, piled on top of one another, crawling with warriors his equal or better, all trained and honed to kill the outsider. They were coming for him now, and he had so little time left. The task would have been hard enough even before his cover had been ripped away, but now there was no chance; there was only the attempt, performed for his own satisfaction as much as anything else. At least the fleet’s schematics had been transmitted, plus the battle records. That data alone would give his masters the edge they needed, making the incursion worth the sacrifice.

  He burst out into a wide open space, and the enclosed walls suddenly yawned away from him. He was on the edge of a chasm, a gulf between sectors. Ahead loomed a metallic cliff face, pocked with blinking marker lights, striated with floor levels rising up into the heights. The deck fell away from him a few metres ahead, and the abyss was spanned by a single bridge, just wide enough for four men or two Space Marines to traverse side by side.

  This was a defence bulwark, created should the flagship be boarded in numbers. Beyond it would be the command levels, the training cells, the navigation and astropath spires. The far side of the span terminated in a pair of heavy blast doors. The whole place was eerily empty, eerily quiet, though muffled booms echoed up from the depths where the forges still churned. High up on the far wall stood the emblem of the Legion: a snarling wolf’s head, twenty metres across and beaten into obsidian-black metal. It looked like the threshold to some half-forgotten underworld of human imagination, imbued with the latent terror of the VI Legion in their own domain.

  He powered back into a sprint, knowing how vulnerable he was while out in the open. As he raced out to the bridge, the floor dropped away into darkened clouds of drifting engine smog.

  The isolation did not last. One moment he was alone on the bridge, running hard for the far end; the next, two white-armoured warriors blocked his path, their axes snaking with pale energy. They had snapped into being from nowhere, and now strode towards him, chillingly silent, their bone armour glowing like phosphor in the gloom.

  He skidded to a halt, aimed his bolter at the closest and squeezed the trigger. The weapon fired but the bolts exploded immediately, nearly throwing him from his feet. He swung round, righting himself, feeling a sudden heat at his back, and saw a third warrior approaching from the other direction.

  He was surrounded, caught out in the open, skewered between foes. He glanced down at the chasm below and saw other spans crossing the shaft, connecting lower levels to their counterparts within the bastion zone. The nearest was a twenty metre drop, after which the plummet went on indefinitely.

  He glanced back up at his pursuer. This one wore the dark-grey plate of the Legion, though it looked strangely ill-fitting on him, as if too big for the wasted frame within. The Wolf limped towards him, clanging an iron-footed staff on the bridge deck, his black and white streaked hair swaying around an unhelmed head.

  A Rune Priest, then – the idiosyncratic name the Wolves gave their Librarians. There was no fighting one of them. He leapt from the bridge’s edge, pushing out as far as he could, his limbs cartwheeling out in the open. For a moment, he had the unnerving sensation of being completely suspended amid nothingness, waiting for gravity to yank him down and on to the narrow strip of the lower bridge.

  Except that it didn’t. He remained out over the edge, but he never dropped. Crackles of whip-thin lightning wormed across his armour, and his limbs snapped rigid. Like a fish on a line, he felt himself reeled in and pulled back towards the bridge. He craned his neck to see the two white warriors and their grey-clad master converging.

  He thrashed wildly against his bonds, managing to break the grip of the psychic hold just as he was pulled back over the edge. He smashed to the deck, activating his powerblade as he fell, lashing out as the first of the white warriors reached for him. He batted one outreached gauntlet away, swiped back at an incoming axe head, then swivelled, knowing the Rune Priest was the greater threat. He charged in low, trying to take him out with speed before the witch could use whatever powers he possessed.

  The ball of lightning hit him hard, ripping at his helm and sending him slamming and skidding across the bridge’s surface. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt his hearts kick into overdrive. Another blast hit, sharp and hot as magma, tearing up his breastplate.

  He hurled his blade, sending it end over end, throwing blind in a desperate attempt to hit just one of them before they ended him. Something heavy cracked down on his right pauldron, shattering the bones within and sending a radial wave of pain shuddering through his torso.

  He tried to drag himself up again, and felt his faceplate fall away, cracking open like an eggshell. An axe-edge plunged into his back, dragging down along the line of his spine, and the agony flared up wildly, making him cry out through bloodied teeth.

  He felt consciousness slip away and fought to keep it – he wanted to be aware for when the killing blow came. Despite it all, he found himself grinning through the pain. He’d already done enough – the Wolves’ fleet movements were known, their movements past and projected, along with their strengths, their weaknesses, and, most of all, their strategies, catalogued and packaged and sent out over encrypted carrier waves ready to be picked up by the fleet. If nothing else had been achieved, that was sufficient for what had to happen next.

  He fought against the numb blur that ran up his limbs. The last thing he heard was the Rune Priest’s voice, shocked, outraged, crying out to his bone-armoured familiars.

  ‘Hold!’

  And that was the end. He never felt the crack of his bare head hitting the deck, his skull fractured amid the growing pool of his own blood.

  ‘He has done it,’ said Russ, suddenly.

  ‘Done what? Who?’

  Russ grinned. ‘Gunnar. He has found the way out.’

  Bjorn wanted to ask how he could possibly know that. ‘That is what we need, then.’

  Russ’ grin turned to a sour laugh. ‘Open void? Have you forgotten why we went into this place?’ He rubbed his eyes with balled fists, kneading the tired flesh. ‘The clouds are our protector. We take the Alpha Legion on in the open, in our condition, with these numbers, and it will be the last battle we fight.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘Gunn knows this. He wants it. He wishes to die, weapon in hand.’

  Bjorn could understand that. It was the way he wished to die, too – in combat, face to the enemy.

  Russ stirred from the ritual circle, pulling the pelts over his shoulders. His movements seemed at once more energetic.

  ‘You have the answers, the
n,’ said Bjorn, hesitantly.

  ‘Answers?’

  ‘You were searching. You called me. Did you learn what you wanted?’

  Russ shrugged. ‘I only know this – we must not leave. Gunn is here, and he will be pushing the fleet harder now.’ He clapped a heavy hand on Bjorn’s shoulder – the burly punch of a brawler, roughly affectionate, a thin mask over brutal power. ‘I feel reborn.’

  Then he started walking, clapping his hands for the true-wolves to follow. They uncurled from the deck, tongues lolling, amber eyes glowing.

  ‘Come, One-Handed,’ Russ said, opening the doors with a gesture. ‘We have a jarl to bring to heel.’

  Kva gazed down at the body. The Space Marine lay prone on his back, his helm half torn away by the lightning the Rune Priest had unleashed. Underneath was a bloody face covered in flecks of broken ceramite. The Runewatchers came to stand beside him, and the three of them studied their kill.

  Except that the warrior wasn’t dead yet. He was tough – one of his hearts was still beating, and he had gone into a restorative coma. One of the Runewatchers raised his axe, ready to bring it down across the warrior’s neck. Kva lifted a finger, and the axe-blade was withdrawn.

  Kva knelt down, feeling his atrophied joints creak as he lowered himself. The wasting disease that gnawed at his bones was only partially contested by the gene-conditioning that enabled him to wear his armour. He was a fractured thing – part superhuman, part invalid – and only a Rune Priest would have been suffered to live with such weakness.

  He prised the rest of the shattered facemask from the warrior’s flesh, pulling the vox-grille away and discarding it. The warrior had snow-pale skin, thin lips and a pronounced, haughty bone structure. His black hair was slicked-down in clumps amid the ruins of his helm’s inner systems.

  Kva flicked up the warrior’s eyelids, looking at the brown eyes. He projected his mind into his, but found only echoes of consciousness to draw on.

  Even so, there could be little doubt. He looked up at the Runewatchers, who were as silent as ever.

  ‘A riddle,’ he murmured, speaking to himself, surprised that he had not sensed it earlier. ‘This one is not a serpent.’

  He pursed his lips, for once entirely blind to the onward turns of fate.

  ‘And so now we ask this,’ said Kva, thoughtfully. ‘What is a Son of the Lion doing in the Alaxxes Nebula?’

  III

  The junction between the ways drew closer. Lord Gunn never approached the command throne, but his orders now rang across the Hrafnkel’s bridge. His two adjutants, Skrier and Aesir, maintained their positions at the top of the wide stairway leading up to the command platform. They shared the space uneasily with Grimnr’s­ forces, but for the moment their weapons had been placed back in their scabbards. With the advent of a genuine choice, one for which Russ’ standing orders gave no guidance, all now deferred to the Jarl of Onn.

  Gunn himself studied the augur schematics intently. The gas tunnel, narrowing for so long, plunged down tortuously, winding like a dragged length of entrails, before reaching a spherical chamber no more than a few hundred kilometres in diameter. Two spurs ran clear of that chamber, one angling back and leading further into the nebula’s heart, one heading – so the augurs told him – clear to the border.

  The manoeuvre would not be straightforward. The entire fleet would have to be piloted down through the aperture without losing any more ships to the encroaching gas, for he would need every lance and macrocannon for what came next. Once out in the void there would be nowhere left to run, no shoals to beach upon and no corrosion to devastate void shields – just a final reckoning, with the Hrafnkel at its heart.

  Gunn knew how far the Wolves would take that. He knew what they would suffer to gain the win, and he knew what pain they would absorb to break the back of their tormentors.

  You have the numbers, he thought, looking at the Alpha Legion vanguard as it maintained the chase. You have the weapons. You have the position. But do you have the stomach?

  ‘Enact formation change,’ he ordered.

  The command was passed down the ranks and sent out across the fleet, and the ships began to move. For the bulk of the pursuit, Ragnarok and Hrafnkel had taken station at the rearguard in order to see off any strikes from the Alpha Legion fast-attack wings, but now the two battleships started to crawl forwards, outpacing the destroyers around them, ready to assume ownership of a new vanguard. Tactics were reordered, moving from the spatial requirements of confinement to standard open-void patterns.

  The intersection was still a long way off. The exit from the cloud was further still, but already the plan was crystallising in his mind. The fleet would burst clear of Alaxxes, slow rapidly and perform a full-about to present their arms to the aperture. As the Alpha Legion emerged behind them, the Wolves would let rip, concentrating all fire at the point from which the enemy had to emerge, taking out as many ships as they could.

  That would hurt them. It might not even up the odds, but it would make them bleed. After that, the carnage could begin in earnest, up-close and ship to ship, in an orgy of shield-breaking.

  Do you have the stomach? he thought again, repeating the words in his mind like a mantra. I cannot believe you do.

  ‘Jarl,’ came an interruption from the sensorium decks. ‘They are reacting.’

  He glanced over at the hololith banks, and saw the Alpha Legion vanguard creeping closer. They had clearly seen the same thing as they had – the divergence, the chance for breakout.

  Gunn smiled savagely. He could see the fast-attack frigates piling on engine-burn, pulling ahead to clear the shots for the monsters beyond.

  ‘You cannot stop this now,’ he murmured, speaking softly to his pursuers and watching the glowing runes shift like pieces on a regi­cide board. ‘No one can.’

  They dragged the body through the blast doors, up into the closest sealable chamber. The two Runewatchers took up position outside, leaving Kva and the infiltrator alone. The Rune Priest propped the Dark Angel up against the chamber’s wall. The remnants of his helm and gorget kept his head upright, and a mix of blood and drool ran down from his slackened mouth.

  Kva gripped the Dark Angel’s jaw and brought the tip of his staff closer. The shadow of the mounted skull fell across the warrior’s battered face, making his features look cadaverous.

  ‘Awaken,’ hissed Kva, lifting the Dark Angel’s chin.

  He could sense the flame of the warrior’s soul, burning weakly. It would not take much to snuff it out.

  ‘Come back,’ Kva said, sinking his own mind into that of his subject. He saw the soul running ahead of him, flitting like a deer between trees. He gave chase, weaving between shadowed boles, calling out. The dreamscape was not like any forest of Fenris – it was rich, mottled with verdancy, as ancient as the bones of the world upon which it stood.

  He caught up, grabbing the fleeing figure, reeling him back, tearing him out of the mirror-realm and back into the world of the senses.

  The Dark Angel came to, coughing up blood, his eyes glassy and rolling.

  ‘Stay,’ commanded Kva, his hand slipping to the Dark Angel’s exposed throat, feeling for the strength of his pulse. ‘I do not permit you to die.’

  The warrior stared stupidly for a moment, disorientated and struggling to breathe. Kva waited, maintaining the barrier between the worlds lest the Dark Angel’s soul slip back into the underverse. Slowly, his breathing returned to something close to normal; the bleeding clotted, the eyes clarified.

  ‘What are you named?’ asked Kva.

  The Dark Angel did not reply. It didn’t look like he’d understood.

  ‘What are you named?’ asked Kva again, this time inflecting the words with command, forcing truth.

  ‘Ormand,’ he rasped, hacking up more blood from his throat.

  ‘You are of the First Legion.’

>   ‘As you see.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I could ask the same thing.’

  Kva let go of Ormand’s jaw. ‘If your helm had not been broken–’

  ‘You would have killed me.’ Ormand hacked again. ‘Yes, that was the risk.’

  Kva looked down at his armour – a decent resemblance to VI Legion markings. ‘It may still happen.’

  Ormand looked up at him, his breathing stabilising. ‘Traitor or loyal?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That is the only question now. Who commands the attack dogs? And the hydra? But your answer matters not – we have the data. My mirror on the Alpha has done the same thing, unless he was caught sooner than me. Perhaps they were quicker – after all, they are born to this.’

  Kva narrowed his eyes. ‘You do not know what has happened, do you?’

  ‘Prospero burns. The galaxy is riven by storms. Two Legions enter the Alaxxes Nebula, each at each other’s throats. Terra is cut off, and all dreams become nightmares. What, in our position, would you do?’

  Kva began to understand. ‘And there are more of you?’

  ‘Many more.’

  ‘Where?’

  Ormand tried to rise and failed, falling back against the chamber wall, his breath rattling. ‘You know nothing of this place. Alaxxes is a fortress. There are depths, and in those depths are treasures.’

  ‘The Lion?’ Kva ventured, grasping at the faint chance. For all their history of antagonism, the primarch Lion El’Jonson and Russ together would surely be enough to turn the tide.

  Ormand’s bitter smile returned then. ‘The Lion? How would I know?’ He edged closer, conspiratorially, as if enjoying the exchange of confidence. ‘And I care not, for I give less than a damn for the Lion. None of us do.’

  Kva must have given away his surprise, for a glint of satisfaction showed in Ormand’s bloodshot eyes.