The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  Even as the Alpha Legion ships turned tail, shifting trajectory to line up for the void chamber’s entry point, Chimaera’s batteries reached full pitch, hurling ferocious quantities of plasma, las-beams, heavy projectiles and torpedoes into the reeling enemy lines. The void ignited, eviscerating some ships from prow to stern, rocking others with the recoil of exploding engine chambers. Gunships fleeing for the safety of their hangars were caught in the tempest and obliterated. The Nidhoggur, Russvangum and Fenrysavar led a counter-attack from the depths of the beleaguered Wolves formation, adding their guns to the maelstrom emanating from the star fort’s steadily rotating flanks.

  Eventually the order for retreat was given, and the Alpha Legion withdrew back down the tunnel they had emerged from just hours earlier. The retreat was messy, and more ships were ripped apart on the way out, harried all the way back to the aperture by vengeful Space Wolves and battle-fresh Dark Angels. After a final defiant barrage, the Alpha and most of the core of the XX Legion’s fleet managed to extract themselves, slipping into the channel, followed by their strike cruiser entourage.

  At the aperture’s edge, in a final act of desperation, four ships remained behind, blocking the passage down the tunnels just as Ragnarok had done. Their void shields were drenched by simultaneous strikes from a hundred incoming las-beams, filling the tunnel’s mouth from edge to edge with ballooning plumes of flame. The residual ships fought hard and well, manoeuvring as best they could in the tight space to rotate shield-facing hull segments, but even so the delay was only temporary, as one by one they disappeared amid shattering explosions.

  Their sacrifice was just enough. Beyond them, the bulk of the Alpha Legion fleet slipped down in the capillary tunnels, flying ahead of destruction, heading at full-burn towards the cluster’s edge. By the time the way was cleared for pursuit it was too late to bring Chimaera’s firepower to bear. The star fort drifted to a halt, remaining sentinel at the void chamber’s edge. The Dark Angels battlegroup fell in around it, mopping up the last resistance before spreading out into a holding formation.

  A few of the Wolves fast-attack craft made a break for the aperture, their rage driving them to visit vengeance on the retreating enemy, but they were hauled back in by furious orders from the Hrafnkel. There was no strength left for a proper assault, and once separated they would have been picked off. The battle was over, and although survival had been achieved, there was no strength left for retribution.

  The last of the wreckage spun and clanked its way clear of the battle site, drifting amid frost-crystals of blood in the void. Battleships slowly wound down their lance arrays and depowered their main drives. The survivors came together amid the drifting clouds of burned metal – battle-savaged VI Legion warships pulling alongside pristine First Legion escorts.

  Above it all hung the massive profile of Chimaera. Its hull-edges were dark from cannon discharge, and its crenellated heights flickered from overloading void generators. It was magnificent, a king among vassals.

  Less than twenty minutes after the last guns had ceased fire, the comm-burst reached Hrafnkel’s bridge. It was terse yet polite, just as inter-Legion communications between these two had always been.

  ‘Commander of Chimaera salutes and gives honour to commander of Hrafnkel,’ it went, hissing over the damaged vox-units of the flagship’s cracked command throne. ‘He requests all vessels come to full-stop, weapon batteries power down and fleet commander makes transit to Chimaera for consultation. By the Emperor’s will.’

  By the time that came in, Russ was back at his station, seated on the throne and surveying the frantic repair work taking place all across the bridge. He cracked a wry smile.

  ‘By the Emperor’s will,’ he murmured. ‘And what can they know about that?’

  Grimnr was instantly furious. ‘Do they not know a primarch’s vessel?’ he raged. ‘They should come here. Lord, I will make the summons.’

  Russ held his hand up. ‘Peace,’ he said wearily. ‘Look around you. Would you wish them to see our weakness? In any case, they have the right of it. We were not the victors here.’

  He rose to his feet. The heavy drilling had already started, and medicae crews jostled with gangs of Mechanicum workers, securing, making good, tying together. Casualty numbers were still coming in, and early indications were that they were ruinous. The Legion had been critically wounded, and the scale of the damage was apparent to all who studied it. To fight again, in any capacity – that would be a miracle. The prospect loomed large now, the one that Bjorn had correctly identified as haunting Russ’ dreams – to miss the great battle, to be forced to the sidelines, to watch as others became the lords of the unfolding war.

  ‘I will go,’ Russ announced, rising from the throne. He turned, looking over to where Ormand still sat slumped, his wounds left untended amid the thousands of casualties requiring the skills of the Wolf Priests.

  ‘And you,’ said Russ. ‘You will come with me.’

  The interior of Chimaera was lamplit, echoing, filled with marching ranks of marble pillars amid a velvet gloom. Menials shuffled in the shadows, swathed in thick robes and carrying ceremonial staves marked with the images of beasts. The designs were herald­ic devices, stylised in the tradition of Caliban, as tortuous as the forest in which their inspirations had once dwelt.

  Russ and Ormand were escorted from the landing stages by Dark Angels in obsidian-dark armour. Each of the Calibanite knights carried a longsword, and their heavy battleplate was draped in pale robes. Cowls had been cast across their helms, making the lenses glow like the light-caught eyes of felines.

  All honour had been paid to Russ on his arrival in the cavernous landing halls. Every Dark Angel had bowed, clasping a gauntlet to his chest. The menials had lowered their faces to the deck, remaining prostrate until he had passed.

  Russ found that distasteful, but said nothing. Everything about the crew of Chimaera was unusual. They wore the war-plate of the First Legion, though with subtle alterations – there was a green amidst the black lacquer finish, and the repeated motif of the beasts, iconography redolent of a kingdom forever overlooked by brooding canopies.

  ‘How long have you been in this place?’ asked Russ, walking through a long gallery hung with ceremonial swords.

  ‘Fifty-nine years,’ said Ormand, limping heavily. ‘Alaxxes is a newer outpost.’

  ‘How many outposts are there?’

  ‘When we left Caliban, there were six. There must be more now.’ Ormand looked at Russ apologetically. ‘It has been hard to maintain communications. Sometimes we even lose touch with the home world. In here, in the clouds, it is worse.’

  ‘So what in Hel are you doing here?’ asked Russ.

  Ormand gestured ahead of him. ‘If I may, lord.’

  They passed through a pair of massive darkwood doors and entered a long hall with a stone floor and tall windows carved into the walls. The rust-red of the void bled through stained-glass images of knights slaying horrors of the deep wood. A throne had been set up at the hall’s far end, surmounted by a huge representation of a chimaera in burnished bronze. Fires guttered in iron torches hung from the pillars, and the pungent smell of incense wafted across the flags.

  We are not so dissimilar, Russ thought. We both take our home worlds with us.

  Knights of the First Legion stood silently in the aisles, remaining motionless under the shadows of the great columns. A lone figure waited for them at the hall’s end – a lord commander by his livery, standing helmless next to an empty throne. Two iron candelabras burned on either side of him, casting flickering light across a lean face. As Russ approached, he bowed deeply.

  ‘My lord primarch,’ he said, his voice precise and aristocratic. ‘My thanks for coming here. I am Althalos, castellan of this fortress.’

  Russ drew up before him, a clear head taller and far broader. His ornate battleplate still bore the marks of the fight with
the Alpha Legion. Amid such austere finery, he looked like an ogre that had stumbled into the halls of the just.

  ‘You want to do this here?’ he asked.

  Althalos raised an eyebrow. ‘My lord?’

  Russ drew his frostblade, already tiring of the ritual, and only stopped when he heard several hundred bolters slide from their holsters.

  Althalos looked at the blade cautiously. ‘I had understood, my lord, that we were allies.’

  Russ looked at him for a moment, then at the Dark Angels with their weapons trained on him, and slowly replaced the blade. ‘Actually, this is refreshing,’ he said. ‘You really have no idea.’

  ‘I think I guess,’ said Althalos, smiling thinly. ‘We have been away from our primarch for a long time. Some traditions have no doubt passed us by.’

  ‘For the better, perhaps,’ muttered Russ. ‘So tell me. This is a major fleet. Your spy tells me you have more. What has happened here?’

  ‘We had hoped for answers from you,’ said Althalos. ‘Lord Luther has done nothing more than what was asked of him – he has raised fresh strength from Caliban, training and equipping new Chapters and sending them out into fastnesses across the void. We are now greater in strength than at any time in our past. We have ships and weapons, and knights to bear them. What we lack is certainty. Our orders have not changed even if the Imperium has.’ Althalos drew closer. ‘We know some things, but not all. We know that the Legions are now at war, that Isstvan has burned. Nightmares of treachery assail our astropathic spires in every cycle, and yet the images are confused.’ He shot Russ an apologetic look. ‘And so we have chosen caution. We had to be sure. If you will forgive me, your reputation...’

  Russ waved that away irritably. ‘It matters not. What counts is the next step.’ Already the thought of a hidden Legion was making his mind race. If there was strength on Caliban, more than any had guessed, then the course of the war would change decisively. A grand alliance could restore his own Legion’s fortunes. The initiative could be seized, the fight taken back to Horus. ‘But what of the Lion?’

  Althalos gave him a dry look. ‘Quite.’

  ‘You have heard nothing?’

  ‘I hoped you had news. You are brothers.’

  ‘That means less than you might think.’ He had no idea where the Lion was. The expeditionary fleets had been scattered widely, following their own courses, carving out new branches of the Crusade. The Lion had been among the proudest of them, driving his Legion hard, vying with Guilliman to conquer the fastest. Russ had often thought of him in the days since Prospero, trying to guess, as he had done with so many of his kin, which way he would have gone. Perhaps Horus had gained another convert, but that was hard to imagine – the Lion had wished to be Warmaster himself, and he would surely never have settled for second place behind his old rival. ‘As matters stand, I can tell you nothing,’ he said, truthfully enough.

  ‘That is a matter of regret,’ said Althalos. ‘The Protector of Caliban has been waiting for a long time. It is hard for him – Lord Luther’s soul is proud, and this silence has tested him.’

  Russ nodded, though his attention was already wandering. The condition of the Lion’s deputy was something that did not concern him at all – the galaxy would never remember his name. What was of huge importance, though, was the deployment of resources – an entire army, hidden beyond the fringes and overlooked by all, Horus included.

  ‘My fleet requires time,’ Russ said. ‘We need supplies. We need new weapons.’

  Althalos nodded. ‘These we can provide. And in return, we need information. We need to know the shape of the war, how things stand.’ He gave Russ a strange look. ‘It is hard to know who to trust, even among ourselves. These questions have never arisen before.’

  Russ smiled wolfishly at him. For the first time in a long while, he could see a path unfolding, a way forward. The retreat could be halted, and fresh blood brought back for the counter.

  ‘All these things will be yours,’ said Russ, clapping the Dark Angel on the shoulder roughly, as if he were a battle-brother of the Rout. ‘We were fated to meet here, lord commander. When the record of this war comes to be written, they will say that the destiny of Caliban was set on this day.’

  The smile broadened, fang-thick and amiable.

  ‘We shall be allies, we two. Such is my vow – fear shall kindle in the hearts of Horus, and it will be the coming of Wolves and Angels that stirs it.’

  Two standard days later, Bjorn was summoned back to the Hrafnkel. The surviving ships of the fleet had spread out across the void chamber, guarded by a mix of Dark Angels vessels and service­able Wolves warships. The refitting began again, and every vessel rang with the whine of drills and the boom of turbo-hammers. The medicae bays remained full, as did the processing morgues. The Wolf Priests would be extracting gene-seed for many days yet, and the corpses still lay in grim rows outside the fleshmakers’ laboratoria.

  Russ met Bjorn in his private chambers. His two true-wolves were there, just as before, though they slept now, snarling and snickering amid dreams of pursuit.

  Bjorn bowed as he entered. ‘We appear to be alive, lord,’ he noted.

  ‘That we do.’ The primarch looked more than alive – he looked rejuvenated. The ashen pallor he had carried for so long had been shrugged off, and what remained was ruddy with the old generous energy.

  Bjorn glanced down at the rune-circle on the chamber floor. The knuckle-bone tokens lay on the engraved lines, and it looked like they had been there for some time.

  ‘You have not been casting,’ Bjorn said.

  Russ chuckled – a purring growl. ‘I asked them for long enough. We must learn to go further now – our enemies cannot be the only ones to scry the ways of fate.’

  Bjorn thought on that. ‘No, I suppose not. And yet...’

  ‘It is forbidden. We forbade it, and we censured the one who dabbled deepest.’ Russ waved a warning finger at him. ‘But it is different. This is different. I understand it now, though it took the serpents of the Alpha Legion to drive me to it.’

  Bjorn let that go. One day, the Wolves would have to examine their mystical creed, to ask themselves the hard questions the Thousand Sons had ducked, but amid a galaxy-spanning war that was still expanding, that day was a long way off.

  ‘They told you the Wolves would never leave the Alaxxes blood-well,’ Bjorn said.

  ‘They did,’ said Russ. ‘The Legion that leaves is not the one that entered. We came into the blood-well as executioners, and we leave as something else.’ He smiled. ‘We are changing, One-Handed. We are evolving.’

  ‘Then where next?’

  ‘I know not. The First have much to tell us, and they are close with their secrets. The fleet will not be ready to fight again for months, and it will never be the force it was – we must choose our fights now. Horus will be marching. I can feel it, like the drum of many footfalls, getting closer. When we meet him, we must be ready.’

  Since returning from Chimaera, Russ had often mentioned taking on Horus. It had become a mantra for him, an article of faith. There was no one else, in his mind, capable of landing the killing blow, no one with the sheer battle-fury needed to take the Warmaster down.

  Bjorn said nothing about that either. In the months ahead there would be many opportunities to talk of strategy, and now was not the time.

  ‘So you are still going to Terra,’ he said.

  Russ nodded. ‘Kva tells me the storms are less complete now – there should be a way. I need to speak to Malcador, and I cannot wait for the Legion to join me. You will oversee the work when I am gone. Drive them hard – the forges must be stoked.’

  ‘But Ogvai–’

  ‘–knows the shape of things, as do the other jarls. They also know better than to go against the Old Wolf. Learn to work with them.’

  Bjorn nodded. Since his restoration,
Russ was impossible to gainsay. If there had ever been a crisis within him, a breakdown of the superhuman confidence that had animated him ever since slaying the first enemy on his adoptive world of endless violence, it had now been quelled. The old light was back in his eyes, as hard as frost.

  ‘We are back now,’ said Russ. ‘We have sounded the depths, and lived to tell of it. Our enemies will be crowing over our funeral pyre, free of the long shadow of Fenris, but that shadow will never leave them – it will slip towards them when the fires burn low, as cold as it ever was, and just as bitter.’

  Bjorn smiled at that. It was impossible not to – the raw joy of it, the pleasure in the hunt; it had all been restored.

  ‘You and I, then, One-Handed,’ said Russ, his fangs bared. ‘The lines will be drawn, the fleet will return. And when we next howl, the universe will shake from it.’

  The fury of the Great Wolf is at last unleashed

  The Binary Succession

  David Annandale

  The ramparts of the Stellarum Vigil were among the highest points of the Imperial Palace. The tower pierced the grey-brown smog cover that choked the Terran sky. Here, unaugmented humans needed rebreathers in the thin air. Here, the atmospheric barrier to the stars faded. At night, they shone with a solemn purity of silver.

  But one of the glints was a holy red.

  Here, the lost Forge World Principal could be seen and mourned.

  The exiles gathered often, crimson-robed figures lining the ramparts. They were still except for the slow twitches of mechadendrites and the hovering of servo-skulls. From the moment Mars appeared on the horizon until the moment it set, there was nothing except the silent observance. All duties were suspended. No consideration could supersede the witnessing of the sacred world.