Wolfsbane

by Guy Haley

  'Lowly?' Gren tore off his helmet. 'That last lot damn cracked my lens,' he said. He held the helm up to his face and wrinkled his nose at it.

  'Put your helmet back on,' said Bror.

  'Can't see a thing through the crazing,' said Gren miserably. 'I'll fight without.'

  'Put it back on, Gren!' snarled Bror. The ship shook hard to a large impact. It was close by, probably the shell distribution node near the gun deck he and the other Knights Errant had marked for torpedo strike.

  'Looks like your beacons and your runes remained undiscovered,' said Ragner.

  Bror nodded. 'It pleases me the deaths of my comrades were not in vain,' he said. 'Though I never thought I'd return here to follow the marks myself.' He glanced at Gren. 'I said put your helmet back on. A lot of the marks I made were on weak points in the hull. If they're targeted, we will lose atmosphere. I don't want to have to blow air back into your lungs. You're ugly. I don't want to kiss you.'

  'And he's got bad breath,' said Enrir. 'He can't stand it himself. That's why he doesn't want to wear his helm.'

  Gren grumbled, but replaced his helmet.

  Other wolf packs were dealing with the macrocannons, spiking them with krak grenades tossed into the breaches. Gun barrels blew out into petalled rings with flat, musical bangs. In a few moments, the VI Legion had turned a functioning cannon gallery into a ruin. Corpses were mounded in piles. Blood dripped from the walls. Any machine that dared voice a protest was riddled with bolts. Burning wads of fibrous baffling and insulation whirled around the room, casting off embers that were pulled into tight vortexes by struggling air cyclers.

  'Our brothers are having too much fun,' said Bror, as another cannon died. 'Let's be useful. Take these sleds out! Stop them reloading the neighbouring battery.'

  'I'll do it.' Himmlik took a krak grenade from each of them, bundled them together and set one for a timed detonation. The next time the sled came past, he casually tossed the grenades atop the fresh shells.

  'I'd get back, if I were you.'

  A hundred metres up the runnel, the grenades blew, setting off the explosives in the shells. The tensioned chain broke, and came scything back down the runnel so close to the Space Marines their wolf pelts rippled. Fire followed, the explosion forcing it down the runnel like a blowtorch. Temperature warnings rang in Bror's ears as the firestorm rolled past them and then sucked back, as a powerful decompression gale snatched it towards the hole the explosion had made in the hull. The winds quickened as other members of the Rout targeted the power units and control boxes for the atmospheric shielding, and blew out the pistons for the blast doors that closed when the shielding failed.

  The entirety of the room's air blasted out in a terrific gust, turning to ice on the edges of the gun port apertures. Mortal corpses tumbled out. They spun away into the battle, human flotsam in an ocean of fire.

  Bror maglocked his feet and leaned into the wind. When it was done, he turned to Gren.

  'See?' he said by unit vox-net. 'Wear your helmet,' Lufven Close-Handed voxed his Great Company.

  'Targets onn and twa taken. Target gallery tra's guns will not speak for long. The hunt goes to plan. Great Company to disperse as per prior orders. Fenrys hjolda!'

  The vox cut out. The wolf packs split. Already the sounds of battle sounded over the company vox from the next gun gallery.

  'Our next kill is the munitions hold,' said Bror. 'A big prize for worthy warriors.'

  'Ha, you flatter us, you dog!' said Enrir. 'They only chose us for that because you've been here before. It's the deepest target.'

  'I didn't make it that far last time,' admitted Bror.

  'We should have left the sleds active,' said Gren miserably.

  'But it was a good explosion,' said Himmlik. 'I like a good explosion.' He patted the cloth satchel filled with melta flasks he wore at his hip. 'May there be many more.'

  'We could have ridden all the way into the magazine, now we're going to have to walk,' grumbled Gren.

  'No, brother,' said Bror, 'now you're going to have to run!'

  Doors were breached all along the gallery. Fresh volumes of atmosphere hurried out to leap into space. The Vlka Fenryka pushed into the current, howling and discharging their weapons as they split up to take ruin onwards into the ship's body.

  More explosions rumbled the deck as Bror's pack pressed on to their next target.

  Twenty-Two

  Wolf Hunt

  There was little resistance on the way to the magazine. Armed servitors were the toughest foes the wolf pack faced, but they were easily dealt with, if one had the knack.

  Bror's pack of Long Fangs were battle cunning. A few scratches in their armour was the worst they suffered.

  Bror's futharc markings had run out some time before, and not long afterwards they passed into a part of the ship devoid of life. There were refectories and common halls there, but they were empty, appearing deserted for some time.

  The magazine was a tricky proposition. Buried too far in the guts of the Vengeful Spirit to be taken out by a hit from outside, and prodigiously armoured, it needed tackling from within, and it had been designed to foil such attempts.

  The magazine was cellular in construction, being made up of giant, armoured silos arranged in multiples of six. Each group was isolated by deep chasms that ran all the way down to the bilges. Armoured panels big as fortress walls baffled the sides of the metal canyon, held out from the walls on huge pistons to absorb any detonation of the shell stores. The chasms' main purpose was to channel blast forces up and out of the ship via chimneys set high into the superstructure, but they acted as well as defensive moats as they did fire breaks. Each silo was connected by two-level retractable bridges to the greater body of the ship. On the top were companionways of open mesh. Below them were the railroads for the shell loaders.

  Fortunately for the Rout, the bridges remained extended. Some of the magazines were inactive, cut off from the guns by the Vlka Fenryka's sabotaging of their rail lines. Most kept up a constant squealing rattle of wheels on tracks as servitor carts dragged shells from the stores and took them away to the batteries.

  They selected the middle silo in the central group of six for detonation.

  A pair of twinned autocannons in turrets were slung under their target's gate arch. They panned back and forth in monotonous sweeps, their augur eyes glowing a baleful red.

  Bror took up a forward position in cover by the bridge. Deep shadows dominated the space behind the baffles. The canyons were lit a twilight blue, but by contrast to the backs of the baffles they seemed bright and open.

  'Enrir,' Bror voxed. He kept the message brief. The turrets were of a sophisticated mark, and were doubtless scanning for vox broadcasts. Enrir came forwards stealthily.

  'Can you hit them with your meltagun?' Bror asked. Enrir carried the weapon as a supplement to his bolt gun. It went against Legion organisational doctrines, but the Rout had never been one to follow rules.

  Enrir leaned forwards.

  'Those turrets are forty-six metres away, the extreme edge of the beam focus. I can do it, but I'll be able to take only one turret down. The other will open fire as soon as I claim the first for Morkai.' Bror patted his pauldron. 'Do it. Take the left. The rest of you, target the right. And be quick. The lack of sentries here is making me nervous.'

  Enrir set his boltgun down quietly. He undamped his meltagun from the side of his power plant. He sighted it carefully, and adjusted the focal length of the fusion beam with a dial on the housing. He brought the weapon to bear, stock close in to his shoulder. He looked down at the iron sight on the barrel end. Fusion weapons were intended for close-range work. They didn't need aiming too carefully under ordinary circumstances.

  'On tra,' said Bror. 'Onn, twa, tra!'

  Enrir squeezed the trigger carefully so as not to disturb his aim. The air shimmered between the gun and the autocannon turret. The efficacy of the beam was reduced so far away, and the turret had time to come to bea
r before Enrir burned through it, setting off the ammunition stores inside. Cooked off shells spiralled outwards.

  The second turret immediately opened fire with a sawing chug, driving Enrir back behind the armoured baffle. Bror and the others responded in kind, but their bolts exploded on the armoured exterior of the turret, doing little damage.

  'My apologies, fat one, but you're going to have to brave the iron rain and take that second one out!' Bror shouted.

  Enrir nodded. He adjusted the settings on his gun, then threw himself back around the corner and fired.

  A large, solid round smashed Enrir's right pauldron from his shoulder with violent force. The edge of the plate ripped open his body glove and cut his flesh down to the bone of his shoulder blade before bouncing off the wall near Gren's head and falling into the chasm. Enrir was turned about by the hit. His meltagun flew from his hands and slid over the edge of the drop. He cursed hard, enraged by the loss of his favourite gun rather than the wound he had taken. His brothers returned fire with a punishing hail of bolt-rounds.

  The autocannon turret opened fire again, but its shells whistled harmlessly over the pack. Though its machine-spirit lived, the mechanisms that drove it were fused solid by Enrir's shot. Ragner put a bolt precisely into its augur lenses, blinding it. He advanced, bolt-gun up. The turret attempted to turn but could not, and voided its magazines uselessly into the armoured baffles.

  'I'd run now,' Ragner said to his brothers, and sprinted for the magazine door.

  The turrets guarding other silo entrances opened fire on the pack as they dashed across the bridge. Ragner was hit, but the round skidded off the curves of his plate, eliciting little more than an oath from the wolf. Bror attempted to help Enrir to his feet, but the warrior waved him away and got up himself. They made it to the entrance of the magazine, hurling themselves into the cover of the silo's vestibule with a series of crashing impacts. A thick blast door barred the way.

  'Burn it through!' Bror shouted over the booming of a dozen autocannons.

  Himmlik pulled a melta charge from his cloth satchel and slammed it onto the door. Seconds later, the way was open.

  Bror stepped through the steaming breach into the shell store.

  A floor level with the upper deck of the bridge divided it into two storeys, and through the grille of the deck panels he could see automated mechanisms at work loading the shells onto their transit sleds.

  The shells, each the height of a legionary, were stored in dozens of tall hoppers that fed downwards into the sled bays. A high rail coming in from the far side allowed the hoppers to be refilled, but the aperture that it entered through was currently sealed. The shells clunked down with loud, decisive noises, selected from the stacks to some machine optimised pattern that looked random to Bror's eyes. The walls were a delicate lime-green made lurid by counterseptic ultraviolet lumens.

  All this Bror had expected to see. What he didn't expect were the organic threads linking the control panels across the narrow ways between hoppers. They clogged the space with a stringy web, their roots buried deep in the machinery of the magazine. Where they touched the metal, slabs of rippled flesh coated parts of the walls, dripping with clear slime.

  Gren came through after him, and stopped.

  'What have they done to the machines?'

  Bror drew his combat knife and probed the sinews. They quivered. When he cut through one, it bled. 'It's… it's flesh,' he said.

  'The traitors tamper with the evils of the Underverse,' growled Himmlik.

  'You are a gothi now, my brother?' said Gren, but his challenge was voiced uneasily.

  'Don't touch it,' said Enrir.

  'Good advice,' said Bror. 'Plant the charges, then leave this place.'

  'Here!' Himmlik unslung his satchel, emptied it and tossed melta devices to his brothers. Enrir kept a lookout from the door as the others locked the charges in place.

  'How's your shoulder?' asked Bror.

  'I'll live.' Enrir touched the wound. Sealant foam mixed with blood scabbed over the rent in his body glove, but the hole was too large to be closed. He had lost the whole outer plate and the nested layers beneath.

  'Don't get any of this skjitna muck on it,' Bror warned. 'Morkai's breath!' He swore as an eye opened in the flesh covering half a shell stack. It followed him as he moved through the flesh web to plant the final charge. He put a bolt-round into it. Yellow pus fountained from the impact site. Something living shrieked within mechanisms. 'Doner Ragner railed.

  'Me too,' Raid Gren. The auspex chimed loudly. Gren swore and plucked it from his belt. 'We've got company,' growled Gren. 'Multiple inbound targets.'

  'The Sons of Horus?' said Enrir. His teeth were gritted against the pain of his wound, but his words were glad. 'I want to shoot something more challenging than deck thralls.'

  'No such luck,' said Gren. He looked up from the auspex. 'Mechanicum combat cyborgs. Hundreds of them.'

  'Is there another way out than the bridge?' asked Enrir.

  'Not that I know of,' said Bror.

  'There isn't one on the auspex. Not on the plans either,' said Gren, twisting dials on the side of his device.

  'Apart from down,' said Enrir. 'I wouldn't recommend that way.'

  'Fine then,' said Ragner. 'We fight our way out.'

  The tramp of metallic feet sounded down the corridor leading to the magazine.

  'We go blade to blade,' said Bror. 'They'll outshoot us if we stay here. But no half-man can outfight us close in. Charge on my word.'

  Leman Russ and his Varagyr cut their way into the Vengeful Spirit with all the subtlety of an industrial auger applied to heart surgery. Rounds of howling never ceased, rippling across the dispersed battlefront, almost dying away before being taken up by another pack. The Vlka fell on the inhabitants of the ship without mercy, even as the Hrafnkel and the others pounded at the Vengeful Spirit from outside. Explosions rocked the vessel from within as packs chased down the breadcrumb trails of the Knights Errant's rune marks and locator beacons, tearing out crucial subsystems and setting supplies ablaze No other Legion could unleash such fury. And yet, to Bjorn, the Vlka's efforts did not seem enough to slay the giant flagship, large parts of the ship were already deserted, many halls designed for mortal use were airless or stale, dusty possessions scattered around the floor. Old blood stained the decking, suggesting that the occupants had been slaughtered, but in many of those places there was no sign of external breaching. Whatever atrocity had taken place within the hull had been perpetrated by the Sons of Horus themselves.

  'Bad memories cling to this place,' said Grimnr to Bjorn. Bjorn had been warned by men who wished to be his ally that Grimnr I spoke out against him to the Lord of Winter and War. Not that Bjorn I cared. He agreed with Grimnr's supposed position, so he was surprised that the warrior spoke with him at all. It was a sign of the I apprehension that gripped the Legion. The Vengeful Spirit felt wrong.

  'A lot of bad things have happened here,' the huscarl said, then I jogged ahead.

  Combat came fitfully to Leman Russ' war band. The sounds of fighting diminished the further they pressed on. The thralls they encountered, they slaughtered. Occasional ambushes stabbed at them from the darkness of the ship's labyrinth. They faced Word Bearers and Alpha Legionnaires in small groups, who came at them, killed and were killed, before vanishing back into the deeps. For all that the Vengeful Spirit and the Hrafnkel had started out as siblings, they had diverged, and the differences had amplified since the betrayal by means that transcended the physical. To Bjorn it felt that the futharc runes pinned the ship's form in place, and that without them the Rout would find itself lost in a shifting maze of service corridors and shafts that doubled back upon themselves.

  If the unearthliness of the Vengeful Spirit were not enough to convince the Wolves of maleficarum, the voices that Bjorn had heard upon their arrival grew stronger. Snatches of words - all alien, but unmistakably malevolent - became apparent, causing the packs to pause many times in case o
f enemy attack. In earlier days they might have checked their vox for malfunction. Now they knew the voices for evil magic. This diagnosis of the ship's ills was brought fully home to them when the corridors they trod ceased to ring under their feet, but became moist, giving flesh that shivered when touched, as if physical contact pained it. Maws gusting mephitic gases replaced vents. Wet orifices took the place of door panels. They were small, these areas of malignant growth, but increasingly widespread, and appeared to be growing towards one another, linking up like the sprouting seeds of cancer subverting the organs of its host body. The segments of the ship suffering this flesh disease were a nightmare given form, and when left behind, memory of them faded, as if they were not truly of this reality and could not be easily comprehended by mortal minds.

  'We walk through the Underverse here,' said Bjorn.

  The flesh-caverns disturbed the Rout, but the gothi accompanying Russ' band had it worse. They were shaken by things Bjorn could not himself see. They behaved in ways Bjorn could not imagine Kva or his companions would have. He understood more clearly than ever what a grievous wound the loss of the best Rune Priests was to the Legion. Kva's cool head was sorely missed.

  'How can the Sons of Horus not be alarmed by what is happening around them?' said Grimnr. Russ had ceased to range so far ahead of the main body, and had come in closer to his guardians, so Grimnr fell back again for a time to walk by Bjorn's side. 'If I were to follow a king in good faith, believing his cause to be just, and then that king introduced the likes of this to my world, I would sink my sword into his spine.'

  'The Sons of Horus have sold themselves to ancient powers. They have crossed the boundaries the gothi speak of,' said Bjorn. 'They have gone mad, brother.'

  Grimnr growled, a wet jungle sound of warning. 'It would be better if they were mad,' he said. 'I fear they are not.'

  Shortly after, the Sons of Horus showed themselves, and Grimnr and Bjorn were able to form a more informed opinion as to their sanity.

  They attacked as the Rout were crossing one of the ship's vast, lateral canyons. It was a cavernous space running down the neck of the ship far below the spinal way of the uppermost levels, but serving the same purpose of facilitating transit between the far-flung sections of the enormous vessel. Long steel lines for cable cars hung from pylons, and a monorail track ran dead down the centre. Bundles of cabling and pipes of all diameters clustered the sides of the chasm. But nothing moved there. Although there was no sign of direct damage, the heavy feeling of dereliction clung to the chasm. Giant, toothed blast doors had sealed the way into discrete sections. A lake of dark, stinking liquid had gathered in the chasm's base, steaming noxious vapours, and this deep in the ship the current battle was noticeable only as intermittent tremors that rippled the lake's surface.