by William King
Their ship was crippled and directly under the guns of the vastly superior foe. It would only be a matter of seconds before the enemy gunners made the necessary corrections to their arc of fire, and the devastating beams of energy would play over the Fist of Russ snuffing out all of their lives. It seemed that all of their hard work had been for nothing. They would have been better off remaining aboard the Chaos cruiser and meeting a hero’s death in battle. Now they were destined to be swatted like bugs. Their deaths would have no meaning whatsoever.
Then the whole shell of the Chaos ship seemed to expand. Great gouts of plasma burst out of every orifice, every turret, every airlock, every porthole, every point of weakness on the hull. The slow expansion of the ship continued. It was like watching a pigskin being inflated to bursting point. Slowly the huge structure of metal began to buckle and twist. The process accelerated as large chunks of the hull were blown into space and the fiery inferno within was revealed. Ragnar thought he saw a few tiny humanoid figures being vaporised but it might have just been his imagination.
The chain of explosions came faster and faster, larger and larger until they all merged into one vast cataclysmic and final eruption. The whole enemy craft vanished, consumed by a fireball brighter than the sun, a sight made all the eerier by the silence in which it happened. Ragnar half expected to feel the Fist of Russ rocked by the Shockwave, to hear a vast rain of debris clatter into the side of the ship, but they were already too far away. He braced himself for the thunder of the explosion, then realised he was being foolish. There could only be silence in the vacuum of space, even at the death of so mighty a ship. He realised that he had been holding his breath, and that the silence within the boarding chamber was as intense as the silence outside its walls, then he heard Berek Thunderfist speak.
“We built a suitable pyre for our brethren. What say you, brothers?”
The roar of the Space Wolves was deafening. Ragnar joined in giving vent to all of his joy and relief as well as his pent up fury and grief. He realised that Sven was slapping him on the back, and that Sergeant Hakon had been hoisted on the shoulders of the squad and was being tossed into the air by his followers.
“We bloody well did it!” bellowed Sven, and Ragnar could only slap his shoulder pad in agreement.
“Silence all!” bellowed Berek, and instantly all was quiet. All eyes turned to their chieftain. He stood there posed, one hand cupped over his ear, obviously listening to a voice coming over the comm-net. He nodded his head twice then grinned.
“It appears that we were not the only ones who were successful in our mission. We have been joined by the forces of the Imperial Grand Crusade. The Chaos-loving scum have been driven off. We are victorious this day.”
This time the roar of acclamation was even more deafening than the first. Berek was hoisted onto the shoulders of his Wolf Guard, and stood there legs apart, braced on the shoulderpads of two of the mightiest of his warriors, looking as completely relaxed as if he stood on the metal deck of the ship. Ragnar was aware how much this was a pose, intended to impress, to project an image, but he did not mind. Berek had shown himself to be a worthy and successful battle leader. He was entitled to his foibles.
Now the warrior chieftain gestured for quiet. “We must lift a stein and toast our dead brothers. This calls for ale!”
The third cheer was loudest of all.
“This is the bloody life!” said Sven, swigging down another tankard of ale. “We gave those mutants what for. Although I must confess there were times when I had my doubts…”
Ragnar looked at his friend closely, wondering whether this was the ale talking. This was pure Fenrisian lager, containing ribaldroot, a herb that suppressed the Space Marines’ usual ability to metabolise poisons, even alcohol, and allowed them to get drunk. It was not like Sven to admit to having doubts, or even admit to thinking about anything so this was quite a confession.
“There were times when I felt the same way myself, to tell the truth. We cut it a bit fine on the run out!”
“Well, thank Russ that the Wolf Lord bloody well knew what he was doing better than we did.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Ragnar, suiting action to words. “Things went pretty well, in our first action of the new campaign.”
“Aye, they did. You know this was my first boarding action?”
“Mine too, if you don’t count that space hulk back at Koriolis.”
“I mean ship to ship, blade to blade, right into the fray, you idiot. I remember the hulk too. Who could forget it and those genestealers?”
Ragnar saw that Aenar was looking at them wide eyed. Torvald was poker-faced but Ragnar could tell from his scent that he too was impressed and hanging on to every word.
“You fought genestealers?” queried Aenar.
“No — we went up to them and gave them a big hug and a hearty hail fellow well-met,” said Sven, pausing to take another swig of beer. “Of course we fought them, idiot boy! What else would we do?”
“I meant you’ve really seen them, and boarded a space hulk as well?”
“Haven’t you ever listened to Sven’s boasting, back in the Fang?” Ragnar asked, not unkindly. The beer was making him feel mellow.
“I don’t think I have ever heard him talk about it.”
Ragnar considered this. Actually, he did not think he had ever heard Sven talk about this in front of the others either. Perhaps it was not surprising. The trip to the space hulk, along with their whole quest for the ancient eldar talisman, had affected all of the survivors deeply. It was not something they ever talked about with anyone who had not been there. There had been too many deaths, and too much strangeness. Now under the influence of the ale, and the warm camaraderie that came with shared survival, it seemed easier to talk about it.
He let Sven tell the tale, only correcting a few of his more outrageous lies about his prowess in battle when they arose. He did not see how it was possible for anyone to take Sven’s claim to have slaughtered twenty stealers in single combat seriously, but Aenar obviously did, and Torvald at least listened with a straight face.
Ragnar looked down into his beer. He remembered how he had frozen in that fight and had been saved by Sven. It was a secret shame he had never mentioned to anybody, although he kept finding it threatening to erupt from his lips now. It brought back memories of how he had almost frozen back in the tunnel of wreckage back on the mutant ship. He continued to think about this, brooding so deeply that he did not even notice that Sven had finished his tale until he felt a poke in his ribs with an elbow.
“You all right there? You’re looking a bit green about the gills. Can’t hold your ale, I suppose, just like I always bloody suspected.”
Ragnar glanced around and saw that Aenar and Torvald had gone off to get more drink. “I was just remembering the fight,” Ragnar said, almost defensively.
“And a bloody good one it was too.”
Ragnar realised that Sven was not the man to discuss his doubts and fears with, no matter how good a friend he was. He would have to wait for another time. Perhaps when he next saw Ranek, the Wolf Priest. After all, listening to such confessions was part of the old priest’s duties. Not for the first time though sitting amid his friends, his comrades and the members of his pack, Ragnar felt alone. How could that be, he wondered? How was it possible to feel this way amid the camaraderie and the drinking and the loud singing? He glanced at the high table, where Berek sat, surrounded by his Wolf Guard, smiling and jesting and looking completely at ease. Had the Wolf Lord ever felt this way, Ragnar wondered? Somehow, he doubted it.
His eyes travelled a bit further and came to rest upon Sergeant Hakon’s scarred and sinister face. He saw the old warrior was looking at him thoughtfully and he wondered how long the sergeant had been doing so. It sometimes seemed like Hakon could almost read his thoughts. Ragnar hoped he could not read his current ones, or the black mood they were bringing on. He looked away and saw Aenar and Torvald returning clutching several
more steins in each fist.
He reached up and grabbed one and swigged it back, hoping to drown out the bleakness with beer. Aenar slammed the remaining steins down on the table.
“I owe you that beer for saving my life,” he said with drunken seriousness.
“You owe me nothing,” said Ragnar. “It was my duty to a fellow Space Wolf.”
The words sounded a little hollow to him, but the others did not seem to notice.
“It wasn’t nothing to me,” said Aenar. “I owe you more than a beer, and I won’t forget it either.”
Sven belched loudly. Ragnar looked at him and laughed.
“I have never seen anybody fight like Ragnar did against those mutants blocking our path,” said Aenar. “It was like watching a berserker from one of the old sagas.”
Ragnar considered this. Was this another source of his black mood. Was he a berserker? He was not sure he liked the idea. In the old tales, such warriors were always coming to dark fates brought on by their insatiable lust for battle. He was not at all sure he wanted to be like them.
“Drink up,” said Sven. “When Ragnar’s in this mood, he could turn a village fair into a funeral.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Looks like we’ll be seeing bloody Garm soon,” said Sven, glancing down at the chessboard.
“How do you work that out?” asked Ragnar, considering his next move. Aenar’s hand hovered over his dragonship, preparing to move it forward to take the most advanced of Ragnar’s thralls. Was he really going to fall into such an obvious trap? The youth was a better player than he looked, although nowhere near as good as Torvald or Ragnar himself. “You’ve been saying the same thing every day for a week.”
Sven squinted down at the pieces. “Aren’t you going to jump that thrall and take the other three pieces behind it?” he asked Aenar innocently.
“We’re playing chess, not draughts,” said Aenar, moving his hand away from the board and frowning thoughtfully.
“My clan never played chess back on Fenris. Draughts is a man’s game.”
“Funny,” said Ragnar. “I thought it was for folk too thick to understand chess. And you haven’t answered my question. What makes you think we’ll be dropping on Garm soon?”
“I’ve been talking with the crew.”
“We all have. They don’t seem to know any more than the rest of us.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” said Sven. He grinned broadly. “Some know more man others. Just like us.”
“And some of us, like you, know less than others, on account of not having a fully working brain.”
Aenar was watching the byplay between the two of them worriedly, as if he actually thought they might come to blows. It showed how green he still was, Ragnar supposed. Back on Fenris, if two warriors from different clans had spoken to each other the way he and Sven did, there would have been a duel moments later. Aenar did not seem to realise that bickering could be just as much a way of passing the time as playing chess.
“Maybe you should concentrate on the game,” Ragnar suggested. “You are already a keep and a thrall down.”
Ragnar turned his attention back to Sven, who was looking as pleased as a cat that had swallowed a sailor bird. “So, who have you been talking to?”
“Tremont, the Navigator’s apprentice.”
“He’s not her apprentice. For one thing, he’s part of our fleet, a man of Fenris. For another thing, he doesn’t have a third eye.”
“So what?”
“I sometimes wonder if everything the teaching engines put into your head leaked out again, then I remember they need a brain to work on in the first place.”
“Ha bloody ha! If you had bothered to wait for me to finish, you would have heard me say that whatever he is, he knows what is going on. He’s always on the command deck. He hears what the sensor augurs see in the divinatory engines as soon as they give their reports, and he tells me that we’ve cleared a path through the Chaos fleet and are putting into orbit over Garm within hours. That was why they fired the big engines two hours ago.”
Ragnar considered Sven’s words. They sounded suspiciously plausible and they fit the facts. Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe them.
Like the rest of the company, he was getting a little fed up with being cooped up on the ship. After the excitement of their battle with the mutants, the past few days had been anti-climactic.
“I heard something interesting at breakfast this morning,” said Aenar. His hand was hovering over the dragonship again. Ragnar could not believe he had missed the obvious trap.
“Are you going to jump the thrall?” Sven asked.
“What did you hear?” Ragnar prompted.
“I heard that the Great Wolf sends twenty-four Wolves as thralls to the Navigator’s House in return for her services.”
“What?” Ragnar almost laughed. The tale sounded ludicrous. No Great Wolf could do such a thing. There would be a rebellion if he even hinted at it. Sven did laugh.
“Sounds like Strybjorn or one of the others was having you on again,” said Ragnar.
Aenar looked up at him.
“Again?” he asked.
“Like the time he told you that all new Blood Claws had to polish the armour of a Wolf who had been initiated at least a year before them.”
“You mean we don’t have to?”
Sven groaned. “And Ragnar says I’m dumb.”
“No — I know you are. But where did you hear this nonsense about thralls and Navigators?”
“From Sven’s friend, Tremont.”
“I never said he was my friend.”
“What did he tell you exactly?”
“That every time a new Great Wolf is chosen he must send two dozen Wolves to Belisarius in repayment of some ancient debt.”
“That can’t be true,” said Ragnar.
“It is true,” said Sergeant Hakon striding across the room. “At least in part.”
“How can that be?”
“Like everybody else, our Chapter needs Navigators to guide our ships through the immaterium. If we did not have them we would be reduced to jumping blind.”
He paused to let his words sink in. All of them knew exactly what that meant. Jumping blind into the immaterium meant a good chance of never coming out again. Only Navigators had the skill to guide ships through the void and bring them safely out the other end. And even they made mistakes sometimes. Ragnar had known this since the tutelary engines had placed the knowledge in his brain, but he could see now that he had never fully assimilated it or thought out the consequences. He had simply assumed that the Navigators were sworn to the Chapter’s service down through the generations just like the ships’ crews. Thinking it through he could see the error in his thinking.
He reviewed the facts the teaching machines had placed at his disposal. Like Space Marines, Navigators were unique, their origins dating back to a time before the Imperium. They were gifted with unusual powers — their psychic talents — available only to themselves. The Emperor and his primarchs had possessed that gift too, but the primarchs had vanished long ago and the Emperor was entombed within his life-giving throne. In effect, the Navigators controlled all commercial and military travel within the Imperium. Were it not for the fact that they were divided into a number of mutually antagonistic houses, they would have a stranglehold on the human realm.
The thought deeply worried Ragnar. It was all very well having Space Marines, but it would all stand for nothing if the Chapters could not reach the worlds to which they were assigned or travel where they pleased, and when. Ragnar realised that it was possible to wield power without wielding a gun.
The control the Navis Nobilitae had over space travel had made them rich and powerful beyond the dreams of most planetary governments. They had ensured that without them, the Imperium and possibly even the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, would be helpless.
“Does the Great Wolf really send human tribute to the Navigators,” Ragnar asked.
“Of course not,” said Hakon contemptuously. “Such foolish words are unworthy of a Wolf. The tale is an old and complicated one, reaching back to before even the founding of the Empire. We have an alliance with House Belisarius of the Navigators that was forged by Russ himself…”
“An alliance,” said Sven, his tone showing that he, like Ragnar, found this far more acceptable and understandable.
“Aye. There is a pact between us. They provide us with the means to sail our ships between the stars. In return, we provide the Celestarch of Belisarius with a bodyguard.”
This too sounded only fair. For priceless as the service of a Navigator might be, surely the service of a Space Marine must balance it in the scales.
“The Navigators swear to obey the Great Wolf as they would obey their own ruler. The Wolves, for the duration of their service, obey the Celestarch as they would their own leader, and protect him with their lives if need be.”
“No one has ever told us any bloody such thing,” grumbled Sven.
“Doubtless, when Logan Grimnar feels the need to discuss every aspect of the Chapter’s business with a Blood Claw, he will call upon you,” said Hakon tartly.
“I think what Sven meant was that the tutelary engines never taught us this,” said Ragnar, attempting to drag his friend out of hot water. Sven’s expression told Ragnar that he had meant no such thing, but he kept his mouth firmly shut. Hakon looked at him.
“The machines are ancient and no one, not even the Iron Priests, entirely understands their workings. They are intended to teach what it is needful for a Marine to know. They cannot fill your head with every detail of our Chapter’s history. Not even Sven’s skull is empty enough to hold all of that. And sometimes there are gaps; the transfer of knowledge is imperfect. That is why people like me are here, to teach what the machines leave out.”