Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  Then something burst along the trench towards them – a grey ghost, massive and blurred by speed. He only had time for the briefest of impressions – the dull boom of machine-armour moving, a blade snarling in the dark, two red eyes blazing like afterburners. It was huge, it was fast.

  The ghost bounded across the packed space of the inner trench, slaying as it came. Its victims died so quickly they had no time to scream, no time to react, just to be spliced open as an energy-spitting blade ripped them into meat-chunks.

  He aimed his autogun. He even managed to get a shot away. He saw it splinter from the creature’s shoulder – a burst of ice-white against the roiling dark.

  Then it was on him – a hurricane of movement, a deafening snarl, a jackhammer impact. He didn’t feel the bite of the blade, just a smash of a huge iron-bound fist, hurling him high into the air. His head cracked back, shattering his helm.

  He landed with a snap of bone. Something burst, and hot liquid sprayed across his hands. He tried to get up, but his legs would no longer work. The air was filled with bestial noises – growls, tears, bellows of rage. He half saw more bodies flung across his field of vision, trailing gobbets of blood like gruesome mortar-trails.

  Then it was on him again. He stared up at something he vaguely recognised from old devotional vids – a warrior-god towering over him, a grey-clad titan, a force of winter elements hurled out of the night and made into hellish, feral reality.

  Just then, in a blaze of clarity and terror, he knew what it was. He remembered his humanity. He remembered what had happened to him. He remembered his old name.

  I was Jevold.

  Then the sword plunged down, slicing clean at the neck, and the misery of existence was ended.

  Ingvar leapt away from the headless corpse, swaying clear of a row of incoming las-impacts and tearing down the earthwork’s boundary trench. Dausvjer whirled around him, lacerating flesh and ripping through armour plates. The trench defenders charged at him in clumps of bodies, moving slowly as if in some dreadful dream.

  He tore through them. He kicked out, pulverising torsos and breaking limbs. He punched, smashing skulls and cracking atrophied ribs. He hacked with the blade, biting into tumours and organs and spilling their contents out across the earth. The hordes clustered around him, swarming him with weight of numbers, before being broken and hurled away, tumbling through the air in a ballet of spiralling limbs. The carnage was voluminous, remorseless, implacable.

  Ingvar wanted to roar – to open his throat and declaim the name of the Allfather, of Russ, of Fenris. He wanted to bellow at them as he slaughtered, relishing every splash of blood against his armour.

  For now, though, he was silent. The Sisters had done their work, drawing the attention of the enemy towards Hjec Aleja’s walls, and the need for stealth was still acute.

  The Wolves, all five of them capable of bearing an axe, had sprinted out of the city just as the assault on the outer walls began, breaking clear of the Ighala Gate and ghosting through the deserted suburbs, heading down and away from the growing fighting and finding passage through the dark. Once beyond the city’s southern limits they’d pulled around, running fast through empty lands before angling back up towards the enemy encampment. The few scouts they’d come across had been murdered swiftly. Like a deadly riptide, the Wolves had swept up out of the gloom and into the maze of trenches, spreading out across a wide front and kindling blade-weapons as they came. By the time they hit the main defence-lines, their momentum was unstoppable.

  Ingvar heard a muffled crump as one of the pack – Gunnlaugur, he guessed – took out another gun-tower. Ingvar kept moving, barrelling down the jagged line of the trench, cleansing it, harrowing it, purging it. A big mutant swayed into his path, its fists crowned with grafted spikes, its heavy helm bleeding marshlight from nine iron-ringed lenses. It lunged at him, gurgling through a clutch of breathing tubes and going for his throat.

  Ingvar severed the tubes with a tight swipe of his blade, spinning out of range of the spike-thrust before backhanding the mutant with the heel of his sword, breaking the creature’s neck and driving its jawbone up into its skull. As the creature toppled into the dust, Ingvar spun to face three more warriors. They lumbered towards him numbly, firing a mix of las-beams and bullets from corroded weaponry. Ingvar charged straight into them, arms wide as if in an embrace. He bore them down with him, crushing ribcages and smashing limbs. Then he was up again, grinding the remains into the bloody mire at his feet, sword crackling, helm scanning for more targets.

  ‘Target located,’ came Olgeir’s heavy voice over the squad-comm.

  Ingvar switched to Olgeir’s loc-reading – forty metres to the north, up amid the big tank formations and heading into the heart of the encampment.

  He smashed aside a grasping claw, ducked under a hastily aimed thicket of green-tainted las-beams, and started running again. He leapt up the far side of the trench wall, boosted by his armour, and sprinted across open ground.

  Enemy troops swarmed at him from the poison-clouds, throwing themselves at his feet, hurling spiked grenades into his path, trying to land a shot, do some damage.

  It barely troubled him. Ingvar raced through it all, speeding like a loosed cannon, veering and swerving out of danger and annihilating all that remained in his path. His armour ran with blood – it slopped away from him as he moved, thick and glistening. He went noiselessly, quietly ratcheting up the kill-tally as he burned towards the hunt’s focus.

  The ground rose up steeply towards a crater-edge summit, laced with lines of razor wire and broken by the shafts of more concentric trenches. Each defence-line was stuffed with mutant soldiers, all now aiming at him as he came.

  If he’d moved like a mortal moved, they’d have hit him – even power armour could be cracked by sufficient concentrations of incoming fire – but Ingvar moved like no human mortal had ever moved. He accelerated far too fast, then displaced himself, then checked back and loped back to full charge. It was impossible to track, to latch on to, to cope with. By the time he reached the crater’s lip he was attracting whole webs of incoming shots, criss-crossing over one another in a desperate attempt to bring him down.

  ‘Whelp – faster,’ Ingvar voxed to Hafloí, who wasn’t closing in at the rate of the others. Hafloí was a natural slayer, but he was decades younger and still had things to learn.

  Then Ingvar reached the summit and vaulted through the final defences before hurtling down the far side of the ridge, down to where the objects of the hunt had been dragged.

  They rose up, ruinous and magnificent, each one the size of a Warhound Titan and angled steeply into the toxin-boiling night. The four wall-breakers stood at the crater’s wide, flat base, each surrounded by vast throngs of attendant slave-workers. Long telescopic barrels glinted in the light of explosions, stained dark green and bearing the ornate livery of blasphemy. Furnaces growled away at their bases. Tubes slung and bubbled, conveying skin-melting compounds to the delivery shells. Plague-burst corpses hung from the lips of the gun-muzzles, twisting in the hot smoke from exhaust vents.

  The guns were nearly ready. Segmented belts churned towards snarl-mawed entry points, carrying payloads of ruination to the firing chambers. Gangs of shackled and blinded slaves hauled on chains, each link the size of a man’s torso, cranking the firing angles a little higher.

  Ingvar sped towards the nearest. The time for secrecy had passed – he heard Gunnlaugur’s blood-chilling war-cry echoing out into the darkness. Frag explosions suddenly kicked out, and the night erupted into a ripple of pyrotechnics.

  Ingvar grabbed his bolter from its mag-locked hold and opened fire. He heard Olgeir’s heavy bolter breaking out on the far side of the compound. The pack was converging, bursting through the defences en masse, hitting them all at once and overwhelming them.

  Ingvar cleared a whole swathe before him. It was all about speed now – sudden, ov
erwhelming force applied to a single point. The whole enclosure held thousands of mutant warriors, and sooner or later those numbers would wear down even a Space Marine. Járnhamar had to achieve the immediate task quickly, then cut their way back to a more defensible position and hope Callia was still keeping the larger part of the huge army busy.

  Ingvar neared the first of the artillery pieces, and its huge shadow fell across him. The breech section loomed out of the smoke, as tall as a Rhino, clad in thick blast-armour and vomiting palls of ink-black fumes.

  He mag-locked his blade and pivoted on his heel, firing all the while to keep the enemy from him. His magazine clunked empty, and he leapt up, latching on to the jagged edge of the breech casing. He climbed fast, ignoring the rain of las-beams that pinged and snapped around him. Once he reached the top of the armour-casing, he flung himself onto an angled roof. The metal beneath him rocked and shook, boiling away like some infernal oven. Just ahead of him, the barrel-base itself soared up into the night, five metres in diameter and ringed with chains.

  ‘They’re good to fire,’ voxed Gunnlaugur. ‘Gut them. Now.’

  Ingvar glanced up, seeing the Wolf Guard clambering across the breech-chamber on the wall-breaker across from him, less than twenty metres distant and barely ahead of a pursuing horde of screaming mutants.

  Ingvar reached for melta charges and clamped them to the sides of the huge barrel, fixing six of them in quick succession, before hearing the first clang of mutants scrambling up after him onto the armour-casing.

  He placed the last charge and whirled to face them, slamming a fresh magazine home just as the first of the enemy hauled itself up onto the roof of the breech section.

  ‘Fenrys!’ Ingvar thundered – the sacred word felt like catharsis as it flew from his fanged mouth. He let loose with his bolter, blasting the way clear of bodies, then raced along the spine of the breech-chamber housing. As he went, he mentally counted down the timer.

  Ten seconds.

  Just as he was about to leap clear, a horrific shape dragged itself clear of the metal grille in front of him. It seemed to emerge from the bowels of the machine itself, and its metal limbs pulled stickily out of a morass of boiling, glowing putrefaction. Six eyes flared at him, pulled back from a noseless, fang-lined face.

  Ingvar kept firing, sending bolts thudding into the creature’s emerging chest. The rounds went off, popping dully as if doused in magma. The creature dragged the last of its flame-licked body free of the machine, and flung itself at him.

  The mech-mutant was as big as he was, multi-limbed, clad in oxidised armour plates and glistening with bio-augmetics. It carried twin power mauls, semi-enclosed in iron gauntlets. It charged him, skittering across the roof of the breech-chamber and screaming in overlapping vox-channels.

  ‘Get clear,’ warned Gunnlaugur over the vox.

  Ingvar grabbed his sword, activated it and slung it wide – all in one movement – and the strike severed the thing’s armour plates. Its momentum carried it forwards, though, and both mauls slammed down against Ingvar’s shoulder-guards.

  Five seconds.

  The impact was heavy, forcing him back towards the steep-sloped chamber roof. The creature swung again wildly and pressed on towards him, but Ingvar punched his blade out point-first, snaking it between the two oncoming mauls and embedding it directly between the horror’s snapping iron jaws.

  Dausvjer’s energy field exploded into life, lashing tendrils of disruptor-force against the mech-mutant’s mottled skin. Ingvar grabbed the hilt two-handed and heaved the impaled creature over the edge. Then he whip-snapped the sword away, cleaving the creature’s head in two and sending its body plummeting to the dust. Hearing the final tick-tick of the charges, he switched back to a sprint and tore back down the length of the breech-chamber roof. With a powerful lunge, he catapulted himself free of the armour-housing, only to hear the whoomp of the meltas going off behind him.

  The blast was horrific – a maelstrom of heat and noise and kinetic force that snatched him up like a leaf in a storm and flung him hard through the air. Other charges on the other guns went off in tandem, cracking open all four artillery pieces in an orgy of rippling flame and spinning shrapnel.

  Ingvar crashed to the ground some twenty metres from the gun-chassis he’d blown open. His head slammed forwards against the inner curve of his helm, and he felt the hot burst of blood spraying across his face.

  Ignoring it, he pushed himself to his feet, and was hauling his armoured body up from the trench he’d carved in landing when an armoured fist grabbed him by his forearm and dragged him higher.

  He tensed to strike, fingers tight on dausvjer’s hilt, before Gunnlaugur’s familiar voice crackled over the comm.

  ‘That was too close,’ the Wolf Guard growled, yanking Ingvar upright before turning to face the mutants still on their feet and already coming at them.

  Ingvar shook his head to clear it. ‘Plenty of time.’

  All four of the massive artillery pieces were cracked open and burning, riven asunder by the power of the massed meltas. Four vast columns of smoke churned up into the tortured sky, glowing angrily from within like nebulae. Sparks whirled and danced across the face of the inferno, thrown up from chain-exploding ammunition. The entire crater floor was in ruins, its defenders scattered, maimed or dazed, its war machines reduced to tilting shards of flaring metal.

  Ingvar stood back to back with Gunnlaugur, his blade spitting defiant energy-stars. Those mutants not killed by the explosions began to gather again, dragging themselves up from the dust and searching for the source of their pain.

  ‘What now?’ asked Ingvar, watching them come.

  Gunnlaugur nodded towards the crater’s northern edge, where the concentration of enemy troops was thickest. ‘They’re not alone.’

  The horde moving down the broken terrain towards them was not just composed of mortals. Ingvar saw flame-glints reflecting from the curved shoulder-guards of power armour. He saw single-horned helms, and pale green lenses, and reapers lifted high.

  A cold rage burned instantly. ‘Plague Marines.’

  ‘I see six.’

  Ingvar scanned across the compound, assessing distances, judging numbers. Olgeir, Jorundur and Hafloí were scattered across the crater floor among the corpses of the guns, out of position, isolated. More mutants were spilling into the crater from the north, adding to the horde already coming at them.

  ‘We should pull back,’ Ingvar said, pointing to a jagged outcrop of sandstone high up on the southern slopes, close to where he’d broken in. ‘We could hold that.’

  He fully expected to hear Gunnlaugur’s growl of disdain then, followed by the command to charge into the heart of the horde, to cut a bloody swathe towards the Traitors before weight of numbers finally bogged them down.

  ‘So be it,’ said Gunnlaugur, defying expectation. ‘We hold the ridge.’

  Both of them started to move. A host of mutants was already racing towards their position, opening fire again in a ragged wave of las-beams. Ingvar lowered his boltgun, picking the first targets amid a sea of warped faces.

  Before he could fire, though, a new roar kindled across the cloud-cover, louder than the residual furnaces of the ruined artillery or the yowls of mutant voices. It was thunderous, like main-drive starship engines gunning to full thrust. A crimson bruise spread out across the boiling brume of toxic smog, glowing angrily. Above it all came a familiar machine-howl – the whine of drop pod engines straining to break precipitous descent velocities.

  Gunnlaugur laughed then, staring up at the heavens and lifting his arms wide.

  ‘He’s here,’ he snarled, infusing the words with hunt-fervour. ‘The sky cracks!’

  All eyes looked up then, buffeted by the sudden storm of massed thruster down-force. The clouds split open, speared in a dozen places. Massive, fist-shaped transports lanced down from the skies
, trailing smog and flame in their wake.

  Ingvar watched the nearest pod make planetfall. The impact was horrendous – an earth-breaking smash that sent dust flying in a bow-wave. Cracks shot out from the epicentre, hitting the damaged foundations of the nearest wall-breaker and shivering what remained. Every mortal within fifty metres of that collision was ripped from their feet by the blast-radius and slammed hard against the churning earth.

  Gunnlaugur kept laughing – the harsh laughter of impending slaughter. ‘The wrath of Fenris!’

  Ingvar kept watching. As the dust cleared, the shape of the pod became clearer. It was huge, far bigger than a typical Adeptus Astartes lander. Its flanks were not the slate-grey used by the Wolves, but arterial red and banded with black. Ornate gold and bronze chasing enclosed panels bearing baroque skull-icons.

  ‘That’s not Njal,’ said Ingvar.

  As the pall of fire and debris cleared around the drop pod, its door-bolts blew. Vivid red light bled out from the interior, wreathed in exhaust fumes, part masking a hulking shape within.

  Only when it moved did the truth emerge. A towering walker stomped clear of the pod, limping out into the open on awkward, switch-backed, pistoned limbs. Heavy arms swung round, each capped with a flamer slung over a chainblade. It was more than three times the height of a man, a nightmare fusion of mortal flesh and machine artifice. Its engine shrieked like a caged ghost, its smokestacks vomited gouts of flaming gas-vapour, and its enormous segmented feet trod down the dust of Ras Shakeh, crushing the carpet of roasted limbs that surrounded the landing site.

  By then more drop pods were coming down, dozens of them, slamming into the ground and opening up with halos of flamer-discharge. More bizarre war-machines streamed out from them – quadrupedal walkers with underslung flame-cannons and swollen vox-emitters screaming war-curses; half-tracked cannons with gun-servitors lurching in escort; hovering gun-drones bristling with trailing hook-lines and segmented chain-flails. Crimson-armoured mortal troops marched in the war machines’ wake, all bearing the same black skull devices on their closed-face helms.