Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al.

by Warhammer 40K

  Conran’s head snapped up, and he began to protest. Egil carried on, speaking over him.

  ‘I will be taking the remainder of my Ironguard underground, to re-establish contact with the Great Wolf. The evacuation from the Magma Gates is to proceed as previously outlined. Within that framework, all pack leaders are to defer to Conran as though he speaks with my own voice. Is that clear?’

  More affirmations, and now complaints too.

  ‘ Let the Cogclaws come with you, lord, ’ Kjartan Stone-eye said over the vox. ‘ My pack have been firing blind into spore clouds and wading through daemon spoor all day. Let us continue the Iron Hunt, lord, I beg you. ’

  ‘ Is what the wyrdlings are chanting true? ’ Nokdr Iceclaw of the Snowfangs asked before Egil could respond. ‘ Is the Great Wolf dead? ’

  ‘That is what I’m going to disprove,’ Egil said. ‘And the rest of you will follow my orders, or Russ help me I will tear the fangs from the jaws of each and every pack leader in this Great Company. Show some discipline, Ironwolves.’

  ‘Lord–’ Conran began. He’d stood and was facing the Iron Wolf, bowed slightly in the hold’s confined space. Egil raised a gauntlet before he could go any further.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Conran. There are no other options. I cannot let us all die here, and Midgardia’s depths are no place for an armoured column. But nor can I abandon the Great Wolf. You will take the Ironwolves to the Magma Gates, and I will see you all again on the bridge of the Wolftide.’

  For a moment it seemed as though Conran would argue, but instead he just shook his head, his jaw locked and gauntlets clenched.

  ‘The nearest recorded entrance to the Midgardian underworld is three hundred yards south-west of this position,’ Egil said, activating a map uplink on his visor’s display. ‘Directly towards the nearest Tallyband. It’s an old mine chute, designated Beta Eleven-Seven. The Ironfist will take us that far, and then you will assume command and get my Wolves clear of this hellhole.

  Understood?’

  Conran nodded, saying nothing, no longer looking at the Iron Wolf. Egil knew better than to push his obedience any further. He linked to the Land Raider Crusader’s internal vox.

  ‘Torvald, all guns live. For Russ and the Allfather, take us forward!’

  Morkai’s Keep, Frostheim

  Canis Wolfborn crouched, ignoring the ache in his joints. The day’s bloodletting had been long and fierce. His armour bore the scars of daemon blades and bolter rounds alike, and the foul ichor splattering its surface had only just begun to crust. The champion of Harald Deathwolf reached out and grasped the corpse before him by the pauldron, rolling it onto its back.

  The body was that of Snorri Redtooth, one of the Grey Hunters belonging to Erenn Frostwolf’s pack. Canis only knew as much because he recognised Snorri’s musk. The Grey Hunter’s head was missing.

  Nor had his pack-kin been any more fortunate. Canis had been tracking their corpses deep into the vaults of Morkai’s Keep for almost an hour. The only one he’d yet to find was Erenn himself.

  The bodies of the Grey Hunters were certainly not alone down in the keep’s depths. Through betrayal and vile maleficarum the forces of Chaos had seized the Space Wolves fortress, presaging the beginning of the daemonic incursions across the system. In the furious battle to recapture the stronghold from the treacherous Alpha Legion, fighting had spilled down into its lowest levels. Canis had counted half a dozen Space Wolves bodies, mostly Blood Claws whose names he’d forgotten, though he recalled their scents. They were outnumbered by the rag-clad cultists that carpeted the vaulted halls and corridors. All around the mark of furious retribution was clear, in the bloody hacking and tearing of chainblades and the vicious, gory detonation of close-range bolt-fire. There were even three Alpha Legionnaires, the stale stench of ancient corruption coming off their bodies turning Canis’ stomachs.

  But all of them had fallen at least two hours previously. Snorri and the rest of the dead Grey Hunters were fresh.

  Canis carried on down the corridor, noting the location of Snorri’s body on his vambrace marker. Behind him Fangir, his loyal thunderwolf, padded silently. Canis could sense the huge animal’s tiredness mirroring his own, by its slow, heavy panting. The beast’s wiry fur was matted with blood, and not all of it belonged to the enemy. But there was no time to stop. Not yet. Like the thunderwolf, Canis had caught a scent. There was something still down here, something that shouldn’t be.

  At the end of the corridor open blast doors marked the entrance to the keep’s main armoury. On its threshold Canis found Erenn. The pack leader’s cuirass had been split by a blow of incredible force, and his breastbone carved open, exposing the bloody mess of the Wolf’s inner organs. Inside the armoury

  more cultists lay butchered, but none of them could possibly have dealt such a wound.

  Two other doors branched off from the entrance, one to the left and one to the right. Canis closed his eyes and inhaled, opening his senses. There was still something lurking beneath the acrid stench of weapon discharges, the reek of stale sweat, the tang of blood and the pack musks of his fellow Wolves. Something at once sickly sweet and bitter, wholly unnatural. He had caught it at the entrance to the vaults, as the rest of Harald’s Great Company had begun the process of collecting their dead and incinerating heretic corpses. He had slipped away from the grim work, his instincts bristling. The fight was not yet over.

  The smell was coming from the right-hand door.

  It was the entrance to a munitions shaft, the floor sloping downwards into darkness. The lumen strips overhead had failed. Canis began to descend, trusting to his sense of smell. Even for a Space Wolf it was keen. Canis was a natural-born predator, the only member of the Deathwolves able to match their lord, Harald, in the Great Hunt. Shadows were nothing to him.

  There were no more bodies. It seemed as though the fighting had passed this section of the vaults by, though that didn’t explain why the blast door had been lying open. The unnatural smell grew stronger, a wyrdling stench that caused the Space Wolf’s hackles to rise.

  Ahead he sensed rather than saw the shaft coming to an end, widening out into what he assumed was a munitions bunker. Behind, Fangir began to growl, the throaty noise reverberating through the narrow space. Canis slid his wolf claws free.

  There was a noise from ahead, his taut senses making it sound hellishly loud. The skitter of claws on rockcrete. The stench grew even worse.

  ‘Wyrdlings,’ he snarled softly to Fangir. His suspicions had to be right.

  Harald needed to be warned. He keyed his vox.

  That was when the first daemon launched itself, screeching, from the darkness.

  Longhowl, Valdrmani

  For the first time in a long time, Krom Dragongaze found himself on his knees.

  It was not an injury that had driven him down, though blood still trickled from the rapidly clotting wound in his shoulder. The daemon prince’s blade had bitten deep, but the Wolf Lord had suffered worse. No, it was the realisation of just how close they had all come to annihilation.

  Even before he had joined the ranks of the Sky Warriors, death had held no fear for Krom. But there were worse things in the galaxy than death. As the daemonic invasions had spilled out across the system, Longhowl, the primary astropathic beacon on the Wolf Moon of Valdrmani, had come under attack.

  The fact that the Chaos-tainted glyph planted in Longhowl’s choristorium would probably have obliterated Krom had never figured in his thinking as he’d led the assault to destroy it. What had driven him to his knees was the knowledge that, if he had failed, the sigil’s infernal wyrdling power would have lanced a false image of his Space Wolves slaughtering Imperial subjects into the mind of every psyker in the segmentum. The illusion would have cemented the belief that the sons of Russ had turned traitor, and set the Imperium’s might against the whole of Krom’s Chapter. The thought made his flesh crawl with disgust.

  A silver gauntlet, blackened by fire, appe
ared before the Wolf Lord. He clasped it and allowed himself to be hauled up by its strong grip.

  ‘Well met, Dragongaze,’ said Captain Stern. The Grey Knight had removed

  his helmet, his noble features streaked with sweat. His armour was still smoking from the hellish wyrdfire which had engulfed it, the marks of warding and protection inscribed into the silver aegis plate glowing bright.

  ‘It is over?’ Krom asked as he looked around. Moments before, the choristorium had been packed with howling daemons and the wailing, melted remains of the station’s possessed astropaths. Now it was a scorched, ichor-splattered wreck, the astropaths reduced to skeletal husks in their burned-out cradles. The Chaos glyph that had been the epicentre of the warp ritual was split and broken, the multihued light that had blazed from it now doused.

  Krom remembered Stern forcing his way through the icon’s wyrdflame and plunging his crackling force sword into its heart, shattering it. The moments that followed were a blur – blinding light, shrieks of frustration and terror, a splitting pain that still throbbed dully behind Krom’s eyes.

  But the daemons were gone. They had won.

  ‘It is over,’ said Stern. Around the edges of the purged choristorium Grey Knights and Space Wolves alike were picking themselves up. Not all who

  had fallen rose again.

  ‘We must establish contact with Fenris,’ Krom said. ‘Send word that the daemons have been thwarted, and that we are both still alive. That should give those who doubt us reason enough to reconsider.’

  Stern nodded. The ritual was supposed to have set the Wolves and the Knights against one another, but even with the daemonic plot defeated there was no telling how the Imperium was responding to the events in the Fenris System. Massive warp incursions, mutation among the Adeptus Astartes, rumours of treachery – something had set out to destroy the Space Wolves, and it had come diabolically close to succeeding.

  ‘I must return to the Fang,’ Krom continued. ‘I cannot leave it unguarded a moment longer.’

  ‘Then go with my thanks. Your assistance here was invaluable,’ Stern said.

  ‘If you had not left Fenris to come to our aid I could never have stopped the ritual in time.’

  ‘Bjorn the Fell-Handed saw you trapped and killed,’ Krom said. ‘I would not have left the Fang on any word save his.’

  A vox blurt interrupted Stern before he could respond. The signal’s ident code belonged to Krom’s flagship, the Winterbite.

  ‘ My lord, we are receiving a priority message from the Fang, ’ said the voice of one of the ship’s huscarls.

  ‘Patch me through,’ Krom ordered, turning away from Stern. After a moment’s static the voice of Albjorn Fogel, chief vox-huscarl of the Fang’s communications array, spoke to him over the link.

  ‘ My lord, our long-range augur sweeps have detected a large fleet translating in-system. The signifier codes are all Imperial. Thus far we’ve identified strike cruisers and battle-barges belonging to the Ultramarines, Iron Hands, Marines Malevolent, Doom Griffons and Shadow Haunters, along with capital ships of the Imperial Navy’s Thirty-Second Obscurus sub-fleet, Knight carriers from House Mortan and six Astra Militarum mass transporters. We also believe…’ Fogel trailed off.

  ‘Go on,’ Krom said.

  ‘ My lord, one of the signifiers belongs to the fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels. We believe the Rock arrived in Fenrisian real space approximately twenty minutes ago. ’

  ‘Hail them,’ Krom said.

  ‘ We’ve tried, lord. They refused to even acknowledge the signal connection.

  Our ships around Midgardia, Svellgard and Frostheim are also reporting no contact. ’ Krom broke the connection for a moment to look at Stern.

  ‘A crusade fleet has just entered the system,’ he growled. ‘Led by the Dark Angels.’

  ‘It’s as I feared,’ Stern said. ‘Supreme Grand Master Azrael has been shadowing your Chapter since he learned of your… genetic anomaly on Nurades. I suspect he believes the Space Wolves to be tainted.’

  ‘Fogel,’ Krom snapped into the vox.

  ‘ Yes, lord? ’

  ‘Raise all shields and prime defensive batteries. Advise all our fleet assets throughout the system to do likewise. I am returning to the Fang immediately.’

  ‘ Yes, lord. Are we on a war footing? ’

  ‘Not unless they fire first.’

  ‘You need to take me to the Rock,’ Stern said. ‘If they won’t open their vox-nets to any communications from us I must speak with Azrael directly.’

  ‘Your battle-barge is ashes, Stern,’ Krom said. ‘If you wish to leave this moon you are welcome aboard the Winterbite, but I am going direct to the Fang. I have already sullied my oath by abandoning it to come here. I will not compound my dishonour further by leaving the Hearthworld to the mercy of fools and zealots.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Stern said. ‘But once there I must request the use of one of your ships.’

  ‘And you shall have it,’ Krom said. ‘It would be well if you reached Azrael before he reaches me, because Allfather protect him if he launches a single strike against any part of this system.’

  The Rock, in high orbit above Midgardia

  The primary command bridge of the Rock was a cavernous place, full of faded glory and shadows that had lain undisturbed for ten millennia. At its heart a great tiered dais rose, each stone step carved with intricate figures telling the long history of the First Legion. The top of the ziggurat bore a throne of brass and steel, bristling with data ports and holo-screens, vox-uplinks and runebanks. There sat Azrael, Keeper of the Truth, Supreme

  Grand Master of the Dark Angels and all of the Unforgiven. Face set beneath his white cowl, he surveyed the bridge below without expression.

  Serfs, servitors and data-slaves scurried to and fro amidst tiered ranks of cogitator banks and oculus viewscreens, while menials toiled in the communication pits sunk around the dais, backs bent double, blind to the cold stone columns that rose around them to the distant, vaulted ceiling. The air was thick with darting servo-skulls and fluttering auto-cherubim, their censers filling the air with the cloying smell of warpbane and other sacred unguents. The rattle and chime of cogitators, the crackle of vox-horns and the throaty machine cant of the bridge’s choir of course-chartists echoed back endlessly from the stained crystalflex of the viewing ports opposite Azrael.

  The bridge, in all its cold stone majesty, dwarfed even the greatest ships of most other Space Marine Chapters. Azrael noted a few of his fellow Adeptus Astartes casting glances up at the highest reaches of the ceiling, swathed in darkness far above. They were assembled around a large, circular holochart near the central nave, laid out before Azrael’s dais. The chart itself was beaming a grainy green representation of the Fenris System into the smoky air, the orbs representing Midgardia, Fenris, Frostheim and their attendant moons revolving slowly around the pallid sphere that was the system’s sun, the Wolf’s Eye. As the briefing began the display flickered, overlaid by red and blue sigils and arrows that plotted the arrival of the crusade fleet.

  It was an impressive undertaking, Azrael thought. A stark reminder of the danger that developing events posed to the Imperium. Normally a crusade fleet took far longer to bring together, never mind fully deploy. Azrael recalled the Antarika Crusade, which he had participated in when he had still been a battle-brother in Sergeant Nefalim’s tactical squad. It had first been approved by the High Lords of Terra two centuries before Azrael had even been born. It took two hundred years to assemble the full fleet assets, petition the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Knightly Households for support, and divert Space Marine Chapters from operations elsewhere. The crusade’s nominal leaders had died and been replaced three times over, and entire Army Groups of the Astra Militarum had been disbanded and recruited afresh before the vanguard of the battlefleet had even left its docks.

  The force Azrael had brought together was smaller than that of Antarika, but it was still fearsome. Contingents from fourte
en Chapters, two Imperial Navy sub-battlefleets and three Astra Militarum Army Groups. Further forces had

  sworn to assist and were en-route, including Titans of the Legio Dominatus.

  Only a figure of Azrael’s considerable standing and experience could have summoned such strength with so little notice.

  Below him, that strength was exemplified by the fourteen Space Marines attending the final operational overview. Among their heraldry Azrael could see Howling Griffons and Red Consuls, the vicious yellow of the Marines Malevolent, the grey battleplate of Shadow Haunters and the silver of one of his Chapter’s own successors, the Guardians of the Covenant. Besides those physically present, two of the Adeptus Astartes were represented by throbbing blue hololithic displays – Captain Epathus of the Ultramarines Sixth Company and Iron Captain Terrek of the Iron Hands Clan Company Haarmek. They were both already bound for the world of Frostheim, on the far edge of the system, leading a detachment of the crusade fleet’s might.

  Interrogator-Chaplain Elezar led the briefing. Azrael had given him the task on the advice of Asmodai. The Master Interrogator-Chaplain had been impressed by his apprentice of late, and Azrael knew how difficult it was to earn the favour of the grim Master of Repentance. Even now he towered like a silent revenant beside Azrael’s throne, observing Elezar without comment.

  ‘Midgardia,’ Elezar was saying, a gesture highlighting the sphere spinward of the Wolf’s Eye. ‘The second largest of the Fenris System’s three planets, and the world we are currently entering high orbit above. Its surface was formerly a toxic jungle, classed as a death world. The Midgardian natives lived below the outer crust, in cavernous subterranean hive cities.’

  ‘ The past tense is noted, Brother-Chaplain, ’ Terrek the Iron Hand said, his voice crackling from the vox-horn built into the holo-display projecting him.

  ‘ What fate has befallen them? ’

  ‘Long-range augur scans indicate the surface of Midgardia has suffered a near-total daemonic infestation. Of the situation underground we have no idea.’