‘Get me one, then!’ bellowed Blackwing, pulling the prow round just in time to thunder past the shattered, blazing hull of a Space Wolves frigate as it rolled gently into destruction. ‘Just one. Morkai’s hairy balls, that’s not asking for much.’
He wrenched the Nauro into a rare corridor of open space and tried to make sense of the tactical situation. His launchpath from the Valgard had sent him straight into the orbital battle as it was breaking out. The Wolves, unprepared and massively outgunned, were being taken apart. The first rank of gun platforms was now cold and dead, a circuit of dark, drifting metal. The second and final layer was holding for the moment, but it had taken a horrendous mauling. Every successful hit from the defenders had provoked a hurricane of return fire. The Thousand Sons’ rapid strike vessels were quickly gaining the space to move with impunity, clearing the way for the larger battleships to take their places and pile on the pain.
The arrival of the Skraemar and her escorts had briefly halted the carnage, but the defending fleet was still outnumbered many times over. Only a handful of the Space Wolves frigates were still operational, and once their protective chain was broken the Skraemar would take the full force of the onslaught.
‘Starboard lance semi-operational, lord!’ came a triumphant cry from below the command throne.
‘Semi?’ snarled Blackwing, wheeling away from a wing of enemy fighters and exposing his less-damaged starboard flank to them. The telltale juddering in the ship’s frame told him that there were still flank gun batteries in operation, which was something. ‘Semi? What does that mean?’
‘We’ve got one, maybe two shots. Then we’re all burned out.’
‘Another kill – that’s all I’m asking.’
He knew then that they were going to die. It would happen in the next second, or the next minute, but not long after. The planetary defence had turned into a bloody-minded attempt to take out as many of the enemy as possible before they were all turned into orbiting streams of dust. Despite all of that, not one of the Twelfth’s ships had turned and run. Not one.
Stubborn bastards, thought Blackwing, glancing at the forest of warning runes on his console with mild interest. Stubborn, magnificent bastards.
‘Lord, I’ve got a link from Fenris,’ reported a kaerl manning the comms platform. ‘You should hear this.’
Blackwing nodded, his attention still fixed on piloting his ship through Hel, and blink-clicked to received the feed.
‘Nauro, Sleikre, Ogmar,’ came the broken, dry voice, filtered through the ship’s internal systems. It was a recording – how long had they been trying to get through? ‘Astropathic communications are down. Repeat: Astropathic communications are down. Break blockade and translate for Gangava System. Rendezvous with Great Wolf and demand urgent recall. Repeat: Demand urgent recall.’
Blackwing cursed under his breath.
‘They’ll think we’re running out on them,’ he muttered, already looking for possible exit vectors. The Nauro was in the middle of the swirling mass of ships, and there weren’t obvious escape tactics open to them. Beyond the immediate layer of attack craft there were larger vessels closing in. The net had a fine weave.
Ahead of him, close to the edge of the sprawling engagement-sphere, he saw an enemy destroyer recoil from a direct lance hit. That was good – at least some of the platforms were still dealing it out.
‘Lock on to that one,’ growled Blackwing, already planning his attack pattern. ‘Prepare the ship for warp transit, but we’re not leaving till I get that kill.’
Klaxons blared deep inside the massive walls of the Fang, echoing down the snaking corridors of stone and making the bone trophies on the walls shudder as if still alive. Shouts rose up from the deep places, the shouts of mortal men mingled with the roars of their superhuman masters. The Aettguard, the body of kaerls committed to the defence of Russ’s fortress, had been mobilised. Hundreds of heavy boots drummed the floor as entire rivens mustered in their garrisons throughout the Hould level, reporting to armouries to collect additional ammunition belts and blast helms.
The Hould was the beating heart of the Aett. The thousands of mortal warriors, craftsmen, technicians and labourers who maintained the massive citadel lived out their entire lives there. They rarely left the Fang unless taken out of it by troop transports: the air was thin even for natives at that altitude. Their skin was as pale as the ice that covered the upper slopes, and they were all Fenris-born, of the stock that still roamed across the ice-fields below Asaheim and provided the recruits for the Sky Warriors. Their breed been taken into the vast halls of the Aett when the first chambers had been hollowed out, and all could trace their lineages back over thirty generations or more. Only some – the kaerls – were kept at arms at all times, but all knew how to wield a blade and fire a skjoldtar, the heavy, armour-piercing projectile weapon favoured by the Aettguard. They were children of a deathworld, and from the youngest infant to the oldest crone they knew the art of killing.
Higher up, past the huge, shadowy bulwark of the Fangthane, was the Jarlheim, the abode of the Sky Warriors. No mortal remained on those levels except on the orders of his Sky Warrior masters, for it was here that the twelve Great Companies were housed. The halls of the Wolves were often empty and silent, since they were ever called away on campaign to some far-flung corner of their galactic protectorate. At least one Great Company always kept the hearths burning, however, tending the sacred flames and paying obeisance to the wards that kept maleficarum from entering the Fang. In the Jarlheim were the war-shrines to the fallen, the totems collected by the Rune Priests from far-off worlds, the armouries full of sacred weaponry. In the holy places, tattered banners from past campaigns were laid to rest amid the dusty rows of skulls, armour and other prizes.
As the klaxons flared across the Twelfth Company’s demesne, the narrow ways were lit with a savage fire. The masters of the mountain had been summoned, and it was as if the earth itself had been shaken into sentience. The stone reverberated with a deep tremor as the massed wolf-spirits were goaded into life. Armour was strapped on and drilled into place, beast pelts reverently draped over the ceramite, runes daubed on shoulder-guards in thick animal blood, charms hung piously over necks and wound around armoured wrists.
Deep within the centre of the maze of shafts, galleries and tunnels, there came the beating of the great drum. It underpinned all other sounds, thumping out a heartbeat rhythm of dissonant savagery. Other drums joined it, working against the single note in a cacophonous, barbed disharmony. The vibrations coloured everything, making the entire labyrinth resonate with a growing crescendo of hatred and energy.
There were few sights more intimidating in the entire galaxy than a Space Wolf Great Company kindling the murder-make. One by one, their armour bolted into place and sanctified by Sturmhjart’s subordinate Rune Priests, the Grey Hunters emerged, hulking and strapped-tight with lethal energy. They went softly like the hardened infantry they were, their red helm lenses glowing in the oily dark. Behind them came the ranged-weapon Long Fang squads, shadowy and bulkier, their faces heavily distended into the maws of beasts, hefting their massive weaponry as if it weighed no more than an axe-shaft.
Then, last of the infantry to emerge from the armourers’ care, were the Blood Claws, the raw recruits. Bellowing curses at the enemy they lusted to engage with, the red-and-yellow streaked armoured giants jostled with one another to get to their mission-points. They were the most human of all the angels of death, still only half-changed by the moulding power of the Helix-enabled gene-seed, but their eyes burned hottest with the ferocious delight of impending violence. They lived for nothing but the joy of the hunt, the winning of prestige at arms, the delight in the stink of blood and fear in those they’d been unleashed on.
Amid them, joined to Sigrd Brakk’s pack, came Helfist and Redpelt. The superficial injuries of their duel had long since faded, as had the others they’d incurred during the days of constant training. The pack, twelve-strong includin
g the Wolf Guard packleader, jogged down a wide, semi-circular tunnel as the drumbeats thundered in their ears, shoving aside kaerls and thralls too slow to get out of the way.
‘Morkai,’ spat Brakk, his voice filtered through the battered grille of his helm. ‘To get you bags of dung...’ He shook his head, and bone totems rattled across the armour like dreadlocks. ‘Just die quickly, or don’t hold me up.’
Helfist grinned.
‘We’ll be hauling your pelt out,’ he laughed savagely, flexing his power claw. Like all of the pack he wore his helm – the near-void altitude of the Fang was too punishing for the bare-headed bravado he preferred.
‘If we think we can get something for it,’ added Redpelt, raising his bolt pistol and checking the ammo counter as he ran. His pauldrons had been drenched in blood-red and the jaws of his helm had a row of teeth running along the lower edge.
‘Where’s this old man taking us, anyway?’ asked Helfist. A shock of straw-pale horsehair hung from his helm and the two Runes of Ending, Ymir and Gann, had been etched on his breastplate.
‘Sunrising Gate,’ snarled the packleader. ‘The only thing on the planet harder than your skulls.’
‘Was that a joke, brother?’ enquired Helfist.
‘An insult, I think,’ replied Redpelt.
Brakk came to a halt as the tunnel roof suddenly soared above them into emptiness. Ahead, the floor petered out into a pier overhanging a huge, dark shaft. The pit below was massive, wreathed in shadow and lit only by scattered red glowglobes. The beat of the drums rose out of it, deep and threatening.
‘Don’t we have Aettguard for gate-duty?’ demanded another Bloodclaw, Fyer Brokentooth. His voice was thick with the wolf-spirit, guttural, throaty and aggressive.
‘You think we’re waiting for the bastards to get to the gates?’ asked Brakk, turning to face the pack and backing toward the shaft. ‘Russ’s arse, lad, grow a pair – and then a brain.’
Then he was gone, sweeping down through the thermals, descending hundreds of a metres a second, swooping from the Jarlheim levels to those of the Hould.
Helfist looked at Brokentooth.
‘I thought it was a fair question.’
Brokentooth ignored him and followed the packleader over the edge. Helfist’s helm signals showed the two of them plummeting toward the gate level.
‘Try to keep up, brother,’ he said to Redpelt, joining the remainder of the pack and stepping lightly over the edge.
‘Try to stop me,’ said Redpelt, taking up the last position and spreading his arms to control the descent.
Hurtling like scree in an avalanche, the Blood Claw pack sped toward their zone of engagement. Above and below them, the beat of the drums hammered out the fresh, urgent call. On every level, in every passageway, figures took up their allotted positions. Bolter batteries swivelled into fire-locks, Land Raider engines gunned throatily into life, and throughout the Aett packs of grey-armoured warriors raced to their stations.
The Wolves had been challenged in their lair, and like ghosts loping across the ice they swept to answer the call.
CHAPTER FIVE
Blackwing had lost track of the damage done to his ship. After so many runes across the console had gone red, it started getting hard to differentiate between them all. The picture was bad, though. The Nauro had never taken pain like it. Even if every remaining shell, las-beam and torpedo somehow managed to miss them, the battered vessel was probably doomed from the damage it had already taken.
Still, the message from the Valgard had shaken things up a bit. Unlike his more hot-blooded brethren, Blackwing had never been too keen on the heroic last stand. He was a dark wolf, a hugger of the shadows, and that bred a powerful sense of self-preservation. It was why the Claws and Hunters disliked him, and why he disliked them. The seed of Russ was bountiful, though, and provided for the whole range of killers – his knife-hook from the gloom was as lethal as a bolter-round in the daylight, after all.
The destroyer he’d targeted lurched into view on the ventral screens. It was in a bad way too, having been hit directly by a gun platform. Those things spat out terrifying amounts of energy, and when one got you, you knew it. Apart from its heavy structural damage, the enemy ship seemed to have lost engine control and had begun to spin away planetwards. A long trail of rust-red plasma ran out to its starboard-zenith. Blackwing could see the pricks of light along its flanks as it tried to power up its broadside batteries, but it wasn’t getting them online any time soon.
‘Do we have that shot?’ demanded Blackwing, rolling the ship to bring his starboard guns in line with an incoming wing of gunships.
‘Affirmative,’ barked a kaerl at the gunnery pulpit, sounding more confident than he had done a moment ago.
‘Then get a lock, and do it,’ snapped Blackwing, watching with irritation as he lost power to his port shield generator. Something was broken badly down there, and there was nothing he could do about it.
‘Twenty seconds.’
Then Blackwing saw death coming for him. A wing of Thousand Sons frigates had broken from the dogged assault on the Skraemar and its escorts and was sweeping back to clear up the remainder of the scattered Wolves fleet. The ships were moving fast. Too fast. At least three of them would be in range before he’d be able to pull away from the fleet action and break for open space. Gunships were one thing; frigates another.
‘Lord, we have–’
‘Yes, thank you, I have eyes. Lock trajectory to target and give me assault speed.’
That time all the kaerls looked up to stare at him, even those busy wrestling with fires on their consoles.
Blackwing gave them a cool stare back.
‘Or will I rip your throats out, one by one?’ he asked, pulling his bolt pistol from its holster.
The crew hurried back to their tasks. The Nauro yawed badly as the engines were goaded even further and the attack vector was replaced by an interception course. The targeted destroyer loomed larger. It was getting much closer, much faster.
‘Ten seconds.’
‘Need it sooner,’ said Blackwing, gripping the sides of his chair and watching tensely as the target raced into proximity. He could see the plumes of flame along its sides, riddling the ornate gold trim of the decks. The ship’s captain was trying to get it out of the way, but with its crippled engines it was as becalmed as an ice-skiff in the doldrums. The gap between the vessels shrank further.
‘Five.’
The frigates were now within range, and sensors across Blackwing’s console registered their forward lances powering up.
‘Skítja. More speed!’
He briefly imagined the frantic comms between the destroyer and the incoming frigates. For all the world, it looked like he was on a suicidal ramming course, which was just the thing a barbarous savage would do.
By then, Blackwing could see the decoration on the destroyer’s baroque prow. It was called the Illusion of Certainty.
How apt.
‘Firing!’
The Nauro buckled as its remaining forward lance blazed into life, sending a searing beam of sun-white, ship-carving energy screaming toward the destroyer. It hit direct amidships, tearing through the weakened shields and burying deep into the structure. A ball of metal-laced flame burst outward, cracking the destroyer in two.
‘We’re going to hit!’ screamed a kaerl.
The Nauro plunged straight into the inferno. Far too close to pull out at such speed, it spun right through the heart of the disintegrating structure.
‘Incoming!’ cried another kaerl frantically, diverting scarce power to the front shields.
‘Hold your nerve!’ roared Blackwing, piloting the ship through the expanding globe of shattered adamantium at full tilt. A massive section of the destroyer’s decking, itself almost as long as the Nauro, swung across to meet them. Blackwing flung the ship into a downward plummet, only to bring the head back round as a rotating spine of struts and bracing swept past on the port side. Debris was ev
erywhere, rolling into their path and clattering against the weakened void shields like daemon-fingers on the Geller field. Something massive and heavy hit them hard under the hull, making the ship buck like a steer before it careered into another storm of shattered plating.
‘And we’re through!’ he whooped, pulling the Nauro into a sharp starboard-zenith climb and feeding the engines everything he had left. Tongues of plasma snaked after him as he broke through the orb of devastation, curling away in his wake like whips.
Emerging from the far side of the destroyer’s death throes had given him precious seconds of time. The frigates would assume he’d destroyed himself in the ramming action. When they realised their error, the plasma trail would distort their targeting cogitators for a few seconds more.
A few seconds was all he needed in a ship this fast. He was on the edge of the orbital battle, and open space beckoned ahead.
‘Faster!’ he bellowed, trying to see what damage had been done on the passage through the destroyer’s ruin. It looked like he’d lost most of his shields, and there was a major breach across his dorsal enginarium. ‘Dammit, push her harder or I’ll still rip your throats open!’
The Nauro’s machine-spirit screamed its anger, protesting at the insane demands put on it, threatening to shut down and flush the life-support. Blackwing ignored it, screwing every last terajoule of power, wrenching every last plasma-burn of speed.
‘Status on Sleikre and Ogmar,’ he snapped, watching for the lance-salvo from the frigates that would make all his audacity worthless.
‘Destroyed, lord.’ The kaerl’s voice, though grudgingly appreciative, implied And so should we be. ‘We’re on our own.’
Blackwing grinned. Something about cheating death at the expense of others appealed to his darker nature.
‘Maintain course and speed,’ he ordered. There was no sign of pursuit from the frigates, which in any case were too slow to catch him now. He looked over the tactical hololith, watching as the swarm of ships fell further behind. Against all expectation, they’d punched their way free. ‘Get us to the jump-point, and calculate translation vector for Gangava.’
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