Battle Of The Fang

by Chris Wraight

  The Great Wolf felt a mix of emotions, looking down on the city he was about to destroy. He’d slept badly during the twenty-one days in the warp. Magnus had come to him in his dreams regularly, goading him, taunting his failure to catch up with him over the decades. Ironhelm hadn’t seen the face of the primarch, just as he hadn’t seen it over the many years of prior visitations.

  But he had heard the voice. An unforgettable voice. Proud, powerful, cultivated, but with a touch of petulance that wasn’t quite under control. For all his primarch’s qualities, he now came across as a diminished, querulous presence.

  My gene-father broke your back, monster.

  Magnus had smirked at such defiance, but there was a residue of pain there. Real, mortal pain.

  Brooding over the realspace viewers in his private chambers, Ironhelm felt his fingers itch within their gauntlets. The journey had been too long. Only hours now remained before the drop-pods would begin to fall, accelerating into a hail of dark seeds from the void, all aimed beyond the cover of the city’s shields.

  Ironhelm saw the ingress routes in his mind’s eye. They were available at any time from his helm-display, but he knew he’d not have to use that. He could visualise all aspects of the battle as it would unfold. If he closed his eyes, the tactical outline would still be there, a pattern of hololith lines and deployment runes overlaid on the streets of the vast city.

  Many in the galaxy believed that the Space Wolves were simply feral barbarians, brutes who charged headlong into battle yelling incomprehensible curses. Only later, when they found their supply lines severed, their comms jammed and their allies breaking out in rebellion behind them did they discover the weakness of that interpretation. Planning was everything, the coordination of pack-movements, the encirclement of the prey, the cleanliness of the kill.

  The Wolves were savage, but not savages. Gangava would be destroyed swiftly and without indulgence. Primarch or no, Magnus would come to regret his decision to establish himself within strike distance of Fenris.

  There was a chime from the wall-unit behind him.

  ‘Come,’ Ironhelm said, without turning.

  He heard the heavy treads of Kjarlskar, together with the marginally lighter ones of Rune Priest Frei. The two armoured giants came to stand alongside the Great Wolf.

  ‘All is prepared?’ asked Ironhelm, his gaze still fixed on the planet below.

  ‘As you commanded,’ said Kjarlskar. ‘Nine Great Companies are primed for first-wave assaults; the reserves are ready when needed.’

  ‘And word from Fenris?’

  ‘Scheduled astropathic updates,’ said Frei. ‘No news. I think they’re bored.’

  Ironhelm laughed harshly.

  ‘Too bad. We’ll bring back trophies for them.’

  Kjarlskar took a step closer to the viewers. His forces had been in orbit above the city for twenty-eight days. Ironhelm knew the Wolf Lord had been desperate to launch an attack during that time, but he’d followed his orders to maintain the blockade. Until the entire fleet had been mustered, not so much as a single bolter had been fired in anger.

  ‘You still sense him, Frei?’ Kjarlskar asked.

  The Rune Priest nodded.

  ‘He’s down there. Just as he has been for weeks.’

  Kjarlskar frowned.

  ‘Why so passive? This I will never understand.’

  ‘It was the same on Prospero,’ said Ironhelm calmly. ‘He trusts in sorcery to protect him, that we’ll be daunted by a few spells. It is inconceivable to him that anything, even the Rout, could threaten him in a citadel of his own making.’

  ‘And can we?’

  Ironhelm turned to face the Jarl of the Fourth.

  ‘You sound doubtful, Arvek. I do not like that, not on the eve of battle.’

  Kjarlskar wasn’t intimidated by Ironhelm’s tone. He was too old, too battle-wily, to care much about prestige or reputation.

  ‘Don’t intimate fear to me, lord, or even unwillingness – I would fight alongside you beyond the doors of Hel, and you know it. I just make explicit the question we all leave unsaid.’ He returned his master’s gaze evenly. ‘Have mortals ever killed a primarch in battle? Can it even be done?’

  Ironhelm didn’t waver in his response.

  ‘I do not know, my friend,’ he replied. ‘Though before this is done, one way or another, the question will be answered.’

  Another day dawned across the frigid wastes of Asaheim. The exterior of the Fang presented a charred, diminished aspect. The barrage of plasma from orbit had ceased, its work done. The rain of offensive artillery had also given out, as no defensive batteries still remained on the surface of the mountain to trouble them.

  Smoke rose in dreary columns from the blackened rock walls. With the passing of the wyrd-summoned storm, the full extent of the devastation was illuminated by crisp morning sunlight.

  The Thousand Sons now controlled both causeways. Their troops moved at will across the wide expanses of stone. Broken companies recovered their shape. Supplies were brought up to the battlefront and casualties taken away from it. More tanks crawled up the slopes, now free of interference from the defenders. The mountain stood alone, surrounded by a carpet of besiegers, its inhabitants buried deep in its interior. Except for the landing platforms still visible at the very summit, it could have been any other peak of Asaheim, lifeless and desolate.

  As the sun climbed into the sky, Aphael made his way to an observation platform a kilometre from the scorched citadel. The cold was getting to him. His constitution should have made him functionally immune to such climatic extremes, especially when sealed in his armour, but still he shivered.

  He knew the cause of it. The flesh-change was gaining speed. Aphael doubted whether he could take his helm off now even if he wanted to. The muscles in his fingers pressed painfully against the inside of his gauntlets. He was being altered. The initial response – disbelief – had given way to a fearful kind of resignation.

  There would be some purpose behind the transformation. There was always some purpose. He just didn’t know what it was yet.

  The platform was ringed by Rubric Marines. Few of them had died in the assault on the gates, though hundreds of mortals had perished. The savagery of the Wolves had been expected, and Aphael had used the vast forces at his command to blunt their peerless martial prowess. An individual Space Wolf was arguably the finest exponent of close combat in the galaxy, but even he could only kill a finite number of foes before being brought down.

  Hett was waiting for him on the platform. His robes were ripped and charred from where his Rubric Marine squad had run into trouble. Aphael had heard stories of some of the Wolves descending into berserk rages and slaughtering dozens before they could be finished off. If so, that was all good. He had the troops to spare, and the lapses indicated the mental stress the Dogs were under.

  ‘A good night’s work, eh, Ramsez?’

  The raptora inclined his head in greeting.

  ‘For you, perhaps. I lost my rubricae. Some crazed boy-Dog, going mad at the death of his mentor.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to take responsibility for some more, my friend.’

  Aphael cast his gaze over to the smoking mountain. The once-pristine cliffs were now a dirty brown. Fires still burned across the causeways where promethium had ignited. The stunning vista had already been turned into a cauldron of devastation.

  We have achieved so much already, Dogs. Now watch as we defile your world some more.

  ‘It astonishes me,’ mused Hett, looking at the same view, ‘how quickly the Dogs are able to kill. I have never seen fighting like it. Any other force in the galaxy would have hidden behind those walls, waiting for us to come to them. Yet they met us in the open, fighting like daemons. What drives them? What makes them the way they are?’

  Aphael shrugged.

  ‘Do I detect admiration, brother?’ he asked. ‘If so, it is misplaced. They were made to do the dirty work no other Legion would do. They are the
exterminators, the vermin control of the Imperium. They cannot change, and they cannot improve. Just like us, they are imprisoned in the image of their primarch.’

  At the mention of Russ, Hett made a warding gesture. Aphael laughed harshly.

  ‘Do not fear – he cannot come to their aid now, as you well know.’

  Both sorcerers fell silent. Far below the platform, more heavily armoured vehicles were crawling their way through the ranks. They were of an ancient and obscure design, though a historian of the Imperial military would have been able to detect the faint emblem of the Legio Cybernetica on their flanks.

  ‘So what now?’ asked Hett.

  ‘It is as I said before, brother,’ replied Aphael, watching the vehicles with distracted interest. The feathers at his neck were irritating him. ‘The Cataphracts will be deployed. The Dogs have chosen to go to ground.’

  Aphael took a deep, combat-weary breath then, feeling the sharpness of the air even through the filters.

  ‘And we, my friend, have chosen to drill them out.’

  Blackwing had resumed his place on the command throne of the Nauro. Neiman was back navigating the ship in his isolated chambers, and the remaining kaerls were at their stations. The course had been maintained, still at full speed despite the engines haemorrhaging fuel and coolant.

  A standard Terran day had passed since the encounter with the Thousand Sons sorcerer and his mute bodyguard. It was a meaningless period of time, neither corresponding to the Fenrisian diurnal cycle nor the natural rhythm of a starship, but the crewmen clung to it nonetheless, perhaps thinking that something of their essential humanity was reflected in it.

  Whatever the reason, twenty-four hours had still not been long enough for the Nauro to recover its equilibrium. Blackwing’s command reputation had taken a hit. All the kaerls he’d taken with him on the hunt had died, and the whole crew was aware that it had only been the fortuitous use of the Navigator’s deadly warp eye that had saved his hide. In the normal run of things, perhaps even that wouldn’t have damaged Blackwing’s standing much with the ratings, but everyone was exhausted, run ragged by the endless demands placed on them. So it was that the muttering had begun, quiet enough for the whisperers to feel secure, but loud enough for Blackwing’s animal-sharp hearing to catch what was being said.

  The gossip and moaning didn’t bother him. What did was the fact that he’d been so comprehensively out-fought by a badly wounded spellcaster and a single warrior in power armour. The encounter should have gone better. He had been in his element, stalking in the shadows like a Wolf Scout should. He should have detected the intruders sooner, laid some ambush for them and caught them just as he’d been caught.

  The fact he’d stumbled into the firefight so brazenly was worse than sloppy. It was embarrassing.

  At the least, Allfather be thanked, it had not ended worse for him. The Rubric Marine had been half-destroyed by the Navigator’s baleful gaze. When the sorcerer had been killed in turn, the last of its animating genius had been removed and the lumbering warrior-drone had slumped into inaction. The engines had consumed their remains, turning the corrupted metal and broken flesh into just one more piece of fuel for the hungry furnaces.

  Blackwing had spent a lot of time thinking about the two stowaways since then. The sorcerer’s body, though crippled by a botched transport, was much the same as his – extended physiology, a broad, stocky frame with overdeveloped musculature and enhanced organs. In many ways, the sorcerer’s corpse had been closer to the Adeptus Astartes ideal than Blackwing’s own, with his rangy, loping frame and Helix-derived peculiarities.

  But the Rubric Marine... that had been strange. Underneath the shattered armour, there was nothing. No flesh, no bones, just a smattering of grey dust. Blackwing had heard the stories, of course. The Wolf Priests had declaimed sagas of the bloodless remnants of Magnus’s Legion, cursed by the dark sorcery of the faithless Ahriman to march to war forever with their souls destroyed, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. He should have found it routine, just another quirk of the galaxy’s tortuous, tragic history.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. For some reason, the notion that Space Marines could mutilate themselves so completely, just to avoid an inexorable flaw in their constitution, was abhorrent to him. There were some things that just had to be dealt with. For the sons of Russ, it was the Wulfen, the dark spectre of the Wolf that hunted in all of them.

  Perhaps the Thousand Sons had suffered from some similar flaw. If so, they hadn’t stood up to it like men, but had turned themselves into monsters. The longer Blackwing contemplated it, the more it horrified him.

  That’s the difference. We are all corrupted, the old Legions, but the Wolves didn’t run away. We face it, every day. We keep the danger close to us, use it to make us strong. Whatever else we do, we must remember that.

  ‘Lord.’

  Blackwing shook himself out of his introspection. Georyth was standing before him on the command platform. Like all the ship’s mortals, he looked terrible. His uniform was crumpled, and there were dark rings under his eyes.

  ‘Speak,’ drawled Blackwing, feeling hollow himself. He’d been awake for days.

  ‘Secondary search has been completed. No further anomalies detected on any decks.’

  ‘Good. And the engines?’

  Georyth let out a long breath.

  ‘I’ve got crews on triple rotation. We’re keeping the worst of the fires back, but I don’t know for how much longer.’

  ‘We need six days.’

  ‘I know. If we had more men...’ he trailed off. ‘But we don’t.’

  Was that a dig at him? Would Georyth have asked for those dead kaerls to be pressed into engine duty? Blackwing felt his hairs prickle with annoyance.

  ‘That’s right, Master,’ he said. ‘We don’t have enough men. We don’t have enough anti-flamm, we don’t have enough parts for the damaged plasma drive, and we’ve got a cracking Geller generator. All these things I know, so I don’t need to hear them repeated. I need you to tell me things I don’t know. Have you anything further to say?’

  The Master let a rare flash of belligerence pass across his face. In his state of fatigue, he was ready to lash out at almost anything.

  ‘You know my advice, lord,’ he said coldly.

  So he was still advocating the void-flush. The fact he’d offered it up twice was itself proof of Blackwing’s flagging authority.

  Suddenly, Blackwing realised that the thralls manning the bridge below the command platform were listening intently. Georyth was speaking for all of them. This was something they’d planned.

  A cold sensation passed through him. The implications of that were serious.

  ‘I do know your advice,’ he answered. He spoke clearly, knowing he could be heard all across the bridge, and let a low, snagging growl undercut the speech. He fixed his pin-pupil eyes on Georyth and pulled his scarred lips back to reveal his fangs. ‘Perhaps my earlier guidance on the matter was not sufficiently clear. This ship has one purpose: to deliver the message to Wolf Lord Harek Ironhelm on Gangava and recall his forces to Fenris. I do not care whether it does so with all the daemons of Hel crawling through the pipework, or if we have to feed our thralls to the furnace to maintain the current speed. Hel, I don’t even care anymore if it’s me that hands over the message. But we will get there, and we will get there on time.’

  Blackwing leaned forwards in his throne, raising a claw to point directly at Georyth. The look of menace on the Scout’s face made the Master visibly blench.

  ‘And know this. I am lord of this vessel. It exists by my will. Its wyrd is in my hands, as are all of yours. If I detect any effort to subvert that will, to turn this ship against its ordained purpose, then I will not hesitate to bring down the full quotient of pain upon you. We will maintain speed. We will maintain the repair programme. We will not fall out of the warp. Is that clear?’

  The Master nodded hurriedly, his face white with fear. The tentative meas
ures he’d taken to transmit some indication of crew dissatisfaction had backfired badly.

  Blackwing smiled, but it was not a kindly gesture.

  ‘Good,’ he said, letting his voice fall to a level only the two of them could hear. The growl of threat still reverberated in his voice, a mere echo of the savagery he could bring to bear if he chose. ‘Between the two of us, we may speak even more plainly. Perhaps you will pass the sentiment on to the rest of the crew. The first mortal to consider mutiny on this ship will find a close welcome under my claws. I will tear his skin from his body and use the hide to plug the gaps in our hull. It won’t help our integrity much, but it will make me feel better.’

  He leaned back against the hard steel of the throne.

  ‘Now go,’ he snarled, ‘and find a way to keep us alive for another six days.’

  A figure had formed over the altar. It was not entirely substantial; Temekh could see the far side of the summoning chamber through translucent skin. More troublingly, it was not quite what he’d been anticipating. It was not the icon of a flaming eye that his dreams had promised, nor was it the mammoth profile of a primarch, clad in red and gold with a towering helm.

  It was a child. A red-haired boy, wearing a white shift, looking painfully immature.

  ‘Lord,’ said Temekh, descending through the Enumerations gracefully.

  His work was not over, and there were many days of trial still to come, but the hardest part was over. In the absence of Aphael’s interruptions, much progress had been made.

  ‘My son,’ replied the child.