Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

by Chris Wraight

  Jorin kept on moving. Bulveye was not in the hall of banners. The fighting had progressed up towards the bridge level, and so Jorin followed its trail, flanked by Hjalmar and his retainers. They passed over broken armour-shells, sweeping like nameless ghouls, their own battleplate scorched black and the markings stripped from the ceramite. Bloodstains streaked the decking, dripping from the low ceilings and glistening in the flickering lumen-strips. Everything reeked of oil and burning and tom flesh, as was always the way with boarding actions.

  'They've pushed on far,' remarked Hjalmar, observing the growing signs of carnage. A few Wolves lay among the heaps of the slain, but the vast majority of the dead were Dulanian.

  Jorin might have celebrated that on another day, but now it made him uneasy. His orders had been for Bulveye to hold the intersection, preventing the enemy from reaching the drive chambers in numbers and giving his own warriors time to halt the race towards the warp. Bulveye was a reliable fighter, not prone to berserker charges when given a direct command.

  'Faster,' ordered Jorin, picking up the pace. Soon the hails from other ships would mount up, and there was work to be done first They reached the bridge just as the last howls of combat were dying down. Echoes of kill-frenzy still resounded in the high vaults, clinging to the adamantium like lost souls. Jorin loped out into the centre of a wide expanse, kicking aside bodies and making for the central command platform - a circular column rising two metres above concentric levels of crew-stations. A blister-dome of armourglass rose above that, threaded with crimson spokes, giving a view of the void beyond.

  Bolter-burst cadavers lay everywhere, slumped over sensor-terminals, sprawled across a deck ankle-deep in blood, jammed down into radial trenches where spilled cables spat and sparked. Three Scarabine mech-suits had been ripped apart and now lay in an intermingled heap close to the command throne, their limbs tom free and hurled far across the bridge's interior.

  Bulveye was guarding the throne, bolter drawn, as were most of those Jorin had placed under his command. The Wolves were no longer advancing, but fanning out warily, all their attention focused ahead, to where the sensor-pits gave way to a wide raised area running down to the very end of the observation dome.

  'What happened here?' Jorin voxed, coming alongside his huscarl. Bulveye was breathing hard, the sound strained from behind a gore-stained helm-face. 'Haraal,' he replied, gesturing with his bolter muzzle.

  Jorin looked out, and understood.

  Haraal had been a Fenrisian, one of the first inducted into the Legion after the Allfather's coming to the ice world. He had not been one of Dekk-Tra's honour guard, the elders who dared the Helix well past the years deemed possible by Imperial sages, but was fresh-taken from the floes, as pure a fighter as ever endured the trials of Asaheim. He had flourished in the Crusade, taking to the rounds of murder with relish and joy. He was popular with his battle-brothers, a candidate for elevation within the Legion, the epitome of a son of Russ.

  All that had gone. He stood alone, out ahead of the others, panting in a slurred mess of sputum-flecked bile. His helm had been ripped off, revealing a shaggy mess of hair and extended fang. His right gauntlet was also gone, and in its place was a clawed fist clutching the head of a Dulanian crew member. The rest of his armour was more red than grey, covered now in a thick sheen of glistening viscera. He had fallen into a stoop, one hand pressed against the deck, and his eyes shone with a bestial illumination. His pupils no longer focused on anything in the room, but darted back and forth, as if he were surrounded by a host of unseen enemies.

  'How long?' asked Jorin grimly.

  'It started in the hall,' said Bulveye, keeping his bolter trained on Haraal. 'Another one too - Bjell Hook-knife, though they cut his thread on the way up.' Bulveye's voice was dark. Such was not a good death - it was tainted, made possible only by a madness born of the deepest nightmares of a singular world.

  'How many did he take?'

  Bulveye snorted a low laugh. 'Most of them. Those three mech-suits? All of them too, one by one.'

  Jorin looked at the creature that had been Haraal. It was twitching now, its eyes moving more violently, scoping out danger. Its face was changed - stretched into the jowly mass of a true-beast's maw, its nostrils flared and sniffing. Slowly, it began to advance, creeping back towards the line of VI Legion warriors.

  'Haraal!' Jorin called. 'Stand fast!'

  The creature halted, swinging its head from side to side, snarling and spitting saliva in yellow loops.

  'You defeated this,' Jorin told it, moving carefully ahead of the line of his battle-brothers. 'Remember? You passed through the madness. You remained a man.'

  The Haraal-creature growled, sinking lower, its armour-clad haunches shivering. Blood dripped from its under-belly, running down the gun-metal outlines of Legiones Astartes iconography. It seemed to recognise Jorin then, focusing blearily on him and baring its fangs, hissing like a feline.

  Jorin stopped moving. He did not aim his weapon. It was not the first time he had seen such a transformation, but never before had one gone so far. To witness it made him sick to his soul.

  'It can be overcome,' he said, hoping fervently that it was true. 'You can slay it, just as you did before.'

  Haraal blinked. For a moment, comprehension flickered and the slavering stopped. The creature seemed to become aware of what was around it - not the dark pines of the Fenrisian wilds, but the site of its own rampant slaughter-orgy. Its wretched breathing became frenzied, and it reared back up onto two legs, a look of horrific agony imprinted on its features, and howled.

  Jorin heard the clink of bolter clips loading. 'No!' he ordered, remaining isolated, but it was too late Haraal charged at the jarl, bounding towards him with claws out, its face twisted into a deathly mask of flesh-stretched madness.

  The bolters opened up, slicing through its outstretched limbs and blasting armour-chunks free Incredibly, it kept on coming, roaring in pain and confusion, somehow shrugging off the impacts even as its body was shot through again and again.

  Jorin never moved. The Haraal-creature collapsed at his feet, destroyed in the hail of bolt-rounds, its body leaking a slick of heart s-blood. Jorin knelt down, stooping to grip the monster's head in his gauntlets. It was barely breathing by then, just a thick wheeze that clotted and bubbled in a burned-out throat.

  Jorin looked into its eyes, searching for something, anything, just a remnant. All that reflected back at him was agony - animal agony, bereft of intelligence or self-awareness. Jorin extracted himself, reached for his own bolter, placed the tip of the muzzle against the creature's temple.

  'Forgive me,' he breathed, and squeezed the trigger. The round exploded on impact, ending its torment.

  As it had been with Bjell, it was a bad way to die. A warrior of the Aett should die as a man, on his feet, fighting against the blood-dark tide. If there had been a way, Jorin would have wished to give him that last grace. The beast's head, now just a mass of gore, slumped wetly to the deck, and the wheezing gurgles ended.

  For a long time, no one spoke. The bridge's automated systems droned and cycled, keeping the hunter-killer powering out into the void. Incoming vox-link requests blinked across helm-lenses, swelling red for urgency. Somewhere out in the void, the VI Legion's outriders would be pulling alongside, waiting to hear if the jarl had got what he'd come for.

  Eventually, Jorin pulled himself back upright, shaking the gore from his gun's barrel.

  'There were no signs?' he asked, turning back to Bulveye.

  'Nothing. It came out of nowhere.'

  'There will be picter-logs from the Haukr. Perhaps a sign they give off, before combat? Something to watch for.'

  Bulveye nodded, uncertain. 'Perhaps. But what now?'

  Jorin looked at the devastation around him. If Haraal had caused most of it, then the curse brought astonishing strength alongside rapid degeneration.

  'Take the body back to the Haukr. Hook-knife's too. Tell no one. They were our packs, our
brothers.'

  Bulveye nodded again. 'It will be done.'

  As he spoke, more priority hails scrambled down the interior of their helm-displays. Ahead of them, in the void beyond, the sleek grey profile of a VI Legion destroyer slid across the abyss.

  'They'll want to know if we have it,' said Bulveye.

  The intention had been to leave the ship's captain and senior crew alive. Dulan's star empire had been steadily reduced, stripped of its outer defences and was now ripe for invasion, though the coordinates of the home world itself were not yet known.

  'This ship was making for the warp,' said Jorin, scanning the bridge for undamaged cogitator units. 'It will have its course stored somewhere. Tear it apart - we do not leave until we have something to take with us.'

  Only once the order had been given did Jorin finally allow the vox-link requests to filter through to his helm's earpiece.

  'Make it good,' he snarled, linking up with the company flagship, the Aesrumnir.

  'Jarl,' came the voice of Arif Redeye, the ship's master. 'Incoming fleet signals, less than one hour out. You should know this now - the Wolf King is with them.'

  Jorin cursed. 'Already? We were not due to meet until Verillis.'

  'Then I would say that things have changed.'

  Jorin cut the link again, shaking his head. The day was not going well.

  'Aye,' Jorin murmured, watching his battle-brothers haul Haraal's body clear of the wreckage, the armour falling from the flesh like ash from the fire. 'Things have changed.'

  The wreckage of the Dulanian bastion station had begun to fall away, burning up in the planet's upper atmosphere, when the first ships of the primarch's flotilla broke into anchor range. First came the escorts, as slender as skinning-knives, twisting away into guard positions to clear the path for the capital ships. Of those, the greatest was the Nidhoggur, grinding its way on low thrust to face its counterpart, the Aesrumnir. Both were battleships of the line, surpassed only by the massive Legion command ships themselves, the workhorses and principal killers of the mighty armada of humanity.

  Other ships joined them - the remainder of Bloodhowl's battle-group, other warships of Tra - all under the suzerainty of the jarl Ogvai. Ogvai Helmschrot. For now, though, he was not the master of his vessel, for his primarch travelled with him, taking control of the joint Great Companies. Such a thing was not uncommon, for the Wolf King went wherever the tides of war took him, making use of any vessel in the Legion's formidable complement. Only when the need was greatest and the fate of the entire Rout was at stake did he take command of his own dedicated flagship, the dread Hrafnkel, one of only twenty such monsters ever created, and by a distance the most powerful ship in the Legion.

  Thus it was that Leman Russ, primarch of the Wolves of Fenris, stood in the Nidhoggur's forward observation tower, flanked on his left by his huscarl of the Einherjar Grimnir Blackblood, and on his right by Helmschrot. Together they watched the bastion station tumble slowly into the furnace of re-entry, its flanks scorched and its lights extinguished.

  Russ was a huge, thick-set, burly figure, clad in heavy-slabbed runic armour of rain-grey, marked with icons of Fenris in gold and iron. His long blond hair fell about his shoulders, plaited and dreadlocked and hung with totems of a lifetime at war. The exposed skin of his craggy face was ruddy, suffused with a vital energy that seemed to burn out of his every movement. He was a war engine, a juggernaut, a sliver of a sun's heart snatched from the void and locked with the species-form of a human. Amid the galaxy at large, he was feared or scorned, the leader of a Legion of barbarians and vandals, though few would have dared mouth such sentiments to his face. To those who served with him he was revered beyond measure - a warrior king who led his shield-bearers into battle from the very front, who scorned no hardship that they were asked to bear, who had never been bested by a living soul on any field of combat.

  Well, there had been one, but that could not be part of the reckoning. The Allfather stood outside all categories, all myths, all sagas, and so to his followers Russ remained inviolate, the bringer of winter to the galaxy and the master of its wars.

  At that moment, hanging over Ynniu, he observed the product of his Legion's mastery of violence The bastion station was long dead, but every sight of the enemy offered up a scintilla more knowledge of them. Several such bases had been destroyed, each at significant cost to the Legion, and yet still so very little was known about the technology that drove them. The Faash were fanatical fighters, wont to scuttle their own ships rather than let them fall into enemy hands.

  The primarch knew his jarls despised that devotion. He, on the other hand, had a somewhat more nuanced view. The Legion were gene-conditioned to loathe the targets of the Great Crusade - the xenos, the recidivist human cultures - for it was in their blood, as much as their superhuman strength was. That was what made them such perfect killing tools, and if that limited their imagination somewhat, then that was what the primarch project was for - beings as creative and empathetic as the greatest of mortal humanity, only gifted too with the vat-grown bodies of the best of its warriors.

  And so he sympathised with the Dulanian foot soldiers, doomed to die in the service of a tyrant who cared nothing for them. Behind the masks and the armour plates and the ingenious shields that made them a match for even Legiones Astartes infantry, they were mortal, prone to all the prides and fears and vainglory that mortality brought.

  Just as he himself, Leman Russ, was mortal, after a fashion. There were no true gods any more, whatever the credulous of the Imperium might wish for; not since that day on Fenris when the sky had opened in a rain of gold, and the ice had melted from the rock, and the true way of things had been made brutally clear.

  'Damned strong boxes,' Russ muttered, looking at the outer skin of the station blister. 'They build them well, I'll give them that.'

  Helmschrot, arms folded across his chest, looked less convinced. The jarl was leaner than his master, though scarcely less tall. Long black hair ran down from a severe face, pocked with metal studs and lone steel lip-ring.

  The Vlka Fenryka were not great builders. Fenris had a habit of tearing down even the strongest structures erected on its changeable crust, and so produced more destroyers than creators. The Fang itself, still incomplete after decades of construction, had been carved out by geo-architects from Terra, and the fleet built by the shipwrights of Mars; the Rout themselves made little more than the weapons they carried and the armour they wore.

  'I never met a wall I couldn't tear down,' Helmschrot muttered.

  Russ laughed - a deep, surprisingly engaging rumble of humour. 'And yet they keep on building them.'

  A chime sounded at the rear of the observation chamber, and two doors slid open. Russ did not need to turn to recognise Jorin's tread - he had been able to identify it perfectly back in the old wars too, back when they had both worn armour of hardened leather and the Wolf King's honour guard had had the stringy, spare musculature of un-augmented men.

  'Jarl,' he acknowledged.

  The master of Dekk-Tra bore more resemblance to his fellow jarl than his primarch, though even there differences remained. Ogvai had been taken from the ice as a child, just as the vast majority of the Legion had, Terran or Fenrisian. Jorin bore the marks of his more arduous passage, not just the scars but the fractionally stilted stance, the black-rimmed eyes that seemed more hollow than they should be, the faint pall of darkness that seemed to follow him like the last smoke of a long-extinguished fire Now, though, those marks were made more severe by the truly horrific state of his armour - charred, scratched, stripped naked of the furs that normally hung across it.

  'I had not expected you,' said Jorin, joining them. He greeted both Blackblood and Helmschrot with a sharp nod. 'We were to meet—'

  'At Verillis. Yes, I know. But you have been slow, Jorin.'

  The jarl's deep-set eyes flashed, briefly, with anger. 'Skitja,' he cursed, dismissively. 'You've seen them, how they fight.'

  Russ
spread his hands expansively, holding them up in the old gesture - no argument, no weapons. 'Not my words, jarl. There are many eyes on us here; and they want this done faster.'

  'Then tell them to come out here,' said Jorin, his voice low. 'I'll show them what it takes to bring down these bastards, and then I'll show them how quickly it takes me to gouge out their eyeballs.' Blackblood chuckled.

  'On another day, I'd let you,' said Russ. 'But not this one. This battle is running out of our hands, and I don't want it to slip further. Tell me that you have a path to their home world.'

  'They are working on it,' muttered Jorin. 'One ship was all we had, running for the void, right at the end. We'll crack its heart open soon, and you'll have the warp-run you're looking for.'

  'It'll need to be quick,' warned Russ, walking out along the curving edge of the observation chamber7s outer limit. He gestured for Jorin to follow him, and for the other two to remain where they were; all in a flicker of battle-language; mere darting movements of three fingers. 'So, tell me truly, how has it been here?' he asked, moving under the armourglass perimeter.

  'Hard,' admitted Jorin, falling in beside his primarch. 'They don't give up. They know they've nowhere else to go.'

  Russ nodded. 'I believe it. I believe you. But, jarl, this is the thing. There are those on Terra who don't see things our way. A month's delay, a week's delay, and they're calling us unreliable, too carried away with slaughtering to marshal a proper campaign.' There was no fury in the primarch's voice, just weariness with it all. 'They wanted us taken off this. I heard the whispers too late and had to petition the Sigillite directly.'

  Jorin snorted. 'I bet he enjoyed that.'

  'He was left in no doubt what I thought, but we don't have many friends on Terra, and other Legions do, and so we find ourselves fighting battles in order to fight battles.' The primarch shook his head in wondering contempt. 'I have no patience for it, but I will not be cast aside like some ailing seneschal. Only in deeds will we find our rightful place. I told Malcador we would be cutting the Tyrant's throat. We were given the order, we will carry it out.'