Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

by Chris Wraight

'Open a channel to the Nidhoggur,' Jorin commanded, pushing his way past Kloja and striding along the gantry towards the exit. 'Tell them we have the route to Dulan, and tell them the fleet is ready on his command.'

  Kloja watched him go, his expression impossible to read behind the thick sloping vox-grille of his helm.

  'It may be nothing,' he called out.

  'It is everything priest,' Jorin replied, never stopping. 'We are hunting again.'

  III

  The coordinates of the home world were only the beginning. The galaxy was not like the terrain of a single planet, which might be mapped and surveyed, and thereafter traversed with confidence. The vast distances between stars could only be conquered by braving the warp - an ocean of swells and counter-currents, each one capable of dashing whole fleets into oblivion, or hurling them far out of their course and into uncharted regions.

  The known void was but a minuscule fraction of all space, its charted worlds infinitesimal specks on a well of infinite depth. Once, humanity had known more of the many routes through the empyrean, mapping them as their great arks crawled through the galaxy in the earliest days of interstellar exploration. But even now, with the Great Crusade having uncovered so much of that ancient knowledge, ignorance of the galaxy's far expanses was near complete, with only rare oases of light, such as Ultramar or Terra, to break the remorseless dark.

  And so it took two more weeks for the Wolves to plot their way to their destination, taking account of the dreams of their Navigators and the gibbering nightmares of their astropathic choirs. Translating the hard scientific business of stellar cartography into the imperfect art of warp passage was not easy, and could not be rushed even by a Legion that was ever impatient to get to the kill. Slowly though, the route was made clearer, and the flotilla burned a path through the reality-bending vaults of the underverse, the hulls of its ships flexing and creaking as if caught in a winter storm at sea.

  Throughout that time, the warriors trained. They scoured down their armour, ridding it of the filth of combat and re-daubing runes where the old patterns had been destroyed. Under the watchful eye of the priests, the hunters spent long hours in the practice cages, smashing one another into bloody lumps, but getting faster with every sparring match, their senses honed again to combat-readiness. When not in battle-rituals, they refuelled, taking on vast quantities of calories and repairing wounds suffered in earlier fighting. Two weeks was long enough for all but the severest of injuries to heal again, a testament to their bioengineered physique and conditioning. Every ship, from the mightiest battleship to the slenderest escort vessel, echoed to the howl and roar of crescendoing battle-rage, as the Wolves brought themselves back to the highest pitch of exactitude.

  All of them knew what lay ahead. The Tyrant of Dulan's empire had been wide-flung, a whole swath of worlds carved out of the ruination of humanity's Old Night of superstition. All of them had been heavily defended and had only fallen after heavy and sustained bombardment, so the centre of the labyrinth could only be more heavily fortified still. The full campaign had lasted for months, giving the enemy time to dig in and prepare.

  For most of that period, taunts had been relayed, translated into standard Gothic and piped to every Imperial unit within range. From these, Imperial commanders were quite clear that the Tyrant was not in the slightest part intimidated by them, and nor did he have any intention of running.

  He wanted them to come. And he wanted them to fight Russ had never listened to any of the taunts. Many enemies, be they xenos or human, had thought to goad him, perhaps calculating that enraging the butcher of Fenris would somehow lead to some kind of tactical unbalancing.

  'The problem with that,' as Russ had once explained to his brother Vulkan, 'is that we like being angry. So it doesn't do very much good.'

  The Tyrant had, nonetheless, tried his best. Captured mortal troops had been tortured over pict-feeds, sometimes in hours-long sessions, enraging Imperial Army generals and provoking massive retaliatory expeditions. Those had all failed, leading to the Wolves being employed to finish the job, and even then the provocations kept on coming.

  Now, though, the window for preliminaries had closed. The VI Legion fleet tore through the warp, driving every vessel's enginarium well past Mars-sanctioned limits to ensure their arrival in the shortest possible time. Axe blades were sharpened, swords were honed, bolters were loaded with priest-hexed ammunition and armour-seals were closed.

  The primarch himself commanded of the Nidhoggur, while Helmschrot took the battle cruiser Valkam. Bloodhowl remained in command of the Aesrumnir, and the remainder of the fleet was deployed to exit the warp in a battle-ready crescent formation. All knew that the planetary defence grid would be up to greet them on arrival, so the real-void run in from the Mandeville points had to be fast and coordinated, hitting the world's orbital zone in an overwhelming tide.

  Russ took his place on the Nidhoggur's command throne just as the flagship entered its pre-translation sequence.

  'Status,' he said.

  Freki and Geri prowled into stations on either side of the throne, their hackles raised and their fangs exposed. Blackblood stood on the dais beside them, together with others of the primarch's own Einherjar retinue, all helmed and battle-girt.

  'Entering translation now, lord,' came the report from Haelgrim, the ship's navigation master, stationed with the mortals below the lip of the throne platform. 'Plasma drives engaging, Geller power-down commencing.'

  Russ sat back as the deck shook violently, making the warp shutters across the forward viewports rattle in their brackets. The low thunder of the aether drives was joined by the more urgent growl of the real space thrusters powering up. Warning runes sparked into life across every exposed viewscreen, detailing the thousand systems gearing up to manage the shift between realities.

  Freki snickered and took a half-pace forwards, slavering. Russ reached down and grabbed the wolfs nape, rummaging the fur.

  'Almost there,' he murmured. This pre-battle ritual had been thus for as long as he could remember. His two wolves had been at his side from infancy, growing as he did, maturing into the hulking beasts that now accompanied his every march to war. They had endured far beyond the standard lifespan of their kind, and neither showed any sign of a lessening of vigour.

  A sharp bang resounded across the bridge, and the deck reeled as if struck. As one, a hundred warp shutters slammed back into their housings, exposing once more the glitter-spread of the starry void. The receding booms of winding-down warp drives were drowned by the thunder of plasma-trains reaching full tilt. The Nidhoggur surged forwards, surrounded by dazzling flashes as the other ships in the fleet crashed through the barrier between empyrean and real space, and joined the hunt.

  For a moment, it seemed like there was nothing but empty space around them, as if they had emerged into the trackless lacuna between the stars and were light years from anywhere. The bridge remained in a ferment, though, with officers shouting orders and thralls racing to follow them. The great weapon systems of the battleships were run out - colossal macrocannons and lances, surging into life as their energy coils and power reservoirs were kindled, stoked and set roaring.

  'Signals incoming!' cried the master of the watch, and immediately every sensorium servitor in the fleet started processing the hundreds of ship-marks swimming across the extremis-range augurs.

  Now Geri rose up too, back arched, legs trembling with eagerness. 'Speak to me,' said Russ, idly.

  The master started to reel off the figures, the vectors, the volumes, but Russ had only asked him to speak so that others would hear - he was capable of processing the information from the screens far faster than anyone else. Already he was visualising the coming battle, seeing the paths it could take, planning how to bring it to the only conclusion that mattered to him - the kill, fast and without hope of recovery.

  Other voices were rising now - the gunnery chief, the pilots, the garrison commanders. Russ stood above it, silent still, a lone poi
nt of stability as the reports and counter-reports flooded in. Ships were moving, shifting into standard offensive deployments. Fire-lanes covered fire-lanes, thrust-vectors were laid in on top of thrust-vectors.

  Dulan appeared on the scopes - as red as Ynniu had been, though smaller, a world of rock and iron and steel, hyper-industrial, ringed with a huge defence halo and other orbital stations. Soon the world would be in full visual range - they were hurtling, screaming through space, full momentum achieved.

  'Destroyer Frey-Slavor, come about, cover flanks of gunship wing five. Good. Maintain speed and—'

  'Not getting enough power on that lance. Fekke, pull it from somewhere or I'll rip your—'

  'Affirmative, we're seeing that. No, not at that speed. Divert down to four-five-thirty-four and—'

  The voices were like an ocean, seething and bubbling, jetting down every vox-conduit in the fleet and sending the gigantic war vessels along their precisely plotted trajectories.

  Dulan appeared on the first real-viewer, tiny in the beginning, just a brighter star, then getting bigger with speed. The curve of its atmosphere - seventy-four per cent nitrogen, twenty-four per cent oxygen, the rest traces, very similar to Fenris - appeared in the auspex feeds.

  Russ stood up. As he moved, his wolves padded to his side, pawing the ground, eyes fixed ahead with the rigid, unbending gaze that only a beast of Fenris could truly perfect.

  'Why do they not come to meet us?' the primarch asked, softly. Most of the crew, frantically busy with the million tasks of bringing a battlefleet into range, did not hear. Only Blackblood, the closest, responded.

  'We are still a long way out, lord,' he said.

  Russ shook his head. 'I see the augur-marks. There are a hundred ships on that world. More than enough. They do not engage Why?'

  Even as he spoke, the screens became crammed with fresh information. Dulan was now a fist-sized orb on the principal viewportal, swelling like a tumour, pocked with fast-moving points of darkness. The first pinpricks of explosions - tiny needles of neon-white - danced over the tactical vista.

  A comm-signal rune from the Aesrumnir glowed into life on Russ' helm-display, and he was answering almost before the lumens had reached full intensity.

  'I see it, jarl,' he said to Jorin. 'So, then - you were not quick enough.'

  Russ cut the link, not wanting to hear the reply and already feeling the dull weight of failure. His two wolves whined, immediately picking up the change of mood.

  Blackblood was still looking at him. 'What is it?'

  Russ laughed - a dry, humourless bark. 'Look at the scopes.

  'They do not attack us because they are already being attacked. My brother is ahead of us - half those ships you see are his.' Seconds later, ship-idents started to feed into the augur-banks, cross-referenced with Legion records and flashing up names, one by one.

  The Redemptive Fire.

  The Blade of Numarc.

  The Austere Purification.

  And the one name known to all who had any dealings, no matter how scant, with the recent history of the Great Crusade.

  The Invincible Reason.

  Russ gripped the hilt of his great chainsword, Krakenmaw, as if he would draw the blade then and there. The tumult on the bridge grew as the situation became clear - a huge void battle was already in progress over Dulan's orbital zone, and they were late for it What are your orders?' Blackblood asked.

  Helmschrot was hailing him, as were Jorin and all the other commanders, needing his word before they would act. The fleet maintained its full speed, barrelling ever closer. Their incoming trajectory must have been picked up by the enemy's scanners, just as it must have been by the First Legion's. Only moments remained before the Wolves entered lance-range.

  Russ exhaled in frustration, and his hand slipped from Krakenmau's grip.

  'Maintain course and speed,' he ordered, opening the vox to address the fleet ship-commanders as well as the Nidhoggur's bridge crew. 'Relieve and support any First Legion ship encountered, but otherwise keep to tactical shape. No quarter, no respite. Allfather willing, we have them now.'

  He took a deep breath. From here on in, he would not be fighting alone, and the knowledge of that was like a knife to his heart. 'So slay them,' he said bitterly. 'Slay them all.'

  In later centuries, the void battle over Dulan would only be recorded in terse entries, lost amid the volumes and volumes of historical tomes that charted the Great Crusade, most consigned to dusty archives and buried under the weight of similar military records. The Annales de Legiones Astarte de Gehennae Proxima, one of the more complete records to survive into the Imperial Age, merely noted that nine ships of the line were lost, along with two thousand Legion warriors and twenty thousand mortal auxiliary fighters. Placed against the countless engagements of the age, that was not especially remarkable.

  Such scholarly reserve did not, however, hope to convey the desperate savagery of a planetary action involving the last stand of an empire. To its inhabitants, Dulan was every bit the equivalent of Terra, if not in size and grandeur, then certainly in importance. It had endured during the centuries of strife following the first scattering of humanity into the stars. None who dwelt there had ever known another home world. In the vernacular, 'Dulan' merely meant 'Earth', and there were no other planets for them to fall back to, no places worth seeking out as refuges. So they would dig deep there, even knowing that death was surely inevitable, sooner or later, and fight for every last scrap of its sacred territory.

  Their ships, red-prowed and swollen with reactor casements, burned out of the orbital quadrants, their interference guns already firing. The great iron defence halo, as ancient and vast as the famed circlet encircling Medusa, let loose from fixed gunnery points, lighting up in a spectacular strobe-pattern of detonations. Faash fighter wings swooped and thrust through larger formations, choreographed like dancers, spitting fire from their underslung main barrels. Every cubic kilometre of space seemed full, crammed with the zing and spit of las-fire, the rolling blooms of void explosions, the tilt and tumble of burning metal.

  The Lion had engaged at arm's length, keeping his major warships out of the most concentrated areas of combat and firing from a distance. His lance-strikes were almost obscenely powerful, vomited in concert from the dark hook-prows of his aquiline battleships. Even Faash shielding could do little against that raw power, and local space was already littered with tidal swells of wreckage.

  To prevent the enemy coming among the battleships and engaging them at close quarters, the Lion had sent his escort-class forces directly into the heart of the Faash formations. They were suffering badly there, outgunned and outnumbered, but their sacrifice kept the stage clear for the repeated, hammering onslaught from their larger counterparts at higher anchor. The Dulanian forces kept on coming, furiously trying to break through the Dark Angels vanguard to get to the inviolate battleships, while the First Legion outriders fought just as fiercely to keep them hemmed in.

  In the last few seconds before the Aesrumnir hit weapons-range, Jorin took it all in.

  'They're sacrificing their own,' he said, grimly. 'Those are Legion assets they're throwing away.'

  Bulveye, standing at his side, shook his head. 'Cold,' he said.

  'It may be their way of war,' said Jorin, calling up attack vectors from the master of the watch. 'It's not mine.' He scanned across the incoming idents, and selected one of the largest Dulanian battleships - a huge, blood-red monster with a hunched spine and smog-trailing thrusters. 'That one's barely touched. We'll take it.'

  The Aesrumnir swaggered into the heart of the conflagration, its main drives powering it round in a wide arc No gunship wings had been released, for they knew the Faash ships were superior at close range, and so the Wolves warships looked to their own defence. Broadsides opened up in rippling waves, hurling clouds of armour-ripping shells out into the vacuum.

  By then the Nidhoggur and Valkam were adopting similar tactics, cloaking themselves in a protec
tive haze of concentrated power, picking a target and burning straight towards it. Where the First Legion capital ships remained aloof, the VI Legion's tore straight into the heart of the inferno, slugging their way clear towards the epicentre of destruction.

  'Jarl, we are being hailed,' came the report from Aesrumnir's sensorium pits. The master of star-speakers, a mortal named Beren Jarekborn, swung around in his throne. 'It's the First Legion vessel Blade of Numarc.'

  'Never heard of it,' said Jorin, focused on the prey-ship ahead. 'Respond when we're clear of this one. I want my blade blooded first.'

  The Dulanian battleship had not sat idly, waiting to be attacked, but had already come about, lifting its heavy prow and exposing a brace of interference barrels. It looked to have taken some superficial damage along its dorsal flank, but nothing big enough to threaten it. The telltale signs of interference build-up crackled swiftly across its onrushing maw.

  'That's close enough,' said Jorin, coldly. 'Fire main lance.'

  The Aesrumnir's gunners had been waiting for the order. The energy-loops were already snarling, the promethium igniters were tight with racing fuel, and the electro-plasma shunts were humming with pent-up momentum. As soon as the jarl's words left the comm, the main lance spat its immense payload of scouring energy across the intervening abyss.

  The impact smacked into the Dulanian battleship just under the bows, exploding across the gathering interference shock wave and redounding into a merged cataclysm of released energy. The Faash ship titled over its axis, its engines running wildly as its internal momentum was up-ended.

  'Again,' ordered Jorin.

  The Aesrumnir was still thundering, its broadside batteries blazing at the shoals of lesser craft trying to drill a hole through its shields. As the distance between them narrowed to less than a hundred kilometres, the lance erupted a second time, scoring another direct hit on the reeling enemy.

  'Lord, we have urgent comms from the First Legion,' ventured Jarekborn, but the blood of the commander was up and it was barely heard.