He drew in a long breath, flexing his battle-weary shoulders. 'Only one thing remains - the head of the Tyrant,' he said. 'That is still in our grasp, and I will not have it taken from me. He will have his plans, so we must force those to our will. We do not seek battles where there is no need, and I can acknowledge a mistake to my brother if he wishes it, so long as it is my hand that ends the campaign.'
He looked up, fixing his retainers with that blue-eyed stare one by one.
'I'll take Helmschrot and Blackblood and Ulbrandr,' he said. 'More would be provocative less would be reckless. You will keep your lips sealed and your blades sheathed, and try to behave as if you know more than brawling and beast-hunting.'
He grinned then, recklessly.
'It'll be fine,' he said. 'We'll get it over with, we'll get back to killing, and no one need ever speak of it again.'
They took the Stormbird Helmgart over from the Nidhoggur to the Invincible Reason, flanked by six Legion gunships. The escorts peeled away as the Helmgart slid under the shadow of the First Legion flagship. The Helmgart banked, dipped and entered into the beckoning hangar, touching down on a buffeting cushion of vented smog.
Russ descended the ramp, followed by his four companions. Ahead of them. Dark Angels stood waiting in battle order, several hundred, all arrayed in perfect parade-squares. Battle standards hung over the ranks, each one marking out a campaign of note. There were so many of them.
Servo-skulls droned overhead, dragging censers and masking the stench of promethium burners with their scent-trails. The huge hangar-space was only sparsely lit, and long, gloomy galleries ran along either wall, cut from age-darkened stone and decorated with the downcast images of robed warriors.
'He couldn't make it easy,' muttered Russ, looking out at the assembled phalanxes of Dark Angels. All of them wore their jet-black helms, but it was easy to imagine their expressions - contemptuous, aloof, curious.
Ahead of the front rank of legionaries stood the master of the flagship himself, set apart, waiting with his right hand placed on the hilt of his sheathed longsword.
Lion El'Jonson, primarch of the First Legion Astartes, stood as he always stood - straight-backed, perfectly poised, chivalric dignity personified. Among the rediscovered sons of the Emperor he was among the tallest, though not as heavily built as his guest. Long, fair hair framed a pale face, one that had been raised under the penumbral eaves of eternal woods and away from sunlight. His eyes were the green of the forests, his face as lean as a hunting dog's. A thick sable cloak fell from his shoulders, lined with ermine and decorated at the hem with silver livery. His armour was a glossy black, and painstakingly engraved with the intricate inlay of heraldic devices.
This primarch, more so than perhaps any other, radiated a dark, sombre majesty, the calm presence of one born to rule and comfortable in the role. In another age he might have been an emperor in his own right, the undisputed ruler of a thousand worlds. Even in this Imperium he was the commander of the oldest and proudest of Legions, a regent to the one who had created them all, though the kingly aspect had not been diminished by time, remaining one of suzerainty, of domination, of command.
'Leman,' the Lion said as Russ approached him, bowing his head by a fraction.
'My brother,' said Russ. They did not clasp hands, much less embrace, and stiff suspicion hung between them.
'I will be honest,' said the Lion. 'I did not think you would come. So I give you credit for that. And I give you credit for your work in the void. Truly, your reputation does not flatter you.'
'We keep our promises,' Russ muttered. 'But tell me, how did you find this place? We'd been looking for months.'
'We've been out in the void for longer,' said the Lion, giving little away. 'And there were signs in the old annals, things to look for!
'You didn't think to tell us?'
'If you had asked, we would have considered it. But what does it matter now? We are both here, and that brings the victory closer. Once this is behind us, we can end the matter.'
'I have been hunting for Dulan since the order came from the Palace. My sons have died to bring him to heel.'
'As have mine,' said the Lion. 'Remember?'
Russ swallowed down the insult that leapt to his lips. 'There is more than honour at stake here.'
'Is that possible?' The question did not sound rhetorical. 'I know why you speak of this. We can discuss the war, and we can join our forces to combine their strengths, just as our father intended when He made us all so… different. But that is not the reason you have come Must I remind you, or do you truly remember your oaths?'
Russ looked at his brother, and for a moment the prospect of drawing his blade, of taking Krakenmaw and ramming it down into that gilded breastplate was almost overwhelming. The two of them held one another's gaze, and it seemed as if the air became heavier somehow, like a thunderstorm on the cusp of breaking.
The ranks of Dark Angels made no move. Russ' retinue did not stir. The entire hangar remained silent.
And then, slowly, as if a cliff-face were grudgingly giving into the inevitable harrowing of time and tide, Leman Russ, the Wolf King of Fenris, moved closer to his brother and bowed his head.
'Let it be heard,' he said, a soft growl that nevertheless carried to all quarters. 'You were wronged. We wronged you. I come here for your pardon.'
The Lion smiled thinly, and finally extended his hands in greeting. He came forwards and took Russ by both arms.
'It is given,' he said, less sourly now, though still with that sonorous seriousness of purpose that seemed to mark his every word. 'For those are noble words.'
Russ gripped him back, making the embrace closer and dragging the Lion's ear to his fanged mouth.
'I said them for your knights,' Russ hissed, now in his brother's hearing alone. 'I'll add this, just between us - if you ever fire on my sons again, boy, I'll rip your throat out and eat it. How do you like that oath?'
The Lion sprung back, startled. It looked as though he couldn't be sure if it was a jest or not, and his expression tightened with sudden wariness.
But Russ laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, hard.
'So now we've got that settled,' he said, cheerfully. 'I'm guessing you've already drawn up plans for the assault. How about you show them to me?'
Kloja's repair details were still working hard many hours after the lance-strike on the Aesrumnir had done its damage. The beam had penetrated deep into the ship's structure, driving a flame-edged well through deck after deck. Whole sections had depressurised and lost power, major cabling had been severed and coolant-tubes curtailed. Jorin's boarding party returned to the ship to find the Mechanicum adepts deployed on every level, struggling to lock down the burgeoning fires and segment-failures.
If time had not been so pressing, his warriors would have joined the effort, lending their strength to the recovery squads, but that was not an option. The enemy would not be given time to regroup after the void-battering, and all knew that landings would be organised just as soon as the packs could re-arm.
While the majority of the company's warriors headed down to the armouries, Jorin and Bulveye made their way up to Ulbrandr's quarters, situated under the bridge in the battleship's forward sections, and the three of them gathered in the same chamber where Haraal's blood plasma had been so painstakingly examined, the doors locked behind them.
'So?' Jorin asked, resting his knuckles on the altar and giving Ulbrandr a jaded look. His battleplate looked no better than it had done after Ynniu - the running repairs had been overtaken by a fresh set of combat-marks.
Bulveye stood beside his master, a Jong gash opened up across his upper breastplate He would be next to surrender his wargear to Kloja's armour-wrights, but other things had greater priority.
Ulbrandr looked at them both across the empty altar-top.
'None,' he said. 'Or none that I detected, Hemligjaga neither. The gene-seed has been taken from the slain and the cut-threads tallied.'
'If they all kept their heads, then—'
'But the numbers do not add up,' interrupted Ulbrandr. 'I have checked, checked again, sent my thralls back onto what remains of the station to run fresh scans, but unless fate has played some jest on us, or I am in error, we are missing warriors.'
Jorin straightened up. 'You're sure?'
'Bodies may be found, but the scans show nothing. We do not have enough kill-records, not enough marks of armour-destruction. And there is also this.' The priest summoned up a hololith of what looked like vid-footage, grainy and unstable 'This was taken from the real-viewer records on the flagship.'
The images showed the underside of the halo during the fighting. Huge sections were tumbling planetwards, knocked out of orientation by the explosions within, creating a cloud of debris that drifted and clunked into itself. Las-fire from the ships above the halo's curve shot down through the clouds of smouldering metal.
'What am I looking for?' asked Jorin, watching carefully.
'You'll see it.'
As Jorin watched, the rain of shrapnel was joined, briefly, by a burst of what looked like thruster fire. Then there was another chunk of metal falling fast, though with less randomness, pulling clear of the rest and heading down towards the planet below.
'They got a ship away,' said Bulveye, grimly.
'They got more than one,' said Ulbrandr. 'This is a single visual feed angle.'
'All should have been taken out,' said Jorin.
'Do not be foolish,' said Ulbrandr, dismissively. 'The flagship had a hole punched through it, and half the close-range guns were burning. Save your anger, for here is the fact - we have missing warriors, and the enemy got ships down to the surface before the end. You can work out the rest.'
Jorin shook his head. 'They can only have corpses,' he said. 'None would have been taken while alive.'
Ulbrandr smiled a crooked smile. 'They were a capable enemy. They lost their defence station, but they gained a captive or two, and that might be a trade they consider worth making.'
'It won't help them,' said Bulveye. 'Russ won't halt the attack.'
'He won't,' agreed Ulbrandr. 'But the jarl is right - no warrior in his right mind would be taken alive. And so we are left with this prospect: what if they were not in their right mind?'
Silence fell across the chamber. Jorin looked at Bulveye. The priest said nothing.
'You cannot be sure,' Jorin said at last.
'No, jarl.'
'Can you track a life-signal?' asked Bulveye.
'Not from down here.'
Jorin pushed clear of the altar and paced between the columns. 'You cannot be sure,' he said again.
'Tell the Wolf King, jarl,' said Ulbrandr. 'Tell him before this becomes greater than you can control.'
'Tell him what?' snapped Jorin, turning on his Wolf Priest. 'We know not what the sickness is, nor if these warriors had it, nor even if they have them. What am I to say to him? Just whispers and half-truths. We will be at war again within hours, and you tell me to go to him with this, now, when he will need every blade at his side.'
'The jarl speaks true,' said Bulveye. 'This is not the time. Afterwards, perhaps, when all is done.'
'And all this time, they have warriors of our company,' said Ulbrandr.
'Then find them,' said Jorin. 'We will make planetfall, break the shielding and run the scans. If any of my company lives, then I shall tear their world apart to recover them.'
Ulbrandr shook his head. 'If they took them, they had a reason. You cannot give the enemy this weapon against us.'
'I give them no weapon.' Jorin reached out for the vid-control and closed down the hololith. 'You said it yourself - this is war, all is confusion, and yet you give me no proof, just suspicion. Send more teams onto the halo, run more scans, search for bodies. If you find none, make that your task on the surface. Find anything, even a sniff of one soul, and I swear I will fight with you across that whole Hel-spawned world to bring him back.'
For a moment longer, Ulbrandr held his ground. Then, slowly, he relented.
'You may have to,' he said, turning away to begin the search.
The council chamber on the Invincible Reason had been created to mimic those of Caliban's ancient fortresses. A marble floor, chequered and reflective, extended across a hexagonal room, lit from above by iron-framed lanterns. Candles burned atop heavy stands, dripping gently with melted wax. In every alcove stood more of the ubiquitous graven images, stone-hewn and sombre. All movements brought an echo, repeated up into the high vaults - the clink of a knife on stone, the thud of ceramite boots on the marble, the scrape of an armoured finger across a data-slate screen.
There were no thrones. All stood - the Lion and Russ at the centre, their retinues around them. Facing the three Wolves of Fenris were three lords of Caliban - Gahael, Master of the Second Order; Moriaen, Master of the Sixth; and Alajos, honoured captain of the Ninth Order. All wore their armour, hung with trophies taken over decades of war. Though austere, the workmanship was superb. Everything on the ship was cast from the same mould, the product of minds raised on a world of night-terrors and high walls.
Between the assembled warriors hung a slow-spinning, spherical hololith, marked with the principal inhabited zones of the planet below. Dulan was a heavily urbanised world, with extensive areas dedicated to manufacturing and war-production. Enormous generators placed near the poles provided prodigious amounts of energy, much of which was devoted to the maintenance of huge shield-lenses protecting the main settlements.
'They have had time to prepare,' said the Lion, who had talked through the preliminary results of his Legion's augur scans. 'The Tyrant seems to have calculated that his fleet would not halt us for long, and so counted on mounting a land defence. Many of these structures look new.'
Russ studied the plans intently. Trench works and fortifications had been raised across the northern hemisphere, much of it encircling the power generators. 'What is this?' Russ asked, pointing to a concentration of spidery lines converging on a single point.
The Lion smiled. 'You see to the heart of it. That is the world's capital nexus. Here, we have orbital records.'
He flicked a finger, and translucent image-casts flickered into life, floating over the points on the schematic below. One depicted a complex of walls, piled up upon one another, rising higher and higher amid natural sheer elevations. Causeways ran between the heights, joining up the circular footprints of what looked like defence towers. The image zoomed in, revealing files of artillery pieces placed along every ridge.
At the very centre of the construction, a mighty citadel thrust upwards, guarded on all sides by buttressed walls and crowned by a cluster of more defence towers. The earth around it all was a dull red, and the edifice above shared the same hue.
'The Crimson Fortress,' said the Lion. 'At least, so my remembrancers name it.'
Russ nodded, gauging the sizes, the entry points, the relative strengths. 'Formidable,' he said, his eyes flitting across the detailed aerial imagery. 'Rogal would be impressed. Or maybe jealous.'
'We calculate that it would take weeks to reduce the site from orbit,' said the Lion. 'Their shields, as you know, are hard to wear down.'
Russ looked up from the hololiths. 'But you are not suggesting that?'
'Every day we stay here deprives the Crusade of another conquest,' said the Lion. 'The Invincible Reason has gunnery capable of breaking sections of the shielding for long enough to make landings. Together, we have five Chapter's-worth assembled here That should be enough for any target, do you not think?'
Russ looked at him carefully. 'One would be enough. Do not overcomplicate this, brother - we take the citadel, smiting the head from the beast. The rest can be handled by lesser forces.'
'Straight for the throat,' said the Lion. 'You do not disappoint. But consider the greater picture.'
The hololith zoomed out again, show
ing massed detachments of infantry, each many thousands strong, placed just a few kilometres outside the main outline of the walls. As the image-scope continued to cycle up, more fortifications scrolled into view, some scarce less extensive than the Crimson Fortress itself.
'The entire region is militarised,' said the Lion. 'A path could be cleared to the centre, forces sent in, and they would be swiftly surrounded. Dulanian armoured infantry are inconvenient when massed in numbers, as you may have noticed. I suggest a little more circumspection.'
Russ raised an eyebrow. 'On whose part?'
The Lion smiled. 'Fear not - I have no wish to deprive you of your promised trophy.' He stabilised the image, which now showed three large defensive positions in addition to the central fortress complex. 'Before you arrived, we had already devised a strategy. Moriaen will take the Sixth Order into the eastern zone and establish a defensive perimeter along our right flank, digging in to prevent the enemy mounting a relief operation from the lowlands. Gahael will land to the north and destroy the generators, eventually depriving their atmospheric shields of power and allowing pinpoint orbital strikes. I will land to the west of the fortress, with Alajos and the Ninth, to take the lesser citadels, occupy the approaches and choke the main nexus of reinforcements.'
'And the fortress itself?' asked Russ.
'Yours, brother,' said the Lion. 'Before you came, I judged we had enough forces to mount the siege and then bring them to their knees in a week. Now, if you will it, the honour of taking the nexus may be yours from the first hour.'
'It was always mine,' growled Russ, defensively. 'It will be my blade that ends him.'
Leman Russ: The Great Wolf Page 9