by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
‘Argh!’ shouted Frikk.
‘Watch it, Uggs!’ bellowed Snikgob.
The buggy went through the middle of a tent. Canvas enveloped the boys, muffling Frikk’s terrified wails. The buggy bucked like a wild animal. They ran over something big that complained loudly. By the time they had chucked the tent off it was ablaze and trailing a couple of braver grots who thought grabbing the ropes might be a quick way out of the fight.
Something clicked in Frikk’s sharp grotty mind. He raked at Snikgob’s back. The ork grabbed him by the throat.
‘Oi!’ he barked. ‘Don’t you scratch me, you miserable–’
‘Don’t chase them! We got to get out of here!’ said Frikk.
‘What? You what?’ Snikgob squeezed slowly. Frikk went purple
‘Listen! Listen! It’s like with that big floating humie town!’ choked Frikk. ‘The battle with Big Mouth, the burny river battle, remember?’
‘What, you mean ‘boom?’’ said Snikgob, catching on. He looked to the sky.
‘Big boom, boss! They’re going to blow up the camp! And me!’ the gretchin wailed.
Snikgob dropped Frikk. ‘Gah! You’re right! Uggs, we gotta leave!’ he bellowed.
‘What? Run away?’ shouted Uggrim.
‘No, let’s stay here and get fried instead.’ Snikgob pointed at the sky, where a light was rapidly approaching. ‘Humie bomber coming in! Drive!’
Uggrim yanked up the handbrake, sending the buggy into a dangerous spin. He arrested it. For a moment, the buggy was still.
‘Waaagh!’ screamed Uggrim, flooring the accelerator.
Mobs of orks were howling after the humies. Uggrim drove right at them. A bunch of surprised nobs loomed out of the dark. Uggrim spun the wheel, the buggy slid sideways with the force of the turn. He wrestled with it, bringing the vehicle back under control and past the swearing boss orks. They were through, going fast toward their own compound while a horde of enraged ork boyz went the other way.
The whine of jet engines working hard came from the edge of the camp. Humie heavy shooters clattered as a fighta came to a hovering stop. Behind the meks orks died. The human commandos scrambled aboard their aircraft and escaped.
‘It’s coming!’ shouted Snikgob. ‘Another humie fighta, coming in fast. Get on! Get on!’ hollered Snikgob. ‘It’s getting closer! Get us out of here or we’re all for it!’ He was jabbing his finger at the sky over and over again.
The bomber became a bright shape that cut down from the night. Four dark cylinders detached from under its wings. They fell like dropped candles, before something ignited in their rears and they accelerated away. The craft pulled up, poorly aimed ork fire slashing the dark as it shot skyward. It wheeled around to join the other fighta blasting off from the edge of the camp.
‘Missiles! Missiles! They is going for the Klaw! Drive, drive drive!’ bellowed Snikgob.
‘But this is as fast as it goes!’ shouted Frikk.
Uggrim’s foot was already to the floor, but he had another trick up his sleeve.
‘Heh heh heh. Oh no it ain’t.’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Hang on! Squig oil injector!’
‘Noooooo!’ squealed Frikk.
Uggrim reached between his legs, twisted the wheel at the top of a canister. The potent stuff inside flooded the engine, causing fire to shoot from the exhausts. The buggy leapt forward so hard bits fell off. Snikgob was thrown painfully into the rails surrounding the gunner’s cage. He recovered to see the missiles lance into the opening containing the Klaw of Mork.
A heartbeat passed, and the night vanished in a massive explosion bellying from the front of the ship. Secondary detonations ripped all along the hull, blasting out plating and sending bursts of flame shooting at the stars.
If the explosion at the tower had been entertaining, this was a real jaw dropper. Giant sheets of hullplate hailed down all over the grassland, setting the plain ablaze. Some bits went far enough to crash down among the ork meks’ satellite camps.
The Klaw of Mork twisted ponderously to one side. Its bright green beam sliced down through the night, cutting out in a spectacular shower of sparks. Giant arcs of electricity earthed themselves in the metallic rubbish littering the plain as the klaw toppled like a felled tree, crashing to ruin amid the fire.
More explosions, many tinged odd colours, leapt up as one highly dangerous invention or another detonated. If a piece hit the Red Sunz’ reactor it would have been goodnight for every ork within three kilometres. In saner moments, Uggrim and Snikgob might have been a mite worried about that, but right then they were past caring.
The grassland was stained as orange as the Evil Sun itself, revealing the speed-crazed faces of Snikgob and Uggrim. They drooled freely, their pupils, barely visible at the best of times in the red of their eyes, were vanishingly small pinpricks. Uggrim gripped his steering wheel so hard he bent it. Snikgob grabbed hold of the bosspole above Frikk’s head, and beat his chest with his free hand.
‘Waaagh!!!!! I love this planet!’ screamed Snikgob.
‘I want to go home,’ sobbed Frikk.
The super-refined squig oil in the injector ran dry. The engine coughed, belching smoke from its exhausts, and settled back to its normal uneven rhythm. Things, most of them on fire, still hurtled out of the sky.
‘Ahaha, hur hur, ahahaha,’ said Uggrim, not lessening his grip on the steering wheel, but the buggy was spent, and was slowing.
‘Now that is what I am talking about, eh?’ said Snikgob. He punched Uggrim playfully. ‘What a fight! Do you see why I might not be me usual self?’ he laughed uproariously.
‘Boss! Boss! Look! Look! Slow down!’ shouted Frikk. He got no response, so bent low and pinched Snikgob’s arm. He dodged Snikgob’s answering punch and pointed out an entire ork lying surrounded by bits of dead ones. He was supporting himself on his elbows and looking back at the conflagration. ‘Dagogg! That’s Dagogg, ain’t it? I’d recognise that squig crest anywhere.’
‘Yeah, yeah I think you’re right!’ said Snikgob.
He told Uggrim, but Uggrim was too far gone, so Snikgob punched him in the back of the head.
‘You what? What you do that for?’ growled Uggrim.
‘Dagogg! It’s Dagogg!’
The thought of seeing so prominent a rival shamed snapped Uggrim out of his speed fugue. He zeroed in on the ork and brought the buggy to a puttering halt.
‘That’ll do, squig,’ he said, patting the injection tank. ‘Well, hello, Dagogg! How you doing?’
‘Fancy meeting up like this,’ said Snikgob. ‘We was just on our way to see you.’
Dagogg stared at the burning ship. His tough green hide was peppered with shrapnel, badly burned in the places it wasn’t charred. All his clothes had gone, blown off by the blast. Smoke rose from the top of his scorched squig. Much of the parasitic creature’s hair had been burned away, leaving the small head exposed. Tiny eyes blinked in surprise by Dagogg’s scalp.
‘Oh dear me,’ said Snikgob with malicious glee. ‘What a sorry sight.’
‘Do you know something, mate?’ said Uggrim.
Dagogg looked up at them, eyes wide and jaw slack. His eyes flicked between the inferno that was lately the Bad Gob, and the smirking Red Sunz.
‘I don’t reckon Mogrok’s going to be very happy with you. Do you, Snikgob?’
‘No, boss,’ said Snikgob.
‘And that’s not a nice place to be is it, Sniks?’
‘Definitely not, no, Uggs,’ said Snikgob.
‘So, I would kill you for being such a git, but you know what? You got far bigger problems than being dead!’ Uggrim put the buggy back into gear with a clunk. ‘See you around, Dagogg! Say hello to Mogrok for me.’
Laughing madly, the two meks drove off into the night, their voices fading as they pulled away.
‘Am I glad that is ove
r,’ said Frikk.
‘Shut up, Frikk,’ said Snikgob.
‘Ow!’ said Frikk.
‘Oi, don’t you hit my grot, that’s my job, hitting that grot. Pass him here.’
‘Here you are, Uggs.’
‘Ow!’ said Frikk.
‘See?’ said Uggrim. ‘You know, Sniks, that you got a knife in your arm?’
‘Have I? Oh yeah. So I have. I’d forgotten about that…’
PROLOGUE
The first Ulli had seen of Alaric Prime was a topographic map projected from the holomat servitor mounted on the floor of the gunship. Now, as the rear ramp of the Skjaldi’s Lament slid open and the icy wind roared in, Ulli could see the holo-briefing had not done this world justice.
A gleaming panorama of frost and white sunlight flooded the gunship’s interior with light, as bright as a magnesium flare. Here, above the layers of cloud, this world’s sun reflected up into an ocean of pale fire. The star Alaric, this world’s sun, burned icily in a mantle of the most extraordinarily vivid blue.
The peak of Sacred Mountain burst up through the light ocean, a mighty spear of snow-capped stone that pinned Alaric Prime to the sky. No wonder the people of this world, settled in the distant reaches of the Dark Age of Technology, had bowed to this peak as the physical manifestation of the Emperor’s will. When the Great Crusade brought Alaric Prime into the Imperial fold, it had been to the vastness and perfection of Sacred Mountain that the Imperium had been compared. The mountain shone as if plated with silver, a counterpoint to the sun above.
Ulli Iceclaw felt his eyes sting as his pupils contracted, his augmented senses correcting to prevent the snowblindness that any normal man would have suffered. The freezing air lashed against his face, whipping the wolf’s tooth necklace around behind him. The many trappings of a Rune Priest – talismans from Fenrisian graves, teeth and bones for scrying, books of battle-prayers and meditations – jangled on his belt.
‘They say Terra’s sky was that colour,’ said Brother Tanngjost, who held onto the handrail overhead beside Ulli. ‘A long time ago. It is like that in paintings and poems.’
‘Tanngjost Seven Fingers was probably there to see it, the old dog,’ said Saehrimnar Brokenaxe. Saehrimnar was grinning beneath his expanse of red-brown beard. He was still strapped into the gunship’s grav-harness and had his weapon, the pack’s massive heavy bolter, across his knees.
‘Not so old I cannot learn some new tricks,’ retorted Tanngjost, pointing at his packmate with one of the remaining fingers on his mutilated hand. ‘Like boxing a fat upstart’s ears!’
Ulli ignored the bickering. It was tension being let off, and in spite of the barbs the pack needed it. They had been together a long time, some of them since they had first come to the Fang as hopeful young Fenrisian warriors, and without some levity they would become jaded and stagnant. Instead the Rune Priest looked back into the passenger compartment, towards Aesor Dragon’s Head.
‘Pack leader!’ called Ulli over the roaring wind. ‘What do you see?’
Aesor unfastened his grav-harness and joined Ulli at the ramp. His long, sharp face was as complete a contrast to Tanngjost’s as the blinding sky of Alaric Prime had been to the gloomy interior of the gunship. Aesor’s was young and unscarred, while age had lined Tanngjost’s face as deeply as the battlefield scars that covered his cheek and one side of his jaw. When the people of the Imperium imagined the Space Wolves, the mighty warriors of Fenris, it was Aesor they imagined.
‘A battlefield,’ said Aesor. ‘A butcher’s block unbloodied. A blank parchment for us to write our glories upon. I see what every son of Fenris desires, a place for us to descend and bring the Emperor’s justice.’
‘There goes the Company,’ said Tanngjost, leaning forward for a view of the cloudscape beyond the gunship’s engine. Streaks of burning light were punching down through the clouds, trailing ripples of flame. They were drop pods, each one in the pale grey livery of Fenris with the black wolf’s head stencilled on the side – the symbol of Ragnar Blackmane’s Great Company. The same symbol Pack Aesor wore on the shoulder guards of their armour.
‘Wish them Russ’s speed,’ said Aesor, ‘and they will wish us his fury. Their battle is on the slopes below and the ballads of this war will speak of what they do. But we shall have our own saga, and though fewer will hear it, it will be ours alone. Pack Aesor! Give thanks, for again the galaxy gives us what we crave! It gives us war!’
‘War!’ cried Aesor’s packmates in response, like a toast drunkenly roared in the Great Hall of the Fang.
Ulli could feel the fury in them, tempered in the bonds of brotherhood. A Rune Priest could not help pick up the vibrations from the men around him – no psyker could, for psychic power was rooted in human emotions as much as human will. The relish Pack Aesor felt at the coming battle thrummed at the base of Ulli’s skull, infectious, eager to be released.
‘You know what I see, Rune Priest?’ said Fejor Redblade, seated at the back of the compartment. He lifted the sight of his customised bolter to his eye, as if picking out a distant target on the upper slopes of Sacred Mountain.
‘What, Fejor?’ asked Ulli.
Fejor smiled, revealing the overgrown canines of a Space Wolf. ‘Piles and piles of dead orks,’ he said.
ONE
Strikeforce Stormfall hit Alaric Prime hard. Beneath the clouds, the massive battle in the shadow of Sacred Mountain had entered its first stages. According to the briefings just before the gunship had launched, the orkish invasion force had made landfall in their hundreds of thousands, crashing to the surface in hollowed-out asteroids and barely space-worthy hulks that had landed more by luck than judgement. Orks cared nothing how many they lost to get to a planet’s surface – each death just meant more mayhem for the rest of them. The numbers had been sufficient to force a beachhead there, and now the Imperial forces were desperately trying to contain a growing mass of orks rampaging out from their landing sites. Imperial Knights, war machines crewed by Alaric Prime’s warrior aristocracy, had blunted the ork breakouts, but they could not fight on forever.
It was the orks’ own war machines that made the difference. Orks could hammer together an engine of war from wreckage faster than the Imperial Guard could get their own tanks loaded and fuelled. Anything the Imperial defenders destroyed just became more spare parts for the greenskins. The Imperial Guard had plenty of veterans who had faced greenskins before and they reported this orkish invasion had with them more armour and greenskin engineers than they had ever seen. That was the extent of the intelligence on the ork invaders on Alaric Prime.
The greenskins had come to this world with numbers and purpose. It was no accident that they had landed at Sacred Mountain, the most storied place on this planet. They had to be defeated here, or Alaric Prime would be lost.
That task of relieving the defenders had fallen to Ragnar Blackmane and the Great Wolf Logan Grimnar. Blackmane was the young king, a future Great Wolf omened as grandly as any who had ever walked under the moons of Fenris. Grimnar was the Chapter Master and the Lord of the Fang, and while he had more battles behind him than in front he was still a terror of the Emperor’s enemies. Together they were the greatest warriors from a Chapter whose lowliest members were ferocious masters of war. They brought with them most of their respective Great Companies, supported by aircraft, armoured formations, and specialists like the Rune Priest Ulli Iceclaw.
The great battle would be for the lower slopes amongst the greenskin landing sites, where there was a great tally of orkish heads to be reaped by chainsword and frost blade. There Blackmane and Grimnar would cover themselves in greenskin blood and hundreds of Space Wolves would glory in the ferocious joy of it. But on the upper slopes, where that battle would be a distant din, Ulli Iceclaw and Pack Aesor would wage a war of their own.
It was Starkad and Fejor who took the lead; Fejor, with his hunter’s eyes, and Sta
rkad with the experience of surviving in places just like this. The snow flurries kicked up by the Skjaldi’s Lament swallowed the guide and the sniper as they jumped down from the gunship. Ulli and the rest of Pack Aesor followed, Ulli reading the winking green runes projected onto his retina by the auto-senses on his armour. In the whiteout he wore his helmet and the icons told him his packmates were nearby, advancing alongside him, close enough to come to one another’s aid but far enough to avoid a single missile or landmine taking out more than one.
A Rune Priest stood apart from the rest of the Chapter – he was a psyker, training alone with the secrets of warpcraft. But here he could hunt with a pack of brothers alongside him, and the joy of that cut through the distance he had to maintain. Ulli’s mind was shared between the Rune Priest and the son of the Fenris, and the Fenrisian’s heart grew to be a pack hunter again.
‘I’ll keep the peak between us,’ came a vox from Sigrund, the Space Wolf who piloted the Skjaldi’s Lament. ‘No greenskin filth will take potshots at my gunship! I shall make for return when the charges are blown and I shall not tarry, so be quick!’
‘Don’t doze off,’ replied Saehrimnar. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘I can see the structure ahead,’ voxed Fejor. ‘I’m taking cover. The greenskins hold it.’
‘Advance, and be swift,’ said Aesor. ‘The snow will settle.’
Ulli emerged from the whiteout to see Fejor crouching by a rock, Starkad beside him peering through a pair of magnoculars. The pair had reached the edge of a long, sheer drop, a shoulder of the mountain, marking a stage of the ascent towards the uppermost peak behind them.
The departing engines of the gunship were replaced by the roar of rushing water. Below the ledge, a great lake reflected the pure blue of the sky. A dam blocked off what had once been a plunge down a sheer cliff face that vanished into the tops of the clouds hundreds of metres below. Several sprays of water gouted from the dam, the force turning hydroelectric turbines inside the dam that shuddered the rock beneath Ulli’s feet.