A distant roof soared away from them, towering like the sheer flanks of the hive spire. More ivory matter curled and twisted in a mesh of buttresses. It all glittered softly, as if studded with tiny crystals.
‘Xenos,’ said Ingvar coldly.
As soon as Ingvar said it, Gunnlaugur saw the truth of it. He’d fought the eldar before and should have recognised their architectural excess. He’d never been inside one of their warships, though. The colossal chamber had the stench of ages on it, as if it had been incorporated into the hulk’s warped menagerie an unimaginably long time ago.
He checked the tactical map – Njal was close now, and above them. More mutants emerged from the tangle of eldritch spires and walkways, defiling the ground over which they scurried like rats.
‘I do not know what is worse,’ snarled Gunnlaugur. ‘This filth, or the ones that built this.’
‘I do,’ said Ingvar grimly, following him into battle again.
Hlaupnir was nearly as fast as Njal’s boasts – a long, lean system-runner that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Naval formation. Olgeir liked it. It had a good smell, like charred stone, and its engines burned hard and clean.
He sat in the command throne. The hewn-stone chair was set at the rear of the bridge atop a low metal platform. Ahead of him, the main sensor station ran in semicircular ranks, interspersed with servitor pits and bulging logic engines. A large iron-framed portal, elliptical like a stained-glass eye, formed the main real-viewer, and took up nearly the entire forward wall of the bridge chamber. The crew worked at their positions, clad in Fenrisian grey, bent over pict screens or sensor tubes.
Olgeir checked the augurs, seeing how far the Festerax had already fallen behind. None of its escorts had come after them, which was something of a disappointment – it would have been good to exercise Hlaupnir’s guns a little before breaking for the planet.
‘How long, Hanek?’ Olgeir asked.
The sensorium officer – a burly kaerl with an unruly beard – pulled up the figures.
‘Entering extreme augur-range now, lord,’ he reported. ‘I’m getting some ghosting on the fore array – either we’re picking up some static from the battle, or they’ve seen us.’
‘Broadcast our position marker. Sooner we make ourselves known, the better.’
Kefa Primaris was still some distance from visual range. Ahead of Hlaupnir ran an empty-looking starfield. Its lingering sub-warp trail-signatures were perfectly standard for the planet’s grade – plenty of bulk carriers, a few light cargo freighters, the odd military patrol. All those ships had plied the incoming space-lanes to the planet recently, their spoor hanging in the vacuum like animal scent.
No doubt they were hanging in orbit over Kefa Primaris now, surrounded by clusters of unloading barges, refuelling and refitting after the warp-stage. Reaching those berths would seem like reaching sanctuary, with prayers of thanksgiving to be offered to the Emperor and the saints after the turmoil of the aether. They could have no idea what was heading their way.
‘We need more speed,’ Olgeir said.
Thraid, the navigation officer, looked up at him. ‘We’re already operating at far beyond–’ He saw Olgeir’s expression, and shook his head resignedly. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Olgeir grunted in satisfaction, resting his gauntlets on the armrests of the throne.
‘You do that,’ he said. ‘Stormcaller wanted us on Kefa twelve hours ahead of the hulk.’ He smiled broadly at Thraid, enjoying the challenge. ‘Make it sixteen.’
Ingvar climbed fast, speeding up the smooth curves of the terrain around him. His boots crunched into a brittle surface, cracking it in tiny patterns. He grabbed at trailing lengths of it, hauling himself higher, immersing himself ever further in tangled trails of alien psycho-substance.
It was like being immersed in a vast, static cataract. All around him, dirty white matter stretched upwards in twisting trunks sweeping towards the cavern roof. The Wolves raced up it, grabbing on to outcrops for handholds and wedging their boots into intersecting forks and platforms.
Ingvar had encountered wraithbone first during Onyx’s raid on Craftworld Nyo-Fae. Halliafiore had taken care to brief the squad on its properties.
‘Harder than ceramite,’ the inquisitor had told them, hefting a piece, ‘yet lighter than honeycomb. And it’s saturated with the warp. Break it open, if you can, and for an instant you’re staring into raw aether.’
The wraithbone on the Festerax was different – it was dull, lifeless, riddled with cancerous pocks and patched with mould growths. On Nyo-Fae it had been magnificent, swirling into arches of such purity that it hurt the eye to look on them; here, it had no more lustre than the scattered bones of a decaying mortuary.
The eldar warship had paid a heavy price for being dragged into the heart of the hulk. Nothing could survive millennia inside such a ruin-ark and not succumb eventually, and he felt the fragility of it all around him, like desiccated flesh stretched too long under a beating sun.
The creatures that screamed at them were no eldar, though. They were the same plague-zombies as before – human in origin but now twisted and distorted into grey-fleshed monsters. Ingvar caught scant glimpses of their faces in the dark before he killed them – jaws pulled wide, eyes staring from bloodshot rims, cadaverous flesh glistening clammily. They burst out of the wraithbone like roaches and scuttled down the long fronds, throwing themselves at the climbing Wolves in a disparate tide.
They were not hard to kill, not for warriors of the Rout, but every wave of defenders slowed them down. Just like all his brothers’, Ingvar’s helm displayed a ticking chrono on his inner lens, incessantly reminding him of the shrinking window for completion.
‘Faster!’ roared Gunnlaugur from up ahead of him, smashing aside four shrieking mutants with one vicious hammer-blow, dislodging them from their precarious handholds and sending them sailing into the emptiness.
The pack fought its way high above the surface of the wraithbone plain, racing up dozens of undulating pillars and cross-spans. The threading walkways led ever upwards, rising towards a single oval orifice at the summit of the chamber. Gunnlaugur made the lip of the passageway, leaping from a wraithbone platform to land on its rim. Three ragged mutants sprang at him, and Gunnlaugur punched them aside, cracking their backs and sending them tumbling over the edge.
Then he was through, charging into the dark. Ingvar raced up after him, stamping aside the snagging fingers of a half-buried zombie before clearing the last of the wraithbone fronds. A thin frame of pale stone ran around the orifice, lined with flowing runes in the xenos tongue, much of it faded and mutilated.
Ingvar plunged through it, and into a second wraithbone chamber. The previous one had been big; this one was colossal. Vast wraithbone sculptures rose up into smog-streaked gloom, each one pitted and worn with age. Sweeping columns soared up towards an obscured and distant roof. The chamber’s floor-level ran away from him, strewn with the broken eddies of some arcane, flowing design. Empty-eyed, lissom statues lined a series of avenues running into the darkness, blank-faced and passive.
The whole place already rang with the noise of battle – a jarring, percussive hammer of boltguns and projectile weapons, underpinned by the roar of hundreds of voices in overlapping, distorted waves.
A few hundred metres ahead of him, more than twenty Wolves had taken position. They crouched behind the cover of broken statuary, firing steadily out into the shadows. Beyond the defensive line, everything was shrouded in murk.
Ingvar spied Gunnlaugur’s marker. He ran up the front line and skidded into cover, stowing dausvjer and pulling his bolt pistol from its holster. Next to him, the Wolf Guard was firing short, deliberate volleys into the smog.
‘Why do we not run at them?’ Ingvar hissed, taking aim himself.
‘Njal is here,’ Gunnlaugur voxed, firing steadily all the while. ‘He
has sensed something.’
Ingvar picked his targets, and opened fire. More Wolves emerged from adjoining chambers to join them, racing up to add their firepower to the fragile defensive perimeter. Ingvar spied Njal’s own contingent fifty metres to the left, clustered around the base of one the hall’s gigantic supporting pillars. Further down the line, Bloodhame’s squad were already creeping slowly up the left extremity, taking position for flanking fire.
Just then, Njal suddenly broke from cover himself, surrounded by warriors of Fellblade’s pack. He lifted his rune staff high and cried out words of power. A clap like thunder boomed out, filling the entire hall, making the miasma shudder. Howling winds spiralled out of nothingness, shearing away the oppressive heat and pushing back the roiling banks of smog. Harsh light suddenly leapt up the faces of the pillars, illuminating for a moment the intricate carvings still visible on their surfaces.
That was not all it illuminated. Njal’s lightburst flooded out across the emptiness, dazzling the hordes of approaching mutants. Beyond them, several hundred metres out, rose a further pair of columns, each one as wide as a Titan. Beyond those columns lay a chasm running transverse across the full width of the chamber. A single span crossed the divide, gently curved.
Something massive was crossing that bridge. Huge, cloven feet cracked against the dusty floor, crushing the lesser creatures beneath it. Gangling legs shot up, bulging in xenos-tainted curves. Long, grasping arms hung down from armoured shoulders, almost human in scale, but deformed by eldritch slenderness. A curved blade of dull, black metal swung rhythmically, balanced by a segmented fan-shaped shield on the opposite arm. A tapered, faceless head swept back and forth, lolling as if intoxicated.
It was fully fifteen metres tall – a giant of xenos tech-witchery, towering far above even Njal’s Terminator bulk. Every heavy stride brought it several metres closer. The mutants around it yelled and goaded, lost in terror and awe, oblivious to those of their number it killed with every crunching footfall.
Ingvar narrowed his eyes. He had seen such sorcerous engines before. Imperial strategos had given them a name fitting their spectral appearance: wraithknight. Under normal circumstances the war machines were shimmering, elusive monsters of combat, sweeping across battlefields, glittering brightly from the energies coiled deep within their ghostly cores.
The thing before them was different. It strode clumsily, as if blind or maimed. Its curved shield was corroded and punched with black-edged holes where projectile fire had once stabbed through. Muddy-green fluid leaked from plated joints and cavities, dribbling across pitted wraithbone. The pregnant swell of its head-unit was fractured and smashed open, revealing intestinal growths spilling out of what had once been the pilot-chamber.
The wraithknight was true xenos no longer: just a shell over a deeper corruption. The black blood now boiling through its artificial veins had once hummed with esoteric harmonics. The Ruinous Powers had turned it into a tool of their own, slaved to the very powers it had been built to fight.
‘Hel’s teeth,’ breathed Gunnlaugur.
By then, Njal was already moving. Heedless of the ravening hordes tearing across the emptiness, he strode out into the preternatural dark, his staff blazing with light and fire. Mutants raced towards the searing light, dying even as their addled eyes caught sight of it.
‘To me, brothers!’ Stormcaller cried, his old voice choked with kill-urge. ‘In the name of Russ – bring it down!’
Chapter Thirteen
The crystalflex viewer still filled with intermittent light, dazzling from discharged lances, though the mortal danger had passed. Vindicatus had pulled back to agreed coordinates, holding position parallel to the plague-hulk and remaining just on the edge of its mainline gun-range. The cruiser’s shields fizzed and guttered as the tech-adepts struggled to restore them, but otherwise damage had been containable – just a few hundred casualties along the macrocannon-ranks; nothing to lose sleep over.
The Cardinal’s throne dominated the centre of the bridge. Its seat was high-backed, ridged with gold and lined with blood-red leather. A domed silk canopy hung over him, held up by the grunting efforts of twelve skull-faced cherubs. Incense filtered out through grilles in the throne’s side-panels, dribbling across the marble dais in filmy swirls.
Hundreds of bodies moved in the spaces under the gaze of the throne. Most wore the crimson livery of the Grand Cruiser’s bridge crew, their faces tattooed with the Cardinal’s emblem and their tabards draped in devotional screeds. Others were tech-priests, spared the most egregious symbols of the Ministorum and given a wide berth by their superstitious counterparts. A few were of Sister Nuriyah’s battalion, towering over the non-power armoured, their cloaks swishing softly as they strutted.
The crowds moved with a purpose, tracing pathways across the enormous bridge expanse. Data-slates were passed from hand to hand and orders were conveyed in soft whispers. Vindicatus’s command stations echoed with the hum of earnest tactical consultations. With its towering columns of bronze and its glassy seas of polished marble, the bridge looked a little like one of the great cathedral precincts of Holy Terra, and that was not entirely accidental.
Delvaux rested his elbows on his lap, and considered the situation. He hardly noticed any of the finery. He had hardly noticed it for many years – opulence was the water in which he swam, as transparent as the seas around a shark. His gaze fixed on the floor-to-roof observation panels at the far end of the bridge. Immense facets of armourglass, framed by curved metal fixings in the shape of angels’ wings, gave a superlative view of the void outside. Ocular implants in his left eye superimposed fleet markers over the polished surface, delineating the patterns of combat still taking place in the vacuum.
He gloomily watched the surviving wings of his interceptors taking their chances against the last dregs of the plague-hulk’s escort. He watched Heimdall stay riskily close to the enemy ship’s lance range, continuing to loose its weapons with reckless defiance. He watched the three slate-grey gunships wheel and dive, shadowing the hulk like raptors harrying prey too big for them.
For a long time he did not stir, lost in his thoughts, knowing none of his servants would so much as dare to look up at him.
None but one.
‘What do you make of it?’ asked Klaive.
Delvaux twitched, and looked down. He hadn’t heard the confessor approach. Klaive was out of armour, wearing his favoured black robes, velvet stole and soft slippers. The man’s ivory skin shone under the bridge’s intense light, and his wet gaze was unsettlingly unblinking, just as ever.
‘Make of what?’ Delvaux asked.
‘The attempt,’ said Klaive, coming to stand just below Delvaux’s left armrest. ‘Can you detect the Wolves?’
‘Intermittently. The deeper they go, the harder it gets.’
Klaive nodded. ‘Let us hope they are preserved. Such fighters.’
Delvaux shot him a scornful look. ‘You admire them.’
‘Of course.’
‘I detest them.’
‘For shame. They are the Emperor’s instruments.’
‘Preach at me here, confessor, and I’ll stuff your tracts down your throat.’ Delvaux felt the urge to reach for more snuff, and resisted. He was getting bad at resisting things. There had been a time, long ago, when he’d not needed stimulants to get through the diurnal cycle, when he’d fervently believed the things he was required to say. It was hard to remember that, now.
Klaive examined a broken nail. ‘How long do they have?’
‘Seventeen hours.’
‘And you’re going to give them that long?’
‘That was the agreement.’
‘Was it? You were generous.’
Delvaux turned to glare at Klaive. Something about the man had always made him angry. Perhaps it was the calm, otherworldliness of him, like the saints were always supposed to be. Klaive
never got angry, never raised his voice. That was unnatural.
‘Did you find what you were looking for on the surface?’ Delvaux asked.
‘Some of it. The rest will turn up.’
‘Anything of interest?’
‘Not really. Wasted effort, for the most part, I’m afraid to say.’
Delvaux studied his face carefully. ‘Archives, you told me.’
‘That is right.’
‘A lot of trouble you went to. For archives.’
Klaive smiled thinly. ‘Such things are important, lord. Records, transactions, documents of succession. When this war is over, they will be needed. Ras Shakeh was a small outpost of your diocese, but not an unimportant one.’
‘It was a blasted rock,’ Delvaux muttered. ‘I still cannot quite believe you persuaded me to take it back in such force.’
‘It was but a detour, lord. The real prize lies ahead.’
With that, at least, Delvaux could agree. Kefa Primaris was a colossal world, one harbouring billions of souls. To send it to the flames – that would be an act of supreme commitment. It would send a message, not just to the enemy, but to those who had begun to doubt his zeal.
The Ministorum had its own games of power, ones that cardinals were compelled to play just like everyone else.
‘And what of you?’ Delvaux asked. ‘What odds would you give them?’
Klaive pondered the question. ‘I am not sure that is the right question, lord,’ he said. ‘The true question is this: can we risk giving them time for the attempt?’
‘I have made my judgement,’ snapped Delvaux. ‘Their Rune Priest knows my limits.’
‘He is out of contact, at least for the moment. You are an honourable man, my lord, but do not lose sight of the danger.’ Klaive’s eyes flickered around the bridge. ‘A whole world given over to ruin. Billions of new souls for the faithless. Once that is started–’
‘Say no more. I know the consequences.’
But Klaive’s speech nagged at him. He could already envisage the torpedoes being launched. It would not be hard to outpace the Festerax, to thunder into range ahead of it, gain optimal orbital position, deploy the life-eating virus-bombs. By the time the hulk made orbit, Kefa Primaris could be a scoured rock, as barren as the void itself.
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