Yet no one laughed. The mutant tides yelled and bawled their defiance. Monsters in their midst lumbered into contact, their minds slushed by pain-amplifiers and thick layers of disease. At the rear of the horde, the bloated Plague Marines waited patiently, immobile and inscrutable.
‘Russvangam!’ thundered Gunnlaugur, decapitating the mutant closest to him with a broad sweep of his hammer. He lurched back into the counter-swing, punching the crackling weapon-head through the bodies of another two.
Ahead, half shrouded by drifting smoke-lines, loomed a greater test. It might have once been an ogryn, a grotesque abhuman many times the size and strength of an unaugmented mortal. Its swell-veined muscles bulged unnaturally, bursting out from under ramshackle plates of beaten iron. As it came on, it laid about itself with a crackling power maul. Its roars of challenge were nearly the equal of Gunnlaugur’s own, though thickened by madness into a bestial, slurring mess.
Gunnlaugur barged his way through a squad of lesser fighters to get to it. The plague-ogryn saw him coming and ploughed its way straight at him. As Gunnlaugur crashed and bludgeoned his way closer, he saw the metal tubes punched through the monster’s corpse-white skin, each one gurgling with combat-stimms. Lodged among the overlapping armour plates were vials of sludgy bile, fizzing from some toxic combination of battle-poisons.
Then the two of them collided, and the impact was shuddering.
Skulbrotsjór scythed, smashing against the jangling gourds and sending them clattering. The ogryn slammed its power maul down, aiming to crack Gunnlaugur’s trailing pauldron. Gunnlaugur evaded the blow, then launched another crushing hammer strike at the creature’s midriff.
The smashes came in thick and fast after that – heavy, driving blows that dented ceramite and tore up iron plating. Gunnlaugur was faster, hauling his hammer around him in speed-blurred arcs, but the tainted ogryn was taller, bulkier and immeasurably strong. Both of them took bone-breaking impacts. Gunnlaugur’s plastron was nearly sheared in two from a sharp maul swing, while the ogryn’s right leg was virtually cloven open by a sharp switchback from the thunder hammer. Blood, both post-human and abhuman, spiralled out from the epicentre of the combat.
The plague-ogryn worked to shut the Space Wolf down, bearing over him and cracking the maul down two-handed. Gunnlaugur responded instantly, ducking low and thrusting up under the creature’s guard. As he did so, he fed a sliver of extra power to skulbrotsjór’s energy field, making it roar like a voidship’s thrusters.
The impact was explosive, lifting the colossal mutant from its feet and sending its power maul flying. The wounded ogryn tumbled away, disorientated and nearly disembowelled. Gunnlaugur pounced after it.
‘For Russ!’ he roared, leaping high, then smashing the hammerhead down on the ogryn’s forehead.
The creature’s skull blew apart, drenching both of them in cranial slime. The ogryn tottered, headless, for a few moments more, its fists still clenched and its legs braced, before crashing backwards.
Gunnlaugur thrust his thunder hammer high and howled his triumph out.
‘Heidur Rus!’
His every pore streamed with sweat, his muscles screamed from the effort of wielding his great weapon, both his hearts raced to keep his genhanced systems from overloading, but still his spirit raged and his eyes blazed.
This was what he had been desperate for. Around him, his battle-brothers raced forward, echoing his howl of triumph with savage whoops of their own. He was where he had always been destined to be – at the heart of the tempest, slaying freely for the Allfather and the primarch.
As the last echoes of his kill-cry rang across the chamber, Gunnlaugur burst into movement once more. Over to his left, Njal was striding out, wreathed in snapping wyrd-lightning. The warriors of the Rout tore into the hordes like the predators they were, leaping across the pits to get at the enemy, driving in low and forging gore-soaked paths through whole knots of mutated troops.
Step by step, blade-swipe by blade-swipe, they were cutting their way towards the objective. The colossal heat-exchanger towers loomed closer.
It was then that the Traitor Marines began to move, hefting their scythes and striding down from the portals. Gunnlaugur detected twelve of them.
Back on Ras Shakeh, right at the thickest of the fighting, the Plague Marine champion had bested him. Now he latched on to the greatest of those who marched under the fires of the enginarium, and bellowed out his challenge.
‘You!’ he thundered, and his hoarse voice cut through the mass of screams and roars to reach its target – a huge monster with a lone-eyed helm, bearing an armour-fixed scythe blade in each hand. ‘I claim you!’
For a moment, Gunnlaugur could not be sure that the Plague Marine had heard him. Then the Traitor paused. His corroded helm swept the battlefield, and his gaze alighted on him. The two of them stared at one another – twin titans of slaughter, separated by a raging sea of lesser warriors.
Then the Traitor nodded, acknowledging the contest, and strode out to meet him.
Gunnlaugur grinned under his helm, licking hot blood from his fangs, and broke into the charge.
Challenge accepted.
Dawn broke over Kallian Hellax. The sunlight was weak, and struggled to push through thick banks of violet-tinged cloud. The vast sprawl of the spire complex rose up through layers of mist like islands in a milky sea, drear and immense.
On the far northern rim of the conurbation, landers came and went like clouds of metal insects. Requisition orders had streamed out of the command centre during the night, rousing divisional commanders and stirring them into action. Regimental barracks were given red-alert warnings, and whole battalions now marched into the waiting maws of orbital lifters. Huge troop-carrying craft squatted obesely on rockcrete aprons, their hulls open and glowing with red-tinged light.
It all looked orderly enough – long lines of marching men in uniform disgorging from ground transports and heading for the cavernous craft interiors. Every ten minutes, one of the big lifters would haul its doors closed, prime its engines and take off in a blaze of smoke and thruster-fire, swaying heavily up into the gathering dawn sky. Every time a space was cleared on the landing stages, another troop carrier would emerge from the clouds above and take its place on the grid, ready to absorb another detachment of living cargo.
‘You have done well, governor,’ said Olgeir, watching the progress from a balcony high on the southern edge of the compound. He’d taken a skimmer over to the complex with Annarovea an hour ago.
He hadn’t slept. None of the planet’s high command had done so. Organising a lift involving such vast numbers of soldiers was no easy task, even more so in the time they had been given. Some orders, inevitably, had been mangled. One regiment, stationed in the equatorial city of Bennafela, had somehow decided that the planet was in revolt and had taken over the local levels of control. Others had wasted precious time querying the orders and demanding to know under whose authorisation the evacuation was being enacted.
But they were the exceptions. The bulk of Kefa Primaris’s many millions of registered Guardsmen were now being lined up for redeployment, drummed into shape by their commanders and commissars and prepped for orbital lift. Every voidcraft in the planet’s orbital zone had been pressed into service, giving them a huge potential capacity.
Annarovea, standing beside Olgeir, smiled resignedly. ‘I am glad you approve.’
‘This is just the start, you realise. News will get out.’
‘Verdello is very thorough.’
‘Even so. Talk will have started. Your people are waking up.’
Annarovea ran a tired hand across her face, massaging the skin. ‘It is in hand. All the compounds are guarded, and enforcers are deployed.’
‘Do they know why this is happening?’
Annarovea gave him a dry look. ‘Of course not.’
‘Good,’ O
lgeir said.
Throughout, the governor had performed with calm competence. All of her staff had done so. As far as any of them could tell, panic had yet to hit the hive spires. Even if those being evacuated guessed the true reason for the orders, loose talk had not yet penetrated far out of the confines of the regiments. Keeping control of information was a specialism of Imperial command cadres, one of the very few things they had improved upon in ten thousand years of planetary administration.
Annarovea leaned heavily against the balcony railing. Half a kilometre away, shrouded in mist and steam, another lifter took off and lurched up into the sky, trailing columns of smog like tentacles.
‘I don’t enjoy watching this,’ she said. ‘My world, stripping itself bare.’ She looked back at him. ‘Would you have done this on Fenris?’
Olgeir’s mind instantly went back to the Fang. He envisioned the immense fortress carved out of the solid matter of the planet’s core, the ranks of ship-killer batteries on the flanks of the Asaheim peaks, the orbital fleets, the Great Companies stationed in the halls of the Mountain, the beasts that dwelled in the shadows, the Revered Fallen sleeping in the deepest holds.
It felt ludicrous even to consider the proposition of evacuation there – Fenris was one of the most heavily defended worlds in the Imperium. For all that, the Festerax was a truly unique threat, one spawned from the nightmares of the Eye itself. Could even the Chapter’s massed warships have stopped it out in the void? If not, and it somehow made orbit, would the brutal logic that governed Kefa’s fate also have extended to the home world of the Wolf King?
‘They are different worlds,’ he said, eventually.
Annarovea pushed free of the balcony and started to walk, back and forth, getting some circulation going in night-stiff limbs. She’d long discarded her ceremonial gown and now wore gilt body armour shrouded in a royal blue cloak.
‘You know we can pick it up on the long-range augurs now?’ she asked.
Olgeir nodded.
‘Soon other stations will detect it,’ she said. ‘The comm-chatter will begin. We won’t be able to keep the truth to ourselves.’
Olgeir turned to her. ‘You trust your staff?’
‘I do.’
‘All of them?’
‘I picked them myself.’
Olgeir grunted, and turned back to the view. Another bloat-bellied leviathan was coming into land, replacing the carrier that had last taken off. More smoke spilled across the rockcrete, thick and oil-black as it mingled with strands of drifting mist.
‘Morfol, your commissar,’ he said. ‘He wants to fight. Every part of his training demands it, and he is a fine example of his breed. We have six more hours. He could cause problems.’
‘Ah, but that is why you’re here, is it not? To keep us in line.’ A trace of bitterness entered Annarovea’s clipped voice. ‘Forgive me, lord, but it won’t matter to you much longer. As soon as you have our regiments safely pulled away, you’ll be back into the void.’
Olgeir regarded her again, surprised. ‘Will you leave, then?’ he asked. ‘You could take any ship you want.’
Annarovea lifted her chin proudly. ‘In six hours, I’ll be on my command throne. If the spore-clouds come, I’ll marshal what remains of my armies and we’ll burn them wherever they land. I’ll fight the changelings every step of the way when they come for us. The last thing they’ll see, when they break into the command spire, is an Imperial aquila standing guard over an uncorrupted, duly appointed leader. Then I’ll set off the hive-atomics, and take as many of the bastards down with me as I can.’
Olgeir suppressed an approving smile. He didn’t wish to insult her with condescension.
‘A fine strategy,’ he said. ‘I will be there with you.’
Annarovea looked at him disbelievingly. ‘You? Why?’
‘I am not leaving, governor. My task is not done, and I do not leave until it is.’ He drew in a long breath of Kefa’s acrid air. ‘Believe me, I am not here to goad you on, governor. I am here to protect you. This is my fate now – caught up with yours.’
‘Protect me?’
‘The news will be out by now.’ As Olgeir spoke, the mist boiled away from the vista before him. The hazy outlines of spires grew firmer amid the drifting clouds. ‘My Wolf Guard tells me the prospect of death does strange things to mortal minds. Perhaps you can trust your staff, perhaps not. In case not, I am here.’
Annarovea stared at him. For a moment it looked like she might burst out laughing, or perhaps flare into anger. In the end, she just shook her head.
‘Twenty-four hours ago,’ she said, ‘I was planning an inspection mission of the ore refineries in the south. The prospect bored me immensely – seven days of touring industrial facilities in the company of tithe officials. Up until then, this world had never known a major assault by the Archenemy. It had never even been visited by one of the Adeptus Astartes. Boredom was the worst I had to fear.’ She smiled grimly. ‘And now I have a Wolf of Fenris as a chaperone, and a nightmare – a real nightmare – is about to be unleashed upon us all. Things change quickly.’
‘They do. You regret that?’
Annarovea rolled her shoulders. Every move she made was tight with stress, but she was keeping herself together.
Out on the apron, more lifters came and went, transporting their precious contents into the temporary safety of the void.
The sunlight continued to grow stronger. The chronos kept ticking over.
‘Ask me in six hours,’ she said.
Vuokho shuddered, struck hard by more las-beams, and ducked down towards the nadir of the battle-sphere. More cracks shot across the armourglass of the cockpit, and the engines began to labour.
‘Maintain power for main thrust,’ snarled Jorundur, pulling the gunship away from a ruinous thicket of incoming projectile fire. ‘Blood of Russ, if you keep anything going, keep the drives going.’
The flight crew worked as hard as ever. Once aboard, Ingvar had taken the co-pilot’s chair alongside Jorundur, with the mortals placed further back at the gunner’s and navigator’s stations. The metal cage around them rattled and screamed, flexing every time another impact came in.
‘We’re coming out,’ said Ingvar calmly, running forward scans on the vessel’s augur array. His armour was still caked in slowly drying fluids, making him look like some butcher’s remnant amid all the naked steel.
The Festerax’s profile fell away behind them, though it still swelled in the rear viewers like some grotesque planetoid. Ahead of them, the void boiled with the lattice and turmoil of discharged weapons-fire.
Heimdall could be detected over to starboard-zenith, though it was moving chronically slowly. Its thrusters glowed black-red, looking more like wounds than drives, and the evidence of the beating it had taken was painfully obvious. Ahead glittered the opulent profile of Vindicatus, its own drives flaring up for launch.
‘I need more speed, brother,’ murmured Ingvar, watching the Grand Cruiser complete its pre-burn cycle. Any moment now the main thrusters would ignite, beginning the acceleration that would take it far out of range. Heimdall wouldn’t catch it then, not in its half-crippled state.
‘You find it, then,’ hissed Jorundur, pulling out of another dive just as a phalanx of torpedoes scythed past ahead of them. The volume of fire was diminishing with every kilometre they put between them and the hulk’s edge, but the hulk was still more than capable of knocking them out of the void with a full hit.
Ingvar ran another scan. Vindicatus was getting under way – grindingly slowly, but its momentum would soon pick up.
‘Get me the link,’ he said.
‘What link?’ grunted Jorundur, fully occupied with keeping Vuokho out of the many paths of destruction.
‘Callia.’
Jorundur snatched the comm-bead from the socket in his gorget and threw it at Ingvar befor
e hauling on the control column again.
Ingvar caught the bead, implanted it, and activated the channel.
‘You are moving, Sister,’ he voxed as the connection crackled into life.
‘Nothing I can do about that,’ came Callia’s voice. ‘Aiming to board? You don’t have long – the shields are compromised in zone forty-five five. You can detect that?’
Ingvar checked the readings. There was a window – a small one. ‘It will be difficult,’ he said.
‘I might be able to mask your approach. They are all scanning Heimdall.’
‘Do what you can.’
Ingvar cut the link, just as the gunship slewed violently in a patch of projectile fire. The whole structure rattled as the ship was flung around further. As Jorundur worked to right it again, Vindicatus picked up speed, its engines suddenly blazing like stars.
‘Full burn, brother,’ insisted Ingvar, watching as the prize began to escape.
Jorundur looked up at the real-view portals, made a quick calculation, and pulled out a whole raft of levers.
‘It’ll shake us apart,’ he warned.
‘We will not get another chance.’
Jorundur fed the last sliver of power to the main drives, and Vuokho kicked into attack speed.
All manoeuvring subtlety disappeared as the gunship shot directly for its target. Vindicatus’s hull raced towards them, its fearsome macrocannon-studded flanks looming rapidly into sharp detail.
‘You have Callia’s coordinates?’ asked Ingvar, gripping the sides of his command throne. Jorundur was right – the whole cockpit felt like it was splitting open.
‘The target is moving,’ muttered Jorundur, nudging the muzzle a fraction to the left. ‘This is complicated.’
Two-thirds of the way along the ventral flank, a docking bay was opening. Gusts of venting atmosphere glistened as the doors slid apart, sparking as they interfered with the ragged edges of the void shields on either side.
‘Like a needle through leather,’ grunted Jorundur, fighting with the controls.
Vuokho was coming in too low, driven down by the final barrage from the plague-hulk’s wall of las-fire. Jorundur pulled the nose up, though the momentum of the thrust still carried them in on the edge of destruction.
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