Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  Now.

  He burst into movement just before they did. If he’d gone any earlier, they would have had a clear shot. As it was, two of them broke cover ahead of him, hampering the sight-lines of those behind.

  Ingvar pounced on the foremost, loosing rounds from his bolter even as he swung dausvjer. His snarling blade lashed into the stomach of the lead Sister, cracking open her power armour and doubling her over.

  The second made it into combat, wielding a chainsword two-handed and screaming devotional screeds. She was fast, and dragged the whining blades into Ingvar’s side before he could bring his own blade to parry. He resisted the instinct to pull away, and let his armour take the damage. Staying close, he punched out heavily with his sword arm. The Sister’s helm snapped back, her neck nearly broken, and she staggered away. Ingvar stumbled as he went after her, feeling hot blood running down from the wound where the chainsword had bitten.

  Jorundur tore past him then, using Ingvar’s fight to shield him as he ran down the remaining Battle Sisters. He sprayed a thick wall of bolts before him that blasted into the statues’ bases and blew them apart. In a hail of spinning stone fragments, the Sisters were flushed out, firing back steadily and trying to retreat back down the long chamber.

  Jorundur downed one of them, but was hit by return fire. More bolt-shells thudded in, exploding across his amour in a wave of sparks, and he lost his footing.

  By then Ingvar had finished off the stricken Sister with a sharp stab to the throat and was adding his own volleys to Jorundur’s. He sprinted at the two final adversaries, crashing into them both and forcing them to switch to close combat.

  They were quick enough, but it did them little good. Ingvar’s greater speed and bulk swept them aside – one beheaded with a savage slash from his power sword, the other run through with the same blade. The final Battle Sister jerked and twitched on the sword as the energy field ran through her body, gurgling with trapped blood in her helm, before going limp.

  Ingvar hurled the corpse aside before going to Jorundur. The old warrior got to his feet. His whole body bristled with irritation.

  ‘Lucky shots,’ he muttered.

  Ingvar checked the data scrolling down his retinal feed. He’d taken a deep hit, but the blood was clotting and the skin already closing over.

  ‘We are out of time,’ Ingvar said, drawing out a krak grenade and heading for the blast-doors.

  Jorundur joined him. ‘Kraks won’t dent those doors,’ he said.

  Ingvar primed the charge. ‘Any better ideas?’

  Jorundur activated the comm-bead. ‘In position, Sister,’ he voxed.

  ‘Location noted,’ came Callia’s voice. ‘The bridge is locked down – you’ll need to come in fighting.’

  ‘How many are with you?’

  ‘Eight. More once the bolts are flying.’ She paused. ‘There are two Engines here, and a lot of guards.’

  ‘It won’t help him,’ growled Jorundur. He glanced at Ingvar, who slammed a fresh magazine into the bolter and nodded. ‘Open the doors.’

  ‘Emperor be with you,’ said Callia, and cut the link.

  Ingvar and Jorundur pulled back to the walls on either side of the door, bolters held ready.

  Ingvar could feel his wounds flaring painfully. Jorundur didn’t look in much better shape – his armour was pocked and scored from shell-impacts.

  This will be interesting.

  Then, with a squeal and grind of metal on metal, the doors began to slide apart.

  Gunnlaugur hardly noticed Njal forging his way towards the engine-gates. The lightning storm roared ahead, devouring and annihilating, and it barely registered. His every thought was consumed by the fight he’d initiated – he was locked into it, his mind fixed in total concentration.

  No one else got close. The severity of the combat was so complete, so total, that even the most rabid of the mutants shied away. Three weapons swung and twisted in double-helix counter-movements, each pattern locked with the other. Gunnlaugur wielded his thunder hammer heavily, knowing how hard the hits needed to be in order to register with such an enemy. The Plague Marine champion responded equally savagely, slicing and slamming with the twin scythes embedded in his arms. For one of his Legion, he was swift, and the scythes danced a deadly series of sweeping figures.

  The impacts, when they came, were crushing. Gunnlaugur was nearly floored by a sudden backhand lunge, barely keeping his feet before pushing back. The champion struggled to match the Wolf Guard’s brutal skill with skulbrotsjór, and both his shoulder-guards were cracked nearly open. Whenever the addled ceramite took a hit, though, it closed over like scabrous flesh, morphing instantly into a hard defensive carapace. The Traitor’s body absorbed punishment by sucking the force out of every blow. It felt like punching into water – the energy of the strike would just dissipate, spreading out across the creature’s fleshy, yielding torso.

  Broken slivers of battleplate were smashed clear. The last of Gunnlaugur’s pelts was ripped away, hacked from his back by the scythes. The Death Guard’s feeder-tubes and toxin-vials were shattered, spraying noxious fluids in blood-spattered streaks across both combatants.

  Gunnlaugur whirled around, using the hammer to build up momentum, and sent a thundering blow ringing from the Death Guard’s right arm. Ceramite cracked, cobwebbing out from the strike and rippling like crude oil. The Traitor withdrew steadily, wheezing through a dented rebreather, before pushing back. His left-hand scythe shot out, driving deep into Gunnlaugur’s opposing arm. The blade entered at the elbow, severing armour cables and biting deep into the flesh.

  Gunnlaugur roared again – this time from pain – and he lost his grip on the hammer. The huge weapon clanged to the ground, rolling to the edge of a smoke-laced pit and teetering on the edge.

  The Traitor champion pressed his advantage immediately, rushing at Gunnlaugur with both blades aimed at his hearts. The long curved edges ran with shimmering green energies, poised to hammer clean through his ravaged breastplate.

  Gunnlaugur surged forwards, both hands extended, eluding the twin blades as they came for him and seizing the champion by his throat. Hit hard, the Death Guard’s balance went, and he stumbled back. Gunnlaugur followed up, squeezing up through the creature’s gorget and driving the ceramite collar into the skin beneath.

  The Death Guard hacked at him, choking, desperate to loosen the grip. The scythes rose and fell, slicing more chunks from Gunnlaugur’s armour-plate. The Wolf Guard took more wounds – a deep laceration across his left shoulder, a savage chop at his right flank – but he kept up the pressure.

  The pain became excruciating. More blows came in, increasingly frantic, trying to deflect him, to knock him off-balance, to send him slamming to the ground. Gunnlaugur exerted all his remaining power into the twin-handed choke-hold, feeling the Traitor weaken at last. The scythe strikes grew more desperate, but the strength behind them ebbed.

  Gunnlaugur gasped, tasting blood on his fangs as his armoured fingers twisted deeper. Cords severed, muscles ripped. With an agonised choke, the Traitor champion went limp at last. Gunnlaugur released the pressure, and the huge body thudded heavily onto its back, scythe-arms splayed. By then, the Plague Marine’s neck was nothing more than a bloody, mucus-slick swamp.

  Gunnlaugur sunk to his knees, exhausted. His entire body felt harrowed. His right arm fountained blood. He drew in deep breaths, fighting the well of dizziness that threatened to overcome him.

  All around him, the enemy was in full retreat. Mutants were being driven like cattle, screaming as they were herded into the fire-shafts. He heard Hafloí’s whoops of triumph, cutting like clear ice through the tumult.

  The enemy was broken. Njal had forged far ahead and secured the portals into the fusion chambers. The last of the Plague Marines were fighting a rearguard action, but the remaining Wolves had the initiative, and were not about to release it.
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  He grasped his elbow with his left fist. The bloodflow was slowing at last as clotting agents flooded the wound. His right hand felt numb and heavy, and he could no longer flex his fingers.

  Grunting, he clambered to his feet again and retrieved his hammer. Hefting it in his good hand, he limped after his brothers. Up ahead, the gates towered over him. Blasphemous scripts ran around the iron frames.

  Hafloí staggered up to him. He was bloody and battered, but his raw exuberance still radiated in his every movement. He was exhausted, just as they all were, but the savage spirit had not been extinguished yet.

  ‘Good hunting, vaerangi!’ he said, brandishing the severed helm of a Plague Marine in one fist.

  Gunnlaugur grunted wearily. He had done well. They had all performed mighty feats – worthy of a song around firelight if they ever made it out again.

  ‘That it is,’ he growled, recovering some of his poise. With every second, the miracle of his genhanced physiology countered the heavy wounds he’d taken. ‘And not over yet.’

  At the vanguard, Njal was forcing the passage of the gates. The Rune Priest was still enveloped in a corona of raw flame. Lightning flickered around him, licking and twisting up against the frame of the central portal. Beyond the dark outlines of blackened iron, the air was raw-red. The heat was incredible, bleeding out of grilles the size of Titans. Vast exchangers hung on chains from the heights, thundering away as power coursed through them.

  Hafloí and Gunnlaugur limped up to Njal’s position, joining all the surviving Wolves at the portals – fifteen Hunters. The diminished warband assembled around Njal. Before them rose the main fusion reactor shell. Pillars of adamantium sheathed a heart of boiling liquid flames. The glowing innards of the reactor flared brighter, throwing bars of garnet-red light across the heart of the enginarium.

  ‘Charges,’ ordered Njal, drawing a spherical device from his belt.

  Gunnlaugur, Hafloí and the others did likewise. They had all brought a heavily shielded thermal charge, each one capable of setting off a ruinous chain reaction if deployed within the heart of something as massive and plasma-rich as a starship engine.

  Njal levelled his staff at the engine housing, and sent a bolt leaping towards it. The metal casing buckled, cracked, and melted, leaving a ragged-edged hole. From within, all that could be made out was the shimmer and blur of extreme energies.

  ‘One hour,’ ordered Njal, setting his chrono.

  Gunnlaugur followed suit, just as they all did. It briefly crossed his mind that an hour was a ludicrously short time for them to get back to the Caestus assault rams – it had taken longer than that to fight their way in – but the mission demanded it, and there was no time to spare if the hulk were to be destroyed before reaching Kefa.

  Njal turned to them all, sweeping his ice-blue gaze across the assembled warriors. Already the howls of fresh defenders could be heard from the depths, ready to surge back out from whatever temporary holes they had found to shelter in.

  Njal held his thermal charge up. Behind him, the swell and spit of the reactor silhouetted his armoured bulk.

  ‘This is what we came for,’ he said. ‘Russ guide their path.’

  Then he turned, and with an almighty heave, sent the first charge spinning into the depths of the reactor.

  The voices were growing louder. Some of them seemed to welcome Baldr’s presence in their midst, some of them were hostile. For all that, he could not catch the words properly. They sounded familiar, with inflections he thought he ought to recognise, but the chatter was just too diffuse to latch on to.

  As more time went on, it became harder to distinguish his own thoughts from the babble around him. Even the Mycelite’s soft tones half blended into the morass, just one more part of the Festerax’s gestalt consciousness.

  ‘They are invaders,’ the Mycelite assured him. ‘You can drive them out.’

  For a moment, Baldr wondered why he was needed to do this. The Mycelite was a powerful sorcerer – could he not do this himself? Were there not a thousand corrupted souls on board the plague-hulk who could have taken his place? What was so unique, and precious, about him?

  That troubling thought, though, was soon buried, and replaced with desire. Baldr found that he wanted to act. The interlopers felt like a wound lodged deep in his own flesh, barbed and hooked. The pain of their presence was a real, physical pain. If he had been a mortal, he would have drawn a blade and excised them.

  But he was no longer a mortal. He was the Festerax, the majestic scion of the Plaguefather, just a part of the infinite tide that would sweep away the rotten Imperium and bring an end to the fruitless striving, the endless scheming, the millennial violence.

  It had been going on too long. The universe needed rest, repose from the struggle. It needed to slip back into the wet embrace of decay and gracefully slide into obsolescence. That was its fate anyway – to resist it further was, as the Mycelite had taught him, to usher needless pain into a reality already ringing with it.

  ‘You know what to do,’ came the Mycelite’s voice again, half buried in the psychic hubbub.

  ‘I do not,’ replied Baldr. His senses were foggy, much as they had been before the attack in the gorge on Ras Shakeh. He felt, deep down, as if something were terribly, horribly wrong, but it was impossible to remember just what it was. All he could sense with any certainty was the matter of the ship around him – its vast spars, its thousands of interlocking chambers, its immense weapons arrays and its gargantuan engines, all swelling with nigh-on infinite power. His mind stretched out through it all, creeping like a cancer into every part.

  ‘You do,’ insisted the Mycelite. ‘Use your gifts. Search for the source of the pain.’

  Baldr did as he was asked. He withdrew into himself, blocking out the spectral chatter from the Festerax as best he could, delving into the network of sensor readings and physical sensations that constituted his new nervous system.

  His mind swept through it all, running down twisting passageways and abyssal transit shafts. He moved through the colossal birthing chambers where new mutations were spawned from rows of cylindrical pods. He soared across forge-chambers where munitions were hammered into being on endless segmented conveyor belts. He ghosted amid the rendering plants where the flesh of a million conquered subjects was boiled down in greasy tanks, ready to be piped to the stomachs of limitless armies. He lingered in the spore vaults where thousands upon thousands of torpedoes waited to be sent out into the void, ready to start the cycle of death and rebirth all over again.

  The pain was in none of those places. Only when he reached the ship’s ancient core, where the reactors belched and roared, did he feel the sharp stab return.

  They were there – the parasites, clawing their way towards his innards. He heard their voices raised in fury and triumph, and felt the bite of tiny weapons stabbing at his flesh.

  For a moment, something made him hesitate. One of the voices made his hearts stop – it brought the terror rushing back, and for a moment he could almost grasp at the source of his doubts.

  ‘Good,’ said the Mycelite, soothingly. ‘You have found them. Now flex your muscles.’

  The doubt faded. Baldr realised he could do it. He felt a burning sensation, and remembered the collar he had once worn about his neck, but it was not enough to prevent him. A well of astonishing, exhilarating power surged up, frothing and surging. He directed his mind towards the interlopers, suddenly seeing how they could be destroyed.

  If he had had lips, he would have smiled. As it was, the entirety of the Festerax seemed to shake with renewed energy.

  From somewhere, he knew the word.

  ‘Skemmdarvargur,’ he breathed, and the rune-curse was echoed by a thousand new voices in his mind.

  The last charge had just been flung into the furnace when it happened. Green-tinged energies suddenly lanced down from the enginarium r
oof, far out of visual range and lost in swirling clouds of soot.

  Spears of warp-matter slammed down among the Wolves, whipping and virulent. Arik, one of Fellblade’s pack, was impaled on the shimmering shafts. He jerked, prone, for a few moments, before his body exploded outwards, showering the engine chamber with armour-chunked gore.

  Two more warriors were caught in secondary tendrils of aetheric power, their breastplates smashed in a bloody stab of warp-kinetics. The rest of the warband fell back, aiming bolters up at the hidden source of the deluge. Only Njal remained in place, still burning with stormlight. The Rune Priest met the incoming warp-spears with fires of his own, and the engine chamber rang and spat with the messy impacts of rival wyrd-work.

  Gunnlaugur drew back with the others, unable to fight whatever power had been unleashed. They need to move – to finish the task and get off the hulk before it ripped itself apart. He tensed, ready to race to Njal’s position.

  ‘Stay back!’ warned Njal, fighting the rain of esoteric fire. More aether-lances crashed down around him, spraying madly as they hit his protective aegis. The heat, already febrile, ramped up further, making his outline blur.

  Njal launched a counter-attack, throwing twisting columns of razor-edged lightning high into the heights. Huge explosions rang out, bringing down arch-sections in crashing clouds. The two rival energies surged against one another, filling the entire chamber with a lurid mix of silver and green. The matched spheres of energy pushed against one another, swelling, flickering and striving. Njal was driven to his knees. Gunnlaugur and the others could only watch, their weapons held ready but with no living foe to take on.

  Eventually, grindingly, Njal’s spirit asserted itself. His neon-white pillars of storm-fire punctured the blooms of corruption, tearing clear shafts through the raging storm. He stood again, one fist raised in defiance, the other holding the skull-staff. With a resounding clap, he summoned a roll of thunder and sent it sweeping up into the distant roof. The whole structure shuddered, shaken to its rotten foundations. The rain of corruption roared and raged, and more debris showered down over the growling enginarium machines.