by Ben Counter
The metal beneath Ulli’s hands buckled and he drew them away. Where his palms had been, the two runes were now raised up from the metal. They glowed blue-white with the energy of their making, energy Ulli had drawn from the warp and forged with his mind.
‘My thanks,’ said Saehrimnar with a grin. ‘Fitting garb for the queen of battle!’
The war-cry of the orks rose to a single wailing bellow, dozens of their voices raised as one. Ulli could hear the rumble of their feet on the rockcrete.
‘Brothers, are we set?’ demanded Aesor.
‘I am,’ said Starkad.
‘A few moments,’ said Tanngjost. He was still fiddling with the detonator on the demolition charge.
‘Starkad, help him,’ ordered Aesor. ‘I would be gone from this place.’
Through the darkness the greenskins approached. Dozens of them loped through the broken machinery and rubble that choked the dam’s interior. Orks were humanoid, but there the resemblance to man ended – their skin was dark green leather covered in scars and scabs, heads hung low on massively muscled torsos. Mouths crammed with too many teeth to fit snarled under red piggish eyes. Every movement was power and anger, for every ork was born with a lust to despoil and destroy that never waned until they died.
‘What sons of a hundred oathbreakers stand before Brokenaxe?’ yelled Saehrimnar. ‘What waits for you beyond death that you are so eager to see it?’ He cocked the movement of his heavy bolter, levelling it at the approaching horde. ‘Do you hunt for oblivion? Fenris obliges!’
The heavy bolter bucked in Saehrimnar’s hands as it rattled off a chain of fire, the barrel flare strobing in the darkness. The din of the gunfire echoed off the rockcrete into a wall of noise. Ulli’s runes glowed hot on the weapon’s housing as shots burst among the orks, ripping open bodies, throwing chunks of torn flesh and limbs into the air.
The other Space Wolves returned fire. Aesor blazed with his bolt pistol. Tanngjost, relieved of his task preparing the charge, stood and unholstered his custom bolter. He added a volley of his fire as Ulli did with his own pistol. Fejor switched to full-auto and sent half a magazine of stalker shells into the orks.
‘Done!’ yelled Starkad into the vox.
Behind the bulk of the horde, smouldering in the shadows, was a great dark shape looming and huge. Ulli felt the crackling psychic mass of the orks, a pulsing insanity like a fire or a stormy ocean, and among it a massive upwelling of rage.
Aesor grabbed Saehrimnar’s shoulder guard and turned him around. The unspoken order was given and the pack withdrew, firing as they went towards the exit behind them. Saehrimnar sent out short volleys now, aiming as he moved, the bolter shells drawn to their targets by the power of the runes Ulli had inscribed on the gun.
‘What a treat to be shot right through!’ yelled Saehrimnar Brokenaxe between volleys. ‘Feel the breeze on your lungs, my friend! Feel the mountain air on your guts!’
The return fire was ill-aimed and without discipline. The ork preferred to fight up close, and most used guns to soften up enemies and make noise as they charged. A shot rang off Ulli’s shoulder guard as he took aim at a charging greenskin and put a pistol round through its skull.
The rage was growing. Ulli had faced orks before, but he had never felt this. In the swirl of combat he could not focus on it to divine what it was, but even the glimpses he had of it spoke of a scale and intensity beyond the psychic field that always surrounded a mob of orks in battle.
Pack Aesor emerged into the snowy glare outside the dam.
‘Do it, Starkad!’ ordered Aesor. Starkad hit the detonator switch in his hand and twin plumes of rubble and dust erupted from the centre of the dam. The sound hit a moment later, the ground shuddering, hot air roaring from the dam entrance.
Orks charged out of the dam onto the snowy mountainside. In ones and twos, the Space Wolves fell on them and cut them to pieces. Starkad drew his twin drake’s-fang daggers, spinning and lunging as he punctured abdomens and severed spines. Saehrimnar clubbed one greenskin to the ground with his heavy bolter, and the creature was finished off by Aesor’s frost blade thrust through the small of its back.
One ork barrelled towards the Rune Priest. Ulli’s axe was in his hand. The weapon had runes of his own making inscribed on its blade and they glowed with anticipation of bloodshed. The power field around the weapon sparked into life, energy rippling across the blade. The ork was a larger one than most, a leader in whatever tribal system passed for their society. Its face was painted with a crude representation of a white skull, its gnarled fangs were tipped with iron and it wore a filthy mass of skins and matted furs. It was armed with a cleaver-like weapon, its rectangular blade well pitted with old blood.
Ulli ducked its first blow, letting the weight of his body and armour drop him out of the cleaver’s arc. He struck upwards with his axe, burying it in the ork’s chest. He balled up a flare of psychic power, born of anger that this alien would dare single him out, and let it burst up through the psychic circuit in the axe. The power burst out through the blade, adding itself to the force of the discharging power field.
The ork was blown clean in two. Scorched meat and organs rained across the snow. The upper half landed some distance away, the legs and abdomen flopping wetly to the ground in front of Ulli.
He could not deny how good it felt. Ulli set himself apart from the ferocious Blood Claws, or men like Saehrimnar who revelled in the kill – but Ulli was still a son of Fenris, and the lust and glory of battle was in his blood.
The ground rumbled as the dam gave way. A new waterfall burst through the break, taking half the crumbling structure with it as it poured down the cliff face to plunge through the clouds. Ulli glanced around to see the orks who had made it out of the dam were dead or dying, the last of them shot down by a short burst of fire from Tanngjost.
Ulli could hear the bellowing of orks trapped inside the dam, and the rushing of water inundating the whole structure.
He could hear something else, too. The roar of unfamiliar engines from the direction of the lake. From the camp across the lake a black speck was rising on a column of grey-black smoke, the drone of its engines growing louder as it approached.
‘They have aircraft,’ voxed Ulli.
‘Russ’s teeth,’ snarled Fejor. ‘I’ll never understand how they learned to fly.’
‘Break and take cover!’ called out Aesor. The pack was already moving, scattering for the scant shelter of boulders and rises of rock. Behind them the peak of Sacred Mountain rose craggy and covered in snowy outcrops, but the slope by the lake was open. There was nowhere a man the size of an armoured Space Marine could hide, not from a strafing run from above.
Ulli ran for a rock that barely reached his waist. He was suddenly so open to attack he might as well have been wearing nothing but the ox-hide loincloth a supplicant wore on his Blooding. He glanced back and saw the ork aircraft knifing across the lake, swooping low. Massive cannon were mounted below its wings and a cluster of fat bombs hung under its belly. The craft had a blunt, lopsided look, the panels of its hull apparently salvaged wreckage, its pilot showing a grin of yellow fangs behind the cracked glass of the cockpit. How such a thing could even fly was beyond Ulli’s understanding. It was as if the orks willed their war machines into motion, and fuelled them with their need to destroy.
The cannon opened fire. Bursts of flame and smoke jetted from the aircraft’s wings. Explosive shells burst deafeningly along the near shore of the lake, and in a second or two they would fall amongst the exposed Space Wolves.
Ulli felt the hot blast of exhaust washing down over him as he was bathed in the roar of an engine. The cockpit of the ork aircraft shattered, throwing shards of glass and broken machinery behind it in a glittering tail. The ork craft angled upwards, wrenched out of its trajectory, and the shots from its cannon sprayed uselessly towards the mountain’s peak. The aircraft spiralled away, its pilot dead, vanishing among the upper slopes and leaving nothing but a contrail of f
ilthy smoke.
‘I leave you for five minutes!’ came Brother Sigrund’s voice over the vox. ‘Five minutes and already you need me to save your mangy pelts!’
Skjaldi’s Lament banked around over the lake, the lascannon mounted under its nose still glowing from the volley that had shot down the ork. Sigrund brought the gunship down towards the slope, the rear ramp already opening.
‘No whelp ever welcomed its mother’s milk as we welcome you, Brother Sigrund!’ laughed Tanngjost.
Beyond the landing gunship, the centre section of the dam was completely gone. The lake was rushing through the breach, the edge already receding from the shore as the meltwater drained away.
‘You made a bloody great mess,’ voxed Sigrund. ‘As always.’
‘Board, brothers,’ ordered Aesor. ‘I would not tarry here.’
‘A shame,’ said Tanngjost as he lugged his heavy bolter towards the gunship. ‘I’ll miss the mountain air.’
And again, welling up below his feet like the molten heart of the mountain itself, Ulli could feel that hate. A rage unbounded, waxing upon itself. It had the stink of the ork, but blacker and stronger, the monstrous will of the greenskin race distilled and made pure.
Smoke billowed at the entrance to the dam, from which howled the rush of water through the breach. The rockcrete entrance was suddenly shunted out of alignment, the lintel forced upwards as a great dark shape emerged through the smoke.
Ulli saw then what that hatred looked like, given a physical form. It was an ork, but that word did not seem to do the thing justice. It was enormous in size, twice the height of a Space Marine even hunched over, as broad through the shoulders as a tank. Its shape was composed of muscle and fang, its skin tattered with scars and almost black with age and smoke stains. Its jaw was so heavy as to look deformed, even among the orks, crammed with too many fangs to fit. Its eyes were burning coals set into pits of scar tissue.
Ulli had faced giant orks before. The larger the ork, the more powerful it was among its tribes and warbands, and so the hugest specimens formed the greenskins’ leadership caste. This one, however, brought with it the psychic wailing of hatred and madness that spoke of the roiling, diseased ocean of rage it had in place of a mind. And there was a terrible intelligence to it, the last attribute one might give to the greenskin. On its back – no, in its back, fused to the spine and ribs, protruding from the skin and muscle – were metal protrusions like antennae, around which crackled blue-white arcs of power. It crackled across the ork’s steel gauntlets and the metal plates riveted to its skin as makeshift armour. Cogs and flywheels spun amongst the machinery, generating the bursts of power. Sparks ground into the rocks, and snow vanished to steam as it stepped onto the lake shore.
In its arms it carried a weapon that would not shame a main battle tank, a cannon with five rotating barrels connected to an ammunition hopper full of loose shells. Like the aircraft, like everything the greenskins built, it looked like something that should never work, or at the very best that should have blown up in its user’s hands as soon as the trigger was pulled. But the will of this thing was enough to make the weapon work as it levelled the barrels at the Skjaldi’s Lament.
‘Hear the thunder straight from Fenris!’ bellowed Saehrimnar as he brought his heavy bolter up. He blasted a chain of fire at the ork, and the shots hammered against its massive frame.
The fire sparked off the armour and thudded into its flesh, but the ork was not even pushed onto the back foot. Explosive bolts were swallowed up by the mass of scar tissue and muscle, and the barrel of its cannon came down to aim at Saehrimnar.
The return fire was scattered wild. One shot caught Saehrimnar in the thigh and blew the ceramite open, revealing the wet redness of muscle underneath. Saehrimnar sprawled, his blood spraying onto the white snow.
Ulli was closest to Saehrimnar. He broke cover and sprinted to his fallen packmate, before the ork could bring its cannon to bear again. It could throw out a massive wall of fire but its recoil was such that the ork had to brace itself before it could finish off Saehrimnar. It would be enough time, Ulli was sure of that. He had the instinct of a seasoned warrior; he knew the cruel science of bullets and bodies. It would be enough.
Ulli grabbed Saehrimnar around the waist and hauled him off his feet. He backed towards the rock he had tagged as cover – it wasn’t much against the air attack but it would provide shelter from fire at ground level.
Ulli saw the ork out of the corner of his eye, leaning into its gun to keep it level. It was even stronger than Ulli had imagined.
There would not be enough time.
The gun roared. Ulli felt the massive calibre shells ripping past him. The ork’s face was illuminated in the muzzle flare.
Saehrimnar’s head and upper chest burst. Ulli was thrown back, a torrent of blood and gore hitting his face. The weight he carried was suddenly less, for a good portion of Saehrimnar’s body was gone.
The ork turned back to the gunship, which was rotating in place to aim its nose cannon. The ork brought its weapon to bear first. The barrels blazed and a dozen shots punched through the cockpit, stray rounds bursting among the fan blades of one engine. The engine tone rose to a scream and the craft wheeled out over the lake, belching smoke.
‘Sigrund!’ voxed Aesor. ‘Brother Sigrund!’
The Skjaldi’s Lament pitched into the lake and vanished, drawn under and out of sight by the currents rushing towards the breached dam.
Across the lake, a flotilla of craft had set sail. They were ramshackle motor launches and hovercraft, wreathed in oily smoke, teeming with greenskins from the camp. They held tribal banners high and waved their cleavers and guns, eager to clean up whatever the air assault had left alive.
‘Fall back!’ ordered Aesor. ‘Take to the peak! The upper slopes!’
The ork turned back to the Space Wolves. It shouldered its gun and drew from among the machinery on its back a blade as long as an oak trunk and as wide as a Space Marine. The jagged length of the weapon was corroded and spattered with old black bloodstains. The time for killing from a distance was gone – it wanted its next kill up close.
Ulli hefted Saehrimnar’s body onto his shoulders and vaulted over the boulder behind him. The lakeside slope became jagged and broken a good long sprint away, the gradient increasing sharply as the knife-like ridges and outcrops rose towards the mountain’s peak. The giant ork could take any of them it wanted if it could outpace them, but that would limit it to one or two. If the pack of Wolves stayed where they were and fought it, they would still be on the shore when the rest of the greenskins arrived.
The scream of tortured engines reached Ulli’s ears. The Skjaldi’s Lament rose from the waters, lurching like a wounded sea creature. Behind the shattered windshield, Brother Sigrund wrestled with the controls as he forced the gunship’s nose to point at the ork. A handful of shots blasted at the beast, most missing, one burning through an armour plate and into the greenskin’s flank.
The ork bellowed and took up its cannon again, and with a final volley shattered the front end of the gunship. It vanished into the waters, Brother Sigrund having got in a final insult to the creature that killed him.
Ulli used the seconds Brother Sigrund had bought him. He ran for the cover of the rocky slopes, willing his body to ignore the weight of Saehrimnar’s corpse on his shoulders and the heat of the blood that ran down his face.
The ork’s frustrated roar echoed around the mountainside, mingling with the tumult of the new waterfall and the grinding of the ork flotilla’s engines.
It hurt Ulli to flee. But the pack would not survive a battle here, exposed, one of their number down and the orks assaulting in full force. Their shame would burn hot, but it would not go unanswered. In that moment, Ulli knew the giant ork had to die, or the stain on Pack Aesor’s honour would never be washed away.
TWO
Pack Aesor gathered an hour later. The way had been hard going, the steep slope forcing them to climb as much
as run. But Space Wolves trained in the treacherous foothills of the Fang – they lived in a mountain and it was natural for them to negotiate such terrain. Even before they had been chosen by the Wolf Priests to undergo the tests that made them Space Wolves, some of the pack had lived among tribes who hunted and made war among Fenris’s mountain ranges. It was difficult, but it was more difficult for the greenskins, who pursued them slowly up the slopes in an ill-disciplined throng with their enormous leader at their head.
Starkad was waiting for the rest of them on a shoulder of rock where they could gather, snatch a few moments of rest, and plan their next move. He was a natural pathfinder and had made the best progress. Ulli, weighed down by Saehrimnar, was last.
Saehrimnar’s head and neck were gone, and most of his chest. The gene-seed organs, which could be preserved and implanted into new aspirants, were gone as well. They had been seated in his throat and chest, from where they regulated the many augmentations of the Space Wolf’s body. Saehrimnar would not give those sacred organs, crafted from the flesh of the primarch Leman Russ himself, to the next generation. His legacy had come to an end. It was the worst coda to a bad death.
There was little time for words, and none of the packmates had much inclination to say them. Saehrimnar had been the quickest among them to speak. Without him, the silence he left said more than any of them could. The pack buried Saehrimnar under a cairn of loose stones, and Aesor took up his heavy bolter.
Starkad pointed up the slope, to where a squat rockcrete bunker occupied a ledge. It was the best shelter they would find up here, probably built by the Knight Houses of Alaric Prime to aid their exploration of the vast mountain.
As the pack made their way in silence towards the bunker, Ulli hoped the orks would not think to search the pile of stones and defile what they found there.
