The second scout seemed more subdued, wearing a hooded wolf pelt that almost completely enveloped him. The hood hid his face so that Ragnar could only see the glow of a bionic eye. Across his back, he carried a sniper rifle.
Ragnar nodded to them both.
“Hoskuld, it is good to see you again. What have you discovered?” he asked.
“M’lord, as instructed we made our way deep into the city. It is as you feared. The traitors have significantly reinforced their numbers,” the scout reported. “The enemy has a sorcerer who opened a portal to bring reinforcements through. We overheard them talking—”
“You overheard them talking?” Ranulf interrupted. “Just how close were you?”
“Close enough to hear them talking,” replied Hoskuld, dryly.
“Ranulf!” Ragnar held a hand up to silence his battle-brother. “Please continue.”
“They are too few to open a portal big enough to bring anything very large through, but they did say that by tomorrow night they would be strong enough to open a larger gate,” the scout concluded.
“We have to go in tonight, Ranulf,” said Ragnar.
Ragnar turned back to the scouts. “Could you lead a small force back to the position where you witnessed this ritual?”
“A small force, yes m’lord,” the scout replied.
“Good. Ranulf, gather the Wolf Guard, and find Tor. I will need him for this.”
“M’lord, are you certain that you want Tor?” Ranulf inquired.
“He’s going to lead the force,” stated Ragnar.
“Lead it?” Ranulf growled with surprise.
“Yes Ranulf, Tor will lead the incursion force to destroy the portal. We will launch our own attack to distract them.”
“But m’lord, Tor—”
“Needs an opportunity to redeem himself, Ranulf. Redemption requires two things, desire and opportunity. I know this better than most. Tor will get his chance for redemption.”
ONE
Service to Belisarius
With a quick strike, Ragnar splattered a large beetle. A yellow smear on his blue-grey power armour marked its passing, and finally he could focus and listen. He needed the full use of his ears, many times sharper than those of ordinary men. The jungle scents confused his acute sense of smell after he had spent so long on the industrialised surface of Terra, and his vision couldn’t penetrate far in this endless thicket of greenery.
Hyades was a lush planet, many sectors from the Imperial capital of Holy Terra on the fringes of Space Wolf territory. Life had taken root on this world in quantity and variety at the high end of Imperial surveys. Colonists had quickly established strongholds on the planet, and although it was not a deathworld, the native fauna and flora did fight against the colonists. On Hyades, the men and women of the Imperium had turned the planet’s promethium deposits to good use. The planetary law of survival was simple: if it moved, it burned. The first colonists had established their cities near promethium mines and burned the jungle to expand their territory. Citizens of Hyades destroyed the environment rather than adapting to it.
After years of political manoeuvrings, the Celestarch of House Belisarius had been granted custodianship of Hyades. Ragnar wondered what types of closed-door dealings had resulted in the acquisition of a planet but he had spent enough time on Terra not to let politics surprise him.
The Navigators of House Belisarius kept their power through their abilities to guide ships safely through the warp. The value of their gift to the Imperium could not be understated. Without Navigators to guide them safely through the immaterium, Imperial spaceships could never travel long distances between the stars. Even the custody of a planet was a side business interest compared to the House’s true asset of Navigation.
Promethium production was one of House Belisarius’s many benefits to the Imperium. Promethium, the white-hot fuel used in Imperial flame weapons, was found naturally in only a few places, including Hyades. In the last three years, production on the planet had fallen dramatically. The excuses given for the drop in production bordered on the ludicrous: reports of unusual equipment failure, coupled with narratives describing attacks from native predators unafraid of Imperial lasguns. The bureaucrats even blamed the weather for problems, claiming that they had faced an abundance of storms. Ragnar was all too familiar with bureaucrats from his time on Terra. They were spineless men who would blame anything for their failure. These people took the coward’s path for their failures, instead of facing them with the responsibility of a true warrior.
The Celestarch had ordered Lady Gabriella to review the situation. She was one of the most promising of the young Navigators and it was generally agreed that she would rise to take the reins of leadership in House Belisarius. In addition, she had spent time on Fenris, homeworld of the Space Wolves, continuing to cement the centuries-old alliance between me Space Marine Chapter and her House. She had brought with her to Hyades living proof of this alliance, the House’s most trusted defenders: the Wolfblade. Ragnar would have volunteered to escort her, but luckily Gabriella had selected him to accompany her anyway.
Ragnar wanted, as much as he wanted anything, to leave Terra and return to a galaxy where he could easily tell friend from foe instead of confronting the conspiracies and verbal sparring of the Imperial capital. Despite his desires, he accepted his duty and his responsibility. Once, he had served as a Blood Claw, a young hot-blooded member of the Space Wolves. Ragnar had battled on the front lines against the Imperium’s deadliest enemies: the bloodthirsty orks, the enigmatic eldar and the heretical followers of Chaos. However, he had been responsible for the loss of a precious artifact, the Spear of Russ, a weapon that had belonged to his Chapter’s primarch, the legendary Leman Russ. The cost of his failing had been his exile to the Wolfblade, in honour of an ancient pact to defend House Belisarius from its enemies.
And he had done his duty well, saving the Celestarch from an assassin, back on holy Terra. Still, he longed to return to the endless wars on the frontiers of Imperial space.
Gabriella’s shuttle had arrived on Hyades, in its capital city of Lethe, earlier that day. She had been received with a formal celebration in the city’s central palace, where she had met with the governor and dozens of other local dignitaries and functionaries.
Once Gabriella had been settled in, Ragnar had requested permission for the Wolfblade to inspect the city and review its defences, taking the opportunity to investigate the fall in promethium production. Gabriella had suggested the Space Wolves also search out the creatures that the locals were claiming were attacking them.
Ragnar’s fellow Wolfblade members, especially Torin, a veteran of the civilised life on Terra, seemed less than pleased. Haegr had wanted to go, probably just to annoy Torin, Ragnar suspected.
Gabriella had assigned eight of the twelve Wolfblade escorting her to the patrol. Ragnar thought she sensed that he needed the adventure. The team was organised into a single pack of eight men, even though the Wolfblade was accustomed to smaller units. The unit was organised more for actual warfare than the skirmishing that the Wolfblade commonly participated in as the bodyguards of House Belisarius.
The members of the Wolfblade had quickly reviewed the city and its defences, although in truth, after spending so much time on Terra, Ragnar had had enough of cities. When they left the city walls to explore the surrounding wilderness, he could feel the excitement creeping in his blood.
The jungle was thick with closely placed trees coiling their roots together just below the soil and their branches together far above to create a dense canopy. Creeper vines hung between the tree trunks and bushes and ferns pushed through any spot of soil left by the roots. Little light penetrated to the jungle floor, and Ragnar wondered how so much life could survive without sunlight. He wondered if the heat of the promethium below the surface somehow sustained the jungle life.
The jungle wasn’t uniformly dense. In places, spaces opened up beneath the canopy. The entire environment made
Ragnar feel more like he was moving underground or through a cluttered building than outside. The jungle also held a constant hum from the beetles that the Space Wolves found everywhere. The team had remained silent and on alert but in the first four hours of their patrol, they had found nothing larger than a fist-sized crawling insect.
Finally, the silence was broken by the grumbles of Ragnar’s fellow Space Wolves. “Great idea Ragnar, coming out here,” said Haegr. Although his friend’s girth made him seem unfit, Ragnar had seen the speed and power that his massive comrade possessed. Haegr was probably half as dangerous as he boasted, and since he was a master at boasting, that made him formidable indeed.
“Come on, Haegr, don’t you feel better now that we’re away from civilisation?” replied Ragnar.
“Well, of course I do, but I would have chosen somewhere less hot and buggy.” Haegr flicked a beetle from the end of his boltgun.
Ragnar’s ears picked a strange noise out of the buzz of the jungle’s insects: a faint scratching sound, and then a click, coming from off to his left. A reptilian scent brushed against his nostrils. Another click answered to the right. Ragnar’s blood warmed as he braced himself and held up a hand to his compatriots. To their credit, the other members of the Wolfblade kept up their bickering as they readied their weapons.
The attack came with a torrent of leaves, as the creatures tore through the jungle overgrowth. One of the beasts hurtled itself into Ragnar hard enough to send him sprawling. Ragnar’s blade glowed with power as he fell back against a solid tree trunk. The sharp edge of the weapon sliced its way into the tree behind Ragnar as if it was paper, not wood. The tree tilted down, trapping the sword for the moment as it teetered on the verge of falling.
Ragnar’s assailant reared over him. Covered in emerald scales, the alien creature blended perfectly into the jungle. Three rows of serrated teeth gnashed in its mouth, while its yellow eyes fixed on Ragnar and black diamond pupils narrowed. The creature’s arms and legs reminded Ragnar more of an ape than a lizard, but the triangle-shaped head, forked tongue, lashing tail and reptile smell suggested it was mostly lizard.
Ragnar put three shells from his bolt pistol into the lizard thing’s chest. Blood spurted out of its tattered torso and it twisted forwards, trying to attack, before something in its primitive brain realised that it was dead. It fell in a heap, and Ragnar moved on to his next foe.
A lizard-ape tore at Haegr in a frenzy, claws sparking as they failed again and again to penetrate the Space Wolfs ceramite armour. The creature increased its efforts, and the strength of the blows kept Ragnar’s fellow Space Wolf pinned on the ground. Haegr was not hurt, but he was off-balance against the assault.
Ragnar hit the beast in the back of the head with his bolt pistol before putting a shot through its skull. With a roar, Haegr clambered to his feet, and leaving his weapons behind, he grabbed two lizard things by their necks and slammed them together with bone-crushing force. Ragnar thought of grenades exploding as their skulls burst.
The entire attack was over in less than a minute. The corpses of the beasts lay strewn around the blackened jungle. They certainly matched the description of the predators reported by the local people.
“Ragnar to Lady Gabriella, we’ve encountered some of the alien life forms,” he relayed on the comm.
“This is Gabriella. What is your status?”
“We’re fine. They’re dead. We’ll find their trail and track it back to their lair. Ragnar out.”
The rush of excitement was intoxicating. Ragnar had missed it. He yanked his blade out of the jungle tree. “Let’s go,” he said, as he hacked his way along one of the creature’s trails.
The team found a worn path in the dirt leading away from Lethe to the east. From the size of it, the Space Wolves agreed that it seemed to have been left by the lizard-ape life forms. The team couldn’t be more than a few kilometres from the city itself, although Ragnar had lost exact track of their exact location. He suspected that his armour’s locators needed some recalibration.
The slope of the ground indicated that the team had found a valley beneath the thick canopy of Hyades. Ragnar recalled from one of the briefings before arrival that in places the jungle canopy could reach over two hundred metres. As they continued, the sunlight faded. Ragnar was reminded of nothing so much as swimming into the depths of the sea.
After another quarter of an hour of travel, Ragnar caught the sickly smell of death and rot in his throat. He swallowed and shook his head. The stink was strong enough to make his eyes water. Considering a Space Wolfs superhuman resistance to toxins, Ragnar was impressed.
Just in front of the team, the tree trunks spread out, leaving a large clear space beneath the canopy. The space was big enough for the canopy above to be broken, and the size of it was comparable to the sanctuary hall in a cathedral. Sunlight filtered down from far above, shining down on the huge carcass of an enormous reptilian creature. The life form stretched almost twenty metres from tip to tail. Behind the dead beast, the far side of the clearing appeared to be a vine-covered rock face.
Ragnar quickly gestured for some of his team to secure the clearing, while he went to examine the corpse more closely. The men carefully readied their weapons and spread out to the edges of the clearing, checking for signs of movement or another ambush.
Ragnar deduced that the massive monster had fallen off the cliff to its doom, crushing trees and destroying vegetation on its way down. He could imagine that it had fallen in stages, catching on trees until its weight snapped them, sending it hurtling again until its final impact.
On further examination, Ragnar realised that his initial deduction might have been wrong. Cuts and tears marred the creature’s mottled skin and long stakes jutted from its sides. Dried blood covered the beast. It appeared that the monster had been driven off the cliff to fall into a clearing filled with stakes. By the positioning of the stakes, the monster must have survived the fall and tried to stand, pulling up the stakes meant to impale it. Then, it had been attacked again.
A smashed emerald lizard-ape lay beneath the corpse’s jaw. Three other bodies lay shattered near its tree trunk-sized tail. Ragnar wondered how many more might be underneath the corpse. He guessed the lizard creatures had driven the monster off the cliff, and then ambushed it.
“Those things killed this,” said Ragnar, voicing the thoughts of his fellow Space Wolves. In order to take down this behemoth, the lizard-apes must have hunted with patience and cunning. It appeared that they had stalked and wounded the beast using spears, and then driven it off the edge of the cliff. A group of them had lain in wait to finish it off once it had landed. They had coordinated their efforts to kill the rotting leviathan. Odd, then, that they had attacked the squad like frenzied animals.
Ragnar activated his comm. A healthy amount of static blared back at him. One of the complaints about production stated that something about Hyades caused problems with communications.
“At least they had hefty appetites,” remarked Haegr, “a sure sign of deadly warriors.” Bite-sized holes showed in the behemoth’s skin. Haegr looked like he was considering a taste.
Despite Haegr’s jocularity, Ragnar stayed serious. “Did any of the briefings say anything about intelligent alien creatures on this planet?” asked Ragnar.
The Space Wolves looked back and forth. They all knew that no one had reported intelligent native life on Hyades.
“Over here,” said Haegr, “there’s something that can’t escape my keen senses.”
“Is it food?” asked Ragnar, trying to collect his sense of humour. Haegr’s appetite was legendary.
Haegr shook his head. “Just remember who saved you from that Imperial assassin.”
“All I remember is the way you fell down when he shot you,” said Ragnar.
Cautiously, he pushed through the foliage in the direction Haegr pointed. A faint path between the trees marked the way. Haegr had found a path well traversed by the native fauna. Only a few hundred metr
es from the rotting corpse, a second immense space opened beneath the canopy.
The new space was extremely large, reaching a height of perhaps twenty-five metres and possibly having a diameter of ninety metres. This new opening looked unnatural, with an arched ceiling created by the twisting vines and trees, almost as if some alien gardener had created a cave out of plants. Strange flora shone with phosphorescence giving the setting an eerie blue and green glow. A large stone structure, wider than it was tall, sat shadowed in the centre of the space, perhaps half the height to the canopy, but at least thirty metres wide. It reminded Ragnar of a great toad lying in ambush for unwary insects.
Magni, a recent addition to the Wolfblade, pushed his way closer. The others followed, scanning for guards, feeling both compelled to investigate and an uneasy sense of horror. Ragnar was reminded of the feeling he had on a silent battlefield, covered with the wounded and the dying. It was that same sense of not wanting to see the carnage visited upon your battle-brothers, and yet having an inability to tear your eyes away.
Magni moved as if drawn by an invisible magnet. Ragnar felt his fellow Space Wolves’ unease as they checked their weapons and scanned their surroundings. When Magni reached the base of the hidden structure, he activated his armour’s illuminators. The bright light revealed far more than the flora’s phosphorescence.
[Space Wolf 05] - Sons of Fenris Page 3
