by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
‘With all due respect, magos, I doubt you can hold off another wave of greenskins,’ said Vorens.
‘The defence servitors will remain in place,’ Zarn replied, ‘and we will bar the hub’s blast doors. We need only hold until we have rerouted and overloaded the power couplings. And if all else fails, we can fight. Do not underestimate the servants of the Omnissiah, Space Marine. The fury of Mars is ours to command.’
Vorens nodded. ‘If you believe it can work, Magos Zarn, then I see no reason not to try.’
‘I compute the probability of causing critical levels of damage on the xenos craft at forty-eight-point-eight per cent. The odds are not in our favour, but now that Epsilon’s loss is guaranteed, it is the most logical course of action.’
‘It’s settled then,’ Vorens said. ‘I will inform your superiors on Alpha One-One of your valour, Magos.’
‘Pray you make it there to do so,’ Zarn responded.
The proximity alarms had begun to shriek. The orks were coming again.
This time they attacked from all sides – blunt-nosed fighters, flyers with thudding rotor blades, lumbering bombers that looked like great conglomerations of jagged scrap.
‘I have altered our course,’ Magos Zarn’s voice rang out over the platform’s vox-masts, ‘and I have done my best to stabilise the plates. Accounting for meteorological conditions, engine damage and possible evasive manoeuvres by the asteroid, I estimate a collision in just over thirteen minutes. We will have an optimal electromagnetic pulse primed within five, but we will hold off until your transports are beyond range.’
Drenn suspected they’d all be dead long before then. The fourth ork wave was vast. The asteroid had emptied its guts, the xenos apparently enraged by the refinery’s defiance.
‘Make ready,’ Svenbald said, chambering a fresh bolt round. Drenn unlocked Graam, his eyes on the storm-wracked skies.
‘I’m getting a signal,’ Vorens said. ‘Stand by.’
The platform’s long-range vox-array was down, scrambled to incoherence by the storm, but the powerful uplinks of the Adeptus Astartes had locked onto an incoming Imperial signal.
Through the clouds came two black Valkyrie assault carriers and two Vendetta gunships, their noses down and throttles open.
‘Flame Hunters, assemble on the southern plate,’ Svenbald voxed. ‘Prepare for aerial extraction.’
The servitor guns opened up, pounding the skies with bolts of plasma and streaking interceptor missiles. The greenskins to the south were unable to get at the two Valkyries as they touched down on the refinery’s edge.
The rear ramps dropped, the engines still turning over. Drenn and half the Flame Hunters fought through the brutal downdraft of the left flyer’s twin engines, the remainder joining the Deathwatch in the other. The troop hold was immediately full, the space for its usual compliment of a dozen men barely sufficient for six armoured Space Marines.
‘Hold on,’ came the voice of the pilot over the internal vox. There was a lurch as the Valkyrie lifted, overburdened by its new cargo. The rear ramp was still closing. Before it clamped shut, Drenn caught a final glimpse of Epsilon, its plates streaked with blazing firepower.
‘We have incoming contacts. With all due respect lords, we need those heavy bolters working. Keep them off us.’
Normally the Valkyrie’s twin side-mounted guns would have been manned by Naval crewmen, but they’d been left behind to make more room. As Hrolfgar hauled back the left-hand hatch, Drenn swung the heavy weapon out from its housing, checked the belt feed and chambered the first round.
A swarm of junk flyers was closing in on the fleeing Valkyries. The two Vendetta gunships covering their escape were sending rounds thumping back into their pursuers, but the sheer amount of aircraft meant that some were getting past the fusillade. Even as Drenn watched, a corkscrewing rocket clipped the wing of one of the Vendettas, shearing straight through. The gunship began to spin out of control, plummeting towards annihilation in Theron’s grim embrace.
Drenn howled into the wind and opened fire, the heavy bolter slamming back on its pintle. He guided the bright stream of shells onto the fuselage of an ork fighter that was barrelling straight at the Valkyrie. The heavy rounds chewed through its rusty plating and sent it tumbling nose-over-tail, flames licking from its front grille.
More greenskins were coming at them from behind. Another rocket, daubed with black and white jags, twisted wildly past before lurching randomly upwards and detonating. Tracer rounds skipped overhead, laddering back and forth as they tried to get a lock. The Valkyrie’s pilot was dumping clouds of chaff and blazing phosphorous flares in a desperate effort to throw the greenskins’ crude targeters.
A rotor flyer began to drag itself alongside the Valkyrie, little more than a long platform mounted on an open fuselage and bearing two massive fore and aft blades. Clinging to its rear were more orks.
They roared and scrambled off the transport as the two flyers levelled up, smacking their rocket packs. Drenn turned the heavy bolter on them, but it was too late – four of the greenskins were reduced to a gory mist and whipped away by the wind, but the rest slammed into the Valkyrie.
The aircraft lurched, its bare metal interior bathed with warning lights. An altitude alarm began to wail. Drenn heard metal-shod boots pounding against the fuselage.
‘No room for chainswords!’ Svenbald barked. ‘Knives only.’
The ork flyer, its cargo unleashed, wanted more. Its pilot was swinging inwards, a manic grin on its bucket-jawed face. Drenn sent a burst of bolts into the greasy mechanism of the rearmost set of rotors, seconds before it could ram the Valkyrie. The thudding blades came to an abrupt stop, and the greenskin pilot’s expression turned to one of panic as the machine lurched away. It began to spin on a crazed downward spiral as its remaining rotor tried to keep it airborne.
Then the first ork was flinging itself in through the hatch.
It came from the Valkyrie’s top, swinging down on one thick, green arm. Drenn’s fist met its face, crunching tusks and sending the beast hurtling back out through the gap. He managed to get his hand on the heavy bolter’s trigger just as the ork hit its rocket jets, launching itself back up with a roar. The heavy rounds shredded it a split-second before impact, and the detonation of its fuel tank slammed Drenn into the armoured shoulder of Erik behind him.
Grunting and the thump of blades told him that more greenskins were trying to clamber in through the other hatch. The voice of the Valkyrie’s pilot came in over the vox as an almost incoherent shriek. ‘They’re on the cockpit! They’re on the cockpit!’
The carrier began to drag to the left.
‘Hrolfgar, take the bolter,’ Drenn snapped. Without waiting for a response, he unlocked Fang and swung out through the hatch, hitting his pack’s boosters as he did so. The wind nearly whipped him away, but his jump pack fought against it, thrusting him up onto the Valkyrie’s sloping wing. He activated his stabilisers as he scrambled for purchase.
There were two orks clinging to the flyer’s scarred hull. The nearest was trying to prime a primitive stick grenade and thrust it onto a whirling turbo-jet intake, whilst the other was repeatedly slamming a chainaxe at the pilot’s cockpit, each furious strike fracturing the reinforced glass.
The closest spotted Drenn as he landed. In a rage, it threw its grenade at him unprimed, the shaft bouncing off Drenn’s breastplate and spinning away. Drenn lunged, the ork unable to dodge without losing its grip. Fang found the beast’s neck and Drenn backhanded it with his other gauntlet. The greenskin let go, and was gone.
The one perched on the cockpit turned. Beyond it Drenn could see the second Vendetta gunship going down, mauled by a trio of greenskin fighters. Rounds from the fighters tore past, punching through the Valkyrie’s wing plating. Neither Drenn nor the ork on the cockpit could move without losing purchase, but the greenskin didn’t seem to care. Chainaxe revving, it jumped and slammed its rocket jets.
Drenn ducked. The ork scythed over
head, the downwards swing of its chainaxe scoring jagged grooves across the back of his armoured jump pack. Then it was gone, carried off into the storm. Drenn turned to see it furiously trying to angle itself back for another run, but then the shrieking bulk of a blazing ork bomber tore past, swatting the greenskin into oblivion. The doomed aircraft rolled onto its back as it fell, armour plates shearing off, one wing a bullet-riddled wreck.
The bomber’s killer blasted overhead, banking left in search of fresh prey. It was a Thunderbolt heavy fighter, and it wasn’t alone. Drenn crouched and watched as two more Imperial fighters barrelled past, chasing down a red ork jet that was bleeding dirty black smoke from its engines.
Drenn mag-locked his knife. Flight Lieutenant Dall’s Naval reinforcements had arrived.
An enhanced pict-caster from one of the Thunderbolts caught Epsilon 9-17’s dying moments. The Space Wolves watched it on the Valkyrie’s uplink monitor bank.
Epsilon was limping through the storm. Most of the ork attackers had peeled off in pursuit of the escaping Valkyries, and the remainder weren’t enough to silence the weapon servitors. The asteroid was trying to turn away, its plasma drives blazing white where they burned through black clouds, but it was too slow. Its weaponry roared too, hammering the refinery, tearing its armoured hull to pieces. Still it struggled on, one deck structure shearing off and tumbling away, another blazing with blue, oxygen-starved flames where an ork fighter had rammed it.
Just when it looked as though the remains of the refinery would finally come apart, Magos Zarn unleashed his final attack.
The electromagnetic pulse, coupled with the overloading of the refinery’s hub, caused the platform to finally split apart with a spectacular flash. The pict feed blazed a fuzzy white as the central hub detonated, mushrooming into a blinding corona of raw energy. As Epsilon 9-17’s remains spun away into oblivion, the asteroid started losing altitude.
The orkish machinery powering the looted rock was already dangerously unstable. Whipped by successive lightning strikes, those systems which hadn’t fused out following the pulse swiftly overloaded. Something within the asteroid’s bowels detonated. A section collapsed inwards, red energy dancing and sparking from its armoured bulkheads.
As more explosions ripped through the asteroid’s guts it began to fall faster, its descent now unstoppable. It was trapped in the embrace of Theron’s gravitational well, caught in an irresistible vortex that pulped those still onboard and smashed the rock into ever-smaller chunks of blazing wreckage. The bulkheads and weapons batteries crumbled and collapsed, as though stuck by the armoured fist of an angry god. The overburdened plasma drives were the last things to go, the fury of their detonation momentarily shorting out the feed.
When it came back online, both the asteroid and Epsilon 9-17 were gone, swallowed by the gas giant’s fathomless depths.
The Space Wolves said nothing.
Alpha 1-1 was Theron’s foremost refinery, and it dwarfed Epsilon 9-17. It was a mountain cast up into the heavens, its hub riddled with secondary blocks housing administrative centres, data banks, hab cells and weapons defence systems. A complex converter array, a whirring mass of spheres and orbs to rival anything from the Dark Age of Technology, crackled with power from the hub’s top. A dozen conjoining plates, each alone larger than Epsilon had been, provided auxiliary earthing spires against which the surrounding clouds constantly lashed bolts of energy.
The remains of the Valkyrie’s fighter escort peeled off as they neared Alpha 1-1. Drenn could hear Vorens thanking Dall over the vox. Of the Lightning wing’s original six fighters, only Dall and one other remained.
The Valkyries touched down on a landing spur jutting from Alpha 1-1’s flank. As soon as he stepped out onto the platform, Svenbald grabbed Drenn.
‘Those tech-priests are dead because of you, young pup.’
Drenn swiped the Wolf Guard’s hand away. ‘Maybe if you showed more leadership, long-tooth, then I wouldn’t have to do everything myself.’
Svenbald tried to strike him, but this time Drenn caught the blow. For a moment they both strained, muscles taut, their blood-streaked features inches apart. Abruptly, the younger Wolf jerked back, his eyes filled with fury.
‘This has gone on long enough,’ he spat. ‘I will prove what I know you to be, Svenbald – a weak old worm undeserving of the rank you hold. I challenge you.’
‘I accept,’ the Wolf Guard snapped. He pulled himself up to his full height, holding Drenn’s glare. ‘I have tried to be patient with you. That ends now. If you won’t learn respect, you’ll no longer be a part of this Great Company, let alone my pack. The Allfather will decide your fate.’
Vorens visited Drenn as nightfall turned Theron’s endless skies an impenetrable black.
He was seated in a tech adept’s commandeered sleeping cell. He’d stripped off the poleyn and greaves from his left leg and was seated on the cold metal slab the adept would usually have recharged on, probing the wound behind his knee. The limb was numb, flooded with painkiller stimms and counterseptic. He grunted as he dug through his flesh with Fang’s hooked point, trying to tease the battered ork slug out.
The cell’s hatch hissed open and Vorens ducked inside. Drenn had never seen him without his helmet on. His face was like tanned leather, beaten by a hundred different suns and carved by a dozen alien blades. The three service studs at his brow gleamed in the flickering light of the cell’s only lumen strip. He looked even older and more battle-hardened than Svenbald.
‘I know what you’re about to do,’ the Deathwatch leader said as the hatch hissed shut.
‘I’m about to get this damned thing out,’ Drenn growled. He dug a little deeper into his leg and the slug finally slipped free, a pulse of fresh blood slowing as the wound clotted. ‘Why are you here, xenos hunter?’
‘You won’t fight Svenbald.’
‘I will. I’ll kill him.’
Vorens shook his head.
‘You know they’ll exile you forever if you do. Send you out into the Fenrisian wastes to die or lose your mind to the curse of your gene-seed. That’s what will happen if you win – if you lose, Svenbald will banish you from the Flame Hunters. You’ll have to petition your Wolf Lord to join another pack, and the shame will haunt you forever. No one will ever respect your warrior prowess again, not when the blood on your blade would be that of a fellow Space Wolf. Is that what you want?’
Drenn said nothing.
‘You won’t fight Svenbald,’ Vorens repeated. ‘Because you’ll fight me instead.’
Drenn looked up, scowling. ‘This isn’t your quarrel.’
‘Maybe not, but I lost a battle-brother today. His name was Kamron of the Storm Wardens. He was a fine warrior, a slaughterer of xenos, and I’d like to have him replaced before we go back into action. The fighting on this world will go on.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Fight your duel with me, Drenn. If I win, you will join me in the Deathwatch. You will match your blades against the most dangerous and terrible creatures the galaxy can spit at you. Fang will remain forever red, and when you eventually return to your packmates the skjalds will sing of your glories for an age to come.’
Drenn laughed. It was a short, humourless bark. ‘Svenbald won’t allow it,’ he said.
‘I’ve already spoken to Svenbald, and he is in agreement. Best me, and he will overlook all of your past transgressions and afford you the respect you deserve. Lose, and he will release you to the Deathwatch. He has sworn me an oath.’
‘I always knew he was a coward...’
‘He saved your life, and it will be many decades before you have won as much honour in your Chapter’s service. You are still young, Drenn, and that fact can cover a multitude of sins. But it will not always be so. Your pack will learn discipline in time, and be promoted. You will continue to strain against all authority, and for that you will remain a Blood Claw until the day you die.’
Drenn frowned. ‘If that’s true, why do you wa
nt me for the Deathwatch?’
Vorens nodded, admitting that the question was a valid one.
‘I have spoken to my brethren, and they are united in their belief that you are a hot-headed young fool. But I’ve seen you fight, Drenn. Your talent is raw, your vigour unfailing. I won’t deny that the loss of Epsilon Nine-Seventeen means our mission on this world has been far from successful, but few would have had the initiative to do what you did. Your determination helped to destroy that asteroid. Sometimes rashness produces results. That is why I’m here.’
‘And yet you came here for nothing,’ Drenn said, ‘because I will defeat you, Caius Vorens. Just as I would have defeated Svenbald.’
‘Come then, Space Wolf. Let us see if you’re right.’
Drenn hadn’t been expecting Vorens to strike first. Everything about the Imperial Fist spoke of stoicism and bastion-like defensiveness, yet no sooner had the initiating rites left Gallio’s lips than the Deathwatch leader was lunging at him, his own knife a silver blur.
Drenn parried, swiping the first strikes aside, and backed up two hasty steps. Pride surged up in him. He bared his fangs and met the next handful of thrusts blade-for-blade. The instant Vorens left his guard open, the Wolf lunged, scoring a deep groove across his silver Deathwatch pauldron. Vorens leaned in, trying to use his weight to regain the initiative, but still Drenn came at him, hammering his left fist into Vorens’ breastplate and stabbing again with Fang.
Vorens took the hits against his armour and countered, jabbing hard towards Drenn’s unprotected eyes and face. The young Wolf was forced to scramble back again, and his anger rose even further. He turned one of Vorens’ blows, and this time the other warrior was a moment too slow in recovering. Drenn lunged, his face contorted in a rictus of anger, aiming towards the joint where breastplate met plackart, just below the abdomen.
