Battle Of The Fang

by Chris Wraight

  ‘We’re fine,’ replied the Tacticus, his fingers playing across a control panel that looked more like an organ. ‘It’s them.’

  Blackwing flicked his eyes at the hololith display. The first of the gun platforms was swimming into augur range, a single rune floating within the emerald sphere.

  ‘What’s their problem?’ he asked.

  The Tacticus turned away from his array and shrugged.

  ‘System failure,’ he suggested. ‘That, or they’re being jammed.’

  Blackwing laughed harshly.

  ‘Yes, like that’s–’

  The wolf-spirit within him suddenly stirred, as if uncurling from sleep. He felt the hairs on the back of his arms rise under his armour.

  ‘Keep trying,’ he ordered, and expanded the range of the tactical display. The figures within the sphere rushed into tiny points as the scope widened. More orbital platforms swept within the augur ambit.

  ‘Can we get the Skraemar?’ he asked, not liking what he was seeing.

  ‘Not responding.’

  The sphere kept expanding as the sensor arrays took in more and more of local space. Then, at the edge of the range, more runes appeared. Lots of them. None with Fenrisian sigils.

  ‘How’re our shields?’ asked Blackwing, clutching the arms of the throne a little tighter.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Keep them fine. Now bring auxiliary plasma banks online.’

  The Tacticus turned to look up at him, staring as if he’d gone mad.

  ‘We’re still within the gravity–’

  Blackwing fixed him with a withering look.

  ‘I want attack speed. Now. Then signal the Valgard and tell them to throw everything they’ve got up here. Then get your prayers in.’

  Blackwing turned to the tactical display and dug his fingers into the control arms of the throne. He poured on more power, and felt the febrile machine-spirit whine in protest.

  ‘Get used to it,’ he growled, gouging at the metal under his gauntlets. ‘It’s going to get a whole lot worse soon.’

  Something had stirred within Greyloc’s mind even before the warning runes started to come in. He was deep in the Fang, working on the edge of his old axe-blade Frengir, the one he’d taken from his old life and kept by his side. The Wolf Priests didn’t like remnants of mortal days being retained, but a blade was a sacred thing, and now he was Jarl they had less power to turn that displeasure into sanction.

  He’d been honing the killing blade with a whetstone, working carefully to maintain the murder-edge. The head of it was iron, far softer than any axe he’d used as a Space Marine and useless for proper combat. Still, he’d kept it in pristine condition over the years, never letting the metal blunt or degrade. Scrapes of swarf littered the bare floor by the whetstone, scattered at his feet as he worked.

  Then the runes glowed into life, set high up on the walls of the forge. At the same time, red sigils burst out across the collar of his armour, smaller versions of the datafeeds his helm would have given him had he been wearing it.

  Greyloc put the axe down.

  ‘Jarl,’ came a voice into his earpiece. ‘We’re under attack. Multiple targets closing in, defensive grids coming under fire. Transmission spires compromised, casualties taken.’

  The change was instantaneous. Greyloc grabbed his helm from its mounting and strode from his cell into the corridor beyond.

  ‘All pack-leaders to the Chamber of the Watch,’ he snapped back over the comm. ‘Including Wyrmblade. Enemy numbers?’

  ‘Over forty major targets closing,’ came the response. It was Skrieya, the Wolf Guard he’d stationed in the Chamber. ‘Possibly more.’

  ‘Forty? From where?’

  There was a hesitation.

  ‘Unknown, Jarl.’

  ‘Make sure Sturmhjart’s there,’ snarled Greyloc as he broke into a run, his whole body tensing. ‘Hammer of Russ, there’d better be a reason why he didn’t see this.’

  Rivenmaster Gregr Kjolborn of the Reike Og orbital platform ran down the plasteel corridor to the command module, half-deafened by klaxons blaring from every angle. There was a massive, shuddering boom, and his world tilted several degrees.

  He slammed against the near wall and spat a curse.

  ‘Where in Hel did they come from?’ he muttered as he regained his feet. The doors to the command module had jammed open, and he could see the mess within before he’d burst past them.

  ‘Status!’ he panted as he took up position on the dais in the centre.

  The command module of the gun platform was seven metres wide and circular. Realspace viewers dominated the ceiling. Normally they would have opened out on to blank space. Now the plexiglass looked out on to an inferno. The whole structure, several thousand tons of plasteel and adamantium, was listing dangerously. Across the floor of the module, kaerls and servitors worked at a cluster of linked consoles, all of them alive with flashing danger runes. Far below, the curve of Fenris’s northern hemisphere glowed ice-white in the void.

  ‘Primary shield failure imminent,’ read out his huskaerl, Emme Vreborn. Her voice was flinty and unwavering, something that did her credit as the burning console in front of her spat sparks. ‘Power ten per cent above minimum. We’ve got a few minutes.’

  Kjolborn nodded, feeling his blood continue to pump around his system. ‘Weapons?’

  ‘Critical,’ reported another kaerl.

  ‘Great.’

  Kjolborn tried to take in the situation. Seven minutes ago there had been signals picked up on the long-range scanners. Two minutes after that the signals had turned into battleships. Either there was a serious problem with the augur array, or a fleet had come out of the warp staggeringly close to Fenris’s gravity well. There’d been no warning, no warp-wakes detected, and no time to do anything other than power up the weapon batteries and prepare to return fire. As it had turned out, that response had been pitifully insufficient.

  A wall of ships had swarmed at them at full speed, sending arcs of energy tearing into the linked network of orbital platforms. Several guns had gone down almost immediately, taken out by the massed volume of fire, their void shields overloaded and cracked apart in a blaze of released energy.

  The defenders’ counter-attack had been sporadic, with no time to coordinate proper firing solutions. In the wake of the initial assault, enemy fighters had spun out of the shadow of the larger ships, screaming into range and strafing the surviving elements of the defensive grid. It had all been too fast, too overwhelming. Now the outer network was in flames, burning and falling into the upper atmosphere, and what was left was going to do little more than slow the bulk of the fleet closing in on it.

  ‘Has the Aett been warned?’ asked Kjolborn, looking at the carnage around him, his mind racing.

  ‘Oh, they know all about it,’ replied Vreborn.

  ‘Lucky them.’

  For a moment, Kjolborn thought wistfully of the saviour pods slung under the planetside face of the platform. If he’d been bred anywhere else but Fenris, he might even have contemplated trying to reach them.

  ‘Divert all power from the shields and feed to the forward battery,’ he ordered, running his gaze over the swirling pattern of light on the tactical displays.

  ‘Sir?’

  There was a second crash as something massive hit the platform from underneath. The lights failed, leaving nothing but blood-red backups. The crew of the command module looked like shadows of the Underverse in the gloom.

  ‘You heard me. I want one shot before we go.’

  The kaerls complied without further query. With an involuntary shudder, Kjolborn watched as the platform’s void shields shrank back across the realspace viewers. The withdrawal left a shimmering trail in its wake, and then the blade-sharp unmediated view of the void.

  ‘Lock on incoming Fyf-Tra, bearing 2.-2.-3. Once you’ve fixed, hit it.’

  Kaerls hurried to comply. Out of the corner of his eye Kjolborn saw another platform explode in a huge ba
ll of hot white plasma and its signal wink out from the tactical display. He ignored it, concentrating on his target. Amid the sea of oncoming ships, an enemy frigate, already reeling from some other impact, was turning to bring a prow lance to bear. It caught the reflective light from the half-disc of Fenris on its armoured prow, and the sapphire plating flashed briefly.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Kjolborn grimly, careless of the las-fire coming in from a squadron of fighters hard to port-nadir.

  ‘Solution ready,’ reported the second kaerl, working to compensate as the incoming fire sent the platform lurching again.

  ‘Knock it out of the void.’

  Eye-watering fluorescent beams leapt across the gap, slamming into the frigate a hundred kilometres distant and breaking open the shell of void shielding. Massive, silent explosions rippled along port-ventral galleries of the vessel as the lethal energy cut though the hull-plates and ripped them aside. The ship stopped turning and began to spin down into an aimless death-spiral. More explosions broke out as something within the structure ignited and set off a chain.

  Kjolborn watched the target die with a cold satisfaction. More enemy fighters homed in on the dark disc of the platform, tearing up the physical shielding with heavy las-fire.

  ‘What have we got left?’ he asked, wincing with each hammer-blow his platform took.

  Vreborn smiled wryly in the dark, her face under-lit red.

  ‘Nothing,’ she reported. ‘That finished us.’

  Kjolborn laughed savagely, watching as vengeful enemy contacts surged towards their position. Other gun platforms were firing more frequently now, but they were being destroyed as quickly as they were taking down their targets. The void was aflame across every viewer, punctuated with the dark shapes of broken hulls and the incandescent burn of debris falling planetward.

  ‘Worth a shot just to piss them off,’ he said to himself, watching fresh signals close in on his position and bracing for further hits. A squadron of gunships was wheeling toward them now, weaving between a slow-moving phalanx of larger ships to get a clean shot.

  Vreborn wheeled around to face Kjolborn, suddenly animated.

  ‘The saviour pods,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to get to them in time, huskaerl.’

  If the lights had been up, Kjolborn would have seen her look of injured scorn.

  ‘They’re projectiles.’

  Kjolborn realised what she had in mind then, and shrugged. ‘If you can spin it, do it.’

  The gunships, wedge-nosed sapphire Thunderhawks, raced into position, battlecannons primed to fire. Kjolborn watched them come, wishing he’d had the time to get drunk before taking his seat. Just because he didn’t fear death didn’t mean he liked the idea.

  And I don’t even know who’s doing this.

  Vreborn worked furiously, tilting the platform upwards. The platform’s low-power manoeuvring drives had been shot to nothing, and the cumbersome disc swung round only slowly. As it turned, Kjolborn heard heavy clamps shoot back on the level below, releasing the saviour pod docking claws.

  He stood up from the throne, watching death come for him from the stars.

  ‘This isn’t the way I wanted to go,’ he announced to the others in the module. ‘But you’ve been a better than mediocre crew. I mean that. There are only two others I’d rather have died with, and one of them–’

  They were the last words spoken on gun platform Reike Og before the incoming Thunderhawks of the Thousand Sons unleashed their main cannons on the listing target. Without shielding, the end was almost immediate, and the fragments of metal, plasteel and bone that weren’t immediately vaporised in a cloud of atoms spun into the upper atmosphere, lit up, and burned into nothing.

  So it was that huskaerl Vreborn would never know that, of the seven empty saviour pods jettisoned milliseconds before the explosion, four made it down to Fenris, two more were immolated by the backwash from another platform destruction, while one of them, against all probability, found its target. A Thunderhawk, roaring under the destroyed gun platform at full attack velocity, could do nothing to avoid the punching fist of adamantium-braced metal that had been ejected at the last possible moment. It was hit hard in the cockpit, flew wildly out of control and tore into the upper atmosphere at lethal, unrecoverable speed.

  Just like the debris of the platform it had killed, it lit up like a meteorite before dying in a blaze of promethium-fuelled destruction.

  Greyloc stormed into the Chamber of the Watch, seconds behind Rossek and Wyrmblade. The Rune Priest Sturmhjart was already there, as were six of Greyloc’s Wolf Guard. One of them, Leofr, was still being enclosed in his armour by a dozen thralls, and the sound of drilling echoed around the dark space.

  ‘Tell me,’ the Jarl growled, taking up position within the column of light. From that vantage he could see every pict-screen that lined the Chamber.

  Greyloc could feel his mind working quickly, poised to tease out possibilities, assessing every scrap of information. There was no fear, just a rapid, mechanical process of appraisal. All around him, his Guard stood ready, expectant.

  ‘Fleet is engaged, Jarl,’ reported Hamnr Skrieya, turning from the screens to face him. The blond, hulking Wolf Guard had a warrior’s shame etched on his face, and it made his speech savage and clipped. ‘Skraemar has taken heavy damage but holds position. Grid is down to twenty per cent.’

  ‘Who dares this?’

  Skrieya let a flicker of hatred mar his intense expression for a second.

  ‘Archenemy, Jarl. The Sons.’

  Greyloc froze for a second.

  The Thousand Sons! Ironhelm, what have you done? You were the prey for this trap.

  He shook his head to clear it and looked at the tactical hololiths. For a moment, even he, a veteran of a hundred void-engagements, was taken aback. The invasion fleet was huge. Around the fifty-four points of light indicating capital vessels, hundreds of smaller signals swarmed and harried. The red lights indicating defensive assets were beleaguered. Even as he watched, three of them guttered out.

  ‘How did they get in so close?’ he demanded, feeling frustrated anger suddenly rise up within him. ‘Where was the warning?’

  There was a distant rumble across the walls of the Chamber as the Fang’s defensive batteries opened up, sending salvos of ship-killer missiles hurtling into the void above.

  ‘We’ve been blinded,’ said Sturmhjart. Like Skrieya, his face was written with shame. ‘I saw nothing, the augurs saw nothing.’

  ‘Damn Ironhelm!’ spat Greyloc. He felt the urge to lash out, to slam something heavy into the screens that reported the carnage above. ‘Can we contact the fleet?’

  ‘No,’ said Skrieya, bluntly. ‘We can’t contact anyone. All astropaths are dead, all system exits blockaded.’

  ‘We need to join the void-war,’ urged Rossek, looking away from the tactical display and preparing to leave. ‘There are Thunderhawks still in the hangars.’

  ‘No.’

  Greyloc took a deep, ragged breath. The tactical displays were unequivocal. Though it had been raging for less than an hour, the war above was already lost.

  ‘Prepare the Rout to defend the Aett. We cannot stop them landing.’

  ‘Jarl–’ began Rossek.

  ‘Open a channel to the Skraemar,’ he ordered.

  A crackling link was established. Over the background of it came huge, shuddering crashes. The strike cruiser was taking heartbreaking levels of punishment.

  ‘Jarl!’ came a Space Marine’s voice over the comm. It was thick with fluid, as if blood had welled up in the speaker’s throat.

  ‘Njan,’ replied Greyloc. He kept his voice soft. ‘How long can you hold them?’

  There was a crude laugh. ‘We should already be dead.’

  ‘Then cheat it a little longer. We need time.’

  A reverberating crash distorted the comm-link, followed by what sounded like a rush of flames.

  ‘That’s what we had in mind. Enjoy the fight w
hen it comes for you.’

  Greyloc smiled coldly.

  ‘I will. Until next winter, Njan.’

  The link broke then, suddenly cutting off the reports of distant carnage. All that remained to indicate the struggle above them were the anodyne points of light on the tactical displays.

  Greyloc turned to face his commanders, his white eyes burning.

  ‘We can debate how this happened later,’ he said. ‘For now, get ready to fight. Ready the Claws, ready the Hunters. When they get down here, we’ll rip their throats out.’

  There was another rumble as the Fang’s colossal defence batteries sent death roaring into orbital space. Greyloc allowed the wolf within him to rise to the surface, and fixed the assembled Wolf Guard with an expression of pure animal loathing.

  ‘This is our place, brothers,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll teach them to fear it.’

  The Nauro corkscrewed through the crimson blooms of detonating charges at full tilt, weaving a path through the shells of dying vessels and spinning away from the flickering tracery of incoming las-fire. In the cold silence of the void, the manoeuvring had a sharp-edged beauty to it, an exhibition of peerless ship-mastery.

  Within the ship, activity was frenetic. Crew members raced to combat the fires raging on the lower decks while kaerls struggled to keep the void shields from buckling completely. The plasma drives were dangerously hot from being overburned, and the ventral augur arrays had been almost completely shot away. Any more big hits, and they’d be fast-moving junk.

  ‘Get those lances back online!’ roared Blackwing, sending his ship plummeting steeply to avoid a barrage of plasma bolts.

  The two underslung energy lances, the only significant offensive weapons the ship had left, had been knocked out of action after a collision with a huge, spinning chunk of somebody else’s prow-shield. The Nauro was already painfully exposed, and the inability to fire back wasn’t helping.

  ‘We can’t save them both!’ shouted a crewman from the pits below him. Blackwing couldn’t see who he was – he could barely see anything other than the dancing lights on his hololith display. Piloting a single vessel in three dimensions through a maelstrom of plasma and las-fire was a nightmare, even for a pilot with his superlative reactions and training.