Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

by Chris Wraight

  'I can feel it,' he growled.

  So could Jorin, who remained on his feet, legs braced, axe held one-handed. 'I told him to come in fast.'

  A low chuckle echoed from behind Bulveye's faceplate. 'Maybe he has got the hang of it.'

  Jorin said nothing. The floor began to vibrate - a rhythmic banging that spoke of structural stress. Ahead of them, the far wall, its steep incline broken by the two macro-pistons at either end, began to shake. Warning lights strobed in the gloom, something that made the warriors in front of them laugh.

  He crouched at last, feeling his secondary heart kick in. His blood coursed faster, his pupils dilated, his grip tightened.

  'Now comes the hour,' he mouthed silently, remembering the old words of combat, the taste of blood and the rush of kill' the purity of murder on the shifting ice 'Now, my enemy, be the gates of Hel opened.'

  Othgar had indeed come in fast. The Haukr was a match for the Dulanian ship in speed at least, and thundered on full-burn under the hunter-killer's leeward shadow. The Mandeville point was by then only minutes away, and the pursued was still clearly hoping to make the jump-stage.

  Las-fire filled the void space between the two hurtling ships, skittering off void shields and sending spike-radials juddering down hull lines. The Dulanian vessel spun away to port, jetting plasma, but Othgar kept in close, piling on the power to shut down the remaining distance between them.

  'All power to the drives,' he commanded as the bridge swayed around him. 'Begin hull-ram sequence, and keep us in tight.'

  The Haukr did not have the guns to penetrate the Faash ship's shields. Experience had shown that only destroyer-class vessels could reliably disable a Dulanian ship at range, and the Legion's destroyers were a long way from securing a firing solution on such a fast-moving target.

  But Dulanian shields were not unbreakable. A sufficiently massive object, moving sufficiently fast and on a perfectly weighted trajectory, had been shown to crack them. In theory.

  'Sequence begun,' reported Ingold, master of the watch. 'Trajectory laid in,' called out Arinn, navigation mistress.

  Othgar turned from the internal tactical displays to the upper viewports. The hunter-killer hung above and in front of them, peppering the forward shields with dense las-fire, corkscrewing increasingly desperately to evade the Haukr's attentions.

  From far below, a thick dunk resounded under the decking as the hull-rams were primed. Othgar had overseen their retrofitting himself - two heavy maul-shaped battering claws twenty metres apart, modified from the boarding damps of larger vessels. Between them was the wide, explosive-rigged hull-seal, normally a standard external embarkation hatch, now primed with melta charges along the length of two dam-shell outer doors.

  The hunter-killer made a final attempt to evade the ramming manoeuvre, dipping its nose hard and swinging round to starboard.

  'We've got it,' said Othgar, with savage satisfaction. 'Bring us in.'

  Proximity klaxons blared as the Haukr surged up under its prey's shadow, Arinn's expert piloting shadowing every movement made by the enemy. The chronos whirred, counting down the time remaining until a warp jump would be possible. It was tight, and getting tighter.

  'Fixing locus,' reported Ingold coolly, locking a beacon onto a point halfway along the hunter-killer's lean underside. 'Brace for impact.'

  A violent slam sent the decking slewing madly, and the viewports ahead disappeared in a welter of static. A sound like claws scraping down iron shuddered along the length of the Haukr, and the armourglass viewports cobwebbed with spiralling cracks.

  For a moment the two ships ran alongside one another, their void shields fizzing and shrieking as the energy fields reacted against one another. The Haukr shook ferociously, only kept in position by the immense pressure of its red-lining plasma drives.

  'Hold fast!' roared Othgar, bracing himself against the bulk and slide of the deck.

  The screaming continued. Explosions sprayed out from high up in the Haukr's vaults, sending debris cascading onto the levels below. The engine's pitch soared higher, hitting a strangled note of frenzy, and a viewport shattered, throwing plasma-laced shards flying across the bridge.

  'Hold fast!' Othgar repeated, ignoring the howl of decompression and the frantic efforts of the bridge crew to seal the leak.

  Then the remaining viewers blazed with neon light, and with a sharp bang the twin interlaced shields both blew out. The Haukr surged in close, no longer buffeted by the resistant energy aegis, and slammed full on into the enemy hull. Metal plates squealed and tore up as the outer flanks ground into one another, kindling electric discharge all along the newly joined interface.

  For a moment it felt as if the Haukr would simply burrow through the hunter-killer's under-hull, propelled by the greater momentum, but then the melta charges on its outer hull blew, and fresh plumes of red-hot flame rippled out across the mangled plating.

  The claws had gone in, shunted hard through the prey's outer skin by explosive macro-pistons. Melta flares daisy-chained across the stricken craft's flanks, eating further into its battered carcass.

  Othgar turned away from the tactical viewers, back to his local augur station. Across a lone visual feed, he could see a flurry of forty-five close-packed red runes moving, bursting out of confinement. He could almost hear the ring of boots against iron, and the thought of it made him smile.

  'They're off,' he reported with satisfaction, turning his attention now to the survival of his ship. 'Ten more seconds, then pull away, and get a lock for the hull guns. We're not out of this yet.'

  The melta charges blew in concert and the entire far wall of the crew-bay disappeared behind a curtain of fire. Positioned ten metres back, the Wolves let out a roar of triumph and raced straight into the wall of flame. They were running even as they hit the blast zone, vaulting through the disintegrating mess of hull plating and deck spars, and out into the liquid smear of atoms beyond.

  Jorin was at the head of it, accompanied by Bulveye and his retinue, smashing their way through a labyrinth of burning, melting, sliding detritus. As he charged into the inferno his helm briefly crackled with white noise, the lens filters overwhelmed with the extreme heat and light, but then he was through, crunching aside a collapsing brace-beam and barrelling into the interior of the hunter-killer beyond.

  The internal corridors were thick with blown dust and fire-plumes. Alarms were sounding from some way off, though they were half drowned out by the clatter and tear of escaping atmosphere.

  The warp engines were ahead, two levels above them. Othgar would have to withdraw the docking claws imminently, dragging half the Dulanian's under-hull with them, so they had to keep moving, push up, carve their way into the interior.

  Most of the Wolves were carrying close-combat weapons designed to take apart the Faash mech-troops - chainswords, axes, lightning claws - but six were equipped with heavy lascutters. These took up position where the damage was already most acute and started to work, scything through deck-plates, cutting deep into the ship's hull. Whole sections sheared away as the las-beams blasted through them, exposing the maws of undamaged chambers beyond. The rest of the Wolves surged across heaps of glowing rubble, scrabbling to reach the firm ground from where the assault could begin in earnest.

  As Jorin reached the summit and prepared to push on, he heard an ominous groan from behind him. He half turned, just in time to see an entire wall of burning plasteel peel away, ripped clear of its footings by the Haukr extracting its ramming claws. Already weakened deck sections dissolved, collapsing into smouldering fragments and tumbling away to where the outer hull was being ripped apart.

  'Faster!' he commanded, powering further up into the hunter-killer's intact interior.

  The Wolves of Fenris forged ahead through the howl of escaping oxygen, cutting and blasting their way deeper, before finally breaking into a long hallway, ten metres across and twenty high. The walls were decorated with chain-lofted Dulanian battle-flags, rippling crazily in the r
acing hurricane. The icon of a great crimson and black dragon loomed at the far end.

  By then the decking had stabilised, and the Wolves sprinted down the length of the hall, blades held low, hunting. The first Scarabines met them at the far end, twenty of them, emerging from behind bulkheads on either side of the hall. They were as big as the Space Marines, encased in blunter, more cumbersome armour with more deeply rounded pauldrons and a slabbed breastplate design. Each of them shimmered with the gauzy sheen of personal shielding and they carried projectile weapons encased in their gauntlet housings. They lumbered out in the open, zeroing their twin-barrelled weapon arms on the approaching Wolves and opening fire.

  Interference guns snapped out, soundlessly, before hitting the first targets. The air shook, and a rattle of explosions burst along the front rank of Wolves. Ceramite panels were powderised, throwing bursts of blood from the flesh beneath.

  They had known the fusillade was coming. The Faash weaponry was hard to evade, rearranging matter at the molecular level, and so they had charged into it, aware of the danger. This tactic was not mindless, but performed in the knowledge that recharge rimes for the esoteric guns was significant - they would get the first shots away, but after that it was bladework. Ten of Jorin's warriors stumbled, their breastplates and helms carved open and crackling with sparks, but the rest charged onwards, crashing into the Scarabine mech-troops before the guns could repower.

  Jorin slammed into the lead enemy, feeling the hot wash of an energy field snarl against his armour. He whipped his axe blade across, going for the cabling at the Faash warrior's neck, and the disruptor growled with released plasma.

  His enemy was slower, hampered by heavy layers of armour, but also hard to wear down. Jorin hacked, two-handed, going for the weapon-arm before it could fire again. The strike was well aimed, hitting at the elbow-joint and grinding deep, but again the shield repelled it. Then the Dulanian punched out with his other gauntlet, catching Jorin on the shoulder and sending him reeling.

  All across the hall, legionaries raced into contact, taking on Scarabines in intermingled lines of close-ranged grappling. Bulveye piled in beside his jarl as the grey-armoured fighters engaged, chainsword snarling. He scythed the weapon across the same Faash warrior's armour, grinding through the shield-covering in a shriek of sparks. The aegis held out for a second, blazing with inflamed feeder-energy, before finally exploding and throwing Bulveye bodily away.

  By then Jorin was back into contact, hacking furiously with his blade, gouging and tearing. The warrior fought back, punching out with crackling power gauntlets, but the man within was a mortal, with mortal muscles and mortal reactions, and there was only so much a suit of armour could compensate for.

  'Hjà!' cried Jorin with satisfaction as his axe sliced across the neck-cables at last A burst of pale green gas exhaled from the suit's innards - chem-stimms, pumped around the armour's breathing apparatus - and the warrior collapsed, gurgling on his own blood.

  There was little time to celebrate the kill - the twin lines of Wolves and Scarabines remained tightly locked, caught up in the claustrophobic embrace of strike and counter-strike. Jorin reached for Bulveye, hauling him to his feet, and they were soon fighting hard again, back to back, surrounded by the thrust and block of desperate violence. The Wolves had the greater numbers, and pressed on through a scream of rushing air, driving their enemy back pace by pace, but taking crushing hits in their turn. Blood flecked into the turbulence, spattering the flapping war-banners.

  Jorin blink-summoned a wire-frame schematic of the route ahead, generated by his armour's cogitators in tandem with augur-sweep data. Incoming target runes were still converging - more mech-troops, moving fast to staunch the incursion.

  'Sixty seconds,' said Bulveye; dragging his chainsword across the battered faceplate of a Faash mech-trooper and swinging about to face the next.

  Jorin nodded. That was the time remaining before the ship reached jump-range. 'Hold them here,' he commanded.

  The division had been planned, for the hall was an intersection of many routes. Bulveye pressed back into the fray, roaring out commands to twenty of the Wolves to remain in position, driving the line onwards. They punched and mauled, gouged and ripped, fracturing the oncoming Faash armour plates in savage, overabundant physical brutality.

  The rest of the boarding party pulled clear of combat and fell back to join Jorin, who now fought his way towards an open portal in the hall's left wall. Through the portal was a metal frame stairwell, zigzagging up a rectangular shaft to the levels above.

  Jorin broke out, one hand clutching his axe, the other his bolter. He and his warriors tore up the stairwell, their heavy treads sending out echoing clangs, their helm-lumens flickering against the lattice of metal spars. Las-fire zinged down from up ahead, grazing across already-damaged ceramite.

  Forty seconds.

  Jorin was first to reach the vaulted entrance to the warp drive chambers, ignoring the rain of las-beams to spy the first of the emerging enemy - mech-guards, just as the others had been. The air shook, marking the firing of interference guns, and Jorin swerved to one side He felt a burst of heat, the power pack on his back shaking and spitting, but the worst of the blast missed him, impacting on the far wall with a crack of detonation. Still moving fast, Jorin charged into the two foremost Faash troopers, knocking them back into the doorway's edge. Their personal shields screamed under the pressure but held.

  Jorin didn't finish them - there was no time - but used his strength to shove the first warrior aside, then the second, then to power on through into the chamber beyond. The Wolves racing hard on his heels did the rest, driving the off-balance Faash to the ground, piling in on them, crushing them, wrenching their armour-cables free and shattering their helm-visors.

  Ten seconds.

  Jorin kept running. The prize opened up before him - a relay chamber for the hunter-killer's warp train. It was a glowing, energy-filled room lined with plasma shielding and bustling with defenders. The Scarabines emerged through a miasma of dust and debris, firing las-weapons and interference guns, knowing they only had to keep the invaders at bay for a few moments more.

  Jorin took hits and ignored them, his brothers already surging past him and forming a cordon.

  Five seconds.

  Above him, high in the centre of the chamber, was the source of the swirling light - a three-metre-diameter conduit pipe suspended amid a thicket of chain-cabling, pearlescent with the thunderous passage of raw promethium, feeding the growing pitch of the massive warp drives as they accelerated up to full power.

  Jorin braced himself and fired, sending bolt-rounds screaming straight into the conduit's protective shell. Every mass-reactive shell hit exactly the same place, shredding the outer protective layers and driving in deeper. The explosions reached critical mass, and the conduit's casing split apart, showering the chamber with erupting fountains of hot engine fuel. Las-beams from the defenders punched through the cascade, igniting it into a curtain of immolation and dousing the entire chamber with a raging cataract of pure burning promethium.

  The Wolves advanced through the inferno, their pelts and totems aflame, firing all the while at the scores of enemies caught up in the shimmering heat-shake. The Faash shields resisted the terrible heat, though they swelled into glittering candles. The lesser Dulanian troops were not so fortunate, burned alive within their carapace suits, shrieking as the liquid fire pulled flesh from bone. The maelstrom of fire - bolter and interference - criss-crossed and overlapped in an orgy of shimmering, fuel-laced destruction.

  'Are we in the warp?' demanded Jorin urgently, switching his fire from the tattered conduit and back towards the phalanx of Faash mech-troops ahead.

  His banner-bearer, Hjalmar Stormfist, fur-heaped shoulders a riot of flames, laughed harshly. 'You hear warp drives, jarl? I don't.'

  Jorin laughed in turn, sweeping his gaze across the burning chamber. Hjalmar was right - the severed conduit had blocked the drives' fuel intake and, am
id the rush and boom of the flames, the heavy clank of turbines going offline could be made out. The enemy had been thrown into confusion by the horrific heat, and even the mech-suits were stumbling now, as if their sensors had been sent haywire by the extremes of temperature.

  'That is well,' Jorin snarled, hefting his axe and picking his next target. 'Then we have all the time we need.'

  Those who remained of the Dulanian guard fought with their customary tenacity, but with their chance of making warp gone, they were now at the mercy of the Rout detachment, and entire worlds had sued for peace in the face of less.

  Once Jorin had secured the plasma chamber, the overhead conduits were sealed and the jets of promethium capped. Hails were received from Othgar, still standing station off the hunter-killer's bows, and then from the mass of the main Wolves flotilla as it drew into range. Ignoring Legion requests for status reports, Jorin retraced his steps through the ship to meet up with Bulveye, mop up the residual combatants and take control of the bridge. Throughout it all, the surviving Dulanians just kept on fighting, exacting pain for every conceded metre, knowing that the chance for mercy had passed a long time ago.

  In a xenos enemy, Jorin might have respected the continued defiance; for it was natural instinct for any organism to defend its own, but there could be no respect for the Tyrant of Dulan's armies. His soldiers were human, of the ancient seed of Terra in its first scattering across the stars, and could have taken their place amid the burgeoning glory of the Great Crusade if they had chosen. Their technology was advanced, their force-numbers formidable, and so by pledging allegiance to the Allfather's vision they could have augmented the progress of galactic conquest. That they had chosen to reject enlightenment, and moreover boasted of the choice, made them contemptible. The Dulanians had been given a choice and had spurned it, leaving only one, remorseless result: death without honour, erasure from the annals of humanity. The hunter-killer crew's last dregs of resistance was more akin to rats squabbling over corpse-meat than any true sense of heroism.