'Now comes the hour,' Jorin intoned, just as he did on the eve of every conflict, though this time with more than the usual venom. 'Now, my enemy, be the gates of Hel opened.'
The Nidhoggur's void shields crackled into nothingness, and the gunships shot out into open space. Every warship in the vicinity had loosed its deadly cargo at the same time, and a gamut of troop-carriers headed from the safety of the starship hulls and into the maelstrom beyond.
At the same moment, the last coordinated lance-strike blazed down from the assembled Wolves battleships, cracking the halo's shielding over the command station in a snapping sequence of exploding energy-fields. The Stormbirds angled down like raptors, gunning hard for the opening, their cannons and heavy bolters tracking all sources of incoming fire.
Not all of them made it. The volume of return fire was dense and well aimed, and the Faash gunships were just as apt to intercept the invaders as ever. A wall of close-range ordnance roared through the void, cutting down ships from both sides. In the confusion and the congestion some rammed into one another, blowing apart as their main engines detonated and spiralling helplessly into Dulan's upper atmosphere.
The Heilmark's interior shook violently, pummelled by both las-fire and the backwash from nearby explosions. Jorin began to slam his axe-hilt against the deck, a repeated, deadening rhythm that was soon picked up by the other warriors around him. By the time the gunship had entered the kill-zone of the halo's static defences, the Wolves were banging out the drum beat in unison, roaring out their wrath in a growing crescendo of noise and fury.
Mor-kai, Mor-kai, Mor-kai.
More gunships were shot down, but there were only so many the Faash could interdict - the Wolves pilots were preternaturally skilful, guiding their vessels at full tilt through the narrowest of safe lanes and bringing them down to the halo's outer hull.
The Heilmark came in, held close to the metal by the massive down-draught of its engines, and the embarkation ramp hissed.
Jorin was out first, maintaining the rhythmic chant from the interior. When the Wolves charged, their cries were most often a cacophony of raw emotion, designed to be overwhelming and disorientating in their sheer volume and energy, but this was different. The killers in grey burst from their fetters, each one repeating the same blood-chilling chant. Above them, the airless skies were filled with the pyrotechnics of void war - burning warships, blazing clouds of gas, the criss-cross brilliance of las-flares - but down on the halo's surface they were the huntsmen of old, racing in a grey tide, their blades beating time with the dread ay of impending slaughter.
Russ had marshalled all the strength that could be spared - thousands of warriors, the cream of two great companies, all landed across the halo's near curve and now all smashing their way inside. Lascutters and volkite chargers reduced the first defence walls into slag, after which krak grenades were hurled en masse into the breach. Scorning shields, the first warriors leapt into the tangle of debris, opening bolters to clear out the defenders within.
Jorin's pack was at the apex, crunching and slashing their way deep into the halo's interior and hunting for the command node itself.
Once within, the fighting became claustrophobic and brutal. Faash mech-troops spilled out of the darkness to meet them, their armoured bulk crackling with interference build-up. The Wolves split into running packs, chasing down the corridors in tight-packed units, and when they hit the oncoming enemy troops, the collisions made the deck shake. Soon the interior spaces were dogged with the sounds and stink of death and destruction, armour plates shattering, shield-units blowing, lenses smashed and flesh ripped.
Jorin pushed on hard, fighting his way down and down, his brothers with him. As the corridor-webs joined, split and rejoined, they linked up with other packs, and soon the deathly chant spread across the entire Wolves vanguard. Down in the echoing warrens of the halo's command nexus, all other sounds were drowned by the endless Mor-kai, Mor-kai, Mor-kai, a maddening refrain spat out from snarling vox-emitters, filling every aural implant, resounding within every helm, a relentless harbinger that redounded and overlapped and swelled as the grey tide surged onwards.
Soon helm-augurs signalled the approaching heart of the halo's command station. Resistance became desperate - Brash troops held intersections through barricades of their own dead, physically blocking the tunnels with burned-out walls of Scarabine armour. The Wolves cleared them out, one after the other. Heavy weapons groups first loosed fusillades from lascannons and meltas, filling the narrow transit arteries and making the walls shimmer and glow. Then the infantry packs rushed them, vaulting through the barrage of crackling distortion fire with the death-chant still ringing. They dragged the Scarabine armour-shells aside, clearing avenues for more battle-brothers to charge through, and then the process started again, leaving corpses in both slate-grey and crimson lying twitching in its wake.
As the last of the barricades was blasted aside, Jorin's pack broke through into the command centre. A vast dome opened up before them, its apex humming with arcs of pale blue fulguration. Ranks of Faash Scarabines, hundreds of them, had dug into defence-trenches set across the wide floor, each of them armed with bulbous interference maulers. They protected what lay at the very centre - a ranked circular platform containing a command altar, crackling with energy, its flanks dancing with the electric beads of cogitator-work. Webs of heavy cabling laced out above and around it, feeding into armoured channels and power lines. Suspensor drones whizzed and darted through the tangle, scanning and chattering, before dropping back into the shadows of the immense cogitator banks.
From high up in the dome's roof, linked chain guns began to pump out rounds, tearing into the deck below The Scarabines stayed in deep cover, firing incessantly from their gauntlet-mounted barrels. The command stauon rocked, illuminated by the flash and burst of muzzle-flare, weapons discharge turning the space into a cauldron of ear-bursting noise and heat.
Jorin went to ground, skidding behind the cover of a crater-ridden heap of semi-melted ironwork. Other packs were emerging all across the perimeter of the dome, burning out of corridors beyond and running straight into the withering levels of return fire. They too scrabbled for coven hunkering down to empty their own weapons at the defensive positions. Soon the dome was awash with a symphony of bolter-volleys and interference fire, tearing up the decking strips and blowing apart the bulkheads, trench-tops and defence walls.
Jorin lay flat, firing without pause, his aim switching to lock on to any scrap of exposed mech-armour. Ammo-counters whirled down as the air filled with the stink and smoke of mass-reactive shells. This would be a grind, but the enemy had nowhere to go - for all their lines of defence; they were penned in on all sides, and sooner or later the concentration of firepower would gnaw away the rings of cover entirely, exposing them at last to the Wolves' full fury.
But then, right on the far side of the dome, thick wall-sections cracked open and cantilevered down. Two-metre-thick segments toppled forwards, crushing any legionaries stationed under them in a tidal wave of dust. From the wreckage emerged a giant, a glittering machine of ridged and segmented battleplate, greater in stature than a Leviathan Dreadnought but with the proportions of a Scarabine guardian. Its arms terminated in whirring spherical siege-drills, each one studded with snub-nosed interference launchers. Its armour plates shimmered with layers of protective shielding, and its chest-lodged helmplate glowed from a single slit-eye. Rocket launchers stacked up over its shoulders, already swivelling to seek targets, and its heavy clawed feet crunched deep into the decking below as it waded into the tempest.
'Interesting,' voxed Bulveye dryly, crouching close by Jorin behind a heap of blown slag. 'So they make bigger ones.'
Rockets were already screaming across to the leviathan and exploding harmlessly against its shield array. Then it opened fire from its shoulder-mounted launchers, and a whole swathe of Wolves positions disappeared in welters of crimson. Three warriors raced in close, their blades snarling with d
isruptor energy, and were swatted aside by heavy swings of the two dubbed-arms. The leviathan swung about even as the grey-armoured bodies crashed to the deck, zeroing its interference barrels and blasting apart another two warriors. Then it waded forwards, shrugging off bolter-volleys and making for the centre of the command station. As it drew fire from the surrounding Wolves, the Scarabines took the opportunity to advance out of cover.
'Skitja,' cursed Jorin, pushing to his feet 'This'll take some—'
He never finished. Even as he gained his feet, the entire chamber was rocked by a blast of ice-cold wind - a tearing, gnawing gale that skirled across the battlefield, ripping troopers from their positions and sending them cart-wheeling.
'Leave it,' came the command, resounding from every wall, from the height of the dome and the depths of the cogitator-shafts, as hard as hoar-frost.
In the storm's wake, Leman Russ strode out across the expanse, his pelts flying about him, the runes of his battleplate flaring like comet-fire. The wyrd's wind whipped and lashed, scouring the metal in eddies, catching on the edge of Krakenmaw in trailed flame-lines. His true-wolves bounded ahead on either side, blurs of white and grey, eating up the ground towards the lines of the enemy.
No bolt or shell slowed him. He did not race, he did not charge He stalked towards the heart of the fighting like the storm's soul, massive and impenetrable, his coming wreathed in a psychic shock wave that burned out nerves, crippled hearts and paralysed limbs. The entire space seemed to shrink, to reel on its axis, to shudder and withdraw in his presence.
The leviathan levelled its gun-arms and opened fire. Russ met the impact with a contemptuous swipe of his chainsword, and the interference energy splashed across the wheeling blade, thrown into slivers and cast aside.
Russ came on, crunching a path towards the monster, smashing aside any Faash soldiers too stupefied or sluggish to get out of his path. Where the Dulanians were cowed by the oncoming hurricane, the Wolves were suddenly filled with a raw energy, and they rose up as one, launching themselves into combat with cries of 'Fenrys! Heidur Rus!'
Russ came on, his blade hauled in great arcs, cleaving a path towards the towering creature before him. Every tread was deliberate, terrible, neither hastening nor relenting, as inexorable as the coming of winter.
The true-wolves reached the trenches, and tore through them, leaping at the throats of the retreating Scarabines and ripping them out. The leviathan swivelled to narrow the angle, then fired from its shoulder-mounts, sending streaks of contrails towards the primarch.
Russ pushed on through the explosions, the impacts cascading from his rune-warded battle-armour, his momentum unharmed. He broke into a run at last - a heavy, thudding charge that seemed to gather and amplify the storm winds, accelerating and augmenting them such that the impact, when it came, was like continents colliding.
The clash of chainsword against Faash-shield was horrific - a yowl and a shriek of tortured energy fields, ramped up amid the grinding cacophony of the whirring blades. For a moment the opposite forces held one another, the leviathan bringing its massive weight to bear on the warrior-lord, and yet somehow seeming less substantial, as if the soul before it were rooted in the very stuff of the universe itself, as eternal and imperishable as the stars.
So it was the shields that gave out first, flying apart in rippling curtains of trailing gauze. The monster's drill-gauntlets whirled round, aimed for Russ' neck, but by then the primarch had already moved, swiping at the nearest knee-joint. Krakenmaw tore through servos, driving into the leg and causing the entire machine to stagger. Russ carved into it, sawing like a chirurgeon, tearing up its chest cavity and working ever deeper.
The leviathan swung back, finally landing a blow and smacking the chainsword out of contact Russ held on to the blade, but no longer needed it. With his other hand, he grabbed the leviathan's wrist, and began to turn the siege-drill back against it The leviathan pushed hard, straining against the primarch's grip, but even its machine-augmented motive force was not enough, and secondary power units shattered across its spine. Russ twisted the leviathan's arm further, bending the drills until they faced directly into the armour-suit's face. With a vicious shove that broke the pistons of its wrist-mounting, Russ drove the grinding blades straight down, tearing up the ablative plates and throwing up a fresh whirl of bloody static.
The leviathan's vox-augmitters sent out only screams now, before Russ silenced them with a final, savage down-thrust. He cast Krakenmaw aside, tore through the morass of ripped metal plating, and seized the still-living thing within - a human pilot bloody, shackled with cranial-implants and neuro-bundles. Russ yanked him free, before holding the carcass aloft and shaking the last of the cabling from its limp remains.
'For the Allfather!' he thundered, hurling the broken pilot away and sending him slamming into the far wall of the dome The Wolves of Fenris responded with a deafening roar of their own and surged back into combat, driving the remaining Faash troops into their own barricades and a fresh round of slaughter.
Jorin looked up at his primarch, resplendent in the heart of the enemy's fortress, standing atop a hillock of smashed, bloody metal, and it took him back to the long years before the skies had cracked, when they had done this to so many other warlords, one by one, carving out the empire that they had thought then was the largest and mightiest that would ever be. Russ was still howling in triumph, pouring out his frustration into the purest and most primeval expression of battle-rage.
Then Jorin laughed and raised his axe in salute.
'Leman of the Russ!' he cried, just as he had done in those long-gone days, recalling the name Thengir had given the infant, which had crystallised into the title that the whole galaxy knew him by. It was impossible to remain angry.
And then he was running again, hunting as he had always hunted, his axe blade thirsting, his eyes narrowing, the joy of the kill made anew in his soul.
It took much longer to neutralise the entire halo. Even many thousand Wolves were constrained by the huge internal distances, and so they fought from command station to command station, setting charges to destroy the weapon systems, hunting down the defenders, breaking apart everything in their path. More of the leviathans were encountered, and more dug-in phalanxes of Scarabine mech-warriors, and each strongpoint took the effort of many packs supported by heavy weapons teams to bring down. Wolves' hunter-packs commandeered rapid transit mag-trains to spread the incursion into every part of the huge orbital tore, backed up by fresh flights of dropships.
As the void-cannons slowly fell silent across the halo's face, lifters were able to get close enough to land yet more elements from the armoury - Land Raiders, Sicaran tanks, lumbering Dreadnoughts - which accelerated the rate of conquest. Once the destruction had started, it spread steadily, bleeding from one control point to the next until, from space; the halo looked like it had been infected by some voracious and terrible burning cancer.
As the construct's lethal external barrage dropped away, the void battle under its shadow turned too. The Lion's fleet, freed from the need to retain distance, engaged the remaining Faash warships at closer range, bringing to bear their superior massed-fire capability. Of all of the Dark Angels ships, the Invincible Reason was by far the most destructive, accounting for dozens of cruiser-class targets and taking out the enemy flagship with a single, perfectly aimed lance strike. As the structure of the halo began to smoulder from the inside and the Wolves took to their gunships once more, the First Legion began the long and grinding task of winnowing out the surviving enemy craft, gradually seizing more and more of the void-space above Dulan, then securing it, then pressing for more.
Only when the last cannon had fired and the last piece of burning wreckage had twisted towards re-entry did the respective Legion fleets take up their orbital vantages again, each pulling back together into overwatch formation and facing one another across a wide expanse of debris-littered space The Lion had brought the greater numbers with him - the Second, Sixt
h and Ninth Orders of his Legion - and outnumbered the Wolves by roughly a third. He had more ships, and in the Invincible Reason a far greater orbital killing power. In isolation, each Legion contingent would have been a match for the vast majority of conceivable foes. In concert, they were nigh unstoppable.
Russ had returned to the Nidhoggur among the very last of the warriors to leave, setting the final incendiary charges himself. On the bridge of the warship he summoned his jarls and his priests and his honour guard, and met them in the flagship's annulus chamber. There, in the flickering flight and under the hewn stones of the home world, he took off his helm, pushed his stiff hair free of its braids, and gave them a weary nod of acknowledgement.
'Tell me,' he said. 'Is there any way we could have handled this worse?'
A few scant chuckles issued from the Einherjar, but most faces remained stony. One battle had passed, another now loomed.
'It is too great a dishonor,' said Helmschrot. 'You cannot go to him.'
'We gave them the victory he wanted,' added Blackblood. 'War is war, and warriors die.'
Russ listened as they spoke, nodding, absorbing. 'And you, Bloodhowl?' he asked.
Jorin lifted his chin, holding his primarch's gaze with a kind of defiant pride. 'It should be me, if anyone,' he said. 'Order it, lord, and I'll go there myself.'
Russ barked a hard-edged laugh. 'Then you'd bury an axe in his chest, and the problem would get worse.' He sighed deeply, scratching at his neck where the gorget seal had left a weal. 'Hel's winter, we have lived up to every foul rumour they have of us. I won't have the blood between us turn sour. How bad could it be; to forget our pride for just a moment?'
The others looked doubtful.
'Do not go,' said Jorin, more firmly. 'It was said in the heat of fighting, and they fired on us first. If we show them weakness now—' 'Weakness!' Russ snorted. 'We show them weakness by hiding here and forswearing an oath.' His expression became serious again. 'You do not know him as I do. He would have destroyed your ship if he felt the slight to honour was sustained. We both have our codes of conduct, and that is his. He is a lord of knights, and we are the barbarians at his gates, and all must play their parts.'
Leman Russ: The Great Wolf Page 8
