Blood of Asaheim

by Chris Wraight

  A fresh salvo scythed out from the Undrider’s cannons. The crews had a good aim – as the glare faded Jorundur saw a swathe of hits across the enemy underside. Something blew up under the dagger-sharp prow, knocking the lance up out of position and sending a splash-pattern of static across the ship’s shields.

  ‘Closer now,’ hissed Jorundur, his fists clenching. ‘Rake them.’

  The Undrider shot upwards, sheering a little and trailing debris, still fast enough to evade most of the hail of las-fire aimed at it. The engines laboured, sending stuttering impacts vibrating through the bulkheads and gantries. Biting detonations along the hull tipped it over several degrees but didn’t slow it.

  For less than a second it passed right beside the enemy, close enough to see its glistening, tumorous hide through the crystal of the realviewers. Banks of lascannons snapped out in unison, hurling a thicket of deadly neon-bright spears across the gap. The return barrage was just as vicious – two walls of heat and light slamming through and past one another, cracking into the swimming energy of the void shields, bursting through and boring down to the metal below.

  Explosions crashed out all along the length of the Undrider, punctuated by the scream and snap of expiring void generators. The whole ship reeled as las-beams carved into overheated conduits and burned through metre-thick plate. The engines coughed and flared, beating erratically as if having a sudden coronary.

  ‘Away now, evasive manoeuvre jorva,’ ordered Jorundur calmly, all the while watching the hololith whirl and flicker.

  The structure of the ship shivered as the Undrider launched into a steep, cork-screwing climb. More explosions thundered out, bombarding the bridge crew with debris. Cracks cobwebbed across viewports, quickly shuttered. Kaerls staggered to and fro across the chamber, labouring to reach nascent fires and douse them.

  ‘Status, master,’ Jorundur asked, all the while monitoring spatial positions.

  Bjargborn, who’d nearly been knocked out of his throne by the repeated impacts, scrambled for data.

  ‘Starboard weapons gone,’ he reported. ‘Lance gone. Six, no seven, hull breaches. We’re leaking atmosphere.’

  ‘What’s this thing made of?’ muttered Jorundur. ‘Paper?’

  Gunnlaugur braced himself against the steepling deck, compensating for malfunctioning grav generators.

  ‘And the enemy?’ he demanded.

  The destroyer had shot wide, battered by the brutal broadside exchange. It was coming round for another pass, but more clumsily than before. A long trail of gases plumed from its underside.

  ‘Its voids are down,’ said Bjargborn, scanning the auspex data. ‘Still got weapons. Still got engines.’

  ‘It can kill us,’ said Ingvar quietly. ‘We can’t kill it.’

  Jorundur whirled around.

  ‘I’m just getting started,’ he glowered.

  Ingvar turned to Gunnlaugur.

  ‘We have to withdraw, vaerangi,’ he said. ‘We can’t fight this.’

  Gunnlaugur looked back at Ingvar.

  ‘Withdraw?’ he asked. His voice betrayed astonishment. For a moment, it looked like he had no idea how to react.

  More explosions hammered out from the lower decks. A whole row of cogitators exploded, their screens flinging shattered crystals across the decking. A choir of warning klaxons broke out, overlapping one another in a discordant hymn of despair.

  ‘There’s no shame in this,’ Ingvar said. ‘We might still outrun it, but we can’t kill it. We have no weapons left.’

  At that, Gunnlaugur gave a grim laugh.

  ‘You’ve been away too long,’ he said. ‘We have plenty.’

  He glanced briefly at the hololith, calculating, before turning to Jorundur.

  ‘Take us in again, close as you can, fast as you can. Then burn like Hel away from it. Don’t care where, just don’t die on the way in.’

  Jorundur grinned knowingly. ‘That is understood.’

  Gunnlaugur turned to face the rest of the pack. They looked back at him expectantly, sealed in their suits of armour, draped in pelts, daubed with ritual bloodstains, etched with runes, hung with wolf’s-teeth, wyrd-totems and fate-forged blades.

  ‘Come, brothers,’ he said, his thick voice snagging with anticipation. ‘I wish to show you something.’

  Gunnlaugur jogged down the corridors leading to the frigate’s hangars. The lumens failed before he got halfway; his helm compensated instantly. The broken thuds of his pack’s massed bootfalls resounded down the narrow space after him. He filtered out the incessant klaxons and warning beacons, only hearing the clinks of weapons against armour, the ragged, expectant breathing, the tinny grind of power armour servos.

  The Undrider was, in all but one respect, a substandard vessel, something that he should have been ashamed to go to war in. It had one thing, though – one thing that made it more than useful.

  ‘So what is this?’ came Váltyr’s voice over the pack-wide comm. ‘What are we doing?’

  He sounded uneasy, like he should have been informed. Váltyr was always on the look out for slights.

  ‘We’re here for this,’ said Gunnlaugur, reaching a pair of thick security doors. He punched a switch, and they eased open with a scrape of pistons.

  On the far side of the doorway was a yawning chamber the size of the Thunderhawk hangar. The metal of the walls was blackened, as if lined with carbon. Huge lifting claws hung from the roof, shaking slightly as the Undrider took more hits.

  In the centre of the chamber was a slingshot launch mechanism – two hundred metres of track-lined tunnel heading straight out into the void, softly illuminated by a heart-red glow.

  At the far end of the track stood two closed sets of armour-plate doors. At the near end, sunk into floor level and squatting amid scorched rockcrete buffers like a lumpen, ugly twin-hulled avatar of the Imperial brutalist aesthetic, was the reason they’d come.

  ‘Blood of Russ,’ breathed Baldr.

  ‘A Caestus,’ said Olgeir, sounding impressed. ‘Glorious.’

  Gunnlaugur laughed as he strode over to the control console and activated the remote launch authorisation.

  ‘Strap in quick,’ he said. ‘Jorundur’s sending us out, and he won’t like waiting.’

  A Caestus Assault Ram was a common sight on Adeptus Astartes capital ships, rarer on escort-class vessels like the Undrider. Unlike the versatile Thunderhawk gunships, which were almost three times as large, a Caestus was built around a single operational principle. Its twin hulls were heavily armoured and reinforced with plates of ceramite, ridged and braced to absorb enormous impacts. Its chunky thrusters had afterburners designed to hurl it into blistering straight-line speeds. Its weapon complement – twin-linked heavy bolters, wing-mounted missile launchers, magna-melta heat cannon – all faced ahead, concentrating their destructive power into a single point.

  A Caestus, launched into the void and carrying its full complement of ten Space Marines, could survive a direct hit at full speed with the unshielded hull of any battle cruiser in the Imperium. That was fortunate, as it could do very little else. It was less a vehicle, more a projectile.

  The two embarkation ramps clanged open. Ingvar and Baldr clambered into one; Váltyr, Olgeir and Hafloí the other. Gunnlaugur took his seat in the tiny cockpit, set back at the rear of the ungainly craft. It was an awkward, cramped fit, doubly so once the metal ribs of the impact cage descended across his chest.

  The hull booms closed with the hiss and snap of locking bolts. Gunnlaugur primed the engines, feeling the whole vessel shudder as the thrusters broke into life.

  The launch chamber rocked again, buffeted by more incoming fire from the void-battle outside. One of the lifting claws separated from its supports and came crashing down beside them, crunching into a tangle of metal fingers and cracking the rockcrete floor.

  Gunnlaugur glanced
down the long launch tunnel, watching as the external blast doors opened, one after the other, exposing star-flecked blackness beyond.

  ‘Brace for launch,’ he ordered, seizing the rudimentary flight controls and tensing for the explosive launch. Piloting a Caestus in such conditions was like riding a whirlwind – he’d be able to nudge its trajectory a little before impact, but not much more than that. ‘The Hand of Russ be with–’

  The ram exploded into movement, leaping forwards as if kicked. Its engines swelled into a crescendo of flaming, roaring thunder, deafening even over his helm’s aural dampeners.

  Gunnlaugur slammed back in his seat. The launch tunnel screamed by in a rush of motion-blur and the Caestus shot clear of the Undrider’s hull. Stars wheeled before them briefly, marred by trailing fronds of smoke and fire.

  Then the destroyer’s bloated hull swept up to meet them, racing into range at frightening speed. Jorundur had timed the burst well – they were heading straight amidships, angling under the jumbled forest of armour plating and into the engine levels. A storm of las-fire cracked around them, some of it impacting on the Caestus’s hull, rocking it even as it careered towards its target.

  Gunnlaugur prodded the vessel’s course down by a fraction, aiming for an already-damaged section of hull-plate. He let loose with the missile launcher, then the heavy bolters, blazing away at the projected impact site.

  The sun-hot magna-melta was the last weapon to fire, just as the destroyer’s bulk overshadowed them, racing up out of the void like a cliff-face of adamantium. For all his conditioning, Gunnlaugur couldn’t resist gritting his teeth together, clenching his jaws tight as the hull hurtled in close.

  The smash was colossal. The Caestus blazed into a raging core of melting, boiling metal. For a microsecond it plunged straight through the magma, barging aside disintegrating columns and armour plate. Then it rammed square against a solid bracing rib and reared upwards. Momentum dragged it onwards, scraping and tearing through chunks of steel and adamantium, boring away into the reeling heart of the destroyer’s wounded flank.

  Gunnlaugur was hurled forwards in his seat, barely held in place by the thick metal bars across his chest. Massive, fleeting explosions flared up around the assault ram, turning the forward viewer into an orange soup of flame.

  The bracing rib bent, twisted, then broke, bringing a fresh mass of crumbling superstructure raining down on the still-moving assault craft. Its engines cut out suddenly, and their roar was replaced by the shriek of tortured metal and the whistling rush of escaping air.

  Slowly, grindingly, the Caestus slid to a halt, wedged deep within the bowels of the enemy ship like a bullet lodged in the muscle of its prey.

  Gunnlaugur released the cage and blew the door-locks. More incendiaries went off, clustered around the hull booms to clear a space for the descending crew ramps. His cockpit hatch flew open and he clambered out, reaching for his thunder hammer as he scrambled free of the Caestus’s up-ended chassis.

  Around him lay a collapsing, howling, blazing maze of destruction. The Caestus had blown a huge hole in the side of the destroyer, carving away whole chunks of hull structure and exposing the ragged ends of broken decking. A gale of oxygen rushed over him, extinguishing the myriad fires that laced the collision site. Shattered lumens flickered and swung from severed brackets, throwing grotesque and leaping shadows over the ruins.

  Behind them, back at the end of a cone-shaped tunnel of molten ironwork, was the void. In front of them was the ship they had come to murder.

  Gunnlaugur activated skulbrotsjór, and blue lightning arced across its adamantium head.

  ‘Time to go,’ he growled, hoisting clear of the Caestus and grabbing hold of a section of broken decking to brace himself.

  The rest of the pack emerged from the hull booms. They hauled themselves away from the upended Caestus, seizing what spars and braces remained intact around them and climbing upwards through the devastation. The air had gone but the ship’s artificial gravity remained, allowing them to orientate themselves and pull free of the tangled wreckage.

  They formed up again on the next deck, the first place that retained some semblance of a floor, walls and ceiling.

  ‘That was… invigorating,’ said Olgeir, shaking a crust of debris free of his shoulders. Sigrún sat comfortably in his two hands, sweeping the area in front of them casually. The rest of the pack fanned out, their helm lenses glowing red in the unsteady gloom.

  A large open space stretched away from them, echoing and empty. What parts of it remained intact had the look of a cargo hold – the floor was rockcrete and the walls were iron. Dark, fluted columns studded the expanse, each one terminating in pointed arches against a ridged ceiling. The vacuum made it silent and as cold as Morkai’s breath. Nothing lived, nothing stirred. The faint vibration from the engines against their boots was the only indication that this wasn’t a dead ship already.

  On the far side of the chamber, thirty metres away, were six huge cargo shafts, each one barred by reinforced shutters.

  Baldr knelt down, peering at the floor. He scraped a patch of still-glowing dust clear.

  ‘Tank tracks,’ he said, looking up at Gunnlaugur. ‘A vehicle depot.’

  Gunnlaugur nodded, swinging skulbrotsjór back and forth and rocking his head from side to side. The cramped passage in the assault ram had compressed his spine – he needed to flex his limbs.

  ‘To the bridge, then,’ he said.

  As he finished speaking, one of the shutters began to rise. A sickly green light, lurid like marsh-gas, tumbled out from under it, dissipating quickly in the darkness. Black shapes, blurry through the fog, moved back and forth on the far side.

  ‘Not just yet,’ said Váltyr with relish, spinning holdbítr in one hand before bringing it up into guard. ‘Here come the crew.’

  Chapter Seven

  Jorundur staggered, keeping his feet with difficulty. The mortals around him did less well. Those strapped into their chairs were flung viciously against their bonds. Those who were unsecured were hurled from one wall to the other, landing with the crack and snap of broken bones.

  A sheet of flame rippled across the observation dome, overloading half the hull-mounted sensoria and masking for a moment the horrendous punishment the Undrider had just taken on the close pass. A gallery on the far side of the chamber twisted and sagged as its supports cracked. Shouts, some of pain, some of urgent command, blended into the background noise of explosions and disintegrations.

  ‘Assessment,’ Jorundur commanded, gripping the back of the command throne as the Undrider tilted precipitously.

  Bjargborn struggled to speak. Something, shrapnel perhaps, had hit him in the face and his cheeks streamed with blood.

  ‘Uh,’ he mumbled, his speech slurring. ‘M-multiple impacts. Hull breached on four, no five, levels. We’re depressurising. No, we’re not. Not everywhere.’

  Jorundur glanced at one of the few functional pict screens, taking in its data quickly.

  ‘Did we hurt it?’ he asked, more interested in the damage he’d done than that which he’d sustained.

  Bjargborn called up the sensoria reports. His hands trembled, but he was working hard to hold it together.

  ‘We did,’ he reported. Even in his battered state, he sounded proud of that. ‘Pretty bad. See for yourself.’

  Bjargborn switched the rear-view feed to the throne-mounted screens.

  Jorundur saw the destroyer falling away from them, its nearside flank bursting with quickly-extinguishing spot fires. Whole sections of hull-plate had been driven in. A swarm of sparking fragments tumbled around it in the void. It looked like it was having trouble coming around, and rolled awkwardly in space like a beached hvaluri.

  ‘And the assault ram?’

  ‘They’re in, lord,’ said Bjargborn. ‘Out of locator range, but they’re in.’

  As the master sp
oke, Jorundur caught sight of the ingress wound made by the Caestus – a jagged hole in the destroyer’s side, laced with glowing shards of molten metal.

  He felt a small surge of satisfaction. He’d aligned the ram well. Gunnlaugur had better remember that when it came to the mission assessment.

  ‘We’ve done what we had to,’ he said. ‘Now get us away from that thing.’

  Around him the command chamber slowly returned to something like a functioning space. Men still lay prone on the floor, streaked with blood, but the servitors just kept on working. Kaerls, many of them limping or cradling broken arms, moved to douse the fires and shore up the worst of the damage.

  For all that, Jorundur knew the situation was still balanced. The Undrider had gone into the broadside in worse shape than the enemy and had come out of it badly mauled. The damage it had sustained already might well prove fatal, even without the continued attentions of a pursuing ship.

  He felt the broken judder of the engines kick it again, thrusting the Undrider away from the combat zone. The movement felt sluggish, as if only half the usual levels of power were online.

  Bjargborn read his mind.

  ‘They’ve holed the enginarium,’ he said. He’d managed to find a rag to wipe his face with, and blood smeared across his chin. ‘We won’t outrun them for long.’

  Jorundur nodded and glanced at the hololith tactical display. The enemy was recovering too. The destroyer began to turn, angling back to match course with them. Its speed had been dented too, but not by as much.

  ‘Give me what you can, master. Stay within range of the planet. Any weapons still functioning?’

  Bjargborn gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘A few,’ he said. ‘Enough to chip their war-paint.’

  Jorundur didn’t find that amusing.

  ‘We’ll trust to speed, then. Find it from somewhere.’