The Space Wolf Omnibus - William King

by Warhammer 40K

  Moments later, in answer to his command, a deep siren sounded and the lights flickered in an alert pattern. In the distance Ragnar could hear feet pounding down the corridors, as starsailors raced to prepare the ship for the jump into the warp.

  ‘Best return to your chambers,’ Sternberg said to the Wolves. ‘No leap into the Immaterium is a pleasant experience.’

  Ragnar lay on the old leather of the acceleration couch in his chamber. A starsailor had entered earlier and showed him how to strap himself in. He had been surprised to find that the chairs doubled up as acceleration couches. A touch of a hidden button and they folded outwards and backwards, extruding restraining straps which looked thick enough to hold a bull mastodon. The harness was controlled by a quick release button similar to the ones on the restrainer straps in a Thunderhawk. The Blood Claw wondered why they could be necessary. The huge starship had seemed utterly stable the whole time he had been on it. The starsailor had been insistent though. He claimed that everyone not performing vital duties absolutely requiring freedom of movement would be doing the same. The tenseness of the man’s body, together with the undertones of dread and anticipation in the man’s scent, convinced Ragnar. This man claimed to be a veteran of a thousand warp jumps, yet still he was afraid.

  ‘Never gets any easier, sir,’ he had said, just before he left the room. Now bells clanged throughout the ship and warning sirens blared. The lights flickered from normal to red, then back again. There was no doubt about what was going to happen next.

  A final long siren wail blared. Over the intercom, a deep voice boomed: ‘Thirty seconds to jump. May we be blessed in His sight.’

  Ragnar felt a sick feeling of anticipation in the pit of his stomach, and just for a moment wished that all of the pack had been assembled in one chamber. He knew there would be something reassuring in their mere presence. Might as well wish to be back on Fenris right now, he thought sarcastically. It’s not going to happen.

  His double heartbeat accelerated. He began to sweat. With an effort of will and the words of a Litany of Calming, using the control of his nervous system granted to him as a Space Marine he brought his heartbeats back to normal, and stopped the sweating. Immediately he began to feel the panic subside into mere unease.

  ‘Twenty seconds to jump. Watch and guide our path.’

  Still he felt anticipation. He had never made a warp jump before, although all his training had told him it would be a very strange experience. The ship would be passing out of this space-time continuum and into another place where matter did not exist and time flowed strangely. In some ways it would be like a submersible going under water. It would become lost to the sight of all tracking devices which operated in the normal universe, until it emerged in real space again. Of course, this might not happen. It was all down to the skill of the ship’s Navigator, who would set his course by the mighty beacon of the Astronomican on distant Terra, and would try to find a path for the starship through the treacherous currents of warp space.

  The warp itself was a turbulent medium, unstable, as full of ebbs and flows as a mighty ocean. It was said to be haunted by daemons and ghosts and the hulks of the thousands of ships, some of them human, which had been lost in it since time immemorial. It was a shifting, ill-understood realm which filled even those who travelled through it with superstitious dread. All manner of tales were told about the warp. Of starsailors who travelled through it convinced that only days had passed and who later emerged to find centuries had gone by in real time and that all who knew them were dead and gone. It had happened even to the Space Wolves. Ships had been deemed lost for hundreds of years and then their crews had returned to the Fang, unheralded and unexpected, to rejoin their comrades. And other, stranger fates had befallen travellers as well. Sometimes crews would travel out and return what seemed days later to their comrades; only when they emerged from their ships, they had grown old and senile and some had died of ageing. Their crews felt like they had been lost for decades in the warp, and showed all the effects of having been so. Sometimes entire crews went insane the moment they slipped into the Immaterium. No one knew why. And sometimes, most ominously of all, ships, even entire fleets vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. It was all down to luck, the favour of the Emperor and the skill of the Navigator.

  ‘Ten seconds to jump. May He return us safely.’

  Ragnar wondered if anything would go wrong this time. He hoped not but it was always a possibility. All he could do was strive to keep calm, and pray to the Emperor and to beloved Leman Russ for succour, cold comfort though that might be. The worst thing, he thought, was the helplessness. He was a Space Wolf, trained for battle, schooled to face a thousand perils in the line of duty. Right now there was no way he could control the outcome, or indeed have any effect on it. He could not take his bolter in his hand and slay a visible foe. He could not take cover and retreat from the danger. All he could do was wait, and try to endure the knowledge that his fate was in the hands of other men. He tried telling himself that the Navigators had been as hard-schooled in their trade as he was in his, but it did not help. At the end of the day he was a Space Marine, a man of action, and this sort of waiting came hard to him.

  Still, he remembered the words of Ranek during one of the many sermons the Wolf Priest had preached during his induction to the Space Wolves: When there is nothing to do but wait, then wait is all you can do. He knew he must simply let go of his worry; it was counter-productive, could not affect the outcome one way or another. That was what he strove to do now.

  ‘Five seconds to jump.’

  Whatever was going to happen was going to have to happen soon, Ragnar thought. In the distance he could hear the howling of the engines as their power emission began to reach a peak.

  ‘Four.’ Was that a faint halo of light beginning to appear around all the furnishings? The howling rose and lowered in pitch until it became a noise like thunder and a whine like a plummeting Thunderhawk.

  ‘Three.’ Yes. The halo was there and getting brighter. Distant thunder rattled the metal walls. The ship was vibrating; it quivered as if with eagerness, anticipation. It reminded the Space Wolf of a wardog being readied to hunt.

  ‘Two.’ The whole ship was shaking violently. Would it break apart in the warp?

  ‘One.’ The whole of the vast starship seemed to spring forward, like a hound that had been straining against a leash and was now released. There was a huge thunderclap of sound, and the ship rang as if it had been hit with a titanic hammer. Ragnar wondered how it could endure the stress, then thought of all the gigantic bulkheads and reinforcing struts he had seen on his earlier wanderings. Had those been as much to resist the strains of the warp jumps as to protect the ship in battle, he wondered?

  The ship shuddered hugely. Ragnar could hear the metal creak, like the masts of a ship in a storm. It felt as if massive forces were being brought to bear on the ship, now puny in comparison to the typhoon in which it seemed caught. With his enhanced senses Ragnar could feel the tension in the juddering vibrations of the couch beneath him. Was the Light of Truth about to shatter like a dragonship dashed against a reef?

  The Blood Claw felt a surge of nervous fear in the pit of his stomach and fought to control it. What was that shrieking sound? It sounded like the wailing of lost souls. And that ominous scraping? Was it the claws of daemons dragging themselves along the hull? The stories he had heard came back to him. He had a half-horrified, half-fascinated desire to look out of the porthole but it had been sealed with massive metal shutters in the run up to the jump. It was said that looking out into the warp was a sure way to madness. Yet he felt the tug of morbid curiosity.

  Could it really be the souls of lost starsailors he was hearing? Or the call of daemon lovers to the curious and unwary? Were these things really penetrating the shields and baffles which protected the ship, or were they simply products of his own morbid imagination? Part of him was curious and part of him hoped he would never find out.


  The ship seemed to have settled now. It shuddered and shivered occasionally but it was less unsettling than the movement of a ship on the sea and Ragnar was well accustomed to that. After a moment’s hesitation, he hit the release mechanism on the restraining straps and rose to his feet. His keen ears picked up the sharp metallic ringing of the other Space Wolves doing the same.

  Ragnar emerged from his chamber into the central hall. Sven strode into the room almost simultaneously. He looked at Ragnar and grinned.

  ‘Well, we’re bloody well away now,’ he said and laughed aloud.

  ‘Aye! That we are.’

  A curious anti-climactic feeling had settled on Ragnar. They had made the jump. They were in warp space and speeding to their destination. All they had to do now was get out again.

  Galt.

  Ragnar called up details of the system from the ship’s mnemonic banks. The information flashed onto the old televisor, a mixture of pictures and Imperial runes. Not an enormous amount of detail, but that was to be expected. It was consulting only the Index of the Compendio Mundae, which contained only the most basic of details. More could be summoned on request, providing the information was not in some way under a ban or interdiction.

  Ragnar’s eyes flickered quickly over the screen. Sun: yellow and terrestrial type. Six planets. One inhabited, known as Galt Three. Two moons. A warm world. Closer to its sun than Fenris, and on a regular helical orbit, not elliptical as his own home world was. Three large continents. Three-quarters ocean. Some large island chains. Most of the human population was confined to the largest continent, where most of the landmass was covered in tropical rainforest. Several large cities. Lots of logging and agriculture. Most common export to the Imperium was the buds of the red lotus used as the basis of many Imperial alchemical products. Also many pre-Imperial ruins – temples, cities, roadways. These indicated the presence of a primitive human culture which had survived the collapse at the end of the Dark Age of Technology. Naturally the cults had been expunged when the people of Galt were welcomed back into the fold of the Imperium. Many of their sacred places had become monasteries and seminaries used by the Ecclesiarchy.

  The Temple of Xikar was one such place, an enormous complex set in the jungle which had become home to the monastic sect known as the Brothers of Perpetual Bliss. The sect had been investigated for the contamination of heresy on several occasions, but the inquisitors detailed to the task felt that its deviation from the broad thread of Imperial scripture fell within acceptable and tolerable norms. The inquisitorial jargon made Ragnar’s head swim but he deduced that what it really meant was that the Inquisition had decided not to cleanse the Brotherhood with fire and the sword.

  And now one of those temples was found to contain part of the Talisman of Lykos. Ragnar wondered how it had got there.

  ‘I am glad you are all here. A problem has arisen, I am afraid,’ Inquisitor Sternberg said. He glanced around the vast command deck. His keen eyes seemed to rest on every Space Wolf in turn, measure him, and then move on. Once his steely gaze had moved on, Ragnar risked a glance around the room. All of the Space Wolves were present, along with the two inquisitors, the ranking officers of the Light of Truth and the commanders of the inquisitor’s bodyguard.

  ‘And what might that be?’ Sergeant Hakon asked, with an edge in his voice. The rest of the pack strained forward, keen to hear. They could all sense something in the inquisitor’s manner and in his scent. Ragnar thought it was a mixture of anger and frustration.

  Sternberg turned and gestured to his military commander. His cloak flowed smoothly with the gesture. ‘Gul?’ he said.

  Commander Gul strode forward into the centre of the room. Overhead the stars beamed in through the crystal roof of the chamber. Ragnar thought it was good to see them again, although he was a little thrown by the strange new constellations which were visible. He was glad the ship had emerged safely from the warp.

  ‘We emerged into normal space about six hours ago. Since then our astropaths have been picking up various messages from the surface of Galt Three.’

  ‘Messages?’ asked Hakon.

  ‘Appeals for help. Military communications. A general alert signal appealing for aid against the invasion.’

  Invasion, Ragnar thought? Who would be foolish enough to invade an Imperial system? Then he smiled at his own naïvety. There were plenty that would do it. Alien races, even rebel Imperial governors. Such things had happened before.

  ‘I instructed our astropaths to make contact with their counterparts on Galt Three and the following details have emerged. About six months ago standard Imperial time, a hulk emerged from warp space. It drifted within three standard units of Galt Three and as it did so it unleashed a host of smaller craft, thousands of them.

  ‘Must have been quite a large hulk then,’ ventured Sven with a smirk.

  ‘Obviously,’ Gul said, as if Sven were an idiot. Which, right at that moment, Ragnar decided, was how he sounded. Hulks could be almost any size. They were huge agglomerations of dead ships which for any one of a dozen reasons came together to form immense space-going craft, often larger than many cities. They drifted in and out of the warp seemingly without reason. Most were uninhabited, but some were homes to various lifeforms. These could be as innocuous as prospectors looking for ancient secrets among the wrecked ships or as threatening as broods of the dreaded genestealers. They could show up at any time, in any system, drifting randomly on the currents of the warp.

  ‘These ships were the spearhead of the ork invasion.’

  ‘Orks!’ various people muttered at once.

  Ragnar thought about the face they had summoned up during Karah’s ritual. That had most definitely been an ork. The Space Wolves looked pleased. Here were foes worthy of the name. The orks may be brutal and barbaric but they were mighty warriors, and fearless. Gul looked over at Mozak, the Chief Astropath.

  ‘Yes, undoubtedly orks.’ Mozak was an old man with a quavering voice and milky white, blind-seeming eyes. He was frail and he leaned on a staff almost as tall as he was. Occasionally Ragnar had come across him tapping his way along the corridors of the ship. He had always nodded to Ragnar, as aware of his presence as any sighted man. His psychic powers must in some way be a substitute for his eyes, Ragnar knew. ‘There have always been some present on the surface of Galt Three, lurking deep in the jungles. They have never formed much of a threat to the Imperial population. Occasional raids, burnings and lootings, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But their presence may have attracted the orks from the hulk?’ Hakon asked.

  ‘Perhaps – or perhaps the two facts are unconnected. We shall never know. What we do know is that it is common for orks to suddenly mass huge formations of troops and go on the rampage. These are in some ways like Imperial Crusades. The ork hordes gather troops and manpower as they go until either the leader dies, his savage ambition is slaked, or they are stopped by external forces such as military intervention or a natural disaster. While these crusades are under way ork morale is high and the sheer momentum and scale can make them irresistible.’

  ‘What has this to do with our quest?’ asked Hakon.

  ‘Galt Three appears to be right in the middle of one of these ork rampages,’ Sternberg cut in. ‘The orks landed and began arming the local ork population which, it turns out, was a lot larger than anybody thought, and are now scything across the planet, smashing any resistance as they go. In short, Galt Three is now a warzone.’

  ‘Worse than that,’ the Chief Astropath added. ‘It appears that one of the major centres of ork military effort is Xikar.’

  ‘Where the temple is,’ Gul added unnecessarily.

  ‘That’s going to make getting our hands on the talisman a little difficult, isn’t it?’ Hakon said.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Sternberg with an odd crinkle of his lips which Ragnar realised was meant to be a smile.

  ‘Is it possible to drop down into the temple and quickly retrieve the talisman fragment?�
�� Ragnar dared to ask. All eyes turned on him but to his relief he saw that no one seemed to think he had spoken out of turn. ‘A lightning raid?’

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ Gul said. ‘The question is whether you can succeed.’

  ‘We’ll never know unless we try,’ Sternberg added.

  ‘According to the Imperial authorities on Galt, there are tens of thousands of orks down there, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Intelligence is vague. Compared to those numbers all the troops we have on this ship are merely a drop in the ocean.’

  ‘No one’s suggesting we try and destroy the entire ork army,’ said Gul. ‘We need only find the talisman and then get it out.’

  Ragnar was a little shocked by the callousness of this. After all, Galt was an Imperial world and they were the Emperor’s warriors. Weren’t they supposed to help defend the human worlds against just such a menace as these orks represented? He said as much out loud.

  Inquisitor Sternberg regarded him coldly for a moment before speaking: ‘Our current mission takes precedence over any military intervention we might make. There are simply not enough of us to make much of a difference anyway. Galt Three is a lightly populated world, unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Aerius is a vitally important Imperial installation. Its loss would be a disaster.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ Ragnar felt compelled to say, ‘are not the people of Galt as entitled to Imperial protection as the people of Aerius?’

  ‘Your devotion to humanity does you credit, young Ragnar,’ Sternberg smoothed. ‘But you must leave it to your superiors to look at the bigger picture. I am in charge of this mission and I must make the decisions here.’

  Ragnar looked at Sergeant Hakon for support but to his surprise sensed that the older Space Wolf was behind the inquisitor on this. Sternberg could see it too.