The Space Wolf Omnibus - William King

by Warhammer 40K

  He sensed the nearness of the riverdragon and felt a moment’s dread as he imagined those huge jaws opening up below him, and then taking him down in one gulp.

  ‘Look out!’ he heard Sergeant Hakon shouting again.

  He glanced around and saw that the wounded beast had broken the surface and was coming towards him. Its jaws were open wide. It was like looking down a long, pink, tooth-filled tunnel. Ragnar could not remember ever seeing anything quite so fearsome. The oily, reptilian smell of the beast filled his nostrils, along with the scent of its blood, and the rotten meat trapped between its teeth and the flesh decomposing deep within its corrupt bowels. It seemed to him that, at any moment, he too might become just another bit of butchered meat in the creature’s stomach. He wondered for an instant whether his life was really over. Then, deep within his own brain, the beast that was part of him awoke, and responded to the threat with instinctive cunning. What the monster could do, he could do.

  As it bore down upon him, he waited until the last second, until the jaws were almost closing upon him, then took a lungful of air and dived, kicking strongly. The riverdragon passed overhead, seeming as large as the hull of a great dragonship. Incongruously, in that moment, Ragnar’s memory had a flashback to the times when as a lad he had dived from his father’s ship and swum beneath it, purely out of bravado and to prove that he could do it to his watching friends.

  He saw the great clawed paws thrashing the water, and the supple curve of the huge creature’s spine as it turned to try to catch him. Was it his imagination or did the thing actually seem slower? As it swam, it was leaving behind it a wake of oily black blood. Ragnar could taste it in the water. Perhaps all those bolter shells were taking effect after all. Watching the thing spin around, though, it seemed unlikely to save him. The huge jaws gaped once more as the beast came for him again. He kicked out, trying to evade it, but the river was the creature’s native habitat, not his own, and in its turgid waters it was far more agile than he, especially enclosed in his power armour.

  He felt the jaws close around him. He felt the pressure on his chest plate as the teeth started to clamp down. The riverdragon gave a swift flick of its head, like a dog with a rat in its mouth. If Ragnar had been an ordinary man, he knew his neck would have broken in that moment. But he was not a normal man, he was a Space Marine, and his body had been reconstructed to withstand far more stress than any normal human beings’. The whiplash threatened to drive the air from his lungs. Sparks flickered in his field of vision. He felt vertebrae grind as his neck muscles took the strain. Ragnar prayed to Russ and refused to black out. He fought to retain consciousness.

  There was a sense of increased pressure. He realised that the beast was taking him down, trying to drown him as it would its normal prey. No, maybe not. It was swimming away from the rafts. Ragnar could see them on the surface, shimmering in a patch of sunlight. Perhaps it was carrying him to its lair, to feed its young. Perhaps it was doing something else entirely. He had no idea and no time to speculate. His armour had switched into oxygen recycling mode. He was in no danger of drowning for the time being. Systems designed to keep him alive in the depths of space would have no trouble doing so here. The major problem was that the jaws were still closing. He could hear the ceramite creaking, feel armoured plates grinding against each other. Prickles of pain from his sensory systems told him that at certain stress points there was a danger of the armour giving way. If that happened, other systems might fail, and then indeed he might drown.

  Looking up he could see a new danger threatened. The other riverdragons were diving downwards, coming for him – or perhaps they were coming for their wounded brother. Could it be that the smell of blood was driving them into a frenzy and attracting them towards their prey, the way it did with sharks in the Worldsea of Fenris?

  Ragnar could see that his supposition was right. The largest riverdragon was coming for his captor. Another two were circling around them, looking for an opening. Suddenly bubbles of air and billows of blood surrounded Ragnar as the two giants closed for battle. Out of the corner of his eye, Ragnar saw a massive claw sweep towards him. The force of the blow was immense. His head reeled with pain. Blackness filled his field of vision. Just as suddenly the pressure on his chest relented. His monstrous captor had let him go in order to use its own jaws to fight with.

  Not that it would necessarily do him any good. One of the other beasts might scoop him up, just another tasty morsel. He fumbled with the utility belt on his waist, and felt his fingers close on the grenade he sought. Through the water he saw another beast coming at him, a nightmare vision of massive teeth and mighty jaws, tiny eyes glittering with ancient malice and hunger. Limbs working as if in slow motion in the water, he pushed the grenade into its mouth and kicked out, heading for the surface, wondering what would happen next.

  For an instant, nothing occurred. He looked down at the riverdragon and saw it arching its back as it prepared to come up after him. Then its whole body seemed to inflate from within. Its stomach expanded, as if the creature had swallowed something much too big for it. Its jaws distended, and even here under the water Ragnar was aware of its roar of pain. Then the flesh of the creature’s belly parted, and its innards blew out into the water. It had swallowed the grenade, and then it had been blown apart through its soft unarmoured innards. Even as he watched, the other riverdragons hurtled towards it, determined to get at this huge easy meal.

  Ragnar’s head broke surface. He saw that the others had managed to pull themselves onto the raft and were watching anxiously. They grinned in relief as they saw him swimming towards them. Ragnar flopped up onto the raft, water running from his dented armour. He turned his head and gazed back. The water churned and turned dark with blood. It was the only evidence he could see of the titanic struggle taking place in the gloomy depths, and it faded from view behind them, as the raft drifted around a bend in the river.

  ‘Say that I’m mindless just like that bloody beast!’ he heard Sven say, before lying back and shutting his eyes.

  EIGHT

  The jungle began to thin out. The river became wider and darker. Ragnar handled the pole easily, keeping the raft on the left bank under the outlying branches. Ahead of them were all the signs of war. Huge smoke clouds billowed darkly into the sky, reaching upwards like the stretching fingers of giants. Great tracts had been ripped from the nearby jungle by the movement of huge machines. Ork warplanes roared overhead, flashing across the sky to deliver their freight-loads of bombs. In the distance, he could make out their target: the massive walled city of Galt Prime.

  It was a city on a scale that did not exist on Fenris. Skyscraper towers loomed over the massive plascrete walls, each as huge as one of the islands that erupted from the Worldsea. And there were other things, monstrous war engines, large as the huge buildings, that moved towards the human city. Ragnar knew these were gargants, mighty metal death machines built in the form of primitive effigies of the orks’ dreadful deities. They bristled with massive weapons. From where he was, Ragnar could hear the frightful roar as they lobbed giant shells into the crumbling city walls. Ragnar knew that the illusion of war was untrue. The city had already surrendered. The orks were merely indulging their appetite for destruction.

  ‘Russ take us! It looks like we arrived just in time to save the bloody city,’ said Sven, his lips twisting in a bitter ironic smile. Ragnar glanced over at him.

  ‘Do you want to do it yourself, or shall I give you a hand?’

  ‘I’m feeling generous so I’ll let you share in my glory. You can have a couple of verses in the Saga of Sven.’

  ‘As ever, you are too generous.’ Ragnar was suddenly glad that Sven was there. For all his childish jokes and nasty moods, he could think of no one better to have at his back if they really were going to infiltrate this ork army.

  ‘The best thing about this is that we’ll have the element of surprise,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’ll never expect us to come out of the jungle and co
mpletely overwhelm them like this. Inquisitor Sternberg is a master tactician.’

  ‘I almost feel sorry for those orks,’ added Sven. ‘Almost.’

  Ragnar knew the humour covered a very real tension. For the past few days, as they had drifted downriver, they had come upon ever more evidence of the orks’ savagery. They had passed riverside villages burned to the ground and seen huge areas of the rainforest burning. As far as he could tell there was no reason for it other than sheer wanton destructiveness. It had been arson on a huge scale, the product of a mindless rage that Ragnar could not understand. This was hardly surprising: orks did not think like humans. They were, after all, a very alien race.

  In the skirmishes they had fought and the ambushes they had laid for the orks, he had come to respect their brute savagery and battlelust. They were fearless foes, hardy beyond belief. He had seen one continue to fight after its arm had been blown off by bolter shells. When it ran out of ammo it had actually picked up its own severed arm to use as a club. The creature had seemed almost impervious to pain.

  At first Ragnar thought the small groups they had encountered were patrols but then he realised that no such strategy was at work. They were merely stragglers who had got separated from the main ork force, either through sheer negligence or out of a cunning desire to find fresh places to pillage. Either the orks had no concept of effective strategy or they were overconfident and felt they did not need it. If the latter was the case, Ragnar could understand it. As far as he could see the human defenders of Galt had mounted little effective resistance.

  And that, too, was hardly surprising. Most of them were not warriors. They were farmers and foresters and traders who had lived for too long under the great shield of the Imperium’s influence. They had not expected such a savage invasion. And according to Inquisitor Sternberg, there must have been corruption too on a huge scale. The Imperial Governor was supposed to maintain a powerful standing army but they had found no sign of it. During their late night discussions around the campfire, Sternberg claimed that the money had most likely been misappropriated, used to swell the Governor’s private treasure chest. He also claimed that if the man were still alive, the Imperium would extract such a vengeance on him that he would wish the orks had killed him. The thought of the Governor’s folly and mismanagement drove the inquisitor into a quiet rage the like of which Ragnar had never seen before.

  They had monitored the comm-net and listened in horror to reports from the human towns and fortresses as one by one they fell before the invaders’ superior numbers and weaponry. It seemed as if the entire embattled human civilisation was going down into darkness. The only cheering news was that the Imperial relief force was preparing to make a counter-attack as soon as the spaceways above Galt were cleared by the human fleet. It appeared such a decisive victory was but days away, but it had left them with a dilemma. Should they await the coming of the Imperial battle force and hide in the jungle? Or should they press on with their original plan and seize the fragment of the talisman? Ragnar had heard the arguments for both cases and had been unable to make up his own mind. If they remained in the jungle there was always the chance they would be discovered by ork forces and slain. Further, there was the chance that the bearer of the talisman would slip away in the fighting or that the artefact itself might be destroyed. The inquisitors were not sure if this were possible but if there was even the slightest chance of it then they did not want to take the risk. On the other hand, what were their chances of working their way into the very heart of this huge invading army without being discovered? There were times when it seemed reckless to the point of folly.

  Ragnar could not make up his own mind but the part of him that was Fenrisian inclined towards the second option. It would be a glorious feat and one that would live long in the sagas if they could pull it off. But it was a big ‘if’, and the quest for glory became mere folly if it involved throwing away your life to no purpose. It was one of the things his instructors had drummed into him again and again during his basic training. So it had gone, backwards and forwards in his mind, as they progressed downriver. In all that time it had seemed a slightly unreal exercise, as they quested through the jungle towards their goal. But now the journey was over, and the point of decision was almost reached, and suddenly it was no longer something to be thought about, but something they would have to act and risk their lives upon.

  Ragnar did not envy Sergeant Hakon and the two inquisitors at that moment. He was glad the decision was not his. He tried to tell himself that it was not that he minded risking his own life, but he would not want the lives of his comrades and friends hanging on his choice. And for the most part he managed to believe himself, though sometimes he caught himself wondering whether he really did want to risk his own life to find this precious artefact for Sternberg. Was it really worth his life? Was it worth all of their lives? The answer was straightforward: if they could save the people of Aerius, yes. But that too was a big ‘if’.

  Now their journey was almost at an end. The days spent travelling downstream, fighting off riverdragons and the endless nights filled with biting insects were almost over. Ahead of them lay Galt Prime and the massive ork force. It was almost time for them to implement their plan. Ragnar wondered whether any of them would survive it.

  It was all very well to sit around a blazing fire and talk about infiltrating the ork camp and seizing the talisman they sought. It was another thing entirely to actually do it. Now that he had seen evidence of the sheer size of the ork force with his own eyes, Ragnar wondered if it were even possible. Inquisitor Isaan was confident that this close she could sense the location of the ork leader and the talisman he held but Ragnar was not sure that this would do them any good. He was sure to be protected by thousands of ferocious warriors, too many for even Sven to overcome in his wildest fantasies.

  They poled the raft towards land and scrambled up the riverbank, weapons held ready. Ragnar threw himself flat and gazed out into the jungle. It was time to abandon the rafts and continue on foot.

  They made camp that evening in a burned out building, what had once been a warehouse in a suburb a mile or so outside the city’s main defensive wall. The building was tumbled down and showed signs of having been fought over. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls. The roof was half blown away and the support girders had half collapsed so that you could, if you wished, run up them onto the unsafe roof. The place smelled of gun smoke and blood and fear. Old bones, some of them cracked for marrow, littered the floor. Ragnar wondered whether this had been done by the human defenders, orks or the wild animals that had come in from the jungle to scavenge. It was something he didn’t really want to think about, but the thought kept entering his mind unbidden anyway.

  Huge cockroaches scuttled away from their dimmed glowglobes. Vicious-looking jungle rats, as large as small dogs, watched them with glittering eyes from the gloom. Ragnar guessed that it would not take too much provocation for them to attack. They looked like ferocious creatures but that was hardly surprising: most of the beasts on this world were.

  He glanced around at his companions, his enhanced vision able to pick out every detail of their faces even in the dim light. Inquisitor Sternberg looked gaunt and worried. A strange fanatical gleam glittered in his eyes. He had lost weight in the jungle. Unlike the Space Wolves, he had not been able to survive by eating bark and grubs and leaves. His normal human stomach had forced him to live on powdered field rations, and while these contained everything a man needed to live on, they were hardly substantial fare. He now had the look of an ascetic martyr, the type Ragnar had seen pictured on stained glass windows on the Light of Truth. It was as if all excess flesh were being stripped from his body by some wasting disease. Ragnar wondered if that might not be the case. All manner of odd illnesses could strike a man down in the jungle. He himself had suffered a fever for several hours while his body adapted. It was so much harder for an ordinary man, he knew.

  Karah Isaan had also lost weight but i
t seemed only to enhance her loveliness, emphasising her huge eyes and high cheekbones. Ragnar guessed that her homeworld was much more like Galt than Sternberg’s for she seemed to have adapted to the heat and the humidity much better than her male counterpart. The talisman glittered at Isaan’s throat. Normally she kept it concealed beneath her armoured chest plate but at the moment she was staring into the jewel’s depths as if contemplating some holy mystery. Ragnar thought he could sense the swirl of her strange powers in the air about him.

  Brother Tethys looked tired and haggard. The long days in hiding and the trip through the jungle had taken it out of him. His nerves had not been helped by the fighting in the jungle or the sight of what the orks had done to his homeworld. Ragnar thought he understood a little. He could imagine how he would feel if the orks plundered Fenris.

  Sergeant Hakon seemed to have become younger. With every day of travel, and every skirmish fought, years had fallen from him. It was obvious to Ragnar that the old wolf was glad to be in the field again, and not stuck in the training camps of Fenris. Ragnar could identify with this. Like all Fenrisians, and all Space Wolves, he held that the only good death for a man was on the battlefield surrounded by the bodies of his foes. But it was more than that, Ragnar could see. Sergeant Hakon was enjoying himself. He liked being here on this alien world, amid the ruin and the death, with the prospect of a life or death fight ahead of him. He had the happiness of a man who was doing work which he had trained to do all of his life. It showed. Even though his face was grim and his bearing calmly alert, his movements had taken on a new grace, and his voice a new tone. His scent too had altered to convey this. Ragnar was glad. At times like this, the fact that the pack had a relaxed and competent leader was deeply reassuring.

  He could tell that the others felt the same way. They were new to all of this, and this was their first major test. All of them had been blooded against the powers of Chaos in the mountains of Asaheim but this was their first time off-world. Each of them knew that, assuming they survived, it would not be their last. The life of a Space Wolf consisted of moving from planet to planet, campaign to campaign, as the Imperium and the Great Wolf deemed necessary. All of them were nervous and excited.