‘He’ll say: “Sven, if you had a brain you would be dangerous.”’
‘I am bloody dangerous, Ragnar. So are you. So is everybody in this stronghold. I just want to know when we’ll get a chance to prove it to the enemy.’
Ragnar looked into the medical sarcophagi, wondering why Hakon had sent for him. The old sergeant lay stiff and unmoving. Gurgling tubes, filled with greenish fluid, snaked from the walls of the ancient bio-magical machine into the sergeant’s flesh. His carapace had been peeled away, giving him a strange vulnerable look. His skin was pallid, like that of a corpse. A metal mask covered one half of his head, hiding the great hole in his skull. The scars on the remaining side of his face stood out even more strongly. Only his eyes looked alive. They burned with fury.
The Wolf Priest nodded to Ragnar, telling him it was all right to speak, and then retired to his duties. A few moments later, Ragnar could hear him muttering medicinal incantations over some of the other patients.
‘How are you?’ Ragnar asked. Hakon’s lips quirked into a tight smile, but the fury never left his eyes.
‘I have been better,’ he said.
‘You will be so again.’
Hakon gave a near imperceptible shake of the head. ‘I do not think so, Ragnar. I have heard the healers speaking; there is too much damage for my body to heal. Parts of my brain were blown away. My spine is damaged. I will never fight again. Or walk for that matter.’
There was no self-pity in Hakon’s manner, only truth. Ragnar did not know what to say. Confronted by the magnitude of the sergeant’s loss, he suddenly felt very young and inexperienced.
‘I heard you were field promoted,’ said Hakon. ‘That is why I asked to see you.’
‘I would have come anyway.’
‘No matter. I think you will do well, Ragnar, if you live and learn to control that fury of yours. It’s a great thing in a warrior to be a berserker; it is not such a good thing in a leader. A leader needs to be able to see clearly at all times. It’s one thing to throw your own life away in combat, even if it’s not a very clever thing; it’s another thing to throw away the life of your pack.’
‘I know, sergeant. I do not think I am ready for this…’
‘No one ever does, no matter what age they are. Do not think that way. I can see you have it in you to be a great leader one day, Ragnar. You are a thinker, perhaps too much of one, and the Chapter has need of men who can think as well as fight.’
Ragnar did not know what to say, so he kept quiet.
‘I would have recommended you for Grey Hunter soon. You and your packmates Sven and Strybjorn are about ready for it. It seems Berek Thunderfist has already seen that.’
‘What do you mean?’
The sergeant’s voice was soft and rasping, and Ragnar realised there was a certain underlying sadness in it. Hakon was speaking like a man who knows he is going to die soon, he realised.
‘I had some doubts, but I do not think Lord Berek has any. I think you are just about ready for Grey Hunter, but I am not totally sure. Because of your fury; it can be a terrible weakness in a man. Berek seems to think differently, but then he always lacked a certain prudent caution.’
Ragnar opened his mouth to say something, feeling that he should defend the Wolf Lord, but Hakon interrupted. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. The Wolf Lord is hungry for greatness, but he has other virtues that make up for it. He is a great leader whatever flaws he may have and you can learn from him, if you watch him. You’ll learn from his flaws too, if you are as smart as I think you are.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because I am an old man, Ragnar, and I do not have much more time in the flesh. I can see something in you, Ragnar, Ranek could as well. I am not sure that it is something good, but good or no, I believe you will have a great impact on the Chapter – if you survive. I am trying to make sure that you do more good than harm.’
‘I will always do my best.’
‘Aye, and that might be your undoing, Ragnar. For you are headstrong and have very distinctive views of what the best is. It’s a failing that most Wolves have, until we get some grey hair and a little sense.’
Ragnar wondered whether the healing potions were making Hakon’s mind wander. They sometimes did that even to men with constitutions as strong as a Space Marine’s. Under the strain of injury even their bodies’ ability to metabolise poisons and drugs sometimes behaved strangely.
‘Is that all you have to say?’ Ragnar asked.
‘No. Despite what I just said, I wanted to tell you that I was proud of you. You were the best batch of aspirants I ever trained at Russvik. Maybe the best I ever saw. See that you live up to that.’
Pride filled Ragnar at the old man’s words. Hakon had always been a rough-tongued man, and never spared a word of praise for anybody. Apparently, he had hidden his true feelings.
At this moment, two Iron Priests entered. Something about their attitude told Ragnar that they had come to take Hakon away. They gestured for him to leave. Hakon saw this and nodded.
‘That’s all. Go now, and may Russ watch over you.’
Ragnar nodded and made the sign of the wolf. He could see Hakon flinch as he tried to do the same and his body would not respond. Ragnar halted for a moment then turned to go. As he left the medical bunker, he knew for certain that he would never see the old man again, and that left him greatly saddened.
SIXTEEN
‘Whose bloody brilliant idea was this?’ muttered Sven, as they slid quietly over the lip of the crater and into the night.
‘Yours,’ said Ragnar. The Thunderhawk had dropped them off kilometres from their target to give them a chance of surprise. The darkness was nearly total. The red glare from the chimneys of the distant factory keeps underlit the clouds, but here in the vast space between the buildings all was shadow. Ragnar tasted the air, hunting for the scent of enemies; he found none. He cocked his head and heard only the scuttling of the giant rats moving between the buildings.
‘What?’
‘You did say you wanted action so I asked the Great Wolf–’
‘Is that right? Did you also suggest this bloody stupid mission?’
‘Quiet!’ Ragnar held up his hand for silence.
‘Yes, your majesty,’ muttered Sven.
A glare told him that Ragnar meant it. ‘There’s something over there. Next crater,’ he sub-vocalised into the comm-net. ‘Bearing north, north-west. Distance about two hundred metres. Looks like the augurs were right.’
Ragnar looked back at his small squad. He knew they had all been listening in on the sealed link. Ragnar gestured for them to keep moving. He was certain now that he had heard something. He was not sure what, but he was certain it was not rats. He picked his way forward carefully, alert for the booby traps and landmines that dotted this cold, empty no-man’s-land. He considered how the crater might have come to be occupied without orbital surveillance spotting anyone moving into it. Suddenly someone had just been there.
Old maintenance tunnels and subway systems ran under the plascrete plains. Most had been sealed off, some had been flooded with toxic waste, but a few were still in operation. Some of them had even been exposed to the surface by the blast craters. Ragnar could remember seeing gaping tunnel mouths and masses of twisted girders in some of the aerial holoprints of the terrain. Anyone trying to make a night approach to the shrine would probably use them. Or there was always the possibility of magic, he supposed. The Chaos worshippers might have used sorcery to teleport themselves in. But why?
Ragnar dismissed the thought. That was what he and his squad were here to find out. All they needed to do was investigate and report back their findings. If it was a problem they could deal with, they would. If it wasn’t, the Chapter would. All nice and simple, which made a change. Little seemed to be straightforward here on Garm. The place was a seething hotbed of intrigue, treachery, betrayal and shifting alliances.
So far the Rune Priests’ divinations still had
not been able to locate the Spear. To all intents and purposes, Father Sergius and his minions had disappeared from the face of the planet. All the priests had been able to work out was that something terrible and evil would happen if the Spear was not returned. Such portents were hardly surprising under the circumstances.
Of course, there were hundreds of rumours flickering over the comm-net, but so far none of them had checked out and many had been set-ups for ambushes. Ragnar smiled savagely. The would-be ambushers had learned to their cost how unwise such attacks were.
Ragnar held his weapons ready and tasted the air. The wind had changed and brought new odours to his nostrils. Yes, there it was. Amid the chemical tang he could pick out the faint odour of unwashed bodies, the pheromone traces of fear and anger. There were men out there, in the nearest crater. Not many, but enough to spring an ambush.
Ragnar’s flesh crawled. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. At this very moment, an enemy might be sighting a bolter at him. In a heartbeat, its shell might pass through his head and send him to greet his ancestors in hell. The rest of the pack sensed the change in him, and crouched down, making their silhouettes smaller. A moment later they too caught the scent. He could tell by the tiny pack noises they made, and the change in their own scent.
Who was out there, he wondered, easing his weight down gently, making less noise than a cat. Another patrol? This no-man’s-land was full of them at night, the orbital augurs spotted the heat trails of many groups of men. All of them had learned to avoid the killing ground around the shrine, but that still left this whole vast industrial wasteland to fight over.
Judging by the signs of firefights they had witnessed, they often encountered each other as well. Or it might just be refugees fleeing some broken factory keep, seeking shelter amid the debris of a world shattered by war. Or it might be something else.
Ahead of them the lip of the crater loomed. Whoever was inside it had not spotted them yet. Hardly surprising for they lacked the night sight and the enhanced senses of the Space Wolves. Ragnar told himself not to be overconfident. He did not know this was the case. They might have night vision magnoculars. They might have all manner of divinatory sensors. They might be mutants with night-adapted eyes. They might have the aid of evil magic. They might just be waiting until he reached point blank range before opening up with every weapon they had. He recalled the words of Ranek: ‘In war, you cannot afford to make the easy assumptions, to see only what you want to see. You need to engage with the world as it actually is, not as you think it should be. Anything else, and you will find yourself quite quickly dead.’
The lip of another crater rose above them now. He could see it was made up of packed rubble and interspersed with torn and twisted girders, and the thick steel mesh that had once reinforced the surface. Among the broken stonework bones gleamed brightly, and the burned out remains of a few groundcars lay like the carapaces of monstrous metal beetles. Ragnar paid close attention to them, for they provided good cover for any potential ambushers.
Quickly he advanced onto the slope, testing the rubble carefully with his foot, knowing that if he displaced any, if it gave way beneath him, he might as well light a flare to give away his position. Cautiously he moved up the slope in a half crouch, until he came to the crater’s rim.
So far, so good.
Nothing had gone wrong. No one had opened fire. An ambush now seemed unlikely. Still, the hardest part was yet to come. He needed to get over the rim without being spotted, and without silhouetting himself against the skyline for anyone taking refuge in the crater to spot. Here the night’s blackness should help him.
He eased himself down until he was flat and then slowly, gradually, raised his head above the rim. He could see the dim shapes of men below him. A gentle snoring told him that most of them were asleep. Not exactly an alert patrol, but the smell of gunmetal told him that they were armed. There were at least a dozen men down there too. Under the circumstances it would be easy enough to take them out. A group of sleeping men with one or two dozy sentries would hardly be any challenge for a group of Blood Claws. All he need do was give the signal and those men down there would be sent straight to hell. But…
There was something about these men. They smelled scared and weary, but there was no taint of Chaos to them. Of course, this did not mean anything. There were plenty of heretics who showed no outer stigmata of their evil and there were an equal number of perfectly human dupes who believed in the cause of Chaos. At the same time, there was the possibility that these men were allies. Again, that presented a problem, for a man could die just as easily from a friend’s bullet as a foe’s. Those men down there were scared and armed and might just start blazing away if a stranger spoke to them out of the night.
Briefly, Ragnar considered his options. What should he do? He could order the squad to open fire and wipe the strangers out. Had he been certain they were heretics, he would have done so without a qualm. Considerations of honour did not enter into account when you were dealing with daemon worshippers: you squashed them as reflexively as a man would squash a venomous spider. But he was not entirely certain, and that being the case, he could not bring himself to order their deaths.
‘Keep me covered, I am going in for a closer look,’ he sub-vocalised silently into the comm-net. Affirmatives rang in his earbead. Keeping himself low, he slid over the rim of the crater, and down into the bowl. These men were careless, he thought, to have left no sentries on guard, and no sentinel devices. Tired or no, under war conditions there was no excuse for it. Silent as a shadow, he moved closer to the group, taking advantage of every bit of cover. A stalking wolf could have been no quieter.
His every nerve was stretched to the sticking point. Every sense was ratcheted up to the keenest. Even as he moved, he realised he had made an elementary mistake. He was the squad leader now. He should not be risking himself. He should have sent one of the others forward. It was too late to worry about it now.
Instead he pushed all such thoughts from his mind and concentrated simply on keeping quiet and alive. The men who were awake were huddled around something. His nose told him it was a small smokeless stove, powered by some chemical oil. The strange acrid tang of it made his nostrils twitch. They were cooking something: meat of some sort. As he moved closer, he picked out more details. All of them were wearing thick insulated uniforms, covered in fur lined greatcoats, and their breath steamed into the cold night air.
Since Ragnar’s body had adapted to it, he had never given the cold here a second thought, but he could see these men were wrapped and muffled like tribesmen for winter back on Fenris. Several of them wore two greatcoats, and had their hands muffled in great furry gloves. All of them wore filter masks over their faces to protect against the heavily polluted air.
One of the men was an officer. He wore a high fur hat with earflaps to cover his face, and epaulettes of rank showed on the shoulders of his tattered coat. A cloak of thick fur was draped on one shoulder. Ragnar assumed this was another emblem of rank, for it would have been far more practical for the man to have wrapped it around himself.
Ragnar was so close now he could almost reach out and touch the officer, and still no one had noticed him. These men almost deserved to die for their carelessness alone, he thought. Then again, few of them possessed the superhuman senses and reflexes of Space Marines either, and none of them had learned the craft of stealth hunting the wild beasts of Fenris.
‘Cold tonight!’ said one of the men. The accent was so thick and guttural as to be almost incomprehensible, but it was still recognisably Imperial Gothic. ‘Cold enough to freeze the nadgers off a snow dog.’
Ragnar froze in place, keeping low, wondering if one of the men would spot him. It seemed unlikely; most of them had been huddled around their stove staring at its small purple flame. Their night vision would not be good. ‘We should never have left Ironfang Keep,’ said another.
‘We did not have much choice,’ said the officer. His voice was h
igher and his accent clearer than those of the common soldiers who had spoken. Ragnar had studied enough of the ethnography of the Imperium to know that he most likely belonged to the ruling class here. At the very least he was of a higher social strata than the first two. ‘Not with Sergius’s dogs running the show now.’
Ragnar felt a surge of excitement. Perhaps this man knew the location of Sergius? He tried to think calmly. Maybe not. Every loyalist on the planet talked about the heretics as Sergius’s dogs.
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but we should have stayed on and fought.’
‘Stayed on and been killed is what you mean,’ said the officer. ‘Like Lord Koruna and the rest of the clan.’
His tone said that he wanted no argument, and so did the way his hand played with the flap of his pistol’s holster, but his men were tired and scared and obviously a long way from home. Discipline was fraying fast.
‘Some of our people are still holding out. We could have stayed with them.’
‘If we are successful we can fetch help. There’s no way we can hold out against the heretics now that the priest and his infernal minions are there.’
‘How do you know those ships we saw coming down were not more heretics? The Emperor knows we’ve seen enough of them come out of the Eye of Terror. Those comm-net broadcasts could be a trick. It could all be a trap by the Chaos lovers to lure us to our doom. We don’t know the Wolves have come back to take their shrine.’
‘We don’t know for certain. That’s what we’re here to find out. If those ships are loyal to the Emperor, we might be able to get aid.’
‘And if they are not, sir?’
‘Then we go back to Ironfang and die alongside our people.’
Ragnar had heard enough to tell him what he wanted to know. These men did not talk like heretics, and he doubted they were play-acting for his benefit. There was no way they could even have spotted him. And any attempt to get closer to the shrine would be suicidal now. He decided it was time to intervene. The officer strode away from the fire to urinate. Ragnar followed him into the darkness and waited for the man to complete his business.
The Space Wolf Omnibus - William King Page 73
