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  Infurnace – Robbie MacNiven

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  Infurnace

  Robbie MacNiven

  Ramilies-class star fort, designate Gormenjarl

  They had been Wolves once. Grey Hunters, experienced warriors, their pelts flecked with silver and their armour etched with runes that told of great and bloody sagas. But they were Wolves no more. The things that came at Brother-Captain Stern and his Grey Knights down the flesh-corridors of Gormenjarl’s primary docking spine wore only a semblance of their old selves, a mocking half-facsimile. Blue-grey battleplate was now bent and twisted around fleshy growths and scarred with the runes of an altogether darker tongue.

  The transhuman physique of the Space Marines had been similarly bent, changed to better suit the purposes of the insane things that now wore the Wolves’ flesh. Arms ended in bony claw-growths, snapping maws or spine-rimmed tentacles. Vox grilles had become slavering jaws, and visor lenses blinked with raw eyelids. Lower limbs were double-jointed or cloven-hoofed. One beast’s bare arms were covered in a million tiny chitin spines that gave the appearance of a bony fur pelt, while another had atrophied, leathery pinions sprouting grotesquely from the seal of its backpack.

  They had once been the Redpelts, Gormenjarl’s Space Wolf garrison. Now they were monsters, possessed by the daemons that infested the star fort, their bodies broken and abused, refashioned with no heed to nature’s constraints.

  And they came straight for the Grey Knights, slavering, snapping and howling.

  ‘Stand firm, brethren,’ Stern shouted, raising his nemesis force sword. ‘Suffer not the unclean to live!’

  The two sides, silver paladins and possessed warp-wolves, met with a crash of ceramite and snapping bone. The foremost daemon, a thing with a red-pelted wolf’s head and crab-claw arms, went straight for Stern. The Grey Knight captain met it with a downward slash of his force sword, silvered steel cleaving through warped plate to hack off one of the monstrosity’s snapping limbs. The thing didn’t even flinch, latching the other claw around Stern’s right fist. The vice-like grip sheared cleanly through his wrist-mounted storm bolter and bit through his vambrace, drawing blood. Stern grunted and lunged forward, driving his blade into the creature’s abdomen. The combatants locked. Even after running it through, the possessed Wolf still fought, lupine jaws distending with unnatural ease as they snapped and slavered at Stern’s helm.

  Stern spat strings of words from the Rites of Exorcism, channelling the holy willpower of his collected Brotherhood into his blade’s psyker-sensitive steel. The stab of energy was infinitely more potent than the physical edge, tearing deep into the daemon wearing the Space Wolf’s flesh. Like shadows ripped apart by a sudden flood of light, the warp creature was banished back to the immaterium. The defiled body of the Wolf slumped against Stern, dead, infected blood pattering down the daemonhunter’s silver armour. Stern pushed the body off, commending its lost soul to the Emperor.

  Around him, his brothers fought for their lives. They had been trained almost from birth to destroy warpspawn. From their blades – adamantium-tipped, forged from blessed silver and blessed by holy water – to their aegis armour – inscribed with catechisms of hatred and wards of faith, and anointed with sacred oils – every inch of their being was repellent to the creatures that scuttled and crawled in the darkest corners of mankind’s imagination.

  But the things they fought now were not purely daemonic. They were an unholy melding, a dark union between the physical and that which should only have existed in nightmares. The flesh of the possessed Wolves did not cringe from purifying silver, and it did not vanish back to the warp when pierced by righteous steel. The speed, strength and savagery of the Space Wolves, itself a match for the battle skill of Stern’s brethren, had been augmented a hundredfold by the dark cunning and unholy vigour of the things that had come from the warp.

  The Grey Knights struggled to match them. Force weapons clashed with chitin and twisted steel, and claws raked at silver power armour. One of the possessed had locked multiple jaws around Brother Lucan’s gorget, tearing open the ceramite with unnatural ease and gorging itself on the flesh of the Space Marine’s throat. Brother Wilfred slammed his force glaive into the creature’s scaled flank, bellowing in High Gothic. Still it hung on. Lucan was on his knees, blood jetting from the savage wound. Wilfred rammed his storm bolter into the side of the thing’s skull and fired, disintegrating it with a blast of hexagrammically inscribed bolts. Beside him Brother Tomaz had wreathed another of the former Space Wolves in the white flames of his incinerator.

  The thing howled, the sound more like four voices than one, all shrieking together. Even as the flesh melted from its deformed bones it came on, clutching Tomaz in a fiery embrace. The Grey Knight kicked the charred remains away in time to take a blow from another possessed Wolf’s hammer-like bony appendage. The impact dented his helmet and slammed him back into the fleshy walls of the docking spine.

  Stern parried the chainsword of another possessed. The weapon had melded with the Space Wolf’s arm, black ichor now oiling the spinning saw-teeth. Stern’s sword locked with it, the tendon-rotor screaming, the teeth jammed as they tried to chew through the blessed steel. The possessed thrust forward, using its unnatural strength to drive Stern back, vox grille snapping with freshly sprouted fangs.

  ‘Brother-captain!’ Alacar bellowed from behind Stern. ‘Down!’

  The Grey Knight reacted without thinking, going on one knee with his sword still locked. He felt the weight of Alacar’s charged force hammer swing overhead. The crackling weapon struck the possessed squarely in the face, pulverising its horned skull and slamming the body back down the corridor with a concussive blast of released energy.

  There was no time for thanks. Stern turned his rise into a lunge that impaled the two-headed horror leaping at him. More daemons were attacking in the wake of the possessed. A back-cut cleaved apart another of the Tzeentch horrors in a blaze of multi-coloured light. A hellsword caught him in the thigh plate, scoring a shallow wound above his cuisse’s seal. A second hacked deep into his right pauldron, scarring the book-and-sword sigil of his Chapter. Stern parried another blow, his sword a silver blur as he kept two hissing bloodletters at bay.

  ‘We’re losing ground,’ Gideon shouted over the vox, moments before a hellsword punched into his gut.

  ‘Tomaz, ignition pattern,’ Stern snapped, throwing Gideon back with a thrust of his pauldron. ‘Scourge formation. Slowly.’

  Tomaz adopted a braced stance and unleashed his flamer in a wide arc, covering the corridor from one side to the other. The walls themselves shuddered and writhed beneath the purifying heat. The warp-wolves howled and shrieked as their flesh ignited, while the flames licked harmlessly across the armour of Stern’s paladins. As one the Grey Knights stepped back, heeding their brother-captain’s orders to disengage. Artemis, Alacar and Wilfred snatched the fallen bodies of Lucan and Gideon as they went, the remaining six knights closing protectively around them.

  Tomaz’s flames didn’t check the possessed for long. If anything, it only drove the daemons into a greater frenzy. They tore through the docking spine, bodies still wreathed in fire. The Grey Knights opened up at point-blank range, hammering them with mass-reactive bolts.

  ‘Report?’ Stern snapped into the vox.

  ‘A few moments more, lord,’ came the strained voice of Star Drake’s huscarl.

  ‘You don’t have them,’ Stern said, parrying the raking claws of a burning, b
olt-riddled possessed with a sucking maw for a head. ‘Open the blast doors.’

  Pace by pace the Grey Knights continued to retreat. When the warpspawn pressed too close, the supportive fire of Wilfred, Alacar and Artemis from the rear ranks cut them down, while Stern, Osbeth, Simeon, Caldor, Tomaz, Ethold and Latimer hacked, slashed and stabbed unceasingly at the frothing, snarling tide. Behind him, Stern heard the grate of the docking blast doors rolling open.

  ‘Tomaz, burn them again,’ he ordered. The fact that the possessed were still clawing at them showed how powerful the warp rift at Gormenjarl’s heart was. They had to close it, and there was only one way to achieve that now.

  ‘My last canister,’ Tomaz voxed, before stepping up once more. The roar of holy flames and the shriek of warpspawn filled the corridor once again. The Grey Knights used the precious few seconds to turn, dragging their wounded back into the Star Drake.

  ‘Hold them here,’ Stern ordered as he reached the doors. ‘We can give the crew a few moments more.’

  As Tomaz backed through the opening, jetting the remains of his incinerator’s promethium canister after him, the other nine Knights halted at the blast doors and unleashed a hail of silver-tipped storm bolter rounds. The corridor immediately in front of the door disintegrated in a hail of torn, burning flesh and detonating shells.

  ‘We’ve done all we can, lord,’ the huscarl’s voice crackled in Stern’s ear.

  ‘Disengage from the docking spine,’ Stern ordered. ‘Now.’ He slammed the sealing rune next to the blast doors. The heavy adamantium juddered shut just as Tomaz stepped inside, his incinerator sputtering a few last drops of liquid fire. Moments later there came the hammering and shrieking of things on the other side, furiously attempting to claw their way inside the Star Drake.

  ‘Caldor, Osbeth, take Lucas and Gideon to the medicae bay,’ Stern ordered. ‘Everyone else remain here, overwatch pattern. Ensure there is no breach. I am going to the bridge.’ There was a thump and a moan of metal as the Grey Knight spoke, and the sounds of pounding from the far side of the blast doors trailed off.

  ‘We’re retreating?’ Ethold called after Stern as he strode towards the docking bay’s grav lift. The big paladin was slicked with dripping, stinking ichor, fists locked around the haft of his force glaive. Stern didn’t look back.

  ‘No.’

  The Star Drake’s bridge was a hive of activity. The huscarl Stern had given temporary command to was standing atop the command dais, snapping orders to his kaerls. In the open vision ports Stern saw Gormenjarl hoving into view as the ship detached itself from the docking spine and swung about to face it.

  ‘Were repairs completed?’ Stern asked as he strode onto the bridge. The huscarl bowed hastily.

  ‘We still cannot route full power to the plasma drives for fear of overloading them, lord, but to all intents and purposes, yes. The coolant coupling was eighty-five per cent complete when we detached. We should make far better time now. Do you have a heading?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Stern said. ‘Reroute power to the forward bombardment cannon. Lock onto the star fort, I don’t care where. Just hit it.’

  ‘Affirmative, lord,’ said the huscarl, before barking orders to the gunnery station. Deep in the Star Drake’s bowels whips cracked and chain gangs heaved in the hellish half-light as they dragged a vast bombardment shell into the breach of the Strike Cruiser’s primary cannon. The ship’s machine-spirit, manifest in the probing of its sensory arrays and augur masts, easily acquired the huge target presented by Gormenjarl.

  ‘Bombardment cannon loaded and locked, lord,’ a gunnery kaerl called.

  ‘Fire,’ Stern said.

  Swallowed by the void, there was no sound of any discharge, but the flash of the mighty weapon reflected back from the fort’s gleaming bulkheads, and the tremor of its recoil reached the bridge’s decking plates. Seconds passed. Then part of the star fort’s gaping docking space blossomed outwards, eerily silent, the armour plating blown apart by the point-blank shot and spinning away with a curiously majestic slowness.

  ‘You were right, Brother Artemis,’ Stern said, smiling grimly. ‘Gormenjarl’s shields no longer function.’

  He turned to the gunnery station. ‘Huscarl, direct all firepower at the structural weak points. I want to have dealt it crippling damage within the hour. And have your communications pit patch me through to the Fang immediately.’

  The Fang, Fenris

  Lord Krom Dragongaze’s footsteps led him into darkness.

  A part of him knew he should not venture into the Vaults. It was a cursed place, an icy shaft buried deep into the roots of the mountain. A place of cracked, worn statues and sealed doors, their mechanisms frozen solid with ice. The power had long ago failed, and even the great geothermal reactor coils that helped keep the Fenrisian death-chill from the Fang’s corridors had never reached this deep. This was beyond the Underfang and the Halls of the Revered Fallen, a place marked on few maps, and remembered in even fewer living memories.

  Krom trod the rock-carved corridors with care, the active hum of his power armour painfully loud in the stony depths. He held a lumen orb in one hand, its pale light picking out the graven alcoves and craggy stairways before him. In a place like this, even the Fierce-eye didn’t want to trust to his senses alone.

  He passed three ward-doors before he reached the chamber he sought. He had to search the depths of his long memory to conjure up the correct pass-codes, and he felt the static buzz of hexagrammic wards and power shields as he passed through each one. Beyond the last lay a great, vaulted room. Krom’s orb failed to even pick out its ceiling. The stony glare of a hundred forgotten Wolf Guard stared down at Dragongaze from their plinths lining the chamber’s walls, while row after row of metal caskets filled its open floor.

  Krom glanced at his visor display, but it told him little. The vox, the chrono counter and his tracking signal had all failed him. He could have passed into another dimension as far as his auto-senses were concerned. All he had was a temperature reading well below freezing, his spiking vital signs, and targeting reticules continually flashing a warning red as they picked up the false outlines of the ancient statues. He deactivated them with a blink, trying to ease his jagged heartrate.

  ‘Why are you here,’ he growled to himself. Even though he hadn’t vocalised it beyond his helmet, the words seemed to echo about in the frozen, lost chamber. There was no reply, but he knew the answer anyway. He could not sit and wait in the great halls of the Fang while the rest of his Chapter fought and bled across the other home worlds of the Fenris System. He had to try to learn the truth. Perhaps, down here, there would be an insight into the curse that plagued them.

  The casket he was seeking was the nearest to the ward-door. It was the last one to have been brought to the haunted depths, laid to rest less than four centuries earlier. Krom approached it, his lumen orb flickering, as though reluctant to go any further. The casket was large – steel bound in brass and big enough to hold Snegga the Giant, the broadest warrior in Krom’s Great Company. Its flanks were inscribed with ancient, intricate runic script while a carving of the World Wolf was inlaid on its lid. Krom brushed his fingers against it, and felt the throbbing power of an active stasis field within.

  The Wolf Lord set his orb down beside the casket and unlocked the gauntlet from his left hand, laying it beside the orb. Then he drew his combat knife, and nicked the razor steel against the back of his hand. A single line of blood ran down his forefinger. He held it against the gene-lock panel set into the casket’s flank. There was a whir as the mechanism matched and confirmed the genetic heritage of the sons of Russ. Then there came a thud of bolts, and a hiss of pressure sealant as the casket’s heavy lid slid slowly back on auto-hinges. Krom kept his combat knife out.

  At first, with the lumen orb still on the ground next to it, the casket’s interior was just a well of power-charged darkness. Krom’s aut
o-senses were stripping the shadows away when a single small lumen in the casket’s top blinked on. What it revealed inside was a horror.

  The Great Wolf had saved it four centuries earlier, on the frigid world of Lumerius. The vile traitors of the Black Legion, led by the insane butcher Fabius Bile, had been hunting for it, desperate to seize its genetic material and fashion an army of nightmares to augment their dark strength. Grimnar and the Champions of Fenris had gotten there first, putting the traitors to the sword and rescuing the casket. It had been taken here, to the deepest vaults of the Fang, and here it had lain undisturbed ever since, sleeping the ages away in the frozen darkness. Fang-brother, the Lost, Herald of Russ. Wulfen.

  The creature had been locked in the casket’s inbuilt stasis field, its claws out, features twisted in an eternal, bestial snarl. Krom bent forward to look into its eyes, seeking something more than animal hunger in them. As his shadow fell across the Wulfen he got the distinct sense that the thing was looking back at him, aware, every muscle silently straining against its enforced paralysis. The Wolf Lord straightened hastily.

  It was not a Space Wolf. Perhaps it had been once, but the heraldry of its ancient power armour belonged to the Wolf Brothers. Theirs was a tragic tale. The only Successor Chapter ever founded by the VI Legion, the genetic legacy of Russ had proven to be too volatile to be replicated beyond Fenris. According to half-remembered, half-believed legend, the Wolf Brothers had been riven by the curse of the Wulfen. Those not killed had been scattered by the tides amidst the Sea of Stars. The few that still survived were hunted, whether by a misguided Imperium, or darker powers.

  Grimnar had gotten to this one just before the forces of Chaos had latched their claws around it. The thought of the warped geneticist Bile capturing a Wulfen for his experiments was a terrible one. Looking down at the stasis-frozen body of the feral creature, Krom sought reason in its form. Legend held that the Wulfen’s return presaged that of the primarch himself. Certainly the old Wolf Priest Ulrik had thought as much. Others had been less certain.