War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Read online

  ‘Morkai,’ spat Brakk, his voice filtered through the battered grille of his helm. ‘To get you bags of dung...’ He shook his head, and bone totems rattled across the armour like dreadlocks. ‘Just die quickly, or don’t hold me up.’

  Helfist grinned.

  ‘We’ll be hauling your pelt out,’ he laughed savagely, flexing his power claw. Like all of the pack he wore his helm – the near-void altitude of the Fang was too punishing for the bare-headed bravado he preferred.

  ‘If we think we can get something for it,’ added Redpelt, raising his bolt pistol and checking the ammo counter as he ran. His pauldrons had been drenched in blood-red and the jaws of his helm had a row of teeth running along the lower edge.

  ‘Where’s this old man taking us, anyway?’ asked Helfist. A shock of straw-pale horsehair hung from his helm and the two Runes of Ending, Ymir and Gann, had been etched on his breastplate.

  ‘Sunrising Gate,’ snarled the packleader. ‘The only thing on the planet harder than your skulls.’

  ‘Was that a joke, brother?’ enquired Helfist.

  ‘An insult, I think,’ replied Redpelt.

  Brakk came to a halt as the tunnel roof suddenly soared above them into emptiness. Ahead, the floor petered out into a pier overhanging a huge, dark shaft. The pit below was massive, wreathed in shadow and lit only by scattered red glowglobes. The beat of the drums rose out of it, deep and threatening.

  ‘Don’t we have Aettguard for gate-duty?’ demanded another Bloodclaw, Fyer Brokentooth. His voice was thick with the wolf-spirit, guttural, throaty and aggressive.

  ‘You think we’re waiting for the bastards to get to the gates?’ asked Brakk, turning to face the pack and backing toward the shaft. ‘Russ’s arse, lad, grow a pair – and then a brain.’

  Then he was gone, sweeping down through the thermals, descending hundreds of a metres a second, swooping from the Jarlheim levels to those of the Hould.

  Helfist looked at Brokentooth.

  ‘I thought it was a fair question.’

  Brokentooth ignored him and followed the packleader over the edge. Helfist’s helm signals showed the two of them plummeting toward the gate level.

  ‘Try to keep up, brother,’ he said to Redpelt, joining the remainder of the pack and stepping lightly over the edge.

  ‘Try to stop me,’ said Redpelt, taking up the last position and spreading his arms to control the descent.

  Hurtling like scree in an avalanche, the Blood Claw pack sped toward their zone of engagement. Above and below them, the beat of the drums hammered out the fresh, urgent call. On every level, in every passageway, figures took up their allotted positions. Bolter batteries swivelled into fire-locks, Land Raider engines gunned throatily into life, and throughout the Aett packs of grey-armoured warriors raced to their stations.

  The Wolves had been challenged in their lair, and like ghosts loping across the ice they swept to answer the call.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Blackwing had lost track of the damage done to his ship. After so many runes across the console had gone red, it started getting hard to differentiate between them all. The picture was bad, though. The Nauro had never taken pain like it. Even if every remaining shell, las-beam and torpedo somehow managed to miss them, the battered vessel was probably doomed from the damage it had already taken.

  Still, the message from the Valgard had shaken things up a bit. Unlike his more hot-blooded brethren, Blackwing had never been too keen on the heroic last stand. He was a dark wolf, a hugger of the shadows, and that bred a powerful sense of self-preservation. It was why the Claws and Hunters disliked him, and why he disliked them. The seed of Russ was bountiful, though, and provided for the whole range of killers – his knife-hook from the gloom was as lethal as a bolter-round in the daylight, after all.

  The destroyer he’d targeted lurched into view on the ventral screens. It was in a bad way too, having been hit directly by a gun platform. Those things spat out terrifying amounts of energy, and when one got you, you knew it. Apart from its heavy structural damage, the enemy ship seemed to have lost engine control and had begun to spin away planetwards. A long trail of rust-red plasma ran out to its starboard-zenith. Blackwing could see the pricks of light along its flanks as it tried to power up its broadside batteries, but it wasn’t getting them online any time soon.

  ‘Do we have that shot?’ demanded Blackwing, rolling the ship to bring his starboard guns in line with an incoming wing of gunships.

  ‘Affirmative,’ barked a kaerl at the gunnery pulpit, sounding more confident than he had done a moment ago.

  ‘Then get a lock, and do it,’ snapped Blackwing, watching with irritation as he lost power to his port shield generator. Something was broken badly down there, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘Twenty seconds.’

  Then Blackwing saw death coming for him. A wing of Thousand Sons frigates had broken from the dogged assault on theSkraemar and its escorts and was sweeping back to clear up the remainder of the scattered Wolves fleet. The ships were moving fast. Too fast. At least three of them would be in range before he’d be able to pull away from the fleet action and break for open space. Gunships were one thing; frigates another.

  ‘Lord, we have–’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I have eyes. Lock trajectory to target and give me assault speed.’

  That time all the kaerls looked up to stare at him, even those busy wrestling with fires on their consoles.

  Blackwing gave them a cool stare back.

  ‘Or will I rip your throats out, one by one?’ he asked, pulling his bolt pistol from its holster.

  The crew hurried back to their tasks. The Nauro yawed badly as the engines were goaded even further and the attack vector was replaced by an interception course. The targeted destroyer loomed larger. It was getting much closer, much faster.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  ‘Need it sooner,’ said Blackwing, gripping the sides of his chair and watching tensely as the target raced into proximity. He could see the plumes of flame along its sides, riddling the ornate gold trim of the decks. The ship’s captain was trying to get it out of the way, but with its crippled engines it was as becalmed as an ice-skiff in the doldrums. The gap between the vessels shrank further.

  ‘Five.’

  The frigates were now within range, and sensors across Blackwing’s console registered their forward lances powering up.

  ‘Skítja. More speed!’

  He briefly imagined the frantic comms between the destroyer and the incoming frigates. For all the world, it looked like he was on a suicidal ramming course, which was just the thing a barbarous savage would do.

  By then, Blackwing could see the decoration on the destroyer’s baroque prow. It was called the Illusion of Certainty.

  How apt.

  ‘Firing!’

  The Nauro buckled as its remaining forward lance blazed into life, sending a searing beam of sun-white, ship-carving energy screaming toward the destroyer. It hit direct amidships, tearing through the weakened shields and burying deep into the structure. A ball of metal-laced flame burst outward, cracking the destroyer in two.

  ‘We’re going to hit!’ screamed a kaerl.

  The Nauro plunged straight into the inferno. Far too close to pull out at such speed, it spun right through the heart of the disintegrating structure.

  ‘Incoming!’ cried another kaerl frantically, diverting scarce power to the front shields.

  ‘Hold your nerve!’ roared Blackwing, piloting the ship through the expanding globe of shattered adamantium at full tilt. A massive section of the destroyer’s decking, itself almost as long as the Nauro, swung across to meet them. Blackwing flung the ship into a downward plummet, only to bring the head back round as a rotating spine of struts and bracing swept past on the port side. Debris was everywhere, rolling into their path and clattering against the weakened void shields like daemon-fingers on the Geller field. Something massive and heavy hit them hard under the h
ull, making the ship buck like a steer before it careered into another storm of shattered plating.

  ‘And we’re through!’ he whooped, pulling the Nauro into a sharp starboard-zenith climb and feeding the engines everything he had left. Tongues of plasma snaked after him as he broke through the orb of devastation, curling away in his wake like whips.

  Emerging from the far side of the destroyer’s death throes had given him precious seconds of time. The frigates would assume he’d destroyed himself in the ramming action. When they realised their error, the plasma trail would distort their targeting cogitators for a few seconds more.

  A few seconds was all he needed in a ship this fast. He was on the edge of the orbital battle, and open space beckoned ahead.

  ‘Faster!’ he bellowed, trying to see what damage had been done on the passage through the destroyer’s ruin. It looked like he’d lost most of his shields, and there was a major breach across his dorsal enginarium. ‘Dammit, push her harder or I’ll still rip your throats open!’

  The Nauro’s machine-spirit screamed its anger, protesting at the insane demands put on it, threatening to shut down and flush the life-support. Blackwing ignored it, screwing every last terajoule of power, wrenching every last plasma-burn of speed.

  ‘Status on Sleikre and Ogmar,’ he snapped, watching for the lance-salvo from the frigates that would make all his audacity worthless.

  ‘Destroyed, lord.’ The kaerl’s voice, though grudgingly appreciative, implied And so should we be. ‘We’re on our own.’

  Blackwing grinned. Something about cheating death at the expense of others appealed to his darker nature.

  ‘Maintain course and speed,’ he ordered. There was no sign of pursuit from the frigates, which in any case were too slow to catch him now. He looked over the tactical hololith, watching as the swarm of ships fell further behind. Against all expectation, they’d punched their way free. ‘Get us to the jump-point, and calculate translation vector for Gangava.’

  He turned to the row of console runes that he’d been ignoring for the past ten minutes. All still red. Technically, that meant the ship was almost certainly doomed. If it didn’t shake apart in normal space, then the warp would probably finish it. No shields, no weapons, shedding atmosphere and with nine decks on fire. Not a happy state to be in.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ said Blackwing aloud, unable to shake off his gruesome smile. ‘Blood of Russ, I’ll take it.’

  The Skraemar was an ancient, powerful warship, tempered in the long decades of the Great Scouring and bearing the scars of a hundred conflicts since. Some of her encounters had gained sector-wide fame: she’d defied a whole squadron of the Archenemy for two weeks in the Aemnon Belt until heavy support could arrive to turn the engagement, had taken out the much larger eldar Corsair flagship the Or-Iladril, and had led the breaking of the blockade of Pielos V at the tip of a desperately underpowered Imperial Navy spearhead. Her machine-spirit was old and star-cunning, and every inch of her machinations was known by her Iron Priest Beorth Rig. She was fast, packed a deadly punch, and didn’t die easily.

  So when she did die at last, isolated in high orbit above Fenris and surrounded by foes, the death was not quick. There was no sudden warp-core breach, no decisive detonation of promethium tanks. She was cut in a thousand places, broken open by a million separate stabs of white-hot las-fire, raked by a score of torpedo impacts and turned black by clouds of burning plasma. They kept coming at her, wave after wave of gunships, dancing around the crushing columns of spitting energy thrown through the void by the looming battleships.

  The Skraemar never stopped firing, even at the end. With her hull cracked, leaking fire and blood, she wallowed in a tide of incoming ordnance, swivelling on broken engines to maintain a firing lock on the Thousand Sons warships around her. With her frigate escorts all turned to atoms and the last dregs of the orbital grid collapsing in smoke and sparks, she was alone, a single gunmetal-grey island in a swarm of sapphire and gold.

  The Skraemar’s forward batteries thundered a final time, sending a torrent of whip-fast, spitting hatred toward a wounded Sons destroyer, the Staff of Khomek. All of her remaining power had been put into the volley. It ripped the enemy vessel apart from prow to stern, shattering the void shields with pure, overwhelming power.

  The Staff of Khomek was a minor kill, joining the Achaeonical, the Numeratory and the Fulcrumesque in oblivion. The Skraemarhad exacted a heavy toll with its defiance, but the end was coming quickly. Gliding through the tide of gently spinning scrap like a predator of the deep ocean, the massive profile of the Herumon emerged from the shadows and into firing rage.

  The Skraemar turned. Unbelievably, leaking oxygen into the void in great, jetting plumes, the crippled strike cruiser saw the danger and somehow managed to obtain a firing solution. On every deck, its remaining kaerls shouldered the burden of survival, performing acts of heroism merely to keep the plasma drives from exploding and the hull plating from crumpling inwards.

  Njan Anjeborn, the one they called Greyflank, the only survivor amid the wreckage of his command bridge, still piloted the crippled strike cruiser, preparing for another salvo, knowing there would be no kill this time, but striving to draw his final tithe of blood.

  Pitilessly, smoothly, the Herumon maintained its course. Taking no chances, lining up the ranked batteries with cool precision, the Thousand Sons flagship rounded down the options to a single, remorseless singularity.

  It took position, opened fire, and the void became light.

  As the brilliance cleared, the broken-backed Skraemar spun with a glacial agony away from the impact. The last of its shields buckled and fizzed out of life. A line of explosions ran along the port flanks, writhing against space like clusters of snakes. Other ships closed in, aware now that the Wolves flagship no longer had the teeth to so much as scrape the paint from their plating.

  On the command bridge, Anjeborn struggled from the cat’s cradle of ironwork around him, dragging his blood-drenched body back to the control pulpit. The pict screens were all down. Vital systems shuddered and gave out, condemning the surviving crew below to suffocation or freezing. He looked around, searching for one last gesture before the incoming spears of energy cut the last of the life from his command.

  There was nothing. The machine-spirit was cold and unresponsive. Anjeborn looked up, out through the plexiglass of the realspace viewers and into space. His last sight was the massive hull of the Herumon sliding across his field of vision, blotting out the destruction beyond. He saw at close quarters the rows upon rows of drop-pod launchers, the pristine launching bays stuffed with landers, the banks of void-to-surface immolators and the bronze lips of the torpedo tubes, all still unused.

  The weapons that would bring Hel to Fenris.

  As the explosions from below crashed their way up to his position, shattering what was left of his ship and sending debris far out into nothingness, Anjeborn watched his death coming for him. Clambering from his knees, he faced it standing, shoulders back, fangs bared, brazenly contemptuous of an enemy that hid behind such odds.

  ‘By your deeds are you known,’ he snarled as the final hammer-blows struck and the vacuum rushed in at last. ‘Faithless. Traitors. Cowards.’

  The Wolf Guard had departed for combat. Rossek, Skrieya and the other elite of the Twelfth had left for their stations, each in charge of their own packs. Only three Wolves remained in the Chamber of the Watch, and they would not linger there long.

  ‘The orbital defences are gone,’ said Greyloc grimly, turning away from the evidence of their destruction. ‘Counsel?’

  Wyrmblade scratched at the back of his leathery neck, his hook-nosed face crumpled into a grimace as he ran through the options. Augur statistics shone from the pict-screens, showing movements in space above them.

  ‘They’ll bring the troop carriers down out of range of the guns and come at us overland.’

  Sturmhjart looked at him questioningly.

  ‘They have control of
space – why not bombard from there?’

  Wyrmblade cracked a crooked smile.

  ‘Stick to your charms, priest. The shields over the Aett were built to last a siege from fleets four times as big. The witches don’t have that firepower, not since we crippled them on Prospero.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Greyloc quietly, ‘they have not come to hurl death from afar. They want to take this place, to desecrate it.’

  ‘I sense nothing,’ muttered Sturmhjart. He looked from Wyrmblade to Greyloc with doubt etched on his face. ‘I sense nothing at all.’

  The Wolf Priest shrugged. ‘They are masters of the wyrd.’

  ‘They know nothing of the wyrd!’ blurted the Rune Priest.

  ‘And yet they can blind you, and all your acolytes. Something powerful is protecting them.’

  None of them said the name out loud.

  ‘But there are defences,’ said Sturmhjart, looking sullen. ‘The Aett has wards in the stone, hundreds of them. Signs of aversion have been carved into the rock and infused with the world-spirit. No sorcerer can enter here, not even the mightiest of them.’

  Greyloc nodded.

  ‘Your brothers have tended them with exceptional care. Now we must preserve them further. How many Rune Priests remain?’

  ‘Six, but four are acolytes and their powers are untried. Only myself and Lauf Cloudbreaker have the power to match a Thousand Sons sorcerer, should one gain the portals.’

  Greyloc found himself cursing Ironhelm again, though he hid his emotions.

  You were warned, Great Wolf. The signs were there. Magnus has played you for a fool, and I should have been stronger.

  ‘Then they’ll have to learn quickly. Ensure the wards are sanctified, and that the Aettguard rivenmasters know their significance. These will be where the defence must be strongest.’

  Sturmhjart bowed.