Fate Unbound - Robbie MacNiven Read online

  Sven cut its head off. Black ichor fountained across the Wolf, and after a moment the thing flickered and vanished, sword and all. Sven bit back a moan as blood flowed from the wound in his side, battling to blank out the pain.

  He was tired. His thoughts, still coloured with the arrogant exuberance of a young Firehowler, railed against the idea of admitting it, but it stood as a fact, incontrovertible despite his own skjald-worthy battle-lust. He had been fighting for days without rest or sustenance. His armour was scarred and in need of maintenance, the servos whirring and heaving, the auto-senses lagging fractionally. His body was no better; it was bruised, cut and bleeding, his hand still sprained and his rib-plate now split in two places. A swooping pack of furies had also managed to rake a wound through the seal of his right pauldron. His vital readouts told him the hellsword had just pierced his oolitic kidney. The wound was far from fatal – his genhanced biology was already rushing to clot and reknit the damage – but the sudden pain had brought home the reality Sven had been denying.

  They were all going to die.

  If Harald knew it he wasn’t admitting it. The Deathwolf was marshalling the defence of the northern and eastern side of the coral shoal, directing the ordnance of the Predators and a trio of Land Raiders at its base as they poured fire into the onrushing wyrdspawn. Sven’s heavy armour did much the same on the opposing slopes, while the bloodied packs gathered themselves further up, checking bolt magazines and dragging thick chunks of daemonic viscera from their chainblades.

  Sven counted the heads of the Skyclaw pack around him. Four of the youths still stood. Olaf, his brow a crusting mess where a daemonette’s claw had caught him earlier, was his last standing Bloodguard. Kregga still lived, but had been almost gutted by a Khornate murder engine. He’d been dragged to the hill’s crest where the Wolf Priests were seeing to the Wolves’ wounded. The rune on Sven’s visor representing his vital signs display pulsed weakly.

  The Skyclaws were staring, and he realised abruptly that he’d been clutching the wound in his side, gauntlet slick with his own blood. He snarled at them, like a pack leader, and they averted their gazes.

  ‘Not long now, pup,’ Harald’s voice crackled over the vox.

  ‘Before the last of us vanish beneath this tide of filth?’ Harald didn’t respond. The air around Sven throbbed as a macrocannon shell from low orbit turned the seabed two hundred yards south into a roiling ball of flame. The Space Wolves ships had shifted their firepower from the southern portal to the wyrdlings flinging themselves at the stalled ground advance. Even their great weapons would not be enough. Time, the basis of Harald’s desperate strategy, was running out.

  Then Sven’s short-range auspex display lit up, and finally everything changed.

  Shuttle Forty-Eight Nine-B, in high orbit above Midgardia

  The Rock made Gormenjarl and Mjalnar look like reclusiam outhouses set alongside a fully fledged Ministorum basilica. It completely filled the pict feeds of the Herald’s shuttle, a craggy planetoid of black, crater-scarred stone studded with bristling spires. Defence turrets, communication uplinks, augur shafts and the yawning maws of spacedock ports were set alongside the crenelated structures that presumably housed the Dark Angels chapel-barracks, armoury cells and training towers.

  A whole fleet could have rearmed and refitted safely within the Rock’s bowels. The light of the Wolf’s Eye reflected back from a thousand arched, stained crystalflex viewing ports and the barrels of a hundred super-heavy defence-system weapons. Light throbbed from the fortified planet shard too, idling in its vast plasma drives and warp engines, and flickering with actinic energy where its ancient force shield shorted and sparked. Crowning it all was the Angelicasta, the Tower of Angels, a great bastion-pillar of dark, shattered stone and flying buttresses surrounded by a cluster of cathedral-sized ruins.

  Looking upon the ancient spaceborne monolith, even Ragnar felt a pang of doubt. The fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels matched the Fang in its towering, seemingly indestructible bulk. It represented the original might of the First Legion, a throwback to mankind’s sundering, the days of wrath and ruin when brother had fought brother and the fate of the galaxy had stood poised on a razor edge.

  ‘Into the Lion’s den,’ the Wolf Lord muttered.

  Neither Stern nor de Mornay answered. Both were watching the visual feeds alongside Ragnar, their faces grim. For the first time since Ragnar had met him, the inquisitor had welcomed them aboard his shuttle standing up, rather than slumped in his palanquin. He was clad in a suit of humming mark seventeen exo-plate, thick with vitae-support coils and strapped-on life pumps. His torso was shielded with reinforced layers of flak, while an energy-conversion pack plugged into his back plates powered the armoured leg callipers and limb braces that held him firm. Though the inquisitor was pale with the obvious strain placed upon his ageing body, he seemed to draw a grim pleasure from Ragnar’s surprise when he saw him.

  ‘Try to keep up, Wolf,’ he’d said, patting the plasma pistol locked to his hip. Now, as they drew near the Rock, Ragnar noted the inquisitor’s knuckles were white beneath the plasteel tendons of his exo-armour, his scarred body clearly charged with anticipation. Once again the Space Wolf wondered at the man’s obsession with the Dark Angels. The relationship between the ordos and the Adeptus Astartes was often fraught, but de Mornay seemed to have dedicated his entire life to hounding the Lions. Ragnar wondered how much longer they’d permit him to chase them.

  ‘We go to negotiate, not fight,’ Stern said.

  ‘They’re often very similar, good captain,’ the inquisitor replied. ‘Both should be conducted from a position of strength. That’s something you learn quickly once you join the ordos.’

  The shuttle docked, sliding through a deactivated section of the force shield and into the waiting maw of one of the Rock’s ports. Ragnar released his restraining harness as the landing probes brought the transport to a shuddering halt. The main hatch disengaged with a thud of clamps and a whine of hydraulics, venting gouts of steam. Beyond it the docking bay was scattered with dead-eyed haulage servitors and scampering Chapter-serfs in discoloured white shifts. Gargoyle-headed vox speakers inset into the bare stone walls blared servicing orders and screeds of data updates.

  A single Dark Angel waited for the three arrivals, the white cowl of his habit drawn up. He gave a short, stiff bow as they stepped out onto the bay.

  ‘Lords, my name is Sergeant Elija. If you will follow me.’ He turned without waiting for them, pacing off towards a grav lift. Ragnar glanced at Stern, but the Knight’s face was unreadable. They followed.

  If the Fang was a tribal lair carved into Asaheim’s cold stone, then the Rock was an ancient cathedral long abandoned. Elija led them down echoing corridors thick with dust and through antechambers overlooked by the towering statues of hooded angels. The floor beneath was flagged with stones and the heavy brick walls bound with shafts of age-dulled plasteel, while the ceiling overhead was vaulted and choked with deep shadows. Burning, spiked braziers flickered at intervals down the corridor, their light seeming to deepen the foreboding gloom. The only signs of life – though it was a cruel jest to call it such – were the servo-skulls that occasionally hummed past, or observed them with blinking optics and empty sockets from brass charging ports set high on the corridor walls. Until they came to the bridge, they met no one.

  Ragnar wondered whether the apparent desolation was just for show. He could feel the humming power of the charged asteroid vibrating through the surfaces around him, and distant booms and clunks occasionally shook pattering motes of dust down from the vaults overhead. He knew there were hundreds of Adeptus Astartes and tens of thousands of serfs above, below and around him. Either the Dark Angels wished to hide their strength, or unsettle their visitors.

  And despite Ragnar’s burning dislike for the sons of the Lion, their efforts were not wholly in vain. An air of unutterable melancholy hung
over the entire fortress-monastery, an ache of the heart that had gone on for far too long. For the first time, the Space Wolf felt something more akin to remorse rather than spite when he considered the Unforgiven. While the halls of the Fang echoed with exuberant boasts, skjald-songs and the sounds of feasting, the Rock lay in cold, sepulchral silence, alone in the void.

  The silence at least was banished when they reached the primary bridge. The plainsong chants of course-chartists warring with the crackle of vox horns, the rattling of cogitators, the blaring of alarm systems and the whir of augur pickups and oculus viewscreens, the scuffle of hurrying feet and the frantic murmur of situation reports finally gave evidence of activity. Elija led the trio through the feverish workings of the vast, echoing command hub, Stern at the fore, de Mornay limping at the rear in his walking armour.

  Their path led them to a great, hooded figure, overseeing the ceaseless work from a throne centred atop a dais that rose from the surrounding communications pits like some ancient ziggurat. Beside the throne stood a second figure, similarly clad in a white habit, the black battleplate and screaming-skull helm marking him out as one of the Dark Angels’ Interrogator-Chaplains. Both figures surveyed Elija as he stopped beneath the dais and struck his gauntlet against his breastplate in salute.

  ‘Welcome, Brother-Captain Stern,’ said the figure on the throne. He rose and descended the stairs, servos humming. All the while he looked only at the Grey Knight, eyes dark and piercing beneath his cowl.

  ‘Supreme Grand Master Azrael,’ Stern said, nodding his head in a brief show of respect. ‘My thanks for receiving us here.’

  ‘You left me little choice, Grey Knight.’

  ‘Choice is a luxury few of us possess.’

  ‘That much is true.’ The Dark Angel and his Chaplain reached the foot of the dais, facing the interlopers. Throughout the exchange they had pointedly ignored both Ragnar and de Mornay. The Wolf Lord felt his anger spike. He could sense the inquisitor beside him struggling to hold his tongue.

  ‘My Master Interrogator-Chaplain, Brother Asmodai,’ Azrael said, introducing the reaper-like figure beside him.

  ‘Explain your presence here, daemonhunter,’ Asmodai said, words slipping like serpent’s venom from his black, cowl-shrouded helm.

  ‘There is something wrong with this place,’ Stern said. ‘I felt it as soon as I stepped onboard.’

  ‘Do not abuse my hospitality,’ Azrael said. ‘I have brought you here in good faith.’

  ‘Then indulge me, lord.’ Stern cast his hard gaze across the bridge. ‘I have hunted the filth of the warp for as long as you have been Master of your Chapter. My kind are trained to root out taint, and my warp-sight knows when they are near.’

  Ragnar noted that the holy etchings on the Grey Knight’s silver aegis had started to glow dully.

  ‘Recently there have been a… number of inexplicable incidents,’ Azrael said slowly, as though unwilling to admit as much. ‘One of our Scouts disappeared from the apothecarion, and a number of the Chapter-serfs have been acting strangely. Even our Master Astropath is unsettled. My own vox seneschal has been–’

  ‘Where is he?’ Stern interrupted, hand dropping to the hilt of his force sword.

  Azrael glanced at the primary communications pit and frowned. His gaze travelled up, and caught the back of Vox Seneschal Mendaxis, trailing data cables and readout scrolls as he walked brusquely towards the bridge’s open blast doors.

  ‘Mendaxis!’ Azrael barked. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  Stern’s blade rasped from its scabbard, and the air was suddenly full of static charge. Mendaxis didn’t look back, but darted through the doors, far faster than any human being should have been able to move.

  ‘Daemon,’ Stern snarled.

  Svellgard

  Like the Wolf That Stalks Between Stars, the Redmaws fell from the void upon Svellgard. The vox thrilled with howls and snarls, and the words of Bran himself.

  ‘Hold firm, brothers. The Lost have returned.’

  Drop pods struck the seabed to the south of what should have been the site of Sven and Harald’s last stand. Wulfen burst from them as soon as their flanks dropped, driven into a maddened frenzy by the confined spaces. Four Murderpacks ripped into the daemons north of the warp rift, their howls echoing up to their embattled brethren.

  The rest of Bran Redmaw’s Great Company – those who had resisted the curse – followed. They fought their way from their pods with savage efficiency, bolters hammering the knots of daemons not already broken apart by their sudden, brutal arrival. Thunderhawks sped low overhead, raking the lesser daemons with more bolter fire, their forward cannons blasting apart the larger engines and writhing spawn. Within minutes the drop zone was secure.

  Sven and Harald had no need to confer, either with Bran or each other. Together they ordered their bloodied packs forward, fuelled by the wild strength of warriors who had learned their immediate deaths were not yet inevitable. They led from the front, trying to outpace each other, frost axes an icy blur in the cold, ichor-saturated air. Darkness was falling, and the last gleam of the Wolf’s Eye touched upon the tarnished armour of the three Great Companies as they came together near the rift’s swirling, churning edge.

  The killing did not end there. The daemons flung themselves at the Wolves with even greater fury than before, heedless of their fate, desperate to rip flesh and shed blood before they were thrown from the material universe. But they found their fury outmatched. Bran’s Wulfen – almost half his Great Company – were savage even for their cursed kind. They fought on despite the gravest of wounds, seemingly sustained by the purity of their hatred. The legions of the Dark Gods could not stand before them.

  As the circle finally tightened around the last rift, the ships of the Wolves’ three fleets combined their armaments, raining fire down into the hellmaw. Together Sven, Harald and Bran hurled the wyrdspawn back into their watery abyss, while the colossal tear of weeping flesh and bone that had burrowed from the darkest dimension into Svellgard’s reality was unmade by orbital annihilation. On the Wolves fought, killing now on instinct, exhaustion driving out conscious thought and leaving room only for the swing of blade and the slash of claws.

  And then, suddenly, Sven found no more wyrdflesh for Frostclaw’s slick edge. He spun, snarling, expecting to be struck from behind, fearing some fresh maleficarum.

  Instead he realised he was staring back at the remains of his pack – ragged, panting, bloody in twilight’s last light. The anger and the hatred that had sustained him was suddenly gone, and he fell to his knees amid the surf, head bowed.

  It was over.

  And yet, in truth, it had barely begun.

  The Rock, in high orbit above Midgardia

  The Changeling laughed freely as it fled. It darted down the bridge’s main access corridor and then right, through a sub-shaft, the doors sliding open with a flick of the Mendaxis-thing’s hand. Around it Chapter-serfs scrambled to get out of the way, wide-eyed with shock.

  Throughout the Rock, warning claxons began to wail. The vox piece still fitted to the Mendaxis-thing’s ear was alive with frantic chatter. Through it all, the furious voice of Azrael boomed.

  ‘Stop that thing!’

  The Changeling managed to control its mirth long enough to spit a string of arcane syllables, grotesquely distorting the Mendaxis-thing’s mouth in order to utter the unnatural words. The vox-link clicked and went silent, the channel killed as assuredly as if the transmission stud had been flicked. The daemonic entity bound to the scrapcode virus the Changeling had uploaded from the primary communications pit had awoken. It would take weeks of machine-psalms and recoding before it was banished and the Rock’s internal communications systems were functioning again.

  The giggling daemon vaulted down a plasteel stairwell and knocked a serf out of the way. At the daemon’s touch the man screamed and c
onvulsed, flesh breaking out into hideous, bloody growths. The Changeling didn’t even notice, barging through one door and then down another flight. Around it reality was a blur, a haze of multiple possibilities overlaying and interlocking with each other. Its goal lay down, deep down, amidst the stygian darkness of the Rock’s forbidden crypts and vaults.

  Soon the distant ritual would be complete, and its master’s plan one step closer to glorious, irresistible, ever-changing fruition.

  They found Mendaxis in a long-disused venting shaft for a reserve thermal coil. His neck had been snapped and he’d been stripped naked, his wizened body hung upside down from a coolant pipe and carved bloody with dark sigils. The corpse was weeks old.

  Interrogator-Chaplain Elezar was there too. He’d been struck so hard that his skull helm had fractured. He still lived, but his sus-an membrane had forced his body into a regenerative coma, and he was immobile. Azrael snapped orders at a train of anxious Chapter-serfs to have him taken to the apothecarion. The hunt resumed.

  ‘This way,’ Stern said. He pounded down a flight of stairs, ceramite ringing off steel, the air heavy with the static charge of his force blade’s disruptor field. Azrael and Ragnar were right behind him. The Wolf Lord had Frostfang out, its rotor idling throatily, while Azrael had drawn the Sword of Secrets, the power weapon’s ancient obsidian blade crackling with its own energy field.

  Asmodai and de Mornay followed, the inquisitor in front, struggling in his whirring battle-suit. Having the Master Interrogator-Chaplain stalking directly behind him set the inquisitor’s whole body on edge, and with every step a part of him expected to feel the Dark Angel’s ignited crozius arcanum slam into his back.

  Below, Stern pushed deeper, through another set of blast doors that, until recently, had been firmly warded and sealed. There were few warp entities capable of penetrating the psychic defences of a fortress-monastery as ancient as the Rock, and even fewer capable of surviving there for any length of time. Whatever the thing was, it had left behind a trail. Its passing would have been invisible to untuned mortals; Stern, however, had the witch sight.