War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Read online

  PART II:

  WAKING THE DEAD

  CHAPTER SIX

  Twelve hours after the destruction of the orbital defences, fire came to Asaheim.

  The Thousand Sons warships Alexandretta and Phosis T’Kar assumed geostationary orbit one hundred kilometres above the Fang and prepared their payloads for dispersal. The two ships had minimal crew – fewer than two thousand each – and virtually no void-war armaments. They’d been shielded from the battle by a dozen frigates and kept away from harm by ships more suited to close combat. In form, they resembled huge cylinders on a vertical axis wedged through the clinging superstructure of a conventional warship. Everything on board the two ships was designed to feed those cylinders, to keep them supplied with huge amounts of promethium and heavy plasma-derivatives they needed to operate. The curved muzzles were aimed planetwards, ready to unload the energies already cradling within their polished walls.

  Aphael called them planet-scourers. They were capable of levelling cities and razing continents, and there was nothing left in local space to hinder their operation.

  Orders went out over the fleet mission channel and the devices began to power up. Within the narrow crew corridors around the cylinder housing, unearthly whining gave way to a low rumble. Chain lightning leapt across the empty void between the cylinder walls, cracking against adamantium bulwarks and breaking out into the void. Generators geared up, pumping energy into enormous converters and channelling it through to the devastation engines.

  The escorts withdrew, opening up a gap of several hundred kilometres. The entire fleet kept its distance, like a crowd of frightened prey huddling out of range of the hunter.

  From his observation cell onboard the Herumon, Temekh watched the accumulation of titanic energies gain pace. The gathering of power was heady, and he could sense the bulging, raging torment locked within the weapons as the limits of containment were reached.

  ‘Lord, your chambers have been made ready.’

  The Spireguard equerry standing at his elbow broke Temekh’s concentration, and he had to suppress an urge to lash out at the mortal. He closed his eyes for a second, maintaining his position within the Enumerations. Some old habits died hard.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘I will observe this before leaving.’

  Even as he finished speaking, the planet-scourers reached their firing level.

  Massive, snaking columns of gold-silver energy thundered down to the target below, twisting and blazing as they sliced through the atmosphere and slammed into the continental shelf. The torrent kept up steadily, a seamless rain of millions upon millions of plasma projectiles, melded into two pillars of withering, draining power and focused on the apex of the mountain ranges below.

  ‘By the Crimson King,’ breathed the equerry, forgetting himself as he watched the lethal quantities of energy unleashed.

  Temekh smiled.

  ‘You think that lightshow will hurt the Dogs? Don’t fool yourself – this is just to keep them busy while Lord Aphael oversees the landing.’

  He turned away from the portal and darkened the viewers with a mental command.

  ‘There are other ways to tear the pelt from them,’ he said, walking from his cell toward the chambers that had been prepared for him with so much labour. The equerry trotted after him. ‘It is now time to set them in motion.’

  Freija Morekborn heard the impact before she saw any evidence of it.

  ‘Hold your positions!’ she barked at her six-strong squad of kaerls, keeping the surprise out of her hard-edged voice.

  They were operating in the upper levels of the Valgard, assigned to the hangars to assist the armoury staff in preparing the remaining Land Raiders and Rhinos for deployment. The work mostly involved standing guard while interminable Mechanicus rites were performed to prime the machine-spirits, and the waiting around while other squads had been sent to forward combat stations was maddening.

  Then the fire came. The hangar was one used by the Thunderhawk transporters and opened directly out to the atmosphere of Fenris. There were powerful shields across the gaping launch bay, both to protect from bombardment and to retain a breathable environment so high up. One moment, the sky outside was the dark blue of the short Fenrisian dusk; the next, it blazed with a seething kaleidoscope of colours, the result of a torrent of hyperenergised plasma hitting the surface of void shields and going crazy.

  The hangar, which had been filled with the clang and grind of mechanical equipment and lifting gear, was suddenly dominated by the high-pitched hiss and fizz of the shields taking the strain. Warning klaxons from far above their position blared out again, breaking the concentration of the tech-priests huddled over their incense and sacred oils.

  ‘What is it?’ asked a young kaerl, a blond-haired recruit called Lyr, hoisting his rifle to his waist instinctively. He was fearless in a human-scale firefight, but the vast energies colliding only a few hundred metres away clearly unnerved him.

  ‘Standard bombardment pattern,’ said Freija, who had no idea what manner of forbidden technology had been unleashed. ‘Stand down, trooper. Until we get the order to fall back, we don’t move.’

  ‘Quite right, huskaerl,’ came an amused, metallic voice.

  Freija whirled around to find herself facing the towering outline of Garjek Arfang, the Twelfth’s Iron Priest. She swallowed reflexively, and instantly berated herself for her weakness.

  How do they do it? How do they project this aura of intimidation?

  ‘Lord,’ she acknowledged, and bowed.

  ‘That’s not capable of hurting us,’ continued the priest, speaking through his slatted vox-grille. Like all his kind, he had a hulking servo-arm sprouting from the back of his strange, gothic armour. Instead of the usual totems and trophies strewn across the ceramite, he wore the skull and cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus on his breast, interleaved with iron renditions of the cardinal Fenrisian runes. His dark battle-plate was heavy with the patina of wear and combat, and looked like it hadn’t been removed for some time. Freija had certainly never seen any of the Iron Priests out of their shells, and it was easy to believe the rumours that what was left of their mortal bodies had irretrievably melded with the arcane technology within. He carried a heavy staff as the badge of his priesthood, crested with the adamantium head of a hammer forged into the likeness of a snarling muzzle.

  ‘They do it to prevent us firing back.’

  He walked past her and stood facing the open launch bays, watching the rain of blazing plasma slam into the void shield barrier beyond.

  ‘Our shields are fed by thermal reactors buried kilometres down,’ he said, half-talking to himself. ‘This will do no more than stress the voids, but we won’t be able to send any ship-killers up through it.’

  He turned back to Freija.

  ‘Inconvenient, no?’

  There was a low grating sound from somewhere below his armour.

  Growling? Clearing his throat? Laughing?

  ‘Enlightening, lord,’ she said. ‘Then we are safe to remain on duty here.’

  ‘Perfectly, huskaerl. For the time being.’

  The Iron Priest looked from one kaerl to another, assessing Freija’s squad for some kind of suitability. He had a strange, clipped manner, and his movements were oddly stilted for a Sky Warrior.

  Metal-heads. Even more void-touched than the rest of them.

  ‘I have chosen you,’ Arfang announced. ‘I will have need of an escort for my thralls, and my tech-priests are fully engaged.’

  ‘At your command, lord,’ said Freija, uncertainly. Anything would be preferable to killing more time in the hangars, but he hadn’t said what he wanted yet.

  The Iron Priest nodded to himself, evidently satisfied. He placed his hammer-headed staff on the ground in front of him, and several hunched figures scuttled out of the shadow of a nearby Thunderhawk. They were servitor-thralls, the half-man, half-machine semi-automata that provided the menial labour for the armoury. Some still had their human faces
in place, drooped in a lobotomised, vacant expression of emptiness. Others had rigid iron plates instead of features and their hands replaced with drills, vices, locks, ratchets and claw-hammers. Some had bundles of vat-grown plastek muscles bunched across their wasted natural frames, bolted in place with rivets and governed by a tangle of wires and control-needles. They were a motley collection of horrors, the result of the dark union of Machine God and the Fenrisian aesthetic of savagery.

  ‘There are preparations to make. It will take days. When I call you, come without delay.’

  ‘Forgive me, lord. Where?’

  The Iron Priest turned his armour-plated head to look at her. His helm-lenses glowed a deep red, as if opening onto smouldering coals within.

  ‘Where else, huskaerl? Have you not heard the war-seers’ counsel? The battle-outcomes do not cogitate well. There is mortal danger here.’

  That, for him at least, seemed to answer the question. He strode past her, clanking his hammer-staff on the floor as he went. Then he paused, as if considering the possibility that he may not have been entirely clear.

  He turned, and Freija thought she detected something like excitement in that flat, unearthly voice.

  ‘Jarl Greyloc has ordered it, huskaerl. We go to wake the dead.’

  The Fang was merely the greatest of the many huge peaks that clustered together in the centre of Asaheim. Other summits reared their heads into the icy air around the World Spine, scraping the atmosphere as it thinned toward the void of space. They were piled atop the shoulders of each another, all encroaching on the space of the rest, fighting like the dark ekka pines of the valleys to climb toward the light. Everything on Fenris was in conflict, even the tortured, broken land itself.

  The peaks closest to the Fang itself had entered the legends of the Vlka Fenryka, etched on their communal consciousness since the Allfather had led them there in the half-remembered twilight of the founding. To the south was Asfryk, white-sided and blunt, the Cloudtearer. To the east were soaring Friemiaki and Tror, the brothers of thunder. To the west was bleak Krakgard, the dark peak where heroes were burned, and to the north were Broddja and Ammagrimgul, the guardians of the Hunter’s Gate through which aspirants passed to take the trials of passage.

  The ways between the peaks were treacherous and known only to those who’d trodden the paths as aspirants. All were scarred with precipitous drops and deep crevasses. Some hunt-ways were built on solid stone, whereas others were on bridges of ice that would crumble to nothing with the first application of weight. Some led true, taking the hunter from the clefts in the shadow of the summits down to the plains where the prey dwelt; other led nowhere but into darkness, to the caves that riddled the bowels of the ancient landscape, full of nothing but ice-gnawed bones and despair.

  For all its majesty and terror, there were islands of stability in that savage land, places where gigantic outcrops of rock created broad plateaux amid the plunging cliffs. These were the sites where the Wolves came to commune with the savage soul of the mountain country. In the Summers of Fire, when the ice was broken across the planet and war came to the mortal tribesmen, great fires were lit in such places and sagas declaimed by the skjalds. Then would the warriors of Russ put aside the demands of battle for a short time and remember those who had fallen in the Long War, and the Rune Priests would delve far into the mysteries of the wyrd, attempting to discern the Chapter’s path into the unknown landscape of the future.

  It was at such a gathering that a younger Ironhelm had announced the first of the many hunts for Magnus. Further back into the past, the same location had played host to the decision to form the Wolf Brothers, the Space Wolves’ ill-fated successor Chapter, now disbanded and a source of hidden shame.

  For the Thousand Sons, who knew and cared nothing of this, the plateaux were merely landing sites, places to disgorge the troops and vehicles from their cavernous landers ready for the land assault to come. So, forty-eight hours after the destruction of the orbital platforms, they came in spiralling columns, darkening the skies with their numbers. Heavy, lumbering drop-ships disembarked from the holds of the troop-carriers above and thundered down to the embarkation points, guarded by wings of gunships and shadowed by the void-to-surface batteries of the warships in orbit. One after another, the bronze and sapphire vessels broke into the atmosphere, streaking trails of fire as they plummeted.

  By nightfall, dozens of them had come, just a tithe of the many that would follow. Wolf Guard Sigrd Brakk watched the twinkling lights of the latest drop-ship fall toward his position, hard under the shadow of the Krakgard, and his lips pulled back from his fangs. Like the rest of his pack, he was shoulder-deep in snow, crouching in the lee of an overhanging drift-curve, waiting for the moment when the plateau he was overlooking was picked by the enemy commanders.

  ‘That one, lads,’ he hissed, satisfied, motioning toward the descending ship. ‘First kill of the night.’

  Assault-Captain Skyt Hemloq kept a sweaty grip on his lasrifle. Despite his armour and environment bodyglove, the air was terrifyingly cold. That didn’t stop him sweating.

  His feet crunched through the snow, illuminated by his helmet-lumen, sweeping across the blue-white surface. His squad, thirty-strong and all equipped for the soul-crushing climate, fanned out beside him.

  So this is Fenris, he thought, gazing up in awe at the dark shapes of the peaks above. The nearest of them soared into the night, far larger than anything he’d seen on his homeworld of Qavelon, and that was reckoned a planet with many mountains.

  There was something about the air. It wasn’t just the cold – there was something sharp, savage, about it. Even modified through his rebreathers and boosted with oxygen-mix from his backpack, it was thin and caustic. Perhaps it was the alt-clim drugs still swimming through his bloodstream.

  And it was quiet. The only consistent sound came from the whining engines of the drop-ship. The hulking lander, twenty metres tall and much broader, squatted on the meltsnow-streaked rock, gradually unloading its cargo of ordnance and manpower. Already over a hundred Spireguard had emerged from the cavernous interior, marching with false bravado on to a world that obviously wanted to kill them and looked perfectly capable of doing it soon. They were the first, the ones in the line of fire, the ones charged with establishing the bridgehead.

  And yet, there had been no resistance. No movement. Nothing detected on the surveyors.

  The silence.

  ‘Stay tight,’ Hemloq voxed, fixing his gaze back on the scene before him.

  The plateau was over eight hundred metres across on the flat. It plunged down into a chasm on three sides; on the fourth, the rock rose steeply in broken, tumbling terraces. Negotiable, but difficult.

  He swallowed, trying not to let his vision get clouded by the myriad points of light across the flat landing site. Fixed lumen-arrays had been erected after planetfall and all the troops disembarking had helm-lights on full-beam. The effect was confusing rather than helpful, as the night was broken by hundreds of star-like points and banks of eye-watering brilliance.

  The drop-ship sat in the centre of the open space, smoke and steam gushing from its exhausts, a dark outline ringed with whirling tracer lights. Hemloq knew the pilots were eager to take off again. Despite the gunships patrolling the dropsites, they were vulnerable while on the ground, like a prey-bird crouched on its nest.

  Even as he watched, another company of troops disembarked, some of them with heavier weapons in tow. A cumbersome lascannon was unloaded, flanked by a dozen gunnery crew, ready for deployment at the site edges. In time, portable void shield generators and proper anti-aircraft defences would be deployed. When that happened, the place would be something like secure. Until, they were vulnerable, and all of them knew it.

  ‘Sweep complete,’ came a vox from the far side of the dropsite.

  ‘Anything?’ demanded Hemloq, speaking more urgently than he’d meant to.

  Damn it. Keep it cool in front of the men.

  ‘N
othing, sir.’

  ‘Then hold position. Until we get fixed surveyors online, your eyes are all we’ve got.’

  The vox-link crackled out. Hemloq tried it again, and there was no response. That was just damn rude.

  ‘Keep tight,’ he said again. He was beginning to sound ridiculous with his military platitudes. The whistle of the wind in the high peaks, the lack of any response from the defenders, the bone-aching cold. It would have unnerved a man of far greater combat readiness than Skyt Hemloq.

  ‘Trust in the Masters,’ he murmured.

  On the far side of the plateau, a lumen-bank winked out.

  Hemloq stiffened.

  ‘Stand fast, men,’ he said, checking on his helm-display to see who was responsible for that section of perimeter.

  Another one disappeared.

  Shit.

  ‘They’re coming!’ he cried, uncaring of how shrill his voice had become. ‘Pick your targets!’

  He hoisted his lasgun to his shoulder, sweeping it round as he peered out into the gloom. Dimly, he was aware of his men doing likewise. His proximity meter was blank. There was no chatter, no feedback.

  They’re as terrified as I am.

  Then, from over to his left, lines of retina-burning las-fire blazed out, followed by the whip-crack noise of their discharge. It was madly angled, fired in haste. Briefly, from the corner of his eye, Hemloq saw something huge and shadowy flit across the snow.

  He whirled to face it, firing his lasgun indiscriminately at nothing. There were shouts of outrage as other beams lanced through the night, some of them striking the flanks of the drop-ship.

  Hemloq dropped to a frightened crouch, feeling his heart hammer in his chest.

  This is a farce. They’ve got us jumping at shadows.

  Then, and from somewhere, from a place he’d never have guessed existed, Hemloq found resources of stubbornness. A defence had to be organised, some structure imposed. The Wolves had a reputation, but they were only men, just as the Masters had promised.