War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Read online

‘To me!’ he roared, leaping back to his feet, a new note of determination entering his voice. ‘Form ranks, and get those–’

  A face flashed across his field of vision, something out of a nightmare. He saw two glowing shards of red, a gunmetal-grey helm studded with teeth, hulking pauldrons daubed in blood.

  ‘Shush,’ came a wet growl, impossibly deep, sounding more like a leopard’s than a human’s.

  In the instant before Ogrim Redpelt’s gauntlet smashed in on Hemloq’s vocal cords and ripped them out, the novice assault-captain had time for a realisation that might have been helpful if it had come earlier.

  These are no men.

  Helfist tore across the landing site, swaying between the flickering las-beams more skilfully than his armour-clad bulk would have suggested possible.

  There was little in the arsenal of such mortals than could have hurt him, but he maintained the absolute stealth of the approach and kept his bolter silent. It was a matter of pride – a clean kill, a minimum of fuss. His helm’s night-vision showed up the scene in clear lines. It was evident from the confused response of the enemy that they were using no such technology.

  A lumen beam swept across him, briefly showing him up against the dark. His helm runes showed six beads locking on to his position, and he checked his barrelling run to home round on them.

  Six mortals, twenty metres off, all dressed in pale-grey camouflaged armour, masked and helmeted, with lowered lasguns.

  ‘Fodder,’ spat Helfist under his breath, already running fluidly toward them, already relishing the splash of their blood against his armour, already bringing his power fist into the optimal swing-pattern.

  One panicked beam got away before he crashed among them. It glanced from his sigil-carved vambraces harmlessly. His fist crunched into the face of one of the warriors, throwing him far into the night. The carry-through crushed the chest of the one behind him.

  Helfist spun tautly on his left boot, using the grip of his bolt-pistol to smash the visor of a retreating mortal. The air howled in and the man fell to his knees, gagging on a shattered jawline.

  The others broke, scrabbling to get away.

  ‘Filth,’ Helfist growled, grabbing the closest and snapping his spine with a whiplash shake of his power fist.

  His helm showed the position of his battle-brothers carving their way toward the drop-ship. There was las-fire everywhere, cracking and snapping in an ill-focused storm of fear. More of the mortal soldiers had taken up positions across the plateau, trying to organise the defence into something that had a hope of stopping the Wolves. It would do them little good. Helfist could see the incoming signals of gunships, and could sense the charging up of lascannons, but neither would change the odds much now.

  Pitiful. It enraged him.

  ‘You come here,’ he snarled, decapitating a mortal with a contemptuous upper-cut. ‘You defile this place.’ Disembowelled another with his power fist. The energy field wasn’t even activated. ‘You dare this.’ Ripped up breathing gear, tore open breastplates, broke limbs. ‘You insult me with your weakness.’ Crushed skulls, blinded faces, ripped out spines, bathed in the blood of the invader. ‘This is making me very angry.’

  A swooping shape rushed past him on his left flank. Redpelt had made a break for the drop-ship. Helfist shook the life out of the man he held in his grasp, cast him aside and joined his battle-brother in the chase. The wolf-spirit within, the avatar of the kill-urge, uncoiled and stretched its claws.

  ‘Fired your bolter yet?’ voxed Redpelt over the comm-link, gunning his chainsword and drawing a splatter-filled arc across the panicked mortals in his way.

  ‘No need,’ replied Helfist with disgust, shouldering up to a barrage of las-fire at full sprint and ploughing into the terrified snipers. ‘They just don’t deserve it.’

  Redpelt laughed, punching the butt of his pistol heavily into his next target’s midriff. The man flew back in agony, stomach burst, blood spilling across the churned snow.

  ‘No argument, brother.’

  By the time they reached the open maw of the drop-ship the slush beneath their boots was rose-red. Brokentooth was still some way behind, detained with tearing apart a row of semi-prepared lascannon batteries. Somewhere further back, Brakk was dealing out silent death in impressively brutal quantities. He’d maintained comm-silence since unleashing his pack on the landing site, content to let the Claws take out the principal target while he maximised devastation amongst the infantry.

  Caught in mid-deployment, the pilots were trying to take off. Enemy troops were scrambling to get back into the false safety of the interior, driven to a state of blind terror by the armoured shades sweeping through them.

  ‘They sicken me,’ continued Helfist, leaping up into the huge loading bay and plunging into the terrified huddle of men within.

  Redpelt jumped up after him, pausing only to let the blood slew from his chainsword before flicking it back into life.

  ‘The Wolves are among you!’ he roared in Gothic, laughing riotously with the pleasure of the murder-make.

  Constricted and cramped, the enemy fell like wheat under the scythe, getting in each others’ way, frozen in herd-like horror. Some tried vainly to escape the slaughter and leap back past the rampaging Blood Claws and onto the ice, but none made it through Redpelt’s gyrating blades. The rest retreated further back into the depths of the hold, postponing death by only few moments, letting loose their ineffective las-fire in panicked volleys.

  Then there was a booming detonation, and a thudding, grinding vibration across the steel floor of the load-bay. The drop-ship had managed to take off.

  ‘Cockpit,’ snarled Helfist.

  Redpelt was ahead of him, charging through the load-bay and racing up the first stairwell he came to. The bulky shoulder-guards of his armour scraped past the narrow walls, drawing huge gouges in the pressed metal.

  Helfist blink-clicked a rune on his helm display and his power fist’s energy-field sparked into life, throwing an electric-blue discharge across the ship’s interior. He slammed the burning gauntlet into the swaying floor and ripped up a sheet of it. With a savage yank, he hauled it back, throwing the first rank of cowering soldiers from their feet and exposing the innards of the ship’s structure beneath. He crouched down and pulled out a length of wiring, snapping the connections and shaking the cords loose like entrails pulled from a wounded beast.

  With a shudder, the lights died across the load-bay, plunging the space into utter darkness. High-pitched screams of terror echoed out from the press of troops ahead, suddenly flung back into a maelstrom of shadows and whirling helm-lumens.

  ‘Run while you can, little men,’ growled the Blood Claw, stowing his pistol and advancing into the dark, his power fist crackling lashes of disruptive force. ‘Now Hel is on your heels.’

  Redpelt thundered up on the next level, his boots denting the meshed-metal stairs with every heavy tread. There were armed guards waiting on the platform above, and a snap of las-fire cracked against his right shoulder as he emerged.

  ‘Brave,’ he snarled, righting himself and sweeping his gore-soaked chainsword into the retreating body of the nearest. ‘But unwise.’

  He spun into the guards, flailing with his blade. The movements looked wild, but they were nothing of the sort – peerless conditioning had given his murder-strokes a deceptive efficiency.

  The guards held their ground against the onslaught, and so they died. As he butchered the last of them, Redpelt’s helm showed Helfist slicing his way through the hold-level below. From its reeling pitch, it was clear the drop-ship was in the air and climbing.

  At the end of the platform was a sealed door. Redpelt sprinted at it, loosing three rounds as he went, all hitting the intersection. The reactive bolts detonated as he crashed into the metal, cracking the doors open and sending the two panels tumbling inwards.

  There were four men inside, all seated at consoles, two by two. Cockpit windows lined the far end, showing flashes of the firef
ight below as the drop-ship struggled to make headway with its load-bay doors open.

  Redpelt laughed raucously in triumph, and the horrific sound echoed in the cramped space of the cockpit. Three of the flight-crew sprang up and tried clumsily to get out of the way of his rampage. There was nowhere for them to go. Redpelt’s chainsword whirred heavily. Two heavy swipes and all three mortals were hacked apart, scattering viscera across the metal-backed seats. Redpelt grabbed the remaining pilot from his flight position, ripping him out of his restraint harness by the nape of his neck. The man’s spine broke from the force of it and the corpse went limp in Redpelt’s gauntlet.

  Snarling with disdain, the Blood Claw hurled the body aside. The control column swayed drunkenly in the absence of a guiding hand, and the drop-ship began to list violently.

  ‘Hel,’ he voxed. ‘Time to go.’

  He plucked a krak grenade from his belt, but then saw incoming danger runes flicker across his lens. Redpelt’s head snapped up, just in time to see a wing of four Thousand Sons gunships home in on the plateau, a few hundred metres off and closing fast.

  Interesting.

  He flicked the grenade back to safety and grabbed the column. It was like a giant’s fist closing over a child’s toy, but the drop-ship instantly steadied under his touch. Instead of letting it crash to earth, Redpelt dragged it out of its dive and gunned the engines further. With a wail of protest, the tortured atmospheric drives blazed back into full throttle.

  The gunships, their pilots looking for targets on the ground, saw the danger too late. The drop-ship rose up to meet them head-on, huge and sluggish.

  Redpelt grinned and smashed the nearside window with his chainsword handle. He let go of the controls, crouched, then crashed headlong through the gap, tearing through the metal frame, spinning out into the night even as the swooping gunships veered to avoid the massive chunk of steel and promethium sent lurching into their path.

  It was only then that he saw how high up he’d taken it. The plateau was over two hundred metres down, still lit up by sporadic las-fire.

  ‘Skítja,’ he spat. ‘This is going to–’

  He plummeted like a stone, barely registering the explosion above him as two of the gunships collided with the stricken drop-ship and the sky was lit with a vast, thundering ball of igniting fuel and ammunition.

  ‘–hurt.’

  He hit the rock before rolling away from the impact and skidding across the ice. Both knees blazed with pain, even protected by his power armour, and he felt a sharp, hot whipcrack run up his compressed spine.

  He lay immobile for a second, dazed from the heavy impact. Then his vision cleared. Grimacing, Redpelt hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the warning runes indicating muscle damage and a fractured tibia.

  Dimly, he was aware he should be paying attention to something else.

  ‘Run, you stupid bastard!’ voxed Helfist from somewhere close by.

  Then he realised what it was. He broke into an agonised sprint, tearing across the rock as the ball of fire in the sky swung down to his position. The broken drop-ship, directionless and ripped open by the gunship collisions, was slewing back to earth again, streaming flames like an earth-bound comet as its engines gave up the fight to stay airborne.

  He ran. He ran like a raging skeiskre, pumping his damaged limbs, feeling endorphins pulse through his battered frame.

  Russ, you’re slow.

  There was a crunching, earth-shaking boom as the metal shell thudded into the rock behind him, crushing any residual survivors within and spraying slivers of red-hot metal across the whole battlefield. The ruined ship kept rolling, toppling like a downed beast on the plains, roaring in its death-throes and igniting fresh explosions within its bulbous carcass before it finally, grindingly, painfully, came to rest.

  Only then did Redpelt stop and turn, looking over the devastation he’d triggered, aware that his second heart had kicked in and was hammering hard. Pain-deadeners had started work as his stressed bones began to re-knit, but the strongest drive within him was the inner wolf, raging and tearing. He felt the rush of the kill-urge sweep over him, a heady mix of adrenalin and gene-rage.

  ‘Fenrys!’ he roared, whirling his chainsword in a huge loop around his head, glorying in his triumph. ‘Hjolda!’

  Then there was another presence at his side. Helfist slapped him hard on the back, laughing harshly over the comm.

  ‘Morkai’s arse, you’re as thick as an ungur,’ he said, giving away the wolf-rage within him too. Even through his armour, Redpelt could pick up the kill-pheromones spiking the air. ‘Tough as one, too.’

  Then Brakk was there too, and the rest of the pack, looming against the burning shell. The las-fire had ceased. No Spireguard had lived to see the drop-ship come down, and the surviving gunships were still coming back round for another attack run.

  ‘Next time just use grenades,’ the Wolf Guard growled irritably. ‘Next target’s north, and they’ve established a bridgehead. Move out.’

  The pack broke into a run instantly, loping across the shattered rock as one, sweeping over it like a grey fluid sliding into the shadows. Power fists were shut down and chainblades were stilled, and once more the Claws drifted into the ghost-like stealth that was the terrifying mirror of their battle-rage.

  By the time the gunships came back, flying low over the dropsite, all that remained on it were the guttering flames, the twisted metal, and the already frozen corpses of those unwary enough to bring war to the world of the Wolves.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Auries Fuerza of the pavoni cult-discipline leaned back against the bulkhead, flexing his pain-drenched limbs. He’d seen death staring at him, the final embrace of the flesh-change, and it had been horrifying. Even now, having finally thrown off the horrors of warp-delirium, he could feel his hearts labour, thumping against his ravaged ribcage like animals trying to claw their way out. How long had he been out cold? Minutes? Hours? Days? In the warp, it was always hard to tell.

  Transportation through the malignant currents of the aether was physically demanding at the best of times, but to make a leap at such notice and under such conditions was both painful and dangerous. When he’d seen the Dog vessel hurtle toward his stricken ship, he’d only had seconds to make the decision. Thankfully, the preparations for evacuation had already been made due to the heavy fire the Illusion of Certainty had taken. Even so, scrying new warp-vectors in the middle of a ferocious void-battle had been far from trivial.

  Fuerza could take a certain level of pride that he’d not sent himself directly into the structure of the recipient ship. The fact he was breathing air and not metal struck him as more proof that the pattern of the universe had a design, and one that included him in it.

  Only barely, though. His palms had been stripped of skin and now shone like glossy sides of meat in the dark. His breath came in sharp, rattling gasps, and under his mask he could feel the damage done to his face.

  There had been four rubricae with him in the warp bubble, but only one had made it intact. Two must have been lost in the jump, ripped apart by the capricious currents of the Ocean. A third had materialised within a heavy adamantium strut, and black metal rods impaled the soulless creature fast. Flickers of warp residue ran across its broken breastplate, still trying to knit the form of the Thousand Sons warrior back together.

  It was hopeless. A rubricae was one of the toughest mobile structures in the galaxy, immune to pain and despair, able to keep operating even after massive structural damage, but being fused with the hull of a loyalist interceptor had destroyed the integrity of the Traitor Marine’s armour-shell. As Fuerza watched, too weak to intervene, the pale light in the broken rubricae’s helm guttered and died. The spirit of the warrior, such as it was, had failed.

  Fuerza felt a profound sadness, an echo of psychic pain within his physical agony.

  So few. Now one fewer.

  He turned, slowly and with spasms of torment shooting up his compressed spine, to face t
he survivor. It stood impassively, unmoving. It didn’t betray the slightest interest in the fate of its comrades. Not for the first time, Fuerza wondered what kind of attenuated existence the rubricae had. Did they see the runes running across their helm-displays like he did? Did speech register with them as it did with mortal men?

  Impossible to tell. Ahriman, curse his black name, had made them as cold and unfeeling as the graven images of Neiumas Tertius.

  For all that, it was an impressive statue. Huge and dominating in its sapphire and bronze battle plate, the rubricae still held the ornate bolter it had carried into battle on Prospero as a living, breathing Space Marine. Its breastplate displayed the delicate images of serpents and dragons, of constellations and astrological symbols, of obscure sigils and ancient glyphs of power, each a piece of stunning artistry.

  The images changed. Fuerza didn’t know how, or even notice when, but they were rarely constant for long. The only thing that remained was the Eye, the one symbol that they wore at all times.

  ‘So, brother,’ Fuerza croaked, looking around him warily, feeling the blood run down his chin and over his damaged chest. ‘What shall we make of this?’

  The two of them had rematerialised in a dark corridor that stretched into shadow in either direction, Fuerza slumped against the wall, the rubricae standing. The walls were formed of exposed machinery and pipework, unadorned and brutal. The floor was a metal mesh, the ceiling a morass of power cables, coolant tubes and boxy life support modules. It was dark and almost freezing.

  Fuerza guessed they were down in the lower levels, since the rumble of the engines felt close. The noise of the warp drives sounded healthy enough, but even in his critical state Fuerza was enough of an empath to detect the hurt the vessel’s machine-spirit had suffered. From far above them, there were faint cries, and heavy, resounding crashes. The crew was doing its best to keep the ship from coming apart.

  ‘We’re in the warp,’ mused Fuerza, licking his dry, cracked lips. ‘For all we know, this is the only ship that escaped Aphael’s blockade.’