Infurnace - Robbie MacNiven Read online

  Sven made out the tiny figures of Astra Militarum troopers vainly attempting to scatter as the Thunderhawk’s burning shadow screamed over them. The Bloodthirster’s chain snapped free, and the Godspear’s wrecked remains hammered into the island shingle. It ploughed a deep furrow in the shore, obliterating a section of makeshift flakboard barricades and wiping the platoon manning them from existence. Then the gunship exploded, a blossoming fireball that blazed across the island’s beach, as though in sympathy with the fiery monster that had caused it. The blast took more troopers with it, demolishing the western side of the island’s defences.

  Infurnace didn’t even pause to survey its handiwork. Wings beating, it launched itself through the air, straight towards the World Wolf’s Lair.

  Ramilies-class star fort, designate Mjalnar

  Ragnar and his Blackpelts stood just beyond the hatch of their boarding torpedo, weapons drawn. Nothing moved to oppose them. The service corridor was old, and quite clearly deserted. The ceiling was a mass of bared coolant piping, and the walls were naked plasteel, inset with cobwebbed lumen orbs. Rust discoloured every surface, and there was a distant hissing where steam escaped from a ruptured pipe. Although the corridor was clearly timeworn and abandoned, there was no wyrdling stench about it.

  ‘Morkai’s heads,’ Ragnar spat, feeling his system flush with rage. ‘Where are they?’

  No one answered. The old lumen orbs flickered once, but remained mute.

  ‘Maybe the star fort is free from taint,’ Uller Greylock growled. ‘Maybe the Grey Knights were wrong.’

  ‘Then where are the crew?’ Ragnar asked. ‘Why haven’t they been responding to our transmissions?’ He blink-clicked his visor’s vox display. ‘All boarding packs, come in.’

  ‘Hostor’s Spears, here.’

  ‘Maegar’s Pack, affirmative.’

  ‘Asgeir’s Allslayers here, my jarl.’

  ‘Contacts?’ Ragnar demanded. Negatives crackled back at him, the Blood Claw pack leaders sounding as confused as he was. A rune in his visor lit up, and Ragnar switched channels to accept de Mornay’s incoming transmission.

  ‘A trap,’ the inquisitor said. ‘It has to be.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘The crew surely wouldn’t have simply abandoned the station.’

  ‘We will soon find out,’ Ragnar replied, switching back to his pack-wide channel. ‘Hostor, take your Claws to the escape shuttle bay, it should be a hundred yards down the corridor on your left hand.’

  ‘Yes, lord, on our way.’ Ragnar switched back.

  ‘De Mornay, what’s your current location?’

  ‘It appears to be an outer munitions shaft for the spinward-facing weapons batteries,’ de Mornay replied. ‘It’s deserted though.’

  ‘Hold there,’ Ragnar said. ‘My Blackpelts and I will join you.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Ragnar met de Mornay at a junction leading to the weapons batteries. The inquisitor was still mounted on his palanquin, but his ageing body was now armoured in flakplate, and an archaic-looking brass-cased plasma pistol rested in one hand. Alongside him stood his grim-faced Adepta Sororitas bodyguard, clad in the midnight-black purgation-pattern power armour of the Order of Our Martyred Lady.

  ‘You know the star fort’s layout?’ de Mornay greeted the Wolf Lord.

  ‘It falls under the auspices of the Chapter Fleet,’ Ragnar replied. ‘It’s part of the system defence network. All pack leaders have access to its schematics.’

  ‘So what do you propose we do?’ de Mornay asked. ‘There’s something wrong about all this.’ He gestured with his pistol down the deserted corridor behind the Blackpelts.

  An update from Hostor clicked in Ragnar’s ear before he could reply.

  ‘Lord, only half of the escape shuttles are accounted for. Six have jettisoned.’

  ‘There are shuttles missing,’ Ragnar told de Mornay.

  The inquisitor frowned.

  ‘The riddle grows more complex. If they were all present I would assume the crew have been slaughtered. But if they evacuated, this place may genuinely be deserted.’

  ‘But why would they leave?’ Ragnar asked aloud.

  ‘The central command deck may tell us,’ de Mornay said. ‘It must have audio and visual logs?’

  ‘And more. It should have recorded the escape shuttles’ projected routes. And from there we can set the fort on a more useful course than its current trajectory. Towards Midgardia, for example.’ He opened a channel to the three Blood Claw assault packs that had boarded with him.

  ‘Converge on the command deck. I want this riddle solved.’

  Transit Line four hundred and three, the Underworld, Midgardia

  They’d found them. Phugulus emitted a blast of noxious spore clouds and pointed excitedly down the rail tunnel. The little pack of Wolves had led them to a larger one, and now they’d combined into a single force. Truly, the Grandfather was good.

  Behind the daemonic Herald his plaguebearers were dragging themselves from the tunnel burrowed by Garr’nokk, the Great Plague Wyrm. Garr’nokk himself was writhing down the rail line towards the Wolves already, his many maws snapping and drooling hungrily. Chewing dirt was clearly not enough – the noble beast was desperate for flesh and blood. Phugulus waved after it.

  ‘Let us bless these great warriors with diseases befitting their might,’ he bellowed at his chanting plaguebearers. ‘Onwards, dear friends, onwards!’

  The plague-recitals of the Infested redoubled in volume and urgency as they set off in Garr’nokk’s wake, Phugulus struggling to keep his diseased bulk near the head of his Tallyband. He could see more than just a fortunate gathering of soon-to-be-blessed wolf-men ahead. He could see the whole glory of a new realm ripe for the Grandfather’s benedictions. The Midgardian underworld was overly humid, yes, but it was certainly earthy, dark and dank. All manner of mould, fungi and rot could be cultivated in its depths. By the time he returned to his Grandfather’s garden he would have a host of wondrous specimens to present.

  The possibilities jostled for attention in the Herald’s thoughts, so much so that he barely even noticed when the Tallyband crashed into the howling Space Wolves.

  The knot of Wolves gathered around Logan Grimnar’s fallen crown turned, weapons revving to life. The air was thick with spores, misting their view further back up the transit tunnel. Shapes were limping through the rancid smog, shuffling and moaning with throaty, bile-choked voices.

  ‘The wyrm,’ Lenold snarled. Egil followed his gaze, and saw that the huge daemonic wyrm had returned. It writhed down the tunnel with a hideous peristaltic motion, its blind maws agape. And, once again, a clutch of rotting lesser daemons were following in its wake, using the tunnel gnawed by his multi-fanged jaws to traverse Midgardia’s underworld.

  ‘Take the beast,’ Egil said. ‘We’ll close the tunnel again. Then we can purge that foul thing together. It must not be allowed to escape this time.’ Lenold only nodded, already moving to meet the wyrm head-on.

  Egil launched himself into the plaguebearers crawling through the tunnel in the rail highway’s wall, his Ironguard beside him. They had to be quick. The counter on his visor showed the toxicity levels in the air rising rapidly. This Tallyband had clearly brought the surface’s corruption with it into Midgardia’s depths.

  The Iron Wolf’s power claws shredded the first plaguebearer he reached for, its rancid form disintegrating into a puddle of decomposing sludge. Egil went through a second and a third, snarling with rage. The memory of the Great Wolf’s broken crown lent every blow a furious, unstoppable strength. How dare these weak, putrid monsters threaten his Chapter with destruction? How dare they seek to turn and warp everything the Wolves had defended for so many millennia?

  The plaguebearers parted before him, their endless, maddening chants for once falling silent. One of their number pressed to the fore. This one was larger, standing a head taller than the things around it. Its frame was bloated and riven with suppurating sores, its lone, cyclopean eye blinking with an unnatural intelligence from beneath one curling horn. It gripped a pockmarked broadsword in its fist, worm-fingers writhing around the hilt. It was a Herald, a leader of the Tallybands. Egil raised his wolf claws, their power snapping, acknowledging the challenge.

  The Herald struck.

  Ramilies-class star fort, designate Mjalnar

  ‘The fastest route to the command deck from here is via the barracks blocks,’ Ragnar said. ‘Kraken formation, don’t hesitate to engage if you make contact. Inquisitor…’ He turned to face de Mornay. ‘Stay close, but don’t get in the way.’ De Mornay simply shrugged.

  ‘Lead on, Lord Blackmane.’

  The Blackpelts set off, Ragnar at the fore. They followed the service chute to a side door that led to a mesh walkway, passing over a vast set of throbbing coolant spheres, used to douse the star fort’s heavy artillery when it glowed hot from repeated use. Beyond it lay a communications sub terminal. The vox banks had been shut down, their screens blank, horns silent.

  ‘That explains why we’ve not been picking up a signal,’ de Mornay said. ‘But why deactivate them?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Ragnar growled. He was following the heads-up schematic display of Mjalnar, overlaid with the three runes representing the other boarding packs. The system was suffering some sort of interference – the runes showing the locations of the Blood Claws kept blinking from existence, then reappearing nearby, yet only fractionally closer to the command deck at the star fort’s heart. Ragnar voxed them, but all reported good progress. And still there was no sign of life, wyrdling or otherwise.

  Beyond the vox terminal was the barracks block. Ragnar glanced into one of the cells as they passed. Its bunk beds were pristine, and kit bags still sat in files along the floor. It was as though Mjalnar’s crew were all still present, but had simply become invisible. The Wolf Lord snarled with frustration.

  The vox transmissions from the other packs were similarly unhappy. Maegar reported he’d come up against a dead end that didn’t exist on the schematics, and had been forced to turn back. Asgeir made a similar report moments later – he’d found himself in a medicae bay that supposedly didn’t exist. The pack leader’s voice was strained, and Ragnar caught the sound of snarling in the background. The noise shook a growl from his own throat, and his Blackpelts responded in sympathy. They were all hungry, all frustrated.

  They passed through the barracks, the command deck just ahead. Ragnar punched in the runes on the security doors, haste forcing him to re-enter them twice. His grip on Frostfang tightened. The doors slide back to reveal…

  The outer service corridor. The same one they’d first entered Mjalnar through. The hole bored by their boarding pod’s meltas still gaped in the far wall, its molten edges now jagged and hardened. Ragnar just stared.

  ‘The schematics must be wrong,’ Tor said, voice choked. ‘Outdated.’

  Ragnar realised he was panting. His vision flickered, colours flashing in and out of focus, like a pict caster switching between high and low resolution. He could smell blood, coppery and insistent. His jaw ached, and his fingers itched. Anger flooded his mind. This wasn’t what they were here for. This wasn’t what he’d endured the Sea of Stars for. Fenris was beset and his warriors were wandering the corridors of some damn, deserted star fort. He needed to kill, now. They all did.

  ‘It’s a trick,’ de Mornay was saying, attempting to penetrate the fug of bloodlust that was gripping the Wolves. ‘They’re trying to confound you. Trying to trigger your curse. This star fort is as infested as the one the Grey Knights purged.’

  ‘A… trick…’ Ragnar grunted, shaking his head slowly. No. Blood. He needed to spill blood. He could taste it in his mouth. His fangs were starting to distend. Frostfang was screaming at him to kill.

  ‘They’re here!’ de Mornay shouted, plasma pistol whining with charge. ‘All around!’ The sudden crackle and the scent of ozone cut through Ragnar’s consciousness. The Young King gasped and blinked, as though only just waking from a long, dark nightmare. He realised ozone was not the only thing he could smell. The unmistakable stench of wyrd-taint was suddenly everywhere.

  Shrieking with rage, the daemons broke their illusion and flung themselves upon the Space Wolves.

  The Rock, in high orbit above Midgardia

  Far below, fire billowed and spread. The Elezar-thing, the Changeling, watched it from the Rock’s vast, stain-tinted bridge viewing ports. From so far away, it looked like an insignificant thing at first. The deathstorm missiles unleashed by the Imperial Navy’s capital ships were like little shards of starlight, quickly lost on their way to the surface. They bloomed again amidst Midgardia’s purple shades, little pricks of light set against the diseased darkness. Only when those pinpricks eventually began to meet and cluster did they truly start to spread. The Changeling didn’t bother to control its grin, masked as it was by Elezar’s skull helm.

  The flames grew and flourished, until they had embraced a third of Midgardia’s visible surface, black ash clouds starting to obscure the upper atmosphere. A part of the Changeling wished it could be down there, experiencing the raw, chaotic annihilation in person. Perhaps, in a different existence among one of Fate’s many other paths, it would walk the surface of Midgardia during its fiery execution. It would see the inferno devouring the planet’s diseased, infected foliage, bursting blighted bark and setting light to the surfaces of the pus-bogs. It would see Tallybands sent blazing back to the warp, just as the fires roasted the human people of Midgardia and gutted the spires of the Magma Gates. Only into the underworld would the flames fail to reach. That did not concern the Changeling. There would be more than enough time to deal with those lost Wolves.

  Grandfather Nurgle would be infuriated by the torching of his new possession. The thought only fuelled the Changeling’s delight. In all of Creation and Uncreation, only its master knew the final form of the tapestry it wove from Fate’s threads, but even the small patch the Changeling saw before it was glorious to behold.

  The Elezar-thing snapped its gaze away from the sight of the burning world. It had let its thoughts drift. There was still work to be done. Swiftly, it turned from the viewing ports and paced from the bridge, back towards the Interrogator-Chaplain’s cell.

  Midgardia was only the beginning.

  Iron Requiem, in high orbit above Svellgard

  Iron Captain Terrek reached out and touched the soul of the machine. The Clan Commander felt the spirit of his battle-barge rise up from the depths as he finished plugging himself into Iron Requiem’s command throne, neural links, spine cords and gene-coils, draped with purity seals, binding him to the centre of the bridge. Terrek always found it a thrilling sensation, to commune so directly, so intimately, with something that had never known the weak constraints of the flesh.

  Iron Requiem was ancient. It had forged through the stars and brought the Emperor’s light to the darkest reaches of the galaxy for almost eight thousand years. Yet the soul of the machine was anything but old and sluggish. It spoke to Terrek freely, as an old friend, of its pride at the successful lance strike against Morkai’s Keep, twinned with its shame at unleashing its weapons upon brother Adeptus Astartes. Terrek quietened its fears. The Space Wolves were at best mutants, and at worst traitors. They were barbarous savages who had run rampant through the stars, unchecked by any authority, for far too long. Now the Iron Hands would help bring them to heel.

  Terrek had deactivated his bionic eyes. Now he saw directly through the Iron Requiem’s augur arrays, the data fed back to him in a steady stream through the throne’s many ports. Svellgard hung below them, a little blue-grey orb framed by the vast, icy sphere of Frostheim behind it. Around the orb clustered what looked from a distance like swarms of airborne insects. With a thought Terrek increased the augur magnification, picking out individual ships from among the fleet that hung around the moon. Most were Astra Militarum mass transporters and Imperial Navy battleships, but Terrek also noted the proud blue heraldry of a sleek Ultramarines Strike Cruiser.

  As per the agreed plan, the sons of Guilliman had not yet committed any of their squads to Svellgard’s surface, allowing the Astra Militarum and the atmospheric aircraft of the Imperial Navy to secure the island beachheads. They would be sufficient to assess the threat, and from there decide whether to reinforce the Wolves or destroy them with their moon. Only once the enemy’s main strength had been pinpointed would the Angels of Death commit themselves. As a strategy it was both simple and logically optimal. The Clan Company’s Iron Father had gone so far as to compute an eighty-seven per cent likelihood of success.

  Such figures brought Terrek as close to pleasure as was possible nowadays, but unknown factors still remained. One of those was playing out even as Iron Requiem joined the rest of the crusade fleet around Svellgard. Terrek noted multiple sensors tracking a powerful energy signal on the surface below. Visual scanning was struggling to map a reliable image of the thing causing the disturbance. Whatever it was, it appeared to be neverborn in nature. Terrek filtered the garbled Astra Militarum vox messages being translated back to their commanders in orbit. Fire. Death. Rage. Terrek assessed and dismissed each keyword in turn. Wings. Axe. Blood. Daemon.

  Greater Daemon.

  Bloodthirster.

  He felt even the mighty spirit of Iron Requiem shudder as they made the joint realisation of what was attacking the Claws of the World Wolf below. One of Khorne’s mighty champions had burst into being beneath the moon’s cold waves. That could only mean the warp rifts were even more unstable than they had initially calculated. The sooner he acted the better.

  His implants calculating range, azimuth, diffraction and speed projections, the Iron Hands captain began to plot another firing solution for his battle-barge’s lance battery.