The Hunt for Magnus - Chris Wraight Read online

  At that stage, two things happened.

  First, it became obvious that the four recovered zones had been surrendered by the enemy, though not without first sucking up thousands of soldiers and heavy war machines. Catastrophic explosions rippled through each area, bursting from the prone bodies of suicide troops and causing havoc where they were allowed to ignite.

  Selvarios’s strategeos realised that the two remaining zones were the real objectives, each one now contested by greater numbers of the insurgents than the archmagos could readily counter. One spearhead was already grinding its way towards the central command nexus, moving with a precision that perturbed even emotionless sector commanders. Another was making its way north from the ingress point, burning a path through several of the larger manufactoria and heading, seemingly, for a secondary archive complex.

  Second, the orbital sensors registered intruder signals from the void, closing at dangerous velocity and ignoring automated hail-patterns. The defensive grid activated across Arvion’s outer layer, causing a power drain so large that the reserve generatorium network blacked out for seven seconds. Selvarios, assuming a second wave of belligerents, ordered a full-spectrum repulsion barrage, something that if enacted would have lit up the void for over three thousand cubic kilometres.

  It was only at that moment that the aural comm-network finally registered a signal, translating it to binaric and feeding it directly to the archmagos’s cranial implants. Several terms remained undeciphered, though the gist of the transmission was clear enough.

  ‘Power your [untranslated] grid down. We are the [untranslated] Wolves of [untranslated] Fenris. If you fire on us we will [untranslated] send you back to [untranslated].’

  The archmagos was not a proud man. Indeed, he was hardly a man at all, being largely a distributed cluster of bio-industrial interface nodes, and pride meant as little to him as any other second-order emotion. The planet’s external grid was powered down and an atmospheric descent matrix was shunted to the incoming fleet’s positional cogitators. Four ash-grey starships screamed into visual range, already rolling into position for rapid dispersal of drop pods.

  It was at that point, the annals of Arvion attest, that the carnage really began.

  Ironhelm was roaring even as he got into battle. The drop pods whistled down from the claws of his starships, fast as torpedoes, and the living warriors within them whooped and bellowed in a mounting frenzy of battle-rage. The insides of the caskets rattled, glowing hot as Arvion’s atmosphere tested the outer shields.

  Ironhelm had brought his entire company, trusting as ever in the testi­mony of the runes: over a hundred Space Wolves, of every pack type and bearing every weapon the Fang’s armouries offered, all crammed into iron shells and hurtling down through flame-lit skies.

  They broke the planet’s outer skin of drifting metal, punching through rusting scrap and plummeting faster. Internal descent markers whirled down, clocking through the kilometres with dizzying speed. Ironhelm paid them no attention – his lips were already flecked with spittle, his fingers twitching on the hilt of his great blade, his limbs pressed up tight against adamantium restraint cages.

  He no longer needed to ask Frei for confirmation of his beliefs. Over fifty years of constant hunting had taught him the signs, and the runes had never let him down. He knew the movements of the Eye-cult as surely as their adepts did themselves, and there was not a single place in the galaxy where they could hide from him. In this place, he would be arriving even before their contagion was established. He had seen it, revealed in the shifting patterns of the wyrd, the place in which there were no secrets. He would be at their throats before they had even gained a foothold. He was their very own nightmare, dragging at their heels, never giving them a fear-free breath.

  ‘For Russ!’ he cried, joyously, feeling the kick of the retros. It would be only seconds now.

  The drop pods came in ferociously fast, slowing only just enough to prevent destruction on impact. Ironhelm’s own vessel crashed into a floor of solid metal, grinding to a halt amidst the crack and stink of melting. The outer doors slammed down, just as the cages scraped back and roof-mounted bolters burst into deafening life.

  Ironhelm charged out, activating his frostblade, followed by Trask and other members of his Wolf Guard. Above them, the night sky was scored with black contrails across crimson-glow cloudbanks. Immense structures reared up on every side, vast as cliff faces yet studded with pinpricks of neon and shuddering with the workings of hidden forges.

  The air ran with grit and screaming. The pod had come down in a wide valley between enormous factory units, taking down a series of walkways on its downward passage and crushing the struts into glowing metal splinters. Every surface teemed with swarms of bodies in desperate combat – robed Mechanicus menials fighting with one another, grappling with iron-clawed automata, striding through thickets of purple las-fire, launching shoulder-mounted grenades and unleashing blooms of proscribed chem-weapons. It was close-packed, claustrophobic, crammed onto every bridge, causeway, platform and gun-tower. Angular walkers clanked through the melee, their snub-nosed cockpits sweeping back and forth as they loosed plasma-rounds into the mass.

  All across the battlefield more drop pods burst open, spilling their contents amid a hail of bolter shells. Grey-clad fighters tore into the multitudes, laying out with flicker-edged energy blades or letting rip with boltguns. Their strikes looked indiscriminate amid the cries, roars and booms – a mere addition of slaughter to an already blood-soaked chasm, but soon it became apparent that the Wolves of Fenris knew their enemy.

  They could smell them, could sense the taint that marked their metal-clad bodies, and thus struck with unerring precision. Ironhelm led the charge, forging a path along the valley’s base and heading north. He laid out on either side of him with his frostblade, slicing through Mechanicus soldiery as they raced to meet him. His prey’s armour was a motley mix of styles – baroque, bronzed, draped in scraps of crimson fabric that ripped away as the flamers hit – but every death was marked with same tinny shriek of machine-souls imploding.

  The Wolves slipped fluidly into pack formations as they pushed out from the dropsites. Long Fang gun-squads seized high ground on either flank of the iron valley, fighting their way up to causeway intersections before hoisting heavy ordnance and letting rip. The ground shook as Thunderhawk gunships followed the drop pods down, hanging darkly in the smoggy atmosphere and cycling through ammo-drums as their atmospheric drives laboured.

  Ironhelm cut his way to the end of the chasm, where the soaring walls fell away to reveal an open area ahead. It might have been a ceremonial square in the past, filled with processions of tech-priests as new machines were sanctified and given the final blessings of the Omnissiah, but now the entire landscape was racked by gunfire. Two Warhounds loped awkwardly across the teeming battlefield, crushing the hordes at their feet. Mechanicus flyers – ungainly creations with bulbous down-thrusters and compound-eye cockpits – duelled above them in the burning heavens.

  The Great Wolf paused then in his slaughter, reaching the summit of a wide procession of stairs that led down to the square below. Packs of Wolf Scouts forged on ahead, seizing positions from where to hit enemy squad leaders and picking their targets. Trask and his Wolf Guard took up watch-positions around the edge of the platform.

  ‘That’s the target?’ Trask asked, gesturing over to the far side of the square, five hundred metres distant.

  ‘That’s the target,’ confirmed Ironhelm.

  It was a colossal edifice, hewn from black iron, rising into the clouds in a series of steep-sloped, overlapping slab walls. Figures stood on its distant parapets – huge statues of the saints of the Machine Cult, some of them human-like. A hexagonal tower rose up from the centre of it, flanked by curving spars that angled high into the smog. Atop that spire was a fifteen-metre-tall representation of the ­Omnissiah-as-Man – an austere, emot
ionless being of pure intellect, staring out across the carnage below.

  A horde of insurgents had made its way towards the building’s gates and fighting raged all across its outer perimeter. The twin scout Titans, controlled by the enemy, had trained weapons on the vaulted entrance, and the remaining defenders were falling back under the cover of wall-mounted lascannon batteries. As Ironhelm ran his eyes across the scene, three heavy explosions rocked the landscape and a vast pall of inky smoke rolled up from the construction’s northern precincts.

  ‘They’re inside,’ remarked Trask.

  ‘They should be incorruptible,’ muttered Ironhelm. ‘How have so many turned?’

  At long range, among the gloom and the flames, it was almost impossible to tell the difference between the insurgents and loyal Mechanicus troops – both sides had access to heavy weaponry and were fighting with clinical, cold-edged ferocity. Infantry units struggled to hold positions in the face of catastrophic damage from the war machines that strode among them. But as more Wolves entered combat, the odds began to shift in the defenders’ favour. Battle-comms crackled into life as jamming stations were knocked out, allowing more than instinctual messages to pass between them.

  ‘My lord of Fenris,’ came a semi-human voice into Ironhelm’s armour system. It was Selvarios, or at least one of his drone-­familiars. ‘Your assistance is welcome, though you have landed north of the command node. Do you require assistance to reach the correct coordinates?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Ironhelm, running a scan to see how many of his company were in position to advance. ‘We’re fine.’

  There was a brief hiss of static, then another burst. ‘Then I do not understand. Why do you–’

  Ironhelm cut the link as Frei strode up to join them. The Rune Priest’s staff slithered with energies, and the blood on his armour told of recent combat.

  ‘You sense them?’ Ironhelm asked.

  Frei nodded. ‘The edifice is what they want.’

  The full force of Ironhelm’s Great Company was now pouring into the square, fanning out along its edges before pushing into the centre. With the resumption of close-range vox-contact, units of loyal skitarii began to coordinate with the Wolves, cutting a swath through the melee towards the distant perimeter. One of the Warhounds turned from its assault on the building’s gates and stalked back towards them, its ornate claw-feet grinding lesser troops beneath it, though it was immediately met by a streaking mass of incoming fire from the established Long Fang packs.

  ‘They have moved too fast,’ murmured Ironhelm, running his finger along the trigger on his frostblade’s hilt. ‘They are the same as those they fight – the same weapons, the same armour. How have they reached the target so fast?’

  Trask was eager to be fighting again. The Warhound limped closer now, half crippled by incoming missile-strikes but still on its feet. ‘We must lead them now, lord,’ he urged. ‘They need to see you at the blade’s edge.’

  Ironhelm lingered a moment longer. Previous hunts had thrown up the same dross for his blades: petty sorcerers, ranting mortals with delusions of inner sight, cultists with stolen lasguns and poor training. They had all screamed of the Crimson King before they had died, but none of them could have known of what they spoke, for the Legion had been shattered and its master thrown into the living madness of the Eye. Those who remained were dabblers – half-seers and demi-witches with access to a few forbidden trinkets but no true insight.

  This was different. The insurgency on Arvion was huge, far bigger than he had expected from the rune-warnings. The Mechanicus were diligent in their monitoring, so it was no small thing to subvert servants of the Machine-God.

  His looked up at the distant edifice, trying to guess its function. As his eyes ran over its summit, where the faceless gods of the Martian creed stared back at him, he felt something like nausea twinge in his bowels.

  There was something else in there. Something different.

  He lives. Every battle you fight, the Eye is there.

  ‘Jarl?’ Trask was impatient now.

  Ironhelm snapped back into focus. The presence was close, on the cusp, and the moment needed to be seized.

  ‘We move,’ he snarled, activating his blade’s energy field. With a heavy crash of ceramite on marble, he began to lumber down the stairs, into the cauldron of fire and blood below, and the slaughter began anew.

  Frei had fought hard since breaking out from his drop pod, and the pace had not slackened since. Before meeting up with Ironhelm he’d been forced to summon the storm early, dragging wyrd-­lightning to his skull-staff in order to clear the ground before him of enemies. Then he and his warrior escort had cut their way west down the valley’s base, working hard against a seething tide of misshapen Mechanicus constructs.

  All the while, he had sensed the presence of the other pulsing beneath the surface. The thousands of souls in combat around him made little impression on his senses – their souls were thin and emotionless even as they died, doing little to block the pall of recondite blackness that he could detect, clotted like a tumour at the base of the world’s heart.

  By the time he’d reached the courtyard and joined with Ironhelm the sensations were almost overwhelming, and he had to fight to prevent them from dulling his reactions. He’d peeled away from the command group once the assault recommenced, leading a flanking charge against a battalion of tech-priests huddled around a formation of ancient Krios battle tanks. The machines vomited out eye-­watering electromagnetic beams, but even under heavy return fire those units were falling back.

  Frei loosed a final blast of storm-lightning in support of the racing packs, then turned to gauge how far Ironhelm had come. The Great Wolf’s retinue was out in the centre of the square, more than two hundred metres away now, and had taken on the badly wounded Warhound. The Titan limped towards them, its back aflame from repeated missile-strikes. Twin furrows exploded out from its mega-bolter and plasma blastgun as it tried to scour the Wolves from its path.

  Frei allowed himself a grim smile. The war machine was a mighty thing, and in the right hands it was capable of devastation, but it was being used poorly. Such a towering construct was a magnet for long-range fire out in the open, and already its void shields were lurid with stress-flickers. Loyal Mechanicus automata had clustered around it, sending crackling arcs of interference fire into its flanks. More missiles pounded into the Warhound’s hunched shoulders, coming now from all angles, and its ventral shield coverage blew out in a shower of sparks.

  Loyal skitarii swarmed around it, risking death under its pounding treads to angle las-fire up at its weakened torso. The Wolves outpaced them, leaping up to the clawed feet to hack at the power cabling. Frei watched as Grey Hunters weaved between its pistoned legs, hurling mag-locked krak grenades before pouncing clear of the rain of return plasma-bolts. Several were caught by the fire-lines, their armour blasted apart and the flesh within atomised, but they had done enough – the grenades went off in a rattling sequence, crippling the Warhound and making it stagger.

  That was the turning point. More missiles slammed in, ripping up armour plate and sending the reeling structure toppling sideways. The relentless mass-reactive barrage finally cracked the shaft-­housings on its left leg, and the Titan slewed to one side, weapon arms blazing uncontrollably. It collapsed, crushing dozens of the fighters that milled around it, before rocking to a smoked-wreathed standstill. Secondary explosions radiated down its prone spine, kicked off by power-units overloading under the constant impacts of massed weapons-fire.

  Inevitably, it was the Great Wolf who claimed the kill. Ironhelm was first up on the Warhound’s neck. Frei saw his frostblade blaze out, a lone streak of neon-blue against a welter of red and black, and the machine’s cockpit was carved open. Ironhelm plunged into the burning innards, ripping out the Titan’s crew and hurling them out at the crowds below. With its mind-link severed, the Warhound’s weap
ons fell silent, the carcass shivered, and the entire machine clanked to a halt. Ironhelm threw his head back and roared out in triumph, bringing an answering chorus of howls from the Wolves of his company.

  Then they were loping off again, swerving around the fallen Titan and making for the edifice’s gates. A rolling wave of skitarii came with them, driving the insurgent forces ahead of them.

  Frei laughed, and turned back to the assault on the Krios formation. For all Ironhelm’s maddening intensity, the Great Wolf was a peerless leader. His voice could just be made out over the roiling tumult, urging his brothers onwards, goading them to ever-greater acts of battle-glory. He was obsessive, yes; he was secretive and he was black-humoured, but he was also a colossus of war, and those who fought with him soon learned the full extent of that.

  Frei’s staff snarled with energy again, and he strode out in the firelit night. The structure loomed up ahead, a vast square of ebony against the crimson skies. One Titan still remained, along with countless fallen servants of the Machine-God.

  ‘For the Great Wolf,’ Frei murmured, angling his staff towards the Krios and taking aim.

  They broke the gates, passing under vaults of burnished bronze with the sigils of Mars etched in gold. Ironhelm was at the forefront, driving all before him. He smashed apart the greatest of the automata that waited in the precincts – hulking creations with polished domes for heads and rotating battlecannons for arms. By then the momentum was irresistible – a crashing surge of Wolves and loyal skitarii. They pushed on, racing through halls of obsidian and marble, fighting under the eaves of vast machine-altars. The fighting spread out through radial naves, pursued down every avenue inside the tortuous interior.

  Until they broke into the inner sanctum, the true purpose of the building had not been apparent. The scrying runes did not speak in specifics – they offered clues, vague dream-states that could be chased down. Who knew what rites the Machine Cult demanded in that place, what secrets were hidden in the shadowed vaults? All that Ironhelm perceived clearly was that the enemy was desperate for something inside, and that was enough for him to follow them in.