Wolf Trap - Robbie MacNiven Read online

  ‘Epathus,’ Terrek said, his voice, for a moment, indistinguishable from that of a mind-wiped translation servitor.

  ‘Iron Captain,’ the Ultramarine replied. He was currently onboard his own flagship, now holding station on the other side of Svellgard, between the moon and Frostheim. Even over the vox, he managed to somehow sound altogether more human than Terrek.

  ‘I am preparing firing solutions, brother-captain,’ Terrek said, struggling to draw his mind far enough out of the machine cant to formulate a diplomatic response. ‘I must not be disturbed.’

  ‘Firing solutions for targets on the surface of Svellgard?’

  ‘Your logic is flawless on this occasion, brother-captain.’ The last word bore a suffix of binary code, a sudden blurt that Terrek had to clamp down on, like a tick. A shadow of discomfort passed through his thoughts, soon gone.

  ‘With respect, such a course of action has been advised against by the rest of the crusade fleet, including Supreme Grand Master Azrael,’ Epathus said. ‘Except in the direst of circumstances.’

  ‘I compute the three identifiable warp rifts below Svellgard’s oceans to constitute dire circumstances,’ Terrek replied.

  ‘But shelling the Wolves from orbit on one of their own moons would represent another,’ Epathus countered. ‘They will already be furious at the damage your first strike has caused.’

  ‘The damage may have included as few as two-dozen casualties.’

  ‘Two-dozen too many in their eyes, I assure you.’

  ‘Four times as many are likely to have perished at the hand of the greater daemon assailing them had I not struck.’

  ‘A fact that will only antagonise them even further. I have served alongside the Wolves before, Iron Captain, on Granthia Nine. Depriving them of a great kill is considered a grievous insult.’

  ‘That is wholly illogical,’ Terrek said, feeling the faintest stirrings of anger flicker in the depths of his neuro-circuitry.

  ‘But it stands,’ Epathus said. ‘If you want an unchecked bombardment now, you risk initiating a full-scale civil war. Their twin fleets in orbit alongside us will retaliate, and that will only be the start.’

  The numbers had stopped. They hung in their thousands in the air around Terrek, blinking insistently. An algorithm left incomplete did not portend to good things, and the Ultramarine’s interruption had pushed his calculations beyond their time threshold. By now it was likely that the Space Wolves had sought shelter in their lair’s subterranean bunkers. Casualty ratios from an orbital bombardment would be slashed by over two thirds.

  Terrek could no longer destroy both the neverborn and Svellgard’s Space Wolf defenders at a single stroke.

  Why he would want to do so was not entirely certain, beyond the fact that his logic engines had traced the reason for the crusade fleet’s existence back to the persecution of the sons of Russ. Terrek was simply attempting to cut out the wasteful intermediary experience. The Ultramarines, however, clearly possessed less foresight. He scratched at one of his few remaining patches of human flesh, white and scarred beneath the housing of his right cranial bionic optic.

  ‘Very well, Epathus,’ he said. ‘I commend myself to your alternatives, whatever they may be.’

  ‘Not an orbital bombardment,’ the Ultramarine said. ‘But an orbital assault. Let us demonstrate to the Wolves the power of the Imperium, and what happens to the enemies of that power. That will show us where they truly stand.’

  Transit Line four hundred and three,

  the Underworld, Midgardia

  Egil wiped green daemonspoor sludge from his helmet’s vox grille and the thermal waste dissipaters on his backpack, switching to his armour’s internal oxygen reserve with a thought-impulse.

  ‘If more of them carry their infections down here we won’t be able to continue our hunt for the Great Wolf,’ Moln said grimly. Like all the Space Wolves still with Egil, the few scraps of his armour not coated in a crusting layer of slime shone scarred silver, stripped to the lowest layers by the nightmarish atmosphere.

  ‘I agree,’ said Orven. ‘If the surface has been completely overrun we do not have long before they begin to infest these tunnels as well.’

  ‘But is it overrun?’ Bjorn wondered out loud. ‘What of Conran’s signal? It comes from the Magma Gates, does it not?’

  Egil nodded, but stayed silent. Conran’s distress transmission had been weighing on him since he had detected it. Suddenly things had grown complicated again. Had his Great Company evacuated Midgardia as he’d ordered? Or did Conran’s presence point to a larger contingent of Ironwolves? If not then why was he here? And what had caused him to loop a remote distress pattern from the peak of the Magma Gates?

  Suddenly, his quest for the Great Wolf did not look so noble, or quite as selfless. He had abandoned his own Great Company, his own pack-kin, during a difficult and dangerous operation. He had left them leaderless. Such an act harmed the integrity of the whole strike force. Even now he could feel the distress of the surviving Champions of Fenris as they sought guidance following Lenold’s demise. When pack leaders died and the links in the chain of command were shattered, the warriors of Fenris returned to their instinctive state, giving deference to the alpha. Until one established itself, a leaderless pack could be prone to prevarication and ill-considered decisions. Egil could feel just such uncertainty creeping through the Wolves now, in the Champions and even among his own Ironguard.

  He glanced at Grimnar’s battered, gilded thunderwolf skull. It was cradled in the claws of a crouching Wulfen, the beast looking up earnestly at Egil. For a moment the Iron Wolf considered the paradox, of the symbol of one of the greatest Wolves ever to have lived being held in the malformed hands of something that they couldn’t even be sure wasn’t wyrd-tainted. Egil realised, however, that it had taken a moment’s introspection to come to that conclusion. When he had first seen the Wulfen with the Great Wolf’s broken crown, he had seen only a wolf-brother guarding one of their Chapter’s sacred relics. The other Wolf Lords could yet disagree, but Egil knew he had come to accept the place of his cursed brethren within the ranks. They were all one.

  The thought made up his mind. He addressed the combined pack.

  ‘We are returning to the surface,’ he said. ‘If only momentarily. We must discover what is occurring there, how we might be of assistance, as well as resupply and receive reinforcements. If the situation is stable, we shall return here immediately to resume our hunt.’

  As he’d expected, there were some growls of challenge. He faced them down, as unbending as the iron that marked his crest.

  ‘I am a Wolf Lord, leader of eleven packs. Honour demanded I come here seeking our lost king. I do not deny, I desired it in my own hearts as well. But I cannot spurn my duties any more. I must see to my Great Company and coordinate the defence of this world, or whatever remains of it. I have promised to return here as soon as I am able, and I cement that now with an oath, before you all. I swear I will find the Great Wolf.’

  The growls became more approving, and there were nods, even among the Champions of Fenris.

  ‘Those who wish to stay here can remain, and continue the hunt,’ Egil went on. ‘But I shall be taking the thunderwolf’s skull. I will keep it safe, until I can give it back to Logan Grimnar in person, and tell him the saga of the brave Wolves who fought and died to preserve it.’ More approval. Egil knew from long experience that now, more than ever, it was time to show strength and certainty. He turned away from the pack, drawing up a chart of sub-level one on his visor. The nearest route to the Magma Gates began at a tunnel branching eastwards from the highway, a hundred and fifty paces back up the rail line. Egil began to walk.

  Behind him, the entire pack followed.

  Ramilies-class star fort, designate Mjalnar

  Something terrible had taken up residence in what Ragnar’s visor schematics called Strategorium
Six-A. Before hell had overturned reality onboard Mjalnar the room had served as a small strategic amphitheatre, plasteel tiers lined with cogitator lecterns encircling a large, central holochart.

  What had once been a space reserved for grave military discourse was now a playground for creatures with no fixed form. Horrors of Tzeentch leapt, skittered and cartwheeled around the buckling chitin plates that had been the strategorium’s seat tiers. Above the holochart, like a nightmarish projection, a more powerful daemon had manifested in the shape of a huge, disembodied eye – a throbbing, lidless, veined orb with an iris that shimmered and changed with kaleidoscopic intensity, passing through every colour in the spectrum in a matter of heartbeats. The jet-black well of the slit pupil at the heart of the storm of colours seemed bottomless, fathom­less, as equally impossible as both finite and infinite realities. Even just glancing at it, Ragnar felt a splitting migraine burst and flare behind his own eyes.

  De Mornay was right. The nearer they drew to Mjalnar’s tainted heart, the worse the corruption was becoming.

  ‘Blackpelts, into them!’ Ragnar roared.

  His Wolf Guard needed no encouragement. Howling oaths and spitting for luck, they flung themselves into the strategorium, slaughtering the nearest horrors without hesitation. Ragnar made straight for the wyrdling eye at the centre of the chamber, not meeting its gaze, focussing on each individual creature in his path as he split and carved and cut them into shards of riotous colour.

  ‘Ragnar, wait!’ shouted de Mornay from the chamber’s entrance. His warning came too late. Over the now-familiar stench of the wyrd, Ragnar caught the distinctive, chlorine-like smell of ozone. A second later a thunderbolt of purple lightning snapped up out of the daemon eye’s pupil.

  The bolt struck Tor Wolfheart square in the breastplate, slamming him back into the side of the tier behind him. The Wolf slumped, his armour smoking, and for a moment Ragnar thought the Blackpelt was dead. Then he stirred, and Ragnar felt a rush of relief. It was short-lived.

  Tor began to scream.

  The Wolf Guard lurched forward onto his knees, his bolt pistol and power axe clattering to the deck. Gauntlets scrabbled at the breastplate where the lightning had earthed itself. Then the metal armour cracked, splitting the plate’s embossed wolf’s head. Tor’s screaming grew worse.

  Ragnar could only watch as something that looked like a fleshy maw ripped itself open in the Space Wolf’s chest. The power armour cracked further, and the Wolf’s organs began to thrust up out of his broken chest bones in a wash of blood. The terrible wound seemed to spread, ripping its way from Tor’s thorax to his groin, the armour peeling back grotesquely. The Wolf Lord realised the Blackpelt was literally being turned inside out.

  It was Sister Marie who ended the Wolf’s misery. She engulfed Tor in a jet from her combi-flamer. The Wolf’s screaming as the fire roasted his deformed body sounded almost relieved compared to what had come before. Finally he stopped, the once proud warrior reduced to indiscernible, burned flesh.

  The daemonic eye unleashed its lightning again. The purple bolt cracked into the chitin flooring a yard to the left of Svengril the Younger. Fleshless, raw hands burst up out of the smoking impact, grasping at the Wolf’s boots. Snarling, Svengril stamped them to a bloody mulch.

  ‘Take cover,’ Ragnar shouted, dropping down behind one of the cogitator lecterns ringing the strategorium’s centre. The Wolves and Marie did likewise, de Mornay rolling his palanquin back out of the chamber.

  ‘We need reinforcements,’ the inquisitor voxed.

  Ragnar didn’t respond.

  The horrors capering around the eye shrieked and bawled with insane laughter as their master fired again. A third bolt hammered the lectern Uller Greylock was crouched behind. In an eyeblink the cogitator was transformed into a cloud of multi-coloured butterflies that dispersed into the wyrd-charged air. Uller, wide-eyed, found himself sheltering behind nothing. The power of the daemonic orb’s mutating energies crackled and snapped around it, and the horrors laughed all the harder, like children delighted with their parent’s trick.

  Howls interrupted them. The sound came from two of the four corridors branching off from the chamber, bouncing and echoing back from its high dome. Ragnar felt a thrill of relief, and rose in time to see his Blood Claws bust into the strategorium from two opposite sides.

  Except they were no longer his Blood Claws.

  What had once been Maegar’s Pack and Asgeir’s Allslayers were now something else. The mark of the Wulfen was unmistakably on them. They’d discarded their helmets and much of the armour plating on their legs and forearms, revealing wicked claws and bristling fur. They ripped into the strategorium like a primal tide, fangs bared, muscles straining as they savaged the horrors around the eye.

  The thing attempted to defend itself. More lightning snapped from its centre. Wulfen convulsed, one collapsing with a howl as its bones were transformed into jelly, another choking as both arms ran and melted together into a fleshy tentacle that then proceeded to strangle the writhing Wolf to death. Another bolt struck like a chain, bouncing between three of the former Blood Claws. One was turned instantly into a frozen statue of glittering, multi-coloured gems, another collapsed as its blood was transformed into amasec, and the third simply vanished, leaving behind a small silver eye token.

  Such warping, unnatural powers would have broken the sanity of most attackers instantly. To the Wulfen it only served to heighten their instinctive blood-fury. The two Murderpacks hit the centre of the chamber at the same time, leaping up onto the holochart from all sides. The eye managed one last bolt – turning a Wulfen into an open book that caught light and blazed away to nothingness – before their claws reached it. The thing deformed and burst with stinking, clear liquid as the Wolves’ talons raked its cornea, ripping into the retina, gouging down to the vitreous centre. The daemonic pupil dilated, the slit of black nothingness widening, and with a wet thud it detonated, showering the chamber in gelatinous chunks.

  The Wulfen howled their victory. Ragnar dropped down into the holo-pit, approaching them tentatively. The murderlust was still in their lupine eyes, and he knew himself how difficult such passions made it to differentiate between friend and foe, or understand when the battle was over.

  One of the Wulfen on top of the chart, still splattered in the daemon eye’s viscera, leapt down to face Ragnar. For a second, the beast held his gaze. Then it bowed. Only then did Ragnar recognise pack leader Maegar.

  ‘Lord,’ the transformed warrior managed to grunt from between its fangs. Ragnar felt an unexpected upsurge of remorse. This was his fault.

  ‘Well met, Brother Maegar,’ he said quietly, putting a hand on the Wulfen’s slime-slick shoulder. It seemed to shudder, but maintained its deferential pose.

  ‘Could not… control pack…’ Maegar growled. ‘Asgeir dead. One pack now.’

  Ragnar understood. Beneath the strain of being led in circles through the infested star fort, Maegar and Asgeir’s Blood Claws had succumbed en-masse to the curse. In the fighting to reach the strategorium Asgeir had fallen, and now the Wulfen had instinctively banded together into a single Murderpack.

  Ragnar realised they were all staring at him, suddenly silent. It was no different to meeting the glare of a pack of wild Fenrisian wolves. Ragnar let his own gaze slowly travel over them, grip tightening fractionally on Maegar’s shoulder.

  ‘It is good to see you again, brothers,’ he said, slowly and clearly. ‘Now on, to the heart of this place. The wyrdling stink is still strong in the air. I would see it purged.’

  As one, the Wulfen snarled their approval.

  The Magma Gates, Midgardia

  Egil reached sub-level seven before Olaf Ironhide collapsed. The pack assumed defensive positions as the Iron Wolf moved back down the transit line to the fallen warrior’s side.

  ‘The rot,’ the Ironguard growled between gritted fangs. He nodde
d down at his leg. Despite the enhanced clotting agents in Space Marine blood, the injury dealt behind his knee plate by the plaguebearer’s sword was still leaking a discoloured, yellowish fluid.

  ‘Skol,’ Egil said, supporting Olaf up into a sitting position. The servo-skull buzzed over the Space Wolf’s leg, the bio-scanner implanted into its left eye socket bathing the scarred silver plates in a wash of green light. After a moment it blinked out, and the results uploaded to Egil’s bionics.

  ‘The organics of your left leg are severely infected,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘I know, lord. The damn spores got in.’

  Egil nodded. ‘I’m no Wolf Priest, but the limb is ruined and the infection will spread if we don’t remove it. If it hasn’t already.’

  ‘You do it, lord,’ Olaf said. He thrust his Fenrisian rune sword towards the Iron Wolf. Egil took it.

  ‘Bjorn, help me with the plate,’ he said. The two Wolves stripped the remains of the power armour from Olaf’s leg. The stink of rotting meat filled the air as the final part was lifted away. Skol’s stab-lumen lit up the ruin that had been the Ironguard’s limb. The flesh around the initial wound had completely sloughed off, revealing yellow bone pitted with infection. The rest of the leg was rotten with fast-working decay. Some skin came off along with the power plates, revealing the dark-veined muscle beneath. Pus welled up from the injury, and the skin further up the limb was as white as a Fenrisian helwinter.

  ‘Do it,’ Olaf urged. ‘Quickly.’

  Egil didn’t hesitate. While Bjorn lifted the leg, the Wolf Lord slid Olaf’s combat knife in a circular motion around the Space Marine’s upper thigh. Dark, infected blood pattered on the tunnel transit’s dirt floor. The flesh parted, and Egil began to cut into the meat of Olaf’s limb with his sword. The Ironguard grunted, hands clutching handfuls of dirt. His body would be flooded with stimms and counterseptic while his secondary heart kicked in, countering the bloodloss. It would all be in vain if Egil didn’t finish the amputation before the infected leg corrupted the rest of the Space Wolf.