Worth of a Wolf

[Adrian Collins]

This short story was my first entry into the Black Library open window in 2011, and hopefully the beginning of my journey to releasing a novel with the Black Library logo stamped on the spine.

 

 

 

 

The Worth of a Wolf

 

 

Turan Rolm stared down the inner corridor of his squad’s ferrocrete bunker in abject horror. The flicker of lights being fed by damaged circuits and the flashes of weapons discharge gave him a stuttering view of the slaughter. He felt his feet began to stumble and lead him backwards from the carnage that had left him bereft of any courage his training may have once instilled in him. His combat boots caught against each other and he slammed down onto the ground.

 

A cacophony of violence assaulted his senses; the screams of pain and terror from his squad mates, the wet slap of fresh gore exploding against the walls, the smell of weapons discharge, the impacts of chitinous claws as they sliced through body armour and human flesh and rendered men he’d fought and trained with for five years into pulpy masses of shredded meat. And then there were the screams of the beast. Inhuman screams that were both menacing one moment and then high pitched chittering and ear piercing the next.

 

Turan’s heart pounded against his chest like it was trying to break out of his ribcage. His breath came fast and panicked as his legs scrabbled against the cold ground and pushed him frantically backwards, not even feeling the skin being grated from his hands on the harsh surface below him. Tears streamed down his cheeks and a wet sob coughed from his lips. He snapped his head around for a heartbeat. The adamantium blast door of a command bunker was only twenty feet away.

 

The door was a little ajar, the stencilled Imperial eagle slightly off centre and the gap easily enough for him to fit through. Turan turned and pushed himself up to sprint. There was no pang of regret at his cowardice, no sorrow at the loss of his squad mates, just terror. Terror so pure it burned every fibre of his being with a white fire that was forced into him by a monster whose sole purpose was to consume him and every living organism around him. Its only reason for being: to eat him alive with that gaping maw of needle like teeth. He could still remember seeing half of Rolek’s head in those jaws, gruesomely separated from the thick coating of Imperial Aquila tattoos across his body and neck, mouth still ajar in a silent scream and one green eye still open.

 

Turan’s legs pumped and his feet pounded the ground as he made his desperate bid for safety. Ten feet. Behind him he heard the skittering of insanely fast claws against the ground. The screams had stopped.

 

It was coming for him.

 

The hysterical Turan turned at the last moment to look over his shoulder. The lights flickered on for the briefest second and there it was. Massive head all dark, slimy sinew and whip cord muscle reached out for him with a mouth distended to twice the height of his face, gibbets of what had once been men still lodged in the forest of teeth. Four arms, all long lean muscle coated in raw, wet, alien flesh and ending in brutal claws trailing crimson viscera splayed wide to present the soldier with his worst nightmare made real. Then the light flickered off. Turan screamed.

 

Impact.

 

Impact so solid it almost rendered him senseless.

 

A hard bang, like a small tank’s cannon firing, blasted his senses for the briefest of moments before he was showered in thick ropy pieces of warm viscosity. He felt harder and heavier pieces of something fall wetly on and around him. Pain cut through him as something sliced shallowly through the meat of his arm. Turan screamed again, thrashing on the ground and begging for help as his mind reeled at the imminent horrific death of its body.

 

“Rolm,” hissed a harsh but weak voice.

 

Turan’s fog of fear did not lift for long enough to allow the voice to penetrate.

 

“Rolm!” Came the voice, louder this time, “Shut your fraggin’ mouth!”

 

Turan heard the voice this time, his sobbing subsiding for a moment as he raised his head. Inside the blast door was darkness. He turned his head back down the corridor. A light flickered on and gave him a heartbeats witness to the slurry of meat and bone the monster had left behind. Turan retched and turned his head to the floor as he vomited up his small ration of food. The globe on the wall just above him doused him for a moment in its dull life.

 

Turan cried out in surprise and pushed himself up from the pile. He was covered head to toe in what was left of the monster that had but a moment before been about eviscerate him. Numb, he stumbled through the blast door and was almost sick again at the sight of the charnel house of the command bunker. Pieces of bodies, some alien but mostly human, were sprayed over tactical tables, the adamantium walls, pict screens, and cogigator banks. The floor was thick with a boot-sole deep red slurry of decomposing fluid with small patches of off yellow or brown where troopers had soiled themselves in life or death.

 

Turan felt the hot burn of stomach acid churn over his tongue as he retched once more. His head swam at the sheer brutality of what he saw. Reaching out an already bloodied hand he leant against the wall, but snatched it back sharply as it came away sticky and vermillion. Stumbling to the centre of the room he fell to his knees in surrender. No man, no army, no world could stand up to the Horde. One had just destroyed his entire squad, and it wasn’t even one of the big ones. There were uncounted trillions out there, Rolek had said. Uncounted trillions.

 

“Rolm, yet off your fat arse and close the blast door,” came a voice; a harsh whisper edged in pain.

 

Without thinking Turan rose to his feet and in the flickering light found the door mechanism on the wall and slammed his palm against the button. Somewhere within the heavy walls surrounding them a mechanism thousands of years old protested for but a scant moment before pushing the thick blast door shut with a loud clang. It was only at this point that Turan thought to find the source of the voice. He turned back and, as his eyes struggled to find focus in the flickering lights, looked about the room once more.

 

“Over here. On the ground,” rasped a voice from the side of the room, its source hidden by machines Turan could not hope to understand the purpose of.

 

A few short steps later was where he found Commissar Burrows, a still smoking bolt pistol held in a limp hand on his lap. Turan ran forward two steps in delight at finding someone alive, someone who would take charge and tell him how to get out of this horrible mess alive. His elated run faltered as he saw, despite the dim and flickering lights, that the commissar was missing one of his legs and a large piece of his augmented right arm.

 

“Damn you Rolm, I’m not a grox. Stop staring at me like you want to mount me you slack jawed farm-boy and go find the emergency generator,” growled Borrows, his face a mask of pain.

 

Not even registering the insult to his regiment’s agri-world heritage, Turan again nodded dumbly and turned to try to find the command bunker’s emergency generator, the source of the wet splashes at his feet not lost on his churning stomach. In a large alcove in the adamantium walls sat a machine with a dull green and a red glowing button. Thick cables ran up and out of the alcove and when Turan followed them he saw that they speared down from the ceiling and into the large banks of machines that filled the bunker.

 

He turned around to see if the commissar could give him direction. Burrow’s eyes were closed; he was out but still breathing. Turan turned back, turning his cheek red as he scratched his thick stubble. He reached out to the green button once. But then pulled back, looking again to Burrows for permission he craved but already knew he would not receive. Again he reached out and again he faltered as his finger touched the cold plastic button.

 

What if it was a last resort self-detonating device? What if it opened the blast doors and let more of those monsters in? Turan had no training beyond the use of his weapons and his body to serve the Imperium, how could he know what would happen? This was the type of machine the Mechanicus adept he had seen with General Fallum should be using! Not him! Inwardly he cursed every member of the general’s command he knew of that should have been here in this bunker to touch this revered machine.

 

Turan closed his eyes and whispered, “My Emperor, who watches over me, guide my hand...”

 

His bloodstained finger pushed the green button. At first nothing happened.

 

“...I am your faithful...”

 

First there was a steadily growing whine, a couple of dull bangs, and finally a cough and the sound of an engine kicking over and purring to life. And then, light; white, fluorescent, and brilliant. Turan’s eyes reeled at the brightness and for a moment he was rendered blind as glowing patches moved across his vision. Panicking he reached for anything he could find for a weapon. His lasrifle was long lost in the desperate flight from the beast that had torn through his squad. His bayonet he’d not been wearing when the attack happened. They had not been issued grenades. He was defenceless.

 

As sight began to return and he remembered he was standing inside a bunker that had been cut into the heart of a mountain and had walls of two-metre thick adamantium plate, his heart began to slow down enough for him to begin to fully take in his surroundings. What horrors the wan light had flickered into his mind before was nothing compared to the full scope of the command bunker of the 345th Lambaar Rifles Regiment.

 

His hand came up and covered his gaping mouth. General Fallum’s entire staff plus an extra squad or two must have been in here. Almost eighty men and women. Burrows, missing his arm and leg, was the most intact of all of them by a long way. Seven or eight blown out or hacked up alien husks, all looking like the one Burrows had just killed, lay throughout the piles of human body parts, their beady black eyes still staring at the carnage they had caused.

 

Turan averted his gaze and tried to stop what little was left in his stomach from coming up. He needed to find something he could use to defend himself and he needed it now. Gratefully his eyes rested on a rack still brimming with las and auto rifles. Walking over he picked up the more familiar lasrifle and slung it over his shoulder while he grabbed power packs and clipped them into his webbing. He also reached out and grabbed a polished auto pistol and its holster and a couple of frag grenades.

 

Having a means to defend himself began to relight the spark of his courage. Pressing the rifle into his shoulder he hastily stormed around the room and put an extra sizzling bolt through the head of each beast. The lasbolts pierced each elongated, sinewy head. Wicked purple and pink tongues lolled out and over the rancid rows of razor sharp and finger thin teeth at the impact, but none reacted any further.

 

“If you’re done re-killing everything,” the commissar was awake again, “can you start trying to find out... just what is going on.”

 

Turan nodded, “Yes, commissar, what would you have me do?”

 

“Get me up off this floor and put me on the tactical table so I can see all the pict screens.”

 

“Yes commissar,” responded Turan and jogged dutifully over to Burrows, who had managed to holster his bolt pistol and was trying to get himself into a straighter sitting position.

 

He reached his good hand up for Turan. The soldier grabbed it and hefted him up into a carry across his shoulders, as he had been drilled to do during basic, and carried the commissar to the tactical table.

 

“Sit me on the edge there, lad,” growled Burrows through gritted teeth, struggling with the pain of being moved, “then take off my belt and tourniquet my leg before I bleed out any more.”

 

Without hesitation Turan obeyed, such was the conviction in the eyes of the commissar, and grabbed the thick black leather belt from around his waist and began to wrap it around the ragged stump of flesh and bone that ended halfway up his thigh. It was only as he got closer that he noticed that some of the flesh was wiggling. No, it was wriggling.

 

He pulled away his hands and jerked back, quickly looking and feeling his jacket and neck for any of the worm like creatures. Burrows looked at him questioningly and then down at his stump and cried out, desperately but weakly battering at them. His fierce eyes narrowed at his subordinate.

 

“Turan, you cowardly steaming heap of grox :D, get your hands in here and get these things off me!” Roared Burrows.

 

Turan hesitated a moment before pulling his coat’s sleeves over his hands and wildly battering at the raw flesh. As they started to fall into the slurry below Turan noticed a deep red sticky oil beginning to coat his sleeves where they touched the creatures. He smiled, satisfied that they were gone and looked up. Burrows had passed out again and was leaning precariously forwards. Turan leaned him back carefully and laid him down before sitting himself on the table next to the commissar, his legs dangling over the ground.

 

Looking at the brightly illuminated ground it was only now he realised the disgusting fluid had swarms of the small creatures swimming slowly around in it, attaching themselves to any piece of dead human or alien material they could find. Arms and legs seemed to ever so slowly melt as they were consumed and turned into only the Emperor knew what. Turan took a deep breath and drew his knees up to his chest, getting his feet as far off the ground as he could. Looking up he saw the host of pict screens showing other bunkers and corridors and the outside approaches to the complex. Some screens only showed a blurry static but many were still working.

 

Beasts of every shape and size crammed almost every screen full. A seething mass of claws, teeth, insane bio weapons, and chitinous bone armour flowed by in an ever-moving flood. The green shades of the night vision view removed all other colours but already Turan could picture them in his tortured mind’s eye. Disgusting purples and pinks; like a horrid weal of tainted flesh. Midnight blues mixed in like oil in an ocean and sickening greens, and the smell; ever the smell of raw organism broken down to its basest bio form and then reconstituted into something designed to shred anything that existed outside of its hive mind.

 

One of the screens flashed white as, for an instant, its ability to handle spikes in brightness levels was completely overwhelmed. Then a split second later another, and then another, flashed white until finally every screen that had shown the outside approaches to the bunker complex was rendered to a single shade of white. Turan leant forward, careful not to overbalance and fall into the flesh eating slurry below him, and squinted trying to see anything that might clue him in on what had happened outside of the walls of the command bunker.

 

The flash subsided for a moment and he saw tall columns of liquid fire striking the ground from the sky that were so incandescent that the pict screens couldn’t even find a colour or hue to represent what Turan was seeing. For the briefest heartbeat he saw a flash of movement, like a wall of hate exploding through the horde outside and rushing upon the mountains he sat deep within the bosom of, and then the outside pict screens turned to static as they completely overloaded.

 

Then the shaking began. It felt like the mountain was trying to rip itself free of the world. Turan reached an arm over his commissar and gripped the edges of the tactical table, holding on through the white knuckled ride as whatever had happened outside threatened to wipe the planet flat. The bone jarring shaking tried in earnest to rattle the teeth from Turan’s jaw, but still he held on to his commissar and the tactical table as if he were a mother desperately holding on to her child.

 

Just when Turan’s strength failed and his grip began to slip the rumbling subsided and the young soldier’s face went slack. The sheer effort of just holding on had taken its toll and, when coupled with the horrors of the last few days, Turan lost his grip on his consciousness and slipped into painless and exhausted blackness.

 

Behind him, as the pict screens showing the outside approaches slowly came back to moving life, Turan did not see the red hot meteors decelerate at the last possible second and slam into the ground. He did not see far off human figures leaping and bounding away from impact craters in small bands, engaging small groups of remaining horde in vicious fire fights or brutal and bloody close combat. He did not see the seven bulky, yet agile, angels of the Emperor’s will loping towards the complex he slept in.

 

***

 

Minutes, maybe hours later Turan Rolm’s eyes snapped open. His head moved from side to side as his mind desperately tried to discover that the last three days had been one long horrible nightmare. His chest constricted as to his right the open but unmistakably dead eyes of Commissar Burrows stared blankly into his. Looking down at the commissars’ black leather greatcoat Turan saw movement.

 

Something in the commissar’s midsection stirred, like a rat under a bed sheet, rippling the great coat. Shuddering, Turan reached his hand out tentatively and uncoupled the button of the coat. Pushing the garment aside Turan screamed as he saw a host of flesh worms, like a spill of sausage meat, flow from the open stomach. Turan backed away over the table, kicking Burrows and the worms that fell from him to the floor, frantically looking around as the decomposing gore that surrounded him re-assaulted his senses.

He wanted to be sick, he wanted to throw up until there was nothing left of him but enough will to put an autopistol to his temple and end the dreadfulness of his final days in the uniform of the 345th Lambaar Rifles regiment in service to the Emperor of Mankind. He reached down to his belt and unholstered the autopistol, tears rolling down his face. His shaking hand gripped the cold steel of the weapon and he winced as he felt the cool touch of the barrel against his temple.

 

Openly sobbing, Turan slipped his finger within the trigger guard. He looked to the command bunker’s ceiling one last time, his vision blurring out the power cables above, and squeezed the trigger.

 

Click.

 

Click. Click. Click.

 

Nothing. Turan roared out in despair and frustration as he hurled the pistol through a pict screen showing one of the many corridors throughout the complex filled with the gruesome remains of the 345th Lambaar Rifles in a shower of splintered glass and sparks. Searching around he looked for a further means to end his own life. Something stopped his desperately darting eyes dead in their tracks.

 

Something from the legends. Something from tales his father had told him as a boy. Something that old, one eyed, usually very drunk veterans of the 345th who were well past their used by dates talked about and were laughed at for. He squinted harder at the pict screen showing a corridor not a kilometre from where he sat. He watched as a group of thirty or forty of the six limbed monsters were carved apart in the most brutally efficient and barbarous show of close combat superiority he was ever likely to see.

Astartes.

 

Four tall, broad figures in a heavy type of armour Turan had only ever dreamed about hacked and slashed their way through a living wave of the Horde. Heavy metal plates of armour moved in perfect synchronisation around the fours’ massive bodies, thick adorned furs swaying in wild unison with long hair and beards either braided or left loose. Axe and sword blades with whirring edges hacked through chitinous armour like it was paper, a flame weapon cleared entire corridors, and massive bolt guns spat a torrent of death.

 

At the forefront of the four Astartes a colossus with a pair of almighty gauntlets with long claws hacked and slashed at a rate far too quick for the pict screen to display. Turan was in awe as the four forged their way beyond the vision scope of the recording device transmitting to the pict screen. Desperately, and urgently, Turan tried to find the next pict screen in the sequence. His eyes darted from screen to screen, growing more frantic by the moment until they rested on a screen showing the four hastily moving down a long corridor.

 

“Look out!” he cried out and sat up as he saw a fell beast awaiting them in ambush around a corner that the screen could see, but the four could not.

 

He yelled and yelled pointlessly, screaming himself hoarse. The four stopped, not ten paces from the corner around which hid a monster at least three times the size of that the commissar had slain. A pair of segmented limbs ending in long vicious claws were coiled above its head, like a pair of river scorpion waiting to sting their prey.

 

The Astartes with the massive claws seemed to push his nose forward a moment, his feet stopping dead, like a dog testing for a scent. The Astartes nodded to the companion with the flame weapon who reached around to a belt pouch on his right hip and for a moment a black icon the shape of a side on wolf’s head rearing up with flame coming from its mouth was evident to Turan, on a thick pauldron as wide corner to corner as Turan was shoulder to shoulder. Turan racked his memory but could not place the sigil.

In a flash three small metal discs were flicked against the wall opposite the hiding beast. The angle of the throw saw them bounce at an exact angle that landed them at the surprised, clawed feet of the hiding xeno. In a movement that blinded the eye with its speed, the monster ducked away just as the screen went white with the explosion.

 

Again Turan found himself desperately searching for the small group of Astartes on the group of pict screens before him. There. Four large shapes moved warily through a smoke hazed corridor, their every step that of the stalking pack seeking its prey. Again the one with the pair of clawed gauntlets was out in front. That one didn’t even see the lighting strike that first skewered, and then yanked one of his men from sight into a dank corridor behind him leaving only a flame weapon with its blue pilot flame still burning.

Turan sat, his jaw distended in utter shock. He hadn’t even seen the strike it was so fast, only the feet of the warrior as he had been pulled into the darkness. The three remaining turned, too late by far, and charged after their companion around the corner and off screen. Once again Turan found himself desperately searching the screens for them.

 

His mind, having worked out the pattern of the screens by now, found the warriors more quickly than before. They ran, far faster than that Turan or anyone he knew could possibly run, after the dragging body of their companion whose feet still moved in weak denial of the metre and a half long ragged bone blade that was still embedded through its chest and dragging it behind the scrabbling creature. That’s when the ambush was sprung.

 

One moment the three were charging through the corridors after their companion and the next they were swamped in vicious, cutting and gouging, streaking forms. Arms of rippling muscle and stringy sinew hacked and scratched the hard armour of the Astartes and over the next thirty seconds Turan watched horrified as he saw two of them torn limb from limb, the armour and the bodies blessed by the Emperor shredded like so many of his friends from the 345th regiment.

 

Turan felt anger at hopelessly watching the lords of mankind being torn apart and their very gen-enhanced flesh tainted as the beasts tried to turn it into the biological slush that benefitted the hive mind of the Horde. He felt like his stomach would turn once more at the sight of it, like the feeling of the light of hope being torn asunder by the shadow of evil so pure it would turn all unto its own cause.

 

A cry of elation erupted from Turan’s lips as he saw one figure rise up victorious from the smouldering pile of bodies, pieces of raw viscera still visibly sizzling and smoking upon his claws. The Astartes looked around himself, lank wolf pelts hanging wet with the thick viscous blood of his slain foes over his broad shoulders. It lifted its chin to the ceiling and opened its mouth. Turan assumed a cry of anguish but his opinion changed a brief moment later as the muted, muffled sound of a long and drawn out howl cut through the adamantium blast door like a murmur on the non-existent breeze within the command bunker.

 

The sound made Turan cry out, such was the anguish in the whisper that met his ears. It forced him to remember the all encompassing grief of the death of his own father; taken during a factory fire in the grain packing plant back on Lambaar Primus when he was seven. Turan’s jaw tightened at the memory.

 

The remaining Astartes leant down and picked up a small totem of each of his fallen comrades and affixed it to his heavily battle scarred armour. With a final brotherly touch to each fallen friend the Astartes with the pair of claws moved on, his gait full of sorrow but his fists clenched in anger.

 

Turan followed the Astartes onto another pict screen. Yet another corridor full of the rags of human flesh that had once been his regiment. Something, apart from the Astartes, caught his attention. Something on the ground; a pallid piece of arm covered in dark forms. Imperial Aquilas; large, hand sized Imperial Aquilas wrapping around a dead but bare forearm. Rolek’s arm. The Astartes was right outside his Command Bunker.

 

The Astartes walked under the view of the pict screen, blinding Turan to his plight. Turan froze for a moment, his mind churning. Inside the maelstrom of the extermination of this planet by an unrelenting Xenos hunger, Turan was about to meet a walking god. A being so far removed from humanity, but brought all the closer to the bosom of the Emperor by that removal, was about to stand in judgement over Private Turan Rolm of the 345th Lambaar Rifles.

 

Dull impacts rung through the door. One, two, three with a mere heartbeat in between. The sheer power of the strikes to ring true on the other side of a thick adamantium door was phenomenal. Turan looked down at the bio slurry covered floor and hastily tucked his trousers into his combat boots before lowering himself slowly.

 

He felt the tiny carapaces of hundreds of small flesh worms squash flat beneath his tread as his weight transferred from the tactical table to the floor. Next to him the decomposing body of the Commissar was melting down quickly as larger, further evolved worms tucked in to the dead meat and reconstituted the devoured pieces into the thick slurry on the ground. Eyes locked on the blast door button on the wall, Turan slowly trudged through the command bunker.

 

With every step he expected the flesh worms to cut through his boots and start consuming his feet. Images in his mind, of him slowly walking through the slurry and his legs gradually being eaten before his diminishing height was too little to reach the blast door button, flashed through him and cut through his confidence. Turan forced his leaden feet to carry him to the wall. With relief like he’d never felt before his open palm slapped against the protruding button and with a groan the heavy blast door slid open to reveal the flickering light beyond and the massive silhouette against it.

 

Turan stumbled backwards to lean against a table as his eyes locked onto the figure, drinking in the majesty of the Astartes like a drug. The pict screens had provided Turan with a diluted version of the Astartes to this point, and the comparison was like looking upon a glorious lord’s master crafted power sword in comparison to a street rats concrete sharpened butter knife. The sheer radiation of the beauty of Man at his finest took his breath away.

 

His eyes stared down at the storm grey heavily gauntleted shins in supplication at first, and then moved up over small inscriptions in a language he’d not seen before and heavy carved wolf sigils etched in gold upon the knees as his curiosity took over. Wolf teeth and small runes carved into yellowing pieces of flat bone hung from pieces of chain or leather from the thighs and a thick belt with a gold wolf’s head clasp.

 

The Astartes cuirass was easily twice, maybe three times Turan’s breadth and held an Imperial Aquila’s wings centred with a browning animal skull. The Astartes’ pauldrons and arms were like tree trunks hanging from massive boulders, the claws at their end still crackling with fierce energy. Huge rents covered almost every piece of armour the Astartes wore, down to showing black muscle like fibres still twitching and crackling with power, and even red raw flesh beneath cracked and shattered gouges in the shining ceramite. Some of the slashes dissected beautiful inscriptions and images stamped, carved and painted into the armour in minute detail and at the desecration of such glory Turan could almost have wept.

 

Turan’s gaze finally rested on the Astartes’ face, easily chest and shoulders above his own. The Astartes’ features looked like they had been carved from the harshest, coldest crevasse of the most brutal mountain during the fiercest storm known to man. Scars criss-crossed the sharp bone structure of the Astartes’ pale face, the cold and almost translucent blue eyes with yellow specks were like pieces of a deep sea glacier prominent from beneath the white blonde shock of hair and thick plaited moustache densely spattered in purple pink entrails. Turan stared, the will to move or react in any way simply absent from his thinking as he stared up at a god made flesh and ceramite.

 

“Gorssen Mrotar, Vlka Fenryka,” rumbled a voice so deep Turan felt the air within his chest reverberate with the sheer timbre of it.

 

Turan fell to his knees and reached out to the god’s ceramite shod boot, completely forgetting what he knelt in as his soul basked in the radiant glow of what towered over him. His fingers never felt the cold kiss of ceramite as the giant strode around him, with the whining and hissing sound of his struggling armour filling the eerily quiet bunker, and slammed his deactivated gauntlet upon the door close. As Turan watched him he barely registered the blast door shutting. The Astartes turned to Turan again.

 

“Kto...” he started, and then checked himself for a moment, “Name, Gorssen Mrotar. Vlka... Wolves Fenrys.”

 

Turan marvelled at the way the god’s harsh accent brutalised the Imperial Gothic but the clipped message was clear.

 

“Lord, you... you are a Space Wolf!” said Turan, stammering at first but his voice escalating in both volume and speed as his excitement got the better of him.

 

“Space Wolf,” rumbled Gorssen, a flash of dislike crossing his hard features, “Yes.”

 

Without further discussion the Space Wolf began moving through the Command Bunker looking for something. Turan stood by hopelessly as even if he had known the name of what Gorssen was looking for amongst the pict screens, cogigator machines, and varied other machinery, it is unlikely he would know what the item looked like. Turan would have been amazed had he even been able to move his mouth to form the question of what the Astartes was looking for.

 

Gorssen’s doggedly determined demeanour seemed to become more and more agitated as he moved around the bunker until he turned once more to Turan, his brow creased like an angry thundercloud and his piercing eyes making the guardsman feel like the Emperor himself was staring into his very soul, pointed to his mouth and then to the ceiling, “Vox. To ship.”

 

Turan couldn’t speak for a moment as he caught a glimpse of two long canines through the Astartes thin lips. He shook his head, “As far as I know we lost contact with the fleet a day or so ago, lord. I heard the general speaking to my captain saying the long-range transmitters were destroyed.”

 

Gorssen grunted in response and reached up to his gorget, the faint click of a short-range vox breaking the silence. He spoke in muted tones in a language Turan did not understand, waited for a response Turan could not hear, and then spoke once more. The discussion went on for a minute at most before the vox quietly clicked off.

 

The big Space Wolf turned his back on Turan and walked over to the pict screens. He sat his bulk upon the tactical table, the glass layer of which cracked instantly under the immense weight of the Space Wolf. Turan moved to sit by the Astartes but saw a look of immeasurable sadness upon Gorssen’s features as his eyes snapped to the pict screen which showed the remains of his comrades. In those almost clear eyes was a mournful longing of the soul that spoke of the type of loss Turan could never fully comprehend.

 

“Coming soon, my brothers.”

 

The voice was so low Turan almost missed it. He looked up at the Space Wolf’s face once more.

 

“My Lord?”

 

“Trapped, little friend,” rumbled Gorssen, turning to look at him, “I go to see my Father and my brothers soon. You too.”

 

The Space Wolf may as well have reached out and struck Turan a blow, “My lord? Surely your brothers will come for you? They can get us out! You’re not going to just sit here and...”

 

A low growl, wet and guttural and menacing, silenced Turan. Gorssen’s fierce eyes nearly took the warmth from the guardsman’s limbs and for a moment he thought the Space Wolf was going to strike him down. Turan struggled to retain his feet as the Astartes stood once more to his full height and glowered down at him.

 

“Death. Glory. In the name of Russ and the All Father,” rumbled Gorssen.

 

Turan turned from the Astartes and sat on the table, the weight of the acceptance of death from the god beside him weighing him down more so than before.

 

“I don’t want to die,” Turan said to himself, taking a shuddering breath.

 

The Space Wolf took a step towards him, his voice radiating power and purpose, “Your brothers. Dead?”

 

“Yes,” responded Turan, surprised the Astartes heard his whisper.

 

“Out there? In tunnels?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Brothers should avenge loss?”

 

“Yes... of course... but against those things?”

 

“One life. One chance. Glory beyond life. One choice. Courage, little friend. Or cowardice. Either way, death. What will Turan’s saga be?”

 

Turan paused for a moment, allowing the words of this god made flesh to sink in. The words struck true. The Space Wolf was right; he was going to die. One of the veterans had told him that the Chapters of Astartes used to be ten, sometimes a hundred times their original size but he doubted that even a hundred thousand of the Astartes in front of him would be able to stop the Horde that had afflicted this planet. When he went to be judged by the Emperor for his life how would his story end? Would it be in the ignominy of spineless starvation or suicide? Or would the Emperor’s name be the last on his lips as he charged the foe like a true servant of Mankind?

 

The guardsman took a deep breath and whispered a prayer to his Emperor. He dropped to his feet once more and un-slung his rifle, coming to parade rest in front of Gorssen. Looking up at the Space Wolf Turan could feel his soul soar. At no other moment in his life would he be closer to the Emperor than now, in this moment, as he stood before one of His grandsons. In that one moment, as he looked upon those cold blue eyes with yellow specks without fear, Turan Rolm knew an odd but welcome kind of peace.

 

“I am ready, Lord,” said Turan.

 

It was time for Turan Rolm to stand and sell his life dearly for his Emperor, his Imperium, and for the 345th.

 

Gorssen nodded and turned to the pict screen. A large group of monsters clogged the corridor outside the blast door like a clot in an artery. Amongst them, keeping to where the flickering lights reached the least, was the beast that Turan had seen drag away a Space Wolf when Gorssen’s squad had numbered four. The Space Wolf’s eyes narrowed and he pointed with one of his clawed gauntlets.

 

“Lictor. Mine. The rest, yours,” he said, chuckling like a mountain collapsing as if having just made a joke.

 

Turan wasn’t sure what a Lictor was but laughed anyway, more out of nervousness than anything else but he found that laughing in the face of death relieved some of the tension of its expectance. To show his readiness Turan slapped the power pack of his rifle to ensure its security, flicked the selection to full auto, and jammed the stock into his shoulder.

 

Gorssen looked on, his face hard but for a small feral grin under his braided moustache. Without any further ceremony the Astartes walked over to the blast door and pointed Turan to the opening mechanism. Turan ran over and with a deep breath punched the button before sprinting to stand just behind and to the side of the massive Space Wolf.

As the door began its slow open with its usual groan Gorssen drew in an immense breath and unleashed a howl that echoed loudly through the command bunker. Turan shivered at its mournful intensity as he sighted down his weapons barrel and, at the first small gap in the locking teeth that showed the maelstrom beyond, unleashed a stream of searing red energy bolts into the masses of chittering and screeching beasts. He saw some drop out of view with neat holes punched in their bodies and as his pack ran dry and he flicked the ammo release.

 

Years of firing range training came to the fore as he reached to his belt and had gripped his second power pack before the first had even hit the ground. As he was slamming the second power pack into place the first monster pushed its way through the gap. With a roar Gorssen hit the charging whirlwind of limbs and teeth so hard that the thing almost disintegrated around the loudly discharging claw of his right hand.

 

As the doors rumbled further open Gorssen killed more and more, the lupine fluidity of his movements almost too fast to see despite his bulk. The Space Marine was fury itself; red, raw and unrelenting as the steaming pieces of bodies in front of him quickly piled up to the top of his greaves. The Astartes took a long stride forward and ducked a lightning fast pair of bone claws, simultaneously hacking down three more monsters in half as many heartbeats as he pushed into the corridor beyond the blast doors.

By the time Turan had reached for his third power pack and began to make for the blast door to follow Gorssen, one got past the Space Wolf. Two of its limbs neatly severed by Gorssen’s claws, it leapt at the reloading Turan and slammed in to him like a freight train. The impact on his back took the wind from his lungs and instantly Turan knew that this was it; his moment under the Emperor’s sight.

 

The guardsman desperately fended the monster off with his unloaded rifle as it snapped at him viciously. Each gnashing of its forest of teeth brought Turan one step closer to death. Turan barely noticed the slimy flesh worm filled slurry slide down the back of his collar as he struggled for dear life. A massive claw carved in to his shoulder and Turan cried out in pain as his blood jetted out and one of his hands lost its grip on the rifle stock.

 

With a wet crunch that reverberated sickeningly through his head the monster claimed a piece of him. White pain quickly turned to cold, nauseating numbness as the shock of losing a large piece of his freshly carved shoulder set in quickly. Time seemed to slow, the flicking movements of the creature on top of him becoming a more normal speed as it bore down on him, his flesh and greatcoat skewered among its teeth.

 

His fingers flicked against steel at his hip. They wrapped around a small cylinder. He lifted the item, despite the fresh agonising pain in his shoulder, and felt his thumb slip into a ring, which came away easily. The monster reared up to attack him once more and spotted his fist rising up. Without hesitation it took Turan’s arm up to his elbow and bit down.

 

The limb came away with a backwards flick of the monster’s head. A moment later and it evaporated, showering Turan in itself. The concussion of the grenade nearly took away his last moment of consciousness and he wheezed and gurgled horribly as holes in his chest from shrapnel bled into his struggling lungs. With all the strength left gifted to him by the Emperor he raised his ruined head over his paralysed and dying body and looked to the door. Turan smiled.

 

The rim of his vision had become a brilliant white and in the centre was Gorssen Mrotar, Astartes of the Space Wolf chapter. Now more than ever Gorssen looked like a ceramite clad god of Mankind, his gore covered claws reaping the bloodiest of tallies through the innumerable horde as he forged his way through them like they were a flood and he was an ancient battleship storming from its port. His hair and fur pelts swung wildly around his shoulders as he pushed ever further towards his goal. Howls and roars of effort and rage matched the chittering and screaming of the beasts.

 

As Turan heard his irregular heartbeat soften and finally give out Gorssen reached his chosen foe. Turan saw the Lictor rear back to its monstrous full height, its claws spearing down and its mindless minions baying for blood at its feet. Against the backdrop wall of nightmare purple, pink and blue flesh and sinew was Gorssen, Emperor gifted glory incarnate, leaping forwards in the middle of it all. One clawed gauntlet was cocked behind him, one stretched out forwards in challenge, and a mighty cry erupted from the Space Wolf.

 

“For the Allfather!”

 

Turan never heard that cry as his life force finally gave out and his head slapped back to the ground, his last whisper of breath passing smiling lips.

 

“For the Emperor...”

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed it. I'd be really interested in seeing what you all think.

 

I have more work, including my first book at www.adriancollins.com.au. Though this is the only 40K fan fiction I've put out so far, available as a free PDF download, there are a few more works on there that are more horror and war-fantasy themed. There are a couple more pieces currently sitting with the Black Library open window judges which I'll post here as soon as I can unless i am lucky enough to have them picked up.

 

Adrian.

[surelock]

I like it a lot,very descriptive and is easy to follow the story arc, and as a Space Wolf fan that makes it all the better. There are a few minor spelling and grammatical errors, but that is what an editor is for. (twoenthusiasticthumbesup)

[Adrian Collins]

Cheers for that mate, I'm definitely beginning to appreciate the value of an editor! To my horror I've found a few in the first novel I released a couple of months back. I came across them and the face went into the hands and the favoured word of the post-publish grammatically defeated rolled out with consummate ease.

 

"Balls."