A re-write of the sixth legion parts of Wraight's Scars.

[No one important]

When Chris Wraight's Scars (HH) came out in instalments I was impressed with everything but his efforts with the Wolves. The first scene with Bjorn and Russ didn't work for me and so in my arrogance I sat down and started re-writing those bits. Of course I never finished, real life got in the way, but I thought it might be of interest to others so I thought I'd share it with you.

 

 

 

  One

 

Fimbulvetr

 

 

It is said that on first seeing the planet Prospero, one of the most revered Rememberancers of the Great Crusade proclaimed it as “beautiful as a star sapphire”. But then that had been before the final sanction of the Sixth Legion Astartes.

 

In their desire to utterly eradicate the Maleficarum the fifteenth legion represented, the Vlka Fenryka had unleashed weapons of horrifying destructive capacity. Mountains had been levelled, molten gashes torn into its tectonic plates, oceans vaporised and the atmosphere filled with a toxic miasma of dust and gas that blotted out the sun. Prospero had been left a dying world, doomed to the slow painful death of nuclear winter, its ecosystems ruined beyond natural repair.

 

The Rout had seen dead worlds before: they had been the cause of many of them. That was after all the reason the Allfather unleashed Jarl Russ and his Wolves. Not to break enemies but to ruin them utterly. That was why they were thought of as being were one of the darker legions. Monsters designed to do the unpalatable, willing to do the necessary evil that civilised men would rather not.

 

But there was something about the death of Prospero that left a bad taste in the throats of the Vlka Fenryka. Not the fratricide. No the Wolves could deal with that, they had long ago accepted the mantle of executioner, obedient as they were to the Allfather’s will.

 

Perhaps it was the Maleficarum then, that had first twisted the minds and spirits of the fifteenth legion and then later warped their flesh into hideous unnatural forms. The Maleficarum that had taken the lives of so many Wolves. The Maleficarum that Magnus had used to escape the final sanction of the Rout.

 

Or maybe it was something more subtle. The feeling of wyrd twisted, of being led into a course of action by unseen and unknown players. Whatever the cause there was little celebration amongst the Wolves.

 

Attributed to Kasper Ansbach Hawser, 

Conservator, Skald of Tra.

 

 

*

 

In various geostationary and polar orbital trajectories, drifted the dark grey fleet of void predators that had slain Prospero. Giant battleships swam like the leviathans and Kraken of the abyssal Fenrisian depths. Around them were their attendant support vessels: fleet-tenders, maintenance pods, shuttles and darting gun-ships. Some of the largest of the behemoths had smaller capital vessels as their own personal honour guard, specialist shield-wall frigates with their distended armour plated flanks and dense thickets of void shield projectors.

 

Trapped by the incessant pull of gravity, the orbital approaches of Prospero were littered with the debris of void war. Reaction control thrusters and even main plasma drives flared briefly in staccato bursts as the smaller vessels jinked to avoid the large bits of detritus. Stoically, the larger capital vessels weighed down by inertia relied on the strength of their void shields to weather the ablative hail, bludgeoning away the spinning fragments of defence platforms and intra system defence monitor ships.

 

A few of the Vlka Fenryka’s vessels had hulls pock marked by weapon impacts or limped along on sputtering engines, their sides carved open to the cold emptiness of space, exposing the ribs and honeycomb soft interior. Their innards lit by the soft glow of hot metal thermally radiating out into space, cruelly exposed interior lighting and the glint of the welding torches of the thousands of repair crews human and half-human servitor that crawled over their torn flanks.

 

At the outer edges of the sixth legion’s fleet were the scout-surveyors, mine sweepers and electronic warfare vessels. All keeping wary electronic eyes on the void around them for the missing fifteen legion‘s fleet.

 

Trans-orbital transport vessels and bulk lifters rose up out of Prospero’s ruined atmosphere fighting the planetary gravity well with huge brute force nuclear drives and more sophisticated counter-gravitic plates. They were ugly functional ships, not creatures of war, just mere beasts of burden. They had been at their task now for three days and nights, recovering the arsenal of drop pods and armour, ferrying it back to the ships. Recovery was always a necessary but painfully slow process compared to the sudden burst of controlled violence that was deployment.

 

*

 

The Nidhoggur the flagship of the Rout’s Third Great Company; jagged with weapon batteries, sensor arrays and communications antenna; hung almost exactly above the planet’s north pole. It was a beast of a vessel, gunmetal grey like all its ilk adorned with protective runes the Gothi used to protect sea and ice craft on Fenris. It had weathered the assault well and a few faint scorch marks on one flank were the only evidence of her role in the slaughter.

 

The vessel’s command bridge was a huge echoing cavern, an odd mixture of metal and marble. Neo-gothic Terran architecture intermingled with elements of hyper-modern Martian technology and only a few token elements of Fenrisian culture. It was dimly lit with electric lights mounted high up in wall mounted sconces and by the flickering glow of image screens and hololithic projection tanks. Tiered decks supported by ornate stone clad pillars surrounded the central space. Each level was filled with multitudes of human and post-human adepts of varying ranks, all outnumbered by the sub-human lobotomised servitors seemingly attached to almost every display or data access terminal.Unlike some of the Sixth Legion vessels there were no fireplaces or smoky burning braziers on the main birdge. The Jarl, Ogvai Ogvai Helmshrot, tended to leave day to day control and organisation of the Nidhoggur to its mortal crew.

 

In the very centre of the room mounted like some baleful flower above the command throne sat a huge hololithic display, projecting images to the vessel’s command crew below so that bridge personnel were in amongst the glowing phantoms of photonic projection. Some of the command crew were equipped with haptic gauntlets that enabled them to interact physically with the images, flicking between images, minimising some, enhancing and magnifying others. Most showed engineering schematics of damaged vessels, fleet movement trajectories or logistical arrangements.

 

At the centre of the mostly human command staff, next to the captain‘s throne, stood Ogvai himself. The seat had been built for human dimensions and was unsuited to Astartes bulk, never mind one armoured in full Cataphractii pattern battle plate. Instead the throne’s occupant was the gaunt figure of the Nidhoggur’s current captain, Tharon di Ravell, deep in conversation with the pensive Jarl. The Captain was career military, with one hundred and forty years of service behind him. Rejuvenat treatments and expensive augmetic implants had prolonged his existence. But they had left him painfully thin; not wiry or athletic; more emaciated and gaunt.

 

Beside him, Ogvai was a hulking dark grey ceramite behemoth, all pistons, power packs and armoured plates. The overlarge shoulder guards of the Cataphractii pattern battle plate hidden under the mouldering furs and dried skins of predatory beasts that he had slain decades earlier. The Wolf Lord’s long black hair was hidden within the shadowy depths of his armour’s cowl. Only his almost albino white face could be clearly seen, commanding, assertive, dominant. 

 

“Forty percent of our drop pods and almost sixty percent of our operational battle tanks have been….” 

 

The Captain’s one sided conversation tailed off as he saw Ogvai’s attention had been drawn to one of the two main bridge entrances.

 

Four of the Jarl’s Vaerangi were acting as an honour guard, escorting two armoured grey figures onto the bridge. The Vaerangi, like their liege lord, clad in Cataphractii armour towered over the Nidhoggur’s human crew. But shockingly the larger of Ogvai’s two visitors stood head and shoulders above the mightiest warriors of Tra.

Captain Tharon was surprised by Bran, Jarl of Twa’s presence on his ship. There had been no mention of the warrior known more commonly as the Thunder Lord amongst the Rout.

 

It was said that he was a Terran by birth, and with the death of Heoroth Longfang, now the oldest of the sixth legion’s Terran born. But whereas Longfang had shown the genetic traits of the canis-helix; with the excessive dentition that marked the children of Russ; Bran looked like more like a Terran, albeit one suffering from gigantism. Such was Bran’s size that some had suggested half in jest that maybe he was a genetically modified migou or maybe one of the last remaining Thunder Warriors. It was the latter association that had led to his perhaps apposite cognomen.

 

Although the venerable Gothi, Heoroth Longfang had been the eldest of the Terran born and trained Legiones Astartes; there were others amongst the Rout who had come from the Throneworld. The early days of the Great Crusade had been expensive on men and materiel and often Legion homeworlds were not equipped to provide sufficient numbers of the high grade candidates required for induction into the hallowed ranks of the Adeptus Astartes. Suitable candidates were chosen by specialists teams on Terra and other heavily populated worlds and shipped for training and induction on the relevant Legion homeworlds. The Great Jarl was known to frown upon this practise, restricting his recruits to young men from Fenris.

 

Ten years after Russ had been united with his Legion, a series of brutal campaigns had massively diminished the fighting strength of the Vlka Fenryka, leaving it smaller then when it had left Terra in search of its wilful progenitor. The Emperor had sent a team of proto-Astartes, to bolster their numbers. They had been held in cold sleep since the tail end of the Unification Wars. Just three hundred strong; armed with dreadful Dark Age weaponry; they were to be used as an expendable assault wave to spare the Sixth Legion from unnecessary casualties in one of the darkest and most secretive conflicts of that time period. One that all the Legions had sworn to stay silent on.         

 

When it was ended, only one of the proto-Astartes still drew breath. Russ had found him dying, surrounded by dozens of dead transhumans, his bioengineered form going into shock. The Wolf Lord had given some of his own blood, perhaps some of his own life force it was whispered, to save the creature’s life and had bade his priests try and help this loyal and brave warrior. That had been almost two hundred years ago and to almost everyone’s surprise Bran, the thrice born, had risen to become leader of one the Rout’s Great Companies.

 

He wore artificer battle plate specially constructed for his physique, carved with protective runes by his Gothi and pocked with the scars of recent battle. Several heavily singed pelts and skins hung from his shoulders. Around his neck hung Fenrisian charms, bone teeth and vicious talons from favoured predators on necklaces of gold wire. Weapons hung from his belts, many of them obscure and ancient design. In a ludicrously ornate leather holster was the archaeotech disruptor-arc Bran favoured. It was a weapon of astonishingly destructive capacity using some long lost extension of the disruptor field technology that enhanced the powered blades of the Astartes. When activated it created a bubble of atomic destruction in front of its muzzle that could be swung into opponents, destroying them as thoroughly as an artillery shell going off. It even worked as a short ranged gun with similarly destructive effects. Ogvai had once seen Bran destroy four heavily armoured orks some thirty metres away with it. Atomising them into bloody smears and leaving only their bloody ruined leg stumps standing oddly upright as testament to their existence.

 

Bran’s face was a mess of scar tissues, some old and some recent. His head was almost totally bald and much of his lower jaw and teeth were augmetic replacements. Towards the rear of his head were a variety of data-jack ports that at a distance looked like clumps of hair.

 

Following in his lord’s shadow both physically and metaphorically was Twa’s chief Gothi, Arvidh. He was also a Terran though his features were clearly shaped by Russ’ genetic legacy with enlarged canines and a hirsute face. Yngvar Arvidh, as he had been named by his trainers in the Rout, had been selected as a young boy and shipped to Fenris some two hundred years earlier. His hair was now iron grey, twisted into dreadlocks, his beard shaped into a jutting waxed spike. The Gothi’s armour was vintage crusade era battle plate almost hidden by ancient furs and necklaces of charms, the exposed plates painstakingly covered in runes of protection inscribed in fine traceries of gold and silver.

 

Twa’s venerable Gothi had a curious way of moving that seemed to suggest that he was not quite bound by the laws of space and time, as if reality was forever just catching up with him. That was the way with the wyrd touched Ogvai mused momentarily. They walked in two worlds at the same time, one of logic, causality and reason. The other a world of lies and imagination and terrible madness.

 

Ogvai stomped over to his guests, mortals scattering to make space for the Jarls to meet. His senior bridge crew left uncertain whether to wait for his return or to continue their meeting without him.

 

“Bran,” Ogvai growled in a greeting that sent infrasonic waves of fear to the unmodified or crew.

 

“Og,” the Thunder Lord replied in an even deeper boom.

 

Separated by only a dozen or so metres, the Thunder Lords huge bulk was even more apparent. He towered over Ogvai by a head or more. The two eyed each other up, their gene-enhanced predatory nature superseding any natural friendship.

 

“You wanted to speak to me?” Ogvai grunted.

 

“Aye,” Bran answered, glancing around. “Though I was hoping to meet somewhere a little more private.”

 

Ogvai gave a non-committal nod, surveying his bridge with a steady gaze and a sweep of his head.

 

“Come,” Ogvai grunted to his guests and set off across the bridge to his personal reclusiam, with the slow measured pace that Cataphractii armoured required of its wearers. Bran and his Gothi followed politely behind, whilst the Vaerangi returned to their other duties aboard the Nidhoggur.

 

*

 

The reclusiam was Ogvai’s space and the only place on the Nidhoggur’s bridge where Fenrisian mores held sway. It was quieter in there, dark but for the burning braziers that lit it with a warm smoky flickering light. Each had been mounted under soot swaddled air ducts so that the smoke did not disturb the rest of the bridge, and each was partnered by a hefty fire suppression system.

 

A large table filled the centre of the room, a gigantic slab of orange crystalline material, a trophy from an earlier Compliance. It was part of a gigantic crystalline construct that Ogvai’s predecessor Gedrath had destroyed in hand to hand combat. In testament to his victory and to the might of his foe, Gedrath had the creature’s carcass carved up and used as a table.

 

Aun Helwinter, Tra’s senior Gothi was there waiting as they arrived. Ogvai hadn’t summoned him. But a skilled Gothi could sense when and where he was needed and hence appear at the most opportune moment. Like most of the Wolves, Aun Helwinter was still fully caparisoned for war, after all they were still in enemy territory. His dark grey armour was as rune inscribed as his brother priest’s, albeit slightly less ostentatiously. Pale furs hung from his shoulders along with his a leather mask and head-bindings. His skin was glacial blue-white under a mane of straight, long white hair that hung over his armour’s power pack in a simple ponytail.

 

The two priests nodded in greeting at each other. There was always an odd tension around the Gothi as if they half suspected their brethren would suddenly degenerate into some fell beast of the Underverse. Perhaps they spoke telepathically to each other. Perhaps they sparred briefly mind to mind, testing each other’s mental defences.

 

The two Jarls positioned themselves on opposite sides of the table. Each with their Gothi to the right of them a step back.

 

“Well, here we are,” Ogvai prompted, waving one armoured arm to encompass the soot blackened cavern.

 

“My Gothi was telling me of your skald and the Horus-daemon on Prospero,” Bran started, waving his hand in Arvidh’s general direction.

 

“And…”

 

Bran said nothing for a moment, glancing back at his Gothi before answering.

 

“Do you believe that the demon-thing was Horus?” Bran said in an almost explosive whisper.

 

Ogvai snorted in derision.

 

“Nonsense!”

 

“Helwinter?” Bran turned his gaze on the impassive young Gothi.

 

“I saw the Horus-thing… spoke to it briefly,” Aun replied in a calm quiet measured tone.

 

“It was maleficarum… a dread thing from the Underverse,” Ogvai interjected quickly. “Such things are not to be trusted. They are creatures of lies”

 

“Yet it spoke as if it was Horus?” Bran said forcefully a sharp edge to his words.

 

“Yes,” Helwinter conceded.

 

“And Jarl Russ has the Skald now?” Bran asked.

 

“Yes,” Ogvai half grunted. “I am told the Great Jarl questioned every member of the legion who encountered the beast.”

 

“But the skald alone he kept?”

 

“He kept Bjorn too.” Arvidh added.

 

“Bjorn is your man. A man of Tra?” Bran asked.

 

“There’s nothing wrong with Bjorn,” Ogvai answered, defensively.

 

“I believe that Jarl Russ has a different reason for keeping Bjorn close to him,” Aun said softly. “The Jarl and his senior Gothi believe that Bjorn’s wyrd is important to the future of the Vlka Fenryka. When his Gothi attempted to parse Bjorn’s wyrd they were surprised how far it seemed to extend into the future. More so they were concerned that it entwines with Jarl Russ in some way that they could not unpick.”

 

“See!” Ogvai grunted, as if that information was sufficient and no one needed to enquire any further.

 

“And the skald is he important too?” Bran asked.

 

Ogvai grunted and glanced back towards Helwinter before saying.

 

“Russ believes in the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

 

“The skald and the daemon are linked as you are hinting,” Aun explained carefully. “It has guided him for much of his life. Preparing him to be a tool with which to manipulate the wyrd of the sixth legion. Jarl Russ merely continues the work we have done since the skald first came to the Aett.”

 

Bran turned his shrewd gaze to Helwinter. “Does Jarl Russ believe that the beast was Horus, or was in some way linked to the Warmaster?”

 

Aun Helwinter didn’t respond immediately. He breathed deeply before answering as if gathering his thoughts.

 

“I cannot speak for the Great Jarl, it would not be right for me to do so. Certainly he did not share his thoughts with us on the matter. But Russ was concerned by some of the things the Horus-daemon said to the skald, Fith, Bjorn and myself. The creature spoke of time in a non-linear fashion, as if it was speaking from the future to the present. Indeed it appeared to be able to stitch together different moments in time, many years in time and many light years in distance apart together. Several men of Tra were able to step physically from Prospero in the now into the skald’s quarters aboard the Lemuryan Orbital Plate the day before he left for Fenris and then back again.”

 

“Could even the Emperor match such an act?” Arvidh whispered.

 

No one answered. Who truly knew what the Emperor’s limits were. But perhaps more importantly were there creatures with powers that surpassed his?

 

Arvidh stared impassively. Bran shook his head like a bear as he struggled to find what to say next. Ogvai shifted uncomfortably, the gauntlet covered fingers of his right hand surreptitiously describing a protective sigil in the air to ward against maleficarum.

 

“What’s got you so worried Bran?” Ogvai asked carefully “You knew all this before, I’m sure. What else do you know?”

 

Bran didn’t answer just glanced towards his Gothi.

 

“As you are aware Jarl Ogvai, astropathic communications has been almost impossible since we arrived at Prospero,” Arvidh said calmly. “Our star speakers have been unable to receive or send messages. We have been completely cut off.”

 

“This is known to us,” Ogvai allowed.

 

“Indeed the last message we received was during the battle itself. It was a message from the Sigillite to Constantin Valdor,” Arvidh finished.

 

“You broke the Custodes astropathic code?” Helwinter said a note of surprise in his voice.

 

Bran managed a look an unmodified Terrran would have described as sheepish.

 

“We believe this message was the reason the Custodes and the Sisters fled back to Terra without retrieving most of their gear from the planet‘s surface,” Arvidh continued.

 

Ogvai stalked round the table towards the other Jarl.

 

“Go on.”

 

“We were only able to decipher some fragments of the message. It said that several Primarchs including Warmaster Horus and their legions had turned traitor. That they had turned upon their loyal brothers and that at least one of the loyal Primarchs is dead.”

 

“They killed …” Aun gasped.

 

Ogvai growled. “Impossible! Horus t….”

 

“Do we know when this happened?” Helwinter asked quickly to still Ogvai‘s rising ire.

 

“It’s impossible I tell you, Horus turning traitor.” Ogvai shouted almost petulantly.

 

“No. We were unable to decipher all the message,” Arvidh answered Aun.

 

“One garbled message Bran, and you think the Warmaster has turned traitor?” Ogvai snarled, the air around him redolent with kill-urge pheromones.

 

Bran had taken a step towards Ogvai. His body language semaphoring his displeasure at Ogvai’s approach and manner.

 

“The message alone, no!” Bran almost snarled in response. “But put it together with the messages Horus sent Russ before we attacked Prospero and the things the Horus-demon said on Prospero and I believe there is reason to be concerned.”  

 

“The messages?” Helwinter queried, trying to inject logical reasoning and civilized patterns of behaviour into the discussion before the two Jarls came to blows.

 

“The Sigillite’s orders were for us to bring Magnus and his legion back to Terra. Yes?” Bran responded almost calmly, his voice hardly above a whisper as he tried to control his temper. “Then en-route the Warmaster sends a series of astropathic messages to Jarl Russ and Lord Valdor and suddenly we’re not trying to capture the fifteenth legion, we’re trying to annihilate it.”

 

“The Horus-demon thing spoke of setting the sixth legion against the fifteenth. Yes?” Arvidh added, keeping their argument going. “It spoke of them being threats that he that is Horus needed out of the way if he was to defeat the Emperor,” Arvidh added.

 

“Yes,” Helwinter agreed. “I think I see what you mean.”

 

“You do?” Ogvai growled, though less enraged. “I don’t!”

 

“They’re suggesting that the Horus-demon was Horus from the near future. That he was setting us up to kill Magnus and his legion and in doing so remove two threats from the hnefatafl board.”

 

Ogvai frowned at that but resisted any further outbursts.

 

“So I ask you again, Aun Helwinter, was it Horus? The daemon thing, was it Horus?” Bran asked again.

 

“I do not honestly know,” Aun answered with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders.

 

“Do you believe that Russ thinks the demon was Horus?” Bran continued relentless as an avalanche. 

 

“I cannot speak for our Jarl,” Aun said quietly “But yes I suppose… I suppose it is possible that the Jarl may well fear as you do, that that the creature was Horus. That it was… Horus from our future reaching into the past and present to guide the direction it would take.”

 

There was an uncomfortable pause, as everyone took in what Helwinter had said. What Tra’s young Gothi had verbalised was bordering on blasphemy maybe madness.

 

“There’s a big gap in your thinking,” Ogvai muttered coldly. “What would cause Horus to turn traitor why would he become a demon thing?”

 

There was a painful silence then as Bran and Arvidh tried to think of a logical response.

 

The silence was broken by the fortuitous arrival of a young and nervous un-modified human wearing the insignia of a communications officer. 

 

“My lords, I am sorry to interrupt,” the man gasped as entered their sanctum. “We are receiving a message from the Hrafnkel we are to weigh anchor in four days’ time and set course for the Khosis cluster.”

 

“Four days,” Ogvai growled, “We need at least ten.”

 

“Maybe more,” Bran said dourly.

 

“The Khosis cluster?” Ogvai asked.

 

The officer glanced at the Astartes, uncertain whether the question was directed at him or the others.

 

“It’s the nearest major astropathic relay station,” the officer said at last.

 

“It’s likely that astropaths on other vessels partially decrypted that message as well,” Aun Helwinter said softly, “Its likely Jarl Russ has seen it as well.”

 

“So you think Jarl Russ seeks confirmation, before we go to confront the Warmaster?” Bran asked him.

 

Aun nodded in reply.

 

“We’d better head back then,” Bran said to Ogvai, “I don’t think half of my ships will be ready to sail in four days. But if Russ wants we had better be ready to deliver.”

 

“You’re wrong.” Ogvai said as Bran turned and stomped away.

 

“I hope so for all our sakes,” Bran growled back.

 

Ogvai turned on his heel as quickly as he could in the lumbering battle plate to face his Gothi.

 

“Thoughts?”

 

“Nothing of any use,” Aun answered truthfully. “I hope that Bran is wrong. But I fear….”

 

He trailed off his eyes staring into the far distance as if he strove to see into the truth or the future or both. Ogvai looked at him for a moment and then grunted and stomped back onto the bridge leaving the young Gothi to his thoughts.

*

[Brother Lunkhead]

I'd really like to read this in depth, but there is so little contrast between the text and the background. It's a mighty strain to read  If you would increase the contrast my tired old eyes would be most grateful

[No one important]

Sorry I don't know how to do that. I found that scrolling over it turned the text white which made it readable.

 

I'll add more later.

 

Kind regards.

 

No one important.

[StratoKhan]

I’d love to read it too, but as Lunkhead said, it’s almost impossible to read the dark text on dark background. On mobile, selecting the text did very little to improve legibility.

You should be able to edit your post and change the font colour. There’s an edit post button. Select all the text. Select a new colour.

[No one important]

Fixed the colour I hope.

One

 

Fimbulvetr

 

 

It is said that on first seeing the planet Prospero, one of the most revered Rememberancers of the Great Crusade proclaimed it as “beautiful as a star sapphire”. But then that had been before the final sanction of the Sixth Legion Astartes.

 

In their desire to utterly eradicate the Maleficarum the fifteenth legion represented, the Vlka Fenryka had unleashed weapons of horrifying destructive capacity. Mountains had been levelled, molten gashes torn into its tectonic plates, oceans vaporised and the atmosphere filled with a toxic miasma of dust and gas that blotted out the sun. Prospero had been left a dying world, doomed to the slow painful death of nuclear winter, its ecosystems ruined beyond natural repair.

 

The Rout had seen dead worlds before: they had been the cause of many of them. That was after all the reason the Allfather unleashed Jarl Russ and his Wolves. Not to break enemies but to ruin them utterly. That was why they were thought of as being were one of the darker legions. Monsters designed to do the unpalatable, willing to do the necessary evil that civilised men would rather not.

 

But there was something about the death of Prospero that left a bad taste in the throats of the Vlka Fenryka. Not the fratricide. No the Wolves could deal with that, they had long ago accepted the mantle of executioner, obedient as they were to the Allfather’s will.

 

Perhaps it was the Maleficarum then, that had first twisted the minds and spirits of the fifteenth legion and then later warped their flesh into hideous unnatural forms. The Maleficarum that had taken the lives of so many Wolves. The Maleficarum that Magnus had used to escape the final sanction of the Rout.

 

Or maybe it was something more subtle. The feeling of wyrd twisted, of being led into a course of action by unseen and unknown players. Whatever the cause there was little celebration amongst the Wolves.

 

Attributed to Kasper Ansbach Hawser, 

Conservator, Skald of Tra.

 

 

*

 

In various geostationary and polar orbital trajectories, drifted the dark grey fleet of void predators that had slain Prospero. Giant battleships swam like the leviathans and Kraken of the abyssal Fenrisian depths. Around them were their attendant support vessels: fleet-tenders, maintenance pods, shuttles and darting gun-ships. Some of the largest of the behemoths had smaller capital vessels as their own personal honour guard, specialist shield-wall frigates with their distended armour plated flanks and dense thickets of void shield projectors.

 

Trapped by the incessant pull of gravity, the orbital approaches of Prospero were littered with the debris of void war. Reaction control thrusters and even main plasma drives flared briefly in staccato bursts as the smaller vessels jinked to avoid the large bits of detritus. Stoically, the larger capital vessels weighed down by inertia relied on the strength of their void shields to weather the ablative hail, bludgeoning away the spinning fragments of defence platforms and intra system defence monitor ships.

 

A few of the Vlka Fenryka’s vessels had hulls pock marked by weapon impacts or limped along on sputtering engines, their sides carved open to the cold emptiness of space, exposing the ribs and honeycomb soft interior. Their innards lit by the soft glow of hot metal thermally radiating out into space, cruelly exposed interior lighting and the glint of the welding torches of the thousands of repair crews human and half-human servitor that crawled over their torn flanks.

 

At the outer edges of the sixth legion’s fleet were the scout-surveyors, mine sweepers and electronic warfare vessels. All keeping wary electronic eyes on the void around them for the missing fifteen legion‘s fleet.

 

Trans-orbital transport vessels and bulk lifters rose up out of Prospero’s ruined atmosphere fighting the planetary gravity well with huge brute force nuclear drives and more sophisticated counter-gravitic plates. They were ugly functional ships, not creatures of war, just mere beasts of burden. They had been at their task now for three days and nights, recovering the arsenal of drop pods and armour, ferrying it back to the ships. Recovery was always a necessary but painfully slow process compared to the sudden burst of controlled violence that was deployment.

 

*

 

The Nidhoggur the flagship of the Rout’s Third Great Company; jagged with weapon batteries, sensor arrays and communications antenna; hung almost exactly above the planet’s north pole. It was a beast of a vessel, gunmetal grey like all its ilk adorned with protective runes the Gothi used to protect sea and ice craft on Fenris. It had weathered the assault well and a few faint scorch marks on one flank were the only evidence of her role in the slaughter.

 

The vessel’s command bridge was a huge echoing cavern, an odd mixture of metal and marble. Neo-gothic Terran architecture intermingled with elements of hyper-modern Martian technology and only a few token elements of Fenrisian culture. It was dimly lit with electric lights mounted high up in wall mounted sconces and by the flickering glow of image screens and hololithic projection tanks. Tiered decks supported by ornate stone clad pillars surrounded the central space. Each level was filled with multitudes of human and post-human adepts of varying ranks, all outnumbered by the sub-human lobotomised servitors seemingly attached to almost every display or data access terminal.Unlike some of the Sixth Legion vessels there were no fireplaces or smoky burning braziers on the main birdge. The Jarl, Ogvai Ogvai Helmshrot, tended to leave day to day control and organisation of the Nidhoggur to its mortal crew.

 

In the very centre of the room mounted like some baleful flower above the command throne sat a huge hololithic display, projecting images to the vessel’s command crew below so that bridge personnel were in amongst the glowing phantoms of photonic projection. Some of the command crew were equipped with haptic gauntlets that enabled them to interact physically with the images, flicking between images, minimising some, enhancing and magnifying others. Most showed engineering schematics of damaged vessels, fleet movement trajectories or logistical arrangements.

 

At the centre of the mostly human command staff, next to the captain‘s throne, stood Ogvai himself. The seat had been built for human dimensions and was unsuited to Astartes bulk, never mind one armoured in full Cataphractii pattern battle plate. Instead the throne’s occupant was the gaunt figure of the Nidhoggur’s current captain, Tharon di Ravell, deep in conversation with the pensive Jarl. The Captain was career military, with one hundred and forty years of service behind him. Rejuvenat treatments and expensive augmetic implants had prolonged his existence. But they had left him painfully thin; not wiry or athletic; more emaciated and gaunt.

 

Beside him, Ogvai was a hulking dark grey ceramite behemoth, all pistons, power packs and armoured plates. The overlarge shoulder guards of the Cataphractii pattern battle plate hidden under the mouldering furs and dried skins of predatory beasts that he had slain decades earlier. The Wolf Lord’s long black hair was hidden within the shadowy depths of his armour’s cowl. Only his almost albino white face could be clearly seen, commanding, assertive, dominant. 

 

“Forty percent of our drop pods and almost sixty percent of our operational battle tanks have been….” 

 

The Captain’s one sided conversation tailed off as he saw Ogvai’s attention had been drawn to one of the two main bridge entrances.

 

Four of the Jarl’s Vaerangi were acting as an honour guard, escorting two armoured grey figures onto the bridge. The Vaerangi, like their liege lord, clad in Cataphractii armour towered over the Nidhoggur’s human crew. But shockingly the larger of Ogvai’s two visitors stood head and shoulders above the mightiest warriors of Tra.

Captain Tharon was surprised by Bran, Jarl of Twa’s presence on his ship. There had been no mention of the warrior known more commonly as the Thunder Lord amongst the Rout.

 

It was said that he was a Terran by birth, and with the death of Heoroth Longfang, now the oldest of the sixth legion’s Terran born. But whereas Longfang had shown the genetic traits of the canis-helix; with the excessive dentition that marked the children of Russ; Bran looked like more like a Terran, albeit one suffering from gigantism. Such was Bran’s size that some had suggested half in jest that maybe he was a genetically modified migou or maybe one of the last remaining Thunder Warriors. It was the latter association that had led to his perhaps apposite cognomen.

 

Although the venerable Gothi, Heoroth Longfang had been the eldest of the Terran born and trained Legiones Astartes; there were others amongst the Rout who had come from the Throneworld. The early days of the Great Crusade had been expensive on men and materiel and often Legion homeworlds were not equipped to provide sufficient numbers of the high grade candidates required for induction into the hallowed ranks of the Adeptus Astartes. Suitable candidates were chosen by specialists teams on Terra and other heavily populated worlds and shipped for training and induction on the relevant Legion homeworlds. The Great Jarl was known to frown upon this practise, restricting his recruits to young men from Fenris.

 

Ten years after Russ had been united with his Legion, a series of brutal campaigns had massively diminished the fighting strength of the Vlka Fenryka, leaving it smaller then when it had left Terra in search of its wilful progenitor. The Emperor had sent a team of proto-Astartes, to bolster their numbers. They had been held in cold sleep since the tail end of the Unification Wars. Just three hundred strong; armed with dreadful Dark Age weaponry; they were to be used as an expendable assault wave to spare the Sixth Legion from unnecessary casualties in one of the darkest and most secretive conflicts of that time period. One that all the Legions had sworn to stay silent on.         

 

When it was ended, only one of the proto-Astartes still drew breath. Russ had found him dying, surrounded by dozens of dead transhumans, his bioengineered form going into shock. The Wolf Lord had given some of his own blood, perhaps some of his own life force it was whispered, to save the creature’s life and had bade his priests try and help this loyal and brave warrior. That had been almost two hundred years ago and to almost everyone’s surprise Bran, the thrice born, had risen to become leader of one the Rout’s Great Companies.

 

He wore artificer battle plate specially constructed for his physique, carved with protective runes by his Gothi and pocked with the scars of recent battle. Several heavily singed pelts and skins hung from his shoulders. Around his neck hung Fenrisian charms, bone teeth and vicious talons from favoured predators on necklaces of gold wire. Weapons hung from his belts, many of them obscure and ancient design. In a ludicrously ornate leather holster was the archaeotech disruptor-arc Bran favoured. It was a weapon of astonishingly destructive capacity using some long lost extension of the disruptor field technology that enhanced the powered blades of the Astartes. When activated it created a bubble of atomic destruction in front of its muzzle that could be swung into opponents, destroying them as thoroughly as an artillery shell going off. It even worked as a short ranged gun with similarly destructive effects. Ogvai had once seen Bran destroy four heavily armoured orks some thirty metres away with it. Atomising them into bloody smears and leaving only their bloody ruined leg stumps standing oddly upright as testament to their existence.

 

Bran’s face was a mess of scar tissues, some old and some recent. His head was almost totally bald and much of his lower jaw and teeth were augmetic replacements. Towards the rear of his head were a variety of data-jack ports that at a distance looked like clumps of hair.

 

Following in his lord’s shadow both physically and metaphorically was Twa’s chief Gothi, Arvidh. He was also a Terran though his features were clearly shaped by Russ’ genetic legacy with enlarged canines and a hirsute face. Yngvar Arvidh, as he had been named by his trainers in the Rout, had been selected as a young boy and shipped to Fenris some two hundred years earlier. His hair was now iron grey, twisted into dreadlocks, his beard shaped into a jutting waxed spike. The Gothi’s armour was vintage crusade era battle plate almost hidden by ancient furs and necklaces of charms, the exposed plates painstakingly covered in runes of protection inscribed in fine traceries of gold and silver.

 

Twa’s venerable Gothi had a curious way of moving that seemed to suggest that he was not quite bound by the laws of space and time, as if reality was forever just catching up with him. That was the way with the wyrd touched Ogvai mused momentarily. They walked in two worlds at the same time, one of logic, causality and reason. The other a world of lies and imagination and terrible madness.

 

Ogvai stomped over to his guests, mortals scattering to make space for the Jarls to meet. His senior bridge crew left uncertain whether to wait for his return or to continue their meeting without him.

 

“Bran,” Ogvai growled in a greeting that sent infrasonic waves of fear to the unmodified or crew.

 

“Og,” the Thunder Lord replied in an even deeper boom.

 

Separated by only a dozen or so metres, the Thunder Lords huge bulk was even more apparent. He towered over Ogvai by a head or more. The two eyed each other up, their gene-enhanced predatory nature superseding any natural friendship.

 

“You wanted to speak to me?” Ogvai grunted.

 

“Aye,” Bran answered, glancing around. “Though I was hoping to meet somewhere a little more private.”

 

Ogvai gave a non-committal nod, surveying his bridge with a steady gaze and a sweep of his head.

 

“Come,” Ogvai grunted to his guests and set off across the bridge to his personal reclusiam, with the slow measured pace that Cataphractii armoured required of its wearers. Bran and his Gothi followed politely behind, whilst the Vaerangi returned to their other duties aboard the Nidhoggur.

 

*

 

The reclusiam was Ogvai’s space and the only place on the Nidhoggur’s bridge where Fenrisian mores held sway. It was quieter in there, dark but for the burning braziers that lit it with a warm smoky flickering light. Each had been mounted under soot swaddled air ducts so that the smoke did not disturb the rest of the bridge, and each was partnered by a hefty fire suppression system.

 

A large table filled the centre of the room, a gigantic slab of orange crystalline material, a trophy from an earlier Compliance. It was part of a gigantic crystalline construct that Ogvai’s predecessor Gedrath had destroyed in hand to hand combat. In testament to his victory and to the might of his foe, Gedrath had the creature’s carcass carved up and used as a table.

 

Aun Helwinter, Tra’s senior Gothi was there waiting as they arrived. Ogvai hadn’t summoned him. But a skilled Gothi could sense when and where he was needed and hence appear at the most opportune moment. Like most of the Wolves, Aun Helwinter was still fully caparisoned for war, after all they were still in enemy territory. His dark grey armour was as rune inscribed as his brother priest’s, albeit slightly less ostentatiously. Pale furs hung from his shoulders along with his a leather mask and head-bindings. His skin was glacial blue-white under a mane of straight, long white hair that hung over his armour’s power pack in a simple ponytail.

 

The two priests nodded in greeting at each other. There was always an odd tension around the Gothi as if they half suspected their brethren would suddenly degenerate into some fell beast of the Underverse. Perhaps they spoke telepathically to each other. Perhaps they sparred briefly mind to mind, testing each other’s mental defences.

 

The two Jarls positioned themselves on opposite sides of the table. Each with their Gothi to the right of them a step back.

 

“Well, here we are,” Ogvai prompted, waving one armoured arm to encompass the soot blackened cavern.

 

“My Gothi was telling me of your skald and the Horus-daemon on Prospero,” Bran started, waving his hand in Arvidh’s general direction.

 

“And…”

 

Bran said nothing for a moment, glancing back at his Gothi before answering.

 

“Do you believe that the demon-thing was Horus?” Bran said in an almost explosive whisper.

 

Ogvai snorted in derision.

 

“Nonsense!”

 

“Helwinter?” Bran turned his gaze on the impassive young Gothi.

 

“I saw the Horus-thing… spoke to it briefly,” Aun replied in a calm quiet measured tone.

 

“It was maleficarum… a dread thing from the Underverse,” Ogvai interjected quickly. “Such things are not to be trusted. They are creatures of lies”

 

“Yet it spoke as if it was Horus?” Bran said forcefully a sharp edge to his words.

 

“Yes,” Helwinter conceded.

 

“And Jarl Russ has the Skald now?” Bran asked.

 

“Yes,” Ogvai half grunted. “I am told the Great Jarl questioned every member of the legion who encountered the beast.”

 

“But the skald alone he kept?”

 

“He kept Bjorn too.” Arvidh added.

 

“Bjorn is your man. A man of Tra?” Bran asked.

 

“There’s nothing wrong with Bjorn,” Ogvai answered, defensively.

 

“I believe that Jarl Russ has a different reason for keeping Bjorn close to him,” Aun said softly. “The Jarl and his senior Gothi believe that Bjorn’s wyrd is important to the future of the Vlka Fenryka. When his Gothi attempted to parse Bjorn’s wyrd they were surprised how far it seemed to extend into the future. More so they were concerned that it entwines with Jarl Russ in some way that they could not unpick.”

 

“See!” Ogvai grunted, as if that information was sufficient and no one needed to enquire any further.

 

“And the skald is he important too?” Bran asked.

 

Ogvai grunted and glanced back towards Helwinter before saying.

 

“Russ believes in the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

 

“The skald and the daemon are linked as you are hinting,” Aun explained carefully. “It has guided him for much of his life. Preparing him to be a tool with which to manipulate the wyrd of the sixth legion. Jarl Russ merely continues the work we have done since the skald first came to the Aett.”

 

Bran turned his shrewd gaze to Helwinter. “Does Jarl Russ believe that the beast was Horus, or was in some way linked to the Warmaster?”

 

Aun Helwinter didn’t respond immediately. He breathed deeply before answering as if gathering his thoughts.

 

“I cannot speak for the Great Jarl, it would not be right for me to do so. Certainly he did not share his thoughts with us on the matter. But Russ was concerned by some of the things the Horus-daemon said to the skald, Fith, Bjorn and myself. The creature spoke of time in a non-linear fashion, as if it was speaking from the future to the present. Indeed it appeared to be able to stitch together different moments in time, many years in time and many light years in distance apart together. Several men of Tra were able to step physically from Prospero in the now into the skald’s quarters aboard the Lemuryan Orbital Plate the day before he left for Fenris and then back again.”

 

“Could even the Emperor match such an act?” Arvidh whispered.

 

No one answered. Who truly knew what the Emperor’s limits were. But perhaps more importantly were there creatures with powers that surpassed his?

 

Arvidh stared impassively. Bran shook his head like a bear as he struggled to find what to say next. Ogvai shifted uncomfortably, the gauntlet covered fingers of his right hand surreptitiously describing a protective sigil in the air to ward against maleficarum.

 

“What’s got you so worried Bran?” Ogvai asked carefully “You knew all this before, I’m sure. What else do you know?”

 

Bran didn’t answer just glanced towards his Gothi.

 

“As you are aware Jarl Ogvai, astropathic communications has been almost impossible since we arrived at Prospero,” Arvidh said calmly. “Our star speakers have been unable to receive or send messages. We have been completely cut off.”

 

“This is known to us,” Ogvai allowed.

 

“Indeed the last message we received was during the battle itself. It was a message from the Sigillite to Constantin Valdor,” Arvidh finished.

 

“You broke the Custodes astropathic code?” Helwinter said a note of surprise in his voice.

 

Bran managed a look an unmodified Terrran would have described as sheepish.

 

“We believe this message was the reason the Custodes and the Sisters fled back to Terra without retrieving most of their gear from the planet‘s surface,” Arvidh continued.

 

Ogvai stalked round the table towards the other Jarl.

 

“Go on.”

 

“We were only able to decipher some fragments of the message. It said that several Primarchs including Warmaster Horus and their legions had turned traitor. That they had turned upon their loyal brothers and that at least one of the loyal Primarchs is dead.”

 

“They killed …” Aun gasped.

 

Ogvai growled. “Impossible! Horus t….”

 

“Do we know when this happened?” Helwinter asked quickly to still Ogvai‘s rising ire.

 

“It’s impossible I tell you, Horus turning traitor.” Ogvai shouted almost petulantly.

 

“No. We were unable to decipher all the message,” Arvidh answered Aun.

 

“One garbled message Bran, and you think the Warmaster has turned traitor?” Ogvai snarled, the air around him redolent with kill-urge pheromones.

 

Bran had taken a step towards Ogvai. His body language semaphoring his displeasure at Ogvai’s approach and manner.

 

“The message alone, no!” Bran almost snarled in response. “But put it together with the messages Horus sent Russ before we attacked Prospero and the things the Horus-demon said on Prospero and I believe there is reason to be concerned.”  

 

“The messages?” Helwinter queried, trying to inject logical reasoning and civilized patterns of behaviour into the discussion before the two Jarls came to blows.

 

“The Sigillite’s orders were for us to bring Magnus and his legion back to Terra. Yes?” Bran responded almost calmly, his voice hardly above a whisper as he tried to control his temper. “Then en-route the Warmaster sends a series of astropathic messages to Jarl Russ and Lord Valdor and suddenly we’re not trying to capture the fifteenth legion, we’re trying to annihilate it.”

 

“The Horus-demon thing spoke of setting the sixth legion against the fifteenth. Yes?” Arvidh added, keeping their argument going. “It spoke of them being threats that he that is Horus needed out of the way if he was to defeat the Emperor,” Arvidh added.

 

“Yes,” Helwinter agreed. “I think I see what you mean.”

 

“You do?” Ogvai growled, though less enraged. “I don’t!”

 

“They’re suggesting that the Horus-demon was Horus from the near future. That he was setting us up to kill Magnus and his legion and in doing so remove two threats from the hnefatafl board.”

 

Ogvai frowned at that but resisted any further outbursts.

 

“So I ask you again, Aun Helwinter, was it Horus? The daemon thing, was it Horus?” Bran asked again.

 

“I do not honestly know,” Aun answered with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders.

 

“Do you believe that Russ thinks the demon was Horus?” Bran continued relentless as an avalanche. 

 

“I cannot speak for our Jarl,” Aun said quietly “But yes I suppose… I suppose it is possible that the Jarl may well fear as you do, that that the creature was Horus. That it was… Horus from our future reaching into the past and present to guide the direction it would take.”

 

There was an uncomfortable pause, as everyone took in what Helwinter had said. What Tra’s young Gothi had verbalised was bordering on blasphemy maybe madness.

 

“There’s a big gap in your thinking,” Ogvai muttered coldly. “What would cause Horus to turn traitor why would he become a demon thing?”

 

There was a painful silence then as Bran and Arvidh tried to think of a logical response.

 

The silence was broken by the fortuitous arrival of a young and nervous un-modified human wearing the insignia of a communications officer. 

 

“My lords, I am sorry to interrupt,” the man gasped as entered their sanctum. “We are receiving a message from the Hrafnkel we are to weigh anchor in four days’ time and set course for the Khosis cluster.”

 

“Four days,” Ogvai growled, “We need at least ten.”

 

“Maybe more,” Bran said dourly.

 

“The Khosis cluster?” Ogvai asked.

 

The officer glanced at the Astartes, uncertain whether the question was directed at him or the others.

 

“It’s the nearest major astropathic relay station,” the officer said at last.

 

“It’s likely that astropaths on other vessels partially decrypted that message as well,” Aun Helwinter said softly, “Its likely Jarl Russ has seen it as well.”

 

“So you think Jarl Russ seeks confirmation, before we go to confront the Warmaster?” Bran asked him.

 

Aun nodded in reply.

 

“We’d better head back then,” Bran said to Ogvai, “I don’t think half of my ships will be ready to sail in four days. But if Russ wants we had better be ready to deliver.”

 

“You’re wrong.” Ogvai said as Bran turned and stomped away.

 

“I hope so for all our sakes,” Bran growled back.

 

Ogvai turned on his heel as quickly as he could in the lumbering battle plate to face his Gothi.

 

“Thoughts?”

 

“Nothing of any use,” Aun answered truthfully. “I hope that Bran is wrong. But I fear….”

 

He trailed off his eyes staring into the far distance as if he strove to see into the truth or the future or both. Ogvai looked at him for a moment and then grunted and stomped back onto the bridge leaving the young Gothi to his thoughts.

*

[No one important]

My first problem with Chris Wraight's Scars was that Bjorn is suddenly there in discussions with Russ as if he's suddenly important. With my first chapter I was trying to provide the start of a reason. The Gothi see that Bjorn's fate is linked to Russ. As I sketched out further chapters I intended to explain the reason Bjorn was so linked to Russ and the consequences of that action.

 

I wrote  Wednesday nights as Scars was released in instalment by Black Library.

 

I submitted the first paragraph about the ships over Prospero as a entry to one of Black Library Submissions. I got a positive response (going to the next phase) and then never heard from them again. Oh well.

 

The start of the second chapter is below. Work was starting to cause me problems at this point and so I partially wrote several chapters but never tied them up properly. Red blocks of text are ideas which I never got round to completing.

 

TWO

 

Jarl of Twa

 

 

Then came the last of the Warriors of Thunder unto battle, all maddened like berserkrs of antiquity. All but one was slain unto death many times over, though each took many enemies with them into the Underverse. Only Bran, known now as the Thrice Born survived and the Great Jarl himself raised him up and made the Wolf Priests bind his wounds and made him one of the Rout.

 

From the introduction to saga of Bran, Jarl Of Twa.    

 

 

 

The Jarl sliced Skull-biter round in a horizontal arc so that its disruptive blade sliced through the creature’s chest from shoulder to shoulder. It was a blow that would have bisected a terminator or disabled a dreadnought. But the Neverborn barely seemed to notice the huge ravine carved through its form, even as ichor gushed in cascading torrents down its front. The wound was already sealing up in front of Bran’s eyes as he brought Skull-biter back to strike again. His attack was blocked by the creature’s huge blackened blade that clanged against Bran‘s disruptor-arc. A normal sword blade could not have parried Bran’s weapon, it would have disintegrated into shards of metal and an atomic mist. But nothing about the Neverborn or its weapon could be described as normal, this was a creature from beyond the physical universe with its scientific laws and enforced causality.

 

Skull-biter wasn’t designed to parry a blow and as the hell blade scraped against the emitter and wave guide guards Bran feared that it would be irreparably damaged. They were close now, pushing at each other, almost face to face, each trying to get an advantage, waiting for the other to make a mistake.

 

The creature was tall and thin. It stood upright, bipedal with backward facing knees and cloven hooves. Its skin was blood red and scaly. Two long and not particularly muscled arms stuck out at odd heights from a barrel chest tufted with random patches of soft down feather or wiry crimson fur. Its head was horned or crested it was hard to determine. There was no nose, not even a slit above the fang filled mouth. The eyes were arranged in asymmetric columns on either side of the face, two on the left and three on the right. The eyes on the left were catlike glowing a bright yellow. The ones on the right were mere slits of emerald green.

 

The creature’s almost prehensile barbed tongue sliced Bran’s forehead open just above his left eye. Bran forced the creature backward using his armoured bulk. As it fought to regain its balance he slammed his head into the creatures face with brutal force. The Neverborn might be resistant to technological weapons, but oddly they were not resistant to Bran. He’d noticed they found his presence close up difficult to bear, his physical touch abhorrent to them. Like the others he had destroyed it seemed shocked and pulled free, slipping back a few metres with the same reality bending ease of all of its kind. The Neverborn didn’t actually move through space as much as they seemed to jump between positions as if the intervening space didn’t exist to them.

 

The daemon’s huge blade swung round towards Bran’s head but he easily dodged its crude attack. He leapt forwards toggling Skull-biter to minimum range and maximum power. Smashing into the creature like a charging bull Konungur, swinging Skull-biter into its chest with all his might and rage. The creature’s odour was rank in his face, its five asymmetrical eyes blinking just once and then suddenly it fell backwards. No ichor fell from its wounds, no wounds healed. It just fell back boneless losing rigidity until splashed onto the deck plates like liquid nitrogen and disappeared, leaving nothing but a sulphurous stench.

 

 

Bran’s practiced senses rapidly surveyed the battlefront, assessing threats planning tactical manoeuvres with a speed no unmodified human could hope to match. Dead crewmen lay everywhere, torn into bloody fragments by the monsters of the Immaterium who had slipped aboard through a momentary flicker of the overstrained Geller fields.

 

He spotted Ornolf, the Sverdhjera busy hacking another denizen of the Underverse to pieces with precise but brutal strikes with Seidr, his overlarge rune-ensorcelled cleaver. It was an almost rectangular blade two-thirds an Astartes in length and almost as broad, the tip slightly angled coming to a chisel point. The two-handed helve was mounted at one side, joined in a rectangular loop to the other side by an extension of the blade that was shaped like a vicious hooked saw. It should have been a crude and unwieldy weapon but Ornolf hefted it as easily as if it were a newborn babe. Its disruptive power field sheathed it in a purple-blue glow of ionized air. But what made it particularly damaging to the Neverborn were the runes of dismemberment, destruction and repulsion carved on the blade by the Gothi. These runes were now glowing an ugly orange-red, the blade smoking as if fresh from the forge.

 

On the right hand side of the bridge, another daemon-creature was rapidly being transmuted into an almost unidentifiable charred pile of ash. The twins Folkmar and Steingrim stood over it, their heavy flamers bathing it in a withering barrage of thick chemical fire. As soon as they were certain this one was ruined beyond repair they would head to the one Ornolf was chopping up and burn it beyond recovery. That was the way to deal with maleficarum, Russ had taught the Vlka Fenryka. Cut the thread. Ruin beyond repair. Burn and scatter the ashes.

 

 

At the left hand side of the bridge where the damage to men and machinery was most extensive, stood Yngvar Arvidh, Twa’s chief Gothi. The Neverborn didn’t see like mortals, they sensed the souls of the living and the choicest most succulent souls of all were those of psykers. So they had gathered around him like vicious Veshii in the oceans of Fenris. He was surrounded by the shattered remains of almost a dozen Neverborn. Most had been minor things that had been birthed into the minds and bodies of crewmen, twisting them into unnatural war-forms. The rib cage and spine had ripped out of a man’s body and folded up over him like a scorpion’s envenomed tail. Here another man’s jaw had hinged unnaturally open, flesh tearing away to reveal rows upon rows of sharp teeth like some creature of the Fenrisan deep. All had fallen to the psychic might of the Gothi: charred, broken, dismembered, disarticulated.

 

Only one daemon still remained alive near Arvidh, if such a word truly applied to a creature that has never been truly born. It was a fell scaly red thing like the one that Bran had just destroyed. The very wall of the ship had deformed as if it had somehow come alive, extruding a huge fanged maw filled with rows upon row of barbed teeth. To Bran it looked like one of the great wyrms of the oceans of Fenris. The huge meter long bladed fangs impaled deeply into the creature’s struggling form as if the wall’s mouth were about to bite it in two. The imprisoned Neverborn shifted and blurred like a faulty picter, like an old fashioned zoetrope, like an insect trapped in a glass jar desperate to escape.

 

It was still only briefly, each time that Arvidh spoke. The rest of the time it spent in frantic fruitless motion. The rune priest was speaking single words in a language unknown to the Thunder Lord. His face was contorted with effort, sweat running down his brow, blood ran from one ear and both nostrils clotting his beard with gore.

 

Arvidh spat out another bloody word. The sound of it was wrong. Its effect on the creature were stunning. It froze again transfixed like a picture capturing a moment in time, and simultaneously a huge gash appeared in its torso as if it been hit by the smile of an axe. It flickered into motion, vibrating so erratically and so quickly that it was almost invisible even to Bran’s gene-enhanced vision. Arvidh spoke again and the creature stopped its head crushed in as if it had been hit with a power field enhanced maul. Then it moved again a blur of frantic random motion. For a moment Bran was certain it was free. But then Arvidh spoke his final word and the creature stopped for the last time. It was on fire burning with an eerie blue-white flame. It moaned sibilantly and then seemed to crumple in on itself, the smouldering ashes of its remains drifting away across the ruined deck.

 

The rune priest physically sagged and would have fallen but by this time Bran was near enough to catch him.

 

“Is it done?”

 

“You’re the Gothi, how the hell would I know?” Bran returned. He helped the slumped priest to lean back against the remains of a workstation.

 

“We’re out of the warp…yes...” Arvidh muttered. “So if there are any others… they will be weakening and… and returning to the Underverse.” 

 

Arvidh mopped at his mouth weakly with a cloth he pulled from a belt pouch.

 

“That took a lot out of me, I had to… to use words of power… words of power against the last ones.”

 

Bran knew only superficially what the priest meant by words of power. As a Jarl he had been tutored in the existence of such tools, but not in their use. Only the most senior Gothi were entrusted with such dread lore. Words of power, words with a death-edge these were some of the secret tools the Gothi of Fenris used against the maleficarum. Using the so called god-runes that both made and unmade creation had clearly extorted a heavy toll on the Arvidh. He looked like he had just aged a century.

 

The Thunder Lord glanced around the bridge at the destruction, at the dead and dying, at the cowering mortals huddled behind broken cogitator stacks, gone out of their minds no doubt with the sanity ripping sights they had witnessed. Some would be useless now, fit only for extensive institutionalised support their minds destroyed. He wondered if enough remained with sufficient wit and drive to repair the ship. He doubted any would willing traverse the gulfs of the empyrean again now that they knew some of the full horror of what really dwelt there. Bran looked back at Arvidh again and the distorted wall maw beside him.

 

“Did you do that?” he asked trying to inject some levity into the situation.

 

Avidh nodded almost sheepishly.

 

“I recognize my failing, and will be sure to correct it," he muttered after spitting another gob of bloody phlegm at the floor.” 

 

“Can you… shape it back?”

 

“Not now my Jarl, I’m too weak,” Avidh said ruefully. “Though in truth it would be better if we had the Mechanicum replace the damaged section.”

 

He coughed again.

 

“It’s warp tainted both my bending of… reality and by the ending of the maleficarum.”

 

That made sense to Bran. Prolonged psychic activities tended to weaken the veil between reality and the hell of the Underverse. Things that were touched by the warp had a tendency to behave oddly at best.

 

“We could probably do with a new bridge,” Bran half-laughed.

 

“The Mechanicum will not be happy…”Arvidh tailed off looking at the figure that was being led across the bridge by Ulfar’s pack.

 

Ulfar was a grizzled veteran who had fought for a little under two centuries as a member of Twa and the Rout. His grey hair was lime rendered into grey white spikes, his face mostly hidden by a complex leatherwork threat mask. He had a rune carved hand axe in one hand and his other clutched the thin arm of the ship’s chief astropath. She was a wisp of a girl maybe nineteen sidereal years old at most, dressed in the shapeless flowing robes of her kind. Behind her came Ulfar’s men. They were all veterans, their faces masked by Mk III helmets, shoulders draped in animal pelts. They were heavy weapon specialists armed with baroque volkite culverins or more modern rotor cannons.

 

The astropath picked her way across the bridge clutching her gown up to avoid the patches of blood or ectoplasm. Like all her kind she was physically blinded by the soul-binding but Bran knew from talking to her that she had several ways of sensing her environment. Like all her kind she had been taught a near sense that acted like sonar, sensing the shadow of things through the memory traces of those who had touched them. Secondly she could catch glimpses of nearby people’s vision, piggybacking on their senses and vicariously seeing the world through their eyes. Thirdly she could with great effort see through a sort of clairvoyance, though her range was poor, a meter or so at best and limited to a small circle a hands width in size. Even keeping the image focussed for a few minutes was dreadfully taxing for her. Though she had told Bran that some of her kind could see through the walls of the ship, across a planet, even across entire star systems and sub-sectors with a full choir behind them.

 

Arvidh looked up at her and smiled. Though it was questionable that she would be aware of his efforts and with his Fenrisian Astartes genetics his smile looked more like the snarl of an apex predator. Bran shook his head in amusement. All Astartes were sexually sterile, their human procreative drives supposedly suppressed and gelded by the genetic changes that had turned them into living weapons. But due to a glitch in their coding the Vlka Fenryka still seemed to find human females attractive.

 

Emmy had been with Twa for almost a year. Currently she was the only high functioning Astropath left. The Sváfnir’s previous chief Astropath and Emmy‘s mentor, the venerable Ikuma, had died of a brain aneurysm six months earlier. He had been a mere forty six years old though by that time he looked ninety six thanks to the ravages of astrotelepathy. Unlike other legion ships the Sváfnir carried no spare high functioning Astropaths in stasis. That left only Emmy and the choir.

 

The Emperor himself made Astropaths, through some arcane process that was rumoured to be psionic in nature. The process was not without wastage. Many candidates burned out during the experience and many more were mentally damaged by the process. Those that were not sufficiently sentient enough to function were placed into choirs where they could reinforce the more capable Astropaths in telepathic sending and receiving.

 

Bran had never seen Astropaths being made, but the Thunder Warriors had been made in a similar fashion. For a moment he remembered seeing young boys like himself standing in front of the Emperor, as his terrible light filled their very being moulding their minds, bodies and souls. He didn’t remember the process directly, just a fragmentary memory of witnessing it being done to others. The transformation itself had been too shocking, wiping away memory, wiping away sanity even sentience. Months, maybe years had passed before he was truly self-aware again. By that point he’d become a towering killing machine slaughtering his way through the Ethnarc’s bio-enhanced monstrosities. Even then sentience had been a passing glitch, as the Emperor’s will had driven him and his brothers on to victory or death.     

 

“How you holding up Emmy?” Bran rasped, trying to pitch his tone at a pleasing pitch and volume. Well aware of his imposing presence.

 

“Well enough thank you great Jarl,” she answered in soft contralto voice. “Thanks to the valour of your brave knights.”

 

One of her honour guard snorted in amusement at this, but Emmy didn’t notice or at least didn’t choose to notice. Unlike the Astartes of the first or ninth legions who appeared to fulfil the legendary role of knightly protectors, the Vlka Fenryka appeared at best as barbaric savages from the very edges of society.  Emmy had spent her formative years as a minor noble on a world in the Ultramar protectorate, the so called five hundred worlds. She had been indoctrinated with teenage romance novels and the documentaries of the Rememberancers. To her the Astartes were a noble and honourable brotherhood based on the highest chivalric ideals. It was probably for the best that the soul-binding had seriously diminished her sense of smell Bran noted to himself.    

 

“Are you sensing any other Neverborn?” Bran asked the girl.

 

“No, my lord,” she answered hesitantly.

 

Bran suspected that was at least in part because she wasn’t trying to sense them. If anything she was probably trying to remain hidden from their soul sight. Like Arvidh, her psyker light was a beacon to the soulless ones who dwelt in the empyrean. As soon as the Geller failure alarms had rang out she would have raised her most powerful mental defences against the prying scratching claws of the Neverborn. But the Jarl of Twa needed to know there were no more monsters lurking on his vessel, before he set the crew to repair it. Normally he would have asked Arvidh to fulfil this role but the Gothi was dead on his feet, exhausted by the battle to retake the bridge.

 

“I’m sorry Emmy but I need you to run a telepathic sweep, see if you can sense anything. It’s safer for you and us if we find the hell spawn now and destroy then whilst we’re prepared.”

 

She nodded in acquiescence. 

 

“I recognize my failing Jarl, and will be sure to correct it," she said softly bowing her long swan like white neck. Her long plaited, raven black hair tumbling to the left hiding her face.

 

“You have not failed me child, and it is I that must apologise to you for asking you to perform such an unpleasant duty, ” Bran replied softly, playing the part of the chivalrous lord she needed him to be. 

 

She nodded, her head still bowed. Her breathing calmed as she entered a light self hypnotic trance and Bran felt the air physically chill as she reached out. Ice crystals formed on some of the surfaces. Dust particles rose up on invisible currents of energy. A loose screw began to describe odd patterns on the work station opposite Bran.

 

They waited. Ulfar’s men on overwatch their weapons sweeping the bridge. Arvidh half sat on the ruined workstation his head bowed. His breathing softer and more even now. The blood had stopped dripping from his nose. 

 

“There is nothing in here,” Emmy whispered. “Just the echoes of their existence. There is much taint here. Some spots that will have to be excised.”

 

Her eyeless face moving to pick out several points on the bridge where the warp taint was greatest. Some were obvious sites of maleficarum, like Arvidh’s great wyrm maw reaching out of the wall. Others more subtle, like a blackened and hideously mutated cadaver with the burnt and charred remains of Arvidh’s sword transfixing it to a cogitator unit.

 

Bran glanced across at the twins, Folkmar and Steingrim, busy completing their task. They had joined Ornolf’s pack and were busy cleansing the maleficarum from the bridge, burning the remains of the Neverborn. The air was thick with burning promethium and other volatile organics. Then there was the sulphurous taint of the Aether-spawn and the acrid stench of burning plastics. Fainter and well beyond the range of human detection, was the pheromone musk of the Wolves thick with the kill-urge.

 

“I’m reaching out further. There’s …NO!” Emmy squealed, her body almost convulsing.

 

“Pull back!” Arvidh ordered his head raised. Bran was glad to see that the Gothi had recovered sufficiently that he had been able to monitor her progress with his own skills.

 

The girl gasped, half sobbing. She would have fallen but for Ulfar’s steadying hand. She couldn’t speak, just gasped and shook. 

 

“There’s an entity, a warp spawn, stalking the corridor two floors below, about three hundred metres that way.” Arvidh gestured. “It’s a soldier of rage, a collector of skulls.”

 

Emmy was shaking with fear.

 

“It hates… it… hates.”

 

“They are creatures of bottomless rage and endless oceans of hate made manifest by the fickle tides of the warp. There is no logic to them, no understanding.” Arvidh muttered.

 

Bran growled. “Best not to think to much about maleficarum . Best just to end them and burn them as.”

 

“It’s fading,” Arvidh added. “It will not last much longer already it is starting to fray.”

 

“There’s something else.” Emmy stopped.

 

She tilted her head as if listening.

 

“Something odd in lieutenant … Treha’s quarters - it’s different … a ripple. Like the echo of something. I‘m not sure…”

 

“Curious!” Arvidh muttered as he plucked the location from the trembling astropath’s mind.

 

“What?” Bran questioned.

 

“Something odd,” Arvidh said quietly “With your permission Jarl, I’ll go and take a look. I’ll take Folkmar and Steingrim with me. Ulfar and the rest of Ornolf’s pack can ensure that the first creature is gone.”

 

He looked up at the Jarl whose scarred face was wrinkled in a frown.

 

“You sure you’re up to that?” 

 

Arvidh nodded.

 

“I am recovering my strength with every minute that passes.”

 

Bran turned to Ulfar

 

“Get Ornolf and his pack. Make damn sure this hell spawn never returns to trouble the Vlka Fenryka again.”

 

The grizzled wolf nodded.

 

“Aye lord it will be done. If it still walks our halls we’ll end it.”

 

He led his pack off towards Ornolf and his pack, Arvidh followed behind trying to hide a limp.

 

Bran turned to Emmy.

 

“You stay with me, just in case,” he said almost softly “And no wandering off… in either way.”

 

He was about to slip Skull-biter back into its holster but remembered to take a look at its projection vanes and the two pairs of wave-guide guards. The wave-guides protected the wielder from the atomic shrapnel generated by the action of the disintegration field cutting blade. There was a small amount of scuffing and a tiny chip in one of the external guards, but the more sensitive wave guides and emitters seemed unharmed. He clicked a switch on the handle, not an easy task with his over large gauntleted  hands. A lens mounted next to the switch activated and projected a small hazy holosphere into the air above the lens. Inside a schematic representation of  Skull-biter rotated. Almost all the images and data screed were green, though the power levels were tinged with orange. As a weapon it was rapaciously hungry. Bran deactivated the machine spirit’s self diagnostic routine, and powered the weapon down before holstering it.

 

“Is it safe?” Emmy asked, her head moving as if she was looking around. She was nervous alone with the Jarl. Not because of his presence, she had served with him for almost a year now. But because she couldn’t ride upon Bran’s senses. Alone in his presence she was almost totally blind again. Even her near sense clouded by the brightness of his mind. When he had asked about it, months earlier, she had mumbled something about his mind being like a huge beast covered with huge barbed blades. He hadn’t deigned to explain the reason why he was unlike the other Astartes she‘d encountered, though no doubt she had heard the gossip and speculation. The Emperor had needed his Thunder Warriors to be resistant to psychic assault and he had built their defences strong.

 

“My lord,” a voice almost broken with stress and fear called out from the far side of the bridge. Bran’s keen sight picked out at a frightened face and an unruly mop of hair, half hidden behind cogitator units and display screens. Bran was glad to see at least one bridge officer, however lowly, still at his post. He picked the man’s name out of his near eidetic memory.

 

“Ensign Jameson, are you well?”

 

“Y-yy.yes my lord,” the ensign stammered as slightly more of his face appeared over the top of the display screen.  “I’m picking up sensor traces. Other ships in our vicinity. They seem to be drifting. Little evidence of activity. I think they‘re wrecks.”

 

“No auspex sweeps?” Bran questioned him.

 

“By us… m-my lord?”

 

“No, by them?” Bran asked. 

 

“No my lord. No electronic emissions, no radio communications chatter, hardly any infra red emissions and those are fading.”

 

Bran took Emmy by the shoulder and guided  across the bridge to Jameson’s workstation, guiding her around the eviscerated remains of several bridge crew.

 

They were almost there when Emmy stopped, her head tilted like a little bird listening.

 

“I’m picking up a sending, a telepathic transmission,” she explained her voice dropping in pitch and slowing as she sank into a light receptive trance, the mental architecture drilled into her mind by the Adeptus Telepathica activating to the telepathic memes she detected.

 

“A sixth legion ship?” Bran asked.

 

“Yes, the Nidhoggur, one of…

 

“Ogvai’s craft,” Bran finished. “Flagship of Tra company.”

 

He grinned. Finally some luck.

 

“Where are they?”

 

“Close, in system at least.”   

 

“Get their astropath to call Og, tell him… tell him that there’s one Konungur but it’s lame and addled.”

 

She nodded and breathed deeply reaching out across the void to touch the thoughts of the astropath on Ogvai’s ship. She breathed out. Her breath foggy as if the bridge was colder than it really was.

 

“Ogvai Ogvai Helmshrot, Jarl of Tra sends greeting to the Jarl of Twa. He says he will come and help you club the dying Konungur to death. He knows you‘re getting a bit weak in your old age.”

 

“Old!” Bran grunted.

 

“He says that he’s bored waiting at the fire pit with only  four striplings to play hnefatafl with.”

 

Bran didn’t deign to reply, he just growled in irritation.

 

The young ensign glanced at his screen, responding to an audible warning from the cogitators.

 

“I have an infra-red signal three hundred thousand kilometres out. Looks like a substantial engine flare from a capital ship. Maybe three others. No four others. Yes four others, though they’re much smaller. Probably frigates. There’s too much eclipsing debris to get a good enough silhouette for image identification.”

 

“It’ll do ensign. You’ve done well,” Bran congratulated the young man.

 

He glanced at Emmy, wondering if there was more. Her head raised as she rose out of her receptive trance. Bran found himself string into the dark hollowed pits where her eyes had been. It always made him feel uneasy, he looked away. 

 

“Keep an eye out for trouble, Jameson. This isn’t over yet.” Bran said to the young officer.  

 

Bran steered Emmy away, back towards the centre of the bridge and the ship mistress’ command throne.  The ship mistress herself lay dead somewhere on the bridge. Bran had heard her death scream over the vox system when she had called Bran to the bridge.

 

Across the bridge, four Astartes entered all dressed in Catapractii plate, Bran’s Vaerangi, his honour guard. He nodded in acknowledgement at them as they took position to guard the shattered bridge. Mortal armsmen filed onto the bridge between the armoured giants, clutching shot cannon, las pistols  and other counter boarding weaponry. Behind them came the first responders, the medicae’s triage specialists.  Slowly training was replacing abject fear and the ship was coming back to life. 

 

Bran glanced at the array of toggle switches on the right arm of the chair and toggled the ship-wide comm system on.

 

“This is Bran, Jarl of Twa. I’m glad to report that our brave and skilled Navigator got us safely back into normal space. Unfortunately we suffered a brief failure in the ship’s Geller field and a tertiary grade breach from the Immaterium. The breach is almost over and any interlopers are being dealt with by our brave warriors.”

 

He hoped it was positive enough. Inspiring even.

 

“We are about to meet up with other ships of the Vlka Fenryka. I‘ll keep you posted.” 

 

He finished and clicked the switch to off,  then glanced at the Astropath.

 

“Good pep talk, do you think?”

 

“I wouldn’t …yes my lord,” Emmy answered sweetly.

 

*

[No one important]

Here's more of Chapter 2.

 

Ogvai Ogvai Helmshrot captain of  the Nidhoggur and Jarl of Tra looked out across the void in the direction of Bran’s vessel. He could just make out the tumbling wreck of a starship one of many between  the Nidhoggur and Bran’s vessel, Sváfnir. According to the Mechanicum, she was of Martian construction, built just under a century earlier. According to the Nidhoggur’s sensor teams it was void cold, the stellar fragments of its power core gone out eons earlier. A ship only built in the previous century it had impossibly died thousands of years earlier. A warp ghost, a product of the Immaterium’s fickle temporal tides. Such losses had been seen before according to the data archives of both Mars and Terra. But they were uncommon enough that only two had been seen since the start of the Great Crusade and both those shattered vessels had started their journeys long before the Age of Strife during the Dark Age of Technology. Ogvai’s keen sight picked up the flare of an engine exhaust from one of the scout ships had sent to study the wreckage. He just hoped that Aun Helwinter’s dire prediction, that these ships were of the Rout, was wrong. 

 

He glanced over at the inscrutable form of the Mechanicum adepts. There were four of them arranged in a square with one vertex pointing at Bran at all times. They were all oddly identical, dressed in red hooded robes that hid their technologically augmented humanity. When they spoke, it was with one voice made up of the voices of all four human flesh voices augmented by the harsh atonal machine code blurts of their technological voices. To all intents and purpose they were all Magos BiuPhong, the Mechanicum’s representative to Tra Company of the Sixth legion Astartes. They were silent at the moment. Communing with technology through their wireless links, Aun called it. Ogvai noted with some irony that the Mechanicum managed the impressive trick of being even stranger than the Gothi. Much of what they did reminded Ogvai of his childhood on Fenris where the Gothi performed strange disturbing rituals to placate the spirits of the Underverse. He wondered  how much of the Mechanicum’s beliefs and ritual proscribed actions were also mere quackery.  

 

Suddenly Aun Helwinter was next to him. How the Gothi had got that close without Ogvai noticing unnerved the Jarl. He glanced at Aun with his best nonchalant glare, hoping the young priest hadn‘t seen the shock in his racing thoughts.

 

“I’m sorry to have disturbed your deliberations my lord,” Aun said quietly.

 

“You have news or insight?” Ogvai growled at him.

 

Aun didn’t answer immediately. He seemed to be testing what he was going to say, as if worried about the Jarl’s potential response. 

 

“The sensor teams have confirmed that all the vessels we are seeing around us are Rout ships, with the three nearest vessels being from Tra company. The fourth is from Jarl Gunn’s company and the last two nearest the Sváfnir are both from Twa company.”

 

Ogvai breathed deeply like a surfacing sea creature sucking in air before returning to the abyssal depths. 

 

“Do we have names for the Tra ships?”

 

“They were the Ormhinnlangi, the Visund and the Reinen,” Aun answered.

 

“That’s sixty one of Tra dead and all of them good men in a throttle fight,” Ogvai snarled. “How many mortals?”

 

“Close on five and half thousand, ignoring servitors.”

 

“Did they die with red snow under them?”

 

“All the vessels show evidence of catastrophic Geller field collapse and mass intrusion by the never born,” Aun answered.

 

Ogvai muttered something inaudible that Aun tactfully chose to ignore.

 

“It is as if the Immaterium itself is consciously trying to kill us,” Magos BiuPhong’s collective voices rang out across the bridge space. Quite a few of the mortal crew turned, anxiety lined their faces.

 

“Trying to panic the crew, are we?” Ogvai grunted at the representative.

 

“Not at all,” BiuPhong answered with the slightest hint of anxiety in his voices. “I was merely conveying a theory.”     

 

Ogvai glanced at Aun who was peering into the void as Ogvai had been doing before.

 

“Thoughts?”

 

“He’s right of course,” Helwinter answered after a momentary delay. “The Rout have long known that there are powers in the aether and that they possess some intelligence and cunning. It appears that they are actively acting against us.”

 

“It’s going to be difficult to fight them in their own Aett,” Ogvai mused.

 

“Harder yet if we are unable to use the Warp to travel faster than the light barrier.”

 

Ogvai growled in frustration and stalked off towards the dark smoky sanctuary of his reclusiam. Aun Helwinter stayed where he was, looking out over the void with eyes both physical and metaphysical.

 

*

 

 

 

 

*

 

The lift carrying Arvidh came to a halt and its huge doors thrice the height of a Cataphractii Terminator opened on huge hydraulic rams. It had been designed to carry objects as large as a Contemptor Pattern Dreadnought or more likely the Mechanicum had designed it to be large enough to carry cybernetic weapon systems like their Castellax Battle-Automata. It had dwarfed the three Astartes clad only in standard power armour.

 

Arvidh led the twins down the corridor. Both of them carried heavy flamers, the blue actinic pilot lights still burning in preparation for unleashing the dragon’s breath at an enemy. Arvidh himself carried only a tiny volkite flayer on his belt, and a rune carved athame, neither suited to combat. His artificer bolt pistol had been lost in one of the many acidic maws that had formed spontaneously and ravenously  in the surfaces of a Neverborn shaped like a gelatinous cube. His rune carved sword he’d left; its blade already shattered; stuck in the chest of another daemon. If they did face any threat mortal or otherwise he would be forced to rely on the twins and his already strained psionic ability.   

 

Twenty five metres from the lift, the lights had failed in the corridor. The acrid smell of burnt plastic filled the air almost hiding the more subtle odours of sulphurous gases and putrescine. There were body parts on the floor of the corridor in loose dissociated piles. Blood smeared the walls and roof and floor in premeditated streaks. It was a charnel house.

 

The ship would be filled with such scenes, the aftermath of the wanton destruction performed by the daemons of the Warp. Arvidh reached out with his other-sight along the corridor for the Taint of warp corruption the psychic signature of the daemon-kin.

 

It was gone. He could see the remains of the daemon lying next to its last victim. Its remains were bits of bone, muscle, several types of plastek and a variety of metallic shards. When a weak daemon manifested it had to use its environment to construct a corporeal structure for it to inhabit, whereas a more powerful daemon could will a body out of nothingness.       

 

They reached the right room after a mere two hundred metres. The door to the lieutenant’s quarters was mostly destroyed, the middle section torn outwards by some huge force. Much of it was missing and Arvidh suspected that it had become part of the fledgling Neverborn as it tried to fully manifest. He overrode the door lock with the wireless master key built into his armour‘s left vambrace and the remains of the door slid open with a screech of tortured metal on metal. With the door fully open a small junior officer’s billet was revealed. Arvidh glanced in at the perfectly arranged room, the Imperial Navy certainly acculturated its officers in proper naval decorum. There was only one thing wrong with the scene. The young man lying dead on the bed, his blood soaking onto otherwise pristine white sheets.

 

He had died badly, in great pain and distress, as the thoughts in his mind, had gained physical reality and torn its way out through the centre of his forehead as the Geller shield flickered. His head and chest had exploded outwards in a fountain of gore, that had been the medium through which the daemon had first entered the mundane universe.

 

Arvidh was about to order the room burned and cleansed when he noticed something on the floor a small paper book. Quite old with a dirty brown cover it had probably fallen as its owner had explosively exsanguinated. The Gothi reached down and scooped it up. Even through his gauntlets it felt wrong, it buzzed like an electrical discharge, it squirmed like an eel, it smelt of rose petals and faeces and passion and fear. He turned it over carefully. There was no lettering on the cover, or maybe it had been worn away by eager hands caressing its hide bound form. The initial jumble of sensation  had passed almost instantaneously, it was just a book now. A harmless piece of fiction, something he might hang on to and read at another time.

 

Arvidh felt the thoughts in his mind, felt the wrongness of their shapes, the book was exerting a compulsion on him, trying to influence him. Resolutely he opened it and looked over a few pages. It was written by hand in at least three different hands. There was the original flowing text in what appeared to be an odd dialect of old Colchisian, then over that in the spaces between the lines someone had written what appeared to be a translation in one of the Nordyc sub-languages. Then there were annotations in Imperial gothic on almost every free bit of page. It described itself as a primer on the nature of the contextual underlying reality of quantum mechanics and an ontological paradigm shift for all students of metaphysics. He flicked though, seeing hand drawn arcane symbols, pentagrams, occult circles and the like. It was for want of a better term a grimoire, a spell book.

 

“Priest,” Folkmar said sharply, perhaps more loudly than he meant.

 

Arvidh realised his time sense had been skewed, he’d been unaware how long he had been standing flicking through the pages. 

 

“What is it?” Steingrim asked him.

 

“Maleficarum,” Arvidh managed to say at last, with a tongue that felt dry and swollen in his mouth.

 

“We should burn it?” Folkmar asked.

 

Burn it… for a moment Arvidh almost said no. For a moment he was going to suggest that he needed more time to study its content. But his will was too strong, his carefully constructed mental defences reacting to the unsubtle persuasion the book was trying to exert on him. Turning he threw it onto the floor.

 

“Burn the body and the book - especially the book. It’s dangerous!” Arvidh almost shouted.

 

He moved out of the way as the twins filled the room with chemical fire. The alarms went off immediately, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors all blaring their incessant racket. The fire suppressant system activated and squirted some sort of fire retardant powder at the room from its ceiling mounted nozzle. It was no match for the twins flamers. The room was an inferno, hot enough for plastics to vaporise and metals to melt. Still, the book took a surprisingly long time to destroy. 

 

A fire suppression team arrived and then two more, all desperate to do their job. Fire on a starship was a terrible danger. It’s not as if you can leave the burning building the ship represents - it is after all your whole world. Where would you go? Arvidh stalled them until both the bodies and the book were reduced to ash. Only after he had ascertained the book’s destruction did he let them stop the inferno that had engulfed the whole section and was turning it into a fiery hell.

 

Arvidh’s comm channel chimed with an incoming call.

 

“Is that you burning my ship, Arvidh?” Jarl Bran questioned. “First you destroy my bridge and now you’re destroying the rest of it.”

 

“I recognize my failing, and will be sure to correct it, Jarl.”

 

“Is the maleficarum ended?” Bran asked.

 

“The immediate threat, yes.” Arvidh paused. “The dead lieutenant, Treha had some rather dangerous reading material. I’m going to see if I can track down where he got it from.”

 

“That’s good,” Bran replied. “Ogvai and some of Tra Company are in coming. Meet me back here when you’re done.”

 

The channel chimed as it closed.

 

Arvidh sensed Steingrim and Folkmar behind him. He turned to look at them. We need to do some digging, it appears we have a few cultists aboard dabbling in the black arts.

 

“There are others?” Folkmar questioned.

 

“I suspect so. I think we need to know more about the lieutenant.”

 

 

  

 

*

 

Bran attempts to put his ship in order. Communication with Mechanicum about damage and their lost vessels. Make it alien but almost approachable.

 

*

 

The Nidhoggur picked its way through the debris, hull fragments and frozen organic residue alike knocked aside by their void shields. The sensor crews kept their electronic ears and eyes pinned resolutely on their cluttered surroundings, prepared for evidence of mines, booby traps or hidden vessels. So far they had encountered  sixteen ruined ships, all of them Rout warships or their supply caravan. It was growing more and more apparent that a substantial fraction of the Vlka Fenryka’s fleet had been ripped apart by the terrible warp storms that had plagued their journey through the Immaterium. 

 

The damage to the ships had left evidence of the nature of the attack. Claw marks were everywhere, savage rents as if impossibly large talons had sliced furrows through alloys measurably harder than diamond as easily as a mortal child might dig furrows through wet sand with his finger tips. Some ships were bitten in two, the evidence of great maws filled with teeth on the tattered remains. Some were constricted and crushed as if by giant coiled wyrms or perhaps vast tentacles.

 

Once or twice the Nidhoggur’s helmsmen had manoeuvred the vessel up and over huge fragments of starship too large to safely bounce off the void shields. At last they cleared the remains of one of Twa’s frigates and saw the Sváfnir in front of them. Ogvai and the Nidhoggur’s captain were peering over detailed hololithic projections of the Sváfnir as the ship’s memory records remembered her and as she was now. The Sváfnir was the prototype design for the enormous Infernus-class battleships, a blade of a ship with a massive armoured prow and a spinal mounted las weapon of enormous puissance. Like every other Rout ship Ogvai had seen over the last day and a half she was scarred by her trip through the Warp. But she was clearly mostly intact only a few blemishes in her outer skin showing where Geller field interruptions had allowed the denizens of the Underverse to phase into her corporeal structure and wreak havoc on the crew inside.

 

Tight beam communication lasers and masers were locking on between the two vessels, passing identifying markers, parsing replies. A new hololithic message flashed up and Ogvai activated it with the haptic interface units built into his gauntlets.

 

A huge washed out photonic projection of Bran the Thunder Lord, hung in the air before them.

 

“Good to see you’re still running a thread Og,” he said with real conviction.

 

“Good to see you too Bran,” Ogvai replied. “This has been a real kongell harfiligr. Helwinter is convinced it was not natural, that it was engineered.”

 

Bran nodded in agreement.

 

“That seems likely. It can be done, though it requires many deaths and much suffering.”

 

Ogvai almost jumped forward towards the hololith in shock.

 

“You have heard of this? Seen it? Know how it may be caused?”

 

Bran looked uneasy, uncertain of what he was going to say.

 

“Much of my memories of my past lives are but half forgotten shadows. I do not even recall my first birth name, the names of my parents or how I ended up in service to the Emperor. All I remember with any certainty is playing under a gnarled tree and someone calling my name. Though I do not recall the name however much I try.”

 

He paused looking almost wistful until he noticed Ogvai’s irritable expression.

 

“Of my second life I have vague memories of battles, great combats that most of my Astartes brothers think exaggerated or misremembered. Hell, even the first decade or two of my third life is mostly lost to me.”

 

He paused again like a Skald would to increase anticipation for a tale’s conclusion.

 

“But I remember the battles against the Hyacc along the Fringe. They made use of such tactics, sacrificing their own people by the millions to raise up huge Warp storms to disturb the aether and destroy our fleets. We would have been overwhelmed ‘cept that the Emperor reached out his hand and stilled the Warp by the power of his will. Then we fell upon them and they were no more.”

 

“And this storm and its effects, you believe it to have similar cause?” Ogvai interjected.

 

“Indeed.”

 

“Would  there need to be proximity between the sacrifices and the storm?”

 

“Proximity?”

 

“Aye,” Ogvai asked. “Will those who caused this effect be nearby in the real universe?”

 

Bran nodded. “Most certainly.”

 

Ogvai turned to the Nidhoggur’s captain but he had already guessed Ogvai’s instruction and was already ordering the men under his command.

 

Looking for vessels that were not part of their fleet.

 

Bran and Ogvai note that some of the ships nearby are not Rout ships they are bulk transports. Aun wants to check the out - takes a shuttle and a small team of terminators to investigate.

 

Arvidh is becoming concerned that there are dabblers in warp craft aboard their ship - he’s trying to track them down.

 

 

A tiny section of armour plate on the port flank of Nidhoggur exploded outwards. From the front it was an irregular hexagon, about fifty metres wide and ninety metres tall. Behind the three metre thickness of battleship grade armour plate was the tiny crew section, part of an Astartes boarding torpedo. Clustered tightly around the crewed section were the stealthy cool-jet manoeuvring thrusters, primary plasma drives and a series of countermeasure launchers for broadcast decoys, chaff dispensers and ablative dust.

 

The Ginnung-mygg was a one of a kind vessel, designed and constructed for a one off mission decades earlier by Tra’s first Iron Priest, Säppo Ilmarrinenn. In the cramped crew section, restrained by their acceleration couches waited Aun Helwinter and his chosen team.

 

They were all from different packs, chosen not for their combat skills but because they were all wyrd touched. Each of them possessed some minor psionic talent. Grey haired and dour Orm Svessel had preternatural luck such that no one amongst Tra would consent to play games of chance with him. Jötnarr the Bloody with his Mjod soaked beard and ravenous appetite, had an impressive sixth sense and on occasion telepathy that drove him away from the gregarious and noisy company of his peers. Alfuær Fell-gaze, whose head was tattooed with fantastical colourful sea serpents, had apparently possessed the evil eye as a child. Now he was more infamous for his eerie savant like knowledge about things he had never been taught. Finally there was Hafljótr the Wild who had an uncanny knack with animals of all sorts. When Ogvai’s Company had last been on Fenris, Aun had  found Hafljótr trying to train a juvenile stórskarinngalt, seemingly oblivious that his protégé already stood as tall as him and would eventually be larger than a Rhino APC.

 

All these men had been deemed strong enough of will to be trained as Astartes, though some had been telepathically gelded by the Rout’s senior Gothi, so that their talents would not manifest uncontrollably, building blocks and bulwarks to harden their minds against intrusion. None of these men before him were puissant enough to fulfil the role as Gothi within a Great Company. Indeed Aun was not looking for an apprentice, although there were only two gothi left amongst Tra since the death of Ulvurul Heoroth and Eada Haelwulf. Instead Aun was looking for men who could act as a bulwark against the wiles of the psykers and the powers of the never born. Jarl Ogvai had been horrified by the number of men slain by the Fifteenth’s maleficarum on Prospero and had demanded action from his senior Gothi. Helwinter had no illusions about the task. The sorcerers of the Fifteenth legion had slaughtered their way through the ranks of the Sixth with their maleficarum. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the nullifying abilities of the Silent Sisterhood and their untouchable pariahs it may well have been the sixth legion destroyed that day.

 

Helwinter was dragged away from his musings by the message icon flashed up in his helmet’s visor display. He blink clicked it and a  series of windows opened, showing a summary of Ginnung-mygg’s status: auspex imagery from the vessel’s passive sensors and more detailed scans from both the Nidhoggur and her sensor drones as they darted around the target bulk carrier.

 

On a whim, Aun let his mind drift out of the confines of his mortal form, reaching past the pilot-servitor up front and then out into near space. Just a cautious telepathic sweep, like a blind man tapping out with his staff to build up a picture of his environs.  As he passed the servitor he knew him instantly. To un- gifted men, mortal or Astartes, servitors were zombie like shuffling half-men. Mere flesh-golems ran by the hard uncaring logic machines implanted in their flesh. Most were vat grown, one of  a gross or more genetic templates whose origins were lost in Mankind’ s turbulent past.  But a few like the Ginnung-mygg’s pilot had once been conventionally conceived and naturally gestated sentient human beings. Most were criminals, their minds wiped by specialist Mechanicum adepts of the Lacyraemara sects whose adepts took  memories and personalities apart with nano-technological gemynd scalpels. Their pilot was one such criminal, a vicious pirate captain and slaver captured by Tra during a compliance a century earlier. It was ironic, Helwinter mused, that the men who had ended his reign of piratical raiding had themselves probably been pirates, raiders, murderers and slavers in their past lives on Fenris.

 

He pushed out further, like a wight drifting incorporeally on the capricious winds of Fenris. The Immaterium was still disturbed and Aun could feel the attention of the Neverborn within the Warp disturbing it in almost the same way masses distort space-time in the real universe. He had hoped to scout out their target but the minor warp predators were already massing around him drawn by his presence and their attentions might draw more dangerous entities. He returned swiftly back to the confines of his physical shell.  

 

One of the display windows in his field of view was now showing the pilot-servitor attempting to communicate with one of the target vessel’s airgates; the Sixth Legion’s override codes attempting to dominate the minor machine spirit that controlled the gate. It put up only briefest of struggles and then the Ginnung-mygg made her approach, the airgate extending from her front mating successfully with the corresponding orifice in the bulk-carrier’s side.

 

As soon as the pressure had equalised between the two vessels, Aun had their airlock opened and activated the team’s scout drone. It was supposed to function like a traditional Fire Wasp boarding drone, designed to provide early warning for the Astartes assault team that followed behind. This one was shaped like a stylized version of a feline carnivore called a lynx . It was mostly metallic, with an odd unnatural gait and a disconcerting clicking noise as it strutted along.  

 

Helwinter’s new pack followed the drone into the ship, with no good grace. They jostled past each other, glowering at each other, vying for position. Only Aun was exempt, his status as Tra’s Gothi leaving him outside the normal pack hierarchies. They found themselves in a long corridor, four men wide and as high as man standing on another man’s shoulders. A quad-lasgun mounted in a cupola on the roof  sat inactive, powered down, muzzles pointed harmlessly at a wall. Presumably it was designed to slow down intruders who forced the airlock and entered the ship. But the same Astartes override codes that had opened the airlock had also powered down the internal defence systems.

           

“Orm take point, Jötnarr and Hafljótr behind Orm, then me and then Alfuær,” Aun ordered, interlacing the verbal command with just a touch of mental compulsion.

 

They arranged themselves swiftly, training kicking in. Orm in front armed with a bolter, Jötnarr behind with a heavy flamer rather than the low slung heavy bolter he normally carried, Hafljótr with a pair of chain axes, Alfuær armed with a fearsome heavy lascutter. 

 

Aun himself had his paired rune carved hand axes on his belt and a bolt pistol ready in his hand.

 

“Orm, lead on,” Aun said over their squad link channel. He closed down most of the armour’s data feeds just leaving the sensor feed from the probe running ahead of them in a single window up to the top left of his vision.

 

 

We leave them and return later via Aun’s audio report to Ogvai. 

[No one important]

And more...

 

“Great Jarl, message incoming from Aun Helwinter,” the senior communications officer called out, not realising that Ogvai was standing three paces behind him.

 

“Patch it through,” Ogvai growled sotto voce.

 

The man almost jumped out of his skin, almost falling as he tried to spin round, his head tilting as he tried to look the Jarl in the face. Then he spun back to his task. Momentarily Aun’s quiet calm voice filled the air.

 

“Jarl, we have completed our preliminary search of the vessel. There are no survivors here. There are I estimate three hundred thousand dead in this one ship alone,” he paused  “I am afraid none of them died well.”

 

“There are few good deaths,” Ogvai replied.

 

There was a brief pause due to the distance the communication signal was travelling.  

 

“There is evidence of ritualistic killing on a massive scale. The vessel had been modified to carry huge numbers of people. There are sections containing thousands of people chained up in chambers exposed to the vacuum. Then there are other sections where people died of diseases almost as powerful as the life-eater itself. Following that there are regions containing thousands of mortals impaled on sharp spikes, followed by furnaces where tens of thousands of  humans were burned alive.”

 

Ogvai could feel the eyes of the mortal crew on him. Judging him. They wondered how would he respond, with good old fashioned human responses?

 

“Was this xenos or the eight legion’s diabolical handiwork?”

 

There was another pause.

 

“There is no evidence of xenos activity. Nor do I believe it shows the touch of Curze’s demented rabble. Their terror campaigns play on human psychology, their understanding of human fears. Whereas this is more of an occult offering. An enormous ritual sacrifice.”

 

“Just as the Jarl of Twa suggested?”

 

Again the pause.

 

“Aye my lord.”

 

“Was this the work of one of the Legions, can we at least ascertain that? Was this the work of Horus or one of the other traitors?”

 

Again the pause.

 

“We have found no physical evidence of Astartes presence. The vessel’s crews and the hundreds necessary to perform this atrocity are no longer present. I’ve got Alfuær Fell-gaze looking for databanks but every cogitator we have found has been blasted into useless debris. I must also report that it is too dangerous to use any of the psyker arts to explore what happened here. The Immaterium is still dangerously disturbed and it would take little to accidentally tear a hole in the veil.” 

 

Ogvai didn’t respond. He glanced at the Nidhoggur’s senior bridge crew as they waited patiently for his leadership. As a child of Fenris Ogvai wanted to burn the ships, destroy them utterly. That was the way to deal with maleficarum. That was what  his tribal leaders had taught to him as a small child. That was the what Lord Russ had taught to his fledgling legion. But as always Ogvai knew he had to temper his decision with the mores of conventional imperial society.

 

“Captain, I would see this abomination destroyed utterly, it’s evil wiped out. Can you or your aides see any reason why that would not be a good course of action?”

 

The Nidhoggur’s captain glanced at his colleagues but they looked stunned. The captain sighed slowly.

 

“I would see them burn too, but do we have enough evidence.…” he tailed off.

 

“I think we have moved beyond chains of evidence, and judicial hearings, this is war,” Ogvai rasped.

 

“Aun, pull your team back to the Nidhoggur. I’ll contact Bran and we’ll plan the best way of doing this.”

 

Again the infuriating pause.

 

“It will be done.”

 

Aun talks to Bran he wants them to head off to the next human inhabited system. He wants to destroy the ruined Rout ships and the bulk carriers used to trap them. The Mechanicum put a spanner in that idea - they want to salvage the ships and the equipment.

 

 

 

 

Arvidh kills the sorcerer in charge after a psychic battle à la Ravenor and Kinsky.

 

Bran is having trouble with the Mechanicum and his ship. They  are having difficulty repairing some of the systems.

 

Ogvai wants to go to nearest world:

 

“Get me a tactical schematic for this system and any neighbouring ones.”

 

New hololiths winked into existence, showing a wireframe representation of their immediate surroundings and then smaller display boxes of the neighbouring systems. The box showing the nearest star expanded revealing a single orange star and its orbiting satellites.   

 

“The nearest system is the Serin system almost a light year out. One inhabited world Serin 3b or Chaertal to its inhabitants,” Ogvai read aloud. “It has a small population of a few hundred thousand. Sparse defences and no standing militia. It would have been an easy target.”

 

“Do we know they have been attacked?” Bran asked.

 

Ogvai’s Mechanicum and Chief propose a warp skip, bouncing off the immaterial - talk about the decay curve - elongating the tail end - reduced fuel cost and won’t be noticed by astropaths or navigators in the same way as a proper warp jump would be - some discussion of relativistic effects - stealthy approach.

 

Ogvai wants to blow up all the ruined dead ships, wipe out any maleficarum. A proper ending for the Rout. The Mechanicum believe that ships should be salvaged that the weapons and armaments, tanks etc will be useful in the wars that will inevitably follow. Bran agrees to stay behind and salvage what can be salvaged. Whilst Ogvai will take his frigates into the next system and spy on the world there.

 

 

 

 

* 

[No one important]

Here's Chapter 3

 

Three

 

A tear formed suddenly in the fabric of space-time, with a flicker of pseudo motion through which the un-light of the hell that under laid reality poured forth. Out of the rift sprung the Hrafnkel, flagship of the Wolf King, forcing its way back into the hard logical sanctuary of the material universe. It was a huge slate-grey behemoth slab-sided and bristling with weapon systems. Bombardment cannons, huge electromagnetic rail guns designed to launch fusion armed warheads at relativistic velocities, opened fire almost immediately they were free of the Warp’s embrace. The moments after a vessel left the Immaterium were the most fraught, when the vessel was blind and almost defenceless, with no protective cocoon of void shields and the sensor array still confused by the reality distorting effects of the warp rift. That was why the Hrafnkel’s cannon were catapulting a half dozen specialist sensor packages out in all directions. The main component of each was an unmanned probe drone with quantum entangled faster-than-light data links to the Hrafnkel. As soon as they were far enough away from her mass-shadow, each probe activated their space-time distorting drives and pushed themselves out beyond the range of the Hrafnkel’s light speed limited sensor grid.

 

Now clear of the rift and with the spatial anomaly closing behind them the mighty warship’s main plasma drives lit with huge nuclear force, accelerating the Hrafnkel away from the Mandeville Point and any other translating starships. Sensor banks continued to search the surrounding void for the electromagnetic spoor of enemy vessels. Void projectors sprung into life and began to cloak the vessel in an aegis of  protective energies.

 

Armoured hull sections on the Hrafnkel’s sides opened up on huge hydraulic rams, exposing the vessel’s larger hangar bays. Patrol vessels deployed with explosive force from their launch cradles. Most were gun ships, far faster accelerating than their parent. As soon as the electromagnetic rams had spat them into space they lit their own nuclear drives, darting away on magnetically vectored blue-hot plasma torches in predetermined defensive patterns.

 

Second by second, minute by minute the Hrafnkel shrugged off its momentary weakness and transmogrified itself into a mobile fortress, a veritable city of war.

 

*

 

Half an hour after the Hrafnkel’s arrival, space rippled oddly a half light minute out from the flagship. Forewarned by its astropathic choir and the on duty navigator, the flagship had already moved its main guns to bear on the probable entry coordinates. Meson projectors, laser arrays and particle casters all pointed at the potential threat.

 

The rift into the Warp opened and a vessel slipped free, shrugging off the residue of the Empyrean from its flanks as it completed its translation. By the time the vessel’s prow had appeared, the astropaths of both ships had exchanged coded memes specific to the sixth legion, confirming vessel identity and the Hrafnkel was already swinging its deadly arsenal of ship to ship weaponry away to cover the void more generally.

 

The new ship was one of the Hrafnkel’s own escort vessels, an ancient and battle scarred shield-wall frigate. The Skroldmaind was an odd design suited to only one task, that of close protection. Overly large engines and reaction control thrusters attempted to compensate for its substantial inertia. Its slab sides were clearly bore armour that had been built for Battle Barges rather than frigates. Unlike a conventional capital ship it had no long range weapons just an extensive array of defensive turrets. Such vessels had just one role, to interpose themselves between the flagship and its foes, buying it time to repair its voids or cover a sudden weakness in its armour brought on by successful enemy fire. To take a kill shot so that its lord might survive.

 

As the Skroldmaind cleared the rift astropathic communications between the two ships was superseded first by radio wave communication and then in turn by secure tight laser-beam communication as the technicians aboard the vessels set up a secure local comm-web. Together, as a pack of two, the ships dove deeper into the depths of the Khosis cluster. Hoping that the rest of the Sixth Legion’s fleet would soon join them.

 

*

 

 

Bjorn known as Bear by Tra’s skald Kasper Hawser and jokingly as Fell-Handed by Godsmote of the Rout, was already late when he arrived at the Hrafnkel’s bridge. It had taken him an inordinate amount of time to get from his assigned quarters to the bridge, after the vox-summons. Security was necessarily tight on a warship and this had not been helped by the rigmarole that necessarily accompanied the shift from Warp flight to real space. At every chance he had broken into a loping run more suited to breaking into combat then moving around a starship, but almost as soon as he made up speed he‘d been forced to decelerate and stop again by a check point or a meandering security detail.

 

Bjorn came to a halt as two Cataphractii armoured Astartes moved to block his passage at the very entrance gateway to the bridge. Both were covered head to toe in dark grey armour, carved with a fine tracery of protective runes as an aegis against psykers and the denizens of the Underverse. From their shoulders hung mouldering furs and scaly skins of great predatory beasts that their wearers had personally slain on hunts or in battle. One was armed with a power fist and a volkite culverin. The other was armed with a combi-bolter melta in one gauntleted fist and a double bladed axe in the other.

 

Theirs were not the only weapons targeting Bjorn. The gateway onto the bridge was protected by fixed combat servitors mounted into alcoves on either side of the entrance just before the recess of the gateway’s retracted blast shield. They were pale things, vat grown for task with extensive cyber augmentation that had rid them of much of their facial features as well as their limbs.  Each servitor’s sensors were locked onto him, and his armour fed this data to him as a prickling sensation through his armour ports. One was armed with a prototype three barrelled rotary auto-cannon and  the other with a pair of more modern plasma cannons.

 

Recognising him by sight and by the electronic spoor of his armour the Astartes stepped back, to let him pass. At the same time in response to a blink-clicked command message from the lead terminator the two servitors also powered down. Their weapons lowering with servo assisted growls. Their head mounted auspex arrays falling back into a pre-programmed scanning pattern.

 

“He’s there,” one of the Vaerangi said, his voice distorted by the helmet’s external speakers. He stretched out one gauntlet covered hand still clutching his axe and pointed towards the middle of the bridge with his forefinger.

 

As was his way Russ stood at the centre of a maelstrom of activity. He was surrounded by a library of flickering shifting hololithic images, several gaunt astropaths, one nervously pacing navigator adjutant, small groups of ramrod straight fleet command personnel, three Mechanicum agents and his own personal gothi.

 

Even across the tumultuous bridge with its morass of electrical, mechanical and organic noise, Russ had somehow become aware of Bjorn’s arrival. He looked straight at him, a gap miraculously appearing to allow line of sight at that very moment. For a second Bjorn though he heard a voice in his head like when a gothi reached out telepathically to speak mind to mind.

 

+Come here+   

 

Bjorn wasn’t sure he’d heard it. Did the Primarchs possess telepathic abilities? He’d heard some say that Russ’ howl was as much a telepathic noise as an auditory one and some of Fyf had claimed to have  witnessed its deleterious effects on the Thousand Sons’ telepaths during the Helios Compliance.

 

“Local scan negative for both planetary bodies and artificial bodies. Wide aperture  sensor array operational data incoming,” a huge metallic dead voice rang out sonorously over the tannoy, like the tolling of some great bell.

 

Bjorn threaded his way through the bridge crew towards the Wolf Lord. He passed three of what the Fenrisian Astartes called star-speakers and the Terrans called astropaths. They were blind as were most of their kind, their bodies emaciated and aged by the power they wielded. One, Bjorn realised mostly from her pheromones, was a woman the others both men. They all had external cyber augmentations, including exoskeletons that helped to support them. Aides provided by the Adeptus Telepathicus  directed them across the bridge, murmuring soothing litanies that the astropaths had planted into their own minds as post-hypnotic triggers. One of the shuffling star-speakers looked straight at Bjorn with his sunken empty eye holes. It was said that though they had lost their physical vision they possessed various types of near sight that enabled them to manoeuvre around.  Perhaps they saw Bjorn’s mind, his thoughts maybe his very soul. He felt a cold shiver run up his spine, the hairs on his arms trying to erect and his primary heart rate rose. Then the astropath’s attention wandered and its face turned back in response to his aide’s whispered verbal goad.

 

“Localised scanning complete. No threats detected.” The tannoy voice rang out. “Tactical display coming online.’”

 

As he slid patiently through the milling crew, Bjorn looked up at the huge hololithic display, above the Primarch, that rendered all of the incoming data into a human understandable image. At the moment it showed the star system as a combination of library images superimposed on the wire-frame outline the sensors were patching together. This was the Khosis system, the destination chosen by Jarl Russ. It was a mostly unimportant system. No important safe aetheric routes passed close by. No heavily populated planets of the Imperium or Mechnicum lay within its bourn. The only thing of importance was the astropathic relay station that lay on the second rocky planet out from the double star at the centre of the Khosis system.  Suddenly a planet shifted, its library image replaced with a false colour near real time image. New data in red flashed up on it and a section was highlighted and expanded.

 

“The astropathic complex.” Bjorn heard Russ say. “It’s intact.”  

 

“I do not sense the thoughts of my siblings in the aether,” the Mistress of Astropaths lisped, her mouth palsied by the neurological damage of the soul binding. “Just the ripples of sudden death. Glimpses of violence. Armoured figures with guns and blades. Astartes I fear, though the images are hurried and disrupted by the suddenness and the traumatic nature of their deaths…..”

 

She tailed off, and raised a shaking hand to dab at her mouth with a handkerchief. She was clearly shaken by the visions her mind eye had seen. Bjorn was surprised to see Russ reach out and pat her gently on the shoulder.

 

“I am sorry for you loss sister.” Bjorn half-heard him say. “If it is any comfort, the Rout will find those who did this and they will make them pay for their crimes.”

 

“How many people are supposed to be there,” the reedy voice of one of the humans interjected, his voice filled with attempted authority yet bristling with unconscious anxiety in the presence of the Wolf Lord. Mortals however brave found the presence of transhumans hard to bear. But it was nothing compared to the fear and awe a Primarch imposed in those who viewed them in the flesh.

 

“The facility had six hundred astropaths, twelve hundred adeptus telepathicus support staff, one hundred and forty seven Mechanicum adepts, six hundred skitarii and four thousand servitors of a variety of grades,” a mechanical synthesised voice rang out from the Mechancium’s representative, Magos Vechus Albart.  Bjorn had only seen the Magos twice before and at no point had Bjorn heard anyone amongst the Rout use his name. He was a tall thin man, an almost emaciated figure hidden by his red robes and mechadendrites half suspended by the arcane technologies attached to his back. He had heard him described by one of the Hrafnkel’s human crew as looking like some sort of mechanical snail. Even from this distance Bjorn could pick his scent out of the other machine tainted air. It was a curious and unpleasant mixture of hydrocarbons, urea, putrescine and cadaverine.

 

Two junior bridge crew scurried hurriedly past Bjorn. One, a girl, smiled at him briefly whilst her companion did his best to ignore the Astartes. He could smell the tang of fear pheromones on them, rising in unconscious response to his presence before them. He moved past them and found himself at the edge of the Wolf Lord’s coterie, rather closer to the gothi than he would have liked. Unlike the majority of the Legion’s gothi who were Astartes, the Jarl’s gothi were all mortals. They had been his gothi when the Emperor had first arrived on Fenris. All had been enhanced to prolong their lives with gene reweaving, biological rejuvenation and cybernetic enhancement.  Even still they were all old men worn down by the centuries they had lives. There were only four of them left now. They even looked like each other. Hidden by robes and stinking Fenrisian furs with long yellow white hair and beards. Their heavily wrinkled and age spotted skin was covered in faded tattoo lines. Necklaces of charms hung round their necks and each leant heavily on a long staff, one of bone the others of age hardened wood.

 

After the events on Prospero involving Kasper Hawser and the Horus-daemon, Bjorn had found himself reassigned to the Hrafnkel. At first the gothi and Jarl Russ had questioned all those who had survived contact with the Horus-daemon thing. But eventually Aun Helwinter and Fith Godsmote had been able to return to Tra and the Nidhoggur. Only the skald and Bjorn remained, though in truth after a while Bjorn had not seen the skald either. He was certain that Kasper Hawser had not returned  to Tra, but the gothi were evasive when Bjorn asked about where he was.

 

The skald staying, that Bjorn could understand. After all the skald had been influenced by the Horus-demon thing from the very beginning. It had been linked to Hawser, spying through him, manipulating Tra and indeed the Rout through him. But Bjorn couldn’t see why he had not been allowed to return to his brothers in Tra. The gothi and the Wolf Priests alike confirmed that there was no sign of corruption in his handless arm. Indeed the only reason Bjorn could see the gothi would not let him go, was that he represented a riddle to them that they could not solve.

 

They had spoken to him of it only once in that odd metaphor and allusion camouflaged way that the gothi spoke to everyone. They had said two things basically, though it had taken them almost half an hour for them to get it out. The first was that Bjorn’s wyrd reached into the future in ways that the gothi had only seen a few times, in people like the Allfather and his sons. Secondly and perhaps more worryingly that his wyrd was somehow linked to Jarl Russ in a way that they had never seen.

 

“It is not just that you will have much future in common. That your paths will cross many times. That you will be battle brothers together in the future that it is to come. It is deeper than that. Stranger…. The wyrd of you both are one, in a way we can not explain.” 

 

That was all that they would ever say on the matter. Bjorn told himself that they were trying to avoid tampering with the future. Aun Helwinter had once told the men of Tra that revealing too much of a man’s wyrd to him could alter the future. In some men knowing their fate fixed their fate and they ran blindly and desperately towards it, missing any opportunity to turn aside and construct a new wyrd. Other men would fear the future laid out in their wyrd that they would alter their lives completely and  in doing so take a poorer path than the one that fate had laid out for them.

 

Reminiscing and philosophising Bjorn almost missed Jarl Russ’ question.

 

“What would you do Bjorn One-handed!”

 

Bjorn floundered trying to get his auditory memory of the last few moments to replay in his mind, filtering out the conversations of those around him.

 

“Would you send men to investigate the array, to investigate its silence. A small team trusting in stealth and speed but unprepared for substantial assault. Or would you have the Hrafnkel stand in geostationary orbit above ready to provide succour to your men but in a tactically dangerous position itself?”

 

Bjorn ran both options through his minds the positives and negatives of both approaches. Whilst at the same time he tried to reason why the Wolf King wanted his lowly opinion on the matter.

 

“The former I think my lord. Or at least a variant. Maybe one Thunderhawk to make the insertion. But two more gunships carrying anti-ship ordinance as immediate back up nearby.”

 

The Wolf King nodded at him.

 

“I like it. We will go with your plan One-handed.”

 

The Wolf King smeared into sudden motion moving through the midst of his gothi, darting around the Mechanicum agents to meet face to face with Lord Gunn, Jarl of Onn. It was an unnecessary move, but for the Wolf King the inaction of bridge life was mind numbingly dull.

 

“Lord Gunn please send a suitable team to investigate the facility. Tell them to take young Bjorn hear as my eyes and ears.”

 

The Jarl of the Rout’s first Great Company nodded in acquiescence. Speech was still difficult for him. An ensorcelled blade had ripped out throat and came close to severing his spinal column and cutting his thread on Prospero. The Wolf Lord had spent weeks afterwards under the skilful hands of the gene-weavers and flesh-shapers as they had reconstructed him. When he spoke now it was through an artfully concealed voxcaster, but it leant his speech a whispering softness that was ill at ease with the mighty warrior.

 

“If you wouldn’t mind my lord?” the main Mechanicum agent asked.

 

Russ turned slowly and fixed him with a steely gaze. Bjorn had seen experienced battle hardened mortal soldiers crumple in abject terror at that stare their bladder and bowels voiding. But the agent was made of sterner stuff, or perhaps his brain’s fear centre had been excised to make way for some sort of enhanced processing capability.

 

“I would send one of my aides with them to help…” he tailed off, finally realising his mistake.

 

“Fine!” Russ snarled. Looking pointedly at the Chief Astropath and her entourage he added. “Anyone else want to go for a ride in a Thunderhawk.”

 

Wisely the Chief Astropath merely shook her head, her lips curling in wry amusement.

 

 

*

 

The Thunderhawk slid through the atmosphere like a falling meteorite rock, its ceramite hull glowing red-hot with the friction of its orbital insertion. Like a bloody bad star Bjorn thought with some irony. At least the skald wasn’t there to twist Bjorn’s wyrd. Atmospheric turbulence made the vessel buck wildly as the ship’s pilots fought to maintain their suicidally steep entry pattern with its missile lock defeating turns and drops.

 

Eventually the ship levelled out, just clearing the crest of a series of rounded grey hills and slid in towards the Astropathic complex with its arcane bladed psi-enhancing towers and more conventional communication dishes and antennae. Most of the complex was underground, to protect the inhabitants from the vicious winds and higher than human survivable solar radiation. In the back of the Thunderhawk Bjorn sat in restraint cages with Ragnar’s pack and ran through his pre-combat drills, ignoring the image feeds from the Thunderhawk’s auspexes that it was trying to feed him through his retinal display. He was armed with two weapons, that Onn’s men had loaned him, a bolt pistol and a powered axe. Though with only one functional arm, the other temporarily capped and waiting augmetic replacement, he would have to choose which weapon to carry wisely.

 

He glanced up at the Wolf pack he had been attached to. The were dressed as him in similar armour, with the same runes, and necklaces and furs as his brothers in Tra would wear. But at the same time they were different to him. This was not his pack. He felt it in their unconscious body movements in their glances and when he had met them un-helmeted in their very scent. He shrugged the feeling away and blink clicked a three dimensional wireframe schematic of the facility up on his helmet’s retinal display. The warriors of Russ cultivated the appearance of barbaric primitives. But that didn’t prevent them from being prepared for every eventuality. He began working his way through the virtual facility, looking for potential ambush points, defensible positions and the like.

 

The pack’s leader had tasked Bjorn with guarding the Mechanicum’s representative, a physically stunted and obsequious fabulous, by the name of Hulev Dash-47-alpha. The dwarf was dressed like all his ilk in red robes and bore the Adeptus Mechganicus logo proudly. But he appeared to have only a few minor augmetics, perhaps to enable him to interact with unmodified humans more easily. Bjorn had wondered whether the man’s stature and slightly feminine appearance had been gene coded into him to make him appear less threatening. Sadly the Magos Biologis hadn’t thought to improve on the man’s personality faults. Bjorn found the man’s tone and incessant questions about his lost hand irritating to the point of desperately wishing he could tear his throat out with his teeth. 

 

The Thunderhawk made one low pass over the facility some thirty metres above the ground, threading between buildings and antenna, to allow its ventral auspex to accurately scan the area. Then it swung round flaring the nose up to lose speed and dropped down onto the grey sand ninety metres from the main entrance.

 

The Wolves slid out of the Thunderhawk breached the blast door with melta charges and entered the facility with the fluid ease of the apex predators the Emperor had designed them to be. Even the best Lucifer Black or G9K Division Kill combat master of the Imperial Army would have been barely off the Thunderhawk’s ramp by the time the Wolves had breached the second set of security doors. That was the thing about Astartes that human didn’t understand unless they had actually seen them in action. Just how mind numbingly faster than humans they were.

 

The second blast doors lasted no quicker than the first, burning through into incandescent globs of white hot metal by the time Hulev Dash-47-alpha had raised his reedy voice to complain that he should have been allowed to use his noospheic key on the first door.

 

Bjorn followed behind the Adept, part of the pack and yet not. He was hoping his feral appearance would drive the irritating creature to at least hurry along with some alacrity after the other Astartes.

 

The pack’s standard auspex had not scented any sign of ambush or living survivors. It pinged contentiously to itself every few moments as its tiny green screen continuously updated. Bjorn like all of the Sixth Legion was grateful to the edge the Mechanicum’s technology granted him but that didn’t mean he felt any need to rely on it. He blink-clicked the helmet’s respirator valves to open and allowed the smell of the facility to reach his own olfactory organ.

 

The smell was that of antiseptic. The cheap mass produced chlorinated phenolic swill, that all human medicae facilities stunk of. The corridors themselves were a dull clinical white, well lit by a series of low pressure mercury-vapour gas-discharge lamp tubes mounted in the ceiling. They flickered at an odd rate that momentarily caught Bjorn’s attention, as if they were pulsing out some sort of message like some ancient telegraphist. 

 

Through the next set of internal swing doors they started to encounter the dead. A man dressed as an astropath’s aide lay dismembered across the corridor. Bjorn saw the manner of his death in a momentary glance. The blood spatter on floor, walls and roof consistent with the aide being struck from behind by a chain sword as he had tried to run away. Three vicious strikes, the last basically post mortem had cut him into slabs of  gore lying in a dried pool of his own body fluids. One person had killed him. Someone right handed, both faster and larger than his prey. The first blow chewing through bone, muscle and gristle, severing the spine column and lungs had been enough to paralyse him from the waist down and ruin him unto a gasping bloody wheezing death. The second horizontal, a return strike with the blade turned by the wrist’s rotation, cutting down through the right thigh then down through the left knee, severing several of the major arteries of the legs. The last strike another tearing cut from left to right, severed fingers from a hand raised to stop an unexpected fall as the man‘s body collapsed beneath him. Then cut clean through the skull and left his head in bloody spattered ruin.

 

Two servitors lay further on.  Neither had any bolt wounds. They had been savagely and pointlessly chopped to piece in a rabid assault that had literally tore them asunder. Their brains lobotomised by the tender mercies of the Mechanicum, they would have stood upright as long as they were physically capable as they were cut into quivering pieces. Whoever had destroyed the half-men had been ferociously angry, berserk to the point of uncontrollable madness.

 

They cam to a junction where two corridors crossed. Round the left hand corner they found one of the facility’s minor Mechanicum adepts with two skitarii warriors. The skitarii had taken bolt shots to their heads and torsos which had torn those body parts into bloody horror. The Mechanicum adept had been less lucky. A bolt round had blown off his left leg and then the chainswords of the attackers had cut him into pieces. Bjorn was certain that his death had not been  quick.

 

“They were not expecting attack,” Ragnar the pack leader voice growled over the vox net. “They were arranged as in everyday life. This was a surprise attack. Bolter fire killed the skitarri, the most dangerous foes first, then they closed and killed the rest with blades.”

 

One Wolf had kneeled down next to one of the dead skitarrii and was poking at his chest wound with a vicious flensing knife.

 

“Careful,” Ragnar muttered loudly. “Did you think to check for booby traps?”

 

“I recognize my failing, and will be sure to correct it," the Wolf muttered, his head bowed. “I was just wondering if they’d used a stalker shell to minimise the noise.” 

 

“No point,” Bjorn found himself answering. “The skitarrii are connected via their Manifold links. As soon as their life signs failed some adept was parsing through the last moments of their auspex feeds.”

 

The red eyes of at least half the pack turned and stared relentlessly at him. The kneeling Wolf rose, took a step towards Bjorn.

 

“Then why go to the effort of butchering the others with blades?”

 

Bjorn shrugged his shoulders.

 

“Some Legions favour close combat, the fresh kill close up. The World Eaters for example,” one of the other Wolves suggested.

 

“Possibly,” Ragnar replied.

 

“Of course it could be someone pretending to be them, to trap us into a particular mode of thought and tactic,” Bjorn interjected. Once again he immediately regretted his input. But the other Wolves made subtle body language signs of their agreement.

 

“Let’s move on,”  Ragnar said curtly. “Ulraak it’s your turn on point.”

 

Bjorn glanced at the Mechanicum’s representative who was painstakingly picking his way through the gore that the Wolves trampled through. The dwarf noticed and turned his attention to him for a moment. His face mostly hidden by his cloak was that of an unmodified human. Though his skin was too smooth, too unmarked by the vagaries of life. His eyes were made to look human and at a distance would have looked so. But Bjorn could see the tracery of technology in the sclera, the repeating fractal patterns in the iris.

 

“Ragnar was correct,” he said sotto voce as if trying not to be heard by the pack in front of them. A fruitless task with Astartes hearing, particularly when augmented by the helmet’s auditory sensors. “There was a bolt shell in the corpse which had not exploded.”

 

“A misfire?” Bjorn asked politely.

 

“With Mechanicum technology?” the representative bristled. “No it was something intentional.”

 

He hurried along clutching the hem of his robes up like some rich dowager desperate to not ruin her silk ball gown in a rain water puddle. Bjorn ignored his departure for a moment. Looking over the ruin again with a practised eye. He had never heard of a boltgun shell being used as a booby trap. That was something new. The Mechanicum were of course always churning out new variations of bolt shells and some of the legions like the Sixth had specialist technicians who built ammunition for special purposes. Bjorn noticed the distance between the Pack and himself and hurried after them.

 

As he caught up Ulraak was crouched low near a pair of swing doors, using the currently inactive chain blade attachment of his bolter to push one half open just enough to allow Ragnar to toss a spherical sensor probe through.

 

A new window appeared to the left of Bjorn’s retinal display and he blink clicked it, expanding it. This was the sensor probe’s ground eye view of the space it found itself in. The room was dark bar for one flickering light to the far left and hanging oddly oscillating back and forth with a lazy repetitious rhythm. The image switched to a green low light intensity image and then back again. Two overlays  sprung up as windows within the main window providing thermographic and ultrasound image augmentations.

 

At one time the room had been a cafeteria for the support staff. Now it was the site of a massacre. A site of brutal destruction. Bodies lay scattered amongst fallen chairs tables and the detritus of a disaster ended lunch break. Close to two hundred people lay dead in the hall, sprawled in untidy heaps. They had not been dead long. But the facility was warm and the cadavers were already a few days into decomposition.

 

Bjorn hastily resealed his helmet. As Ragnar led his pack into the space, his men spread out to cover all firing angles with the ease of a well oiled pack. Bjorn found himself unconsciously sliding into position by Bryla the pack’s heavy weapon specialist who carried an ornate volkite culverin with a gold dragon lying slumbering across the top of its emitter barrel. Hulev Dash-47-alpha, Magos Albart’s representative stood a few steps away, still following Bjorn like a shadow. Just like Hawser all over again, Bjorn thought ruefully.

 

“Teleport event in the centre,” Ulvaark muttered over the vox. Bjorn tried to work out what the taciturn warrior had seen in the carnage of the room. He followed his line of sight along the floor.

 

There. An Astartes warrior, or at least the shoulders of one appeared suddenly from the floor. His head slumped. The floor around him scratched with gouges from his ceramite armoured finger tips as he had struggled against the death that had chosen him. During the hypnogogic training he had received as he was remade as a Sky Warrior, Bjorn had learned the mechanicum’s neutral non-threatening term for this type of death. They called it a teleportation event.  It did nothing to describe the agonising scream of a man who has suddenly merged with another structure. His atoms intermingled between the atoms of the object that is killing him.

 

Ulraak picked his way across the field of dead bodies towards the Astartes.  He poked the dead man’s helmet with his stilled chain blade just in case it was some sort of grotesque trap. The head lolled loosely.

 

Ragnar followed precisely in Ulraak’s footsteps, swinging his auspex scanner over the dead Astartes and his surroundings.    

 

“Armour says he’s Seventeenth.” Ulraak voxed. “Word Bearer.”

 

“Traitors?” Bryla questioned.

 

“Suspected.” Ragnar replied cautiously.

 

“They left him to die,” Ulraak growled. “The poor bastard… see those scratches. They could have ended his suffering.”

 

That was odd Bjorn thought. The Astartes of most legions would have granted their suffering brother peace as soon as was possible. The room’s occupants would have posed almost no threat to power armoured legionaries. So why had they left him there to die such a painful lingering death. The World Eaters that Bjorn could understand, their higher brain functions and basic humanity stripped away by the screaming demands of the Butcher’s nails.

 

“They didn’t even try and retrieve his gene seed,” Ulraak added.

 

The gene-seed was the Legion’s future, its very immortality. If it was recoverable intact, it was recovered. This made less and less sense. What had happened to the Seventeenth Legion. What maleficarum had so corrupted their brother Astartes.

 

“Bryla, how did they die?” Ragnar asked the Pack elder. “Tell me how did the mortals died?”

 

Bryla looked over the room surveying it from end to end with his experienced gaze.

 

“There was a second teleport event to the left of the first one from your perspective, probably from the same translation. A few dozen died from that, caught in the re-materialisation locus. Then bolter fire outwards in all directions from at least five Astartes. With possibly one heavy bolter. Some of the bolt rounds were grapeshot rounds, for soft unarmoured targets. No evidence of directed energy type weapons being used. Then they moved out with blades to finish the survivors. It was all over in a few minutes. I don‘t think any mortals made it to the doors and there‘s a few weapons present but no evidence of return fire.”

 

Bjorn glanced around but couldn’t find fault with Bryla assessment. Ragnar breathed deeply and sharply enough that it triggered his vox.

 

“Bff…Ok! Let’s move on. Ulraak you’ve got point. Let’s take a look at the control centre then we’ll head towards the star speakers.”

 

*

 

Six hours after entering the Hrafnkel had entered the system, it had been joined by eighteen of its pack mates. It wasn’t unknown for fleet translation times to be separated by as much as a day. But that was usually just a few stragglers. At the moment the bulk of the Sixth Legion fleet had still not materialised. Many of the ships that had translated were in a poor state, damaged by the terrible Warp storms that had plagued their flight through the Immaterium. Some were clearly scarred by what appeared to be marks made by unconscionably large fangs and claws.

 

Russ stood alone on the Hrafnkel’s bridge studying the data-feeds as they came in from the other ships.  He had sent everyone away to give himself time to think. It hadn’t helped. His thoughts were in turmoil, still disrupted by Prospero, by Magnus, by Horus and his treachery by the confusing astropathic messages. He peered past the flickering data-ghosts at the empty void of space beyond the armoured crystal of the viewing ports. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He had not suffered any precognitive dreams, no waking presentiment. Yet still there was something , a niggling unease. 

 

The nearest person to him on the bridge some sixty metres away, was Katlya the Mistress of Astropaths.  She was still close enough that Russ could hear the valves of her heart in her chest, the soft whoosh-dub of her heart murmur. Her head was bowed, her body supported by the wheezing augmetic exoskeleton that propped up her failing body. It was always the way with Astropaths, his tutors had explained to him after the Emperor had reclaimed his sixth son. Those who burn the candle brightest and all that. The truth the scholars had not cared to know was that mortal frames were not meant to bear the burden of the Emperor’s light. That was the flame that made them so puissant but also destroyed them. By saving them from potential death from the perils of the Warp the Emperor had merely set aside their death to a more propitious time cursing them with a curious half life that was not really their own.

 

She was communing with her brothers and sisters aboard the other ships. Checking that their choirs were functioning. Checking for messages, for news. If Russ concentrated he could listen in to the arcane allegorical mental imagery the Astropaths used to communicate. Unknown to most of his brother Primarchs his telepathy was as good if not better than many of them.

 

When the fledging Sixth legion encountered their Primarch, the Wolf King Leman Russ, they brought with them some of the finest scholarly minds of the century. It had been the task of these savants to raise him from ignorant savage king of a pre black-powder feudal society to the master of an Astartes Legion well versed in sciences, arts, politics and diplomacy. The task had lasted less than a week. Nothing but prior experience of training a Primarch could have prepared these learned men and women for the unbelievable ability to learn that these demigods possessed.  It was less that they learned but that the briefest of experiences reawakened buried knowledge in the archives of their minds. Skills that a normal man would master in a lifetime they mastered in an hour or less.

 

Much of the training focussed on the arts of war. For that was the reason the Emperor had raised such martial sons. But like a few of his brothers Russ had other interests, and one of these surprisingly was the psyker arts. On Fenris after King Thengir died and he had become king, Russ had set out to conquer his world. Kings and chieftains alike fell before his wrath. It was during these battles that he first came to realise the fell power of the gothi, the often-raving half mad shaman priests of the Fenrisian tribes. Some gothi were little better than showmen, confidence tricksters and charlatans. But others could tamper with a man’s mind, undermine his will, control him like a puppet or drive him to madness and leave him an imbecile picking at his own flesh as the snow settled over his dying form. Others were weather-workers, storm tamers, who could still the seas and calm the winds to help their tribes passage. In times of war they would raise up great waves to smash apart their enemy’s ships or drown their fragile aetts. With thick fog they would mask their presence. With icy storms they would blind and shred their enemies. With lightning they would incinerate even the most dangerous foes. Almost all possessed a little prophetic ability and could see the twisting futures sufficiently enough to guide their tribe away from peril and death. Many had the skill and lore necessary to raise minor daemons, fell and fickle allies from the Underverse and command them to battle their foes.

 

One such fell gothi had led a tribe of cadavers a hundred strong raised by his fell necromancy. The frozen flesh of the foreheads all marked by the glyphs that bound them in half-life, shambling frozen flesh animated by the wights of the Underverse. He dwelt in a rough cylindrical squat stone tower on a small islet in the southern oceans. When Russ and his army had come to challenge him, he had sent his minions out to destroy this new threat. Russ had bade his men wait in their boats and had gone on foot through the late summer snow drifts to meet the blue grey men. They swarmed over him in a wave of bodies, beyond reason, beyond sanity. He had cut them down with his great blade. Slicing them down like the Fenrisian people cut their grasses at he end of summer. Against other foes the undead had been an unstoppable force. Chopped down by axe or sword, knocked down by club or maul, they got back up again wearing their wounds proudly as they shambled on slowly dragging their opponents down into suffocating crushed and bitten death. But the huge blade Russ wielded, flickering with crackling blue energies, slicing through the runes that granted them un-life. Not one twitched or moved to get up when he struck them down. He’d been proud of that blade. He’d made it himself from the bladed limb of some fell sea beast, some abyssal sea kraken he’d slain. It was longer than he was tall and in battle when his rage transformed him, the blade resonated with his fury. He’d destroyed the gothi’s keep with one blow of his blade, tumbling the smelly sorcerer into the body strewn snow still screaming obscenities and imprecations to his patron daemons. Russ had been sickened by the man and his corruption and had moved towards him, to end him, to cut his foul thread. In desperation the gothi had spoken words of fell power, casting a spell that ripped a hole in the veil, summoning some fell grey-white beast, all rows of slavering fangs and many taloned arms from some best forgotten Hel pit to defend him. 

 

According to the sagas sang in his praise the battle had been short. Russ had dodged the creature’s attack and thrown an axe the length of the isle to hit the gothi clear between the eyes and leaving him stone dead.  Then Russ had pulled forth his mighty blade Bannahogg, shaped from a talon or fang from some monstrous creature of the ocean depths and slain the daemon with twelve sharp blows.

 

Well that was what some of the Wolf King’s sagas said. Russ himself with his perfectly eidetic memory remembered it differently. The creature, the daemon spawn of the Empyrium, had hit him hard knocking him flying and landing on top of him savaging him with claws and talons. He had fought back of course, but it had been a surprisingly long and gruelling battle. Some of it in the real world, some of it in the Immaterium. He recalled almost falling into the Warp as he had slain the beast, finding himself standing at the edge of the two worlds, felt the pull of the Great Ocean, heard the thought calls of the neverborn, the un-life predators as they swarmed in to attack him

 

After that battle the sagas said that Russ had used the gothi trick of sending his thoughts out through the Underverse like ripples in a meltwater pool. So powerful was his sending that it was said that his image appeared in the middle of every firepit on Fenris. That every Fenrisian then sleeping woke their body drenched in sweat with his word ringing in his ears. That every wolf picked up his head and howled. He had called to the remaining gothi, demanding they come and serve him or be destroyed.

 

Again the sagas weren’t quite as Russ remembered the event. The result was still the same. The gothi had come to see Russ. To speak with him. To swear allegiance to him. Some had stayed to teach him at his request. He had chosen those that he instinctively trusted, killed those who were touched too strongly by the dark powers of the Warp.

 

When the Sixth Legion came to Fenris, it brought Astropaths with them from the Adeptus Telepathica on Terra. Russ had called them to him and asked them to teach him. They wanted to refuse him, he knew this. But they were honour bound to obey him and so unknown to the Imperium at large Russ had been tutored in every psychic art his teachers had mastered.

 

It was the skills of the Fenrisian gothi and the Astropaths that Russ had secretly taught to his first Astartes gothi, men like Urvural Heoroth known by Tra as Longfang. Russ had seen the need of the gothi on Fenris to ward against maleficarum and had foreseen the need of them in the future that was to come as the Sixth Legion strode the stars in the Great Crusade. 

 

That had been one of their strengths as a legion. One of the reasons they were the Emperor’s chosen Executioners. That apart from their loyalty was why they had been sent to Prospero to deal with Magnus and his benighted legion. They were a legion well practised in fighting  maleficarum.

 

Russ paused, conflicted, his thoughts disturbed by the emotion that tainted them.

 

Magnus.

 

He had killed, Magnus.

 

His feelings were conflicted, anger at his failure to really  kill Magnus, anger at Horus, at Valdor and at the skald’s daemon thing all manipulating him, anger… no sadness…no….

 

He crushed the feelings down , buried them deep. There would be plenty time for recriminations later. Now was the time for dealing with Horus and the other traitor legions.

 

But the feeling of dread didn’t go. For the first time in his life the Primarch of the Sixth Legion felt doubt. Doubt about the choices he had made. Once again Russ tried to crush the treacherous thoughts. But time and again they came back to haunt him.

 

He had allowed himself to be manipulated….

 

 

*

 

 

The command centre had been a charnel house, filled with more butchered technicians, adepts and skitarii. The computers had been as thoroughly trashed as if the Rout had come to destroy the place themselves. Hulev Dash-47-alpha had made several attempts at accessing information from damaged servers but to no avail. Electromagnetic pulse wipe-devices had been exploded to scrub any data from the facility’s archives. Their radioactive residue littered every surface and filled the air with low levels of unstable nuclei.

 

Ragnar had led his pack out then to the extreme end of the facility, the secluded annexe where the Astropaths were quartered. This section was very different from the rest of the facility. The corridor walls changing abruptly into odd dull stone slabs with strange patterns or glyphs carved into them. Three times they passed ornate but tactically useless portcullis gates still secured in the roof space.

 

“The gates and the carvings and the rock they’re to control the psychic outflow of the Astropaths,” Hulev Dash-47-alpha had explained breathlessly.  He seemed more ill at ease in the annex then he did in the radioactively contaminated command centre with its butchered inhabitants. “Sometimes the psi power builds in a place and that can have nasty side effects. Really weird stuff.”

 

The Astropath annexe was a rabbit warren of corridors. In cells cut into the walls of the corridors they found quarters for the Astropaths and their aides…..

 

Rooms of dead astropaths…

 

 

…. Astropath sending receiving chamber

 

… no astropaths.

 

… summoned back

 

*

Astropathic messages received, further information about Istravan V.

 

*

Bjorn and the others return.

 

*

 

Russ was checking the status updates from the remains of his storm wracked fleet. More Astartes ships along with several Sixth Legion fleet supply vessels had entered the system over the last four hours. Two sensor laden scout-surveyors, a battered but still belligerent Vanguard Cruiser, a massive Chapter Barque supply vessel and one of the Sixth legion’s two Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Ships along with a few Warp-Runners and Mechanicum Typhon-class Hunter-Killers

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

The attack came suddenly, a wave of warp skimming torpedoes. They were ship killers that skimmed the aether for most of their flight, popping out into real-space just long enough to get a more accurate target fix. This allowed them to strike a vessel before her light speed limited sensors could detect the threat. But forewarned by the Hrafnkel’s quantum entangled drones and the spacetime sensitive navigators of House Belisarius, the Hrafnkel and her fleet had sufficient time to unleash an array of countermeasures in their path. Ablative sand projectors, false echo decoys and suicidal hunter killer drones were spat out of the fleet’s bombardment cannon. The torpedoes re-materialised in a flash of chaotic light, each warhead separating to unleash a salvo of sub-munitions at the vessels before them. Some crashed into the sand at almost a hundred-g, their surfaces worn away, tumbling off course, tearing themselves into oblivion. Others homed into decoy drones blaring false energy signatures into the void. Over half of them, some nine hundred individual warheads, made it in past this outer layer of defences crashing into void shields with punishing atomic impacts. Only a few dozen slipped past failing voids, through momentary gaps in hastily raised defences. Hitting accurately predicted weaknesses in armour plates, cutting deep into hull spaces before unleashing their deadly nuclear payloads.

 

No Sixth Legion ships were lost. But three suffered terrible damage, their sides carved open like a Fenrisian Konungur torn apart by a predators jaws. The wounds glowing infernally red, radiating heat out into the void. Thousands of crew were vaporised instantly. Thousands more were trapped in irradiated burning sections facing death by suffocation, by burning in uncontrollable firestorms, by hard radiation. There were few good deaths in void war, but there were some that were more terrible than others.

   

In the aftermath of that first strike came the fleet, main engines driving them relentlessly inwards, formed up in a sharp wedge behind a small cadre of battle barges. The Wolf fleet parted, split in twain by the oncoming axe blade of the unidentified enemy fleet. Broadside volleys from the attacking ships tore into the flanks of the Sixth Legion as they struggled to manoeuvre out of the way.  The Rout responded in kind with a barrage of directed energy strikes and hypervelocity launched kinetic kill weaponry, but their riposte was desultory at best.

 

The fleet didn’t slow, they shot through, using the planet’s gravity well to slingshot them out towards one of the system’s stable Mandeville Points.

 

Behind them the Rout brought their fleet into some semblance of order, trying to protect its weakest members. Waiting for the fleet to circle round and attack again. Waiting for a second assault wave to attack from out of the planetary plane or out of some obscure angle.

 

The attack never came. The fleet reached the Mandeville Point in twenty six minutes. Their warp engines bored holes in reality. Then they were gone.

 

Aboard the Hrafnkel Jarl Russ shook his head ruefully at the departing fleet.

 

Behind him the bridge crew threw orders in desperation trying to assess the situation so to better prepare. In return partial answers merely confused the situation.

 

“It was the Twentieth Legion, The Alpha Legion,” Russ whispered just loud enough to be heard through the din. Every conversation stilled. Russ continued to stare out of the windows at the departing ships.

 

“The ships. They were from the Alpha Legion. I’m sure of it.”

 

Lord Gunn, Jarl of Onn stared at the hololiths of the departing ships.

 

“How can you tell, Jarl?”

 

Russ didn’t answer. He just stood there. Finally after what seemed an age he spoke.

 

“A feeling nothing more. A presentiment. A precognitive intuition if you will.”

 

No one questioned any further, respecting the line drawn in the sand by Russ proclamation of precognitive vision. It wasn’t just that the Wolves were naturally superstitious. It was also that Russ’ precognitive insights had been right on so many occasions in the past.  

 

“Are they leaving?” Lord Gunn asked after a few moments of respectful silence.

 

“For now, most certainly. But there will be other attacks. This has only just begun”

 

“I’ll get the Navigators to try and trace their course,” The Ship’s Master interjected carefully, trying to ignore Lord Gunn‘s glare.

 

Russ turned, looked at the mortal and nodded in acquiescence. Then he frowned and looked back into the void, chewing his lower lip in obvious frustration.

 

“From the beginning the Alpha Legion had been different from the other Legions,” he explained. “When the sixteenth Legion discovered the Primarch Alpharius he ran rings round Horus and his Legion. That was from the beginning the trademark of the Twentieth, they are experts in subterfuge and misdirection.”

 

Russ paused and turned to face his expectant audience.

 

“We will need to expect the unexpected. Get messages sent to the other ships by coded tight beam, noospheric links and Astropathic meme transfer. Tell them to look out for ambushes, booby traps, scrapcode subversion attempts, covert boarding whatever.”   

 

A young officer, the Master of Signals aide, rushed off towards Katlya the Mistress of Astropaths, another junior rating to the communications tier. Everyone else just stood waiting for further instructions. 

[Brother Lunkhead]

I plan to read this thread in depth later on this week now that I can actually read it Thanks for the changes Brother No.

 

In the mean time I'll just make a brief comment concerning rewriting another author's work. This is actually a very a time honored and common practice among practiced and novice writers. Many find it among other things, a useful exercise in honing their own writing skills.... and that's one of the things this subforum is for.