Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Six



‘We are coming through now, lord.’

Bjargborn’s voice betrayed some of measure of relief. Gunnlaugur guessed it hadn’t been easy for him sharing a cramped, poorly-equipped frigate with a pack of prowling, unsatisfied Sky Warriors. He’d done well, all things considered.

‘Very good, master,’ said Gunnlaugur, slicking his beard down with lacquer ready to receive his helm. ‘Bring us in close.’

Gunnlaugur liked mortals. He liked their simplicity and prized their bravery. Kaerls were a tough breed even without genetic manipulation – they stood their ground, they followed orders, they knew how to hold an axe when the situation demanded it. Bjargborn was a good example of the type.

The master swung round in the throne to direct the break back into real space. Ahead of him the lead panels on the observation dome creaked and snapped, ready to withdraw when the bolts were pulled.

The seven members of Járnhamar stood on the dais behind the throne, just as they had done at the start of the warp-transit. All of them wore their armour. Gunnlaugur could sense their eagerness to have earth under their feet again. It was most palpable in Baldr, for some reason. He’d lost his habitual air of unconcern, and looked drained by the warp passage.

‘The veil is breaking,’ reported Bjargborn. ‘Navigator reports that your desire to come in close will be satisfied.’

The Undrider’s hull creaked, as if braced against crosswinds. The low grumble of the warp engines cycled down, ready to be replaced by the imminent roar of real space drives.

‘Let’s get a look at this place, then,’ breathed Gunnlaugur, his eyes fixed on the observation dome, ready for the withdrawal of the shields.

A crack echoed up from the frigate’s bowels, and the deck trembled. A sound like an elongated scream shuddered across the command chamber, followed by a rushing hiss.

The void drives thundered into life. The ether-screens slammed back into place. For a second, the viewer panes were smeary with snags of false colour. Then they clarified into the deep velvet of the void, punctuated by a pinprick-sharp starfield. In the centre of the display, dead ahead, was a rust-red world scarred by iron-black birthmarks.

The cogitators around the throne burst into life as screeds of data suddenly flooded into the sensoria. Servitors started up their swollen-tongued chattering, and banks of bronze-ringed lights flickered. The Undrider was once again in the world of physics and matter.

‘Bring her up to approach speed,’ ordered Gunnlaugur calmly, walking forwards to Bjargborn’s side to get a better look at the view ahead. ‘Anything on the auspexes?’

Bjargborn worked smoothly, his fingers running over levers and dials set into the arms of his throne.

‘Nothing yet, lord. Translation has been affected with ninety-two per– Ah. We’re getting something. Are we getting something? Yes, I’ve got ship signatures.’

Gunnlaugur felt the hairs on his neck stiffen.

‘Show me,’ he said.

Behind him, he heard Olgeir’s low growl. The sweet tang of kill-urge suddenly pricked in his glands.

‘Unencrypted traffic picked up,’ reported Bjargborn, flicking a switch to send the feed to bridge-wide audio. ‘No location yet.’

Speakers set on either side of the command throne crackled into a fizz of white noise.

Ingvar drew up alongside Gunnlaugur. His grey eyes fixed steadily on the blood-red orb suspended in front of them. His expression was taut.

‘Do not broadcast that signal,’ he said.

Bjargborn’s hands moved to comply, but it was too late. For a few seconds, the fizz dissolved into recognisable word shapes, thick with phlegmy distortion.

‘–sccrxxscrt… sfccgh… skeerrs… talemon mon mon morrdar ek’skadderjjul… nergal alech frarrjar… ach h’jar nergal–’

The feed broke off.

‘How many ships?’ Gunnlaugur demanded.

‘One, lord,’ said Bjargborn. His face was white. He didn’t understand the words, but he knew what kind of mouth uttered them. ‘I think.’

Gunnlaugur turned round to face the pack. He felt his blood already beginning to pump.

‘Ensure full power to the weapons.’ He seized his helm from his belt and lowered it over his head. ‘Maintain full speed.’

Járnhamar were moving too. Jorundur took position by the throne, his eyes sparkling with sudden excitement. The others donned helms, twisting them into place with a series of tight hisses.

Gunnlaugur glanced up at the observation dome, scouring the starfield. His animal spirits were active already, priming his muscles, making him alert, speeding his thoughts.

‘Find it,’ he snarled. ‘Then kill it.’

Void battles were strange and varied things. Most were settled over unimaginably vast distances and conducted via the statistical feeds of locator machines, neither captain ever setting eyes on his opponent. Some lasted for months, with ships dropping in and out of the warp in a drawn-out attempt to gain positional advantage. Some were brutally simple – a rammed hull cracking apart in a destructive orgy of engine detonation, an overloaded shield generator causing a cascade of ruinous chain reactions. The variables to consider were immense, the variety inexhaustible.

Which was why Jorundur enjoyed it. No motive cogitator had the imagination, the flair, to take on void war. It was left to flesh-and-blood captains, men and women who knew the tolerances of their ships like they knew the limits of their own bodies, souls who could eke out the last gramme of power and aggression while the universe exploded in fire and blood around them.

This situation, of course, was different. Jorundur had no more understanding of the Undrider’s finer-edged capabilities than a newly-inducted ensign. It would have been prudent to leave matters in Bjargborn’s hands, trusting in the mortal’s experience of his vessel’s powers.

But that would have been no fun. And, despite what many believed about Jorundur, his capacity to find enjoyment in his work had not been entirely lost over the centuries.

‘There it is,’ he said, pointing at a fast-moving blob on the forward auspex picter. ‘Give me hololithic local space. What are the shields doing? Speed to maximum – we need to close it down.’

Bjargborn complied without hesitation. A three-dimensional matrix flickered into life above them, glowing in lines of red and gold, dominated by the globe of Ras Shakeh. It showed the position of the Undrider closing fast on the planet. Another signal emerged from the far side of the world, moving directly towards them to intercept.

Jorundur had no idea what the ship was doing there. He could hear Gunnlaugur trying to establish comms with the world below and failing. All he knew was that it was there, that it was commanded by something unholy, and that it needed to die. The circumstances of its presence could wait until its carcass was burning up on re-entry.

‘What are we facing?’ he demanded, watching the signal race into range. ‘Give me something to work with.’

‘On screen,’ said Bjargborn, switching long-range scanner readings onto a picter mounted next to the command throne. A three-dimensional schematic sheered into life on the hololith, spinning around its axis.

‘Arch-enemy,’ said Gunnlaugur immediately.

‘A destroyer,’ confirmed Bjargborn, watching fresh columns of data running down the hololith boundaries. ‘Its weapons are powering up.’

Jorundur scrutinised the flickering image rotating before him. The bridge around him ran with shouts and orders as weapon systems were brought online and the void shields raised. The lumens overhead dimmed, replaced by the dull red glow of combat lighting.

‘Can we kill it?’ demanded Gunnlaugur. ‘Decide now.’

Jorundur growled. He needed more time. The outline of the destroyer was… odd. Its guns looked misshapen. It might have been Idolater-class, but if so then something bizarre had happened to its hull. The Undrider was probably faster, but his hunch was that it was weaker and packed less of a punch.

‘Ashamed you even asked,’ he growled, fixing his eyes on the hololith and gauging distances. ‘Maintain speed and course. Prepare for drop to nadir on my mark, ten thousand kilometres.’

Bjargborn scurried to comply. Warning lights strobed across the picter array, warning of energy spikes out in the void.

‘Lance strike!’ shouted a kaerl from the sensoria station.

‘Too far away,’ breathed Jorundur. ‘They’re too–’

Space ahead of them exploded into a blaze of harsh, caustic light. The Undrider slammed to port-zenith, sending unsecured crew members tumbling across the marble floor. Klaxons blared out, and the combat lumens flickered twice before resuming.

‘Evasive action!’ ordered Bjargborn.

‘Do not dare,’ threatened Jorundur. ‘In closer.’

Gunnlaugur, still on his feet, looked at him sharply. ‘Closer?’

‘We can’t hit it back at this range,’ snapped Jorundur. ‘All we’ve got is speed.’

‘Hits to forward voids,’ reported a servitor. The voice was dry and empty of concern. ‘Damage on dorsal plates. Repair crews dispatched.’

Ingvar approached the throne and stared hard at the hololith image of the enemy ship. Jorundur ignored him.

‘Down now, hard,’ he ordered. ‘Scrape the planet’s edge, find us some more speed.’

The Undrider plunged towards the world below, and the huge orb began to fill the real space viewers. As it did so another energy beam scythed past, missing the crenelated spine of the frigate by less than a kilometre. The growl of the engines swelled to a howling whine and the deck trembled beneath their feet.

‘This is hurting,’ warned Bjargborn, as more warning lights blinked on across a dozen consoles.

The structure of the bridge started to rattle. The sound of something shattering echoed up from a lower deck, followed by a diminishing run of sharp cracks.

Jorundur ignored all of it. Proximity indicators rattled down in front of him, tracking the shrinking gap between the two ships. They were still too far out, and the enemy had the range on them.

‘Open fire, master,’ he ordered.

‘We don’t have–’

‘Open fire or lose your teeth.’

The Undrider’s forward lance sent a shard of sun-white light arcing into the void. Banks of lascannons opened up all along the prow, briefly flaring up against the dark before disappearing in a hail of scattered beams.

The barrage caused no damage, but the enemy adjusted trajectory, just by a fraction, enough to postpone the next volley. By then the Undrider’s course across the fringes of Ras Shakeh’s atmosphere was hurling it onwards even faster. Continents blurred by underneath them in smudges of red and black.

A few seconds more…

The enemy barrage hammered in again. The destroyer opened up with ship-to-ship las-fire and the Undrider took hits all along its exposed starboard flanks, making the shielding buck, flex and crackle.

‘Losing voids!’ shouted a kaerl from the cogitator banks, seconds before a hard bang made the chamber shake. The Undrider swung keenly down and to port, lurching off course just as a baroque cluster of cabling exploded overhead, showering the floor in bouncing, tumbling sparks.

‘And that’s enough running,’ said Jorundur, standing defiant and unconcerned against the ship’s yawing tilt. ‘Now we return the favour.’

He caught sight of the enemy in the realview portals then – a bruise-black, bulbous destroyer, swinging in closer for another pass. Its forward lance was already blazing white, ready for the next spike. The telltale glitter of void shields shimmered across its outline, still intact.

A fresh salvo scythed out from the Undrider’s cannons. The crews had a good aim – as the glare faded Jorundur saw a swathe of hits across the enemy underside. Something blew up under the dagger-sharp prow, knocking the lance up out of position and sending a splash-pattern of static across the ship’s shields.

‘Closer now,’ hissed Jorundur, his fists clenching. ‘Rake them.’

The Undrider shot upwards, sheering a little and trailing debris, still fast enough to evade most of the hail of las-fire aimed at it. The engines laboured, sending stuttering impacts vibrating through the bulkheads and gantries. Biting detonations along the hull tipped it over several degrees but didn’t slow it.

For less than a second it passed right beside the enemy, close enough to see its glistening, tumorous hide through the crystal of the realviewers. Banks of lascannons snapped out in unison, hurling a thicket of deadly neon-bright spears across the gap. The return barrage was just as vicious – two walls of heat and light slamming through and past one another, cracking into the swimming energy of the void shields, bursting through and boring down to the metal below.

Explosions crashed out all along the length of the Undrider, punctuated by the scream and snap of expiring void generators. The whole ship reeled as las-beams carved into overheated conduits and burned through metre-thick plate. The engines coughed and flared, beating erratically as if having a sudden coronary.

‘Away now, evasive manoeuvre jorva,’ ordered Jorundur calmly, all the while watching the hololith whirl and flicker.

The structure of the ship shivered as the Undrider launched into a steep, cork-screwing climb. More explosions thundered out, bombarding the bridge crew with debris. Cracks cobwebbed across viewports, quickly shuttered. Kaerls staggered to and fro across the chamber, labouring to reach nascent fires and douse them.

‘Status, master,’ Jorundur asked, all the while monitoring spatial positions.

Bjargborn, who’d nearly been knocked out of his throne by the repeated impacts, scrambled for data.

‘Starboard weapons gone,’ he reported. ‘Lance gone. Six, no seven, hull breaches. We’re leaking atmosphere.’

‘What’s this thing made of?’ muttered Jorundur. ‘Paper?’

Gunnlaugur braced himself against the steepling deck, compensating for malfunctioning grav generators.

‘And the enemy?’ he demanded.

The destroyer had shot wide, battered by the brutal broadside exchange. It was coming round for another pass, but more clumsily than before. A long trail of gases plumed from its underside.

‘Its voids are down,’ said Bjargborn, scanning the auspex data. ‘Still got weapons. Still got engines.’

‘It can kill us,’ said Ingvar quietly. ‘We can’t kill it.’

Jorundur whirled around.

‘I’m just getting started,’ he glowered.

Ingvar turned to Gunnlaugur.

‘We have to withdraw, vaerangi,’ he said. ‘We can’t fight this.’

Gunnlaugur looked back at Ingvar.

‘Withdraw?’ he asked. His voice betrayed astonishment. For a moment, it looked like he had no idea how to react.

More explosions hammered out from the lower decks. A whole row of cogitators exploded, their screens flinging shattered crystals across the decking. A choir of warning klaxons broke out, overlapping one another in a discordant hymn of despair.

‘There’s no shame in this,’ Ingvar said. ‘We might still outrun it, but we can’t kill it. We have no weapons left.’

At that, Gunnlaugur gave a grim laugh.

‘You’ve been away too long,’ he said. ‘We have plenty.’

He glanced briefly at the hololith, calculating, before turning to Jorundur.

‘Take us in again, close as you can, fast as you can. Then burn like Hel away from it. Don’t care where, just don’t die on the way in.’

Jorundur grinned knowingly. ‘That is understood.’

Gunnlaugur turned to face the rest of the pack. They looked back at him expectantly, sealed in their suits of armour, draped in pelts, daubed with ritual bloodstains, etched with runes, hung with wolf’s-teeth, wyrd-totems and fate-forged blades.

‘Come, brothers,’ he said, his thick voice snagging with anticipation. ‘I wish to show you something.’

Gunnlaugur jogged down the corridors leading to the frigate’s hangars. The lumens failed before he got halfway; his helm compensated instantly. The broken thuds of his pack’s massed bootfalls resounded down the narrow space after him. He filtered out the incessant klaxons and warning beacons, only hearing the clinks of weapons against armour, the ragged, expectant breathing, the tinny grind of power armour servos.

The Undrider was, in all but one respect, a substandard vessel, something that he should have been ashamed to go to war in. It had one thing, though – one thing that made it more than useful.

‘So what is this?’ came Váltyr’s voice over the pack-wide comm. ‘What are we doing?’

He sounded uneasy, like he should have been informed. Váltyr was always on the look out for slights.

‘We’re here for this,’ said Gunnlaugur, reaching a pair of thick security doors. He punched a switch, and they eased open with a scrape of pistons.

On the far side of the doorway was a yawning chamber the size of the Thunderhawk hangar. The metal of the walls was blackened, as if lined with carbon. Huge lifting claws hung from the roof, shaking slightly as the Undrider took more hits.

In the centre of the chamber was a slingshot launch mechanism – two hundred metres of track-lined tunnel heading straight out into the void, softly illuminated by a heart-red glow.

At the far end of the track stood two closed sets of armour-plate doors. At the near end, sunk into floor level and squatting amid scorched rockcrete buffers like a lumpen, ugly twin-hulled avatar of the Imperial brutalist aesthetic, was the reason they’d come.

‘Blood of Russ,’ breathed Baldr.

‘A Caestus,’ said Olgeir, sounding impressed. ‘Glorious.’

Gunnlaugur laughed as he strode over to the control console and activated the remote launch authorisation.

‘Strap in quick,’ he said. ‘Jorundur’s sending us out, and he won’t like waiting.’

A Caestus Assault Ram was a common sight on Adeptus Astartes capital ships, rarer on escort-class vessels like the Undrider. Unlike the versatile Thunderhawk gunships, which were almost three times as large, a Caestus was built around a single operational principle. Its twin hulls were heavily armoured and reinforced with plates of ceramite, ridged and braced to absorb enormous impacts. Its chunky thrusters had afterburners designed to hurl it into blistering straight-line speeds. Its weapon complement – twin-linked heavy bolters, wing-mounted missile launchers, magna-melta heat cannon – all faced ahead, concentrating their destructive power into a single point.

A Caestus, launched into the void and carrying its full complement of ten Space Marines, could survive a direct hit at full speed with the unshielded hull of any battle cruiser in the Imperium. That was fortunate, as it could do very little else. It was less a vehicle, more a projectile.

The two embarkation ramps clanged open. Ingvar and Baldr clambered into one; Váltyr, Olgeir and Hafloí the other. Gunnlaugur took his seat in the tiny cockpit, set back at the rear of the ungainly craft. It was an awkward, cramped fit, doubly so once the metal ribs of the impact cage descended across his chest.

The hull booms closed with the hiss and snap of locking bolts. Gunnlaugur primed the engines, feeling the whole vessel shudder as the thrusters broke into life.

The launch chamber rocked again, buffeted by more incoming fire from the void-battle outside. One of the lifting claws separated from its supports and came crashing down beside them, crunching into a tangle of metal fingers and cracking the rockcrete floor.

Gunnlaugur glanced down the long launch tunnel, watching as the external blast doors opened, one after the other, exposing star-flecked blackness beyond.

‘Brace for launch,’ he ordered, seizing the rudimentary flight controls and tensing for the explosive launch. Piloting a Caestus in such conditions was like riding a whirlwind – he’d be able to nudge its trajectory a little before impact, but not much more than that. ‘The Hand of Russ be with–’

The ram exploded into movement, leaping forwards as if kicked. Its engines swelled into a crescendo of flaming, roaring thunder, deafening even over his helm’s aural dampeners.

Gunnlaugur slammed back in his seat. The launch tunnel screamed by in a rush of motion-blur and the Caestus shot clear of the Undrider’s hull. Stars wheeled before them briefly, marred by trailing fronds of smoke and fire.

Then the destroyer’s bloated hull swept up to meet them, racing into range at frightening speed. Jorundur had timed the burst well – they were heading straight amidships, angling under the jumbled forest of armour plating and into the engine levels. A storm of las-fire cracked around them, some of it impacting on the Caestus’s hull, rocking it even as it careered towards its target.

Gunnlaugur prodded the vessel’s course down by a fraction, aiming for an already-damaged section of hull-plate. He let loose with the missile launcher, then the heavy bolters, blazing away at the projected impact site.

The sun-hot magna-melta was the last weapon to fire, just as the destroyer’s bulk overshadowed them, racing up out of the void like a cliff-face of adamantium. For all his conditioning, Gunnlaugur couldn’t resist gritting his teeth together, clenching his jaws tight as the hull hurtled in close.

The smash was colossal. The Caestus blazed into a raging core of melting, boiling metal. For a microsecond it plunged straight through the magma, barging aside disintegrating columns and armour plate. Then it rammed square against a solid bracing rib and reared upwards. Momentum dragged it onwards, scraping and tearing through chunks of steel and adamantium, boring away into the reeling heart of the destroyer’s wounded flank.

Gunnlaugur was hurled forwards in his seat, barely held in place by the thick metal bars across his chest. Massive, fleeting explosions flared up around the assault ram, turning the forward viewer into an orange soup of flame.

The bracing rib bent, twisted, then broke, bringing a fresh mass of crumbling superstructure raining down on the still-moving assault craft. Its engines cut out suddenly, and their roar was replaced by the shriek of tortured metal and the whistling rush of escaping air.

Slowly, grindingly, the Caestus slid to a halt, wedged deep within the bowels of the enemy ship like a bullet lodged in the muscle of its prey.

Gunnlaugur released the cage and blew the door-locks. More incendiaries went off, clustered around the hull booms to clear a space for the descending crew ramps. His cockpit hatch flew open and he clambered out, reaching for his thunder hammer as he scrambled free of the Caestus’s up-ended chassis.

Around him lay a collapsing, howling, blazing maze of destruction. The Caestus had blown a huge hole in the side of the destroyer, carving away whole chunks of hull structure and exposing the ragged ends of broken decking. A gale of oxygen rushed over him, extinguishing the myriad fires that laced the collision site. Shattered lumens flickered and swung from severed brackets, throwing grotesque and leaping shadows over the ruins.

Behind them, back at the end of a cone-shaped tunnel of molten ironwork, was the void. In front of them was the ship they had come to murder.

Gunnlaugur activated skulbrotsjór, and blue lightning arced across its adamantium head.

‘Time to go,’ he growled, hoisting clear of the Caestus and grabbing hold of a section of broken decking to brace himself.

The rest of the pack emerged from the hull booms. They hauled themselves away from the upended Caestus, seizing what spars and braces remained intact around them and climbing upwards through the devastation. The air had gone but the ship’s artificial gravity remained, allowing them to orientate themselves and pull free of the tangled wreckage.

They formed up again on the next deck, the first place that retained some semblance of a floor, walls and ceiling.

‘That was… invigorating,’ said Olgeir, shaking a crust of debris free of his shoulders. Sigrún sat comfortably in his two hands, sweeping the area in front of them casually. The rest of the pack fanned out, their helm lenses glowing red in the unsteady gloom.

A large open space stretched away from them, echoing and empty. What parts of it remained intact had the look of a cargo hold – the floor was rockcrete and the walls were iron. Dark, fluted columns studded the expanse, each one terminating in pointed arches against a ridged ceiling. The vacuum made it silent and as cold as Morkai’s breath. Nothing lived, nothing stirred. The faint vibration from the engines against their boots was the only indication that this wasn’t a dead ship already.

On the far side of the chamber, thirty metres away, were six huge cargo shafts, each one barred by reinforced shutters.

Baldr knelt down, peering at the floor. He scraped a patch of still-glowing dust clear.

‘Tank tracks,’ he said, looking up at Gunnlaugur. ‘A vehicle depot.’

Gunnlaugur nodded, swinging skulbrotsjór back and forth and rocking his head from side to side. The cramped passage in the assault ram had compressed his spine – he needed to flex his limbs.

‘To the bridge, then,’ he said.

As he finished speaking, one of the shutters began to rise. A sickly green light, lurid like marsh-gas, tumbled out from under it, dissipating quickly in the darkness. Black shapes, blurry through the fog, moved back and forth on the far side.

‘Not just yet,’ said Váltyr with relish, spinning holdbítr in one hand before bringing it up into guard. ‘Here come the crew.’