Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Seven



Jorundur staggered, keeping his feet with difficulty. The mortals around him did less well. Those strapped into their chairs were flung viciously against their bonds. Those who were unsecured were hurled from one wall to the other, landing with the crack and snap of broken bones.

A sheet of flame rippled across the observation dome, overloading half the hull-mounted sensoria and masking for a moment the horrendous punishment the Undrider had just taken on the close pass. A gallery on the far side of the chamber twisted and sagged as its supports cracked. Shouts, some of pain, some of urgent command, blended into the background noise of explosions and disintegrations.

‘Assessment,’ Jorundur commanded, gripping the back of the command throne as the Undrider tilted precipitously.

Bjargborn struggled to speak. Something, shrapnel perhaps, had hit him in the face and his cheeks streamed with blood.

‘Uh,’ he mumbled, his speech slurring. ‘M-multiple impacts. Hull breached on four, no five, levels. We’re depressurising. No, we’re not. Not everywhere.’

Jorundur glanced at one of the few functional pict screens, taking in its data quickly.

‘Did we hurt it?’ he asked, more interested in the damage he’d done than that which he’d sustained.

Bjargborn called up the sensoria reports. His hands trembled, but he was working hard to hold it together.

‘We did,’ he reported. Even in his battered state, he sounded proud of that. ‘Pretty bad. See for yourself.’

Bjargborn switched the rear-view feed to the throne-mounted screens.

Jorundur saw the destroyer falling away from them, its nearside flank bursting with quickly-extinguishing spot fires. Whole sections of hull-plate had been driven in. A swarm of sparking fragments tumbled around it in the void. It looked like it was having trouble coming around, and rolled awkwardly in space like a beached hvaluri.

‘And the assault ram?’

‘They’re in, lord,’ said Bjargborn. ‘Out of locator range, but they’re in.’

As the master spoke, Jorundur caught sight of the ingress wound made by the Caestus – a jagged hole in the destroyer’s side, laced with glowing shards of molten metal.

He felt a small surge of satisfaction. He’d aligned the ram well. Gunnlaugur had better remember that when it came to the mission assessment.

‘We’ve done what we had to,’ he said. ‘Now get us away from that thing.’

Around him the command chamber slowly returned to something like a functioning space. Men still lay prone on the floor, streaked with blood, but the servitors just kept on working. Kaerls, many of them limping or cradling broken arms, moved to douse the fires and shore up the worst of the damage.

For all that, Jorundur knew the situation was still balanced. The Undrider had gone into the broadside in worse shape than the enemy and had come out of it badly mauled. The damage it had sustained already might well prove fatal, even without the continued attentions of a pursuing ship.

He felt the broken judder of the engines kick it again, thrusting the Undrider away from the combat zone. The movement felt sluggish, as if only half the usual levels of power were online.

Bjargborn read his mind.

‘They’ve holed the enginarium,’ he said. He’d managed to find a rag to wipe his face with, and blood smeared across his chin. ‘We won’t outrun them for long.’

Jorundur nodded and glanced at the hololith tactical display. The enemy was recovering too. The destroyer began to turn, angling back to match course with them. Its speed had been dented too, but not by as much.

‘Give me what you can, master. Stay within range of the planet. Any weapons still functioning?’

Bjargborn gave a hollow laugh.

‘A few,’ he said. ‘Enough to chip their war-paint.’

Jorundur didn’t find that amusing.

‘We’ll trust to speed, then. Find it from somewhere.’

Bjargborn turned back to his pict screens, a furrowed look on his bloody face. He knew their only chance of picking up speed lay with the hundreds of enginarium workers down in the forge-hot belly of the vessel, striving against hope and reason to restore the titanic drive mechanisms to health. For all he knew they were already dead, their bloated corpses tumbling through space in their wake.

Jorundur kept watching the ship-signal on the hololith as it completed its turn and came after them.

‘Out of interest,’ he asked, feeling like he already knew the answer, ‘can we still make warp?’

Bjargborn smiled sadly. ‘Without a Geller Field?’

‘Just asking.’

It had been a hypothetical question; while the pack was on board the enemy ship there was no question of leaving them. Jorundur liked to know all the options, though, just for the sake of completeness.

Whatever you’re doing in there, he thought, watching the destroyer’s shadow loom larger on the hololith, do it quick.

They had once been human. They weren’t any more.

They still had the carcasses of human-flesh, and still wore the robes and uniforms of human soldiers, but they had passed beyond their old state and into something new, something abhorrent, something debased.

For Ingvar, the most striking aspect was the smell. The fighting soon took them beyond the ruined vehicle depot and into pressurised areas of the ship, and after that the stink of it pressed in on him. A thousand aromas jostled against one another like swine in a herd – decaying offal, mould, pestilence, the rich tang of recent death, the metallic stench of old blood. He could pick out every strand. He could taste it like sour milk at the back of his throat.

Over the past decades he had become used to xenos fighting. The smell of an alien was always so utterly bizarre that disgust barely registered; engagement with it was a rational matter, something to be processed and filed away for reference.

And so he had forgotten the uniquely sickly fug of fallen humanity, the cocktail of scents that hovered on the edge of familiarity before plunging into chasms of filth, all of it too close to home to be indifferent to.

A human wore his scents like an autobiography, describing his journey through the labours of sanctioned life and into damnation. It picked out traces of old ways – the fabric of uniforms, the sweat of mortal glands, the rotten breath swirling out of mouths black with caries. There were smells of the descent – the flush of fear, the frothy residue of mad euphoria, the dull ache of coming malady. Then, finally, the stink that came with the falling itself: pox, bloat, sore, tumour, pus-streak, glisten-tight sac, ulcerous gobbet of slime, residue of bile, liver-green effluent of gristly, metastasising organ. It all piled up on top of itself, multiplying like a nest of blowflies on a corpse, intensifying in the dark and the wet, redounding to the glory of the false god that revelled and rolled in such muck.

The ship was pregnant with bodily horror. In every chamber, down every corridor, behind every bulkhead and compartment more of it lurked, ground hard into the spongy mass of the floors and dripping like afterbirth from the sagging ceilings. The creatures that had once been human waded through it all to meet them, dragging scrofulous limbs through slurries of liquidised flesh and breaking the scum-crusts that floated atop standing pools of fermenting saliva.

They had lost much, those once-humans. Their eyes were milky orbs, shuttered with cataracts or clawed into blindness by frenzied fingernails. Their exposed skin was grey and vomit-yellow and clustered with berry-red sores that wept trails like bloody tears. Their distended stomachs swung low and heavy, wobbling free of chafed leather belts and spilling over knock-knees and bowed legs. Their jaws lay slack on blubbered necks, laced with sulphurous, trembling strands of viscous spittle. Clouds of biting flies swarmed over them, clogged in the fatty clefts of their quivering hides, tumbling out of sleeve-ends to buzz and plop into the liquid below.

But they had gained much, too. Their rotten muscles were strong. Their addled flesh sliced without bleeding, closing up on wounds instantly. They gurgled and murmured as they came, immune to fear, immune to pain, lost in a universe of syrupy infection. They had forgotten what it was like to yearn for health and cleanliness, for all that remained was the sticky embrace of plague. They cavorted in it, sweeping up the filth and waft and musk in both hands until nothing but a blurred miasma of cankerous foulness remained, swirling around them in billows of seamy vapour.

They had forgotten their names, their ages, their purposes.

They were the lost. They were the damned.

Ingvar raced through the twisting corridors alongside his brothers, charging into the oncoming horde with clean, fast strokes. Grey hands reached out to him and he cut them clear at the wrists. Fingers tugged at his armour, grabbing the pelts that flew around him, scrabbling to get at the joints of his helm and gorget.

He kept moving, kept working. His sword dripped with a thick layer of mucus that clung to the metal, weighing it down. Plasma and creamy dollops of fat splattered across his armour, slowly dribbling down the overlapping curves of ceramite.

The others laboured just as hard. He could see Gunnlaugur ploughing on ahead, hurling the head of his thunder hammer around, crashing it through semi-living flesh, annihilating it in bloody bursts and plastering the walls with scraps and flecks. Váltyr fought more clinically, aiming holdbítr for the neck, the eyes, the skull. The corpses that tumbled away from him did so cleanly, their released heads splashing into the knee-deep slime, their outstretched hands scrabbling at nothing.

Over on the flanks, Olgeir reaped whole swathes of corpses, firing in disciplined bursts from his heavy bolter. Diseased flesh exploded into spinning fragments, laced with clots and cysts like biological frag grenades. Baldr and Hafloí used their bolters, backing up Olgeir’s volleys with pinpoint strikes that burst skulls, punched chests, spilled mottled guts.

Progress was slow. The once-humans could be cut down, only to drag themselves back up. They clogged the claustrophobic corridors and access routes, shambling into battle in close-packed crowds. Some hefted blunt hand weapons – mauls, warhammers, spiked clubs – and others carried guns. They were outlandish things, those guns: rusting, oil barrel-shaped blasters with glowing cabling and feeder vials of toxins. Others hurled gas grenades, each stuffed with nerve-agents and flesh-eaters. The poisons they used were potent, strong enough to melt the walls around them in hissing pools of steam, but still they marched through it all, wheezing and streaming but staying on their feet.

Ingvar hauled his blade around, swinging it two-handed, barely registering as it ended the tortured existence of another glass-eyed mutant. More came to replace it.

‘This is taking too long!’ he warned Gunnlaugur.

The Wolf Guard didn’t seem to hear him. Gunnlaugur fought on, scything his hammer upwards and hurling broken bodies into the ceiling. They fell back to the floor in a slapping rain of body parts. Further back, the echoing roar of sigrún’s discharge picked up frequency. Olgeir was having to expend more bolter-rounds than he wanted.

Váltyr swivelled on one foot, kicking a stumbling mutant in the face. His boot wrenched the creature’s spine clear of its shoulders in a shower of fractured bone and fluid. Then he switched back to the blade, gutting two more before taking a single stride forwards.

‘How many of these things,’ he asked, his breath getting short, ‘does it take to run a ship?’

Ingvar nodded grimly.

Thousands. Tens of thousands.

They would be crawling down from every deck, leaving their stations and slithering into creaking transit shafts. They would be shuffling up from the bilges, thick with oily slime on their fingers. They would be emerging from demented apothecarions, their organs hanging out and their faces bandaged with dirty swaddling. They would just keep on coming, unable on their own to seriously threaten the armoured giants that walked among them, but capable of slowing them, holding them up, throttling their progress.

‘Too many,’ Ingvar said. ‘We need to speed this up.’

He reached for a frag grenade at his belt, cleared space around him with a vicious blade-sweep, then hurled it down the corridor. It sailed over the heads of the oncoming horde, bouncing from the slime-slick walls before falling among them.

The explosion rocked the confined space, crashing out and hurling severed bodies in all directions. The blast wave swept along the corridor, slamming dismembered corpses headfirst into the foaming effluent. A wave of whirling gore flew back at them, dropping around them in messy, liquid slaps.

That broke the horde’s momentum. The front ranks staggered, dragged down into the slime by the weight of those falling behind them.

Olgeir stepped up to take advantage.

‘Watch your backs, brothers,’ he warned, then opened fire.

Sigrún thundered out, vomiting a thick hail of mass-reactive rounds. The bolts punched deep into the reeling mass of pustulent flesh before detonating in a ragged line of destruction, ripping diseased meat apart in bleeding slabs.

As the echoes died away, Gunnlaugur surged back to the front, ploughing into the shaken heart of the enemy, immense and battle-roused, his hammer whistling around his shoulders in incisive arcs. Váltyr and Baldr were close behind, crashing through what remained of the mutant horde with growing space and freedom.

Of all of them, though, it was Hafloí who went in hardest. He sprinted right into the press of once-humans, screaming battle-cries through his helm-vox. His bolt pistol bucked in his right hand; the left clutched a double-bladed axe. He leapt straight past Gunnlaugur, slamming bodily into the morass of corruption beyond, lashing out like a berserk of the Old Ice.

Olgeir struggled to keep up with him.

‘Whelp!’ he roared furiously, trying to summon him back.

It did no good. Even Gunnlaugur laughed to see it – the Blood Claw, limbs flailing, giving into his bloody rush of primordial kill-urge.

‘Fenrys!’ Hafloí cried, pounding and slaying with artless abandon.

The mutants broke then, assailed on sides and faced with the twin storms of Gunnlaugur’s massive presence and Hafloí’s crazed one. Those that had survived the initial assault began to limp away, shrinking back into the stinking shadows or sinking into the murk at their feet.

‘Hjolda!’ roared Gunnlaugur, wading after the fleeing horrors.

The pack hunted the remnants down the corridor, following its organic twists and turns as it snaked into the heart of the corrupted ship. The retreat became a rout, a killing ground, an exercise in raw butchery.

They fought on until reaching an intersection with a vertical transit shaft, running up from the lower levels and soaring away into the heights. The iron doors that had once guarded it from the corridor were shattered.

‘They’ve destroyed the lifters,’ observed Baldr calmly, wrenching the head of a milk-skinned mutant from its rash-red body.

‘So they have,’ replied Gunnlaugur, shaking his hammerhead free of a ropey necklace of entrails. ‘Then we climb.’

‘Hel,’ swore Olgeir, preparing to hoist sigrún across his back. ‘How far up?’

Váltyr kicked out with his boot again, driving in the eggshell-thin skull of a blinded, crawling mutant.

‘Not far,’ he said coolly, walking up to the shaft. ‘But rein in your protégé. He’s getting carried away.’

Hafloí had ignored the transit shaft and had surged ahead down the corridor, lashing out to either side of him with bolt pistol and axe, shrieking and cursing.

Ingvar was closest, and went after him, grabbing him by the shoulder and dragging him back. Hafloí whirled on him, for a moment looking like he’d take on anything.

‘Easy, hot-blood,’ warned Ingvar, keeping dausvjer en garde. ‘Don’t make me use it.’

Hafloí stared at the sword for a moment, bristling with aggression, before finally lowering the axe.

By then Gunnlaugur had moved into the shaft, swinging clear of the broken gates and into the red-tinged darkness beyond. The others followed him, leaping like grey ghosts into the abyss.

The shaft was immense. It dropped away below them into an angry crimson swirl of choking fumes. The deep boom of the destroyer’s engines drummed up from its base, echoing eerily from the many-columned walls. Iron gargoyles stared out across the void, their leering, daemonic faces warped into grotesque, bloated expressions of loathing.

Pipework, rusting electronics, mouldering mounts and braces all criss-crossed the metal-plate surface, affording plenty of handholds. Everything was draped in a slick, sticky layer of slime, making the surface treacherous. For all that, the pack surged up the shaft like rats running up a hawser, going quickly even as the fragile ironwork cracked and crumbled under their armour’s weight.

‘How far up?’ repeated Olgeir, falling behind as his heavy bolter slowed him down.

Gunnlaugur gave him no quarter. The pack clambered up the levels. Eerie noises pursued them: moans, creaks of tortured metal, whispered voices just under the edge of hearing. The filth in the air got thicker, making their helm filters strain. A pale green mist tumbled down to meet them, emerging from beast-mouthed outlets protruding from the shaft walls.

Gunnlaugur reached the summit first. Massive, twisted iron cables hung from the roof of the shaft, swinging and clanking in the rising stink. They would once have hauled elevator cages up from the depths; now they dangled free, like nooses.

Near the top a narrow ledge jutted out into the abyss, above which were a pair of heavy doors surrounded by two swollen pillars of warped and cracked stone. Gunnlaugur grabbed hold of the ledge and dragged himself up on top of it. He seized his thunder hammer, pulled it back and hurled it two-handed at the join.

The doors crashed inwards in an explosion of blue-white lightning. Gunnlaugur charged through the gap, closely followed by the others as they reached the ledge and hauled themselves over the top.

On the other side of the doors was a huge chamber. Its roof was curved like a ribcage of burnished bronze and glazed with translucent crystal. Beyond that was the void, half visible through smeary panes. Pillars of veined marble jutted up from a floor swimming in greasy, bubbling matter. Gantries ringed the central command throne, all dripping long lines of clear fluid from rust-edged walkways. It was stiflingly hot, and the air hummed with the drone of corpse-flies.

On an Imperial frigate, a bridge that size could have accommodated over two hundred crew members. On that ship, only one remained at its station. No room was left for anyone, or anything, else.

Perhaps once the creature had sat on a command throne like a normal human, legs planted on the floor and hands resting against the arms. Maybe the mutations had burst out quickly after that, blooming like overripe fruit and tumbling forth across the available space. Or maybe it had been sitting there for centuries, slowly bulking out, slowly consuming everything around it, squeezing all other life from the chamber until it alone squatted there, wobbling with sores and lesions, hemmed in on all sides by the creaking walls of its starship cage.

Whatever the process, it had become colossal. Its lower limbs had long since been swallowed up by its expanding girth, the bulk of which rippled like gelatine across the floor. Webs of ink-dark veins pulsed under the trembling surface of its skin, pumping sluggish blood around its gigantic structure. Waves of blubber folded up against grimy cogitator banks, surrounding them, enveloping them, sinking down over them. Strands of sinew stretched directly from its obese flanks and locked into signal connector nodes. The frail network of tendrils shivered as the thing drew shuddering breaths.

It no longer occupied the bridge. It was the bridge.

And it stank. It stank of suppurating fat, of boiled fish, of rotten fruit, of confined and intensified putrescence. When it moved, waves of foul odour wafted across its vast body. Fluids glistened in the crevices between fatty tissue. Mucus spilled across slick patches of taut skin and bubbled over scabby patches where abscesses had ruptured.

A tiny head still surmounted the mountain of blubber, a vestigial remnant of a human skull and face. It was eyeless and hairless, with flared nostrils and a long whiplash tongue. It screamed at them, and flecks of yellow spittle splattered down a cascade of trembling chins. Tiny arms, wasted and scrawny, thrashed against its sides.

Baldr gazed up at it.

‘That is impressively foul,’ he murmured.

Ingvar stood at his shoulder. Dausvjer’s energy field spat and shimmered, throwing electric light across the face of his armour.

‘Then we end it, brother,’ he said, bringing the blade to bear in unison with his pack-brothers, ‘and send one more lost soul back to Hel.’

‘Energy spike, lord!’

The kaerl’s report rang out across the command chamber. On the realview feed, Jorundur watched the destroyer’s forward lance power up, sparkling like ball-lightning in the darkness of space.

The Undrider was racing as fast as its savaged engines would carry it, but the enemy had clawed back much of the space between them. Las-fire flickered from its forward array, too inaccurate to cause much more damage, but with increasing intensity.

It would soon find its range. After that, the brief game would be over.

‘Any signal from the pack?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Bjargborn.

The man’s voice was tense. The pressure of the chase was telling.

‘Then we are out of time,’ said Jorundur. ‘Give the order.’

Jorundur had only partial faith in the plan they’d concocted. Enginseers working down in the weapons levels had somehow managed to dredge up a semblance of a working weapons grid. He had no idea how: he’d heard Bjargborn over the comm talking about re-routing the output from the lance mechanism to burned-out lascannon coils under the warp core, which had meant precisely nothing to him. Whatever they’d done, it had been difficult and dangerous. He’d heard the screams of the tech-priest himself as one attempt had failed, incinerating an entire generator module and blowing lumens on every deck in the ship.

Now, though, they had it working. A single volley, that was all – a lone burst of shots sent spiralling away aft, hoping against hope to score a decisive hit on the destroyer’s forward lance housing. If they managed to disable that, then they had a chance to live a little longer. A small one, but a chance.

Jorundur had waited until the last moment before authorising the strike. The odds of even hitting the destroyer’s lance were low, but if they somehow managed it, an infinitesimal risk existed that they would do more than just knock out the weapon itself. A starship lance was a huge repository of volatile energies – a direct hit might cause an overload, sending mutually reinforcing explosions rushing back up into the vessel’s innards and destroying the whole thing.

That would save the Undrider, but wipe out six-sevenths of Járnhamar. The decisions were fine ones, each soaked in danger.

‘Order all non-weapons crews to prepare for saviour pod evacuation,’ said Jorundur, his eyes fixed on the glowing hololith before him. ‘If this fails, tell them to move quickly.’

‘By your will, lord,’ said Bjargborn, his fingers dancing over the throne’s controls as he distributed the instructions down the chain of command.

One, the few surviving servitors, plugged into a terminal close by, turned its pallid, slack face towards them.

‘Weapon primed, lord,’ it intoned dryly.

Jorundur’s eyes never left the hololith.

‘Fire,’ he commanded.

A crackling boom rang out from the lower decks, echoing up from the depths as if something huge had collided with the frigate and was now ploughing up through the ship, deck by deck. The command chamber shook, dislodging a stone image of Russ from the ceiling. It shattered on the floor in a cloud of shards, nearly killing the kaerls working nearby. Red lights flickered across the consoles, reciting a baleful litany of overloaded relays and burned-out translocators.

That was the price of a final, defiant volley. Jorundur watched as the makeshift array opened up, stabbing a tight cluster of las-fire aft towards the closing destroyer. For an instant the barrage blazed brilliantly, a nanosecond’s worth of hard, clear energy, then it was gone.

The Undrider shuddered. The arrhythmic growl from the engines cut out entirely, then shakily resumed. Cracks ran up the walls around them, and more loosened debris scattered across the marble.

‘Did we hit it?’ demanded Jorundur, peering intently at the viewers.

The destroyer hadn’t lost speed.

‘We did, lord,’ reported Bjargborn. He sounded like he barely believed what his auspexes were telling him. ‘Direct hit, forward lance.’

A second later, and the damage became obvious through the realviewers. The destroyer’s prow was burning, masked by an inferno that raged in defiance of the vacuum around it.

‘Blessed Allfather,’ breathed Jorundur, gazing at the destruction. He turned sharply to Bjargborn. ‘I want detailed readings on that ship. Power build-ups, secondary damage. You get anything, you tell me.’

He was already planning what he’d do if a chain reaction took hold. He might be able to get the Undrider in close again, but only if the enemy had lost control of its remaining weapon batteries. They couldn’t survive another broadside. He started to calculate the distances, the relative speeds, what remained of his hull armour.

‘Energy spike, lord!’

The report came from the same kaerl as before, in exactly the same tone.

‘That’s imposs–’ started Bjargborn.

Jorundur’s head snapped back up. He looked out at the realview feed.

‘They can still fire,’ said Jorundur grimly.

The gap between the ships had closed further. Jorundur saw the energies snap and fizz across the lance’s muzzle, only temporarily disrupted by the volley they had sent into it.

Bjargborn’s face was locked into horrified unbelief. Part of him was still searching for something – some mistake, some reading that had eluded him. Anything but the truth that now confronted them.

The chase was over. The Undrider was seconds from destruction.

‘We can source more power,’ Bjargborn said, his fingers and eyes moving quickly. ‘We can–’

Jorundur laid his gauntlet heavily on the mortal’s shoulder, silencing his desperate attempts to find a last-gasp solution.

‘They’re firing,’ he said. ‘Get to the pods. Now.’

Bjargborn looked up at him for a moment longer, his unwillingness to leave evident.

Then his shoulders slumped.

‘This is the master,’ he announced over the ship-wide comm. ‘Leave your posts. Leave your posts now. Take the saviour pods. Go swiftly, and the hand of Russ be with you.’

Jorundur released him.

‘Well said. Now run.’

The chamber was already emptying. Kaerls unstrapped themselves from their stations and sprinted across the deck, streaming towards the lifters that would carry them to the banks of saviour pods.

Bjargborn made to do the same. The chamber shuddered as the first stabs of las-fire cracked into the Undrider’s structure.

‘And what of you, lord?’ he asked, still deferent even as the ship began to come apart around them.

Jorundur smiled, already moving.

‘Look to your own, master,’ he said. ‘I can handle myself.’

Then the lance fired – a brief, silent stab of immense energy out in the void – and everything turned to fire.