Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Eight



Gunnlaugur roared.

The bellow of raw aggression made his lungs burn and the bridge around him tremble. He whirled his hammer around his head, picking up tremendous amounts of momentum before loosing his fury at the horror before him.

Around him, his pack did the same. He saw Hafloí launch himself into action with typical reckless abandon. He saw Ingvar and Váltyr work off one another, the two of them forming a seamless wall of swordplay. A rain of bolts punched into the creature’s bloated withers, puncturing the translucent skin and exploding in wet, muffled slaps.

Fighting it was like fighting a sea of living fat. Sword-edges snagged on it, gripped by the cloying matter. Hafloí’s pistol-rounds seemed to do no more than pock-mark it. Only Olgeir’s heavy ammunition made much headway – his relentless barrage had carved a vast, weeping gash in the mutant’s putrescent hide.

Gunnlaugur’s thunder hammer was the next most effective weapon. Its charged head could shear swathes of juddering flesh away, ripping it up and throwing chunks clear. He felt like a reaper of old, striding into the mouldering heart of the beast and carving his way towards its heart.

The sensation did him good. He could lose himself in his battle-anger. The doubts and trials of the past few weeks meant nothing in the heat of combat; all that existed for him then was his fury, unleashed on the flood.

Hjortur had been the same. The old Wolf Guard had been an immense presence to fight alongside. He’d howled to the sky while charging in close, his axe whirling. It had looked messy, but that was all artifice. No Sky Warrior fought inexpertly, not once they’d emerged from the testing ground of the Blood Claws. The battle-cries, the posturing, the bravado, the howls and growls, that was all to chill the blood of the enemy, to stir the ancient spirits of murder, to loosen the amber-eyed wolf within.

To kill, kill, and kill again. That was what he had been bred to do. That, in the end, was what they had all been created to accomplish. A Space Wolf was an axe-blade, a sword-edge, a hammer’s head. Life offered nothing finer for those who understood that; only misery awaited the Son of Russ who queried that purity of purpose.

His gripped the handle of skulbrotsjór, relishing the familiar weight and heft of it in his armoured hands.

‘Deyja, hrogn af Helvíti!’ he thundered in battle-cant, hacking and sweeping, feeling the muscles of his mighty arms sing.

The creature responded. It did so blindly, erratically, all the while screaming from its grotesquely tiny head. New growths burst out from its innards, glossy and shining like embryos. Polyps emerged from pores, bursting in clouds of foul-smelling gas. Ragged jaws opened up all across its body, splitting the skin and exposing concentric rows of black teeth.

One bursting polyp caught Hafloí full in the face. He staggered back, clutching at his facemask, hacking uncontrollably. Baldr got himself entangled between two snapping pairs of flesh-jaws, and a mountain of blubber rose up over him, quivering with the anticipation of drowning him in a tide of corpulence.

Ingvar broke free immediately and waded towards Baldr, slicing through sweeps of jellied meat with his lightning-arced blade. That blunted the effectiveness of Váltyr’s attack, and the blademaster was forced backwards before a snaking forest of barbed, poisonous feelers.

Gunnlaugur snarled. The pack’s momentum was faltering.

The head. Always strike corruption at the head.

He glanced up, spying the raging, wailing skull of the creature as it flailed around in a spittle-laced fit. Three metres away, and nothing but jaws and adipose horror in between.

‘Russ guide me,’ he whispered, crouching down and tensing. The pistons in his power armour geared up, responding to his physical and mental cues. He gripped his thunder hammer two-handed, feeling the shaft vibrate as the lightning-crowned head whined up to full power.

He launched himself into the air, propelled by his enormous strength and boosted by his armour. As he swept towards the creature’s shrunken head, he raised skulbrotsjór high.

At the last moment the creature sensed the danger. Its blind head snapped towards him, screaming hatred.

Then Gunnlaugur landed. The thunder hammer plunged downwards, cleaving straight through the monster’s skull and boring through what remained of its upper body. Gunnlaugur heard bones snap and organs splatter. The screaming broke off abruptly, replaced by the sick splat of watery flesh-sacs bursting and the stench of disruptor-scorched skin.

Gunnlaugur’s weight carried him down. He plummeted into the heart of the beast, cutting through with the still-burning skulbrotsjór. Waves of blotchy, greasy fluid crashed over him, dragging him under, enveloping him in a clutching swamp of sucking, ruined tissue.

He kept fighting, feeling the pressure of the beast’s headless carcass press against him. Curtains of visceral slime washed down his armour, smearing his helm lenses. It felt like being thrown into an ocean of slops and foetid offal.

The pressure built up. Gunnlaugur felt his grip on his hammer slip and struggled to hold on. The tide of blubber rose over his head, burying him in cloying, suffocating bulk. Moving his limbs became difficult, like swimming against a riptide. He raged on, hearing his thunderous battle-cries become muffled as slick nodules of flesh pressed against his helm.

Then, just as it was getting tricky, the pressure released. The walls of fat and stink abruptly shivered, quaked, and began to fall apart. Gunnlaugur heard the snarls and howls of his pack coming for him. His hammer whipped around in front of him, cutting cleanly through the rapidly diminishing press of bloody brawn and sinew.

His head burst free, dripping with gore-flecked sludge. He saw Olgeir wading towards him, the great one using his bulk and strength to rip the creature apart.

He was using his hands. That made Gunnlaugur laugh – a brutal laugh of joy in battle.

‘Hjá, Heavy-hand!’ he roared, greeting the arrival of the heavy weapons specialist with a slopping salute of his gristle-dripping hammer.

Then he saw the others, all cutting and slicing their way towards his position. In the face of that combined assault, what remained of the vast creature melted and shuddered away, sliding into a foaming, bursting morass of shapeless tallow.

Olgeir extended his gauntlet to Gunnlaugur, seizing him and dragging him clear.

‘That was a mighty leap, vaerangi,’ he said.

Gunnlaugur broke clear of the last of it, his armour caked in gobbets of slime. Now that the thing was dead, the euphoria of the kill was waning fast, giving way immediately to a fresh sensation of danger. The floor under his feet was trembling.

‘What of the ship?’ he asked.

‘This is the ship,’ said Baldr grimly, standing knee-deep in a bubbling pool of blubber. ‘We need to leave.’

Even as he spoke, that truth became obvious. The horror’s residual flesh was blackening fast, hardening and stiffening as if scorched by fire. The tendrils it had used to link to the ship’s corrupted spirit snapped, severing the arteries of control.

Marsh-gas lumens above them flickered and died, plunging them into darkness. From far below, the destroyer’s engine-growl halted, restarted, then halted again, as if the entire vessel were having a massive coronary. Corroded pipes running up the glistening walls of the bridge burst open, showering the space in oily spurts of coolant.

Gunnlaugur shook off the last stringy lengths of sinew and started to move.

‘The whelp?’ he asked.

‘He’ll live,’ said Ingvar, supporting Hafloí as the pack began to withdraw. The Blood Claw’s helm was cracked half open, exposing a raw mass of bloody flesh beneath. He was breathing, though, and the wound was already clotting.

‘Can we make the Caestus?’ asked Baldr, bringing up the rear as the pack hastened out of the bridge and into the gloomy corridors beyond.

‘We’ll see,’ said Gunnlaugur, picking up the pace as the bridge around them began to convulse. ‘But if we can’t, pray that Old Dog’s still flying the Undrider.’

The Undrider was broken, impaled by a scything column of energy. Whole sections of hull peeled free, shearing clear of the stricken core and rolling slowly planetwards. A fuel tank breached, causing a fireball to roar through the containment cages and sweep through the lower decks, raging thirstily as it destroyed ammo dumps and power storage cells.

Some of the crew had made it into saviour pods, jettisoning free of the dying ship even as the lance-strike burned through it. The cloud of tiny vessels – little more than teardrop-shaped caskets of adamantium – burned their way into Ras Shakeh’s atmosphere, lighting up like torches as they spiralled down to the surface.

Jorundur saw none of that. His last clear view of anything had been Bjargborn’s head being blasted apart by a leaping crackle of electric discharge. Then the command chamber had collapsed around him, bursting into a sun-hot cloud of flying crystal shards and powdered marble.

His armour absorbed much of the impact, but he didn’t go unscathed. The servos in his right leg-plate buckled, and he crushed his left wrist against something heavy as he landed, twenty metres away from where he had been standing. The impact was bone-jarringly hard, sending radial judders down his spine and causing him to black out momentarily.

He moved like an automaton after that. His survival instincts propelled him even as his mind remained blurred and sluggish. He clawed his way free of the wreckage, somehow finding the half-destroyed doors at the rear of the command chamber and dragging himself through them.

The escaping atmosphere howled around him into the burning void, dragging detritus with it. Jorundur crawled onwards, his senses gradually returning to clarity. He could feel pain burning all over his body. His retinal display listed all the ways his battle-plate had been battered and dented. The only important factor was its air-tight seal, which appeared to be intact. Jorundur’s breath echoed raggedly in his helm, and he could already taste the staleness of the oxygen recycled through his suit’s filters.

More crashes rang out, roaring up from the flame-ridden bowels of the frigate. Everything around him seemed to be in motion – the walls of the corridor shook, rolled and buckled. Wall sections further down broke open, revealing the glow of swelling fires beyond.

Jorundur clambered to his feet and started to run. Keeping his feet on the rolling deck was difficult, even with his preternatural balance. He slammed into the nearside wall, staggering away from it. Then the floor began to give way.

He leapt ahead, landing heavily on a firmer patch as the metal walkway tumbled into ruin. Gouts of fire-flecked smoke poured up from where the floor plates had been, filling the narrow space with choking waves of smog.

‘Hel,’ he spat, feeling his body protest as he pulled himself back into motion. ‘This is absurd.’

He limped, crawled and lurched onwards, buffeted by the raging destruction around him. The corridor gave way to an intersection, then to an access tunnel, then an open hallway with a crumbling roof and jagged crevasses snaking across its floor. Explosions shook the walls, multiplying into an overlapping orgy of demolition. Bodies were everywhere, hurled on top of one another, stuffed into blocked service hatches, hanging from stairwells, all beginning to burn as the growing flames lapped at them.

When Jorundur finally reached his destination he barely recognised it. Sheets of blue-tinged fire coursed down the melting entrance passage. A whole segment of outer hull had peeled away over to his right, exposing dizzying patches of emptiness. He had a brief glimpse of stars striated with flying lines of wreckage. There was no sign of the enemy destroyer, and he briefly wondered why it hadn’t closed in for the kill yet. The ground beneath him rippled like water, snapping pressed-steel panels as if they were made of plexiglass.

He broke into a limping run, racing over the disintegrating floor and skirting past igniting piles of fuel tanks. The ship was coming apart around him. He felt his footfalls growing lighter as the grav generators gave out.

‘Skítja,’ he swore as he tumbled forwards, careering into a pile of ammo cases and sending them flying. Unable to arrest his forward momentum, he blundered on, slewing through the half-open shutters of the entrance passage and into the huge space beyond.

Once through, he skidded along a wide, open patch of buckling rockcrete. He had the vague impression of an enormous vaulted roof above him, zigzagged with growing cracks. The lack of air made everything strangely balletic – a choreographed dissolution in total silence.

Ahead of him was the gulf into the void. He saw the starfield beckoning, broken only by lines of spinning debris. He’d made it to the outer skin of the Undrider, beyond which there was nothing but empty space.

For a moment he thought he’d be carried straight out, shooting clear of the collapsing structure and somersaulting into vacuum.

He avoided that by a hand’s breadth. He shot his intact left hand out to catch the trailing edge of the landing gear as he sailed past it, grunting from the effort. His gauntlet closed over the metal strut, arresting his outward trajectory with a jerk. Once secured, he began to haul himself back up, struggling against the hurricane of flying wreckage.

He looked up, seeing a familiar grey cockpit looming over him. For all its bulk, it was already beginning to slide towards the void as the docking clamps holding it in place twisted and snapped.

Jorundur grimaced, and started to pull himself towards the entrance hatch.

‘No you don’t, you ugly bastard,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Not… yet…’

The plague-ship was dead and drifting, locked into a steadily accelerating tilt towards the planet below. The animating presence lurking at its heart was gone, and like a vast body suddenly bereft of its brainstem the whole vessel began to go haywire.

Ingvar ran hard, keeping Hafloí on his feet and trying not to lose ground with the rest of the pack. Together they tore through the warped labyrinth of the ship’s gruesome interior, going as swiftly as the cramped space and treacherous footing would allow. The route they’d taken to reach the bridge was closed to them – blocked by a furious, acidic inferno belching out of the ship’s tortured innards – and so they’d been forced to make their way down through the narrow capillaries of the destroyer’s crew decks.

It was hard to believe that the ship had once been designed by the hand of man. Once, many thousands of years ago, it would have been a creation of iron and adamantium, proudly bearing the insignias of the Imperial Navy on its golden prow and commanded by mortal officers bearing the sacred aquila on their breasts.

After millennia of corruption, little remained of that. Every surface had been warped and twisted, curled away from its original purpose and compelled into new, troublingly carnal forms. The narrow airways were thick with spores, and the spongy floors were clogged with filth. Every metal strut and beam was thick with oxidisation. The machinery, all of it ancient and arcane in its own right, had morphed into bizarre techno-biological hybrids, quivering with organesque appendages and glossy with cascades of dribbling fluid.

When it started to break open, it did so like a body. Blood coursed down from the sagging ceilings; pus pooled in the torn gaps between wall sections, oozing like infection across a scabrous hide.

‘No signal from the Undrider,’ reported Baldr, leaping over a dissolving patch of hissing floorspace. ‘Nothing at all.’

The plague-ship suddenly lurched hard, throwing them against the pulpy walls. The narrow tunnel started to shiver more violently.

‘Out of interest,’ asked Váltyr, struggling to keep his feet, ‘how close are we to re-entry?’

‘You had to ask,’ grunted Olgeir.

The pack pressed on, going as fast as the treacherous conditions permitted. With every step, the stench and filth intensified around them.

Eventually they burst out of the tunnels and into a larger domed chamber. It had been set into the side of the ship, and its exterior wall was entirely taken up by a multi-faceted window in the shape of a giant eye. The place might once have been a viewing gallery, built in an age when starships carried more than purely military crew.

Now it was a charnel house, a rotting canker of accumulated foulness. Death-bloated corpses hung from the roof on rusting hooks. Maggots carpeted the floor, wriggling across a sickening floorspace of mouldering cadavers. Bleached skulls protruded from the festering mass, barely visible under the clouds of flies that droned around them.

As they entered, the heaps of putrescence stirred. Bodies, clad in robes of mildewed sackcloth, twisted to meet the intruders. Their cowled faces were masked by obscenely long rebreathers, and their round eye-lenses glowed lime-green in the dark. Like the mutants they’d seen earlier they carried toxin weapons in their bony hands. Oblivious to the slow doom encompassing their ship, they limped towards the pack, chattering to one another in half-breathed, sibilant voices.

‘Slay them!’ thundered Gunnlaugur, kicking aside the heaps of decaying body-parts to get at them. ‘Slay them all!’

Olgeir’s bolter opened up again, sending severed limbs spinning and bouncing across the chamber.

Ingvar didn’t follow the order. Dozens of the creatures had already risen; many more were stirring. There would be hundreds before long, drawn from every stinking hole and pit in the ship by the sounds of battle.

They were running out of time. Soon the ship would begin to roll into the planet’s atmosphere and the whole structure would burn. Gunnlaugur would never admit it, but they’d left it too late to reach the Caestus. They’d still be fighting their way towards it when the first flames began to lick along the destroyer’s hull.

Hafloí struggled to free himself from Ingvar’s grip. Though still spore-blind and bleeding, he wanted to fight. Ingvar didn’t let him go.

‘Bastard,’ Hafloí slurred groggily.

Ingvar ran another sweep via his helm-mounted sensors, searching for some sign that the Undrider had survived.

He got nothing: the frigate was gone. Ingvar felt his heart sink. Gunnlaugur’s gambit had been too risky; they should have withdrawn when they’d had the chance.

He was about to give up, to return to the fight, when something suddenly registered. He picked up a signal in the void, moving fast, closing on their position.

The way it flew was familiar. Ingvar smiled.

‘Brothers!’ he roared, dragging Hafloí over to the huge window. ‘We have to leave! We have to leave now!’

They didn’t listen. They couldn’t listen: they were already hard-pressed by hordes of grave-mutants. The whole chamber crawled with them – snaking down from the meathooks, burrowing up from the butcher’s piles, shuffling into the chamber from corridor orifices.

Ingvar turned to Hafloí, and activated dausvjer’s disruptor.

‘Hold your breath, whelp,’ he said. ‘This is going to hurt.’

He lashed out with the blade, shattering the window. The sword’s energy field exploded and the iron frame cracked outwards. Foul air exploded through the breach, wrenching the rest of the window free and blowing the contents of the charnel chamber out into the void.

Ingvar was ripped out first, shooting clear of the destroyer’s hull in a tumbling rain of crystal and iron. He kept a tight grip on Hafloí’s cracked helm, squeezing it tight in his gauntlet and trying to stem air-loss.

A messy spume of spinning bones and cadaverous flesh shot out after them. Among the spreading fog of decay tumbled the grave-mutants, clutching wildly at nothing and gasping for air through their useless masks. The armour-sealed Space Marines came along with them, protected from the shock of exit and oxygen loss though powerless to halt their ejection.

‘What in Hel?’ demanded Gunnlaugur over the comm, sounding choked with rage as he rolled clumsily through space. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Look up,’ replied Ingvar calmly.

Vuokho swooped in close, manoeuvring expertly on its retros as beams of las-fire flickered around it. It hovered over the expanding cloud of falling bodies, swivelling on its axis and opening the frontal crew-bay doors.

‘Six of you,’ came Jorundur’s sour voice on the pack-wide comm, dripping with irritation. ‘This could take a while. For Russ’s sake, try not to thrash about.’

The two vessel-corpses carved their way into Ras Shakeh’s upper atmosphere, lighting up in vivid trails of flame.

One was the Undrider, barely more than a semi-coherent collection of melting metal plates.

The other was the plague-ship. Its core integrity remained intact until the full force of re-entry hit. Its swollen underside began to glow rust-red, then orange, then eye-watering white. It exploded shortly after that, spreading a network of burning debris across the skies of the planet below.

Gunnlaugur watched both ships burn from the sanctuary of Vuokho’s cockpit. Since being recovered, his mood had blackened. He’d always found it difficult to come down from the fearsome endorphin-high of combat. This time, though, it was doubly hard. Jorundur had sensed it, and for once attempted no acerbic comment. They sat together in silence, watching the wreckage below them twist and blaze.

All across the control console, Vuokho’s machine-spirit sent them angry warnings of imminent systems failure. The gunship had taken a lot of damage from the enemy’s close gunners. Just making planetfall would be an achievement.

The whole pack was subdued. Hafloí had nearly died. Váltyr shared Gunnlaugur’s anger with Ingvar, convinced that they could have fought their way to the Caestus before it was too late to launch. Baldr and Olgeir had said nothing about it, though even Heavy-hand had found little to smile about after his recovery.

It had been victory, of a sort. They were alive, the enemy was dead. Somehow, given the carnage, given how close it had been, it was hard to see things that way.

He overruled me.

Gunnlaugur suppressed the thought, knowing where it would lead. Dealing with Ingvar would have to wait

He turned to Jorundur. The two of them were alone, sitting side by side; the others had remained in the crew compartment below.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me. What was that?’

‘Only guesses, vaerangi,’ said Jorundur.

‘Any signal from the planet?’

‘Still silent.’

Gunnlaugur looked down at the Thunderhawk’s scrolling auspex readings. He saw patterns of conurbations down on the surface – sprawls of industrial cities, web-like traceries of roads, the puckered mass of mountain ranges. Some of it was burning; trails of black smoke stained the atmosphere across a whole band of urbanised terrain.

‘No orbital defences,’ he said. ‘One ship couldn’t have taken them down. There must have been others.’

Jorundur looked sceptical. ‘Then why aren’t they still here?’

‘They did what they came for – landed forces, then moved on. We saw empty depots on the destroyer. It stayed behind. A sentry, perhaps, overlooking the planetary assault.’

Jorundur nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps.’

Gunnlaugur scrutinised the auspex feeds. Their resolution wasn’t enough to make out much detail, but the damage on the surface was hard to miss.

‘There’s fighting down there,’ he said. ‘Movement. I can see it. If we’re getting no readings, then they’re being jammed.’

‘We have to land,’ said Jorundur. ‘We’re losing power. Soon we’ll lose our hull. Here are the drop coordinates we were given.’

Gunnlaugur watched as the picters scanned across to them. He saw a blurry urban splash of pale grey against red earth. He saw two concentric walls, and what looked like massive defensive installations arranged in terraced rows. There was no burning around those walls; the nearest sign of destruction was hundreds of kilometres to the south-west.

‘Looks undamaged,’ he said. ‘Take us down. Broadcast encrypted landing clearance on the secure comm. I’ll get Olgeir up here to man the guns – we might need him.’

Jorundur started to move the heavy control columns, and the gunship’s battered muzzle dipped towards the world’s curve.

‘What are you expecting?’ he asked, trying to lighten the oppressive atmosphere.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gunnlaugur, sinking back into his seat and falling silent. ‘I really don’t know.’