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  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.

  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 wa
s 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.