EIGHT
Descent into Darkness
The iron stairs rang as the Space Wolves made their way into the command bunker's lower level. With a draconic hiss the flamer spat a stream of burning promethium down the length of the dark staircase. Ruddy orange light pushed back the cave-like shadows for a moment, revealing a steep descent to a ferrocrete landing and a switchback leading farther down. Teeth bared, the lead Blood Claw clambered slowly down the stairs with Ragnar and the rest of the team close behind.
Bolt pistol trained over the Blood Claw's right shoulder, Ragnar strained his senses to the utmost, listening for tell-tale signs of ambush. In the distance, he thought he could hear the crash and echo of gunfire, but the stone walls of the bunker made it hard to gauge where the sound was coming from.
Once again, a cold wave of vertigo swept through him, and the young Space Wolf fought to control his balance on the narrow stairs. Shadow shapes flitted at the corners of his vision, further disorientating him. Ragnar growled softly and forced himself to concentrate on the feel of the weapons in his hands and the presence of the Blood Claw in front of him as they made their way down the stairs.
Ragnar signalled for the lead Wolf to halt at the bottom of the first staircase. They listened in the gloom. Faint sounds reached Ragnar's ears. Was it whispering or the faint scrabble of claws on metal? Whatever it was, the sound was coming from around the corner of the staircase. Ragnar signalled to the Blood Claw, who nodded and swiftly thrust the flamer around the bend. An all-too-human scream of horror was quickly swallowed in the flamer's hissing roar.
The Blood Claw held down the trigger for a full second before drawing back out of the way. Ragnar swept past, bolt pistol levelled, and pumped shells at the burning, flailing forms writhing on the staircase. He advanced into an inferno, killing men with shots to the head and chest or ending their agonies with a sweep of his blade. Power packs and ammunition cooked off all around him, filling the narrow space with thunderous detonations and deadly ricochets. Behind him, the rest of the team swept down in Ragnar's wake, eager to come to grips with the foe.
There was a small landing at the base of the stairs, piled with smouldering corpses. In the dim firelight, Ragnar's keen senses picked out an open doorway to the left of the landing. As he approached, he heard the distinct double click of a pair of grenades being primed, and the twin silver canisters were lobbed through the doorway at his feet. A lesser man might have panicked. Ragnar simply knocked them back the way they'd come with a sweep of his armoured boot. They detonated less than a second later, close enough to pepper him with bits of searing shrapnel, but the effect on the rebels in the chamber beyond was far worse.
Ragnar charged through the doorway into the reeling squad of rebel troopers, knocking two men off their feet with bolt pistol shots before slashing into the rest with his frost blade. The room was nearly pitch-dark. Ragnar's keen senses caught the ultrasonic whine of thermal-vision goggles and marked the locations of the rebel Guardsmen in the stroboscopic flashes of their weapons. Light burst from a lasgun to his right, sending a beam point-blank into Ragnar's breastplate. The flash revealed a snarling Guardsman little more than a metre away, his sunken cheeks crudely carved with blasphemous sigils. Ragnar spun on his heel and lashed out with his sword, eviscerating the soldier with a sweeping cut.
A shotgun went off, spraying his right shoulder and the side of his face with lead pellets. Ragnar howled in fury and fired a round in the direction of the flash, hearing the meaty sound of the shell striking home in the rebel's chest. As Ragnar drove deeper into the room a chainsword slashed in from the left, glancing off his left pauldron and tearing open his chin. Without hesitation, the young Space Wolf tore upwards with his keening frost blade, severing the rebel's arm near the elbow.
There was another flash, this time behind Ragnar, as Haegr fired at another target. The young Space Wolf glimpsed the rebel who'd struck him, reeling away, blood jetting from his shorn arm. Another traitor cowered on the floor near the far wall, his blood spattered hands pressed to his face. Ragnar shot them both for good measure.
Thunder and man-made lightning burst again and again in the confined space. Guardsmen thrashed and spun, hammered to the ground by bolt pistol shells. Within moments, the survivors broke and ran, loosing ragged volleys of lasgun fire as they fled down an adjoining passageway to the north.
Ragnar heard Haegr and Torin step to the mouth of the passageway and fire on the retrearing troops. The young Space Wolf stood near the centre of the dark room and tried to get his bearings. He swayed unsteadily on his feet. Strange smells assaulted his senses over the reek of propellant and the stink of ruptured organs. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Somewhere, impossibly far away, he thought he heard a howl.
The rest of the team spread out into the room. In the darkness, Haegr chuckled cruelly. 'The fools should have stayed put,' he said. 'I've never met a man who could outrun a bolt pistol shell!'
'There's a room at the far end of the passageway,' Torin cut in. 'I can see some sort of faint, purple glow.'
Sorcery, Ragnar thought. That had to be the source of his hallucinations. Madox and the Thousand Sons served the dreaded Changer of Ways, a vile god of madness and illusion. Now, it appeared that the rebels were turning to their unholy patrons for help against the implacable Wolves.
Ragnar peered around the dark room, straggling to focus. Time was running out. Beyond the danger of whatever sorceries the rebels were trying to invoke, the extraction flight would be over the base, circling and strafing any traitor vehicles that emerged from their shelters. They couldn't remain for long. If they weren't back on the surface within a few minutes, there wouldn't be anyone waiting to take them back to base. He didn't want to try his odds fighting his way back on foot with half a dozen enemy prisoners in tow.
The young Space Wolf tried to summon the maps of the bunker complex to the forefront of his mind. He knew that the vault adjoined the main war room on this level, but how many passageways connected to it? The spilled blood in the room made it difficult to think. Ragnar started to pace, fighting the urge to charge off into the gloom in search of something to kill. Sounds echoed in the darkness. A howl seemed to echo from another passageway to the south.
'Did you hear that?' he hissed.
To Ragnar's surprise, Torin answered at once. 'I did. It could be Sigurd or the other team. If they're pinned down, we're the only ones in position to reach the vault.'
Ragnar stifled a curse. Torin was right. He was letting his imagination get the better of him, and time was wasting. He worked his way past the fallen bodies of the rebel soldiers and reached the mouth of the north passageway, where he too could see a dim, purple glow pulsing slowly at the far end. As he passed Torin, he whispered, 'Is there anything else you feel? Do you see shadows?'
'Yes,' Torin whispered back, 'perhaps worse than before, but let's worry about that later. For now, let's just get down this corridor.'
Ragnar nodded to himself. He shouldered his way alongside Haegr and checked the ammo load for his pistol. Satisfied, he focused on the light in the distance and set off at a loping run with the rest of the team behind him.
They passed through half a dozen small rooms along the way, cluttered with debris and devoid of life. As they drew closer to the pulsing ethereal light, Ragnar could feel the invisible tides of sorcery washing over him in waves of oily filth. A strange, acrid stench burned in his nostrils and set his teeth on edge. Buzzing atonal notes echoed in his ears, growing louder with each step he took.
Distracted as he was, Ragnar didn't notice the flak-board barrier until he was within three metres of the end of the passageway. The enemy had laid boards over the doorway to well above human height, their grey sides reflecting the shifting purple light from the ceiling of the room beyond.
Ragnar slowed his pace at once. 'Barrier ahead,' he said gruffly, his voice sounding tinny and distorted over the infernal buzzing in his ears. 'We'll get the plasma gun—'
Haegr laughed. The sound was deep and guttural, like the growl of a bear. 'A barrier for you perhaps,' he growled, 'but not for mighty Haegr!'
The huge Space Wolf charged right at the slabs of flakboard, his thunder hammer ready in his hand. With a bloodthirsty shout, he crashed against the barrier. The flakboard exploded inward in a shower of debris, falling apart so easily that Haegr stumbled forward with an awkward shout into a hail of gunfire and a chorus of excited cries.
'Morkai's black breath!' Ragnar shouted angrily, and then chased off after Haegr. Shouts and war cries echoed after him as Torin and the Blood Claws took up the chase.
Sharp blasts of thunder rang from the walls of the chamber as Ragnar charged through the doorway and found himself in the bunker's expansive war room. Situation tables and logic engines had been overturned or moved to create defensive positions across the wide, rectangular room, and more than a score of huge, burly figures stood or crouched behind their barricades and unleashed a storm of fire upon Haegr and Ragnar both. Beyond them, at the opposite side of the war room, Ragnar saw a pair of gleaming steel doors: the entrance to the bunker's emergency vault.
Stubber shells whipped through the air around Ragnar or rang off his ceramite armour. One gouged a fiery path across the side of his head before ricocheting off his thickened skull. Tracer fire criss-crossed around him in a deadly web of shells. A few metres away, Haegr had crashed against the face of an upended hololith table and was smashing at the traitors on the other side with his crackling blood smeared hammer. Bullets sparked and howled off the curved surfaces of his armour, though Ragnar saw where almost half a dozen rounds had left red-rimmed holes in the burly warrior's arms, waist and legs. The hits didn't seem to slow Haegr in the least.
A heavy blow struck Ragnar in the left arm, and fiery pain blossomed just above his elbow. Snarling the young Space Wolf turned and blasted away at the rebels taking cover behind the barricades to his left. A huge figure reared up behind a broken logic engine.
Ragnar caught sight of a twisted, misshapen hunk of gleaming muscles and a scarred lump that might once have been a human head. The mutant turned its beady red eyes on Ragnar and levelled a short-barrel heavy stubber at him. Roaring, the young Space Wolf charged at the mutant, blazing away with his bolt pistol. Shell after shell rocked the monster, blowing gory holes through its massive arms and torso, but the mutant refused to die.
Its heavy stubber hammered at Ragnar, spitting a stream of tracer rounds at the onrushing Space Wolf. Hammer blows struck Ragnar in the chest and abdomen, but the blessed armour plate held against the heavy stubber rounds. Howling like a beast, Ragnar leapt onto the toppled logic engine and buried his blade in the monster's cartilaginous skull. Sickly grey and yellow matter spewed from the frost blade's whirring teeth, but the mutant refused to die. It howled and thrashed, throwing down its smoking gun and reaching for Ragnar's blade. Horrified, Ragnar shot the monster twice in the face and dashed its blasphemous corpse to the floor.
Howling, gibbering figures rushed at the young Space Wolf from every direction. A Guardsman with a skinned face swung a chainsword at Ragnar's left leg. Ragnar parried the stroke with his frost blade and kicked the onrushing rebel in the head, bursting it like a melon. Another mutant, this one wearing the tattered uniform of a PDF staff officer, wrapped a long, barbed tentacle around Ragnar's left ankle and with surprising strength hauled the Space Wolf off his feet. He landed heavily, smashing his head and shoulders against the metal and glass case of the logic engine before rolling, senseless, to the floor.
For less than half a second he was too stunned to move. Sounds rolled like surf in his ears: shouts, gunshots, screams and thudding blows. A blade of some kind smashed into Ragnar's back again and again, grinding off the armour. Figures crowded above him; a gun went off, the round burying itself in his backpack. Then a tentacle squirmed wetly around his throat and began to squeeze.
Ragnar roared like a wounded beast and lashed out with his whirring blade, shearing through ankles in an arc around his head. Mutants shrieked and toppled like felled trees, bleeding their lives out onto the floor. Ragnar used the impetus of the swing to flip onto his back, his bolt pistol hammering at the foes still looming above him. Three mutants reeled backwards with smoking holes in the backs of their heads. The tentacle around Ragnar's throat came away with a spasmodic jerk.
An upended table nearby exploded in a blue ball of plasma, scattering flaming debris across the room. Two mutants staggered away from the explosion, blinded and firing wildly into the melee. Battle chants and bloodthirsty cries rang from the stone walls as the Blood Claws in Ragnar's team charged into the fray. Ragnar caught sight of Haegr carving a gory path through a knot of struggling mutants, bursting them apart with earth shaking blows from his hammer. A shadow passed across the young Space Wolf's vision, but this time it was Torin, leaping nimbly over a barricade of smashed logic engines and opening the throats of the mutants hiding behind them.
For a moment, the room seemed to spin. Ragnar felt as though he was falling, but then he heard a guttural voice snarl into his ear. 'Watch your head!'
Something in the tone of the voice galvanised him. Ragnar rolled to the left, just as a roaring chainblade smashed into the ferrocrete where his head had just been.
Heart racing, Ragnar threw a blind swing behind him as he lurched to his feet. His frost blade swept through empty air, and then he heard the chainblade's throaty rasp, and a terrible blow struck him in the back of his left thigh.
The pain was immense. For a brief, agonising instant, Ragnar could feel the teeth of the chainblade tearing through his flesh. He staggered, but his sacred armour sensed the impact and locked his left knee-joint to keep him upright. Snarling in agony, the young Space Wolf spun on his immobilised leg, barely warding off a second blow aimed at his neck.
He found himself staring at an enormous, hyper-muscled mutant, wielding a two-handed chainsword in its clawed fists. Ragnar recognised the weapon at once: it was an eviscerator, a ponderous but devastating weapon favoured by would-be martyrs in the Guard's Ecclesiarchal auxiliaries. The young Space Wolf realised that the leering mutant was wearing the tattered remains of a priest's homespun robes. An Imperial aquila, once the priest's most prized possession, hung upside-down on a necklace of body parts strung around the mutant's bull-like neck.
The mutant gibbered a stream of blasphemies and pressed its attack. The eviscerator was a clumsy weapon in human hands, but the muscle bound traitor wielded it like a willow-switch. Ragnar blocked one powerful blow after another, knowing that if his defence failed, even for a moment, the mutant would hack him in two.
A blurring stroke leapt at Ragnar's face. The young Space Wolf blocked the eviscerator in a shower of sparks, and shot the mutant in the left knee. The monster staggered, bellowing through a mouth full of pointed teeth, but it pressed its attack without pause.
The mutant charged forwards, slashing across Ragnar's left pauldron and leaving a deep gash in the ceramite. A lightning-fast return strike nearly took off half the young Space Wolfs face. Ragnar shot the mutant twice more, once in the belly and once in the groin, and this time, when the mutant lurched beneath the impacts, the young Space Wolf lashed out with his frost blade and severed the traitor's left hand at the wrist. Hot blood spurted onto Ragnar's face as the mutant howled in agony, and the young Space Wolf rushed in to finish off the traitor, but the former priest dropped its weapon and seized Ragnar's sword wrist in a vice-like grip.
Ragnar felt servos whine under intolerable pressure as the mutant closed its fist. The cuff of his gaundet began to deform under the pressure. Bones grated in his wrist. Ragnar put the bolt pistol to the mutant's head and pulled the trigger, but the weapon was empty.
The mutant looked into Ragnar's eyes and hissed cruelly. Ragnar felt a wave of panic as the bones in his wrist and arm began to splinter. It was as though a wild beast came howling up from deep in his breast. With a savage growl, Ragnar leapt forward and buried his teeth in the mutant's over-muscled neck.
He bit deep, feeling flesh and cable-like muscle tear within his powerful jaws. Blood, hot and bitter, filled his mouth. The mutant shrieked, pummelling Ragnar with the stump of its left arm, but the young Space Wolf wrenched his head left and right, widening the wound and digging for the pulsing arteries buried within the neck.