'I will,' Wulfgar said. Then, the bondsman reached forward and extended his hand. 'It has been an honour to serve, lord.'
The young Space Wolf shook his head. 'No, Shipmaster Wulfgar, the honour has been ours.' He clasped the master's bloodstained wrist. 'I shall tell the Old Wolf of your deeds,' Ragnar said. 'You have my oath on it.'
The bondsman smiled, and then straightened his tunic and turned away. He studied the pages of the book propped on the lectern before him, and began to read aloud in a strong, clear voice. 'For if the Emperor is with me, who may stand against me…'
Ragnar turned to Inquisitor Volt, and the old man nodded silently. Torin and Haegr were already escorting Gabriella to the lift at the rear of the command deck. His heart heavy, the young Space Wolf hurried to join them.
The decks beneath the battle cruiser's bridge were a hellish realm of fire, smoke and twisted wreckage. Torin salvaged an emergency air supply from the body of a damage control technician and gave it to Gabriella, while Haegr and Ragnar took turns forcing their way past the worst of the debris. More explosions hammered at the hull of the dying battle cruiser, and with every passing minute Ragnar feared that they would not reach the hangar deck in time.
Yet luck was with them once they were within a few decks of the hangar bay. They made it past the worst of the fires and quickly regained their bearings. The many days Ragnar had spent wandering the lower decks of the huge ship paid off, and he was quickly able to lead the party down a series of maintenance accessways that brought them directly to the waiting Thunderhawk. Harald had the engines idling as the group burst onto the deck, and Volt gave the order to launch as soon as they were aboard.
Ragnar struggled to reach the Thunderhawk's command deck as the assault ship roared down the launch platform and into a storm of enemy fire. The Chaos fleet had come about and was blasting away at the Fist of Russ. Ragnar saw at once that the battle cruiser's main thrusters had been reduced to a twisted mass of metal, and her dorsal superstructure had been all but ripped apart. Fires glowed like sullen coals in the deep wounds along the warship's flank.
The horizon spun crazily as the pilot rolled the assault craft and pulled away beneath the Imperial ship. Ragnar gripped nearby stanchions for support and kept his eyes on the dying battle cruiser the entire time, bearing witness to its final moments.
She went down fighting, her guns still defiantly answering the enemy barrage. Ragnar saw an enemy cruiser burst apart under a punishing strike from the battle cruiser's lance battery. Then an enemy shell found one of the Imperial ship's magazines. The Fist of Russ disintegrated in a massive chain reaction, a fitting pyre for her heroic crew.
Ragnar took a deep breath and looked through the forward viewports at the ominous curve of the ebon world. 'How long until we make planetfall?' he asked.
'Forty-five minutes, lord, give or take,' the pilot replied, his voice subdued. 'I'll keep the wreckage between us and the enemy ships until we're well out of range.'
Ragnar nodded. With the Fisf of Russ destroyed, there would be no escape from the shadow world for any of them. Wulfgar and his crew were only the first among them to die.
Setting his jaw, Ragnar forced such thoughts ruthlessly from his mind. They had a mission to perform. Beyond that, nothing else mattered.
He was just about to turn and head back into the troop compartment when a warning telltale began to blink on the augur officer's panel. The crewman leant forward, twisting a series of dials.
'Russ preserve us,' the bondsman said, reading the icons on the screen. 'I have multiple contacts launching from the enemy ships. They look like fighters!'
Ragnar swallowed a curse. 'Full power!' he snapped at the pilot. 'Get us on the deck as fast as you can!'
Thrusters flaring the assault ship dropped like a thunderbolt towards the shadow world. Behind them, the first of the sleek attack ships was already passing through the battle cruiser's debris field and starting to dive.
The hunt was on.
THIRTEEN
World of Darkness
'I count twenty – no, thirty – contacts, closing fast!' the Thunderhawk's augur operator cried, his eyes glued to the phosphorescent display screen. The bondsman's gloved hands played with the augur unit's tuning knobs. 'At present speed they'll be in range in seven seconds,' he calculated.
'Very well,' the assault ship's pilot replied calmly. He reached up and keyed his vox-mic. 'Gunners, look alive! Contacts at six o'clock,' he said, alerting the four crewmen manning the weapon stations in the compartment beneath the command deck. As an assault ship meant to carry troops into hostile landing zones, the Thunderhawk traded speed and manoeuvrability for weapons and armour. Along with a massive forward firing battle cannon and a pair of lascannons, the Thunderhawk also mounted four twin-linked heavy bolters on remote hardpoints. Two of these hardpoints were mounted beneath each wingtip, allowing them to fire both forward and aft. Ragnar felt the vibration of the hardpoint gimbals and the clatter of the autoloaders as the two mounts swung about and began tracking the incoming Chaos fighters.
Ragnar's grip tightened on the stanchions to either side of the command deck's hatch. He hadn't counted on the possibility that the cruisers circling above the shadow world could carry attack craft as well. 'How long until we make planetfall?' he asked, eyeing the lightning-streaked curve of the ebon planet.
'Twenty minutes, more or less,' the pilot answered tersely. 'Setting up the proper re-entry angle is going to be tricky at this speed.'
'We'll be lucky to last twenty seconds,' the young Space Wolf growled. His hearts were hammering in his chest, and he thought he could feel the blood hissing in his temples. It took every ounce of will not to lash out, to feel something break and bleed in his hands. He closed his eyes and forced the Wulfen from his thoughts. The red tide seemed to ebb somewhat, after a moment, leaving his mind a little clearer.
'Is there any sign of a city on the planet's surface?' Ragnar asked. 'If this planet is truly a mirror image of Charys, there must be a shadow version of the capital as well.'
The pilot shook his head. 'I don't see anything but lightning,' he replied, and then glanced back at the augur operator. 'Otto, switch to navigational surveyors and sweep the planet.'
'What about the enemy ships?' the operator asked, looking up from his screen with a panicked expression on his sallow face.
'Forget about them!' the pilot snapped. 'You heard the lord. Find me a city down there.'
Swearing under his breath, the augur operator jabbed at a set of runes on his control panel, and the display screen shifted to a new set of oscillating lines. Frowning the bondsman adjusted a series of knobs, and studied the pulsing readouts. 'I'm picking up small collections of ground structures at wide intervals. They fit the profile for agri-combines,' he said. 'Hard surface reflections from transit lines, but nothing… wait!' he leaned forward, gently twisting a pair of brass dials. 'Looks like a hard set of returns bearing zero-one-five, right at the planetary terminus. There's your city.'
The pilot nodded and brought the assault ship into a shallow turn to starboard. 'Lining up on zero-one-five and starting our descent,' he said, reaching up and adjusting a set of conttols on a panel over his head. The Space Wolf looked over his shoulder at Ragnar. 'Good news, lord. The city is right at the edge of our glide path. We can touch down near the outskirts without adding any more time to our descent.'
Ragnar nodded. 'And the bad news?'
As if on cue, streams of seething energy bolts filled the darkness around the Thunderhawk, and the assault ship rang with a series of heavy blows along its fuselage. Warning icons flashed amber on the tech-priest's control panel, and the crewman began to recite the Litany of Atmospheric Integrity as he frantically jabbed at damage control runes. At the tips of the assault ship's wings, the twin-linked heavy bolters went into action, barking out stuttering bursts that reverberated through the Thunderhawk's armoured frame as the high-speed dogfight began.
The enemy fighters were sharp and angular, like shards of polished obsidian. Faint, greenish light glowed from their angled cockpit viewports, giving the ships a sinister, insect-like appearance. They descended on the larger Thunderhawk in a swirling, chaotic swarm, blasting away at the Imperial ship from a dozen different angles. Energy bolts burst across the assault ship's wings, fuselage and tail, wreathing it in a web of small explosions that ate away at the Thunderhawk's dense armour plate. The assault ship side-slipped abruptly left, and then right, trying to spoil the attackers' aim, but it wasn't enough to fully evade the storm of enemy fire.
Red tracer rounds slashed through the enemy formation in response as the Thunderhawk's heavy bolters returned fire. A pair of Chaos fighters blew apart in clouds of glittering fragments and glowing plasma. The shattered fighter craft dissolved in the ebon world's upper atmosphere, consumed by arcs of sorcerous lightning, but there was still more than a score of attack ships dogging the battered Thunderhawk's tail.
A powerful impact struck the assault ship's port side, causing the craft to slew sideways for a dizzying instant before the pilot could regain control. 'Number one engine is hit!' the tech-priest cried out. 'Pressure indicators are spiking!'
'Hold it together for another few minutes,' the pilot shot back. Another blast hit the nose of the attack craft just beneath the cockpit, limning the pilot's helmeted head in lurid green light. 'I'm going to increase our angle of descent and see if I can get the bastards to back off. Hold on!'
The Thunderhawk steepened its dive, coming into the planet's turbulent atmosphere at a sharper angle and increasing the speed of its re-entry. At once, the leading edges of the hull began to glow red with friction build-up. The Imperial vessel trembled like a ship in a summer gale, but her reinforced superstructure held against the strain. Several of the enemy fighters sharpened their dives as well, but their hunger for destruction proved their undoing, as the heat and turbulence tore their hulls apart. The rest of the swarm fell back, unable to match the assault ship's dangerous descent.
'Well, that bought us a minute or two,' the pilot shouted over the thunder of re-entry. The heat inside the cockpit was intense, and the assault craft shuddered violently as it plunged towards the planet's surface. More and more warning icons flashed an insistent red on the tech-priest's display.
Ragnar held on for all he was worth. It was clear that the pilot was pushing the Thunderhawk to the edge of its performance envelope and possibly beyond. 'Will this get us on the ground any faster?' he shouted.
To the young Space Wolfs surprise, the pilot threw back his head and laughed. 'Oh, aye, lord! One way or another, it surely will.'
They were close enough to the planet's surface for Ragnar to make out dark oceans and broad continents studded with mountain ranges. There were no lights that he could see, but the shape of the land masses was a perfect reflection of Charys as near as he could tell. All this just to facilitate a single ritual, Ragnar thought with a terrible sense of awe. He truly grasped the sheer scope of Madox's plans, for the first time, and felt something akin to dismay. He thought of the handful of Space Wolves in the troop compartment behind him and wondered how they could possibly challenge something so vast. Who are we to overcome an entire world?
The answer was obvious. We are sons of the Allfather, Ragnar thought, just as Madox once was. Whatever the traitor can bring to bear against us, we are its equal.
The Thunderhawk flashed past a rocky coasdine, plunging towards the dark surface of the world like a fiery comet. Vast plains stretched beneath the descending craft. Ragnar was amazed to see the outlines of enormous agri-combines, their subdivided crop zones radiating like the spokes of enormous wheels more than a thousand kilometres across. The young Space Wolf could just make out the towering granaries and equipment hives at the hub of each combine, where legions of farm servitors would shuttle back and forth like bees to tend their carefully monitored crops.
Within minutes, the fierce shuddering began to subside as the assault ship passed through the upper atmosphere and dived through a dark sky empty of clouds. A torrent of green bolts slashed downward from high and to starboard. The daemon ships were closing the range once more. Ragnar eyed the multitude of warning runes flashing on the tech-priest's screen to his left. 'How long?' he asked.
'Otto?' the pilot said.
'Surveyor shows the city dead ahead at five hundred kilometres,' the augur operator replied. Then, suddenly, he straightened in his seat. 'Wait – I'm getting something—'
Bursts of green energy bolts howled down around the Thunderhawk from high and to starboard. The pilot muttered a curse. 'Never mind, Otto. I see them.'