Lee Lightner - Wolf's Honour

Annotation

A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

WOLF'S HONOUR

Lee Lightner

Special thanks to Mike Lee.

It is the41st millennium. For more thin a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls arc sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even inhis deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they arc barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants and worse.

To be aman in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

PROLOGUE

Heart of the Wolf

The four Thunderhawks swept in at full power with the sun of Hydra Hydalis at their backs, plunging like a sheaf of iron tipped spears at the dark leviathan drifting before them. If someone or something on the space hulk was watching for signs of attack, Ragnar Blackmane wanted to mask their approach until the last possible moment, concealing their emissions amid the raging solar winds given off by the system's three suns.

It hung in the void like the pitted shard of a broken world. Ridges of stone, plains of ice and towers of trapped metal stretched for more than ten kilometres, dwarfing all but the largest of Imperial battleships. And not the biggest of its kind by any stretch, Ragnar thought grimly, studying its ominous bulk through the viewports of the lead Thunderhawk's command deck.

Space hulks were the flotsam and jetsam of the warp, or so the theory went, drifting in and out of the Immaterium as though carried on an invisible tide. Many were nothing more than hunks of lifeless rock, perhaps torn from worlds by the teeth of warp storms in ages past. Others, however, were studded with the hulls of entombed starships, some of them tens of thousands of years old and not all of them human in design. Such discoveries were legendary; often they contained treasure troves of lost technology and xenos lore.

Sometimes they also carried horrors hidden deep within their decks: foul alien raiders, hordes of twisted mutants, or worse.

When the space hulk first arrived at the edge of the system almost eight standard months ago the handful of decrepit ships that comprised the Hydalis system defence squadron drew close enough to perform a series of long-range auguries. Not long afterwards, the alarm had gone out via astropath, and three months later Fenris sent its answer.

Now all that stood between the oncoming hulk and the forty-five billion Imperial citizens of Hydra Cordalis was Ragnar Blackmane and his small company of Wolves.

The harsh light of Hydalis's primary gave the notional prow of the hulk a bleached out, blue-grey cast. Tendrils of steam wreathed the rocky surface as pockets of trapped ice boiled away beneath the suns' harsh glare. Here and there, the light flared painfully bright along a spar of metal or a shard of jagged hull plating. Abyssal shadows pooled in the depths of ancient impact craters. They seemed to shift with the changing position of the Thunderhawk, like the multiple eyes of some vast predator. The thought left a cold feeling in the Wolf Lord's gut. Ragnar was first and foremost a son of Fenris, and his people had a healthy dread for the horrors of the deep.

Baring his fangs in a silent snarl, Ragnar surveyed the red-lit interior of the command deck. It was a cramped space at the best of times, the pilot and co-pilot side-by-side at the forward end of the compartment. A master tech-priest and the senior augur operator situated directly behind them. The two bondsmen were fitted in bulky, armoured flight suits that made them look slope-shouldered and apelike, but Ragnar's power armoured bulk loomed head and shoulders above them all. With the Wolf Lord standing at the back of the compartment the atmosphere was nearly claustrophobic, but the crew did their level best to go about their work as though Ragnar wasn't there.

The Wolf Lord turned his gaze to the augur operator at his right. 'Any change?' he asked.

'None, lord,' the crewman replied, never taking his eyes from the wavering lines on the augur screens before him. The operator reached up with a gloved hand and made a minute adjustment to a set of brass fronted dials. 'No engine heat or augur signals. It's drifting at a constant rate, heading for the centre of the system.'

'Any power emissions at all?' Ragnar inquired.

The crewman shook his head. 'None so far,' he said. 'We'll know more as we get closer.'

Ragnar nodded thoughtfully, and then addressed the pilot. 'Where is the hull that the defence ships spotted on their augurs?'

The pilot glanced over his shoulder at the Wolf Lord; like Ragnar, the Space Wolf wasn't wearing a helmet. Bright blue eyes glittered beneath a pair of shaggy red eyebrows, and a web of fine scars indented the pale skin of his right cheek. 'We'll find it on the dorsal side of the hulk, lord,' the pilot said in a rumbling voice, 'roughly amidships, so they said. We'll be there in another few minutes.' Then he turned back and keyed the vox-bead behind his ear. 'Jotun flight: approach pattern Epsilon,' the pilot growled, 'and Snorri, keep your fat arse tucked into formation this time. If you get shot down again you're walking back to Fenris!'

Ragnar couldn't hear Snorri's reply, but the flight leader let out a booming laugh and pushed the throttles forward. The three other Thunderhawks in the flight shook out into a rough arrowhead formation, and their thrusters flared blue-white as they began the final phase of their approach.

The Wolf Lord shifted his weight and reached for a nearby stanchion as the assault craft pulled into a climb that carried them over the hulk's bulbous prow at a distance of less than a hundred metres. Jumbled plains of rock and twisted metal flashed by underneath the Thunderhawk's nose. Ragnar caught fleeting glimpses of broken hulls jutting from the surface: here the curved bow of an Imperial merchant ship, there the saw-toothed profile of an ork raider. Once he thought he caught the dull sheen of yellowed bone encased in a steaming sheet of ice.

Then he saw it, like a dark cathedral rising from a broken field of stone. 'There, off to starboard,' Ragnar said, pointing just to the right of their current course.

'That's it!'

'Where?' the pilot said, peering into the darkness. Then he straightened in his seat. 'Ah, yes. I see it now.'

The ancient warship rose from the centre of the hulk as though it had taken shape around her. Plains of broken stone stretched away on all sides, rising almost to the level of her dorsal turret deck. Her buttressed command bridge stood straight and tall, still remarkably intact after more than four thousand years. The prow of the Imperial battleship was almost completely buried, but Ragnar saw that instead of the customary eagle's head at its crown there rose the figure of an armoured warrior, sword and shield held ready.