Leman Russ: The Great Wolf by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2016-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Kloja's repair details were still working hard many hours after the lance-strike on the Aesrumnir had done its damage. The beam had penetrated deep into the ship's structure, driving a flame-edged well through deck after deck. Whole sections had depressurised and lost power, major cabling had been severed and coolant-tubes curtailed. Jorin's boarding party returned to the ship to find the Mechanicum adepts deployed on every level, struggling to lock down the burgeoning fires and segment-failures.

If time had not been so pressing, his warriors would have joined the effort, lending their strength to the recovery squads, but that was not an option. The enemy would not be given time to regroup after the void-battering, and all knew that landings would be organised just as soon as the packs could re-arm.

While the majority of the company's warriors headed down to the armouries, Jorin and Bulveye made their way up to Ulbrandr's quarters, situated under the bridge in the battleship's forward sections, and the three of them gathered in the same chamber where Haraal's blood plasma had been so painstakingly examined, the doors locked behind them.

'So?' Jorin asked, resting his knuckles on the altar and giving Ulbrandr a jaded look. His battleplate looked no better than it had done after Ynniu - the running repairs had been overtaken by a fresh set of combat-marks.

Bulveye stood beside his master, a Jong gash opened up across his upper breastplate He would be next to surrender his wargear to Kloja's armour-wrights, but other things had greater priority.

Ulbrandr looked at them both across the empty altar-top.

'None,' he said. 'Or none that I detected, Hemligjaga neither. The gene-seed has been taken from the slain and the cut-threads tallied.'

Jorin nodded. 'Good,' he said, with feeling. That was hard graft.

'If they all kept their heads, then—'

'But the numbers do not add up,' interrupted Ulbrandr. 'I have checked, checked again, sent my thralls back onto what remains of the station to run fresh scans, but unless fate has played some jest on us, or I am in error, we are missing warriors.'

Jorin straightened up. 'You're sure?'

'Bodies may be found, but the scans show nothing. We do not have enough kill-records, not enough marks of armour-destruction. And there is also this.' The priest summoned up a hololith of what looked like vid-footage, grainy and unstable 'This was taken from the real-viewer records on the flagship.'

The images showed the underside of the halo during the fighting. Huge sections were tumbling planetwards, knocked out of orientation by the explosions within, creating a cloud of debris that drifted and clunked into itself. Las-fire from the ships above the halo's curve shot down through the clouds of smouldering metal.

'What am I looking for?' asked Jorin, watching carefully.

'You'll see it.'

As Jorin watched, the rain of shrapnel was joined, briefly, by a burst of what looked like thruster fire. Then there was another chunk of metal falling fast, though with less randomness, pulling clear of the rest and heading down towards the planet below.

'They got a ship away,' said Bulveye, grimly.

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