Wolf King by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2015-09-23T10:54:17+00:00

III

The junction between the ways drew closer. Lord Gunn never approached the command throne, but his orders now rang across the Hrafnkel’s bridge. His two adjutants, Skrier and Aesir, maintained their positions at the top of the wide stairway leading up to the command platform. They shared the space uneasily with Grimnr’s­ forces, but for the moment their weapons had been placed back in their scabbards. With the advent of a genuine choice, one for which Russ’s standing orders gave no guidance, all now deferred to the Jarl of Onn.

Gunn himself studied the augur schematics intently. The gas tunnel, narrowing for so long, plunged down tortuously, winding like a dragged length of entrails, before reaching a spherical chamber no more than a few hundred kilometres in diameter. Two spurs ran clear of that chamber, one angling back and leading further into the nebula’s heart, one heading – so the augurs told him – clear to the border.

The manoeuvre would not be straightforward. The entire fleet would have to be piloted down through the aperture without losing any more ships to the encroaching gas, for he would need every lance and macrocannon for what came next. Once out in the void there would be nowhere left to run, no shoals to beach upon and no corrosion to devastate void shields – just a final reckoning, with the Hrafnkel at its heart.

Gunn knew how far the Wolves would take that. He knew what they would suffer to gain the win, and he knew what pain they would absorb to break the back of their tormentors.

You have the numbers, he thought, looking at the Alpha Legion vanguard as it maintained the chase. You have the weapons. You have the position. But do you have the stomach?

‘Enact formation change,’ he ordered.

The command was passed down the ranks and sent out across the fleet, and the ships began to move. For the bulk of the pursuit, Ragnarok and Hrafnkel had taken station at the rearguard in order to see off any strikes from the Alpha Legion fast-attack wings, but now the two battleships started to crawl forwards, outpacing the destroyers around them, ready to assume ownership of a new vanguard. Tactics were reordered, moving from the spatial requirements of confinement to standard open-void patterns.

The intersection was still a long way off. The exit from the cloud was further still, but already the plan was crystallising in his mind. The fleet would burst clear of Alaxxes, slow rapidly and perform a full-about to present their arms to the aperture. As the Alpha Legion emerged behind them, the Wolves would let rip, concentrating all fire at the point from which the enemy had to emerge, taking out as many ships as they could.

That would hurt them. It might not even up the odds, but it would make them bleed. After that, the carnage could begin in earnest, up-close and ship to ship, in an orgy of shield-breaking.

Do you have the stomach? he thought again, repeating the words in his mind like a mantra.

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