A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL RAGNAR'S CLAW William King William King «Ragnarʹs Claw» IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than 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 are sacrificed every day. so that he may never truly die. YET EVEN IN his 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 Emperors 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 are barely enough to hold off the ever‐present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants ‐ and worse. To BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These arc the talcs of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be rc‐lcarned. 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. William King «Ragnarʹs Claw» PROLOGUE AS THE SHELL seared past, Ragnar threw himself flat behind the low pile of rubble, trying to make himself as small a target as possible. That had been close, too close. The shot had almost parted his hair. Only his lightning-quick reflexes and the microsecond's warning provided by his superhuman senses had got him out of the way. If he had ducked half a heartbeat later, his head would have been an exploding fountain of gore and bone. Ragnar had seen it happen too often to have any doubts as to what his own fate would have been. Now, however, was not the time to brood on what might have been. Now was the time for action, the time to teach the infidel cultists trying to slay him the penalty for attacking one of the Emperor's chosen Space Marines. He raised his head slightly, lifting it just above the parapet of rubble, his superhuman senses taking in the entire scene. Everything imprinted itself in his mind in one split second, then he ducked down once more before his enemies could fire. He sorted through all the impressions he had picked up; not just the sights but also the sounds, the smells and the less tangible cues from the mixture of senses in his altered brain. He recalled the ruined city, stretching as far as the eye could see. The enormous blackened stumps of the smashed skyscrapers, the burned out wreckage of ground-cars and tanks which filled the street. The infernal blaze of the fuel pumping station that had been hit by a missile and which had now burned on for days, sending huge tongues of flame leaping into the darkening sky He remembered the crimson and purple clouds contaminated by chemicals from the mighty industrial plants which had once provided this city with wealth and importance to the Imperium. He recalled the earthshaking roar of distant artillery as Basilisk tanks shelled the rebel positions, and the stutter of small arms fire in the near distance. He could hear the guttural shouts of rebel officers ordering their unruly troops into new defensive positions and the faint scrape of ceramite boot on stone, inaudible to normal human ears, that told him his own troops were close by. He even recognised the footfalls as belonging to young Brother Reinhardt. He made a mental note to remind himself, after this engagement was through, to have a word with the Blood Claw. He was supposed to be moving stealthily. Not even his leader should have been able to pick out his position by the noise he was making. Of course, Ragnar had other ways of spotting his troops. The wind carried their distinctive scent to his sensitive nostrils even over a gap of fifty paces. He could pick their clean, cold aroma out from all of the tangled mess of background stinks - the rotten-egg taint of industrial pollution, and the even subtler, sicker taint, which marked the Chaos-touched presence of heretics. Bones of Russ, how he hated that foul stench! He had never got used to it, though it had assailed his nostrils on coundess occasions for over a century. There was something deeply offensive to him in the very odour of diose who had forsworn their souls to Chaos, a thing that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and filled his heart with a red desire to kill and rend. Not even the fart that he suspected that this was a deliberate product of the process of alteration that had turned him into a Space Marine, could alter the basic, primal nature of his hatred. The unquenchable anger affected him as instinctively as the urge to seek its prey drives a wolf. An apt analogy, thought Ragnar, for he was a human wolf, and the Chaos-worshipping scum were his rightful prey, fit subjects for the Emperor's vengeance, delivered by he and his fellows, humanity's superhuman protectors. They had turned their backs on humanity and offered themselves up to the gods of darkness in return for power, or more likely the promise of power. Ragnar knew that it was a false promise. The only reward most of those deluded fools would receive would be the stigmata of mutation, and a degeneration of mind and spirit until their souls matched their twisted bodies. It would be a mercy to kill them before that happened, although most of them would never appreciate the natural justice of such an end. Here, amongst these blasted rains, the stink seemed worse, even, than before, for along with the taint of Chaos was the stench of sickness, of some foul pestilence that had infected the heretics, and the people of Hesperida alike. It was a sour, unclean reek that made his throat constrict. It brought back too many old memories, ones he had thought long buried. He pushed them to the back of his mind; now was not the time to lose himself in reverie. These reflections had taken less than five heartbeats perhaps. In the midst of battle, Ragnar's mind worked at a speed far beyond the merely human. He realised he had only been keeping himself occupied until his troops were massed in position for the final assault. He focussed his mind back on the problem at hand, selectively editing the memory of the scene he had just witnessed, using his superhuman abilities with a skill born of long decades of practice. Using ancient meditation techniques taught to him in the fortress-monastery of his order, he concentrated upon the impression of the one part of the battiefield that was currently important to him: the rebel position directly ahead. He consciously selected all the crucial details. The walls of sandbags hastily thrown into position to plug the gaps in the building walls. The heavy bolter team ensconced in the twisted wreckage of a tank just in front of the building. The edge of a peaked cap which marked the presence of a rebel officer glaring out of the barred windows on the remains of the second floor. All was more or less as he had expected it to be when he had surveyed the enemy stronghold earlier. There had been no important changes in the heretics' disposition. His basic plan remained sound. It would simply be a matter of hitting them at their weakest point, blasting the sandbags out of the way and then scouring the building of every last Chaos-worshipping wretch. Nothing too difficult, he thought - even though his force was outnumbered at least five to one. Such numbers did not really matter, Ragnar knew. In battles such as this, the quality of the troops counted for far more than the quantity. His men were Space Marines, Adeptus Astartes, hardened warriors drawn from a world of fierce fighters, put through the toughest testing regime ever devised, then subjected to a process of genetic re-engineering which had transformed them into supermen, many times faster, stronger and tougher than mere mortals. They were armed with the best weapons and equipment the Imperium could provide. They lived lives of monastic discipline; when they were not fighting in the Emperor's William King «Ragnarʹs Claw» service, they trained to fight. They were the best troops the millions of worlds the Imperium of Mankind could produce. And their opponents? Scum, pure and simple. They were conscripts, pressed into the service of a rogue planetary governor; men so lacking in faith that they had forsworn their oatiis of allegiance to the Emperor, and given themselves body and soul to the dark powers of Chaos. Of course, they had some military training and they were not without a certain desperate bravery, but there was no way they could withstand an assault by the Space Wolves.