He saw the organisation of his Chapter. He saw that it was arranged into twelve great companies, each led by a mighty warleader from whom the company took its name. He saw that there was a thirteenth great company belonging to the Chapter’s leader which consisted of all the priests and other types of warrior. He saw the progress that he would need to make through the Chapter. He learned that if he were accepted he would become a Blood Claw, part of a pack of similar youthful warriors struggling to tame the unruly beast within. If he lived he would become first a Grey Hunter, then a Long Fang, growing older, wiser, mightier and more cunning.
On and on went the endless flow of knowledge, burning itself into his memory, making him wiser, and causing his brain to glow with love of his Chapter and Russ and the Emperor.
“Lift your arm,” the Iron Priest said. Servo-motors whined as Ragnar did so. The priest nodded his masked head, and then tightened a joint with his power wrench. Ragnar felt him do it. The sensation was an odd one, not painful exactly, but it let him know that something was happening with his plasteel carapace. The knowledge implanted in his brain told him that over the coming months and years he would get better at recognising the meaning of these sensations.
“Now move your fingers.” Ragnar did as he was told. Once more the priest made a few adjustments. Immediately his hand felt better, more flexible, stronger. The priest intoned a litany to the machine spirits and then bowed his head once more. It appeared the work was complete.
“You may rise,” the priest said. Ragnar raised himself from the altar. As he did so the various cables and attachments the priest had fitted retracted back into the sacred stonework. He was free to move. Ragnar smiled and looked down at his body. The entire length of his massive frame had been encased in plasteel and ceramite yet he did not feel too much different. There was no sensation of being encumbered by heavy armour. In fact, if anything he felt lighter, fitter and stronger. He knew now that the powerful servo-motors within the armour were doing their work, helping support his weight, make him mobile. The Iron Priest obviously recognised that smile and knew its meaning.
“You must be very careful over the next few days, for you do not yet know your own strength.”
Ragnar looked at him, not quite following his meaning. A small servitor robot moved closer at the priest’s gesture. A compartment in its chest opened and a long telescopic arm stretched out and placed a stone in the priest’s hand. Ragnar was amazed by the seemingly mystical manner in which the priest and his machine communicated. Not a word had been spoken.
“Take this stone,” the Iron Priest said. “Do not worry; it has no significance at all. It is merely to demonstrate a thing.”
Ragnar took the stone, marvelling at the sensitivity of the gauntlets that let him feel its texture despite being thick enough to stop the blow of an axe. It was not quite like touching the stone with his bare flesh. It felt more as if he were wearing thin gloves. The Iron Priest was right. This was going to take some getting used to.
“Crush the stone,” the Iron Priest said.
Ragnar looked at him, not quite able to comprehend what he was saying. He knew that it was theoretically possible for the systems in his gauntlets to generate enough pressure to do so, yet something instinctive in his brain rebelled against the concept. It was not possible. Human beings could not crush rocks with their bare hands.
“Do it,” the priest said. There was a note of command in his voice that could not be disobeyed. Ragnar closed his fist. Instantly he felt resistance and instinctively he began to loosen his grip but the Iron Priest merely repeated his command. Ragnar closed his fingers once more. There was a cracking sound as the stone broke like an eggshell crushed by a strong man. Ragnar opened his hand to see that the hard stone had been reduced to several small chips of rock.
He let out his breath in one long slow exhalation. Now he truly began to understand the power that had been granted to him.
“These are your own personal weapons,” the armourer said. “You are responsible for them. Each has been stamped with your rune-sign so you will know them, and we will be able to identify them in the event of your death.”
Ragnar picked up the weapons reverently. There was a projectile weapon, called a bolt pistol. It was like the magical weapon with which Ranek had dispatched the sea dragon, only smaller. And there was a chainsword, one of the potent weapons that Sergeant Hakon had carried. In the belt on which the pistol was scabbarded was a dispenser of other small but no less potent weapons known as microgrenades.
“Be careful with these,” the armourer said. “They are as dangerous to fools as they are to enemies. Now follow the servitor and report to the training ranges.”
Ragnar looked around and saw Sven, Nils, Strybjorn and the others all standing inspecting their weapons. They all looked different now, taller, heavier and more burly with their heads shaved save for one long strip of hair, and their bodies encased in armour.
On their faces was the same look of pride and wonder that he knew must be on his. They all looked as if they had just been given enchanted weapons out of legend, and in a way they had. He gave Strybjorn another long hard look. It was just possible, he thought, that the Grimskull might have an accident on the training ranges. Strybjorn looked up and met his gaze, and Ragnar felt that it was all too possible that his enemy was thinking the same thing about him.
The bolt pistol kicked in Ragnar’s hand. Even with the enhanced strength granted by his armour and his altered body, the recoil was something fierce. The gun moved like a wild thing he held trapped in his vice-like grip.
The shell blazed past the target and hit the stone wall behind, blowing a huge chunk out of the cavern wall. Ragnar was exhilarated by the sheer sense of power using the weapon gave him at the same time as he was frustrated by his inability to hit the target. Not for the first time he became aware of the difference between the theoretical knowledge the ancient engines had placed in his head, and the actual practical ability to do something.
He knew all about this weapon. He knew how it worked. He knew that it fired caseless self-propelled ammunition capable of piercing armour up to several hundred strides. He knew the magazine capacity. He knew in theory how to disassemble, clean and repair it. He knew all about firing it He knew about relaxing as you took aim, breathing out gently as you fired. Unfortunately there was a big difference between knowing this stuff and being able to do it.
“Do not worry, lad,” said Sergeant Hengist, their weapons instructor. “Just keep at it. It will come eventually Anything can be mastered with practice. And you do need to master this. Believe it or not, there was a time when I couldn’t hit the side of a barn door. Now…”
In one smooth fluid action, without seeming to aim or concentrate, Hengist drew his own pistol, seemed only to extend his arm, point it and pull the trigger. A cluster of three shots hit the bull’s-eye directly over the heart of the man-shaped target.
Ragnar watched in awe. “You make it look so easy, sergeant,” he said.
“Nothing is ever as easy as it looks, lad. And it’s the mark of a master that they make difficult things look easy.”
Ragnar nodded. He enjoyed listening to Hengist talk, and he enjoyed learning from the grizzled veteran. It was one of the most pleasant things about his new status. He and the other aspirants weren’t exactly accepted but at least they were not treated as simply expendable things. They had value to the Space Wolves now. They might become part of the Chapter at some future date. Or maybe Hengist was simply more pleasant than the other Space Marines. One thing Ragnar was becoming aware of was that all these awesome fearsome characters were different. They were people in and of themselves, as distinctive as all the folk back in his home village. His former home village, he corrected himself. In another, far distant, life.
He did not know why this surprised him. Perhaps it was simply that he had become used to seeing all of the Space Wolves as the same. They certainly all looked similar. They were all far taller and stron
ger than mortal men, and they all possessed those odd wolfish eyes and frightening fangs And they all had a similar fierce and feral manner in some ways. And, of course, they all wore the greyish armour, which sometimes made them look more like machines than men. Still, Ragnar was coming to realise that for all that they were men just like he was. And he was also coming to respect them, for he knew that all of them there had come through everything he had done, or worse, and had survived years of terrible warfare besides.
“Try again, lad,” Hengist said, not unkindly. “And this time don’t think so hard about what you’re doing. Just relax and do it. Do it a thousand times if need be, but keep doing it. One day your life and the life of your comrades will depend on your accuracy. Sure as Russ was a drinker, that’s the truth.”
Ragnar nodded and raised the pistol once more. He turned to see if Hengist was watching him, but the sergeant had already walked down the line of aspirants and was talking quietly to Sven. Ragnar closed one eye, breathed deeply and as he exhaled pulled the trigger. The bolter shell sped past the target and buried itself in the wall.
Ragnar let out a long sigh of frustration. This was going to take a lot of practice.
Ragnar charged through the jungle thicket. The air was hot and humid. Green fronds whipped his face. Carnivorous plants snapped at his knees. He ducked a strangler vine, skidded onto his knees and rolled forward through the leafy mulch into cover behind the toppled remains of some titanic fallen tree.
He heard a disturbance in the undergrowth ahead of him. He wiped spores from his face, sighted along the barrel of his pistol and whipped off a shot. It smashed through the leaves and exploded sending a cloud of paint and dye over the crouched figure of Sven. “Got you,” Ragnar cried.
With a groan, Sven put his hand over his heart, pushing the button that would deactivate his comm-links then toppled theatrically back onto the ground. Ragnar smiled with satisfaction. That was the third of the Red team he had picked off this exercise. One more and his squad would have won. He would have wiped out all the rival team. He was enjoying himself. He liked this strange place and he enjoyed these training exercises. This vast cavern full of alien flora was the place where the recruits were inducted into the basics of jungle warfare. It was a controlled environment deep below the Fang, where the heat and the humidity were carefully controlled to create a place just like the real thing. He was pleased with himself. His shooting had improved greatly with practice, just as Sergeant Hengist had promised him it would.
“Got you,” he murmured, knowing all he had to do now was find Strybjorn, the last member of the Red team.
“And I’ve got you, Ragnar,” a voice said from behind him. Ragnar twisted around striving to bring his pistol to bear but he was too late. Strybjorn stood there his pistol already pointed. He squeezed the trigger and the impact of the shell knocked Ragnar over. A cloud of paint covered his armour. Briefly Ragnar considered ignoring the hit and firing back at Strybjorn but his sense of honour would not let him. Well, that and his knowledge that Sergeant Hengist was probably watching him through one of the camera eyes of the floating drones that moved through the caves. Frustrated, he punched the button on his chest comm unit and cut himself out of the link.
Ragnar cursed. It was going to take a long night of scrubbing to get his armour clean again. Still, he was grateful that it had been only a paint shell and not live ammunition when Strybjorn fired.
He wondered whether the Grimskull would have been so quick to pull the trigger if he had been firing a real bullet. Ragnar knew that he himself would have been.
Ragnar looked down on Vrotwulf’s corpse. Things looked like a mess. The whole back of his head was gone and a pulpy mass of blood and brains decorated the wall over the aspirant’s bunk.
“Bones of Russ,” Ragnar breathed. It had all happened so quickly. One moment Vrotwulf had been sitting there laughing and joking and polishing his bolt pistol. Then there had been a bang and a roar and his head had disintegrated. It had all happened so quickly that the youth had not even had a chance to scream.
Sven came over and looked down at the corpse. He picked up the gun and looked at it. “Idiot!” he muttered. “The magazine was still in it.”
Ragnar looked closely. “And the safety stud wasn’t pushed in,” he added. They looked at each other. Ragnar guessed that they were both thinking the same thing. Deaths in training still happened, and most of the time through sheer carelessness. He was coming to recognise the signs. This was indeed part of the problem with the way knowledge had been imparted to them. All of the aspirants knew things but the knowledge was not yet fully part of them. They all knew the procedures for cleaning their weapons but they had not yet learned the total respect that the firearms demanded. It was that way with much of the lore they had learned. As always there was a huge difference between knowing the theory and being able to implement the practice.
“I suppose someone better go tell the powers-that-be,” Sven said. He looked meaningfully at Ragnar hoping that he would volunteer.
“Off you go then,” said Ragnar. Sven snarled, showing his developing fangs but did not argue. He and Ragnar had clashed often in the past few weeks, establishing their positions within the pack, and Ragnar had always come off the best. The others were learning not to challenge him whether in a simple contest of wills or an exchange of blows. Ragnar returned to contemplating the body. He offered up a prayer to Russ.
Well, he thought, they were learning respect, the hard way. He just wondered how many more of them would die before the training was over.
Only two more did, to Ragnar’s knowledge. An aspirant known as Logi managed to blow himself up with his own krak grenade during live ammunition training. Another aspirant, Hrald, had simply keeled over and died while eating one day, and his body was carted off by servitors to be dissected by the Iron Priests. No one really understood what had gone wrong, although word went around that his body had rejected either the geneseed or the new organs that had been implanted. Ragnar was not quite sure how this could happen but the new lore implanted in his brain told him that sometimes human bodies simply would not accept implants, that they rebelled against any alteration, and the subject simply died. This was not a cheering thought to Ragnar or to any of the other aspirants but there was nothing they could do about it except lie awake at nights in their cells and wonder whether it would happen to them. After a few days Ragnar simply quit worrying. He had not died and wondering about it seemed like a needless waste of energy.
Besides, there was so much to learn and to do that his entire mind and spirit were kept occupied. Each day at dawn he rose and entered one of the great meditation chambers, where he busied himself reciting the litanies that had been placed in his brain the previous day. After three hours of contemplation of the religious mysteries and honing his spirit for war, he ate a hearty breakfast. While his body digested this he was hooked up to one of the ancient tutelary engines and more knowledge was pumped into his brain, along with an unquestioning adoration of Russ and the Emperor. By noon, stiff but unwearied, he was unhooked from these ancient cryptic devices and went to the chambers of armaments. For the remainder of the day, depending on the schedule set for him, he either exercised, or practiced unarmed combat, or trained endlessly with the weapons he had been issued. Every few days, they would be sent to one of the environmental chambers, sculpted to resemble some alien landscape, and practise the disciplines of war and survival in those strange places. Ragnar came to recognise quickly what days those would be, for some knowledge of them would have been placed in his brain the day before.
After this they would retire to the refectory for the evening meal, and then another session either with the tutelary machines or with the Iron Priests. The things they learned now were always technical in nature, usually concerning the maintenance of their weapons and armour, or the new organs that had been implanted in their bodies. The day would conclude with several hours in the meditation cells and then to bed where Ragnar would
drop into an exhausted sleep.
Every seventh day, they would assemble in the Chamber of the Aspirants where Ranek had first explained their purpose to them. The Wolf Priest himself would arrive and preach to them, telling them old tales of the Chapter’s glory, stirring their hearts and minds with the deeds of those who had gone before them. They were then taken around the Fang, always to places they had not seen before. The nature and purpose of the great devices which they were permitted to see were explained to them, along with their glorious places in the Chapter history.
Ragnar looked with awe upon the sites of ancient battles with the forces of Chaos from those dark periods when the Fang itself had been invaded. He watched in wonder as mighty sky-ships took off, destined he now knew to pierce the envelope of air that surrounded Fenris and rendezvous with those mighty vessels that plied the unimaginable distances between the stars. He stared at the vast automated factories where the weapons and munitions of the Space Wolves were created from the very bones of the planet from deep mined metals and minerals and oil.
As the days became weeks and the weeks became months he found himself becoming more and more comfortable with his new role and his new position. He got to know many of the people around the Fang by name, and he saw that slowly, as he learned and grew and survived, that they were coming to accept him as one of them. He became more aware of the rhythms of the place and of the fact that it was more or less empty of the Space Wolves themselves who were forever on the move around the galaxy on the Emperor’s business.
He knew more now of how the Chapter was divided up into a number of great companies, the armed retinues of mighty warleaders, and that it was rare indeed for more than one of those great companies to be at the Fang at any given time. Sometimes the companies would return home briefly to be rearmed and re-equipped and to replace losses taken in battle with new recruits from among the aspirants. He knew that there was a constant steady flow of aspirants passing through the Fang, and that one day it would be his destiny to be chosen to accompany one of those great companies out to the stars.