I arrived at the Fang, the gigantic fortress spire on Fenris with a wolf at my side, and gave a toothy grin to the Space Wolf Scouts guarding the armored door.
"Do they sll tasty, Canis?" I asked my loyal companion.
Canis advanced and slled the startled Space Wolves, and their wolfish companions, and grinned back at . "Woo?"
"Yes Canis, they all have the Canis Helix gene, just like you do. But sure, you can have fun with the grey bitch if you want. This eting will take so ti." I explained patiently.
My wolf didn't need to be told twice, as he rapidly mounted and subdued a Fenrisian wolf female, to the amusent of the guards.
"A Lanter with a wolf at his side. Yes, there is only one of you in the entire galaxy I suspect, Lord Lancefire." The guarding Scout said after examining for a long minute.
"And such a good friend as well, my loyal Canis. So, who is around for a friendly chat? , although the defenses were greatly simplified by the Hive Cities being buried deep underground.
Thousands of new PDF regints were being hastily raised and trained, then given defensive bunkers and sealed gates to protect.
Ferrocrete and blackstone plates were being assembled into new fortifications, both on the toxic surface and the access ways into the Hive Cities, while millions of new servitors were being converted from the local criminal gangs.
anwhile, I abused the tesseract to increase orbital presence with more defense forts and ard asteroids, mounting so Tarantula turrets for point-defense as well, although their Gellar fields and the hidden torpedo tubes drilled into the asteroids would be quite sufficient.
Expecting another debacle like at Agripinaa may seem paranoid, but nevertheless I ordered my fleet carriers to retreat a couple of light-years away in deep space, once their payload of corvettes and starfighters have been launched. The carriers were still in range of our FTL transcievers, in case I needed to recall them urgently.
I'm not sure what Primarch El'Johnson thought of my moves, but I really didn't care much.
I was more interested in the world of Fenris itself, and its strange inhabitants. From giant mammoths to oversized white bears and Fenrisian wolves, feral elks and badgers, up to real dragons flying on thermal currents, then spaceship-size Kraken monsters inhabiting the deep oceans, and lastly the Cavern Cities and their mutated Nightgangers, worshiping Chaos Gods and using Archeotech artifacts as maces and axes.
I extracted thousands of specins of these amazing animals, keeping a balance as to not cause a famine by kidnapping too many elks and not enough bears. I could populate so Fringe worlds with these beasts and provide my Lanters with a constant source of training and protein.
However, a dozen plasma warheads arrived inside the largest Krakens, burning them alive from inside out. I kinda suspected those were feral Tyranid bio-titans that were left behind by so failed invasion.
I took a couple of smaller specins to give the Biologis Magi sothing to investigate, and by next day they all agreed. The crazy Space Wolves cohabited their planet with giant Tyranids and didn't even know it.
Sure, the Space Wolves hunted the Krakens for their diamond-like claws and teeth, but never in a concentrated effort to eradicate them. But should a Tyranid Hive Fleet arrive in this system the Space Wolves would have a major problem, being assaulted by kiloters long organisms rising from their own oceans at the command of the Hive Mind.
As for the Nightgangers, they visited the Wolf's Eye for a short second, before being burned into space dust by the system's sun. The Cavern Cities had been constructed from the remains of the first colonization ships, and were filled with ancient devices, so mundane and other rather priceless. The ship's bridge was quite intact, and filled with a treasure trove of logic-vaults and datastacks, everything from maps and weapon schematics to movies and songs and poetry.
I'll have to copy everything and distribute it among my techpriests and family, although the broken ship reactor and the imrsive radiation had damaged most storage devices. But even fragntary data was better than nothing, and I suspected so of the devices in the Fang were also extracted from these old caverns. But now they were locked tight and forgotten, of course.
Perhaps only the old dreadnoughts recalled their existence now. Bjorn had been a contemporary of Leman Russ and had led the Space Wolves after the Primarch departed for the Eye of Terror, on so kind of penitent crusade.
I wasn't sure why all the Primarch had chosen to abandon their duties, since they certainly haven't managed to find and kill their traitor Brothers in the depths of the Warp Rift.
I had an inkling the silly Primarchs were all captured and made to fight in a giant arena for the amusent of Khorne. It would be his style, after all.
And speaking of Khorne, flashes of purple and violet clouds began forming in the Fenris system, just as I was torching so Chaos altar in the depths of the Cavern Cities.It appeared my prediction was correct once more. The Chaos was coming out to play.
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