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castellankurze · 6 years

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I wish you would write a fic about a Dark Angel and a Space Wolf that are buddy-cops

Somewhere amidst the Horus Heresy…

The land raider was a behemoth of a machine, surging forwards on spinning treads that had been modified for extra speed. It was marked with stripes of blue and white, the side imprinted with the great, serrated Maw of the World Eaters. It had been blackened by war, but had lost no speed for its scars, and its engine howled as it tore down the wide-open roadway of the hive city, smashing aside an abandoned groundcar with no more notice than a man stepping on an ant. Atop the vehicle’s back, a gigantic figure in terminator armor lurched, swaying the force of the impact, planting the butt of the great scythe held in one hand.

In the wake of the rampaging vehicle came another, smaller, engines likewise screaming as it fought to gain ground against one of the XII Legion’s famed assault transports. The rhino was a gleaming black, trimmed in red, stamped with the winged sword of the I Legion, but when the hatch popped and a head emerged from the boxy metal vehicle, the figure that emerged was a far cry from those infamously stoic knights in black.

Britte shook her head as the wind hit her in the face, blasting back her braided locks like a dirty blonde war banner, and her fangs flashed as she spat off the side of the roaring treads. “Yer not gonna close the gap like this!” the Space Wolf snarled down into the compartment.

From the driver’s station her companion flashed her a look of pure murder. She’d stripped the armor from her torso in the wake of taking a plasma shot, and so the tattoo of the Dark Angels flexed with Amelia’s biceps as she hauled the rhino around the silent corpse of another groundcar. “Just get up there and let me do my job,” she growled, and Britte shrugged, climbing onto the top of the rhino and clinging to its back.

Amelia gripped the wheel as if imagining the XII Legionnaire’s neck under her fingers and wove an aggressive course through the debris that cluttered the superhighway. Her prey could smash through the cars all day long with the bulkier land raider, but the collisions slowed the bigger machine and left the loyalists sprinting in their wake, waiting for the chance to present itself.

One bloody volkite shot and I’d ruin yer whole day, Britte thought to herself as she crouched atop the rhino, shifting her weight every time Amelia swung left or right. But there were no bloody volkite charges left to be had - both sides had run increasingly dry of ammunition as the fight turned into a knock-down, drag-out battle of attrition.

Without warning, the land raider suddenly juked to one side and smashed through the barrier that divided the thoroughfares of traffic, heading for the arterial loop on the opposite side. Britte slapped a hand against the vehicle’s roof and screamed “they’re going for it! We can’t lose ‘em now!”

But Amelia was already in motion, even as her temper finally exploded. “Lose ‘em? I’m Ironwing, bitch! Hang on!” she roared as she hauled on the gear shaft and spun the controls. With a sudden shower of sparks and a horrific grind of steel and asphalt the rhino swung about, its back end slewing to one side as the Dark Angel put it through an aggressive turn without taking the time to slow. Britte clung to the troop handle near her as the maneuver threatened to throw her from the top. She’s bloody insane!

…and did she just call a Fenrisian a bitch?!

The rhino screamed across the highway, but Amelia didn’t aim for the arterial. Instead she put the rhino through the hole left by the land raider and proceeded to slam the six-tonne vehicle through the opposite wall. Concrete shattered and for a few glorious seconds the rhino knew what it was like to fly. Beneath them, the land raider was exiting the arterial heading in the opposite direction, and Britte took her chance, springing from the falling vehicle and aiming for the fleeing transport, chainsword howling.

The Death Guard terminator had looked up as the loyalists erupted from the side of the road above, and as a result saw the Wolf coming, but with no time to ready its war scythe the hulking figure instead put a halt to the attack in the most efficient way possible - by lifting one massive arm and snatching the Wolf’s wrist in mid-air so that Britte came to a jerking halt, sword arm held prisoner. Without hesitation she kicked out and her ceramite boot caught the terminator’s visor, cracking the receptors.

Meanwhile, well behind the land raider, the I Legion rhino hit the lower-level road with a percussive bang of thunder and all but spun end end for end as Amelia worked the brake, throwing up a cloud of smoke as she wheeled about to regain pursuit.

The terminator whirled and threw Britte, and the Space Wolf was forced to choose between her chainsword and her enemy, and so let go of the buzzing weapon to grab the land raider’s rear flap with both hands, kicking her feet to cling to the rear of the vehicle, inches away from the whirling treads. Above her, the Death Guard reached up the broken helm and pulled it off, revealing pinched, pale features and a mane of white hair. The veteran trooper stomped towards the Space Wolf and glared down wordlessly before raising her manreaper like a farmer about to cut down a particularly troublesome crop. Britte pulled herself close to the vehicle’s frame and heard the blade thrum as it passed centimeters from her body. The Death Guard caught the scythe as it swung up and redressed, and this time the wicked blade struck sparks from the Wolf’s backpack.

In the land raider’s wake, Amelia slammed a fist on the rhino’s dashboard. “Get out of there, you idiot, get out of there!” she screamed in rage.

On the third swing, Britte took the most dangerous risk in a life made part and parcel of such risks. As the manreaper’s blade came down, Britte swung and grabbed hold of the shaft. The Death Guard lurched, but Britte had gambled right - even for the grim efficiency of the XIV Legion, the symbolic harvesting weapon was too precious to simply let go for the sake of expedience. The terminator hesitated, and the Space Wolf took advantage of the split-second lance to pull herself up, scrambling back onto the land raider’s roof and belly-crawling between the hulk’s legs. Even as she did so she felt as much as heard a stomping boot and knew she had just narrowly avoided losing a hand, but the mighty terminator armor and the long-handed manreaper were not built for such a close-quarters fight.

Even so, it was anything but a fair fight, and it had to end quickly. As she came to her feet Britte drew her last weapon, a mere combat knife, and readied it as her opponent drew herself up and likewise readied the manreaper for another swing. In the heartbeat between motions, each had a chance to study the other - both of them brutes plucked from the most infamous death worlds of the Imperium, each of them a decorated veteran of the transhuman Legiones Astartes. Had they been switched at birth, would they yet have traversed the stars only to bring blades to bear against one another, but with their stances reversed?

There was no time for Britte to dwell on the existential thought, because behind the Death Guard came roaring a coal-black rhino that closed the gap with sudden speed. In the moments before the impact, Britte lunged - the Death Guard started her swing - but rather than go for the head with her knife, the only attack that would have made sense, the Space Wolf all but dropped back to all fours and slammed her armored weight into the terminator as the scythe cut through the air above her. A split-second later, the nose of Amelia’s rhino crashed into the rear of the land raider with a charge worthy of its name that made the back end of the larger vehicle jump into the air.

Between the collision and the impact of the Wolf, the Death Guard’s ponderous armor worked against her, and she had no choice but to rebalance with a step back. But she had moved up to the very edge of the land raider in her attempt to slay the Space Wolf, and though she had turned about, there she still stood. All she had needed was a single step back…but there was nowhere to step back to.

There was a flash of emotion - no more than a grimace - as the veteran toppled from the land raider and crashed to the road with an impact that broke the surface. A moment later, the left-side tracks of the rhino slammed into the prone terminator, and the boxy vehicle went up on its right side for a long moment before slamming back to earth. Maybe that had finished her, maybe not, but Britte put the Death Guard from her mind as she clambered back towards the front of the land raider.

As she did so, Amelia brought the rhino up and tried to sneak around the land raider’s left side, only for the bigger vehicle to suddenly jerk left. The rhino braked and narrowly avoided being slammed into the side of the road. Britte waved a hand at her compatriot’s vehicle in irritation. “Are ye daft? I’m up here!” she howled into the wind.

Her combat knife dove into the mechanism of the land raider’s top hatch and severed it, allowing the Wolf to tear it open with a screech of ceramite. A moment later she nearly lost her face as a white-hot plasma bolt erupted from the interior. “GET OFF MY MACHINE!” a hoarse voice roared from inside, and Britte briefly wondered how much the World Eater had been swearing over the past minutes. A lot, probably. Fortunately, she’d pulled the trigger a split-second too early, and Britte took advantage of her opponent’s lack of patience, diving headfirst down the hatch and hurrying to come to grips with the World Eater before her pistol could recharge. A crimson-eyed pitfighter with a set of implants arranged in the fashion of a crude scalplock didn’t hesitate to meet the Wolf with a scrabble of furious limbs, the plasma pistol thudding to the deck as she gouged at Britte’s eyes. The pair grappled, snarling as Britte tried to get the knife down into the World Eater’s open collar, but the traitor legionnaire was stronger than she was, and despite keeping one hand on the controls was able to force the Wolf’s wrist back.

Then the entire vehicle lurched to one side without warning as Amelia slammed the rhino into the side, and fortunately she’d picked right as the momentum of the crash threw Britte into her opponent and gave the the opening she need to slam her knife home. Arterial spray fountained forth and the Wolf kept her weapon pressed deep so that the fast-clotting Larraman cells could not undo her damage. “FOR THE ALLFATHER!” she roared.

“FUCK YOUR ALLFATHER!” the World Eater snarled, and spat a mixture of blood and Astartes-sharp saliva into her face. Britte felt her eyes burn, but she squeezed them shut and leaned into her foe, keeping her pinned against the dashboard and sawing furious with her knife. She felt the World Eater’s fingertips dig into her brow and cheek, the ceramite tearing furrows across her face as a parting gift, but as the seconds past the berseker’s strength faded and she slumped against the dashboard.

Cracking her eyes open, Britte managed to shove the corpse - all but headless thanks to her frenzied knife-work - from the driver’s seat to get at the bloodied control panel and hauled back on the throttle to bring the rampaging behemoth to a screeching halt with one final lurch. Only when it was finally stopped did she take the time to breathe out. She heard the roar of an engine nearby and knew that Amelia would be pulling up nearby, and so she slipped the knife back into its sheath and made for the land raider’s hatch.

There was a tiny crack as she put her foot down.

THE BLOODY FUCKING PLASMA PIST-

Britte burst from the hatch and dove to the ground, head covered as behind her the land raider’s interior erupted into flames, and the Space Wolf scrambled on all fours and eventually worked herself up to a sprint as the superheated plasma set off the engines and the back half of the XII Legion vehicle vanished in a heart-stopping blast. The Wolf actually felt the shockwave slam into her back and even an Astartes was all but plucked from her feet, slamming gracelessly into an ebon wall of ceramite. She clung to the rhino like a drowning woman to a dragonship, hauling herself up the side to drop herself through the hatch beside her partner. “Next time,” she said, scooping bloodied, singed hair out of her face, “I drive. You knife-fight.”

“Not in this lifetime,” the Ironwing replied, flipping the vehicle into reverse and spinning the control to slew it around once more, gunning the throttle to head back towards friendly territory.

#40k #Horus Heresy #asked and answered #kurze writes #Space Wolves #Dark Angels #World Eaters #Death Guard #female space marines #be warned there is a music link and it may be loud #rhino drifting #blood warning #Anonymous

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