Hrafnkel

The Hrafnkel was a highly modified Gloriana-class Battleship that served as the flagship of Leman Russ, the Primarch of the Space Wolves Legion during the Great Crusade in the late 30th and early 31st Millennia. This flagship led the flotilla of the Space Wolves warships which comprised the VI Legion's unnamed Imperial Expeditionary Fleet. Ancient texts from embedded Imperial Remembrancers describe the scale of the Hrafnkel as incredible. Even the smaller escorts and fleet tenders were blunt-nosed slabs like slices of mountain cliff. The principal warships were shockingly vast. The surface detail of their flanks took forever to flash past the ports as the pinnace flitted between them. But the Hrafnkel was a slate-grey monster with a ploughshare prow. This was the apex predator, the alpha male of the Space Wolves fleet.

The Hrafnkel is known to have transported the Wolf King as he led the vast Imperial flotilla during the Scouring of Prospero, the sanctioned Imperial military reprisal against the Thousand Sons Legions' homeworld of Prospero at the start of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. This action was carried out by the Space Wolves Legion and elements of the Legio Custodes and the Sisters of Silence as a punishment for the Thousand Sons' flagrant violation of the Emperor of Mankind's edicts against the use of psychic powers and sorcery made at the Council of Nikaea.

Interior
The deck spaces of the flagship, vast as cityscapes, constantly heaved with activity. Hundreds of thousands of ratings, thralls and Servitors worked to status-sweep the colossal ship from its last translation and prep it for the next immaterial transfer. Deck plates and interior struts were constantly examined and reinforced. Powerlines were tested. In some stretches of companionway, inspection plates would be lifted in forty- or fifty- metre long trenches. In the lofty arming chambers, cathedrals of war, automated hoists raised payloads of void munitions from the armoured magazines to delivery points where gunnery trains coiled like sea-orms, waiting to thread the service arteries of the ship and deliver the titanic warheads to the Hrafnkel's batteries. Regiments of men, dwarfed by the arched vaults, would unpack weapons and lay them out in rows along the deck to be stripped and hand-checked before distribution to the troop contingents. The moaning shiver of the ship's vast engines would rise and fall, swelling and dying away, making the intensity of the deck lights rise and fall as its powerful warp drive was tested.

Command Bridge
The command bridge was a multi-levelled vault that reminded visitors of a palace throne room. Despite its sheer size, the presence of Leman Russ dominated the command bridge. Officers and servitors attended control positions wrought from brass and gold which encircled the great dome of the bridge and plugged into the bulkhead walls with fat braids of gilded cables, circuits and tubes. These extending fans of tubework made the consoles resemble giant pipe organs. To reinforce the mental image, most control positions had triple or quadruple sets of keyboards. The keys were made of bone, inlaid with instructional marks. Use and age had yellowed some. They looked like the grin of old teeth. They looked like the keys of a battered clavier.

Hololithic screens, many projected from overhead or underdeck emitters, turned the central part of the command area into a flickering picture gallery. The crew moved among the images, surrounding some for study, adjusting the data flow of others with finger touches of their reactive gloves. Some images were large, others small, or arranged in stacked series that could be flipped through with a deft gesture. A junior officer would often slide a luminous rectangular map of fleet dispersal through the air for his superior's attention. Some of the slightly incandescent images would show topographical maps, contour overlays, positional guides or course computations. Others scrolled with constant feeds of written data, or showed, in small frames, real-time pict-links to the talking heads of other ship commanders as they reported in.

The air was filled with the constant mechanical chatter of machinery, the brittle stenographic clack of keys, the crackle of voxed voice messages or Mechanicum vocalisers, the drone of background chatter. Command officers with cuffs and high collars stiff with gold braid would rasp orders into vox-mics that were attached to the consoles by flex leads. Cherubs, giggling at private jokes, would buzz through the bridge hustle, carrying messages and communiqué pouches. Insectoid remotes, as perfect and intricate as dragonflies, kept obedient station in the air at the shoulders of their Mechanicum masters, their wings droning in hover-mode at a disturbingly low vibrational threshold.

In the centre of the command bridge was a massive brass and silver armature, an instrument designed for complex celestial display and calculation. It resembled an orrery with its skeletal metal hemispheres and its surrounding discs and measuring orbits, but it was ten metres in diameter and grew out of the desk grille on a stand as thick as a tree trunk. Attendants manned small lectern consoles around it, tapping out small adjustments that caused the main frame of it to turn, realign and spin in subtle measures. The hemispheric theatre of the planetarium was often used to display a large-scale hololithic image of a planet. The glowing topographical light map, three dimensional and rotating in an authentic orbital spin showed day and night side and was contained inside the moving, spherical cage of the brass instrument. Smaller side projections hung in the air, enlarging particular surface details, and various declinations, aspectarians, and astronomical ephemerides. As an indivual got closer, they would see that the vast image was actually a mosaic compiled from thousands of separate detailed pict scans, a work composition that suggested a vast effort of careful and systematic intelligence gathering.