The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  The tyranid warriors were too broad for any more than one at a time to pass down the gorge towards Feng. The first came forward with a step that was altogether more deliberate and measured than the stampeding of its underlings, a forked tongue flicking out to taste the dry air, like a gaja lizard on distant Chogoris. The horma­gaunts and termagants scraped their chitin against the canyon’s flanks in their efforts to make way, nodding their crested heads at the warrior’s passing like beasts acknowledging the presence of a pack alpha. Feng spread his arms, still smiling, alien viscera dripping slowly from his body.

  There was a clatter off to his right. More stones falling from the cliff face. Feng looked up. His smile faded. His hunt-brothers had gone from the top of the canyon’s right-hand side. It could not be. They had come here for him. He was ready. His time had come. At least, he was going to rejoin them and their unity would again be complete. They could not leave him, not again, not now.

  The stones falling from the gorge’s flanks became rocks, harder and heavier. A gaunt shrieked as it was crushed, its back snapped by the boulder dislodged from the canyon’s side. It was joined by another, and then another. The clatter rose to a din, and the truth became undeniable – the cliff face in front and to Feng’s right was collapsing.

  The tyranids realised the danger they were in too late. The swarm’s unified consciousness was focused entirely on Feng. He had made everything difficult, but they were being drawn on, drawn to the prey like bloodtails to fresh meat. Overcoming this one last obstacle meant everything. And because of that the swarm found itself trapped.

  After the initial dislocation, the collapse occurred with terrifying rapidity. A great chunk of stone near the top of the cliff, close to where Feng’s brothers had been, crumbled and came away, ricocheting down the rock face with earth-shattering force. It slammed into a clutch of gaunts close to Feng, flattening them without ceremony and sending a hail of rock fragments, grit and dust slamming along the canyon’s bottom. Even with his armour locked and auto-stabilisers activated, Feng was knocked back momentarily onto one knee.

  Now an unsupported overhang, the top section of the canyon, swiftly followed. It dragged the whole cliff down with it, a thunderous cascade that tumbled down upon the shrieking tyranids. The warriors went with the rest, lost entirely to the freak avalanche. Feng took a pace back as rocks the size of his clenched fist battered and scored his armour. Alarm systems pinged as his auto-senses registered multiple impacts and damage points – barely an inch of the front of his white battleplate wasn’t scarred or dented.

  Finally, the collapsed stone settled. The last long echoes of the rockslide clapped away up the gorge, leaving behind only the occasional rattle of loose fragments. The dust began to clear. Feng’s optics pierced the worst of it, revealing the carnage wreaked by the collapse. The swarm was gone, crushed and buried, no trace of it remaining amidst the jagged mound of yellow stone the northern half of the canyon had become. The sudden lack of motion, of movement, of life where once there had been so much of it was unnerving.

  He looked up at what had been the right-hand side of the canyon, now reduced to a sagging ramp of rubble. Its top was bare, the spore-choked skies visible beyond. There was no sign of his dead brothers.

  He stood for long minutes, feeling his secondary heart slow and settle, sensing the combat stimms and adrenaline easing from his battle-fired veins and muscles. It was the vox that brought him back. It clicked in his ear, demanding his attention. The icon on his visor told him it was Wind Tamer.

  ‘Feng,’ he said, opening the link.

  ‘Honoured türüch, we are inbound. What is your status?’

  ‘Secure,’ Feng said, looking once more at the carpet of shattered stone that had once been the canyon floor. ‘By the Khagan’s will, the xenos are no more.’

  ‘We are passing a column of Darkand tribespeople. It appears they are under attack. Will your status allow us to divert?’

  ‘The column is under attack?’ Feng demanded. ‘From what?’

  ‘A single xenoform. The scans are reading it as a lictor. If we don’t intercede immediately it will slaughter the entire tribe.’

  ‘Do it,’ Feng said. He had already slung his guan dao and was running, back towards where his bike waited, the dead bodies of the Beged warriors and the tyranids they’d taken with them heaped around it.

  It wasn’t the lictor’s severed head mounted on his bike that had first drawn the swarm. There had been a second lictor, a second murderous xenos chameleon in the mycetic spore he had first seen in the Beged encampment. He had believed the threat ended. He’d been wrong.

  The roar of his bike filled the broken canyon as Lau Feng raced east.

  Yenneth watched the battered and bloodied mon-keigh warrior depart. She stood near the edge of the canyon’s southern cliff face, the steppe wind twitching at her blue-and-yellow robes and soul charms, shielded from the senses by an invisible sphere of deflective psychic energy. Beneath her, scattered among the rocks trailing along the cliff’s edge, were Pathfinder Roneth’s outcasts. The rangers preferred their chameleon cloaks to Yenneth’s seer spells, their shrouded forms blending seamlessly into the dusty yellow stone around them.

  ‘Was that necessary, honoured farseer?’ Roneth asked over the link. Few aeldari would have addressed a member of Iyanden’s seer council so brusquely, but the rangers answered to no one, least of all Roneth. He had been walking the path of the outcast for at least as long as Yenneth had trod that of the seer.

  ‘It was,’ she answered. ‘The thread of that mon-keigh was fixed in place. If it were snapped, our task here would become almost impossible.’

  ‘Perhaps that would be better, for us all.’

  ‘Perhaps, pathfinder, but perhaps not. There are few absolutes in the universe. I deal only with varying degrees of likelihood. And upon those degrees, the mon-keigh must live at least a while longer.’

  Roneth did not reply. Yenneth surveyed her handiwork – the shattered gorge beneath. She had observed the mon-keigh warriors from the moment they had passed into the canyon. Their stand had been undertaken with their usual attributes, a savagery that was disgusting yet effective. Not effective enough, however, to see the group’s leader survive until help arrived. The eldar farseer had been forced to intervene, summoning her eldritch strength and using it to prise a great boulder away from the canyon’s flank. The ensuing rockslide had pounded the tyranid swarm into oblivion. It had taken a great deal of focus and control to ensure the collapse did not spread, or catch the lone mon-keigh up in its crushing embrace.

  Now he was safe, returning to the ones he had been trying to protect, not realising they were already dead. Yenneth’s intervention would be enough, for now. She still had to weave together the threads representing her actions with those of the mon-keigh. Time, such as it was, had almost run out. A different, more direct approach was necessary.

  ‘Back to the portal,’ the farseer ordered. The rangers responded without question, five jagged boulders suddenly transforming into lean, patchwork-clad figures as they threw back their capes and rose. Roneth and his outcasts closed around Yenneth as she retreated towards the shimmering patch of light, barely discernible amidst an outcrop of boulders a hundred yards back from the canyon’s edge.

  If the mon-keigh seer would not countenance an alliance, perhaps their blade-master would.

  The aeldari stepped through the patch of haze and, like a mirage losing its grip on consciousness, they flickered from existence. The shimmer was gone, leaving behind only the steppe wind sighing in the long grass.

  Trying to fight them is like counting the grains of sand on the shore. Better you burn your own homestead, your own city, your own world and everyone you know, than allow yourselves to be consumed.

  – Inquisitor Sylas Vult,

  Ordo Xenos, just prior to the

  Entharian Exterminatus

  Chapter
Nine

  THE GREAT DEVOURER

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

  [TERRAN STANDARD]: 29 HOURS.

  TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

  East of Juben’s Gorge, Darkand

  He was too late to save the Beged.

  Lau Feng knelt beside the lictor’s corpse. There wasn’t a great deal of it remaining. Wind Tamer had riddled it with heavy bolter rounds, blasting away limbs and gristly pieces of torso. The split-open carcass was still smoking. Feng looked into its eyes. They were black, glassy, unreal-looking. Even in life, they had no soul. Without the hive mind, they were nothing.

  The White Scar stood slowly, servos in his armour clicking. The creature lay at the heart of a jagged pattern of death it had woven about itself. The remains of the Beged tribe stretched out around him, massacred. With their most experienced warriors fighting and dying alongside Feng in the canyon, there had been none capable of stopping the xenos assassin when it had struck.

  There were bloodflies buzzing around the slaughtered tribesfolk lying nearby, but no insect or vermin would touch the tyranid’s corpse. It lay undefiled, alien in every sense of the word. It had killed about half of the tribe before Wind Tamer had ended its rampage; not all the Beged had been slaughtered – many had scattered, terrified of the creature that suddenly appeared in their midst. They were as good as dead though, spread out and lost across the grasslands. The xenos would find and tear them apart one by one.

  ‘Brother türüch,’ said a voice, starting Feng from his dark thoughts. Wind Tamer’s gunner, Timchet, had approached him without his knowledge. The Land Speeder was idle a few dozen paces from the body-littered track, awaiting fresh orders.

  ‘You are unharmed, brother?’ Timchet went on. The gunner would know from his own auto-sense scans that very little of the blood on Feng’s armour was his own, but he clearly wished for a reason to address the squad leader.

  ‘I am,’ Feng said, looking back at the lictor’s remains.

  ‘The entire brotherhood is assembling before the Founding Wall,’ Timchet went on. ‘Wind Tamer could escort you, if you wish.’

  ‘No,’ Feng said. ‘I will make my own way.’

  Timchet lingered for a moment longer before turning and walking back to his Land Speeder. The skimmer departed with a screech of turbofans, the steppe grass rippling in its wake. Silence descended after it had gone, Feng’s only companion the whisper of the wind. And the four corpses looking at him.

  He glanced up to the sky. It was not long after noon, and yet the sun’s light was weak, diluted by the alien filth choking Darkand’s atmosphere. The hive fleet’s grip on the stricken world was tightening. Eventually, the White Scar turned and mounted his bike.

  There was another wave coming.

  The Mountain Gate, Heavenfall

  The Great Devourer had arrived in full. The khan of the Fourth Brotherhood watched as Darkand’s skies convulsed. They were clear and open no more – the heavens had been infested, a thousand alien bio-ships occupying upper orbit like fleshy growths. The flanks of the hideous xenos organisms rippled and pulsed with peristaltic motion as they spat wave after wave of mycetic spores down through the upper atmosphere. Cicatrix was seeding Darkand, ripening it for annihilation.

  Joghaten saw the second wave filling the skies from the primary gatehouse of the Founding Wall. Below him stretched a river of human misery and fear – the tribes of Darkand, returning to Heaven­fall. Over a dozen had arrived in the last hour alone, choking the routes into the slope-city and flooding its gateways. The Pinnacle Guard had been deployed in strength both inside and just beyond the wall, their orders to keep the columns moving and stop them turning against one another in fear and anger. Behind, up the tower slope, the lower streets of the city were filling with a swelling tide of men, women and children, along with their herds. Few of the beasts brought by the tribes could be accommodated within the wall – under the eyes of Pinnacle Guard squads, herds of yats and ux were released. There wasn’t even time to cull them, they were simply set loose on the steppe. Even the tribe’s precious horses weren’t all spared. There had been arguments and threats of violence from the tribes, but the presence of the White Scars, scattered among the slowly converging columns, ensured that eventually the tribespeople complied. Joghaten knew that the nomadic peoples of Darkand would suffer many years of famine and poverty because of what was happening today.

  Assuming any of them survived.

  ‘Khan-commander, we are in position,’ voxed Subodak, commander of one of the brotherhood’s two Devastator squads. Joghaten acknowledged with a blink-click of his visor display. A few hundred yards from the base of the wall’s outer las bastions, the Fourth Brotherhood was assembling. The two Devastator squads had established a firebase on a low rise overlooking the main route to the gatehouse, white-plated Rhinos idling in the shadow of the hill’s reverse slope. The tactical squads not seconded to Qui’sin’s protection in the city had set up in support, guarding the base of the rise. To their right flank, close to the road and the column of tribespeople flooding it, the brotherhood’s bike squadrons were still drawing up. Lau Feng had only just rejoined his hunt-brothers. The pilots of the Land Speeder Wind Tamer had reported that the haunted türüch had been trying to protect one of the farther-out tribal convoys. He had been unsuccessful, it seemed, and his delay had left his squadron relying on Chokda’s leadership during the opening skirmishes. Joghaten would need to speak with him personally again, when time allowed.

  The shriek of engines momentarily engulfed the khan as Lord of the Sky roared overhead, kicking a swirl of dust from the parapets of the Mountain Gate and tugging at his lar’ix furs. The Stormhawk banked north beyond the wall, running parallel to it, its snub-nosed shadow darting along the plain beneath. Bar the Thunderhawks that had remained with the fleet, most of the brotherhood’s air power was aloft, watching over the last of the tribal columns straggling in from the steppes. Not all the nomads would make it – out beyond the horizon a storm was building.

  From his vantage point atop the gate Joghaten could see black clouds coalescing, shot through with occasional bolts of purple lightning. The air was heavier than ever with xenos spores – the Pinnacle Guard had donned their respirators, and the tribes­people were already suffering from raw eyes, red skin and breathing difficulties. The tyranids were polluting Darkand, but it was as nothing to the swarm seedings currently happening across the farthest reaches of the plains.

  Joghaten had a direct link to the Darkand augur arrays, sited high up on the slope-city’s flanks. They were detecting tens of thousands of large orbital entries to the west, north and south, bombarding the open steppe just beyond the horizon. The khan already knew what such readings meant – the primary invasion was underway. The two swarms already picked off by the Fourth Brotherhood had been small-scale scouting operations, designed to ascertain the level of resistance and confirm the findings of the vanguard organisms. The true swarms, many thousands of times larger, were now landing, a deluge of mycetic spores disgorging wave after wave of chittering weapon-organisms and their larger leader-beasts. They would be moving on the Founding Wall in a matter of hours.

  Joghaten’s visor pinged. After over twenty minutes, his uplink had finally established a connection with the Pride of Chogoris. He opened the channel and was greeted by Tzu Shen.

  ‘It does me well to hear you again, voyagemaster,’ the khan said, eyes still on the distant thunderhead that stained the horizon from end to end.

  ‘And I you, earth-brother,’ Shen responded, voice chopped and distorted. ‘We are holding position along the system’s coreward edge. The xenos have committed wholly to the planetary invasion, they haven’t troubled us yet. How do things fair dirtside?’

  ‘As well as can be expected. We are still relocating the tribesfolk. Those that haven’t joined us by now are lost. The Devourer has begun
its primary planetfall.’

  ‘Then it is time for the next phase?’

  ‘Yes, voyagemaster. Let us begin.’

  I don’t know how they carried on. Ten thousand to one, it must have been. I’m not ashamed to tell you the truth, any of us would have just laid down our lasrifles and let them tear us apart. But they’re not like us. They’re nothing like us.

  – Corporal Torchim Drang,

  401st Battalion, Darkand

  Planetary Defence Force

  Chapter Ten

  THE BATTLE OF THE FOUNDING WALL

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

  [TERRAN STANDARD]: 15 HOURS.

  TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

  Outside the Founding Wall, Heavenfall

  The tyranids came with the dawn. The night had been a dark one, Darkand’s three moons obscured by the hive fleet’s presence. The last of the surviving tribes had straggled in, terrified and exhausted. The Pinnacle Guard had finished its deployments along the wall. There had been no word from Commander Harren. The entire city was tense, poised on the edge of anarchy.

  Joghaten had put it all to the back of his mind and focused on the specifics of the coming battle. The plan he had discussed with his squad leaders was an old Chogorian steppe ploy, as simple as it was effective. It was the khan alakh, the king killer, and Joghaten knew that it was their only chance of survival, let alone victory.

  The brotherhood’s defence was based around the dismounted Devastator and tactical squads, deployed on their shallow rise just outside the Founding Wall’s Mountain Gate. They were supported by the brotherhood’s armour – three Predators, a Vindicator, two Land Raiders and a Whirlwind – and by the two jump pack-equipped assault squads stationed on the wall’s forward bastions. The bikes and Land Speeders had been grouped on the right flank, along with Joghaten’s own bondsmen. It was not a conventional defensive formation, but the White Scars were rarely known for either convention or defence, especially when it came to the Master of Blades.