The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  Dorich did not look up from his work. He was administering adrenal balances via his narthecium to a comatose brother Ulya, from the Second Tactical Squad. All four wounded Space Marines had entered a restive state thanks to their sus-an membrane, and were laid out on straining surgical gurneys, stripped of most of their armour. Their wounds were uniformly grievous – much of Ulya’s left side, including his face, had been scarred and melted by a gout of bio-plasma. Dorich had been stripping away the fused, dead flesh and applying synth-skin wraps, while at the same time trying to stabilise the Space Marine’s vitae signs before shock overcame him. The other three were all suffering from the vicious stab and slash wounds administered by tyranid talons. Two zart assistants, the sleeves of their white kaftans stained red, were overseeing the other three while Dorich sought to save Ulya.

  Joghaten said nothing as he watched the emchi work. It was Dorich who spoke first, eyes still on the synth-skin he was applying with short, expert strokes to Ulya’s flank.

  ‘The other three will live.’

  ‘Thanks to you, honoured emchi,’ Joghaten said, casting his eye over the bloody flesh of his brothers. Space Marines rarely reached the medicae table. Their transhuman physiology and mental strength ensured that any wound that was less than fatal could be shrugged off or treated without the need to leave the front line. Victory or death, there was rarely a line between the two.

  ‘Would that I could save them all, my khan,’ Dorich said quietly as he applied the last of the synth and injected a final shot into Ulya’s arm.

  ‘They fell in glory,’ Joghaten assured him. ‘This world has been saved because of them.’

  ‘You sound unsure. Rarely have I seen the Master of Blades heavy with mourning guilt following a great victory.’

  To many other members of the Tulwar Brotherhood Joghaten would have brushed aside such an accusation. Dorich, however, was far too venerable to be fooled by his khan. The Master of Blades nodded slowly.

  ‘I cannot truly explain it, emchi,’ he said. ‘Little since we made planetfall has been as I expected. I had… such dark premonitions. This world is not finished with us yet.’

  ‘Perhaps the Khagan has interceded for us,’ Dorich said, gaze lingering on Ulya’s terrible scars.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Joghaten said, accepting an incoming transmission feed in his earpiece. It was Qui’sin.

  ‘You must come to the centrum dominus, my khan,’ the Stormseer said. ‘There is something happening out on the plains. The augurs have detected it.’

  ‘Detected what?’ Joghaten said, bowing briefly to Dorich as he exited the ward.

  ‘The swarm has ceased to scatter. They… appear to be coordinating once more.’

  The Temple District, Heavenfall

  Lau Feng, steedmaster of the Fourth Brotherhood. It was un­mistakable, an almost exact likeness. The only difference was what looked like three las-burns in his breastplate, and the fact that he wasn’t wearing his helmet. A dark gash was clotting over his left brow, where none yet marked him. Feng only saw the vision for a split second, but he knew his memory did not lie. Like all Space Marines, he could replay visual snapshots with perfect clarity. It was absolutely the steedmaster of the Third Assault Bike Squadron that he had just seen. It was Lau Feng.

  But the figure had already gone. Feng’s double had passed into the darkness of the undercroft stairway without even looking at him. It was as though he hadn’t even existed, as though he was present and intruding on his own waking dream. His pistol, still raised and now aiming at thin air, started to shake. He lowered it slowly.

  ‘Steedmaster?’ Oda was standing before him, face unreadable behind his helmet’s visor. Feng blinked, unsure when his three brothers had returned from the cleared rooms.

  ‘Is something there?’ Jakar asked, following Feng’s gaze as it lingered on the undercroft grate. ‘Contacts?’

  Feng didn’t respond. He pushed past Oda and approached the entrance to the catacombs. The darkness beneath was even more absolute than the spore-choked shade that gathered under the cloisters. He activated his pauldron’s inbuilt stab lumen. The sharp beam of light struck an unyielding surface about a dozen paces down the crumbling undercroft staircase. It took him a second to realise the surface was a breastplate of white ceramite, embossed with a red-winged lightning bolt. Slowly, Feng drew the light upwards, up past a gorget, up towards the face of the figure blocking the passageway. Up to the ruined, acid-burned features of Eji.

  The ghost’s scream melded with Feng’s own.

  ‘Steedmaster!’

  It was Oda again. The White Scar was pinning Feng’s right vambrace in an iron grip, holding it away towards the fountain of Saint Paulus. Feng realised after a moment that it was because he’d been pointing his bolt pistol at Oda’s face. He was standing back before the doorway arch he had yet to enter, the undercroft stairway still a dozen paces away.

  ‘He is touched with the sight,’ Jakar said quietly. ‘I have seen it before. My father’s father was a weathermaker.’

  ‘So you often tell us, brother,’ Sauri said with false levity. Oda was still gripping Feng’s arm.

  ‘Release me,’ the steedmaster ordered. The larger Space Marine did so only after a second’s hesitation. Feng mag-locked his pistol.

  ‘We are reporting back to the khan,’ he said with a certainty he did not feel. ‘This sector is clear.’

  ‘The catacombs,’ Jakar began, then trailed off.

  ‘The sector is clear,’ Feng repeated. The other three White Scars exchanged looks, still unreadable behind their helms.

  ‘This place is cursed,’ Feng said, moving past them towards the devotarium’s exit.

  ‘Everywhere you go is cursed,’ Oda muttered.

  Feng didn’t respond.

  The centrum dominus, Heavenfall

  Fifteen minutes after first receiving his Stormseer’s message, Joghaten was standing beside Qui’sin at the edge of the centrum dominus’ primary holochart. Pinnacle Guard officers clustered across from them, the green light of the projections throwing their tired, worried features into ghoulish contrast. The khan ignored their low muttering. His eyes were on the projections being beamed from the chart, fed by the Pinnacle’s powerful augur arrays nestling on the mountain peak above.

  The swarms were gathering again. There was no other way to describe it. Red icons representing tyranid broods had scattered like a constellation across Darkand’s plain after the battle outside the Mountain Gate, their coordination gone with the loss of the hive mind. Now, however, it seemed something was once more orchestrating them. A vast alien mass was forming out on the plains with terrible rapidity, swelling even as the two Space Marines watched. The flocks of gargoyles that wheeled above the swarms were already turning towards the wall, darkening the holo-representation’s skies.

  ‘How is this possible?’ Joghaten asked eventually. ‘The hive fleet has been all but destroyed and their primary leader-beast is slain. None of the remaining synapse creatures should be strong enough to coordinate a swarm of such size, let alone over so wide an area.’

  ‘I do not understand it,’ Qui’sin admitted. ‘Nothing in the records speaks of an event such as this. Unless Hive Fleet Cica­trix has developed some horrific new evolutionary trait, our remaining operations here should have been simply cleaning up.’

  ‘They will be moving against us again in a matter of hours,’ Joghaten said grimly. ‘Whatever power now controls them, it will not cease until it has breached the city and consumed those within. Pinnacle Guard, stand your men to and prepare the wall once more.’

  ‘But the Furnace Season,’ one young officer complained, not daring to meet the Space Marine’s eyes. ‘It is already taking a toll. We cannot survive above the surface for more than another day in this heat. It is about to hit peak temperatures.’

  ‘We will hold your Wall together,’ Joghaten sa
id firmly. ‘Or the xenos will slaughter you and all your family once they breach your catacombs. You must choose where and how you meet your fate – cowering in the dark or defending your bastions like men. Is that clear?’

  There was a flurry of affirmatives, all edged with fear. The assembly broke up as the two Space Marines stepped away from the hololithic.

  ‘They are even more afraid than they were before,’ Qui’sin said quietly, watching as officers barked deployment orders to the centrum’s vox operators. ‘They thought themselves reprieved. Now they know what is coming.’

  ‘But just what is coming?’ Joghaten asked, eyes on the holo display as it flickered and dissolved. ‘This is… unprecedented.’

  ‘I feared it would happen,’ Qui’sin admitted, hand resting on the ulzi fate-pattern marking his staff’s haft. ‘The portents have been ill ever since we made our jump to the warp. Darkand is not finished with us.’

  ‘You have been reticent since we first engaged the xenos on the plains,’ Joghaten said. ‘What have you seen, weathermaker?’

  Qui’sin hesitated before answering.

  ‘There is a presence in the city. It seeks to mask its psychic potency, but I can feel it all the same. I fear it is… beneath us. In the catacombs.’

  Joghaten remembered the mawloc’s tunnel, and how it had led not to the plains, but to the city.

  ‘The squads deployed below ground have yet to find anything. If the xenos strike from beneath us as well as above, can we hold them?’

  ‘I cannot see,’ Qui’sin said. ‘But I fear we cannot weather this storm alone.’

  Joghaten marshalled his bondsmen and rode for the scriptorium. The roar of engines parted the wide-eyed nomads clogging the lower slopes, the sound echoing back from the crowded hab blocks. As they climbed higher the streets became deserted, bar the occasional stray pony or ux horn that had escaped the tribes below and now wandered the abandoned upper slopes. The citizens of Heavenfall were in their catacombs, while the steppe peoples were still packed into the lower slopes, either occupying the destitute hab blocks near the Founding Wall or filling the streets and flattened square blocks. Patrols of Pinnacle Guard, however, had stopped any moving higher than the Old Town, and the steepness of the streets themselves had been a sufficient deterrent to the heavily laden tribal masses.

  Joghaten led from the fore as they climbed higher, his hunt-brothers close behind. Those members of the brotherhood not investigating the temple district had been redeployed back to the wall, while their air elements were refuelling higher up the slope. Joghaten made it halfway towards the scriptorium headquarters, passing up the eerily deserted colonnades of the temple district, when the vox messages started coming through.

  They were picked up from the Pinnacle Guard’s comm-nets first, reports of gunfire in the lower districts, down among the nomad tribes. Then the messages started coming from the White Scars squads still stationed on the Founding Wall. Elements of Shontai’s assault squad started taking sniper fire from the nearby hab tops. A combat team drawn from the Third Tactical Squad and assisting the Pinnacle Guard with keeping the nomad tribes corralled came under fire from an unseen source. Further confirmation of what Qui’sin had warned them of. Joghaten routed a message to the entire brotherhood.

  ‘Be aware, hunt-brothers. Pinnacle Guard units could potentially bear xenos taint. There are snakes in the grass. Secure your objectives with all possible speed.’

  By the time the cult reveals its full military capabilities and begins to openly attack centres of Imperial authority, it is almost always far too late.

  – Inquisitor Tormund Kalo, Ordo Xenos,

  from his Selected Memoires, sixth edition

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE SECOND SWARM

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

  [TERRAN STANDARD]: 5 HOURS.

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

  The Founding Wall, Heavenfall

  Qui’sin joined the First Battalion of the Pinnacle Guard on the Founding Wall, two sections north of the Mountain Gate. Colonel Uygar was there, struggling in the furnace heat, still sporting the scars of his first encounter with a tyranid – red-stained bandages over his scalp that hid a vicious slashing wound. His expression was grim as he stood in the White Scar’s shadow, following his gaze out onto the plain.

  The swarm had returned. It stretched from horizon to horizon, a glittering, barbed black sea covered by a thunderhead of flying xenoforms, rolling like a rising tide over the patchwork yellows and browns of the steppe. The air between the xenos and the wall shimmered, distorted by the Furnace Season’s heat and the sheer amount of alien spores clogging Darkand’s atmosphere. Behind the swarm, on the plains where they had first made planetfall, dark clouds had gathered. The planet’s skies were being changed and deformed by the hyper-evolution of the hive mind. Even without its mother ships in orbit, the Great Devourer was still doing its work. Qui’sin still did not understand how such a thing was possible.

  ‘They are numerous,’ Uygar croaked, his throat parched and raw from xenos spores. It was a commendable understatement. The susurration of the approaching swarm carried through the heavy air to the wall. Qui’sin could feel the rockcrete vibrating underneath his boots.

  Against the great mass, what did they still have? The brotherhood was still combat effective, with just over seventy hunt-brothers able to wield a bolter, but their strength was split between the wall and those still combing through the catacombs. There was no possibility of them meeting the swarm on the plain again, and no clear leader-beast for them to strike at anyway. The Pinnacle Guard had supplied thousands to the wall’s parapets, but from what vox traffic Qui’sin intercepted it seemed they were suffering command and control issues. Units had gone dark on the comm-net or were not reporting to their designated positions, and munitions were still being transported down the slope-streets to the wall’s rear armouries. No one had foreseen the tyranids’ return.

  ‘Your men are fully equipped?’ Qui’sin asked Uygar, forcing himself to turn his gaze away from the dark majesty of the incoming swarm and meet the terrified eyes of Darkand’s defenders, the thousands of Pinnacle Guardsmen atop the wall.

  ‘We have brought forward all our reserve stockpiles,’ Uygar said. ‘Brigade command expects it to last until tomorrow.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then we will use our bayonets, great hetman.’

  Qui’sin looked back at the swarm, his heart heavy. Too often the duties of the Adeptus Astartes called upon them to witness good men die badly. For a warrior genetically formed to defend mankind’s empire across the stars, it was a cruel irony that he so often had to witness the best of humanity perishing.

  ‘Tell your men to conserve ammunition as best they can,’ he instructed. The colonel’s affirmative seemed distant as the Stormseer began to focus his mind. He was tired, mentally fatigued not only by the previous fighting but by the ever-present scratching of the hive mind, and the strain of not fully understanding what was coming for them. They had won. They had killed the leader-beasts. So how could the swarm be so coordinated?

  For a moment, he recalled the aeldari witch and her warnings. He had almost told Joghaten about her visit in the centrum dominus. Now that hope had begun to gutter out, the temptation of seeking the aliens’ help was growing stronger. But what had such creatures ever offered mankind besides lies and deceit? The eldar were more likely to worsen their situation than save them.

  The Stormseer forced such troubles from his mind, seeking his centre. More so than ever before, his abilities were needed, not just by the brotherhood now taking up positions along the wall, but by the human soldiers who stood by them. Repel the swarm one more time and it may disintegrate, or they might be able to find the root of its strength. It was their only hope.

  Qui’sin raised his hand and unhooded Kemich, the
psyber-hawk taking flight with a cry. Either side of him the Pinnacle Guardsmen began clicking home power packs, while the auto-loaders and mount rotations of the heavy weapons batteries built into the bastions clattered. The swarm was about to enter maximum range.

  ‘All Wall sections,’ crackled Joghaten’s voice over the vox. ‘Fire at will.’

  The catacombs, Heavenfall

  Underground, vox distortion was chopping the net. Feng and his three brothers had moved down into the catacombs east of the devotarium, seeking traces they had picked up on the auspex. Feng led them in silence. He had barely spoken a word since leaving the devotarium’s quadrangle. The quiet was at odds with his thoughts. He had seen himself, of that he had no doubt. Not a revenant, but real, tangible, present. How could it be possible?

  He forced himself to focus. From what little they could pick up, it sounded as though the swarm had re-engaged the defences of the Founding Wall. Feng yearned to be on the front line, but Joghaten’s orders had been clear – they couldn’t afford to let up on the hunt for whatever was festering beneath Heavenfall. Defeating the swarm attacking from the plains would count for nothing if the city was breached from below.

  He concentrated on the winding rock tunnel ahead. Heavenfall was riddled with catacombs. Most were used for storage or to shelter the slope-city’s citizens during the Furnace Season, though beneath temple district there was also numerous crypts, undercrofts and ossuary vaults. It was one such catacomb that the squad was moving through now, its walls lined with heavy, upright stone caskets containing the remains of long-dead dignitaries from the government district. The cobwebbed lumen orbs in this section of tunnel had failed, and the White Scars had fallen back on their auto-senses to pierce the dusty darkness.

  ‘Lower slope contacts–’ a panicked voice on one of the ­Pinnacle Guard frequencies clicked, before the signal was lost again; ‘–every­where, we need–’