The Last Hunt
Page 24
Feng cursed, wishing he could pick up a link to the rest of the brotherhood. It appeared fighting was breaking out in the streets and squares near the Founding Wall. He pushed back his desire to know more about what was happening on the surface. His thoughts were still haunted, memory fixed on the image of his own revenant.
Darkand was cursed, and a part of him knew he would never leave it.
Oda was on point, but at an intersection Feng took over the lead. His brothers were no longer willing to follow him, he was sure. They knew how much the loss of his old squad still plagued him. They knew he was only a remnant of his former self, shattered pieces placed back together but never fixed. They knew he saw things that were not really there.
The thought had barely entered his mind when he became aware of a presence to his left, looming between two of the upright stone sarcophaguses. It showed up on his visor’s infrared display as a patch of distortion, rather than a direct contact. He turned sharply, cancelling the visor reading with a blink and activating his pauldron’s stab lumen.
The beam of light picked out broken white ceramite. This time, Feng did not hesitate. With a roar he swung his fist at Eji’s horrific, acid-burned face, transhuman strength driven on by the need to end the nightmare he had slipped into. But there was nothing there. Feng’s gauntlet met the stone of the wall, and carried on. There was a shuddering crunch as the steedmaster punched through the tunnel side, the stone façade giving way before him.
The lumen picked out what lay beyond – a secondary tunnel, this one lower and more natural, its rocky sides craggy and scummed a rust-red with lichens and fronds. Feng stared for a moment, recalling the auspex mapping of the lower levels. This tunnel was undocumented, and it ran parallel with the one they were currently following.
‘Markings on the walls,’ Oda said from over Feng’s shoulder, painting them up on the squad’s connected visor display. Feng saw that he was right – there were scrapes around the shoulder height of a man all along the tunnel, where the lichen had been dragged free and the rock itself scarred. Whatever had caused the markings had left behind no other trace.
Feng tried the vox, but the connection was gone. Someone more prudent would likely have withdrawn to the surface and reported what they had found. But Feng, like all White Scars, was a hunter first and last.
‘Jakar, cover the rear,’ he ordered, moving into the secondary tunnel with his bolt pistol raised.
After a moment’s hesitation, his hunt-brothers followed.
The Chamber of Seers,
Iyanden Craftworld
With a harsh clatter, the seeing stones fell to the floor of the arching wraithbone chamber, scattering across its gleaming expanse.
Yenneth did not remember crying out, but she must have done – Arianna had entered at the sound. The first she knew of the warlock’s presence was her hand, helping her back into a sitting position. The farseer blinked, struggling to process past and present realities as they were unmade around her, unravelling like a thread being dragged by a spindle. A shudder ran through her body, and she realised she was clutching her spirit stone so hard the edges of the wraithbone filigree that decorated it were cutting into her slender fingers.
Arianna said nothing, but Yenneth could sense her questions. She shook her head, taking a breath and letting the present settle into being.
‘I was too late,’ she said. ‘I have done everything within my power to avoid this moment, but it is upon us regardless. I must go back to the mon-keigh city and set in train the final events. You must awake your cohorts, dear Arianna, and return to the City of Pillars.’
‘The dead do not return to us lightly,’ Arianna said. ‘Not so soon after being put to rest once more.’ Yenneth did not look at the warlock, but gestured instead at the stones scattered across the floor.
‘Tell me what you see, sister.’
Arianna took in the supposedly random fall of the stones, and realised in a heartbeat what they showed.
‘The runes of past and future, looping to form the whole.’
‘Past and future, yes,’ Yenneth agreed. ‘But where is the present? Nothing lies between the two. They lead back and consume one another.’
‘Then it is true,’ Arianna said, bowing her head. ‘I will ready our fallen brothers and sisters. The wraith hosts of Iyanden will march once more.’
The upper catacombs, Heavenfall
Fourth Tactical Squad took the upper slope catacombs. Timchet was with them. They’d lost their heavy weapons specialist, Hunt-Brother Oyunchimeg, in the first clash with the tyranids in the Hills of the Broken Bones. Timchet and his heavy bolter, salvaged from Wind Tamer, was Fourth Squad’s replacement.
Timchet had not interacted with the Tactical Marines since joining them in the troop compartment of their Rhino, responding to squad leader commands only. In truth, none of the White Scars were in the mood for exuberant back and forth – they had all lost good hunt-brothers, and the joy of a battle well fought had evaporated when it became apparent that there was another xenos attack being mounted against the wall, and possibly more already below them. The squad had been deployed high up the slope and split into two four-man combat teams, to better explore the catacombs there. These were expected to be occupied by civilians, but a sweep was necessary – contact had been lost with the evacuees within, and it was impossible to be sure that was simply the effect of Darkand’s yellow rock and soil.
Timchet was with the second combat team as it secured a registration hall and took a grav-lift down to the entrance of the nearest catacomb section. These ones, higher up on the mountainside, were the preserve of Heavenfall’s wealthier citizens. While not quite the private compartments enjoyed by those employed in the government district, the briefing dockets Timchet had memorised during the ride up the mountainside had described them as more spacious and better ventilated.
The entranceway to this particular section had been sealed off, but the leader of the combat team, a silver-haired hunt-brother named Uygai, possessed the access code.
‘Still no contact from within,’ he warned as the hatch’s locking bars disengaged automatically. ‘Be wary, brothers.’
The hatch rolled open and revealed what lay beyond – a cavernous space lit by wired lumen strips, the light illuminating ranked bunks and storage lockers.
‘Janggi, on point,’ Uygai voxed. The White Scars breached in silence, Timchet taking up the rear. Janggi’s curse told him something was wrong even before his auto-senses registered the stench of opened bodies.
Most of the people sheltered in this section of the catacombs had been wealthier than most Darkanders – artisans, educators, government district administrative staff and the families of off-worlder Imperial dignitaries or merchant and freighter captains. They had all died together though, massacred like a trapped herd of yats towards the far end of the chamber. The bunk beds and storage cabinets ranking the subterranean space were soaked with blood.
‘The entrance was sealed,’ Janggi confirmed. ‘And the grav-lift had not logged any usage since it brought the last relocation group down.’
‘Something was already down here with them,’ Timchet said quietly. ‘Perhaps it was even already among them.’ He’d barely spoken before movement at the far end of the cavern flickered across the squad’s linked auto-senses. The lumens towards the rear of the bloody chamber had failed, but the darkness could not fully hide what was lurking there.
‘Contact,’ Janggi managed to vox, before an alien shriek rent the air.
The Mountain Gate, Heavenfall
The Master of Blades had taken up a position on the Mountain Gate. Behind him Heavenfall and the Slope Road stretched, a mountain-city under siege. Ahead, the swarm engulfed all.
The Founding Wall’s defences had opened fire. Bastion-mounted artillery lobbed high explosives into the oncoming masses, churning up clouds blossoming with burning and
torn xenos meat. Heavy bolters, autocannons and missile launchers were deployed, first tearing into the gargoyles sweeping down from above, then blasting gaps in the broods beneath, holes that were instantly filled. The thudding of flak turrets added to the barrage as the wall’s inbuilt, servitor-manned air defences kept the flying swarms at bay. All the while the khan was scanning the broods beneath for whatever leader-beast was controlling it. There were still synapse creatures – warriors, zoanthropes, even lesser tyrants – but nothing that seemed to be coordinating so vast a brood. The absence of a leader made striking a swift, decisive blow impossible. Such troubles enraged Joghaten’s Chogorian sensibilities.
The snap-crack of thousands of lasguns opening fire simultaneously was filtered out by the khan’s Lyman’s ear. The rapidly narrowing space between the swarm’s leading edge and the foot of the Founding Wall became brilliantly lacerated by thousands of points of light as the Pinnacle Guard poured small-arms fire into the swarm. For a moment the swiftest creatures in the alien horde, the hormagaunts and sinuous raveners, faltered.
‘Maintain fire on the leading edge,’ Joghaten instructed, his orders routed through the Pinnacle Guard’s comms systems.
There was a whirr beside him as the fixed-defence Hydra AA gun sited on top of the Mountain Gate traversed, its quad cannons opening up with air-shuddering thuds. Seconds later bisected alien remains were tumbling down around the khan. He looked up as sizzling xenos ichor splattered his armour. The brotherhood’s air support had engaged with the flocks of gargoyles that had broken through the initial salvoes of fire from the wall, combining with Heavenfall’s flak defences to paint the sky with metal and death. Those Pinnacle Guardsmen stationed to the rear of the wall’s parapets were shooting up into the sections of flock that managed to wheel below the flak barrage, searing the sky with bolts of red las.
It was carnage but, for a moment, it looked as though the swarm was stalling.
Then the tyranids unleashed firepower of their own. Bio-plasma and gouts of acid struck the wall’s parapets, sending groups of Pinnacle Guardsmen reeling back screaming as they clutched burning or dissolving flesh. Borer beetles, launched by the gargoyles swooping above, chewed through flak and flesh in an indiscriminate feeding frenzy, while venom-coated spines riddled rockcrete and dropped men who clawed at pierced faces, shoulders and backs.
The White Scars steadied the line. These were not the open plains, and their steeds were not beneath them, but they were Space Marines, the Emperor’s chosen, as immovable in defence as they were implacable in attack. Spread thin along the Founding Wall, they stood tall amidst the nightmarish alien barrage, cutting down the oncoming tide with disciplined bursts of bolter fire and directing the shots of those nearest to them.
The swarm shuddered forward then stalled once more, barely a hundred yards from the wall. Joghaten, still standing unmoving atop the Mountain Gate, looked from left to right and knew hope. If anything could stop this tide of ravenous alien filth, it was the Tulwar Brotherhood.
Then the xenos struck back once more. Too late, Joghaten realised the tide truly had turned.
The catacombs, Heavenfall
Movement through the secondary tunnel was difficult. Feng was forced to advance almost side on, power armour grinding against the ragged edges of the stone passage. The scrape markings were higher up than the old ones that seemed to mark the tunnel for its entire length. What had made them remained a mystery, as did their location or where they were headed. The auspex display was offline, blank and useless, and all communications systems were being blocked by the weight of stone and earth above. All Feng was certain of was that the passage was sloping gradually downwards. They were descending into Darkand’s depths.
After about fifteen minutes the tunnel started to widen once more. Feng’s auto-senses detected a scent on the humid subterranean air – sickly, alien. He didn’t need to open his visor to know that the tunnel was thick with the stench of xenos.
‘Light ahead,’ he voxed. ‘Possible contacts.’
They had reached the end of the tunnel. Feng found himself emerging into an uneven cavern, its ceiling a thicket of jagged stalactites. Other tunnels, similar to the one he had entered through, pierced the cavern’s walls. The light was dim, cast by a few lumen lanterns scattered across the more even parts of the floor. Feng took in the surroundings in a second – the rough stone, a littering of human remains – before focusing on those still living, occupying the centre of the room.
There were half a dozen of them. One, a prisoner, had been bound to one of the stalagmites studding the cavern’s floor. The other five, clearly alerted that something was approaching thanks to the scraping sound of the White Scars’ armour, had gathered close to the passageway’s entrance. They were not human, or at least not fully so, though clad in the ornate yat gowns and beading of the local Imperial cult; the exposed flesh of their heads and hands was pale and purple-veined, and their craniums were obscenely swollen. The five figures were staring up at Feng as he emerged, black eyes registering something akin to shock. Whatever they had expected to emerge from the tunnel, it was not a fully armed and armoured son of Jaghatai.
Feng suffered from no such hesitation – a glance was enough to know the five men were xenos-tainted. The first died from a snapshot at point-blank range, a bolt pistol round blowing away much of its torso. A second followed the first before they were able to react, Feng’s gauntlet pulverising its swollen skull as the White Scar launched himself into the cavern with a roar.
The three surviving hybrids snatched at lasrifles bearing the markings of the Pinnacle Guard. The nearest fired just as Feng, striking with all his servo-enhanced strength and speed, knocked the weapon’s muzzle aside. The las-bolt struck one of its kin, searing through its throat and dropping it immediately. A heartbeat later Feng’s bolt pistol detonated the first hybrid’s skull in an explosion of bone fragments and grey matter.
The final half-xenos’ salvo cracked squarely into Feng’s breastplate, the shots burning into ceramite and plasteel at point-blank range. Warning icons blinked on the White Scar’s visor display as his armour registered penetration and pain flared across his chest, but before he could respond the cavern resounded to another thunderous detonation – Oda, the second White Scar out of the tunnel behind Feng, had blown apart the last hybrid.
Feng dismissed the warning displays, feeling his body flood with stimms and counterseptics. A glance at the vitae readout told him the wounds were flesh only, and his enhanced physiology had already suppressed their pain.
‘Area secure,’ Oda voxed as the rest of the squad spread out through the cavern. Only one other figure now lived in the echoing subterranean space, the ageing man bound to one of the stalagmites. Though he was alone, there had clearly once been more prisoners – the cavern floor underfoot was carpeted with human remains, a few scraps of rotten meat and tendon, but mostly polished bone. The prisoner himself wore a slashed scriptorium gown, and had what appeared to be bite marks on his arms and legs. He was shaking and dull-eyed, seemingly unaware of what was happening around him.
‘No threat,’ Sauri confirmed as he scanned the man. ‘His vitae signs are low.’
‘Let him down,’ Feng ordered, boots crunching through bone as he approached. The man collapsed into Sauri’s arms as he snapped his bonds.
‘Who are you?’ Feng asked, going down on one knee so he was level with the man.
‘They turned the young ones,’ the man mumbled, not making eye contact with Feng. ‘They… they didn’t need us.’
‘It seems as though the xenos have been feeding on prisoners held here,’ Jakar said. ‘Almost all the bones have been gnawed.’
‘Where did they take you from?’ Feng asked the prisoner. He didn’t respond. He’d gone limp in Sauri’s grip. Feng’s auto-senses confirmed that he was dead.
‘Back to the surface,’ he said to the rest of the squad. ‘If this
is just one of their nests the size of the taint here is greater than we thought.’
The others didn’t reply. Feng didn’t need to ask why – he’d just realised there was a noise echoing down the tunnel and into the cavern. And it wasn’t just coming from the one they’d entered through, but from all the entrances around them. It took him only a second to recognise the long, multi-limbed shadows thrown ahead of the hundreds of creatures approaching the cavern, their carapaces scraping the tunnel sides.
Genestealers.
Many of our cousins refuse to retreat. They see it as dishonourable. They are fools. Ten thousand victories have started with a retreat. The only dishonour is in not coming back.
– Vorgha, Master of Steeds,
Khan of the Bloodrider Brotherhood
Chapter Fourteen
HEAVEN’S FALL
TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK
[TERRAN STANDARD]: 2 HOURS.
TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.
The Founding Wall, Heavenfall
At the rear bastions the men of Fifth Squad, Company C, First Regiment of the Pinnacle Guard watched the skies with terror. In the supply zone, at ground level immediately behind the Founding Wall, they were unable to see the nightmarish might of the tyranid swarm throwing itself at the parapets held by their comrades, but the flocks of gargoyles battling the Space Marine gunships overhead were all too visible. The thunder of the battle only added to the fear, each hammering discharge of the Earthshaker artillery pieces, set up on the bastions mere feet away, making the pale-faced soldiers flinch.
Sergeant Toren had given up trying to find the words to embolden his charges. The Fifth Squad was one of the youngest in the entire regiment, and for that reason they had been posted to the rear echelons during both the first assault on the Mountain Gate, and now during this second, unexpected attack. Besides the batwinged aliens wheeling in their shrieking flocks overhead, none of them had yet seen a tyranid.