The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  Overhead, the new stars glittered.

  Senari heard the beast before he saw it.

  Tribal legend had spoken of the roar for centuries uncounted. Senari’s own father’s father had claimed that his brother had even seen it with his own eyes once when the Three Moons were aligned – two sickles and a full orb – and the New Stars had glimmered in-between. As a child Senari had spent long, cold nights watching the flock, wondering how he would react if he ever heard its howl or saw its monstrous form. Now that his time had come, fear rooted him to the spot.

  The New Stars had returned. His father’s father had spoken of six, but more than six had come tonight. Many, many more. There had been dark mutterings among the tribesfolk, and the elders had shut themselves away with Colek in the seer’s tent, while the aged shaman read the entrails. Many had gathered outside, waiting anxiously to hear whether the omens were benign, or presaged some other-worldly horror. Senari was not lucky enough to be among them. It was his duty to watch his father’s flock, this night of all nights. He would have argued that since departing the slope-city he had shepherded the yats more nights than two of his five brothers, but he had seen the gleam in his father’s eye. This was a night to obey, not wrangle.

  So Senari had sat, hunched in his blanket, trying to coax the dry plains grass he’d uprooted into some semblance of a fire. Occasionally he would snatch glances up at the New Stars scattered across the firmament, glinting in the gathering dark. And that was why, of all the Beged tribe, he heard the beast first.

  The yats were distressed, their bleating and the clatter of their bells drifting across the ridge line. The distant grumble that had first made Senari stand and peer out into the gloom had built to a roar that seemed to vibrate through the entire world around him. He snatched the short spear he kept by the fire – its edge wicked enough to gut a steppe canid – and stared out into the gathering dark, tense with expectation.

  And that was when he saw it. The beast. It was just an impression at first, a dart of movement out in the long shadows that were stretching and lengthening across the steppe. It swiftly grew though, resolving itself in the last of the day’s red light as it tore towards him. It was fast, so impossibly fast. Attempting to flee never even occurred to him.

  A god rode the beast. It was clad, like its mount, in thick plates of white, the dying light sliding like fresh blood across the broad, gleaming surfaces. The pair came straight at Senari, as though it had always been aware of his presence and was purposefully seeking him out. The yats panicked and broke, fleeing in a lowing stampede up and over the crest. Senari was too overwhelmed to even feel distress at the herd’s flight. The terrible roaring of the beast filled his senses, setting his teeth chattering and vibrating through his bones. It was mounting the lower slope of the ridge, coming too fast to avoid. It was going to strike him. The gods had come for him, and his time among his tribe and his kinfolk was at an end.

  Then, at the last moment, the beast turned. A deft jerk of the god’s left wrist caused it to slew to one side, coming to a juddering halt just before its metal-plated snout struck Senari. Ash and embers flew as the meagre fire he’d been tending was scattered by the thing’s armoured bulk. The god on its back set one heavy boot down to steady itself, crunching amidst the remains of the fire. It was huge, its bulk combining with that of the metal beast to make Senari feel like a wide-eyed, shaking child.

  The beast’s roar had dropped to a deep, rumbling growl. It seemed to shudder and twitch beneath its rider, as though eager to race off once again. If the white-clad god felt any discomfort at its straining, it was impossible for Senari to tell – its face, if it had one, was concealed by a great helm, its crimson lenses locked on the shepherd. For a moment, he knew how the plains vole felt beneath the cruel, swift eyes of the hawk.

  ‘You are of the Beged?’

  The giant’s voice crackled and snapped up from its helm like great branches breaking in a storm. The words sounded stilted and ill-formed to Senari, but he understood them nonetheless. He managed to nod.

  ‘Show me the direction of your tribe,’ the god demanded. ‘How far?’

  As he struggled to find an answer, movement caught his eye. He looked up, mouth agape, in time to see the impossible. The stars above were falling.

  He counted maybe half a dozen. Half a dozen streaks of light, dashes against the deepening night sky. They darted across the firmament, left and right, falling individually towards the darkening expanse of the plains. The closest passed right overhead, a soundless flash of brilliance that caused Senari to turn, half stumbling as he sought to follow it with his eyes. It vanished somewhere over the far side of the ridge. After a few moments there was a distant boom.

  The giant had seen it too. As Senari turned back to face it the god drew a massive, wicked glaive from a strap across its back. The shepherd cowered before the mighty weapon, but the giant showed no inclination to use it.

  ‘Your people are beyond the ridge?’ it demanded. ‘Where the falling star struck?’

  Senari managed to nod. It was enough. The giant removed its boot from the ground and twisted its grip on its mount. The great beast roared furiously once more, and in the blink of an eye had shot away past Senari, carrying its inscrutable rider on up and over the ridge line.

  A strange and sudden passion drove Senari after it. Choking and coughing on the dust kicked up by the beast’s passing, he made it to the crest of the ridge. There he stood and stared, long after the night had swallowed up the giant, and its mount’s roar had grown distant.

  A part of him wondered whether he had dozed off beside the fire, and this was all some myth-spawned dream. But he knew it was not. The New Stars were falling, and gods stalked the plains. The legends were true. Senari knew what he had seen this night.

  A Sky Warrior.

  ‘Possible xenos vanguard contact, surface sector three-nineteen, one mile out. I will have its head soon.’

  Feng sent the transmission as he reached the outskirts of the Beged encampment, double blink-clicking the icon on his visor display’s long-range uplink. There was no time to check for any response besides the auto log. The first Beged yuruts loomed up out of the darkness ahead, lit by the flames of torches and campfires. People were scattering, alerted by the throaty bellow of his bike at full throttle.

  He tore into the encampment, jinking between fleeing tribesfolk, animal pens and lodge tents. The heart of the Beged encampment had been abandoned, and there was steam or smoke rising from the area a hundred yards to the right of the chieftain’s yurut. Feng turned his bike in a tight circle in the cleared space at the encampment’s heart, easing the brakes and angling back round towards where the smoke was coming from.

  He saw immediately that he’d been right. The shooting star that had darted over the ridge line was no star at all. Instead of void-scarred rock, something fleshy and chitinous had impacted into Darkand’s soil. It had burrowed into the dirt between two ux horn pens – the beasts were going wild, battering at their wooden enclosures and tethering pegs and lowing desperately. Steam was coiling from the thing’s outer shell, its unnatural surface blackened and fused by the force of atmospheric entry.

  It was a mycetic spore. Worst of all, it was already open. One side of the roughly spherical shell had burst and was oozing stinking purplish sludge and amniotic fluids.

  Whatever had been inside was now free and hunting.

  Feng loosed his bike’s kickstand and dismounted, unclamping his bolt pistol in one hand, guan dao already in the other. His secondary heart had kicked in, flooding his body with jagged combat adrenaline and stimms. His helmet was hunting, the visor display seeking out hostile targets amidst the flickering firelight. He turned in a low crouch, dao not yet activated, gripped high on its haft with his pistol extended, tracking left, right, left.

  The tribe, panicked by the spore, were doing what they always did when threatened by a
force they did not comprehend – vanishing into the tall grasses of the steppes. Some warriors remained behind, armed with spear and bow, watching the Sky Warrior from the shadows of their tents and wagons.

  Feng snatched a moment to read the snap-reports filtering in over his visor’s uplink. His own visuals had combined with those of the other remaining outriders to confirm the planetfall of a handful of xenos pods, scattered in a radius dozens of miles wide across the steppe. The mycetic spores contained the vanguard organisms, the first creatures the tyranids seeded a planet with. They were scouts and infiltrators, deposited by the hive fleet to gauge the location of the greatest centres of biomass and the level of opposition. The quicker they could be eliminated, the less information Cicatrix would have to act on when it came to the next phase – full-scale invasion.

  A shriek disturbed Feng’s thoughts, piercing the quiet that had settled across the encampment. The White Scar spun in time to see a young tribeswoman, her black hair wild and her dress torn, stumble from the flap of one of the smaller yuruts. She was splattered with blood.

  ‘Yaksha, yaksha!’ she shrieked, before collapsing. Daemon.

  Feng advanced over her unconscious form, switching his visor display to heat-tracing. There were no signatures coming from within the yurut, but that meant little – the deadliest tyranid xeno­forms were capable of masking themselves on even the most advanced augur systems. He switched back to standard visuals and triggered his guan dao. Lethal energies crackled into life across the long blade as its disruptor field activated. The onlooking steppe warriors gasped.

  He ducked under the flap, dao raised, a snarl of readiness on his lips. For a split second he thought he saw Tenjin in the tent’s fire-shot darkness, blood oozing from his splinter lacerations, staining his white battleplate bright red. The heart-stopping apparition was gone the moment Feng focused on what lay beyond the entrance flap, but the blood remained. The inside of the yurut – sleeping rolls, patterned rug-weave, an open chest of yat gowns and shawls, a small, foldable table and seating cushions – were splattered with gore. However, beyond a single dismembered arm lying in the yurut’s centre, there were no bodies. The trail of blood led to the tent’s rear, where a jagged rent had been torn in the coarse hide fabric.

  Feng passed through the yurut, silent but for the low hum of his power armour and the occasional snap-crack of his dao’s disruptor field. His every transhuman sense was on edge, the genhanced power of his modified physiology beating through his veins and throbbing in his tensed muscles. Time seemed to slow down as he neared the rip in the yurut’s far side. His auto-senses were fixed on the darkness beyond, tracking phantoms, seeking a physical return to lock on to.

  He passed through the rip, bolt pistol raised. Nothing. The darkness of the camp’s outer edge lay before him. The grass underfoot was sticky with blood, the trail leading off into the shadows that clustered, thick and black, between two parked wagons. Overhead the thousand new stars of the tyranid hive fleet glittered.

  He went further, following the trail. His auto-senses could find nothing in the darkness, every spectrum sending back blank returns. Suppressing a snarl of frustration, the White Scar unclamped his helmet and mag-locked it to his belt. Free from constraints, he caught the scents of the night breeze – blood, woodsmoke, cooked meat, animal dung and the underlying, sickly reek of the xenos. It had to be close.

  He passed between the two wagons, his ignited dao offering a pallid luminescence. Near the other side of the wheel spokes he found two bodies. A glance told him they were likely the girl’s parents. They’d been hideously dismembered, both now little more than vivisectioned pieces of bone and meat, laid out side by side. Judging by the lack of blood on either of the wagons it looked as though they’d been dragged all the way from the yurut after they’d been killed, and left deliberately between the wheels.

  They were bait. Feng spun, dao glaive raised. Something impossibly fast and silent had reared up behind him from amidst the rug rolls in the bed of one of the wagons. Feng caught an impression of a chitin-plated exoskeleton, vast bony blade-limbs and a maw of writhing feeler tendrils, crouched up on the wagon’s side. Even as the creature’s silent presence registered he felt impacts against his left pauldron and the side of his breastplate.

  A dozen stiff tendons had burst from the thing’s chest carapace, their wicked hook-tips punching into Feng’s armour and lodging there. He saw its upper blade-limbs arch back to strike as the tendons contracted, the flesh hooks dragging him off balance. He snarled viciously and swung his dao, pulling back against the creature’s murderous embrace. The angle was a difficult one, the xenos assassin too close for him to use the power lance properly, but the snapping energies of the blade’s disruptor field were enough to slice through the tendons that had latched on to Feng’s armour. He stumbled back, his auto-stabilisers preventing a fall as the scything talons carved the night air where he’d stood a double heartbeat before.

  With a hiss the thing launched forward before he could recover, pushing off the edge of the wagon. The impact slammed the White Scar back into the second cart, wood splitting. The xenos was big – almost twice an unaugmented human’s height – yet it moved with a speed even Feng’s genhanced abilities could not match. The claws of its two middle limbs scraped his breastplate and pauldron, diamond-hard chitin biting into white-painted ceramite as it tried to reach up towards his unprotected face. Its unnatural alien stench filled Feng’s senses. It was too close for him to use his weapons, but at the same time it couldn’t plunge down with its upper scythe-limbs without lodging them in the timber of the cart to Feng’s back. His own arms were pinned by his side by the thing’s wiry, carapace body, but he fired his bolt pistol anyway, the booming report echoing out across the encampment. The round hit one of the creature’s backjointed legs, blowing away a shard of chitin and a bloody chunk of purplish flesh. It recoiled from Feng as he fired again, loosing an eerie, ululating shriek.

  The White Scar used the second his desperate shooting had bought. He swung his dao in a choke-grip with vicious speed, up towards the xenos’ chitin-plated skull, the air igniting around the lance’s crackling blade. The xenos, still unnaturally fast, darted backwards, and Feng let out a cry of fury as he saw his blade pass by the leathery flesh of its throat.

  Except, not quite. The feeder tendrils that constituted the creature’s maw were caught by Feng’s slash, a dozen of them bisected at a single stroke. The worm-like appendages flopped to the ground, writhing, and a flow of hissing purple ichor burst from the sliced stumps.

  The creature shrieked again – this time a more high-pitched, painful note – and turned on Feng, darting back up onto the wagon. The White Scar raised his pistol and fired three shots after it, but none seemed to connect; before the steedmaster’s very eyes, the creature seemed to disintegrate. It melted from reality, swallowed up by the night.

  Feng didn’t hesitate. He shouldered his way past the wagon and back towards the centre of the Beged camp, keying his vox earpiece as he went.

  ‘This is Lau Feng, previous coordinate lock. I have engaged a vanguard organism, xenoform “lictor”. It’s using its damned chameleon abilities.’

  He didn’t wait for a response. He knew there was little hope of assistance – he was the only White Scar for many miles. A hiss from ahead drew him on. The acidic ichor spilling from the lictor’s wounds had left a trail of withered dead grass in its wake. He had to find it before whatever regenerative properties it possessed stemmed its wounds and made it untraceable.

  There was a creak of timber to his right. He turned, bolt pistol raised. For a second all he saw was another Beged wagon, heaped high with sacks of meal. Then one of the bags shifted. The air around it shimmered.

  Feng fired, filling the night with his bolt pistol’s roar. A salvo of rounds punched harmlessly into the meal, blasting the sacks of grain apart. The wagon shuddered, and he caught an impression of a gnarled bla
ck carapace and hungry, alien eyes. Then the thing was gone again, melting away like a nightmare. He ran to the wagon, reloading as he went, but there was no sign of the lictor. The wounds he had given it before must have already clotted.

  Screaming broke out again from the heart of the camp. Feng turned, muttering an oath to the primarch. The thing was too damned fast. He broke into a run, the servos in his power armour whirring. The dark shapes of tribesfolk that cowered in the shadows of the outer yuruts and wagons cringed away at his passing. In seconds he was back in the torchlight of the encampment’s centre.

  It seemed as though the xenos had been attempting to cut through the camp and out into the darkness beyond. The Beged, terrified by the noises coming from the outer yuruts and wagons, now clustered like their own terrified cattle in the trampled dirt at the centre of the camp. Slowed by its wounds, the lictor had been unable to pass through them unnoticed. It had dropped its chameleon trickery and lashed out. Now it was loose, at the heart of a mob of terrified, screaming tribespeople. Feng saw it as a blur of scythe-limbed movement over the heads of the jostling mass. Blood arced into the air, followed by the disembowelled body of a tribal elder. The screaming redoubled.

  ‘For the Khagan!’ Feng roared, and charged. The battle cry was more to alert the Beged than anything else. The tribespeople in front of him pushed and shoved frantically as they tried to get out of the giant’s way. Before him the lictor turned, hunched over, its form revealed in the firelight. Blood dripped from both its foretalons and upper scythe-arms, running in rivulets between the gnarled ridges of its black carapace. Bodies lay at its feet – half a dozen, maybe more – all dismembered in a few frantic seconds of animalistic, alien savagery. Time seemed to slow as the xenos reared, shrieking again. Feng’s battle cry became a bellow of effort as he slung his arm forward, flinging his activated power lance. The thing was quick, quick enough to melt back into the shadows if Feng tried to reach it, but not quick enough to avoid a guan dao flung at its heart. A last-minute twist of its lean, hard body avoided certain death, but the powerblade still ploughed into its flank, slamming all the way up to the gold-edged crossguard.