The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  ‘Be on your guard,’ he told Jeddah as he left the scriptorium. ‘There are more threats in this place than even I had first imagined.’

  Near Yellow River, Darkand

  A tainted dawn heralded first contact with the main swarm. The sun was rising as Joghaten’s strike force closed on its primary objective, two bike squads and two supporting Land Speeder Tempests scattered in a rotating skirmish chain around three Rhinos. The ubiquitous Space Marine armoured personnel carriers had been forced to go off-track over the rugged grasslands, but the biker squadrons found their speed barely hampered while keeping pace – all White Scars Rhinos had exchanged most of their ablative armour plating for greater engine capacity. The roar of the speedy transports echoed out over the steppes, competing with the biker squads that raced back and forth around them.

  They were riding for the Yellow River, a dried-up basin where the augurs had triangulated one of the nearest tyranid swarms. Going off vid recordings of the xenos planetfall taken during the night, Joghaten didn’t anticipate the brood being more than his demi-ordu could handle. Wipe them out, while the other half of the brotherhood slaughtered a second brood at the Hills of the Broken Bones to the south, and they would have bled potentially vital numbers from the main swarm as it gathered further out on the plains.

  The khan pulled his own bike – Whitemane – to a juddering stop on a gentle rise overlooking their route. He was giving Qui’sin and his bondsmen a chance to catch up, knowing Jubai would be complaining once more that he should not leave his honour guard behind. He refused to apologise. They all felt it; out here on the open plain, unconfined and free, the urge to roam sung through his veins. It had been a part of him, a part of them all, from the moment they had been born, an instinct that transcended even their new lives as servants of the Khagan and the Emperor. It was a passion that all the gene enhancement, hypnotherapy and chemical indoctrinations could not overcome. Before and after every other consideration, a White Scar was a son of the steppes, a warrior born to the saddle and the hunt. To experience it was to know the greatest joy in existence.

  He looked up at the sun, not long risen above Heavenfall’s receding mountain range. It was not the bloody red dawn of a new Chogorian day. Nor was it even Darkand’s pale imitation any longer. The sun that now climbed through the corrupt sky was infected, an ugly orange sphere shot through with buzzing darts of shadow. Darkand’s atmosphere was clouded, already infested with uncounted trillions of alien spores. They would clog the air, beginning the horrific subversion of the planet’s entire ecosystem. The light that reached Joghaten was tainted, unable to pierce the fug of seedlings that now choked Darkand’s heavens.

  He looked away, hawked and spat. His bondsmen roared up on their heavy, low-set assault bikes, growling to a halt beside their khan. Qui’sin was with them, his blue-edged power armour marking him out. The Stormseer had been strangely withdrawn since they had departed Heavenfall together, remaining silent where the khan would have expected his strategic advice. He wondered whether the presence of the Shadow in the Warp was weighing heavily on the weathermaker.

  ‘Orders?’ Khuchar asked as the khan’s honour guard killed their engines. Even more so than the rest of the White Scars, the brother­hood’s champion was eager to be released to the hunt. Joghaten said nothing at first, looking from Qui’sin up at Jubai’s lodge pole, at the horse hair tokens snapping in the breeze, and then at the dark shapes wheeling in the spore-choked sky beyond. Too big to be mere seeds, they flocked together with a dire, vulture-like purpose, over and above the next grassy rise.

  ‘We are close,’ Joghaten said, gesturing at the airborne shapes that surely marked the leading edge of the swarm.

  ‘Vermin,’ Dorich the emchi spat. ‘Their mere presence is an affront to the honour world.’

  ‘Them, and all like them,’ Tamachag said.

  ‘We must be swift,’ Joghaten said, before opening a channel to the rest of the column.

  ‘This is the khan-commander, I am advancing to the next crest. The xenos are near, brothers. We engage with the speed of the racing stallion.’

  He broke the link, not waiting for confirmations. His blood was up. He held his arm up, one finger pointing skywards.

  Ride.

  The Fourth Brotherhood’s command squad raced to the next rise, Khuchar whooping battle-boasts and Bleda canting the ordu’s war song. Joghaten led them, not because the others deferred to his honoured place at the tip of their spear, but because none could keep pace with him. He was the Master of Blades, Khan of the Tulwar Brotherhood, and today he hunted.

  The things in the sky had sensed their approach. A gaggle peeled away from the main flock, rising on leathery pinyons to better observe them. The khan and his bondsmen rode on regardless, gears shifting as their bikes effortlessly took the gentle slope leading up to the next rise. Joghaten was the first to crest it, easing the brakes as he did so.

  Beyond the slope the xenos threat was finally laid bare. The plain before the khan was studded with hundreds of large egg-like spheres, half buried in the Darkand dirt. Their shells were gnarled, formed from leathery flesh and chitin left blackened by the red-hot fury of atmospheric penetration. Some were riddled with fluted chitin chimneys that churned out the clouds of microorganisms polluting the atmosphere. Others had burst. Viscous purple sludge oozed from cracks torn from within by diamond-hard claws. Their former occupants now roamed the plain – packs of gaunts, tyranid foot-soldiers, hunched over killer-beasts with crustacean-like chitinous armour and limbs that ended in scything talons or fleshy ranged bio-launchers. After a second’s calculation, Joghaten’s auto-senses read back over a thousand returns.

  The creatures were still disorganised, moving in sluggish swarms around the mycetic spores that had given birth to them, alien amniotic fluids dripping thickly from black carapace and ­purplish flesh. Further out, towards the heart of the fresh seeding, Joghaten could see larger spore pods. There, protected by the screen of smaller creatures, the leaders of the first invasion wave were ripping their way into existence, taking their first shuddering breaths of prey-world air. Tyranid warriors, bigger creatures with thicker shells and a synapse link to the hive mind, and the queen of the swarm itself – a hive tyrant, a towering monster with a ridged crest of chitin around its skull and four limbs each ending in wicked organic alien weaponry. The creature dragged itself from the ruin of its mycetic spore, shaking broken shell and globules of birthing slime off its armoured back. As it rose to its full height it let loose a shrilling alien shriek, the disturbing sound rolling out over the plain.

  The call had an instant effect – immediately the leaderless swarms of gaunts became more coordinated, sweeping out from the landing zone in all directions, their hooves drumming the trampled earth. A few minutes more and the entire brood would be ready to move off, guided to the first concentration of prey by the synapse signals and pheromone traces of the previous night’s vanguard infiltrators.

  Joghaten’s bondsmen had caught up. They sat atop their idling mounts, each one looking out upon the alien invasion with undisguised expressions of disgust.

  ‘We should wait for the rest of the demi-ordu,’ Tamachag said. Joghaten twisted in Whitemane’s saddle to look at him.

  ‘You think I will, brother?’ A grin split the veteran’s ugly, scarred features.

  ‘No, khan-commander.’

  Joghaten glanced towards Qui’sin. His expression was unreadable behind his helm, but he inclined his head, once.

  ‘For the Khagan,’ Joghaten said, his twin tulwars whispering free from their red leather sheaths. The sound was mirrored as his ­honour guard drew blade and bolter, and clamped on their helmets.

  No further words were needed. With a shriek and a roar of engines, Joghaten kicked his steed down the slope and directly into the heart of the tyranid swarm.

  The Hills of the Broken Bones, Darkand

  To t
he south, around the Hills of the Broken Bones, the other half of the Tulwar Brotherhood were engaging a swarm of their own. Wind Tamer’s twin AS 9-60 ramjets were screaming as the Land Speeder came around for its attack run, the air around it shimmering with the furnace heat. Timchet triggered the Godwyn-pattern heavy bolter’s auto feed, helmet display lighting up with targeting reticules as his auto-senses locked with dozens of rapidly closing contacts.

  ‘Don’t miss this time,’ his co-pilot, Hagai, said over the vox.

  ‘Try steering straight then,’ Timchet responded, and opened fire. The pintle-mounted heavy bolter bucked against its railing as the big weapon launched a stream of .998 calibre explosive rounds into the flock of gargoyles sweeping towards them. Timchet controlled the stream and bent it towards the heart of the shrieking swarm, guided by darts of crimson tracer. Aliens squealed and howled as they were blown apart, purple flesh and ichor painting the sky.

  ‘Braking,’ Hagai said tersely, and Wind Tamer slewed hard to the left. Timchet cursed his brother-pilot as he sawed his weapon to the right to compensate, the heavy bolter scraping around on its open cockpit railing.

  A second later the return fire started to come in. The gargoyles – spindly tyranid creatures borne aloft on bat-like wings – were armed with organic weapons melded to their lower limbs. The flock, still closing on the White Scars Land Speeder, had unleashed a hail of crackling purple bio-plasma from their flesh-fused weaponry.

  ‘Brace,’ Hagai said as the utility skimmer took a flurry of hits to its right side. Alarm bells started to ring in the cockpit, deactivated immediately by a flick of Hagai’s gauntlet. One plasma bolt seared away the white paint of the support stanchion just above Timchet’s head, leaving the heavy plasteel twisted and deformed.

  ‘They’re coming around,’ he said, the angle making tracking the xenos flyers impossible.

  ‘Karro’sai has them,’ Hagai responded, easing back on the controls as he took the skimmer into an engine-shrieking climb. Timchet grunted, feeling the G-forces dragging at his restraint clamps and power armour.

  ‘Since when has Karro’sai had anything,’ he managed to growl.

  ‘True enough, brother,’ Hagai said as he levelled out a hundred feet above their last position. A moment later and the angle Wind Tamer had been shooting across was lit up by a fresh hail of fire. Spear of the Khagan, coming in at ninety degrees to Wind Tamer and fifty feet below it, struck the gargoyle swarm in mid-turn, as the xenos attempted to wheel up and around to pursue Timchet and Hagai. Spear’s assault cannon was a clacking, fire-studded blur as it unloaded into the tyranids, tens of thousands of rounds churning the alien flock to a gory shower of ruin. The Land Speeder Tornado carried right on through the disintegrating flock, Karro’sai’s sponson gunner adding the weight of his heavy bolter to the fusillade. By the time he ripped out the other side his skimmer’s white plating was splattered with ­sizzling ichor and smears of pulverised xenos meat.

  Hagai turned Wind Tamer round in support. Timchet opened up again, auto feed rattling fresh bolts home as the Land Speeder swooped down on the pickings left by its brother. Another hail of mass-reactive rounds riddled the airborne flock, but the pickings were thin now – the combined firepower of the two skimmers had decimated the swarm and left it scattered.

  ‘He will want us to congratulate him,’ Timchet said, watching as Spear of the Khagan banked around. ‘Even after we were the ones who set him up. Again.’

  ‘He can boil his arse,’ Hagai said, opening the ramjets and letting the wind take them.

  Below, the Fourth Brotherhood’s second strike force was beginning its assault. Steedmaster Chokda had ordered Subodak’s Devastator squad to take post on the low grassy rise overlooking the tyranids’ main landing zone, covered by Anunga’s Tactical Marines. The gargoyles, circling above the assembling xenos swarm, had attempted to attack while the base of fire was still being set up. The strike force’s two Land Speeders had swiftly halted their pre-emptive effort. Now the second phase was proceeding.

  ‘The sky is ours, Steedmaster Chokda,’ Karro’sai’s voice crackled across the net.

  ‘First to claim the glory, as ever,’ Timchet observed.

  Chokda’s reply to the Tornado pilot cut in over the vox before Hagai could respond to his gunner.

  ‘Good hunting. Bring your skysteeds in support of the main strike.’

  Hagai acknowledged wordlessly, blink-clicking Wind Tamer’s confirmation rune. Ahead of them Chokda was taking his assault bike squadron in a straight race down the slope and into the midst of the xenos swarm. They were scattered across a shallow valley at the edge of the Hills of the Broken Bones, the grassy slopes studded with their spore pods. The gaunts that constituted the main mass of the swarm were still sluggish from their recent birth.

  ‘The leader-beast,’ Karro’sai said to Timchet and Hagai over the vox. ‘We should move against it now, while their sky swarms are scattered.’

  ‘It will defend itself,’ Hagai warned. ‘Better to open a path for Chokda’s charge, and let him strike the surest blow.’

  ‘Chokda has enough heads for the lodge pole,’ Karro’sai responded. ‘I am going.’

  Spear of the Khagan accelerated, pulling away from Wind Tamer. Karro’sai’s target was visible at the heart of the swarm, a great, lumpen beast weighed down by its own thick black carapace. After a moment’s analysis Timchet’s tactical readout lit up with the moniker assigned to it by the Ordo Biologis.

  ‘Maleceptor,’ he growled, fingers unconsciously tightening around his pintle weapon’s grip. Orifices in the swollen creature’s broad flanks were studded with pulsing, glistening brain sacs, the gelatinous grey mind-nodes visibly snapping and crackling with the power of the hive mind. Ethereal tendrils snaked from the lobes, pseudopods of psychic energy that waved around the huge beast like the feelers of some oceanic horror. It was a control hub for the gestalt consciousness that drove the aliens, and killing it would throw the swarm into confusion. That was exactly what Chokda intended to do. Karro’sai wanted to get there first.

  ‘Damn the fool,’ Hagai said, opening the throttle. The Wind Tamer accelerated in the wake of Spear of the Khagan. Beneath, a sea of upturned xenos heads raced past, a blur of thousands of hissing fang-maws and ravenous eyes. Timchet didn’t waste bolts on them. They’d need every round if they were going to help slay the maleceptor.

  Spear of the Khagan had opened fire, the chatter of the ­Tornado’s underslung assault cannon rising above the shrieking fury of the swarm. Karro’sai’s gunner had clearly locked the automated weapon on the mind-nodes embedded in the giant alien’s sides, but for all their apparent fragility the brains were well protected. Actinic energy flashed around the throbbing grey matter, robbing the thousands of rounds fired at them of their kinetic energy. Shots from the Tornado’s heavy bolter added to the barrage, blasting jagged shards of carapace from the maleceptor’s shell but otherwise doing the beast no harm.

  ‘Pull left,’ Timchet said as Spear of the Khagan dragged itself up at the last minute, only just avoiding the psychic pseudopods that waved around the alien’s heavy bulk. ‘If those tendrils reach us they’ll tear us apart.’

  For once Hagai didn’t counter his co-pilot’s advice. He slewed Wind Tamer to one side, while Timchet opened fire on the beast. Like Spear before, his shots had almost no visible effect. The thickness of its shell and the strength of its psychic defence were too powerful a combination.

  ‘We need bigger guns,’ Timchet said as the Land Speeder arced back round for another run.

  ‘Subodak looks a little busy,’ Hagai said humourlessly. Timchet saw that he was right. Half of the swarm had finally found its coordination and launched itself at the slope being held by the strike force’s dismounted section. Subodak’s heavily armed Devastators and Anunga’s supporting Tactical Marines were holding them back with a storm of firepower. Heavy bolters, missile launchers
and plasma cannons were creating a tidal mark of broken and torn gaunts around the base of the slope, but the weight of the horde was too much for them to shift fire from their immediate vicinity. That meant Chokda’s assault bikes were going in alone against the half of the swarm still clustered around their leader-beast.

  ‘We need support,’ the steedmaster snapped over the vox. ‘Break off your attack runs and open a corridor for us.’

  If Karro’sai had heard the order it was too late, anyway. Spear of the Khagan was swooping down once more on the maleceptor, this time from the opposite side, guns blazing.

  ‘He’s leaving it too late,’ Hagai said, switching vox frequencies. ‘Karro’sai, pull up!’

  ‘Watch the tendrils!’ Timchet added as he saw the phantom-like pseudopods lash out towards the oncoming Land Speeder.

  Too slow, Karro’sai tried to pull to one side. The skimmer cleared the tyranid, slicing mere feet past its carapace ridges. It did not, however, succeed in avoiding the psychic appendages lashing from its bared brain lobes. Two of the tendrils caught the Speeder, seeming to pass right through its white-plated frame. Karro’sai and his gunner did not survive the ethereal passage of the translucent strands. Timchet bit back an oath as he saw both White Scars’ helms explode in a shower of bloody matter, their brains ruptured by the sudden and direct contact with the raw power of the hive mind. Spear of the Khagan dipped immediately, plummeting into the swarm around the malceptor’s cloven hooves. The skimmer’s front buckled and its fuselage gave out in a gout of flames and sparks. Seconds later the entire vehicle, along with its pilots, was lost beneath an undulating tide of lesser tyranid killer organisms.

  ‘The riders,’ Hagai snapped to Timchet. ‘Or must I take control of the heavy bolter as well as the steering stick?’