The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  Red Berkut added a kill tally of its own. The Stormtalon gunship fell from the heavens, the spore-polluted sunlight glinting from its red-and-white-dashed armour as it streaked down on Joghaten’s advance route. Its screaming afterburners carried it between the circling flocks of gargoyles from where it had been holding off at high altitude, leaving the leathery-winged creatures unable to react in time as it opened up on the ground swarm.

  The effect was immediate. Red Berkut’s twin underslung assault cannons caused the gaunts ahead of Joghaten to simply disintegrate, tens of thousands of rounds shattering chitin and bone, pulping flesh, liquefying organs and churning up Darkand dirt. In just a few seconds the creatures the khan had been swinging for became nothing more than a haze of mulched organics, their vile stench penetrating even the filters of his armour recyc units.

  Red Berkut came around. Its pilot, Dren-cho, vectored the engines and left the gunship hovering barely a hundred feet above the tip of the White Scars’ charge. It opened up again, now firing ahead of Joghaten, hundreds of hot brass shell casings cascading down to clatter from the onrushing honour guard’s helmets, pauldrons and bike frames. The space ahead of Joghaten opened up, a corridor of ichor-soaked earth and shuddering, unrecognisable alien remains. At the end of it the hive tyrant towered, guarded by three larger warrior xenoforms.

  ‘Glory to the Khagan!’ Joghaten roared, and twisted the right-hand throttle forward. Whitemane responded to his battle cry with one of its own, tearing through the corridor of annihilation ploughed by Red Berkut’s murderous salvo. A mist of xenos body parts splattered the khan and coated his white armour in a sheen of slime, but he was far beyond caring – the culmination of this first fresh hunt was laid out before him.

  The tyranid warriors shielding their tyrant moved to intercept his charge, organic bio-weapons rising. For a split second Joghaten found himself staring down their hideous contracting orifices, and saw his own death, burned through by sprays of bio-acid or riddled with borer beetles. The premonition died like the warriors – in a flash of fire – as three rockets from Red Berkut’s skyhammer missile launcher streaked over Joghaten’s head and slammed into the xenos. As the flames roiled away into nothingness all that remained were three burnt-out alien husks splayed across the blackened earth.

  For a moment, the hive tyrant was alone. Joghaten struck.

  The White Scar jinked his bike to the left as the towering beast lunged into his charge. It was fast, far faster than its size should allow, but Joghaten was faster. One of its upper scything talons buried itself impotently in the dirt where Whitemane had been a second earlier, while a set of claws raked the air above Joghaten. The White Scar bent low in his saddle to avoid the vicious swipe before rising on the bike’s running tread stirrups, momentarily leaving the saddle as he slashed back across the angle he’d taken around the tyrant’s right side. His tulwar kissed flesh, and then bone. With a snap the wicked blade’s disruptor field sliced through one of the tyrant’s four upper limbs, sending the snapping claw-hand tumbling in a gout of hissing acidic ichor.

  For all its speed, the tyranid monster’s size still worked against it. The bellowing xenos attempted to turn with Joghaten, but the White Scar’s tight second jink left it floundering. At the same time fire from the rest of the oncoming honour guard started to ­batter at its left side, a hail of twin-linked bolter rounds chewing through the creature’s gnarled black carapace. It shrieked with frustration as Joghaten turned around it once again, this time aiming a blow at its tail. Chogorian metal flashed, disruptor light flared, and the thick appendage was left flopping grotesquely on the trampled grass.

  Joghaten’s bondsmen split as they reached the combat, racing left and right to intercept the wall of gaunts now turning inwards in a frenzied effort to save their beleaguered leader. Red Berkut had been forced to pull away, climbing to higher altitudes as it was beset by screeching flocks of gargoyles. Their gambit had left the heroes of the Fourth Brotherhood surrounded and alone at the heart of the swarm. Joghaten knew he had a minute at most to kill the hive tyrant before its minions overran and slaughtered his honour guard, and buried him beneath an avalanche of stabbing talons and scrabbling claws.

  He hit Whitemane’s brakes hard, auto-stabilisers compensating for the harsh jolt as he twisted the handles left, completing a full dust-streaked circuit around the tyrant. The bike’s wheels gouged great furrows in the ichor-slashed Darkand soil as the bike came around, finishing with its front facing the looming monster barely half a dozen paces away. The creature stumbled slightly as it completed its own turn to face Joghaten. The khan-commander was grinning as he hit the bike dashboard’s firing studs.

  Whitemane’s twin bolters blazed, blink-locked through Joghaten’s auto-senses onto the tyrant’s overextended left leg. The bolters’ auto-loaders rattled as they churned fire into the alien leader-beast at point-blank range; in just a few seconds, the explosive rounds had sawed through iron-hard alien muscle and thick chitin. The tyrant let out a soul-shuddering screech as it began to topple, and there was a wet splitting sound as its fatally weakened limb snapped beneath its own weight.

  Joghaten kicked his feet out of the running tread stirrups and approached the thrashing, roaring monstrosity. It was gouging great rents in the earth as it tried to drag itself towards the khan-commander, its spiny carapace and blade-claws churning up Darkand’s defiled soil. There was no pain in its yellow alien eyes, nor fear, nor even fury. Only hunger. The world around Joghaten, shot through with the hammer of bolters, the shrieks of gaunts and the clash and clang of chitin and ceramite, faded away as he broke into a run.

  The first of the tyrant’s upper scythe-limbs was met by one of the khan’s tulwars, an explosive discharge of the disruptor field jarring up Joghaten’s arm and almost cutting the alien’s chitin blade in two. His momentum carried him on past the downward stroke of the creature’s second scythe, bringing him inside its thrashing guard. Without hesitation the khan slammed the tip of his second tulwar through the xenos’ right eye, crunching through its distended skull and into its swollen brain. The beast’s roar faltered and it twitched, its cranium impaled by Joghaten’s blade. He thumped his second sword into its other eye, two lengths of Chogorian metal meeting in the nexus of the beast’s mind. The shrieking of the swarm reached an agonising crescendo around the sphere of bloodied, churned earth. The tyrant let out one more rattling breath, and went still.

  The disruptor fields on both of Joghaten’s tulwars had shorted out. The khan spat and planted a boot at the base of the single wicked spike that crowned the tyrant’s scalp. Then, with a grunt, he dragged both swords free, their wicked edges trailing cranial fluids and pulverised eye matter. Both blades ignited once more.

  The khan’s thoughts thrilled with victory. At least, to have foe-blood running from his blades, to have their corpses laid out on the dirt before him, to have smashed this first wave of the xenos invasion – there was no greater joy. Joghaten let out a whoop as his brothers finished the slaughter.

  Around the leader-beast’s carcass the battle had turned. The wall of stabbing talons and snapping maws that had been slowly constricting against the tight perimeter established by the ­honour guard had gone, the pressure abruptly easing as the xenos plunged their claws into one another.

  ‘They’ve gone feral,’ Dorich called, the emchi’s white armour so befouled by ichor it looked as though he’d been stained head to foot by purple chinyua.

  ‘Ajinai,’ Joghaten voxed, turning in a slow circle as he surveyed the scattering horde around him. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘The swarm is breaking apart,’ the tactical squad türüch replied, surveying the plain from the slight rise where his brethren had been laying down supporting fire. ‘It seems like every beast for itself, khan-commander.’

  ‘Dren-cho?’ Joghaten asked, patching the Stormtalon pilot in over the net.

  ‘It’s true, khan-commander,’ Dren-cho
replied. ‘Even their sky flock is scattering.’

  Joghaten looked up, and saw his wind-brother was right. Like the gaunts on the ground, the gargoyles had lost all the single-minded coordination that had made them so deadly. Now they were starting to spread across the heavens in all directions, Red Berkut picking off individuals with chattering bursts of assault cannon fire.

  ‘The synapse link is broken,’ Joghaten said. ‘They will become disorganised.’

  A stray hormagaunt leapt at the honour guard and was tackled by Khuchar, the champion physically bearing the hissing alien to the ground and snapping its neck. Another tried to dodge past, heading for the open steppe beyond Yellow River’s dry basin. Joghaten beheaded it with a contemptuous swipe.

  ‘Consolidate on my position,’ he ordered. ‘Brother Hobgetur, bring your flamer to the fore.’

  As the strike force advanced down from the rise and the honour guard bent to wipe clean blades, armour, gears and treads, Joghaten switched vox frequencies. He had to find out how the second strike force was faring to the south, at the Hills of the Broken Bones.

  The Hills of the Broken Bones, Darkand

  It was a pitched battle. The demi-ordu commanded by Chokda and Changadai was fully engaged, and close to being overrun by the second xenos swarm. Only Hagai, considering his Land Speeder’s height, had spotted their potential salvation – a long scar of yellowing earth and dry grass running along the right of the tyranid flank.

  Timchet shifted his arc of fire right, catching a group of hormagaunts as they leapt for Chaplain Changadai’s bike. The xenos came apart amidst the flurry of heavy bolts, their remains splattering the skull-helmed White Scar’s left side. Changadai didn’t notice – he was swinging right, his crozius arcanum a golden blur as its blunt mace head pulverised one snapping, lunging gaunt after another. Although they were on different vox frequencies, Timchet fancied he could hear the Chaplain roaring the name of the Chapter’s long-lost primarch, even over the shriek of Wind Tamer’s turbofans.

  ‘If you’re wrong about this, they’ll all die,’ he said.

  ‘When was I last wrong about anything,’ Hagai said, as he pushed the skimmer’s acceleration to its edge, the powerful Gs battling with the twin pilots’ armour and restraint harnesses.

  ‘You were wrong about Konchen losing to Surii’s dice,’ Timchet said as he dragged the heavy bolter round to compensate for the increased speed. ‘And you were wrong about Boral beating Uygar on the sparring mats. And this time you were wrong about the warp jump’s time approximation variance.’

  ‘You fire the bolter,’ Hagai said. ‘And I’ll fly the skimmer, understood, wind-brother?’

  Timchet didn’t respond, already firing once more in support of the assault bikes below. In advising them to turn right, Hagai had likely saved the lives of Chokda and the rest of the mounted strike force. The swarm had responded sluggishly to the sudden, sharp change in direction, no longer pressing the White Scars now that they weren’t offering a direct threat to the maleceptor. The momentary decrease in the ferocious coordination of the swarm had allowed the bikes to pull away, though hormagaunts in particular were still throwing themselves at the White Scars with the great, bounding leaps that made them so dangerous.

  ‘They’re moving in behind,’ Hagai said to Chokda over the vox. ‘Cutting you off.’

  He was right. While the swarm was no longer flinging itself at the bikes, they had moved around and beneath their current route, fully separating them from the Devastators and Tactical Marines holding the rise overlooking the combat. The only way to escape now was to continue straight onwards – towards a canyon concealed by the dry earth of the steppe grasslands. After Jaga’s death, the entire brotherhood had been warned about the dangers of hidden sinkholes out on the plains.

  ‘Use your firepower to keep herding them after us,’ Chokda instructed tersely over the vox, addressing both Wind Tamer and the Devastators. ‘We’ll only get one chance at this.’

  Timchet did as directed, picking off the stragglers below and leaving the gaunts pressing close on the strike force’s tyres. The entire swarm was being drawn after the assault bikes, its centre dragged south-west by the new angle adopted by Chokda. The maleceptor was no longer at its heart, but was close to being left in its outer orbit, lumbering to keep pace with its underlings even as it drove them relentlessly after Chokda’s harried bikers. Another White Scar had fallen, his bike riddled with borer ­beetles and his body run through multiple times with long chitin blades. Unless the swarm could be driven off or dispersed, none of the fallen brothers’ gene-seed would be recovered.

  ‘I’m coming in low,’ Hagai warned as he brought Wind Tamer round on the tail of the swarm. Ahead Timchet could see the bikes nearing the hidden canyon’s edge. Behind, frag rockets, brilliant bolts of plasma and lascannon beams from Subodak’s Devastators were tearing at the edge of the alien horde, the crump of detonations and the crack of high-energy shots overlying the constant thunder of thousands of xenos hooves.

  ‘Five seconds to the canyon’s edge,’ Hagai voxed, guiding the bikes from above. ‘Accelerate!’

  ‘May the Khagan and the Emperor watch over us!’ Chokda’s voice shouted over the link. Moments later Timchet heard the roar of bike engines rising above the battlefield din, and saw the surviving bikers, still led by Chokda and Changadai, ride straight at the length of dead earth. They cleared its edge, wheels spinning, dust and xenos gore streaking out behind them. Almost immediately the ground began to give way in their wake, a cascade of earth that threw up a great pall of choking, yellow dust. For a glorious moment Timchet saw the bikes suspended in mid-air, like the vengeful spirits of the eternal hunt, defying the laws of the galaxy on their long and magnificent ride. Timchet watched them clear the canyon’s edge, and he gloried in the name of his Chapter and his primarch.

  Chokda struck the other side of the ravine first. The impact would have likely smashed a lesser-made bike and broken bones in a mortal rider, but the White Scar’s locked power plate and his mount’s grav suspension and auto-stabilisers absorbed the worst of the landing. The great treads bit dirt, and the türüch roared away, his exhilarated laughter audible over the vox. Chaplain Changadai and his hunt-brothers followed, each in turn slamming down on the far side of the dividing canyon and racing for the grassy plains beyond. Behind them the full expanse of the canyon became apparent as the soil gave way to a black void, the earth shuddering at the exposure of the long fissure.

  The tyranids realised what had happened far too late. They were driven wholly by the imperatives being channelled through the maleceptor, and the lumbering beast was not wholly aware of the presence of the canyon that now carved through one flank of the battlefield. It understood thanks to the great dust cloud and the vision of the leading edge of the swarm, but by the time its imperatives to stop had registered with its underlings the forward momentum was too great. The thick press of stampeding gaunts pitched the foremost over the canyon’s newly crumbling edge, shrieking and twisting as they fell to their deaths on the jagged rocks below. Timchet watched in awe as a glittering wave of black carapace cascaded over the side of the cliff, driven to destruction by the remorseless imperatives of the hive mind.

  ‘Told you they’d make it,’ Hagai said as they tore through the dust cloud, while Chokda and his hunt-brothers brought their bikes around. For once, Timchet didn’t respond. He was grinning like a freshly scarred steppe youth.

  Not all of the swarm pitched itself over the edge. The rearmost, alerted by the deaths of those in front, were able to pull away in time, splitting left and right along the canyon’s edge in scurried masses. Others made the jump. Dozens of those hormagaunts not forced over, but given the split second needed to bunch their thick leg muscles, leapt the divide. They cleared the far edge of the gorge and immediately continued on after the bikes, quickly becoming strung out across the grasslands.

  ‘Let’s clean
them up,’ Hagai said, and Wind Tamer dropped down to support Chokda’s riders. The biker squad had completely come about and were now roaring forward to meet the hormagaunts. The Land Speeder joined them, keeping pace, barely fifty feet above the flattened grass. Timchet locked his auto-senses onto the leading xenos and opened fire.

  Across the canyon the Devastators and Tactical Marines were clearing up the remains of the swarm. It had swung about in confusion, the central controlling consciousness now uncertain whether to turn its attack towards the ridge line, or cluster defensively around the maleceptor. Controlled bursts of long-range bolter fire supported by the heavy weapons specialists of Subodak’s squad whittled down their remaining numbers remorselessly, leaving twitching, blown-apart xenos corpses scattered around the thicker clusters from Chokda’s first charge.

  The hormagaunts left stranded on the far side of the canyon met the same fate. Scattered and no longer a coordinated mass, the firepower from the bikes and Timchet’s heavy bolters wiped them out. Hagai climbed away up and over the gorge, leaving Chokda and his brothers to pick off the last of the xenos. The White Scars whooped and laughed as they caught the surviving disorientated beasts, putting them down with crunching impacts from their bikes or vicious slashes of daos and chainswords.

  ‘Targeting the leader-beast,’ said Subodak over the vox. The commander of the Devastators had turned his firepower against the maleceptor on his own initiative, no longer viewing the remains of the swarm as a threat. The gigantic tyranid lowed and shuddered under the successive strikes of krak missiles, plasma bolts and lascannon beams, the psychic shield that protected it quickly overloading. A las-bolt seared into one of its throbbing brain lobes, bursting the grey matter in a hideous shower and slicing straight out the other side. A krak missile buried itself between the creature’s thick rib plates, blasting a chunk with the mass of a grown human away in a spray of ichor and torn organs. The thing went down on its knees, phantom tendrils whipping the air in pain and distress, the gaunts around it shrieking in panicked impotence.