Extinction Read online

  Legions die by betrayal. They die in fire and futility.

  Above all, they die in shame.

  Kallen Garax, Sergeant of Garax Tactical Squad, Sons of Horus 59th Company. His armour is wreck-blasted and cracked, gunmetal grey with the sea-green paint scorched away into memory. Across his helm's left side, image intensifiers refocus with smooth whirrs, miraculously undamaged from his fall.

  His men are in pieces around him. Medes is a dismembered ruin, his component parts scattered over the rubble. Vladak is impaled through the chest, decapitated by junk, twitching in a spread of bloodstained sand. Daion and Ferae had been closest to the defence turrets' power generator when their length of the wall exploded under a gunship's strafing run. Kallen has a flash memory of both warriors covered in chemical fire, burning as the Shockwave sent them sprawling. Their scorched remains scarcely resemble anything human. He doubts they'd been alive when they hit the ground.

  Smoke rises all around him, though the wind steals the worst of it. He can't move. He can't feel his left leg. Jagged wreckage lies strewn in every direction; a particularly sharp chunk of it impales his thigh, pinning him to the charred ground. He looks back at the burning stronghold, with its remaining turrets firing at the gunships strafing the battlements, and an entire wall broken open to the enemy. Across the desert, the enemy come on in a dusty horde, half- occluded by the dirty smoke thrown up by their bike tyres and smoking engines. Dirty silver on a dull, desecrated blue: the Night Lords, riding in wild unity.

  He keeps his calm, speaking over the vox, demanding Titan support that he knows isn't coming, despite the prin- ceps's promises. They are betrayed, left here to die under VIII Legion guns.

  Kallen looks at the plasteel bar driven through the meat of his leg, and gives it an experimental tug. Even with pain nullifiers flooding his bloodstream, the grind of metal against bone peels his pale lips back from his teeth in a snarl.

  'Tagh gorugaaj kerez,' he calls out in Cthonic. 'Tagh gorugaaj kerez.'

  A howl sounds closer, mechanical and full-throated. Jump-jets, whining to a close.

  'Veliasha shar sheh meressal mah?' asks a vox-voice in a language he doesn't speak. He knows the sound of Nostraman, tongue of the sunless world, but speaks none of it himself.

  A shadow eclipses the world's poisoned sky. It isn't one of his brothers. It doesn't offer a hand to help him rise. Instead, it aims a bolter down at his face.

  Kallen stares into the gun barrel, dark as the nothingness between worlds. His eyes flick left, where his own bolter lies in the rubble. Out of reach. With his leg impaled, it might as well be half a world away.

  He unlocks his helm's seals and pulls it free, feeling the desert wind on his bleeding face. He wants his killer to see him smiling.

  Sovan Khayral, Techmarine, bound to the Sons of Horus 101st Company. The bridge burns around him, shrouding his vision with greasy smoke the ventilators have no hope of scrubbing into something breathable. To compensate, his eye lenses cycle through filters: thermal sight reveals nothing but smears of migraine heat; motion-sensing tracks the crew staggering and suffocating on the deck, and slouched in their seats.

  The ship dying around him is the Hevelius, a destroyer of some renown in the Sons of Horus fleet. Like so many of the Legion's ships, she was at Terra when the Throne-world burned. The last sight Khayral had of the auspex display showed the flickering runes of the Death Guard fleet closing into killing range, herding the outnumbered and outgunned Sons of Horus vessels into showing their bellies. The Death Guard meant to finish this up close and personal. They'd get their wish, in a matter of moments.

  Khayral's dense ceramite acts as a heat shield against the fires consuming all life around him. Retinal displays mark the temperature close to melting flesh and muscle from the bone. Sirens wail without respite, never needing to pause for breath in the choking smoke.

  He hurls himself at the control throne, throwing aside the slack corpse-to-be of Hevelius's asphyxiating captain. Through the smoke, he keys a code into the console built into the armrest. Shipwide vox comes alive with a nasty, wet crackle. Circuits are melting all across the ship, diseased and rotting and burning.

  'All hands,' he says through his helm's mouth-grille speaker. 'All hands, abandon ship.'

  Nebuchar Desh, Captain of the Sons of Horus 30th Company. He exhales a rancid coppery breath from his lungs, feeling bloody spit stringing between his teeth. One of his hearts has failed, now a cooling dead weight in his chest. The other beats like a heathen war drum, overworked and out of rhythm. His face is on fire with the pain of the lash wounds tiger-striping his flesh. The last whipcrack stole one of his eyes. The one before that opened his throat to the gristle.

  He raises his sword in time for the whip to lash back, wrapping his fist and the hilt in a serpentine rush. A sharp pull tears the weapon from his grip. Disarmed, half-blind, breathless, Desh falls to one knee.

  'For the Warmaster.' With his ravaged throat, the words are as strengthless as a whisper. His enemy answers with a bellow, loud enough to shake Desh's remaining eye in its socket. The wall of sound hits him with rippling physicality, denting and bending his armour plating in a series of resonating clangs. He stands against the wind for three erratic heartbeats until it breaks his balance, hurling him down and sending him skidding across the landing platform with a squeal of ceramite on rusting iron.

  As he tries to rise, a boot presses down on the back of his head, grinding his mutilated face into the iron deck. He feels his teeth snapping in their sockets, gluing to the inside of his mouth with thick, corrosive saliva.

  'For the-'

  His benediction ends in a voiceless gurgle as the blade slides lovingly home into his spine.

  Zarien Sharak, Brother of the Sons of Horus 86th Company. A seeker, a pilgrim, a visionary - he seeks out the Neverborn, surrendering his flesh to daemons as a statue of meat and bone offered up for reshaping. He pursues them, proves himself to them with sacrifices of blood and souls, forever seeking the strongest to ally with him within his own skin.

  He no longer recalls how long he's been on this world, nor how long the World Eaters have been chasing him. He isn't here to run from them, he's here to stand and face them. They chase him now, laughing and howling up the side of the mountain. Sharak can hear the mad wetness in their words, and pays their frothing laughter no heed. His muscles burn; the last daemon to dwell within his flesh was cast out seven nights before, leaving him drained and anaemic in search of another. Soon, he knows. Soon.

  His gauntleted hand grips the rocky ledge above. He has the briefest moment to smile at the bolt shells bursting stone into fragments nearby before he hauls himself up and out of the World Eaters' line of fire.

  The shrine awaits him, as he knew it would, though it resembles nothing he'd expected. A single sculpture, weathered by mutable time, reduced to something stunted, formless, vague. Perhaps it had once been an eldar, in the era when this entire region of space had been the domain of that sick and weak alien breed.

  You have found me, comes the voice in his mind. Sharak sweats at the silent sound. He turns, seeing nothing but the deformed statue and the endless expanse of glass desert in every direction.

  Sharak, it beckons. Your enemies draw near. Shall we end them, you and I ?

  Sharak is no fool. He's whored his flesh as a weapon to devils and spirits alike, but he knows the secrets most of his brothers lack. Discipline is all it takes to maintain control. Even the strongest of the Neverborn is no match for the strength of a guarded, warded human soul. They could share his flesh, but never dominate his essence.

  This daemon is strong. It has demanded much of him these last months, and here at the precipice, it offers everything he needs to save his life. But he is no fool. Cauti
on and care are his watchwords when dealing with this realm's creatures. He's seen too many of his brothers become scorched husks, home to daemonic intelligence, all trace of themselves scoured and scraped away from within.

  The World Eaters howl below - not like wolves, but fanatics. It's the lack of anything feral that makes it so sickening to hear, so much more of a threat. A beast's howl is a natural thing. A fanatic's cry is something of anger and tormented joy in equal measure, born of spite and twisted faith. He turns back to the stunted stone pillar.

  You've followed my voice for a hundred days and nights. You've made foes of brothers and cousins alike, just as I asked. And now you stand before the stone that sinners once carved in my image. You've proven yourself in every way I asked of you. You are worthy of this union. What now, Sharak? What now?

  'I'm ready,' Sharak says. He bares his throat in a symbolic gesture, and pulls his helm free. He can hear the rattle and grind of ceramite over rock. The World Eaters are almost upon him.

  The Joining is different each time. Once, it was a hammer blow to his sternum, as if the daemon wriggled its way through an invisible puncture hole into his body. Another time, it came as a burst of consciousness and sensuality - perceiving shadows of lost souls moving at the edges of his eyes, and hearing whispers on the wind from entire worlds away. This time, it strikes with heat, with a burning itch across the skin. He feels the Joining physically at first, a welcome violation of his flesh despite the bleeding and choking. It hurts down to his bones, weighing them down, driving him to his knees. His eyes turn next, hardening in their sockets, fusing to the bone behind. He taps them, scratches them, pulls at them... they're stones in his skull, edged by spines pushing from his face.

  The strength is narcotic in its intensity. No combat drugs, no stimulant serum can match the energy feeding the fibres of his muscles. He starts to claw at his armour plating, no longer needing its protection. Ceramite peels away in chunks, making room for the chitinous ridges beneath.

  Sharak looks past the pain, refocusing, seeking to calm his racing hearts. Control. Control. Control. It's only pain. It won't kill him. It can be overcome. It...

  It hurts. It hurts more than the agonies of all past Joinings. It hurts to his core, beyond his flesh, hurting past the aches in his bones and into something deeper and truer and infinitely more vulnerable.

  A lesson here, the voice says. Not all pain can be controlled.

  Sharak turns, screaming through a mouth now crammed with knife-teeth. His jaw barely obeys him. His voice strangles off, killing the cry, and becomes someone else's laugh.

  And not all enemies can be beaten.

  Fear - fear for the first time in his life - floods through his organs in an adrenal rush.

  Erekan Juric, Captain of Vaithan Reaver Squad. Lasfire slashes past him, ionising the air he breathes and leaving scorched smears across his armour. He ignores the incidental beams, firing back at the humans with his bolter kicking in his fist. The turbines on his back are heavy, broken things that no longer breathe flame. They stutter and sigh, exhaling smoke and bleeding promethium.

  At his boots, his brother Zhoron is cursing him and thanking him, all at once. Juric drags Zhoron by the backpack, hauling him metre by metre up the gunship's ramp. Both of them leave a snail's trail of fluid along the ridged metal: Zhoron leaves a path of his blood from where his legs now end; Juric leaves a dripping track of leaking oil and fuel, with spent shell casings clanging down on the metal ramp by his boots. In the gunship's cargo bay, hastily loaded crates wait in ramshackle order, with wounded warriors in abundance.

  'Shersan,' he voxes. 'Go.'

  'Yes, captain,' comes the confirmation, flawed by vox-crackle. For a moment, Juric smiles, even under enemy fire. Captain. An echo of an era when the Legion still had a structure; from the time before they were hunted like dogs by those they'd failed.

  With a shudder, the ramp starts its grinding rise. The gun- ship kicks, lifting off the ground on a cloud of engine wash and swirling dust. Juric releases Zhoron, tosses his empty bolter into the gunship's waiting cargo bay, and starts running.

  Don't,' his downed brother warns through pained hisses. 'Erekan. Don't do this.'

  Juric doesn't answer. He drops from the rising ramp, thudding back down onto the rocky ground, breaking stones beneath his boots. In his fists, both weapons whine as they accrue power in unison: the curving axe shivers with lightning dancing over its silver blade, while the plasma pistol trembles with the heating of its spinal coils. Bursts of gas relieve the pressure from muzzle vanes. It wants to fire. He knows this gun, and he knows its will. It wants to fire.

  The humans are upon him now. He faces them at the heart of the burning fortress, while evacuating gunships rise into the grey sky. The first is a woman, her face a canvas of fresh scars, invoking gods she scarcely understands. Two men run behind her, armed with salvaged twists of metal, their violated flesh different only from the woman's in the cartography of their mutilations, but the same in intent. A mob charges behind the three leaders, screaming and chanting, killing each other in a bid to reach him. Faith gives them courage, but their zealotry has driven them past the point of self-preservation.

  Juric starts butchering them, saving the overkill of his pistol for what will surely come afterwards. Swing after swing takes him through the rabble, his axe never ceasing. Blood flecks his eye lenses, and sizzles as it burns away from his energised blade. These lives are meaningless.

  'Kahotep,' he breathes the name through his helm's vox- speakers. 'Face me.'

  The reply is a psychic pulse of distant mirth. +Now why would I want to do that?+

  Juric puts his boot through the chest of the last man standing, and runs even as the body falls. Another shadow darkens the sky as a gunship judders overhead, before the concussive boom of its engines lift it into the storm. As if in sympathy for the falling fortress, rain starts in a hissing torrent. It does nothing to fight the fires.

  Breathless, Juric asks the vox: 'Who's still on the ground?'

  Name-runes and acknowledgement pulses flicker across his retinal display, along with a chorus of voices. The stronghold will fall before the hour turns, and half of his men are still inside its sundered walls.

  He crosses the courtyard, leaping the green-armoured bodies of his dead brethren, heading to one of the last remaining buildings. The defence turrets are silent now, all as broken as the battlements. Thousand Sons gunships, stark and dark in the rain, drift over the tumbled plasteel walls. Their battle tanks rumble in through holes torn in the stronghold's barricades. With them come phalanxes of the walking dead, directed by unseen hands.

  'Kahotep,' he says again. 'Where are you?'

  +Closer than you think, Juric.+

  Yet another shadow blacks out the sky, this one cast by a vulturish gunship of old indigo and worn gold, not fleeing in shame but bearing down in triumph. Juric throws himself into the vague cover of a fallen wall, his eyes activating retinal runes on his eye lenses.

  '1 need anti-armour fire in the southern courtyard. Do we have anything left?'

  The responses aren't encouraging. At least more of his men are escaping. That's what matters.

  The Thousand Sons gunship burns the air with heat haze from its engines, hovering above the courtyard. Its spotlights cut down through the darkness, raking over the desecrated ground.

  +Where did you go, Son of Horus? 1 thought you wanted to face me. Was I wrong?+

  The gunship's landing claws bite into the earth, grinding bodies beneath their weight. As the engines cycle down, the ramp beneath the cockpit starts to lower, a maw opening to breathe warriors into war.

  Juric watches the Rubricae march forth. His targeting reticule leaps from enemy to enemy, detecting mismatching life signs that suggest everything and conclude nothing. Are these men alive or dead? Both, perhaps. Or neither.

  'Vaithan, to me.'

  Three runes flash in response. It'll do. It's enough.

  He wills his jump pack
to fire, but the turbines' response is a shudder and a shower of sparks. He's grounded, and will need to do this the traditional way. Unopposed, three seconds is all it will take to close the distance. Four or five if they land more than one hit, which is likely.

  Thayren strikes from above, landing boots-first into the phalanx of the walking dead. Dusty ceramite breaks beneath his impact and two automatons in the blue and gold of the Thousand Sons go down to the dirt, falling with no sound of protest.

  Juric starts running the moment Thayren lands. For all his flaws, which he considers many and varied, he's no coward. The Rubricae's bolters bark in his direction the moment he rises into sight. Whatever independence death stole from them, it left them able to aim. Each explosive hit is a horse kick to his body, blasting ceramite shards away and sending him staggering, cursing the loss of flight. Temperature gauges flicker in alarm as his armour starts to burn with blue witch-fire.

  He finishes the first by taking its head, cleaving the stylised warhelm free. Dust bursts from the neck in a thin cloud, with the smell of tombs best left untouched. With the breath of dust comes a faint, relieved sigh. Juric doesn't see the headless body fall; he's already moved on, axe leading the way.

  Thayren duels two of the enemy, easily weaving aside from their heavy, precise swings. Juric is almost at his brother's side when protesting engines herald the arrival of Raxic and Naradar. Both hit the ground amidst the Thousand Sons formation, chainblades revving, bolt pistols crashing.

  Juric staggers again, down on one knee. His axe falls from his grip. The witch-fire washes over his armour, refusing to burn out, digesting the ceramite and eating into the softer joints.

  'Zhoron!' calls one of the other Reavers. Even through the pain biting at his joints, Juric tries to tell them it's futile. The Apothecary is already gone, evacuated on the way to Monument.

  He tastes the acid of his own spit on his tongue, and hears the sorcerer's voice in his mind.