Extinction Read online

  +This is how a Legion dies.+

  The warship sits silent in space, her reactor cold, her engines dead. Battlements line her spine in a protrusion of castles and spires, with thousands of powerless gun turrets aimed up into the void. She drifts alone at the heart of an asteroid field, suffering occasional impacts against her scarred armour, each slow crash adding to the asymmetry of her scars.

  She once carved her name through the galaxy at the vanguard of humanity's empire, a bloodthirsty herald of eminent domain. She once hung in the skies of Terra, laying waste to mankind's cradle. Now she lies still, abandoned in hell, hidden from those who covet her.

  Her spirit is a tight, tiny essence in her inactive core; the only iota of sentience and life within the immense hulk. This soul, as true as any human life despite its artificial genesis, slumbers in the infinite cold. She waits to be reawakened, but holds no hope it will ever happen. Her sons fled her decks, leaving her here to grow frigid and silver with ice crystals, so far from the light of the closest sun that the star is nothing but a pinprick in the night.

  She dreams a warrior's dreams: of fire, of pain, of blood soaking across steel while great guns roar. She dreams of the Many that once lived within her, and the warmth they took when they left.

  She dreams of the times she broadcast her name to lesser vessels, shrieking Vengeful Spirit as she crippled and killed her enemies.

  She dreams of the last words spoken in her presence, ordered in the low growl of the one who'd come to command her. She knew him, as she knew all of the Many. He'd stood before her machine-spirit heartcore, a massive clawed hand against the glass of her brain. Her mind filled the cavernous chamber, shielded and armoured in dense metal.

  Liquids bubbled. Engines groaned. Pistons clanked. The sound of her thoughts.

  Abaddon, she'd said to him. We can still hunt. We can still kill. You need me.

  He couldn't hear her. He wasn't linked, so he could neither hear nor respond. She knew that had been intentional. He was deafening himself to her, to make the abandonment easier. He'd spoken the final three words, then. The last words she heard with the clarity of consciousness.

  'Shut her down.'

  Abadd-

  Ezekyle the Brotherless, a pilgrim in hell. He stands at the edge of a cliff that reaches impossibly high into a sky the colour of madness and migraines, and he looks down at the armies warring below. Ants. Insects. A crusade of souls the size of sand grains, half-lost in the dust churned up from the hammering of so many thousands of boots and tank treads.

  His armour is a patchwork panoply of scavenged ceramite, repaired countless times after countless battles. The armour he wore in the rebellion is long-since abandoned, left to rot aboard the warship he exiled into the ether. His weapons from that war are likewise gone: his sword broken in some nameless skirmish years ago, and the claw he stole from his father left at the Legion's last fortress, the bastion known to the Sons of Horus as Monument. He wondered if they still left the weapon on display with the Warmaster's stasis-locked remains, or if they'd given in to their fevered hungers and fought over the right to be its bearer.

  There was a time he'd be down there with them, waging war at the vanguard, maintaining a steady stream of orders and listening to a flow of positioning reports, all the while killing with a smile in his eyes and a laugh on his lips.

  From this distance, he has no hope of discerning which companies are embattled, or even if either side holds to any of the old Legions' structures. Even a cursory glance through the dust clouds is enough to betray the most obvious truth: the Sons of Horus are losing once more, against an enemy horde that vastly outnumbers them. Individual prowess and heroism means nothing down there. A battle can break down into ten thousand duels between lone souls, but it isn't how wars are won.

  The wind, always a treacherous companion in this realm, carries infrequent scraps of shouted voices from the valley below. He lets the sounds wash over him without guilt, as unconcerned for the screaming as he is for the way the wind drags at his long, loose hair.

  Ezekyle crouches, gathering a fistful of the red sand that serves this world as worthless earth. His eyes never stray from the battle, instinct pulling at him despite having no investment in whoever lives and dies.

  Far below him, gunships crow and caw above the battlefield, adding their incendiary spite to the dusty frenzy. Titans - at this distance no larger than his fingernails - stride through the choke, their weapon fire still bright enough to leave thread-thin blurs across his retinas, each one a little slice of razored light.

  He smiles, but not because of the battle. What world is this? He realises he doesn't even know. His wandering takes him from planet to planet, avoiding his former brethren when he can, yet now he stands upon a world watching hundreds of his brothers dying, without even knowing the planet's name or what they sell their lives to defend.

  How many of the men screaming and fighting and bleeding down in the valley would he know by name? Most, without a doubt. That, too, makes him smile.

  He rises to his feet, opening his fist. The lifeless, glassy dust glitters away in the wind, catching the light from three weak suns before spreading in a thin burst, lost to sight.

  Ezekyle turns his back on the battle, and leaves the cliff behind. Footprints mark his passage, but he trusts the wind to breathe his tracks into memory before anyone catches sight of them. He looks to the horizon, where seven vast stepped pyramids rise into the sky, shaped by hands neither human nor alien, but wrought solely by divine whim.

  In this place in space, on every world he walks, desire and hatred forge the landscape more reliably than mortal ingenuity or natural tectonics. He's crossed bridges over oblivion, threaded between islands of rock hanging in the void. He's explored the tombs of xenos-breed kings and queens, and left priceless plunder to lie untouched in the dark. He's travelled the surface of hundreds of worlds in this realm where the material and the immaterial meet to mate, scarcely paying heed to the extinction of the Legion he once led.

  Curiosity drives him, and hatred sustains him, where once anger was all he needed. Defeat cooled the fires of that particular forge, however.

  Ezekyle Abaddon, no longer First Captain, no longer a Son of Horus, keeps walking. He'll reach the first great pyramid before the first of the three suns sets.