The Last Hunt by Robbie MacNiven

Author:Robbie MacNiven [MacNiven, Robbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2017-10-02T12:02:11+00:00

Trying to fight them is like counting the grains of sand on the shore. Better you burn your own homestead, your own city, your own world and everyone you know, than allow yourselves to be consumed.

– Inquisitor Sylas Vult,

Ordo Xenos, just prior to the

Entharian Exterminatus

Chapter Nine

THE GREAT DEVOURER

TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

[TERRAN STANDARD]: 29 HOURS.

TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

East of Juben’s Gorge, Darkand

He was too late to save the Beged.

Lau Feng knelt beside the lictor’s corpse. There wasn’t a great deal of it remaining. Wind Tamer had riddled it with heavy bolter rounds, blasting away limbs and gristly pieces of torso. The split-open carcass was still smoking. Feng looked into its eyes. They were black, glassy, unreal-looking. Even in life, they had no soul. Without the hive mind, they were nothing.

The White Scar stood slowly, servos in his armour clicking. The creature lay at the heart of a jagged pattern of death it had woven about itself. The remains of the Beged tribe stretched out around him, massacred. With their most experienced warriors fighting and dying alongside Feng in the canyon, there had been none capable of stopping the xenos assassin when it had struck.

There were bloodflies buzzing around the slaughtered tribesfolk lying nearby, but no insect or vermin would touch the tyranid’s corpse. It lay undefiled, alien in every sense of the word. It had killed about half of the tribe before Wind Tamer had ended its rampage; not all the Beged had been slaughtered – many had scattered, terrified of the creature that suddenly appeared in their midst. They were as good as dead though, spread out and lost across the grasslands. The xenos would find and tear them apart one by one.

‘Brother türüch,’ said a voice, starting Feng from his dark thoughts. Wind Tamer’s gunner, Timchet, had approached him without his knowledge. The Land Speeder was idle a few dozen paces from the body-littered track, awaiting fresh orders.

‘You are unharmed, brother?’ Timchet went on. The gunner would know from his own auto-sense scans that very little of the blood on Feng’s armour was his own, but he clearly wished for a reason to address the squad leader.

‘I am,’ Feng said, looking back at the lictor’s remains.

‘The entire brotherhood is assembling before the Founding Wall,’ Timchet went on. ‘Wind Tamer could escort you, if you wish.’

‘No,’ Feng said. ‘I will make my own way.’

Timchet lingered for a moment longer before turning and walking back to his Land Speeder. The skimmer departed with a screech of turbofans, the steppe grass rippling in its wake. Silence descended after it had gone, Feng’s only companion the whisper of the wind. And the four corpses looking at him.

He glanced up to the sky. It was not long after noon, and yet the sun’s light was weak, diluted by the alien filth choking Darkand’s atmosphere. The hive fleet’s grip on the stricken world was tightening. Eventually, the White Scar turned and mounted his bike.

There was another wave coming.

The Mountain Gate, Heavenfall

The Great Devourer had arrived in full.

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