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Extinction – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Extinction

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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 Ferac 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 battle-ments, 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 princeps’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 Throneworld 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.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2012.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.

Extinction © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Extinction, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-236-3

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