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Into Exile – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Into Exile

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

10

Gritty ochre dust clings to the dead warrior’s open eyes. A shadow retreats from his stilled form, something immense yet hunched, something with rattling joints and grinding metal claws. It strides away, limping badly, its orders unfulfilled, its masters informed.

The legionary lies in the dirt, his duty done.

9

The scholar sits hunched in the chamber of stinking steel and bleeding bodies, breathing in the scorched scents of mangled automata and riven human flesh. The creature on his shoulder bears no small resemblance to a species of simian detailed in the archives of Ancient Terra. Its name is Sapien. The scholar named it himself when he constructed the creature from vat-cloned fur and consecrated metals.

The psyber-monkey gives a worried chitter at their surroundings. The scholar feels no such unease, only disgusted irritation. He sneers at these charnel house surroundings, this place of the ruined and the wounded that is supposedly his salvation.

The arched walls shake around him. Outside the ascending ship, the sky of Sacred Mars is on fire. Far below, Nicanor will be dead by now. Butchered, no less. The fool.

Arkhan Land huddles like some filthy refugee amidst the other survivors, praying to the Omnissiah that the reek of their cowardice and failure won’t infect him.

Sapien scampers to Land’s other shoulder. He chitters again, the tone wordless yet curiously inquisitive.

‘He was a fool,’ the scholar murmurs, idly stroking the cog-like vertebrae plates that made up the little creature’s spine. ‘Space Marines,’ he snorts the words. ‘They are all fools.’

But even to himself, those words ring a little hollow this time.

8

Nicanor stares into his slayer’s eyes. His own blood marks the bulbous golden domes of the war machine’s visual actuators, blood that he coughed into the thing’s face right after it drove the crackling, motorised spear through his breastplate. It keeps him aloft, impaled, his boots scarcely scraping the dust that makes up the useless yet priceless Martian soil. Each scuff smears away the red-brown regolith to reveal greyer earth beneath – a secret of the Red Planet concealed mere inches beneath the surface, yet unknown to most capable of conjuring the world’s image in their imaginations.

The machine leans in closer, the domes of its insect eyes inspecting the prey, recording Nicanor’s face and the markings upon his armour. The dying warrior hears the clicking whirr of an open transmission sluice as his killer exloads its findings to its distant masters.

This is prey. It knows that in the processes of its murderously simple consciousness.

But this is the wrong prey.

Nicanor swallows the pain. He doesn’t cower from it and he refuses to let it consume him. Pain is felt only by the living, and thus it is nothing to regret. Pain is life. Pain can be overcome as long as breath resides in the human, and transhuman, body. He will die, he knows this, but he will not die ashamed. Honour is everything.

Blood falls from Nicanor’s clenched teeth as the war machine shakes him, seeking to dislodge him from the toothed length of its spear-limb. The lance is buried too deeply in his innards, clutched by reinforced bone and armour plate, and refusing to easily come free. He feels his left boot connect with his fallen boltgun, the ceramite clanking against the gun’s kill-marked metal body. Even if he could twist to reach for it without tearing himself in two, the weapon is empty. Through his reddened gaze he still sees the scorched pockmarks cratering the robot’s head, where every bolt he fired found its target.

The war machine lowers its spear, slamming the impaled warrior hard against the dusty ground, and its taloned foot crunches down on Nicanor’s limp form for leverage. With a brace and a wrench of machinery joints, the lance tears free in a fresh scattershot of bloody ceramite and cooling gore.

The disembowelling also pulls the last breath from what remains of Nicanor’s body. He stares up, strengthless and silent, and he sees nothing in the robot’s implacable eye domes. There is no hint of intelligence or sign of who might be watching through the automaton’s retinal feed.

His greying gaze slides skyward, slipping from the hunched and bolt-blasted carapace of his mechanical slayer. There, rising into the embattled sky, is the silhouette of the scholar’s transport vessel.

It would be poetic to say that this is Nicanor’s final thought, and victory is his final sight. Neither is true. His final thought is of the ruination of his breastplate, where the symbol of the Raptor Imperialis had shown so proud in ivory upon the golden-yellow plate. His last sight is of Mondus Occulum, where subterranean foundries and bolt shell manufactories burn beneath the Martian rock, and where the last of his brothers’ gunships stream into the sky.

The dust in the air begins to settle over his armour, upon his torn body, even on his eyes as they twitch one last time, yet fail to close.

The war machine casts a shadow across his corpse as it records his demise.

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A Black Library Publication

Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Into Exile © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Into Exile, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-276-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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