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The Long and Hungry Road – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Long and Hungry Road

Adrian Tchaikovsky

There is a scent, that’s all.

Or not a scent, not in the killing void of space. And humans, that intrepid species, have set foot on worlds of lava, of ice, of poison, but of all murderous biomes, space is king. The antithesis of life. Unless it is surpassed by the rending horrors of the warp.

A scent in the mind, save that which receives the scent has no mind as humans know it. Say rather that it has receptors. As insects spread fronded antennae to catch the pheromones of their mates, as a canine’s ears swivel to its master’s voice, so these nameless organs register a stimulus and discharge a cascade of biochemical instructions into the vast body of the whole. Here, says that signal. Here is sustenance. Here is the seed of all the generations to come.

It voyages with its kin, in a loose coalition that exists in a state that is neither individuals nor pack. A self in which there is no I. Simultaneously vast and minuscule. Sky-blotting things larger than the greatest warships. And yet tiny, for space goes on forever, and even the grandest of living things cannot compare against that infinite canvas.

Not for them the vagaries of the warp. Instead, at the heart of the fleet, a fragile eggshell vessel reaches out with its delicate spines and detects the heavy hand of gravity. A star, worlds, the potential for life. Food. Like a spider within a universe-spanning web, it feels the promise of this place, the potential for beings that will cry out when the fleet defaces their sky. In worship or in fear. The fleet’s instinctive response to these delicate tremors is to reach out and pull, to haul itself hand over hand like a human with a rope. That one delicate sensory creature dragging the entire clutch of ravenous ships through the interstellar gulf at speeds beyond human understanding, sliding down the slope of gravity until they burst without warning into the star system.

As they arrive, other parts of the fleet awaken. The star’s hand on the scales of gravity, its warmth, the buzz of mind and thought like vox static in which faint words can be heard. All these things trigger a thousand separate living processes within the hive ships. Juices flow, biochemical reactions seethe, organs ripen.

Ahead of them, the origin of that non-scent whirls within the void, registered and analysed by their flowering arrays of sensory organs. The feelers and fronds and biological lenses that blossom and form in clusters and nests across their scarred shells. Sustenance, say those senses. And so often it isn’t so. Dead rocks and blasted worlds, the source of that signal already scoured away by the countless other skirmishes and strifes the dark universe is heir to. And they cannot know disappointment, but every failed voyage consumes their inner reserves. They hunger. But then they always hunger. It is what they’re made of.

And, after false alarms and failures and meagre repasts that barely serve to replenish their strength, here is what they have been hungering for. One more ball of rock in the void, but carpeted with a lush skin of biological material, like fields awaiting the farmer’s scythe. Seas teeming with aquatic life, sprawling forests of a thousand interrelated ecosystems, cities dense with bodies and bustle and mind. The mind that calls out to them, Here, come here, for we are fruit ripe for the eating!

The hive fleet propels itself towards that signal, that cluster of sensory overload that is a living world within the desert of the void. Feeling the subtle shift that is the shallow end of the planet’s gravity well tugging at it, triggering a sequence of neural nodes that has it altering its approach towards a stable orbit. The members of the pod follow in sequence, coordinating without ever quite being aware of one another’s existence, lost in a cloud of uncertainty between I and us.

A feast, after so long and so far. Hope for the future. That they might continue their endless pilgrimage.

To the Imperium, the world is Chertes, and twelve billion human subjects of the Emperor dwell there.

Bartilam is the first to know. Before the Imperial Navy’s batteries of alarms burst into shrieking voice, before even the early-warning choir of the Adeptus Mechanicus sanctuary on the moon. He wakes in the sudden and complete knowledge that today is the day.

In the dense hive tenements where his people dwell, he sounds the call to prayer. The public information vox-boxes resound to a harsh, alien language – the one that crept into his mind as he grew up, that marked him as one of the chosen. All his life he has believed this duty would fall on his successor or some later scion, but he is the blessed one. He is the magus whose voice will herald the apocalypse and the ascension.

Even as Bartilam knows a suddenly invigorated purpose, a wave of selective panic is spreading across Chertes. In Imperial service, licensed psykers wake suddenly, feeling as though they are blind and deaf, a whole sense severed from them. In cellars and tenements and asylums, those whose warped gifts have not yet been detected start screaming; in the cells, those waiting for the Black Ships to carry them away stop. A smothering blanket descends on the psychic life of the world, choking the powers of every psyker from the lowest gang runaway to the astropaths of the cruisers in orbit. None will ever hear the world’s death throes.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.

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