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Unbroken - Chris Wraight - Extract

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Unbroken

Chris Wraight

He runs, head low, bolter held loosely one-handed, loping over terrain broken by a mortal generation of war.

He moves faster than should be possible, his steel-grey armour a blur in the desert sand, whining from servo-strain, driven to its limits by the hunter’s mind encased within. He is a dust-cloud, a djinn of vengeance launched across the parched wastes.

The world around him howls its outrage. The skies crack with flame, throbbing amid tumbling amber cloudbanks. Every footfall is a violation, an imposition of alien matter on tortured soil.

This world hates him. It hates his armour, forged on a planet of relentless cold. It hates the angular runes on his shoulderguards, carved in black and choked with the dust that fouls all things here. It hates the fact that he is alone, for Armageddon is a world of limitless hosts, of Legions stretching from lightning-scored horizon to horizon. As he runs, this world tries to throttle him, to snatch away his breath, to seize him up.

He feeds from the hatred. He looks up at the ember-glowing skies and laughs. He feels the beating heat on his back and snarls for more. Blood-red flickers dance across the western desert-edge, and the incipient storm-rumble makes the dust shiver.

He is panting now, his saliva viscous. He has been running for hours, a constant rhythm since being dropped into the deep desert by the lifter. Ahead of him squats the ridge, carved like bone from the desert, crested, wave-like and dominating the surrounding flatlands. It rises two hundred metres, jagged and earth-dry, scored by gulches that will never gush with water again.

He sees the summit, zoomed through his helm’s ocular augmenters, beaten flat and crested with withered scrub. The peak is the target. It is the stronghold, a citadel, a natural fortress of bare stone and wind-flayed columns amid the baking expanse of desert. Xenos-cattle would break against that rock like spilled blood, foaming back into the gasping earth in their anger. He intends to make them.

He grins and pants harder, dog-like. He can hear them coming for him now. They have picked up his spoor, and they are breaking away from their pits and towers along the river’s edge, a kilometre to the east. He can already see them in his mind’s eye – roaring, stamping, furious. They will come for him, racing across the sands, desperate to bring him down, to crush his spine and trample his lifeless body into the red soil.

The thought of it makes his battle-spirit sing. He feels his axe clatter against his thigh as he runs and burns to pull it free.

Not yet, he thinks. Not until they are on him, piling in around him, bellowing with tusked mouths gaping and spittle flying into his face.

He runs. He keeps running. But though he is the prey, he is not running from them. He has never run from an enemy in his life.

The dust flares around him, curling like a cloak. The skies burn, the heat shimmers.

Ahead of him, the summit nears. It looks, for a moment, like a cairn on the peaks of Asaheim.

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Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

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