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The Will of the Legion – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Will of the Legion

Andy Clark

Captain Hashin Yonnad squeezed his bolt pistol’s trigger. The gun boomed as it spat self-propelled micro-missiles down the length of the corridor. Around him the warriors of Breacher Siege Squad Tybo added their fire to his, each Iron Armour-clad battle-brother expertly plying his boltgun over the rim of his shield.

At the corridor’s far end, their targets were blown messily apart. Rangy human warriors in brightly patterned enviro-armour detonated as though each had swallowed a grenade in some obscene suicide pact.

In turning their guns upon the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet, these Driftborn may as well have done just that, thought Yonnad. He advanced, reloading as he went. Blood and pulverised meat dripped from the walls and ceiling onto the Imperial Fists as they passed.

‘No small thing, to see such bloodletting aboard the Tribune, eh, captain?’ asked Sergeant Tybo over the squad vox as they clattered up a flight of iron steps. They passed their Legion’s sigil, embossed upon the walls in semi-precious metals and lit red by the strobe of alarm lumens.

‘It will not last long,’ Yonnad replied. ‘Our enemies fight with vicious tenacity, but they have nothing to truly threaten the Legiones Astartes. When the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet entered their domain, they should have capitulated at once. The Consus Drift might have been a staging post. Instead they force us to make of it a mass grave.’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘Wasteful.’

They emerged into an intersection and were met by another hail of bullets that clanged from power armour and boarding shields.

This latest band of boarders had dragged heavy munitions crates into a crude barricade. Checking his auto-senses’ map of the Tribune he saw that the fighting had brought him almost to the ship’s outer hull.

‘This position was intended as a last-ditch defence for the enemy’s beachhead,’ opined Tybo.

‘Perhaps, in their ignorance, they never believed it would be needed,’ Yonnad replied. Certainly, the fire from behind the barricade was ragged and haphazard, easily shrugged off by Tybo’s legionaries.

‘Break them,’ Yonnad ordered.

Shields interlocking, bolters fore, the Breachers pressed forward. Their guns thundered, the sound filling the intersection and drowning out the terrified screams of their enemies. Pale-skinned, dark-eyed Driftborn were torn to pieces and the stench of blood and ordure filled the air. Some tried to fire back with their boarding rifles and wide-muzzled pistols.

Futile, thought Yonnad, pitifully so.

The bullets barely marred the legionaries’ shields. By comparison, simply standing against the Space Marines’ blizzard of fire was to die. A dozen Driftborn did so in the first seconds of the gunfight; another half a dozen followed them moments later, and then the last of their number were fleeing down the corridor in animal terror.

‘Follow. We finish this.’

At their captain’s command the Breachers bulled their way through the ill-fated barricade, their heavy boots crushing ruptured corpses into the deck plates as they strode relentlessly after the retreating Driftborn.

Through another bulkhead door, down a chevroned ramp between thumping pistons the size of gunships; Yonnad noticed amber warnings appearing on his auto-senses as air-oxygen content and external temperature both dropped steadily.

‘The fools must have made an imperfect breach with our hull,’ said Sergeant Tybo in disgust. ‘Sloppy.’

Yonnad passed through one last doorway, a wide portal whose mechanisms still sparked where the Driftborn had forced entry. Then the enemy were before him, what was left of them at least. Twenty-two men and women knelt upon the decking of a fire-damaged servitor bay, looking as pale and lifeless as the corpse-machines that dangled on armatures above them. They were shivering violently, Yonnad saw, those without respirator masks gasping for breath in the thin air.

Behind them yawned the boarding jaws of their attack craft, its ramshackle interior lit by stuttering lumens. Before them lay their weapons, set down in obvious surrender.

Yonnad’s auto-senses highlighted four separate micro-fractures around the boarding craft, where its rudimentary blast-foam dispensers had failed to properly seal the craft into the hull. At the rate the air was whistling away through those gaps and the cold of the void creeping in, he estimated the defeated Driftborn could survive in this chamber for a few minutes more at most.

‘What do we do with them?’ asked Tybo, his voice dispassionate.

‘They have surrendered and will be made Compliant,’ Yonnad replied, allowing his words to echo from his helm’s vox-grille. ‘They are not tainted xenos, but lost children of humanity and as such shall be afforded the light of the Imperial Truth.’ He had heard the Driftborn giving orders and shouting battle cries, and while their dialect was somewhat adrift of Terran standard, it was close enough that mutual understanding could be easily achieved. Sure enough he saw some amongst the Driftborn relax minutely. A few faces looked up in hope.

That hope spread, if only slightly, as the Imperial Fists gestured with their bolters for the captives to rise and exit the chamber. They did as they were bidden, walking two by two, hands on their heads with Brother Lordyan walking at their fore and the rest of the squad bringing up the rear. Yonnad was the last to leave, runemarking the site for immediate attention by the ship’s servitor repair clades.

‘We do not want to risk their boarding craft wrenching free from the hull and causing a breach,’ said Yonnad, then froze as script flowed across his auto-senses. A priority summons for him and the veteran legionaries of Squad Tybo, issued from embarkation deck six.

‘Other side of the ship,’ Tybo commented, already detailing two of his brothers to detach themselves and deliver the prisoners.

‘We will take the turbolifts,’ replied Yonnad.

‘What do you suppose this means?’ asked Tybo.

‘We will find out soon enough, sergeant,’ said Yonnad and set off with Tybo and his squad following close on his heels.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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