The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  SHAS’O

  A Tau Empire collection

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Praetorian of Dorn’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Fire sputters… The shame of our deaths and our heresies is done. They are behind us, like wretched phantoms. This is a new age, a strong age, an age of Imperium. Despite our losses, despite the fallen sons, despite the eternal silence of the Emperor, now watching over us in spirit instead of in person, we will endure. There will be no more war on such a perilous scale. There will be an end to wanton destruction. Yes, foes will come and enemies will arise. Our security will be threatened, but we will be ready, our mighty fists raised. There will be no great war to challenge us now. We will not be brought to the brink like that again…

  ‘All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.’

  – General Carl von Clausewitz,

  the Prussian Militarum of Ancient Terra, M2

  One

  Plaeos – atmospheric entry

  Check 2, -00:15:21

  Kjarvik Stormcrow stood in the gunship’s open hatch. One armoured boot was on the lowering assault ramp, the extended hydraulics gripped in one wolf-clawed gauntlet. The braid of heavy ork knucklebones strung through his long forelock drummed wildly on his shoulder. His pelt whipped about behind him. The unfamiliar salts of an alien sea filled his nose and mouth. Before him was grey ocean, as far as his prodigiously enhanced senses and stupefying altitude could show it. Massive waves were capped with oily pollution and stuck through with scrap metal. It made them frothy and barbed, like watching the hreindýr herds on their winter exodus across the fjords.

  The phosphorus burn of auto-fire tracers stitched across the streaking blue, the loose-chain rattle of machine cannons barely audible above the roar of turbofans. The Penitent Wrath descended hard and hammered left. A propeller-driven biplane with a lightning bolt jagging down the side droned by on the right, and spat high-velocity slugs into the water. Kjarvik held on, scowling. More of the atmosphere fighters were buzzing low over the ocean on an intercept course. They were not going to make it, of course.

  The ork aircraft were remarkably capable given their ramshackle design, but they had not a scrap on the Thunderhawk’s speed. And Atherias, the Hawk Lord, was good. Almost preternaturally good. His co-pilot was not too bad either.

  The gunship levelled out, auto-fire crisscrossing the sky around them. Kjarvik beheld the mountainous structure that Atherias’ evasive manoeuvres had brought into view.

  Bohr would have called it an island hive, or the remains of one, but Bohr had no soul.

  It was a titan of the ocean underworld, the burned, bombed-out skeleton of a thing that could not die. Its skin partially regenerated with drift metal, plastek sheeting, and planks of wood, it reared up for the feast of metallics that glinted in the orbital band. Fat blimps and transorbitals buzzed around its thorny head like carrion birds.

  Massive guy ropes held the teetering mountain upright, anchored within the sprawling pontoon shanties that crested and fell with the waves. The relentless wave action was converted into power by salt-corroded copper converters, fed into hab-size capacitors for storage or through fat cables towards immense desalination complexes. The dark blue water was slurped out of the ocean by the kilo­litre, potable water and salts spitting out into drums for export. Fleets of ramshackle paddleboats trawled the ocean for usable scrap.

  Mere months after Plaeos had fallen, the orks had made their new conquest not just viable, but valuable.

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ came Atherias’ voice, tinny in his ear bead.

  An ork fighter came apart in a blizzard of outsized engine parts as Penitent Wrath’s lascannons neatly cut it out of the sky and set off its fuel tank. Debris spanked off the gunship’s heavy hull armour, and Kjarvik ducked back to avoid a piece of propeller that came scything across like a circular saw and took a bite out of the foot of the ramp before bouncing clear.

  He looked back out, and saw the fighter’s wingman pull a turn that would have torn a Lightning interceptor in half, then spear out left. Machine-guided underwing hardpoints tracked it, mass-reactives spitting between its wobbling interwing struts as it flashed underneath the gunship then pulled into a gravity-defying vertical corkscrew that swung the fighter-bomber in behind. Kjarvik caught a glimpse of the pilot – immense musculature, bulked out in furs and squeezed into a cockpit. A huge grin split the ork’s ugly mouth beneath a set of red-lensed goggles as it mashed its firing toggles to send a stream of auto-fire gnawing through the Thunderhawk’s blocky rear armour.

  A ruptured oxygen main sprayed compressed gases across the assault ramp as Kjarvik drew his bolt pistol and loosed a flurry of rounds. The gas spray cut out as Penitent Wrath’s spirit redirected her outlets. The wind cleared the ramp, and Kjarvik was able to watch as the fighter veered off with a mass-reactive wound in her upper wing before breaking up in the water.

  ‘Hah!’ he roared. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘A lucky shot,’ Bohr chided, crackling in his ear.

  ‘Better to be lucky than not, I say.’

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  The Thunderhawk responded to the heightened strain of four armoured Space Marines moving towards its rear hatch with a barely audible wh
ine of its already howling turbofans. Kjarvik looked over his shoulder.

  Baldarich pressed Phareous’ shield into his gauntlets. It was white against the fresh black of his armour and bore the emblem of a writhing snake. Phareous in turn tossed the Black Templar his broadsword. Behind them, Zarrael rammed the most vicious-looking weapon Kjarvik had ever seen across his back. He called it an eviscerator. The Flesh Tearer was massive, despite the fact he had just knelt to strap a bandolier of grenades over his thigh plate. Kjarvik had seen orks smaller.

  Kill-Team Umbra.

  ‘Your helmet.’ Iron Father Jurkim Bohr appeared from the cockpit hatch. Whipping mechadendrites performed final checks on his battleplate and moved, apparently guided by their own spirits, to pluck spare magazines and grenades from the equipment lockers. Other tendrils snaked through the cargo webbing, moving in a weird mirror-fashion to the stride of his armoured limbs. Two women in bulky pressure suits, back-mounted grav-harnesses and underwater rebreathers flanked him.

  Despite their protective coverings, their relative stature, the women possessed a presence that engulfed them all, that the Thunderhawk itself could not contain. They glided where the Iron Hand clumped, floated within a null singularity of their pariah physiology.

  Kjarvik gave a pantherish snarl, and slid the black helmet over his mane as advised. It found the gorget softseals with a hiss of magnetic constrictors. It killed the wind, but it would take more than an environment seal to take the chill factor of the Sisters away. After a moment, his helm display came alive, pre-set with counters clocking local probable and relativistic time. They were all blinking rapidly down towards zero.

  ‘Five seconds.’

  There was a time and a place for waiting. Kjarvik did not think that this was it. What was five seconds anyway?

  He stepped backwards off the ramp.

  The wind hit him hard and he began to fall. The thunder of turbofans and heavy bolters disappeared in the roar. He spread his arms and legs wide and let go a howl of joy. The black paint of the gunship disappeared. The wide grey of the ocean rushed up to meet him, waves rearing up as though desperate to hit him before he hit them.

  Then they did, like being rammed in the chest by a Razorback, and everything became black.

  Eidolica – orbital

  Check 7, -00:09:01

  No one had ever called the Fists Exemplar home world beautiful.

  Its sun was a ball of thermonuclear rage. The daylight terminator was a line of fire ten kilometres high and twenty thousand long, a creeping barrage of photons and ultra­violet rays. Barren mountains rose high into the atmosphere, what wind the world’s torturous spin could generate insufficient to blunt them. Vast black expanses of promethium sands covered about a third of the surface in lieu of liquid oceans.

  From the Storm Eagle’s open rear hatch Tyris could pick out the sprawling extraction and refinery complexes, a web of rust and piping and sporadic flare-offs that ate into the littoral boundary. A countdown timer hovered over his left eye, stretched slightly by the curve of his visor. He turned from the hatch and stepped aside. The deliberate heel-up, disengage, toe-down maglock gait came as second nature.

  His own genetic proclivities, maybe, but the Raven Guard would always be more comfortable in the black.

  ‘Nubis. Antares.’

  The Salamander and Fist Exemplar of Kill-Team Stalker clumped up to the hatch. The sun burned a white stripe along the smooth relief of their helmets, pauldrons, and the lift jets of their jump packs. They stood either side of a third figure, similarly geared with a light-variant jump pack and grav-lines. She was tall for a human, but not so tall in the company she kept. Her ornate, high-collared armour appeared gold, but the thermal membrane that had been painted over the top dulled its shine. It stretched over her bald head and braided topknot like a taut skin. The infinite depths of her eyes were shielded by a set of flare goggles.

  ‘Go,’ Tyris voxed.

  The two Space Marines pushed themselves through the hatch and into the thin, void-boundary layer of the upper atmosphere. The Sister followed a second behind.

  ‘Next.’

  Vega and Iaros stepped up to the breach, a second woman similarly positioned between them. If Tyris had once thought the mortal women in need of protection, then that misconception had been cleansed from him over the weeks of joint exercises and training. They were simply too valuable to go in first.

  Maglocked though they were, Tyris could picture the Doom Eagle shifting from foot to foot as he would in practice, eager to be away. He had come to know them all, better than many of his own gene-brothers, and he knew therefore that the Ultramarine would hesitate on the threshold and glance back.

  ‘I have an ill-feeling about this, brother-sergeant,’ said Iaros.

  Tyris glanced to the silent Sister, felt his gut coil at the nothing that filled her space.

  ‘Don’t we all.’

  ‘We do not,’ voxed Vega.

  ‘Go,’ said Tyris, lest the Doom Eagle jump alone, and once again the three warriors pushed themselves through the open hatch.

  Alone inside the coasting gunship’s assault bay, Tyris moved to the edge.

  He held a moment, heart swelling, eyes drinking in the view.

  There was no wind. No pull of air or ding of particulates hitting the fuselage. No howl of decompression. Just inside, outside, and nothing but the liminal between them. Half an eye on his visor’s countdown timer, he spread his arms, disengaged maglock, and pitched forward.

  Sunlight hit him like a bolt-round in the face. It overloaded his auto-senses and bleached his view to whites and greys. Bleeps and chimes alerted him to temperature and radiation warnings, failures in his suit’s auspex, vox, and power distribution subsystems. There was a reason that Antares cursed with a reference to ‘bright skies’. Work ceased. Cities were locked down. Even microbes could not exist on the planet’s surface during its day.

  Which was why only a daylight raid would succeed.

  There was no sensation of falling at all. The air was too thin to be felt. The planet was so far below him that the passing seconds brought its features no closer. He could almost reach out, and clasp a hemisphere in each gauntlet. If not for the madcap race of altimeter runes in his helmet display, he might have believed he flew. He could just about pick out the rest of his kill-team through the radiation glare. They were far below him, freefalling, but still in formation and descending fast.

  He turned his head slightly and caught the Storm Eagle as it cushioned off the atmosphere and away. Twenty metres of inertially propelled metal, unpowered, it might as well have been invisible. The precision calculation required to graze a body moving at one hundred and eighty thousand kilometres per second with another impelled towards it from a trillion kilometres away staggered him.

  It could only have been achieved with the cooperation of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  He looked back to the planet. He scoured it for the coordinates of the Fists Exemplar fortress. Genhanced synapses lapped at the brink of the neural cascade that would trigger his jump pack as numerals raced across his helm display towards a string of zeroes.

  It had to be all together or it might as well be not at all.

  Soon.

  But not yet.

  Valhalla – Kalinin trench

  Check 3, -00:03:35

  Tulwei stood up on the bike’s foot pegs and looked back over the skull and triple-forked lightning emblem on his pauldron. The command Salamander rumbled up through thick snow, pitted dozer blade ploughing up a great heap of it as if to bank up its own earthwork. Rattling caterpillar tracks threw fresh fall over the idling attack bikes of Kill-Team Tigrus as it pulled in. Its chassis trembled and growled, one big beast asserting dominance over the lesser vehicles that spat and whined around its armour skirts.

  ‘The one you were sent for is here, all right.’ General Sebko
of the Kalinin CCCIII, ‘White Guard’, was swaddled in an ice-camouflage greatcoat with a thick fur collar, gloves, a snow-speckled cap, and snow goggles. Only the pins on his cuff and the iron in his beard distinguished him from the junior staffers bustling about the command tank’s exposed rear section. ‘The orks are dug in deep, and in numbers. It will be a slaughter, my lord.’

  ‘Let the slaughter be your concern. The Lord Commander’s quarry is ours.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  The general had to shout to be heard, or if he was addressing one of his own unaugmented soldiers he probably would have. Earthshaker batteries thumped and thundered. The shaking ground spilled snow into trenches where tens of thousands of heavy-coated soldiers tramped over squelching duckboards. Lasguns in equivalent numbers crackled. Men shouted. Tanks roared. Guns of every calibre voiced their frustration and spite. Hatred was as thick on the air as the slush in the bottom of the tenches, and every degree as bitter.

  ‘The army goes over on my signal,’ Tulwei roared. He could hear over the din perfectly well. Shouting was out of consideration for the human’s ears.

  The likely annihilation of the CCCIII would leave Kalinin’s northern approach wide open, but to to the general’s great credit, he simply saluted. ‘It will, lord.’

  ‘A full-scale assault on the ork lines will draw them out, and when they come…’ He indicated the trio of black-painted attack bikes grizzling in the snow beside his. Spitting out promethium fumes and snowmelt alongside them were the lavishly baroque gold-and-black bikes of the Sisters of Silence. One of the sidecars was empty. It would not be so for the return ride. Tulwei clapped his gauntlets together. ‘We will wait for word of the witch-breed’s position and be on him like a winter gale.’

  Sebko smiled thinly. ‘Show it Valhalla’s warmth.’

  Cleaning out the sidecar’s heavy bolter beside Tulwei, Sentar gave an approving chuckle.

  The Valhallans’ loathing of the greenskins could have matched their own. Small wonder that their world held out while forge worlds and garrison worlds with standing forces in the billions were ground under the ork war machine like stones under the linked treads of a super-heavy tank.