Claws of the genestealer, p.1
Claws of the Genestealer, page 1
Book 1 ATTACK OF THE NECRON
Book 2 CLAWS OF THE GENESTEALER
Book 3 SECRETS OF THE TAU
Book 4 WAR OF THE ORKS
Book 1 CITY OF LIFESTONE
Book 2 LAIR OF THE SKAVEN
Book 3 FOREST OF THE ANCIENTS
Book 4 FLIGHT OF THE KHARADRON
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
The Imperium of the Far Future
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Galactic Compendium
About the Author
About the Artist
An Extract from ‘Secrets of the Tau’
Warhammer Adventures
eBook license
THE IMPERIUM OF THE FAR FUTURE
Life in the 41st millennium is hard. Ruled by the Emperor of Mankind from his Golden Throne on Terra, humans have spread across the galaxy, inhabiting millions of planets. They have achieved so much, from space travel to robotics, and yet billions live in fear. The universe seems a dangerous place, teeming with alien horrors and dark powers. But it is also a place bristling with adventure and wonder, where battles are won and heroes are forged.
CHAPTER ONE
The Hunt
The forest was silent. A fresh blanket of snow had fallen overnight, drifting through the gaps of the strange mushroom-trees. No birds whirled above their wide, frozen caps, nor were there insects crawling along their mottled stalks.
Heat had no place here. At night anyone caught outside without protection would freeze, and conditions barely improved during the day.
A snout pushed out of the snow. A small, pot-bellied creature scrabbled from its burrow. The tiny ridge-boar, barely a month old, shook snow from its milk-white spines. It snorted, its breath misting in front of stubby tusks. The boarlet looked around, its eyes becoming accustomed to the glare of the surface. It lifted its blunt nose into the chilly air and sniffed once… twice…
Satisfied that no predators lay in wait, the young creature trotted deeper into the forest. It didn’t care about the snow, or the tracks it left in its wake. All it cared about was the gnawing hunger in its belly.
It struggled on, the trot becoming a scramble, the boar’s skinny legs disappearing into the snowdrift. Every now and then it stopped, churning up the snow with its snout, searching in vain for roots or berries. The snow was too thick, the ground too hard.
Its nose twitched. There was a scent, something new. The boar darted forwards. There, in the middle of a clearing, a pile of dried flakes lay piled on a stump. The boar crept towards them cautiously, sniffing the air. The smell of the food made its belly rumble. The animal pounced upon the unexpected feast, grinding the flakes between its teeth. They tasted so good.
Unfortunately, they were also a trap.
A net flashed through the air. The ridge-boar squealed, kicking up snow as it scampered away. The net missed its target, landing on the stump. The boar disappeared between the frozen stalks, and a nearby voice cursed.
Talen Stormweaver stepped out from his hiding place and grunted in frustration. He had been so close that time. If only he’d been quicker springing the trap. With a sigh, he snatched up the net he’d woven from voidship cables, shaking loose the excess snow. At least the hunt hadn’t been a complete waste of time, not like yesterday or the day before. This time he’d actually found something. This time he had tracks to follow.
Trying to tread quietly, Talen followed the hoof-marks in the snow. Two weeks they’d been on this Throne-forsaken planet. Two weeks. He still wasn’t used to the cold. Yes, he was wrapped in a thick thermo-coat, but the chill was relentless. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to be warm.
Talen wasn’t used to this. Home was the tunnels beneath Rhal Rata, the largest hive on Targian. It was never cold beneath the great city. It was wet and dark and stank so bad your eyes watered, but you were never in danger of freezing to death. You could be attacked by another gang or find yourself facing dire-cats in the crawlways, but you were always warm. Plus, food was everywhere, even if most of it didn’t belong to you. There were stalls ripe for looting in the markets above and plump sewer rats fresh for hunting in the tunnels below.
Here, there was nothing.
No, that wasn’t exactly true. There was a ridge-boar. He just had to find it again.
Of course, his home wasn’t there any more.
There had been times when he’d loathed life on Targian, but now the planet was gone forever. The entire hive world had been torn apart by the Necrons, living alien machines. Talen had escaped the destruction, more by luck than by judgement, and had ended up on this ice-box with a ragtag bunch of survivors. There was Erasmus, a stuffy old lexmechanic, and Zelia, one of the bossiest girls he’d ever met. They were the normal ones. The rest of the group was made up of Mekki, a Martian kid who was happier dealing with machines than humans, Fleapit, an orange-furred Jokaero with a knack of making weapons out of next to nothing, and a tiny winged robot called a servo-sprite. It was Fleapit who had fashioned their thermo-coats, and who had somehow transformed their cramped escape pod into a shelter large enough to house all six of them.
No, Talen corrected himself. Not six. Not any more.
A Necron Hunter had followed them to the ice planet, searching for an ancient artefact the old man had been hiding – the Diadem. They had barely survived with their lives, and only because Erasmus had made the ultimate sacrifice. The archeotech had lured the Hunter into the path of an avalanche. Both were buried beneath tonnes of snow on the other side of the mountain.
At least, they hoped the Hunter was buried. Talen had seen those skeletal horrors in action, seen them repair themselves in the heat of battle. They could also leap from place to place, phasing in and out of real space. Every night, Talen dreamed of steel skeletons clawing their way out of icy tombs, or appearing above his bed, green eyes blazing.
Zelia told him he was being paranoid. ‘The fact that we’re still breathing proves that it’s destroyed,’ she’d told him, ‘or at least damaged beyond repair. It’s gone. We’re safe.’
The Diadem itself was now stashed in Mekki’s backpack, shielded by a gizmo that the Martian had made from a vox-caster. It would stop other Necrons from finding it, at least that’s what Zelia said.
Zelia said a lot of things. She and the others were content to sit in the shelter, huddled near the distress beacon Mekki and Fleapit had erected, waiting to be rescued. Not Talen. The escape pod’s emergency rations were almost exhausted. Someone had to find more food, and it might as well be him.
Besides, no one was coming to help. The beacon had pulsed for two weeks with no answer. It was time to face facts. They were stranded.
Talen crept through the towering stalks, wincing as his boots crunched in the snow. He didn’t want to scare the animal any more than he already had. There it was, floundering in the snow ahead. The boar was caught in some kind of root, unable to get away. The more it thrashed, the more entangled it became. Finally, a stroke of luck!
Talen grinned. ‘Hello, lunch!’
Talen rushed forwards, throwing his home-made net over the creature. The boar squealed, extending its spines to protect itself.
‘Shut up, will you?’ Talen complained as he pulled the net tight, the boar trussed safely inside. It writhed and screamed but had no way to escape. ‘How can something so small make so much noise?’
There was another snort, over to his left. Talen looked and saw a second ridge-boar glaring at him. While the one in his net was an infant, this one was fully grown, spikes bristling along its arched back. It glared at Talen, head down, large pointed tusks jutting forwards.
‘Nice piggy,’ said Talen, raising what he hoped was a calming hand. ‘Nothing to see here. Go on. Shoo.’
With a ferocious bellow, the angry boar charged straight for him. Talen let go of the net and ran for his life.
‘Help!’ he screamed, although no one could hear him. The boar was almost on him, grunting as it carved a path through the snow.
Talen’s muscles burned with the effort of running through the thick snow. He pelted forwards, and then cried out in alarm as the ground disappeared beneath him.
He fell, tumbling through thin air, before landing with a bone-jarring crunch far below. Snow tumbled down from above. The boar had stopped itself from following Talen over the edge. It snuffled around the hole that had opened beneath his feet. Talen groaned, clutching his arm as the animal gave up on its revenge and scooted away.
Talen tried to sit up, and pain lanced through his shoulder. He couldn’t move his arm. Was it broken?
Breathing hard, he looked around at his new surroundings. Icy walls rose high on either side of him. He had no hope of climbing them with one arm. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, trying
Grimacing, he reached into his coat, searching for his vox. Fleapit had fashioned small communicators for each of them, and Talen prayed that his hadn’t been damaged in the fall. He pulled it out of his vest. The case was cracked, but hopefully it would still work.
‘Hello?’ he croaked, opening a channel. ‘Can you hear me? Zelia? Mekki? Anyone?’
There was no answer. He shook the box and tried again. Someone would answer, sooner or later.
They just had to…
CHAPTER TWO
Into the Pit
‘Where have you got to, Talen?’
Zelia peered through her omniscope, searching the line of mushroom-trees that formed the edge of the forest. The ganger was nowhere to be seen. The minute Talen had told her about his hunting expedition, Zelia had known it was a bad idea. She’d begged him not to head out alone, and yet he’d gone anyway. It was bad enough that they’d lost Erasmus, she didn’t want to lose Talen as well.
She dropped the omniscope from her eye, the thought of Erasmus bringing a fresh pang of grief. He’d been the one who had got them into this mess, keeping his Necron artefact secret, but had paid a terrible price to protect them. He was one of her mum’s oldest friends. How on Terra was Zelia going to break the news when they finally got off this planet?
But that was a concern for another day. Right now, she needed to find Talen. By the look of the heavy clouds in the sky, a storm was coming in fast. They’d been here long enough to learn the signs. Talen should have known better.
She trudged back through the series of posts that ringed the camp, flicking a switch on her jacket sleeve to activate Fleapit’s sonic fence. A wall of sound hummed into life behind her. While it wouldn’t stop a Necron, it would make life uncomfortable for any wild animals that were tempted to investigate their temporary home.
A large, snow-flecked dome sat in the middle of the camp. It had started life as their escape pod from the Mercator, but Fleapit had worked his techno-magic. The resulting shelter was now somehow three times the pod’s original size. Mekki sat at the door which had once been the lifeboat’s airlock, tapping the small screen he wore cuffed to his left arm. The Martian’s other arm was withered, the result of an illness when he was a baby back on the Red Planet. He wore a brass exo-frame of his own design around the affected limb that was permanently connected to both the large backpack he wore and the shimmering electoos on his pale skin.
‘Where’s Fleapit?’ she asked as she approached the hatch. The ape-like Jokaero was nowhere to be seen, nor was Mekki’s servo-sprite, a tiny robotic imp that kept everything working.
Mekki shrugged, not looking up from his screen. ‘I do not know. Perhaps Flegan-Pala has gone on another scavenging run,’ he said, using Fleapit’s full name, as was his custom. ‘I have not seen him for hours.’
‘Not him as well,’ Zelia sighed, looking over at a smaller tent not far from the main dome. That was Fleapit’s own private nest. Zelia hoped that the Jokaero was safely holed up in it, rather than tramping off in the snow somewhere. The bad-tempered alien had soon decided that living alongside humans wasn’t for him, no matter how well he seemed to get on with Mekki.
She had to admit being a little jealous of their relationship. Mekki and Fleapit had bonded over building the distress beacon. She hadn’t minded at first. She and Talen had been getting on fine, but as the days had stretched into weeks, Talen had become moody and argumentative, not used to being told what to do. That didn’t mean she didn’t want him back in camp now. He’d freeze if he was still out there when the blizzard hit.
‘Any luck?’ she asked Mekki as she approached the hatch.
‘He is not responding to messages.’
‘And you can’t locate his vox-box?’
Mekki shook his head. Zelia sighed, trying to rub some warmth back into her arms. ‘He has to be somewhere.’
The snow crunched behind her. She turned, hoping to see Talen, but it was only Fleapit, deactivating the sonic fence as he and the servo-sprite re-entered the camp.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked as the hairy alien lolloped towards them, the sprite flitting around his head on fragile mesh wings. ‘Did you see Talen?’
The Jokaero ignored her, heading straight for Mekki. She tried not to bristle at the snub. The Martian was the only one of them who could understand Fleapit, the two of them communicating by some kind of electronic telepathy.
‘No,’ Mekki said, answering a seemingly silent question. ‘He has been gone since dawn.’
The Jokaero grunted and pulled Mekki’s wrist-screen towards him. The alien’s long fingers tapped the display, reprogramming the device, before letting go of the boy’s arm.
A voice hissed out of the screen’s vox.
‘Hello? Can anyone hear me?’
‘That’s him,’ Zelia said. ‘That’s Talen.’
She tapped her own vox, stitched into her jacket’s sleeve. ‘We hear you, Talen. Where are you?’
‘Where am I? Where were you?’ came his reply. ‘I’ve been calling for ages.’
‘Flegan-Pala had to boost the signal,’ Mekki explained. ‘There is a lot of interference.’
‘That’ll be the cave walls. They look pretty thick.’
Zelia frowned. ‘What cave?’
‘I fell into a sinkhole. I was chasing a boar and the ground sort of gave way.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No…’
He didn’t sound convincing.
‘Talen?’
‘I can’t move my arm, but I’ll be fine.’
‘Is it broken?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it means I can’t climb out. There are tunnels down here, but I’ve no idea where they lead.’
‘Stay where you are. We’ll come and get you out.’
‘How? It’s a long way down.’
It was a good question. She looked at Mekki and the Martian shrugged.
‘We could rig up a ladder. We have a few cables left over from the escape pod.’
‘Ah, no we haven’t,’ Talen said over the vox-line. ‘I used them to make a net… which I… um… lost.’
‘Do we have anything else?’ Zelia asked.
Mekki shook his head. ‘I do not think so.’
Beside them, the servo-sprite was buzzing frantically at Fleapit, as if trying to remind the Jokaero about something. The alien was stubbornly ignoring the flying robot.
‘Flegan-Pala?’ Mekki asked.
The Jokaero rolled his eyes and reached behind his back. With a click the implants across his spine snapped open, although Fleapit wouldn’t let either of them see what he was doing. The metal plates covered a portal to a pocket universe where the Jokaero kept his hidden stash of technology. There was a whoosh and the implants snapped shut again. Fleapit turned his back on them, hiding what was in his hands. He started to work, Zelia having to wait patiently until he turned and thrust a device towards her.
‘Th-thanks… I think,’ she said, taking it and turning it over.
‘What is it?’ Talen asked over the vox.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ she was forced to admit. It looked like a pistol, but had a barbed hook pointing out of the barrel, a reel of cable set beneath the grip.
‘It is a grappling line,’ Mekki informed them before turning to the alien. ‘But where did you get the cable, Flegan-Pala?’
The Jokaero didn’t answer. Instead, he waddled off to his nest without another word, his long arms wrapped around himself to keep warm.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Zelia asked.
‘He does not like the cold,’ Mekki told her.
‘He’s not the only one,’ Talen snapped. ‘Are you coming to get me out, or what?’
Snow had started to fall as Mekki and Zelia trudged into the darkening forest, following Talen’s signal. The blizzard hadn’t struck yet, but it wouldn’t be long.
