Legion by Dan Abnett Read Free Book Online Page B

silenced the man forever.
    More followed, falxes raised. Soneka began to shoot. By his weapon’s digital display, he had twenty shots left. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…
    B RONZI BROUGHT THE Scarab to rest and hit the dampers. The sun was up, fierce and bold.
    ‘Wake up,’ he told Shiban as he unstrapped his harness. Shiban groaned.
    Bronzi jumped down out of the speeder and looked around. His stomach was grumbling. Where the hell was Honen’s promised cavalry? The cratered desert spread out all around him in the burning light of the rising sun.
    He saw a figure toiling up the trail towards him, a tall figure wobbled by the heat haze. Bronzi waited, two minutes, three. The figure came closer, becoming properly visible.
    It was a Space Marine in full battle plate. The armour was purple, trimmed in silver, with green markings on the immense shoulder plates.
    ‘Great god,’ Bronzi murmured.
    The towering Astartes came to a halt ten paces from Bronzi and the speeder. Soft red light glowed like embers in its eye slits as it read and targeted him.
    ‘Bronzi, we meet again,’ the helmet speaker crackled.
    ‘Sir?’
    The Astartes held its massive boltgun close against its armoured chest.
    ‘I warned you. You really do know how to stir up trouble, don’t you, Hurtado?’
    Bronzi blinked. ‘I don’t understand. This is important! This is—’
    ‘None of your business, but you’ve made it your business, which is a colossal mistake, and a shame, because you’re a decent fellow. There’s only one option.’
    ‘What the fug are you talking about?’ Bronzi cried, wishing, very suddenly, he’d brought a weapon with him.
    ‘Back right off, you son of a bitch,’ Shiban declared, moving out from behind the cover of the hovering tank, his double-carbine raised to his shoulder and aimed squarely at the armoured figure.
    ‘Dimi, don’t!’ Bronzi yelled.
    ‘No one threatens my friends,’ Shiban growled back. He edged forwards, his weapon fixed steadily on the figure in purple armour.
    The Astartes turned its visor slowly to regard Shiban. The soft red ember-light flickered in its eye slits.
    Far too fast for Bronzi to follow, the Astartes wheeled and fired its bolter. Dimitar Shiban, who remembered his dreams word for word, left the ground and exploded as he travelled backwards, showering blood and meat in all directions. His twisted carcass hit the ground and lay still.
    ‘Oh god! Oh Terra! No!’ Bronzi yelled.
    The Astartes switched its aim back to Bronzi. Bronzi sank to his knees in the dust.
    ‘Please…’ he murmured.
    ‘As I said,’ the Space Marine remarked, stepping forwards, its bolter aimed, ‘there is only one option.’
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ Bronzi pleaded.
    ‘For the Emperor,’ the Astartes replied.

THREE
    Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, two days later
    T HOUGH J OHN G RAMMATICUS was over a thousand years old, he had only been Konig Heniker for eight months, and he was still getting used to the idea.
    According to his file, and as far as any Imperial methods of scrutiny were concerned, Konig Heniker was a fifty-two year-old man from a region of Terra known as the Caucasus, and he served in the Imperial Army as an intelligence officer attached to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad.
    Grammaticus still thought of himself as essentially human . He had been born human, raised as a human, and he had been human when, to all intents and purposes, he had died for the first time. Definitions became a little more complicated after that. One thing was certain: at some non-specific point after his first death, probably as the result of a slow process rather than a sudden change of heart, he had stopped being quite so steadfast in his devotion to the interests of his birth species.
    He was still unashamedly fond of the human race, and was a stout apologist for its less edifying qualities, but he had been with the Cabal for a long time, and they had shared the Acuity with him, at least in part. These days, he saw what