Read Online Legion by Dan Abnett - Free Book Online

possess myths and legends, as all cultures do, and some of them contain elements that might be interpreted as containing some race-memory of xeno contact or intervention. But until the 670th Expedition came along, the Nurthene believed they were alone in the galaxy. Remember, the Nurthene don’t even realise they were originally colonists from Terra.’
    ‘That is the true misery of this war,’ Rukhsana nodded. ‘They do not recognise us as kin.’
    Grammaticus felt her discomfort. Kinship meant so much to the geno uxors. Indeed, he found this aspect of the Emperor’s Great Crusade especially troubling. In its youth, mankind had spilled out across the stars, colonising thousands of worlds, forming the first human stellar community. Then the Age of Strife had come down, like the blade of a guillotine, and for the better part of five thousand years, warp storms had rendered interstellar travel impossible. The out-reaches of Man had become cut off, beleaguered, isolated. In that turmoil, many offshoots had entirely forgotten who they were or where they had come from. Such was the case with Nurth.
    When the Emperor, a figure long foreseen by the Cabal, had finally unified the anarchic fragments of Terra, he had undertaken a Great Crusade – oh, how telling was that title! – to seek out, and reconnect with, the lost outposts of the human race. It was astonishing how often the lost worlds resisted those overtures of reconnection. It was unconscionable how many times the roving expedition fleets had been forced to go to war with the very cultures they had set out to rescue and embrace, just to bring them to what the Emperor had euphemistically called compliance. It was always, so the official line went, for their own good.
    John Grammaticus had met the Emperor once, close on a thousand years before. The Emperor had been just another feudal warlord then, leading his thunder-armoured troops in an effort to consolidate his early Strife-age victories, and pave the way to eventual Unification. Grammaticus had been a line officer in the Caucasian Lewies, a significant force inveigled by truce and pact to support the Emperor’s assault on the territorial holdings of the Panpacific Tyrant, Dume.
    After a bloody conquest at Baktria, Grammaticus had been one of a hundred Caucasian officers invited to a Triumph at Pash, hosted by the retinues of the thunderbolt and lightning army. During the festivities, the Emperor – even then he had been known only by that objectionable epithet – had grandly toured the tables to personally thank his foreign allies and the leaders of the mercenary clans. Grammaticus had been one of hundreds present to receive his grateful handshake. In that moment of contact, he had seen why the Emperor was a force to be reckoned with: a psyker of towering, unimaginable strength, not really human at all by any contemporary measure of the fact. Grammaticus, who had never met anyone else like himself, had shuddered, and felt like a drone insect in the presence of its hive king. The Emperor had felt Grammaticus in the same passing second of contact. He had smiled.
    ‘You have a fine mind, John,’ he had said, without having to ask Grammaticus his name. ‘We should talk, and consider the options available to beings like us.’
    Before any such conversation could happen, Grammaticus had died, that painful, stupid first death.
    Looking back, Grammaticus wondered if he would ever have been able to influence the Emperor’s course if he’d lived. He doubted it. Even then, in that tiny moment of connection, it had been clear that the Emperor was never going to turn away from the road of catastrophic bloodshed he was set upon. One day, he would unleash upon the galaxy the most dreadful killing machines of all: the Astartes.
    How ironic it was that Grammaticus’s current task was to broker cooperation with one of those fearsome Astartes Legions.
    Gahet had once remarked to Grammaticus that the Emperor was the only human