He can hear them a full twenty miles behind the line.
Two tons of leather and bone, hordes of them battering the Walls day and night. It really feels like the big bastards know the secret even before the colonists do.
The Imperial garrison has abandoned the remote colony of Vanguard, leaving a skeleton crew of deserters to protect us from the planet’s indigenous lifeforms. Maybe they smell it, sense it somehow.
The beasts know we don’t have the numbers to resist them.
Aaron Havenes has toiled in the Empire’s worst prisons, from desolate rocks to industrious labor camps. Now he faces a devil’s bargain from the very people who wrongfully imprisoned him when he was just a child. They need strong and willing bodies to man the Wall, and they can give him what he and every other convict dreams of.