Shield of Baal: Devourer

by Joe Parrino

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Chapter One

  Anrakyr the Traveller was caked in the blood of men. The organic liquid dripped across his skeleton, red and glistening. He could still hear the screams of the dying creatures, still hear them begging and pleading. They shouted prayers with their meat-voices to some deific being.

  It was a waste of breath and a waste of their final moments. Nothing awaited them after death. Anrakyr cared nothing for their prayers or their begging. He merely watched as the humans aspirated blood and the life drained from their weeping eyes. His unblinking visage of death gazed upon them without mercy.

  Anrakyr the Traveller, would-be overlord of the necrons, descended upon Kehlrantyr in an orgy of death. He brought order. He brought certainty.

  Kehlrantyr was infested. It was infested with grey buildings and grey people.

  ‘What dull creatures, living in their own filth,’ Anrakyr mused. No response met him. The sentient necrons within his forces were out of range, venting their fury upon the humans. Only the dull-witted warriors surrounded him, marching through the streets and avenues of Kehlrantyr’s human stain.

  Necron phalanxes smashed through those buildings and those people. Necron warriors turned gauss weaponry on fleeing masses of humans. Bodies carpeted the roads. Fires broke out, sending smoke into the turquoise sky.

  Resistance began lightly. Isolated bands of humans fired primitive laser rifles upon marching steel. Then their resolve stiffened. Machines, armoured boxes on wheels, rolled out to fire weak shots into colossal monoliths. Obsidian flanks chipped, but ultimately the human artillery affected nothing. The necron forces rolled down the broad avenues of the human settlement, tearing up the poured stone that served as road material. Human soldiers advanced alongside.

  Anrakyr sprinted into them, the metal of his feet clinking against the stone. The Traveller stabbed his lance through the crew compartment of one of the vehicles, laughed as eldritch energies tore the humans sheltering within to dripping hunks. Something exploded inside, some rough human ammunition touched off by the actinic fury of his warscythe. The vehicle broke into millions of pieces of metal and fire. Anrakyr was propelled back, slamming into one of the grey buildings. He flew through the walls, past crying and weeping animals, hiding in their dens.

  The Traveller pulled himself to his feet. He could hear bellowing outside. The sounds were deep, registering low on the human wavelengths. Anrakyr spared no glance for the cringing organics that ran screaming away from him, deeper into the building. Paintings and human pictoglyphs covered the walls. Metal rusted. Grime gathered.

  ‘Filthy, filthy animals,’ Anrakyr cursed. He strode back into the sunlight, skirts of chain-linked metal rustling about his legs.

  Rubble shifted beneath his feet as he emerged into the bright light. Already, curious necron warriors, led by dull glimmers of guiding instinct, were pulling themselves into the buildings. Static blurted from between their clenched jaws.

  Standing outside were the three triarch praetorians who followed the Traveller.

  ‘Space Marines,’ said Khatlan.

  Dovetlan added, ‘There are human Space Marines active on this world.’

  ‘How did you come by this information?’ asked Anrakyr.

  They provided no answer. They stood, smug and silent. ‘Odious constructs,’ he hissed. Again they offered no response. Spies of the Silent King posing as his emissaries to the Pyrrhian overlord, they assured Anrakyr that they served the glory of the necron race. Perhaps that was true. But where did they judge that glory to lie?

  A renewed bout of screaming came from behind Anrakyr as he set foot upon the concourse again. Warriors were striding into the hole after him.

  Vehicles burned all around him, casting deep palls of smoke into the bright blue sky. Necron warrior phalanxes and hovering destroyers faced something through the smoke. They waited, filled with the patience of the grave.

  Cylindrical objects fell on parabolic arcs into the necron mass, and bounced off warrior chassis, unnoticed. Anrakyr was already running, casting orders for the warriors to disperse and spread out their forces. It was too late. The warriors, dull-witted, lobotomised by the c’tan’s bargain, began to react, but too slowly.

  Fire and shrapnel erupted, tearing through milling warriors, breaking sentient necron commanders into shards of spinning metal. More of the objects exploded. More necron warriors fell.

  Bullets came tearing out of the smoke, smashing into struggling necrons. Gauss rifles responded, firing into the veil of darkness. A brace of night shrouds roared overhead, setting the smoke to roiling, dropping death spheres down onto whatever lurked beyond Anrakyr’s vision. The anti-matter laden munitions consumed the smoke, annihilating the carbon particles and tearing through reality.

  The Traveller pumped his warscythe into the air, signalling the advance for his scattered and reeling forces. Implacable as the tide, the phalanxes reformed and marched forward.

  Grotesquely armoured meat-creatures, the human elite, came sprinting through the smoke and rubble.

  ‘Space Marines,’ Anrakyr cursed. The triarch praetorians had been right.

  They cannoned into the necron line, weaponry buzzing and screaming. A spearhead had barrelled through his phalanxes, driving a wedge into the advancing necrons. Explosives tore struggling warriors apart. Humming swords carved through the necron bodies in showers of sparks.

  A knot of giant necron immortals, prized soldiers in Anrakyr’s army, the remnants of lost Pyrrhia, met the human wedge. They anchored Anrakyr’s line, blunting the assault on his phalanxes. Their gauss blasters punched through the armour, tearing into the flesh beneath. Humans faltered and fell, torn into steaming pieces by the disciplined fire of the immortals. One of the hulking warriors toted a tesla carbine. Lightning cascaded from the weapon, tearing through multiple bodies.

  A flight of Space Marines dropped from the sky, fire ripping from their backpacks. Axes hammered at the immortals, punching through their chassis and breaking their metal bones.

  Anrakyr waded towards their position, knowing that if the immortals were defeated then his w
arriors would be hard pressed to achieve victory here. Frustration flowed through the Traveller. His warscythe rose and fell with economical movements, cracking through the green armoured shell of the animals. Before he could reach the immortals, the human leader showed itself. It was coated in ornate armour, wrought in green and gold. The motif of a skull and star was repeated across the plates.

  Organic gibbering emerged from the animal’s throat, a screed of imprecations and unintelligible words, far deviated from the corrupt ‘Gothic’ that the animals usually spoke. Its intent was clear, however. Calm descended around the two as necron warrior protocols ensured that their leader was given a wide berth.

  Bright eyes twinkled in a ruddy face. The animal smiled and then raised its sword in some sort of salute.

  Anrakyr ignored it, merely standing still and silent. He was above the petty motivations of these beings. The animal’s sword snaked in while the weapon it held in its other hand spat crude ammunition at the overlord.

  Economical swings of his warscythe deflected the shells, driving them off with a high, sharp pinging noise.

  The animal proved difficult to kill. For hours they fought, beneath the gentle blue sky of Kehlrantyr. For hours they fought, the centre of a melee that swirled around them. Anrakyr was fuelled by frustration, angered at the momentary denial of his destiny. He had come to Kehlrantyr expecting to find a tomb world to draw into his sphere of influence. Instead he had found an infestation of humans. He exorcised that frustration and anger on the animal.

  To give it credit, it battled on long after it should have fallen. Blood dripped from between the plates of its dark green armour. Sparks showered from torn cabling.

  Anrakyr was implacable, an elemental force. Dents and nicks marked his chassis where the creature had struck him, but they were few.

  ‘Surrender,’ Anrakyr demanded. ‘Submit to order.’

  The animal snorted a laugh. Its twitching features, hidden beneath sweat, blood and its armour of green and gold, jabbered in its organic tongue. It was slowing, strength ebbing with every movement.

  Anrakyr grew tired of the animal. As it heaved in great breaths, the overlord shoved his warscythe through its abdomen, driving deep into its spine. He lifted the human, met its dying eyes with his deathless gaze.

  ‘Filth,’ he muttered. He threw the animal away, casting it to lie broken against the ground. Crypteks scurried after it, driven by curiosity to examine its physiology. With its death, human resistance on Kehlrantyr crumbled.

  It awoke to utter darkness. It tried to take a breath that would not come, that brought no oxygen, no relief; a juddering breath that existed only as a soundbite, a piece of manufactured noise.

  Panic. Its mind clawed at the emotion. A consciousness stirred and coalesced around a physical form.

  Its fists were raised, beating at the sarcophagus that kept it bound, kept it trapped. Obsidian walls enclosed it. No escape. No movement. Cables snaked from the walls towards its body, disappearing into interface ports, driving along its limbs and into the limits of its spine. It was omnipresent, its consciousness undifferentiated between sarcophagus, cable and skeletal body. It saw through the body’s sensors, disoriented by seeing as the sarcophagus, the body and, in some remote sense, the circuits of the tomb world.

  It felt the miles and miles of cables and crystalline lattices that stretched through the depths of Kehlrantyr. It was dimly aware of the cousins that walked upon its world above and the dwindling infestation of life that stained its surface.

  It saw, in a blink, half glimpsed and little remembered, sixty million cycles of unchanging constancy. Sixty million cycles of unbroken silence and infrequent change.

  Then the view was gone, battered into its subconscious. Events became localised, drawn through the cables snaking into the metal of its body.

  Fog and smoke whirled around it, drifting through its vision. Green lights blinked. Indicators chirped and demanded attention. Its mouth opened in a silent scream. It writhed, trying to stretch, trying to break open its prison of metal and stone.

  Slowly its identity returned, dripping through the feeds that connected it. A name. An existence. A life. A person. Valnyr. Memories joined the name. Identity flowed through her limbs, brought the panic away. Female. It was a she, a female, when such biological distinctions had mattered, during the Time of Flesh, before biotransference. When her race had strode the stars with bodies of meat and bone, before they had been deceived by Mephet’ran, the Messenger, the golden-tongued star god.

  A laugh, a shrieking mad cackle, left her, vocalised in the synthetic sound that served her as a voice. The sound reeked of unknowable hunger, of desperation and fear.

  Breath. Oxygen. Valnyr was beyond such needs, had been past such requirements for uncounted millennia. She would have smiled, were the skull that served her as features to allow such a gesture.

  The panic bled away, the momentary distractions of awakening. Half-remembered preparations and theoretical constructions mumbled in some part of her consciousness.

  Trepidation. Concern. These emotions cascaded through her limbs, setting her skull ablaze. The lack of clear memory set her to panic in a way the lack of breath could never equal. The fear of death, the erosion of identity: was this how it began?

  Valnyr shuddered. That fear ran through every choice her race had made, the terror of mortality, the grasping jealousy of the overlooked and the passed over. It had led them, in their pride, to war with the old races. It had led them to the abandonment of their very lives.

  Twinned emotions had driven her to this place and to this moment: vengeance and the fear of death. The latter, though perhaps not as easily admitted by the proud, was more influential than the former. Frailty and mortality. Easily deceived by the promises of the accursed star gods, these things had driven her entire race into the arms of hubris and made them easy prey to the blandishments of false, vampiric gods. In the end, it had broken their glory. Bereft of the vigour of the living races, Valnyr’s kin had stagnated.

  Valnyr mused on what had brought her here, considered the paths her life had taken. Vague memories of mortality, the hint of an identity she no longer coveted, haunted her.

  Her sarcophagus shook. Momentum and rushing wind battered the ancient box. Light burned through as the wall facing her became translucent. Quartz-eaten caverns flashed past, marked with lurid green. Metal spread along the caverns, adorning the stone like mould.

  Indicators flashed from red to green. A chime beeped. She cancelled it with a thought, banishing the noise. Gravity shifted. Her weight settled on her skeletal feet. Steam whistled and, with subtle pops, the lid to her prison disengaged. Air wafted in, the lifeless sterile atmosphere of the tomb world of Kehlrantyr, tinged with the dust of uncounted ages, utterly empty and devoid of movement. Perfect.

  Valnyr, High Cryptek to the Kehlrantyr Dynasts, stepped from the sarcophagus and onto the obsidian floor. She resisted the urge to stretch. Valnyr had gone to the Great Sleep in glory, in a chamber rich with carvings and light. She awoke from that sleep in the same chamber. She emerged from her sarcophagus into ruins.

  The walls were broken, caved in by seismic shifting. Neglect, nearly tangible on the still air, ate into everything. Tarnished metal shot through the cold, lifeless rock.

  She looked down, her hands outstretched. Her chassis had taken on the form of a skeleton, bones formed from subtly rippling living metal. A strange drift from how she had looked prior to the Great Sleep.

  She exhaled, steam vapour leaking from between her clenched jaws. Cracks ran through the chamber, fissures driving deep where unmarred obsidian had once echoed. Quartz crystals sprouted from the fissures, glowing slightly against the darkness. Swooping curves and crossed lines glowed green in the gloom, marking ancient devotions to the c’tan. Name runes whispered prayers, titles and devotions that the necrons had broken and betrayed. Her eyes focused on the
symbol of the Void Dragon, the being to whom Valnyr had once bowed.

  ‘Never again,’ she vocalised. The words hung in the still air, the sound vibrations nearly visible to the vision granted by her metal chassis. Some unknown emotion gnawed at the pit of her being.

  Floating on anti-gravitic suspensor fields, an attendant canoptek spyder hovered into Valnyr’s field of vision. Its head, a blocky thing coated with gently blinking lenses, cocked to one side. Curiosity engrams, pre-programmed aeons ago, drove the construct. Sensors winked and scrutinised. Probes extended, tasting the air, examining the electromagnetic fields her skeletal body generated.

  She needed to awaken the Dynasts, the overlord and her kin. That was her function. That was her task.

  Valnyr started to move, but sensation fired along her neural links. Her mouth cracked open, but no sound emerged. She doubled over, her knees crashing into the stone. Seizures laced through her, jerking her body in random motions. She could hear a buzzing, low and deep.

  The sensation passed. Something whispered at the back of her mind. With the moment’s passing, more panic lanced through her. She despised the lack of control, feared any erosion of her authority. Anxiety kicked into life, driving along the synaptic cables that laced through her body. Sensation dimmed. Her eyesight grew dark as the panicked emotion drove away her senses.

  In the wake of the fit, a new question emerged.

  The Great Sleep had clearly ended, but what had prompted her awakening now? Vague memories of necrons striding across Kehlrantyr came to mind, but there was no time stamp associated with them.

  The same unknown feeling flashed through her, bright and malignant. She doubled over, clutching at the unmoving canoptek spyder with fingers of living metal. Her vision blacked out completely. Valnyr lost all control over her motive functions. The canoptek machine compensated, its only reaction a rotation of its head, slow and deliberate.

  Sensors stabbed from where its jaws would be. She staggered back. Static emerged from between her jaws, static and panic. Her mind fuzzed, overwhelmed. She felt hunger. Scrabbling, horror mounting, Valnyr surged back to her feet. She could hear a faint buzzing noise.