Shield of Baal: Devourer

by Joe Parrino

  The clicking of its calliper limbs surrounded the Space Marines. Pain punched through Jatiel’s left leg. A metal forelimb erupted through his thigh.

  Asaliah dropped his bolter and grabbed the sergeant as the machine started dragging him backwards, pulling him into the darkness. Jatiel bellowed as more limbs gripped his leg, and pressure and pain mounted.

  The construct stopped moving. It phased out of existence, leaving holes in Jatiel’s leg. It reared back into reality above Asaliah and Jatiel, energy coruscating about the eye lens.

  ‘The eye!’ Asaliah yelled. ‘Take out its eye!’

  Bolts hammered at the construct, pinging off the metal as Ventara fired his pistol. A well-placed shot blew out the construct’s eye in a wash of actinic lightning. Micro-explosions studded the alien construct, travelling along its length as circuits were consumed by energy blowback. Anti-gravity engines failed and the thing fell to the floor with a clatter of metal.

  More tapping came from deeper in the tunnel. A curious looping speech sounded as well, harsh and full of consonants and machine burbles.

  The Space Marines moved back, clustering closer to one another. Jatiel hurried to reload his bolter. Ventara and Asaliah readied their close combat weapons.

  Lights burst into being all around them, emerging from the walls, eating the darkness. The reliefs seemed to march and writhe, alien figures making war once more.

  Screeching sounded from behind them, the unmistakable hiss of questing tyranid organisms. Ventara turned to face that direction. In his hand, he hefted a number of fragmentation grenades, primed and ready for throwing.

  ‘It seems we are caught between one threat and another,’ Asaliah said. ‘As usual.’

  Jatiel barked a dark, sad laugh. ‘We were lucky to survive this long. We lived through the crashing of a starship. Every breath since has been a gift from the Emperor and Sanguinius.’

  ‘Your orders, sergeant?’ Ventara asked.

  ‘Die well,’ answered Jatiel. ‘Die well, my brothers.’ The Blood Angels sergeant sighted down his boltgun. He breathed out words, ages old. They felt smothered by the darkness around them, but not by the situation. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius.’

  Asaliah handed his sergeant a bolter magazine and took up the words, belted them out with all three of his lungs, and expelled them at the foe. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! By the Blood of our primarch!’

  Footsteps arched towards them, the sound slightly off as it echoed, as if it were produced by legs that did not match the proportions of the human frame. The cadence was different, and therefore wrong. Synchronised stamping signalled the double-step of a marching phalanx. Green lights sputtered from ahead of them.

  Scuttling claws came from behind, scrabbling and hurried, like rats crawling through the walls of a house, hungry, searching.

  The first aliens came into view, skeletal and vile. Jatiel opened fire, boltgun blazing and clawing chunks out of the advancing phalanx. They did not answer back. They withheld fire, weathering the storm of righteousness. Xenos fell, spindly skeletons toppling to twitch in the dust of their dead world. Lightning played about their limbs and they staggered to their feet seconds later, lifeless skulls glaring without malice at the Space Marines.

  Still they came on. Still they withheld their fire. Why? The question formed in Jatiel’s mind before being shunted away. The question served no purpose. All that mattered was that he yet drew breath and that the enemies of mankind surrounded him.

  Behind him, he could hear the savage movements of Ventara as the Space Marine fought off sprinting tyranids. Creatures vaulted overhead, and soon a sea of hissing, screeching organisms surrounded the Space Marines. Claws extended, hooting and spitting xenos rushed forward in a mad scramble, dead-eyed with mouths twisted by unknowable hunger. Acidic drool pitted the obsidian floor. The ambient temperature rose as the press of bodies grew and Jatiel turned to face the tyranids. If the necrons weren’t going to fight back, the organic aliens were the more pressing threat.

  Jatiel’s bolter, emptied of ammunition, became a club once more. He used it with savage efficiency, laying into the tide of genestealers. Bones broke and flesh split. Alien ichor flew from shattered jaws and cloven skulls. The strength of his blood sustained him, driving him to feats that would be considered heroic even by the genhanced standards of the Adeptus Astartes. He was an avatar of fury, an angel of death. His fangs cut into his lips, driving from his gums and drawing his own blood. His fractured skull, his injured brain, were forgotten in the purity of this moment.

  But the genestealers were quick things, bouncing and jangling. They slipped through the sergeant’s guard, punching claws into his armour like knives through paper. Blood streamed freely from his many wounds. Already he felt cold, lost blood being barely replaced by synthetic chemicals.

  By Jatiel’s side, Ventara’s skulls and sliced off limbs. Adrenaline cast off the sluggishness of the chemicals and medicines that flooded his body. He chanted litanies of death and devastation, hymnals to a secular understanding of the founder of the Imperium and His primarchs.

  They fought back-to-back, killing and somehow avoiding death. They moved as one, each action followed by another, anticipated and anticipating. Their boots squelched in the rapidly growing pool of blood and ruptured organs. But they did not slip. They did not fall. They were the Emperor’s finest, none better. They were sons of Sanguinius, the Emperor’s Own Angel.

  Wounds were carved, rents made in their armour. Transhuman blood spilled, dripping to the floor, mingling with spilled tyranid perfidy. The wounds were ignored, lost beneath the killing haze. The red thirst of battle gripped their souls, consuming them, filling them with an unquenchable thirst. A low, howling moan slipped through Jatiel’s lips, channelling his pain and rage, expelling it outwards in time with every blow he landed.

  The Space Marines fought on, flesh hanging from them in ribbons, bodies torn and bleeding. But no mortal blows fell. They fought with the fury of their primarch, the consummate poise and skill of that angelic being.

  Shadows descended over Jatiel’s vision. He heard a scream in his mind, a voice far deeper and more beautiful than his own could ever be. The Blood Angels sergeant blinked the darkness away and turned as he heard a sigh slip through slack lips.

  Ventara was the first to die, decapitated by the bladed limbs of a lictor. His body fell, cast aside and dashed against the rock walls. He shattered into a frieze, breaking an eldar warrior-figure and a necron overlord. The body, no longer housing the immortal soul of Naskos Ventara, slumped to the floor with a wet meat thump. It danced and jerked as neurons continued to fire, the flesh not aware that the animating force was gone.

  All the while the skeletal ranks of necrons watched and waited, as silent and still as the dead things they resembled. They saw the Space Marines’ heroism, observed Ventara’s death. Their gaudy leaders, covered in ornate trappings, watched with cocked heads.

  Through the screen of flickering tyranids, Jatiel saw a skeletal limb flash up and then down. It was obviously an order given.

  Green lightning sheeted into the tyranids, slaying the creatures. Skeletal forms waded into the melee, culling and scything down the beasts. The reprieve was entirely unexpected. His brain began to form a question, lost in the distraction. And so, Jatiel was entirely unaware of the chance to save Asaliah’s life, the opportunity to buy the Deathwatch veteran a chance to fight on for a scant few seconds more.

  A genestealer lunged forward, four killer limbs outstretched, mouth wide and the filthy, crawling horror of the creature’s ovipositor distended from between drooling jaws. It danced past Jatiel, passing inches from the sergeant. He could have reached out, could have battered the creature, thrown himself before it. But he did not, lost in wonderment at receiving aid from the necrons. The genestealer latched onto Asaliah.

  Asaliah, the brother who had served twice with the
Ordo Xenos, the brother who had fought horrors beyond counting in both the black and silver of duty and the red and gold of honour, right hand and friend to Jatiel, fell, vivisected into steaming sections by the alien.

  Jatiel could have saved him, could have intervened. He could have lashed out with his elbow, knocking the creature away. But he was distracted, and Asaliah paid for his laxity.

  Jatiel’s psyche flew apart. The duty that pulled at him, that shaped and guided him, was drowned beneath a tide of blood. The angelic exterior that should have guided every son of Sanguinius fell away, revealing the beast that lurked within.

  The sergeant flew at the crouching genestealer that had torn apart his friend. He dropped his bolter and pummelled the alien. It mewled in sudden pain, but he ignored its sounds, as he ignored the claws that ripped at him. All that mattered was that this creature die, that all of these creatures die.

  He broke the genestealer, shattering its spine upon his knee. Jatiel tore after the others, seeing only red. In the back of his mind, he could hear the repeated discharge of the necron weaponry, could hear the strange sounds of language coming from the aliens, but he was lost to anger.

  More tyranids fell before him, torn apart by his fury. A genestealer landed on his back, hissing and spitting. Its grasping claws tore away his helmet, baring his senses to the foetid reek of blood and spilled viscera. He could feel his fangs carving through his lips.

  He was alone and surrounded. The tyranids glared at him with their dead eyes. Then they swarmed him as one. Jatiel fell beneath a mound of the creatures, borne down by claws and bladed limbs. Barbs and spikes shot into his flesh.

  His world was filled with hissing, buzzing pain. The red haze lifted from him, beaten into submission by his impending death.

  Then came a reprieve. The mass of wriggling, biting tyranids was pulled from him by aliens with expressionless skulls. A blade lanced through a genestealer that crouched on top of him, the tip nearly punching through the aquila that stood proud on Jatiel’s chest. Metal hands gripped his pauldrons, hefting him into the air.

  The sergeant looked down.

  A skull’s unblinking visage, proportions noxious and alien, met his gaze. The head was cocked to the side, a curious regard. More of them crowded around this overlord, bedecked in tattered gold and tarnished metal. Axe blades crowned its skull and it opened its mouth to speak, to craft words in a halting and unfamiliar accent. The xenos’s skeletal hand stretched up to his throat, grasping at the soft point where the helmet interfaced with the breastplate.

  ‘I am called Anrakyr the Traveller,’ it said in machine-mimicked language. ‘I wish to offer assistance in your time of trials.’

  Jatiel’s mind struggled to comprehend the situation, struggled to make sense of what was happening. ‘By the Blood,’ he said, the oath slipping past his lips unbidden. ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice full of wonder and growling rage. ‘Why would you help us, xenos?’

  The necron shifted where it stood, placing Jatiel down almost gently. ‘You assume that we think and behave on the same twisted wavelength that you filthy humans do. You assume our reasoning follows the same paths that your stunted minds take. We wish to help because it is in our interest to aid you here. Be relieved that we offer our assistance. Now, come with me as I awaken this tomb world. Know that you are privileged to witness this. Take it as a mark of respect, for your skill in fighting these things.’ He gestured to the dead and dying tyranids.

  ‘And then?’ asked Jatiel. ‘After you have awoken this world?’

  ‘Then,’ said Anrakyr, ‘you will take me to your leader.’

  About the Author

  Joe Parrino is the author of a range of Warhammer 40,000 stories, including the novella Shield of Baal: Devourer, the audio dramas Alone and Damocles: The Shape of the Hunt, and the short stories ‘Witness’, ‘The Patient Hunter’, ‘Nightspear’, ‘In Service to Shadows’ and ‘No Worse Sin’. He lives, writes and works in the American Pacific Northwest.

  The might of Hive Fleet Leviathan bears down on the worlds of the Imperium.

  As the xenos threat approaches, the elite soldiers of the Militarum Tempestus are charged with a vital and deadly mission by the agents of the Inquisition.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Cover illustration by Dave Greco.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78251-756-6

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