The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  The fearful silence was broken by the rumble of engines. A pair of giant cargo landers grumbled overhead. The crowd started at them, as if they were the vanguard of invasion.

  ‘I must ask more of you than I have ever asked before.’ And here was the final message, which would condemn so many. Dante hid his sorrow to deliver their fate in the same bombastic fashion. ‘Those of you capable of carrying weapons will be deployed under the command of the angels to aid in the defence of Baal. These ships you see carry guns and ammunition. Every man and woman of sound body over the age of ten standard Terran years will be armed. Children below the age of ten and their mothers will be excused this duty, and evacuated from the system today.’

  Weeks of rumours had sent the population into a state of dread anticipation. Their worst fears confirmed, their dread turned into panic. Dante raised his voice.

  ‘Any refusing this duty shall be executed. All must fight, or all will perish. This is my decree, as commander of the Blood Angels, Chapter Master, Lord of Baal, Baal Primus, Baal Secundus, and of the Angelic Host!’

  The crowd surged forward. Those at the front, until moments ago full of quiet adoration, were crushed up against the marble. Outside the walls, rockets thundered as the cargo lifters touched down. Loading ramps dropped, and transit containers rolled out from their holds, each one full of lasguns.

  ‘May the Emperor watch over you and protect you. May we all find mercy in his light.’

  Blood thralls were moving into the crowd, heavily armed and armoured. They shoved at the people, corralling sections of the populace and herding them away for processing under the watchful eyes of Space Marines. ­Feeble fists thumped off their carapace armour. The Baalites were screaming, shouting, weeping and wailing. Questions issued from a thousand mouths, merging into a harsh babble that could never be answered.

  ‘Stay back!’ roared the Sanguinary Guard. ‘Away from the statue of Sanguinius. Away!’

  Dante turned and marched back within the pediment. Inside was a small complex, completely unknown to the men and women living above it. A fast monotrack waited to take him to the Fortress of the Blood at the edge of the city, where a Thunderhawk stood by.

  The first shots rang out before the bronze doors sealed themselves with a doomy thump, cutting out the screams of the panicking multitude.

  The Blood Angels were not gentle in this recruitment. Resistance was brutally quashed, and the square was soon sticky with spilled blood. Similar scenes were repeated all over both moons.

  Dante hated himself for what he was doing, but it was necessary. The guns were needed in Baal’s defence, but more was at stake. The more human biomass he could remove from each of the moons, the more likely the moons were to survive. He must drive the tyranids to attack the Arx Angelicum directly. He was counting on it.

  Seeing the necessity and stomaching the manner of its execution were two different matters. To ensure the survival of his Chapter he had exterminated worlds and now he brutalised his own people. To billions, Commander Dante was a hero, for centuries he had striven to be worthy of their love. He felt far from heroic at that moment. He betrayed himself by fulfilling his duty.

  He hardened his heart. Worse was to come.

  Far above the complex where Dante walked, over the square where the protectors turned on the protected, the serene face of Sanguinius’ giant statue stared heavenward, away from the violence perpetrated in his name.

  Dante held court upon the Blade of Vengeance. Chapter Masters came from both worlds in flocks of transports to the gathering. It was a pre-mission edification like no other. There had been precious few gatherings of so many Space Marine lords in all the history of the Imperium, fewer still of all one bloodline, and only a handful of similar size at Baal itself.

  They arrived shorn of pomp, for the time of display was done. Space Marines were warriors first and foremost, and although ceremony had its place in all they did, when battle came they were sober and focused. The decision to follow Dante was made. There were no sly words in deserted corridors, no jockeying for power one would find in another Imperial force. Space Marines were weapons clothed in men’s flesh.

  They willingly put themselves at Dante’s disposal.

  Seventeen Chapter Masters, their aides and a dozen other officers who led Chapter contingents where the Master was not present, sat within the Red Council Chamber on the flagship. Six more stood behind the chairs as luminous hololith ghosts.

  Dante was humbled by their loyalty to Sanguinius; he was under no illusion, he knew full well that when they looked to him for leadership it was not Dante they saw, but Sanguinius’ eternal golden visage.

  Time turns about a spiral, he thought in silent prayer. We live in a pale reflection of ancient times. Here we are but a shadow of you and your Legion, Great Angel. Give me the strength through your blood to honour you.

  ‘My lords,’ said Dante. ‘The time has come.’

  He held up a hand; a vox recording crackled out of concealed speakers.

  ‘…ear of Destiny, report thirty-two, mission ma… three-zero-nine… other-Sergeant Callisto reporting.’ The recording was a mess, cut up by sequenced interference pulses, but the enemy had not completely succeeded in blotting it out.

  ‘Position Dernos Five.’ The recording became stronger. ‘Hivefleet Leviathan is here. Tell the commander that there are millions of them… e… to… cannot achieve an accurate count.’ Shouting came from the background, calls for signal boost and shield activation. The recording cut out, becoming a buzzsaw drone. Signal beeps punched through the racket. When Callisto’s voice returned it was blurred and came with the rumble of weapons fire. ‘…are engaged. We are surrounded, I repeat, we cannot retreat, we…’

  A cry and an explosion cut short the recording.

  ‘Chapter Master Techial,’ said Dante.

  The lord of the Disciples of Blood stood from his chair. He had no helmet on. The mass of scar tissue he had for a face twisted his mouth into a permanent snarl.

  ‘This message was received by the Red Blade, also of my Chapter. The Spear of Destiny was on the far side of the Adernos system when the tyranids emerged from the system fringe. They were lost. The Red Blade made warp and returned. Their augur soundings speak of a swarm of un­precedented size.’

  ‘Captain Fen encountered them at Aldine,’ said Dante. A cartolith quivered into focus over the hollow circular table. Baal was at the centre, other Red Scar systems around it. A star blinked. ‘From Aldine it is three point four light years to Adernos. The tyranids are making great speed towards us.’

  ‘We can be thankful they do not travel the warp,’ growled Malphas of the Exsanguinators.

  ‘If they did, then we would be dead. Even so they make a mockery of natural law in moving so quickly,’ said Zargo of the Angels Encarmine. ‘Their ships are slow in-system, but in the interstellar void we have nothing that can match them. We need more time!’

  ‘We have a few similar eye-witness accounts from other systems,’ said Dante, ‘and our scourging fleets have encountered scouting swarms at six others. Astropathic plea prayers were received from nine more.’ A crescent of minor stars blinked, then twelve once-populous star systems within the same vector. All of them were lifeless now, made so by tyranid consumption or at Dante’s order. ‘They approach on a broad front,’ said Dante. ‘So far as we can tell, all from the galactic south. This gives us an advantage. Thus far, we have denied them the opportunity to replenish their fleet biomass from the Red Scar systems. Therefore, the combined might of the fleets will not be much over what our intelligence suggests. Our defences are ready. The concentration of our forces and of the drafted populations around the Arx Angelicum should ensure that the full force of the tyranid attack falls there, where we are strongest, and not on the moons.’ Dante pressed his hands flat on the table. ‘These are only small consolations. Let it be known that we face the great
est concentration of tyranids since Hive Fleet Behemoth penetrated Ultramar.’ He paused. ‘The shadow is falling. Our astropathic prayers no longer resist the roar of the hive mind. The warp is becalmed all around the system, its currents are stilling as water upon which oil is poured. There will be no more reinforcements. My requests to my brothers at Diamor go unanswered. There will be no more messages. The Great Devourer approaches.’ Sanguinius’ face looked at each of the Chapter Masters in turn. ‘They are coming.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Broken Necklace

  The junker-tribesman Chrismsae led Gabriel Seth over rusty plains. He scurried. He scuttled. He did not walk like a true man. Seth’s steady, heavy footsteps crunched upon the crusted surface of ancient war glass while Chrismsae’s pattered, rodent-like and furtive. The junker was young, though reckoned old for his tribe, sparely muscled, his growth stunted by malnutrition, teeth already rotting in his head.

  Seth fought down his contempt for the youth. He had been useful during the fortification of Baal Primus. He had shown Seth the ancient redoubts on the shoulders of the moon’s wrecked orbitals that his men now laboured to rebuild. Chrismsae’s knowledge of the deep caverns of the Necklace was invaluable, and he had a certain ­wiliness. But he was not sufficiently gifted to be a candidate for apotheosis, or he would not be languishing on the moon. Chrismsae was evasive when questioned about the Blood Angels trials. Seth thought he must have tried. Anyone living in a hellhole like Baal Primus would try.

  Now there was this, a report of another force of Space Marines putting down on the far side of the Necklace that had been corroborated by no other source and that Chrismsae would show to no one but Seth. Perhaps the youth meant to lead him into a trap. He was a greater fool than he looked if that were so.

  Oxide dust puffed up with every footstep. The area around the Necklace was thick with metal rusted to powder over the glass. The glass was a product of firestorms from reactor failure when the orbitals came down. Seth suspected the Necklace had been bombed after their fall also; the ancients must have possessed terrible weapons, for there were areas still hot with exotic isotopes twelve thousand years after the supposed date of the war. Imperial atomics would render an area dangerously radioactive for weeks, not years, never mind millennia. Whoever had attacked Baal Primus had been engaged in a calculated attempt at sterilisation. Such hate between the two worlds; humanity’s capacity for hatred was bottomless. If indeed the legends were true, and the wreck of the paradise moons had not been occasioned by xenos assault.

  The ancient attempt at exterminatus had failed. Humanity was a persistent, vermin species that thrived in wreckage. Mankind had survived on Baal Primus to produce such debased specimens as Chrismsae.

  The boy turned back to him, yellowed eyes peering over hunched shoulders. His head was covered over by the filthy pelt of a creature native to the deeps of the Necklace, possibly descended from Terran rats.

  ‘We must go up, angel, to the top.’ Chrismsae pointed to the square wall of the unnatural mountains. ‘Other ones on the far side.’

  ‘My warriors saw nothing,’ said Seth. ‘This system is full of other Chapters. They saw nothing. I do not believe you.’

  Chrismsae shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Chrismsae not lying. He not knowing. But Chrismsae sees. You see too, if you follow me.’

  ‘If you are lying, I will kill you,’ said Seth.

  Seth’s vox-bead pinged. Chaplain Appollus’ voice followed.

  ‘Seth, these wretches are pitiful! They will not work hard enough.’ Appollus’ perpetually angry voice barked in Seth’s ear. ‘The eastern fortress will not be ready by the estimated time of planetfall.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ growled Seth. ‘Work them harder.’

  ‘You should be here to tell them yourself!’ spat the Chaplain. ‘I invoke the rights of my rank to reprimand you. You neglect your duties.’

  Seth thought this hypocritical coming from Appollus, whose own penchant for violence often had him rushing ahead of his brothers into adventures of his own with little thought for the consequences.

  ‘You will hold your tongue, master of the lost. You will oversee the construction while I am gone, and you are not to provide your usual brand of incentive. We need the mortals.’

  ‘Then how am I to make them work?’

  ‘Use your imagination.’

  ‘You have grown soft, Seth.’

  ‘Insult me again, Appollus, I dare you,’ said Seth. ‘Perform your duty, finish the fortress. I will be back soon.’ He cut the vox.

  Chrismsae stared expectantly at his giant charge, chewing on ragged nails as he waited.

  Seth nodded at him.

  Chrismsae grinned and scurried off, but no matter how fast his legs rose and fell, he could not outpace Seth’s slow, deliberate stride.

  Time had worn down the wounds of the Long Ago War. Edges of minor impact craters overlaid on one another had been abraded down to soft circles, so that the earth was pocked, like the skin of a survivor of disease. Wiry vegetation covered over irregular highlands. The orbitals had come down in a long line and at first glance they appeared a natural mountain range. Shock ridges wrinkled the plains for dozens of miles around them, the stone blending with the metal of the fallen orbitals in a facsimile of foothills. Erosion had smoothed off snapped spars, and caused decks to collapse, sealing the hollow interiors away from sight. Only after a time examining them did the mountains’ true nature reveal itself. It was there to see in the boxy strata of compressed decks, the strangely straight courses of mountain streams, in the square mouths of room-caves, until they crested the last ridge and there came a point where the broken orbital plate rose suddenly from the ravaged crust around it in an unnatural cliff. There the beginning of man’s artifice was sharply delineated.

  Seth rested his hand on ancient metal and looked upward.

  ‘Now we climb, yes? Yes!’ shouted Chrismsae eagerly. He beckoned to the Space Marine lord, that he follow into a ragged cave mouth.

  Seth looked back. Crags of stone pushed up by ancient impact blocked his view of the way back to the fortification site. His presence would not finish the forts any quicker, no matter what Appollus said.

  Shaking off his misgivings, he ducked into the cave, and passed through the flaking hull of the ancient orbital of Baal.

  They avoided the deep caverns, skirting through the outer passages to make their way to the summits. The route had been improved by generations of Chrismsae’s people, though in the most rudimentary way. Bridges of sheet metal crossed holes in the floor, rents in buckled walls and decks had been widened into doors. Rope railings had been strung alongside the most dangerous drops. The work was crude, like the war rigs the junkers rode around on the plains beyond the false mountains. There were chasms that could have been crossed by slightly more advanced engineering, but that appeared to be beyond the junkers. Any culture that could maintain combustion engines should be able to make a proper bridge, but the junkers could not. The desperate nature of their existence had pruned away any knowledge that was not absolutely essential to their survival.

  The outer passages opened in many places to the outside world. Seth’s enhanced mind, so much more powerful than Chrismsae’s, kept track of their path easily, confounding Chrismsae’s attempts to conceal the route. They passed a small rust-red waterfall gurgling from on high, disappearing down a chute into metallic deeps. Ferric deposits furred the walls, narrowing the passageway. They crossed a bridge, little more than a plank of metal, that shook dangerously under Seth’s weight. On the far side, half-hidden by the accretions of rust, there was a doorway.

  ‘That way is quicker,’ said Seth.

  Chrismsae did not ask how Seth could possibly know such a thing. Seth was an angel. He knew things nobody else did.

  ‘No, no, my lord. Dangerous. Phantoms and ghasts and worse are there. We go upward.’ The boy’
s fear of the deeps was greater than that he had of Seth, and he hurried on ahead before Seth could command otherwise.

  Seth looked down the dark hallway. His Space Marine eyes saw a space still recognisable as a maintenance corridor. Drifts of detritus cluttered the corners, and its bulkheads were bent out of true, but this part of the ancient space station had come down belly first, and it was more or less level. A dank wind blew from somewhere far inside. Seth grunted, and followed the boy.

  They stayed within the orbital for a short time. Soon after the waterfall, the path emerged through a bent-toothed docking gate, and they continued their ascent through a wood of stunted trees whose limbs bore witness to genetic corruption.

  That part of the station had sustained heavy damage. Its hull was crumpled, giving chance for thin soils to accumulate. In places it was possible to forget the origin of the mountains, until a square and deadly shaft yawned suddenly underfoot, or the armoured glass of an ancient viewing port glinted from behind curtains of orange mosses.

  On they went, following ancestral trails of Chrismsae’s people. The junkers had no vehicles that could traverse this terrain, all was tailored to hiking. Where the trail grew steep there were ropes and ladders, or badly welded steps to speed them on. These additions were few, for the orientation of the downed orbital and its broken nature made for easy climbing. In a few hours they had walked several miles from the Flesh Tearers’ fortifications and ascended seventeen hundred feet. Smashed turrets and spires made the peaks of the artificial range. Their dull grey metals were cloaked in ice, for though the altitude was modest Baal Primus was a cold world. Dirty snow, the product of Baal Primus’ dysfunctional hydrological cycle, crunched underfoot. By now, Seth could hear the newcomers. The sky rumbled softly to the coming and going of landing craft.