The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  The variety of vessels beggared belief. Some were like slugs, others looked like void whales. There were examples that bore a passing resemblance to sea creatures, scaled up a million times. There were ships with massive blades at the front, or armoured beaks. Ships with tentacles predominated, but others had horned rams for prows, or carried super-sized versions of biocannons weilded by the carnifexes or tervigons fixed in giant, never-closing maws. There were ships with flippers, ships with tails, ships with atrophied arms and legs. Many had monstrously long tails. Some were armoured with the segmented chitinous plate common to most tyranid organisms, albeit on a massive scale, others seemed to have no protection other than a leathery hide. Every possible permutation of life was there, but all melded, changed, bent to the hive mind’s will. In their diversity was an awful uniformity.

  ‘Brother,’ said Asante from the command throne. ‘We will have to move position. There are multiple attack craft on an intercept course.’

  Bellerophon spared a glance for a side screen where Asante cast the relevant data.

  ‘One more moment, Asante. One more.’

  ‘The hive ship?’

  ‘The hive ship.’ Bellerophon nodded absently, only a fragment of his mind on the conversation. His face flickered with the light of a dozen tactical displays. His enhanced Space Marine mind took hundreds of different pieces of information and translated them into a battle plan. ‘It is our primary target at this time. We take that out, this entire sub-tendril will collapse.’

  Power feedback from stressed void shields shook the ship stem to stern.

  ‘Very well,’ said Asante. ‘But I am pulling up and out of this maelstrom as soon as it is dead.’

  Bellerophon signalled the Blood Angels battle group. ‘Prepare for attack run.’

  The Blade of Vengeance groaned as engines forced it down. The hive ship loomed ahead. It was a true leviathan of the void, twenty miles long and three across. Impacts flared all over its shell. Four strike cruisers harried it, all aiming for the front. Bellerophon could not bring himself to call it a prow. At the base of two vast mandibles spread wide like shears was a cluster of red-brown eyes and a tiny, tentacled mouth.

  ‘Charge lances,’ ordered Asante. ‘Load cyclonic torpedoes. Main guns, keep our flanks clear.’

  Bellerophon spent an intense half minute rearranging the Blade of Vengeance’s support ships. Flights of interceptors flew around the group, doing their best to clear away the teeming swarms of tyranid fighter beasts. Swift destroyers identified and disabled approaching kraken ships with volleys of torpedoes.

  The four cruisers zeroed in on their target, hammering away at the creature’s face. The angles were awkward, and many shots were simply snatched from the void by the thing’s lightning fast feeder tentacles.

  ‘Let us lance this thing in its vile xenos face, then break off,’ said Bellerophon.

  ‘As you command, Lord of the Heavengate,’ said Asante.

  ‘Cruisers, stand clear,’ ordered Bellerophon.

  ‘Targets locked,’ reported Asante’s gunnery master.

  ‘Fire,’ said Asante.

  The Blade of Vengeance spat out a full spread of torpedoes, turning slightly once they were away to glide cleanly abeam the hive ship. As it passed the living battleship, four pillars of blinding light slammed out from the Blade of Vengeance’s dorsal turrets, blasting the hive ship’s head to pieces. The weapons snapped off, leaving the hive ship dying. Thick blood spewed from the front. The torpedoes smashed home as the Blade of Vengeance and its escorts moved upward over the hive ship. Atomic fire annihilated the first three miles of its forequarters. The symbiotic weapons creatures were still firing, but the core of the hive ship was dead. Random eructations of gas spasmed from its thruster spiracles, and it lumbered out of formation, smashing aside dozens of its fellows.

  Beyond the dead hive ship, the void was packed with uncountable enemy vessels.

  ‘One down, fifty thousand to go,’ said Asante drily.

  ‘Hold formation.’ Follordark’s simple command cut through the alarms clanging repetitively all around Erwin. He would need luck to restore order to the Angels Excelsis fleet, whose battle order was being split apart by repeated, suicidal attacks towards their centre. The responses of Erwin’s fellow captains were garbled nonsense in his vox-beads.

  The Angels Excelsis were under massive attack. Granted the honour of sallying out from the mobile fortresses of the main battlegroup, they dipped in and out of the onrushing swarms like a rapier. But repeated thrusts had blunted their point. The quick attack and withdrawal that bought them many good ship kills earlier in the battle was confounded by the density of bio-ships streaming past them towards Baal. The Space Marines had been pushed further and further back across the system. Three days of fighting saw them lose hundreds of millions of miles of ground. Large tendrils of the hive had twisted away towards Set and Amair and were greedily devouring the resources of the worlds. If there was one comfort to be taken from this difficult battle, it was this: the tyranids had been so starved in the Red Scar that they were consuming worlds with little to no complex organics, worlds they bypassed when the hunting was good.

  The swarms flowed over and around the Space Marines like a mountain river around boulders. There were not enough Imperial ships to stop the flow. Little islands of violence were all they could manage.

  Ships came at the Angels Excelsis from every direction. Sprays of penetrative spines burst into flares of light against the Splendid Pinion’s void shields.

  ‘They are coming in for another pass,’ shouted the Servile of the Watch.

  ‘Intensify forward fire!’ Erwin commanded.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ responded the Servile Belligerent.

  The oculus flickered like a primitive imaging device. Thousands of autocannon rounds from point defence turrets slammed into the waves of spine-torpedoes hurtling towards them. Leech-like boarding craft twisting their way through the bombardment disintegrated under intense fusion fire. Spores were obliterated by the thousand.

  ‘I have seen thinner blizzards,’ growled Erwin.

  Half the Angels Excelsis ships were lost. The panicked cries of serviles screamed out of the vox as the Angelic died. Its sides were riddled with the maggot holes of tyranid boarding worms. Its guns were silent. The questing arms of a vast kraken ship wrapped themselves about the Angelic’s mid-section, pulling it inexorably towards the grinding bone plates of the bio-ship’s maw.

  Erwin threw up his hand to shield his eyes against a reactor death that didn’t come. The Angelic was sawn in half and pulled inwards. The sight of its prow and stern rubbing against each other was obscene somehow. Even the gas vented from its emptied compartments was inhaled by the gigantic creature. It consumed the entire thing, meat, metal, men and monster. Not a scrap escaped.

  Follordark was on the vox, hollering orders. On a short-range hololithic tactical projection the full enormity of the situation was plain. The Essence Eternal, the Chapter flagship, was in trouble. Three lesser kraken ships had their boneless arms entwined about the Chapter battle-barge’s superstructure. One kraken came away, its shell burning ferociously, eviscerated by a broadside. It would not be enough to save the Essence Eternal. Many-limbed spores were clamped like tumours all over its angular lines. Boarding worms were chewing their way inside. Guns fired wildly all over the battle-barge.

  ‘We are losing, Follordark,’ said Erwin. His own ship shuddered as it unleashed yet another payload at the predators stalking it.

  ‘They shall pay! We shall destroy them all!’ replied Follordark.

  ‘We should withdraw.’

  ‘Negative,’ said Follordark. ‘I command you to hold your–’

  One of the krakens crept sinisterly over the Essence ­Eternal, arm over arm. It wrapped its tentacles around the main vox tower. Follordark’s voice cut out as it wrenched the entire asse
mbly free.

  ‘He is lost,’ said Achemen.

  ‘The Chapter is lost,’ muttered Erwin. ‘Servile of Response, open vox channels to all surviving ships.’

  ‘Aye, my lord.’

  Erwin stood from his throne. The cables plugged into the back of his armour at least permitted him to do that.

  ‘All vessels of the Angels Excelsis…’ As he spoke those words, another of his Chapter’s ancient craft was chewed up and eaten. Then another. ‘I, Erwin, assume command. I order all ships to turn about and rendezvous with–’

  ‘Erwin! To port!’ shouted Achemen in alarm.

  Erwin had time to look up and see the blunt, exposed bone of a ram ship snout emerge from the swarm of vessels, swift and unexpected as an eel darting from its hole. The void shields burned away layers of the ram and sent purple lightning arcing all over the ship. It made not one iota of difference. The ram ship impacted the Splendid Pinion’s command tower several decks below the command deck. The violence of the impact threw Erwin off his feet. He slammed into the railing of his dais and flipped over it. The cables attaching him to the ship’s power and command systems parted in a welter of sparks and smoke.

  He slammed into the lower deck, killing the servile he landed upon.

  For a moment, he lay dazed. The hiss of air from a breach in the hull roused him, the deadly sound standing out amid the cacophony of alarms, screams and creaking metal.

  He stood with difficulty. His armour had no power supply. It was a dead weight on him, onerous to move without the assistance of its supplementary musculature.

  ‘Serviles!’ he barked. He coughed. His ribs were bruised by his fall. The air was foggy with smoke and fire suppressant gas. ‘Serviles! Report!’

  There was no reply. Someone was weeping, another groaning. At the last, unaltered humanity betrayed its weakness.

  ‘Achemen! Achemen! Where are you? Damn you, answer me!’

  He staggered around the wreck of his command dais. The smell of Adeptus Astartes blood drew him to Achemen’s final resting place. The sergeant lay sprawled under a girder, eyes bulging out of his broken skull.

  ‘Serviles!’ he roared. ‘Report!’

  There was still no reply. Thrashing electric cables spat arcing crackles. The glass of the oculus was queered by a massive crack running from the top to the bottom of the central pane. Much of the view was obscured by the sucking mouths of tyranid beasts. Diamond teeth rasped on the glass, scratching it deeply. The command tower had buckled, and the oculus now pointed downwards towards the main hull. Through the diminishing gaps between the flocking beasts chewing on the glass, the dead bulk of the ram ship was visible, its head thrust deep into the ­Splendid Pinion’s innards.

  Among the orchestra of alarms a fresh one began. Erwin’s eye was drawn to a broken console.

  On a cracked pict screen the rune for boarders blinked urgently.

  Something began hammering on the command bridge door. Something big.

  Erwin reached for his storm bolter, but it had been torn away from its strap.

  He struggled forward towards the doors, drawing his combat knife. The command deck reverberated. Ten feet of plasteel was denting inward.

  Erwin took cover before the doors. The few Adeptus Astartes on the deck were all dead. The rest of his company was trapped in the decks below.

  ‘Come on!’ he screamed. ‘I will slay you!’

  By the time the carnifex hammered its way through the door, Erwin was fully in the Red Thirst’s grip. He charged at the tyranid in mindless frenzy.

  His mangled body hit the deck plates moments afterwards.

  Brilliant light from yet another reactor death seared the vision of the Blade of Vengeance’s deck crew. A sphere of nuclear energy tore out a hole a dozen miles across from the approaching tyranid hive fleet. As suddenly as it was opened, it was filled again by the hurtling bodies of ten thousand tyranid organisms, their tentacles already extending as if they could grab Baal from half a million miles away.

  ‘That was Erwin’s ship,’ said Asante. ‘He died better than he lived.’ He consulted a tac-display. ‘The entire Angels Excelsis Chapter is gone. We are losing ships too quickly. The force of the swarm is double what we expected.’

  Bellerophon studied the tactical display. He could only agree.

  ‘What do you propose, brother, that we turn and run?’ said Bellerophon.

  ‘No, my lord,’ said Asante. ‘We should begin phase two of the strategy–’

  ‘Not yet!’ barked Bellerophon. ‘We cannot split yet. We must slaughter as many of these xenos filth as we can while we have the numbers. Our lives do not matter. I will spend them all if I thought it would help.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Only through sacrifice shall Baal stand.’

  The Space Marine fleet was bent back upon itself. Four battle groups had become one, a crescent line venting fire forward and to the sides. They could do little more than kill what they could. The tyranids were too numerous to stop.

  Kill counters rattled up in a blur. Cogitation estimates had the number of tyranid dead well into the millions. Three hundred and seven hive ships had died to the Imperial guns. Bellerophon doubted they would ever get a good idea of how many lesser vessels had been blasted apart. Surely it would make sense for the enemy to stop, to turn about and retreat? No amount of feeding in the Baal system could possibly make up for the losses the tyranids were enduring, and would surely endure, when they landed upon Baal. Bellerophon was a gifted fleet commander, but he could not credit the hive mind with the strategic ability to force a passage north through Baal. It was idiocy. Why not avoid the Red Scar altogether? He also did not believe it intelligent enough to want the Blood Angels eliminated, or intelligent at all, in point of fact. And Mephiston’s theory that the hive mind thirsted for vengeance, that was laughable.

  But what he could understand was that the tyranids were numberless, and they were at Baal.

  Bellerophon understood defeat when he saw it.

  He chided himself. There was hope. The Sanguinor himself had said so. They could not hold the tyranids, but they could slow them. Every dead beast was one that would not set foot on Baal. Every hive ship destroyed saw the hive mind’s coherency weakened. They could do it. They must.

  Hope proved itself fleeting.

  ‘My lord!’

  The tone of the thrall’s voice had Bellerophon reacting instantly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The augurs, my lord.’ Blood thralls were brave, loyal, not quite the best of the best, but head and shoulders above the common herd of man. The thralls who manned the command desk had been aspirants to the Chapter who had failed by the narrowest of margins. But this one was scared. ‘Look!’ He raised a quaking finger.

  Bellerophon turned his head to a minor hololith. The main display was occupied by the immediate environs of the battle, an area of a hundred thousand miles or so. The lesser hololith the thrall shakingly pointed to supported a graphical view of the entire system.

  ‘By the blood of the Great Angel,’ said Bellerophon.

  From the far side of Balor, a second hive fleet was approaching, bypassing the defences, and heading straight for Baal. There were tens of thousands more vessels. Far too many to overcome, but he did not pause in making the order that would end his life.

  Bellerophon slammed his hand down on a button, opening every vox horn within hearing distance of his voice. ‘All battle groups, pay heed!’ he shouted, his orders competing with the hideous white noise of tyranid denial broadcasts. ‘A second hive fleet approaches Baal.’ He keyed in a number of rapid orders into a nearby cogitator. ‘Battle group alpha, fall in line with the flagship. We cannot leave Baal undefended. The rest of you, cover our withdrawal until we are away, then break apart and make distance. I release you from my command. Pursue objectives of harassment and division as best you can. Keep as many of t
hese xenos fiends away from the primarch’s birthplace as you can, for as long you can. By the Blood were we made, my brothers. May the Emperor guide you and preserve you.’

  Dante did not see Bellerophon die. He did not see Asante die. He did not see the ancient Blade of Vengeance overwhelmed by tyranid razorfiends as it rushed into Baal’s orbit. He did not see the Victus and the Bloodcaller forced to abort their attack and withdraw, heavily damaged. He did not see the miles-long flagship draw a blazing river of fire across Baal’s upper atmosphere. He did not see it crash land. Not until later would he see the column of black smoke that issued from the downed vessel. He did experience the violent tremor of the impact, though it originated hundreds of miles away. But as the steady green arrow of the Blade of Vengeance turned grey upon the hololith and fell from the representation of the sky, he felt the same, burdensome regret he had felt every time a man had died under his command for over a millennium. He remembered Asante as a neophyte. He remembered Bellerophon’s misery as his natural affinity for void war saw him permanently seconded to the Heavengate Fleet, and been gladdened by his joy as he had grown into his role.

  He could not remember meeting either of them for the first time. There was a lot he did not recall. His memory was a vast hinterland, full of obscure countries shrouded in Lethean mists. Forgetting saddened him. It was a second death for those who had died, a further lessening of what they had been, and who they were.

  ‘Bellerophon and Asante were heroes of this Chapter,’ said Dante. ‘They will be honoured.’ Silence greeted his words. There were many other heroes who had fallen in the past five days. The thunder of shocked air replied, loud enough to be heard through the redoubt’s thick walls: the sound of thousands of tyrannocytes, mycetic spores and landing beasts falling into the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound.

  For the last half day, the defence lasers and larger cannons had been firing, their infrequent reports an irregular heartbeat. Now thousands of smaller guns joined them. The Arx Angelicum trembled with rage.