The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  It did not halt the tyranids.

  Ordamael threw up his arms and turned his skull helm to face Baal Secundus looming beyond the whirling aerial swarms.

  ‘By his blood did he make me!’ shouted Ordamael. ‘I am an angel of Sanguinius!’

  The first gaunts plunged through the scrim of sand obscuring the thirstwater, their screeches lost instantly as hundreds of their fellows plunged down on top of them. They piled on into the thirstwater without stopping. All around the Arx Angelicum, driven on by the unrestrained desire to kill, they tumbled into the rockcrete channel where they thrashed and screamed and died. The bleached bones and exoskeletal plates of the creatures emerged as bright reefs from the surface, only to slip back under as every vestige of moisture was sucked from them and they were reduced to powder. The death toll was incalculable, how many hundreds of thousands Ordamael could not tell, but they kept on coming, and coming. As the remains clogged the moat it allowed the aliens to come closer, but still half the width remained unfilled, and the ’gaunts continued to fall mindlessly into it, screeching hatefully as they died.

  All of a sudden, it stopped. The swarm halted dead in its tracks. Hundreds more were murdered by impetus, and then the slaughter was done.

  The rest fell back from the brink. The thirstwater slopped and churned in its narrow prison, eager for more. Larger beasts moved forward to impose the hive mind’s will. The ’gaunts steadied, only to scatter again as the greater beasts were shot down by weapons on the curtain wall. More leader beasts came to die, then more. Back and forth the ’gaunt horde went, never quite making it to the edge of the moat, their numbers thinned all the while by a constant rain of giant shells and raking fire from the defences. The slaughter went on for half an hour. The air grew hot with weapons discharge. The smell of fyceline and scalding metal overpowered the stink of spilt alien blood.

  No more larger beasts came. The ’gaunts drew back one final time, turned tail, and scurried from the moat.

  Unbelievably, the tyranids were withdrawing.

  Cheers and song erupted all along the curtain wall, followed by a redoublement of firing into the backs of the fleeing creatures.

  Ordamael let the head of his crozius thump to the floor, and knelt in thankfulness. ‘By the Blood, are we made victorious,’ he said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Darkest Hour

  The tremors of battle penetrated every part of the fortress monastery, shaking even the hidden halls of the librarius, whose walls were not all of cretes and stone, and whose ways did not necessarily lead to places on Baal.

  Rhacelus sat impatiently within the Chemic Spheres, watching an entranced Mephiston for signs of life. Mephiston had not moved for days. His face was grey, his skin contrasting queasily with his mane of white hair. He looked like a corpse.

  Rhacelus wished he were performing the vigil alone. Unfortunately, Mephiston had insisted Lucius Antros attend with him.

  ‘He has been gone a long time,’ said Antros.

  Antros’ voice was a croak. Antros was inhumanly beautiful, a paragon of Sanguinius’ form to Rhacelus’ pugilist’s body. But his beauty was marred. His sculpturally sharp features were drawn. Dark shadows pouched his eyes. The Librarians of Baal suffered the ill effects of proximity to the hive mind. Lesser beings than they would have been driven insane. Rhacelus could not help but think that the strain had peeled back Antros’ beauty to reveal something of his true nature.

  ‘He should have returned to us by now,’ said Antros plaintively.

  Rhacelus ran his gauntlet over his close-cropped silver hair. He was very old, but it was rare for him to feel his age like he did then. A billion voices hissed at the edge of his hearing. The mental pressure did nothing good for his humour. His limbs were like lead, heavy in their metal casings; they had been armoured since the invasion began. He had taken no solid sustenance nor liquid while in the Chemic Spheres, relying on his battleplate’s nutrient fluids, and his mouth was gummy from underuse. His skin was intolerably grimy under his bodyglove. Every microscopic grain of salt from his dried sweat was a rough pebble grating on his flesh, each as irritating to him as Antros was.

  ‘It will take as long as it will take, Lexicanium,’ said Rhacelus, pronouncing each word with acid calm. He closed his ever-glowing eyes. It was tempting never to open them again.

  Antros was fretful, behaving in a way unbecoming for an angel of the Blood. His hands twisted in his lap, ceramite grating on ceramite. ‘It is wrong to be in here. We should be out there with the others. They need our strength. Our gifts will be missed in the fight.’

  Rhacelus almost shouted at Mephiston’s protégé, but bit back his anger at the last. ‘One cannot dictate to the Lord of Death,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘You can only do what he asks, and hope it works in your favour in the end. If we do not act to head off this other peril, we will have two enemies to face, and then three as we turn upon ourselves. We are needed here. We stay here.’

  Admitting it aloud would have killed Rhacelus, but Antros had a point. More than half of the Blood Angels Librarians present on Baal, and a score from other Chapters, waited for word from the Chief Librarian. That was a lot of destructive potential sitting on its hands. Isolated in the Chemic Spheres, Rhacelus had little idea how the battle fared, but the guns had not rested once, and kept up a steady rhythm, firing enough times to shatter a warfleet. He could tell when the tyranids landed. The shake of every discharge was now followed moments later by a fainter impact tremor, a sign of guns firing at targets on the ground. ‘He will come back to us when it is time.’

  Rhacelus doubted the words as he said them. Mephiston had been in a trance for too long. The longer Mephiston was under, the more concerned Rhacelus became. Mephiston walked the warp at the worst possible time.

  ‘By the angel’s wings, Mephiston, where are you?’ he said.

  The Lord of Death said nothing.

  Hours crawled by. Another day passed. The endless pounding of the guns merged with the thump of Rhacelus’ headache. Once, he tried to enter a trance himself, to see if he could locate Mephiston’s astral form, but he was stymied. Mephiston was a master at spiritual projection, a skill few Space Marine Librarians had to any degree, and that was yet another thing that set Mephiston apart from his fellows. Rhacelus lacked his master’s ability, and the crushing malice of the tyranids’ composite soul shut all doors to the epistolary.

  His attempts exhausted him. His warp-blasted eyes slid shut. He meant to meditate, instead he slept. He awoke to a gentle shaking of his shoulder guard.

  ‘Rouse yourself, now is the time Rhacelus!’

  Mephiston stood over him, his skin still drawn and grey. He was a revenant, haunting Rhacelus in the night.

  Rhacelus blinked and swallowed in an unsuccessful attempt to moisten his dry mouth. ‘Mephiston? My lord?’

  ‘I have returned. We must go. Now.’

  Antros was already standing. Their thrones had vanished. Rhacelus got groggily to his feet, and his own seat dissolved into a mist of blood-red corposant.

  Mephiston made a series of gestures, and the flesh-like dome wall of the Chemic Spheres parted.

  Their isolation was over. Rhacelus’ vox-beads came alive with the steely calm battle chatter of Space Marines at war.

  ‘Prepare our Thunderhawks.’ Mephiston’s sepulchral voice cut into the vox like a knife. ‘We leave now.’

  Two gunships packed with Librarians and a small body­guard of veteran Space Marines flew out from the Arx Angelicum. The gunships were yet more assets that should have been utilised against the xenos. Rhacelus patched his helmplate display into the augur eyes of the craft, and watched as the ships ascended at a steep angle and flew quickly over the excavated landing fields around the fortress monastery. Vast networks of spidered cracks were eroded into the ancient rockcrete. If he had not known them for what they were, it would have
been easy to think the fields a natural formation on the ground, but from the air their artificial origin was obvious, and the footings of long-vanished buildings were clear as day in the sand between the numerous landing aprons that had known no thruster’s kiss since the beginning of history. The extent of the extramural facilities were a tragic indication of how large the Blood Angels had once been. Not even all the sons of Sanguinius gathered together in this one place again matched the full size of their parent Legion. Another reminder, if Rhacelus needed one, that they lived in diminished times.

  The Thunderhawks followed the curve of the void shield down. Rhacelus swayed in his mag-locked boots as his mass shifted. They passed over formations of Space Marines moving to reinforce various points of the wall. Tank formations and whole phalanxes of jump pack equipped Assault Marines waited behind the wall to deal with breakthroughs. A sense of unfettered rage took him as they flew over a newly built hangar of plasteel. The psychic mark of the Death Company was unmistakable to Rhacelus, and awesome in its might.

  They flew between stabbing beams of energy, jinking to avoid the track of shells. The craft wobbled in munition-shocked air as they sped over the curtain wall and on past the killing zone between the wall and the third line. In the open space, funeral pyres of neatly stacked mortal corpses sent up thick black smoke. The numbers of mortals manning the defence barriers seemed thin. Long-ranged weapons fired from the two lines. The defenders’ small arms were silent. The tyranids had ceased pressing their assault; the reasons became clearer once the gunships decelerated to pass through the void shield.

  Hundreds of thousands of tyranid corpses lay around the outermost defences, the piles of them growing in height and density until they were heaped as tall as a Dreadnought around the moat. The layer of camouflaging sand and oil had been disturbed, and the moat was now revealed for most of its circuit. The bleached, desiccated remains of tyranids half filled it.

  ‘A respite, nothing more,’ said Mephiston, as always seemingly privy to Rhacelus’ inner thoughts. ‘The hive mind will be formulating a new strategy.’

  Sporadic fire rained down on the luckless mortals. Their position was outside the void shield, and therefore exposed to both the enemy’s artillery and its airborne contingent. But the Arx Angelicum’s mightiest void ship killing weapons suppressed most of the tyranids’ heavy gun beasts, and the few winged aliens daring to stoop upon the mortals were mostly shot down before they could finish their attack runs.

  Rhacelus tensed. Outside the shield, the gunships were at risk.

  ‘Where are the aerial swarms?’ he said.

  ‘They will be on us when we are out of range of the wall’s anti-aircraft emplacements,’ said Mephiston.

  The Lord of Death was rarely wrong. They headed away from the fortress monastery, flying hard for the south. The ring of churned-up desert and dead xenos gave way to a sea of creatures of every size, from those no bigger than vermin to examples as large as battletanks. There was not a scrap of sand visible through their multitudes, and though shells screamed down into them, blasting hundreds to pieces with every hit, the holes filled rapidly.

  ‘It is no more use than throwing stones into the ocean,’ growled Rhacelus.

  ‘We have other problems,’ said Antros, his eyes closed in a light trance. ‘They are coming for us.’

  The pilot’s voice bore out Antros’ predictions. ‘Be warned, my lords, the aerial swarms approach. Initiating evasive manoeuvres.’

  The Thunderhawk’s engines screamed up to maximum power, jolting Rhacelus in his armour. He switched views between the external lenses of the ship, until he caught sight of flocks of black shapes swirling like sentient smoke towards them from the east. They were a replication of the cosmic swarms reaching for individual worlds. The tyranids were fractal in organisation, their hierarchy and their movements repeated at every scale.

  The view grew uncertain. Residue accumulated on the augur lenses. The engines coughed as tyranid micro­organisms clogged the intakes.

  The aerial swarms switched and moved as one. In their precise choreography it was easy to see them as one creature, not many.

  The ship outpaced the eastern swarm with ease, but ­others appeared to the south, spreading like an opening hand to catch them. The horizon grew black over the mountains where the Thunderhawks were heading, until the sky was a thick swirling mass of winged bodies.

  The Thunderhawks’ weapons opened fire. Their armament was pitifully inadequate to take on so many beasts.

  ‘My lord,’ voxed the pilot. ‘We will have to turn back. We cannot pass this swarm, it is a wall in the sky.’

  ‘Hold your course,’ stated Mephiston. ‘And open the rear ramp.’

  Alarms clanged through the passenger cabin as the rear-facing assault ramp dropped down, forming a slope that ended as a black line against the faded red of the desert.

  ‘I shall return in a few moments, brothers,’ said Mephiston.

  There were warriors from other Chapters within the Thunderhawk who had never seen Mephiston in action. Rhacelus grinned at their reaction as Mephiston unlocked his boots from the floor and strode towards oblivion.

  Empyric energy coursed through the transport hold, Mephiston its focus. With a crackling snap, wings of ruby energy unfurled from his back and Mephiston leapt into the air without breaking his stride, drawing the sword Vitarus as he took flight.

  ‘He really will return in a few moments,’ said Rhacelus.

  He focused his attention once more on the feed from the Thunderhawk’s external sensors. Propelled by the limit­less power of the warp, Mephiston streaked past the gunships. A storm of red energy built in front of him, trailing streamers of gases chilled out of the atmosphere. The Lord of Death held out Vitarus before him, his ethereal wings beating with firm, steady strokes out of time with the great speed he was travelling. A wordless, psychic shout roared from Mephiston’s powerful mind, and the storm around him expanded to a broad globe, shaking the Thunderhawks. Writhing energies passed through their airframes and sparked from the psykers’ armour within. The Lord of Death’s power concerned Rhacelus. He spent his quiet hours wondering if the being he called a master and friend truly was on the side of the angels.

  The storm stabilised, making a barrier around the ­Thunderhawks. It flickered with eruptions of pink and red lightning that grew fiercer as the aerial swarm approached. The tyranids would attempt to slow or stop them, if they could not destroy the Thunderhawks outright, until the pursuing swarms caught them up, and their heavier, slower, flying beasts could be brought into play. Then, the Librarians would be finished.

  Such a tactic had probably worked a million times on a million devoured worlds, but there was only one Mephiston, and the hive mind had yet to experience the full potency of his wrath.

  Rhacelus let his empyrical senses brush Mephiston’s mind briefly, for to push deeper invited death at the Chief Librarian’s own hand. The chill, cold fury of Mephiston’s rage outmatched the hunger of the hive mind. Rhacelus thought it could dull the light of the Astronomican itself. The warp heaved around them. The hive mind’s vastness had calmed it to doldrums. Mephiston stirred it into a psychic hurricane.

  The tyranids shrieked as they neared their prey. Weapons symbiotes extended from aerodynamic housings. Claws flexed in anticipation of the kill. Maws glowed with building bioplasmic generation.

  Into the swarm the globe of energy went. The skies flashed for a hundred miles around with unnatural auroras. The tyranids disappeared as Mephiston’s wrath consumed them. Most of those present knew this ability as the Blood Lance, but none of them could wield it as Mephiston did. A tremendous, electric roar shook the craft as the storm bored a hole right through the tyranid swarm. Greasy ash thumped against the ships. The Librarians moaned as they fought to keep hold of their souls while immersed in the ambit of Mephiston’s overwhelming power.

  The Thunderhawk buck
ed, and they were through. On the ship’s view, Rhacelus saw clear sky ahead. The storm winked out. Mephiston turned back towards the ship. His wings were fading and shrinking in on themselves. All pyskers had limits. Mephiston, strong though he was, had reached his.

  The ship shook with engine exertion, blurring Rhacelus’ vision. He unlocked his boots, leaned forward against the acceleration and headed for the ramp.

  ‘Somebody, help me!’ he called against the howling engine noise. Antros came down first, then a Codicier of the Red Knights, and a Lexicanium of the Blood Legion.

  ‘He will return in a moment,’ Rhacelus shouted, relying on vox and augmitter amplification to convey his words. ‘Do not let him fall!’

  The swarm was receding behind them, its constituent parts wheeling around in the sky to pursue the escaping Space Marines.

  Rhacelus locked his boots to the ramp only at the very edge. He scanned the empty skies.

  ‘Where is he?’ shouted Antros.

  A bang on the ramp answered his question. An armoured hand appeared. Mephiston clawed his way up. Vitarus rang on the metal. Rhacelus trapped the blade with his foot to prevent it falling from the gunship.

  Mephiston could rise no further. His eyes glowed red in his pallid face. His teeth were bared, his canines fully extended.

  Rhacelus knelt and grabbed Mephiston’s arm. ‘Someone take the sword, and help me drag him in!’ he called.

  The others pulled at the Chief Librarian. He was ­unable to move, and a deadweight in his armour that taxed their strength, but they hauled him aboard.

  ‘Shut the ramp!’ commanded Rhacelus.

  Pistons drew the exit shut. The roaring of the engines and rush of air was sealed away from their ears.

  A second mind made itself known to Rhacelus, as ravening as the Red Thirst, yet coldly calculating. In the fraction of the second of contact, the similarities with Mephiston’s soul were striking – a creature of immense power, possessed of a hunger that could never be sated.