The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  It was strong, but not as strong as the natural, glassy stone of the dead volcano.

  The lictor rose suddenly. It emitted a short burst of aromatic chemicals and a weak psychic pulse. Both were beneath the prey’s notice, but its fellow creatures heard. Like white blood cells are attracted to sites of infection, soon creatures joined the lictor. They needed no direction. A pair of suitable beasts swam through the sand and began excavating a new tunnel alongside the path of the old. They were known to the Imperium as trygons, something else the hive mind did not care to know. It had no names for its constituent parts. The wolf cares nothing for the thoughts of sheep. They worked quickly, shoving the sand aside with their claws and compacting it. There would be no spoil heaps to give them away. Resinous secretions from their long bodies sealed the sand into a form of organic concrete. Soon others came. The swarm selected the best organisms for the task. Infiltration creatures with high combat capability were automatically deployed. Dozens of genestealers came in ones or twos, moving stealthily so that the gathering group would not be noticed. Another safeguard. They would not be seen anyway, the eyes of the Space Marines were upon the sea of monsters attacking the second wall.

  Twenty minutes went by, a meaningless measurement of a meaningless span to the eternal hive mind. Sand suddenly hissed away into a rapidly widening hole, and the lictor plunged in. The genestealers followed. They ran along a pitch-black tunnel, needing no light to see. They passed under the moat, the fallen third line, and the curtain wall without detection, their movements masked by gunfire. At the far end the two trygons attacked the plug seal with acidic spittle and teeth with monomolecular edges. The ground rumbled around them to the steady heartbeat tremors of artillery fire. No sand fell from the resin-bonded roof.

  Acid ate through metal easily. When that had ­dribbled away to noxious fluid the prey creatures’ false rock dissolved just as fast, revealing a thick rustless plasteel pipe piercing the foot of the Arx Murus. The wall was of diamond-hard volcanic glassrock. Eating through that would have taken days. Time equalled detection. The simple plug in the pipe’s jacket took only hours.

  A hole opened. The trygons rapidly gnawed at the edges to widen it. Toxic vapours steamed from the material as it dissolved, shortening the creatures’ lives by years. Another consideration meaningless to the hive mind.

  Silently, the trygons pushed aside the rotting material. It scattered into damp, steaming sands. The pipe within the fortress remained. The lictor paused, multiple senses reaching out into the depths of the fortress monastery. The air was stale. The machines there dead. Nothing had moved down there for generations.

  As one, the infiltration splinter poured into the Arx Angelicum. They ran soundlessly down the pipe, reaching a junction. A further seal barred the way. Bio-acid reduced it to metal-rich liquid in moments.

  Acid vapours dispersed on feeble currents. The lictor tasted the air. Its olfactory sense was sensitive to chemical components at one or two parts per million. The amount of data it processed would have confounded an advanced cogitation unit. Thousands of compounds, borne on multiple air vortices from locations it had never seen, were processed in fractions of a second.

  It found what it was looking for.

  There were two targets. It tasted them both quickly: a diversion, and the objective.

  The diversion would drive the prey into a rage, and conceal the second.

  Prey always fought hardest to protect its young.

  Dante fought on the wall.

  The killzone was a field of burning wrecks. Dozens of priceless war machines lay broken in the desert. Dante had a chilling flash of prescience, seeing their unrusting hulks beneath an airless sky, the Arx Angelicum in ruins behind them.

  Not yet. The Chapters of the Blood still lived. The consumption phase was hearteningly late in beginning. The wall still held. The void shields stood. Between the vehicle wrecks the sand was carpeted in shattered white and purple chitin. Desert that had not felt the kiss of moisture for a billion years was soaked in alien fluids.

  Assault after assault was thrown back from the restored curtain wall. Guns roared and boomed all day and night. The sky was a constant pyrotechnical display of flak and las light. If they stood alone, Dante would have been more careful with his ammunition, but the Blood Angels successors had brought millions of tonnes of ammunition with them, and so he allowed the cannons of his fortress to fire and fire. In the dark their muzzles glowed with heat. The desert shook with explosive impacts and the constant, quiet tremble of the Arx Angelicum’s reactors working at maximum capacity to supply energy to las emplacements, plasma turrets and shielding.

  Any other army would have withdrawn from the siege. The Arx Angelicum would have been impregnable to any other foe, its ten thousand defenders too great to overcome. The tyranids cared nothing for death. They threw their living bombs at the fortress monastery, not caring or not understanding that they would never hit their target. The void shields groaned and snapped. The flicker of displacement was a noisy aurora around the Space Marines position. Floating spore mines were slow enough to pass through, but as they were drawn to the noise of war, they were targeted and blasted apart by Icarus lascannons and quad autocannon anti-air defences. A near constant rain of acid fell from these clouds of living bombs, too diffuse to do anything but scorch the colours from the battleplate of the Space Marines. The aerial swarm too might fly through at the correct speed, but their beasts had withdrawn in the face of heavy casualties, leaving the sky to the racket of exploding flak rounds and the crash of phosphorescent chemicals splashing to nothing against the aegis.

  Along the curtain wall emplaced heavy bolters chugged, panning back and forth monotonously, sweeping away genestealers, ’gaunts and warriors. The wet crack of splintering chitin and alien death screams were a hellish symphony that played without pause. There were enough Space Marines to man the parapets shoulder to shoulder. Boltguns fired from every embrasure, destroying the lesser bioforms by the thousand. It was a tactic of the hive mind to pile up its dead to render any defensive line unusable, as it had at the moat, but the tyranids could not get close enough to the wall. An embankment of heaped corpses provided a little shelter to the advancing swarm; there yet remained a clear killing field between it and Dante’s wall. It crept forwards a few feet every day, as corpses rolled from the top. In strict rotation, sections of the wall were cleared by concentrated melta fire, plasma incineration and promethium bombs, to stop the heap of dead becoming a ramp. In doing so, the Space Marines created a thick, black smokescreen in front of the sections under clearance, obscuring the view and encouraging attack. So these minor advantages were traded back and forth between the two sides. None gained a decisive edge. The fortress was inviolable, the tyranids practically infinite.

  A biotitan shrieked as it was blasted to pieces by a defence laser. There were fewer of the large constructs coming. Dante’s army was killing them faster than they could be bred. Slowly, the swarm was being worn down.

  Stalemate was not a victory, but it was better than the alternative. Every day the Arx Angelicum held, the chances of triumph increased. Garbled reports burst through the tyranids’ vox jamming every so often, reporting successful hit and run raids on the hive fleet. These could sometimes be seen in daytime through the watery shimmer of the void shield and the flowering of flak. At night, these battles lit up the heavens.

  Defence lasers aided in thinning the orbital swarm. Most of these powerful weapons could only be fired a few times a day, but when they did they invariably claimed a kill apiece; each meteor shower of burning alien meat streaking across Baal’s sky brought another cheer from the wall’s defenders.

  Back and forth. For every ten tyranid ships destroyed, another strike cruiser was lost. Reactor deaths made brilliant suns. Messages from Baal Primus and Baal Secundus were just as likely to tell of defeat or Chapters decimated as they were to report positions held.


  Everything depended on the void shield. Hold that, and the swarm would be blunted, broken, and finally turned aside.

  Until then the hive mind would throw its endless armies at the curtain wall, employing variant strategies each time.

  The enemy’s latest gambit approached. Hundreds of hulking carnifexes bulled their way through the hordes, trampling their smaller kin. They were giant assault beasts, their short limbs thick with muscle, domed backs protected by inches of chitinous armour, powerful weapon symbiotes bonded to their flesh. There were bigger tyranid constructs, but none were as numerous nor so versatile as the carnifexes.

  Heavy weapons fire burned the air over the curtain wall from the fortress, striking at the hulking monsters and laying them low by the dozen. There were too many to stop. Several broods were protected by floating psychic abominations which projected fields of warp energy, proof against all but the heaviest guns. Others marched under the cover of toxic fogs whose swirling spores foiled target locks as easily as they choked human lungs.

  Dante watched from a low drum tower that shook with the recoil of its turreted macrocannon. Five of his Sanguinary Guard led by Brother Dontoriel, hero of Cryptus, were arrayed around him in a protective circle.

  The carnifexes were getting close to the berm of the dead, disrupting attempts to hit them. Fountains of limbs and xenos flesh pattered down where shells tore into the bank.

  ‘In a few more moments they will come under the shadow of the walls,’ said Dante. ‘Then we will see how well the foe will test us.’

  The encircling carnifexes ploughed through the embankment of the dead, causing it to tumble forward closer to the walls. Some of them were doing so deliberately, shoving corpses ahead of them, banking them up at the foot of the wall. Closer examination showed they had adaptations specifically for this role, with massive flattened claws that locked together like dozer blades.

  Dante checked visual feed from augur eyes and the helmets of his fellow Chapter Masters. The same was occurring in several places.

  ‘Prioritise carnifex forms pushing forward the dead,’ he ordered, switching to battleforce-wide vox. The Arx Angelicum amplified his signal through its powerful communications centre, but even so the return feed was full of the chilling voice of the hive mind.

  The last of the weapons fire from the fortress monastery cut out. The carnifexes were too close to the curtain wall. The Arx’s guns redirected their punishing bombardment to a second wave coming behind the first, leaving the leading carnifexes to the heavy weapons mounted on the second line, so the attack was under fire from the curtain wall alone. Dante scanned quickly through thumbnail views from around the wall. He halted at one. Six carnifexes were absorbing an obscene amount of fire, heaping the dead at the foot of the wall as stolidly as serfs digging in the rain. ‘Chapter Master Orix, you have a breakthrough imminent in your sector. Please deal with it,’ he said.

  In another place the enemy had sent a spearhead of giant serpentine forms to race at the wall and scrabble up it with vestigial claws. One nearly made it before a plasma cannon shot took off its head and set it alight.

  ‘Captain Therus, attend to those trygons,’ Dante commanded, his voice as always clear and steely. Minor breakthroughs could be contained. It was crucial there were no major breaches of the wall.

  Still the rain of spores fell. Still the hissing sea of lesser forms leapt and snapped, those few who made the wall’s base scrambling part way up the smooth rockcrete before slipping back. Others waited with mindless patience for the ramps to be finished, relatively unmolested by gunfire while the defenders concentrated on the siege beasts. Should the carnifexes build their macabre ramps, there would be thousands of tyranids within the second perimeter in moments. Dante’s hand tightened on the Axe Mortalis. There was not much he could do but trust in the skill and devotion of the Chapters of the Blood.

  A desperate vox call cut into the inter-Chapter traffic. ‘The wall! The wall! Carnifex brood coming over the wall!’

  Dante’s attention snapped to a place half a mile from his bastion. Four monsters there eschewed the heaping of corpses, and were attempting an escalade. They made their own ladders as they climbed, smashing out holds in the rockcrete with their giant claws. Fleshhooks whipped out from chest cavities and scrabbled for extra traction, hauling them further up the wall towards the warriors at the top.

  Dante was close, and first to respond. He leapt from the bastion and jetted high, his guard following instantly.

  His jump pack fuel indicator fell quickly. Baal’s gravity was strong. Sustained flight could therefore only be brief, and so he leaned forward, willing himself to reach the crisis point before it was too late.

  He roared over hundreds of Space Marines firing from the wall. Blades of light stabbed out, a weft of las-beams that died and replenished itself over and over again. A carnifex imploded below, peppered with so many krak bombs it collapsed into itself in a shower of gore. The small explosions of bolt shells were so numerous that it seemed the war was conducted to the layered playing of a million insane drummers. Washes of flame so intense Dante felt the heat through his armour drove back hordes of ’gaunts from a nearly completed corpse ramp. Dozens shrivelled in the heat. Thick promethium gels adhered to the larger monsters, coating them head to foot with flame, but the carnifexes continued working, immune to pain, even as their eyes cooked in their sockets.

  A flight of gargoyles screamed at Dante and his guard, only to be blasted apart by quad cannon fire before they got within a hundred yards.

  His fuel indicators dipped towards amber, hurrying for the red of exhaustion, and then he was there.

  Dante cut out his jets at the apex of his leap, allowing himself to fall fast towards the monsters clambering over the wall. He selected one and corrected his drop with a microsecond jet burst. Carnifexes were the brute squads of the hive, built to take large amounts of punishment then retaliate in kind. A power axe such as Dante bore would harm one, but not enough to ensure the survival of the attacker. Dante had fifteen hundred years’ experience in warfare. There was little new he could learn of any martial artistry. He had fought hundreds of things as big as carnifexes before, and slain dozens of carnifexes besides. He fell like a meteor onto the creature’s swollen head. With the weight of transhuman and battle armour multi­plied generously by gravity, Commander Dante used the impetus of his fall to split the thing’s cranium with the Axe Mortalis. Purple brain matter splattered his armour as he dropped past. Dante followed his blow, falling away over the carnifex’s shoulders and spore chimneys towards the seething tide of attack beasts hammering at the foot of the wall. He adjusted his weight a touch, somersaulting through the creature’s broodmates, dodging a swiping talon, moving over whip-like tentacles that flickered out at him. The lesser creatures fired upwards. Their weapons grubs splattered upon his armour, their acidic innards steaming as they dissolved on his golden plate. Close to the packed mass, he ignited his jump pack’s jets again, incinerating hormagaunts leaping up to spear him with their scythe-like talons, then flew back to the parapet.

  His honour guard thumped down around him, one after the other. The Blood Swords were stationed on that part of the defences, their armour darker red than the Blood Angels. They fought all the harder for seeing the Lord of Baal among them.

  Another of the climbing carnifexes bore multiple ­smoking powerblade wounds all over its body. Dante’s guard had targeted its joints, and one claw dangled from a red skein of sinew. As Dante looked past it, he swore loudly. The carnifex he had decapitated was still climbing, coming up behind the one wounded by his guard. With the primary brainstem destroyed, its weapon symbiote took on the task of directing the creature’s massive body. Puppeted by its gun, the carnifex clambered on upwards jerkily. Its ruined head pumped yellow alien blood down the wall. The tongue, still attached by the root to the shattered skull, flapped about like a wet flag. None of this discomfited it. />
  ‘By the Blood! Is it not possible to kill these things?’ swore Dontoriel.

  ‘Well you know that, brother,’ said Dante.

  Dontoriel jerked his head at his gold-clad comrades. They rose again and dived at the one-clawed carnifex. They flitted about it in whooshing jet bursts, every manoeuvre timed for maximum fuel efficiency and ending in a strike. Jump packs were inelegant devices, not intended for true flight. Bulky, noisy, hungry; compared to the finer constructs of some races they were clangorous toys, but in the hands of Blood Angels, Imperial jump packs transcended their limitations. It was possible to forget what they were, and see in the skill of the Space Marines the graceful flight of true angels. A fatal blow slashed out, cutting away the carnifex’s second claw completely. For a moment it held its place, then overbalanced and fell roaring into the milling sea of ’gaunts at the bottom of the wall.

  Dante remained where he was, eyes fixed on his own target. The headless carnifex’s huge claws continued to punch holds into the rockcrete to a steady rhythm, hauling itself up another few feet with every wall-shaking impact. It crawled directly over a heavy bolter emplacement. The space between its belly and the gun lit up with a hundred explosions as the bolter fired at point-blank range, but the carnifex pulled past it, leaking fluid from fresh wounds, and dragging the bolter and its machine-spirit free of the mounting as it climbed. Dante aimed the perdition pistol and waited for the carnifex to lift its claw again. For a moment in each second, the weapon symbiote was exposed. Bred in the shape of a long, fluted cannon, the thing looked like an artefact, but it was independently alive, and intelligent. Half-formed limbs curled around the base of its barrel-snout. The last vestiges of an alimentary tract could be picked out towards the rear. Most tellingly of all a large yellow eye stared out malignantly from the stock where the carnifex’s lower limb melded with the gun’s mechanisms, if they could be called such.

  Dante adjusted his aim.