The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  The lictor crawled along dusty conduits. Whenever it sensed a maintenance drone or servitor it froze, shrinking into the dark, until the thing had passed. It pressed on, deeper into the machinery of the prey hive, following the unique vibration patterns of the shield genatorum. The tremors of the battle outside were easy to discount. It had no trouble finding its way to the target.

  Deep inside a conduit, it stopped. A hole a foot across crammed with pipes led downward into the guts of the prey’s device. It crouched low, tentacled mouth feeling around the hole. Thrills of electrical energy tingled in its brain. Beneath it was the prey creatures’ energy nexus. This was the way.

  Its hands were incredibly dextrous. With them it wrenched out the pipes and cables, cutting them where necessary with razor claws and teeth, hacking and tearing until the hole was clear. The last cable broke and slipped away down the shaft.

  Some half-biological thing came rushing to investigate. The lictor slashed out with its scythe-like upper claws before it could raise the alarm.

  The lictor leaned over the hole again. Probing tentacles provided a perfect measurement of the hole’s size. Even now the cabling was gone, the hole was still too small to admit the lictor.

  Without hesitation it tore its upper scythe-limbs off. When the hive mind had reshaped its ancestors it had left the neural architecture for pain intact, but though the lictor felt the agony, it did not trouble it.

  Now it would fit. Its body convulsed, controlled muscle spasms moving its exoskeletal plates and endoskeletal structure apart. Its skull flattened, the sutures between sections cracking wide. Its remaining limbs popped out of their sockets. The lictor drooped its way towards the hole, and with a shivering rush slipped inside and down, lubricated by its own blood.

  Fleshhooks flicked out from its ribs, dragging it downward towards the electric hum of the field generator. The lictor could feel the machine in its mind. The energy skins of the prey were but one of their technologies that utilised the energies of the immaterial universe that lay over that of matter. Crude. Ineffective. Most prey species were like this one, changing the world to suit them rather than changing themselves. All had fallen to the superiority of the hive.

  A flickering light registered on the lictor’s eyes. It was close. The light grew brighter, then became painful. The lictor cared nothing as its eyes were blinded. It pressed doggedly on.

  The conduit ended. Had it still been able to see, the lictor would have witnessed a crackling sphere of cold energy. But it did sense the magnetic field holding the force in place. It could smell the tang of psychically stressed iron.

  It slithered from the conduit, towards the scent of iron, seeing its way by sonar and magnetic senses.

  Tapping hands found the thing it sought. To the Imperium it was a field-generating spike, to the lictor’s magnetic senses it was a glowing pillar of cool light surrounded by radiating bands of force.

  The lictor embraced it like a monster sneaking into bed to devour the sleeper.

  This pivotal act was performed unnoticed. Not even the hive mind was truly aware of what the lictor did, for its constituent parts performed every action automatically. A man does not feel his blood cells about their work.

  An internal convulsion squeezed thin-walled cysts seeded throughout its body, an adaptation it had grown specifically for this mission while waiting in the desert. Cellular walls broke, mixing chemicals that were inert alone, but when catalysed formed a potent bio-acid.

  The pain this caused could not be ignored. Agony racked its body. It suffered, but the instinctive responses to pain its ancestors possessed had been taken long ago. The lictor did not let go. It could not. It held on tightly to the spike as its body dissolved. Liquid seeped, then flooded, all over the spike. With slow certainty the acid ate its way through the metal.

  Energy shorts burst from the corroded surface. The spike collapsed into itself and fell away from the side of the reaction chamber. The cold power it held in check ­wobbled on its axis, then failed.

  The explosion that followed heralded the beginning of the end for the prey. The lictor lived until the last moment, certain vascular adaptations enabling its brain to outlive the death of its body and communicate its success. It felt no satisfaction at achieving its mission. No exhilaration. No release at its death. It felt nothing at all before it died, and nothing after either.

  Dante went at a limping run up from the Hall of Sarcophagi. His damaged armour ground and caught, its machine-spirit singing a plaintive song of alarm and dismay that begged him to stop. His knee throbbed dangerously. The three Dreadnoughts of the Sixth Company stumped after him, beseeching him to wait.

  He could not.

  The Arx Angelicum shook. Another explosion rocked deep at the heart of the mountain. Statuary toppled from plinths, smashing on the floor. Stone groaned and creaked. Cracks ran up walls designed to withstand major tectonic upheaval. The mountain flexed, shaking off millennia of human artifice. Dante ran for the Stair of Apotheosis only to find its long steps shaken loose of their sockets and piled like broken gaming chits at the base of the shaft.

  ‘Dontoriel! Report!’ snapped Dante. Dust and smoke spilled downward.

  There was no reply.

  ‘My lord,’ voxed Incarael. ‘A massive reactor failure has destroyed the void shield genatorum. We will be exposed in seconds. I have major issues across all our power generation nexuses. The collapse of the shield is in danger of sparking a chain reaction right across the fortress monastery.’

  ‘Fix it before it goes critical!’ commanded Dante.

  ‘My lord, it cannot be done. Not without taking sixty per cent of our power generation off line.’

  More explosions rocked the ancient fortress. Alarms wailed from every quarter. Dante’s vox-beads were a typhoon roar of shouting voices, all asking for information.

  ‘Then shut it down!’ shouted Dante. ‘Shut the fortress down!’

  ‘My lord,’ said Incarael. ‘I…’

  ‘Do it!’

  Tragedy was unfolding. The Arx Angelicum was falling. Dante hobbled on, making for the bottom of the Well of Angels. He burst into a circular shaft of galleried walkways. High above was the plaza and the Nine Circles of the Verdis Elysia, but he could not see that, only a circle of pinkish blue sky sectioned by the triangular panes of the Dome of Angels.

  The watery shimmer of the void shield had gone.

  The fortress rumbled again. The aftershocks were decreasing. Black rubble fell past in an unseemly rush. The galleries above were failing.

  An uneasy quiet fell. The fortress ceased its grumbling. The sky remained free of tyranids.

  Dante stared upwards. It would not last.

  Black curtains drew over the dome, swirling masses of flying beasts that rushed at the fort. Guns opened up all over the fortress, firing skyward, and a rain of broken bodies fell thumping onto the armourglass. There were so many of them. Their corpses tumbled down like leaves into the gutters of wetter worlds. Many arrived unharmed. Living things of gargantuan size landed on skidding talons and attacked the dome directly.

  Vox requests beeped in his helmet, all of them marked as being of the utmost urgency. He selected Captain Borgio’s vox almost at random.

  ‘My lord, we have tyranids all over the fortress. The aerial swarm is attacking unimpeded.’

  Gunfire boomed and roared all around the Arx, shaking its mighty walls.

  From above came a series of titanic bangs. The aerial swarms parted, making themselves into a living tornado up whose funnel Dante looked. Through the maelstrom, thousands of heavy landing pods were falling.

  They could not lose the Arx. If the fortress fell, they were as good as dead. He could not fight a war on two fronts.

  Dante closed his eyes. With heavy hearts he opened a battle group wide vox channel. ‘All warriors, fall back to the Arx Angelicum. Abandon the sec
ond line.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Blood and Flesh

  Gabriel Seth was at peace. In his hands was a chainblade as tall as a full-grown mortal man that shook and snarled for blood. Over his head guns fired unremittingly. Before him were uncountable foes. In his heart was a savage need to kill.

  And yet, he was at peace.

  He played Blood Reaver with consummate skill, sustaining its impetus so that it never stilled. A combination of weight, Seth’s strength and the blade’s razored teeth had it cutting through chitin, flesh, endo and exoskeletal structures, strange alien organs and weapon symbiotes with ease. The weapon sent out fine sprays of bone meal and blood mist with every swing. Never did a tyranid come closer than six feet. The length of Blood Reaver defined a hard limit around Seth that none could cross.

  The Flesh Tearers fought with savagery at last unfettered. Here was a foe whose total destruction was desired. There were no civilians to fear for on this battlefield.

  Freedom came in violence. It was a release. For nigh on two centuries Seth had exhorted his warriors to restrain themselves, curbing their worst excesses, directing what bloodlust he could not stop to the appropriate ends. For his troubles he had been censured, tried by his peers, betrayed by his warriors, hunted by the Inquisition.

  None of that mattered now. None of it at all. He slew and he slew again, and as the enemy died, and Seth roared and raged at them for having the temerity to exist, a slow, cold smile crept over his face. Not even at Cryptus had he been able to enjoy such abandon. Here was vindication at last. On Baal Primus the Flesh Tearers had a battlefield where they could do no wrong.

  A tyranid warrior reared up in front of Seth. Blood Reaver was already on its way to the beast’s neck as it raised its deathspitter. The chainblade cut through vertebrae, sending the head, jaws still snapping, wheeling through the air. The creature remained upright, jerking spasmodically, its bladed upper limbs scything. The gills of its symbiote weapon pulsed, dribbling clear mucous, yellow, slit-pupilled eye squinting at him. The headless warrior tottered forward.

  ‘Stay down, xenos!’ shouted Seth. He barged the tyranid back with his shoulder, and brought Blood Reaver around in a reverse cut that gutted the deathspitter. Acid slopped from its riven abdomen, hissing on the floor and pitting his ceramite where it splashed him.

  It was dead, but there were more. There were always more. High Chaplain Astorath himself, the Redeemer of the Lost, and arbiter of the fate of all afflicted by the curse, had declared Seth a weapon. It was a role gladly fulfilled. He pumped Blood Reaver’s activation bar, revving its compact engine. The chain track spun around, flicking out gore that might clog its workings, and he set to his appointed task again.

  Time passed. Seth’s sense of self receded. His world became the pumping of his twin hearts, the play of his muscles, the growing ache in his flesh as he fought.

  Seth could see no further than forty yards in any direction. Requests for orders from the warriors stationed in the forts went unanswered. His men were individual dervishes, their squad cohesion abandoned.

  A sudden lull came in the fighting. Seth was short on foes. He had slaughtered every tyranid warrior within a hundred yards. Nothing but ’gaunts remained nearby, scurrying around the corpses of their larger cousins.

  Seth strode forward down the slope towards a knot of his warriors fighting out away from the mountain, Blood Reaver ready to begin its rhythmic slaughter again, but the tyranids parted like water before him. A pathetic spattering of ammunition grubs cracked on his armour. Seeing Seth unharmed and unwilling to face his rage, the horde of ’gaunts turned tail, eerily moving in complete synchronicity, and scuttled away. Warrior broods embedded in the tyranid second line hissed and roared and never turned their faces from him, but they too fell back.

  The urge was there to throw himself into the fray, to abandon sense. The Black Rage pulsed hot in his breast and head, seducing him with the promise of blood and death.

  Seth shut his eyes and quickly whispered, ‘By the Blood am I made. By the Blood am I armoured.’ He could not see the battle raging on, but he could hear it, the bark of weapons and roars of his brothers, and the eerie screeching cries of the tyranids. He must hear it and master his wrath. If he shut off his displays and auditory equipment and let himself sink into silence, he knew he would lose himself as soon as he reactivated them. Calm must be regained in the face of fury, he told himself. ‘By the Blood, I will endure.’

  He let out a long breath, feeling the touch of the blood madness retreat from his mind. Time to take stock.

  He had attained a position up on a ridge some way from the wall of the Necklace. To his front, a sea of tyranids seethed around knots of Space Marines, some in the black and maroon of his own Chapter, some in the silver and red of the Knights of Blood, too many in the black of the Death Company.

  Behind him the counterfeit mountains of the Necklace rose skyward. He had chosen to make his stand where the metal range bowed back in a U-shape, making a formation not unlike a corrie. His forts occupied the summits of the ridges embracing the space, now misted with blue fyceline smoke and columns of black from burning tyranid monstrosities. A makeshift defence line stoppered the mouth. His few armoured fighting vehicles studded this line, filling the role of bunkers. Their tracks were chained to prevent their belligerent machine-spirits taking control and driving at the enemy. So far, the crews had resisted the temptation to free them.

  They were making progress. The Chapter as a whole was becoming better at holding down its temper and directing its berserk fury in the right direction. Such a pity it was all going to end there.

  ‘Furious Sentinel, report,’ he voxed, signalling the first of the forts. His words were bitten off, half-snarled.

  ‘My lord, you have taken a fine toll on the foe.’ Captain Kamien’s voice was phlegmy, almost strangled. It was hard for those warriors Seth had commanded to man the guns and watch over their brothers. He would not be able to keep asking them to do so. Defence was not his preferred form of war, but tyranids required walls to break themselves on. To give in completely to the thirst would result in a single charge – glorious, but short-lived. Hence this hateful skulking behind fortifications.

  All his Chapter thirsted for the raw, unadulterated slaughter of close-quarter fighting. A third of his remaining men, already pitifully few, had succumbed to the curse and now wore the black and red of the Death Company. Appollus led them with consummate skill, wielding them as a weapon, somehow managing to coax them back and redeploy them after each attack, conserving their numbers beyond expectation, though every evening there were fewer, slain in glory during the day. More succumbed to their own bloodlust in the nights.

  It was nearly over. Bolts ran out. Lives ran out. Time ran out. This battle was a charade, a grand performance to keep the Space Marines occupied while the tyranids went about their real business. On the horizon tentacled feed ships were nosing down from the void, held aloft by giant, venous gas bladders whose rapid inflation made a rubbery booming over the plains. Feeder tubes were already creeping upward from the ground to meet the ships’ pulsing mouths, and giant chimneys, as grand as any Imperial industrial structure, were belching out shifting clouds of spores and microorganisms to aid in the digestion.

  Seth spent minimal time reading tracts on the mores of an enemy. He saw no point. He was first and foremost a warrior. His requirement was to know where the enemy were, and how they could be killed. But he recognised the digestion phase of a tyranid attack.

  His breath rushed in his helm like the snorting of a bull. The disgusting stink of tyranid blood polluted his air supply despite his helm’s best efforts to filter it out. The trap was obvious. The tyranids had read him well, luring him away from his forts. If his force advanced any further he would pass through the curtain of the artillery bombardment, and be isolated and destroyed.

  The next words he spok
e were among the hardest he had ever uttered.

  ‘All companies, regroup. Fall back to Furious Sentinel and Wrathful Vigilance. The enemy have had enough for today.’

  Night fell of a double blackness as Baal Primus turned its back to the sun and to Baal. The stars were blotted out by smoke and spore clouds and the endless ships of the swarm in orbit. Light came from the ground instead of the heavens. Low fires played over the horizon where Stardam, Baal Primus’ only sizeable settlement, burned. The noise of human weapons firing there had ceased earlier that evening.

  Unlike on Baal, the war on the first moon was diffuse. Chapters were scattered across the world’s surface. Dante had deployed them that way deliberately, just enough warriors to divert the tyranids away from Baal and the Arx Angelicum, not enough to weaken the defence of the fortress monastery, spreading them out to divide the ­enemy’s attention. The Space Marines upon Baal Primus were a token force. Most of the population had been moved, much of the rest had died in the fighting. The dark was alive with the screeches of tyranid beasts and the thunderclaps of Space Marine guns. The ancient metal of the fallen orbitals thrummed in sympathy, remembering ancient wars in their dreams.

  ‘What are we waiting for, Gabriel?’ snarled Appollus. He appeared from the gloom of the makeshift rampart, his grimacing skull helm alive with the flicker of gunfire from the artillery platform below. ‘Why did you order us back? This is weakness, pathetic!’

  ‘We will die,’ said Seth. His fingers curled into fists as he imagined smashing Appollus in the face. Too many times the Chaplain had questioned his judgement.

  ‘We are going to die whatever you do,’ said Appollus. ‘This is an unwinnable war. You knew that, when we came here.’