The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  Cannons, manned by the last mortals in the Arx, boomed from the Citadel Reclusiam. The more esoteric weapons were beyond the mortals’ comprehension, but they worked the fortress projectile casters well enough. Cones of sand and body parts sprayed wildly upwards, their mad dash for the sky arrested by gravity only when they had reached hundreds of feet in altitude.

  On Dante’s helm plate the marker beat slowly, temptingly, luring the commander into the press of alien monsters. He pressed on through the curtain of explosions. There were few blood thralls left. The ragged conscripts of Baal’s moons lacked training, yet by a miracle Dante was not blown to atoms by his own side.

  Dante fought his way forward. Ordamael raged at his side, his crozius banging with every impact. The songs of the Angels of Death became debased howling. Any semblance of squad cohesion or tactics went from the battleline as they surrendered themselves to the thirst. They fought and died alone, a wave of howling berserkers who hacked and bludgeoned, who soon forgot the ranged weapons they bore, who broke the chainswords they carried, who grappled with alien monstrosities with weaponless hands.

  The world was a shifting mass of xenos, pealing detonations and the terrible colours of the sky that hid the universe from sight. The tyranids were responding, recovering from their shock, if such creatures could be shocked. As Dante drew nearer to the hive node marker, the tyranids’ movements fell into further synchronisation. They had yet to attain the perfect simultaneity of the hive mind at peak efficiency, but their attacks evidenced greater thought and coordination. They feinted and withdrew. Differing creatures presented themselves to battle particular foes where before they had come thoughtlessly at the Space Marines. Phosphor bio munitions flew overhead on slow parabolas. They slapped into the landing fields, sending out gobbets of burning liquid in every direction, immolating tyranid and Space Marine equally. Artillery beasts fired and fired, their cannon symbiotes screaming, a heart-rending noise that grew louder as the Space Marines penetrated deeper into the horde.

  Dante slew with abandon. The honour guard fought alongside him with the consummate skill of murderers five hundred years in the making.

  For all their unstoppable fury, the signs of defeat were unmissable. One by one, the Sanguinary Guard were dragged down, plucked from the air by shrikes or clawed apart by carnifexes. Sepharan was torn in half by a hive trygon. Dontoriel, hero of Cryptus, was the last to die, falling in a tumble of tattered wings not far from the commander, his golden armour hidden by a thrashing mass of alien limbs as he was ripped to pieces.

  Dozens of wrecks from the withdrawal were strewn among the landing field’s battered temporary buildings. Suits of power armour lay in quantity, their colours stripped by acid. The tyranids had yet to remove the corpses, for the feeding of the swarm had not begun there. Dante laughed in wild despair. Gathered together, all the sons of Sanguinius could accomplish was to slow the consumption of a single world.

  Thoughts of that clarity became rare. Dante let the ­raging monster in his soul out to smash down the foe. His perceptions lost their edge. Hallucination stole upon him, supplanting reality. The first sign of his failing mind was a golden flash overhead that had him shout in joy.

  ‘The Sanguinor!’ he called. ‘He comes at last!’

  Sanguinius’ herald had come to the aid of the Blood Angels wherever they were most sorely pressed for ten millennia, appearing from nowhere, and disappearing as suddenly. He had haunted Dante in particular, his only recorded words spoken to him. Dante had felt abandoned by the holy warrior. He could not know the Sanguinor’s absence from Baal was occasioned by his presence at the Cadian Gate.

  When he looked again, the herald of Sanguinius was nowhere to be seen. The tortured skies were empty. These lying sights came more often, and soon the battle flickered and changed around him. He took a step forward, and was sent backwards in time, finding himself fighting alongside Blood Angels with unfamiliar markings in ancient suits of armour. The sky in that ancient battle was black, lit sporadically by the sheeting glare of energy weapons. He wept for the Emperor’s dream as he fought alongside his brothers, but his fury did not abate with his sorrow. It was watered by it, becoming larger than he, a demigod’s anger that did not originate in him but possessed him and overfilled him.

  The battlefield flickered back to the present. A Space Marine, burning head to foot in corrosive chemical fire, howled madly, bludgeoning a tyranid beast with his broken sword as he died. All around the Angels of Death were falling. Ordamael charged into a hulking, multi-weaponed assault beast, stunning it with a blow from his crozius arcanum, only to be ripped in two by giant, crustacean’s claws.

  Dante salivated at the sprays of blood that flowed out. He would have torn his helm free and lapped at the sticky sand then, had a trumpet’s sweet notes not halted him.

  Light shone over a part of the battlefield. The Sanguinor hovered, five hundred feet away, sword held upright, finger pointing downward. Warriors in black battleplate appeared from the shimmering air, their armour covered in skulls and bones. Fire streamed from their eyes and mouths, and when their bolters fired, they shot strange ammunition of blue flame.

  The Legion of the Damned had come to aid the sons of Sanguinius in their hour of need.

  Dante blinked, but this vision did not disappear. His warriors shouted and howled, regaining some of their humanity, and pressing on after the revenants deeper into the hordes of tyranids.

  The tyranids fell back before their unearthly assailants. The trumpet sounded again, and the Sanguinor pointed again with his blade at a spot on the field.

  When Dante looked where the herald indicated, the reticle in his helm beat madly and flashed green. He blinked. In his fury he had forgotten his mission. His vision blurred, and the Sanguinor became an angel of flesh and blood, huge and mighty, clad in blood-red robes.

  ‘Sanguinius?’ Dante said. He pushed on, shoving his way through combatants whether alien, revenant, or Space Marine.

  A carnifex reared up before him, barring his way. Dante prepared to tackle it, hefted the sparking Axe Mortalis, but a helmless warrior barged past him, face locked in a savage rictus, teeth exposed, and engaged the creature in a hopeless, one-sided battle. Captain Fen, a quiet part of Dante remarked. The Angel Vermillion had been good to his word. Dante ran past, his last embers of intellect telling him he needed to reach the Sanguinor before he lost himself for good.

  He fought on, sometimes alone, but as he pushed on, he was surrounded by the ghostly shapes of the Legion of the Damned, whose ceaseless, uncanny fire felled aliens all around the Chapter Master, and so he drew nearer to the Sanguinor.

  He passed the first of the beasts of Amareo. The red-skinned giant lay curled up, childlike, surrounded by the rent bodies of tyranids, its face at peace as if sleeping after long efforts. The second came soon after, then the third. All were dead, their immortal bodies pierced in a hundred places each.

  The Sanguinor maintained its position, pointing downwards. Warriors from all over the field were converging on the point, not for tactics or for glory, or even for survival. They did it for fury. They did it for blood. They did it for their primarch.

  Sanguinius reached out to his sons through his herald, and commanded they strike one final blow in his name. They obeyed.

  A wall of poisonous vapours obscured the target. Spindly things floated by. Feeble limbs dangled beneath oversized spore chimneys that pumped out yellow and green granular gases. A trillion spores gave the fog its texture, each one a tyranid organism smaller than a terrestrial mite. As Dante ran into this smoke his armour let out a shrill warning. The tiny sporelings attacked his battleplate, eating into the banded metal of the joints and the soft seals beneath. Where his skin was exposed by broken plate it blistered under the effects of toxin and acid. He did not feel it.

  The fog muted all sound. He could see no further than a few yards. Dark shapes grappled in its depths, edg
es of chitin or ceramite illuminated by weapons fire. The flaming, silent warriors of the damned Legion fought on unaffected, but they drew away from him, lighthouses in the fog, leaving Dante to his fate. He knew in his soul he must fight this battle alone.

  A blind tyrant guard emerged from the coiling false smoke. It was huge, and hunched, bent over its short, heavy claws. Dante engaged his jump pack instinctively, roaring out of the way of its attack, and up over its eyeless head. The Axe Mortalis sparkled with the death of a hundred thousand tyranid spores as it cleaved down, caving the thing’s head in. A shot from the perdition pistol burned out its internal organs and sent it crashing down.

  A golden glow led Dante on. The snarls and howls of his warriors were barely more human than the hissing chitters and roars of the tyranids. His flesh burned, his superhuman physiology unable to keep pace with the damage inflicted by the miniscule creatures eating into his body. The sensation barely registered. Pain that would have incapacitated a normal man, even a Space Marine, was a dim, meaningless throb to him.

  More of the blind giants emerged from the fog, moving with increasing surety of purpose as the sluggish hive mind reacted to the threat. Space Marines came in from every direction, screaming for blood and death, crashing into the guardians of the swarm’s leader.

  Dante shot another of the tyrant guard, wounding it, and slipped by. As it staggered about to follow him, three sons of Sanguinius in blackened armour charged at it. One was scissored in half by the beast. A fire-wreathed warrior with pallid skin moved in to engage the creature with his powerfist. Dante did not witness the end of the fight, he headed further into the killing smoke, seeking out the leader beast.

  The reticle in his borrowed helmet strobed rapidly. He was close.

  Sounds of battle receded. He ascended a mound of intermingled tyranid and Imperial dead. The hive mind would consume them together. Autophagy was a part of its evolutionary strategy; its weapons were disposable, like the bolts in a Space Marine’s gun. The biomass of its warrior beasts would find new uses elsewhere.

  The smoke thinned as Dante climbed. He could not recall seeing such a tall pile of dead from the Arx. When he looked at his feet the tyranids had gone. Instead he walked over the tangled corpses of myriad species, all soaked in bright gore. Not a few among them were men or Space Marines, and he numbly recognised some as faces from long ago.

  Dante walked on the collected remains of his victims. Whether this was a psychic attack by the hive mind, or a symptom of his imminent mental collapse was immaterial. There was one more body that must be added to this pile, then he might rest. He forced himself up the phantom mound by strength of will alone.

  Up he went for hours. At times he was accompanied by ghosts from his past. A boy with a black smile. A Blood Angel he had executed. A teacher he had almost forgotten. A Space Marine’s memory was eidetic, but Dante was so old that his memories had corrupted over time. That which he had not entirely forgotten of those distant days, he struggled to access. Now all his past was there to torment him.

  The corpse pile grew steeper. Dante was forced to lock his axe to his back and holster his pistol so that he might drag himself upward. The stiff limbs of the dead were his handholds. Rotten cavities provided him places to put his feet.

  He attained the summit without realising how he got there. He was suddenly, inexplicably standing upon a plain. The corpses were gone, replaced by a pavement of closely packed skulls marked with vile runes.

  Ahead lay his final struggle. Horus the deceiver stood as vast as a titan over the battlefield. The face of his brother was a mockery of what had been. His charismatic smile had become a cruel leer. Arrogance displaced confidence. Where wisdom had shone in noble eyes, there burned the fell power of ancient, evil gods. He…

  Dante screwed his eyes shut. ‘I am not Sanguinius,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I am Dante. Dante. I will die as Dante. This is my final battle oath. I shall be myself.’

  Horus shivered, and became more real. The scene rippled. A corrupted spacecraft wall wavered into being behind him. Dante continued to walk forward, his heavy feet beyond his control. Armoured boots clanged on deck plating. He was fated to die here on the Vengeful Spirit. He had to. For the Emperor’s sake, he would allow his death at the hands of his brother. His wings twitched, longing for one final flight.

  No, that was not right. Not right.

  ‘I am not Sanguinius!’ he shouted. ‘I will die as Dante!’

  He blinked. Horus was gone. The skulls were gone. Poison smoke was being harried to shreds by the gathering desert wind. He saw a light in the sky, a star? The redness of the warp storm seemed to be thinning. He stared dumbly upwards, wondering if the storm was over, until a screaming roar brought his attention back to earth.

  Fifty yards away was the largest hive tyrant Dante had ever seen. Upon backward-hinged legs it stood taller than a Dreadnought. Red spore clouds pumped from the chimneys on its high back. Bonded to its fists were four matched boneswords, with heavy ends as square and brutal as cleavers. He had heard of this thing, the galaxy’s bane, the hive mind personified.

  Commander Dante faced the Swarm Lord.

  His perception coalesced around the monster. Reality reasserted itself, his visions driven off by the sheer physicality of the hive mind. The past gave way to the present. The sounds of battle returned, albeit muted. The horde was broken into pieces. The howling of his blood-mad warriors was scattered, so isolated there could only have been a few of them left.

  In the monster’s eyes glimmered an ancient and powerful intellect. As old as he was, Dante felt like a newborn babe compared to the intelligence staring at him through that unblinking gaze. He sensed that there were two beings looking at him. The monster, and the being that controlled it. They were separate, yet one. A sense of crushing psychic might emanated from it, so great its grasp encompassed galaxies. There was sophistication there, and terrifying intelligence, but all were outweighed by its ­bottomless, eternal hunger.

  For the moment that the man and the monster stared into one another’s souls, Dante pitied it. The hunger of the hive mind made the Red Thirst trivial by comparison.

  A rumble sounded in the monster’s throat. Muscle fibres exposed by gaps in its chitinous armour contracted; that was all the warning Dante received. There was no threat display, no roar to intimidate, it simply hurled itself into the attack. The hive mind was nothing if not efficient.

  Despite its size, the Swarm Lord moved with staggering speed. Its alien anatomy made its attacks difficult to predict, and Dante found himself fending off a blur of jagged bone. Crystal veins glittered in the blades, generating a shimmering energy field like none Dante was familiar with.

  The Swarm Lord’s weapons met the Axe Mortalis with a thunderous boom. Dante reeled back from the blow, letting out a brief blast from his jump pack to steady himself, dodging narrowly to the right to avoid a return strike from the Swarm Lord’s two left-hand swords. He ignited his jump pack fully, making a short leap backwards as the swords from the right smashed into the desert where he had been standing. The energy field encasing the blade exploded the sand.

  As the beast slammed down its weapons he snapped off a quick shot with the perdition pistol. His aim was honed by centuries of practice. The meltabeam cut a roiling line through the air, connecting with the Swarm Lord’s lower left elbow joint. An explosion of steam carried the smell of broiled meat out towards Dante, and the thing’s arm went limp.

  It made no cry of pain. As it moved forward, its useless arm snagged on the ground. With an total lack of human emotion, it severed the crippled limb with a sword blow and moved in to re-engage. Dante leapt again, jets on full burn. He swooped low, darting in to strike and withdraw. His fuel indicators plummeted, but Dante remained aloft, soaring away from bonesword strikes with expertly timed exhaust bursts. His blows left a dozen smoking scars in the Swarm Lord’s carapace. It responded wi
th a buffeting storm of psychically generated terror that had no effect on the Space Marine lord, so deep in the thirst was he. The thirst grew in Dante until he stood on the brink of the Black Rage, a pit he could never climb from. He resisted the urge to finally throw himself in. The strength this last surrender would grant him would be formidable, but his mind would be gone for good, and so he would perish. Not until this thing was slain would he abandon his last shreds of self-control. He had to know that it was dead.

  He focused on his hate, on his desire to kill, on his need to rip this interloper’s head from its shoulders and cast it to the sand.

  The Swarm Lord’s armour was thickest on its shoulders, head and back. They duelled for long minutes, Dante landing so many blows that the edge of his fabled axe dulled, and its power unit vented black smoke. All his skill could draw but a little blood. The Swarm Lord snapped and swung at him with undiminished might.

  Dante needed a decisive blow soon. The Swarm Lord’s endurance would outlast his own, and one lucky strike from the beast’s weapons could end the fight long before exhaustion set in. So Dante dived in again, axe held low in the manner of a cavalryman stooping in the saddle to strike with his sabre. Jinking through swinging boneswords and into the spore cloud issuing from the Swarm Lord’s chimneys, he raked the blade of his weapon across the leader beast’s face, catching it across one eye. He was momentarily blinded by the swirl of red microorganisms belching from its back, and forced to touch down.

  The two combatants wheeled to face each other. The chitin around the Swarm Lord’s right eye was cut down to a gleam of bone. Ichor and humours from its ravaged eye wet its cheek.