The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  ‘You are leaving then, my lord?’

  Guilliman nodded. ‘Soon enough. I am glad to have arrived here in time to save you. It will make my task a little less impossible.’ He smiled. They shared the joke. The task was impossible. ‘I will see your worlds secure before moving on.’ He looked out again; finding what he saw satisfactory, he turned his back on the desert and lavished his full attention on Dante. It took all the commander’s will to hold his gaze.

  ‘The genesis machines are operating correctly. You will be able to begin creating Primaris Space Marines of your own within the week, and put all these new neophytes you have created to use. I trust my warriors are settling in to their new quarters?’

  ‘They are, my lord,’ said Dante. It was he that needed to adjust, not they. The Arx no longer felt like his home. The older generation Space Marines were in a decided minority.

  ‘Good. There are enough of them to bring all the Sanguinian bloodline Chapters back to full strength. I appreciate the adjustment for you will be difficult, but they are experienced warriors, and mighty. I am in the process of establishing a number of new Chapters, also of your gene-father’s bloodline.’

  ‘We will extend to them the same friendship we do to all of the Blood, my lord,’ said Dante.

  ‘I know you will, and it is good that it is so, for before I go I shall formalise the obvious influence you have over your brother Chapters.’ He became distant a moment. ‘Now is the time for great leaders.’

  ‘My lord?’

  Guilliman’s eyes refocused. ‘To that end, my Mechanicus have begun the work to recover the wreck of the Blade of Vengeance. It can be salvaged, and it will be rebuilt.’

  ‘The effort to take it into the void alone will be monumental, my lord,’ said Dante.

  ‘I have the resources, Dante. I will expend them as I see fit.’

  ‘I thank you. It is a fine gesture.’

  ‘It is no gesture. You will need it.’

  Guilliman placed a hand upon Commander Dante’s shoulder and smiled sadly.

  ‘Listen, son of my brother. You have witnessed much, I sense in you your weariness. The Emperor never told me how long the Space Marines were supposed to live, but I suspect he never envisaged any living quite so long as you.’

  ‘I am weary, my lord, it is true, but I shall not stint in my service.’

  ‘I do not think you will. As I understand it from these records, you have carried the mantle of Imperial hero for a very long time. I am here now, my son. Be no longer afraid. Put aside your weariness. You need not masquerade as my brother any longer, for a real primarch walks among men again.’

  ‘I meant no deception or pridefulness, my lord.’

  Guilliman smiled and squeezed Dante’s pauldron. The metal creaked at the pressure his bare hand exerted. ‘I know plenty about men being worshipped when they would rather not be. The error is a common one, and it is not yours. You have nothing to feel shame for. I offer you relief, not condemnation. Remove your helmet.’

  Dante took off Sanguinius’ mask, exposing his aged features to Guilliman’s scrutiny. The primarch had seen him without armour while Dante recovered, but he felt naked before Guilliman’s gaze in a way he had not before.

  ‘I must soon leave Imperium Nihilus,’ said Guilliman. ‘My final mission here was to reinforce you and your Chapter’s successors, to shore up the defence of the Imperium in this segmentum. To…’ He let his words die in his mouth, and began again. ‘Dante, I am afraid I am going to add to your burdens. The Blood Angels and their successors are needed more than ever. You need no longer allow men to see you as my brother, but I cannot let you retreat from the role of hero. I am going to name you Warden of Imperium Nihilus, commander of all Imperial forces north of the Great Rift. I must return over the Cicatrix Maledictum soon. Now I have found someone who will strive in my stead, I may. The situation here, though dire, is not as bad as I feared, while that in the Imperium remains parlous.’

  ‘I understand. I will do my best.’

  ‘Your best is more than I could wish for.’ Guilliman looked overhead. Baal Primus and Baal Secundus continued their slow waltz around Baal as they always had, only Baal Primus was now dead, and upon the southern hemisphere the daemonic rune of Ka’Bandha’s name leered in bright white bone. The skulls of millions of tyranids, from void ships to vermin gatherers, had been stacked to create the sigil.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Guilliman. ‘The arrogance of the Neverborn remains as great as it ever was. But it is we who remain, and it is we who shall prevail. Dante, there is a lesser task I will set you.’ He lifted his hand up to encompass three worlds. ‘These planets were hells. For generations we have recruited the strong over the weak, in the belief it makes our warriors better. I do not think this is so. Cruel men make cruel warriors make cruel lords. We need to be better. We need to rise over the need for violence and recognise other human qualities in our recruits. Your Chapter has ever understood this. If we do not, then we will fall prey to our worst excesses, the kind of thing that that represents.’ He pointed at Ka’Bandha’s name. ‘It has long been in your capability to transform these worlds. Baal Primus is dead, but you need not let your remaining people suffer unnecessarily. Will they fight any better for dwelling on a world that kills them? By sacrificing their children to the Emperor’s service, they have earned a better life. Once you have torn that blasphemy down, raise up the population of Baal Secundus. Teach them what we are fighting for. A line must be drawn between what is good and what is evil, for if the Great Enemy comes with offers of power to a wretch, what reason does he have to refuse hell if he dwells in it already?’ Guilliman was tense. Dante had not expected that in the Lord of Ultramar. Guilliman was impatient to change things. He was angered by what he had found upon his rebirth, and he was not hiding it.

  ‘You must find the strength to continue, Commander Dante,’ said Guilliman. ‘There are very few warriors like you in the galaxy any more. I need every exemplar of heroism I can find. Please do not disappoint me.’

  ‘I will not, my lord regent.’

  Guilliman smiled at him again, and reached out to Dante. Dante extended his hand. The primarch’s fingers engulfed his hand, gauntlet and all.

  ‘I know you will not. I am counting on you to prove me right.’

  Fourteen weeks later, the Indomitus Crusade pulled away from the Baal system. Behind it left the skeleton of new orbitals and shipyards over the prime world, and multiple ships of Mechanicus fleets attending to their construction. Dante waited for every engine stack to burn bright on the ships before sending the order to his own fleet to open fire on Baal Primus. Bloodcaller symbolically loosed its torpedoes first.

  The day was clear. Baal Primus was large in the sky. Dante could track each flaring cyclonic torpedo as it fell towards the dead moon. The assembled fleets of the Blood were a shadow of their former selves, but mighty enough to kill a world nevertheless.

  Roboute Guilliman went to a fiery salute. Rings of flame burst on Baal Primus’ airless plains, gone as soon as they were made, but potent enough to render Ka’Bandha’s monument to bone dust. Macrocannons joined the demolition, and lances, until all the force of the Space Marines warfleet was employed in erasing the daemon’s name.

  Guilliman’s ships rapidly receded into twinkling lights, leaving Dante an insurmountable task. Dante looked down from the top of the Sanguis Corpusculum. Chapters in liveries old and new looked back.

  ‘My lord warden,’ said Adanicio, kneeling and offering up the Axe Mortalis to Dante. ‘The Chapters of the Blood await your command.’

  Dante took the haft of his weapon in silence. Slowly he raised it over his head.

  ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor!’ he roared.

  ‘For Sanguinius! For the Emperor!’ tens of thousands of Primaris Space Marines roared back.

  About the Author

  Guy Haley is the
author of the Horus Heresy novel Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  An extract from Shield of Baal.

  The black flesh of the void was torn asunder by a sudden eruption of red as Blade of Vengeance, flagship of the Blood Angels fleet, thundered into real space, weapons batteries roaring out a brutal announcement of arrival. More ships followed, plunging out of the warp like coursing hounds. The massed batteries of the fleet joined those of the flagship in a dull, pulsing war-hymn. The burning remains of the Cryptus System’s defence monitors were swept aside by the song, the detritus of their final heroic stand against the enemy washed away by volley after volley of high-powered energy beams.

  The audience for whom this sudden performance was intended was not appreciative. The vast shapes of the outlying bio-ships of the tyranid hive fleet, their bloated, shimmering forms faintly reflecting the deadly red light of Cryptus’s twin suns, reeled and shuddered like wounded animals as the fusillade cracked their shells and ruptured the soft contents.

  The Blood Angels fleet swept forwards with slow deliberation, bombardment cannons sweeping aside the swarms of escort drones which leapt from the flanks of the massive bio-ships and spiralled into death with unseemly eagerness.

  Such was the considered opinion of Captain Karlaen, as he watched the performance unfold through the massive vista-port of the flagship. Ships moved across his vision, pummelling one another in a grand dance of life and death, duty and instinct, honour and abomination. The arched, cathedral-like space of the vessel’s tacticum-vaults echoed with the relentless song of war. Karlaen could feel the roar of every cannonade through the deck-plates beneath his feet and in the flicker of every hololith display as enemy volleys spattered across the battle-barge’s void shields.

  This battle was merely a microcosm of a greater engagement which now spread across the Cryptus System and the Red Scar Sector. The monstrous shadow of Hive Fleet Leviathan, as the Ordo Xenos had classified this particular xenos incursion, stretched across countless worlds, being enveloping Segmentums Ultima, Tempestus and Solar. Worlds were being scoured clean by the Great Devourer, and even the most sacred sites of the Imperium were under threat, including Baal, home world of the Blood Angels.

  When the bow-wave of Hive Fleet Leviathan washed across the Cryptus System, the Imperium had met it with all of the strength that the Astra Militarum, Adepta Sororitas and the household troops of the ruling Flaxian Dynasty could muster. But orbital defences and massed gun-lines had proven unequal to the task. Within a cycle, tyrannic spores were darkening the skies of every major world within the Cryptus System. And now, at last, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers Space Marine Chapters had arrived to deprive the monster of its feast. Though the system was lost, they could at least diminish the biomass that the hive fleet might recycle and use against Baal.

  All of this passed across Karlaen’s mind as he watched the Blood Angels fleet engage the enemy. Battle was a thing of vivid colour and riotous fury, even in the cold, airless void of space, and he felt something in him stir as he considered it – like a persistent, red hum deep below the surface of his thoughts. It had been with him since the day of his Sanguination, but familiarity did not breed affection. His reflection stared back at him from within the slightly shimmering surface of the vista-port. A battered face, blunt and square and lacking all but a trace of its former good looks – acid scars pitted his cheeks and jaw; his hair was a grizzled golden stubble that clung stubbornly to his scalp and his nose had been shattered and rebuilt more than once. A bionic eye occupied one ruined socket, and the magna-lens of the prosthetic orb whirred to life as he examined his reflection, seeking out some niggling imperfection that he could not name.

  He was clad, as was his right and honour as commander of the First Company, in the blessed plate of Terminator armour. It was the toughest and most powerful form of personal armour ever developed by the Imperium of Man: a heavy blood-red shell of ceramite-bonded plates, chased with gilding and brass, reinforced by sections of plasteel and adamantium and all of it powered by thick bundles of electrical fibres and internal suspensor-plates.

  It had taken twenty red-robed Chapter serfs and dull, cog-brained servitors to encase him within it, hours earlier, when the prospect of a boarding action first reared its head – they had worked feverishly, connecting fibre bundles to nodes using spidery, mechanical limbs which possessed the inhuman dexterity required for such a precise task. Others had cleared air and build-up from the pistons and pneumatic servo-muscles that enabled him to move, while the senior serfs, their gilded masks betraying no emotion, polished the ceramite with sweet smelling unguents and blessed oils, awakening the primitive soul of the ancient relic, stirring it to wrathful waking. The armour was heavy and powerful, and, in those moments when he succumbed to the lure of poetry, Karlaen thought that it might be the closest thing going to the Word of the God-Emperor made harsh reality.

  Karlaen raised a hand, his fingers tracing the outline of the Crux Terminatus on his left shoulder plate. It was said that the symbol contained a shard of the Emperor’s own Terminator armour, which had been shattered in that final, catastrophic duel with the Arch-Traitor in ages past. At the thought, Karlaen’s breath hitched in his throat, and his vision blurred, as the red hum grew louder, now pounding where it had pulsed, as if a thousand hammers were beating on the walls of his skull, fighting to be free. For a moment, his vision blurred, and he saw a different face, not his own familiar battered features, but a handsome and radiant face which he recognised but could not name, twisted in loss and pain the likes of which no mortal could bear, and he heard the snap of great wings, and felt the rush of heat and pain and his fingers touched the surface of the void-hardened glass.

  He closed his eyes. Swallowed thickly. Opened his eyes. He looked up at the stained glass which marked the circumference of the vista-port. It showed scenes from Imperial history – the discovery of Sanguinius on Baal Secundus by the Emperor; Sanguinius, angel-winged and radiant, taking command of the Ninth Legion; other scenes, dozens, hundreds, all depicting the glorious history of the Blood Angels, a history which had shaped Karlaen, and made him who he was today. I am Karlaen, he thought. I am Captain of the First, the Shield of Baal, and I am true to myself. I am not flesh, to be swept up in the blood-dimmed tide, but stone. And stone does not move or yield to those red waters, no matter how they crash. The hum faded, hammer blows becoming taps, and the pressure retreated as it always had. Irritated with himself, he concentrated on the world beyond the curtain of void war.

  Asphodex – it was an inelegant word for an inelegant world. Beyond the shifting, shimmering distortion of the battle-barge’s void shield, behind the bloated shapes of the bio-ships which clustered about its atmosphere like feeding ticks, Asphodex roiled in its death throes. The magna-lens of Karlaen’s bionic eye whirred to its next setting, bringing the world into stark relief. The heavy grey clouds which shrouded the atmosphere were shot through with infected-looking strands of purple, each one squirming with billions of tiny shapes. The lens clicked again, focusing on the bio-ships clustered about the world’s poles. As they moved across the atmosphere, he could see corresponding disturbances in the clouds. Someone joined him at the vista-port. ‘They are feeding,’ Karlaen said, out loud.

  ‘Yes,’ Sanguinary High Priest Corbulo said softly. Clad in crimson power armour edged with white, he was the spitting image of the face which haunted the black dreams and red memories of Karlaen and every Space Marine of the Blood Angels Chapter. His v
oice, too, throbbed at the roots of Karlaen’s mind, stirring to life ancient thoughts which were not his own. Corbulo was a ghost, though whether of the Chapter’s past or its future, none could say. ‘That is what they do, captain.’

  ‘They will strip the planet of all life soon,’ Karlaen continued. He had seen planets caught in the grip of the Great Devourer before, and had calculated Asphodex’s chances of survival on an idle whim. The planet was doomed. He looked at Corbulo. ‘Why am I here, Master Corbulo? I should be making ready to–’

  ‘To what, Captain Karlaen?’ Corbulo asked. His voice was gentle, but resonant, like the crash of waves against a distant shore. He looked at Karlaen, and his eyes caught and held Karlaen’s own. They were deep and pale and powerful, and Karlaen felt the red hum in his head grow in strength. He looked away. ‘You are exactly where you should be, captain.’ Corbulo spoke with such surety that Karlaen could not help but feel an atavistic thrill course through him.

  ‘As you say, master,’ Karlaen said. He kept his face stiff and still.

  Corbulo smiled, as if he could sense Karlaen’s reluctance. ‘I cannot help but feel as if you doubt me, brother,’ he said.

  ‘Detecting doubt – or worry, anger, or any other emotion for that matter – on Karlaen’s face is a skill akin to the detection of geological shifts on Baal, Corbulo. One must know where to look for cracks in the stone. Isn’t that right, brother?’

  Both Karlaen and Corbulo turned as Commander Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels, strode towards them, his golden artificer armour gleaming in the reflected light of the hololiths that studded the tacticum-vaults. His features were hidden, as ever, behind the golden mask which was said to have been modelled on the features of Sanguinius himself.