Shield of Baal: Deathstorm Read online

  Among the rubble, clicking feeder-beasts feasted upon the hillocks of corpses which lay like a thick carpet throughout the structure. Many-limbed shadows moved through the upper reaches of the ruins, and alien voices stuttered and warbled in a song of ending. The song ceased abruptly, as the air became greasy and metallic. There was a sound like thunder, and arcing lighting of an unnatural hue sparked and snapped to sudden life. The feeder-beasts scattered with frustrated squeals and protests as the lightning swirled, flashed and faded, revealing heavy, crimson figures. The Archangels had arrived.

  Twenty carmine-armoured Terminators stood on a patch of scorched stone. They were among the greatest warriors of a Chapter replete with such, and each of them had participated in dozens of gruelling defences and surgical strikes, against tyranids as well as orks and every other enemy that had dared test the might of the Imperium. Karlaen had chosen from among the most battle-tested for this mission, and each of them had stood with him at Balor’s Hope, as well as participating in the destruction of the space hulks Divine Purgatory and Twilight Aegis.

  ‘Well, isn’t this pleasant?’ one of the Terminators said, the vox-amplifiers of his helmet transforming his voice into a crackling growl. Brother Aphrae, Karlaen knew, recognised the Terminator by his vox-signature and the delicate coiling script flowing across the scroll stretched across the front of his chestplate. Aphrae had a passion for calligraphy, as well as an inability to properly observe vox protocols.

  ‘No,’ Karlaen said. ‘Fan out and establish a perimeter – I want detailed augur scans and vox-channel analysis before we move out.’ Long-range auspex echoes taken by the fleet had proven disappointingly vague, and teleportation was not an exact science. He needed to be certain that they were where they were supposed to be in the Tribune District, and that meant triangulating their exact position via vox signals and augur readings. ‘Alphaeus – you know what to do,’ he said, looking to the closest Terminator.

  ‘When has it ever been otherwise?’ Alphaeus rumbled, dropping one gauntlet to the pommel of the power sword sheathed on his hip. The Terminator sergeant had served with Karlaen longer than any other Space Marine, and familiarity had bred a congenial deference that Karlaen still found slightly disconcerting.

  He had chosen Alphaeus as his second-in-command for good reason. Among the warriors of the First Company, there were none, save himself, with greater experience in battling the scuttling minions of the Great Devourer than Alphaeus and his squad – jocular Aphrae, taciturn Bartelo, and the twins, Damaris and Leonos. The latter pair snapped to attention as Alphaeus ordered them to scout ahead, and then turned to relay orders to the other squads. Satisfied that Alphaeus would see to things, Karlaen scanned their surroundings.

  The city was already being consumed; the presence of the feeder-beasts and the spore-chimneys were proof enough of that. He had seen similar sights often enough, but it never failed to awaken a thrill of revulsion in him to see humanity and all of its artifice reduced to a slurry of protein and bio-matter. Death was one thing, but the tyranids took even what little dignity remained afterwards.

  His fingers tightened on the reinforced haft of the master-crafted thunder hammer he carried. The Hammer of Baal was one of the most exquisite relics possessed by the Blood Angels Chapter; it had been forged by master artisans millennia ago, and entrusted into Karlaen’s care by Dante himself, upon his ascension to the rank of Captain of the First Company. The weapon hummed with barely restrained power. It was much like its wielder in that regard. Karlaen lifted the ancient weapon and rested it against his shoulder plate.

  He turned, his bionic eye whirring and magnifying the landscape. Rotting corpses and the burning wreckage of battle tanks stretched as far as the eye could see. For a few brief days the world had been a battlefront, and the soldiers of the Imperium had made the tyranids pay a bloody toll for every patch of ground. He checked his suit’s augurs, searching for any life signs among the carnage.

  ‘They died well,’ Alphaeus said.

  Karlaen turned. ‘Report,’ he said.

  ‘We’re probably in the right place.’ The sergeant had removed his helmet, revealing a shorn scalp and a permanently determined expression. A service stud gleamed over his right eye. As Karlaen watched, he sucked in a great lungful of toxic air. ‘Paaaah,’ Alphaeus grunted. ‘Smells like home. If home was an overgrown sludge pit.’

  ‘Which it is,’ Aphrae called out, from where he stood examining a spore-chimney. He lifted his chainfist in considering fashion. The weapon groaned to life, and the teeth rotated with a snarl that echoed across the plaza.

  Before Karlaen could move to stop Aphrae, Alphaeus barked, ‘Aphrae, please refrain from whatever it is you’re planning to do.’ He looked back at Karlaen. ‘We were able to scrape the recordings from the orbital vox-arrays, but that information is days old at best. This looks like a palace forecourt, if that helps.’ He gestured towards the immense, battle-blasted archway that dominated the other side of the plaza. Great steps, each one a hundred metres wide, rose up towards what he suspected were the remains of the Phodian Gates, the entrance to the palace. ‘Those steps are definitely palatial, in my considered opinion.’

  ‘You know a lot about steps, then?’ Karlaen asked, examining the archway.

  ‘I know about architecture. You can tell a lot about a people from their architecture.’

  Karlaen glanced at Alphaeus, who ran his palm over his bare scalp in a gesture of contemplation.

  ‘I could be wrong, of course. Who knows what sort of upheaval the planet has gone through since those vox-arrays were functional? Remember Fulcrum Six? The whole southern continent folded up like a leaf caught in a blast of heat,’ said Alphaeus.

  ‘This isn’t Fulcrum Six,’ Karlaen replied, smiling slightly.

  ‘No, and thank the Emperor for that.’ Alphaeus stamped the ground. ‘I don’t approve of continental land masses shifting unexpectedly.’ He looked around suspiciously. ‘I don’t approve of this either.’

  ‘This place is an abomination unto the eyes of the Emperor,’ Bartelo said glumly, gesturing at the spore-chimney with the barrel of the heavy flamer he carried. It took a special sort of warrior to go into battle equipped with what was a highly volatile amount of promethium mixture strapped to them – one ruptured hose, or clogged mechanism, and Bartelo would be cooked inside his armour quicker than he could scream. But he seemed to take pride in his position as fire-bearer for Alphaeus’s squad, and he was skilled at employing the cleansing flames to greatest effect.

  ‘So is wasting valuable promethium. Stay alert,’ Alphaeus said. He shook his head and cocked an eye up at the dark sky. ‘Gargoyles,’ he murmured.

  Karlaen looked up. The magna-lens of his bionic eye spun, focusing in on the innumerable swarms of winged bio-beasts swirling across the horizon like a vast tornado of fangs and talons. ‘Where are they going?’ he murmured.

  ‘East,’ Alphaeus said.

  ‘What’s east of here?’

  ‘Organic–’ Damaris began.

  ‘–matter,’ Leonos finished.

  Karlaen looked at the two Terminators as they trudged towards him and the sergeant. Some quirk of the Sanguination process had taken two unrelated men and made them replicas of one another, as if they had been cast from the same mould. Even through the vox-link, their mellifluous voices sounded identical, down to the slightly strained intonation. With their helmets off, they reminded him of Corbulo, with too-perfect features that belonged on the ivy-shrouded statues of long-forgotten deities rather than on men.

  ‘There’s fighting to the east, in the area around the manufactorums,’ Leonos said. ‘This whole district looks as if it’s been left to the feeder-beasts.’

  Karlaen quickly flicked through the vox-channels. Most were clouded with interference from the hive fleet, but he quickly hit upon cries for aid and pleas for reinforcement. Just as he found them, something exploded in the distance. The front had moved east, the Imperial battle lines battered bac
k by the ravenous hordes of bio-beasts.

  ‘The fabricae districts,’ Alphaeus said. He frowned. ‘It’s a last stand.’

  Karlaen said nothing. The vox crackled, as the screams of the soldiers of the Astra Militarum filled his ears. Part of him yearned to take his men and strike out for the manufactorums where the last defenders of Phodia were selling their lives in the mistaken assumption that help was coming. But those were not his orders, and that was not what the Sons of Sanguinius were here for this day.

  Asphodex was a firebreak and nothing more. The war against Hive Fleet Leviathan would not be decided here, or indeed anywhere in the Cryptus System. But this tendril of it would be annihilated. Within a few standard hours, the remainder of the Blood Angels First Company and the full strength of the Second – supported by elements of their successors, the Flesh Tearers – would be making planetfall. Then the true war would begin. A war of annihilation, a war to taint the wells and break the supply lines of the enemy. A war that the chosen of Baal knew well how to fight.

  But that was still in the future. For now, Karlaen had his mission. ‘Form up and fan out. We will proceed,’ he said, shutting off the transmissions. Alphaeus nodded and pinged the vox, alerting the other squads that it was time to move out, even as Leonos and Aphrae joined them.

  In moments, a line of crimson-armoured giants was on the move, marching across the plaza towards the great archway that was the Phodian Gates. As they climbed the steps, Karlaen took in the carnage which stretched up the steps to the entry plateau. The corpses of Imperial Guardsmen were piled in messy heaps among tumbled sandbag emplacements. The stink of alien ichor was strong here, and dead tyranid weapon-beasts lay where they had fallen, brought down by the guns of the Astra Militarum.

  At the top of the steps, the broken corpse of an Imperial Guard officer bore silent witness to the approach of the Blood Angels, his dead gaze staring out at the battlefield defiantly. He still clutched a bolt pistol in one bloodied fist.

  Karlaen sank down to one knee beside the corpse, which lay propped up against the scorched and shattered archway. He studied the slack features, memorising them as he had done a thousand times before. His warriors stood silently, understanding that this was a sacred moment, and one that they themselves might have to perform one day.

  This man, Karlaen thought, had been a hero, though they did not know his name. He had died unsung, and would not be remembered by any save themselves. But they would remember him. The Blood Angels always remembered, even when the memory proved burdensome. ‘Sleep, soldier,’ Karlaen murmured, the familiar words escaping him with ease. ‘Lay down your burden, and return to the Emperor’s light. Your fight is now ours. And we will make them pay, measure for measure.’ He reached out and closed the staring eyes.

  He stood. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have a governor to find.’

  Across the plaza from the armoured giants, hidden by the fallen bulk of a statue of the Emperor, a pair of alien eyes watched the Blood Angels enter the governing palace of the Flaxian Dynasty. White, vestigial lips peeled back from a wall of clenched fangs as the flat, crimson eyes of the creature once called the Spawn of Cryptus narrowed in baleful interest.

  As the Blood Angels vanished into the interior of the palace, the broodlord pushed itself upright, its four arms clutching at the statue. It rose to its full height, tasting the air. The fires of distant battle were reflected in its pale, shiny carapace. It cocked its bulbous skull, listening to the distant drumbeat of battle. Hundreds of kilometres away, the defenders of Phodia were waging their final battle against the forces of the Hive Mind, and the Spawn of Cryptus could feel the ebb and flow of that conflict in every fibre of its grotesque being.

  It longed to join that distant fray and wet its talons in the blood of its enemies. That was what the Hive Mind asked of it, whispered to it, deep in its skull. The song of the Hive Mind filled its head, driving out all other thoughts save those which moved in time to the cosmic rhapsody of aeons. It was a song of consumption and survival, of grand design and joining. The song filled it and warmed it, driving out fear and anger and leaving behind only iron purpose.

  The broodlord shook its large head and gave a snort. There were yet things to be done – important things, more important even than the all-consuming song of the forces that had guided it up out of the darkness and into the light.

  It had lived on Asphodex for years, long before the coming of the Leviathan whose shadow even now lay over its monstrous soul. The people of Phodia had given it its name, and the raconteurs among them had claimed that it was a child of their solar god, sent to punish them for their transgressions. The creature found some small amusement in that, for the storytellers were not far wrong.

  That amusement was not in evidence now, as it watched the red giants disturb and disperse the feeder-beasts as they tromped into the demesne that it had claimed as its own. It had never seen such beings before in all the years of its long life, but it knew them for enemies even so. It could taste the harsh violence of their thoughts, even at this distance, and its long, crimson tongue flicked out from within its thicket of teeth to lash and curl momentarily, before retreating back into its maw.

  It did not know what they were after, and annoyance burned across the surface of its brain like a black comet. Their minds were open to it, and it could smell their intent to enter the palace as if it were the scent of prey carried upon the night wind. Its talons dug frustrated grooves into the stones around it, and it hissed in growing anger.

  For a brief instant, the song of the Hive Mind grew ragged and weak, and the old pain came back, thundering to the fore of its mind. It saw faces, fleshy and soft, but familiar, and a whine of agony escaped it. A single quavering note of loss, swiftly borne under and erased by the snarl that followed. The Spawn of Cryptus shook itself, sending the fragments of memory fleeing. With a single fluid movement, the beast leapt down from its perch and crept into the ruins, claws clicking. Lesser creatures fled before it, and in return for such obeisance, it duly ignored them.

  It would gather its brood. It was past time for the Children of Cryptus to have their due.

  Two

  Tribune Chamber, Flaxian Palace, Phodia

  The interior of the palace was just as much a scene of horror as the plaza outside. The stab-lights mounted on the Terminators’ armour illuminated signs of a ferocious running battle as they moved through the immense, shadowy corridors. The exquisite artworks which had once covered the high walls were torn and pitted by acidic bile, lasgun fire and the heavy craters left behind by shellfire. The floor was carpeted in the dead, both human and otherwise. And everywhere, clicking, clattering ripper swarms worked to render the mangled heaps of blood and bone down into something more palatable.

  The signs of the Hive Mind’s consumption were everywhere. Whole side corridors and cathedral-like foyers had been given over to the bubbling, noxious digestion pools of the feeder-beasts. As the Terminators pushed deeper into the depths of the palace, grisly shapes flapped, crawled and scuttled just out of sensor range.

  When they reached the entrance to what Karlaen though must be the governor’s Tribune Chamber, he raised his hammer, signalling a halt.

  ‘We go our separate ways from here, brothers,’ he said. He swept the hammer out, indicating the corridors diverging from the central hall they now stood in. ‘Four squads can search more swiftly than one, and time is not on our side in this place.’ As if to punctuate this statement, the dull boom of distant explosions rolled through the corridors, echoing and re-echoing throughout the wide, vaulted spaces.

  ‘Melos, you and your squad take the western sector,’ Karlaen continued, gesturing to the Terminator in question. Melos stroked the gilded skull set into his gorget and nodded. Melos’s relic armour had a reputation, Karlaen recalled. He hoped that it would serve Melos better than it had all its other owners. ‘Joses, the east,’ he continued, pushing the thought aside. Joses grunted, and hefted his storm bolter. Like Alphaeus, he was b
areheaded, and he had battle-scarred features. Karlaen looked at the last of his subordinates. ‘Zachreal…’

  ‘Up,’ Zachreal rumbled, pointing a finger towards the upper levels of the palace. His crimson armour was scored by hundreds of gouges, battle scars earned over the course of a hundred-odd boarding actions, and a trio of silently fuming, golden censers hung from his chestplate, filling the air around him with a vermilion mist. ‘Always send somebody to clear the upper decks, captain.’

  ‘Then that honour falls to you,’ Karlaen said. He looked at Alphaeus. “I’ll accompany your squad, Alphaeus, if you’ll have me. We’ll keep moving forwards, through the Tribune Chamber, and sweep the heart of the palace.’

  ‘If we must,’ Alphaeus said, smiling slightly.

  Karlaen ignored the Terminator’s attempt at humour, and said, ‘Observe vox protocol. This is no different than any floating hulk we’ve boarded in the past.’

  ‘Except that it’s a building, won’t lose gravity, and we damn well know it’s full of tyranids, rather than merely suspecting that such is the case,’ Aphrae piped up. Bartelo gave a snort of sour laughter, and the twins chuckled.

  ‘Quiet,’ Alphaeus snapped.

  Karlaen ignored the by-play. He had fought beside Alphaeus and his squad often enough to know that Aphrae’s jocularity, misplaced as it was, was as necessary to the unit’s survival as the promethium in Bartelo’s tanks. Laughter was the gates of the soul, as discipline was its walls. ‘If you find any sign of the governor, you are to retrieve him, dead or alive, and fall back to the Plaza of the Emperor Ascendant for extraction. The plaza will be rallying-point alpha in the event of overwhelming resistance. Do not hesitate to fall back, should it be necessary. Pride is merely the seed of hubris, and death without victory is wasted,’ he said, quoting a line from the Philosophies of Raldoron. He looked about him as he spoke, trying to impress the gravity of the situation upon his men. ‘Eyes open, sensors on, my brothers. May the wings of our father shield you from the rains of bad fortune.’