Chapter 104 - The Battle for Baal (1)
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Baal Prime.
A crimson sandstorm thick with the stench of blood scoured the towering outer walls of the Angel's Fortress without mercy.
The fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels was suffering its most suffocating desecration since the Great Crusade.
Inside the highest command spire of the Angel's Fortress, Chapter Master Dante stood before the holographic tactical table. The legendary veteran had served the Imperium for nearly a millennium, and his face was hidden beneath the golden death mask sculpted in Sanguinius's sorrowful likeness. Even Astartes hardened by centuries of slaughter found it hard to breathe beside this thousand-year-old elder. Ten centuries of authority pressed down on them like gravity.
A storm of comm channels wove through the chamber. Blood thralls scrambled to relay desperate data from every front.
"The combined fleet has suffered heavy losses, lord!" A mortal operator looked up, face slick with cold sweat, voice trembling. "Two successor fleets just declared total annihilation! The remaining Chapters' void groups have taken catastrophic casualties. They can't hold much longer!"
The drawn-out campaign in the Hades System, combined with the scorched-earth retreat all the way back, had indeed bled Hive Fleet Leviathan.
But the xenos' numbers still exceeded the upper limits of every recorded human tactical doctrine.
The loss of void supremacy was entirely within Dante's expectations. He cut to the response without hesitation.
"Order the remaining fleet to disperse immediately. Withdraw to the system's edge." Dante's voice carried through the mask's vox-amplifier, weathered by ages. "Break formation. Conduct independent guerrilla operations. Do not engage the xenos capital ships in low orbit."
Before the order finished transmitting, the right side of the tactical table flared with glaring red.
"My lord! The outer line has broken!" Another blood thrall stabbed a finger at flashing holographic coordinates. "The Thirstwater barrier has been overrun! They're surging toward the forward mortal militia positions!"
This was very bad news.
Thirstwater was no ordinary liquid. It was a lethal nano-devouring weapon left over from the Dark Age of Technology, capable of consuming any organic thing that fell into it. Dante had always counted it as the Angel's Fortress's most reliable natural moat.
But the chasm was only 15 meters wide.
The Tyranid tide blanketing the wastes did not care about casualties. The front ranks simply hurled themselves into the nano-pit, and tens of thousands of xenos corpses filled the death rift until they formed a bridge of flesh spanning the chasm.
The militia's mission had only ever been to lure the enemy. With the moat filled in, throwing armorless civilians against scythe-clawed bioforms was the same as feeding them to the slaughter.
"Deploy the Death Company," Dante ordered at once. "Open the outer restraint cages. Cover the militia's withdrawal. Do not squander mortal lives."
The instant the order went out, the massive blast gates beneath the Angel's Fortress's outer walls roared upward.
Hundreds of Blood Angels in pitch-black armor stormed into the crimson sandstorm like beasts torn loose from their chains.
They had long since drowned in the genetic curses of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. Nothing remained in their minds but the searing fury of the moment their gene-father fell.
"HORUS!"
"Your life is forfeit, arch-traitor!"
Shrill, frenzied war cries drowned the chittering of the swarm.
The black-armored giants smashed straight into the Tyranid vanguard. Chainswords tore through alien carapace. Even when claws punched through their abdomens, the Death Company kept their jaws locked on the necks of the swarm.
Their suicidal charge held the Tyranid advance for five full minutes, long enough for tens of thousands of mortal militia to fall back safely to the second line.
Dante watched the table and gave a small nod.
The line was holding.
Atop the first wall, over ten thousand Astartes from the Sanguinary successor Chapters stood in position. Anchored by the towering ramparts and the thick void shields, heavy bolters and plasma incinerators vomited dense curtains of fire while the massive siege cannons at the rear roared with deafening fury.
As the days dragged on, the ground before the Angel's Fortress piled high with mountain-mounds of Tyranid dead, choking the swarm's main advance. The Tyranids would have been delighted to let those mounds grow higher and higher against the walls. It would have made scaling them trivial.
So the swarm even paused its assault from time to time, dragging the bodies of its kin back to the rear, recycling them into nutrient pools to spawn fresh bioforms.
But the work was inefficient. Every recovery team was met with punishing fire from the Blood Angels on the walls.
The Tyranids were caught with no clean option in either direction. The Sons of Sanguinius, rested and entrenched, hammered the enemy without pause.
It was pure attrition.
And Dante was not afraid. The ammunition reserves brought by the successor Chapters were more than abundant. As long as they kept the great siege-beasts from reaching the walls, they could pile a second mountain of xenos dead right here.
The scales of victory seemed to be tipping, inch by inch, toward the defenders.
"Hold the line. Bleed them dry in the grinder."
Dante murmured it to himself.
But the xenos' trouble was not confined to the front.
Without warning, the adamantium doors of the command chamber erupted with a thunderous crash.
BOOM!
The doors slammed open.
A Blood Angel staggered through. His crimson power armor was streaked with sickly green acid and raw, gaping cracks. His left arm had been sheared off at the shoulder, the stump still pumping blood.
"Chapter Master!" The wounded warrior shoved past the medicae thralls reaching for him and roared at the top of his lungs. "Tyranids — they're pouring up from beneath the Fortress!"
The words detonated through the chamber.
Dante spun.
"Location!"
"They've tunneled through the foundations! A brood is tearing into the Sanguinary sarcophagi where the neophytes are cultivated!"
The Sanguinary sarcophagi.
The sacred vessels by which the Blood Angels reforged neophytes and continued their bloodline. Lose those, and the Chapter's very roots would be ripped out of the earth.
In any defensive war, that was a line that could not be crossed.
"Trygons..." Dante had it the moment he said it.
A Tyranid burrower lurking at the edge of the battle must have caught the faint vibration of the Fortress's subterranean works. The Hive Mind had immediately deployed its best tunnelers, slipping silently beneath the surface auspexes, driving a blade straight at the heart.
Fury churned in Dante's chest. He seized the battle-axe from its rest and strode for the door.
"Transfer command to the Captains! Honor Guard, with me! We purge the lower works!"
Dante would not let the Chapter's future die in the jaws of these insects.
He and his Honor Guard threw themselves into the elevator shaft and plunged toward the deepest catacombs of the Angel's Fortress.
The lower corridors rang with the shriek of xenos and the bark of bolter fire. The acrid, unmistakable stench of Tyranid flesh had already seeped into the ventilation.
As he ran, Dante turned the situation over in his mind.
And the further he ran, the more his commander's instinct told him something was wrong.
The Hive Mind was a vast collective driven by consumption and propagation. Destroying the sarcophagi would indeed strangle the Chapter's recruitment, but that was a long-term wound. In the middle of a siege, it offered no immediate tactical gain.
Had cunning Lictors really clawed their way into the most heavily defended ground in the Fortress just to smash a few stasis crypts?
"It's a feint..." The words slipped out before he could stop them.
At that exact moment the Fortress's internal broadcast erupted with a shrill, broken alarm tone that warped as it sounded.
Every Astartes who heard it felt the cold crawl up their spine.
"Commander!" A Tech-Priest's voice burst over the channel, edged with raw panic. "Anomaly at the primary power node! The void shield generator's output is in freefall!"
Dante's stride locked.
In that single instant, every thread snapped together.
The brood tearing at the sarcophagi was bait.
The real killing stroke was the cunning bioform. It had used the window, the moment the defenders rushed to save the sarcophagi, to slip alone into the most thinly guarded heart of the Fortress: the primary generator chamber.
The instant the void shields fell, the Tyranid hive ships circling in low orbit would rain tens of thousands of drop-spores straight down onto the wall-tops of the Angel's Fortress, unhindered.
➤ Next: The Battle of Baal (2)
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