The Devastation of Baal (Space Marine Conquests Book 1) by Guy Haley

Author:Guy Haley [Haley, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2017-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Void War

Situated beneath the Citadel Reclusiam at the top of the Heavenward Redoubt was the Prime Strategium of the Blood Angels.

Pale red sunlight filtered through armourglass windows twenty feet thick. Wide horizontal slits, cut through the rock on the other side of the glass, gave sweeping views out of both sides, into the desert, and the plunging Well of Angels.

Several hundred people were present, and a tense hush was upon them. Servitors, mortals and Space Marines were engaged in duties that could decide the fate not only of Baal and the Blood Angels, but of the segmentum beyond. Each piece of the war machine was as vital as the next, whether human thrall, cogitator sub-array or decorated captain of the Adeptus Astartes. Commander Dante understood that better than most. Under his purview they operated excellently.

A dozen separate command stations, individually tasked with overseeing an aspect of Baal’s defence, were situated around the central hololithic tacticarium. About its eerie projection sphere were gathered a band of heroes of rare renown. Many were regarded as the epitome of Imperial virtue in their own right, but even these great warriors waited upon Commander Dante’s word.

Dante stood upon a raised platform, his eyes trained on the projection along with everyone else’s. The sphere depicted the Baal system. The red star Balor and its worlds; the triplets of the Baalite subsystem, the solitary gas giant Set, the clumped asteroid field that separated outer and inner system, and the cold, distant world of Amair alone on its six-hundred-year journey around the star. Balor was not a fruitful sun. It had few children.

‘Expand the field of observation,’ said Dante. ‘Show me the outer bounds.’

A quiet whirr of lenses pulled back the view. Balor shrank to the size of a pomegranate. Baal and its moons were bright dots circling each other. The other worlds glinted. Only gaseous Set was big enough to see as more than a point of light.

Far out at the edge of the projection field, where the image began to lose integrity and focus, was Balor’s cometary belt depicted on the hololith as a swarm of tiny dots moving with the agitation of bacilli in a drop of water.

Just inside this ultimate shell of the system was the Space Marine fleet. The assembled navies of nigh three score Chapters divided into four battle groups. They waited at a distance from one another. The direction of the tyranid fleet’s approach was known, where exactly it would breach the cometary wall was not.

On a human scale, the ships of the Imperium were colossi, miles-long chunks of metal as large as cities, home to tens of thousands of cyborgs, thralls and Space Marines. In the vastness of space they were specks. Shifting shoals of data tags displayed their position.

By Dante’s left shoulder stood the Master of Interpretations, the blood thrall liaison with the astropaths of the Chapter. Vox signals would take hours to reach the fleet. By the power of ancient science, hololithic communication was instantaneous across in-system distances, but fragile in the face of the shadow in the warp.

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