NIGHTFALL PREVIEW

The Devourers Baine (PT 1)

Part One: Baptism of Blood

The origins of the Imperial hero known to posterity as Colonel James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas are lost to time. That he was born on Lesser Gesar is all we can be certain of, as he served in the phalanxes of that world and its parent for all that we know of his life.

Lesser Gesar is a colony of Gesarron, extending that ancient foundry world’s influence into the wilds of the Urunian Drift, a pocket of space where stars and planets are far less dense than anywhere within a thousand light years. It would be an area of space utterly unnoticed were it not for two things: the Drift was where the ancient warship Gorgon was purported to have vanished. None know who built the Gorgon, but its infamy and legendary power led many to search for it after the reign of terror it had wrought across ten thousand light years. Yet there was something worse than the Gorgon in the Urunian Drift.

The Cenites had a den there.

They might not have realized that there were Imperial worlds nearby, not at first. But as soon as the adventurers hove into the Drift, they became aware of new prey.

Lesser Gesar was the first attacked, and that was where Kasallas first made his name.

There was little warning. Gesarron had little in the way of Imperial presence, and Lesser Gesar even less. The 1^st Gesarron Phalanx was also the only such formation, and was an understrength 300,000 men in total. Only a fifty-thousand-man detachment was assigned to Lesser Gesar, supported by only two Imperial cruisers, the Hussar and the Reins of Sleipnir.

Both cruisers, based on limited recordings, gave good account of themselves as the claw-shaped Cenite ships closed in on them, but they were vastly outnumbered, and soon were boarded. It is perhaps fortunate for all that no recordings of the carnage aboard made it off either ship before they were floating abattoirs in orbit.

The bombardment that followed targeted the primary spaceports and the major cities, most of which still stood on the eastern continent. These Cenites used plasma bombs, possibly having looted them from other prey some time before. The core of Uessa Spaceport was vaporized in a flash, immolating nearly ten thousand people outright in an eyeblink.

In the aftermath, the Cenites waited nearly two days before descending in their landers. By then, the survivors had dispersed, expecting the Devourers to concentrate on the wreckage of the cities. Unfortunately for them, such was not the Cenite way. They came down in great circles around the ruins, spreading out in hunting packs to pursue the refugees first.

Headquarters for the 1^st Gesarron Phalanx detachment had been at Uessa spaceport, along with the majority of their personnel and equipment. Only small patrols, about thirty men apiece, mostly concerned with the pirates and slavers that frequented the wastes between the populated urban sprawls, survived the bombardment. One of these patrols was led by Sergeant James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas.

While there is no record of previous experience, he had seen the flashes as the spaceport came under attack, and correctly surmised that his command was gone, and that a follow on attack was imminent. Leading his patrol into the harshest, rockiest terrain in the wastes, braving the savage local predators that, much like the aliens soon to descend from the sky, hid within the jagged spires to range out after their prey when least suspected. There, the Imperial troopers waited and watched, even as their water and food got low, observing the landers descending on fiery trails from the sky above.

The Cenites spread out, picking off those that had fled first, slowly tightening the noose around the spaceport and what remained of the planet’s primary settlements, all of which lay within two hundred miles, the colony only being a century old. Still, for a few days, Kasallas waited and watched, until he saw the time was right.

Striking out from the redoubt in the wastes, they ambushed a pack of Cenites that were hounding a desperate band of refugees. With the Devourers so focused on their prey, Kasallas and his troopers slaughtered them quickly, before disappearing back into the wastes.

For the next month, they continued to hunt the Cenites, occasionally joining other patrols of Phalanx troopers, but generally trying to stay small, fast, and agile. They attacked only when they had the element of surprise, and they showed the predatory aliens no mercy.

Finally, the Cenites began to hunt Kasallas and his men more seriously. While the Devourers prefer to hunt on foot, chasing their prey like their ancestors did before they reached the stars, Kasallas had killed enough of them that they brought their fast attack vehicles into play, hunting through the badlands under a sky turned dark by lowering clouds of smoke and dust that still had not settled from the bombardment.

It took a clash with a fast-attack claw of speeders that left half his men dead for Kasallas to rethink his position. Small and elusive they had been, but they were still men on foot, no match for Cenites on speeders and sickle-winged attack planes. Driving deeper into the badlands, he began to circle around toward where his scouts had determined some of the other surviving phalanx forces had been hiding.

One by one, staying just ahead of the Cenite hunter packs, Kasallas gathered the ragtag bands of local militia and surviving phalanx troopers, working his way toward the ruins of Uessa. By the time they reached the scorched and gutted remains of the poor quarter habitation blocks, Kasallas had gathered nearly a battalion. Even with the Cenites hot on their heels, they were able to keep them back with ambushes and delaying actions, enough for The Six Hundred to begin to dig in.

The Cenites were closing in, packs gathering from all around Uessa and coming out of the ruins where they had been hunting those civilians and deserters that had sought shelter in the debris. Kasallas and his troops had killed hundreds of them already, and whatever pack leader was directing the slaughter saw him as the threat that he was.

The first attack on the Six Hundred came before the defenses were completed, and nearly shattered one flank before Kasallas himself led a spoiling attack, exposing himself and his attack force far out from the defenses in order to strike the assaulting Cenites from the rear. If his hope was to stop the assault altogether, he failed, but he still bought time, though the spoiling force lost nearly thirty percent casualties before getting back within the burgeoning fortifications.

There, they prepared for the next attack, as night fell and the Cenites regrouped.

It came in the dead of night, the Devourers’ alien senses attuned far more than those of mere humans. Even so, Kasallas was ready for it.

The first attack came with sound and fury, striking almost directly up the cratered road that was the primary avenue of approach to the Six Hundred’s positions. They came on speeders and loping on foot from crater to crater, sending up hunting howls as they came, bringing devastating fire down on the Imperial fighting positions.

Kasallas sensed that this was a feint, however. Over the previous several months, as he’d hunted the hunters through the badlands, he’d learned their ways, come to understand them perhaps better than they understood themselves. For all their savagery, the Cenites were not fools or heedless, frenzied beasts. The noise and the high volume of fire was not their way. He sent two squads to reinforce the road, then waited for the real attack.

It came on two axes, the Cenites bounding through the rubble on foot, sometimes going down onto all fours as they clambered over the ruins, silent and dark. They used blades and talons on the listening posts, but one got a warning out.

Still Kasallas held his primary force in reserve, even as the first lines spotted the shadowy shapes slipping through the night and opened fire. He watched and waited, knowing instinctively that the Devourers still had not fully committed.

Only when the two flanks were fully engaged, the frontal assault on the highway stalled, did he move, striking toward the Six Hundred’s rear area.

There he encountered the main Cenite force, about to launch itself deep into the Six Hundred’s position, and the battle was joined.

The fighting raged the rest of the night, with Kasallas always seemingly in the thick of it. Some of the Six Hundred, already low from the last month or more of fighting, ran out of ammunition and resorted to bayonets, knives, bare hands, rocks, even the Cenite hand weapons they could seize. They finally threw the Devourers back, gaining a few hours to rest and see to their wounded.

Their trial was not over. While it was whispered that perhaps Kasallas had himself slain the pack leader that had gathered the force that sought to overwhelm this bastion of resistance—as far as they knew, possibly the last such bastion on the planet—the word had seemingly gone out to the rest of the Cenites on Lesser Gesar’s smaller continent, and the hordes closed in on the Six Hundred.

It is said that Kasallas had his remaining wavecast operators call for help, if there were any forces left in the system that might hear, but told his troopers and militia that he himself would stay and fight, at least until all of them were taken off. At the time, none had much hope for deliverance, as the Cenites circled, occasionally getting close enough to take shots at the defenders with their dart weapons, almost never exposing themselves long enough for one of the Imperials to get a shot off.

Finally, the next wave of diversionary attacks began, more ferocious than before. The Cenites prefer to eschew artillery, preferring their prey wounded but alive when captured, so they used the rubble to their advantage to get close before attacking, some having seemingly burrowed to get even closer. One flank nearly collapsed as the pack closed in, and only Kasallas’s personal intervention got the Imperials to hold, even as the main attack appeared out of the dark along the highway that had been the diversionary path of attack before.

Leaving the beleaguered flank, Kasallas and his chosen few attacked the Cenites on their main axis of attack, falling on them with a ferocity that rivaled even the fanged predators of the sky. Once again, they took terrible losses, but they threw the Devourers back, leaving hundreds of them lying broken on the shattered flagstones of the ruined city.

There was no possibility that the Cenites would retreat. More of their flyers and fast vehicles were coming, gathering yet more packs to assault the Six Hundred, now closer to three or four hundred after the last few days’ fighting. The Cenites were enraged that their prey was fighting back so effectively, and they would see the Six Hundred eviscerated for their temerity.

Some have reported inspiring speeches that Kasallas gave to his surviving troopers. No two recorded speeches are alike, however. It is more likely that his reputation for grim, quiet determination, seen so much in the wars that followed, dominated the still hours before the next attack. The survivors of the Six Hundred, now nearly completely out of ammunition, sharpened their blades and prepared for the end, determined to take as many of the Cenites with them as they could.

Strangely, however, the attack did not come. The Cenites scattered, coming quickly under fire from heavily armored Orn-pattern gunships, as the vanguard of the Varyagus Paladin Clan descended in blood and fire to turn the Cenite hunters to hunted.

None record the words between Kasallas and the Paladin commander, in that blood-soaked pile of shattered rockcrete that had once been a city. Nor are the words exchanged with the commandant of the 1^st Gesarron Phalanx to be found, this long after the events. All that is known is that Kasallas was taken to Gesarron directly, leaving behind the rest of the Six Hundred, to become the new commander of the 2^nd Gesarron Phalanx.

TO BE CONTINUED