[M] War in the Dirt - Patriots IC

[Azazeal849]

Link to OOC (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=92434)
Link to Patriot announcements (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=92608)


CAMPAIGN 1

The Agglomeration, Baraspine orbit
Zero hour +8
Patriot objectives: Defend barracks module

War had come to Baraspine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlpE6oqvVhI). While the imperial guard took control of the hills around Allocthon crater and rained fire on the capital hive, their Navy counterparts had brought the orbital Agglomeration under a similarly intense siege. The Glom had bared its teeth in response, but from what little communication filtered through the vox net several of the defensive blisters had already been knocked out, and Navy armsmen were breaching in several places.

Frakking armsmen. Security armsmen, once suited up to repel boarders, were tough sons of bitches. Assault armsmen were worse. Armoured in heavy plate with integrated helmets that made them look more like deep-sea divers than voidsmen, equipped with magnetic boots to keep them locked to the deck, armed with breaching charges and heavy shotguns with armour-piercing slugs and room-clearing scattershot.

The Glom was more space hulk than space station, welded together over centuries from satellites, docking hubs and defence bastions, and full of cross-spliced wiring that wedded the many querulous machine spirits together by force of will as much as technical expertise. This made communication with the other sectors intermittent, but also made it harder for the Imperials to breach the often-multiple sets of airlocks between modules, or for their attendant tech-priests to hack their way through.

In a barracks module, geostationary above Baraspine’s night side, captain Kreoss and the rest of his Menoth infantry had been in the middle of training exercises with an ad mech destruction maniple before the attack. They had been spared the full-scale assault above hive Alda on the opposite side of the orbital ring, and that had allowed them to muster for evacuation at a cargo loading module, but without a friendly ship to take them off they were on borrowed time and they knew it. Forward elements of the Imperial boarders had already found them, and were shooting down at Kreoss’ men from the upper gantries.

“Where’s our extraction ship!?” a soldier was yelling as he ducked behind one of the barricades, automatically deployed by the station’s machine spirit to give them some semblance of advantage.

“Mors and her fleet will be here shortly!” answered another, who had a white-knuckle grip on the vox set he had linked to the nearest astropath’s eyrie.

“Shortly relative to what, frakking plate tectonics?”

A high-pitched shriek tore through the station, brutal as a stun grenade. The gunfire from both ends of the gallery briefly ceased as both Imperials and Patriots flinched.

“What the frak was that?”

An old soldier who had a voidsman’s wheel among his myriad tattoos spat on the steel deck. “Warp transition, close.”

Extremely frakking close, Kreoss knew. Any closer and the translating ships would have risked scouring the Glom and half the planet with a brain-melting psychic shockwave.

“I thought there wasn’t no sound in space.” a plasma operator grunted, gritting his teeth against his weapon’s hissing discharge.

“Yeah,” cackled the void veteran. “Tell that to the immaterium.”

“Well they’d better be ours, or else we’re...ah shit!”

The latter was directed down the loading bay, where the Imperials had just breached the main cargo doors. Before a barrage of smoke grenades enveloped them, Kreoss caught a glimpse of green-armoured men with full-body boarding shields, linking up to form a phalanx.

As murder-red lasbolts pelted down from the gantries and the defenders spat back venom-green, a series of heavy thuds resonated through the deck beneath Kreoss’ feet. The arches overhead, ribbing the gallery like the bones of a great gothic whale, collapsed to the floor one after the other on a bow wave of molten shards. The thermite sparks were still writhing across the floor when the rappelling lines spooled down from the newly-cut holes and men began to descend like metal beads. Kreoss saw wild, hard-bitten men carrying short-stocks and boarding axes, but the soldier who crunched down next to him was armoured from head to toe in heavy carapace; face hidden by a black-visored helm, an oversized autogun swinging down to join the other reinforcements unloading on the Imperial armsmen.

“Clear the gantries and the main entrance.” the Nebula barked. The voice from behind their helmet was female, and the hololith flickering at her chestplate read Capt A Tarran. “We’ve got squads securing the hanger bays so our frigate can get your men out of here.”

[Atrum Daemon]

The Agglomeration
Zero Hour +8
Maniple Objective: Assist in the Barracks Defense

“Well this is a fine predicament,” Anarkos said as he approached Kreoss and Tarran, flashing his biometric identification. There was plasma weapon slung across his back and his hand gripped a bolt pistol. The maniple had been there to run drills along side the Menoth troops. He was eerily calm given the situation and his soldiers had snapped to action as best they were able. Galvanic rifles let out sharp cracks against the snaps of lasrifles as the Skitarii returned fire from relatively covered positions.

Underneath the vat-grown flesh, the Skitarii were all suitably augmented and Donovan the most out of the bunch. Though the extent of his augments was only obvious through the way his eyes shined. It was a wish of the Dominus that the Skitarii be outwardly human in appearance since they fought alongside the hulking robots of the Cybernetica. But there was little time or point in appearances as such and Donovan showed as much when a stray lasbolt glanced off near the right side of his face, charring away the cheek to reveal the bionics beneath. He identified the source of the shot and fired his pistol in return, blasting off the offending soldier’s right arm at the shoulder.

“Well the Nebulas make this feel almost like home,” the Tribune said as he looked between Kreoss and Tarran, “but that’s beside the point. This is a sub-optimal situation, certainly. My men can keep the suppression up but not too long. Close quarters are not the best for galvanic rifles in the long term.”

The Skitarii had been running long-range drills but tended to use their arc rifles for closer quarters like indoors. Anarkos knew his men could make do but it was, as he said, sub-optimal. He was not attempting to talk down to the Captain, just make her aware of how his men were able to operate as he simply did not expect non-Mechanicus to understand how Skitarii functioned.

[dakkagor]

“Well the Nebulas make this feel almost like home,” the Tribune said as he looked between Kreoss and Tarran, “but that’s beside the point. This is a sub-optimal situation, certainly. My men can keep the suppression up but not too long. Close quarters are not the best for galvanic rifles in the long term.”

"Then its a good thing we aren't relying on you toaster fondler's to actually do any work." Growled a huge, bearded slab of meat and flak that emerged from behind Tarrans armoured form. Looming behind the man was an even larger square shouldered killer carrying a vox in one hand and a las-carbine in another. Briefly, the first man turned and yelled orders in a deafening bellow at nearby special weapon troopers who had arrived with the handful of Nebulas. Grenade launchers soon joined the Skitarii counter fire, lobbing frags into the wedge of advancing boarders while accurate hails of lasfire broke up the formation and drove it back.

"Jarn Hassek, Colonel, Damned 88th, I'm your ride. So if you could kindly unscrew your thumb from out your arse, and reattach it to a tentacle or other appendage, we might get out of here alive. Once our ship swings back around we'll have minutes to get those dress wearing kiddy fondlers and your cog fuckers out via the transit ways. So have your 'men' ready to leave."

As he spoke, more teams fast roped into the cavernous training bay. Some of these carried flamers and stank of promethium, while others carefully manhandled a standard, rust red munitorum armoured container down from the roof and into the bay. The flamer troopers bulled forwards and washed several of the access points with roaring curtains of flame, while a stout woman covered in flame tattoos and stinking of promethium jelly emerged from inside the container, slamming it shut and giving Jarn a thumbs up and a manic grin.

The Colonel’s crude speech aside, the Tribune was at least pleased there was a way off the station. Magos Dominus Krypter was, as Anarkos’s interface told him, readying to depart with the five robots that made up the heart of the maniple: four Castellex and one mighty Thanatar. Binaric commands left the Tribune and the Skitarii obeyed in due haste, maneuvering from their static positions while keeping up suppressive fire to positions closer to the heart. They would be ready to depart at a moment’s notice.
“We’re ready to go as soon as your ship comes back. That’s quite the parting gift you’re leaving.”
The grin on the Tribune’s face was made more sinister since he was missing almost half the skin. He had a great appreciation for all manner of fiery destruction and it was only due to the heavy emotional suppressants in his augments that he was not more outwardly pleased about it. The sooner they could get off that deathtrap of a station and to a proper battlefield, the better.

"Oh yes, it should be an explosive parting gift!" the woman cackled as she snapped a pair of goggles onto her soot covered space, and was then handed a flamer. "Now, sirs, if you'll excuse me, I need to introduce some Imperials to the concept of irony." She took of at a jog, and a fierce cheer came up from the barbaric renegades as they surged across the hanger bay, driving back the Imperial boarders.

"We'll launch a counter attack, shake the cunts loose of the perimeter and drive them back. Once we've got some breathing space, we can pull out by the numbers." The brutish Hassek flicked a look towards the Nebula officer. "If that's alright with the hero of the Rebellion."

[Azazeal849]

"We'll launch a counter attack, shake the cunts loose of the perimeter and drive them back. Once we've got some breathing space, we can pull out by the numbers." The brutish Hassek flicked a look towards the Nebula officer. "If that's alright with the hero of the Rebellion."

The captain’s sleek, black-visored helmet jerked down and up, the current situation giving little time to respond to baiting. “There’ll be a Nebula platoon covering the hanger bay to make sure our escape route stays clear. Tribune, I’m going to clear that gantry so you can put your Rangers up there. First squad, with me!”

That last was evidently directed into her helmet vox, as she took off at a sprint towards the flanking wall of the cargo module.

“Holy shit.” captain Kreoss murmured.

“That was Alicia Tarran.” blurted his vox officer.

“I know it was Alicia Tarran, that’s why I just said holy shit.”

Ahead the 88th’s flamer teams had opened up with a whooshing roar, adding palls of black smoke to the white already choking the module’s air scrubbers. Despite their heavy armour, the Imperials did what every human in history had done when targeted with flame weaponry - turned and fled. Shotguns and boarding shields clattered to the ground as a few men threw them away in their haste to flee.

“What do you think she’s cooking in there, sir?” Kreoss’ plasma gunner asked, jerking his head towards the huge storage crate the barbarians had lowered into the middle of the cargo bay.

“Dunno.” Kreoss had to admit uneasily, as he waved his men forward. “But my guess is a ten megatonne nameday cake.”


+ + + + + +

Alicia Tarran sprinted towards one of the collapsed arches ribbing the module, myomer bundles whining as they took the weight of her armour, feet darting left and right as she weaved through bursts of tracer fire. Satrophene combat stimms were singing through her bloodstream, sharpening every sight and sound, and letting her draw some semblance of meaning from the multiple auspex feeds pinging in from her fellow Nebulas. It was an effective cocktail, albeit a physiologically corrosive one. Even after the post-combat antidote flush, she knew she would be puking her guts up back on the Exitos tonight.

The Tâin was silent, and for the moment she was grateful of the fact.

Alicia launched herself at the wall, and let her suit’s booster jets kick her upwards on a pillar of fire. She slapped the wall with her palm, and a mag-lock in her glove secured her to the wall. The Nebulas of Makinde’s First Squad jetted upward and thunked into the wall beside her.

“How the frak did hired killers like the 88th end up on the governor's payroll?” Makinde growled as they boosted higher, locking against the wall level with and fifty meters wide of the gantry.

“Killed the right people, I expect.” Alicia commented, unslinging her modular assault rifle. Lasbolts cracked against her contoured armour as the Imperials on the gantry realised what they were doing. There wasn’t supposed to be any killing at all.

Alicia didn’t need to see her antagonists; the Glavian-style circuitry running through her limbs and linking her to her armour also linked her to fellow Nebulas on the ground and above the breached ceiling, who still had some modicum of sightlines through the fire and smoke. Grimly she swung her right arm round and let her armour absorb the recoil as her assault rifle jackhammered. Her fire line converged with First Squad’s to sweep the Imperial armsmen clear of the gantry in a flurry of sparks and blood.

“Tribune!” she voxed, nudging her communicator onto the skitarii channel with a blink-click. “Get your men up here now!”


+ + + + + +

The rattling air circulators had all but given up, and the smoke in the cargo bay was now thick enough to choke. Fire from the Menoth infantry slackened off as men without goggles or rebreathers simply collapsed to their knees behind their barricades, coughing and retching. In contrast, the deploying Jotunhel veterans found themselves coming under punishing fire as the Imperials regrouped at the cargo handling belts, using the conveyors and the half-closed bay doors for cover. The smoke evidently wasn’t bothering the fully-enclosed armsmen as they fired back in an attempt to keep Herkja’s flamer teams out beyond their effective range.

Hassek heard the distinctive bang-whoosh-bang of a bolt shell, and surmised that someone had just paid the price for throwing away their weapon in the previous retreat. The heavy armsmen were ranking up again, this time with covering fire, and forming a steel testudo to countercharge the resurgent defenders. Hassek caught a brief glimpse of the bolt pistol wielder through the smoke, almost indistinguishable from the other diver-suit armsmen except from the sword in his other hand and the black commissar’s band on his arm. A moment later he had vanished, and another volley of skittering, smoke-spewing grenade canisters bounced across the floor as a foreign voice roared the order to attack.

[Atrum Daemon]

“High up, boys! Marksman priority, the rest of us prepare for closer engagements.”

A series of red-clad soldiers charged up the gantry, folding out into a firing line along it and picking targets at their leisure. The sharp cracks of their rifles rang out starkly as they fired upon the Imperial masses below, volleys meant to dishearten and harass at first before picking out targets of priority or opportunity such as officers or weapon specialists.

The rest on the ground formed up around the Tribune in covered positions, a few drawing side arms and arc weapons in preparation for closer quarters. Donovan slung his rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger after sighting down the advancing formation. A glaring volley of plasma fire erupted from the weapon to rake the front rows of the advance. The caliver burst was meant more as a distraction with the display of light that came with the volley as well as the destructive intent. The Tribune quickly released the trigger and ducked down behind a raised barrier, thanking Omnissiah and Machine Spirit that the weapon had been true to him yet again.

There was little for it now but to wait until the Colonel’s men were ready for their counterattack. Donovan relayed to his troops to join in at their best when it happened as he did not want them to be shown up too badly by a cadre of fleshlings. And the Tribune was taking this whole mess as a lesson in continued preparedness for engagements. The lion’s share of the Rangers were on the gantry firing down at the Imperials while a small number were with him, ready to charge. What wider surveys he could access from his position at least told him that the rest of the Maniple was active but he could not safely contact them. The Sicarians would be a wonderful asset right then.

But luck was a raging bitch more often than not for him.

[dakkagor]

"You didn't bring rebreathers! You fucking moron! Your damn whore of a mother must have been drunk when she shat you into existence! All of you child fondling church buggerers are fucking idiots!"

Jarn was yelling at the choking, blue faced menite crumpled next to him. His own tirade was muffled by the rebreather mask over his face, Kantreal MKXIII rebreather with filter, good for 2 hours of combat in low oxygen, toxic or smoke heavy environments. They had stolen these from a fat munitorum cargo hauler years ago and he had kept them for just such a smoky day.

He reached down and grabbed the menite by the ruff of his robes. The man clawed at his arm and his masked face, leaving streaky sweat marks on his plastek visor.

"Go fucking see what the imperials are doing!"

With a grunt, he hurled the man over the barricade. He listened to the man stumbled blindly forwards, and then the rattling thump of combat shotguns, and the wet sounds of flesh tearing.

The imperials were getting closer, then. Careful not to breath in the toxic smoke, he lifted his mask, spat, and pulled it securely into place.

"88 Actual to all units on the perimeter! Prepare to resist storm assault!"

Grenades clattered over the barricade. Jarn kicked one away and Ulf threw one back to detonate dully against the steel shields of the boarders. He heard screams and explosions from along the line, and yells for medics. He tuned it out, waited for the moment, watched as the enemy picked up the pace and broke into their charge, letting the fire slacken for just a second.

"Now! Now!"

Jarn leapt to his feet, Ulf a step behind him, and two squads of infantry. Meltas brought to burn through bulkheads catching men mid stride and blasting them to ash, krak grenades punching through shields in plumes of fire. There were a lot less of them than he expected, and the beams of searing white light from the gantry explained that. The hereteks were doing their job at least. Shotguns roared and lasguns spat back as Jarn and his men covered the short distance to the enemy in a mad counter charge.

The Damned hit the line like a battering ram. Jarn shouldered into the press, bolt pistol spitting death and his axe taking a kill tally. He carved through three men in as many blows, and into the breach his squad poured in, firing point blank and attacking with their own hull-axes and chainblades. A blow sent his pistol spinning away, so Jarn snatched up a shield, ramming its edge into a mans neck and stepping over his twitching corpse to tear another man down. He roared heresies at the Imperials, damning their Emperor, their priests, their officers, them. His men bayed for vengeance for their lost homes, loves, lives. The pent up fury was a physical force pushing them forwards, breaking the solid block of Imperials apart until Jarn was suddenly clear of the scrum, breathing in ragged gasps as he came face to face with the commissar.

"And fuck you especially, hangman." He snarled. He threw the battered bloodstained shield to one side and drew his second axe as the Commissar raised a chainsword and charged.


+ + + + + +

Droplaug leaned slightly to the right, and extended her right arm, locking it out with an axe braced and ready.

They said she didn't feel anything any more. That it had all been burned out of her, except for her hate. That was the barracks rumour, anyway.
That wasn't true.
She felt the impact run up her arm, the tremor of the axe carving through a Commissars yielding neck. She flicked the axe clean and re-sheathed it as she and her squad raced on.
She felt good about that as she came to a stop just behind her Colonel.


+ + + + + +

Jarn huffed as the body of the Commissar slid to a halt at his feet. He turned and stomped towards Droplaug, pressing her face mask against his.

"Took your fucking time!" He yelled.

"Sorry Sir, getting the scrambler company aboard took some doing." Droplaug pulled out a map and spread it across the grumbling engine of her bike. "We've cut into their rear here, here, here. Blown up this transit way and left some flamer teams to set fires and retreat behind them."

"Good! We'll push up to here, hold them at this throughfare. Its a market?"

"Yes. Some prime looting, women and children and the like."

"Get to it!"

Droplaug broke the hold and roared away. Jarn gestured Ulf over from where he had been stamping on the necks of downed armsmen, the remainder dead or retreating. He grabbed the vox and started issuing orders. With the charge broken and its reinforcements in disarray, they could finally push the imperials back and make some breathing room.


+ + + + + +

Starolf told his rider to bring his bike to a halt as they neared the mechanicus reactor-shrine. The double doors were clearly designed for keeping people out, and they had the mechanicus symbol, half skull, half machine, haloed by a cog, stamped in the middle in brass. Starolf had no particular love of the mechanicus. Like all of the Jotunhel natives, he held them to blame for the destruction of his homeworld. However, he had taken pains to understand them. He knew that most of them were drones, no better than ice bettles, following the orders of their queens. A squad of his hand picked scouts dismounted, leaving two dozen bikes and a pair of stripped down tauroxs ready to take on plunder.

Four skitarii emerged from alcoves on the walls leading to the door, and halted his progress with held out hands.

"STATE YOUR BUSINESS"

"Evacuation." Starolf shrugged. "If you haven't noticed, the station is about to fall. The order is to evacuate anyone we can, and your priests are high value assets."

There was a moment as the skitarii communicated with its master in the temple.

"NEGATIVE. MECHANICUS SECT PURSUES NEUTRALITY IN INTER-IMPERIAL CONFLICT. EVACUATION NOT REQUIRED. PLEASE LEAVE."

Starolf grabbed the skitarii by the shoulder, jammed a pistol under his helmet and blew its augmented head to chunks. His scouts snapped up lascarbines from ready positions and hosed down the robot-men with a blaze of fire, throwing broken bodies against the sealed portal.

"I wasn't asking."

Two of his scouts stepped forward and used the hull cutters they had brought for this purpose. The doors thundered backwards as they were cut apart, and Starolf led the advance. Another pair of skitarii ran fowards to bar their progress, and they were cut down with loose, brutal shots.

"Enough!" one of the priests yelled. "You bring violence into a holy place!" Starolf regarded the tech priest gliding towards him. He was heavily modified, with spindly arms designed for inputing data into the Imperiums cogitators, if he was any judge. Those arms were outstretched in a plea for mercy that Starolf knew all to well.

"Are you in charge here?" Starolf asked flatly.

"No. . .I speak for the magos of this reactor sector." He gestured towards a towering thing that was tottering towards them on three piston legs with a wheezing, galvanic hump and a face of waving, frond like data jacks.

"Will he issue an evacuation order for this sector of the station, under the orders of Governor Tierce?"

"He will not."

Starolf nodded. He cast an eye on the adepts around him. Data punchers, gear heads and grease jackers. Very few seemed like a threat. All seemed cowed by the display of violence that had left a handful of Skitarii smoking heaps on the floor.

"Shame that." He snapped his fingers, and his men opened fire. The lumbering tripod priest went down in a hail of lasbolts that set his oily red robes alight. The priest crumpled to the floor with a pitiful code laced squeal, where two of the scout cadre repeatedly bayoneted him until he stopped moving.

"Congratulations on the promotion, Magos." Starolf clamped a hand and a vice grip on the priests shoulder. "Now, I ask you, will you issue an evacuation order for this sector of the station, under the orders of Governor Tierce? Or do I need to promote someone else?"

The olive coloured, broad featured tech priest regarded him with very mortal fear in his eyes, before casting a glance at the ruined hulk that had been dismembered on the floor, and the two dead skitarii in the temple precinct.

"I will."

"Good man. Err. Thing. Whatever. What's your name, anyway?"

"I am Enginseer Brandt (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=74089&page=3&p=2617959&viewfull=1#post2617959)."

"Brandt. Good solid name that, Magos." He threw an arm around the priests shoulders and guided him towards the doors. The scrambler drivers were now hauling det-packs and demo charges into the reactor-temple, even as the scouts hurried the other priests out of the temple.

"We've got a lovely ship for you to visit, real killer, one of a kind. I know you'll love it aboard, and we have some positions available that would be right up your street."

[Azazeal849]

The claustrophobic mask amplified Jarn’s laboured breathing. The adrenaline singing through his blood almost wiped out the burning in his muscles, but sweat was pouring down his face and fogging his mask lenses. Not that he could see much through them any more.

It was a surreal, ugly scene. Thick smoke climbed like swamp fog up towards the gothic arches of the loading bay, shrouding deck plates that were slippery and stinking with red. The scrambler bikes growled through the smoke like ghostly beasts, drawing wild fire from the enemy armsmen - and even a few of the Menites who were unfamiliar with the sound and took them to be Imperial aggressors.

The melee before the barricades petered out as the attackers’ cohesion slowly disintegrated. Jarn heard a bark of pain on his left, as an armsman fled the wrong way through the dense smoke and blundered straight into a Jotunhel gun sight. A lasbolt punched him skidding onto his knees, a second took off the flak-gloved hand he was raising, and another six or seven eventually penetrated his thick armour and battered him to the blood-slick deck.

Heavy shotgun blasts up ahead told Jarn that a couple of his men had pursued too far and met the same fate, or else the Imperials pinned down by the cargo belts had accidentally shot their own retreating comrades. The only ones still retaining a modicum of effectiveness seemed to be the skitarii. Jarn heard a voice through the smoke shouting “Fulmen! Fulmen armsmen to me!”, only to be silenced by the deadly thwip of a galvanic rifle.

Donovan Anarkos would never have admitted it in front of the baselines, but even his superior optics were struggling to penetrate the blooms of hot smoke that scrambled both visible and infrared spectra. Nevertheless he knew the general situation: the loyalists were disorganised - pinned down at the doors and the conveyors just beyond, fire slackening as they tried not to shoot their retreating comrades. A heavy crash beside him announced captain Tarran dropping back down from the gantry.

“Frakking smoke.” the Nebula captain cursed. “If the rest of the men had suits we could just void the deck… They’re going to break, tribune. We’ll lead and bullet-sponge for you and the light infantry. Form up at the barricades and-”

A clunk sounded somewhere ahead of Donovan, and then a chain of others, running left to right across the gallery. It was followed by a whine of hydraulics and the ratcheting turn of cogwheels.

“Oh no…” a Menite huddled behind the barricade in front of Donovan cursed in panic. “Oh shitting frak, no!” The scarred ceramite barrier he and his comrades were sheltering behind was slowly sinking back into the floor.

Tarran had a gauntlet pressed to the side of her helmet, apparently receiving a vox update.

“Great.” the Nebula cursed through her teeth. “Their friends further in must have brought an enginseer and got into the module’s control systems. Come on, we need to move!”

The Imperial shotcannons were barking again: still blindly, but now they didn’t need accuracy to tear puffs of red through the smoke. Luck, Donovan reflected, was indeed a raging bitch.

[dakkagor]

"Oh fuck me."

Jarn watched as his cover disappeared. Some frakking loyalist cogboy no doubt.

"Everyone grab shields! Quickly!"

The deck was fairly littered with dead armsman, but no-where near enough for all his soldiers. But it would make a difference. With the skill of people who had lived through nightmare fragfests by stripping the dead and the dying, the Jotunhel renegades dug in, ripping shields and spare rebreathers from the dead and dying. Jarn quickly formed up a platoons worth with mostly intact shields, while his few heavy and special weapon teams began to haul piles of bodies, friends, enemies and allies alike, and dump them down as bleeding barricades.

"My damn ship had better get back here soon or we are dead men." Jarn growled. He gestured for Ulf who handed him the vox. "Droplaug, new orders! They've got a command post back from the bay, with a cog boy in attendance. Find them and kill them!"

There was a burp of static in reply. He thought he made out Droplaugs voice, but he couldn't be sure.

"Keep trying until you get confirmation!" He tossed the speaker unit back to Ulf and took a quick headcount. 25? 30 at a push? Visibility was frag all.

"You see something, you tap the guy on your left and right! We hold here, not a step back!"

And we hope the witch hasn't left us to hang.

[Atrum Daemon]

“Oh dammit all!” Donovan watched as their cover vanished. Loyalist enginseer for certain and now a priority target in his mind. “Boys, adapt for low visibility. Weapons close and prepare to engage in the smoke. Watch each other close and tag potential targets for focus. Marksmen above, keep the pressure on and those loyalists suppressed. Rest of you, advance up with me! Anything in the smoke gets removed.”

Side arms and deadly knives appeared in the hands of the Skitarii. They moved forward from what had been a good barricade and began their push under the cover of continued rifle fire. Their target was ultimately the same as Jarn’s: the command post with the techpriest. It had to be done and they had to gain ground one way or another. The loyalists lessening their fire could pay dividends for them as they moved into the unavoidable smoke. They came upon a few loyalists trying to retreat their way through the obscuring cover and cut them down in a brutal salvo of pistol fire before spreading their numbers out so as not to make an obvious spot as they advanced.

“Don’t waste any chances. A necessary risk is all this is, boys.”

[Azazeal849]

The Imperials were already trickling back into the ring-hub, their retreat covered by a thin, grim line of veterans holding behind the cargo conveyors. Gunfire ripped back and forth as they exchanged fire with the advancing skitarii, scattershot criss-crossing with the hissing glow of radium and phosphex. Donovan’s implants filtered out the sound of a sergeant screaming at his men to switch to armour-piercing slugs.

At a hand signal from Tarran, the black-armoured Nebulas shouldered forward to take the brunt of the enemy fire, returning it full-auto from their long rifles. Heavy penetrators battered into boarding shields to send the men behind them skidding and stumbling. Co-ordinated fire from each Nebula’s wingman punched through exposed helmets and torsos as the shields slipped. A Nebula near the centre of the line cursed and went down onto one knee as a shotcannon slug destroyed the myomer bundles in his right leg. He jammed his rifle back into his shoulder and fired a sawing burst before glancing back at Jarn’s men, contempt evident even through his matte-black visor.

“Are you coming or not, you mercenary fraks!?” he bawled at the Jotunhel shield line.

Donovan saw flashes of light through the smoke as the Nebulas ahead of him activated their jet packs, lowered their shoulders and boosted straight into the Imperial rearguard. The cargo conveyors and surrounding machinery disintegrated as the Nebulas bulldozed through, opening up gaping holes for the pursuing skitarii to exploit. Donovan’s soldiers set about themselves with lethal precision, and soon there were no combat-effective armsmen who were not already falling back. The rangers exchanged desultory fire with the last few armsmen leapfrogging away down the hub, who soon peeled away from the shredded walls and disappeared.

“Area secure.” the Nebula who had ended up beside Donovan reported into his helmet vox. His armour was bullet-scored and flecked with blood, but evidently none of it was his. He turned to Donovan. “Tribune, did you say it was an enemy enginseer that took down the barricades?”

“Well we can’t stay here and wait for them.” captain Tarran broke in, shrugging away a spasm in a damaged shoulder joint as she rejoined the others. “With the barriers down this loading bay is one big shooting gallery.”


+ + + + + +

Objective secured: Defend barracks module
New objective: Disrupt Imperial staging area

“They’ve got a command...ack from the bay, with a cogboy in atten...them and kill them.”

Droplaug received the scrambled vox transmission, and unfortunately understood enough of it to know that Jarn was ordering her to turn away from the market. Unfortunately, she and the first of her scrambler bikes had already just thundered down the adjoining ring module and ramped over the mezzanine deck into it.

The market had once been another cargo module. Now it was a shanty-town of prefabs and temporary structures that had grown up in this hub between the docks and the inner modules; a maze of flimsy structures pitched up with no real regard for civic planning. As Droplaug’s squadron skidded to a halt and regrouped, a few jumpsuit-clad civilians who had not had the good sense to take cover inside when the fighting started screamed and scattered, fleeing from the wild-looking Jotunhel bikers. Angrier shouts followed, and then the unwelcome crack of lasfire.

Suddenly armed men were boiling up from both ends of the street: red-robed skitarii and armsmen in their heavy void suits. Plastek walls and tottering stacks of produce exploded, causing the civilians cowering in their prefabs to scream anew. Four Jotunhel bikers were punched from their mounts in as many seconds, and the scrambler beside Droplaug roared and backflipped as a dead hand convulsed on the accelerator.

“Fuck!” one of her bikers swore vehemently as he slewed his scrambler around and gunned the engine. “The market is their command post!”

[dakkagor]

“Are you coming or not, you mercenary fraks!?” he bawled at the Jotunhel shield line.

"You heard the fucker, advance!" Jarn bellowed, gesturing forwards with his axe. With a clatter, the improvised shield line jogged forwards to catch up with the Nebula's. Jarn would never admit it out loud in front of the Adranteans, but he had thought all the talk about the Nebula's had been just that: talk. Seeing them in action was different. They were impressive, and deserved respect. But Jarn had fought the Imperiums Angels of Death, and lost. He had seen better.

“Well we can’t stay here and wait for them.” captain Tarran broke in, shrugging away a spasm in a damaged shoulder joint as she rejoined the others. “With the barriers down this loading bay is one big shooting gallery.”

"I might have some people on that." Jarn had jogged up beside the officers, Ulf in tow again as his men spread out to make best use of whatever cover was left. "Get me a decent vox link in this shit-can and I can confirm one way or another."


++++++

"Spread out! By the numbers!" Droplaug yelled into her vox, and peeled away from the sudden wave of Imperial reinforcements. In one smooth motion she unlimbered a grenade launcher, and punched a shot down range over her shoulder. She grinned in satisfaction as the krak grenade found a skitarii torso and explosively disassembled them. Around her she could hear other squads hitting and running, harassing the enemy with blasts from autoguns, shotguns and whatever specialist weapons they had been able to pry away from Herkja and Starolf. She had no flamers, but she did have a good supply of launchers and smoke, and they leaned on that now.

"Boss!" One of her troopers yelled. She pulled up next to him as he gestured to a length of flakboard leaned up on a shipping container. A wheelbarrow, on its side and spilling its contents of salvaged parts, lay nearby, clearly abandoned.

"A ramp and gangway system? Where does it go?"

"No idea. Gotta be better than here."

Droplaug was inclined to agree. But they'd need a distraction to make best use of it.

+Droplaug, you still alive in here?+

From the other side of the market, a series of fireballs reached to the high ceiling, accompanied by panicked new screaming. The whole market chamber seemed to shake. Herkja.

"I won't be if you keep cutting the hull!" She unfolded her map again, orientating it as the man next to her summoned a few more squads over. "Can you pin them there?"

+Oh you know me, I love killing cog boys! They burn so good!+

"Then hold your position. I need to find and kill one specific toaster fucker."

She killed the vox link and nodded to her man nearby. He started gesturing for bikers to scramble up the ramp, abandoning their bikes. Droplaug followed.

"Hold your fire until we have him." Droplaug ordered to the squad as they moved forwards. It was different up here, more exposed. She wondered if the mechanicus had deployed any of their snipers. She hoped not. Around her, bikers pushed forwards as quietly as they could, autopistols and lascarbines at the ready.

[Azazeal849]

Droplaug, Imperial-held cargo module

In the end, they found it almost by accident.

The twisting warren branched off into pump stations and rumbling air handlers and stripped-out chambers, several of which had been taken over by squatters and converted into grubby dens of blankets and empty ration cans. But after perhaps a kilometre the decorations above the bulkheads changed from imperial aquilas to mechanicus cog skulls, and after creeping down a wide flight of stairs they found themselves in a long corridor, and at the end of the corridor was a shrine to the machine god.

Something bulky and tall and cylindrical had been erected inside the shrine. Plug cables snaking from its rearside had been jacked into a number of the surrounding cogitators, and its front was festooned with panels and dish-shaped receivers. A tech-priest stood in prayer before the machine, a green sash across his red robe marking him as a shipboard enginseer. His human hands were folded into a cog, while spidery machine arms hooked over his shoulders to glide across the panels like a church pianist working an organ. Except the song of this organ was shill, teeth-itching bursts of static, and its music spelled death for the soldiers trying to hold the cargo deck.

A Navy officer who wore flak instead of a heavy armsmen’s void suit was hovering by the priest’s shoulder, presumably urging him to hurry, though his shouts were drowned out by the hellish binary drone. Two fully-armoured armsmen stood guard and it was they who reacted first, bellowing a warning as they swung their heavy shotcannons to bear.

Droplaug’s bikers fired first, sending tube-launched grenades spinning down the narrow vestibule. A deafening triple-bang rocked the section, and shrapnel cut the four imperials over like the sweep of a scythe. The tech-priest twitched onto his back, slopping intestines across the floor, and let out an awful static-distorted wail before his augmetic arms clawed up like those of a dead spider and went still. The officer pawed at the hole where his right eye had been for half a second before dying with a ugly shudder. One of the armsmen lived just long enough for Droplaug to saunter over and crunch her axe through his armoured faceplate.

“That’ll be that, then.” one of her companions commented gruffly, as he jerked the one unsevered cable out of its cogitator and inspected the smoking ruin of the machine the cogboy had been tending.

Droplaug fiddled with her vox, trying to re-establish a line to Herkja or Hassek through the intervening layers of iron. All she got was static, though she could still hear the heavy thuds of Herkja’s demolitions through the walls. That she hadn’t caused a catastrophic structural failure and ripped some section of the hull open to hard vacuum was a small miracle. Over the distant rattle of explosions, she could just make out the blast of shotguns and the steady, overlapping sizzle of las-weapons. Something else too - something that kicked and barked with percussive force.

It almost sounded like bolter fire.


+ + + + + +

Patriot-held cargo module

“Frakking hell!” a Menoth infantryman complained. “They never gonna get tired of shooting at us?”

His grievance was directed at the armsmen who were lurking at the far end of the linking spar. They had pushed the imperials back from the cargo conveyors; back further beyond the transfer lifts that sank cargo away into the berths below; and finally out of the module entirely, along the four narrow umbilicals that linked them to an adjacent power module. Judging by the clashing hues of metalwork along the corridor, the generator section had originally belonged to an entirely different ship. At the end of the umbilicals the imperials had turned and so their pursuers had halted, neither side willing to make a suicidal rush along the long, narrow spars that joined their module precariously to the next.

There was nothing but dead and crippled men in the five hundred metres separating the Patriots from the imperials, and a squad of Anarkos’ rangers were keeping the imperials bottled up beyond the far bulkhead, but every minute or so an enemy armsman would break cover and snap a burst of laser light their way, or try to dash forward to one of the carved arches ribbing the hallway.

The skitarius behind the infantryman didn’t answer his question, only reloaded his rifle and sent another galvanic round zipping down the spar. It was stalemate, but that was sufficient for the current directive - they merely needed to push the imperials back until the mercenary kill-teams had done their work.

Back in the cargo module, turned into open killzone by the deactivation of the barricades, Jarn and Donovan could only wait. The Nebulas had taken their leave: Tarran’s squad to the besieged eyrie spire to chivy the astropaths there to safety, and the rest to hold open their escape route back towards the hanger bays. The Patriot ships were coming to pick them up, or so the vox messages from the eyrie promised.

Jarn was more interested in receiving a message from Herkja or Droplaug, but while his vox operator continued to curse and slap at her bulky handheld, it was instead Starolf’s unit that came pounding out of the smoke-choked side tunnels. They were accompanied by a column of red-robed figures, with a few bewildered-looking menials scattered among them. Most of the unaugmented, overalls-clad menials had their hands up and were casting scared looks at the brutal Jotunhel mercenaries, but the tech-priests walked in unconcerned silence. Starolf shot his commander a sly grin as he waved the prisoners past.

“Tribune Anarkos.” a voice clipped over Donovan’s earbead vox, untroubled by the poor signal that plagued the cruder Jotunhel sets. “Squad Kappa reporting. Enemy combatants pinned down beyond the connector spar. Intercepted audio indicates enemy reinforcements inbound. Request order update.”

Objective secured: Disrupt Imperial command module
New objective: Evacuate the Glom

[dakkagor]

"Torch it." Droplaug snarled. As her small strike team fell back by the numbers, one of her men with a hand flamer moved up and washed the machine with a wave of burning promethium. She didn't want even the chance of someone repairing the damn thing.

"Now we fall back. And pray that we don't get left behind."

Her men jogged up the wide set of stairs, many holding pistols for quick response in the warren of tunnels they would soon enter in the atmosphere processing sections. Droplaug counted them off and slapped her voxman on the shoulder as he kept working his set, trying to reach Herkja.

As they fell back into the warren, the bolter fire caught up with them. Rounds spanked off pipes and walls, and two men dropped in chunks. Droplaug dropped into cover and returned fire before crabbing backwards under a heavy pipe.

The flashes, the profile of the armour, the tremor of the deck. . . For a horrible second, Droplaug was watching the Astartes rout her finest warriors with contemptuous ease again. But above the roar of the bolters was the sound of female voices raised in song to their cursed dead god. . .

"I have Herkja!" Her voxman cried as they fell back, now being definitely chased by the thudding bootsteps of power armour. Droplaug grabbed the horn away from him and yelled into it.

"Sisters! Herkja, we have sisters coming, and you took all my fucking cookers!"

+++++

A moment ago, Herkja had been admiring her work. The market was a blazing ruin, and her men were laden down with all manner of booty, and few civvy prisoners to haul it all back to the ships.

Now she was running her short, flame retardant arse off.

Droplaug was only a few minutes away. She had the rest of Droplaugs command with her, and her own specialists. About 300 soldiers. Ahead of her, they were falling into cover and lining up for support fire.

At the far end of the market, with a nice lane blasted and burned through the lean toos and scrap hovels, Herkja saw Droplaug and her fireteams emerge from a transit way, running at full pelt.

"The trench you silly bitch!" She yelled into the vox. She watched as Droplaug's eyes widened and she threw herself into the ripped up crawlway, as good as a trench dirtside, and her men piled in next to her. At the hatch, hulking armoured figures emerged from the gloom, bolters blazing.

She didn't even need to issue the order. The entire transit way exploded under heavy fire, crew served autocannon, grenade launchers, and a wall of lasrifle fire. They kept it up for thirty seconds as Droplaug and her team crawled out of the side of the trench and out of the fire lane, then booked it through the shanty town and flopped down next to Herkja's men.

"Clear! Blow it!"

The market rumbled and shook, and the ceiling began to collapse. They were running again, scrambling back into corridors and accessways as bulkheads slammed shut behind them.

"Did you breach that section?" Droplaug asked, incredulous.

"I don't think so." Herkja shrugged. There was a dull roar, and a rumble that seemed to move up and down the station.

"Ah."

"Ah?!" Droplaug panted.

Herkja and her men set off at a dead sprint. With a breathless curse, Droplaug was a half step behind.

+++++

"Starolf, start looking into a way off this damn station."

The scout captain raised an eyebrow at his commander.

"I thought we were using the main accessway?"

Jarn looked into the distance, clearly deep in thought and shook his head slowly.

"I don't think the Eudomania would have bugged out like that unless the orbital fight wasn't going sideways fast. So, we'll probably only have a few minutes to get off this station before the Imperials close the net."

Starlof nodded. "I'll lean on our new assets. There should be some vehicle bays we can use to pack up our men, the loot, and the locals, as well as the few boats we pulled over ourselves."

"Make it happen."

+++++

Jarn jogged back to the front line, not exactly confident in Starolf, but knowing that hanging over the mans shoulder wouldn't get much done either. The vox was already noisy with units beginning to pull back from the rear areas, wounded and the captured civilian toaster fuckers going first. He had two reconstituted platoons holding the long corridors, along with a few sniper teams from Starolf.

Ulf pushed the vox receiver into his hand, and he automatically put it up to his ear.

"Go for Jotun Actual."

+Am I glad to hear your voice.+ Droplaug wheezed over the vox. +I'm incoming, mission accomplished. We have battle sisters following us in, so expect heavy company.+

He didn't bother asking for a confirmation, or even a number count. If Droplaug had known, she would have given him the numbers immediately. He instead checked his map on a nearby bulkhead.

"Head towards corridor A-23. Signal when you hit the Imps in the rear, and we'll push from the front. That should open a path for you to get back to us."

+Confirmed. See you soon.+

[Atrum Daemon]

“Acknowledged, Kappa,” Donovan replied, “redistribute and assume heavy reinforcement incoming.”

Donovan looked out across the spar from the position his men shared with Jarn’s. There was no easy way out but then again where was the fun in an easy victory? The Tribune was not pleased by the prospect of enemy reinforcements when they still had no clear means off the station. But if the fighting around the station was any indication, they might have a ride out sooner rather than later. “Allied forces identified,” barked one of the vanguard marksmen as he fired across the connector and clipped an Imperial. It was a benefit of the enhanced optics that they picked out Droplaug and her men as they made contact with the Imperial forces they were sharing fire with.

“Arrived right on time, colonel,” Donovan remarked to Jarn before he got an oddly distracted look to his eyes. “There’s a broadcast going over mainly Mechanicus local channels. An allied cruiser is preparing to dock but they need any survivors to make a fast exit.”

[Azazeal849]

The knots of Imperial resistance unravelled as Herkja and Droplaug’s men crushed into them from behind. Soon, the bloody and smoke-stained Jotunhel were racing along the connector spars, their footsteps crashing on the blood-slick grav plates.

The Menoth soldiers accompanying Kappa breathed a sigh of relief, rising to their feet as the feral worlders streamed past.

“Noble is our cause.” one man sighed, “Just is our reward.”

A Menoth corporal clapped the man on the shoulder and hauled on his combat webbing to pull him into the surge of moving soldiers. “Come on, Himinez, we’re retreating. Battle sisters coming.”

The younger soldier blinked as he was dragged along. “Are we headed for the hangers, corp?”

The corporal gave him another shove. “We’d be bloody fools if we didn’t. Move!”

Points of red pushed against the current of surging grey as Kappa’s scarlet-robed Vanguard redeployed to maximise their overwatch on the opposite ends of the spars. The footsteps of the baseline soldiers thundered a disorderly cacophony as they streamed back into the cargo module. Among the din were heavier, hollower footsteps. They were less rushed, more deliberate. Kappa scanned the retreating baselines and, finding no pattern match, frowned as he tagged the anomaly for his squadmates to triangulate. His augmetic ears filtered the noise, and directed his attention upward. The skitarius raised his head, just as the ceiling exploded.

One moment there was the rust-streaked girders and flickering strip-lights of the bridge; the next there was a ragged hole gaping into bottomless black. The struts of the bridge were severed and bent, trailing hourglass trickles of debris out into space as the black sucked up the last of the explosion and swallowed it. Kappa saw a graceful, sable-clad figure straddling the torn hull, black against black. Armoured feet mag-locked to the metal skin of the bridge, armoured hands gripping a boltgun whose muzzle was carved in the shape of a roaring dragon mouth. The dragon snapped towards Kappa, and its mouth spat fire and thunder.


+ + + + + +

The thumping explosions were swallowed by the wail of automated alarms, and the hydraulic screech of airtight doors scissoring closed across the mouths of the connector bridges. Men screamed as they were pulped beneath the guillotines of falling ceramite. Other men yelled in shock. There were more heavy thumps beyond the doors, muffled this time; and gunfire; and screams.

“What the mother fuck?” one of Herkja’s men yelled, spinning back towards the slamming doors. “The toaster-fuckers hacking us again?”

“Automated!” a Menoth soldier yelled back, having spent the last six months on the Glom. “Hull breach!”

Tribune Anarkos had no need for logical extrapolation - he could see it happening. Through the feeds of his rearguard skitarii, he could see explosions chaining off along the ceilings and walls of each spar, cracking open the steel hull of the bridges. Hostile combatants began to drop through the blast points; armsmen in their diver-like void suits, and night-black figures in sleek power armour. He saw sallet helms with smouldering eye-lenses, silver fleur-de-lys glinting in the sputtering light, boltguns and pistols adding their own light in lethal flashes. They were targeting his Vanguard first, ignoring the few Menoth and Jotunhel soldiers who had been trapped on the wrong side of the doors as they reeled and choked in the rapidly venting atmosphere.

The data feeds of his rearguard squad began to go dark with alarming speed. Within ten seconds there were less than half; within twenty there were none at all. And for the next ten seconds there was only chaos as the baselines continued their pell-mell retreat, or stopped in confusion and yelled for orders, or spun round and raised their weapons towards the airtight doors in search of the enemy beyond. This time it was colonel Hassek, standing at the far end of the cargo conveyor, who saw it first - one ceramite bulkhead and then another beginning to smoke and glow red; the gouging, glaring assault of a melta beam.

The doors shattered outwards, but the firewash that chased it was sucked back, and the air of the loading bay began to follow it with a hissing roar. The alarms began to shriek again, and now it was the airlocks leading to the hangers behind them that were slamming. The men around the conveyor belt were oblivious, their vision tunnelled by the adrenaline of the fight directly in front of them. Gunfire blazed back and forth. A single booming shot from a boltgun burst one of Jarn’s man open and threw him back ten metres. He hit the ground and carried on sliding until he crunched into the wall. Black-armoured sisters were struggling to climb through the molten holes in the blast doors, battered by the rushing air and the storm of concentrated return fire.

“Colonel, tribune.” a voice cut across the vox, surreally calm against the unfolding chaos. “Captain Tarran here. We’ve secured the astropaths. The Stella Rosa has pulled up alongside docking arm 3-12 and deployed umbilicals. They’ve unloaded servitors to cover us and your leading units are linking up with us now. What’s the ETA for the rest of you?”

[dakkagor]

Jarns bolt pistol kicked in his hand as he emptied the last of the magazine. Bolts slammed around and into the Sister as she forced herself through the hole, and something connected. The woman jerked like she had been kicked, then slumped forwards. Behind her, her sisters pushed her body aside and started firing.

"What’s the ETA for the rest of you?”

"Fucked if I know!" Jarn roared as he ducked behind cover. He looked across to Droplaug who was hunkered down nearby. She flicked up a hand, three fingers extended.

"3 minutes, I say again 3 minutes!" Jarn yelled into his microbead. His men knew their business. Squad by squad, section by section, they fell back under bounding fire as the Sisters forced more and more breaches, tearing melta-softened doors open with their armoured hands to allow them to push in in pairs and trios, boltguns barking. He watched Stepenvarn rise up to fire, and take a bolt shell to the chin that punched right through that ridiculous bum-fluff beard he insisted on and tear his head from his shoulders. He winced, rolled over to the blood spurting corpse, and got the lasrifle into his hands. He simply planted it on the conveyor, and not bothering to check his aim, emptied the cell and tossed it aside. The next second he was up, head low, and his section ran past one holding ground and pouring on everything they had.

"Anarkos! Get your arse and the menites out of my mens way! We need to break clean and I can't do that with those militia fucks clogging the access way!"

He didn't like admitting it, but he was putting a lot of faith in Anarkos to get the disorganised Militia falling back in good order. If the accessways became clogged in panicking bodies, then he would lose every man and woman he had deployed to the station.

As he dropped into cover, a bolt round winged his shoulder. The force was enough to spin him to the floor, where he slammed, rebreather mask first, into the deck, cracking the plastek and blacking him out. He awoke to someone jamming a stimm in his leg and smacking him in the head.

"Get up sir! Move!"

He stumbled to his feet, some unbidden reflex making him aim his last loaded bolt pistol behind him and spray a fan of shots. Bolt rounds seemed to fly by him in slow moving shoals of bright pricks of light.

Concussion. He realised groggily. He had no idea who was hauling him along. It didn't matter. Men dropped left and right as he was hauled down into cover again, breathing heavily. No. Struggling to breathe at all. The air was getting thin.

"Oh, fuck" He propped himself and looked back. The sisters were still on his tail. It would be up to Anarkos now to make sure he could get his people out before they either got boltered to pieces, or suffocated.

[Atrum Daemon]

“Docking arm 3-12!” Anarkos roared over the sounds of battle around them, ripping the bothersome remains of the synthetic skin from the leering sliver skull that was his cranial replacement. “Move with purpose, baselines, or be left behind! And if these Menoths don’t move out of the damn way, shoot them!”

Any pretense of social niceties needed to be discarded. It was either make it to the docked ship or die. There was no in-between and no second chances. The Skitarii’s weapons joined the covering salvos as the group moved as mostly one, the Militia being somewhat bullied into motion by the uncaring advance of the Martians. It was time to cut any losses and move before they were overwhelmed by the advancing Sisters. Anarkos’s men were pushing the Militia to move and anyone who lagged too much was simply cut down. There was no time for kindness only the cold forward momentum of the Skitarii. The colonel’s men had proven their worth and continued use to the cause while the Menoth had become something of a burden.

Luck was on the tribune’s side as the Militia quickly fell in line and joined the organized retreat to the docking arm. The returning volleys of fire covering the retreat were light up further by blazing salvos from the tribune’s rapid-fire plasma caliver. A saving grace of the fire from the Skitarii was the sheer penetrative power of the galvanic rifles’ ammunition when they did find homes in bodies.

They were making progress.

They were getting close.

Anarkos had taken a few glancing hits but nothing enough to stop him from beaming regular orders to his men along with barking out orders to those still confused via his vocal projectors. There was no time for second-guesses or pauses. Not from anyone.

[Azazeal849]

Anarkos’ threats were sufficient to get the Menoth soldiers moving. They fell back, a semi-ordered retreat behind a thin screen of red skitarii and grey Jotunhel. A squad of sisters attempted to press the attack but were forced back into cover, sparks flying from their armour like a cloud of fireflies.

The route to the docking arm sloped up, a plane of blood-splashed steel. The smoke which had begun to clear from the module was now thickening again. Jarn could see it blooming along in thick banks, drawn by the sucking vacuum beyond the breached doors. Another melta charge went off somewhere behind.

“Don’t these bitches ever use doors?” the man who was dragging him complained to no-one in particular.

A bolt round cracked, and Droplaug spun to pull up one of her bikers who had sprawled to the floor.

“Fuck!” the man barked. One hand was clasped to his shattered chestplate as blood leaked through the flak, but somehow he had kept hold of his hull axe. “Ah, damn, that sucked.”

Another man turned to laugh, and was immediately knocked sideways as the wheel-lock door to his right blew off its hinges. An armsman with a heavy boarding axe shouldered through. Droplaug’s partner heaved his own axe at the Imperial’s head, forcing him to duck wildly as it spun past. The Jotunhel steel thunked as it buried its blade into the metal of the bulkhead.

The armsman steadied himself, snarling curses through his visor. Droplaug’s wounded biker coughed. There was a surreal pause as he looked at the axe grinning in the armsman’s gauntlets, and then down at his own empty hands. “Oh.” the man sighed, wilting in realisation. “What the fuck did I do that for?”

The armourglass of the armsman’s helmet shattered, and then the face behind it, like an egg burst in a child’s fist. Jarn spun to see a gun-servitor on heavy treads rolling down the slope, a swarm of shipboard skitarii advancing around it. Shots sparked and flashed as they pinged off the metalwork, but none came close to the retreating Patriots.

“Come on!” a Menoth captain roared, and the defenders were able to hoist their wounded and run pell-mell for the hanger as the relief line from the Stella Rosa swept past them.

The welcome sight of the docking arm stretched away before Jarn as he crested the slope, alternating squares of thick armourglass and the round mouths of docking umbilicals. The Rosa loomed beyond the windows like a baroque cliff, backlit by the lightning flashes of the orbital war. Jarn found the skitarii tribune, and saw a knot of Nebula troopers herding civilians towards the halo-lit umbilicals. Captain Tarran spotted to the two commanders and waded through the press to join them, depolarising her visor to reveal a sharp face with blonde hair sweat-plastered to her forehead.

“We’re secure here for the moment.” she informed the two commanders. “The Rosa’s servitors have things in hand, though some more armsmen tried breaching through the loading shafts.”

“They all dead?” the man supporting Jarn asked, frowning pointedly at the Nebula from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“I wouldn’t be standing here chatting if they weren’t.” She looked at Jarn. “Get your men aboard, colonel. We -”

Tarran broke off as the deck beneath their feet shuddered. Jarn, who was facing towards the armourglass portals, saw it first. A backscatter of light across the Rosa’s flank, lighting up gun battlements and deepening the skull eyes of the icons machina that adorned the hull. The surface irradiation of grav-tether beams.

“Tribune!” a voice shouted from among the Jotunhel prisoner train. A slender, brown-skinned tech-priest was trying to push his way towards Jarn and Anarkos, fighting Starolf’s guards with the articulated silver dendrites that had replaced his arms.

Tarran’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Who is that?”

The tech-priest sprawled onto his knees as a Jotunhel soldier cracked him with the butt of his lasgun, but when he raised his head he was smiling through his blood-split lips.

“Enginseer Brandt. Acting magos by the authority of this degenerate behind me, but before that I tended the machine spirits of this docking arm.”

The steel claws of his arms clacked against the deck as he struggled to rise. His dark eyes were still fixed on Anarkos.

“Tribune. I have complied with your ally’s demand to order an evacuation of mechanicus personnel. Now I demand that they be remanded to your protection, not to the mercy of those who hold no faith in the Machine God.”

“You demand.” Tarran repeated, and unslung her modular rifle. “I don’t think we have time for this.”

“Correct, you don’t.” enginseer Brandt agreed. His six arms clicked as they came together in front of his chest, the needle ends folding together into a cog circle. “You could kill me and spend the next half hour trying to break my encryption codes, but by then I expect that docking arm 3-12 and the ship tethered to it will have been overrun by boarders, or else blown apart by the Imperial Navy.”

[dakkagor]

“You're the only one who knows the codes, aren't you?” Jarn asked. He stood up, pushing the man who had held him up away. “That would be just like you toaster fuckers, to make sure that only one of you knows the codes to let our ship get away.”

Starolf raised his rifle to deliver another blow, but Jarn waved him off. The lean officer fell back a step, and started to wave more men past the knot of officers, busying himself with the evacuation. Some Jotunhel men had stopped to gawp, and he hurried them along while keeping the group in his line of sight.

“Drop those tethers, and you have my word. Tarran and the Tribune here will look after your people. You'll never have to deal with me or mine again. I swear it on my dead homeworld.”

“Your promise is worthless, baseline.” Brandt said without inflection. “I require the binding word of another from the machine cult.”

"On my oath as a servant of the Machine God, they will have the protection of my Skitarii." Anarkos was in no mood for a prolonged conversation. Having some adepts and menials to aid in repairs and maintenance could be useful. Unless they just got turned over to the Rosa, of course.

Brandt glanced back at Starolf with very human animosity. “Concordance, tribune.”

The deck shuddered again, and the flickering grav-tethers vanished.

“Anarkos. Can you lock him out? I don't want him changing his damn mind.”

“Allow me, Colonel. The tribune hasn’t been granted such access for this mission.” The modulated voice of Magos Krypter spoke up as the hunched form swathed in red made his way through. “And you, Brandt, your actions saved many lives today including my own. And I will do my best to see your people are well taken care of and put to the best use possible.”

The Magos locked out the tech-priest from the dock arm controls with a dismissive wave of his hand. Anarkos would have just shot the tech-priest had it been left up to him but the Dominus had a bit more decorum about the whole thing. “Now let’s get off this damned station before those uptight bitches blast us all into the vacuum. I think the gracious captain of the ship is getting anxious.”

Jarn ground his teeth, tempted to have Starolf shoot the kneeling 'Magos' Brandt. But with Krypter suddenly present, he reigned in his anger and let it slide.

"You better hope we don't run into each other again, Brandt." Jarn snarled, before turning on his heel and marching towards the ship, raising his voice to hurry his men along.

"I suspect that we will not." the caliper-armed enginseer replied across the rushing press of infantrymen. His tone was dignified, despite his kneeling stance and bloody lips. "But while the Motive Force runs within me I will never let children of the Omnissiah become slaves to heathens like you."

"Oh I like this one. We might just keep him." Krypter could see the potential uses for an enginseer like Brandt blossoming before him like pulses along a circuit track. Sure it might take some convincing to get him to see the nature of their cause but Krypter was confident he understood the enginseer just enough to make that a reality.

[Azazeal849]

For the skitarii, it was home. For the Menoths and the Jotunhel infantry, storming up the ramps and into the the atrium bays of the Stella Rosa was like stepping into the temple of a foreign god (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0L38p9DUHQ). The lights were dim and red, splashing angular shadows across the walls and the grated floor. Cog-haloed skulls grinned from every doorframe, eyes burning with the red lights of picter lenses. Overhead, huge vox casters were suspended below the ceiling, though as far as the humans could tell the only noise coming from them was a broken-sounding pop and crackle of static. The air was warm and bone dry.

Bulk elevators settled in jets of hydraulic fog, ready to carry the skitarii to their berths on the upper decks. Around them the enginseers were already at work, shepherding the returning servitors. Most of the servitors would be recalled, for the adeptus mechanicus disliked wastage. A minimum screen of expendable drones would be left behind to stall the Sisters while the Rosa shook itself free of the Glom for the last time. Cranes lifted dormant, scarred kataphrons back into their alcoves, which lit up with flickering ghost-lights as welding teams set to work.

Captain Tarran found Jarn again amid the crowd, her helmet slung under her arm. The Jotunhel colonel could see a muscle above her eyebrow ticking as her powered suit began to flush the satrophene from her veins.

“That’s everyone.” she was saying to a parchment-skinned astropath at her side. The blind man was trotting to keep up with her, one hand hooked around her elbow to avoid being knocked down and lost in the press. “Signal the Exitos and tell them that we’re casting off.”

The astropath had his head tucked down between hunched shoulders, flinching away from the noise and the crush of hundreds of souls still riding a battle-high. “It will be done, m’lady.”

Tarran nodded and turned to Jarn. “Best hang on to something. It’s going to be a bumpy ride out.”


MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

[Azazeal849]

Troop transport Princess Seladon
Adrantis Centrum jump point

Operation Viper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sW3DYSPj_w), they were calling it. The Imperials had speared out from Baraspine towards Tranch, Marioch and Coseflame, leaving the local PDFs hard pressed - but what they did not know was that the bulk of the Adrantean Rapid Reaction Force was mustering here, ready to counterattack.

Captain Kreoss was a man of faith, like all in his Menoth regiment, but he was also of the opinion that faith manifested through deeds rather than words. He took a less than charitable view of the Tephainian cardinals, who six months after the revolution still seemed unable to offer their unanimous and full-throated support of their war against Imperial aggression.

It made a pitiable contrast with the black-armoured Nebula troopers tramping off the shuttle in perfect lockstep, to the fanfare and cheers of the assembled infantry. These were men of deeds - the soldiers who had rescued the subsector governor at great cost, the soldiers who had saved Kreoss and his men on Baraspine.

The governor’s own Nebulas, fighting beside us once again as we start the counterattack.

The Nebula company unfolded into the hanger bay, like a black rose with thorns of adamantium. Leading them was the Hero of Siculi, her helmet cradled under one arm so that her blonde hair lay free about her shoulders. Alicia Tarran’s face was a tightly drawn mask, seemingly impervious to the cheers thundering across the muster deck.

She is modest. Kreoss thought approvingly.

Watching the stony-faced figure at the head of the column, Kreoss decided that the Warp could take the cardinals. He knew who his faith lay in.


+ + + + + +

It took a sizeable amount of supplies to keep a demolitions expert like Herkja in business. The Adranteans had promised them all kinds of fuel and ammunition for the next operation on Marioch, but only a single transport had pulled alongside so far, and the amount it had parcelled out to the Jotunhel left much to be desired.

“Look at this shit.” Herkja complained, thumping her fist down on a half-empty fuel barrel for emphasis. “We might be mercenaries but you’d think they’d bump us a few places up the priority list after we got some of their best troops off the Glom.”

Dolf was lackadaisical, watching with his boots propped up atop a case of demo charges. “Maybe we’ll have to fight smart then, rather than strapping kraks to our heads and trying to simply headbutt the fuckers into oblivion.”

The diminutive captain folded her flame-tattoed arms. “And what’s your great plan?”

"Sneak past them and fuck ‘em up the arses. I’ll do it all myself if you want. I could probably pass for a Mariochi.”

Herkja smirked. “Uh huh?”

“Just need someone to stamp on my face first, so it's not as conspicuously pretty."

"Up your arse, mate. My dad had a grox back home that was prettier than you."

Dolf laced his hands behind his head and leaned back on a stack of flak vests. "That's no way to talk about your mother."


+ + + + + +

Starolf probably wouldn’t have picked a Tephanian to play cards with, but unlike 90% of colonel Tanaka’s rangers, lieutenant Beck seemed to lack his comrades’ snooty disdain for the mercenary units that were helping to make their glorious revolution possible. He also lacked any kind of skill at Hearts, but made up for it with enthusiasm and a seemingly bottomless supply of ration chips to lose, which made his company tolerable.

“I only hope they don’t want you to waste time shepherding the locals out again.” Beck was saying as he played a Ten of Tiles, which if he had been paying attention he would have known was a suit that Starolf had already exhausted two hands ago.

“You can’t blame them for wanting to get away from those Imperial bastards.” Leif said carefully. He squinted at the Ten suspiciously for a moment, and then threw away a Nine of Clover.

Beck placed his cards carefully face down. “Take it from a Tephanian who’s been watching those cultist sympathisers crawl into our starports for years. Letting them come would only encourage more people to risk their lives in the journey.”

“Uh huh.” said Starolf, who couldn’t have given a damn about the Mariochi either way.

“Besides,” Beck went on in an authoritative tone, “You can bet half of these people aren't refugees, just pilgrims or migrants looking for work now the sector economy's tanking."

Starolf grunted another noncommittal reply, and slapped down his Queen of Pikes.

Beck blinked down at it for a moment, cursed, and then laughed and handed over another ration chip.


+ + + + + +

Enginseer Brandt sat upon an overturned cargo drum in the cavernous storage bay, awaiting the pleasure of magos Krypter. His six caliper-fingers clicked rhythmically as he turned his personal icon machina over and over before his lowered eyes.

The Fifth Law: Sentience is the basest form of Intellect.

The icon turned slowly in his dexterous metal pincers. On one side the half-mechanical skull was proudly embossed; on the reverse, the concave stamp caught the shadows of the bay lights and almost seemed to snarl.

The Tenth Law: The soul is the conscience of Sentience.

He raised his gaze to the milling crowd of magi and menials that shared the space with him. The Mars-faithful whom he had nominally saved, by his bargain with magos Krypter.

The Sixteenth Law: To break with ritual is to break with faith.

He prayed to the Machine God that he had not simply condemned them to a worse fate.

[Azazeal849]

CAMPAIGN 2

Tephaine
One week before Operation Viper

A rising whine filled the hanger as the Aquila lander whirred into life, braking flaps flexing like a bird stretching its wings. Alicia Tarran shifted her weight inside her armoured suit, and looked down the marble steps at the VIP transport that would wing her up to the warp runner and then on to the Centrum muster point. A simple Arvus shuttle would have been fine.

“Take care!” Ella called from behind her, having to yell to make herself heard over the piston crash and engine roar of the launch spire. For a moment, Alicia wondered why she didn’t use her psyker gift and simply push the words into her mind instead.

You know why. she thought, and made sure the flinch was gone from her face by the time she turned back around. Ella stood with the downwash of the engines tugging at her skirts, a fragile smile on her face. For a moment she looked like she was going to start forward, but instead she just clasped her hands, one thumb rubbing tensely over the other. Please. Alicia saw her say, though this time the howl of a rising shuttle swallowed the word.

Alicia felt her cheeks pricking at the obvious, honest concern. “I will.” she promised, smiling shyly. As she turned away, she realised that she had probably spoken too softly to carry over the engines. She flinched again, and almost turned back.

“Careful, beloved.” A phantom hand gently squeezed her shoulder as the Tâin rose up within her. “Don’t just latch too hard onto the first person who shows you affection. You’re not that insecure.”

Normally her mother’s voice would have soothed her. But then she remembered Ella’s face when she had offered her the Tâin’s help.

“Be quiet.” she hissed quietly at the presence inside her head. “And stop using my mother’s voice.”

“Your mother lives within me.” The Tâin sounded wounded. “Along with all the other DeReis.”

“My mother is dead.” Alicia snapped, and willed the daemon down as she spied Burakgazi standing inside the hanger with his hand resting on the hull of a powered-down gunship. His silvered eyes missed nothing, and he dropped his hand and turned towards Alicia as she approached.

“Sorry.” she apologised. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your prayer.”

“No harm done.” the muscular electro-priest reassured her. “I wasn’t praying, merely thinking.”

Tech priest or not, Alicia wondered how he could think at all with the constant roar of engine noise. “Can I ask you something?” she blurted, on a sudden impulse.

Burakgazi folded his hands, eyeing her. “Of course.”

“Will you look after Ella for me, while I’m away?”

The Vostroyan considered for a moment, and she anxiously searched his features for any sign of his expression hardening.

“I am also being deployed off world soon.” Burakgazi said at last. “But I have some very capable friends. I promise you that I will see to it.”

He held out a gloved hand. Slightly surprised, Alicia extended her own, and the Vostroyan clasped her forearm in a warrior’s handshake.

“You trust your friends?” Alicia pressed as she dropped her hold.

Burakgazi did not hesitate. “Implicitly.”

The calm, untroubled certainty in his answer was enough to make Alicia a little sad as she turned to leave.

The dropship roared (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uPTgDkb5yc) like an angry beast as it tore down through the atmosphere.

Jarn Hassek would much rather have been deploying from the Eudaimonia, rather than an unfamiliar tub like the Princess Seladon, but the Seladon had something that only a fully-funded sector military could procure: a host of Tetrarch and Devourer dropships to move troops from orbit to ground quickly and on a massive scale. Meanwhile, Eudaimonia was somewhere over Coseflame, where no doubt Iric was badgering the Gallowglass witch about the futility of trying to bombard a world where half the major settlements were inside mountains, and trying to get her to warp over here where they might actually do some good.

The tactical hololith rotated in the air before him, flickering every time the dropship juddered through another layer of cloud turbulence. Their destination was a parched island off the coast of Marioch’s third continent. Surrounded by mountains that caught most of the sea’s moisture and left nothing for the dustbowl inland, it had little value except as a defensive position, being the site of a comms hub and an airfield that commanded the surrounding sea-routes. As it happened, the imperials had seen the value in the airfield too.

“Our Emperor, who dwelleth on Terra,” Starolf intoned mockingly from the grav-couch opposite, as he shook his head at the shrieking SOS runes. “What the actual fuck.”

“What’s all this then?” the Tephainian lieutenant Beck asked, pausing as he groped his way along the handrail back from the chemical toilet. Nerves, Hassek supposed.

Starolf gestured expansively at the hololith, and a scattered line of half-finished trenches that were scored around the airbase. “Apparently, the idiot in charge thought the triple-A round the airfield would also stop the Imps from landing out of range in the dustbowl and making a ground attack. He also decided that digging more defences would be bad for morale. Now all his civilian labour’s run away and the Imps are bearing down on him. Bastard should be shot.”

“We’d better save their arses, then?” Beck suggested.

Starolf shrugged. “Apparently it’s a holy day here on Marioch, so it might as well be today.”


+ + + + + +

Patriot objective: Repel the attack on the airfield

Alicia Tarran watched the dropship’s external augers dubiously as they broke through the last layer of cloud and dived towards the objective. The thermal scryers were reading 30 Celsius in the air outside, climbing as the sun rose and the cloud cover burned away. As soon as the mouths of the dropships opened it would be like stepping into an oven for every soldier who didn’t have the benefit of sealed Nebula armour.

Through the command deck windows she could now see the great basin of the dustbowl, and the streamers of sand blowing about it, half-shrouding the concrete grey of the airfield. Pushing in from the west were a scatter of smoke plumes, tank tracks and weapon flashes, emanating from a swarm of infantry and vehicles. Waves of heat rose from the rolling terrain, turning the imperial attack into a shimmering mirage.

“Attack group.” Alicia voxed, turning her head slightly within her helmet to bring her mouth to the mic pickup. “This is Striker Actual. Looks like infantry up front with Salamander and Sentinel support, Chimeras and Devil Dogs behind. Heavy weapon teams and a Griffon have set up in the rocky ground to the south. We’re going to land on the north side and turn their flank, all captains designate your drop zones.”

[dakkagor]

"This is Blizzard Actual, Striker." Jarn responded. "Blizzard group will take the rocky ground to the south. We can move quickly over broken ground and capture the guns, turn them on the Imperial advance."

He released the send button and looked at Starolf.

"Are you mad? Artillery and heavy weapons? We'll get pulled apart!"

"Not fucking likely." Jarn responded back. "We'll use the cover and our own mortars and grenade launchers to fight them at their own game, until we can get on top of the bastards. We need some new heavy weapons. Anyway, you want to get torched alive by a hellhound, you feel fucking free to take the centre. Leave that to the cogheads." He kicked Starolf in the shin, eliciting a sharp growl of pain. "Get your lads and lasses unfucked quick. Its hotter than a daemons anus out there, so I want everyone to clear the landers fast, the Imps will be arrowing in on our position faster than a priest in a boys scholam, and I don't want to be sitting next to one of these landers when they take a pasting from a griffon battery."

"Whoever first colonized this place must have been insane." Starolf muttered as he stood and moved down the line of seated soldiers. "Its over 30 bloody degrees out there."

"The imps probably thought the same about us when they landed on our planet." Hassek grinned wolfishly. "So lets see what kind of welcome the locals have for us."

[Atrum Daemon]

“This is Phi Actual,” Krypter responded, “I will keep the center busy.”

His words were punctuated by the thunderous blast of his beloved Thanatar’s plasma mortar. It arced through the sky zeroed in on one of the Imperial Salamander units. It would take time for the massive weapon to fully recharge and before that time it would be up to the Castellex robots and the Skitarii to bear the main burden. Which they would do gladly.

<Standard Attack Pattern Zeta> Dominus Krypter encoded over the maniple’s private channel. <Engage the Imperials until our comrades can acquire those artillery pieces.>

The Castellex robots were fitted with Mauler canons on their shoulders and heavy bolters on each massive mechanical fist. The Imperials would first get a taste of Krypter’s prized machine before facing the rest of his forces. The Dominus was at the back of his forces with his Thanatar, directing hundreds of processes at once along with his datasmiths to ensure the actions of his robots were absolutely precise.

[Azazeal849]

The hull rattled as they dived, though whether from impacts or simple turbulence Hassek couldn’t tell. The air beyond the armourglass portholes sparked with autocannon tracers and bursts of hastily deployed flak. The Devourer retaliated with its rotary cannons, raking the outcrops below with sweeping lines of bullets, until they dropped into the dead ground beneath the hillside and a temporary respite from the Imperial fire. The landing rockets thundered, and the Devourer touched down with a muffled thud, settling on its skids.

“Go, go, go!” Beck was shouting, pushing the Tephainian rangers forward. “We can’t stay here!”

Side hatches sprang open, and the armoured prow of the dropship split apart like a mechanical seed pod, assault ramps deploying, servitor cannons spooling outwards to cover the egress. A wave of hot air and dust washed through the open hatches, mauling the Jotunhel soldiers as if the planet itself were trying to batter them back from its surface.

By the time Hassek’s boots hit the hard-baked ground, mortar rockets were already tearing at the ground nearby. Beck’s Tephainians had darted forward to the foot of the hill to form a picket line, where they had been forced to ground as heavy weapons began swivelling round to counter them. Somewhere up the hill an autocannon was banging, throwing up geysers of red dirt between the hunkered-down rangers.

From what Hassek could see, the hill the Imps had occupied was all rocky outcrops and pockets of scrub, all but impassable to the south due to a three-metre high shelf of rock that ringed the base. The approach from the west was easier, though already lousy with crossfire between the defenders and Beck’s Tephainians. The north slope was an option, though that would mean leaving the safety of the dead ground and exposing their backs to the main imperial force that the skitarii and the Nebulas had only just begun to engage.

“Where to, boss?” Herkja called as she waved her flamer teams forward, yelling to make herself heard over the Devourer’s engines. She flinched as the rising whine of the Devourer powering up for dust-off was eclipsed by the louder, distinctive shriek of a Griffon mortar. There was an almighty crash as the shell hit the dropship’s wing, sending out a puff of flame and shards of blast-torn engine cowling.

“Venatora stands!” an Imperial voice exulted from further up the hill.

“Ah, fuck you and the condom you should’ve been caught in!” Herkja shouted back.

The Thanatar announced its landfall with a ground-shaking plasma blast, demolishing a Salamander command vehicle. There was a rushing sound as the IFV went up, heaving sparks and metal shards into the hot sky.

The imperials had seen the dropships coming, and so had not been caught entirely off guard. Nevertheless the Castellex robots punished the vehicles which were still maneuvering between cover, or which had remained hull down with their backs exposed to the drop assault. Six targets were knocked out in the first minute, dark smoke pouring from the wrecks. It mingled with paler artificial smoke as imperial vehicles deployed their launchers, Guardsmen spilling from their Chimeras and immediately going to ground. To the imperials’ credit their reaction to the new avenue of attack was swift, and the ragged pockets of lasfire opposing the maniple’s advance soon became a more formidable wall.

The battle automata secured an acceptable perimeter around the landing zone and hunkered down, shoulder cannons raised above cover to keep the imperials’ own heads down as they awaited Krypter’s next orders. A unit on the extreme left of the perimeter tagged an imperial Devil Dog anchoring the imperials’ flank - hull-down amid a screen of infantry, it had already burned several warning streaks of molten glass through the sand ahead of Krypter’s position. The units in the centre were hampered by the plumes of hot smoke, but they had triangulated enough heavy weapons spitting among the lasguns to suggest a platoon-sized force blocking their path.

[dakkagor]

Two directions to get shot in the arse in, and one we can only climb. And me without scaling gear.

"North slope!" Hassek yelled, then flinched as a mortar round landed nearby, tossing up dirt and a few limbs. "You take an assault section, lay down as much smoke as possible. Starolf will coordinate suppression fire from this line!" He chopped his hands to indicate the line held by Becks Tephanians. "I'll be with him to coordinate on the vox. You take Droplaug with you. I'm giving you command!"

"Right boss, I won't let you down!" Herkja yelled and scurried away as the autocannon coughed again. He wrangled a section up to the firing line, screaming over the pounding artillery and the roar of landers lifting clear. One took a pasting and broke clean in two as it tried to lift, exploding in a lopsided blast that sprayed burning promethium over a half dozen of the damned and a squad Tephanian Rangers. The sound was appaling. Hassek and a few of his men shot them down, putting them out of their misery.

"Those were my men!" Beck yelled as Hassek tossed himself down next to the ranger. "You fucker! You shot my men!"

"If they were Imps I'd have let 'em burn. That was a mercy." Beck grimaced, but said nothing, looking at the smouldering corpses. Hassek grabbed him by the lapel of his too clean uniform, and cuffed his helmet, hard. "Listen to me! They were dead, or they wouldn't want to keep living afterwards! This is a fuckin' war, and worse things than being mercy killed by your own side happen all the time!"

Beck nodded, focusing again. "What now?"

"We advance! Squad by squad, bounding covering fire, up this goddamn slope. We support our flankers so they don't get mowed down, and we eat as much dirt as we can stomach!"

+++++

"Smoke em!" On the ridge!"

Herkja stormed forwards, feeling so exposed she might as well be naked. She knew the logic of it, but her back felt like it had a huge target on it. Hassek was putting a lot more faith than she would in the cog-boys and the elite of the rebellion. Grenades fired from launchers landed ahead of her, pouring out white smoke that hazed the battlefield and cut visibility. Enemy fire still hammered down at them, but they couldn't be targetted easily at least. Under smoke cover, and with suppression coming from two sides, Herkja's force started to make ground towards the battery.

Herkja slid behind a small outcropping, finding a unit that had got ahead of her. They were young, transit born troopers, and they looked scared out of their minds.

"We can't go forward! We'll get shot to bits!"

Herkja punched the girl in the mouth, knocking her onto her arse.

"Groxshit! Stay here, and you're good as dead! The imps will have the whole slope ranged, and they'll drop a mortar on your damn fool head!"

She risked a look over the rock outcrop, as shell landed to her left, punctuating her point with a gritty blast.

"The smoke is only buying us time! And anyway, don't you wanna hurt those fuckers for destroying your home?"

There was not the roar of anger she was hoping for. They didn't know Jotunhel. They probably barely remembered Atalanta. Well, plan B.

"Get up that damn slope, or I'll kill you myself."

That got them moving. Herkja hated it, hated being just like the nooses that had terrorised her for so long. But if it kept them all alive in the long run, it was a necessary sacrifice.

[Atrum Daemon]

<Sicarians> The order came over the secure lines of the Maniple the instant the Devil Dog was reported so close to their defensive perimeter. A moment later there was a buzz of activity as a squad of heavily augmented killers emerged from their concealed positions. The squad was led by the Sicarian Princeps of the Maniple who was known simply by designation as “Sigma.” Like Alpha Tribunus Donovan his augmetic head was shaped as a skull in accordance with Krypter’s preferred aesthetics. But Sigma’s was a leering visage of fangs with burning eyes that flitted through multiple vision modes at the speed of thought.

The automata were still in suppressive stance, their shoulder cannons blaring to keep the Imperials from advancing too far. The flame-spewing vehicle was a priority target for the Maniple’s Sicarians while the rest of the Skitarii riflemen and weapons teams focused on triangulating through the smoke.

<Kill.> It was an order that was delivered with a chilling tone across the Sicarian battlenet as they approached the Devil Dog’s flank. Stubcarbines opened fire, tearing into the infantry screening the vehicle. The Sicarians were fast and lethal killers, aided in no small manner by the stopping power of their firearms. As they closed in, power weapons flared out and sliced through armor and flesh. Sigma’s taser goad flashed out and struck an Imperial, the weapon discharging and cooking the man’s nerves and organs in moments. With the noise being projected by the domed heads and antennae, vid-screens in the Dog began to go static and the infantry outside became disoriented.

The attack was sudden and brief, leaving a little over a dozen Imperials dead and melta charges magnetized to the Dog’s treads. The Sicarians retreated and detonated the charges, ripping the tread to shreds in a shower of fire and molten steel.

[Azazeal849]

Hassek and Beck made slow progress, hugging the ground. Attacks probed, faltered, crawled sideways, faltered again. But they were achieving their intended objective: keeping a portion of the Imperial guns trained west and not north


+ + + + + +

That got them moving. Herkja hated it, hated being just like the nooses that had terrorised her for so long. But if it kept them all alive in the long run, it was a necessary sacrifice. She was proved right when a mortar round landed with a teeth-rattling explosion, blasting a jet of earth and rubble from the very spot where they had been sheltering not half a minute ago. Smoke hemmed in around them like a choking blanket, but from the snap of las and the whip of glowing beams through the haze, Herkja could guess that the Imperials had a dugout ahead, hunkered down amid the rocks above a treacherous scree slope.

A heavy stubber sawed blindly across their front, checking the poor spacer kids a second time, but this time they managed to take a knee and start firing back, instead of instinctively scrambling for cover first. A loose chain of grenades rolled down the slope, missing them, but drawing a yelp from someone behind as they detonated. We need the assault weapons.

It might have been seconds or minutes before the rest of the section caught up with them - time slept when the guns woke. Getting the flamer teams into position was difficult, though - the Imps knew and feared the bulky backpack tanks. Any operator who showed through the smoke attracted warning shouts and a storm of las. Herkja saw one man get hit and tumble back down the slope, spilling punctured jets of blood and prometheum.

Of course, as soon as one team did get within range of the strongpoint, it was all over. Herkja saw one of the Imps turn and run as soon as they heard the distinctive hiss of the nitrogen valve being opened. A second later the curtain of flame swept across the rocks and everything was screams and the firecracker sputter of exploding ammunition.

“Go, go!”

They clawed and cursed up the scree slope, the blowing smoke and the stench of carbon doing their best to choke them as they climbed past shrivelled, smoking corpses. The hill crest beyond was an undulating tangle of rocks and desiccated shrubs, and it was crawling with Imperial troops. Knots of men were holding the western ridge, hammering down at Hassek’s squads with heavy stubbers and shoulder-mounted quad launchers that thumped out white starbursts of alba phosphor. Spotters with auspex and magnocs were voxing back to the Griffon on the reverse slope - Herkja couldn’t see it, but she saw another one of its rockets howl skyward and go crashing down somewhere along the western face of the hill. And in the centre of the hilltop Guardsmen were swarming, warned by the blast of the flamers and now trying to organise enough fire to sweep away the Jotunhel who were cresting the ridge a mere twenty metres away.

The Sicarians retreated and detonated the charges, ripping the tread to shreds in a shower of fire and molten steel. Smoke began to stream from the turret, and a moment later the crew were bailing out of the side hatches, dragging wounded crewmates after them.

<Mission kill> ticker-taped across magos Krypter’s constantly evolving noosphere, spidering new lines of data and avenues of attack across his virtual battlescape.

On the Imperial side, two flickering streams of heavy bolter fire swung round to cross ahead of the stricken Devil Dog, clearly expecting a charge from that quarter, but the Sicarians had already extricated. The spider-limbed infiltrators skittered headfirst back into their hiding positions, ready runes turning green as they awaited new orders.

Though the suppressing fire from the maniple was fierce, the Imperial company ahead of them held their positions, declining to advance into the teeth of Krypter’s robots. They seemed content to merely bar the Patriots’ own advance, screening the ongoing attack on the airfield.

"Venatora stands! (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=40923&page=21&p=1857913&viewfull=1#post1857913)" someone shouted defiantly, Krypter’s scanners plucking the battlecry from the maelstrom.

Comet-tailed plasma bolts sheared through the air as baselines in heavy armour rushed to occupy the space around the knocked-out Devil Dog. Krypter noted an uptick in fire intensity from that quarter, as if the Imperials were still afraid that the Sicarians might push the left flank a second time.

“All units,” a vox signal bearing Nebula scrambler codes pierced the dust and blast waves. “Striker Two. Imperial troops have breached the airport perimeter. All-”

The transmission cut off with a roar and a pop.

“Sniper, right flank! (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=92760&page=3&p=3073687&viewfull=1#post3073687)” another voice answered. “Deploy smoke!”

Blasts of shrapnel and alba-phosphor covering smoke left irritating pockets of uncertainty in Krypter’s battlescape, but he could see the allies on his right flank visibly recoil, trying to compensate as several units winked out in rapid succession. The enemy too were regrouping: after his Thanatar had made a smoking wreck of their command Salamander, his augers were picking up a new nexus of vox traffic to the southwest, some distance behind the picket line currently facing him. His left flank was secure, the Jotunhel mercenaries having taken losses upon landing but, by his calculations, now had an acceptable 75% chance of neutralising the enemy mortar strongpoint, perhaps even capturing it and turning it back on the Imperials.

Looking further west to gauge developments at the airfield he could see the Imperials pressing hard, slowly rolling back the Patriot garrison. The airbase vox mast was hit by a stray tank shell and collapsed, hinging over in a burst of sparks. A battle-smog of engine fumes and fire smoke was drifting up from the launch bunkers, backlit by the piercing sun.

[dakkagor]

"Frags! Frags and storm! Jotun! Jotun!"

Herkja pumped her arm, lobbing a frag grenade into the scrambling guardsmen and then drew her sidearm, a fat nozzled hand flamer linked to a fuel tank at the small of her back. She ran at the ducking guardsmen as grenades detonated, breaking up the counter fire to the Damneds charge. Men and women fell left and right, dropped injured or dead by lasrounds, but Herkja slammed into a small knot of guardsmen. Her flamer roared and two stumbled back, shrieking as they burned, and in her right fist she swung a hullmetal axe, cracking it into a flak helmet with enough force to drop her opponent in one go. She was a small woman, but her frame was packed with corded muscle, and she wasn't afraid to kill. A rifle butt slammed into her jaw and sent her stumbling over, blood filling her mouth. She tried to roll away as standard issue boot caught her in chest, and then again in her crotch. Trying to roll onto her back caused a heavy weight to drop onto her, which resolved into an enemy trooper trying to stab her with a bayonet clamped in one hand, the other clamped around her neck.

For a second her vision began to grey as she fought desperately to keep the knife away. Then there was a sharp crack as the troopers head exploded wetly, and he fell slack across Herkja. For a second she just stared up at the awful, hot bowl of the sky, until someone dragged the body clear and hauled her to her feet.

"Droplaug." Herkja coughed. "Took your damn time."

"You saved me on that rotten orbital." The taller woman calmly reloaded her lasrifle, a ghost of a smile on her face. "Seems only fair I pay you back."

The Jotunhel forces had bit deep now, like a bullmastiff with its jaw locked around its opponent. Fire against them had slacked off, and more squads made the ridge, clearing the rocks and pushing towards the artillery battery. However it was anything but decided yet.

"Call it in to Jarn." Droplaug passed Herkja her axe. "Time to take the battery."


+ + + + + +

Jarn tossed his vox receiver back to Ulf. Drawing a bolt pistol he turned to Beck, grinning.

"My lasses have made the ridge, we need to push!"

"What the hell do you think we've been doing?" Beck snapped back, gesturing to the slope with its scattering of bodies.

"The pressure is about to come of us as the imps redeploy to stop my other companies from consolidating. In that moment, about a third of the imps are going to be running around, rather than shooting at them or us. Thats the moment we storm forwards, full assault!"

"For a mercenary you know an awful lot about Imperial Guard tactics." Beck shouted as he drew his own pistol, and started gesturing his squads forwards.

"Fuckers taught me everything I know." Jarn laughed. "And I'm happy to repay that kindness!"

[Atrum Daemon]

It only took a few moments for Krypter to take in all the information and run the odds of their best course of action. The time for just sitting there was gone for if they were to repel the Imperials, letting them keep moving in would accomplish nothing. It was time to shift the tables of the battle just a small amount. For even that much could end up turning the tide entirely.

<Begin advance> was the command sent out across the Maniple. With the mercenaries taking the mortar positions with good projected success now was the time to press on.

The whirring of machinery joined the cacophony of noise as the Castellex robots began their ponderous march forward, metal feet thudding into the ground and gouging tracks into it. The Skitarii advanced as well while the Sicarians relocated to push further into the Imperial lines. Precision fire from the Skitarii galvanic rifles rained upon those Imperials holding position, sending two of the heavily armored baselines around the Devil Dog down in twitching heaps as their nerves were cooked. Arcs of returning plasma fire reduced a few of the advancing Rangers to melting slag and meat but all Krypter and Donovan saw were “acceptable losses” ticking across the command feeds.

The Castellex robots kept up volleys of fire from their fist-mounted heavy bolters as the advance shifted southwest toward the nexus of activity Krypter had detected. Metal fingers wiggled with something like excitement once the Dominus got the ready wink from his beloved Thanatar. The firing directive was given and the familiar rumbling of the plasma cannon warmed his senses. His sensors adapted to the blinding flash of the cannon firing and the roiling payload of plasma arced over his advancing forces to land deep within the Imperial lines. He had no directed target, more using the miniature sun to disrupt the efforts of the baselines.

[Azazeal849]

The Jotun at the bottom of the hill rose up like shades from their graves. They were met with shouting warnings and alerts from up the hill, and the pelting lasfire coming down at them frantically redoubled. Grenades arced and bounced down the slope, detonating in savage bursts. A wall of suppressing fire swept back at the Imps, and the Patriot infantry were hard on its heels. Jarn clawed his way up the slope on one hand, vaguely aware of a blood-spattered Guard helmet rolling past him as he climbed. Then he and his squad were up among the foxholes, and it turned into a brawl - close-range murder, the kind of fight that had no business being on an open field like this. The kind of fight that Hassek and his men excelled at.

Jarn made one kill: a headshot, a red mist. Two, a Guardsman blowing apart under the hammer-blows of exploding bolt shells. He was close enough to hear the curse detonate on the third Imperial’s lips as a lasbolt from the left blew out the ablative plate of his flak vest. He fired again into the broken chestplate, and the Guardsman reeled, spitting blood. As Jarn clawed for a reload, a buzzing roar warned him to turn to his right, just in time to see a chainsword spattering as it mauled through one of his men. A scarred Imperial officer met Jarn’s eyes and roared something at him in a foreign strain of Gothic. Jarn assumed the man was telling him to get off his hill. He stepped back, but before he could finish reloading Ulf blindsided the Imperial from the right, spear tackling him to the ground and hacking down and down and down with his hull axe.

By the time the rest of the Jotun and Tephainians had boiled up over the hill crest, it was all over at the battery, Droplaug and Herkja having shot down the gun crews as they scrambled for their stubbers and lascarbines. Ulf kicked at an Imperial corpse, interested by the soft boots the man was wearing.

“Suede.” Beck explained, reaching for his water canteen and cursing when he saw that it had been holed by a stray piece of shrapnel. “Normal leather falls to bits in heat like this.”

Some of the Jotun were sniffing around dropped Imperial weapons, though more were slumped with hands on knees, coughing and spitting in the dust-dry air. Most of them had already emptied their water canteens during the long hour stuck at the bottom of the hill. The sun was beating down like a hammer, and even Jarn himself felt like his brain was slowly frying underneath his helmet.

While skitarii and Guardsmen clashed and died in messy organic explosions, Krypter’s noosphere rendered the combat down into pure, clean mathematics. The hulking castellax robots naturally drew fire, and although several were lost to the turret guns of hull-down chimeras, they provided cover for the advancing skitarii. The scissoring streams of bolter fire across the imperial frontline would have dissuaded lesser troops, but the skitarii took their losses and pressed on. Sigma’s sicarians identified a second node in the enemy defence and struck, disabling a chimera and swiftly rolling up the imperial line with their debilitating vox static. The stormtroopers by the knocked-out Devil Dog held out longest, disabling the castellex ahead of them and repelling two squads of rangers, until the sicarians threatened their flank and forced them to retreat.

Satisfied with developments, Krypter permitted himself a moment to assess the wider battlefield. The Jotunhel had, as predicted, captured the enemy mortar battery, opening a path to attack and relieve the airbase. The elite Nebulas were pressing their own attack after compensating for the enemy sniper fire, though their command section had inexplicably halted. Some unknown variable calling itself Kally Sonder had issued a brazen challenge over the vox (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=92760&page=3&p=3073687&viewfull=1#post3073687), and it was causing an inordinate amount of disruption among their allies’ command.

“She’s mine.” captain Tarran was growling over Krypter’s vox intercept. “I’m not letting any more of you die because of that psycho bitch.”

“With respect, captain.” a second Nebula responded. “If you think we’re going to let you go after that psycho bitch alone, you’re crazier than she is.”

Krypter heard a click from tribunus Donovan, his ocular implants whirring with the closest thing to a raised eyebrow that his skull mask could make.

<Baselines.> the skitarii commander canted in deadpan amusement.

Urgently pinging vid-feeds from the rear echelon drew Krypter’s attention to the east, behind them. Bright stutter-flashes were lighting up the horizon, and the skyline was hazy with rising smoke. It seemed that the beleaguered imperials were calling down artillery support in an attempt to shift the calculus of battle back in their favour. Shells smacked the ground amid the Patriot backlines, exploding great fountains of dirt that streamed away into dusty smoke. Krypter saw unit markers disperse as rangers went to ground, following standard protocols. What perturbed him more however were the new markers emerging from the east, appearing one by one as squadron alphas tagged them rolling over hill crests and churning between rock formations. Blinking contact with enemy Leman Russ platoons, the alphas appended the reports with urgent requests for new orders for their squads.

A second wave. This required a countermeasure, lest they be caught between two imperial forces much as they were currently doing to the enemy first wave.

[Atrum Daemon]

<Perhaps I have given these fleshlings too much of a soft touch> Krypter growled over his maniple’s secure line. <No more! Engage action form destructo maxim! Atomatic shielding to full on the robots and remove those tank squads!>

Multitudes of orders rolled out as Krypter’s mind feasted on tertiary data from his datasmiths to boost his processing augments even further. At the same time, his adjutant adepts were bringing his wargear to him. The brief hint of mortality given to him by the arrival of the Leman Russ squads had succeeded at driving out the complacency of the Magos Dominus to the detriment of his enemies.
Tribunus Alpha Donovan relayed orders to the Skitarii legion, prompting those taking cover to fall back to defensive positions and those that could to reinforce the advancing line. The thunderous steps of Castellex robots and the earth-shaking ponderous movement of the Thanatar as it moved to face the tanks. The true might of the Destruction Maniple was about to be unleashed as his secondary displays winked with activity from the Datasmiths that attended the Magos.
The mask was slipping from the maniple as no mere grouping of Skitarii kill-teams and Sicarian killclades but as a mighty Maniple of the Legio Cybernetica.

Krypter raised his personal weapon, a power-axe forged by his own hands, and from behind the Maniple lines emerged the Kastelan cohorts led by his Datasmiths. If the worlds of Adrantis were to win freedom and any measure of bargaining power at the end of this war, the Imperials needed to know just how much destructive power they could command. The useless scrapheaps that comprised the majority Mechanicus who joined the Patriots could preen and politick all they wanted but Krypter understood a simple truth: War is the ultimate expression of power. And he would prove his mastery over that power again and again if he had to.

The Thanatar fired its mortar again. The roiling ball of plasma burst overhead of a tank squad, reducing the mighty machines to little more than boiling scrap from the intense and explosive heat. Searing barrages of fire from the mauler cannons of the Thanatar and the phosphor canons of the Kastelans ripped into the approaching enemy armor. The Skitarii and Sicarians were redoubling their efforts as well, servos and implants kicking into a higher level of combat readiness as an all-encompassing order radiated through their systems originating from Krypter:


<ALL-KILL>

Arc rifles snapped and cracked through the air, burning the life out of Imperial soldiers with the plodding advance of the Skitarii lines. The Sicarians, taking advantage of the renewed pace to sow more disorientation among the Imperial lines, were targeting field officers among the enemy. Bolter fire from the supporting Castellex platforms reduced squads to bloody pools of viscera and gore in seconds, paving the way for the marching feet of cybernetically enhanced rebels.

[dakkagor]

Jarn resisted the urge to take his helmet off. He'd seen too many good people get shot right in the head just when they thought they were safe.

"Ulf, call an officers meeting." The big man got to his feet and started working the vox as Jarn walked towards a covered, sandbagged dugout towards the rear, Beck falling in behind.

"We need water up here." He mused aloud. His soldiers came from a very cold, very hard planet, but they never had a risk of going thirsty if they could make a fire and boil ice. This dirty, hot rock was about as far from his home as he could imagine. He stepped over a corpse, pausing to police its weapon, before stepping into the dugout proper. Charts lay strewn about folding tables.

"A command post" Beck stated, picking through the charts. "Maps of the local area, with ranging data for the batteries."

"Good." Jarn collapsed into a chair, stared up at the camo netting ceiling, and cursed roundly. He was hot. Too damn hot.

Ulf, Droplaug and Herkja entered the dugout. Herkja looked battered, and queasy.

"Where's Starolf?" Jarn asked. Droplaug sighed.

"Took a deflection in the hip on the way up. The medics are patching the hole, but he lost a lot of fluid. He's out for the moment."

"Damn." Jarn pushed himself to his feet, finally allowing himself the luxury of taking his helmet off. "I don't need to tell you how precarious we are here, we're out on a fucking limb. We need to dig in and hold this ground until we get fresh orders and support from the rest of the Patriot forces. Droplaug, arrange scav parties. Water is the top priority, and ration it fairly. Work with our medics. After that, ammo. Then fungibles."

"Fungibles?" Beck asked, but Herkja held up a hand to shush him.

"What about me boss?"

"Get the big guns working, and give our toaster lovers in the valley as much support as you can. Don't get fancy, just drop shells on the Imps arse, keep em distracted and pinned. Ulf, park yourself next to Gamal, help him supervise Starolfs mob."

"Gamals dead." Droplaug stated. "During the storm."

"Shitting idiot. Varny then?"

"Still alive as far as I'm aware."

"Good. Give him the promotion and get him to organise Starolfs men."

The officers stood as one, and scattered to their tasks.

"We'll be managing the perimeter, I take it?" Beck said.

"You've got it. We've taken the ground, now we hold it. And to answer your question. Fungible is an adminstratum term. Its for equivalent parts. Like for like."

Beck nodded. "You and your regiment have been through a lot. You remind me of some of the guard veterans."

"We are guard veterans." Jarn smiled. "We've been through some proper shit shows. Stick close to me, and you and yours just might make it through."

[Azazeal849]

The initial casualties (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Gz8jJOLAk) were heavy as squads of vanguard and rangers struggled into the teeth of imperial fire, but, as dominus Krypter had expertly calculated, a full assault was the correct tactical move. Like a pendulum swinging, the momentum of the fight quickly shifted as the advance began to overrun the imperial squads and send them falling back, rolling over each other in increasing disarray. The unexpected mortar fire from Hassek’s captured battery only increased the confusion and hastened the rout. While castellex robots stomped through the greasy smoke, shunting aside knocked-out vehicles, Krypter received an order request from one of his forward units, appended with a vid-feed of several imperial squads emerging from cover with their hands up.

To the south, a swarm of beetle-armoured stormtroopers had been massing to retake the hill, with Beck’s company mounting a spirited defence. The stormtroopers were flanked and driven away by the steady forward grind of Krypter’s skitarii, and the maniple and the Jotun contingent linked up just as the first sicarians were prowling into the airfield; striding over bodies to root out the last of the imperials, much to the shock of a few dazed Patriots who were still holding out in the launch bunkers. With the field temporarily secure, Droplaug was able to start scavenging in earnest.

“Grenade launchers are good!” she barked at a sweating, sunburned Jotun who was scrambling back up the hill with a sackful of them. “But get these men some fucking water!”

“Alright, alright, I’m on it!” the man replied as he dropped the bag onto a growing pile, and hawked a glob of gummy spit into the dust next to it. “Quit hammerin’ my dick!”

The parched and tired Jotun on the east side of the hillcrest were able to watch the second arm of Krypter’s counterattack unfold. Artillery muzzle-flashes were lighting up the horizon, and the air was thick with rising smoke. Explosions mushroomed around the mechanicus perimeter, with flickers of plasma spraying out in reply. Several imperial tanks were burning; others had rolled into hull-down positions among the ridges and rocks. To the eyes of some of the more experienced Jotun, they seemed to be returning fire with a mix of high explosive and kinetic penetrators.

From his own command post, his beloved thanatar concealed from line-of-sight to the enemy as it rained sunfire down on them, Krypter watched the firefight unfold as a series of runic tags scattered across the battlefield, blinking and switching colour as they reported status and damage. The castellex shields were not calibrated to repel direct hits from battle cannons, and as such they had only advanced so far before the accompanying datasmiths ordered their robots to hunker down and use their elevated shoulder cannons, sacrificing firepower for protection. However, several of the tech-priest controllers had been killed by explosive rounds, and Krypter heard Donovan let out an uncharacteristic curse as one squad of leaderless robots was methodically knocked out, cored one after the other by AP rounds as they failed to take cover.

It was an irritating loss, but not enough to change the overall calculus of the engagement - with the imperial first wave scattered and half a dozen of their tanks already burning, the imperial armoured company declined to push forward into the castellex plasma wall and instead began to fire off smoke rounds and retreat before the skitarii infantry that had overrun the starport could come back into play.

<Estimate fifteen minutes to regroup western offensive units.> Donovan reported back to his magos dominus, returning to his facade of steel-hard stoicism once more. <Casualties within acceptable range. However, ranger alphas are quantifying 30% loss of combat efficiency due to Maxim drug injectors coupled with heat exhaustion.>

The enemy artillery was still firing, shells biting chunks out of the earth and spitting the rubble skyward. The majority seemed to be falling in the dead ground between the Imperials and Krypter’s maniple, covering the armoured company’s withdrawal. Some however were airbursting far behind the retreating armour, and one salvo of manticore rockets veered far to Krypter’s left, landing among the rocky foothills.

Hassek had reluctantly re-donned his helmet and left the shelter of the dugout in favour of the merciless sun. Herkja, stripped down to a sweat-sodden tank top, was enthusiastically showing him some of the captured phosphor quad-launchers when Ulf arrived with the vox.

“Blizzard group?” an unfamiliar voice crackled. “Striker Four.” The Four drew a raised eyebrow from Ulf and Herkja. How many of the Nebula squad leaders had that damn sniper (https://role-player.net/forum/showthread.php?t=92760&page=3&p=3073687&viewfull=1#post3073687) managed to take out? “The imps are falling back to their drop zone on the east side of the island. How soon can you and Ironhammer group move out?”

[dakkagor]

Ulf groaned and looked at Herkja, who merely shrugged.

"Thats the bosses call and you know it."

Hassek swore, and kicked a battered helmet on the floor, and stomped away cursing the imperium, the Patriots and the galaxy. Herkja sighed. No point asking Jarn for his opinion right now.

Herkja took the vox transmitter from Ulf and propped it between her ear and shoulder.

"This is Blizzard Three Striker Four, Blizzard Actual is occupied. I've got a lot of dehydration casualties here, and I'm going to have a lot more if we push too hard. Standby."

Hassek slumped back over, looking wrung out. His tantrum had cost him more than he'd like to admit.

We're all getting too old for this groxshit. Herkja kept the thought to herself

"We can't afford a push right now Herkja. We just fucking can't. But if we let the Imps get away and rally we will have another big fucking problem to deal with. Fucking patriots, couldn't find their arses with a whole pioneer corps."

One of the kids ran up to Herkja, Ulf and Hassek and handed each of them battered water canteens, still stamped with a simple copper imperial eagle. Herkja took a couple of careful sips and looked the young trooper up and down.

"You seem to be doing alright."

The young Jotunhel soldier was transit born, and made a sloopy salute with the wrong hand, as his right arm was laden with several canvas sacks of salvaged canteens.

"Its hot as the devils arsehole Maam, but I'm managing for the moment."

"So you are. Stay there trooper." She turned to Jarn. "We can't push with a lot of the force, but we at least have to show willing right? So we scrape up all the young bucks and fillies and put them under someones command, and we send them in in support of the pioneers. The rest of us hold this position and the artillery. Its not like we won't be fighting like daemons anyway, but it will involve a lot less fucking walking."

Jarn nodded, mulling it over. The kids were sons and daughters of the regiments civilian train, as well as the frontliners and lifers. They also represented a hope of something beyond just limping from war to war and getting shot at for money. That somewhere at the end of all this, a home was waiting for them.

But you got nothing without sacrifice.

"We'll take a few veterans for command and control." He took the vox. "This is Blizzard Actual Striker 4. I'll be leading two light companies and Ironhammer to the objective. Any more than that and the damn Imps will retake this battery. Confirm?"

[Highland Sniper]

Initially, the pack militia rode in silence, The Void silencing the sounds of energy cannons blasting past the ship.
The tense moments are soon over as Colonel Maxim came back from the cockpit, "Smooth sailing from here," He said in a low voice. The two other small drop ships carrying everyone else would be hearing the same thing one way or another.

"Wolf Pack to ground, Wolf Pack to ground. This is Pack Alpha, come in ground" Captain Grimm's voice came over the Vox.

Everyone in the drop ship was silent as the man spoke. He was normally good natured, but he's not someone you wanted to interrupt. Doubles, everyone in the other two drop ships would be singing songs, probably one of the few ancient ones Xiaton claimed was passed down from generation to generation.

Knowing the danger of being blown to pieces were gone, everyone's spirits lifted and they all started checking their assortment of gear and weapons that were mainly scavenged from the battlefield. Hold hunting rifles, shotguns, and anything else that could shoot metal with just as many laser weapons. Half their armor taken from dead soldiers, and some painted over with rough patriot insignias and the wolf.

The briefing said they'd be landing in a secured drop zone, but they didn't know the status of all that yet. In a battle, things can change in an instant.

[Azazeal849]

From the air, the battlefield was laid out as vivid as a chessboard - here a deep scar where the skitarii machine-men had dug in, there the remnants of an artillery redoubt that the Jotunhel mercenaries had stormed, complete with the wreck of a dropship the Imperials had managed to bring down before succumbing. Blast craters had turned over chunks of hard, rust-red soil, so it looked like the earth itself was bleeding. Knocked out vehicles were everywhere, most of them Imperial, and plumes of smoke were rising from the airfield at the centre of the scene, like exclamation marks.

The Tephainian militia were able to land and deploy without incident, touching down behind the picket lines where scattered units were attempting to regroup and resupply. About half a kilometre to the east, a line of steel giants were spitting plasma to chase the Imperial tanks back towards their own lines, but they weren’t having it all their own way as Imperial artillery fire continued to screen the retreat, shaking the ground underfoot even from this distance. The sun was beating down like a hammer, so hot that it almost hurt to breathe.

To captain Grimm’s left, a cluster of pale, mean-looking Jotunhel were handing out weapons, organising those of their number who could still stand into assault squads. To his right, two red robed figures were conversing in what sounded like beeping static, beneath the forbidding shadow of a giant war machine. Directly ahead, a knot of junior officers were gathered beneath the dubious shade of a shrapnel-torn tarp awning, and Grimm recognised the uniforms of the republic’s capital world, the sister planet to his own. The officers seemed to be struggling with a static-blurting vox set, until one pointed towards the rocky hills to the north. The others followed his gaze just in time to see a flight of missiles dive into the rocks and detonate, igniting the horizon in a chain of fireballs.

“Holy Throne.” Grimm heard one of them say. “That’s where Tarran and her strike team went!”

One of his companions redoubled his efforts with the vox. “Striker Actual, this is Ironhammer, artillery strike in your area, what’s your status?”

Several voices answered through the howling interference, but they weren’t directed at the Tephanian.

“Her armour’s flat-lined! Get over there now!”

“Captain? Captain!”

The dread in every Tephanian officer’s face was plain to see as the operator let the vox caster slip from his nerveless fingers.

[Highland Sniper]

"Stay put, boys." Captain Grimm said, "We may be deployed sooner than you think."

He strode to the command center, "Sir, I bring fresh blood to the battlefield," he said in a serious tone, "Unless you have any better position for us to occupy, me and my men will deploy to reinforce that hill."

Everyone else sat tight in the drop ship as they looked on to Captain Grimm amd the rest of the officers.
"Bloody warp, he's gonna throw us into the thick of it." One of the men said.
"Then why don't request a transfer to another unit?" Another shot back.
"Stow it. We're hear to kick the Inperium out of the sector. If any of here are here for any other reason, I suggest you get out now." Colonel Maxim said. He was stern, and quiet. He went back up to the pilot and said "Get ready for some crazy flying, because I've got a feeling it'll come any minute now."

Those in the other drop ships remained seated as well. One snagged a scavenged vox and his voice crackled to the other two.
"Anyone else think we're flying into a ghost wasp nest?" One guy asked.
"I expect nothing less" another voice crackled.

The militia was unconventional at times. Probably what kept a few of them alive for so long.
"Yeah, maybe it'll be another Alpax." A success for the militia, when they found a dead end and lured imperium troops into a practical shooting gallery.

"Sir, shouldn't we unload some of the supplies?" Nores asked.
They were given several containers of food, ammo, and water. Each man had his own canteen, maybe a second if one was smart. But there was still extra they could unload.

It wasn't much longer until all the extra supplies were unloaded.

[Atrum Daemon]

<Acknowledge fifteen minutes> Krypter replied, allowing himself a lingering amusement at his Tribune Princeps’ indulgence into baseline vulgarity. <Allow for cleansing and recovery of Alpha units as well. Standard command rotation pattern. And deal with those surrendered Imperials.>

Donovan winked in acknowledgment as the Maniple slowed almost imperceptibly to the untrained eye. The exhausted and overstimmed Alpha’s from the front systematically rotated toward backlines as they were replaced with fresher command units so they could undergo chem cleansing and much-needed hydration. The Tribune Princeps unshouldered his plasma caliver and headed out to where the vanguard had the Imperials under watchful eye.

Magos Krypter took a moment more to assess the damages taken, finding them still in acceptable parameters even with the loss of the datasmith control units. Such techpriests could be replaced and the destroyed Kastellans repaired, refitted, and/or recycled. The Castellex were the more important units due to the more archaic and arcane nature of their design and components. Though all the robots would need their atomatic shielding recalibrated somewhat, time permitting (but even then there was never a guarantee of full protection with such things). Until then, their deployment would need to take the possibility of Imperial armor into more consideration given the number that had withdrawn. The progress reports from Sicarian Sigma and his killclade of Infiltrators was pleasing as they were crossing into the starport.

Donovan arrived at the forward location where the Imperials were under guard and took in the situation quickly, noospheric data divining the best approach in a matter of heartbeats. <We have neither the space nor inclination to take prisoners> was the Tribune Princeps final judgement. He quickly raised his plasma weapon and pressed the trigger, raking the Imperials with a fatal salvo of rapid-fire bolts.

[Azazeal849]

Objective secured: Repel the attack on the airfield
New objective: Eliminate remaining Imperial forces

The attack force consisting of fresh militiamen, Jotun youths, reorganised skitarii, and the remnants of the Tephainian rangers ground its way east. Krypter’s sicarians ranged ahead, shutting down the hovering skull probes that the Imperials had left along the route, but all the same the attackers were glad of the rolling, broken ground. As soon as the Imperials knew that a counterattack was beginning in earnest, the artillery would no doubt begin falling again.

Hassek personally took on the task of leading the scouts up a nasty looking ridge, and lying at the crest with the heat radiating up through his flak vest, he trained his magnocs on the terrain ahead. The horizon was a smear of heat-haze, but he could make out the shape of a small village beneath the next hills, with the grey mass of a prefab base dropped like a brick in the centre of it. A supply dump still sat mostly unloaded, and modular aegis barricades had been thrown up, zig-zagging between the buildings. No doubt the artillery battery was somewhere behind.

How to get there was the first problem. Once over the ridge they would be within sight of the Imperial defenders, and separated by several miles of cracked earth that was lousy with boulders and little cliffs where parts of the folding ground had dried and crumbled away. He could pick out two relatively clear paths, striped with tank tracks where the Imperials had maneuvered their own units through, and both easily wide enough for Krypter’s battle automata to form a firing line. Both, however, had been conspicuously shelled, with shallow craters and half-buried metal shards littering the way.

"Where's the Nebulas when you need 'em?" Hassek heard a Tephainian scout mutter under her breath.

[dakkagor]

"This is some fucking bullshit." Hassek growled. He tapped the magnocs on the rocks, thinking. The ground was shit-all good for a sneaking advance until night fell, his men would stick out like a sore thumb under the blazing sun, and who knew how long that would be?

A bums rush across the broken ground was probably suicide, but its where his thoughts kept turning to. But he'd probably loose as many men to twisted ankles and broken legs as enemy fire, crossing that broken ground at a run. Never mind that it was still hotter than Horus's own arsehole out there. Throw in the prepared defenses and it was the worst kind of shooting gallery.

So that left channelling forces down the roads. He wished those militia reinforcements had brought some armour. Flanking fire onto the roads would be murder. He gestured for the vox, and Ulf scrambled up to him, pushing past the rangers and his own lads and lasses.

"Phi actual, this is Blizzard Actual. We've got a lot of open ground to cover, 2 miles of of hardpan, and two zeroed in roads covered by imp arty. Recommend a three pronged assault, infantry down the middle, auto's down the roads to draw heavier fire. I'll pull up a mortar platoon and our captured guns, see if we can lay down suppression, but regardless, if the Imps are halfway competent, its gonna be bloody. Our only other option would be a wide encirclement via the foothills three miles north-north-east, and I think thats going to take too much time."

He clicked off the transmit button and looked around.

"Runner! Get the commander for the militia up here. We need to talk about his part in the glorious revolution."

And how its going to involve his men going into the grinder face first, rather than mine.

[Highland Sniper]

Varnin Maxim lowered his own 'noculars as a runner came to him accompanied by a militiaman, and he wasted no time getting to the Damned 88th.
"Colonel Hassek, I presume," The lanky, bedraggled looking man said, dressed in ragged fatigues and scavenged, repainted guard armor. The man walked with a sort of gliding grace you wouldn't normally see in one such as him. Like a large cat stalking prey. He extended a hand for a shake. "Colonel Varnin Maxim. Disappointing we couldn't have met under better circumstances. You've called me up to discuss plans?"

Hassek took the mans hand in a quick crushing grip, then released to gesture at the broken ground, making sharp chopping motions as he laid it out.

"We have a lot of broken ground to cover in the centre here, bracketed by these two roads. The roads are the best ground for heavy armour and tanks, but the dead ground in the centre is going to be slow going even for my boys and girls." He paused, rubbing the back of his neck. "I've been thinking about those foothills beyond the town. If we could get heavy weapons up onto them, we could shoot down into their perimeter and allow a push from here to close." He shrugged. "Long walk in this weather though."

"That it would," Varnin said as he looked over the terrain from this vantage. Lots of shell craters to provide cover, but could be easy pickings for well placed artillery. Lot of open ground besides. Armor would have been nice, but probably would be blown to the warp and back by artillery.

"You want to take the hills while you have my pack advance?" He asked, "You do realize that's suicide."
There was no question about it. It could probably be done, but at what cost?

"Its not going to be a cake walk for anyone." Hassek shrugged. "Someone is going to have to cross the ground, and the longer we sit here with a thumb up our arse arguing the longer the Imps will have to dig in and get organized. My girls and boys have already done a storm operation in this bastard heat and we don't have a lot more to give. If we suppress the imps and put enough smoke down, it should keep losses down to a minimum."

"Hmph. Maybe if we can take out some of those damn guns, we might be able to get some close air." Varnin sighed, "I don't like it. Anyone we tries to run across those plains are going to get blasted to the warp and beyond. Whoever moves will need to be smart and fast."

Varnin scratched at his neck a little in thought, "Get that artillery up here and start blasting in there as soon as possible." He finally grumbled, "My men 'll be moving soon. At least we should be fine fodder for their guns while you get set up. Get snipers set up to catch any heads that pop out, if you can. And try to keep your heads down, they'll start pounding us as soon as they spot anything moving close enough to zero in on."

"I'll have my sniper teams move up to this ridge and provide some cover. Winds good so they should have a good range. You just worry about getting across that dead ground. Wait for me and mine to get into position and start putting fire onto the base before you make your mad dash to glory."

Hassek clapped the officer on the back.

"And try not to get fucking fragged yourself. Its nice to talk to a patriots officer who doesn't have a stick all the way up his arse."

"Just know, I'm blamin' you if we die out there," he said and gave a good smack on his back as a return for the favor. "Just make sure you got our backs."

Varnin started back to his unit, and called all of his officers together.
"Alright," Varnin sighed, "We're going to move against the town in fifteen minutes. Get your men dusted up to blend in as much as possible. Keep any scopes covered to prevent glare. Same for everything else that might cause it. Stay low and out of sight. Stay spread out so we lose as few men to artillery as possible. Any questions?"

[Azazeal849]

Tribune Donovan was grinning. He always grinned, of course, on account of his skull-faced augmetics, but it seemed appropriate as the castellex robots arrayed once more for battle. Inside his tactical oracles, the maniple advanced from dead ground and laid down a white wall of plasma fire, then repeated the maneuver a second time as he scoured the plan for sub-optimal firing angles. Finding none, he ran the simulation a third time, simply to savour the visual of the Imperial defenders scattering into red crosses and skull-shaped kill markers.

+The baselines’ forward elements are advancing, magos.+ he reported solemnly. +Our own units await your command. The castellex are predicted to draw the most enemy fire as they advance along the roads.+


+ + + + + +

The Imperial gun nest was stationed half way up the shoulder of the mountain, on a spur that overlooked the village to the west and the approach from the east. Two Guardsmen sat by the heavy bolter, drinking water in an attempt to ward off the heat. A third was kneeling behind the sandbags, sweeping the eastern road with a dusty pair of magnocs. The fourth checked his wrist chron, unwound the caster from a bulky vox set, and made a quick, coded report. He dusted off the cradle and put the hand set back in its place.

Two seconds later, a lasbolt tore half of his face off. The others reacted instantly to the signature crack; rising, bringing up their own weapons. A hail of lasfire punched them back down. The spotter slumped down against the sandbags, the magnocs slipping from her fingers.

“We’ve got ten minutes.” the Jotunhel sniper growled, nodding towards the blood-spattered vox set as he waved the rest of the infiltrator squad up. “I timed ’em.”

“The Tephs are moving.” another offered as he helped himself to the Guardswoman’s magnocs. “That means our mortars and the toaster tanks are all set up.” The infiltration force had taken some of the stolen support weapons up into the hills with them; the heavier ones had been left behind for long range fire support. Tapping the magnocs, the Jotunhel panned them over to inspect the village with its lines of prefab Aegis wall. He saw several trucks haphazardly parked near the supply dump, but no armoured vehicles. “Where are all the tanks?”


+ + + + + +

The scouts and snipers of the Teph Min wolf pack were already skulking forward. Baras Nile was also a sniper, but he was hanging back with the main force behind the rise, two kilometers from the imperial stronghold. Long-las rifles were good out to six hundred metres or more, but somewhere along the path of the galaxy’s long and bloody history, some bright spark had figured out that if you attached a hi-res scope to an autocannon and configured it for single-shot fire, it made for a shockingly effective sniping weapon. Even better, out here in the Adrantean Republic you were less likely to run into a tech-priest who would pitch a fit when he saw what you’d done to their beautiful factory-spec cannon.

Nile settled himself in place and adjusted the zoom on his scope. He could see imperial guardsmen on the prefab walls around the village; here and there a heavy weapon hardpoint; the windows of what looked like a schoolhouse and chapel knocked through to make way for gun muzzles. Power cells and ammo crates were stacked readily to hand. Implant-studded servo skulls drifted back and forth over the lines, serving as spotters.

“Officer by the supply dump.” Nile’s own spotter passed on to him, as he trained his infrascope monocular past the imperial front line. Nile tracked his scope slowly from right to left, and saw a knot of men standing next to a cargo truck. The officer wore the same sand-camo flak as his soldiers, but Nile could pick him out by the way he was directing the others to load ammo crates from the supply stack onto the truck. The operation was interrupted by another figure, who wore a black storm coat in spite of the heat. She stalked over and began having what looked like an argument with the officer. The officer protested back, gesturing sharply. The woman in the black coat pulled out a pistol and levelled it at the officer’s chest. The officer capitulated, and began to wave the men down from the back of the truck.

Some distance ahead of the ridge line, another Teph sniper was crawling laboriously over the craggy ground, his long-las slung across his back. He had been keeping parallel to the southern road, except where boulders and shell craters forced him to make his way around. The artillery impacts were more clustered here, daisy-chained across the road and the surrounding hillocks, but they had done surprisingly little damage. Metal shards - darts and blocks - had been liberally scattered by the barrage, most of them lying half-buried in the baked earth. It was only when the sniper saw the trip wires spidering out from the one nearest to him that he realised what he was looking at. Very slowly, he reached for his vox caster.

“Norin?” he whispered into it. “Better tell the boss that these artillery shots weren’t just for ranging. The whole road’s covered with mines.”

[Highland Sniper]

"Of course they bloody rigged the place," Tored Norin growled' standing as still a possible, as he noticed a mine between his own legs. No one moved in that small crater as they stared.
He turned on his Vox, "At least no one's been blown to bloody hits yet. Be careful, and keep your head low."

Norin changed the channel on his Vox to the Wolf's general broadcast channel, "If you've not noticed yet, you're lucky," Norin hissed into the Vox. "There are bloody mines everywhere. So be careful as you move, or you may not see another bloody day after."

"Teams, sound off if you've heard," Maxim's voice commanded over the Vox.

"Team Beta, copy"
"Team Delta, Copy"
"Team Charly, Copy"
"Team Foxtrot, Copy"
"Team Goffer, Copy"
"Team Hotel, Copy"

"Oh, F**k! Where the hell is-" Someone started to say before another voice started to crackle over the Vox, heavy with static.

"Sig-... 2-2, plea- Re-eat- Signal 2-2. Too mu-... 'fearence."

Norin let go of the button for a second as he growled "Bloody Voxes, if it's not the Voxes it's always something bloody else." He spoke into the Vox again "Team Echo, there are mines everywhere. Repeat, mines everywhere."

The box was silent for a second.
"We thou- ... you sho-- know th-- .... mines everywh-...."

Norin swore he could hear some groans and hands smacking faces.
"Bloody hell" he muttered.


++++++++++++++++

Sisilia was in one of the rear teams, Hotel, with the slight hope of keeping their greatest asset out of direct danger and still have her close to hand to blow up some heads.

She was huddled in another crater in some of the smallest armor they could find, and it still didn't fit quite right.

As they had been told, there were mines everywhere. And they had to watch their step.

Some of the forward teams could be seen scuttling across the ground to another crater.
They'd be moving themselves here in a minute.

She had to chastise herself when she thought of swearing by the emperor.

She was once again reminded to keep low, be fast, and to watch for those f***ing mines. Like she had to be told a third time.

[dakkagor]

+Blizzard Phantom 2 for Blizzard Actual. Repeat, Blizzard Phantom 2 for Actual.+

Hassek took the proffered vox horn and held it up to his sizzling head. He wished he was out of this accursed heat.

"Go for Actual."

+Chief, the Imp armour is not, repeat not, present in the compound.+

"Not present or not visible?"

+Not buggering there at all sir. I can see right down into their perimeter from the ridgeline. They have trucks, infantry, emplaced positions, but no armour.+

"Blizzard Phantom 2, hold position and prep to offer supporting fire for the advance. Await further orders on this channel."

+Confirmed Blizzard actual. Hold on to our arses and get ready for a shit-show+

Jarn rocked back onto his heels and looked around. Where in the hell did you stash a bunch of tanks and not have them be visible? Had they broken off completely and withdrawn? Been evacuated somehow?

Or, most likely, were they lurking nearby waiting to pounce as the infantry extended themselves for an attack.

Ulf fiddled with the vox and offered the horn again. Hassek knew already who he would be talking to.

"This is Blizzard Actual to all commands. We have no sight on enemy armour, repeat, we don't know were the enemy tanks are. Does anyone have a line to orbital track or a fly-over? Because if we don't know where that armour is, its gonna fuckin' screw us when we go for that assault."

[Azazeal849]

"This is Blizzard Actual to all commands. We have no sight on enemy armour, repeat, we don't know where the enemy tanks are. Does anyone have a line to orbital track or a fly-over? Because if we don't know where that armour is, its gonna fuckin' screw us when we go for that assault."

“The Nebulas could probably call one in,” Beck suggested as he cinched his webbing and prepared to lead the Tephainian rangers forward. “They have priority.”

“Blizzard, Striker Four.” the vox responded, as if on cue. “Requesting orbital augers now. I’ve also got three squads en route to your position, ETA thirty minutes.”


+ + + + + +

“Well?” one of the Jotunhel infiltrators asked nervously (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjjXP7Ex83A), glancing up from the captured heavy bolter. Three other heavy weapons taken from the hill above the airbase were also being lugged into position by the sandbags.

“Three minutes until they expect another check in.” the squad marksman warned, glancing at his wrist-chron. “I can speak Calix gothic but I don’t know their codes.”

No more than five seconds after he had spoken, the vox lit up. “Overwatch, enemy troops are moving into killzone, bolter teams hold, mortar teams fire at will.”

A moment later, a battery of earthshaker cannons thundered distantly, the individual reports blurring into a single rolling blast. At several other points in the craggy foothills, mortar teams opened fire with bangs that ricocheted between the rocks. In the aegis line below them, lascannons spat in searing blue lines.

“Well, fuck.” the man with the magnocs cursed. “Looks like it’s go time.”


+ + + + + +

She was once again reminded to keep low, be fast, and to watch for those fucking mines. Like she had to be told a third time.

Sisilia felt it a moment before it happened, like the crack of a lasbolt whipping past her ear.

“Get down!” she was able to shout to the men of Hotel squad crawling up the crater side, just before the first explosion rang out. Pebbles jumped from the cracked ground, and fragments of stone and metal whistled over the crater. That one had landed a hundred metres away, maybe a little less.


+ + + + + +

“This is it, here we go.” Jarlson, the junior officer that Hassek had left in charge of the fire support, snapped his arm towards the mortar teams at his back. “Smoke rounds! Get some smoke on that field, give them some cover!”

The Jotunhel mortars whistled, sending airburst rockets arcing over the Teph Min infantry. Closer at hand there was a hiss and clank of hydraulic pistons as Donovan’s Castellax units began to mobilise. The lines of iron giants flowed together as they began a quick-march towards their designated assault routes. Plasma cannons glowed on low power, the leading robots snapping their arms up as they approached firing range.


+ + + + + +

"Bloody hell" Norin muttered.

The first shells landed, blasting out shockwaves and ugly pillars of smoke. Norin counted four, five, six plumes. Ten seconds later another salvo came down, and the ground shook like it had been struck with a hammer. Patriot shells landed next - some way ahead of the Wolfpack, bursting into white smoke to give them some cover against the enemy. Nevertheless, Norin and his squads were still nearly a kilometre short of the imperial strongpoint - much further than he would have liked to be before the bullets starting flying.

From the distant barricades a few heavy lascannons were snapping speculatively, aiming at their mechanicus allies as they surged forward from their staging grounds. One of Norin’s squadmates wasn’t reassured by the approaching war-bots.

“Shit.” he cursed, and pointed towards the road, where a metal disc lay half-buried between the spidering anti-personnel mines. Norin recognised a melta bomb. “They’ve seeded tank-busters as well, the cunning bastards. The toasters are gonna have a bad time if they keep coming up the roads!”

[Highland Sniper]

"Get down unless you want to be bloody chunks everywhere!" A man with Norin shouted over the mortar and fire as he moved to leave the crater.

"What the hell are you doing?" Norin demanded.

"I'm clearing for those toasters!" Was the reply as the man got out and ran a few meters before turning and blasting the tank buster.
Shrapnel flew everywhere, and the man was shoved into another crater by the force of the explosion with a resounding "F**K!"

"F**k," Norin said, "Move to the next crater. And don't get turned to atoms!"
He ran out and doe for the next crater where the man lay, blood from a gash in his head seeming to be the most of the bleeding.
"Someone patch him up, quickly!"

"Well," he man said weekly, it was hard to hear over the explosions, "That worked."

"S***t." Norin said and pulled out the Vox, "This is Wolf team Alpha to the bloody toasters. Watch the road, it's littered with tank busters! And that goes for everyone bloody else!"

"Alright, we move forward!" Norin said after he was done addressing anyone behind or ahead of them, "Just don't get blown to F***ing bits!"

"F***! we lost Freddy!"


+ + + + + + + + + + + +

"S***T!" A man shouted, "I can't hear!"
"They bloody saw us!"

"Move up! let's go!" Their team leader shouted, "To the next crater!"

They went over the ridge of the crater and saw smoke everywhere.
Everyone rushed over to the next crater as fast as they could as another round of mortar fire fell around them.

"F***, my arm!" A man shouted as he fell into the crater. He must have been hit by some shrapnel.

"Sis! Can't you throw up a shield or something!?!?" Someone asked.

"I'm still barely trained!" She shouted back.

"Well, you can at least do something!"

Another round of mortars fell around them.

"GO!"

And they went again, Sisilia trying to form any sort of barrier around them. The effort was making her pant, more than running around in the ill-fitting armor was.


+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Nores dove into another crater as mortar and bolter shots fell around him.
He was probably lucky not to be riddled with holes.

"S***t!" Someone shouted next to him, "my A**, I got shrapnel up my A**!"

"Welcome to the club!" Another man barked a laugh as more mortar shells fell around them.

They were one of the closer teams to the wall. Team Foxtrot.

"This is Wolf team Alpha to the bloody toasters. Watch the road, it's littered with tank busters! And that goes for everyone bloody else!"

"Well, that's just great!" Someone else said, "Now how are the bloody toasters supposed to get here?!"

"They probably could get here in one piece if they had any real brains. How do they even think with all those wires?"

"Enough chatter!" Their leader said as another round of mortars fell, "Move!"

Over the ridge they went and back into the fire, bolter shots rang out in the heavy smoke barely missing in most cases until they managed to get into the next one as more shells fell around them.

"Man, this is hell." Nores said.

"It might as well be the bloody warp!"


+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Colonel Maxim watched grimly as the field turned to hell.

No tanks to be seen, tank busters on the road, and all hell broke loose way too soon. And on top of that, they might not get anything more for 30 minutes. A bloody long time in a battle.

He raised his magnocs to see the field. The smoke made it hard for both sides to see.
He scanned around the field and off it, hoping maybe to get a glimpse of something that might help them.

[Azazeal849]

Colonel Maxim watched grimly as the field turned to hell. No tanks to be seen, tank busters on the road, and all hell broke loose way too soon. And on top of that, they might not get anything more for 30 minutes. A bloody long time in a battle.

He raised his magnocs to see the field. The smoke made it hard for both sides to see. He scanned around the field and off it, hoping maybe to get a glimpse of something that might help them.

Through the smoke he could see the brief backlight flares of explosions along the road - one of Norin’s squads was hanging back and braving the mortar fire to detonate some of the mines in the path of the mechanicus war-bots. Closer to him he could see the wounded and dead casualties of the barrage beginning to appear through the thinning smokescreen, stark against the rusty clay. Further away he could see long, stuttering lines of tracer fire roping back and forth from the high ground to either side. That meant his men had gotten closer to the objective - close enough to come under fire from the heavy bolter nests on the cliffs.


+ + + + + +

Blizzard Phantom Two were still hiding in their captured gun nest, afforded a prime view of the valley that was now shrouded in smoke and alive with mortar blasts.

“Patsie troops approaching second marker,” came a voice through the captured vox they had propped against the sandbags. “All heavy weapon teams fire at will! Light the bastards up!”

Bolter fire began to hammer down from the cliffs, above and behind them. It stitched through the cratered hellscape of the valley, spitting up rock and dust against the dissipating smoke. None of the Jotunhel infiltrators envied the poor bastards trying to advance down there.

“What’s taking them so long with those orbital picts?” one of them said, cursing under his breath as he glanced up at the sizzling blue sky. “It’s not as if there’s any fucking clouds!”

Back behind the ridge, it was as if the Nebulas had heard his stern rebuke.

“Blizzard, this is Striker Six.” Hassek’s own vox fuzzed. “Orbital track reports negative on enemy armour in your combat zone; however they can see vehicles being airlifted from the beach three kilometres to your east. Unless they’ve got tanks hiding under camo, looks like you folks are fighting a rearguard.”


+ + + + + +

And they went again, Sisilia trying to form any sort of barrier around them. The effort was making her pant, more than running around in the ill-fitting armor was. Focusing past the heat and the din of the bombardment, she saw the terrain around them swim and distort as a thin bubble of psychic force domed in around them, bending the incoming light. Trying to hold it steady as they advanced was a trial, and after half a minute she was already feeling a painful, thudding pressure around her eye sockets.

The mortar shell landing a scant ten metres away was like a thunderclap. An explosion clawed up the side of the bubble, and a cone of shrapnel whistled as it was redirected away from the squad.

“Good work little sis!” one of the Wolf Pack shouted back over his shoulder.

The sharp snap of lasguns firing prompted the Tephainians to hit the ground again, this time behind a shoulder of crumbled clay where a fold in the ground had half fallen away. The respite gave Sisilia the opportunity to drop her barrier, the pain around her eyes receding slightly. She risked a peek over the lip of the cracked slope.

Ahead, the broken ground was crowned by the square, grey stripe of a prefab defence line. Every few metres was a firing slit spitting blue threads of las, and here and there a gun emplacement. Sisilia recognised the four barrels of a hydra quad-gun, slamming back two by two as they ripped the ground into ruin somewhere behind her squad.

Gunfire was lashing with fury from the fortified line - lasguns, autoguns, heavy stubbers. Whoever was in charge of this place clearly wasn’t concerned about running out of ammunition.


+ + + + + +

Two kilometres from the imperial line, sniper Nile rotated the focus ring on his autocannon scope, muttering curses about the smokescreen even though it had been dropped with saving his comrades’ lives in mind. The artillery and mortar fire threw up even more muck, and the blazing light-show as the aegis line opened up was just the icing on the cake. He found the blocky shapes of the ammo dump through the haze and tried to work outward from there.

“Wait.” Nile suddenly spoke aloud, half to himself and half to his spotter. “There you are, you bastard.”

Behind the safety of the aegis line, imperial guardsmen were running back and forth with belts and boxes from the ammo crates, their shoulders hunched against the noise alone being pelted out by their fellow defenders. Overseeing the operation was the woman Nile had seen previously, her black flak-coat fluttering around her ankles as she shouted orders at the runners. The officer whom Nile had seen her threatening earlier was taking a more subdued approach to command, kneeling by the wall of the abandoned school and speaking into a vox handset as he coordinated the defence.

[dakkagor]

"Blizzard Phantom 2, open up with whatever you've got! Knock out the overwatch now!"

+Confirm that Actual, going loud+

Across the ridgeline, men and women of the Damned 88th rose up, firing full auto blitzes of las and tossing frags and smoke grenades. The punishing autocannon and heavy bolter fire slackened and fell off as confusion reigned for a few brief minutes.

Jarn turned and roared at the batteries stashed behind him in safety.

"You've got your coordinates! Open fire!"

Eighteen 'tunks' sounded, followed by another dozen, then another. Whistling mortar shells arced through the boiling sky to land around and on the Imperial frontline positions, frag rounds driving Imperials into cover or tossing their broken bodies into the air. It wasn't alot of fire, but it all helped reduce what was coming in at the Militia and Mechanicus.

Jarn watched the firefights on the ridgeline, the sparkling lines of las and the clouds of smoke rolling off the heights. A few weapon positions had opened up again, some against the Seperatists, some against the Imperials where the damned had overran a nest in good enough condition. Jarn knew his boys and girls would fire until the loaded magazine ran out and then reposition, not wanting to draw heavy counter fire that would pin them down.

[Highland Sniper]

Nores panted as bolter fire flew overhead.

His group had caught up with those up front and was hunkered down in a rocky crevice for protection.
Some of the other guys were looking over and trying to give some return fire.
One guy fell back with a singed face.
Nores checked for a pulse, and found none.

He swallowed, the face of a dead man not helping his nerves in the situation as another man fell back into the hole with a hand to his eyes.
"S***!" He said "I got dust in my eyes. F***!"

The laz blasts lessened and a series of explosions followed.

"Go go go!" Tored Norin shouted as he rose up and charged with he continued to fire back at the now chaotic defensive lines.
Many followed suit.

Nores took some deep breaths and charged out with a mighty war cry, charging the prefabs and tossing a grenade as he went.

Imperials recovered and swung their guns to fire on the wolf pack, and chaos continued as men fell around Nores. He felt a few stings, but ignored them. He couldn't stop now.

More grenades were tossed by others, and more gun emplacements and protected positions were littered with frag shrapnel.

He ran up to the prefabs and got below a window. An imperialist guard looked over and tried to shoot him, but he grabbed the man, hauled him out and stabbed him several times with his knife and continued to breath heavily.
He stared at the blood on his hands. He was still not really used to killing.

Another guard fell by him, as one of the pack had seen him and shock and took out the guard.
"Come on, Nores. Get it together!" Jorden said before getting shot in the shoulder and fell.

Nores swing around and traded shots with the guard through the hole in the defenses and downed the guard.
He crouched to check on Jorden who was clutching his shoulder.
"Welp, I think I'm out." Jorden said through gritted teeth. "Go. Get going you B************, before they're all gone. Go... go kicked their A******* for me."

"Right... right." Nores said and hopped through the hole and back into the fray.


++++++++++++++++++

Sisilia could see the chaos from their position, and it hurt to see those who cared for her get torn to pieces. Almost like using her abilities too much.

She tried to steel her emotions, to keep them in check. But it was hard.
She reached out, and it was almost like a wave of force left her and headed straight for the defensive line, tearing up the ground on it's destructive path and tearing a large gap through the prefabs. The pain that came a counterpoint to the sense of loss for her comrades, and she sat down and clutched her head against it.

"Crap!" Some one shouted, probably looking on the destruction she had just caused.

Arms engulfed her, "Hey, hold in there. That's enough." The voice said, on edge and forceful, "We don't want you going nuts on us now."

"Shut it, it's not helping." Someone else said.

"He's just trying to help." Another jumped in.

"Take five, Sisilia. Rest for a minute." The head of the group said, "James, Brenna, Calvan. Stay with her, keep her safe. Everyone else, with me. Forward!"

Sisilia wanted to say something, but something restrained her. And with the pain and worry came flashes.


++++++++++++++++++

Bitan thundered through the new hole in the prefabs.
He had seen the wave pass through and tear it to shreds and could only think of Sisilia. She had such power, yet with it, much danger. She'd need to be careful in coming days. But now was not the time.

He barreled through and halted long enough to bring a mid-bolter to bear and let loose a barrage on the guardsmen trying for a new defensive line just past the prefabs. He became a rallying point as men both in fair condition and bloodied formed up beside him, taking cover where possible, and adding their blasts to his own.

The assault halted there. But they were inside now and, soon, the enemy would break.


++++++++++++++++++

Bender crouched low, and stood a ways back as he and a few others continued to pick out AT mines. Deako was back in another crater close by, trying to hit some of the cliff side nests. Of all the man's claims if being a crack shot, he still hadn't seen it for himself.

Not too much farther from the main fighting now, but they still had stray bolts and the occasional mortar shell to worry about.

He gritted his teeth as more shrapnel whizzed by him from another shell.
Did it slow down? Wasn't there more earlier?
No time for that. Just clear a way for those clankers.
Where were they anyhow? Maybe they could help make a way for themselves.


+++++++++++++++++

Maxim saw the chaos. And he saw some things that could help.
"All teams, This is chief." he said over the Vox to the Tel Min Militia, "Form up and hold, wait for the bots. Goffer, what's your status?"

"We've just regrouped and are ready to let loose," was the reply. Goffer team had split up into smaller groups to meet up closer on the heights. They were probably the best hunters in the militia, and getting where they had without much trouble might show just that.

"See what you can do about those cliff nests, and maybe whatever artillery they have left. I don't want them blowing us away now that we're so close."


++++++++++++++++++

"Yes sir, we're on it." Zen said and slipped the vox back in his breast pocket before motioning for the others to spread own and gestured for targets.

They all tried to pick spots that had a good view of their preferred targets, and good cover.

they were still too far to make out faces in those bolter nests on the cliffs, but they were just higher enough, some making their way to smaller ledges, to have a bit of a view into some of them. Not the easiest shots though. Getting their attention would make things very interesting.

Zen set himself up for the nests with five others, while the other six took up positions with a better view of the compound.

[Azazeal849]

Where were they anyhow? Maybe they could help make a way for themselves.

Bender’s question was answered by a tap on his shoulder guard as one of his fellow militiamen gestured urgently for him to get out the way. Out of the dust and smoke behind them came hulking, vaguely humanoid shapes, their whining servos and thunderous footfalls masked by the earthshaker rounds that rocked the ground every few seconds. The war-bots loomed past Bender and the others as they scurried to get out of the way, each one three or four times the height of a grown man, moving in lockstep single file. One after the other, the cannons mounted on their shoulders began to glow and pulse with killing light.

Dominus Krypter’s war-bots were advancing, funnelling into the mine-safe corridors cleared by Norin’s men. It was safe now for them to do so - the Imperial heavy fire had shrivelled away to almost nothing in the confusion of the Jotunhel ambush. Earthshaker rounds continued to pound and destroy, but they were landing largely behind the Teph Min, and ahead of the castellax.


* * * * * *

“Ad Mech heavies incoming, sir!”

Garlan Ruiz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjjXP7Ex83A), captain of the 4th company of the 45th Konorian Rifles in the Emperor’s most stalwart Imperial Guard, gestured for the spotter to move over and pressed his own eyes to the periscope that looked southwest from the garrison pre-fab. Now that the Patsies’ smoke-screen was thinning out, the grainy green auger scope was actually worth a damn again. He focused the picters beaming their feeds down from the battlements, and saw that there were, indeed, ad mech heavies incoming.

“Shit.” he muttered. “Has anyone seen that bloody cogboy Veiss?”

He looked around, but the stormtroopers nearby shook their heads one after the other.

“Did he leave us his kastellans, at least?”

Silence, save for the vox operator at the next view-port haranguing the earthshaker battery two kilometres behind them to adjust their fire. With most of the spotter drones out of action, the artillery had kept up a rolling barrage on their previous fire zone. Evidently, it hadn’t stopped the heretek war-bots.

Ruiz drummed his fingers against the riveted steel of an I-beam that buttressed the periscope alcove. The enemy mortar fire wouldn’t scratch the pre-fab base, but the brick and slate buildings of the village around were another story. The men inside them were keeping the breaching Patsies back with a deadly crossfire for now, but the heavy weapon teams on the cliffs had been effectively neutralised by Patsie infiltrators, and when the war-bots got within firing range…Ruiz and his regiment had been on Vaxildan with the ad mech, albeit fighting with the gear-heads that time rather than against them, and they had all seen what the martians’ battle automata were capable of.

Turning to the black-clad figure behind him, Ruiz invited her to look through the periscope. “Commissar?”

The hatchet-faced woman eyed him suspiciously, but assented. That was good - she needed to see. She had been on Vaxildan too. Ruiz saw the commissar stiffen, just slightly, as she took in the advancing wall of steel. That’s good too. Even she knew that continuing to try and hold the line would be buying mere minutes, at the cost of a whole company of men.

Ruiz cleared his throat. “Permission to fall back, commissar?”

The commissar’s hand tapped her thigh. For a moment, Ruiz thought it was going to move to the bolt pistol at her hip. But instead, the commissar folded her arms.

“Aye.” she said, looking at Ruiz grimly. “Set someone you trust to blow the ammo dump. I’ll handle the rock charges.”

Some of that ammo could have been saved, Ruiz thought sourly, If you’d let me load them up half an hour ago. He kept his face carefully neutral. He was already more fortunate that some. Still, perhaps the commissar’s earlier intervention had been a blessing in disguise - more trucks still on hand meant more vehicles to evacuate their men.

The commissar’s eyes narrowed, just slightly. “An orderly withdrawal, captain. Any man I see running will be made an example of when we return to the staging point.”

Ruiz chewed the inside of his cheek. He didn’t know precisely what examples the commissar had in mind, but he could already hear the blood dripping from them. “As you say, commissar.”


* * * * * *

The assault halted there. But they were inside now and, soon, the enemy would break. A lasgun snapped and a man to Bitan’s left stumbled, cursing in surprise as the ablative plates of his chestpiece shattered and blew off. Bitan himself drew back behind the schoolhouse wall to reload, beneath the clocktower that had already had its bell sheared off by a mortar. As the artillery fell, the Imps had drawn back naturally into the buildings to avoid it, turning the small village into a cluster of bunkers. Bitan’s ad hoc fireteam were inside the walls with Noren’s squad close behind, but the overlapping fields of fire from the houses past the school posed a thorny obstacle.

Spinning out to fire, Bitan saw one of the bungalow roofs cave inwards as a pair of mortar shells hit it direct. A stutter of explosions followed - not the expected heavy thud of rockets detonating, more like the chained bangs of an autocannon that blew out the windows and spalled a line of brick fragments from the walls. It was only when another pair of rockets slammed down into the school that Sisilia had already half demolished that Bitan realised that they weren’t mortar rounds at all. They were humans in heavy carapace armour, smoke curling from the jetpacks on their backs and from the long-barrelled autoguns that they hefted as easily as a lascarbine. Nebulas.

The one who had landed a few short metres from Bitan was a mess, missing her visored helmet and most of one gauntlet, and with a visible rent in the side of the chestplate. She pushed dirt-matted blonde hair away from her face and fixed her gaze on Bitan. He recognised her face. Everyone in the Adrantean republic knew that face.

“Captain Tarran.” she introduced herself. “And I take it you’re the Tephainian milita. There’s three more squads coming - where do you need us?”

A few paces behind Bitan, Morgan paused mid reload and stared slack-jawed. The aquila necklace that he always wore was in his hand instead as he brought it, shaking, to his lips.

“Captain Tarran? But they said you were dead! The Imps dropped a manticore barrage!”

Tarran’s expression soured, her mouth twisting. “Call it a miracle.”

Morgan laughed, sounding almost delirious as he slammed a fresh charge pack into his lasgun. “The Emperor is with us! Follow the Nebulas! Follow the living saint!”


* * * * * *

Sisilia wanted to say something, but something restrained her. And with the pain and worry came flashes.

“Easy, easy.” murmured Brenna, with that half-concerned, half-cautious look that everyone reserved for psykers, even the people who liked to call her little sister.

Sisilia’s eyes were drawn towards the half-demolished school building as something tugged at her psychic sense.

“What? What is it?” Brenna followed Sisilia’s gaze, lasgun twitching up cautiously. Even the ones who feared Sisilia’s powers had learned to trust her instincts. The school hall looked like a giant fist had swung a haymaker into its corner, the rubble scattered by Sisilia’s psychic strike. The building interior was still shrouded in hanging dust. Then they both heard a cough.

Brenna nudged Calvan and James. “Hey. Hear that?”

Calvan groped for his lamp pack and began to slide it onto the attachment bar of his las. “Sure did.”

The two rose and stalked quietly towards the building, torch-beams sifting through the dust as they stepped carefully over a pair of dead imperial guardsmen. Sisilia heard them scrunching over rubble, and then hard impacts as they tested floorboards. There was a creak, followed by low, sharp voices that she couldn’t make out.

“Clear.” James called a moment later. “We’ve found a civvie.”

“Imp or Patriot?” Brenna asked warily.

“No idea. No weapons on her though.”

Calvan and James reappeared with a third figure in tow, this one a teak-skinned woman of perhaps thirty standard, her hair and her loose clothes stained grey with brick dust. Her gaze shifted nervously onto Brenna and Sisilia as she was ushered over towards the group.

“You speak Teph?” James asked, and when the woman looked at him blankly tried again in the trade language of their sister planet. “Addie standard?”

This time the woman nodded. “Little.” she said, a rolling Mariochi accent dusted over the Tephainian Major.

“Want me to watch her?” Calvan asked hopefully.

“No chance.” James snorted, “Don’t want you thinking with the wrong head when there’s a battle still going on.”

Calvan made a face, and glanced at Sisilia. “You know what, little sister, you take her. I’ve got less to prove.”

As the soldier indicated her, the Mariochi woman regarded Sisilia with bewilderment. In her oversized flak, she probably looked like a teenage conscript or message runner.


* * * * * *

Jarn knew his boys and girls would fire until the loaded magazine ran out and then reposition, not wanting to draw heavy counter fire that would pin them down. That was exactly what the team who had taken the very first gun nest were doing, scrambling their way down the slope as a lascannon scorched a molten trench through their former position. No sooner had they recovered from the scalding-hot pebbles raining down on them from that shot, they were showered again with dirt tossed up by the mortar barrage.

“Fok’s sake!” one of the Damned cursed, cuffing away the dust that had gummed itself to his sweating face.

The Patriot artillery weren’t actively trying to kill their own infiltrators, although it certainly felt like it. Down in the village, buildings were shivering under the earthquake bombardment, and there was a constant rumble and slither of dislodged roof tiles falling to shatter on the hard ground.

“Phantom Two for Blizzard Actual,” voxed the squad marksman, who had had the presence of mind to lug the captured imperial set along with them. “Watch your fire, friendlies close. The Tephs have breached the village and we’re getting pushed that way too.”

“Glad to know someone’s looking out for us at least.” said a voice, and the Jotunhel turned to see Zen and his squad gesturing from behind a torn-up cluster of shrubs. One of the Teph Mins pointed towards the pre-fab garrison base that had been dropped into the centre of the island village.

Round the back of the rockrete bunker, blocky cargo trucks were loading up with guardsmen who were leapfrogging back from the village. Men in heavier armour, stormtroopers by Zen’s guess, were filing out of the bunker and holding a perimeter, some pelting overcharged las-bolts back towards the village while others swept the ridgeline above.

[Highland Sniper]

Mariochi woman regarded Sisilia with bewilderment. In her oversized flak, she probably looked like a teenage conscript or message runner.

"You don't have to," Brenna said, "I honestly trust myself more than these knuckleheads."

The bolter fire and Las blasts continued a short distance.
But notch fighting seed to be that close.

"How about you come with me?" Sisilia asked Brenna.

"Ho, little sister's got a brain," James said before Brenna smacked the helmet off his head.

"Hey, he's gotta point." Calvan said.

"Alright, let's go." Brenna said and changed to trade, "follow us, move fast, and keep your head low." She told the woman before giving a nod for Sisilia to lead the way.

The bewilderment in the woman's face made her nervous. But she left the building and headed for the command posts back where they came from.

It wasn't long until they met some more pack militia running towards the front with war-bots close behind.


+++++++++++++++++++

Bender stumbled back as the war-bots slowly thundered past. Though they were slow, it was still a faster pace than the stride of a normal man.

After the small moment of wonder, Bender scrambled over by Deako "hey, the wire-heads are here. Let's get back with the main force!" He raised is voice over the thundering steps and booming shells.

And they ran to get ahead of the bots and came across Sisilia, Brenna, and a civi.

"Good to see you're still alive!" Brenna called.

"Takes one to give one!" One of the boys responded.

"We got bots coming up the line, we're heading up to join the fight," Bender said quickly, "We can share some drinks when this is all over!"

After they passed, they continued on to the main fighting and managed to find Bitan with captain Terran.

"Bitan, we got wires for brains coming in behind us," Bender said panting from the run and saluted the officers and did a double take when he realized that he just saluted captain Terran. Everyone else behind him was practically gaping.

"Alright." Bitan said, "Captain, take some of your men and reinforce the line, we'll push as soon as the-"

The Vox came over "All teams, this is Foxtrot, we got eyes on troops loading into transports with stormtroopers seeming to be covering."
"This is Tored in Delta. They're probably pulling back and are rigging the ammo caches to blow."
"Chief to Beta, those caches could be a useful resource" Varnin's voice came over the Vox, "see if you can secure them."


++++++++++++++++++++

Bitan took all this in with a dark face and thought for a moment.
"Terran, take same men and support Norin, have the rest bolster the push. I'll have some men circle around to flank." Bitan said and went to the Vox to give the orders.

"Delta, see what you can do to secure those caches," he said, "Echo, Foxtrot, circle around for a flank. Everyone else not ready doing something, get ready to push as soon as the war-bots arrive.
"Goffer, what's you're statis?"


++++++++++++++++++++

"Just cleaning up," Zen said into the Vox as some Las blasts flew by. As soon as they started taking out targets, they started taking fire, and it already moved a little close for comfort.
"We just got some trash left."
He popped out of cover and took another imp in the face.

Their distraction seemed to work. They were no longer focused on pointing everyone bellow. But now they were taking the heat.

"As soon as you're done, see what you can do about those trucks. We're gonna make them pay for every day they stay in our region." Bitan said
"Belay that. As soon as you're clear, find the enemy officers and take them of you can."
There was silence.
"Yes sir. We'll see what we can do with the officers." Zen replied and went back to focusing on the fight in front of him.

[dakkagor]

There was a burst of static, and the mortar fire tailed off.

+Phantom Two, this is Blizzard Actual, fire mission cancelled. If they've breached, pull out, you've done enough.+

"Roger Blizzard Actual."

The recon sergeant watched as the glory boys and guard fell back.

"I can stop them running." Hissed the markswoman, Britta. She nestled her hotshot long rifle into her shoulder and lined up a shot. "I can blow out an engine block at the front of the convoy."

"Negative." The sergeant placed a hand on the rifle barrel and pushed it gently down. "We blow that, we force them to stand and fight, and this whole thing gets a lot messier." He shook his head. "We've done enough today."

Britta thought about arguing. She was a veteran of the original intake, and had watched imperials kill her husband for the 'heresy' of being a priest of the old Jotunhel religion. Every burst skull, shattered ribcage, blown out back, was meant to be vengeance, but it was never enough. She knew now it would never be. But at least when they died, she felt better for a little while.

She blew out a long breath, and safed the rifle.

"You see a blackhat though, you feel free to cap that fucker." The sergeant chuckled darkly. "Wouldn't mind myself one of those cinder-crag bolters they carry round here."

"More than fair." Britta responded, and started hunting for a high value target.

[Azazeal849]

“How are they doing, Sorn?” Webber asked, holding has flak helmet firmly down against the relentless bombardment that threatened to shake it loose with earth tremor alone. They had been separated from the rest of Beta squad in the confusion of the rush towards the village, and neither of them had a damn vox caster.

Sorn bellied his way up to the lip of the shell crater and peered out. “There’s a couple of Coburn’s squad heading back our way.”

Webber checked the charge counter on his lasgun. “Do they look happy?”

“Wounded and dirty.”

Webber frowned. “Oh shit, maybe we lost.”

Loose clay slithered down the side of the crater as one of the war-bots lumbered past, venting sparks from superficial damage.

“Heh, not likely with them around.” Sorn quipped, looking up at the machine, then waved at someone up top. “Hey, little sister! Over here!”

Webber cautiously shouldered his lasgun and crawled up until he too could see over the crater lip. Three women were hurrying in their direction, heads down like they were fighting their way through a rainstorm. Two of them wore Teph Min armour - one set noticeably too big on its small wearer - and the third looked like a native, with tousled hair and dust-ruined clothes.

“Well you’re a pretty one.” Sorn observed, before turning to the two wolf pack. “Who’s she, then?”

“A civvie, I think.” Brenna said as she and Sisilia slid down into the crater and hunkered down. “And don’t compliment her. I’m sure I read that Mariochi natives have this weird superstition about it attracting jealous daemons.”

The civilian clearly didn’t speak Teph, because she seemed less concerned by their exchange than by Sisilia, who she was still staring at - or rather, at the symbol on the shoulder of her fatigues that denoted her as a sanctioned psyker.

“You are…?” she asked Sisilia quietly, in stilted Adrantean standard. She flailed her hand for a moment, as if trying to capture the right word from the air, before settling for pointing at her own forehead. “Witch?”


+ + + + + +

Threads of killing light were all around Norin, the green of his squad’s Jager-patten lasguns crossing with imperial red and blue. Lasguns snapped like hungry jackals, bolts glancing off flak armour or punching through to release puffs of vaporised blood. The wolf pack were slowly wrapping around the village buildings like a tightening noose, while the heavily-armoured Nebulas dropped straight down into them. A fire team of Imps tried to break out from a ruined terrace, and were immediately hit by Patriot crossfire. Norin had thought that the prefab base at the centre of the hamlet would have been a tougher nut to crack, until the ad mech war bots turned their guns on it, blowing out chunks of rockrete with the methodical back-and-forth sweep of their plasma cannons. Soon the base was burning just like the other buildings. Norin led his men at a run, anxious to secure the weapons cache spotted by Foxtrot squad before the fires spread.

Ahead of him were a cluster of steel crates stamped with the imperial double-eagle, their lids hastily crowbarred off and lying next to them. Stray power cells and frag grenades scattered the ground where the ammo runners had dropped them in their haste. Only a knot of Imps were still sheltering near the crates, the rest of the guards seemingly having been killed or fallen back. One of the guardsmen saw them coming and clawed at his bandolier for a fistful of grenades, but a burst of lasfire scythed him down before he could pull the pins. Another Imp with some kind of rank stripes on his collar looked up from the vox set that he was busy pulling off the back of a dead caster-man. Still shouting into the receiver, he fumbled for the pistol at his hip. Norin’s lasgun snapped and the guardsman flailed back, dragging belts of stubber rounds after him as his clawing hand hooked around one of the crates. The vox handset thumped to the ground, still crackling with return chatter.

“Hey Yurgen,” Norin snapped, beckoning to one of his squad who he knew spoke the high-falutin’ lingo of Calix standard, “What’s he saying?”

“Something strike confirmed?” Yurgen said, running forward. He pushed the dead officer off the vox set and pressed the caster horn to his ear. As soon as he did so, he paled. “Hail to you, martyrs.” he translated, “Hail to the Emperor.”

Norin nearly fell over himself running backwards as he realised what those words meant. “Everyone get the fuck down!”


+ + + + + +

The first artillery round smacked the village with enough force to stumble Ruiz even from several hundred metres away. The sound was like a physical force, a punch in the face to match the shockwaves that rippled through the cracked earth, making loose gravel jump as if the ground itself were flinching. Imperial artillery, Ruiz knew from a hundred similar bombardments. Earthshaker rounds, doing exactly what the name implied. A rip and crackle of secondary explosions followed, perhaps one of the ammo caches going up.

Well, he thought grimly. That’s it then. He hadn’t given lieutenant Carver the order, but if someone had taken it upon themselves to start voxing for an artillery strike within the perimeter, then things were sufficiently frakked that no-one else was coming.

“Go, go!” he urged the last few stormtroopers who were leapfrogging back. He looked at the final Taurox that was revving up in preparation to leave, and struck the angled wheel arch that stood as high as his shoulder for emphasis. Dust and pebbles sprayed from the oversized tyres as men piled through the open rear hatch, and with a dragon’s breath of oily smoke the APC tore away down the switchback road.

Ruiz turned to the commissar, his only companion now while explosions and the sharper whip-crack of lasfire blitzed through the embattled village. The commissar seemed unconcerned, her eyes tracing up the cliffs that flanked the switchback, as if giving the melta charges nestled there one final inspection. Seemingly satisfied, she turned to Ruiz. “You didn’t have to accompany me personally, you know.”

That, Ruiz thought, was true. “Permission to speak freely, commissar?”

The commissar’s eyebrow flickered. “Alright.”

“You scare the hell out of all my Guardsmen, ma’am.”

Ruiz had never seen the commissar smile, but at that moment her face did something close to one. “Okay that’s fair.” She reached inside her flakweave coat and pulled out a detonator, flicking back the plastek cap that covered the ignition button. “Shall w-?”

She never finished the question as her chest exploded, spraying Ruiz’ face with splinters of bone and spalled pieces of her armourplas cuirass. As she stumbled into him and fell, he caught a glimpse of a woman pointing a long-las directly at him while lightly-armoured soldiers scrambled down from the rocks behind. The captain reflected that it was probably the commissar’s additional layer of armour that had saved him from the overcharged lasbeam as he shoved the falling corpse away from him and dived to the side, rolling behind an abandoned Tauros scrambler that lay upside down on its roll cage, engine block still smoking from the mortar round that had flipped it. He could hear other traitors shouting - Tephanians, judging by the hissing staccato language they were calling out to each other. He had drawn his automag pistol on reflex as he dived for cover, but from the number of voices he knew exactly how much good it would do him. He looked at the crumpled body of the commissar, and at the detonator that had fallen next to it. The corpse’s face was turned towards him, glassy eyes seeming to command even in death. You’re the only one left. Do your duty, captain.

Ruiz cursed under his breath, and lunged for the detonator.

The lasgun burst caught him in the hip, below the ablative plates of his armour vest. It burned through the flakweave and sliced an agonising line through his gut, from left to right. He stumbled and collapsed with a gasp, on top of the dead commissar.

Garlan Ruiz had made his peace with death when he joined the Guard. He had accepted that it was likely the minute he had decided to stay behind, rather than leave one of his men to the task. But now he felt like cursing the island and its airfield, so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The Guard were already in retreat from the beaches to the south. This was not the stuff of a hero’s death. Neither was the pain burning a red line through his abdomen, making him retch and whimper and squeezing tears from his eyes. Was he supposed to think of the Emperor? Of home, and the two little brothers he had waved off before leaving Konor forever? Of the men he was supposedly buying time for? All he could think about right now was the pain, and the fact that, in the end, he didn’t really want to die.

Frak you, he thought at the sniper, and at whichever traitor had just shot him. Frak you all.

The Patsies were moving up, shouting in their mongrel Gothic. One of them pointed at Ruiz, which reminded him of the detonator still in his hand. Well, he might as well finish it now. He pressed down, but the searing boom of the melta charges was eclipsed by the screech of a lasbolt snapping his head back.


+ + + + + +

Objective secured: Eliminate remaining imperial forces

By the time Hassek and Grimm had moved up to the remains of the village, the bombardment had ceased, and so had the gunfire. Smoke still bled from ruined buildings, and the grainy red clay thrown up by mortar strikes had settled over everything, like a bloody shroud. Krypter’s war-bots stood idle now, like ugly statues, indifferent to the troops who were policing bodies and corralling the few Imp survivors who were stumbling out of the ruins with their hands on their heads. The rest of the Imps had retreated, and it would likely be a while before the Patriots could follow, thanks to the demo charges they had detonated to bring down the cliffside across the evacuation road. A plume of black smoke climbed from the tumbled rockslide like an exclamation mark. Pursuit was hardly needed - orbital track from the Nebulas’ home ship indicated that the remaining Imp units were clustered on the southern beaches and being ferried out to the transports standing offshore as fast as their Sky Talon lifters could manage - but it would have been gratifying to trap and destroy the Imp expeditionary force, instead of no doubt facing them again on some future battlefield. Still, the two commanders knew, they had done enough. More than was expected of them, given the punishing climate and the gauntlet run that had been the assault on the village.

The command Chimera creaked to a halt next to a knocked-out imperial Taurox, whose roof had been peeled back like a tin can by a direct hit. The interior was still belching yellow smoke, its guns cocked brokenly into the air. Lieutenant Beck was nearby, poring over what looked like a captured code book while two of his men turned over a broken imperial vox set. He nodded acknowledgement to the two company commanders as they climbed down from the hatch of their dust-fouled Chimera transport.

“Some of your wolf pack found this.” he smiled thinly at Grimm as he rose to meet them. “Sounds like the Imps are planning to regroup on the mainland. Tarran’s asked the aeronautica to buzz it with a recce aircraft, so hopefully they won’t know we’ve got all their codes for a little bit longer. One more small step towards victory.”

The Tephainian sighed, though the way he cuffed sweat from his face suggested he was thinking in terms of one small step towards getting away from this island and its damnable heat. Hassek could sympathise. His own brain was fried, and now that events were winding down it had left a thick, grey grease across all his senses.

“And then peace,” Beck added. “Emperor willing.”

“There won’t be peace.” an even wearier voice interrupted. It came from one of Tarran’s Nebula soldiers, who was breaking down his oversized autogun to scour the clay and brick dust from its barrel. His hands were steady thanks to the counter-stimms injected through his powered suit, but the abrasive mix of combat drugs had left his eyes bloodshot behind his visor.

“What are you talking about?” Beck asked, torn between his Patriot fervour and his respect for the legendary Nebulas.

The Nebula gestured slowly towards the few Imperial prisoners being marched out of the village. “They can’t let an order other than the Imperium survive. They can’t let people see that there might be another way.”

Beck looked towards the dishevelled knot of imperial prisoners and pursed his lips. “Lets pray the ordinary Imps aren’t so close-minded.”

The Nebula hmm’d hoarsely in agreement. “You’d better pray for that. We might have the moral high ground...but in a war this brutal, the side whose soldiers have fewer doubts, ask fewer questions...that’s the side that’ll win.”


MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

[Azazeal849]

CAMPAIGN 3

The village was called Endurance, and the name was apt. It had been bombarded at least once in the war already, so that many of its brick hamlets were missing roofs, but they still stood, as did the old fashioned mill that the hamlet had grown up to serve. Most of the houses stood on the southern side of the river while the square, redbrick mill squatted on the north bank, its ancient waterwheel still churning as the few natives who hadn’t fled the area continued to work away. They were brave people - the Imperial army stood a mere twenty kilometres to the north, and when they came the mill would be the first building in their line of fire, though everyone knew that the Imps’ objective would be not the town but the bridge that linked it - prefab steel, but two lanes wide and sturdy enough to accommodate tanks and heavy cargo vehicles, built as it was to carry away produce from the mill to the bigger towns to the south.

Despite its strategic placement, Endurance remained a small village; connected by a worn path that wove like a spider's web, catching every building. The impression was enhanced by the slit trenches and spools of razor wire now stringing between the houses. The mill on the northern bank was the most heavily fortified, anchoring the concentric half-rings of trench work that guarded the north end of the bridge. Its courtyard also sited one of the four perimeter gun nests, where soldiers manned shoulder-fire missiles and tripod-mounted lascannons for anti-tank work. HQ had been generous with its handouts, unshackled from imperial paranoia about giving any one unit too much operational independence, but with the whole riverfront and its five bridges to defend, they had had to spread the weaponry thinly. Nevertheless, the defenders of Endurance were ready.

Foxtrot and Hotel squads manned the breastworks on the north bank, stiffened by the Siculi peacekeepers and two of Anarkos’ castellax. Red-cloaked skitarii were prowling around the mill building, finding the best vantage points for their galvanic rifles. Before meeting them, though, the enemy would have to deal with the Sicarian skirmishers prowling the distant woods, and the liberally mined and booby-trapped road that threaded down towards the bridge. Add to that the artillery batteries a few kilometres behind the front line, and those psychopaths from Jotunhel waiting in reserve just to the south, and they were ready to rain Horus on any Imps who tried to take this river crossing.

Calvan, making his way down the trench with an armful of MRE rations for his squad, paused to squint at Brenna who was idly sketching faces in her pocket notebook. The latest one looked like captain Tarran - no doubt one of the Siculi yokels had inspired it, with the way they were always banging on about her having come to their very home planet to save governor Tierce, back when he’d somehow gotten himself kidnapped. Calvan was still waiting for the perfect moment to tell the Siculans that he’d met the captain personally during the battle for Astrix Island a few weeks ago. Some folk had already declared her a saint for the seeming miracle of surviving that Manticore rocket strike. A few crazy people had swung to the opposite extreme, and claimed that she had to be warp-touched because nothing holy could have walked out of that barrage unscathed. Calvan would love to see what major Hancock and his Siculans thought of that.

“How much would she charge, you reckon?” he asked Brenna, deliberately teasing his squadmate.

Brenna didn’t miss a beat. “Bitch please, she’d do me for free.” She paused to squint at Calvan. “You though? Probably a hundred Thrones at least.”

“Fuck her then,” Calvan said with exaggerated impiety. “She ain't my type anyway.”

He looked around in the hope that a nearby Siculan had heard him, but they were all watching the sky. They had been ever since the previous day when what looked like a stripped-down Marauder had flown overhead - out of reach of their shoulder-fire missiles and not dropping any bombs in return, only circling ominously a few times before racing away north. Tribune Anarkos had hypothesised a reconnaissance flight, and the cogboy was rarely wrong, but the Imps’ awaited push hadn’t come that day. This morning however they had awoken to the dull crump of artillery hitting other areas of the riverfront line, and answering bangs behind them from counter-battery fire. The horizon was lit to north and south, flickering with pockets of angry orange light.

An hour after dawn (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM3cM7BByY8), the artillery began to fall on Endurance.

“Any word from Tanaka?” captain Grimm asked his vox operator, both of them flinching down a little as a tree above the foxhole was hit by shrapnel and blew into flying shreds and fibre splinters.

The voxman lowered his handset. “Tanaka says artillery and airstrikes along the line.” Mitsu Tanaka was the colonel of the 4th Tephaine Rangers, and she held nominal command of their sector of the front line. Her regiment were stationed further south with the artillery, in case the need arose to plug a gap in the defensive line. “Says they’ve spotted paratroopers landing near Overlook, and mechanised units moving near Prospect.”

Overlook was another village and the next viable crossing, about ten kilometres east, while Prospect town was their bulwark on the north side of the river. It sounded like the Imperials were finally moving, and in force. Over the roar and crash of the enemy bombardment, another sound began to manifest. The skitarii with their augmetic ears picked it up first - a scream of ramjet engines that, when passed back to the squad alphas and relayed in turn to tribune Anarkos at his command post, was quickly filtered and identified as the signature sound of Thunderbolt fighters.

A whole squadron of them appeared above the distant woodland, a camo-painted arrowhead flying low and fast - so low that they raked up plumes of spray from the river as they thundered over it. Some of the pilots curled away from the bristling defences of the village, while some gunned right over it, letting rip with their autocannons. One row of exploding shells traced over a trench and through a brick hovel, which shuddered and collapsed as the fighter boomed overhead.

Patriot objective: Defend the bridge

[Highland Sniper]

"Back blast clear!" came the call before another let a rocket loose, the warhead catching the tail of the Thunderbolt fighter than had pealed away overhead. Another rocket was fired, streaking over a second fighter.

"S***! One already dropped their payload!" came a shout from one of the spotters.
"Nothing for it. Open up on these F***ers!" came the response.

Several more rockets were shot off as men rushed to get more warheads to reload. Others just opened up with whatever small arms they had, lazrifles and old bolters alike wizzing past the fighters.

"Why didn't they give us a blasted flack gun?" one guy shouted.
"Maybe they were being used elsewhere?" Another suggested.
"Screw this!"

Someone got the idea to swing one of the big guns around and was getting others to help.
"As soon as it does another fly by, lead it and shoot!" They shouted.

"Here he comes!" Another shouted as a fighter bore down on them. The pilot must be hoping to take out the threat to their air superiority.
"I got him. Back blast clear?" One guy shouted and got the all clear as the auto-cannon opened up on them.
The man shot and clipped the wing as his leg was blown off. He fell over in curses as the craft careened over head and crashed on the other side.
"Ah, F***!" he shouted, holding his mangled leg.
"Someone get a medic over here!"


===========================================

James coughed as the smoke cleared. "Is everyone alright?" he called

"What they hell do you think? AAHH!" Came the answer from another man who was half buried in the rubble from the bombing.

"Come on, then. Let's get him out. Quickly!"

And they all worked to remove rubble. It started to shift dangerously.
"wo, wo wo. Stop! You're gonna get us all killed!"
They all stopped.
"Someone get some supports." Someone said, "Don't worry. We're gonna get you outa here."


===========================================

Sisilia ducked at the fly over and explosions, when she looked around, she saw that a brick hovel and part of a trench line was ruined.

"This is just perfect," Tored said, "They've brought the tenderizer. They'll be moving in, soon."
"Keller, have artillery ready to pound any troops that come up. Make sure everyone is standing ready." Captain Grimm said, picking up his heavy bolter in both hands, and setting it on the edge of the fox hole and let off some controlled bursts as another fighter passed close by, ducking a little as more shrapnel flew everywhere.

Keller put out the orders.

"Sir?" Sisilia spoke up.
"Do what you must," Captain Grimm said, "I've learned a while ago not to question a phsycer's feelings."
"yes sir." She said and climbed out of the fox hole, sprinting for the ruined trench line.

"Keller. You might want to let the others know that we're taking some heat." Capt. Grimm said.


===========================================

"Orders! Artillery to stand by to fire on incoming troops!" the squad vox operator shouted.

"No S***!" a man shouted, "Jorden, on the right!"
Jorden shifted to the right "Back blast clear?!"
"You're clear!"
Jordon fired off another shot, and it at least scared to fighter off their planned course. Ending a run short.
"F***!"

"fire!" was shouted as the big gun shot at another fighter overhead.


===========================================

"Right at lunch time, too." Calvan complained before taking another bite of his jurky. He was lucky with his MRE, but the rest would have to wait.
There were others with bits of food hanging from their mouths as well.

"Orders are in! We stand ready for the push! The Artillery should be standing by!"
"And what in the warp are we supposed to do about these f***ers?!"
"Screw them! We need to focus on that push, and it'll probably be marching this way any minute!"

Some of the men were firing up at the Thunderbolt fighters. No one bothered to stop them.

"Just keep your heads down, and your eyes open for those f*** boy imps!"
"I wonder what they're trying to f***?"
"Not you, that's for sure!"

"Get down!" came the shout as another one of the fighters came to strafe the trench lines.

[dakkagor]

"So, in conclusion, we are about as dug in as we can be. I've been busy laying mines and traps across the most likely avenues of attack, and I double checked the set-up on the bridge. It was competent and conservative, so the bridge will come down." Herkja dropped into a camp chair and huffed, cuffing sweat from her brow. "But you can't make me and my squad go back out into that frakking heat."

There was a labouring air-cooler in the corner of the tent, chugging away as it turned back and forth, back and forth, like an automated rapier turret. Jarn hadn't asked were Starolf had stolen it from and Starolf hadn't lied to him about it. It was a slim privilege of command. Everytime it hit Jarns bare, sweating back it was bliss, and torture when it moved on.

He hated it here.

"Right. Good job. Take a breather, get re-hydrated. Then I want a full munitions count and a report ready to go up to Patsy high command. While we are sitting holding our dicks, we might as well take advantage of easy resupply."

"Fuck you boss." Herkja groaned, looking up at the tent.

"Hey now, that is no way to talk to our glorious leader." Starolf snarked. "Personally I fucking love it here, especially as we are completely dependent on the Patsies to haul us out if this goes bad."

"You got something to say, Lieutenant?" Jarn asked, his voice level. The tent went quiet for a moment.

"No, I think I said just about everything I want to fucking say, especially what we are all thinking." the chief scout swung his arms out to take in the tent, which had a half a doze officers in it. "This shit stinks, and we are hip deep in it. We shouldn't be here. The Patsies have fucked up, just like the Imps."

"We need the money, Starolf." Jarn muttered. "We need the resources the Patsies have if we want to find a new home."

"Bullshit!" Starolf barked. "This is still about killing Imps! I'm all for sending every one of those fuckers straight to hell, but gods-damnit, we aren't line infantry! We aren't Krieger's or Cadians or whatever the fucks! We should be on some nice cool urban terrain, doing our damn job in our damn specialisation! This kind of shit is exactly what the Imps would do and you know it."

Jarn pulled himself to his full height. "And what, exactly, do you want to do about it."

Starolf drew his knife, and smacked it, point first into the table, then began to strip his webbing. Jarn met his eyes, and began to do the same.

"Seriously?" Droplaug interjected, stepping between the two men. "Right now?"

"Right now." Starolf and Jarn answered together.

******

The two stepped out into the burning light, into the middle of the Jotunhels scrabbly camp. Men and women lounging in the open, under whatever shade they could find, looked up as the two officers stepped into the meeting circle at the centre of the camp, and squared off. A murmur passed through the crowd as the troopers realised what was happening. In the distance, grumbling artillery was ignored.

"Don't go easy on me because I got shot, old man." Starolf was about to say something else, when Jarns jab took him in the jaw and sent him spinning.

"Wouldn't dream of it" Jarn growled as he closed. Starolf was up in a second, stance set, and started throwing hard hooks and jabs that Jarn could barely keep up with. Men cheered around the impromptu match as either officer landed a good hard blow.

"Fucks sake." Droplaug hissed. Herkja stood next to her, and just shook her head. The regiment had been facing discipline issues since it landed on this oppressive mudball, but this took the cake.

"We should intervene." Droplaug finally offered as the two showed no signs of slowing down.

"Why?" Herkja asked. "This was the way we settled it back home."

Droplaug felt a large presence at her shoulder, and turned to see Ulf standing behind her, vox set on his back, and vox horn in his hand.

"The boss is a bit busy." She explained as Jarn bore Starolf to the ground with a tackle. With a frown, Ulf handed her the vox horn.

"This is is Blizzard 2 IC." Droplaug rolled her eyes. "They've been doing artillery strikes all damn week. I will not mobilise because of a sortie. Yes, even if its landing on you. That doesn't mean they are going to push, just that some dicksucker in the Guard has too much ammo on hand. Unless you have an orbital track or orders from High Command, or actual eyes on Imperials, we will not stand the regiment to condition red."

Droplaug glanced back to the fight, which was almost over. Jarn had got a meaty arm under Starolfs chin and was slowly applying pressure. Soon the scout commander would pass out, and Jarn would be back in command, his position confirmed.

Droplaug saw a glint of something metallic in Starolfs hand. She dropped the horn and began to step into the arena. As she did, the distant sound of fresh, renewed fire rolled over the assembled regiment.

It wasn't artillery. It was big bore auto, missiles, las. It was the sound of an actual attack.

Jarn released Starolf at the same moment he tapped the ground three times. The two staggered to their feet, followers from both sides of the regiment running to steady them and offer them water.

"Stand to!" Jarn roared after a gulp of water. "Condition red! Scouts, get out and assess our route to the bridge! Scramblers, with the scouts!"

Droplaug snapped a salute and ran for the vehicle pool, her soldiers falling in around her, scrambling into uniforms and strapping on webbing. One thought kept nagging at Droplaug as she mounted her bike and a light, wiry scout by the name of Kost dropped onto the seat behind her.

Both sides. The old guard around Jarn, and the newer members of the regiment around Starolf. If they started fighting amongst themselves, the Imperials would be the least of their problems.

[Atrum Daemon]

The exercise was proving itself to be quite the interesting one. Yes, that was what this was to Magos Krypter: a demented exercise to his war-addled mind. In the lull after their first objective had been successful, the Magos had ensured his Skitarii and his robots were refitted and recovered along with the added inload of data based on calculations from the previous engagements. Damaged machinery had been repaired and those who could be returned to fighting form had been. He looked sidelong at his Thanatar in response to a wavering from the machine spirit. It was restless and eager for a chance at more violence. A chance to rain glorious fire and death upon those who Krypter designated as enemies.

Violence would consume them all sooner or later. It was the only fate that waited at the end of the long road.

The Skitarii had taken up good defensive positions after extensive looking and the keenest of eyes could pick out the dulled barrels of galvanic rifles peeking from the mill. The main eyedraw, however, was the mass of red robes and shiny augmetics manning the main defenses along with the hulking robots. And in the woods, Sigma and his Sicarians were skulking about looking for more scalps to claim and ensuring the various mines and traps remained primed and well-hidden. The entire Maniple had always had a vicious streak thanks to Krypter but recently it had seemed to have gotten somewhat worse. There was no longer any room for compromise and no other acceptable result other than grinding the Imps to bloody gravel under their boots and pistons.

The pass of the thunderbolt fighters had been met with the roar of fire from the mauler bolt canons of the Castellax robots. In an instant, combat orders sang along the Maniple's noosphere causing the Skitarii, Sicarians, datasmiths and more to jerk into more precise action. Linking up and relaying movements and defensive patterns with their allies while Krypter managed the massive datastream from within the command post with Anarkos relaying the more precise and parsed orders to the Alphas. With minimal contact to their allies.

The baselines they were partnered with were useful, yes, but as unreliable as all baselines tended to be. They would fulfill their use and nothing else, as far as Krypter was concerned.

[Azazeal849]

"Back blast clear!" came the call before another let a rocket loose, the warhead catching the tail of the Thunderbolt fighter than had peeled away overhead. The tail of the aircraft disintegrated and it nosedived into the fields beyond the village, skipping an uneven furrow as it cartwheeled and came apart. Another Thunderbolt tilted its wings and seared a lascannon blast down the length of a trench section, throwing up a plume of dirt and red fog. The aircraft flared its afterburners and kicked away southward with a boom that rattled the village’s few remaining windows.

“Where’s my frakking leg?” the wounded militiaman was shouting.

“I’m not going to be able to stick it back on.” the medic snapped at him. “Now hold still before you bleed out.”

“Frak sticking it back on, I had my last two months pay stuffed into my sock!”

Keller ran past them both, slipping on loose earth as he struggled with his bulky vox pack. He stumbled up to captain Grimm, shrugging the pack back into place on his shoulder. “Artillery reports standing by, sir!”


+ + + + + +

The exercise was proving itself to be quite the interesting one. Yes, that was what this was to Magos Krypter: a demented exercise to his war-addled mind. He observed the castellax robots, hydraulics screeching as they thundered streams of bolter rockets into the air. The targeting cogitators were adequate but the machines’ servos were not, unable to pivot the gun arms fast enough to sufficiently lead their targets. The screech of the robots’ motors sounded almost like frustration as the imperial Thunderbolts banked away from the firestorm. But that was what exercises were for - to gather information that would allow for fine-tuning, leading to the creation of more worthy vessels for the Machine God’s warlike spirits.

As the imperial aircraft rocketed away towards the south and a temporary reprieve from the maniple’s guns, Krypter turned his attention to the code feeds being passed back by Sigma in the northern wood. The Sicarian infiltrators prowling the roadways were reporting ground vibrations from light vehicles, most likely Salamander scout tanks and Sentinel walkers.


+ + + + + +

Droplaug snapped a salute and ran for the vehicle pool, her soldiers falling in around her, scrambling into uniforms and strapping on webbing. One thought kept nagging at Droplaug as she mounted her bike and a light, wiry scout by the name of Kost dropped onto the seat behind her.

Both sides. The old guard around Jarn, and the newer members of the regiment around Starolf. If they started fighting amongst themselves, the Imperials would be the least of their problems.

Droplaug and her scramblers ripped across the ploughed-up fields, spraying mud in their wake as they passed the burning wreck of an imperial fighter. Missiles and ribbons of auto fire were burning bright above the village, the tracers seeming almost to float and drift in the air. The imperial aircraft tearing over them were peeling away to all sides, hugging the terrain. The escape vector of one took it right towards the scramblers.

“Hang on!” Droplaug snarled to her co-rider, jinking the bike aside as a white beam of las slashed the earth, showering them both with burning soil. The T-bolt streaked over them, roaring like a dragon, and banked away.

“They’re only strafing!” Kost shouted over the engine roar.

“What?”

Kost leaned forward, gripping Droploug’s shoulder to shout in her ear. “No missiles or bombs! They’re dropping that shit somewhere else, we’re just a target of opportunity!”

Droplaug risked a glance over her shoulder, following the contrails and the smoky tails of damaged aircraft. The ragged attack wave was moving away south. A few moments later, the horizon began to light up with red flashes.

“Our artillery support.” Droplaug groaned, and thumped the handlebar with her fist. “Shit!”

Kost looked up, towards the shredding clouds. “Want even more good news?”


+ + + + + +

The sound was different from the Thunderbolt fighters - less a roar, more of a shrill whine. The sky above was being scored by an arrowhead of pale shapes, with the distinctive twin tails of Valkyrie gunships. Some tilted and fell away to either side. Others held their course, ejecting a stream of black specks that began to spin and tumble downwards. Not munitions. Drop troops.

Men in freefall jerked upright as the grav-chutes on their backs activated. Some began to unsling bullpup lasguns. Others threw down smoke grenades and demo charges to burst around the fortified buildings. A corner of the mill blew out and collapsed, bricks and roof slates raining down. Soldiers hauled on their grav-chute control yokes, sideslipping into squad formation, hovering down towards the trench lines.

At the Siculan command post, major Hancock thought of the Nebula drop assault that had annihilated Nalaran’s traitors, and blanched. He clawed for his vox-man’s caster.

“Hancock to all Siculi squads. Fall back, repeat, fall back!”

In moments, there was chaos in the trenches. Siculans trying to climb out impeded their fellow defenders, and Grimm’s squad leaders were bombarded with requests for orders, if they were supposed to be redeploying too.

The Valkyries that had broken away from the pack were landing in the fields to encircle the village, spooling down rappel lines, touching down to lower landing ramps. One gunship pivoted gracefully and discharged its missile pods, the blazing darts slamming into a heavy weapon emplacement, while the fast-roping Guardsmen went to their knees and began to spit fire towards Droplaug’s bikers.

[dakkagor]

"Theres no damn cover!" Droplaug snarled as she slew the bike around. As if to punctuate the point, a lasbolt tore through the front wheel as she tightly turned, and her and Kost went of in a tumble of limbs.

Droplaug hit the deck, hard, and came up staggering, then was hit by something heavy again. Kost had tackled her to the floor, and a hail of lasbolts ripped over their heads.

"SHIT!" Kost rolled off her, and unshipped his rifle, a lascarbine with a metal framed, folding stock. Not regiment standard, she noted, but few scouts carried a standard rifle after years of front-line combat. He propped himself up on his elbows, and started to snatch shots at the imps. The scouts, caught flat footed, did their best to take what cover they could, hugging dips in the ground, ditches, or cut back tree stumps.

The only thing in their favour was the few seconds of company level disorganisation the drop troopers were suffering from. If they were formed up, and advancing, the scouts would have been swept away in moments.

"Boss, what the hell do we do?" Kost yelled. He primed a grenade and tossed it, then looked back to his commander. Droplaug was lying on her back, clutching her arm, wheezing in pain. A lasbolt had punched right through the meat of the bicep, a neat through-and-through wound. The wound was weeping blood and boiled marrow freely, the lasbolt having burst through and cooked the bone under the muscle.

"Medic!" He yelled, panic in his voice. "MEDIC!" No one was answering, not on the scouts vox-net, not to his yelling. Cursing all the gods and a few of the saints for good measure, he scuttled backwards and started to dig around in Droplaugs medical kit. He found a stimm, and slammed it into the wounded arm, making her jerk and scream as the shot brought her back to functioning, if only for a little while.

"Get back Sir!" He yelled as Droplaug focused on her. She nodded, sweat sheening her face, and rolled away, getting far enough back to get up in an awkward run, clutching her wounded arm. She collapsed into a ditch, next to a scout corpsman.

"I need attention!" She yelled. When he didn't respond, he pulled him round to face her. A neat little black hole had been drilled in his forehead. Morbidly, it was still smoking. "Shit!" She kicked the body, out of frustration. "Shit!"

Now she was back to lucidity, even for a minute, she focused on the vox, even as she looted the body for more powerful stims. The whole engagement was a mess. The Siculans were folding like wet paper, and Krypter wasn't talking to anyone yet.


"All scout elements, fall back towards the camp! Make use of bounding cover, squad by squad, and abandon the vehicles!"

She jammed another stimm into her arm, and pumped the wound with anti-septic foam. It wasn't a perfect fix, but she wasn't bleeding to death. The pain was cutting through the stimms, but it reminded her she was alive for the minute.

Scouts dropped into her drainage ditch, and she started yelling orders, reorganising fire teams and the few heavy weapons they had left. A shoulder mounted missile banged off, taking out a loitering valkyrie and showering a portion of the battlefield in flaming fuel and detonating munitions. Two-man autocannon teams, mainly lighter 40-caliber guns, chattered into life. There was finally an organised line of resistance. But being caught in the open had cost them. Dozens of scouts littered the fields, as well as most of their scramblers.

+Blizzard Two this is Blizzard actual, pick up your fucking vox!+

"This is Blizzard Two" She looked out of the ditch, and ducked again as a hail of las bolts tore overhead. A launcher fired grenade hit a little further down the line, tossing two jotunhel troopers into the air and dismounting a cannon. "We are overwhelmed by Imp drop troopers. Need immediate support. Expect mech/armour assault in the next half-hour/hour, this has all the hallmarks of a full assault"

+Confirmed Two. Hold on Droplaug, we're right behind you.+

Kost dropped into the ditch next to her. Blood was sheeting his face from a superficial cut, making him wink constantly.

"We all right?" He asked as he grabbed a fresh powercell from the dead corpsman, slapped it into position, and loosed a full auto volley into the smoke and dust.

"Just fucking peachy." Droplaug hissed as the pain welled up from her arm. "Just another day in the frigging 88th."

[Azazeal849]

An artillery salvo thundered, painfully close, and threw up shockwaves of brown smoke as the high explosives smashed down a rising Valkyrie and the squads of stormtroopers below it. Most of the imperial drop troopers had closed quickly to nullify the artillery threat, but those fire teams had hung too far back and now they paid for it.

Vox-man Keller whooped despite his ringing ears.

“Aegis One this is Wolf Pack, salvo effective!” he shouted into the caster handset, his own voice sounding dull and distant. “New target, grid sq-”

He was cut off by an awful screech from the other end of the line, followed a moment later by the channel going dead.

“Aegis One?” he repeated, fiddling with the dials, “Respond?”

Captain Grimm had raised his head above the trench and was peering south, before ducking down with a curse. Keller followed suit, just in time to see a ball of flame mushroom on the horizon, silhouetting the dart shape of an imperial Thunderbolt as it peeled away. Smoke rose from the skyline at several points, like a fan of crooked fingers.

“Ah, shit.” Keller cursed. “That was their target.”


+ + + + + +

Vox operator Irving was one of the few Siculans who had held his post when the fall-back order was given. Up in the grain-mill tower, he had both the view and the clear signal to coordinate the next move when major Hancock relayed it - even if it meant squatting in an elevated target, surrounded by the horrific Rho Phi skitarii with their screaming weapons and their beeping, chittering tech-cant.

He peered through a hole in the brickwork to see more stormtroopers swarming down into the north bank trenches, and fumbled for his caster. He flinched as the handset squealed a white wall of noise at him. He cycled the frequencies, getting no change, and cursed as he belatedly looked up and saw the Rho Phi enginseer in the centre of the room, circling his hands in one of those tech-incantations he had seen them use. The damnable noise from the vox seemed to be rising and falling in time to the enginseer’s somatic gestures.

“What the Horus are you doing?” he shouted at the enginseer.

The Martian turned his cowled head, favouring Irving with a horrific visage that had glowing red coals instead of eyes and a slatted metal grille for a mouth.

“Jamming vox frequencies.” he rasped through the grille. “Enemy infantry are attempting to call in artillery support.”

“You’re jamming ours as well, you dumb fucking toaster!”

The enginseer regarded him with his smouldering eye-lenses. “Affirmitive. A necessary sacrifice.” He turned away, resuming his haptic spell-casting.

Irving roared his frustration and scrambled to his feet, hurtling down the stairs to find his comrades.


+ + + + + +

The room around dominus Krypter was filling with acrid smoke, and chips of brick rained down as another missile thumped into the mill. As an obvious strongpoint, they were taking more than their fair share of fire.

The magos’ partitioned datasphere was following several threats at once: the trenches where he had sent one of his beloved Castellax wading in to support the baselines who were engaging the enemy drop troopers at murderously close range; the perimeter where he was allocating precisely enough fire to dissuade and delay a full assault from the northeast; and now the distant woods where his Sicarians at last saw the faces of their targets.

He saw imperial scouts, overflown by skull probes and supported by Sentinel walkers, picking their way carefully after being bloodied by the crude but effective Jotunhel traps - only to be assailed once again as skitarii infiltrators rose from the ground or dropped from the trees to land among strung-out squads and smash through Sentinel cockpits. The initial casualties were three to one in Krypter’s favour, but the Sicarians began to falter as armoured units they were not optimised to fight began to roll up, sweeping the trees with multilaser fire. As combat units began to wink out at an unfavourable rate, he pinged the order for them to retreat and disperse, and set to planning the next phase of the defence.

The predictive algorithms of his blessed implants were not as confident of victory as the magos would have liked, but dominus Krypter enjoyed a challenge. Adversity was, after all, the mother of invention.


+ + + + + +

Droplaug’s leap frog retreat brought her within the comparative safety of Endurance’s outer homesteads just as the fire of the imperial drop troopers was beginning to suppress and buckle the hastily-formed line in the drainage ditch. Pinned in place, the scouts’ rearguard were fighting like tundra wolves as the enemy pressed in with grenades and lasfire. Up ahead, however, they had a new problem. Seeking to pincer the Endurance bridge from both sides, the imperial landers were tightening the noose on the hamlet’s western quarter.

Through the smoke of buildings pounded to rubble by the supporting Valkyries, Droplaug caught snatches of armoured men, teeth gritted beneath the black eyeshields attached to their helmets. They were moving in squads, hugging crumbled walls and battering fire back at the houses the defenders were using to turn the open spaces of the village into a killbox. The Siculans who had abandoned their trench works had inevitably come off worst as the demo charges and gunship missiles rained down, and their dead and wounded were scattered across the ripped, bloody earth. Nevertheless the survivors who had hunkered down in knots around the smoking, impact-stippled houses were now actually saving their comrades’ arses by keeping the imperials from crawling up and posting grenades through the windows.

Kost was fighting with their looted vox, but for the last sixty seconds or so the fucking thing had only squealed static at them.

Jarn, you grox-fucker, where are you?

Smoke hung in the air in a thick haze, heavy and choking, fed by burning buildings and the fumus grenades the imperials had dropped to cover their advance. A shadow flickered through the reek as another Valkyrie dipped its nose and buzzed away north to take cover in the woods, its ammunition expended. A Siculan officer crouched against a drystone wall, coughing and shouting for his absent squad to rally to him. Off to the Jotunhel’s right an imperial flamer team had worked itself into position, and there was a whoosh of red that engulfed one of the brick homesteads. Black smoke and piercing screams surged above the collapsed roof.

A Mariochi child sat bizarrely in the middle of it all with his hands over his ears, no doubt one of the locals who had stubbornly ignored the army’s order to evacuate, though Horus only knew where the rest of his family was. Two imperial drop troopers must have seen him too, breaking from cover and running towards the boy only to catch a burst of heavy stubber for their trouble, which punched them into the air and threw them down on their backs, coughing blood.

[dakkagor]

"Gods fucking damnit!" Droplaug screamed, in rage, pain, and, though she would never admit it, a little fear.

They were all going to die here. They were all going to die in a pissing Imperial standard issue hamlet, huddling behind rocks and blown out walls.

It was pointless issuing orders, the vox was dead, even inter-squad was fried at anything less than 20 yards. Visibility was gone, and cohesion was collapsing as they were forced back, room by room, into the hamlets centre. Every instinct was screaming at her that this was it.

But she would be damned if she didn't take a few of the bastards screaming with her to hell.

She'd picked up a pistol from somewhere, and was leaning out of a first floor bedroom window, snapping shots of at the shapes in the smoke and dust, not sure if she was hitting, not even really sure if she was shooting the enemy.

Even if they somehow held on, even if they somehow won, the Jotunhels scrambler corp, the cream of their elites, was dead as a formation. The rational part of her mind was telling her that, trying to figure out how they could reorganise, retrain, get back some capability, and it kept coming up blank. They had no homeworld to recruit from, nowhere to retire to retrain and rearm.

But it was a decent enough distraction from the dull ache in her arm. Because thinking about some impossible future kept her from thinking about the narrowing problems of her present.

Her laspistol whined empty, and she fumbled with it, one handed, to change out the power pack. Down below, she could hear her men snapping shots at advancing imperials, and she risked a look out the window. Stalking forwards, hugging the cover, were black and gold armoured figures in heavy carapace, with hellguns cabled up to backpack power packs. Scions, stormtroopers, whatever you wanted to call them. She saw one take a centre-of-mass shot, fall onto his arse, then pick himself up and return fire, the overpowered las-bolts chewing through the wall below her position.

She tossed the laspistol aside, and reached into her kit. She took out two red ampules, and braced.

They breached like the trained, deadly professionals they were, hosing down the buildings front with penetrating las-shots, following up with grenades that made the wooden floorboards under her feet jump. The first one smashed the door of its hinges and swept in as she jammed the ampules into her neck.

The second. . .

She fell out of the window like a hunting snowcat, hull axe in one hand, long bayonet knife in another. The Slaught/Frenzon burned through her blood, banishing the pain, fatigue and fear. The bayonet knife sank into the second mans collar seal, spraying arterial gore into the air as she swung the hull axe with a banshee shriek, taking the first mans head of and sending it sailing away.

Two hotshot bolts punched through her stomach and sternum. She threw herself at her killer, smashing the axe down, taking of a limb in trade as she threw the bayonet knife to sink into the helm-lense of trooper four.

Trooper five smashed her in the side of the head with his rifle, and she spun away. A lasbolt cut through the meat of her leg, and she stumbled, surged up, and swung the axe in an upper cut that smashed helmet, jaw and skull, scattering ceramite, bone and teeth.

Three more lasbolts caught her, and threw her backwards into the wall. She slid down it, choking on her cooked lungs.

"Fucking patsie." The shadow snarled. "Sir, we've got an officer here."

"Can she be saved?" She stared up at the trooper, in his fancy fucking armour, edged with gilt, and snarled. She could hear a corpsman running over to tend to her kills.

"No sir." The warm barrel of a lasrifle pressed into her forehead. "Traitors can't be saved."

"Not. . ." she whispered. The man paused, and bent down. "Not. . .not a traitor."

"Not from where I'm standing, girly." The impassive helm snarled. "Don't think I'll waste the shot. Let you bleed out."


"Big mistake." She smiled as her bloodslicked hands relaxed, dropping the pins to her remaining grenades to the floor. The blast was big enough to knock the crumbling house the rest of the way down.

+ + + + + +

Jarns reinforcements bit into the Imperial formations flanks. Their quick march had got their forward squads, with their heavier weapons ditched, in time to stop the scout being completely obliterated. But it wasn't a sure thing, Jarn noted bitterly. Vox was still down, and the Imperials were still pressing forwards.

"Get squads into the hamlet and get the scouts out and behind the main body!" He roared, sending runners. "Reposition our strength along this axis so we can cut through their line of advance. If we can cut of their spearhead, we might have a chance."

Aslong as they don't throw heavy armour at us for the next 20 minutes. With only a few tube launchers to his companies name, and a double handful of cookers, an armoured push would see this company as chewed up and spat out as the scout company.

[Highland Sniper]

Gast shoved some rubble off himself. His ears were ringing as people ran every which way, shouting, trying to get those who were unconscious into cover.

He looked over to see most of the guns were destroyed.

Another ran up to him and looked him over. Curse his ringing ears, he couldn't hear a blasted thing.
The man shook him.
Gast tried to say something, but he couldn't even hear himself.
He pulled him up and dragged him over to cover and laid him down with some others. One or two people tending to the wounded as best they could.
Other people were digging at a caved in doorway as others moved the few remaining artillery guns into position, one at the main door to the compound with people on the walls, engaging people on the outside


===========================================

"Frick!" the thunderbolts peeled off after they successfully dropped their payload.
They were in disarray.

"Vox is down! I ain't gettin' nothin'!"

"The ammo cache is buried!"

"They dropped the shock troops!"

"Well don't just stand there! They'll be knocking down the door any second!"
"Yeah, we still got 2 good guns! Swing one of them around at the door!"

anyone still on their feet scrambled to make the best of it.
The way things were going, they'd not survive the shock troops barging in. But they'd make them pay for it.

"Vesta! Get over that wall! Tell the others that we're alive, and we'll hold out as long as we can! Take someone with you!"

"Right! Braidy, let's go!"


===========================================

Sisilia was nearly knocked off her feat with that blast.

"Bloody hell, they took out the artillery!"

Sisilia had just helped unbury a few people who had gotten trapped by rubble on the first run. And things had just gotten much worse.

"Sisilia, you might want to get up to the trenches. We got this lot. Frank, go with her."

"Alright. I'll follow you, lil' sis." Franck said, shouldering his las rifle.


===========================================

Calvan shot blast after blast as another militiaman unloaded his ancient heavy bolter into the trench line in front of them as the imps advanced.

Men ran past him setting up at a choke point in the trenches, in hopes to catch some of the imperial troops in a closed trench corridor.
Putting a heavy bolter in place with a quick makeshift barricade and a crate of grenades.

Calvan shot at one of the shock troops in the chest 3 different times.
"These guys aren't going down!" He called.
Benton on the heavy bolter punched through a few of them after nearly 5 rounds a piece before running out.
"We'll be out of ammo before we get all of them!" He said.

The shock troops advanced.
"Frick!"

A rocket slammed into one of the shock troops and knocked them all back into the trech.
And Calvan only had enough to think to toss a grenade over in the direction were the shock troops disappeared to before looking behind him to see who fired the rocket.

"Bren, I couldn't be happier to see you!"
"Save it!" Brenna shouted as she hopped into the trench line and reloaded the launcher. "you're lucky I was even able to find one of these in this mess!"

Benton worked to reload his heavy bolter "perfect timing." He said, "how many more rockets do you have?"

"only two!" She said, unslinging her las rifler and joined in the firefight "Don't count on me finding any more!"

Fighting broke off to their right, and Calvan turned to shoot at some lighter armored imperial troops that had managed to push up.

"We're fricked! We gotta move back!" Benton said, sliding the heavy ammo belt across his shoulders and hoisting the heavy bolter. "Move!"

Calvan and Brenna, along with several others laid down some suppressive fire, using their experience in the field to execute a tactical withdraw back to the next trench line.

"This isn't what I had in mind!" Durock said as they approached his position.
"Well, none of us had this in mind either!" Was the response.

They continued to hold as best they could, friends falling around them to close grenades, and las bolts to the face.


===========================================

"We got it!" Someone called. They had finally made a small hole you could crawl to get to the ammo cache.

"Well hurry up! That door ain't gonna last!"

Two men slipped into the hole and formed a short ammo chain, passing out rockets and shells, most being passed to the people who would be holding the door with one of the big guns and a hastily made barricade constructed of mostly rubble.

One man, crouched on top of the wall, was going to act as a spotter amidst the hair of fire.

"Alright, load her up!"
The men manning the one remaining peace of artillery not being used to hold the door was loaded.

"alright, fire on grid 233, 475, 926!"

"233, 475, 926!"
"got it!"

"fire!"

[Azazeal849]

Aslong as they don't throw heavy armour at us for the next 20 minutes. With only a few tube launchers to his companies name, and a double handful of cookers, an armoured push would see this company as chewed up and spat out as the scout company.

A heavy thud trembled the ground under Jarn’s feet, and far ahead of them a cone of black smoke jetted up above the village.

“That’s ours.” Herkja said, having paused a moment to cock her ear towards the explosion. She cuffed sweat from her forehead with a flame-inked arm. “One of our guns is still firing after the airstrike, at least.”

Jarn grunted tensely. The Adrantean sub did use a different calibre of field gun from the ones the frakking Imps had hauled in from Scintilla, and if anyone was going to be able to tell them apart by the sound of their shell-fall alone it was probably Herkja - but with the vox swamped with jamming, whatever artillery they had left would be firing blind. It wouldn’t be stopping the Imps except by some outrageous luck. It was down to them.

The Patriot garrison had cut the trees back some distance from the north bank of Endurance, but to the friendly south they had left the trees in place, and that was to their advantage now. Travelling light, the Jotunhel rushed out onto the ploughed-up fields and were within a hundred metres of the Imperial picket line before the latter realised the danger. The picket was a few strung-out squads of drop troops, lying flat against the furrowed earth while the bulk of their comrades had pressed on towards the village. First they met the Jotunhel charge with snapping, snarling bursts from their lascarbines, and they were effective. The man four metres to Jarn’s right was drilled through the thigh in a puff of vaporised blood, and he tumbled to the ground spitting curses. At Jarn’s roared order the Jotunhel pressed on, firing back with bayonets fixed and hull-axes drawn.

In Jarn’s experience there were some things that even the bravest men turned and ran from. Flamethrowers were one. Naked steel baring down on you at close quarters was another. The prone Imperials began to scramble up and try to back away, spoiling their own aim, and making them easier targets. Jarn saw one cupping his ear and shouting frantically into his vox-bead, but whatever was jamming their communications cut both ways, and Jarn buried his hull-axe in the man’s clavicle as he tried to backpedal away from him. Then they were through, running through mud and blood and the overturned bikes of Droplaug’s scrambler company.

There’s no damn cover out here, they’ll have gone to ground in the village. Jarn clung to that thought as they plunged on into the smoke-shrouded hamlet and saw lasbeams hissing back and forth through the murk. Heavy stormtroopers and lightly-armed drop troops were pressing in towards the centre of the hamlet, and they turned too slow as the Jotunhel came blazing in from behind.

The killing began again.


+ + + + + +

On the north bank of the river, the mill that had formed mangos Krypter’s anchor point had finally collapsed into rubble, but red-clad skitarii were still occupying the ruins, and stalking the trenches. The Castellax war-automaton, surrounded by corpses, swatted at a thrown melta bomb and lost an arm in the explosion. It staggered, recovered, and swung its remaining mauler cannon to bear, sweeping a storm squad out of existence in an eyeblink. Vesta and Braidy heard the bangs and shrieks of the robot’s handiwork as they scrambled for the safety of the second trench, hard up against the riverbank.

“Oh shit!” Braidy shouted, pointing. “Look!”

There were Imperials at the south end of the bridge. Some of them were on their knees, blazing fire back towards the burning hamlet. A few others spotted the two running Teph Mins, and Vesta and Braidy rolled into the trench just in time as the earth above them detonated in showers of burning mud.

In the trench with them were a few of the Wolf Pack, and a depleted squad of skitarii, calmly reloading.

“Tell me you’ve got orders.” one of the Pack implored them as lasbeams hissed back and forth across the river, some knocking chunks out of the bridge, others smacking the water and puffing up steam. “Or at least an idea of what the frick’s going on out there.”


+ + + + + +

"Grab some gear, boys!” Starolf shouted as he kicked over a crippled stormtrooper and confirmed the kill with a brutal stab of his blade. “The Guard get better stuff than us!"

Moving through the village, they had finally made contact with a few survivors from the scrambler company. Kast was kneeling next to Droplaug, having dragged her free of the collapsed homestead. Jarn’s second in command was torn up almost beyond recognition, but her eyes were open - all of the capillaries in them burst red from an overdose of combat stimms. Jarn wondered how many of them she had killed before going down. Not quite enough.

“Sir?” asked one of the Siculans, speaking up for a knot of his dusty, smoke-blackened comrades who had banded together from whatever was left of Hancock’s peacekeepers. “What do we do now?”

“What do you think?” Herkja answered harshly, and pushed a dead drop-trooper’s lascarbine into his hands. The agri worlder flinched at the sight of her flame tattoos and blood-streaked face, but he took the gun and checked it over competently enough.

Without vox, the fog of war never ceased to amaze Jarn. They had raised hell a few hundred metres behind the remaining Imps, up to and including detonating a flamer operator’s tank in a fireball that reached higher than the buildings, and most of the enemy ahead of them were still facing north across the river as they slunk forward round a half-collapsed church wall. Drop-troopers on the riverbank were laying down covering fire while a few men slipped and slithered down towards the bridge foundations, no doubt hoping to cut the wires to the explosives they had spotted there.


+ + + + + +

Calvan could feel blood (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wlXjP59jZCM) trickling from his ear.

The sudden artillery strike might have been fired blind, and from a single functioning gun, but it had been enough to make every Imperial within a hundred metres of the trench line go to ground for a moment. Now the panic of the first trench settled into a lull of sniping and lobbing grenades - their own grenades, Calvan thought ruefully as he spotted a distinctively spherical Tephaine-pattern frag bounce over them and explode harmlessly outside the trench. Probably from that crate he’d been forced to abandon. Some reinforcements would be great round about now - maybe Jarn’s Jotunhel, or maybe even Tanaka’s vaunted Tephainian Rangers would get off their arses and come help.

Sisilia and Frank had somehow survived, and came stumbling along the trench towards them. Frank spied a periscope on a dead skitarius, and extended it over the lip of the earthworks. Whatever he saw made him curse.

“What do you see?” Calvan asked urgently, fearing the answer.

“More Imps coming.” Frank reported, ducking back down. “And they’ve got tanks.”

“Tanks?” Durock blurted. "The artillery at Prospect was supposed to stop them!"

"You're an idiot.” Benton told him bluntly. “They know artillery can't give up their prepared position and fight them in open ground. The bastards just bypassed them."

"Are we getting anti-tank support, at least?"

"Yeah, up your arse. If they'd got AT guns to spare they wouldn't be sending us, would they?"

“Only got two of these,” Brenna wriggled up to the firing step and hefted her rocket launcher. “Might as well make ‘em count.”

The crosshair icons on the targeting monocular pulsed, beating like a frightened heart as she trained it on the enemy emerging from the tree line a kilometre away. The infantry came first, sweeping cautiously ahead of their camo-painted Chimeras. She also spied a couple of Sentinel walkers and a low-slung Salamander scout car, but they were keeping well back. The Jotunhel traps and Krypter’s ambush must have spooked them.

As she tracked potential targets, a trio of Leman Russ tanks with stubby conqueror cannons mounted to their turrets rumbled forward, keeping within the concealment of the tree line. Brenna saw the turret hatch on one open, and a woman with some kind of black bionic visor appeared, tapping the side of it as she scanned the town. No doubt she was just assessing the situation, though Brenna couldn’t shake the feeling that the tank commander was looking right at her.

“Now?” she asked Calvan, “Or when they get closer?”

[Highland Sniper]

"Whatever you're gonna do Brenna, make it count." Calvan said tensely.

"Wait." Sisilia whispered.

Brenna hesitated, "Are you sure?" Brenna asked, staying tensely trained on the commander's tank.

"No I'm not. But I... I have the feeling you should wait." She said

"Sis's normally right." Frank said a little hesitantly.

"Keep it trained," Calvan said through gritted teeth, "fire on Sisilia's mark."

Everyone else in the trench kept their heads low as more grenades and lasblasts flew over head.

Brenna saw the commander mover her head, and saw some more obscured movement, troops shifting.

Sisilia twitched, and blinked. "Now," she said, very insistently.

Brenna blinked before double checking her target, and pulled the trigger.


===========================================

Sisilia could never really explain her feelings. They just happened.
During the course of her younger life she had had them. And she learned quickly to trust them.
Some were almost soft, as if it might be a better choice, but it didn't really matter. Some were a lot stronger.

When Calvan and Brenna talked about firing the launcher, she couldn't see. But she had the strongest sense that it wasn't time. This was strong enough she couldn't ignore it. Hold fire.

She spoke up. In moments, it went away, and something in the air... felt like it went from really tense, to... a little relaxed. And the strong urge to wait stopped.
Sometimes she was surprised by how strong these were, and never knew until it had come and gone. She was almost a little disoriented from the relief, she had to collect herself.
This must be a really good time to fire. She put a little more force into what she said next. More than she intended to.

"Now."


===========================================

A lazblast flew over his head as he observed the shell drop.

he cursed. Not only was the shot close, but he saw the imps hunker down. And more advancing.

"3 degrees down, 10 to the left!" he called out.

"3 down, 10 left. Got it!" came the reply. "Come on, get that shell over here!"

Getting the berried ammo out of the hole was slow. But they weren't about the stop now.

"We got tanks!" came a call from another wall.

"locked and loaded!"

"hold!" The spotter called as he rushed over to the other walls to find the tanks lightly obscured by trees.
He looked though the binoculars and consulted the map.
"Swing her around!" he called, and rattled off grid numbers. He double checked land marks, run the rough estimated calculations again. Good enough.

"Ready!"

"Fire!"


===========================================

Zen and the rest of Goffer were farther back out of the trenches.
The approaching enemy was way too far away at first. But with the fighting moving to the trench lines and hamlet, they opened fire.

Voxes were down, so they had no orders except the ones previously given before everything went the way of the warp. Hold the line. Take out high value targets.

Now they didn't find much. But whenever they found any form of officer, they were first to go, along with any heavily armored troopers, or anyone with special weapons.
But they were only so many, and couldn't take out every target at once.

"Tanks coming from the trees" someone muttered.

Zen looked over at the tanks and saw the officer before spotting another patriot with a launcher. Colors indicated part of the Pack.

"Defend the that trench line." Zen said, "She's keying up for a shot."

And 3 of them focused on taking out anyone who might even remotely be aiming at Brenna while the others continued shooting at others.


===========================================

Norin spat out some blood before pulling the bayonet from the trooper he just skewered.

He looked down the trench at the scattered corpses.

The close explosion of a grenade brought him back quickly to the battle at hand. And more Imps were trying to come up the trench line.

"Keep your heads low! Only peek over enough to see your sights!" Norin called and started returning fire, "We will not lose this line!"

He cursed himself for the flashbacks in the guard days.
This was all too familiar. He even remembers receiving similar orders.

More grenades were tossed, and the heavy bolter rattled off the rounds.
Norin felt a sting in his leg and cursed as he hobbled over to a new position.

[dakkagor]

Jarn sighed, heavily. He suddenly felt very old, and very tired. A strange lull had fallen over the battlefield around the corpse of his second in command. Just an hour ago, she had been alive and invincible. The idea that Droplaug would let something as mundane as a Guardsman kill her seemed impossible.

"Whats the play?" He looked up, and Starolf was standing above him. He didn't remember sinking to his knees next to Droplaug. He turned away from the scout, and gently brushed Droplaugs eyes closed, before he took in a deep, shuddering breath.

"We get across the bridge. As many of us as we can."

Something unspoken passed between them. It was the decision Starolf would have made, not Jarn. Retreat to preserve the company, not fight like cornered animals to claw a few more hated imperials into the abyss with them.

Jarn got to his knees, and started to bellow orders. First, clear the banks, then that knocked down church. Then rally with the Patsies, and manage a withdrawal over the river. Then, send the bridge straight to hell.

As he stormed off, rallying the Damned 88th, Herkja sank to her knees next to the mangled corpse. She gently pressed a frag grenade into the dead womans hands, and then rolled her over, setting up a wire and pin combination that would see the grenade detonate the moment someone shifted her body.

"Hope you get a couple more, you leathery old bitch." Herkja muttered.

+++++

The order flowed by word of mouth and squad vox, runners carrying the news. A leapfrogging advance to the bridge, each company relieving the last. Starolf was on point, leading his scouts into ferocious combat with the lead Imperial elements from their rear, pressing them against the defenders in the trench. Jarn held the hamlet, using it as a point of reference to rally his squads, and send them to the bridge, effectively bowing the defensive line outwards, but ready to collapse back at any moment.

+++++

Herkja slipped down the muddy bank and slammed into an Imperial combat engineer, bowling him over before putting an axe into his face. Her squad laid about them with tools and pistols as one of Starlofs squads cut down the covering drop-troopers, freeing her up to act.

"I was just frakking here." She muttered. She had a few minutes to check the wiring was still good on this bridge span, then her and her engineers had to get across and assume command of the demo box. The last thing they wanted was a jumpy Patsie blowing half the Damned to kingdom come thinking they were a guard unit that had broken through.

[Azazeal849]

"I was just frakking here." Herkja muttered. She had a few minutes to check the wiring was still good on this bridge span, then her and her engineers had to get across and assume command of the demo box. The last thing they wanted was a jumpy Patsie blowing half the Damned to kingdom come thinking they were a guard unit that had broken through.

“If only the fraggin’ vox wasn’t jammed…” one of her engineers voiced her thoughts for her as he shook the portable caster and then slapped it against a bridge pillar in frustration. The handset merely continued to hiss white noise at him.

“Wish into one hand,” his wingman said mildly, as if he was imparting some profound wisdom, “Shit into the other, and see which one fills up first.” He cracked a lasbolt across the river, and on the far side a Guardsman clapped both hands over his face and went rolling down the bank into the water.


+ + + + + +

"Defend the that trench line." Zan said, "She's keying up for a shot."

“Aye.” growled one of the Pack, and pivoted smoothly to follow Zan’s pointing arm. Down in the foremost trenchline, which was by now almost entirely in Imperial hands, a Guard sharpshooter had climbed onto an empty ammo crate to take aim over the rear lip. He had seen Brenna pop up once with a launcher in hand, and was waiting for her to do so again. The Pack’s lasbolt caught him in the side of his armaplas helmet, and Zan saw the Guardsman’s own shot scythe wide of Brenna’s location as he fell back down into the trench, cursing.

Down in the second trench line, Sisilia whispered, "Now."


+ + + + + +

Frank was almost freaked out by the resolution on the skitarius periscope he had stolen. He could make out the snarling feline painted on the turret of the lead Conqueror. Horus, he could even make out the rank pins on the commander’s fireproof overalls as she shouted across to the commander of the neighbouring tank - it seemed that the Imps were being screwed just as hard by the blanket vox jamming as the Patriots were. The commander touched a dial on the side of the aug-visor that covered the upper part of her face, and pointed to her ten-o-clock, towards the ruined mill from which some of Krypter’s skitarii were still stubbornly shooting.

To Frank’s left Brenna’s missile launcher thumped, and then there was a whoosh of igniting rockets as the missile flipped vertical and soared skyward. The tank commander saw it then. She started waving an arm frantically at the other tank. He could see her mouth shouting a warning beneath that weird black visor welded across her eyes.

The commander disappeared as she pulled down the cupola hatch. The tank tracks began to turn as the driver below revved the Conqueror into reverse. Smoke grenades flew from the turret, cartwheeling through the air and veiling the tank in a thick bank of fog. None of which saved it as Brenna’s missile came smiting down like the fist of the Emperor. A yellow flash backlit the smoke, followed by a secondary explosion that lofted the Conqueror’s turret above the height of the smoke plume. It drifted almost gracefully for a moment before crashing back to earth, the painted cat’s head beside the barrel now upside down.

The two surviving Conquerors let fly their own smoke grenades. An infantry officer kneeling among the trees started screaming, signalling violently towards the trench line. “Go!” Frank could imagine him shouting, “Go, go, go!”

“Hey Brenna!” Frank shouted, eye still pressed to the periscope, “The good news is, you got the lead tank. The bad news is, the rest of ’em are real pissed!”


+ + + + + +

Imperial Chimeras gunned forward towards the trench line, banks of white cover smoke pluming from their exhaust grilles. One struck a mine and slewed to a halt, hatches popping as the surviving passengers staggered out. Some scion or drop-trooper had the presence of mind to light up a signal flare and send blue smoke spewing above the captured trench line to mark it as friendly. Some of the Chimeras halted and dropped their ramps, allowing the Guardsmen inside to roll out and sprint for the torn-up breastworks.

At the eastern end of the trenches the Patriots were still stubbornly defending, anchored around one of Krypter’s castellax war-bots. The hunchbacked shape of a Hellhound flame-tank rolled to a stop and elevated its turret, spewing a twisting, burning arc of dragonfire over the trench line. It enveloped the castellax, sending the machine into spasms as its actuators roasted, and then it vanished as black smoke boiled up to smother the screams of the skitarii and Wolf Pack defenders caught in the inferno, as well of those of several imperials who had been trying to push along the trench.

One of the surviving Conquerors surged forward past the wreck of the command tank, turret tracking, and fired. Up in Goffer squad’s vantage point the screech of the passing shell made Zan wince, but then the burst of flame off to his right made him realise that the high explosive had been aimed at the ruined mill. A dirty yellow fireball mushroomed skyward, carrying pieces of skitarii and tech-priests with it.


+ + + + + +

As Starolf and his scouts stormed across the bridge, the voxman running with them heard a squeal from his set as the destruction maniple’s jamming abruptly cleared.

“...anyone at Endurance, repeat, this is colonel Tanaka, Tephainian Rangers. What’s your Throne-damned status?”

“Boss!” the voxman piped up. Starolf shushed him with a flapping hand as he took a knee by the bridge wall to cover the next squad moving up. Forward of them was a hell of smoke and flame. The mill was a burning ruin, and he couldn’t even see the forwardmost trench line. The second still seemed to be held though, as the furtive heads of Patriot soldiers popped up to greet the advancing Jotunhel.

“Hey, Calvan!” Benton hailed, squeezing past Frank and Sisilia to tug on his fellow Teph Min’s arm. “The rest of the Damned 88th’s here, looks like they took back the village!”

Along the trench one of the skitarii turned his head just long enough to get a precise count of the approaching Jotunhel, then returned to firing north into the imperial advance as he reported the intel to magos Krypter and awaited further orders.


+ + + + + +

“Hey captain! Captain!” Herkja’s engineer shouted, “Vox is working again!” He waved the handset for emphasis. Then he focused over Herkja, past her. “Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me…”

Herkja turned, and was just in time to see a Guard chimera skirt round the ruined mill, its forest-green puzzle camo stained by mud and smoke. It chewed a path down the north bank and plunged into the water, its nose digging in before bobbing back up. It thrashed round, treads churning the river, and started crawling upstream towards the bridge, shooting water-spray from one end and streaks of burning light from the other.

Its turret multi-las raked the bridge side, sending Starolf’s men stumbling and sprawling for cover as the stones exploded around them. Herkja’s engineers instinctively ducked down among the bridge pillars. Behind the chimera’s spitting turret, some over-eager Guardsmen popped the top hatch and leaned out to add their own fire, sending las beams and bolts of plasma bursting along the bridge supports.

“Stop that fucking waste of bullets!” one of the engineers howled back with a kind of absurd bravado, returning fire with his own lasgun. “There’s demo packs on those struts, you fucking psychopaths!”


+ + + + + +

The roar of the flames had sucked the breath from Norin’s lungs, and suddenly he had found himself pinned down by a burning hand that pushed him flat from behind and kept on pressing. When he staggered back to his feet the heavy bolter was gone, and so were the Imps who had been trying to push up the trench. All that was left in the dugout were a handful of twisted black mannequins, one of whom was still shrieking horribly. Norin’s eyes were watering from the smoke, and he felt like he was choking on ash. All he could smell was promethium and roasted flesh.

Somewhere far behind him, the lone, defiant artillery piece spoke again. The open ground between the trees and the trenchline quaked and blew upward. With all the smoke, Norin couldn’t see where the shell landed, but he did know that any imperials caught within a hundred metres of it would now be dead.

“Norin!”

Norin turned to see a young Wolf Pack soldier staggering towards him. His face was black with smoke but his eyes were shockingly white, wide and terrified.

“Norin, we gotta go! The Imps are all over this trenchline, we gotta get back to the bridge!”