[M] War in the Dirt - Patriots IC

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Campaign 2 preview 

Troop transport Princess Seladon
Adrantis Centrum jump point

Operation Viper, 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

Spoiler: Prologue 

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.

Spoiler: Destruction Maniple Alpha-Rho-Phi, the Damned 88th, Cytherian Outriders - Marioch 

The dropship roared 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]

Spoiler: The Damned 88th 

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.

Spoiler: Destruction Maniple Alpha Rho Phi 

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]

Spoiler: The Damned 88th 

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.

Spoiler: Destruction maniple Alpha Rho Phi 

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!" 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!” 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.