Seeing the Yulrasian Heavy Assault Regiment assembeled for war is, you will freely admit, not and unimpressive sight: a thousand men and women stand in their heavy carapace, rifles at their side, ready to embark into their Chimeras. The Regiment, it transpires, is actually truly two: one of the Ogryn Auxiliary Units has been all but absorbed along the way, the bulky mutants given equipment and uniforms to match the rest of the Regiment as closely as possible. This makes sense, to your eyes: when it comes to close assault, you can think of nothing else non-modified more suited to it then Ogryn. Even their lack of what is generally perceived as intelligence is generally a benefit: it is not, after all, a smart decision to charge at a heavy stubber wielding a shield and hammer.
Now, they march ahead of the Regiment, shields and hammers raised. Moro, the one possessed to attack at Dinner, is not among them, though he insisted on coming along. The mutant is clearly mortified by the fact he attacked his beloved Colonel: more so even then by the grievous wounds he received. His face resembles a checkerboard in a way that will mark him for life, and he is still walking with a slight limb caused by the nerve-numbing agent you dosed him with.
The fact he thanked you profusely for the fact that you stopped him before he could hurt his Colonel is the sort of novelty that wears off rather quickly, though the apparent respect it garners you at least means he leave you effectively alone.
It was Theama-Nul who recommended he get a place inside the Command Salamander, which makes the almost cramped interior cabin almost unlivable.
There is something to having a bodyguard made largely of muscle, loyalty, and wrath directed at your enemy, though. You may grow to like it.
It took you a few moments, to reconstruct the route the daemonic fragment took to get into the head of the Ogryn: the route takes you past the ruins of a burned-out servitor to an unconcious guard, and from there to a video fragment of an autocarriage that pulled up in front of the Tower of Life right before a brief burst of static. The Hand of Transformation plainly has some understanding of tradecraft, however: you find the autocarriage burned out a hundred meters away from the Tower of Life, neither the charred corpse inside nor the slagged remains of the interior giving much of a chance to reconstruct where it come from. Lucky, then, that Theama-Nul caught the little warp thing in his disgusting sling. It bears, at least according to your subordinate, a remaining and persistent connection to the central body: one that it cannot sever and that you can track even if the wisps of pseudo-flesh trailing of the thing cease or point in an entirely false direction. That same connection does, of course, mean that it knows you are coming, and that it knows which direction you are coming from and where you are at any given time. You expect ambushes.
Instead, for a suspiciously long time, everything is entirely quiet, except for a brief flareup where a gang that was apparently at odds with the Overlord of the Tower of Life before finds itself engaged and then wiped out to a person within the span of less than thirty minutes after trying to bar the Heavy Assault Regiment it's passage. The Overlord's forces remain with you, forming a scout screen both on foot and on cobbled together scrap bikes. "I want to see if I can get an Artillery Component too", the Colonel tells you, for whatever reason, and you choose to politely nod. The man has taken your barebone explanations of the facts rather well: you suppose he has earned the right to rant at you about his plans for a bit, even if nothing at all can force you to listen as he begins to go on about 'combined arms' or some such thing.
Military matters have never held much interest to you, beyond providing an opportunity to see your lethal creations tested under exceedingly adverse conditions.
This isn't even truly a military operation either: it is more akin to a hunt, with the Regiment acting as your drivers and hounds.
Of course, in the conception of such things to ordinary people, you assume the targets of the hunts cannot shoot back. You cannot pretend to be a judge of such, however: the vast majority of the hunts you participated in were conducted by members of the Emperor's Children that had commissioned you for this hunting beast or that.
In those, the prey tended to at least possess the theoretical capability of firing back, though truth be told more often than not they were too paralyzed by terror to do so.
Your current prey, you suspect, will not provide you such luxury.
Your route quickly takes you from the Underhive, which isn't much of a surprise: it wouldn't make much sense for the Hand to strike up a base so far away from the center of the Hive, not if it wishes to strike in every strata. The precise moment of transition from Underhive to Lower Hive is, of course, difficult to pinpoint: such borders tend towards being rather fluent in all places were concerted effort isn't being made to ensure their rigidity. Here, the tangle and mess of the Underhive simply slowly recedes, replaced with a slightly more orderly tangle of Hab Blocs arranged along pathways clearly intended for trams or some other means of mass transport more than any individual vehicle. It forces the Chimeras to move forward in a column, something that strikes you as a terrible state to be in.
The Colonel, it seems, agrees: a halt is soon ordered, the scout elements given sufficient time to clear the flats on the side of the road of anyone that might be lying in ambush.
Not ten minutes later, a firefight erupts: a brief one, but sufficient to warrant a continuation of the same cautious creep forwards.
More attempted ambushes follow and are foiled. The going is slow. Every window bears a potential assailant, and you soon discover that many of the bridges and underpasses you have to navigate have been rigged with melta charges and other improvised explosives: none that do any actual damage, but always enough to force you to slow down. "Delay Tactics", Theama-Nul opines, and you are forced to agree.
"It's not moving", your subordinate preempts your next question, and you can hear what you think might be worry creeping into his canting, "but it might not need to. If I had to guess, I'd say it's drawing every asset it can get its hand on to its current location."
You are inclined to agree: the thing does, after all, probably want the part of it you have taken back.
Moving in smaller numbers would likely have meant making faster progress and giving it less time to prepare. On the other hand, it may have meant that what scattershot forces it could throw at you along the way would have posed an actual threat.
You take the time to inspect one of the corpses during a forced break that takes a little longer than the others: you are standing in front of a vast bridge spanning over a chasm that seems to run all the way back into the Underhive, and somebody has proven creative with wiring up the Melta Charges that would topple it and you along with it down into the depths below.
Regicia has taken point in disabling the device, taking the loss of her limb and the no doubt expensive and rare digital weapons on it in stride.
You watch her work for an hour, but as brilliant as she is in her systematic dismantling of the demolition charges, you find your mind wandering nonetheless. It is then that you go and take a look at these insurgents: an attempted Sniper, hunted down and dragged back dead by a pair of mutants whose noses have warped to resemble those of hounds more than those of humans.
It strikes you just how average he looks: a barely adult male, wracked by malnutrition in general and vitamin D deficiency particularly, indistinguishable from any other Hivedweller save for the Longlas he was cradling and the camouflaged cloak he had hidden himself beneath. The cloak is a particularly clever piece of mimicry, seeking to disguise its wearer as a pile of garbage akin to those you all too commonly see piled up around you. If it had not been for the sharp noses of the mutant scouts, he likely would've gotten away with taking an aimed shot at whoever was disarming the bombs: not that you expect a shot like that to do much to Regicia besides inconveniencing her temporarily.
"Somebody is training them", the Colonel opines next to you, and you nearly jump out of your skin.
"Don't misunderstand me", he continues, luckily ignoring the fact you nearly skewered him with your arm blade before stopping yourself at the last moment, "they're ideologically committed and deeply motivated."
He leans down, and retrieves a pendant from the neck of the young dead insurgent: an Aquila, by the looks of it, one of the cheaply made ones you've seen all too often around here. The Colonel regards it curiously for a moment, before folding it in half between his burly fingers like it was made of paper. "But these tactics, this sophistication, they're not something the Imperium usually teaches its citizens, for obvious reasons. Somebody is at work here. Maybe it's your strange machine, but I honestly doubt that a little. Too…heretical, to influence the wider insurgency on a basis other then the opportunistic."
He shrugs, and wanders off, leaving you to ponder his words.
A strange certainty washes over you, when Regicia gives the all clear and the column begins moving again.You are, you suddenly and unaccountably think, doing exactly what Lady Czevene wants you to do. She has a plan, accounting for everything, and you are following it to the letter. You feel your conviction swell and grow as you cross the bridge, and notice the Colonel and his staff perking up around you.
No ambush awaits you as you cross the bridge, nor do the scouts discover any for the next few hours.
That is not to say they discover nothing, however. Hideouts and prepared ambush spots litter your progress, many hastily abandoned, some containing corpses of insurgents killed in what seems, to your eye, like hasty arguments. On occasion, you still discover improvised explosive devices, though some of them have been hastily disarmed, one apparently taking the insurgent that was doing the disarming with it.
"Fascinating", Theama-Nul cants next to you. "She must be amplifying her natural telepathy somehow, or else this wouldn't work. I wonder how she did it."
You look at your subordinate askance, and then, all of the sudden, the pieces fall into place, and your perspective shifts.
The strange certainty you are feeling doesn't stem from yourself: it is a product of the Psyker who claims rule over this planet, projecting a psychic suggestion across the entire world.
It is, you have to admit even as you feel anger at the intrusion well up inside you, not an attempt without merit: conveying that everything is proceeding according to her plan both bolsters the confidence of her forces and undermines those of the enemy.
If she actually feels the certainty she projected herself, though, that deeply worries you: you would rather not be under the mental influence of somebody so clearly warp-addled.
Well, whatever the case may be, you may as well capitalize on the opportunity. The Column picks up speed, and before long, your goal becomes apparent.
"It's the Three Saints Manufactorum Complex", Colonel Parlo tells you, studying the map with a frown. "It's got to be."
The Complex you see on the hololithic map reminds you of a tumor, grown through pre-existing structures and converting all in their way to it's new purpose. "They made Chimeras here, I think", the Yulrasian says, stroking his mustache, "although the entire place is supposed to be out of commission." He taps his command table, and frowns as it begins to slowly display numbers ticking up. "Communication is still down, else I'd be able to look at the power flowing into here. We were supposed to clear these."
He frowns, tapping his leg. "It would of course explain where they get spare parts to keep those damn Hydras in operation."
He waves his hand, and several possible approaches turn red. "They'll be dug in around here. We can break through, of course, but it'll be bloody work, and that thing will mean it'll always see us coming."
He pauses, then turns to you. "It's up to you, really, Magos. I have brought you this far, and I can carry out whatever instructions you give me, but how to proceed from here is up to you."
[] Direct Assault
You will stick with the spearhead of the Yulrasian Assault Regiment, providing your own special edge to the frontal assault on the Manofactorum Complex: you may be wounded, but the defenders are bound to be shaken by the psychic suggestion they have surely been subjected to, and your own contribution will likely enable you to breach their defenses quickly and to overwhelm the hand alongside the Yulrasians
[] Diversionary Assault
You will leave the daemonic fracture with the Colonel, who will launch an assault while you find an alternate way inside. This means you will likely face the Hand of Transformation alone, but will also hopefully enable you to evade the attention of most of the defenders. Of course, this will necessitate leaving your one lead towards the Kill Servitor behind, so that it cannot track your infiltration as it occurs. This risks it recovering it somehow, though that seems unlikely.
[] Flush and Chase
You will release the Daemonic Fragment, swiftly taking away the Kill Servitor's reason for remaining behind and hopefully inducing it to flee and release whatever hold it has on the defenders. The big advantage is that this will likely flush it out form the territory it has prepared far more efficiently then force of arms ever could, and you can probably still hunt it down as it tries to flee, the Yulrasians breaching the disorganized foe to enable you to do so. Of course, if this doesn't work, you'll be out of a way of tracking it and it will be gone to the wind.
