The sky above Cathexias II was smeared with an orange-brown smudge. Tiny from a distance, it's true and horrific scale only became apparent with planetary context: the curve of a continent, the bulk of a moon, the glittering of city lights.
The smudge was the sixty eight thousand meter wide flaming wreck of the
Happy Grox, which had managed - through guile and daring, elan and well trained gunnery crews - to sustain a naval engagement so lopsided that it should have been finished in under sixty seconds for more than three standard solar days. The Sword class frigate, with nearly sixty eight thousand souls aboard, had taken advantage of the evacuated megalopolis orbital infrastructure that sprawled around Cathexias II like a crown of thorns. Darting in and out of orbitals long since left to rot, turned into mine fields and fireships by the solemn, red robed priests of Mars, it had fired a quick salvo here, a shot there, harrying the Word Bearer battlefleet that had come to claim the world below.
The Word Bearers, trapped between their strategic goals and their tactical problem, had sieged the
Happy Grox for those three days, sending teleportation squads every time they caught her thrust plume. A few Legionaries there, a few Legionaries here, slaughtering dozens before retreating into the vastness of the ship, their powered armor blending into duct and air vent, their power signatures masked by a ship's sprawl of over five hundred years of life. There, they set melta charges, plasma bombs, and foul shrines that drove men mad to look at them.
The slow bleeding and time caught up with the
Happy Grox, and two battle-barges both managed to corner her, then bring her down moments before the Legionaries aboard evacuated in stolen salvation-pods.
The Word Bearers waited then, for a day.
In that time, the smudge faded. Vanished. And people asked, why did they wait?
Was it to salute the crew that had so bedeviled them?
Was it to say a prayer to their Gods?
Who was to say.
Because, on the tolling of the Hour of Mourning on Cathexias II, the battle-barges maneuvered past the orbital infrastructure, planning to drop their armies.
And the Governor-Elect of Cathexias II set the sky on fire.
***
The hatch squeaked open with a groan and a clunk and a wafting stink of burned air and you slowly slid out, the first to taste the surface air in almost a week. If your Commissar could see you now...you were pretty sure she'd have had you shot purely for the uniform. You weren't
in a uniform exactly. Your normal colors and flak vest had been replaced with layers of cloth and metal plates scrounged up and cobbled together by a tech-wight who knew some little about radiation and pollutants. Add to that the goggles and a makeshift filter and the fact you could
taste the surface at all was bad enough. You slowly looked around and...and felt sick.
This had been a city once. You were pretty sure it had been called Tanthar - but you hadn't had too long to really take in the local culture before Plan Retribution had been put into effect. Your days had been spent working with the other regiments placed here by Command to stem the tide of invasion building up fortifications, transporting the civilians who made the checklists into the bunkers, and...
Well.
God Emperor be praised, you hadn't been picked to protect the hatches when the plan had started.
The landscape around you was uniformly chaotic - craters and slagged buildings, pyres and pillars of smoke, and a blackened caul overhead. The only things that looked even remotely like they had survived were the void shielded facilities that Plan Retribution had decided were of maximal required need: Food synth and manufactorums. They looked like silvery pebbles stuck into a painting of the ten hells - black ash and bones everywhere, surrounding their eerie perfection.
And in the sky, hovering like a pregnant mangla shark, was a Chaos battle barge. Smoke wreathed it, and crackling void shields shrouded it, but it remained in the air in an utter defiance of gravity - its ventral thrusters blazing like tiny stars, pinpricks against its dark red and black paint. Fleets of flying machines were coming off the sides, and drop pods were being fired directly into the ground. Booming across the crackling wasteland, you could hear a distant voice.
"Rejoice! Rejoice, children! Your salvation is at hand!"
You nodded, the swung back down the ladders.
The other man - he was from the 45th, you thought - who had been selected for scout duty used a long pole with a hook to swing the hatch down.
"We good?" he asked.
"No," you said.
The 45ther sighed. As the hatch finished locking, he tugged his cloth covering aside, then stuck a lho stick between his chapped lips.
"Fuck," he said.
The two of you clanked down a narrow tube-corridor that had once been a sewer duct, then came to the catwalk that stretched over the staging ground for your regiments. You peered over the railings, shaking your head slowly.
It had been three months crawling through the warp. Three days watching the flowers and the firegrass bloom between the city streets. Three weeks of digging. Then, a week of waiting as the world burned above you. The bitterest thought?
It didn't even
work.
"See you topside," the 45ther said, then made a gesture you didn't recognize. Might have been good luck. He stomped down the catwalk, while you collected yourself, looking for your regiment.
Ah, there they were.
---
What's your regiment?
[ ] The 309th Krieg Cavalry - the Death Riders (a regiment of cloned, gas mask wearing depressives, riding genetically engineered horses into battle)
[ ] The 2nd Vashuden Grenadiers - the Drowners (a regiment of heavily armed, heavily armored close combat specialists from a water world)
[ ] The 10th Mordian Heavy Reconnaissance - the Steel Chariots (a regiment of professional, serious minded soldiers that all drive heavily armed walkers)
[ ] The 4th Shrike Void Special Service Regiment - the Helldivers (a regiment of light infantry specializing in orbital drop tactics)
[ ] Write In
