An attack across the open fields of Thedias Prime was suicide.
This was the accepted axiom in the PDF and the Adeptus Mechanicus - and even the Adeptus Astartes would look askance at advancing through kilometers of jagged rock, pressure-coooker temperatures, acid rain, rockquakes, and deep, sudden pitfalls.
This was why, across the many centuries of Thedias Prime, what few wars had been fought had been teeth to teeth, claw to claw, pistol and knife scrabbling in corridors and lockers. It was a planet of tunnel wars, and prison cell riot wars, and areostat grappling. It was not a place for tank advances.
Until today.
The armored Maniple XII of the Reformed Math of Saint Thespellion advanced across the mesa between the Pits and Golgotha in full force-screen regalia. Shimmering blue fields crackled around what had been, a mere week before, simple Adeptus Arbites pattern riot suppression Chimeras. The armored vision slits had been reinforced and the heavy stubbers had been replaced with plasma and melta weaponry. A red robed commander stuck her head and her shoulders from the copula of the command Chimera, her hood drawn up, her grille glittering in the dim bluish light that shone through the cerulean clouds that lurked like a low ceiling above the flat mesa. Her name was Ophidian and she was considered the best warrior of the entire First Legion, the newly formed force of the Forge World that would one day work its clockwork precision under the clouds of Thepsellion's Gift.
Her optics saw clearly through the glimmering force screens that kept her mechanized unit operational, and she tapped her vox on.
"Time to target, six minutes."
"Understood, Master Ophidian."
She remembered the brutal fight with the kelermorph, which was even now being strapped down in the heart of Tech-Lab 221, approximately fifteen kilometers behind her force, and shook her head. SHe hoped that the Magos BIologis that was studying her, Lena-61 Lambda, had been right when she had briefed the attack mission that the other genestealer cultists would be significantly less dangerous. Her datum-memory and her own fleshy thoughts were all too good at conjuring up the terrifying speed, grace, and hideous beauty of the fallen Interrogator. She had nearly had her at least twice...
Now, we have you. Ophidian thought, her voice grimly amused.
The canyon they were driving towards was visible thanks to the curious darkness of Thedias Prime's surface: The peller fields that kept the canyons somewhat more livable without hardened suits and toughened vehicles glowed around the edges of the drop like a distant sunrise of eerie blue light. If the auguries and the technospex tactica analysis was correct, there were three prongs of the genestealers attacks coming towards Tech-Lab 221, and they were all rushing throught the canyons.
On cue, her vox crackled.
"Enemy contact!"
The thick atmosphere of Thedias Prime carried sounds farther and deepened them a full octave, turning the familiar roar of heavy bolters into bassy whumps that Opheidian felt deep in her chest. The roaring crash of a shalefall reached her auditory implants seconds later and she could visualize, clearly, that the first shots from the hardpoint she had placed in the canyon was peppering the weakened walls. The glowing peller field caught and refracted the backflash of lasgun fire, creating auroral sparkles and lines above the canyons.
And the chimeras parked directly where Ophdian wanted them. Looking down onto the attacking force, the maniple commander immediately saw that the genestealers were not thoughtlessly throwing themselves into heavy bolter fire and overlapping flamers. Instead, they were pressing the attack with a grim, determined and disciplined pressure: Smoke grenades, flashing and popping with tiny pinprick sparks bloomed into darkness, and emerging from the chaff clouds came hunched, multiarmed figures backed up by all-too-human seeming recruits, firing their lasguns with what the Imperial Guard called the soldier-shuffle, taking advantage of the lack of kickback to plant accurate shot after accurate shot as they hunched and moved forward.
Bolter fire scythed back and forth, but the mass reactive rounds mostly hit wall and zipped off through the peller fields and into the sky. More than they should have. Ophidian narrowed her optics and spotted, among the masses, a robed figure holding her hands up. She lacked the bald head and chitin of a genestealer cultist, but her eyes were wild with fiery heat. She had quite a few tattoos visible on her arms, which were exposed to the scalding heat of Thedias. Her skin glowed with a pale blue light, but it was not enough to stop the Skitarius from identifying and giving a 86% probability that her tattoos had once been symbols of the Ruinous Powers.
Save, of course, that they had been inked over by new winding tattoos of purple and winding tendrils, eradicating her old loyalties.
"Kill the witch," Ophidian said, her binaric calm and even as she spoke over her vox-network. Plasma weaponry turned, aimed, then started to rain down pulses of star-bright flashes down from a completely unexpected angle. From the back of the Chimeras came heavily armed and armored Skitarii, who started to simply leap off the side of the canyon. Their repulsor fields kicked on and they drifted down like snowflakes onto the much, much larger force. Their melta-guns seared bright pinpricks into even Ophidian's hardened optics, and their arc-weapons shot bolts of lightning that crackled through entire squads. THe witch, to her surprise, survived the first volley, her hands clenching into fists as she snarled and glowered at the three glowing, minuature stars that had almost impacted on her position. She trembled, slapped her palms together...and hurled all three of them right back at the Chimera to the left of Ophidian.
The screens were not enough to stop plasfire.
The first struck the glacis plates, bursting out a gout of ablated armor, like a small volcano. The second clipped the upper left corner, striking the plasma cannon mounted there directly - and overloading its ammo bottle. The third hit one of the tread guards at the same instant the plasma cannon went up with a roar and a plume of orange fire, blue-white heat, and a sudden ozone wash as the force screen protecting the vehicle snapped down. Within seconds, what little was left was hissing, bubbling, charring as acid rain and furnace heat caused the softer components to run like blood. Even the fire couldn't survive more than a few seconds, snuffed out as it ate up what little oxygen was there. By the time Ophidian blinked away the flare, the Chimera was just a puddle.
"Enough of this," Ophidian snarled. She stood, put her foot up on the edge of the copula then thrust every inch of her two and a half meters and one hundred and fifty kilograms of muscle, steel and pure will up and over the side of her Chimera. She did not even touch the rusty dust of Thedias, instead, she cleared the edge of the canyon, dropped, and landed before the Witch with a bloom of dust, the faint crackling buzz of lightning around her body clinging from her passage through the peller field that made the bottom of the canyon even slightly livable. Ophidian stood and the witch, her body surrounded by a haze of shadows cast from no light source that Ophidian could see, glared at her as, around her, her men died under power ax, melta, and steel boot.
"The Omnisiah has calculated your fate, witch," Ophidian said.
"The Star Children embraces your life," the witch growled. "They gave me...something
real and I will die for it."
"Your terms are acceptable." Ophidian advanced, drawing and twirling her power-axe in her hands. The witch focused...drew on the powers of the warp...and in that moment, stumbled. The world lurched hard to the left and she screeched, her hands going to her temples as the powers within her slipped from her control. A crackling purple tear in reality snapped open and
something sprang free - something sleek and red, something with a terrible, carving sword, dripping with blood. The something loomed near the psyker, who fell to her knees, clutching her temples, her body trembling.
Ophidian cut the beasts head off with her back stroke, walked past its dissolving body, and crushed the witch's head into a red slurry against the wall of the canyon with the haft of the blade.
The world lurched right.
And the tear was gone.
Ophidian nodded, curtly. "Station Alpha, report," she said.
"All enemy forces in full retreat."
"Station Beta, report."
"No attack here, Master."
Ophidian frowned. "Station Gamma?"
"We're picking up a lot of debris..."
Ophidian frowned. Her plan for defense covered earth, air, and undergrund. The tunnels were mined and primed to collapse, the mesas had been warded by her Chimeras, the canyons had Alpha, Beta and Gamm. The sky, too, had two trump cards: A pair of areostats formerly held by House Mark, denounced traitorus extremis. She had rigged them for Aznable Protocols - it was only logical, just in case her position was overwhelmed. The death of a few hundred...
Her focus shifted to the genestealer dead.
"There's less than a platoon here," she said. "Station Gamm!" She turned, then gestured to her troops. Grapnels started to hiss and chuff up, shooting past the peller fields. Skitarii started to scramble, arm over arm, their own repulsor fields making it light work. "The witchling deceived us! Activate the sky shield! Drop the stats! Now!"
"Master, the Anzable Protocols have been engaged - but one of the stats isn't falling as swiftly as it should. The second is off target..."
She reached the lip of the canyon. She could see the off-target areostat, a glittering sky garden of green and glass, plunging from the sky like the fist of the Omnisiah itself. It landed in the Berekkian Wastes, midway between the Pits and Golgotha, a barely visible white spark of fire announcing its landing. She turned away from it and back towards the tech-lab, not even waiting to see the blooming mushroom cloud of the mutlikiloton scale impact and the destruction of 1.5% of the arable land on Thedias Prime. The calculations she had run for the Aznable Protocols had assumed the reduction in population from wartime activities would outstrip the loss.
The tech-lab was being rained upon, but not by an entire skyfarm. No, the skyfarm had only partially plunged beneath the cloud layer, its broad wings shuddering with makeshift repeller fields and thrust-plumes. Acid and pressure alike was already wrecking the dome, but from it fell metal chunks - containers marked with House Mark, House Pierre, House Zav, even PDF and Adeptus Arbites symbols. They were the cargo containers that would once have shipped food across Thedias Prime.
"...drop pods," she said, slowly.
For a single, fleeting moment, Ophidian almost saw the genius of it. Her logic, her precision, her mercilessness, it had all been taken and turned upon her, like a knife being twisted around in a desperate scramble. The very nature of the skyfarms and those serfs who dwelt upon it meant that the moment the Protocols were put in place and understood...the serfs would have two options.
Death...or rebellion.
Then Ophidian logged that realization as another piece of evidence in the frailty of the laity. Her men were back in their Chimeras. She hopped onto the side and, before she had even scrambled in, her binaric trilled out.
"
Back to Base!"
***
"This is what I was
born for! Haha!" Sergeant Ashin said, grinning wide and toothily at Alyssa, who was clinging to the straps keeping her bolted firmly against the side of what had once been a pod for the transport and maneuvering of docilized grox and was, right now, falling through kilometers of acid rain, buffeting winds, and high pressure towards a base full of very angry cogboys. Alyssa gave him a nearly complete mirror of the boggled expression he had given her when the truth of the cult had been revealed.
"It was!?" she exclaimed.
The rest of the crude drop pod whooped and laughed.
"Impact in five!" The woman at the front of the pod shouted. Her hand was on a crude joystick that had been bolted to the even cruder attitude controllers - just a set of simple repeller emitters and even simpler thrust engines. The pod swung, swirled, righted...and then with a
crash it came to a stop so hard that Alyssa was nearly wrenched from her harness.
I miss being a diplomat, she thought, dazedly. One issue with the mobilization had been that, well...the Sisterhood was not very large. It meant to sustain an army of this size, everyone had needed to be trained. That meant
everyone. She had helped to induct members into the Kiss, and in return, they had taught her how to duck, how to follow orders, and how to hold and shoot a lasgun. The fact she was here at all still felt utterly surreal. She had a few seconds of silence, then heard the suttering TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP of the pre-mounted lascutters kick on. A second later, the far side of the pod swung in and Sergeant Ashin leaped into a corridor. With the instincts of a born tunnel brawler, he brought the blunt edge of his lasgun butt into the jaw of a shocked tech-priest, who went sprawling, while his comrades fanned out, firing in every direction. Bangs and cracks were coming from every direction as Alyssa wriggled free, sprang out, then threw herself behind a servitor wedded to a wall.
A second later, a crackling
snap filled the air and a bolt of lightning burst through two flak vests worth of armor, and sent Leyin and Qar to the ground, their chests smoking, their eyes wide and staring.
"Hose 'em down! Light the coggie up!" Sergeant AShin shouted as the entire squad leveled their lasgun at a huge, hulking looking Adeptus MEchanicus priest, whose body was studded with mechadendrites and implants. Two of those mechadendrites had what were clearly some kind of weapon - and they spat hissing, bright death which struck the wall, the ceiling. Molten metal burst as Alyssa did as she had been trained.
She aimed her gun.
And she held down the trigger.
The beams of their lasguns were visible in the smokey, chaotic corridor - bright ruby light which shone across the Admech. HIs robes burst into flames. His armor bubbled. HIs mechadendrites flailed wildly. By the time that Alyssa realized her gun was chirruping its machine spirit was trying to warn her that it was exhausted by flickering a red light by the fire selector, the Tech-Priest was on the ground and smoking. She stood, shakily, and took a step forward.
Ashen put his palm on her flak vest, stopping her. He instead took a krak grenade from his belt and chucked it at the prone body. One of the mechadendrites snapped out and caught the grenade from the air.
It blew a second later, and turned the priest into a red smear of robes, glittering steel and blood.
"H-How did you know he wasn't dead?" Alyssa whispered.
"I unno," Ashen said. "Saw a vid pic once, where the bad guy came back at the end for one last scare. Figured, ya know." He shrugged.
Alyssa slowly turned to gape at him.
Her lasgun stopped chirruping. THe machine spirit had rested enough to fire more.
"Come on," Ashen started to advance.
***
"It seems that the laboratory is under attack," Magos Lena said, looking up at the sound of gunfire and the distant shouts, cracks and thumps. "We may need to terminate the subject immediately."
Lexmechanic Alia glanced up from the station she had been given - a place of honor, really. She was holding the tools for the vivisection in a tray, and handed them over. Each time she did, she was forced to watch as the Magos turned and used the mono-scalpel, the extractor, the spreader, the excruciator and the forceps upon the bound and trembling Shexi. By now, one of the Kelermorph's arms had been removed, the extraneous one on her right side, to explore the nerve connections and the muscule groupings there, and Magos Lena had been preparing to start the cranial examinations to see how the interface between the enhancement glands and the psyer talents that the Kelermorph had exhibited before her nullifier collar had been activated...but now, she was looking down at the panting woman, her eyes half closed against the swimming agony of the moment.
The door to the operating theater opened and a tech-priest stepped in. "Magos, we need to evacuate. Master Ophidian says that her maniple cannot respond to the attack against here and our stations in the Pits."
"Hmm." Magos Lena said. "I may not be a scholar of tactics, but...Alia, you used to be studying to be a skitarii, does that mean the cult is significantly larger than previously anticipated?"
Alia tore her eyes from the beautiful Shexi, and forced her heart to stop aching. She nodded, then stammered. "A-And better organized. I-If they managed to turn a skyfarm into a drop platform, that's..." She shook her head. "Creative."
"A shame they cannot be properly inducted into the Adpetus Mechanicus," Magos Lena said, abstractly. "Though, I suppose-"
"Magos, we need to leave. NOw."
"Hmm? Why?" Lena's optics blinked. "Oh, forgive me, I was distracted by extrapolation and hypotheticals. Alia and I will clean up here and we will evacuate."
The tech-priest nodded.
Alia flushed as the Magos turned to face her, then nodded. "The las-scalpel, I believe a simple beheading will be efficent."
"Y-Yes, Magos," Alia said. Her stomach knotted and she felt...torn. Twisted. Her body wanted to...she had been Kissed by the horrible creature, she was going to report this fact, at any second. Save she hadn't. She had kept quiet and transferred to the Magos BIologis, just to be
near her, but that was so she could...watch this and...and she hated every second of it, and she wanted to touch her, and feel her, and hold her, and tell her it would all be better, that she'd be all better, and she...she couldn't...just...
Lena turned back towards the kelermorph.
Alia couldn't...just...she had to...
Lena leaned over, humming quietly.
Then she grunted and jerked upright. She blinked, then peered down at the needly protruding from her left arm.
"Hmm!" she said. "Lex...mechanic, that...is...a...a great deal of...sed..."
She wobbled.
"I..." She clutched at the operating table, desperately, her expression pure befuddlement around her facial grille. "I don't...see how you made that mistake..."
Alia looked at her hand, as if she wasn't quite sure how or why she had done it either. THen the Magos slumped to the ground, unconscious. ALia walked over to the operating table, the las-scalpel in her trembling hands. She looked into the bright golden eyes of the...the xenos horror that had done this to her. Her mind drifted back to her shameful memory of confronting her in the laboratory...of tasting her cunt on her tongue through the bars, of desperately wanting to please her. Her cheeks burned and she turned on the cutter...and with a swipe, the restraints came free. She kissed the cutter carefully to the collar, and it slumped off the kelermorph. Clawed fingers reached up, gripping the back of Alia's head, caressing her bald scalp as the xeno-bitch leaned up and smiled at her, shakily.
"Thanks," she whispered.
And she leaned in, then kissed her, deeply. Alia's eyes rolled back into her head.
THe door opened and a pair of cultists - one horned, an abhuman by the look, and the other a ash splashed and terrified looking woman - stepped in.
They both blinked, watching, as ALia's robes slithered to the ground and, despite her injuries and her missing arm, Shexi pinned her onto the operating table and began to kiss her way down her body.
"I guess we made it in time, huh?" The horned one whispered.
***
Lascannon fire and rockets - makeshift, but deadly - rained down around the Chimeras as they reversed across the mesa and towards Golgatha. Kept from chasing close behind them by the atmosphere of Thedias, the cultists were using Tech-Lab 221 as a firing base - their lasfire and rocket artillery smashing into the ground around the Chimeras, hitting their shields and causing them to flicker dangerously.
"NEver fear, Skitarii!" A cheerful, masculine voice came through Ophidian's earpiece. "We're on the way."
She nodded, and the retreat continued.
The Space Marines were coming.
---
You've taken 2 territory, dropping them from 3 to 2 to 1! Though, interestingly, the first conquest bumps you from 2 to 3, the second set only gets you the pleasure of reducing their territory - there's a limit to how much you can get from a smaller company, and their territory is smaller than yours now!
HOWEVER, their 4x5 offensive defense does manage to hit you one before your sets hit them twice - meaning your Might is reduced from 6 to 4 (non-permanently.)
[ ] Call off your attack, let them retreat - no sense running into space marines and, potentially, being attacked on two fronts.
[ ] Press the attack (write in plan - note, if you want, you can aim for another double, or even triple, sets if you want to REALLY hammer them. Do remember to include your goals if you aim for more than just one set, since you can't reduce their territory below 0, but you can also start hitting their Treasure, Might, Influence, etcetera.)
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE LEVITHAN
(Cycle 1, Month 5 - the Month of Gnashing Teeth)
MIGHT: 6(4) | TREASURE: 5(4) | INFLUENCE: 4 | TERRITORY: 3 | SOVEREIGNTY: 6
