Plan Ungaunt
The strategic situation was in flux. The Traitors to the West were besieging an allied world and would turn on the surrounding planets when they were finished. To the North the previous barrier between Calavar and Orkish aggression was in the process of falling. Xenos had emeerged and were encroaching upon the Humans to the South in some capacity. The pirates and raiders of the Imperial era had mostly moved on but there was still the need to be seen protecting the worlds who had aligned themselves with the Crusade, reducing the number of hulls that could be sent to stabilize the other theaters.
So be it then. A Crusade was not just a military campaign, but something to rally to! Let the enemy come, it would just make their defeat come faster!
Cooler heads judged enemy force estimations and compared them to established norms. Crusade assets were marshaled and dispatched to the areas of most direct concern to the stability of Calavar and her dominion. Dozens of vessels, tens of millions of soldiers were sent through the void once more to bring death.
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2nd Naval Squadron + 3rd Naval Squadron + 1st Support Squadron + 2nd and 3rd Calavar Infantry Army + 5th Bailafax Infantry Army + 1st Calavar Armored Army: Bailafax
The historical profession of Bailafax was under threat. For years the Loyalist population have been under siege in their mountain holds, kept there by the armies of Traitors. Khorne worshippers spread over the lowlands in numbers that could not be fought directly; Bailafax children were trained with rifles and explosive charges instead of harvesting knives and transport trucks. Even should the Traitors be dispelled, Bailafax would be remembered as a War World rather than a world of farmers.
And that future seemed ever farther away, as news of fallen villages and forts spread every month.
The Carmine Glory rested in orbit of the plundered world with her attendants. And why shouldn't she? Khorne was being worshiped below as blood was shed in large quantities. The Loyalist squadron that had attempted to shield the populace had been chased off and eventually fled. Clearly the claims of the Loyalists were overestimations of themselves. What ships they had to spare from saving their own weakling hides had been present and defeated. The ease of the campaign was already being felt back home. One of the newly built ships had been crippled and returned to the yards but it had hardly been the glorious fight that had been promised, as the Loyalists drew back to fortified and weathered positions the little supported soldiery found difficult to crack. What was left was a grinding siege and so warship support would be directed to the north against the slow advance of the greenskins.
Space tore. Unreality screamed. Sorcerors scrambled to reveal ill omens to their sworn masters.
A mighty fist of warships entered the system, taking a day to form into formation from the scattered positions they had dewarped at. Vengeance was at hand.
The Carmine Glory looked upon her challengers, and laughed. Her previous victims had returned lesser in number. More than half of her foes were civilian hulls with weak weapons. Prey pretending that numbers were strength. Yet the vanguard gave her pause. Weekend soldiers they may have been, but they were still armed. Yet there would be no resolution without bloodshed for despite the surface level discipline of her new crew they were still disciples of Khorne.
[Combat Initiated
Friendly Forces:
3x Armed Merchant
3x Resolute Corvettes
2x Escort Carrier
1x Scorn Bombardment Ship
1x Ferryman Transport
2nd Calavar Infantry Army
1st Calavar Armored Army
Enemy Forces:
Carmine Glory Claymore Corvette
3x Armed Merchant
4x Cultist Armies (approximate)]
Bone deep enmity filled the combatants on the field. The Calavans had been taught to hate their foe for they had sold their souls to dark powers who held Humanity in contempt and wanted nothing more than to destroy and corrupt them, their families, and everything relating to their faith. The Khornates had once been System Defense Force before their power had gone to their heads and they had seized the warships repairing in their yard for the simple reason that they
could. The strong did as they willed and the weak suffered what they must. And if their deaths could benefit their betters? So be it.
Both forces were limited in their speed and so it was not a single high speed pass of gunnery. The relief force needed to shield the defenseless ground troops and the carriers that would support them once at the target from the more capable enemy warship. It would be a slugging match.
The Aegis Immortal, Undaunted, and Armor of Hatred joined together to face down the Carmine Glory as the lessers of the fleets squared off and jockeyed for position for the transports. Three newborns against a century old killer of renegades, Xenos, Traitors, and now Loyalists. It was an affront to what the Calavan officers had pledged their lives to protect and the notions of the Cult Mechanicus members who were aboard.
Shells slashed out in wavering sheets, far more going out from the Calavan warships then came against them. Yet their shells were correspondingly weaker even with the subpar warheads the Traitors were forced to use. When a hit was landed on the Claymore the solid rods expended their fury on the plasteel used to cheaply armor her hull and left little to ravage the decks within. When a hit landed on a Resolute it was with a gout of burning air and metal driven out by the heat of the detonation, into the thin haze of gases left by the rest of the volley as it battered down the distributed shields.
Yet, as Humanity had always known, quantity had a quality all its own. The Resolutes timed their volleys to coordinate their impacts to when the void layer of the target had been battered down. When one of their number took a bad hit it faded back to let the other two launch a more aggressive attack on their enemy while the Carmine reloaded. If the Claymore attempted to bypass the stalwart defenders it exposed the less armored broadside of the Claymore and it's foes would seek hits on the engines.
The other fights could be said to be going worse, and then the captain of the Crusader's Conquest made a surprising move. It was not loaded with boarding craft so they ordered the landers of the Auxiliary Squadron to launch. The enemy's Armed Merchants were not armed with more than rudimentary point defense, as were most of the ships present, and had taken more than a few penetrating wounds. When one of the enemy ships came close it was set upon by Calavan boarding parties, hastily augmented by members of the ship's repair teams. Boarding points were crudely pressurized by sealing the entrance and cutting into pressurized portions of the hull to allow the less protected infantry to begin pushing into the ship.
The surprised crew of their target rallied… Somewhat. In a sense, for there were few unprepared for combat on it's decks, as the crewmembers merely gathered a group of their fellows to attack the intruders on their "hallowed" decks. Unarmored crew with melee weapons and repurposed equipment were quickly exterminated by the attackers who began seeking out critical locations throughout the hull and encountered the enforcers sworn to the captain armed in the pattern of armsmen in the Imperial Navy rather than the fully geared infantry of Calavar.
The Carmine Glory was flagging. It's appearance was bedraggled as it's armored hide was covered in dents and rents from the constant hail of ordnance from its opponents. Sensor and vox masts had been torn away by ricocheting rods. Her engine bells had small bites taken from them. The fore turret had been damaged, jamming in place as it's armored ring was welded to the hull from the energy of an impactor.
Her opponents hardly fared any better. The captain of the Armor of Hatred did not know if anyone still lived amidship after a paired hit. The Aegis Immortal had taken engine damage and sported multiple craters in her thinly armored bow. Undaunted had had two turrets destroyed and others were under repairs. All had lost sections of their shield coverage as generators were destroyed by incoming fire.
Yet the Calavans were fighting for a cause. The Carmine Glory was only here for the rewards of victory. She turned to flee, having coated her weapons in the blood of her enemies, and the Resolutes let her go. She was faster than them even now and the newborn warships had a duty to discharge to the transports they escorted.
The Armed Merchants of the Khornates broke and fled when their better did, for they knew the Loyalist corvettes would turn to them next. One did so at a crawl, as it's captain was finally notified that there were enemies aboard rather than the crew fighting each other again as battle madness overtook them. A shell detonated in it's magazine with the armored shutters left open and a boarding party set breaching charges meant for quickly cutting open warped bulkheads onto the fuel lines for the reactor.
Leaving it easy pickings for the vengeful corvettes chasing it.
The people of Bailafax saw more ships arriving in orbit and grimly tightened their grips on their weapons, for more ships had only meant more enemies.
Then, a new dawn broke. An artificial sun erased the ruins of the old capital and the otherworldly energies of the Khornate temple, formed from blocks of stone and metal quarried from the ruins mortared into place with the remains of cultists and Loyalists alike, guttered as it held back the onslaught. Red figures howled at the sky impotently, and the gunnery officers of the Wages of Sin dispassionately reported minimal effect on target. The solution? Repeated firing.
Partially completed and with the campaign rapidly becoming a failure the temple was consumed in the cleansing fires of successive atomic fireballs.
Having taken only minor attrition from the occasional shot during the void battle, the Calavan First Armored Army spilled from their mothership in a tide of steel. Standard Leman Russ battle tanks trundled off their transports and were joined by Basilisk self propelled guns, Hydra flak tanks, and the strange looking Calavan Pattern Malcador Defenders. The latter were infantry support tanks through and through, unlike the notably faster Russ MBTs, and were correspondingly assigned to reinforce the mountain holdouts and enable a breakout against the poorly equipped cultist footsoldiers who had little answer to the rolling armor built to mulch enemy infantry in support of friendly forces.
One such answer was the release of a comparative handful of Possessed cultists who, with some luck, could damage Calavan armor before being gunned down.
The sight of fresh troops disembarking was a welcome sight to the faltering defenders, who commonly wept when they saw the Imperial aquilae marked on the Harbinger transports. Even so it was unlikely that decades of depredation by their enemies would be forgotten and the people of Bailafax remained in the mountains that had been their salvation from Traitors twice now, deepening and expanding the works that had allowed them to survive the past years of siege.
Bailafax was clean once more, having lost over two thirds of her population since the Subsector started to fall. Opportunities were marketed on a dozen worlds as a wave of colonization began to be planned to regain the pharmaceutical products offered by the planet's flora, as the Calavar Admiralty met to decide how to safeguard their front line against the Traitors going forward.
[Operation Result: Victory
Enemy Losses:
1x Armed Merchant
Totality of ground forces deployed (~five Armies) with only minor bands of stragglers
Friendly Losses:
Moderate to heavy damage to all ships (26M)]
1st Naval Squadron + 1st Torpedo Squadron + 1st Auxiliary Squadron + 6th Crusade Infantry Army & 1st Calavar Infantry Army: Homna String Defense League
The detachment of the Crusade fleet sent to the aid of the Homnans watched their neighbors distrustfully. The ships representing the Dark Star alignment were plated with scrap and tended to have their shields and engines gutter out as internal failures took place; nevertheless they were technically Human and were vaguely aligned with Imperial values. More to the point they had been vouched for by the Bagalog forces on much the same grounds and Captain Ajra Keelaman had orders to cooperate with them. Softly written orders but given the state of the area of operations even targets to draw fire from more worthy vessels would be valuable.
Her opposites were displayed on the pict screens of her command throne. The Bagalog officer was clearly one of Mulyran's merchant captains, wearing a tunic that had once been more valuable than the gravcar her father owned over the semi-powered armor that was his mark of station. While the Dark Star officer had a similar arrangement, no doubt drawn from their impressive stockpiles of Imperial equipment, he had a stylized aquilae tattooed on his face in a manner uncomfortably similar to what the Traitors did with the mark of their so-called "gods".
Compared to these well equipped lords, all Ajra had was her power sword that had been reclaimed from the Orks and an armored vacuum suit.
She had her reservations about these so called allies, but it could not be denied that alone her command was outgunned. Even with the new and improved Resolute-As in her squadron alongside the untested Castigations attached to it, this battle would be a fight. Better to have people she didn't care about dying for the victory.
The destination of the coalition fleet was not Homna itself, for the most important portion of the league when it came to the reclamation of said area was the Jawbreaka fleet. That the league fell was a symptom of it's lack of heavy industry to repurpose to the making of war and so the destruction of the Ork mobile forces was the simplest way to ensure that the region could be held and stabilized by the limited forces at hand.
A half dozen ramshackle hulks manned by heretical fanatics had been sent by the Dark Star Alignment as part of the coalition attack, with another squadron operating somewhere in the region. The warlord of Bagalog had sent a trio of warships and four transports, the flagship bearing a lone lance turret and was clad in swathes of armor and a weak layer of void shields while it's pair of attendants had a weapon battery not far dissimilar to the Calavan warships and the same level of protection.
The Calavan task force was both the largest and strongest force in the ad hoc fleet and presented an interesting contrast between the old and new as roughly half of the hulls were part of the first wave of shipbuilding the world had undertaken when the changing circumstances had been declared unacceptable. Old, venerable, proven craft per Calavar standards and yet still newborns compared to established norms in the Imperial Navy. Now, at last, the Escort Carrier The Causeway was furnished with proper strike craft rather than semi-mobile point defense turrets as Fury interceptors and Starhawk bombers slumbered in her holds alongside masses of ordnance.
Then there were the new ships. Looking similar to their lead ship, the Resolute-As were nothing more than an extension of the preceding class with incremental upgrades added into the engineering spaces and command deck. Faster and more tightly controlled the Resolute-As would serve as extended range raiders or act as close support for the Castigations: the first torpedo craft produced from the Calavar yards.
Opposing this collection of ships were a motley bunch of light craft that had been bodged together from the scrap of the Subsector's fall. Eclectic and unique collections of guns decorated the prows of the majority of the Attakk Ships present with a subset bearing armored ramming prows instead. Calls to action were roared into the void as jets of chemical flame belched, turning jagged prows towards the newly arrived sport and revealing the shape of the flagship of the barbarian armada in the midst of it's lessers.
"Wot's dis? Ya humies fink you'z ready fer a skrap? Alrighty den, jus' try not ta die too fast dis time, eh?"
[Combat Initiated
Enemy Forces:
17x Attakk Ships
5x 'Ard 'Ead Assault Corvettes
1x Looted Cobra Destroyer, Horde Flagship
15-20x Warbands
Friendly Forces:
6x Captured Ork Ships (Dark Star)
2x Hatchet-class Corvettes (Bagalog)
1x Knife-class Corvette (Bagalog)
4x Civilian Transports
-2x Infantry Armies
2x Resolute Corvettes
2x Resolute-A Corvettes
2x Castigation Torpedo Corvettes
1x Escort Carrier
4x Civilian Transports
-6th Crusade Infantry Army, 1st Calavar Infantry Army]
The Dark Star vessels lunged into an answering counter charge, followed by the more sedate advance of the Calavar and Bagalog detachments. Thick clusters of limpet craft blew away from the sides of the heretic vessels and plunged through heavy but inaccurate fire into the hulls of any Ork ship in range. Previously somewhat ordered groups fell apart as the alien crews deserted their posts to fight the attackers in much more satisfying close combat.
As the Dark Star vessels suffered for their reckless charge the other portions of the Human counterattack knifed into the disorganized mass. Three Orkish hulls flared as they burned as nuclear detonations forced superheated fluid into their hull, cooking off ready ammunition, fuel stores, and more as the ill prepared light craft burned from stem to stern and vented gases from hundreds of new openings. A ramming corvette was pounded into so much floating debris by the concerted firepower of the Resolute while the Wages of Dissent failed to reproduce the nigh instant kill on an Attack Ship. The Resolute-As coolly crushed target after target under their combined guns while using their speed and maneuverability to evade the thickest barrages of Ork cannon fire and bring fresh shield sectors to bear.
"HAH! You got sum fight in ya, ya do, I lahk dat!" Jawbreaka laughed as his flagship bore into the fighting, the additions made by it's new owners making it faster than when it had been in Imperial service but not enough to make up for it's increased bulk compared to the Attakk Ships it had followed into battle. "Now lookit me, boyz, an' do dat!" A singular torpedo issued from the Cobra and boosted forwards on a roaring column of flame.
A light winked in the middle of the riotous mass of ships dead, dying, and fighting mightily to avoid or bring that very fate.
"Huh?"
A squadron of Fury interceptors erupted from the dissipating fireball like marine predators through a shoal of small fish in search of worthy prey. More shapes became visible behind them as the preceding element of strike craft blared jamming and flares to cover the bombers behind.
"Ya gits, Ah wuz
savin' dat! Looked mighty nice, do…"
The stream of strike craft slid underneath the Ork flagship, collimated light flashing out at rebuilt gunnery stations and teasing fireballs from what had once been armored and shielded point defense stations before the Ork gunners even knew there were incoming threats in some cases. Armor piercing missiles screamed off of launch rails and the strike package broke off to avoid return fire and potential shrapnel.
Detonations flowed across the bottom of the ship's engine bells, nuclear ordnance tearing through shoddy Ork and ancient Human craftsmanship alike and leaving the ship lumbering in the void. Fuel and engine flares arced behind the vessel like oil on water as containment was lost and the ship's bow kicked to the side.
The Bagalog flagship lined up it's lance on the damaged vessel as it's escorts held back the Orks with their heavy armor. Energy capacitors discharged, forcing electrons into lasing tubes that converted them to electro-magnetic radiation of almost perfectly aligned vectors. These rays existed for several seconds before terminating on and within the mass of the Looted Destroyer and deposited their energy in the form of heat. Then another shot was charged and fired, and then another.
An Ork boarding corvette impacted on the Resolute's flank, tearing into the soft skin and arresting it's momentum within the unarmored hull. Ork boarding parties poured out from it's hull and pried their way into the hallways to set upon the crew, to the consternation of Captain Kelaman. The corvette was shot away within an hour, and the rampant outbreak of greenskins was bitterly combated through the use of bulkheads, combat servitors, and the eventual arrival of elements of the 6th Crusade Army as the flagship withdrew from the brawl with portions of the Ork corvette welded into place in her side.
Yet despite the fearsomeness of the conflict, the Resolutes were tempered for battle and the Ork ships were not. With the distraction given by the Dark Star boarding parties, the laudable durability of the Bagalog warships, and the localized superiority caused by the Calavan warships operating in pairs, the coalition forces weathered the tide of Ork ships and dealt righteous justice to the scrap ships at every hand until the remaining aliens got bored and performed a maneuver every other race would call a rout with a mere five vessels out of the twenty three they had started with.
The lopsided number of ship kills the Calavans accumulated due to focusing on gunnery over defenses allowed Kelaman, sword still in hand from when she had personally intervened in the defense of her bridge, to lay claim to the Cobra wreck at the heart of the new debris field as Dark Star transports began dewarping and moving to the planet to begin the lengthy cleansing process.
Without the ability to resist, the boarding of the Ork flagship proceeded smoothly. The fighting was less so, as numerous large specimens of the Orkish race were present due to this being the flagship, but no matter how good they were the Orks could not overcome being outnumbered hundreds to one. Nor could their biology resist the chemical agents pumped through the ship once the vitae processor had been seized.
After spot repairs to their ships the Calavan warships began trickling across the region, at turns chasing and being chased by Traitor squadrons. In light of the damage the force had suffered Captain Kelaman declined to take any further offensive actions and so settled back to hold onto the world that had been taken with the defeat of Jawbreaka.
[Operation Results: Tactical Victory, Strategic Situation Developing
Enemy Losses:
13 Attakk Ships
4 'Ard 'Ead Corvettes
Friendly Losses:
Moderate to Heavy damage to all Resolutes (16M)
Looted a Looted Cobra Destroyer]
3rd Patrol Squadron: Civilized World Ungaunt
The information coming out of the bastion against the Orks to the South had been infrequent and contradictory. They were holding, they were already fallen as Ork ships marauded with impunity, new vessels had been spotted; the stories of refugees and what few madmen willing to brave the Orks and Traitors who habitually raided the region. With such a dearth of actionable intelligence about the region the Admiralty grudgingly released a squadron to substantiate claims while other campaigns were prosecuted.
They returned, hulls marked by weapon fire, with a cluster of recognizably Human vessels in tow that were stuffed to the brim with refugees.
Ungaunt, the captain in charge of the patrol squadron reported, was under attack by Xenos. Disorganized Ork marauders slipping out from the small Ork Empire of Gunbreaka, but more distressingly by unfamiliar hulls acting in concert to break the back of the resistance. The Civilized World that had held the region together was being invaded as the squadron dewarped and the locals sent pleas for assistance to the newly come warships be they Traitor or Loyalist.
A single, sharp attack against a section of the blockade enacted by the smooth and flowing warships opened a channel for a half dozen ships to escape the potentially doomed world. The crew of the Unbowed Supplicant carefully recorded everything they could about the new threat as they fought and then as they debriefed and inspected the refugees that desired sanctuary among the worlds of the Crusade.
Individually the Xenos massed about the same as a Human yet were shorter and stockier. Resembling reptilian apes in a sense with long arms and short legs, the Ungaunt refugees named them "Hashim" for an old word in their dialect meaning the dark clouds of an approaching storm in a reference to the starships that could enter and exit a planetary atmosphere. These would turn out to be the smallest vessels in the enemy fleet, fortunately, though the ability to have corvettes do so at all was indicative of the severity of this threat.
In space the Hashim built their ships to a relatively similar standard to each other: a rounded diamond where the engines were on the rear and the majority of weapons were on the leading edges. Said weapons were most commonly composed of a ball of plasma held together by some mechanism and fired en masse at the enemy. However, they were not akin to Human plasma weapons that dealt damage through physical impact and thermal shock but rather semi-guided missiles that used their heat as their damaging characteristic. Incendiary missiles in hybrid broadside/turret mounts, the onboard analysts categorized them.
Defensively, this brand of Xenos depended on shields. Their hulls, while tough, were not significantly more so than that of the Resolutes or civilian shipping and had smooth ridges along their length that held gun decks, bristled with sensor or emitter spines, or safeguarded defense lasers that could serve as either a knife fight weapon or point defense.
Of the refugees brought back most of them passed the purity test. A few tens of thousands were deemed to have fallen to the depredations of the Ruinous Powers in their time of weakness and were given the opportunity to prove their true colors and removed. The rest were slated for the upcoming recolonization of Bailafax.
Of the most interest to the Admiralty was the presence of an Army Group of Feudal soldiery equipped with a mix of equipment similar to that which Calavar armies used. Experienced troops, forged in the fires of Ork, Traitor, and now Xenos attacks, they had pledged their honor on protecting the refugees as best as they could. Even as just a garrison for the exposed Bailafax they would prove of use to the Crusade.
[Operation Result: Intelligence Gathered
Minor Xenos in the South changed to "Hashim".
Enemy ships utilize missile type weapon batteries that fire incendiary packets of plasma, backed by only somewhat dangerous lasers that cycle between being able to threaten ships and scything strike craft from the void.
Ungaunt has not fully fallen yet, but they are able to do little as the two Xenos clash over the worlds they took under their banner. In Ungaunt alone there were at least three squadrons of corvette analogues and two frigates. Roving pickets patrol the other Human worlds to presumably prevent Orks from taking root.
Gain Feudal Army and a number of refugees.
7M in ship repairs.]
