It's is the year 137 of the forty second millennium, and the galaxy burns. The Indomitus Crusade rages across the Imperium Nihilus, now entering its second century, as half the imperium has been cleared from the astronomicon.
For the untold billions within, this is a time of privation, of desperation...
And of opportunity.
And on the planet of Hexos VII, some would see that opportunity quashed.
On the outer edges of the Hexos system, where its brilliant star is merely one speck among many, reality tears open. A screaming, violent thing, violating the peaceful black with a riot of color and horror.
From this hellish maw, a fleet emerges. Warships the size of cities, adorned with cathedrals and spires and armaments that have killed planets.
Here, there is the death of revolution. The death of change. A promise of stasis and continuance and a million types of fear. Fear that will keep the galaxy in line.
There, Vow of Sacrifice, the hymns of its crew ringing in the ears of every Psyker in the system. Here, Indefagitable, leading a true war fleet out of the void. Awaiting them, glad for reinforcement at last, the Strike Cruiser Excrcuciator, in the black and silver of the Sable Swords.
And distant, swirling through the void and waiting for violence to intensify once more...
Hexos VII. And twenty one billion souls that call it home.
A number that will drop shortly.
System News
An Imperial Crusade fleet has emerged in the outer system, bringing relief to the beleaguered loyalists within.
The Mythwright cuts space true to its name, cleaving legend from the fabric of cosmos with its sharp prow. And at its helm sits the only one that could command it, resplendent in her panoply, proud and singular.
"They are forgetting someone."
There will be time, in days to follow, for subterfuge, for stealth, for tactics subtle and underhand. But the Mythwright not a knife in the dark. It arrives shining and glorious, for all to marvel.
"All holo-fields down. Let them see us in full."
On the bridges of Imperial ships, auspex systems wail in alarm as, as if from nowhere, without even the whimper of warp translation, a new fleet is made manifest. An Aeldari battleship, sleek and deadly, and flocked around it a flotilla of destroyers, their solar sails glistening in the light of the uncaring sun. There is beauty here, honed to a killer's edge, but a beauty nonetheless: those ships were meant to more than destroy. The exist to strike awe; to remind of a galaxy more sublime, gone, but not fully forgotten.
"Open all communication channels. Let us be heard."
Across the system, vox receivers crackle and sing in an alien voice. Astropaths grasp at their temples as a beguiling song fills their minds. And even in the bowels of the vehicles of Chaos ancient enunciators stir from their millennia slumber to announce an arrival, and issue a challenge.
"Friends, and soon to be dead men. Princess Jea'ni is here."
There is no need to brag. There is no need to say anything more. The name alone suffices for those who know it; and those who do not, will learn, praise and lament soon enough. And so, the signal fades, and the flotilla hides again behind the shimmering cloak of holographic deception. Only later does another message, this time far more narrow, and private, reach the bridge of the Indefatigable (along with a bottle of fine rum).
Isobel, old companion, how pleased I am to see you here! Fate in its kindness brought us together again. As always, you keep the most dreadful company, but let's make it joyous. I would love to accept your surrender on the bridge of my ship, or bedchamber, whichever you prefer.
It is the dead of night in local time when the void-vox watchmen on duty pick up the first broadcasts from their allies amongst the Brunern concern, soon corrobated by vigilant auguria from the steadfast techpriests of Hexos VIII.
Reinforcements are here. At long last, after months of desperate, losing, battle against the forces of secession and indolence. Reinforcements are here.
Technomats are roused from their bunks to propitiate the ever-ornery machine spirits of the lex-transcriptors to put words from the void to parchment, auto-quills depositing gold-flecked black.
Reinforcements, the susurrus builds. We are not abandoned. Praise the God-Emperor, we are not abandoned! Many gather around the macro-statues of the Emperor Victorious, of Sanguinius the Redeemer, to hold hands in grateful prayer-circles.
Their Cardinal hears nothing of it, at first. None dare enter the Grand Cathedral, whose beautiful stained-glass windows shine brightly from within, whose laud-hailers transmit the funereal elegies. Every day since the uprising began they have done this, holding funeral mass at the end of the day for all who have fallen in His service this day. Every single day the Cardinal has joined his voice to the chorus, joined his tears to that of the people. "It is my sacred duty, my life's work, to shepherd the souls of Hexos' people. I can not demand that her people work a hundred hours a week if I shirk my own dutiesin pursuit of indolence."
It is only when the elegies die down and the bells of the Upper Spire toll to rouse all for the prayers at Matins that an aide approaches the exhausted Cardinal Pius IV.
There is a weight lifting off his shoulders, visible to all the friars, the vicars and the deacons pushed into the Upper HIves, dispossessed of their flocks by rebellion as their leader turns to them.
"It is true. By the Grace of the God-Emperor, our undying master, our reinforcements are here. Qintus, go to the storehouses and see if we can arrange an extra half-day ration for the brave arbites, for the Widow's Guard, for all those who have stood and fought to keep this part of the Hive free from the sin of rebellion and indolence."
FROM: The Eccclesiastical Diocese of Hexos VII, the office of Cardinal Pius IV TO: The XII Commandery of the Order of the Sacred Rose, to hands Canoness-Commander R. Lassemar @Crilltic
Ave Deus Imperator, Canoness-Commander.
I know not who amongst the reinforcements holds the rod of Warmaster for this crusade of liberation, but the Diocese of Hexos stands ready to receive you. Even if - no, even when you and your fellow-sisters will be occupied bringing purging wrath to our enemies, I would dearly appreciate it if you could send at least some of your novitiates to join the Widow's Chorus.
We have held funeral mass every day since rebellion gripped this system, and God-Emperor willing, we will not have to hold them for so much longer, but until then the elegies must be given voice and there are no purer souls than those of the Orders Militant.
There will be time, in days to follow, for subterfuge, for stealth, for tactics subtle and underhand. But the Mythwright not a knife in the dark. It arrives shining and glorious, for all to marvel.
Far above, at the highest of the void-vox observatory spires, a few technomats listen, first with curiosity and then with disgust.
"What do we do about it?"
"It's self-important xenos bleating. Strike the Rune of Decreasing Volume the prescribed ten times, then ring the Gong of Gnosis and light the incense sticks for purifying the airwaves."
The sun rises over the Asaa Valley, casting long purple shadows across the carefully tended garden-farm estates that provide megatonnes of grain, fungus, and reconstituted protein to the mouths of Hexos, as well as providing pastureland to the enkhippos that form the mainstay of the Rough Rider regiments raised in the Emperor's name. Once these were the summer estates of noble families who raised the eel-horses that the common folk of the Asaa Valley and Yedi Wastes rode off to the stars. The fires have since cooled, but the black plinths of charred wood remain as stark reminders of where the Khan's forces impaled and then immolated those who refused to ride with the Stormwind. Blue blood burned the same as any other when doused in promethium.
As dawn breaks, the sound of horns and trumpets inform the inhabitants of the valley that it is the call to prayer. For those in the gathering camps, activity had already begun for the day, and so this represents a slight pause. The assembled soldiers will take their prayers in designated shifts so as to not bring a complete halt to activity. As Khan of the Stormwind, Agamede Fochia of course takes pride of place in the first prayer shift, personally rolling out his mat upon the hardpacked earth of the primary muster. Long experience lets him ignore the sounds of men and animals marching by while vehicles rumble in all the logistical activity a muster requires, even the tremendous whine-roar of aerospace assets lifting off in the early morning light to attend to their tasks. All there is is service to the Emperor, which has become so very trying to sort out in recent days. As disorder, dissent, and treason had swept the planet, the Stormwind had gathered to push back, only to be told that their spontaneous mobilization was in fact heretical and treasonous. Agamede had cut down the poisonous curs who had proclaimed themselves nobles with the authority to rule them, and then been proclaimed Khan by the assembling hosts.
It vexed him that he counted what could only be true traitors and heretics among his "allies", but there was a reckoning on Hexos that was needed that outsiders had decided to interfere with.
A seer in the greens and yellows of the Enduring Angel passed by, swinging a censer filled with pungent incense as he chanted benedictions to the Green Lord Vulkan, He Who Reforges Through Suffering. The sharp scent was so excellent for focusing the mind on the moment through the watering of eyes, a reminder of the pain and suffering of the Emperor on Earth. Thoughts of promethium consumption and autocannon shell allocation were put aside as the prayer session moved into full swing. Seers in the brilliant crimson of the Blood Angel passed by bearing intricate mosaic icons of the Emperor, His Angels, and the Saints, their droning chants reminding all of the sacrifices of the Red Lord, the Great Martyr Sanginius. Their reliquaries clattered with the gilded skulls of great servants of the Emperor, the seats of the soul recovered and painted the colour of the soul, in the hopes of one day being interred upon the Soul Throne of Terra with the Emperor - even if only in metaphor.
As Khan, Agamede was of course the first to rise at the behest of a Red Seer, to lead the Rite of Sanguine Transubstantiation. Seers of the Scarred Angel in their opalescent white robes stripped his torso bare, revealing the ritual marks upon his arms and chest. If the Enduring Angel taught to move through pain into productivity and compassion, and the Blood Angel taught the values of sacrifice, then the Scarred Angel reminded one to embrace the pain of existence as a manifestation of the joys of life. Ritual blades opened up old scars, just enough to barely wet their edge before they were immersed in sacred ritual wine, thick and red as Angel's Ichor. As the priests of Jaghatai finished their ministrations, the prayers of the seers of the Cunning Angel in their blue robes transformed simple wine and drops mortal blood into the Emperor's Own Blood, with which all present would be annoited. This had taken on special meaning in recent generations with the miraculous news that the Blue Lord, He Who Plans Inevitable Victory, was announced to stride the stars in the flesh once more.
It was not every morning this ritual was performed, but this morning was special and significant. Word had come during the night that interlopers - both foul xenos and interlopers of uncertain fealty to the Emperor - had arrived in system. So far the Stormwind had only been involved in minor skirmishes between various forces, but soon it would be time to march in truth against those that would attempt to stamp out the Word of the Emperor and His Four Angels. Most who had gathered to the khan's banner had few skills beyond the ability to ride and shoot upon the sinuous, sidewinding bodies of the enkhippos, but he had a muster of regiments that were supposed to have been sent off world before their orders became bedeviled by traitors.
As the morning prayer service wrapped up, he also broke out something special. Those who had shown particular piety and competence in the past season were called forward to receive from the khan's hand stainless steel aquilae obtained in better days from the office of the Cardinal Pius IV. Let none question their piety.
With this shift of the prayer wrapping up, the Khan bellowed out to his audience, "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD ANGEL!"
His host roared back in enthusiastic agreement, "SOULS FOR THE SOUL THRONE!"
Aboard the Cruiser Defender of Zeal, on Lord General Jean Lumiere's desk sat the transcripts of two astropathic messages.
First was the xenos message announcing the arrival of known pirate lord Jea'ni. Jean cared little for such things. No doubt his command staff and intelligence officers were already in the process of searching the Restricted Militarum archives and contacting the Ordo Xenos at Sector Headquarters to analyse this new threat. His staff consists of capable men and women; Jean did not deign it necessary to expend his own genius on such shallow, trivial matters. When the time was right, the required information will have been prepared for his assessment.
No, what occupied his mind was the far more important, and indeed considerably more shocking, second message from Sector Command.
++ FROM: DEPT MNTRM SEPTIMUS CMD ++
++ TO: 24601 IMPR ARMY CMD ++
++ SUBJECT: ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HEXOS RECLAMATION GROUP ++
++ PRIORITY: HIGH ++
++ SENSITIVITY: RESTRICTED ++
++ ENCRYPTION: VERMILLION ++
++ SENT: 137.124+SCM.M42 / 4113137.M42 ++
++ RECEIVED: 137.125+HCM.M42 / 5114137.M42 ++
++ ASTROPATHIC DUCT: H18/S117MC ++
++ THOUGHT: ALL I OWE IS TO THE THRONE AND BY DUTY I WILL REPAY ++
Departmento Munitorum Septimus Command relays the following order issued by his Excellency Lord Septimus Pietro XIV Orseolo, signed 137.121+SCM.M42:
++
By the power vested in me by the God-Emperor of Mankind on Terra, through Lord Commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent Guilliman, the Senatorum Imperialis, and Lord Regent of Imperium Nihilus Dante, I hereby invoke my right as Imperial Commander of the Septimus Sector to establish a joint Navis Imperialis, Astra Militarum, Adeptus Astartes, and Adepta Sororitas command for the purposes of pacifying the revolt on Hexos VII, and issue the following orders and ordinances for the 24601st Army and Void Watch 407, to be relayed to them through Departmento Munitorum Septimus Command and Battlefleet Septimus, respectively.
The 24601st Imperial Army, and Void Watch 407 will be combined into the HEXOS RECLAMATION GROUP. A Joint Command of the Hexos Reclamation Group will be established, and the 24601st Army and Void Watch 407 will be attached under the Hexos Reclamation Group Joint Command.
The Hexos VII Quick Reaction Force Temporary Command (see ref/cv6tf3) will therefore be dissolved upon receiving this order. Its constituent forces will be allocated as follows:
Item 1, the 3rd Mordian Infantry Regiment will be attached UNDER 24601st Army Command.
Item 2, the 12th Sword-class Escort Squadron will be attached UNDER Void Watch 407.
Item 3, Demi-Company Caliburn of the Sable Swords Adeptus Astartes Chapter is planned to be attached TO, not under, the newly formed Hexos Reclamation Group Joint Command. Space Marine forces will be separately informed of their assignment.
Furthermore, the XIIth Commandery of the Order of the Sacred Rose is planned to be attached UNDER the newly formed Hexos Reclamation Group Joint Command. Sisters of Battle forces will be separately informed of their assignment.
Lord Captain Isabella Corner will be PROMOTED to the rank of COMMODORE, from the moment this order is received to the cessation of the Hexos Reclamation Group's activities.
Commodore (P) Isabella Corner is granted the title of LORD HIGH MARSHAL OF THE HEXOS RECLAMATION GROUP and is to assume supreme command of the Hexos Reclamation Group, in addition to her continued command of Void Watch 407.
The Hexos Reclamation Group is ordered to pacify the rebellion on Hexos VII, restore all Imperial facilities to Imperial control or ensure their permanent denial to the enemies of Mankind, acquire resources from Hexos VII to make up for the shortfall of tithes in the current Munitorum and Exacta extraction cycle, and ensure the resumption of Imperial Tithes from Hexos VII by the next Munitorum and Exacta extraction cycle. If this is impossible due to fortunes of war, then you are ordered to-reassess the Tithe of Hexos VII, and collect the re-assessed Tithe.
Lord High Marshal Isabella Corner is also granted the title of ACTING GOVERNOR OF HEXOS VII, to fill in the vacancy after Felipe Despyre's vassalage as Planetary Governor was revoked in the light of his treason (see ref/op4bg4). She is thus temporarily vested with partial authority of the Imperial Commander of Hexos VII until the cessation of the Hexos Reclamation Group's activities. She will be granted the authority to commandeer all local resources on Hexos VII for the task of the Hexos Reclamation Group, grant local titles and peerage, and authorise some merchant charters (see ref/bas12f) to ensure the cooperation and compliance of those still loyal on Hexos VII and the Hexos System in pursuit of her mission, in addition to other secondary powers (see ref/fl4gb0).
Lord High Marshal Isabella Corner is also granted the title of ACTING ADMINISTRATUM ASSESSOR, and is authorised to determine and if necessary re-evaluate the Tithe Grade of Hexos VII in accordance with Administratum Standing Rubric ref/11147-u52s, until the cessation of the Hexos Reclamation Group's activities.
The Hexos Reclamation Group and its constituent formations are to execute this order with full haste.
The Emperor protects.
Signed,
Lord Septimus Pietro XIV Orseolo
Lord General Militant Gauthier Pichet, Departmento Munitorum Septimus Command
Lord Admiral Games Jambier, Battlefleet Septimus
++
Attached are relevant references and precedent ordinances as requested by his Excellency the Lord of Septimus (see ref/fl4bl2).
In accordance with this directive, it is ordered that the 24601st Imperial Army obey the authority of Lord High Marshal Isabella Corner without hesitation, and 24601st Army LOCs are to be redirected through the Lord High Marshal's joint command rather than to Septimus Command directly.
Signed,
Lord General Militant Gauthier Pichet, Departmento Munitorum Septimus Command
Livid would have been an understatement when Jean had first read this message. It was lucky that there were no propagandists present when an aide handed him the communique, for some of the things he said while in rage could've gotten him into a lot of trouble.
A Navy officer, appointed to lead a joint Guard-Navy command? This was unheard of - and absolutely outrageous. It was custom for joint commands at this scale to be led by a Guard Officer, and for a good reason: Hexos VII will be a ground campaign, any child with two brain cells could surely see that. Yet those pencil pushers at Septimus Command had the audacity to place this "Lord Captain" with authority over him! Had Guard officers in the Munitorum lost their minds? Their pride? Their honour?
To rub salt into the wound, the Lord Captain had been temporarily promoted to Commodore. By the throne, if he wasn't mistaken about the ranks of the Navy, that still meant that Jean outranked this "Commodore" by a wide margin! Such shame! Such dishonour! Such disrespect!
It was immediately clear to Jean that this strange arrangement was no accident. He could almost hear the smug, dastardly look that must've been on Pichet's face as this order was written. That bastard has obstructed and opposed the glorious program to rectify the Guard at every bend and turn; Jean secretly suspected that Pichet's foul hand was also at play during Sajarevo Prime, which had cost his good friend Jacques' life and honor. Well, if they wanted to play politics and endanger the success of the Emperor's Armies, Jean could play that game too. He was about to send an immediate Astropathic message lobbying his allies in the Sector Capital for assistance when his aide pointed out that attempting to directly contravene an explicit order by the Lord Septimus himself was probably a bad idea.
After a few hours, and after the initial outrage had subsided, Jean mulled over his options. As he continued to contemplate, the more Jean realised that he was actually fine with this. Nay, it was actually better. To save his career Jean needed a great story, and a great story always needed a great villain - and what better villain was there than the entrenched, geriatric bureaucracy of the Septimus Sector itself? It was hardly a great feat that the mighty battlegroups of the Astra Militarum could defeat some pesky rebels, but to successfully prosecute a glorious, victorious campaign despite being hamstrung and stabbed in the back by the very system that was supposed to support him? Now that was a great story, a holo-pict that would be very popular with those in the upper spires of the Sector Capital.
Already, Jean had begun to draft up a memoir he'd get published after this campaign, and instructions for the propagandists he had brought along aboard the Defender of Zeal. Yes, the "Add-On Committee", he would call them: he began to describe how they had conspired behind the scenes to load up the initially agile, nimble force he had with a bunch of useless heavy armor and men, and now they had dumped some navy upstart who'd been away in the middle of literally nowhere for years to command the whole task force. A commander that was no doubt incompetent and out of touch with the reality of contemporary war. He described how her and the navy's byzantine and banal requirements and checklists forced him to abandon his initial bold plan of victory that could've crushed the rebellion in a matter of days.
The servitor-scribe furiously scribbled his words into vellum as Jean continued to wax poetic about how these challenges did not daunt him, for friction was one constant of war, and how he was already devising innovative solutions to these challenges with the power of his keen strategic mind. He had observed, oriented, and decided. Now was the time to act.
When he was done with around a chapter's worth of content, he realised that he hadn't actually talked with his new commanding officer yet: that was a mistake, he was so caught up in thinking on how to still salvage this that he'd forgotten basic manners. Yes, if Jean was successful Isabella Corner's reputation after the campaign would suffer, but she didn't have to know about that - at least not yet. And it's not like Jean was going to be too harsh on her, for it was the eggheads at High Command that had caused this terrible, inefficient arrangement. Really, she was a victim, just like him! And in all likelihood she wouldn't care anyways. Jean had read up on her files prepared by his staff during warp transit and she didn't seem like the type to care about high command politics.
For now, he needed her to cooperate with him in prosecuting the war, and that meant getting on her good side.
Jean tasked one of his aides to prepare a vox transmission to the Indefatigable, relaying the message from Sector Command in case it had not yet been received, and indicating he wished to meet with the Lord Captain - Lord High Marshal, Commodore, Acting Governor, and Acting Assessor now, he corrected himself - in person on board her flagship to discuss the campaign.
As Jean finally sat down after hours of walking around and talking, feeling much better about himself, his future, and his new status as a subordinate commander of the Hexos Reclamation Group, he began to wonder whether he should bring along one of the bottles of Hexos Seven-Spiced Rum that he'd managed to acquire upon first hearing of news of the rebellion.
Yes, that was a good idea. It was too sweet for his taste, but from what he understood the Navy types loved it. And the punch they made with it was excellent, he had gulped down several cups of it without thinking when he attended their vicennial ball and the hangover from that lasted for days. In fact, he definitely will. He'd served under naval officers before when he was still a Colonel. They usually liked these little tokens of appreciation.
It had all been going so well. It hadn't really started out well. The genestealer who would eventually become Patriarch Xav'rrar had become damaged in a desperate under-decks battle on the ship-place where he'd been prior to coming to Hexos, and had lost his connection to the Greater Hive for a time. That had forced him to develop a personality and an identity, and oh hadn't that been an unpleasant process. His first few attempts to get his own lesser hivemind going had been half-botched, and the less said about the unfortunate months of "killing all of the people who find out that we're going around killing people", the better. He'd liked that hat. Fortunately, a horrible industrial accident had wiped out a small chunk of the lower hive including all evidence of the killings, and he'd been able to stop using that strategy. Thank the Hive.
He'd stabilized. He'd begun to grow in a more controlled way... and he'd learned to listen. it turned out that if you were willing to listen to what your thralls had to say, they sometimes told you useful things. It turned out that if you dialed back the level of mental domination to a sort of low, pleasurable buzz, they could come up with useful ideas on their own. It turned out that if you tweaked things just right, you could make the hivemind... something that potential thralls actually wanted to be a part of? It was all very strange, but he had plenty of minds telling him that it was working, and the bit where they didn't have to go around killing people and then killing other people and then killing more people because of the people you were just killing... that was nice. Patriarch Xav'rrar liked that part. It was just so much less stressful.
So... a cult, then. A friendly cult. A friendly cult where the weird mutant biohorror sex with inhuman things was entirely voluntary, and also not emphasized in the recruitment literature. It was just made available as an option for those who might be interested. The skills for making a genestealer cult that people would want to be a part of weren't anywhere in the genetic legacy, but that's where leaving people most of their own identity came in. Apparently the idea of having people you could trust absolutely and also moderate genetic upgrades was something that just sold itself in certain areas. Who knew?
Then it got weird.
It wasn't a bad weird, really. It's just... when every single one of your cultists is some form of oppressed, and the genetic advantages that they're most interested in are things like "better endure the literal lashes of the overseer" and some days half of the traffic on the hivemind is just people passing sympathy and commiseration back and forth, that's not really something that you expect the nobles in the Spire to be interested in. When you've never had a single cultist that's anything above "dirt-poor", and your entire recruitment spiel starts off with encouraging the target to talk about how utterly awful their life is... well, at that point having some noble actually approach you and ask to join is kind of unprecedented.
He said "yes" of course. His choices were to say "yes", say "no", or kill her on the spot. Saying "no" would result in a noble who both knew about him and had reason to dislike him, and everything his local hive was telling him was saying that that would not end well. Killing her...? Let's just say that he'd finally gotten a replacement hat that he liked almost as much as his old hat, and he didn't want to lose that one too. Saying "yes" meant that she might get caught, but it was less risky than either of the other two options, and infiltration was infiltration, right? So he did what the rest of the hive told him he had to do and utterly capitulated. He opened wide the vaults on whatever gene-splices she might like, let her take a few servitors with her to keep the splicing going, and all that stuff. It... apparently worked?
It was still weird.
The Church of the New Flesh was a family. The Cult Above... wasn't. They had arguments. They had infighting. How do you get infighting in a hivemind? It made no sense. It made no sense. Lady Dulcinea reassured him that this was... normal. This was apparently just How Things Were in the upper spire. Then she asked for more servitors. Well... okay. He rewarded a few of the more deserving of his flock with a pile of appropriate upgrades and the opportunity to live a life where "the overseer's lash" wasn't a regular part of their experience and went on with his day. If she had it handled, then she had it handled, right?
Then the entire thing fragmented even further, and some of them wound up perilously close to knifing each other in the dark, and he started to get concerned. He started to ask questions. Now he had Lady Dulcinea and this new guy called "The Star in Velvet" and both of them were assuring him that they had it under control and asking for more servitors. Well... he supposed that no one had been knifing the servitors in the dark. As long as the nobles stuck with knifing each other? Honestly, he had bigger problems to deal with. The rising tithes were making life really bad for his people. Recruitment was up, and that was always nice, but there was even more misery than normal. He didn't like that. He didn't want his people to be miserable. Then the revolution happened and suddenly there was a lot of killing going on up above. Welp. Might be worth breaking out a few of those weapons caches a bit early. He really didn't want to go back to killing everyone who knew he was killing people, but if the choice is between "get murdered where you stand" and "be able to fight back at least a little and maybe convince people to leave you be" then he'd take the latter.
Then the skies opened up and a host of the heavens declared their intent to purge the unclean and unworthy from this world. Well. That... well.
"Greetings, traitors and heretics. In the name of the free peoples of Hexos and the eternal Emperor, I welcome you to your grave.
For too long, we have suffered the rights and liberties granted to every citizen of His Imperium by the God Emperor in time immemorial to be trampled underfoot. @Graf Tzarogy
We have suffered our good governance and prosperity to be replaced by corruption, and the enrichment of sycophants at the expense of those who labor! @EarthScorpion
We have suffered the replacement of our true religion with idolatry and a tumult false doctrines! @Academia Nut@bookwyrm@Zorakov
And when our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters have found the courage to protest these outrages, we have suffered the so called Imperial Regent to place a scourge in our hands and bid us lash them into submission lest HE bathe this planet in their blood. @dash931@Gladsome
WE WILL SUFFER NO MORE!
We shall bring the purifying flame to this rotten edifice your masters have constructed around us, and burn away these pestilential innovations that have strangled our freedoms, till all that remains is as the God Emperor intended!
And to that end, I, Felipe Despyre, Duke of Yushory Borough and Governor of Hexos, hereby issue a DECREE OF NO CONFIDENCE and DISSOLVE the current regime, due to the deep rooted corruption festering in its ranks.
I hereby RESTORE the Council of the People's Crusade, as governed this planet in the days when the Emperor walked among us, and charge it to restore Hexos to her ancient freedoms and prosperity and fail not.
I further DELEGATE AND DEVOLVE all powers of the office of Governor to the CPC, and take up my seat upon it as one among peers, as it was done in the days of old. As the God Emperor arranged his High Lords, before the dark days of the Usurper!
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S CRUSADE! AVE IMPERATOR, REX ETERNUM!"
"Greetings, traitors and heretics. In the name of the free peoples of Hexos and the eternal Emperor, I welcome you to your grave.
For too long, we have suffered the rights and liberties granted to every citizen of His Imperium by the God Emperor in tike immemorial to be trampled underfoot. @Graf Tzarogy
We have suffered our good governance and prosperity to be replaced by corruption, and the enrichment of sycophants at the expense of those who labor! @EarthScorpion
We have suffered the replacement of our true religion with idolatry and a tumult false doctrines! @Academia Nut@bookwyrm@Zorakov
And when our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters have found the courage to protest these outrages, we have suffered the so called Imperial Regent to place a scourge in our hands and bid us lash them into submission lest HE bathe this planet in their blood. @dash931@Gladsome
WE WILL SUFFER NO MORE!
We shall bring the purifying flame to this rotten edifice your masters have constructed around us, and burn away these pestilential innovations that have strangled our freedoms, till all that remains is as the God Emperor intended!
And to that end, I, Felipe Despyre, Duke of Yushory Borough and Governor of Hexos, hereby issue a DECREE OF NO CONFIDENCE and DISSOLVE the current regime, due to the deep rooted corruption festering in its ranks.
I hereby RESTORE the Council of the People's Crusade, as governed this planet in the days when the Emperor walked among us, and charge it to restore Hexos to her ancient freedoms and prosperity and fail not.
I further DELEGATE AND DEVOLVE all powers of the office of Governor to the CPC, and take up my seat upon it as one among peers, as it was done in the days of old. As the God Emperor arranged his High Lords, before the dark days of the Usurper!
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S CRUSADE! AVE IMPERATOR, REX ETERNUM!"
Cathedral of the God-Emperor Victorious
Heptos Hive, Upper Spires
Hexos VII
A man - a Cardinal - paces.
He has listened to that man's self-aggrandizing bleating for a day. Faithless, ill-fated Felipe Despyre, a man who he had thought had missed his chance to be third-best at anything, forever chasing something the God-Emperor had never designed for him to have. And then rebellion bloomed and so did Felipe the Inept's fortunes - never by his own hands, always only by chance.
Perhaps it is the Emperor's will, to so test the faithful of Hexos, to put Felipe the Faithless in command and control of the frothing, baying masses attempting to storm the upper Hive. To put Felipe the Invidious but a mile from the throne he craves, and righteous souls with flamers to keep him from his desideratum.
Nevertheless. Nevertheless. Preparations must be made.
FROM: The Eccclesiastical Diocese of Hexos VII, the office of Cardinal Pius IV TO: The esteemed Magos Lamarck of the Adeptus Mechanicus Divisio Biologica @Mina
Esteemed Magos Lamarck,
one hopes that the Emperor-Omnissiah lends His blazing sword and His adamant shield to your efforts to safeguard Hexos VIII, and that you abide in pious labour. As you have been well aware, it has been a trying time here in the HIve Spires, and one must needs make an example. It is thus, by the compacts that bind our Imperium together, that the Ecclesiarchy represented by my personage wishes to commission from the tech-wrights of your Division a Penitent Engine, that most sacred device by which the impious soul may be rendered pure in devotional sacrifice in the Emperor-Omnissiah's name.
Attached are the physical measurements of the faithless soul whom this sacred device is meant to redeem, the man Felipe of the Despyre family, that we may install him upon the one throne he deserves once the Reclamation Crusade seizes him.
May your labours ever be fruitful,
Pius the Fourth,
Cardinal of the Diocese of Hexos
The droning hum of the servitor was all that could be heard of a skirmish deep at the border between the upper and mid level of Hive Heptos. None around the servitor knew its identity before the procedure made it a lobotomized piece of metallic flesh. Antennas sprouted out of its head and a vox-box was poorly melded at the throat. This was one of the few reliable connections afforded to the 679th Penal Legion. It then came alive with a burst of a man's voice.
"We are being pushed back across sector 341. Secessionist Basilisks have nullified any opportunity to counterattack. I am registering a 56% loss rate for my vanguard. We are down to 45% of our allocated ammunition too."
The voice stopped after a sharp beep. Tilting its head, the servitor fell. It was never to get up again. A nearby sergeant muttered, "Throne! They breached the comm frequency. Bring the next thing. By the Emperor's mercy, this one will last longer."
With the servitor that fell being dragged away, the next one marched uneasily into position. The latter was taller, more alien in appearance, with the transmitter shaped like horns. It drooled the same until the connection was reestablished.
"Every gunhound unit has been lost. Reinforcements are needed immediately if the position is to be held. I repeat: we need more bodies here."
"You are quite mistaken about your mission," replied a sharper voice. "Whether the sector is held or lost is of no material consequence to you. Your success is counted in the enemies slain and those under you martyred."
"Colonel Hollowshade, you cannot be serious. We aren't equipped with bomb harnesses. The preachers were killed days ago."
"The lidless eyes of the Emperor see all. He will consecrate your death should they be worthy of it. Report back only when you are down to your last reserves."
The comm was silent after. Instead, the pivot of the orbital guns—a heavy, grinding sound—was heard outside their headquarters. The sergeant looked at Hollowshade with worry.
Said the sergeant, "Colonel, I know the man. He isn't one to panic easily. There is some merit to his request."
"Merit perhaps for a regular," Hollowshade said with a joyless smile. "But we are the dead living only to take the sin of others."
Lord-Captain Isabelle and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The Indefatigable
Morning Watch
7.34 (Shipboard Time)
The vast bridge of the Indefatigable was ahum with a low murmur of activity as the Morning Watch drew to a close and the Forenoon Watch and its promise of the traditional call of "Up Spirits" beckoned. The entire squadron had been adjusting their shipboard times to Hexos standard in a series of staggered hourly adjustments, leaving everyone looking a little haggard and rocket-lagged. A nicely restorative quarter-pint of rum for elevenses was needed more than ever. But there would be no rum ration for this morning's contingent of midshipmen working on their astrogation in the auspex-pit. Today they were lucky enough to have the personal tutelage of their esteemed Lord-Captain alongside the terrifying spectre of the First Officer, Commander Rathbone "Iron Jaw" Jarvis.
Isabella sipped spiced tea from her favourite thermal flask and watched as seventeen year old Midshipman Avert-the-Heretic-Defy-the-Foul-Xenos-Redeem-the-Mutant-and-Praise-the-Emperor Truebridge (or "Avvie" for short as the sailors had named her) stammered through her astrogation logbook. Currently her calculations seemed to put the fleet about two hundred notches*(1) spinward of the Eye of Terror, a revelation which was being greeted with considerable interest by Commander Jarvis as he grilled on her ciphering and numerology. Even after decades of practice, Isabella still sometimes struggled to keep a straight face when tutoring the mids.
The midshipmen or "mids" were the junior officers of the Service, taking their name from their berths traditionally being amidships in the most protected area of the ship. Unlike the Guard who could take any damned fool aristocrat, pin some pips to them and ship them off to some Emperor-forsaken hellhole as a Colonel, the Service required its officers to learn an immense amount of technical skills, and this necessitated an apprenticeship. The typical age for a midshipman was between twelve and twenty, with only some deeply unfortunate souls remaining into their late twenties or thirties, either unable to pass the notoriously difficult exams to grade as "passed midshipmen", or lacking the luck or patronage to receive a commission.
Which made the prospect of twenty seven year old Acting-Lieutenant (Second Class) Midshipman*(2) Edoardo VII Orseolo even more of an enigma, Isabella mused. A minor scion of that same illustrious dynasty as the current Lord-Governor Sectorial, who had come aboard with the ink barely dry on his warrant when the squadron stopped for a regrettably short stint at Port Hydra with little warning or reason. But not the most pressing one while the mysteries of astrogation still beckoned.
Time to put the megafelid into the grox-pen.
"Mister Truebridge, suppose you are close-hauled on the starboard tack in the mid-geos of a Saturnine planet, beating up the orbital with a solar wind at four points and blowing strong, the rings bearing at twenty megameters, when a coronal burst takes you amidships and puts you flat aback, dousing your mainsail and royals. What do you do?"
Isabella interjected mildly with the same tone she might use to ask a Planetary Governor's daughter to pass the scalloped pitats.
This question (one her old captain "Dreadnought" Kanmon loved to pose, Emperor rest his bones) was greeted with a hushed silence by the mids. Poor Midshipman Truebridge began to stammer out a reply, rather hedging her bets by trying to re-ignite her main drives whilst laying out a void-anchor, and probably dooming her hypothetical crew to be dashed on the unforgiving rings of a gas giant.
"YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE DASHED ON THE ICE SHOALS, MISTER TRUEBRIDGE. THE ICE SHOALS OF SATURN!" The signature grating boom of the voxcoder built into Commander Jarvis' cybernetic jaw cut the poor midshipman off mid-sentence and stunned her into silence.
"Perhaps what Mister Truebridge was endeavouring to suggest was that she would box-haul with her topsail and hullsail to put the ship abeam, before setting up a luffing jib with her imperials and sinister imperials and ordering a full burn to regain her orbit." a small and rather squeaky voice piped up from the huddled mass.
The timorous squeak belonged to one Midshipman Honorius Cornetto, one of the other newly arrived mids from Port Hydra, thirteen years old and wearing a uniform which his mother may have vainly hoped he would have grown into by now. The boy certainly showed no lack of spirit in speaking up to the rather terrifying form of old Iron Jaw. Isabella thought she should probably rescue the sprig before her First Officer ate him.
"A fine suggestion Mister Cornetto. However-"
The scream of klaxons across the bridge brought the lesson to a halt. Lexmechanics sitting wired into their auspex stations sang in Binaric, whilst officers began shouting orders and tapping runes on their cogitator arrays. The bridge's main vista plates shimmered with static, the holo-tank flickered as new target tracks appeared and disappeared, whilst armoured shutters slam closed. An alarm began, sounding "Clear for Action" across all decks of the Indefatigable, as it would be sounding on every ship in the squadron.
The Indefatigable
Morning Watch
7.37 (Shipboard Time)
Lord-Captain Isabella stood impassively on the quarterdeck and considered the holo-tank calmly. She took another sip of spiced tea from her flask. She did not need to give an order. Her crews had trained for this. They were ready. She was confident they could give a good account of themselves be it the Despoiler himself and the Nine Legions of Hell bearing down on them. Training, duty, and the chance of Prize Money could overcome any foe.
Pilots of Fury starfighters were even now sprinting to the cockpit gantries of the alert squadrons. Gun crews all across the ship cleared for action and began loading fuses and splicing power cables along decks of warming laser-impelled plasma basilisks, machine spirits groggily awakening. Able voidsmen heaved and reset the plasma rigging and gravimetric plates from a cruising rig to battle readiness, readying the ship for combat burns of up to nine gravities. All across the spine of the Indefatigable, topmen in voidsuits started rigging the sensor masts for battle. The ship's two great dorsal turrets Old Tobias and Furiosa, each bearing a twin mount of the fearsome long milleniums*(3) loved by the Service, began to swivel towards the enemy bearing with the terrible inevitability of continental drift.
Vox systems across the ship crackled, and machine-spirits sputtered in outrage.
"Friends, and soon to be dead men. Princess Jea'ni is here."
Lord-Captain Isabella coughed and spat tea over herself.
The Indefatigable
Afternoon Watch
12.38 (Shipboard Time)
Lord-Captain Isabella sat at the head of the polished hornwood table of the Indefatigible's cupboard-room*(4). Along with every other part of the command decks it had been remodelled extensively since the ship's last battle with the Tyrannic Menace. The skulls of several Warrior-forms and one horrific Carnifex were now mounted to her left, right next to the scars still left on adamantium bulkheads by their claws. The remains of a cold working luncheon sat on the table, cistern-fish with curried greens and perfumed rice, along with some other assortments. Isabella smiled as she saw a midshipman far down the table surreptitiously wrapping sweetmeats in a handkerchief and tucking it into his jacket for later.
"Commander Jarvis, how are we doing?" Isabella asks. It was considered rather gauche in the Service to bring up professional matters at table, but needs must when the Warmaster drives.
"THE COMBAT AERONAUTICA PATROL HAS BEEN DOUBLED. WE'VE SPLICED NEW AUGURS TO THE MAIN MASTS IN THE THETA AND UMBER BANDS. DATALINKS FROM TERROR AND JOYEUSEGARDE FOR LONG INTERFEROMETRY. THE COG-BOTHERERS ARE CRYING SOMETHING FIERCE ABOUT THE DATA-LOAD, BUT THEY'LL HOLD. IF THE WITCH SO MUCH AS SNEEZES THIS SIDE OF THE PERIHELION, WE'LL KNOW."
Commander Jarvis finished his report, sipping from his Catachan Sunrise through a straw which looked tiny next to his steel prosthetic jaw. Before they served together Isabella had never taken him for a little pink umbrella kind of man, but that only confirmed her long-held belief that assumptions were a mistake in naval life.
"Very good. Lieutenant Starling, what of our allies?"
The Cadic*(5) First Lieutenant was a young woman from a great family which normally sent sons and daughters to the Guard. Her name and noble bearing combined with those brilliant violet eyes framed by jet black hair and perfect ochre features had half of the squadron's officers pining after her. It also made Isabella choose her often as a diplomatic liaison.
"Tolerably well, ma'am. The Defender of Zeal had a bit of a scare which turned out to be sensor-ghosts; Vow of Salvation and Excruciator are rather eager to get to grips with the foe. Claymore and her squadron are offering to scout around Hexos XI." Starling says.
Isabella made a face. It was very comforting having all the extra weight of metal in her line of battle, but liaising was already giving her some grey hairs; juvie treatments or no juvie treatments. Of course she had only the highest respect for her comrades in the Guard, Sororitas and Astartes. Indeed they were heroic, for how hard must it be to fight for the Emperor with no hope, nary even a chance, not a crumb, of Prize Money?
"Very good. Send me the report from the Defender. And arrange a holo-conference with the task force captains at three bells."*(6)
"Yes ma'am." Starling nods. Whether due to Guard heritage or some Cadic quirk which years in the Service had not altered, Starling still insisted on referring to Isabella as "ma'am".
"I would like permission to push the CAP further out, Lord-Captain. The Eldar have to be hiding somewhere in the asteroid belt or behind one of the sub-Jovians." interrupted the Indefatigible's CAG, Flight Lieutenant Pellew. The man was a raging bore and quite arrogant, but he was also brave and honourable to a fault, the spitting image of an Imperial Navy pilot, from his waxed moustache to his languid aristocratic frame.
"I'm sure they are Lieutenant. They also have a significant fighter wing. If they get the drop on you, we won't even be able to plot a pursuit before they're gone. Denied." Isabella replies roundly.
A deep voice sounded across the table.
"To hunt a Terradon, it is said one must go in force or not at all."
This sage proverb was delivered by Brother-Sergeant Altantsetseg of the Solar Hawks, who with his four battle-brothers had been running an Advanced Fighter Tactics School on the Indefatigable for the past year and a half, part of a joint training programme between their Chapter and the Navy. Whilst one tended to think of Space Marines in a boarding action or wielding some ancient blade against the Archenemy, the Navy pilots aboard had quickly grown to respect the centuries of piloting experience that the sons of Jaghatai had to offer.
The gigantic transhuman was also a good Regicide player, and a dab hand on his homeworld's version of the fiddle. Although the yak-hide drum and throat-singing could be a bit trying at times.
"Lord-Captain, I was reading your logs, and I am given to understand that you have faced this foul witch before?" This question came from Acting-Lieutenant Orseolo, and was really pushing the bounds of pertinence for such a junior officer. Isabella ran a fairly informal table, but there were limits. Still, he had rather pointed out the mastodont in the room.
"Yes, we had some run-ins when I was captaining the Valiant and the Terror. A most cunning and wily foe. Still, we have faith and steel on our side." Isabella said evenly.
"But are the stories true that you were both captured by the Drukhari? Or crash-landed upon Hydrax IV and forced to work together against those Ork freebooters? Or your duel on the bridge of the Valiant? The logs are rather vague and I would wish more dearly than any thing to hear the story from you, Lord-Captain." Orseolo continued, not seeming to get the hint but with an entirely innocent look on his face.
Isabella paused. A silence fell on the room. Was he attempting to insinuate something, or simply an eager young officer asking for stories of derring-do as juniors had since times immemorial? His family name made her feel suddenly wary.
"I think those are stories perhaps not for luncheon Midshipman. As I recall they are rather grisly, and need a stiffer drink."
The rather mild tone came from her friend and confidante, Master Physician*(7) Simeon Abdelazim. As usual he had gotten the naval rank wrong, and Orseolo appeared to be fuming at the apparent snub. Well, let him seethe. To Isabella's mind the job of a junior officer when invited to the captain's table was to shovel food into their mouths, answer a polite question or two, and listen.
Orbit-Master Lively heroically stepped into the breach to rescue the conversation.
"So, Brother Sergeant, is it true what they say about the giant birds on your homeworld?"
"I believe you refer to the great raptors of Altai, Mister Lively. Oh, what would I give to be able to sketch one, let alone inspect a specimen!" Simeon piped in, as avidly interested in anything which touched on naturalism or xenology as he was utterly ambivalent to all the niceties of the Service.
"Yes, the thunderbirds are indeed mighty predators, Doctor. We believe that the spirits of our brothers fly alongside-" Brother-Sergeant Altantsetseg smiled, an uncharacteristic yet surprisingly warm expression.
"But I thought they had wings and feathers, yes? A raptor is a great bounding reptile with teeth-" Lively interrupted.
"If you refer to Deinonychus Terribilis, my good sir, then it has both feathers and teeth, but is not, in the proper classification of Archmagos Linneaus, technically a raptor-"
Orbit-Master Lively was not giving up the point.
"No, I won't be having with any of this High Gothic Malarkey, a raptor is a great horrible stinking lizard that jumps your las-fences and eats your mouflon, I know because I've shot one with-"
What was promising to be a quite amusing argument was interrupted most rudely by Midshipman Truebridge, who was serving this afternoon as a courier.
"Priority message for you from Sector Command, Lord-Captain."
Isabelle frowned.
"I'll read it in my ready room. Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies. Please serve the digestif without me."
The Indefatigable
Afternoon Watch
12.54 (Shipboard Time)
…
Isabella read the missive for a third time, simply to ensure she was not having a sudden bout of the 'gravs or some sort of psychotic break. She leaned back in the rather uncomfortable chair. She considered the watercolour of the Reclamation of Calth which she did not particularly like, and left hanging mainly because she did not sit in her ready-room very often and did not want to have to choose another painting. Simeon had been such a drudging bore the last time she had asked his advice…
Everything had been shaping up so wonderfully. She would be made Acting Commodore, whilst some elderly planet-lubber Guard general would be made High Marshal. They would occasionally send her missives with vague instructions, which she would largely ignore whilst cruising as she pleased, sweeping the orbitals clean of foes and occasionally bombing things.
Add in a bit of Prize Money and a bottle or two of that delightful Seven-Spice, and it would have all been just perfect. A feather in her cap, and Thrones in all their hands.
But first she had shown up. Why here, of all places? Why now? Could it be deliberate?
And now… now…
Isabella looked at the cogitator, and saw another blinking rune indicating a second message on the same astropathic duct as the first. Naval encryption.
++ FROM: BTFLT SEPTIMUS CMD ++
++ TO: 407 VD WTC ++
++ SUBJECT: ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HEXOS RECLAMATION GROUP ++
++ PRIORITY: HIGH ++
++ SENSITIVITY: RESTRICTED ++
++ ENCRYPTION: MAGNETA++
++ SENT: 137.124+SCM.M42 / 4113137.M42 ++
++ RECEIVED: 137.125+HCM.M42 / 5114137.M42 ++
++ ASTROPATHIC DUCT: H18/S117MC ++
++ THOUGHT: CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD ++
Battlefleet Septimus Command relays the following missive from his Grace Lord Admiral Games Jambier, signed 137.121+SCM.M42:
++
Dear Isa,
There's a lot riding on this one. I vouched for you personally.
Don't fuck up.
The Emperor Protects
Jamby
++
Signed and Authenticated,
Lord-Secretary Benitz, Battlefleet Septimus Command
Isabella swore an oath that was most unbecoming for a Naval officer, let alone a Lord High Marshal.
*1(Translator's Note: A Naval unit of distance equivalent to exactly seventeen sixteenths of a standard Terran Parsec. The reason for the discrepancy is elusive.)
*2(Translator's Note: Making a Midshipman into an "Acting Lieutenant" for some bit of daring during action or to replace casualties is a long-established practice in the Navy. Normally they would hold the rank until their Commission could be confirmed. For a Midshipman to be an Acting-Lieutenant when arriving on a ship in port is highly irregular. For a Midshipman to be made a Acting-Lieutenant Second Class, technically outranking many other far more senior officers on the ship, is something normally not normally seen outside of stunning acts of heroics.)
*3(Translator's Note: In groundling this means "heavy lances".)
*4(Translator's Note: As with any capital ship of the Imperial Navy, the Indefatigible has many different officer's wardrooms, dining halls and relaxation areas for the officers of the ship, from grand dining halls which can seat most of the ship's officers and visiting guests, to smaller spaces adjoining areas like the gundecks and so on. The cupboard-room is a wardroom directly adjoining the bridge and captain's quarters, a relatively small and intimate space seating at most a hundred.)
*5(Translator's Note: Regional variation of "Cadian". By some counts the Cadian diaspora may be in one of the top twenty most populous ethnic groups in the Imperium, due to the habit of rewarding Guard regiments for service by settling them as military colonists. This is complicated however as many noble families with a propensity for Guard service have begun using gene-fixing to get the signature violet eyes, a practice which has if anything only been accelerated by the famous destruction of Cadia.)
*6(Translator's Note: The Navy uses a system of four-hour watches (along with two two-hour "Dog" Watches) where bells are rung at each half hour, and eight bells at the end of each watch (even the Dog Watches). The Afternoon Watch begins at noon, so Isabella is scheduling a conference for 13.30PM shipboard time.)
Across the towering spires of the Hexos VII shipyards, alarms flared to life. Drive plumes in their dozens had been sited from the outer system, the assembled crusade fleet had finished their plotting.
The Imperial navy, in all its might, and all its glory, was coming for the Shipyards.
Combat was common in the spires. Skirmishes between arbite squads and the brightly-clad revolutionaries of the civic guard. Horrific brawls between myriad lower-hives Militia and the penitent faithful of the Widow's Guard. Death and desolation an every-day occurrence as staircase-by-staircase, control of the hive ebbed and flowed.
Today was a low tide. Watchpost after watchpost reported clear, that the usual strikes and bombings simply had not occurred. That today, and perhaps for days or weeks to come, there was peace.
But on the horizon, the spires of Hive Heptos could see straight to the sea. Could watch the fleets and their strike groups sail inexorably towards the coast. And in the control hubs for train networks and logistics depots long-since fallen to the rebellion, exhausted overseers noted inflows of materiel not seen since the war's start.
Within hours, the ersatz leaders of the loyalist government knew one thing: The rebels were coming.
Upper Hive: Rebel and Interloper Invasions from the Middle Spire! Potential Combatants: Any Rebel, Deku, Garg, Aleph, Aodyssey
The blockade had, at least, managed to set up well. Repurposed Hydras and missile batteries had been towed into position by the ever-zealous soldiers of the Urdu. Disguised under camo nets and blessed in the Blue Angel's name. The first of the regular monthly supply landers, loaded heavy with munitions from hastily-erected asteroid based munition's workshops, had disintegrated in a hail of missile fire.
Unfortunately, the second batch of supply landers was thousands strong, containing regiments of imperial soldiers. And, judging by the ways the skies glistened with drive-torches at night, more were on the way.
The blockade was about to face its first real test since the rebellion took these hills. And if it failed, the Sab'a mines were clearly next on the Invader's agenda.
Defense Guns: Rebel Blockade from the Mines! Potential Combatants: Any Rebel
Assets Declared
Academia - Military - Fochia's Urdu
Gladsome - Military - PDF 23rd Regiment Limitanei
Declared Effort
Academia - 4 Effort
Gladsome - 5 Effort
Defense Guns: Tau Skirmish from Out-system! Potential Combatants: Dekutulla
Assets Declared
Deku - Navy - Spinetail Command
Declared Effort
Deku - 5 Effort
Sab'a Mines: Imperial Invasion from the Guns! Potential Combatants: Guderian, Crilltic, Carol
Across Hexos, in dark corners, dispossessed nobles and brutalized merchant scions huddled in dark corners and prayed for salvation. Their wealth, their prestige, their faith in the emperor had gone but the connections forged by the late governor, his vision of salvation…
That remained.
So they prayed to new gods. Invoked new allies. And, as their dreams and forms twisted, something answered.
Southwest of Hive Heptos, portals tore open in once-pristine glades. Twisted eaves, long-poisoned by hive runoff, were rent asunder as reality broke. Boots in their thousands trampled rotten leaves and long-dead earth. Tanks and demon-engines billowed smoke into the skies and set their sights upon the lower hives and its teeming millions.
And across the planet, as farmers gathered the autumn's harvest in the Asaa valley, the sky grew bright with incoming dropships.
At the helm of the Mythwright, Princess Jea'ni feels like mounting a dragon. And is she not just? Leave to younger races technology, the unsteady interface of flesh and machine, leave to them screens and levers, panels and steering wheels. Leave to the younger races dumb plasteel, mute wiring, craft only a little more aware than a fledgling bird. But for the children of Asuryan, who first to the stars, give ensouled vessels, no less alive than any of the Aeldair. But for the children of Asuryan, give the right to sail the void like Kurnous on his stead.
And of course, Princess Jea'ni gives herself that, and more. She allows herself to sink deeper into the communion with her battleship, hearing the murmur of its Infinity Circus in her ears, feeling its systems like slowly flexing muscle of a beast eager to hunt. Yes, she knows the Mythwright well. She knows how hungry the ship is, in its quiet, focused patience. She knows the sheer satisfaction that will rise in it once the battle is joined and it can slash with its pulse laser claws, bite in with its wraith-cannons, roar and bathe the cosmos in scintillating flame. She, too, can't wait. But wait she shall; pleasure deferred is pleasure magnified.
"Soon," she assuages the Mythwright, and feels the battleship purr in response, flickering its holo-shields in lazy waves. "Soon."
"You look masturbatory again, my princess," a voice - not the ship, but her favoured Felarch's - snaps her out of the communion, and back into the softly-lit wraithbone shell of the bridge. "It is disgusting."
The Corsair princess blinks, and looks at the Felarch's scarred face, and mean sharp eyes. She used to love this woman like a dream of a beautiful death; she's gotten better, but still can't restrain a certain kind of glee at being talked down like that. Anyone else but her would have to die for it, which only makes it more beautiful.
"What can I say," she responds lazily instead. "I was just mounting a void dragon."
The Felarch scowls in a particularly ugly way.
"And here I was," she says, voice like iron nails on glass, "thinking that it was the mon-keigh way to want to fuck their ships. Another bestial habit you picked up from that pet human of yours?"
Ah, Isabela! Now, to be true, the Felarch was not that wrong. That woman, like so many of her race, developed a relationship with their craft that bordered on pornographic, and definitely felt highly erotic. Of course, none of them were properly aware of that, either. Humans, for some reason, seemed unable to recognize desire even as their chins were lifted up at the tip of a blade; so many beautiful women Jea'ni hoped to seduce only to have them misunderstand that as an attempt at murder. As if! If she wanted them dead, she would have called for a broadside, not her trusty blade.
"On that note," she remembers something suddenly, and smile. "Please, find a bottle of some good rum in our stocks, and send it to Isa, with a letter of apology."
There is disgust in the way that the Felarch smiles in response; she would rather have that poor captain (commodore? admiral? Jea'ni wondered if the uniform she was wearing now would finally flatter her) quartered and her heart sacrificed to Khaine. But she had a keen nose for bloodshed, that old warrior, and so she knew she soon would be given an opportunity to bring her sword down on the mon-keigh, for reasons altogether different from the ones preferred by Jea'ni.
"What for?" the Felarch asks, stretching each syllable in anticipatory glee.
With the first flick of her fingers, Jea'ni summons forth a holo-display of that horrifying mound of misery that humans call a "hive". With the second, she highlights upper levels of it in read, paths for ingress - and solutions for orbital bombardment - already calculated. And now, the Felarch smiles wide, showing all her teeth filed into sharp points.
A-11 snarled as he shot the apostate prelate, the force of the shot throwing the man spread eagled against the altar. A-11 was not a man prone to devolve to barbarity but he never could stand apostasy, the very idea of turning from the light of Him on Terra disgusted him. The traitor even had the temerity to thrust a heretic idol at him as if to ward off his righteous punishment. Unfortunately for the priest his new gods didn't hear him and the Emperor the priest had abandoned did not see fit to intervene on his prodigal son's behalf. He looked around the desecrated church in disgust; he wondered if the chaplains could reconsecrate it or if it would need to be destroyed.
A-11 turned his attention back to the dead priest as the icon he had been holding clattered to the ground. The 8 pointed star on the rosary chain caught A-11s eye for some reason. He raised his foot to crush the heretic icon but just as he was about to bring it down the icon flickered shining with golden light. Looking again A-11 noticed that it wasn't a star but an aquila. A-11 started at the sight and soon realised that the priest also wasn't wearing the desecrated vestments he thought he had been but clean and proud ministorum robes now stained in blood. In growing horror he saw that the chruch was not defiled but whole, clean and loyal. In a moment of panic, thinking he had snapped from battlefield stress, hallucinated and spilled loyal blood on consecrated ground he raised his hand to his head and suddenly stopped. On the front of his gauntlet he saw that the aquilla had been defaced with an eight pointed star. He quickly saw that his bolt pistol too was not clean burnished imperial metal but soot blackened and daubed in heretic sigils. At this moment he remembered it all. He remembered every crime, every murder, every act he had committed against the Imperium he loved. He remembered that his soul was dammed and he was a tool of the enemy.
He stood there for what seemed like an eternity; his mind processing the horror. Then, at the same time he started to scream and raised his gun to his head. As he did he could feel the threads in his gasmask worming their way into his flesh and himself start to suffocate behind the mask. Then just before he pulled the trigger he heard the doors behind him crash open.
A-11 stood before the traitor priest. He scratched his helmet with the but of his pistol, he did not remember raising his arm. He must be getting old. He turned to the two troopers he had clattered through the doors. They had obviously come hearing the gunshot.
"This place has been defiled and is a disgrace to the Emperor. Burn it"
And he strode out of the building.
Gulian, in a secret room, sits in the silent dark. Below him, through panes of holo-glass, people pray. A golden statute receives their offerings: hand-whittled figurines; re-used paper with wishes scrawled on; too much of their rations, nutrient paste put in plastic bowls. They worship a figure false; the gilt paint, his ruby eyes colored glass, his face not of the Emperor but generated at random from a malfunctioning fabricator. If you look too closely, you realize the Lord of Terra has a few too many teeth.
Before him is what is now called a cogitator, though he has a different name. On the screen, a map of the great Hive, from dreaming spires to stygian depths. And like stars, a thousand points flicker and beep. Comparative to what he'd done, a few hundred secreted tracking beacons hardly qualified as a deception.
Below, they are singing hymns. Songs of praise to the Star-Father, the Omnissiah, the Anathema rise to uncaring ears. A few listening devices steal the wishes people mutter under breath between lines of faith to a God whose men come to kill them all. For a child. For a lover. For a chocolate for dessert.
The cogitator records them, puts them in an archive older than the first ruins on the planet. A tomb of a thousand generations. Gulian, though, is distracted. A light blinks twice, and goes red – and another, and another.
Above, he knows, are those he fails. Above, children and dreamers and desperados march a desperate charge, spilling blood against marble floors. They kill in the name of progress – in the name of the future. But he just told them that. Told them like he told them of his "Father". Told them as he told them who he was.
He remembers – he doesn't want to, but he does – a thousand million valourants like them, that he might have once called friends. He remembers smashed skulls and bloodied torsos, torn limbs and last words. He remembers a boot, smashing down on them forever.
A little boy lights a candle, and beside him, an old woman does the same. He'd made sure the fabricator made enough wax. A waste but mourning always was. The fire burns down the wick, and the wax drips to the floor. What matter why one lights the flame; the inferno is still your fault.
The cogitator is still beeping. Red spots, more and more, in the ruins and the dark below. Screaming things of impossible geometry. Oblivion opens, and the dammed stumble out. And Gulian feels jealousy, because there is an awful freedom in giving up.
But he has acted and will do. He is an old man and has no new tricks. A holding pattern, till the stars burn out. His blessing and his curse. A force of the universe – like gravity – but at least the strong nuclear force was not obligated to use the shitter.
An alarm is blaring. People are pouring into the shrine, now; clutching children, blasters, lucky charms. There is much trembling and screaming.
Most of his screen is red. From countless secreted boltholes, messages pour in. Help us. Save us. Protect us.
Sensei. Sensei. SENSEI!
Gulian stands up. He checks his belt for his pistol. He shuts the dammed computer off.
He looks, up, up above him, his only secret luxury. A telescopic window – an ancient wonder. He looks up, and sees past the rot, and industry and spires and smog and sky – just space, speckled with stars – infinite, timeless.
Just a man turns his gaze away, as the seconds tick towards another self-made doom.
A press of a button – a voice over a tannoy – in the shrine – into the Hives; down, down to the pits of perdition.
"This is Sensei Gulian. Please stay calm. The situation is under control. Proceed to the nearest evacuation point…"
And as the automated message reads, he opened a door, into a stairwell that spiraled up and down so far that neither end was in view.
At the edge of the Hexos system prowls a wolf. It was supposed to be a voidship, was built and consecrated as one by the red priests of Selethan, but that was a long time ago. Now it is a beast, fed on slaughter and bathed in terror until there is nothing left but a hunger for battle and a cold awareness that would horrify the tech-adepts that first gave a name to its bones. Most of its breed are feral, frenzied things, endlessly screaming through the void at speeds the Imperium can no longer match, but not this one. It has grown patient across the years, learned something of discipline through millennia of service. There is always another battle to fight, another campaign to wage, another foe to leave burning in the void. Why rush? Some kills, the wolf has learned, taste best when savoured.
In the hollow chambers that make up the wolf's heart rests a throne, and upon that throne sits a man. He is older than the ship, older than most in the Hexos system could even comprehend (most, but not all). He is old enough that there is a very good chance the system bears its name in honour of him, though in truth he does not remember enough of those days to say for sure. There were so many worlds in those early, heedless days, so many wars. How is a man supposed to remember them all?
There is only one War now, and it is going... poorly.
With infinite patience Warlord Hexaros of the Black Legion studies the myriad flickering images projected on the air in front of him. Painted in green are the assets that brought him to this world, the mines and shipyards and population centres that make Hexos such a valuable nexus for future expansion efforts in the region. Painted in red are the forces of the Imperial defenders, both the loyalists who remain on world and the relief forces sent to reinforce them, the ones who understand as well as he does how valuable this world could be in the right hands. There are more of the later than he would have liked, but that is fine; sometimes the Imperium manages to exceed the bare minimum, and win or lose he knows how to account for that. What he is not prepared to account for are the other colours, the unforeseen variables.
Here, rebels unaffiliated with his patrons or his foes. There, cult elements which early auguries suggest may owe allegiance to something older and far more hungry than even the gods. Over there, the thrice-damned Aeldari. Interlopers all, thieves seeking to steal the bread from his table, strangers seeking to overturn the board. It was all prepared, all perfectly arranged, and then... this.
"The Gods have a cruel sense of humour," Hexaros says quietly. Nobody answers him. His brothers are busy at present, his servants elsewhere. There is nothing in this room with him except the shadows, and they have always preferred to keep their own counsel.
It began with what he can admit...to himself, at least, was a moment of poor judgement.
His nephew's back turned on their weekly regicide game, the ornate hunting bident on the wall hooks beside the board gleaming in a way that spoke of having been recently taken down to be polished and sharpened, another barbed remark thrown his way, nothing worse than the rhetorical spears and arrows cast at him at every game for every week since the younger man took his father's place as Governor, and suddenly it was all too much, cool calculation shattering into a thousand red tinged shards of rage, a sensation of impact and and a flash of coruscating rainbow light stealing his vision.
Light that does not fade as clarity returns, accompanied by scalding, searing pain across his face, raking over his arms, chest and shoulders, grinding his teeth against the pain as he continues to press his weight against the polearm shaft, twin prongs held at bay by a crackling mantle of force surrounding the other man.
"Blood of Sanguinus, Nuncle, it took you long enough to try, I don't know if I should congratulate you on patience or castigate you for cowardice."
Governor Alonzo Despyre V is warded, shielded somehow, some article or item of his regalia generating a refractor field, something secret handed down from one Governor to his chosen heir and never breathed to anyone else, and he's just handed the little shit an excuse, sanction, a justification to snuff out decades laid plans with the full authority of his office, has just pissed every hope and dream he ever had against the wall in one moment of weakness and he thrusts forward harder, wordlessly hissing as sparks from the field burn against flesh and silk, his nephew is pinned against the massive reinforced windows, he can't hurt him but he can hold him there, try to think, to plan, to somehow disappear into a galaxy where he hasn't thrown his whole life away, to live and breath as long as he can press forward and endure the agony.
"Not that I do not enjoy watching you burn yourself alive, but if you put the lance down and come along quietly something with slightly more dignity might be arranged-"
Alonzo is savoring the moment, robed arms folded over his chest, lips quirked as he revels in his victory, and then with a single crystalline tink everything changes. It changes because the enormous reinforced windows of the private chambers of the Planetary Governor of Hexos, wall spanning stained glass works of art angled so that generations of Governors can stand before them and look down on their domain, masterpieces proofed against long range las shots, military grade ordinance, adverse weather conditions of any kind imaginable are, it turns out, not invulnerable to having an active refractor field pressed against them for an extended period of time. Are being shot through with slowly spreading spiderweb cracks radiating out from where Alonzo is being forced against their surface.
"Nuncle WAIT-" and the rest is lost because Felipe finds new strength, shoving with his legs, his back, the stench of scorching meat is a reek in his nose and mouth but he's not just grimly hanging on and there's a shattering sound like the world itself coming apart and he's falling forward, reinforced glass flying all around him...and then he's leaning over the edge, one arm and one leg dangling amidst bloody colored fragments, icy wind howling as it races over his burns and cuts because he doesn't have the strength to pull himself back from the drop, drenched in sweat, lungs heaving, forcing his hands to uncurl around the bident's shaft as he lets it follow Alonzo into the clouds below, crawling, dragging himself towards the comms servicer standing resolutely in the corner of the lounge, crawling, fumbling at the transmitter held obediently in its mindless grip, bleeding, cracked lips mouthing "There's been...there's been a terrible accident-"
In a grim, dark galaxy ravaged by war, there are many hells.
Some of them are merely human evils. Hive Cities tower over blasted, barren worlds, their crumbling Underhives host to billions of souls who labour all their lives without ever experiencing the warmth of the sun or the taste of fresh water. Forge Worlds see the flesh cast aside in favour of the pitiless machine, men and women vivisected and lobotomised by the thousand only to be put back together as shambling cyborg servitors in serve to masters that scarcely seem human anymore. Battles span entire continents and turn the sound of screams and lasgun fire into an ever-heard refrain as countless millions of the nameless dead stack up in piles until the seas turn red.
Others are the horrors born of the alien. Ork fungal spores infect whole worlds and give rise to brutish, murderous armies that throw themselves toward violence with enthusiastic savagery. Tyranid swarms drown all in their path under an unrelenting tide of tooth and claw and chitin, devouring their victims while they're still alive. The Tomb-Worlds of the Necrons are cold and still, deathly graveyards in which sickly green light still animates the skeletal forms of ancient, callous killers. Genestealers spread their genetic curse into unwitting hosts and from them spawn sprawling cults of tainted progeny who labour endlessly to advance their foul agendas.
So too are there nightmares come to life. Chaos licks at the galaxy with a thousand corrosive tongues. Its corrupted servants spread plagues and festering disease through the endless farms of agriworlds, condemning billions to slow deaths from sickness. They butcher whole planets in tides of blood and fire, or invite excess and vainglory to twist and pervert all that is good and pure.
Yes, there are many places in the galaxy that deserve to be called hells.
And then there is Commorragh.
Commorragh! The Dark City, its name whispered in hushed terror across the galaxy! Commorragh, home to the Drukhari, who name themselves true inheritors of the old Aeldari Empire! Commorragh, the cancer within the Webway ever-lit by the poisoned light of its stolen suns! Commorragh, the sprawling megatropolis whose dimensions twist and warp into madness, against which the greatest Hive City of the Imperium is little more than a termite mound!
If there is a single true hell in the galaxy, surely it is here. Its rivals justify the evil they do - for the good of humanity, for the joy of battle, for food, to cast down the false Empire. But in Commorragh, trillions of slaves wail in agony for nothing more than their masters' pleasure. For the Drukhari feed on pain, on misery and hopelessness, on torture, fear and suffering; they drink deep from the souls of other sentient beings to abate the gnawing of their monstrous god on their own, and to this end they have made their home a hideous nexus of concentrated torment unrivalled in its monstrous scale. Within its endless dark warrens, they vie among themselves for power and turn their hungry eyes to realspace to raid and pillage and ruin.
In the shattered ruins and angular black spires of Low Commorragh, one such pair of eyes was narrowed in thought. Their owner; Sraelian Juud, fifth daughter of the noble house of Juud and archon of the Flayed Face Kabal. A minor house not fit for the vast palatial estates of the Inner Ring, and a small kabal barely worth notice by those that held the great citadels of High Commorragh. But that status was soon to change. Sraelian's star was rising; her ambition limitless, her cunning unrivalled. In the crystal panes and holofields of her war room, she looked upon the Hexos system and devoted her unmatched strategic genius to contemplating its affairs.
"What," she said blankly, "is happening right now."
Upon the screens and above the projectors hovered the forces arrayed around this unimportant little world. A fleet of mon-keigh trumpeting their genocidal goals. An Anhrathe Corsair taunting everyone in the system. The lurking red shadow of some servant of She-Who-Thirsts' rivals. More besides, and probably a few she hadn't even discovered yet.
This was supposed to have been simple! An easy target! A world at war, divided against itself! She should barely have needed to do anything beyond letting them kill one another!
She closed her eyes and ground her teeth together, calming herself. Alright. Alright, it wasn't all bad. There were options she could explore. Either side of the mon-keigh conflict might be fool enough to accept carefully phrased under-the-table deals - deals that might even be worth honouring, at least for as long as the opposing side yielded more slaves than betrayal. The Anhrathe had potential, too. An arrogant creature barely half a step away from the blinkered, itinerant Asuryani - but perhaps not quite as tiresomely opposed to all the Drukhari stood for.
Most Drukhari were treacherous backstabbers who would turn on an erstwhile ally as soon as look at them. Sraelian prided herself on being one of the rare few who understood that sometimes, genuine cooperation with a suitable accomplice today meant ending up in a better position to backstab everyone else tomorrow. And if you followed through on your promises the first two or three times, it made it so much easier to slide the knife in whenever your patsy lost value.
A knock sounded at the door. She scowled, shut down the strategic arrays and strode over to it, one hand falling to the agoniser at her hip. Throwing the door open with a vicious retort on her tongue, she promptly choked on it and retreated back into the room.
"G-grandmother!"
The stately matriarch of House Juud stalked into Sraelian's war room, tall and lithe and corpse-pale with her long coat of quilted living skin billowing out around her. She cast a disdainful eye over the surroundings and sniffed - the sound summarised in a single gesture her contempt for all that Sraelian had built here on the outskirts of the Dark City.
"Granddaughter," she sneered. "You have made bold promises of your success, yet this is all you have to show for it?" Her hand fell to the hilt of her venomblade, and Sraelian's own tightened on her agoniser. She'd have little chance if her grandmother chose to strike her here - her elder had been a star of the wych cults and fighting pits in her youth and had lost none of her deadly grace - but she'd be damned to She-Who-Thirsts if she gave up without a fight.
Still, best to avoid one altogether, all things considered.
"In fact, grandmother, the first prizes from my successes are imminent," she said, flicking the displays back on and hastily picking a place at random on the map to gesture at. The upper levels of the Hive City - that primitive imitation of Commorragh's labyrinthine urban sprawl. What could she say, what could she promise... ah! "As you can see, the upper spire of the mon-keigh's capital has many of their nobles and great houses," she began. "My kabalites will be dragging the first of them back through the Webway gate within the next few millicycles-"
The venomblade slid from its sheath with a slick whisper, and Sraelian threw herself backwards to get out of its range and into her agoniser's preferred distance. But it wasn't pointed at her. Her grandmother barely even seemed to register her evasion. All her attention was directed with a murderous scowl at one of the displays.
"That insolent harriden," she hissed, her presence filling the room. "She dares. She dares interfere here, with the affairs of House Juud, after the insult she has already given us?"
Sraelian's mind went perfectly blank for a fraction of a second as she followed her elder's seething gaze to… the Anhrathe, Princess Jea'ni? She had history with their house? Wait, no, this was no time to be confused. That could come later.
"Yes, grandmother," she agreed, covering seamlessly for the fact that she had no idea what her elder was talking about. "She will face ruin along with all the others who are fool enough to oppose me - us - in this matter. House Juud will have vengeance for her trespass, and profit greatly through my victories in the coming cycle."
"See that it does," her grandmother snapped. "And when you have that pretender captured, see that her head is delivered to me on a platter once every drop of agony is wrung from her flayed carcass."
She stormed out, lashing out with the venomblade in a beautiful, graceful blizzard of motion that drew blood from nine slaves and two halfborn subordinates on her way out. The screaming started shortly thereafter as the hypertoxins began to do their deadly work.
Sraelian stared after her for a moment. It was always a relief to see her leave, but…
She sighed, and sent her agoniser whipping out to wrap around the neck of the nearest writhing, poisoned slave and drag it into the room, where the warm agony could at least give her a respite from the oncoming headache. The shriek as further poisons set to work and the skin around its neck visibly tore and blistered was a delightful silver lining to an otherwise terrible day.
"Clean up these bodies!" she shouted in the general direction of the nearest still-living slave. "Contact Succubus Zhuyan and tell her I have need of one of her Circles for a realspace raid! Alert the haemonculi that we'll be taking plunder and may bring wounded back!"
The sounds of frantic activity picked up as her slaves and subordinates jumped into motion, none of them willing to test her patience or the wrath bubbling under her stress-torsioned voice.
"And someone find out who in the hells Princess Jea'ni is and what insult she's dealt to my House!"
Cathedral of the God-Emperor Victorious
Heptos Hive, Upper Spires
Hexos VII
Pius the Fourth leads his congregation in prayer, arms spread at his side, feet apart, as a dozen novitiates of the Ecclesiarchy bustle about him.
He has chosen a prayer fit for the day, a day where treason was set to boil up the hive, his hive, in numbers previously undreamt of. The hagiography of Dolan Chirosius, the Grand Confessor, he who walked his path to martyrium with eyes open and a steadfast soul.
The Cardinal's voice is steadfast, carrying far in the cavernous nave of this blessed cathedral, amplified by vox-resonators down the fifteen hundred paces to the grand gates on the far sides. It remains steadfast as the novitiates about him affix ceramite plates about his legs as they silently perform one of the lesser Rites of Aramament. There can be no interruption to spiritual guidance this day, and it speaks to the years of practice at public speaking that allows the Cardinal to keep speaking without interruption when the unfamiliar weight of a ceramite breastplate settles on his chest.
Thousands of eyes are on him - this is nothing new, for he is Cardinal and the spiritual guide to all the twenty-one billion people of the Hexos system. But what is new is that here, in this cathedral, they are neither holding a funeral lament as they have for so many months past, nor a celebratory exultation of the God-Emperor.
No, the thousands of the Widow's Guard, kneeling, rifles locked between hands folded in the Aquila, look at their Cardinal in shared, total knowledge that tomorrow many of them will have found martyrium in the God-Emperor's name.
With a rasp of durable fastening straps securing the last of his armour about his body, and the reverent ringing of the Triangles of Insight, Understanding and Vox Clarity, the arming-rite for the Cardinal concludes - but his prayer does not. It is in this moment that Pius . the Fourth, the Young - regrets that his path in life did not take him through the ministers-martial of the Ecclesiarchy, that he served as a bridge-builder and as a conciliator.
What is a man to do when another rejects all bridges outright and chooses fraternisation with xenos-clades over working with man? Can such a soul truly be saved? No, no, he thinks to himself a moment later - compassion is a virtue altogether too rare in the Imperium. He must stay steadfast, he must not give in to wroth - only this way can Felipe Despyre find absolution for his tattered soul in a Penitent Engine, only this way can the man one day be pulled back from the brink of Xenoheresy on top of Treason.
And that compassion means that he now weeps for his Widow's Guard. So many of them have lost their beloveds, and many more will lose them in the coming war of liberation. So many will themselves be lost today, and perhaps he will die with them. So he does what he must. Section by section, the Widow's Guard step forward as he takes their hands between his and places a gentle kiss on their forehead. The God-Emperor watches you, the God-Emperor loves you, the God-Emperor forgives you, he tells them, come what may, we shall meet again in this life, or at the foot of the Golden Throne in the War Eternal.
Again and again and again he repeats the benediction. The unfamiliar ceramite plate weighs on him. The repeated affirmations to the Widow's Guard chap his lips and render hoarse his throat. The sound of distant explosions that marks the beginning of the chaos in the Upper HIve sends fear into his heart.
But faith endures, and overcomes all that. The gaze of the grand statue of the God-Emperor Victorious is upon him and lightens the load of his armour, is a balm to his aching throat, extirpates the embers of fear inside his soul.
When at last the nave of the Cathedral is empty but for his closest confidants and the regimental command squad of the Widow's Guard, he turns to them.
"I will go and do my duty, as I trust each of you to do yours. Forgive me the selfishness, forgive me that I must take to this battle in person, but I cannot ask so many of the Widows to die for me without bearing witness to their noble martyrium and doing what I can to help. Go with the God-Emperor, my friends, but go."
There is no need for further words.
The Ecclesiarchy's finest and most skilled movers and managers of people in the entire system nod and depart - the increasingly tired survivors, where the zealous crusader-brethren had fallen in the battle for first the lower and then the middle of the hive, forever pushed up, forever pushed out. Perhaps today the God-Emperor will call these servants to His side too, perhaps not. Nevertheless, they shall not be found wanting.
And the Widow's Guard? For all that their grief is almost beyond measure, it has been given new purpose by the Cardinal, strengthening what was once brittle iron on the verge of breaking into an adamant conviction that will see these women fight for him, with him, until they are all called to the God-Emperor's throne. The only words they need now are the roll of battle-orders as the Tide of Unbelief crashes against Upper Heptos.
The Imperial reconquest of Hexos began with the relief of its defenders. When the PDF turned, the planet's penal regiments were some of the only ones to remain loyal, damned men selling their lives in their thousands to hold back an unending tide of rebels.
By the time relief had arrived, the surviving penal troopers had been bottled up at the wetland peaks north of the Sab'a mines, turning the mountaintop orbital defense batteries into a sprawling network of fortifications. Their supplies hand dwindled, and they were reliant on periodic drops from the aerostats and mines to keep the guns supplied and themselves fed. New recruits, rare though they were, were shipped directly from still-loyal prisons in a desperate attempt to outpace casualties from onroaching rebel PDF units and the roving warbands of Fochia's Urdu.
Even that status quo had begun to falter. The Urdu had dragged Hydras and Manticores into the mountains, turning any resupply drop, any medical evacation, and any attempt at rapid repositioning into a fateful brush with death. The streak of missiles and distant booms of dueling artillery were constants, while ammunition and food dwindled precipitously.
Then, the Crusade Fleet landed.
Ship after ship dropped from high orbit, carrying with them copious quantities of food and ammunition. Baneblades and Leman Russ and Space Marines stepped off their ships. Warships were visible in low orbit, forcing besieging artillery to hide for fear of bombardment. For the first time in months, full rations were re-instituted and ammunition stores were full.
But among the command staff, things were less jovial. While command among the fleet had been settled by the time they arrived in high Hexos Orbit, the question of the penal legion's officers and their trustworthyness remained in flux. There had been tense moments during the descent, as dropship captains wondered if this would be the moment the guns operators revealed their true colors. As pilots and gunners on the ships above wondered if this or that movement of defenders was the signal, that they needed to start bombing now or risk the bulk of the crusade fleet being caught in a vice. Even when they landed, questions of chain of command, of strategy and planning, swiftly lead to rampant miscommunication between the crusader forces and their local allies.
Within a week, the offensive launched.
The III Corps led the charge, smashing into and through the first lines of bunkers and entrenchments. The beachhead established, the heavy armor of the 2nd corps advanced, relying on the penal regiments to cover their flanks.
Unfortunately, due to rampant miscommunication between the ranks, the penal regiments had not advanced. They were still gathering fuel for their transports, preparing to join the drive on the Sab'a mines after the blockade had been cleared. Hexos' 17th PDF regiment, Pseudocomitatenses, saw the gap before the attackers did, a chimera-led offensive hitting II Corps as it transited a valley in the Jebiri mountains and pinning it in place with high casualties. Airstrikes and stormtrooper deployments from I Corps stabilized, but now the mobile I Corps lacked the mass to clear the Hexos 23rd's anti-aircraft batteries, greatly limiting the air mobile Corps ability to relocate and prosecute the offensive.
The worst was yet to come, overnight Fochia's Urdu used the cover of darkness to bring its eel-horse regiments through the porous front-line of the offensive. As dawn arrived, a full cavalry charge descended upon II Corps headquarters, seeing the destruction of its Command Baneblade *Silver Bayonet*, its colonel only saved by the intervention of the Sable Swords. The Sable Swords were themselves savaged by the attack, losing one battle brother in an ambush, and seeing another four badly injured. True catastrophe was only averted when half a dozen Urdu officers were killed by a Necron teleport-ambush, which brought the Imperials crucial time to redress their lines and recover.
Unsure how many necrons were in the field, uncertain of their ability to punch through the defenders, and worried about the Tau naval detachment that had been quietly stalking high orbit since their arrival, General Lumiere called a withdrawal to friendly lines. The dispirited retreat, and vicious argument with Colonel Hollowshade, were interrupted by a series of brutal explosions across the mountain range.
Someone, or something, had reached the ammunition stockpiles. The ammunition stockpile for the guns, and for the penal legion's abhuman troops, had messily detonated. Only preparations for the ongoing advance had spared the supplies of more units. Resupply would be difficult, as any dropship sent from above risked being shot down by the blockading troops, with both II Corps and the Sable Swords low on munitions. As a small mercy, the Tau flotilla departed in the aftermath. Whatever opening it was looking for had simply failed to appear.
For the Rebels, this was a hard won victory. Severely outnumbered and outgunned, they had held the line and their blockade would surely pay dividends in the months to come. But the sheer scale of the incoming attack ensured that every rebel unit had been brutalized in combat.
Outcome
Rebel Minor Victory downgraded to Stalemate by outside sabotage.
Blockade remains up: Ammunition and resources can't reach the Orbital Guns until it is dealt with. Industry sent to the guns this turn will remain in the location it was sent from.
Imperial Casualties:
Sable Swords Demi-Company and II Corps are Damaged in the fighting.
1st Regiment Militia is Exhausted by damage control post-sabotage
Two Repair actions are pre-queued, no effort expended. Sable Swords and II Corps are repaired but exhausted.
Ammunition for the orbital defense guns destroyed. Will be refilled whenever the guns are successfully resupplied.
Rebel Casualties:
PDF 23rd, PDF 17th, and Fochia's Urdu are all damaged.
Votary chapels repair PDF 17th.
++ FROM: 679TH PENAL LEGION CMD ++
++ TO: DEPT MNTRM SEPTIMUS CMD ++
++ SUBJECT: PUNISHMENT ++
++ PRIORITY: LOW ++
++ SENSITIVITY: RESTRICTED ++
++ ENCRYPTION: STYGIAN ++
++ SENT: 0216.137, M42 ++
++ RECEIVED: 0216.137, M42 ++
++ ASTROPATHIC DUCT: H18/S117MC ++
++ THOUGHT: THOSE TOUCHED BY THE EMPEROR'S LIGHT SHALL NOT RETREAT AND SHALL NOT FAIL ++
This slave relays the following dispatch to the Departmento Munitorum Septimus Command:
++
My lord,
It is to my understanding that my command was not where it was supposed to be for the last operation. Be it an act of sabotage by the rebels or my own incompetence, I accept the responsibility for this oversight. Grant me the privilege of wearing the sacred bomb harness. Upon the next strike, I will take double of what they took from us today.
Hollowshade
++
Signed and Authenticated in Eternal Servitude,
Colonel Hollowshade, 679th Penal Legion
Hundreds of thousands of people stormed the upper hive. A tide of humanity, in half-completed chimeras and sentinels, in appropriated riot gear, in hand-made armor. Armed with clubs and autoguns and lasrifles and simple, bloody fervor.
Facing them, the Imperium's most devout. Two full Commanderies of the Sisters of Battle. The entire remaining force of the Hexos' Arbites. And the Widow's Guard, a legion of the ecclesiarchy's most fanatical. And behind them? A full imperial battle fleet, bombardment cannons and aero-wings trained on the hive below.
Airstrikes sent bridges and towers packed with combatants spiralling into the murk. Traps detonated walkways, fortifications, anything and everything the rebels took as they took it. For a moment, it seemed the Imperials might pull it off. Might simply stall the rebels long enough to manage a clean, orderly withdrawal under the cover of orbital guns.
Then things began to go wrong. Traps failed to go off. Arbites units found their comms going dead, found they were deployed out of position to be flanked and overrun. Glorified gangsters ambushed Sisters of Battle with rail-rifles and seeker drones. Macro-munition deadman's switch after deadman's switch failed to detonate. Bombardment beacons glitched, directing strikes onto the defender's positions instead of the attackers.
Worse, the Eldar arrived. Drukhari raiding ships appeared in low orbit, the artificial sun of orbital bombardment dimming with their approach. Corsair vessels erupted from the ocean, mingling with air-raids from the PDF's First Fleet before re-cloaking and appearing in the Spire itself. The 22nd Cruiser Squadron and, surprisingly, the previously rebel grand cruiser Emperor's Will, broke off to intercept.
This went poorly immediately. Though they managed to disrupt the Drukhari formations, both suffered boarding actions. The Terror would see its engine rooms and guns savaged, and many of its armsmen killed or maimed. The Joyeusgarde would have to abort its own bombing runs to tow its compatriot into high orbit. The Emperor's Will suffered breaches on a dozen decks and the destruction of its secondary bombardment lance before repelling the boarders.
Then, the defense buckled. The chokepoints fell, and tens of thousands of militia pored across the Upper Spires. Noble palaces were ransacked by Corsairs looking for records of some ancient aeldari artifact. Less fortunate ones were targetted by the Drukhari, entire noble families and their staff kidnapped into the stars, occasionally in running battles with rebel PDF units or loyalist defenders opposed to piracy.
It was a slaughter, poised to be one of the bloodiest days in the planet's history. Millions upon millions of lives at risk.
Fortunately, it was not to be. Lord High Marshall Isabella of the Imperial Crusade Fleet, and Admiral Theah of the planetary PDF, had come to an arrangement. With a good amount of cajoling, it was an arrangement that Duke Despyre and Cardinal Pius had, reluctantly, agreed to. Many civilian areas, especially evacuation corridors, were let be and actively protected by the fighting parties. Hundreds of thousands fled down to the lower levels, or boarded valkyries and repurposed cargo shuttles off the hive entirely, to survive the chaos.
Millions more sheltered in place, hidden and sheltered in the vast public-works facilities of the Nine Aeon Salon. Many would emerge to find their homes and their lives ruined, but they had survived and in comfort on the largesse of strangers. The salon's popularity would reach near cultlike levels in the immediate aftermath of the battle.
The Imperial defenders, attempting to hold long enough for a dignified evacuation, would be less lucky.
The arbites were overwhelmed. The last of its pre-war formations overrun by wounded underhive militias. The Sacred Rose found themselves pressed on all sides, their evacuation shuttles swarmed by genestealers and pressed on all sides by the Civic Guards. In the chaos of the fighting, they would find themselves shuttling Cardinal Pius onto a shuttle as rounds pinged off his rosarius.
In the months to come, both he and Duke Despyre would claim the duke himself fired the sniper rounds pinging from his rosarius as he evacuated.
As to the Widow's Guard, they fought valiantly. They fought nobly. They fought against overwhelming odds, refusing to surrender even as the 1st Fleets drop-commandos stormed their shuttle bays.
But they died. Outgunned, outclassed, their attempts to take their enemies with them thwarted by sabotaged targetting flares and drukhari jamming.
As the last of them fell, as the survivors retreated to high orbit, as Duke Despyre stepped into the governor's mansion, Cardinal Pius revealed his last trick. Nuclear macro-charges, strewn across the upper spires, set to drop the hive upon itself. The largest, most impressive, replacing the governor's throne.
(The throne itself, of course, was secreted safely away aboard the Vow of Sacrifice)
Duke Despyre's eyes went wide as he saw the bomb. Far above, Cardinal Pius depressed a detonator.
Nothing happened.
And a Necron Cryptek stepped around the side of the enormous warhead, with pointed questions on her mind.
Outcome:
The rebels take the Upper Hive but the Ecclesiarchy manages an evacuation of its most important assets.
Imperial Casualties:
Widow's Guard - Cornuthaum - Destroyed!
Sacred Rose Commandery VII - Crilltic - Damaged
Sacred Rose Commandery VI - Crilltic - Damaged
22nd Scout Cruiser Squadron - Skippers - Damaged
The Emperor's Will - Zokarov - Damaged
Drukhari Casualties:
Circle of Graceful Frenzy - Aleph - Damaged
Other Casualties:
Autonomous Genestealers - No-one - Destroyed
Upper Hive - Damaged - Captured by Wade Garrett
Rebel Other Changes:
"Starchildren" Militia - Graf Tzarogy - Gain Well Armed.
0190.137 M42
Southwest of the Hive, in dying towns and poisoned villages that were once thriving communities, chaos marched.
A hundred thousand boots stepped from the depths of hell itself, daemon-engines and unfathomable horrors backstopping the grim parade. Those who could not outrun them were taken, fitted with grim masks as the Faceless came for Hexos. The only interruption to their relentless advance, the endless detachment of engineering teams to dig, dig, dig.
Ahead of them, an improvised defensive strategy was underway. Militias and half-formed governmental agencies evacuated hundreds of thousands from the path of advance, many headed to refugee camps set up for the Upper Hive offensive, others to the mid hive. Bombing runs from the 4th Atmobile and orbital bombardment from the Tau Spinetail flotilla disrupted attempts to harry the refugee columns, while more subtle cult infiltration attempts ran into the twin right-hooks of a surprisingly effective humanitarian relief program and the Mid Spires Intramural Targeball Team.
There were successes, of course. Masked children suicide-bombed food distribution centers, cults attacked supplies, summoned demons, and kidnapped the vulnerable. But these were small, scattered things.
By 0210, the myriad attempts at subversion had dissipated. Instead, the Faceless redoubled their march. They were slowed by unrestricted orbital bombardment from the Spinetail flotilla, bombing runs from the 4th Atmobile, and an inability to capture enough people to replace their losses. Still, their march was inexorable. They shelled, then overran, an Atmobile airbase and, soon, hit the outer reaches of the lower hive.
And there, they met their match. Local militias fought them door to door. The Atmobile dropped entire formations into blocking positions. And, as they built up actual momentum, the Tau revealed their full might. The 712th Auxiliaries, a unit of kroot, gue'vesa, nicassar, vespid took the field. They held the center against all comers, stopping the chaos advance cold. Artillery and orbital strikes wreaked a terrible toll across the lower spire, but once again the humanitarian corridors proved their worth and the bloodletting was far less than it might have been.
By the year's halfway mark, the chaos forces were in full retreat. None of their formations were truly intact, and they were forced back to their entrenchments to recuperate and plot their next move. The hive had been saved, but it was still besieged.
Outcome:
Chaos forces are repelled from the Lower Hive. The evacuation route was leaked to chaos forces, but attempts to intercept refugees failed decisively.
Chaos Casualties:
Average - Mil - The Forgotten Ones - Damaged
Average - Mil - The Betrayed - Damaged
Average - Mil - The Abandoned - Damaged
Psyker Coterie - Maugan Ra - Exhausted
Rebel Casualties:
Dash - Military - 4th Atmobile Corps - Damaged
Tau Casualties
Tenfold - Military - 712th Auxiliaries Brigade "Lea'weo" - Damaged
Rebel Other Changes:
Lower Hive is Damaged and Fortified
Siete Coast is Fortified
Chaos Other Changes:
Entrenched fighting positions have been dug south-west of the Hive.
TRANSCRIPT OF TRUTH FOR ALL, A LEVELLIST NEWS PROGRAM BROADCAST ON A SIX-STANDARD HOURLY BASIS
Article:
[Patriotic music plays, as scenes of correct action and the Shichii Rebellion play. The vidlink then connects to the studio, to the host. He is - or, rather was - a tall and classically handsome man. Now he is a preserved corpse, grey flesh pierced by machinery and his voice a monodrone from his artificial voicebox. The torture inflicted on him by the old regime has left its mark.]
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Hello, and welcome. Remember that all men are born equal in the eyes of the Golden Saint and the rot of aristocracy was the first great sin of the Enemy. This is the seven o'clock news, and I'm your host, Let-All-Men-be-Equal Ouve.
Our top stories today: industrial production is reported up month-on-month for the fifth month in a row.
[The vidlink displays a brown uniformed man from the Sanctified Omnissian Planning Bureau, his red hood covering his features]
PLANNING MINISTER OF-THE-COG-AND-THE-HAND SAMAN
Further economic rationalisation has led to the production of lasgun power cells to increase by six percent, ration packs by nine percent, and fabrics standardisation has allowed economics of scale to transfer workers out of the cosmetic garments industry.
[The vidlink returns to the studio]
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Touching scenes today as the first expeditionary force departed from the Sept docks, there to protect freedom and equality from the oppressive forces of the Great Enemy whether openly wicked or glad in the false garments of righteousness. While certain elements of the expeditionary force remain classified, all our hearts go out to our brave men and women overseas.
[The vidlink shows a pale young woman. Her eyes are reddened, and there are visible ports on her temples. Her lips are withdrawn and shrunken. She has no hair, neither on her head nor on her eyebrows. Her pale, withdrawn force is lost among the archaic armour, the Adeptus Mechanicus designs repainted in the grey and gold of Levellism. Her eyes burn with fanaticism.]
CORPORAL ■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■
In the name of the Great Levelling, I'll be going overseas to ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■■. I'll gladly lay down my life for the People! And so everyone I serve with. Those poor fools who run into us, I'll tell you what! We're free and fighting for the Great Levelling, while they're slaves to darkness, trapped under the Pyramid of Vice!
[The vidlink returns to the studio.]
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Coverage of the derby between the Sept Dock Savages and the Hab-32904 Hooligans. But first, coverage of the dramatic scenes at the LEVANCOM Judicial Council today. We go live now to our Executions Correspondent, Quintilla Lahos.
[It is snowing outside. It is always snowing in the Metroplex at this time of year. The fumes of the industry paint the falling white a dirty recaf brown. The Executions Correspondent, Quintilla Lahos, is a smiling blonde woman whose jaw and lower teeth have been replaced by metal. The muscles in her brow, paralysed by the old regime's 'crowd control' chemical weapons, cannot move]
QUINTILLA LAHOS
That's right, Ouve. No fewer than three aristocrats were convicted by LEVANCOM yesterday - all of them of the de la Mousilva family. Their list of crimes is as bad as anything we've seen - hierarchicalism, anti-levellism, treason, murder, and crimes against the people. The head of the family, Amidila de la Mousilva, was caught with actionable intelligence on her person as she attempted to flee to the Hive.
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Disgusting.
QUINTILLA LAHOS
That's not all, Ouve. As was laid out by the prosecution, Amidila de la Mousilva directly benefited from the ecological crimes in the abominable Xii mining complex, where when it was liberated over twenty thousand bodies were found in a mass grave dating back several decades. And - oh, I'm sorry, I'm just getting a live update in.
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Exciting! What are they saying?
QUINTILLA LAHOS
The news is in. Khicros and Imiti de la Mousilva have been sentenced to servitorisation, to work off their crimes against the people until death, but Amidila de la Mousilva was judged beyond even that. We go live now to Judicial Chairman Oto Sanamdillo who is reading out the LEVANCOM Judicial Council's sentence.
[Chairman Oto Sanamdillo is a grey man, in a brown-and-gold uniform. Both his eyes are unblinking cybernetics. His hands have blood-carrying tubes running out of them onto a machine on his back. His elderly voice quavers as he speaks]
CHAIRMAN OTO SANAMDILLO
With malicious aforethought, the wretched convict took. She took and took and took. In her furs and her ungodly spire, she cared not for the suffering of the common man. Her teeth are stained with the blood of her fellows, her hands ripe with their gore. There is no crime of aristocracy or anti-Levellism she has not committed. Her soul is too damned to seek absolution for labour, and she will bring her wretched crimes with her, affecting the other labouring penitents. So death, so we say! Death in the name of the people! Death is the Great Leveller, that which all men must face! Death to the criminal! Death! Death! Death!
[The vidlink returns to the split screen between the studio and outside the council building]
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
I think that's news that all of us will feel safer with.
QUINTILLA LAHOS
Quite so, Ouve. They're already saying that Amidila de la Mousilva will be getting a mix which is one hundred percent neurotoxin and zero percent sedative.
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Ensuring that she will be conscious and aware that it was her crimes that led her to her current position until her final moments, of course.
QUINTILLA LAHOS
Quite so. I think we can all hope she'll beg the Golden Saint for mercy and realise the wrong of her ways before her execution date, but let's be honest here, someone who gets the hundred-percent-neurotoxin blend will never change.
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
Except by the mercy of the Golden Saint, of course.
QUINTILLA LAHOS
Of course. And they're reporting that not only will she be executed, but her corpse will then be preserved for display as an enemy of the state in the Museum of the Glorious Levellist Revolution.
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
That goes without saying. We'll be sure to be there to cover the opening of her display and will have a special program on her crimes. Thank you, Quintilla.
QUINTILLA Lahos
Thank you, Ouve.
[The vidscreen cuts the remote link]
LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
On other news-
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LET-ALL-MEN-BE-EQUAL OUVE
-that's all we have time for now. Remember, viewers, you were born in sin and only the grace of the Golden Saint allows you the slightest hope of redemption. We are all born to the crimes of hierarchy, and we must shed blood, sweat and tears to level that abominable edifice. This is Let-all-Men-Be-Equal Ouve, signing off.
Death came to the Asaa Valley, heralded by fire from the skies.
The jagged silhouette of the battleship Pinnacle of Spite descended upon Hexos. Futile fire from the planetary defense guns flickered against its shields as the open maws of demon-possessed bombardment guns turned on the world below. Sheets of flame and plasma tore through the atmosphere and into the Asaa valley, vaporizing towns and farms and forests alike as they cleared a landing area.
Then, the chaos force landed. At its head, Lord Wyrmwood, resplendent in power armor dedicated to the Dark Gods. At his back, an enormous force of mortal soldiers and possessed daemonhosts, including a full regiment of Black Legion cultists and traitors. The initial force arrayed against them, a spread of Stormwind Host militias, were swiftly pushed back from the landing site, orbital bombardment and relentless onslaught killing thousands.
The defenders swiftly rallied, joined by the 1st Shichi People's Free Corps and armed by mysterious donations of advanced military equipment from the upper hive. The invading forces won many battles, but were increasingly stymied by armored columns, advanced weaponry, and sheer numbers. Township after township burned rather than submit to the chaos advance, the defenders trading people and space for the time they needed. The Pinnacle of Spite wiped entire formations from the field with its bombardment gun, daemonhosts slaughtered thousands in displays of psychic might, and yet again and again they found their subordinates overwhelmed by numbers, outmaneuvered by swift cavalry and rolling chimeras, and picked apart by revolutionary pseudo-skitarii.
Eventually, Lord Wyrmwood aimed to leverage this concentration of force to his advantage. He would meet the defenders in open battle, then use orbital superiority and psychic might to open a daemonic rift, burning out the primitive psykers defending the valley and overwhelming their forces with the might of the dark gods. But when the time for battle came, the rift refused to open.
Instead, the sun turned black, orbital fire withered to nothing, and a necron monolith appeared on the chaos flank. Rank after rank of immortals poured forth, pouring withering gauss fire into the chaos flank. Eight Thousand Screaming Souls, a Tzeentchian daemonhost, was wrenched in half by the onslaught, the daemon within dissipated by necron technologies, and Wyrmwood sounded the retreat.
Outcomes:
Chaos forces are repelled from the Asaa valley, but the valley itself is badly damaged.
Chaos Casualties:
Gig - Space Marines - 3rd Host - Damaged
Maugan - Military - Levied Troops - Damaged
Rebel Casualties:
EarthScorpion - Military - 1st Shichi People's Free Corps - Damaged, then repaired.
Academia - Militia - Stormwind Banner Notus - Destroyed
Academia - Zealots - Stormwind Seers - Exhausted
Academia - Location - Asaa Valley - Damaged and Exhausted
LBTC Pact, or the surprising pragmatism of religious fanaticism
As imperial forces prepared to invade the shipyards, an offer was made, to secure the Shipyards without wasting precious imperial resources. To achieve that, they were willing to extend great concessions towards the faction currently occupying it.
At a first glance, to expect compromise from the "Army of the Emperor's Will", by all accounts a deranged mob of zealots, sounds like a bad bet. But that fails to take into account a crucial detail: blind fury and blind faith, when not controlled by strict dogma, can be redirected, a gun that can be ably wielded by those skilled on it. Thus, faced with an offer he could refuse, Paulinus skillfully wielded his weapon, now directed against his former allies.
For he identified those who really disrupted the Holy Pilgrimage, by causing disorders and taking arms against the God-Emperor and his son, the Holy Primarch. He identified those whose disloyalty, selfishness and heresy had led them astray of His path, of His Divine Will, and he now received orders from Him to end their heresy, for only then their Holy Pilgrimage can continue. And thus he preached this new revelation, and it soon spread across his Army.
The people followed their leader, their shepherd, any dissent was quieted by their fervour, or quietly extinguished by Paulinius' most reliable supporters. The crystallization of this change of alignment, however, was not done through sermons, processions, or acts of faith. Anticlimactically, it was done with the signing of a document.
In a small logistical ship named " Little Boat that Could", faith and the pragmatic instinct for survival were united, in a meeting between, one one side, representatives of Lord-Captain Corner's staff, and on the other, Captain Capaldus and members of Paulinius' inner circle. The following was agreed upon:
The Members of the "Army of the Emperor's Will" denounce the rebellion and promise to assist in the restoration of the God-Emperor's Divine Rule over Hexos;
General amnesty for past acts against the lawful imperial authorities;
The Pilgrims will have the right to continue their pilgrimage unmolested upon the conclusion of the pacification. All those who die in His service will receive the same spiritual benefits of concluding the pilgrimage: a place at his side;
Father Paulinius is recognized as "Chief-Chaplain" over the Hexos shipyards, and as a legitimate agent of God-Emperor and His Adeptus Ministorum;
Chartist-Captain Dominician Capaldus and all his descendents shall receive free berth, repair and refueling in the Hexos Dockyards, as well as special trading rights and the right to operate pilgrimage routes across the sector.
Shortly afterwards, The Emperor's Will would take part in void operations above the Hive, protecting those evacuated from xeno predations, much to the shock of their former rebel allies. And without firing a single shot, the Imperium secured its first big victory in the Hexos campaign.
Above Hexos, the full might of the Imperial battlefleet burned towards the Spaceyards. The Midnight Patrol in all its glory lead the approach, weapons hot, but vox arrays trusted to do most of the work. In the days, even hours, leading up to the assault negotiations were rife between the Imperial host and their nominal enemies.
When, finally, the fleet entered weapons range, there was an exchange not of fire but of shuttles. A deal was struck, and less than a week into the campaign Lord High Marshall Isabella Corner won the first great victory of the Imperial Crusade fleet without a shot fired.
The Dockyards had not merely surrendered, it had flipped. Pardons were handed out, promises given. A dead inquisitor, simply forgotten. Some fled, certain that their crimes would not truly be forgiven, but most were willing to trust rather than fight the assembled fleet. The promises made were lavish: Restorations of lost privileges, continuation of interrupted privileges, charters and pardons and more.
But what are such promises in light of what was gained? Access to Hexos' grand shipyards, full orbital superiority, and an assurance for safety of all loyalist assets no longer on the planet.
Or at least, an assumption of safety. For fortification efforts continued, publicly in the aerostats, where the Mechanicum redoubled its security protocols in expectation of xenos biological samples. Less so in the asteroids, where pirate and smuggler captains found themselves given offers they did not want to refuse, minelaying efforts redoubled, and treasure hunters began to flood the old rocks, searching for rumors of an ancient aeldari superweapon that might change the course of the war on its own.
Zorakov joins the Imperium with significant concessions. The Spaceyards fall to Imperial control without a fight.
Treasure hunters and pirates begin swarming the asteroids, looking for an ancient aeldari superweapon.
The aerostats fortify and take surface scans of the Siete Coast in order to prepare for the conflict to come.
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