Still not quite content with this one, but, you know how it goes. C'est la vie. Maybe you guys can think of the thing I haven't thought of that I need.
Chapter 4
The first things I'd sent into orbit had been a few small, insignificant Hermes space probes. Tiny little things, they were fast, and could give me a better look at what was going on space-side.
To put it mildly, space…wasn't looking good.
The shattered wrecks of once mighty vessels tumbled in orbit, all that remained of the forces of the Imperial Navy defense fleet. A mere handful of the redoubtable Imperial vessels still contested with Chaos warships for space superiority. Judging by the profiles…a single battlecruiser, a light cruiser, and three frigates were all that was left, and none of them were in anything even resembling good shape.
And opposing them were the ships of Khorne. They hadn't emerged unscathed from the conflict either, but there were still three cruisers and six frigates left. Not good.
Luckily for me (or unluckily, depending on how you sliced it), unlike his fellow Chaos gods, Khorne despised sorcery and trickery of any kind, much preferring instead to use his vessels solely as chariots to bring his bloodthirsty hordes to the next fight. What that meant was that while they didn't have as many special tricks and gimmicks as other Chaos warships, the great vessels were relentlessly ferocious, charging into opposing ship formations to overwhelm them with boarding craft in order to slaughter them in their vessels to satisfy the endless sanguine thirst of their dark god.
From what I could tell, most of the damage taken by the destroyed vessels had been exactly that; the Khornate fleet had used their guns to bring down the Void shields, and then swarms of boarding craft had penetrated the hulls to disgorge Khorne's assault troops.
Crystallized blood seemed to glitter in the rays of the orange sun as one of my probes maneuvered through a wreck. There were…a lot of bodies floating up here. A lot of bodies. And there would be a hell of a lot more if I didn't do something.
But what?
I wasn't sure how much help I could be up here. Where Planetary Annihilation outdid its contenders on the ground, so too did Warhammer 40k surpass theirs in space. No one else had quite a reputation for building big like the Imperium did. Imperial ship-building doctrine revolved around putting a giant gun in space, slapping some heavy-duty armor and engines on that gun, adding another metric fuckton of guns, and building a fuck-mothering cathedral on top of that, and calling it good. Some ships had been in service since the Horus Heresy, 10,000 years ago, some from possibly even further back.
For fuck's sake, their godsdamned frigates were over a kilometer in length. That was bigger than some settings' dreadnoughts. The biggest ships I could create were barely a few times bigger than their fighters, and none of my units even had shields. So yeah, I was in a bit of a pickle. It didn't matter if I owned the planet or not; if I couldn't establish an orbital foothold and turn the fight around in favor of the Imperium, everyone would die all the same. Plus, there was the not-insignificant problem of, "Still gotta convince the Navy not to shoot at me either!" Le sigh.
Fortunately for me, again, ROB had done me a solid, compared to the other Commanders. (Didn't even come close to making up for me being in Warhammer 40k, but I'd take what I could get!) He had given me the schematics for every single unit that had ever been released in the game. Not just the original Planetary Annihilation units. He had given me the Titans expansion pack, and everything in it. Even the designs for a Metal Planet. And the Annihilaser that came with it. But, alas, that wasn't meant to be in this fight. Too expensive, and too time consuming, and coming from me, that was saying something. I also had the strangest feeling the natives wouldn't take kindly to me turning their only moon into a planet-busting superweapon...or maybe they would. I'd bring it up later.
No, another schematic would have to suffice here, instead.
The Helios. The invasion Titan. The one space-capable Titan in PA's arsenal, and possibly my most major contribution to a space battle.
Had this not been 40k, I'd have said it looked like a giant flying Starmie. A giant flying Starmie that shot some impressively-sized artificial lightning bolts and had a teleportation beam in the empty center. Perfect for bringing the wrath of god (and your waiting army) to an enemy planet-side. With a little work, I didn't see why I couldn't make it start blasting opponents in space as well. And the teleporter! I could think of more than a few ways to use that thing offensively. Might even make for a good trump card.
But there was a problem. This was 40k. And thusly, the Helios didn't look like a Starmie to me anymore. It now looked kind of like the eight-sided star of Chaos. And considering that, if I wasn't mistaking my canon for my fanon, the Men of Iron had been corrupted by Chaos because a spot in their circuitry happened to resemble said star. (On that note, I did a quick check of my systems for anything similar; nothing turned up, so there was that going for me, at least.)
You really could not be too careful when it came to the possibility of Chaos corruption, 'cuz it was some bull. Sheeit.
If Chaos got their grubby little mitts on me, the Imperium, and the rest of the galaxy, would die. I wasn't about that life. The current schematic needed to go.
So, I opened up my handy-dandy unit designer and made a few minor tweaks. The initial design had been, for the most part, purely aesthetic, with some functionality. It needed spires for the lighting attacks, and an enclosed ring for the teleporter. So, I shaved off a few spires, branched the others off until it resembled more of a high-tech snowflake instead of a star of EVUL, turned the circle into a square, and bam, problem identified and solved in a few microseconds. I could be bullshit too!
I needed to step up my production. Aside from a few raids by Chaos that had been rapidly discouraged by massed laser-turret fire and nanobot swarms dissolving them into more resources, things had been all quiet on the home front, allowing me to build in relative peace. And I sure needed it; my economy was not nearly big enough to field the multitudes of warships I would need.
Miles upon miles of unclaimed ground were repurposed for the much more important fight in space. More metal extractors and energy plants were built and upgraded to T2 to feed my hungry war machine. Nuclear missiles were assembled and stored in their silos, awaiting my fatal command. They would be the first strike against the enemy's Void shields. Anchor defense satellites spread out over the planet, sniping enemy troop dropships as they flitted about; what few managed to dodge my fighter squadrons, that is.
My orbital launchers launched my orbital fabbers into orbit, which then proceeded to fabricate an orbital factory. (In orbit. In case you couldn't catch the redundancy thing I had going on here.) Then ten more. In those factories, Artemis railgun platforms and Omega battleships were queued up by the dozens; Avenger space-fighters, by the hundreds. My forces may have been massively outsized in space, but by the Emperor, I'd make up for it by outnumbering them a hundred to one, a thousand to one if I had to!
An entirely imagined chill ran through my circuits as my Hermes sent me an urgent ping. My mad scramble in the planet's orbit had not gone unnoticed.
Uh oh.
