Helgastram shook his head.
Focused.
He was not losing this.
"Switch your fucking optics you moron!" He snapped into the vox - and the panicky breathing of Lukan paused, then his pict-view swam, twitching through optic modes until the smoke and thermal confusion snapped into something visible - the corridor was crumbling, and the figure of the cultist was darting back through the flames, which crawled along the walls. Helgastram nodded. "Squad two, into the mansion - we're taking her down. Someone get that lazy motherfucker out of his pit before his whining clogs the fucking vox."
"Fuck you!" Kaindaite sounded like he was laughing, almost hysterically.
"I'm bringing the
Invisible Hand in for close air support - lets see if she can dodge a heavy bolter."
The Thunderhawk dropped and the three marines he had kept on reserve within moved to their positions.
And Helgastram made the mistake that would kill him and every single other Marine Malevolent on the planet.
***
The Planetary Defense Force are often overlooked by the greater powers of the Imperium - seen as little better than a means to hold the enemy in place, so the Imperial Guard could arrive and perform their duty. This axiom serves quite well on many, many worlds.
But not on Thedias.
This fact was, in fact, logged by the scribe of the Interrogator, the bookish Annalesa in one of her three compartmentalized, hypnotrained personalities, Essa. Essa was the one of her triumvirate that was really fascinated with warfare and machinery and logistics in the same way Anna was fascinated by trains and manufactorums, and Lesi was an inveterate puzzle solver and tome reader. But while Essa dearly loved to talk about the Imperial Guard, and would have been delighted to go on at length at how Thedias - with it's trickster nobility offloading their martial duties to serfs that grew up in the constant, low level warfare of the gang-hives of the drophabs had bred a deeply loyal, highly trained and deadly collection of tunnel fighters and tekwarriors who could (in a pinch) turn a lascooker into an IED - there was one simple problem.
No one had asked.
Oh, yes, Shexia had, in the early and worrying days of the investigation, asked Annalesa if the PDF could withstand the hive fleet and, switching Essa to the fore, Annalesa had confidently said: "Not a chance!"
But that was because short of a multiplanetry concentration of forces and planetary encastlement doctrine, no human army could stand against the tyrannic horde.
It was not because the Thedasian PDF was anything close to incompetent.
However, competent or not, what the Thedasian PDF was not was
pure.
The efforts of the Sisterhood had born very cautious fruit among them.
One such budding leaf was, at this moment, in the command center of the STS lance battery mounted on one of the highest peaks of Thedias' most impressive mountain range. Not quite out of the cerulean fog of the acid shrouded planet, the weapon systems were still rated to punch holes in any ships that didn't belong in orbit, while also being hooked to enough power systems for one of the prison planets many failsafe systems in case of riot and succession. Essentially, if the STS battery crew became aware that Thedias had been about to fall to the prisoners and there was no other hope, the power cores could be overloaded.
Because the power cores were tapped atop one of Thedias' most massive calderaic superextinction sites. The jolt would have been enough to destory a mountain range, but seated here, it was able to both tap the caldera for limitless geothermal energy...while also, being a very inexpensive form of exterminatus. Many people on Thedias thought the world could not get more hellish. They were wrong.
Captain Quinn rubbed her thighs together as she sat in the command throne of the STS battery, and watched the console teks at their duties, lighting votive candles, whispering soft prayers. Her mind drifted in that hazy moment to two years before. She had just made Lieutenant, and she had emerged from a bar in The Pits, drunk and cheerful, full of good feeling for the world, and somewhat forgiving of the Emperor who had consigned her father and mother to this hellplanet. Staggering and humming a rather raunchy ditty to herself, she had almost fallen into the arms of a grinning woman with bright golden eyes and olive brown skin, like warm chocolate.
I think you'd be tasty! Quinn had been nothing if not forward when that thick on cheaply fermented, quasi-toxic amnesac rotgut.
The woman had grinned at her.
Well, first, let me read your palm.
It was then that the drunk Quinn had recognized the little symbol the woman had worn at her throat - she was a fortune teller. Quinn had allowed herself to lose some script, then been taken aside to a tent, where the fortune teller had murmured softly about what a long love-line Quinn had. She had read it not with her fingers, but with her tongue, sliding it slowly along Quinn's palm to her wrist. The languid lovemaking that had followed had felt like a greater reward then then shiny new bar tabs on her brown and silver uniform. Sprawled in a sleep niche, with Lissanda's body draped across her, legs interlocking like twining roots, Quinn had been happy.
And the relationship had only gotten fiercer and more intense...and Quinn's career had hit a fierce snag. The head of the PDF's airwing, a fat oaf of a Colonel, had blocked her promotion in favor of his pet. She had spiraled into drink. But there had been Lissanda, always there to listen, always steady...always condemnatory. Not of Quinn, but of the bloated, hateful system that made her slower and slower, and more and more sure she'd die a 2nd grade Lt in the commissary supply department of a prison planet's PDF.
Then one night, Quinn had asked her lover.
How do you do it?
And Lissanda had shown her. She had taken her deep to her social club. And there, naked, kneeling, her body trembling with the delicious fizz of Lissanda's warm mouth, her eyes wide as the strange, beautiful creature unfolded before her, Quinn had been unable to look away from those liquid eyes as a gentle voice hissed in her mind. Telling her everything was all right. Everything was fine. Claws had rasped along her skin, teasing her bared breasts, as the Pure had knelt forward and pressed her lips to Quinn's mouth. The long tongue, sliding down her throat and deep into her body had felt like a completion that Quinn had never known that she needed.
The breeding frenzy it had kicked off had been easily handled, despite Quinn's preferences.
After all.
Having Lissanda watch as one of her
special sisters fucked Quinn from behind, thrusting her girldick deep inside of her body, was as trascendent as getting to taste the Pure's chitin on her tongue.
Her child was now happily in the cult creche, and a captain's bars glittered on Quinn's shoulders. Magi Yolanda had quietly greased some wheels and Magi Xandra had encouraged a certain bitter officer to take his bitterness out on a certain Colonel who was now, quite certainly, dead.
And now she was in a place where she could pay back the glory she had been given.
"Ma'am, we're picking up an unknown fast mover, no IFF, no vox, they're not responding to our hails," one of her teks said, turning to look back at her. "The machine spirits are saying it could be a dropship, possibly smugglers."
Quinn smiled, slightly, and let her mind opening to the Magi, knowing that one was always close to connecting to her, just in case.
Is this one of ours, my sisters?
Hmm? No. Yolanda sounded distracted, worried. Quinn made a note to ask Lissanda to send her a gift, maybe offer to be her throne. It had been some time since a beautiful woman had sat on her face while discussing schemes. Quinn...liked...not being in charge of certain things, it was a delicious contrast of her day to day life of managing nearly six thousand bored, horny soldiers.
"Smugglers then," she said. "Show them we have teeth."
"Aye ma'am."
The sky burst into flames in a ten by ten kilometer wide box over Trustworthy Compromise. The Thunderhawk within heeled hard left to the side, engines bursting into flames, as shrapnel tore into the metal armor. Helgastram, his eyes widening, tried to understand where this antiaircraft battery fire was coming from - and how was it so accurate. The last thought passing through his head, before the dashboard of the Thunderbolt sent him to whatever waited beyond the great veil between this life and the next...was mewling, uncomprehending confusion. It was the thought of someone who saw life, largely, as a game...and expected to always win.
But the PDF aren't that good a shot! They're not! They're-
***
Shexia tapped her finger on the desk. Lot and Annalesa stood before her, and Shexia was so...so furious that she didn't even have to stop herself from imagining Annaelsa in a biomiracle bondage, wriggling as two genestealers kissed her from both ends. She normally had that thought cross her mind at least once a meeting, but right now? Right now, she was simply too furious for words.
"Run me...through this...again..." she said.
"The Marines Malevolent, without an IFF, were mistargeted as a smuggling shuttle - the Thediasian PDF shoot down three or four every month. They're actually so good at it that no smugglers survive long enough to spread the reports, which has ironically, led to a persistent rumor across underground factions that Thedias is such a rich treasure trove for any smuggling crew that they have to retire afterwards!" Annalesa said, her bright eyes shining behind her glasses as she smiled. "I believe it is encouraged by several parts of the Arbites, as it leaves them with less work. However, this time, it led to the unfortunate demise of Captain Helgastram and his third fireteam."
"And the other two?"
"Dead," Lot said. "Slit up by a monorapier, burned to death, one shot dead by friendly fire."
"And House Mark?"
"Well, we didn't release the news that they were cultists, and the Marines Malevolent attacked them seemingly from the blue, so this defense of their homestead against what everyone has decided are traitor chaos marines means that Lady Winfried Mark is now being lauded as the greatest hero of the hour, doubly so due to the injuries she sustained so gallantly rescuing the twelve children who were caught when the blaze carried over to the nearby noble creche," Annalesa said, cheerfully. "Six hundred armsmen have already sworn themselves to the Marks, they're now, um...well, if they have time to rebuild and reoganize."
"Are you telling me the Malevolent fucked up
so badly that the chaos cult is now significantly
stronger than when they attacked!?" Shexia snarled as she sprang to her feet.
Annalesa shook her head. "No, no, no, no, no! Their manor home has burned down, their matriarch is horribly wounded, and we still have the evidence of chaos worship and profane rites that we've collected."
Shexia frowned, Annalesa always carried on like this.
"...it's just that, given a month, or two, they could quite easily become significantly more powerful," Annalesa said. "Also, uh...moves have been started. Lady Winfried Mark, despite still being in her sickbed, has declared that the noble houses of Thedias, in time of crisis, with such threats lurking about, must stand more united together and has offered her hand in marriage to the governor and the alliance of both house."
"He already has a wife!" Shexia said.
"Polymarriage is accepted here, it was in my notes."
Shexia scowled and leaned back in her seat.
Stop giggling so much.
Sorry, Yolanda's voice whispered.
---
So, uh, with their counter-attack, House Mark zeroed the MM's treasure stat. Hitting 0 on Might and 0 on Treasure collapsed the company, and with more than half as many points as House Mark, this grants them +1 to one of their scores, bumping their might from 1 to 2 as armsmen flock to their cause. Then with their action, House Mark has influenced House Zav for a combination through offering the heroic and noble Korine Winfried Mark's hand to the feckless governor! The wedding may be any day now!?
Oh, also, I realized that the PDF should be here, and since they're now relevant, I have stated them and added them to the list. Before, the PDF was purely in wait and see mode, but now they're in play! You have one (1) officer in it that has been kissed.
What do you do?
[ ] Attack BLANK (Might + Treasure VS Might + Territory)
[ ] Being Informed (Influence + Soverignty vs Diff 1)
[ ] Spying on BLANK (Influence + Treasury vs Influence + Territory)
[ ] Influence BLANK to do BLANK (Influence + Treasury vs Influence + Territory)
[ ] Increase your Sovereignty (Territory + Treasure vs Diff [Current Sovereignty])
[ ] Police BLANK (Might + Sovereignty vs Influence + Might)
[ ] Rise in Stature (Sovereignty + Treasure vs Diff [Current Influence]
[ ] Train and Levy Troops (Sovereignty + Territory vs Diff [Current Might]
[ ] Unconventional Warfare (write plan in)
[ ] Wait and Recover
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE LEVITHAN
(Cycle 1, Month 3 - the Month of Scampering)
MIGHT: 2 | TREASURE: 5(4) | INFLUENCE: 4(3) | TERRITORY: 1 | SOVEREIGNTY: 4(3)
Shexia's Lackys
MIGHT: 2| TREASURE: 3(1) | INFLUENCE: 3(0) | TERRITORY: 0 | SOVEREIGNTY: 4(3)
