Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
Disclaimer: I do not own Warhammer 40,000 it belongs to Games Workshop.
Even as the Imperial forces assembled to the south of the capital, the local Tau defense force prepared to fulfill its duty. Shas’el Por’co, the Fire Caste Commander, quickly decided on the Kauyon as opposed to the Mont’ka, given the overwhelming superiority of numbers that the Imperium’s forces enjoyed.
Instead, the Tau and their gue’vesa allies would wear down the invading forces, with the goal of holding out until reinforcements could arrive. That would take time, months at least, given the limitations of Tau FTL capabilities, though the commander was sure help would arrive. The orbital dock had managed to get off a distress signal before it was destroyed, and he also knew that one of his ships had managed to retreat from the battle, bringing further word with it of the Imperium’s aggression towards the planet of Soros.
Predicting the enemy would strike at the capital, and use its position as the center of the planet’s groundside communications and transportation network to further their conquest of the planet, Shas’el Por’co quickly concluded they could not hold the city indefinitely. They could contest it indefinitely, but holding it was out of the question.
That said, even nominal control of the city would not be given up without a fight, along with its environs. The greater part of the planet’s available Fire Caste Warriors were sent south, to hold the rugged ground through which the roads south passed through coming to and from the city, and through with the Imperials had to pass. There’s was to buy time, bleeding the Imperium out while limiting their own losses, before withdrawing once the evacuation of the city’s civilians was complete.
Or failing that, to avoid becoming entrapped or overrun.
The remaining Fire Caste Warriors were dispersed across the city, to support the Gue’vesa Auxiliaries that would form the bulk of the Tau’s defense once the Imperium’s forces reached the city. There’s was not to contest the city street to street or house to house, but to again delay and bleed out the Imperium’s forces, before going to ground and continuing to defend asymmetrically, preventing the Imperium from consolidating its occupation, and leaving them vulnerable to when Tau reinforcements arrived.
Finally, the Crisis Suits available were organized into a tactical reserve, under Shas’el Por’co’s direct command, for strikes against targets of opportunity.
As for the Imperium, it took them the rest of the day and the whole of the night to finish preparing for the advance on the capital. Once, it had borne the name of Jonesburg. Now, it had been renamed, given the uncouth xenos name of Shal’ele. And within an hour of the solar primary’s rising come the following morning, the Legiones Skitarii marched north.
The Tau had expected their coming, Pathfinder teams providing reconnaissance support for their fellows to the north. The Imperium also knew of the Tau holding rough ground further north, thanks to orbital support. Proposals for lance strikes and heavy bombing were brought up, only to be vetoed by the Archmagos, who was unwilling to ruin the infrastructure needed to get men and materials from the landing zone to the city, at least until the city was also in Imperial hands.
For three days and two nights the Legiones Skitarii and the Fire Warriors fought over the approaches to the south. The latter had expected to face Imperial Guardsmen, and found themselves unpleasantly surprised to find their expectation completely ruined. The Skitarii’s cybernetic augmentations and heavier armor gave them superior durability against the Tau’s pulse weaponry, with the former also giving them better aim than the Tau, despite the latter’s use of markerlights. However, it was the weapons of the Skitarii that proved the Fire Warriors’ greatest disadvantage.
Skitarii Vanguards came equipped with radium carbines, and coupled with their Alphas’ use of phosphor weapons and omnispexes, allowed them to match the Tau in volume of fire. A very unpleasant surprise for the Tau, who were used to overwhelming Imperial Guardsmen with volleys of pulse rifle fire. And that was before the radiological effects of radium weaponry was factored in, more than half of the Tau’s casualties coming from radiation poisoning.
By the end of the first day alone, the Tau had taken sixty per cent losses, with only the smart missiles their Devilfishes carried allowing them to prevent a breakthrough by the Skitarii. And that was before factoring in the contributions of Ironstrider Ballistarii to the battlefield, their twin-linked cognis autocannons outright murderous against Tau infantry. Even Devilfish found them formidable, with more than Devilfish finding their hulls torn to bits by the sheer weight of fire from the Balistarii’s autocannons. This forced Shas’el Por’co to send additional Fire Warriors from the city to reinforce the lines to the south, as the evacuation of civilians had yet to finish.
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The Earth Caste medics grimly covered the dead Fire Warrior’s body with a sheet, the latter’s body pockmarked with burns, sores, and even tumors caused by exposure to excessive amounts of radiation. Had the warrior survived the battle, he would have to take numerous medications to stay combat worthy, and once the invasion had been foiled, would still have to take indefinite leave to recuperate from the damage down to his body. Years even…
…but that was not what had killed him. No, what had claimed the life of the valiant warrior had been a shot from one of the machine-man warriors who carried oversized and clunky pistols. It had been a solid projectile, burning hot and slow, cruelly sticking to the warrior’s chest before melting through not just his armor but also his body, literally cooking his internal organs before burning itself out. The medics had done the best they could, but the phosphorus round had fragmented, and the warrior had been brought to them too late.
Even trying to remove the fragments would have compromised his internal organs, with the best they could do simply making the dying warrior comfortable. And with his passing, to give him some measure of dignity.
As they hurried on to the next set of battle injuries, the Earth Caste medics grimly reflected on the barbarity of the gue’la Imperium. Radiological weapons and phosphorus incendiaries…
…what civilization would use such horrible weapons, and yet claim itself civilized?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The evacuations themselves were under attack. Orbital surveillance had exposed them to the Imperial Fleet, and Archamagos von Karbelnikoff immediately dispatched Skitarii Rangers and Sydonian Dragoons to ‘intern’ the evacuees. That was bad enough…
…except the evacuees were escorted by gue’vesa, and more than a few of the more martially-inclined refugees fought alongside the gue’vesa against the Skitarii when they arrived.
When Archmagos von Karbelnikoff received the news, she was furious. It seemed that the taint of xenos corruption had consumed the world’s Human inhabitants, and the vast majority of them were already damned. With that in mind, she invoked her wartime authority as the ranking member of the Adeptus Mechanicus present, and passed swift judgment.
All Humans aged eleven standard years and above were to be executed, along with all xenos civilians. Those Humans aged below eleven standard years were to be granted mercy, and interned as previously-ordered, for deprogramming and just perhaps, a chance at redemption and a return to their blessed place in the Omnissiah’s grand design.
She also dispatched additional forces to the outlying communities, the Skitarii Rangers and Sydonian Dragoons now supported by Kataphron Destroyers. The Kataphron Destroyers proved especially devastating against Pathfinders and Gue’vesa Auxiliaries taking cover inside the vast fields of wheat and other cereals in the rural areas, the servitors’ plasma culverins and cognis flamers allowing them to start massive firestorms to literally burn out the xenos and their dupes, to be chased down and picked off by the Sydonian Dragoons, or hunted like base animals by Skitarii Rangers.
Meanwhile, on the third night of the battle for the approaches, Archmagos von Karbelnikoff dispatched a force of Sicarian Infiltrators to seize a pair of hills to the west of the southern road. The Sicarians were assisted by Skitarii Rangers, a number of whom received trans-uranium arquebuses to knock out the enemy’s transports, neutralizing their artillery and immobilizing the Fire Warriors.
The attack went off like clockwork, the Sicarians’ specialized augmentations synergizing with the cover of dark to allow them to infiltrate the xenos lines without being detected. Many of the senior Tau commanders were dead, either torn apart by flechette blasters or electrocuted to death by taser goads, before the alarms were sounded, and by then the rangers were in position.
Some of them stayed at extreme range, using their arquebuses to knockout the enemy’s transports, and then at other targets of opportunity. Others pressed forward to join the battle, picking at the cracks the Sicarians had opened up in the Tau lines, and tearing them open. While not quite able to match Fire Warriors’ volume of fire like their vanguard counterparts, the rangers could outgun them, with the superior penetration of their galvanic rifles.
The Tau fought hard, but after midnight had been forced to withdraw from the contested hills, and giving the Imperium the advantage of high ground over the battlefield. Immediately, the Archmagos dispatched reinforcements, predicting that the Tau would attempt to retake the hills, or at least contest them long enough to allow the rest of their troops on the lower ground to retreat in good order.
She was right.
Shase’el Por’co was determined to retake the hills, or at least keep the Imperium from using them for another day, to finish the evacuations, no matter how…ineffective, the latter was becoming. And so he assembled his battlesuits, along with a crack force of Fire Warriors, to deploy via Devilfish to follow through on the battlesuits’ counterattack.
As the solar primary rose over the capital and its environs, the Tau attacked…
…right into the teeth of Imperial gunnery.
The Mechanicum had worked round the clock in the pre-dawn hours, bringing in prefabricated equipment and setting up Aegis Defense Lines, to allow the Skitarii to bunker down behind proper fortifications. Onager Dunecrawlers had also been moved up, with the Archmagos herself prepared to descend from orbit accompanied by her honor guard should it be needed, able to arrive on the battlefield in plus/minus twenty minutes.
She need not have bothered. Fully a third of the Crisis Suits were shot down by Imperial anti-aircraft artillery, and those that managed to get on the ground found themselves scattered and attacked on all sides by entrenched Skitarii.
Shas’el Por’co himself was among the first to die, as he unfortunately landed right in the sights of an Onager, which short work of him and his XV-8-05 Enforcer Armor, with a single shot from its eradication beamer. That’s not to say that the Tau didn’t give as good as they got, as the relatively-close nature of the battlefield allowed the Tau to use the fusion blasters which their Crisis Suits each had a single one, typically paired with a burst cannon.
Even entrenched and with heavier armor than Imperial Guardsmen, Skitarii had their limits, many of the Machine God’s warriors laying their lives down in the line of duty. But they had the advantage, and after losing half of what they had left, the highest-ranking Tau left ordered the mission to abort, boosting out and away.
With the hills secure, it took several more hours to consolidate the Imperial positions, in which time the Onagers were reequipped, this time with neutron lasers. The Tau across the battlefield also began to retreat at this time, but they couldn’t finish before the Mechanicus could finish reequipping their Onagers, allowing the Onagers to savage them with long-range artillery fire. Hundreds of Fire Warriors died in the retreat, their flanks harried by more Ballistarii, these ones equipped with twin-linked cognis lascannons to simply blow apart Devilfish.
The road to the capital was now open, but at a cost. Over a hundred Skitarii and Sydonians were dead, and hundreds more injured, though the latter could be repaired within a couple of days at most. Dozens of Balistarii had been lost, along with a number of Sicarians. It took hours for the Archmagos and her attendant tech-priests and tech-priestess to finish poring over the streams of data funneling into the noosphere, but at the end, the losses were judged as acceptable in light of the greater prize they sought.
The onslaught would continue, and the Mechanicus would not be denied their prize.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A/N
Sing praise to the God of All Machines...
Reclamation
Part II
Part II
Even as the Imperial forces assembled to the south of the capital, the local Tau defense force prepared to fulfill its duty. Shas’el Por’co, the Fire Caste Commander, quickly decided on the Kauyon as opposed to the Mont’ka, given the overwhelming superiority of numbers that the Imperium’s forces enjoyed.
Instead, the Tau and their gue’vesa allies would wear down the invading forces, with the goal of holding out until reinforcements could arrive. That would take time, months at least, given the limitations of Tau FTL capabilities, though the commander was sure help would arrive. The orbital dock had managed to get off a distress signal before it was destroyed, and he also knew that one of his ships had managed to retreat from the battle, bringing further word with it of the Imperium’s aggression towards the planet of Soros.
Predicting the enemy would strike at the capital, and use its position as the center of the planet’s groundside communications and transportation network to further their conquest of the planet, Shas’el Por’co quickly concluded they could not hold the city indefinitely. They could contest it indefinitely, but holding it was out of the question.
That said, even nominal control of the city would not be given up without a fight, along with its environs. The greater part of the planet’s available Fire Caste Warriors were sent south, to hold the rugged ground through which the roads south passed through coming to and from the city, and through with the Imperials had to pass. There’s was to buy time, bleeding the Imperium out while limiting their own losses, before withdrawing once the evacuation of the city’s civilians was complete.
Or failing that, to avoid becoming entrapped or overrun.
The remaining Fire Caste Warriors were dispersed across the city, to support the Gue’vesa Auxiliaries that would form the bulk of the Tau’s defense once the Imperium’s forces reached the city. There’s was not to contest the city street to street or house to house, but to again delay and bleed out the Imperium’s forces, before going to ground and continuing to defend asymmetrically, preventing the Imperium from consolidating its occupation, and leaving them vulnerable to when Tau reinforcements arrived.
Finally, the Crisis Suits available were organized into a tactical reserve, under Shas’el Por’co’s direct command, for strikes against targets of opportunity.
As for the Imperium, it took them the rest of the day and the whole of the night to finish preparing for the advance on the capital. Once, it had borne the name of Jonesburg. Now, it had been renamed, given the uncouth xenos name of Shal’ele. And within an hour of the solar primary’s rising come the following morning, the Legiones Skitarii marched north.
The Tau had expected their coming, Pathfinder teams providing reconnaissance support for their fellows to the north. The Imperium also knew of the Tau holding rough ground further north, thanks to orbital support. Proposals for lance strikes and heavy bombing were brought up, only to be vetoed by the Archmagos, who was unwilling to ruin the infrastructure needed to get men and materials from the landing zone to the city, at least until the city was also in Imperial hands.
For three days and two nights the Legiones Skitarii and the Fire Warriors fought over the approaches to the south. The latter had expected to face Imperial Guardsmen, and found themselves unpleasantly surprised to find their expectation completely ruined. The Skitarii’s cybernetic augmentations and heavier armor gave them superior durability against the Tau’s pulse weaponry, with the former also giving them better aim than the Tau, despite the latter’s use of markerlights. However, it was the weapons of the Skitarii that proved the Fire Warriors’ greatest disadvantage.
Skitarii Vanguards came equipped with radium carbines, and coupled with their Alphas’ use of phosphor weapons and omnispexes, allowed them to match the Tau in volume of fire. A very unpleasant surprise for the Tau, who were used to overwhelming Imperial Guardsmen with volleys of pulse rifle fire. And that was before the radiological effects of radium weaponry was factored in, more than half of the Tau’s casualties coming from radiation poisoning.
By the end of the first day alone, the Tau had taken sixty per cent losses, with only the smart missiles their Devilfishes carried allowing them to prevent a breakthrough by the Skitarii. And that was before factoring in the contributions of Ironstrider Ballistarii to the battlefield, their twin-linked cognis autocannons outright murderous against Tau infantry. Even Devilfish found them formidable, with more than Devilfish finding their hulls torn to bits by the sheer weight of fire from the Balistarii’s autocannons. This forced Shas’el Por’co to send additional Fire Warriors from the city to reinforce the lines to the south, as the evacuation of civilians had yet to finish.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Earth Caste medics grimly covered the dead Fire Warrior’s body with a sheet, the latter’s body pockmarked with burns, sores, and even tumors caused by exposure to excessive amounts of radiation. Had the warrior survived the battle, he would have to take numerous medications to stay combat worthy, and once the invasion had been foiled, would still have to take indefinite leave to recuperate from the damage down to his body. Years even…
…but that was not what had killed him. No, what had claimed the life of the valiant warrior had been a shot from one of the machine-man warriors who carried oversized and clunky pistols. It had been a solid projectile, burning hot and slow, cruelly sticking to the warrior’s chest before melting through not just his armor but also his body, literally cooking his internal organs before burning itself out. The medics had done the best they could, but the phosphorus round had fragmented, and the warrior had been brought to them too late.
Even trying to remove the fragments would have compromised his internal organs, with the best they could do simply making the dying warrior comfortable. And with his passing, to give him some measure of dignity.
As they hurried on to the next set of battle injuries, the Earth Caste medics grimly reflected on the barbarity of the gue’la Imperium. Radiological weapons and phosphorus incendiaries…
…what civilization would use such horrible weapons, and yet claim itself civilized?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The evacuations themselves were under attack. Orbital surveillance had exposed them to the Imperial Fleet, and Archamagos von Karbelnikoff immediately dispatched Skitarii Rangers and Sydonian Dragoons to ‘intern’ the evacuees. That was bad enough…
…except the evacuees were escorted by gue’vesa, and more than a few of the more martially-inclined refugees fought alongside the gue’vesa against the Skitarii when they arrived.
When Archmagos von Karbelnikoff received the news, she was furious. It seemed that the taint of xenos corruption had consumed the world’s Human inhabitants, and the vast majority of them were already damned. With that in mind, she invoked her wartime authority as the ranking member of the Adeptus Mechanicus present, and passed swift judgment.
All Humans aged eleven standard years and above were to be executed, along with all xenos civilians. Those Humans aged below eleven standard years were to be granted mercy, and interned as previously-ordered, for deprogramming and just perhaps, a chance at redemption and a return to their blessed place in the Omnissiah’s grand design.
She also dispatched additional forces to the outlying communities, the Skitarii Rangers and Sydonian Dragoons now supported by Kataphron Destroyers. The Kataphron Destroyers proved especially devastating against Pathfinders and Gue’vesa Auxiliaries taking cover inside the vast fields of wheat and other cereals in the rural areas, the servitors’ plasma culverins and cognis flamers allowing them to start massive firestorms to literally burn out the xenos and their dupes, to be chased down and picked off by the Sydonian Dragoons, or hunted like base animals by Skitarii Rangers.
Meanwhile, on the third night of the battle for the approaches, Archmagos von Karbelnikoff dispatched a force of Sicarian Infiltrators to seize a pair of hills to the west of the southern road. The Sicarians were assisted by Skitarii Rangers, a number of whom received trans-uranium arquebuses to knock out the enemy’s transports, neutralizing their artillery and immobilizing the Fire Warriors.
The attack went off like clockwork, the Sicarians’ specialized augmentations synergizing with the cover of dark to allow them to infiltrate the xenos lines without being detected. Many of the senior Tau commanders were dead, either torn apart by flechette blasters or electrocuted to death by taser goads, before the alarms were sounded, and by then the rangers were in position.
Some of them stayed at extreme range, using their arquebuses to knockout the enemy’s transports, and then at other targets of opportunity. Others pressed forward to join the battle, picking at the cracks the Sicarians had opened up in the Tau lines, and tearing them open. While not quite able to match Fire Warriors’ volume of fire like their vanguard counterparts, the rangers could outgun them, with the superior penetration of their galvanic rifles.
The Tau fought hard, but after midnight had been forced to withdraw from the contested hills, and giving the Imperium the advantage of high ground over the battlefield. Immediately, the Archmagos dispatched reinforcements, predicting that the Tau would attempt to retake the hills, or at least contest them long enough to allow the rest of their troops on the lower ground to retreat in good order.
She was right.
Shase’el Por’co was determined to retake the hills, or at least keep the Imperium from using them for another day, to finish the evacuations, no matter how…ineffective, the latter was becoming. And so he assembled his battlesuits, along with a crack force of Fire Warriors, to deploy via Devilfish to follow through on the battlesuits’ counterattack.
As the solar primary rose over the capital and its environs, the Tau attacked…
…right into the teeth of Imperial gunnery.
The Mechanicum had worked round the clock in the pre-dawn hours, bringing in prefabricated equipment and setting up Aegis Defense Lines, to allow the Skitarii to bunker down behind proper fortifications. Onager Dunecrawlers had also been moved up, with the Archmagos herself prepared to descend from orbit accompanied by her honor guard should it be needed, able to arrive on the battlefield in plus/minus twenty minutes.
She need not have bothered. Fully a third of the Crisis Suits were shot down by Imperial anti-aircraft artillery, and those that managed to get on the ground found themselves scattered and attacked on all sides by entrenched Skitarii.
Shas’el Por’co himself was among the first to die, as he unfortunately landed right in the sights of an Onager, which short work of him and his XV-8-05 Enforcer Armor, with a single shot from its eradication beamer. That’s not to say that the Tau didn’t give as good as they got, as the relatively-close nature of the battlefield allowed the Tau to use the fusion blasters which their Crisis Suits each had a single one, typically paired with a burst cannon.
Even entrenched and with heavier armor than Imperial Guardsmen, Skitarii had their limits, many of the Machine God’s warriors laying their lives down in the line of duty. But they had the advantage, and after losing half of what they had left, the highest-ranking Tau left ordered the mission to abort, boosting out and away.
With the hills secure, it took several more hours to consolidate the Imperial positions, in which time the Onagers were reequipped, this time with neutron lasers. The Tau across the battlefield also began to retreat at this time, but they couldn’t finish before the Mechanicus could finish reequipping their Onagers, allowing the Onagers to savage them with long-range artillery fire. Hundreds of Fire Warriors died in the retreat, their flanks harried by more Ballistarii, these ones equipped with twin-linked cognis lascannons to simply blow apart Devilfish.
The road to the capital was now open, but at a cost. Over a hundred Skitarii and Sydonians were dead, and hundreds more injured, though the latter could be repaired within a couple of days at most. Dozens of Balistarii had been lost, along with a number of Sicarians. It took hours for the Archmagos and her attendant tech-priests and tech-priestess to finish poring over the streams of data funneling into the noosphere, but at the end, the losses were judged as acceptable in light of the greater prize they sought.
The onslaught would continue, and the Mechanicus would not be denied their prize.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A/N
Sing praise to the God of All Machines...