Warhammer The Light of the Past [DAOT in 40k]

The Sanctuary, Part Two

Navarro

Well-known member
THE SANCTUARY, PART TWO

381.M25


The RH1-N0 Planetary Reconnaissance Vehicle trundled across the surface of the world now designated Sanctuary. It was a planet approximately the same distance from its G-class star than Earth was, inhabited by non-sapient xenobreeds. Sector General Miles Victor Bradley of the Third Merican Empire's Colonial Marine Corps tried not to let tears of nostalgia for the Birthworld cloud his vision as the vehicle moved on. He shuddered to think of what would be happening amongst the sprawling starscrapers of the ancient city of Boswash when the food shipments stopped coming in. Within days, the teeming billions would be eating each other alive. It might have even already happened. Who knew with the tachyon-ansible network ripped into so many shreds?

The RH1-N0 PRV itself was a well-tested design from the early Stellar Exodus period. Based on end-M2 APCs from humanity's distant past, the vehicle was essentially an environmentally-sealed metal box – often treaded, in rare cases hovering on grav-plates – which served as a functional STC design for navigating potentially hostile alien worlds and as an APC used by high-grade militia and low-grade light Army units. A "Predator" light tank variant also existed, but was generally relegated for militia units since it was simply too thin-skinned for Army engagements and too fast to serve as an infantry tank.

This particular variant had been upgraded something above normal specs– a Volkite caliver mounted on hull top to deal more effectively with hostile wildlife, semi-sentient AI targeting and navigation protocols, self-repair nano-nodules. There were a number of larger IFV-grade RH1-N0 “Proteus-type” variants as well on the outer levels – big, bulky things that had been designed to deal with the needs of the Iron War. This was all that was needed for scouting a planet for potentially hostile xenoforms – damned greenskins popped up in the most unlikely places – and dangerous wildlife while the Federation Army's real military equipment remained in orbit. These vehicles had been fabricated aboard the colony ships.

Bradley sighed. For a millennium the Federation Army and by extension the forces that made it up had been considered an affectation to long-lost days of martial prowess, a parade-ground force. The Iron Men had been the ones to hold the leaguers of the quarantine zones and launched the pro-active strikes to knock brewing Ork waaaghs off-balance. Then the apocalypse had come, and the decadence of the core-worlds had come home to roost. Five hundred or more years of war had broken the society that the Federation had once been. In some ways it had made it better – a commitment to duty, an embrace of meritocracy, a strength that hadn't been there before. In other ways it had been made worse – an example of which was the dangerous foolishness that was the Simplifier movement.

Enough damage had already been done without raving mobs rising up seeking to destroy anything that had survived. Bradley had heard of STC machines, formerly given places of honour in the Old Colonies' grandest museums, taken and hurled into running fusion furnaces. But then, they had their reasons to do what they did.

Everything had been connected in those days. A living ecosystem of data spanning the stars. And it had all been subverted by the initial tendrils of hostile code crawling out from the initial centres of AI rebellion. Nano-meds made to dissolve the people who used them; industrial and construction equipment used to set up countless billions of “accidents” across human space; smart-habs turned into death traps; auto-piloted shuttles and aircars set to run over crowds or crash themselves into buildings. It had been the Stone Men's efforts to contain the worst of the attacks that had ensured humanity managed to survive the initial shock, realise what was happening, and turned what should have been an unmitigated slaughter into a war worth calling the name.

He looked over the gunner and driver – sturdy Catachans from Merica's extrasolar domains, gene-bulked and immune-reinforced to survive their death-world home planet, neurolinked into the vehicle's systems – and engaged his own connector with a thought. Nanomachine threads stabbed into his nervous system, infiltrated the sensory systems of his brain. He saw what the PRV's sensors percieved, or as best as they could be translated into.

They were near the base of an extinct shield volcano, near the coast. The environment was reminiscent of the Middle Sea at the nexus of Africa, Asia and Europa – Aetius would like this place for sure. There would need to be further scans of course, to determine geological stability and such, but they had already made a good start.

Aboard the Ultima Ratio, surrounded by the cool metal of her ready room, Aetius looked over the plans for the primary stasis complex, with the ship's AI in attendance via holo-avatar along with the chief engineer, Falk Karben of Cthonia. The structure was to be buried one kilometre under the surface, extending nine kilometres down and dozens in various directions. Karben, a sturdy bald-headed man with deep-set eyes, was proud of his work.

“We Cthonians sure know how to dig,” Falk boasted in a bittersweet tone. The War had seen his homeworld, located in the Sirius system, mined out to the very core to fuel the military efforts of humanity's armies. Ultima Ratio was largely made of Cthonian metal. It had been deemed non-viable for habitation and all those who could leave the planet had, leaving the dregs of its society to remain. An official Evacuation Fleet had been then declared, but it would likely never come. The storm-front of the Warp disturbances was already on the border of Solar. They were reaching deeper inwards to the heart of man's realm by the month, travelling on the very empyreal currents that bound human space together.

With a bitter twinge, Aetius thought of those who hadn't heeded his warning. The doom was coming on them, and they could no longer be saved. One of the ships that had joined his colony fleet, the arcology-vessel Interrex, had abandoned it later on, before the great journey to the eastern fringe. Her captain had not approved of the military-led nature of the expedition, that its civilian complement would be under martial law for the duration, and of the long stasis sleep the colonists would have to be subjected to. They had headed to the galactic south-west, hoping to ride out the storm by themselves. The nature of the coming cataclysm, he knew, would not leave them be.

Another vessel, the Van Saar, had been lost in the Warp, en route to rendezvous with his flotilla at Araneus Prime. He would have been glad to have had her scientists along with the Martians and Ryzans, but the Warp was cruel and getting crueller. He had lit candles for her brave and loyal crew, and prayed for them in the manner of his Chalcedonian-Zen faith. The religions of the Federation's most committed faith was that the Warp, with its vindictiveness and fickleness, did not represent the totality of immaterial reality. So it was believed and desperately hoped.

But he had gained some as well. A full clan of Tarrellians had aligned him and joined forces. The hardy reptilian xenos had elected to go into stasis along with his soldiers, but they would settle the deep deserts of Sanctuary where no human could comfortably live once they awoke.

The stasis vaults would be built largely from the recycled material of the colony ships themselves, surrounded in a shell of hexagrammic-inscribed phase-metal to protect against empyreal attention. Each individual would be first sedated, then cryo-frozen, and finally contained within a stasis field. The double layer of this system was necessary to prevent the insanity that would be caused if Warp-active sapients such as humans were to enter stasis in a conscious state. Psychic channellers and latents had been required to have a plasma-charge implant installed at their spinal column. If uncontrolled or non-human Warp resonance was detected in these individuals, the stasis field would collapse and the plasma charge automatically detonate. A scorched stump would be all that was left of their heads.

The military forces involved would be in the top layer of the facilities, ready to defend the civilians. There were six planned, each housing thirty million civilian colonists, and ten million Federation Army soldiers. Of course, not all would be awakened at once – but enough would be to defend the facilities if they were attacked. The complex would be AI-overseen, and would awaken if either 100,000 years had passed; humans broke into the antechamber a klick below ground, or significant hostile xenoform lifesigns (including Ork and Aeldari) were detected anywhere on the planet.

The Federation Navy elements would be contained in carefully concealed hangars located beneath Sanctuary's moon. Their crews would sleep within, ready to awaken at a signal from the planet below.

Despite himself, Aetius felt worry. The complex's troops would awaken in stages, piecemeal. Could a sufficiently large force core it open before they got the chance to mobilise? But it had to work. If mankind failed, it failed forever.

==*==

Vorr Kastav oversaw the excavation as teams of men and machines tore open the earth in great numbers, grav-beamers lifting up chunks of rock as sonic mining machines made soil run like water to allow the seamless deposition of dismantled arcology-ship corridors and phase-metal armour. There were thousands of engineers in powered suits, assisted by teams of construction robots, civilian-grade Iron Men with their consciousness cogitators removed by design. What remained was something sub-sapient; a bundle of expert systems that required oversight by a human or Stone Man, but the Iron War had shown the follies of trying to automate all aspects of life – even automation itself. A dictum had been learned in those dark days, one that would – if the adepts of the Sigilite Order who had joined the expedition in the interests of preserving humanity's tens of thousands of years of history saw to it, at any rate – be remembered forever by the Federation.

“MAN MAY NOT BE REPLACED.”

Even the Stone Men were now required to be bonded to a human at all times. This ensured that the two would be able to oversee each other, the man and machine checking the flaws of each others' natures. It had been common practice even before the War for a ship's captain to be the bondsmate of the vessel's AI. In orbit, the fabrication vessels were making immense amounts of phase-metal to be sent down below, working down dozens of asteroids every day. They too would sleep beneath Sanctuary's moon.

It would be an immense exercise in trust to let them take control of the stasis facilities, but they would be operating at minimum power to avoid detection and conserve energy at any rate.

The construction would be done in twenty years, it having been five since the project began. Even now though, the tachyon ansible got occasional reports from Federation space – psychers encouraged to explore their powers exploding into armies of extradimensional monsters that drowned planets in their own blood, horrific xenobreeds formerly locked behind guarded quarantine buffers openly raiding human space, client races declaring that the Federation had shackled their development and launching campaigns of secession (none of the xenos who had sent support to the expedition had made such statements). Behind them, the galaxy was burning.

Many had wanted to quit the project, but Aetius had been resolute. The Federation as it stood could not be saved. Even if they could put out one fire, another would spring up, and the effort of trying to preserve the galaxy would crush their limited resources – especially with the Warp disturbances. The Federation military as a whole was starting to fracture, many star nations' forces rushing home to save their own worlds and clusters. The government on Earth was increasingly nominal.

Nevertheless, Kastav continued to oversee and supervise his section of the grand design as best he could. The landers were always dropping off equipment – Baneblade heavy grav-tanks, Spatha MBTs, Volkite rifles in profusion for the Federation army troops, lasguns for civilian militia purposes, industrial and military materiel in abundance. Always, always more. Always more to dig and to build.

==*==

The sanctuary complexes were completed on the planet deemed Sanctuary by Aetius and entered. The Federation of Man, brought to its knees by its mechanical apocalypse, was destroyed by its psychic one. Across man's former realm, worlds burned by the score, then the hundred as monsters from the abyss of the galaxy's collective psyche slavered and capered through the burning streets of countless cities and villages. There was no organised response – there could not be with Warp travel impossible due to the storms. The Federation Army and Navy ceased to be. The disruption of galactic travel brought fresh disasters. Rapidly dwindling resources brought on civil wars on thousands of planets. Weapons of mass destruction were used in desperation.

Other planets simply starved to death. For five thousand years this continued, then an Imperium rose across the stars. The Warp brought it to horrendous civil war, crippled the Imperial dream before it could truly be born. Nevertheless, the Imperium of Man fitfully held on through the centuries and millennia, simultaneously contracting and expanding. Its colonists landed in M38 on a world once called Sanctuary, and developed it into a Civilised World known as Vyzanthia IV.

For three millennia the backwater colony planet subsisted, its population approximately one to two billion, until in 850.M41 a major Ork Waaagh!, led by a ferocious warlord under the Overtyrant of Jagga, landed on the planet. PDF and Astra Militarum forces were hard pressed against the invaders, but knew little of the forces that began to stir under their very feet as the war dragged on into its second year.

Forces that would change the fate of the galaxy.
 
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ATP

Well-known member
Orks are fucked.But Feds would be not happy.I do not see them becoming part of IoM,or IoM letting them be.

If Interrex created cyvilisation destroyed by IoM,then why IoM do not knew about them? probably that lore was forgotten as unimportant and knew only but few,but even then they should found it in archives.
Well,i like it

P.S if you need extra dakka for feds,use stuff from other settlings as somebody which feds invited but not mass produced.
For example - Bolo tanks,Honor Harrington style missiles with X-ray lasers,gundams
Maybe some powerfull demihumans,too
 

Navarro

Well-known member
Orks are fucked.But Feds would be not happy.I do not see them becoming part of IoM,or IoM letting them be.

If Interrex created cyvilisation destroyed by IoM,then why IoM do not knew about them? probably that lore was forgotten as unimportant and knew only but few,but even then they should found it in archives.
Well,i like it

It had been five thousand years and the Legions were not particularly interested in the deep history of the civilisations they conquered.
 
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ATP

Well-known member
It had been five thousand years and the Legions were not particularly interested in the deep history of the civilisations they conquered.

That explain everything.Or,knowing that IoM was capable of forgetting entire planets,knowledge about it could be in some dusty archive on Terra.
 
The Awakening, Part One

Navarro

Well-known member
Next part has some outside POVs.

==*==

THE AWAKENING, PART ONE

850.M41

Vyzanthia IV/Sanctuary, Deep Underground


The metallic voice came over the PA speakers, that of the AI core that maintained this facility, designated 368-Alpha-Illion. It rang through and within the underground halls, plasteel and adamantium covered in protective phase metal.

“78th Merican Colonial Armored, 87th Aranean Arco-Wardens, Albyonic Grenadier Guards, 91st Kolossian Serjeants, 24th Rhomanian Themata, prepare for combat deployment effective immediately. Knights of House Raven under Princess Alyssia Raven, Knight-Colonel in the Federation Army, prepare for combat deployment.”

Captain Spencer Henderson, of the Grenadier Guards, listened to the words and thought over it as he got into his standard-issue Lamellar-pattern carapace suit. Greenskins, the sensors had said. He knew how to deal with the bastards. He'd seen the training holovids – fancy scientist type firing a volkite at a captured Ork. The beast had kept raging against its force-cage with a third of its chest deflagrated to cinders – it had taken a triple-tap to the head to take it down, though its death throes had lasted a while.

His time in the stasis chamber had been a dreamless sleep. As if he'd just gone down for a nap and woken up 15,000 years in the future. More concerning right now was the fact that half this planet's largest continent was awash with orkoid lifesigns. There seemed to be humans present at least – it was a good thing, knowing that the people in this facility and those like it were not the last in existence.

He picked up his rifle from its holding bay, a standard-issue Federation Army Volkite Charger rifle, Lastrum Corporation-made. The gun was essentially a rapid-fire maser rifle, capable of devastating effects on organic tissue. During the War they had not often been used on the Iron Men themselves, but on their fodder – the humans they'd subverted and sent forward instead of the main robotic forces as mere ammo-wasters. Henderson tried to remember a moment of his life that hadn't been coloured by the War, and realised he couldn't. In a way - born into his regiment - it had been his life. And then it had ended, only to be followed by fresh horrors.

“Come on!” he yelled to the men under him, urging them into the Mastodon grav-transport – a longer version of the Cataphract IFV; capable of holding a full company of 120 Federation soldiers, a forty-man platoon of Myrmidon heavy troopers, or four Hero-class warsuits. Its weaponry consisted of a forwards-facing melta array, a turret-mounted twin-linked neutron gatling array for AA purposes, two neutron-lascannons at the sides for any poor tanker who tried to flank the craft, and two plasma projectors closer to the front to light up infantry who tried getting close. Furthermore, it had a single refractor array to weaken enemy firepower. “You motherless bastards, you wanna live forever?”

The TacWeb was already giving him the immediate data of the unit, numbers, vitals, and so forth. Once they got onto the surface he'd have a satmap of the local area in the corner of his HUD, showing hostiles, friendlies, and neutrals. Orders were not to engage humans unless given a reason to.

==*==

Sergeant Kallista Belissariotis, 24th Rhomanian Themata, got into her warsuit. It was a standard-issue Myrmidon-pattern combat suit, the one used by Federation Heavy Troopers to fight the Iron Men. The perfection of human power-armour. She waited a moment for the neural interface to click – for the suit's nanomachine colonies to integrate into her brain and nervous system, at the back of her head, at the small of her back, at her elbows and legs and wrists, without need for the ports and plugs surgically introduced into earlier human power-troopers. A Myrmidon suit's data-and-target-acquisitions went beyond HUDs and displays – they made her know. The armour's expert systems integrated perfectly with her own instincts and training as a soldier.

One of the people fighting above would have fought the Myrmidon suit resembled Astartes warplate, but like none they'd had seen before in their manuscripts and stained-glass iconography. The shoulderplates and power-pack were stripped down – technically the powerpack was not needed for the armour to function, but it was there as a source of reserve power. The main power was generated via microfusion below the backpack itself. The helmet had an elongated rebreather/vox setup, a feature copied by Mark IV. Astartes armour, and a gorget which to an Imperial observer would have resembled a Mark VIII. There was no Aquila though – only the Solar Eagle and the Federation Army Cross.

She took up her weapon – a neutron rifle, rapid-fire pulsed particle beam weapon. The thing could blast through solid adamantium and vapourise the torso of anything organic in a single burst. Neutron radiation would also cause severe harm to anything organic that survived the first few shots and fry electronics – an especially good effect when fighting the Men of Iron - but the danger of backscatter radiation meant that only powered Federation soldiers used infantry-scale neutron weapons.

They would be deploying via teleport – homers were shooting upward to the surface and his suit had the requisite aerythmetic defence-formulas inscribed on its inside, projecting a field of material-realm sanity and order around her as she traversed the abyss of the Immaterium. She waited for the signal from higher command. It arrived.

She and her squad ran into the teleport chamber, waited for the machines to energise, and for an instant all was whirling darkness until –

Kallista was on a field. Sunset, surrounded by greenskins, who were assaulting some kind of fortress in the far distance. It was short time before they began to remedy that. Neutron rifles flared out as the Federation troops began to establish a perimeter, and greenskins dropped by the score. The soldiers were going for headshots – more viable for getting a quick kill – but the sheer destructiveness of the particle weapons was vaporising necks and upper torsoes as well. Not enough, though, she bitterly mused..

This land would have to be cleansed via phosphex and nanite scourer afterwards. Not a single spore of humanity's oldest enemy could be allowed to set its foul roots on this world.

Chem-propelled ballistics hit her suit's conversion field, failed to breach it as their kinetic energy was converted to harmlessly radiating heat and light.

Some of the heavy troopers were less lucky though – where the orks managed to bring up heavy weapons, some had armour damaged and were badly injured. Auto-triggered nanite colonies rushed to patch up the damaged plasteel/ceramite composite, as automed nanites rushed in to the soldiers' bodies to provide field stabilisation and minor regeneration. Combat medics and engineers would arrive later

Above, Thermae missile-troopers, held aloft by suspensor fields, rained down devastation with the missile micro-launchers attached to their risks. Highly miniaturised nova-missiles – about the size of a pen – loosed devastation on the enemy. Within the perimeter, Ravager units clad in heavy-duty Bellam combat-suits fired rapid-fire plasma bolts, pulsar-rifle melta-beams, graviton-beams, phosphex missiles and more out at the Ork hordes. They died in their thousands.

But the green tide kept coming. They always did, relishing the promise of a good fight against enemies they had not faced before.

Some distance away, the ground churned and melted, Mastodon heavy grav-IFVs following the vicious eruptions of melted soil and rock before firing into the churning masses of Greenskins. Out of them poured Army soldiers, fellow Myrmidon-suited heavy infantry, and the Hero-class warsuits that formed the lowest tier of Federation warmech.

They were uncannily agile for such hulking walkers, a result of plasma thrusters enhancing their movement and suspensor assistance reducing their overall weight, carrying vehicle-scale weapons in rifle-pattern. Volkite culverins, plasma destroyers, grav-impeller autocannons. Among others, there were workhorse Ajax-patterns, tough but slow Hectors, spearhead Achilles-patterns, CQC-oriented Heracles-patterns, lightweight fast-attack Atalantas, airborne Bellerophons. They moved across the battlefield like the heroes of old they had been named after, throwing back the orks again and again.

She was not sure about the pilots – they were loyal men and true, but their suits' systems crossed the line into AI. Non-sapient and human-bonded to be sure, and the autonomy was helpful, but

And still the greenskins kept coming.

Kallista would have spat on the ground in disgust had she not been in armour – as it was her frustration was only rising. There was a warboss somewhere – a key pylon in the orks' psychic dominance network that they only had a dim idea of. Taking him out from range would ensure some squabbling as his subordinates fought to take position – but it wouldn't be enough to halt this invasion.

What was needed was for a strikeforce to hunt and kill the warboss in single combat. That would be the killing blow – short-circuit the orks' in-built dominance hierarchy by having a non-ork dominate and kill the current leader. This would lead to all sense of cohesion in the Waaagh collapsing in on itself. It was an old pattern and one often executed.

They were in no position to do such right now, sadly enough.

Kallista grit her teeth and led her fireteam to focus their position on an ork walker, taking it out. There were plenty to kill right now, though.
 
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ATP

Well-known member
Nice chapter - and good to see romanians.Maybe made them still orthodox? and add orthodox Patriarch among cyvilians.
About war - Even now we had missile launcher with range of 200km.Why not use those to take down boss after drones find him?
Or just teleport nuke on his head.
Giving how good orks schooter were,drones at 1km attitude,especially stealth ones,should be save to work.
 

Havalt300

Well-known member
About war - Even now we had missile launcher with range of 200km.Why not use those to take down boss after drones find him?
Or just teleport nuke on his head.
Giving how good orks schooter were,drones at 1km attitude,especially stealth ones,should be save to work.
Because that wouldn't be fun. :D
 

The Whispering Monk

Well-known member
Osaul
Nice chapter - and good to see romanians.Maybe made them still orthodox? and add orthodox Patriarch among cyvilians.
About war - Even now we had missile launcher with range of 200km.Why not use those to take down boss after drones find him?
Or just teleport nuke on his head.
Giving how good orks schooter were,drones at 1km attitude,especially stealth ones,should be save to work.
Given how the Ork psyker field works, defeating the Ork Boss in 1v1 combat is the singe greatest way to destroy their own belief in the current fight. If Boss dies, then the whole thing must have been a failure. This would cause a huge decrease in the overall beneficial (for the Orks) effect of their mutually generated psyker field.

EDIT: I wonder how much of an effect a sufficiently large number of blanks would have on Orks. Would their tech stop working b/c they wouldn't be able to power it any more?
 
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Navarro

Well-known member
Given how the Ork psyker field works, defeating the Ork Boss in 1v1 combat is the singe greatest way to destroy their own belief in the current fight. If Boss dies, then the whole thing must have been a failure. This would cause a huge decrease in the overall beneficial (for the Orks) effect of their mutually generated psyker field.

It also disrupts the psychic loyalty effects of the Waaagh! field.

EDIT: I wonder how much of an effect a sufficiently large number of blanks would have on Orks. Would their tech stop working b/c they wouldn't be able to power it any more?

War of the Beast has some weird stuff involving Sisters of Silence vs Orks. But then that was a weird series.
 
Informational: Fed Mil Design #1

Navarro

Well-known member
Federation of Man Myrmidon PA:

ETFG0rPXgAU8-LD
 

ATP

Well-known member
Federation need to spare its soldiers - they would not get new ones.Against orcs - guided missiles with sub ammunition.And thermobaric bombs - orcs need oxygen in air to breathe,and soldiers in Myrmion armour do not.
 

Navarro

Well-known member
You thought this was dead, didn't you? Think again! Teaser for THE AWAKENING, PART TWO:

++*++

Guns boomed every second, dozens of Basilisk artillery pieces firing out from behind the Imperial Guard’s trenches, the walls of martyrs proudly bearing the remains of the God-Emperor’s faithful shielding firing positions and dugouts against the unending tide of xenos scum who battered against them day and night, bellowing brutish warcries as wave after wave of them swept towards the redoubts of the Imperium, a green sea of utter brutality that had surged to cover half of Vyzanthia’s supercontinent before the Imperial defenders, after long months of futile efforts by the planetary PDF to hold, had finally arrived and brought the war to stalemate. Every minute, every hour, a fresh mob of orks threw itself against the Imperial defences. However, in the past few days the Orks had thrown themselves against the trenchline less and less.

Lord Colonel Gerhen Vyzer of the 95th Archonan Prefects, responsible for holding this segment of the line, looked out on the battlefield before him, feeling a sense of unease that . The . The Fortress Incarnadine, named for its red sandstone walls, on whose battlements he stood was little more than a minor Imperial keep set atop a vclcanic bluff that had once been the heart of a caldera, raised up when the world was first colonised and forgotten soon after it was established. The local PDF had used it as a base, but now it was the centre of the war effort, the key lynchpin in a defensive network that sprawled across a continent. He sighed.

This Emperor-cursed fringe world with its yokel inhabitants was, in his opinion, not that important to the wider Imperium - hence why only local forces had been brought up from the surrounding subsector to reinforce it. The war may drag on, so far as he knew, for decades or centuries - it was not the way of the Imperium to send more troops than was necessary to maintain at least some of a world’s tithe value when there were always more important warzones. Enough that the Orks were kept at bay from more valuable planets.

He’d received reports just today concerning unknown forces that had arisen out of the ground a few days ago. Reports were unclear, confused, sporadic, sent by Imperial Guard scouts not precisely knowing what they described, looking at the fighting from a distance. Some described the soldiers as being similar to the holy Astartes, the Emperor’s own Angels of Death (yet none had come to this minor warfront); yet others described warsuits reminiscent of the unclean Tau filth, and yet others mere soldiers in carapace like the Tempestus Scions. He knew not what this portended, but he felt concern. Were these men, or Xenos? If either, where had they come from and did they serve the Archenemy? Xenos and worshippers of the Ruinous Powers would have to be purged; men who simply knew not the Emperor could be made part of His glorious Imperium.

Vyzer thought again on what had happened last night, another incident that disturbed him. A silvery mist had risen from the place where these unknown interlopers were fighting the Orks. It blocked both vision and the fortress’s powerful auspexes, and was spreading out across the great steppe from the main camp of the unknowns. It seemed to be staying away from the Imperial lines, but Vyzer knew not its provenance and feared the worst. Some witchery of the Great Enemy, perhaps. Parts of it seemed to be flowing with some kind of directed intent according to the scouts; yet others said it was sinking into the ground and flowing through it like water. Whatever it was, it represented something new and Vyzer feared that.
 

ATP

Well-known member
You thought this was dead, didn't you? Think again! Teaser for THE AWAKENING, PART TWO:

++*++

Guns boomed every second, dozens of Basilisk artillery pieces firing out from behind the Imperial Guard’s trenches, the walls of martyrs proudly bearing the remains of the God-Emperor’s faithful shielding firing positions and dugouts against the unending tide of xenos scum who battered against them day and night, bellowing brutish warcries as wave after wave of them swept towards the redoubts of the Imperium, a green sea of utter brutality that had surged to cover half of Vyzanthia’s supercontinent before the Imperial defenders, after long months of futile efforts by the planetary PDF to hold, had finally arrived and brought the war to stalemate. Every minute, every hour, a fresh mob of orks threw itself against the Imperial defences. However, in the past few days the Orks had thrown themselves against the trenchline less and less.

Lord Colonel Gerhen Vyzer of the 95th Archonan Prefects, responsible for holding this segment of the line, looked out on the battlefield before him, feeling a sense of unease that . The . The Fortress Incarnadine, named for its red sandstone walls, on whose battlements he stood was little more than a minor Imperial keep set atop a vclcanic bluff that had once been the heart of a caldera, raised up when the world was first colonised and forgotten soon after it was established. The local PDF had used it as a base, but now it was the centre of the war effort, the key lynchpin in a defensive network that sprawled across a continent. He sighed.

This Emperor-cursed fringe world with its yokel inhabitants was, in his opinion, not that important to the wider Imperium - hence why only local forces had been brought up from the surrounding subsector to reinforce it. The war may drag on, so far as he knew, for decades or centuries - it was not the way of the Imperium to send more troops than was necessary to maintain at least some of a world’s tithe value when there were always more important warzones. Enough that the Orks were kept at bay from more valuable planets.

He’d received reports just today concerning unknown forces that had arisen out of the ground a few days ago. Reports were unclear, confused, sporadic, sent by Imperial Guard scouts not precisely knowing what they described, looking at the fighting from a distance. Some described the soldiers as being similar to the holy Astartes, the Emperor’s own Angels of Death (yet none had come to this minor warfront); yet others described warsuits reminiscent of the unclean Tau filth, and yet others mere soldiers in carapace like the Tempestus Scions. He knew not what this portended, but he felt concern. Were these men, or Xenos? If either, where had they come from and did they serve the Archenemy? Xenos and worshippers of the Ruinous Powers would have to be purged; men who simply knew not the Emperor could be made part of His glorious Imperium.

Vyzer thought again on what had happened last night, another incident that disturbed him. A silvery mist had risen from the place where these unknown interlopers were fighting the Orks. It blocked both vision and the fortress’s powerful auspexes, and was spreading out across the great steppe from the main camp of the unknowns. It seemed to be staying away from the Imperial lines, but Vyzer knew not its provenance and feared the worst. Some witchery of the Great Enemy, perhaps. Parts of it seemed to be flowing with some kind of directed intent according to the scouts; yet others said it was sinking into the ground and flowing through it like water. Whatever it was, it represented something new and Vyzer feared that.



It is alive! it is alive! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Jokes aside -
good chapter,and showing what would happen - the same IoM which do not cared about peasants dying there,would send battlefield to kill Federation remnants.
IoM in nutschell.

Well,it is up to @Navarro to decide what to do - both tragic end and heroic victory seems fine to me.

P.S If they do not die,only possible allies are Tau.
 

ATP

Well-known member
If @Navarro want survival of his Federation,they must prevent IoM forces from sending info about them.IoM could ignore unknown aliens,but if they knew that Federation live,they would send everything to kill them.
Best idea - pretend to be Xenos.

P.S Militia should have better firepower - maybe giving them mechs?
 

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