Invasion raw text

SSCM + 20.602
Location: Scordia’s Star Outer Orbits, Emperor-class battleship Unequal Ending

Ladies and gentlemen, servants of the Emperor.
This meeting has been called to discuss three topics.  The first is the ongoing progress of the Task Force in the seizure of the outer Void Platforms, Deep Voids, and space stations, as well as the invasion of the moons of the gas giants.  The second is concerning the re-convening of the ships that took flight from Syracuse and arrived scattered or late.  The third is the unexpected loss of the supply ship at the outer edge of the system.
To the first:
The Imperial Guard and Navy assets dispatched to the edges of the system have thus far encountered minimal resistance.  Some have even surrendered once it became obvious that we were coming to contest their holdings.  This implies that all essential personnel were withdrawn to inner, more defensible targets.  We have examined each one for signs of self-destruct bombs, and found none.  This implies that they think they will get to return.  Thus, we should leave a small party of counter-boarding troops behind to protect our holdings.
To the second:
The turbulence in the Warp has not abated, but all of the ships sent are now accounted for.  The vessels that arrived well outside the stellar gravity well have begun to arrive at the edge of the system.  Thanks to the degree of their dispersal, the rebel fleet has abandoned any obvious attempts to disperse or sink them.  This, in turn, leads to my final point.
To the third:
The object that intercepted the supply boat appears to have been a kinetic kill missile of unknown make.  Since that incident, several of our ships have reported these vessels, akin to Ork ramships, colliding with them.  However, it seems that they are not stealthed as this singular vessel was.  We do not know why that one was, or yet how.

With that, I open the floor.

[Magos Dominus Claude Yolter] Lord General, have any of your advance units reached the spaceports of the larger moon colonies around the gas giant worlds?
[Lord General Senioris Erlan Ghuntherd] They have not.  Their orbits are still chock-full of junk and enemy units.
[Lord Admiral Helmut Walker] We’re working on it, Magos.  Our fleets are approaching the habs that orbit Scordia 7.  The other gas giants are too far from our approach path to be worth engaging on the way in.
[Yolter] Our hallowed vox-callers stand silent.  Wherever our kindred have gone, they cannot speak to us over the frequencies.
[Walker] Nor ours.
[Ghuntherd] I vow that my men are looking, Magos.  Our troops on the habs report that the civilians there saw the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel slowly disappear over the course of several years.  Until they are found, though, we must face present matters.  Admiral Walker, how goes your post-analysis of the supply boat loss?
[Walker] Slowly, but surely, General.  The supplies lost were mostly food and clothing.  We do not expect to be able to instantly convert seized facilities to the support of the war effort, but we do expect to be able to turn enough to our cause that we can replenish what was lost.  However, the Chartist Captain whose supply boat was lost is demanding a bigger share to compensate for his lost boat.
[Ghuntherd] Scrivener?
[Scrivener Elias Hall] The Administratum has afforded the funds, although that does not leave a tremendous amount of leeway in our remaining discretionary funding.
[Ghuntherd] Very well.  Admiral Walker, do you believe this will be a common occurrence?
[Walker] No, General, I don’t.  I feel if they had the means to do this more than once, they could have done it against our more valuable ships, or when we had yet to form up in a defensible perimeter.  Of course, we should still take precautions.
[Ghuntherd] Naturally.  Magos, what are these objects?
[Yolter] Ramships, my Lord, of make that is Imperial, but Ork in design.  They are operated by a few servitors or by remote.  So far, we have not yet determined their precise point of manufacture, but it is inside this system.  That much is clear.
[Walker] Magos, the cargo units from Segmentum Command and Syracuse will need to be protected from these ramships.  What do you recommend?
[Yolter] I would recommend that the vessels of the fleet treat them as self-guiding torpedoes or missiles, and adjust their point defense accordingly.  However, I do not want the fleet to regard them disproportionately.  They are a threat, to be sure, but the primary threat was and remains the enemy warships.
[Brigadier General Wing Chan] E-excuse me… one moment.  Yes, thank you.  My comrades, I have a message here from the Blue Dagger forward elements.  They have located a pocket of fierce resistance on one of the moon landings.  They report two SDF security regiments are present, and some of these Purity Shields, and an unknown force of mercenaries.  Several battalions’ worth of mercenaries, in fact.  They are passing along unit estimates to me now… yes, I have them.
[Ghuntherd] Brigadier Chan, are they calling for backup?
[Chan] Negative, sir, but they do report that there is no sign of this cabal of witches we’ve heard about.  It is… implied in their message that the Imperial Guard may be better suited for this than they are.  Massed infantry combat is not the Blue Daggers’ style.
[Primaris War Psyker Elwin Lewis] Massed infantry combat is their primary and renowned style, Brigadier Chan.
[Chan] Infantry defense, perhaps, Primaris, in combined ops.  Moon landings with two thousand dug-in opponents for each Marine?  Not their forte.
[Lewis] Fair enough.
[Ghuntherd] Brigadier, move three regiments from your ECAF to aid the Daggers.  Hang their pride.  Secure that moon.  Which one is it?
[Chan] Checking now… it is Bluefields, sir, Scordia 7-13.  They landed in a large, open field outside the capital and offloaded their armored units there, but the enemy is moving to encircle them by the tens of thousands.
[Ghuntherd] They may be panicking.  I don’t blame them.  It’s been a long time since they saw Space Marines in this backwater.  The Angels of Death will not bother taking prisoners.


Inquisitor’s note: This was an accurate assessment, both of the Blue Daggers’ tactical appraisal and tactical conduct.  The Daggers, unused to large-scale invasions and lightning war, were not well-suited to invade a large, hostile target as they were here.  Being Adeptus Astartes, and therefore creations of the Emperor, they were not so unprepared that they were caught truly off-guard.  Indeed, even as the defenses of the nearby city mobilized against them, the Blue Daggers had already fortified their landing zone with dozens of Tarantula and derivate turrets, each armed with a twin-linked heavy bolter, a pair of lascannons, or a Hyperios air defense emplacement.
However, because the rebels had detected the Space Marines coming, they were able to shift a limited number of assets to intercept them.  Before the Daggers had even made moonfall, the rebels had already scrambled several dozen local aircraft to shoot down their drop pods and gunships.  However, this proved inadequate.  The Daggers had already fielded Stormhawk and Thunderhawk craft to drive off the rebel interceptors.  Neither were the Daggers fool enough to dispatch all of their forces in one place.  Unbeknownst to the rebels, the Daggers had already delivered thirty Vanguard Infiltrators and Vanguard Eliminators, along with three Helix Adepts and a Vanguard Librarian, to the heart of the capital city of Montserrat.  The Vanguards did so using a combination of very precise teleportation and stealthed insertion aircraft.  However, there was no real way to prevent the defenses of Montserrat from reacting when the Vanguard and conventional forces landed at the same time.  Because the rebels had seen the conventional Daggers forces landing first, the military forces mobilized to fight the Vanguard forces were far smaller, and were unable to respond as quickly as needed to contain them.
Therefore, the conventional forces outside the city, numbering eighty Space Marines and Primaris Marines, were able to move towards the city in confidence that the more subtle arrival of their Vanguard brethren would disrupt the enemy’s planned response to the arrival of their larger number.  Before long, there was indeed a disruption of the enemy’s actions as they suddenly realized that there were over three squads of new, never-before-seen Space Marines slashing through their home city.

Included here are the battle recollections of the Brother-Sergeant Raphael of the Incursors, who was called upon to provide close-action support to his Inceptor and Tactical brothers in the field.  This recollection begins roughly one hour after the arrival of the Vanguard forces shook the rebel formation.  I do not know why this report has very different stylistic elements from the first; perhaps he never wanted it read.


SSCM + 20.603
Location: Scordia’s Star moon Bluefields, Scordia 7-13, outside the capital Montserrat.

The enemy has not fortified in depth here, but the defenses they have erected in the capital are obvious.  Above us ring the sounds of long-range guns and the engines of our mighty aircraft.  My brother Marines are advancing all around me, firing at maximum range.  Bodies carpet the grass from a large transport airplane shot down by our Tarantulas some while ago.  Flying at dirt-level did not save them from the Emperor’s vengeance.
Rebels fire upon me from all sides.  They are desperate.  These are abandoned men, and they know it.  Their kin able to withdraw have done so.  They are in their trucks and their IFVs and their APCs and their ornithopters and their gunships, and they are driving or flying away, disengaging, to protect their homes from thirty Space Marines.  These I kill quickly, for to live in such a state is not life, but pitiful false-life.  Others stay and die with fire in their eyes, valor in their hearts, and the name of the Emperor on their lips.  These, I kill quickly, for they are brave and deserving of it.
The fighting ebbs and flows, but mostly ebbs.  The enemy sought to contain us with tens of thousands of men, more than enough to do the job had we allowed it.  We are no fools, of course.  Captain Savoir knew perfectly well that there was no way we would allow ourselves to be so easily surrounded.  Our bolters snap and flicker with shells that pierce the hides of light trucks, peel open men and women, and yet surely even we would have fallen before the onslaught of twenty-five thousand rebels.

Thus, we have changed the game.  Even as I sight a tank six miles away, and it promptly explodes from the hunter-killer missile my vehicle crewer brothers unleash, I see the contrails of wheeling aircraft far away, awaiting orders from men with cut throats.  Even as my Aggressor brothers step into pillboxes and emerge covered in handprints smeared in ash, I see smoke rise from seven pre-determined buildings in the distant city.  The Vanguard is there.
The sky alights in flame and needle-thin beams of color.  Our Strike Cruiser, Fury’s Sons, is pouring energy from its blessed armaments into the city.  Bases cook, rebels boil, and temples to the Emperor conflagrate.
Why?
These rebels claim to worship Him on Terra, and so perhaps they do.  I step over Aquilae and brush aside devotions in spilled soft-top truckbeds.  Surrendering captives whisper for mercy from Him and beg His angels to show them pity.
Belisarius Cawl did not speak of this.  Perhaps he did not care for this.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter.  For, of course, when these troops do have me and my brothers outnumbered, they do not hesitate to shoot us, entrap us, shell us.  Brother Elric is down, with an AP slug striking him with a one-in-a-million glancing shot to the neck joint of his Phobos armor.  Do these men deserve to call themselves worshippers of the Emperor, when it is so clear that they would kill His servants if given the chance?
We shall find these missing Adepts.  We shall find this rebel Overlord Noctolis.  We shall have answers.
Or we shall not.  Perhaps he shall simply step through the darkened hatch of an Inquisitorial shuttle and never again see the sky.  Perhaps we shall storm his office and find him dead with a bottle of amasec and a pistol with one shot missing from the magazine.  Perhaps we shall never see him at all, and his last moments shall come in a blast of brilliant light from the sky above.
That is irrelevant.  Thoughts such as these serve no purpose.  Thoughts such as these are at best and worst a distraction.
Yet, of course, there is time for them.  My auspex hums, my Occulus sweeps all with its machine eyes.  The enemy nearest us is in a dead retreat.  Thousands of men dig in between here and the city, and then run when the tanks roll up shooting.  Light glints from aircraft and spacecraft above, dancing their dark rhythm, firing on each other and me and my brothers.  A missile slams into the ground two hundred yards away that sends my brothers and me to our knees.  I am up in an instant and scanning.  A rebel soldier pops up as soon as he can, hoping to take advantage of the distraction.  I shoot him once in the heart and his chest explodes.

The rumble of vehicles is louder now.  All around me, there are vehicles advancing.  Tanks and APCs of the Chapter grind on tracks and treads, or glide on faintly-vibrating hoverpads.  I hear the rattle of a heavy stubber as a slowly-driving Predator coasts by, sending individual shots into rebel soldiers playing dead.  No risks allowed.  No second chances.
Beyond, the weird light of Warp-power, but it is no witchery.  This is the sanctioned and pure power of my brothers, the Vanguard Librarians.  A building suddenly changes shape as a thousand windows blow out.  In my enhanced optics, I see the glittering of a million shards of glass as they catch the light of Scordia’s Star.  A pressure wave.  The building glows from within.  My brothers unleash their fury.
Machine gun fire rakes over my armor.  It does literally no damage.  Ceramite and steel and my custom helmet ensure no harm is brought to me as I lead my brothers at a dead sprint, splitting in two directions to avoid the incoming fire.  The flick of my wrist sends a krak grenade off to the machine gunner, and when it detonates, three men reel back, clutching broken skulls.  Three quick slashes, and the Emperor has fewer foes.  I honor you, my gene-liege, as I claim rebel lives in your name.

The sky darkens with the bulk of a warship.  It is an Imperial Navy light cruiser, taking station between Bluefields and Scordia’s Star, and it is shooting.  My heart turns to my brothers, but if the Navy accidentally killed Space Marines today, their punishment would chill the blood, so I suspect they are exerting the utmost of care.  My helm vox beeps.  A few quick unit designators appear.  Astra Militarum.  The 198th Septiim Spearmen, with their Leman Russ Executioners and Chimaeras with as many bolters as the Mechanicus can find places to fit bolters.  Fine.  Let them offload their chalk in our dust.  We shall be up to the elbows in the blood of rebels before long.
The Oglith Jaegers, the Septiim Sharks.  Overkill.  This city is dying.  The people weep on their knees as my brothers slay their leaders and strip their defenses bare.  Scions aren’t needed here.  Guardsmen would do the trick.  Conscripts with swords would do the trick.

We have reached the city now.  There is no high wall to keep us out; the city simply begins, a series of hab buildings, all sealable despite the breathable air.  Typical Imperial fourth-rate colony architecture, all STC copies and stone.  Bolter shells detonate inside walls, blasting targets beyond with stone shards and bits of glass and drywall.  Imperial Guardsmen surge from landers fifty miles back, thirty miles back, ten miles back.  I have paused to summon more ammunition from my arming servitor four times.  My bolter is scorched black with the smoke of my shots.  I have been fighting for fifty minutes.

The Scordian Purity Shield seeks to slay me.  Militiamen and zealots, driven mad by ‘Slaught and anger.  They pour from buildings, they dump alcohol firebombs on me.  Each is visible before they move, as they ignite their payloads and chamber their guns.  These men in masks, bearing the uniforms of soldiers but having no martial tradition to their name, assault me from vantages of surprise they do not have, with a righteous cause that they do not have, in the name of the Emperor who commands me to kill them, on a moon none find consequential.  They die, all of them die, several per second die, as they spring from behind window-frames that did not conceal them and announce their presence with war cries I ignore behind my helm.
Widows and widowers weep and hurl curses, sometimes more substantial things, as I pass among buildings shattered by bolt rifle shells and the touch of the Warp.  Vanguards were here.  I see divots in ferrocrete walls where men in Power Armor climbed to find vantages.  I see shards from spent mass-reactive shells lodged in bricks.  I see screaming terror etched on the faces of dead men.  I see shadows twitch and fade behind the glare of sudden muzzle-flash as my brothers slay from rooftops, and I see heat flashes dim in my auspex as matte-painted knives find throats in the darkness.

The rebels have re-garrisoned the city.  My brothers and the Vanguard re-unite inside the city proper, surrounded by mountains of the remains of men who thought to make sport of killing a mere eighty Space Marines.  Of the twenty-seven thousand who took to the roads, the skies, and the plains to oppose me and my brothers, nineteen thousand made it back.  Holes have opened in command chains, in hierarchies, in morale.  Eight thousand soldiers and thugs, dead in one hour and forty minutes.  The machine-learning tells me that is greater than the populace of nations on Old Earth.  Good.  Perhaps these rebels will fear us enough to surrender.  I do not count on this, but it would be nice to move on to greater targets.  Cache White awaits.

Cache White.  A secret so secure that the Novamarines and the Angels of Fury did not know it.  Did Cawl?  Perhaps.  Somewhere in his many minds, in his history, in his cogitator banks, there may have been the text string Cache White.  Did he know more than we do now?  Did he learn of its contents, declare them obsolete, and move on, seeking to define the border between the sin of Innovation and the labor of Machine-Worship?  Or was he surprised, as we were, to find record of ancient technology hidden in this nest of criminals and peasants?  Did he see the name Cache White and come up empty in his searches?
It doesn’t matter.  The rebels do not know of it.  I suspect the Imperial Guard and Navy do not know of it.  The Adeptus Mechanicus did not, perhaps does not know of it.  It shall be ours.  We shall not be denied our prize.  Cache White, the treasure of ancient brothers, shall find its home in the Gargantuan, and serve the Golden Throne again.
I wonder what it is.