Post by Rolling Thunder on Feb 12, 2013 13:39:59 GMT -5
Excerpt one: The War in Heaven.
There were few world's as peaceful as Du'n. An old, gentle antique of a frontier world, she had not seen war in her long, long history, settled long ago during the Age of Expansion, she was truly beautiful. Verdant grasslands swathed her heartlands. Rich, teeming jungles interspersed across worn down, old-man mountains dotted her coastlines. She, like so many Imperial worlds, had never truly seen conflict. Her fleet honed it's edge against the sporadic pirate and Ork activity, and her noble houses fought their duels and small skirmishes, far away from the eye of the planetary authorities. Her PDF had tithed it's regiments to the Guard, and, a few years ago, they had returned, full of stories of crushing the Greenskin menace, of a world covered in cities and ash, of war machines that blotted out the sun, and of men of a hundred thousand worlds, bound together by the common cause of Emperor, Imperium and humanity.
And their lessons had been learned. The PDF had modernized, at first motorizing with the ubiquitous Gecko armoured truck, and mechanizing it's combat elements with the formidable Chimera armoured carrier. A core tank force had been purchased, at significant expense, in the form of antique Malcadors bought from armouries and reserves around the sub-sector, and eventual local production began. A Grenadier regiment, trained in infiltration and armed with the finest weapons and heavy armour that could be made on-world, was formed. Regular and updated versions of the Tactica Imperium had been circulated as low as platoon level.
In short, they had done all they could to prepare themselves to face any threat. And they would have. All but the most determined foe - Renegade, Ork or Tyranid - would have ground to a halt in the face of this world. She was small, but her cities well-defended from both aerospace and ground assault, her forces mobile, her lines of communication secure and her forces almost completely self-sufficient in terms of supply.
It began, as these things do, at night, a few hours before dawn. The crossroads town of Gdarin reported communication loss of forward pickets. The alert sounded, the sirens rung out, the garrison readied.
And then the voxes filled with screaming. The screaming of men in such absolute, abject fear, in such indescribable, rending, flesh-peeling, utterly broken pain that it drove the Government's Warp-hardened Astropath mad.
A minute later, the screaming stopped. To their credit, the relief column was already inbound, rolling their chimerae across the wide, poplar-shaded highways as a pair of reconnaissance Thunderbolts buzzed the town, to spot nothing but motionless, cooling darkness.
Just as the first lights of dawn began to break, the column rolled up to the buttressed gates of Gdarin. Crucified to the Imperial Aquilla above those still-sealed gates, lay the castrated form of Major Voss, the garrison commander.
But it was not until the Engineers had blown the gates off, using a two-part explosive of meltabombs combined with a massive concussion charge, that the actual scale of the horror became apparent.
Flenshed, skinned corpses hung from lamp posts. The town's priest dangled in the central square, impaled from the statue of the Emperor Ascendant, who now wore a hood of fused, browning human skin. Bodies littered the streets, twisted in hideous, bone-cracking throes of agony.
But the true horrors were the children. Or rather, the absolute, empty spaces in the crechés, in the shelters, in the hospital, where they had been taken by the horror that had come here.
War had come to D'un. And it had come in the shape of the Druchii.
There were few world's as peaceful as Du'n. An old, gentle antique of a frontier world, she had not seen war in her long, long history, settled long ago during the Age of Expansion, she was truly beautiful. Verdant grasslands swathed her heartlands. Rich, teeming jungles interspersed across worn down, old-man mountains dotted her coastlines. She, like so many Imperial worlds, had never truly seen conflict. Her fleet honed it's edge against the sporadic pirate and Ork activity, and her noble houses fought their duels and small skirmishes, far away from the eye of the planetary authorities. Her PDF had tithed it's regiments to the Guard, and, a few years ago, they had returned, full of stories of crushing the Greenskin menace, of a world covered in cities and ash, of war machines that blotted out the sun, and of men of a hundred thousand worlds, bound together by the common cause of Emperor, Imperium and humanity.
And their lessons had been learned. The PDF had modernized, at first motorizing with the ubiquitous Gecko armoured truck, and mechanizing it's combat elements with the formidable Chimera armoured carrier. A core tank force had been purchased, at significant expense, in the form of antique Malcadors bought from armouries and reserves around the sub-sector, and eventual local production began. A Grenadier regiment, trained in infiltration and armed with the finest weapons and heavy armour that could be made on-world, was formed. Regular and updated versions of the Tactica Imperium had been circulated as low as platoon level.
In short, they had done all they could to prepare themselves to face any threat. And they would have. All but the most determined foe - Renegade, Ork or Tyranid - would have ground to a halt in the face of this world. She was small, but her cities well-defended from both aerospace and ground assault, her forces mobile, her lines of communication secure and her forces almost completely self-sufficient in terms of supply.
It began, as these things do, at night, a few hours before dawn. The crossroads town of Gdarin reported communication loss of forward pickets. The alert sounded, the sirens rung out, the garrison readied.
And then the voxes filled with screaming. The screaming of men in such absolute, abject fear, in such indescribable, rending, flesh-peeling, utterly broken pain that it drove the Government's Warp-hardened Astropath mad.
A minute later, the screaming stopped. To their credit, the relief column was already inbound, rolling their chimerae across the wide, poplar-shaded highways as a pair of reconnaissance Thunderbolts buzzed the town, to spot nothing but motionless, cooling darkness.
Just as the first lights of dawn began to break, the column rolled up to the buttressed gates of Gdarin. Crucified to the Imperial Aquilla above those still-sealed gates, lay the castrated form of Major Voss, the garrison commander.
But it was not until the Engineers had blown the gates off, using a two-part explosive of meltabombs combined with a massive concussion charge, that the actual scale of the horror became apparent.
Flenshed, skinned corpses hung from lamp posts. The town's priest dangled in the central square, impaled from the statue of the Emperor Ascendant, who now wore a hood of fused, browning human skin. Bodies littered the streets, twisted in hideous, bone-cracking throes of agony.
But the true horrors were the children. Or rather, the absolute, empty spaces in the crechés, in the shelters, in the hospital, where they had been taken by the horror that had come here.
War had come to D'un. And it had come in the shape of the Druchii.
