Invasion of Pireaus
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Having waited as long as he thought strategically advantageous to gather forces for a heavy assault, Lord Commander Carab Culln put into action his plans for the invasion and conquest of the Pireaus System on the edge of the Badab Sector. Strategic command had identified the system as key to the subsequent attack on the central Badab System due to the relatively stable Warp route between the two regions. Pireaus would be an ideal staging post for an invasion as it already possessed extensive lunar orbital stations and minor shipyards centred around the gas giant Kritias. These facilities if seized intact would both weaken the Secessionists further and be of invaluable assistance to the Loyalists as a forward base. A plan long in the fruition, Culln had already set up a series of secondary fronts at the Isin and Decaballus systems, where raids and hit and run actions by his own Red Scorpions Chapter along with the Minotaurs and Exorcists had destabilised much of the region and forced the Tyrant’s armies to spread their outer defences thinly.[1]
Contents
Assault on Kritias
The initial attack plan against Pireaus called for a Imperial Navy assault to interdict the industrial world of Pireaus V with a direct Space Marine assault against the lunar colonies on the second moon of the system's dominant gas giant, Kritias. This attack was to be conducted by the combined forces of the Exorcists and the Red Scorpions Chapters.[1]
From the start, the invasion of the system was subject to reversal and unexpected calamity, this first reared its head when the Spear of Mezoa suffered a catastrophic Geller Field failure as the invasion fleet left the Larsa system to make the Warp transit. Further unexpected turbulence in the usually stable Warp route forced the remainder to arrive piecemeal into Realspace at the target system’s edge. Far from their chosen attack vector to the system, the Loyalist ships were forced to reassemble and operate at maximum thruster burn for a number of days to reach the inner worlds of Pireaus, by which time all element of surprise had been lost.[1]
With little choice but to press the attack, the Loyalist fleet made best speed to engage. As expected, the initial enemy resistance in space was proved insufficient to slow the attack, this defence armada would have been enough to stand off a sizable raiding force, particularly in combination with the chain of orbital weapons platforms which formed a second line around Pireaus V, but against the imperial force assembled, they stood little chance of long delaying, let alone preventing, the assault.[1]
Despite a torpedo bombardment endured for several hours, the Loyalist fleet reached their mission break point intact and split to engage their separate targets without incident. The bulk of the Imperial Naval ships led by Vice-Admiral Kagawa and the Retribution Class Battleship Throne of Blood broke off to engage the defence fleet and bombard Pireaus V, while the Space Marines strike force diverted to assault Kritias Secundus. The fighting above Pireaus V proved particularly fierce, as the defence ships flung themselves almost suicidally against the attackers, scoring several hits against the oncoming cruisers before being wiped out. The Imperial Navy ships, however, were prevented from achieving the bombardment of Pireaus V, as ground fire from massive emplacements of macro-cannon and defence laser batteries on the surface forced the Naval ships back. The Gauntlet of Ages was crippled when it strayed too close.[1]
The Red Scorpions’ Sword of Ordon and the Exorcists’ Redeemer smashed Kritia Secundus' asteroid forts. Landing zones were quickly identified and subjected to preliminary bombardment before a full-scale moonstrike was initiated via Thunderhawk and drop pod assault. The Space Marines’ task was to strike hard and with speed to take the lunar colonies and their strategically valuable facilities intact. On landing, the Red Scorpions and Exorcists were immediately met head on by the Tyrant’s Legion in a strong counter-offensive driven on by the use of explosive-collars and armed with little more than sharpened tools and crude promethium bombs. The Astral Claws’ trap was sprung.[1]
Caught Between Fire
Hidden ground batteries fired from the depths of the alien forests that covered the moon, striking down Thunderhawks and landing craft and ripping into the Space Marine ships in close orbit above. The Sword of Ordon barely escaped the barrage, spewing flame and trailing debris from her shattered launch bays, while the Exorcists’ ship Aleph Argentium exploded, showering burning wreckage down onto the planet and setting ablaze hundreds of square kilometres of vegetation. From within the moon’s citadels cannons and mortars thundered afresh, pelting the Loyalist Space Marines with missile and shell, indiscriminately targeting the battles where their own forces were engaged at close quarters with the Loyalists. This was only a heralding barrage and from concealed bunkers Land Raiders and Rhino tanks roared forth: The Astral Claws in near-Chapter strength and with their master Lugft Huron at their head. The loyalists were caught between the fire above and the Tyrant below.[1]
The Tyrant had long ago divined the importance of the Pireaus system as a keystone in the Badab Sector’s defence. He had been able to anticipate the Loyalists’ plan of attack. The massive presence of the Astral Claws on the ground and the planetary defences activation had not been the whole of the Tyrant’s strategy, and within an hour of fire, cutting off the Loyalist spearhead from its supporting ships, the Tyrant’s own war fleet ripped into Materium at the edge of the inner Pireaus System. What was to follow was to be one of the largest and the last major fleet engagement of the Badab War.[1]
Broken Formations
The Secessionist armada represented the last excise of their once vaunted naval power. Its flagship was the final remaining operable battle barge in the Astral Claws fleet, the mighty and storied Seraph of Judgement, clustered around which were eight line class vessels. These were the last remnants of the Secessionist Chapter and Maelstrom Squadron fleets including the cruisers Thoth's Hound and the Dreadchild. Alongside this main force were over sixty other vessels; a ramshackle conglomeration of Chapter escorts, patrol frigates, raider craft of unknown provenance and hastily converted armed transports, at least a dozen of which proved to be fire ships; suicide weapons packed with volatile cargo and primitive atomic explosives, and driven before the main fleet.[1]
Vice-Admiral Kagawa, assaying the suddenly shifted tactical situation realised that if the Tyrant’s fleet could take on the two already damaged Loyalist forces separately, they might yet attain a crushing victory. He immediately ordered his fleet to move away from the oncoming enemy ships, and via coded channels sent a request setting out his assessment of the upcoming battle to the Space Marine forces near Kritias Secundus. With communications with the ongoing ground war impossible, it was with a heavy heart that Captain Waite Ryder, the Exorcists’ Master of the Fleet, reluctantly agreed and complied with his plan of feigned retreat and rendezvous.[1]
With their enemies seemingly in full-flight before them, the Secessionist fleet ravaged into the inner system at full speed but their ships’ differing thrust-forces and the general indiscipline of their captains rendered their formation ragged. These front runners started striking at targets of opportunity such as the ungainly Loyalist rear echelon transports. The badly damaged Loyalist Gauntlet of Ages turned to a glorious and fatal last charge into the teeth of the oncoming enemy, deliberately seeking out and engaging the Secessionist fire ships before they could wreak havoc on the Loyalist main force, until the Seraph of Judgement closed in and crushed her valiant heart.[1]
The Tyrant’s Fury
Below on Kritias Secundus, now outnumbered, it was the Loyalists who were pushed back into ever narrowing defensive circles. Mass bloody hand-to-hand confrontations and indiscriminate fire at a half-seen foe were the way of the battle. The Astral Claws came on in savage and bitter fury, heedless of their ‘merely human’ foot soldiers caught between them and the object of their vengeance. The Red Scorpions met them with righteous hatred of their own, while the Exorcists displayed their usual unnerving calm in the face of overwhelming force. Lord Commander Carab Culln of the Red Scorpions, stood as an unyielding rock amid the storm of battle on which the enemy broke, and at his side was Sevrin Loth, his Chapter's Chief Librarian.[1]
Lugft Huron, Tyrant of Badab and master of the Astral Claws, struck the Exorcists' line like a thunderbolt, smashing aside Space Marines as if they were pieces on a gaming board, burning and hacking his way through the crimson-armoured Exorcists with wild, almost insane, abandon. The Tyrant’s blood-spattered personal guard poured into the breach behind him, forming a murderous wedge as the Tyrant strove to reach his true and chosen enemy; Carab Culln. Silas Alberec, Captain and commander of the Exorcist forces knew that if he were not stopped, the Tyrant alone might turn the course of the battle and so opposed him, leading a counter-assaulting force of his Chapter’s elite Enochian Guard to confront Huron head on, intercepting the Tyrant’s force at the foot of the looming habitation stack the Red Scorpions were using to anchor their defence. There, rather than being matched against the Tyrant, Alberec found himself in a duel with Ancient Kleitor, one of the most feared and infamous of the Astral Claws’ Dreadnought brethren, and suffered terrible wounds which crushed and crippled his Terminator armour before disabling the Dreadnought’s motive systems with his relic-mace.[1]
As the battle raged on Kritias Secundus, the two masters of war at last found each other, and Carab Culln and Lugft Huron matched their skills in personal combat. This was a savage free-for all amid a mass combat, with a press of armoured bodies about them and the air riven with bolt shell and plasma blast. The Tyrant came on in fury, bellowing his hatred and cursing the Golden Throne bitterly, while Culln fought in grim silence, every ounce of his formidable skill needed to wield his relic blade to counter the frenzy of blows rained on him by the Tyrant’s ghostly claw. Only this ancient heirloom of his Chapter, the Blade of the Scorpion, seemed proof against his enemy’s blows, and within moments of Lugft Huron’s onslaught, Carab Culln had seen his storm bolter shredded like paper, his Iron Halo flicker and fail and his Terminator armour gouged and slashed in a dozen places. The wounds caused by the claw were flowing freely with blood in defiance of his Astartes-augmented metabolism.[1]
After an exchange about his treachery, The Tyrant of Badab, further maddened and howling inarticulately with rage, charged again at the Red Scorpion, who expecting the frenzied attack, deftly turned aside allowing the Tyrant’s momentum to take his Terminator-armoured bulk past. Lashing out with the Blade of the Scorpion, he slashed deeply into the Tyrant’s side, parting his foe’s armour in a welter of blood. Such a blow should have felled even the mightiest Space Marine, but it did not slay the Tyrant of Badab. Lugft Huron wheeled around, his claw arcing down, the ghostly blades punching effortlessly through Carab Culln’s breastplate and spearing into his chest, piercing flesh and bone alike. The Tyrant closed his clawed fingers and ripped out the Culln heart. Direly wounded, Culln staggered once more to his feet as the battle thundered on, and a new sun burned in the heavens, raining destruction down on all below.[1]
Judgement in the Void
In the cold void above Kritias, the concentrated fleets of the Imperium and the Badab renegades clashed in a brutal head-on engagement. After a devastating first pass, both sides turned back into battle, filling the void with wreckage as ships were destroyed. The God Slayer rammed Thoth's Hound and broke its back while lance strikes bit deep into the Sword of Ordon, disabling its main guns. The Throne of Blood, its steering shattered and spewing fire from scores of craters and wounds on her flanks, confronted the Seraph of Judgement on a collision course at point blank range. The venerable battle barge frantically manoeuvred to bring her bombardment cannon to bear, but the Throne of Blood unleashed a full salvo of melta-headed torpedoes at the last possible moment, their machine-spirits all locked onto the pulsing reactors deep with the battle barge’s hull. In an instant all became flooded with impossibly bright, burning white light, and when at last it had faded, a war machine that had survived a thousand battles and millennia of war was nothing but a smouldering corona of ash and radiation-fogged haze, and the Throne of Blood tumbled on, its vast armoured prow replaced with a scorched and blacked stump. The star battle was won for the Loyalists with the death of the Seraph of Judgement, but at great cost. Though the Loyalists won the fleet engagement at great cost, fierce boarding actions followed as the remaining enemy vessels were routed or captured. Before the fighting could be resolved, one ship escaped at extreme speed: the Redeemer, driving hard toward Kritias Secundus.[1]
A Comet from the Heavens
With the planetary defences blinded by the battle above, Captain Waite Ryder gambled on a desperate extraction. The Redeemer plunged into Kritias Secundus’ atmosphere at extreme speed, its void shields turning it into a blazing comet the ground batteries could not react to in time. Guided by Librarian Taloth of the Exorcists, who locked in on the bright soul of Sevrin Loth and the familiar spark of his wounded master Silas Alberec, the battle barge tore low across the surface, flattening forests and towers and scattering the Astral Claws, its arrival separating Culln and the Tyrant mid-combat. Extraction began at once under the Redeemer’s apocalyptic gunfire, and after two brutal hours nearly three-fifths of the Loyalist survivors were recovered, many wounded, including Lord Commander Culln. With her hull shattered and engines failing, the Redeemer barely escaped the moon’s gravity, her void shields holding just long enough to reach orbit.[1]
Aftermath
The invasion was over. Both sides claimed a victory and both sides tasted defeat. For the Secessionists, the Loyalist invaders had been driven off and no ground had been surrendered to them, but in doing so they had gambled the last of their once mighty fleet and lost it, and with it any hope of maintaining dominion outside of the Badab system itself. Fatalities on both sides had been appallingly high, and Lord Commander Culln had seen his attacking force blunted and many of his most powerful ships of the line damaged to the extent that might take years to repair. For a brief time some hoped that the Tyrant himself had been slain in the anarchy of the extraction, but Culln did not believe it, and he was quickly proved right. The Badab War had arguably been won at Pireaus by the Loyalists, but there was one last battle to fight, and that was likely to be the most terrible of all: the final Siege of Badab. The whole system was a heavily fortified death-trap the likes of which few had ever encountered, but the Tyrant could not be left alone in his place of power to fester. If the invasion of Pireaus had a lesson to be learned, it was that the Tyrant should never be underestimated, and nothing was more dangerous than a cornered beast.[1]
Sources
- 1: Imperial Armour Volume Ten - The Badab War - Part Two, pgs. 34-39
