Anvil Worlds Invasion

The invasion of the Anvil Worlds by the forces of Chaos occurred in 13 post VCM.M41. The war was fought between defenders allied to the Anvil Conclave and invaders sworn to the ruinous powers. Though colloquially referred to as the Anvil Worlds invasion or the Anvil Worlds War by sector scholars, the attack was in reality an advance on all the worlds in the Meaxi Cluster of the Tectonian subsector. Though many were controlled by Mechanicus interests, just as many were wholly Imperial in culture and politick.

Cause of the Conflict
After the Fall of Tectonia and subsequent bottling of the Tectonian Throat, the forces of Chaos in the Vlaktes Mare consolidated their holdings and began a buildup of men and materiel. Utilizing the vast manufactoria and natural resources of Tectonia That Was (newly-christened as a daemon world in thrall to Kaagar Apocryphon), the Chaotic alliance spread its influence across the rest of the Foundling Worlds, darkening skies and reaving the populations of said worlds at will. Drawn by an expansion of power, an influx of Archenemy warbands were drawn to the Vlaktes Mare, seeing in its roiling tumult a potential reprieve from Imperial persecution in the wider Imperium Sanctus and a plethora of soft, forgotten loyalist targets.

Paramount among the dark forces now in command of the sector's northernmost reaches was the plague fleet of the Corpsemakers, led by Rutus Bileheart. A lord of contagion of some renown, Bileheart had been instrumental in the destruction of Tectonia Prime's defending forces, but had ultimately profited little from the planet's conversion to a daemon world of Khorne. Without the strength to wrest control of the world from its rulers in the Black Legion, Rutus set his eyes on a greater prize than the mean pickings he had seen so far.

So it was that, merely two years after the Fall of Tectonia Prime and the loss of the Foundling Worlds, the Archenemy armada sailed forth once more, this time to assault the Meaxi Cluster--otherwise known as the Anvil Worlds.

Phase One: Vranno in Flames (12.7 to 13.942 post VCM.M41)
The opening phase of the invasion saw a major attack on the Vranno system by the lead elements of the Chaotic horde. Fighting touched the mortuary world of Mournfall, heat-blasted Diablomundi, and the manufactoria-studded Ladenus.

The Defense of Mournfall
The invasion of Mournfall--and, indeed, the invasion of the Meaxi Cluster as a whole--were presaged by years of cultist activity on the planets of the Vranno system. Mournfall, a planet entirely dedicated to honoring the Imperium's dead, was affected perhaps worst of all. Insidious powers twisted the planet's righteous cult-castes from the proper path of subservience to the tasks of internment to a path of degradation and usurpation.

In late 12.7 post, when planetary enforcers and the local Arbites precinct had judged the uprisings beyond their ability to contain, the Anvil Conclave redirected the Vostroyan 616th Mechanized and half of Vostroyan Army Group A to the Vranno system, including the 68th armored and 300th Shock Infantry. Though the entirety of Army Group A was under the command of the Vlakten-born Lord General Lucilius Bullert, local command of the Mournfall pacification fell to Colonel Culpan Toschenko.

The invasion of Mournfall occurred in 13.1 post, and was carried out by a mixed assault force of the Void Reavers Chaos Space Marines under the command of Ghor Dranas, and a score of Questor Traitoris Knights of House Vextrix. This invasion was aided on the ground by a major uprising from the Cult of Sunken Souls which overthrew governance of the planet's foremost mausoleum-hive, Cairn Primus.

Mournfall boasted no significant surface-to-void defensive capabilities, and the Archenemy was free to land at will. Fighting in and around Cairn Primus lasted the better part of three solar months. Imperial authorities conscripted most of the hive's military aged populace into service. Hive spires which had stood since the earliest days of the sector were brought low by orbital sub-munitions, and the streets were filled with fire and screams as the heretic Astartes set about their dread rituals.

The invasion came to a head during an extermination sweep of the Interan mausoleum district in 13.31 post, where Toschenko's 616th Mechanized and 68th Armored came into conflict with Ghor Dranas himself, escorted by four Knights of Vextrix and a host of his own Void Reavers. The forces engaged and soon found themselves in a running battle through the Interan crypts. Leman Russ tanks dueled with the monstrous Knights while Vostroyan infantry fought and died in close quarters with Chaos Space Marines.

In the end, Toschenko himself managed to strike down Ghor Dranas in single combat, after sacrificing dozens of his men for the opportunity. With the core of his force battered and his corporeal form weakened by Toschenko's mysterious, pariah-energy command rod, Dranas quit the planet, his forces engaging in quick punitive strikes as they withdrew.

Operation Flaming Serpent
Operation Flaming Serpent was not a colossal engagement. It was not a full-scale planetary invasion, it was not preceded by a void-ripping orbital war, and it did not result in more than a few hundred casualties. Still, it was a vital engagement in the grand scheme of the war effort, though its actual details are still sealed behind crimson-level clearance requirements.

Flaming Serpent occurred in 13.4 post on Diablomundi, the first planet in the Vranno system. A punishing desert world, Diablomundi had played host to mining stations and covert Mechanicus research facilities for hundreds of years, a secluded arena for the Techpriests' most closely-guarded secrets. With the invasion afoot, the conclave realized that a lost piece of arcane technology on the planet's surface needed to be secured. The technology in question was an empyreal sextant array--a device used for forecasting Navigator-less jumps through dense warp storms. With the forces of the Archenemy closing in, the likelihood of unstable warp jumps increased. With no Anvil forces in the area capable of rapid, en-force retrieval, the Mechanicus turned to their Imperial allies. Militarum command tasked the artifact's retrieval to the Skunkheads, and issued orders to their commander, Colonel Toschenko, to relocate via an Imperial Navy escort frigate to Diablomundi immediately. Toschenko's regiment made planetfall quickly, and was unable to do so in full force--Toschenko only making it groundside with his first company, psykana auxilia, and a meagre tank escort. Marching on the covert mining station in question, Toschenko's soldiers encountered forces of the Corpsemakers' second plague company, the Bloated, led by Gothillium Goutbelly. A full twenty-strong host of plague Marines were set against him, along with a shambling horde of monsters which had once been the outpost's menial worker contingent.

Under heavy fire and baking sands, the opposing forces did battle. The Corpsemakers used tunnel access beneath the station to rise from the shifting sands and spew concentrated disease into the ranks of the Vostroyans, boiling soldiers alive with bursts of acid. Poxwalkers drove guardsmen to the ground only for their victims to soon rise again, slack-jawed, pale, and thirsting for the blood of their former comrades. In the confusion, Toschenko detonated a vortex grenade within the station's former administration building, collapsing the structure atop Lord Goutbelly.

Eventually, Toschenko's men found the empyreal sextant. The 616th pulled the lost tech and their wounded aboard a bulk lander and evacuated as, behind them, Corpsemaker orbital assets pounded the area with a blight bombardment, wiping the facility--and any further secrets it might have held--out of existence.

The Reaving of Ladenus
When fighting broke out in the Vranno system, the controlling Imperial Navy patrol elected to spend its ships blockading Ladenus. This left the rest of the system's worlds vulnerable to attack, but ensured that the system's overall production capacity continued undiminished. This held true for the first four months of the war, as while Archenemy forces made landings on Mournfall and Diablomundi, Ladenus was spared. The leading edge of the Archenemy's void forces were not sufficient to break the blockade. This changed in 13.5 post, when the larger bulk of the Chaos armada broke warp at the Vranno system's primary Mandeville point. A full plague fleet swept in-system, supported star-ward by the ships of Ghor Dranas and Gothillium Goutbelly, each driven from the inner worlds. The Imperial Navy fought in both directions, waging a blistering void war in orbit around Ladenus.

It is important to note that at his point in the invasion, five months of outright warfare had not proven sufficient to stir the wider Anvil Conclave into action. Whether through astropathic mistranslation or political malfeasance, the tech priests had neglected to commit any significant military assets to the conflict beyond those that were unavoidably snared in the initial attacks. The only exception to this was Tech-priest Dominus Hexense, who had arrived in the Vranno system merely a week before fighting began, bringing with him a reclamation macroclade and his vessel, the Archeothunder. In this action, Hexense acted of his own autonomy, outside the bounds of the Gyraxian Pentarchy or the Anvil Conclave, guided instead by the council of his cloned selves and strategic prediction codelines authored by him and him alone.

The Battle of Manufactorum X-V-III Theta
The Void Reavers were first to the fight, driving through the star-ward edge of the blockade with the Slaughter-class cruiser Crimson Whisper. With the full force of a heretic Astartes cruiser in low orbit, Dranas unleashed hell upon the planet's surface, decimating the equatorial assembly-hives with lance strikes and macro-cannon bombardments. Whether this was for the purposes of some obscure ritual or merely a venting of frustrations at his defeat on Mournfall, it is not clear. Dranas then landed his forces in the ruins of Manufactorum X-V-III Theta, a city-sized assembly plant dedicated to the production of armored vehicles.

Dranas was opposed in this landing by forces of Reclamation Macroclade Hexense. Dranas’s daemonic cunning was pitched against the hyperlogic triptych of the Hexense concordance. In the end, each side took their fill of the Manufactorum’s vast supply stocks before pulling back, preventing the battle from entering a strategic deathspin from which neither side would recover.

The Destruction of the Amaranthine Chapel, Praxima Civitas
A demi-company sized force of Corpsemakers led by Gothillium Goutbelly made planetfall in Praxima Civitas. Intelligence indicates that the force was drawn to the site following a ritual performed by a planet-side cult dedicated to the pestilential forces of Nurgle. The Archeothunder, still embroiled in the fast-decaying orbital war, detected this landing by way of data in-loads from Ladenus’s primitive noosphere, an relayed the coordinates to Dominus Hexense, who was still in Manufactorum X-V-III Theta after his engagement with the Void Reavers. Judging the strategic risk of allowing a plague force loose in a populated area as worse than his current engagement, Hexense broke off from the manufactorum, taking maniple delta with him.

Hexense intended to intercept the Corpsemakers before they could dig in too heavily around their landing site. Mechanicus forces met the Goutbelly’s vanguard, including a bodyguard force of Blight Lord Terminators, in the streets near the Amaranthine Chapel. Mechanicus forces arrived before the Corpsemakers had off-loaded their heavy armor, catching them unaware. Unrelenting salvos of neutron laser fire and galvanic rifle volleys were able to drive off the invaders. The fighting saw Skitarii trading fire with Plague Marines inside the chapel, and though both sides took casualties in the close-in melee, the chapel itself got the worst end of it, and was entirely pulverized.

It was in the chapel’s ruined undercroft, after the Corpsemakers had withdrawn, that Xanthos-Theta unearthed an archeotech relic. Called the Arc Annulus, the device had lain within the chapel for a thousand years, interred with its previous owner, its materiel-annihilating potential taken to the grave. By unearthing it, Xanthos-Theta had committed what some among the Ladenean priesthood would call grave robbery, and drew questions about whether or not the battle had been waged for the safety of Praxima Civitas or for a convenient opportunity to plunder the once-pristine chapel.

The Seeding of Maxim Generatorium
As the orbital situation degraded further, long-hidden Chaos cults began to rise up across Ladenus. One of the most potent of said cults was the Wardens of the Sickened Spark, an organization which, through guile and sedition, had enmeshed itself within the overseer guild of Maxim Generatorium, a colossal geo-thermal power plant which supplied most of Ladenus's northern hemisphere with energy. When the Wardens saw the skies over their home darken with the un-color streaks of ruinous void weaponry, they took it as a signal to begin their final, unholy task. By the ritual sacrifice of seven times seventy-seven cultists did the Wardens unleash their gods upon the generatorium.

Within moments of the sacrifice, Maxim Generatorium went dark, taking with it the light and power of all Ladenus's northern continent. Panic set in quickly, and soon Ladenus's planetary governess, Mariana Cyllia, found herself dispatching PDF forces in riot control of his own worker population, giving no room to investigate the incursion itself. Such was not the case for Baron Hector Voltaris III, who was on-hand with a full banner of House Vulker Knights, and had the strategic wherewithal to sortie to the generatorium mere days after it went dark.

No matter his tactical prescience, upon reaching the generatorium, Voltaris found a den of misery which he could not have in his worst nightmares foreseen. Clouds of corpse-flies wreathed the complex in a cumulonimbus malaise. Behind its high walls, within the streets and alleys which weaved throughout the vast magna-capacitors, pure Chaos reigned. Plague daemons burst from rents in reality. Nurglings spilled from overloaded sluice-pipes. Plague bearers marched through the streets, counting the harvest of the generatorium workers. Above all sat Boilbum Spoilking, great unclean one and sixty-seventh in Nurgle's favor, atop the highest of the thermal stacks, each ring of his dolorous bell signaling a fresh burst of stinking, ravenous daemon-forms. The plague host choked Maxim Generatorium with its filth. Auspex scans made the truth self-evident: the great unclean one was dripping its filth down the primary geo-thermal shafts, planning to rot Ladenus from the inside out.

Voltaris launched a full attack, his Questor Mechanicus Knights pounding the generatorium with shell and beam, blade and fist. The heavy warsuits cut through hundreds of daemons, greasing the streets with pulped bodies and smeared ichor. Voltaris led his banner into combat at the heart of the storm, drawing the Spoilking into face-to-face confrontation, and blew the greater daemon from reality. Though it was a heroic kill to mark in the annals of House Vulker, it was all for nought, for despite the grievous blow to their leader, the plague host had accomplished its goal. The thermal shaft was clogged with filth, and with the Spoilking's death, that filth came alive, granted pustule sentience by the leaking morass of the greater daemon's last breath. The generatorium chugged back to unlife, threading malformed, spoiled energy throughout the planet's crust--a planet-killing virus brought to frothing fruition.

Voltaris was set to bring the entire generatorium down around him when his knights reported malfunctions in their systems. Glitchlings began to manifest inside his brother warsuits' ion shields, and the filth in the air was such that energy weapons began to decay within its grasp. Seeing this, Voltaris ordered a full retreat, his banner evacuating from the vast complex in rapid order.

The Death of Ladenus
"The Archenemy has killed your world. That it yet spins and its people yet fight their invader does not change the fact. A plague unleashed at its core will doom it. Even now, the northern reaches darken at its touch, and cities writhe madly in its grip. This death is exponential. The fleet's psykana and the honored techpriest dominus are in agreement--by the end of the solar week, Ladenus will be a planetary corpse pile. The fact is indisputable. Still, your world's strategic importance is diminished, not undone. Our duty now regards the evacuation and safeguarding of as much war materiel as can be salvaged. Evacuation routes and offload sites have been compiled. Lieutenant Orren of the fleet's tacticae will take you through the particulars." —Lord General Lucilius Bullert to the mercantile conclave of Ladenus, 13.651 post VCM.M41 The planet-killing plague proved unstoppable. Imperial high command recognized it immediately, when their psykana council and adepts of the biologis agreed that the plague's growth was steady and incurable. The Archenemy knew it, too, choosing to withdraw their fleet to the outer edge of the Vranno system to let the apocalypse run its course. In the face of its inexorable advance, Lord General Bullert ordered a full evacuation of all available, completed war materiel on the planet. Governess Cyllia's troops fought rearguard actions as Militarum and Mechanicus forces oversaw the evacuations. The PDF soldiery were forced to turn their weapons on waves of their fellow Ladeneans. Many of those gunned down were possessed, pox-afflicted wretches, little more than zombies. Still, a good number of the panicked civilians were just that--healthy noncombatants driven to the evacuation sites by the pressure of the rotting cities they had fled. As PDF soldiers buckled under the pressure to kill crowds of their neighbors, off-world commissars stepped in to convince them otherwise.

During this time, the 4th Commandery of the Order of the Thorn, under Canoness-Commander Valanthe Sunwell, engaged Corpsemaker forces at Manufactorum II-IV-I Beta. This battle was a last-ditch effort by the 4th Commandery to withdraw vital supplies from the remnants of the manufactorum--specifically, a shipment of Godwyn-De'az pattern boltguns which had been commissioned for them years prior. Sunwell's force was successful in their recovery strike, and purged a minor infestation of Plague Marines in the process.

The evacuation took three months, lasting from 13.651 post, when Bullert gave the declaration of abandonment to Ladenus, to 13.942 post, when the last cargo trawler had delivered its payload to the ships in orbit. To slow the plague, the Imperial fleet made tactical orbital strikes against manufactorum-cities as they were overrun, burning back the advancing tide. By the last month of the evacuation, the air of Ladenus was thick with an acrid, chemical smog thrown up from the incinerated cities and coughing fat-bergs which now honeycombed the planet's crust. Nearly half a year's output of war materiel was harvested by the retreating Imperials, an achievement made possible by the sacrifice of nearly the entire million-strong planetary defense force.

Leaving Vranno
The Imperial fleet, accompanied by the Archeothunder, made best speed for the edge of the Vranno system immediately after leaving Ladenean orbit. Auguries indicated significant empyreal turbulence in the warp-space surrounding the system. This posed a particular problem to the Imperial fleet. Due to the titanic nature of the evacuation of Ladenus, a great number of chartist vessels had to be press-ganged to the task. These ships were warp capable, but traveled well-worn warp lanes from system to system, utilizing cogitators instead of Navigators to fulfill the short-jump trade agreements their captains were entitled to by the Vlaktes free trade charter.

Since the Fall of Tectonia and the increase in warp turbulence in the Tectonian subsector, roughly three dozen such chartist vessels had found themselves marooned in the Vranno system, unable to jump into the Sea of Souls with any degree of accuracy. Now they were asked to take the plunge blind.

Thankfully, Imperial command had prepared for such an eventuality. The empyreal sextant array recovered by the Vostroyan 616th from Diablomundi, modified by the skill of the Hexense concordance, was able to network the cogitators of all the chartist ships and give them accurate, real-time data on the warp's turbulence. The concordance assured Imperial command of a "fifty-four percent success rate" in jumping the unguided vessels to the nearest system--a grim percentage, but acceptable.

Worse still was the threat of the Archenemy fleet, which had blockaded the nearest Mandeville point, content to let Ladenus rot and catch the Imperials on their way to a retreat. Both sides had prepared for a renewed void engagement for the past months, but the carnage was still severe to behold. The Imperial assault cruiser trio of His Honored Might, Ser Killian's Lament, and Tantamount Martyr made a suicide charge alongside six frigate escorts, blunting the Archenemy counter-attack and destroying the cruiser Seventh Maggot. The Archeothunder held the rear line of the Imperial advance and traded shots with the Crimson Whisper, driving the strike cruiser back with rolling blasts of its digital cannon arrays.

So it was that, relatively unmolested, the Imperial fleet drove its way into the roiling warp storm and away from the Vranno system, a strategic victory secured in the bulging bellies of their cargo vessels.

Phase Two: The Diorton Deadlock
By the beginning of 14 post VCM.M41, the seven systems of the Meaxi Cluster were firmly in the grip of a warp storm heretofore unseen in the northern reaches of the Vlaktes Sector. Empyreal cartographers have since classified the storm as an immaterial discharge that stretched out from the Mare and deep into the sector proper, a naturally-occurring calamity. More highly-classified sources tell a much darker story, one of dread rites committed across all seven systems of the Cluster simultaneously, garnering this sickening warp storm.

Either way, the result was the same: the systems of the Meaxi Cluster were cut off from one another. Intersystem travel and astropathic communication was rendered nearly impossible. High-gain astropathic relay stations could still allow some communication, but they had not the bandwidth to support more than a trickle of vital information, most of it classified at a high level. Those astropaths who did retain their duties complained fiercely of voices in the storm, of eyes peering into their dreams from unlit, rotting gardens beyond time. Madness was widespread. Martial law went into effect on most Imperial worlds in the storm's grip, and planetary defense forces mobilized, prepared to face whatever horrors the storm might visit upon them.

War in Diorton
The remnants of Battlefleet Tectonia emerged into real space at the edge of the Diorton system between 14.05 and 14.12 post, and did so largely intact. The naval vessels and lone Mechanicus ark did so entirely undamaged, though the same could not be said of the three dozen chartist vessels that had set sail from Vranno. Of them, only nineteen remained, and three of those had to be scuttled immediately upon arrival in Diorton, their once-proud forms reduced to rotting hulks by the unholy energies of the warp storm they had flown through. Still, for an unguided fleet jump through the warp--even one to the nearest available system--the fifty-percent losses were deemed a miraculous success.

Lord General Bullert advised the fleet to move in closer to Diorton's populated worlds, only to learn via vox greeting that the system was unaware of the situation at Vranno, having not received even one of the hundreds of astropathic warnings he had sent since the plague fleet's arrival.

Bullert found himself not as the de-facto head of the forces at his disposal, but rather one amid an alliance of varied interest groups. He could not command the magos dominus, Hexense, who kept his own council. He felt sure he knew the mind of Lord Admiral Stanis Iovan, whom he had been in agreement with regarding the evacuation of Ladenus, but still held no direct power over the man or his fleet. Thankfully, the given strategic situation was dire enough that little argument could be had. The Ladenean burden, as the fleet's officers taken to calling the chartist vessels, was in no condition to make another warp translation through the storm. The Imperial Navy vessels fared little better, and needed time in open void to affect repairs and make ready for battle.

Thus, the Imperial alliance set to fortifying the asteroids and moons of Diorton's many gas giants, making ready to defend the mining complexes of the system's helium merchant-clans. Of particular note was Mongereye, the system's only star fortress. Originally built by a pre-Imperial civilization, Mongereye was a warp-incapable vessel possessing an amount of firepower that far outmatched the tiny system it was forever trapped within. The fortress was manned by an Imperial Navy crew and possessed dry dock facilities capable of repairing the ad-hoc fleet. It became the seat of command for the Imperial alliance, and was promptly moved to a mid-way point between Diorton VII and Diorton IX, the system's two most profitable gas giants, whose orbits carried them in conjunction during much of the Anvil Worlds Invasion.

The Battle of the Wailing Moon
It was during the Imperium's fortification of the Diorton system that the Wailing Moon went suddenly silent. The outermost satellite of Diorton IX, the Wailing Moon was a location of no small local superstitions--superstitions which often rang true. As the home of the system's most high-gain astropathic relay, the Wailing Moon gained its name for good reason, with many a voidfarer telling tales of nightmare-thoughts that were not their own forming as they passed the icy planetoid's orbit.

So it was that a location of vital strategic importance was garrisoned very lightly by local armed forces. When the moon fell silent in 14.23 post, it fell to out-system forces to investigate its disappearance. A mixed force including the Vostroyan 616th, a patrol of the Adeptus Arbites, and a delegation of the Scholastica Psykana led by Psyker Primaris Olecea Nayn was sent investigate the dormant relay. What they discovered was an advance picket of the Archenemy fleet and a demi-company sized force of the Corpsemakers under the personal command of Rutus Bileheart.

The Corpsemakers had arrived days before, breaching the warp at the system's edge. The heretic Astartes fleet had splintered after the engagement at Vranno, spreading out across the many systems of the Meaxi Cluster, hunting for opportunistic prey worlds. Bileheart himself had pursued the Imperial fleet from Vranno, hoping to catch them off guard and cut them down mid-flight. Destroying the relay was step one; with it gone, the system would be isolated, and he would have no fear of reprisal from outside elements.

The Imperial intercept force engaged Bileheart's forces at the Wailing Moon's main astropathic relay complex. Guided by the mind-cries of the complex's hidden astropaths, Olicea Nayn and her wyrdvane psyker brethren were able to quickly direct Vostroyan tank fire at key points in the Corpsemakers' battle line, destroying their long-range fire support and drawing the Plague Marines into a close-quarters grind. The guardsmen paid a dear price, throwing themselves against the rotted ceramite of their hideous foe, but they prevailed; given adequate time, Mistress Nayn was able to guide most of the complex's astropaths to safety before overloading the relay's psy-capacitors, allowing her to send one last mind-warning into the aether.

The Imperials retreated immediately after, leaving Bileheart's men to ravage the frozen moon. The lord of contagion's rage was undeniable: he now had a ticking clock on his invasion of Diorton.

The Fall of Diorton III
After his failure to stop the Vostroyan 616th at the Wailing Moon astropathic complex, Rutus Bileheart knew he had to work fast. The threat of neighboring systems sending reinforcements meant bolstered defenses across the Diorton system, which could make things extremely difficult for the Corpsemakers. Setting his reserve forces to ravage the Wailing Moon in plague, Bileheart sought the council of Arkvald Maggotongue, one of his chief advisors and war chiefs. Within the remains of the moon's astropathic complex, Maggotongue discovered a data terminal that hadn’t been fully expunged of all its information. Upon investigating, Arkvald discovered a cipher to the local Imperial code-language. With this, Bileheart tuned the Nemesis Rising 's vox relays toward the intra-system traffic, discovering the identity of Lord Millitant General Lucillius Bullert, the man whose leadership had undone Bileheart in the war for Vranno.

Now armed with information and purpose, Bileheart called for the Tattleslug, and asked it to ferret the location of Lord Millitant General Lucillius Bullert. The Tattleslug laughed at Bileheart, for he would be happy to do what was asked of him, but only for information in return. Bileheart knew he could not give the Tattleslug just any information, for the Tattleslug glutted itself on secrets most foul. Secure in his arrogance, Bileheart told the slug that he knew the so-called gifts of Grandfather were nothing but mere steps to total enslavement. To Bileheart's thinking, ascension was true slavery, and Rutus Bileheart would bow to know one.

Not a secret, judged the Tattleslug, but enjoyable nonetheless; to think that the pustule, leaking behemoth before it truly believed himself free of thought and body was the finest of jests. Sufficiently fed, the Tattleslug revealed the location of General Bullert--or, more accurately, his location-to-be. The general was to attend a defense summit with the helium-lords of Diorton in the upper spires of Diorton III, the blackened moon, in three days' time. He would deploy from the Imperial frigate Ser Hyde's Flame, itself breaking from its escort cordon due to the depleted nature of the Imperial void forces.

When this event came to pass, Ser Hyde's Flame was intercepted by Bileheart's flagship. Ascending undetected from below the solar plane, the Nemesis Rising made short work of the Imperial frigate, shattering its voids with lance fire and gutting its hull with a rolling broadside of macro cannon fire. When the ship was in flames, Bileheart came about and speared it on his prow, bursting the multi-kilometer ship in two. Bullert escaped aboard an Aquilla lander, speeding for the surface of Diorton III. Corpsemaker attack craft disgorged from the Nemesis Rising's putrid belly and swarmed after the shuttle, bringing it down in a defunct power station in the moon's ash wastes.

Bullert alone survived the crash, ensconced in a stasis pod. Corpsemaker recovery efforts were hampered by shocking new combatant: a shield host of the Adeptus Custodes under the command of Shield Captain Valdus Tychor. It was assumed that the Custodes' efforts were on behalf of the lord general's safety, though the true nature of their involvement in the war was unknown at the time, and would not become obvious until years later. The golden warriors of the Emperor struck the Corpsemakers as they entered the power station, lancing them from the saddles of their jetbikes and striking with castellan axes as they teleported directly into the plague Marines' midst.

As the battle raged, the Nemesis Rising bombarded the moon with viral ordnance, withering PDF forces and civilians alike. The spires of the helium lords corroded and fell in one night, and the lowest levels of the moon's lone hive turned feral upon one another as their kin turned to ravening plague zombies.

Immune to the rapidly toxifying atmosphere, the Custodians fought on, though they suffered losses. Custodian Guard fell to acidic chemical weapons. Plague knives found weak points in auramite armor, and bolts fell like hail. Bileheart himself took to the field, dueling with the Emperor's guardians, his plaguereaper Gravedeath clashing blade-to-blade with guardian spears. After grueling hours of fighting, the Custodes fell back, disappearing in a flash of teleportation. The Corpsemakers recovered Bullert's stasis casket and brought him back aboard their flagship for interrogation.

The Imperial fleet, realizing that the Corpsemakers had left their flagship so far out of alignment, made speed to intercept the flagship and pushed it back into the system's outermost reaches, to recuperate at the Wailing Moon with the rest of its attendant fleet.

Battle for the Black Sands Installation
Mechanicus outposts dotted the surface of Diorton VI, working day and night to strip the moon of all its worth. The largest of these was the Black Sands Installation. Also known as Outpost Beta-Epsilon 462, Black Sands was maintained by the forces of Gyraxis.

Ghor Dranas recognized the iconography of Gyraxis and hoped to lure Xanthos out to take revenge for his defeat on Ladenus. Harrying strikes from the Void Reavers quickly overwhelmed the blockhouses and gun servitors as the Traitor Astartes began pushing on the main facility. The goal of the Void Reavers was to render the outpost completely inoperable in a bid to disrupt Imperial arms manufacturing in the sub.

Manipul Deltus deployed around the main pumping compound of the Black Sands Installation. The terrain of the installation worked against the defenders. The loose sand made it impossible for the defenders to establish a firing line as they tried to repel the repeated charges by chaos space marines. As the enemy advanced Xanthos ordered Trans-Sulpur pipelines sabotaged at precisely calculated intervals, unleashing black clouds of corrosive noxeous gasses. The gas ate through armor soft seals and rapidly corroded power sources leaving the Ghor Dranas’ men vulnerable to calculated galvanic rifle volleys. The attack looked like it was stalling until the Void Reavers called in their reserve. With the distinctive crack of teleportation the three obliterators of (squad name) appeared out of the churning sulphur clouds. Skitarii and Ballistarii were blasted apart en masse as the Obliterator cult blew holes in the Tech Priests’ lines. The holes created by the Obliterators were exploited by the Daemon Prince and he crashed through the thinning Skitari, rending them limb from limb. Only the timely arrival of Destroyer clade Destroyer-clade Hexense-Vho-9 and their heavy grav cannons stopped the demon prince long enough for Hexense to reform his scattered skitarii to push back the Void Reapers and ensure the outpost stayed in imperial hands.

The price of this victory was heavy. Half of Manipul deltus had been destroyed in the fighting, including their detachment of Ironstrider Ballistari. Ghor Dranas had been wounded by Hexense Theta’s magna rail cannon once again, ensuring the Daemon prince would seek to settle the score soon.

Ambush at Zorvan Flats, Diorton VI
After the rebuff from the assault on the Black Sands installation, the Void Reavers sought to consolidate their forces in the Zorvan flats region of Diorton VI, roughly a hundred kilometers from the moon's primary refineries. These refineries were a clear lynchpin objective for either force in the war for the system, as the reactor coolant created there would allow the voidships of each side to run high-energy maneuvers for longer durations without a risk of overload. Sensing this, Imperial high command sent the majority of Vostroyan Army Group A to defend the refinery, including elements of the 68th and 82nd Armored, 33rd Superheavy, 616th Mechanized, and 300th, 356th, and 405th Shock Infantry regiments. Also accompanying the defense effort were forces of the 16th Tectonian Magma Guard Armored, whose own task force had been stranded in the Diorton system since the invasion began.

The shock infantry regiments landed at the primus refinery on schedule, but the 616th Mechanized and the rest of the armored regiments were incorrectly deployed at the defunct refinery secundus, over two hundred kilometers distant. With the Lord General missing in action and communication with the fleet sporadic in the face of the worsening void situation, it fell to Colonel Toschenko to rally the regiments and move them overland to their correct landing zone. Unfortunately, this path led them directly through the Zorvan flats.

The traitor knights of House Vextrix ambushed the Imperial armored column with the aid of the daemon engines of the Void Reavers. The ambush struck at the center of the column, engaging forces of the 68th Armored and 33rd Superheavy. Spread over multiple kilometers, and with only one mechanized infantry regiment to supply close-in support, the Imperial armor was eviscerated. Burning hulks dammed escape routes, and chaotic scrap-code rendered the vox network an unintelligible slurry. The infantry of the 616th bore the worst casualties of the assault--of nearly a thousand soldiers, only two hundred made it out unscathed. Whole companies were sacrificed to slow down the heretic Astartes, Toschenko spending their lives to buy what precious armor he could time to escape the whirlwind.

The ambush lasted an hour. By the time the traitors' ammunition reserves were spent, the Imperial force was able to escape with less than half its original weight of armor--just thirty-five tanks out of its original ninety, and many of those barely functional. Of the 33rd Superheavy, only three Baneblade-class vehicles were left functional. The rest of the vehicles, and their crews, were left behind as food for the unholy engines of Ghor Dranas's horde.

The siege of Refinery Primus, when it came, would be a desperate battle indeed.