[Dan296]

“Certo! Captain! Are your men prepared?”
“Yes Inquisitor.”
“Yes Mi’lord.”
“Give the order, Certo. Captain, prepare the stormtroopers for drop!”

“Run’al, anything to report?”
“No Shas’ui, quite. As always. The Gue’vesa in the hills do nothing.”
“Good to hear. I will check back in two hours.”
The fire warrior sighed. He hated this sentry duty. The loyalist Gue’vesa had done nothing in weeks. They made a few raids, burnt some buildings, but did little damage. The world was under the Tau’Va and nothing a few guerillas could do would change that.

“Troopers, prepare yourselves. This is a high-altitude jump, and we are coming in hot. Do not activate your chutes until after the Astartes have finished their buissiness. You will drift out of the landing zone and get caught by incoming. None of you want that, including me, but if it happens its your own damn fault. Malekai gave me this pack to look after personally, with instructions that if I fall one of you are to pick it up and insure its safety. I don’t know what it is but whatever purpose it serves we will find out soon enough. Now lock n load!”
The inquisitorial storm troopers coaxed as many metallic sounds out of their hell-guns as they could in reponse to the cliché pre-battle speech.
“Hey Marto, the captain is such a drama queen.”
“Tell me something I don’t know Grox face. I wonder what that pack thing is though.”
The Navy Taxi swept above the tau-controlled world’s capital, and out of it tumbled dozens of stormtrooper hit-squads.

“Praise be to the Auns, without which the Tau’va could not continue. Praise be the……Shas’Ui! Come here, I see something!”
“What is it? Why do you interrupt the daily rituals.”
“Look! The skies are full of hundreds of black dots.”
“Hmmph. Perhaps the fleet is performing maneuvers. Think naught of it.”
As they turned back and went inside the command post, they failed to see the falling drop troops out-shined by a dozen flashes, even higher up.

The Dark Redemption rocked as the full broadside of lance batteries were fired again and again, lighting up choice targets for a less-then subtle knock on the tau’s door. Across the broad plains of the outlying industrial world in the Baetica system, fire reached into the atmosphere as communication stations, barracks, munitions dumps, and outposts ceased to exist under the punishing fire of the Revilers Battle Barge.
Certo, outfitted in his terminator armour, stood in the depths of the massive warship.
“Certo, are you sure these work?”
“Please Malekai, though we’ve fought together many times, I can assure you I have arrived to battle with this very device a dozen times. I just wish your troopers would hurry up…”

“Marto, look at that! The Astartes really know their business huh?”
“Well, Keeg, that’s why they’re superhuman and we are not.”
“Now I know what a guardsman feels when they look at us.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
Beneath the descending stormtroopers, the capital city, which in reality was little more then a starport, the governors mansion and other aristocratic homes, blocks of warehouses, and the slums of the dock workers, fires burned in a dozen places. The world had become a tau stronghold, and this city was their main holding point. Break it, and the rest would crumble.