V3 Chapter 69: The Great Enemy of Chaos Has Arrived
Once Duvette and Huron finished their discussion, he soon left the Thorn Palace with the thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna.
By the time they stepped back out onto the plaza, the sky over Badab Prime had grown stranger still. Shifting colours churned behind the clouds, and every so often the sky itself seemed to warp for an instant, leaving no one quite certain what they'd just seen.
The barrier between the Warp and realspace was growing thinner by the moment.
Under conditions like these, Chaos rituals that would once have demanded vast sacrifice and lengthy preparation might now tear the veil of reality open at only the slightest cost, letting daemons walk the earth in truth.
Ordinary mortals could not even bear to look up at the sky for long.
Some grew dizzy and sick after only a few minutes of staring at it; any longer, and hallucinations and phantom voices might follow.
But to Duvette, it was little more than an unusual sight.
A warning of danger yet to come, and nothing more.
The piercing alarm still echoed across the Thorn Palace, as the Astral Claws and Badab's defenders continued shifting into position. Duvette stood at the edge of the plaza, waiting for the Thunderhawk gunship coming to collect him.
His conversation with Huron just now had given him a genuine picture of the defensive strength held by Badab Prime, Badab Secundus, and the orbital habitation station.
The mortal garrison numbers across these worlds and orbital installations had already climbed into the tens of millions.
Badab Prime alone held twenty-one million primary mortal defence troops.
Under full emergency mobilisation, Huron could push that figure as high as sixty million in a short span of time.
Sixty million.
The number alone struck Duvette as almost absurd.
Most of them were, of course, nothing more than ordinary Planetary Defence Force troops, hive militia, and hastily mobilised auxiliaries. Many had never lived through a real large-scale war, and both their training and equipment varied wildly.
But so long as they followed Huron's orders, and Huron followed his, then under the influence of Duvette's abilities, everything would change entirely.
[Flesh Engine]
[King of War]
[Iron Crusade]
And on top of that, the passive enhancement built up over time from his accumulated campaign Marks.
Under the combined effect of these powers, tens of millions of mortals would gain enhancements beyond imagining, in a very short span of time.
Their strength, reaction speed, endurance, and marksmanship would all shift dramatically.
Sixty million mortals, briefly rivaling Astartes in capability.
It was a concept almost impossible to hold in one's head.
Even if the enemy truly tore the veil of reality open and summoned a horde of daemons, for the duration of Duvette's abilities his forces could meet them with sheer weight of numbers alone.
And besides, Duvette had almost forgotten the last time he'd fought a defensive positional battle at all; he was always either attacking or counterattacking. [Scorched Earth Ironguard], granted by the Sabbat Worlds Honour Medal, would finally get its use.
So long as the Legion under his command held a defensive line in a given area for over an hour, the physical structure of the cover in that area would reinforce itself, and remain reinforced until they left.
This ground defence, he could safely say, would hold like an unbreakable fortress.
What actually worried Duvette was an entirely different problem.
Sixty million people were, after all, no single unified body.
They came from different hive cities, different towns, different families, different regiments. Plenty already carried old grudges against one another. Some officers held mutual hatred, some units had let discipline rot, and some of the people involved were simply no good to begin with.
In ordinary times, they were only ordinary mortals, and the damage any one of them could do was limited enough.
But the moment these people gained strength far beyond the ordinary, all at once, problems that would once have amounted to no more than a brawl or a scuffle could spiral out of control fast.
Revenge.
Plunder.
Even outright arson and slaughter.
If Huron couldn't maintain control over these people, hundreds of thousands, even millions, going out of control at once could prove harder to handle than the daemons themselves.
The thought made Duvette frown despite himself.
Numbers mattered, of course.
But what truly decided whether an army could bring its strength to bear was always discipline and organisation, and nothing else.
The roar of the Thunderhawk gunship soon reached him from a distance.
A great wash of air swept across the plaza, and Duvette's coat snapped and billowed in the gale.
He glanced over at the thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna beside him.
The true backbone of the ground fighting would, in the end, still fall to the battle-hardened elite Imperial forces and the Astartes.
As things stood, Duvette had four mortal combat groups under his hand, including the 112th, his own directly-commanded force, for a combined total of three hundred and fifty thousand elite mortal troops.
On top of that, thousands of armoured vehicles.
The Astral Claws, the Mantis Warriors, the Lamenters, and the other Astartes companies still attached to Guilliman's own fleet came to more than four thousand five hundred Astartes altogether.
The Mechanicus's Knight houses and the Titan Legion had likewise entered combat readiness.
Huron, for his part, held two hundred thousand elite Badab Guard, along with a great many fixed defence platforms scattered across every world of significance.
It was a vast ground force.
Duvette genuinely found it hard to imagine what kind of army the enemy could possibly field that would outnumber them in any meaningful way.
Unless it was a Tyranid Hive Fleet coming for them.
Still, caution was warranted.
The initiative, for now, still lay with the enemy.
The Thunderhawk gunship touched down slowly.
Duvette and the Shadow Wolves boarded, and the gunship lifted off at once.
Through the side viewport, the Thorn Palace quickly shrank away below.
Seen from high above, Badab Prime's hive cities, fortresses, gun batteries, and star ports looked like a single vast map, one that had already been entirely given over to war.
Higher still, the Macragge's Honour waited for them.
Duvette looked at the great Gloriana-class vessel, and the last of the stray thoughts in his mind finally settled.
Whatever happened.
They had done everything there was to do to prepare.
Guilliman stood on the command bridge of the Macragge's Honour.
The whole bridge was a hive of activity.
Reports and information poured in without pause, screen after data-screen refreshing with new content.
The data-screen before Guilliman turned over a fresh report almost every ten seconds.
Fleet status.
Mobilisation reports from every Badab world.
Shifts in the Warp storm.
Navigator reports.
Mechanicus monitoring results.
He drew what truly mattered from all of it at speed, then issued new orders in turn.
This was the scene Duvette walked into as he stepped onto the bridge.
He came to stand at Guilliman's side and offered the proper salute.
"The ground defence arrangements with Huron are settled."
Guilliman did not look at him.
His eyes stayed fixed on the data-screen before him.
"Ground command remains entirely yours for this engagement."
Even as he spoke, he raised a hand and dismissed an unimportant report.
"But the moment anything happens that you can't handle, report it to me at once."
Duvette knew exactly what he meant by that.
He nodded.
"Understood."
Guilliman went on working through the reports.
Duvette was about to say something more when an urgent voice suddenly rang out from the other side of the bridge.
"My lord!"
An astropath spun around sharply.
"Massive energy readings at multiple Mandeville points along the system edge!"
The mood on the bridge shifted in an instant.
Guilliman's head snapped up at once.
"All hands to combat stations!"
The order swept through the entire Macragge's Honour in moments.
The whole fleet began moving right behind it.
Weapon arrays powered up.
Void shield output climbed.
Fighter craft went to standby.
Ship after ship shifted position, falling into the battle formation already laid out beforehand.
Duvette walked to the viewport.
Far off in the deep void, the Warp storm still stained the darkness with shifting colour.
He narrowed his eyes.
Just what scale of fleet would dare come charging straight into the Badab system like this?
Guilliman now had, at his command, one Gloriana-class battleship, three battlecruisers, and a great many cruisers, light cruisers, battle barges, and Mechanicus arks besides.
Not to mention the Iron Ring Huron had already begun building, still not fully formed.
Any enemy hoping to come charging straight in would first have to weather the full weight of this main fleet, and the entire Badab defence network besides.
Duvette looked off into the distance.
The energy readings at those Mandeville points kept climbing.
It looked as though the answer was about to arrive.
If you're enjoying the story, toss a Power Stone or drop a review — it helps more than you'd think.
Advance chapters → patreon.com/Eatinpieces