HALLSGATT
LIBERATION
Alphon Legher had found himself on his ass behind an over-turned miner's cart, ducking low instinctively to keep away from the savage ambush he and his troop had walked into. The sound of solid slugs ricocheting and spanking off of the thick-bellied cart was deafening, but the cover it offered was worth the din. He'd lost track of Bruno and Pohg a few moments before, and an overwhelming amount of small 0rdinance had been playing havoc with the ground-level vox. He let out an impressive curse, and spewed a hail of red las-fire over his cover.
Peering over his shoulder, Legher found himself staring slackly at a pair of large figures bounding past his cover. They were enormous, and they made his guts freeze. One of them paused, and turned back to face him; bestial eyes set into a goat-like face crowned with twisting black horns. Unthinking, he fired his lasrifle blindly on full auto, spraying the pair with a hail of red illumination.
A sudden change in atmospheric pressure popped Legher's ears, and he swore again - he hadn't expected anything in the air, and he sure as frig' didn't have anything to deal with it. Shielding his eyes and raising his gaze into the growing dust-gales, he made out the form of an incoming lander. The ugly snub-nosed carrier careened in at high speed, flaring retro thrusters struggling to stabilize the craft's descent. Alphon smiled, and immediately coughed out a mouthful of grit and sand. On the nose of the craft was painted a two-headed eagle. It was weather-beaten, and had been nearly scorched off by the craft's ludicrous entry vector, but it was all Alphon needed to see.
The lander came to a stop with landing gear already deployed, dangling like squat reverse-jointed legs wrapped in vines of hydraulic and oil cables. Alphon watched as hatch after hatch dropped open just above the ground. Men clad in dirty black uniforms exited the nearly hovering craft with hurried leaps. They were grizzly, and had an earthy smell to them as they filed around Alphon. They ran low with wood-stocked lasguns held skyward, and he heard a large officer yell, 'Do you boys want to live forever!?'. The call was answered with an incoherent and terrifying shout from the rest of the troopers. He had never seen men hailing from another world, and had always imagined that they might somehow have looked more... apart, from what he knew. These men, however, with their pale skin and scruffy beards were somehow more terrifying than he could have imagined simple men to be.
Those men were just the beginning. Three weeks later, a landing force of more than 12,000 imperial guardsmen with accompanying armor and support elements followed in their wake. Those three weeks were bloodier than the rest of the six-month conflict in it's entirety.
Heavy stubber rounds whipped overhead like murderous sleet, exploding rockrete and old brick, as Berezi struggled to set up his own heavy weapon. Rodol lay beside him, readying an enormous drum of ammunition for their heavy bolter. Their vox units crackled. Boro, their scout, was reporting movement - infantry heading their way down the avenue in real numbers. Their entire battalion had been stationed in this hellhole, to reinforce the local scratch companies. The planet, Hallsgatt, had only become a place of note when their substantial mining operations uncovered a disturbing geographic-anomoly. It was a hole, really. An unchartable, seemingly bottomless hole - which would seem a rather impossible thing inside of a planet. It was a dark place, that abyss.
Berezi crawled to the lip of their earthen barricade, and confirmed the report; Op-for incoming, heavy infantry supported by light biped walkers. Enormous, tattoed biceps straining, the gunner heaved their heavy bolter into place, so that the tripod found suitable purchase and Rodol could load from relative safety. He grinned, and pumped the lever-trigger. His black beret was nearly vibrating around his skull as the gun barked out fist-sized shells in a practiced suppressing arc. A cluster of cultists in crude metal armor found their courage and darted across the street, twenty metres south; right in Berezi's sights. The first trooper managed to stumble out just ahead of the tracking bolts, but his comrades weren't so lucky. The second caught a bolt in his chest and was rendered to chunks, which froze the remaining two in their tracks. One fell as if asleep, his legs removed at the knee, and the last was sprayed with organic and metal debris which threw him back into the cover he'd just emerged from. It was a shooting gallery for now, but the two Guardsmen knew it wouldn't last. Eventually, the enemy numbers would begin to tell.
Boro watched the unfolding action through the scope of his longlas. Berezi and Rodol were fighting like wild dogs, but he knew it was their way - Berezi especially, he got the itch. The world was almost quiet from his vantage point, six stories up in the guts of a remarkably intact logis-hab stack. In his peripherals, he could see where workers had left half-full tanks of caffeine and sheafs of in-bound data yet to be processed as they fled the city central. He focused again on the street below, and caught his breath.
'Shade to Shadow, Aleska is the word,' Berezi tapped his mic twice in response; confirmed, but unable to vocalize. 'Berezi, there's a nasty friggin' traitor marine looking right at me, fifty meters south of you and heading your way,'
