Chapter 45: The Planet Exploded!
The Alpha Fleet moved like a scalpel through the disorganized xenos forces. Within days, they'd cleared the immediate vicinity, exploiting the lack of coordination between the Randan vessels and the biological warships.
The aliens couldn't agree on tactics and paid for it with their lives.
Drop pods hammered down onto the Multi-legged Bugs' primary world. Gunboats and atmospheric craft followed in waves, establishing forward bases across the contested surface.
War consumed the system's third planet. Space, sky, and ground, every layer became a battlefield.
The Multi-legged Bugs weren't individually dangerous, and their weapons were crude, but their numbers were staggering. The landing forces, Space Marines and Imperial Army alike, found themselves grinding through an endless tide.
Once enough alien ships were destroyed, Omega turned his attention planetside. He ordered the fleet to target the hive clusters directly.
Lance strikes stabbed down from orbit. The first volley hit a massive xenos hive-city dead center, detonating the brood chambers in a series of thunderous explosions that rippled outward for kilometers.
After a dozen bombardments, the dozen largest hives were cratered wastelands stretching hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Millions of Multi-legged Bugs vaporized instantly. Ash clouds rose into the atmosphere while shockwaves flattened everything within a thousand kilometers. Surviving bugs were hurled skyward by the blast waves, their formations shattered, their coordination broken.
The Space Marines seized the opening. Leading Imperial Army regiments, they established solid defensive positions across multiple continents.
Two months later, the orbital battle was won. Every alien vessel had been reduced to wreckage.
Omega descended to join his forces at a Mechanicus stronghold on the surface.
From the fortified walls, he could see the enemy clearly, an ocean of green chitin stretching to the horizon. Multi-legged Bugs surged forward in their millions while airborne variants darkened the sky above.
The Imperial response was overwhelming, gunships and fighters carved through the aerial swarms. Missiles, Basilisk artillery pieces, and heavy mortars hammered the ground forces without pause. The earth trembled under constant bombardment for a thousand kilometers in every direction.
Explosions tore gaps in the xenos tide. Tank batteries fired in disciplined volleys; they didn't even need to aim. The bugs were too numerous to miss.
Defenders on the walls added las-fire and bolter rounds to the maelstrom, cutting down whatever survived to reach effective range.
Despite the carnage, the bugs kept coming. Corpses piled into mountains hundreds of meters high, yet the horizon still churned with fresh waves. Tens of millions strong, the swarm showed no signs of breaking.
A month of this grinding attrition passed. Omega surveyed the killing field, endless mounds of dead xenos, and still they came. Imperial Army casualties were mounting to unsustainable levels.
He opened a Vox channel to the fleet. "Begin systematic orbital bombardment. Eliminate the hive structures one at a time. Exercise caution, I need this world intact enough to be useful."
Aboard the ten-kilometer flagship, the Imperial Army general commanding fleet operations went pale. His bridge officers exchanged worried glances.
The order walked a razor's edge. Destroy the enemy completely while preserving the planet's habitability.
One atomic weapon might crater a few hundred kilometers, manageable. But hundreds of strikes? The cumulative effect could poison the entire biosphere, rendering it beyond recovery.
Still, the general understood the calculation. The xenos showed no signs of breaking, and the ground forces couldn't sustain these losses indefinitely.
"Acknowledged," he replied.
Five hundred warships assumed bombardment positions. Coordination officers cross-referenced surface scans with targeting data, marking priority strikes across the planet.
Ten simultaneous lance strikes crashed down. Hive nodes and millions of bugs vanished in incandescent fire. Aftershocks rippled across hundreds of kilometers.
After waiting for the crust to stabilize, they resumed bombardment the next day.
A month into the systematic strikes, Omega noticed something wrong. The sky had changed color, grey and black, choked with ash. Rain fell constantly now, dark and oily.
He immediately ordered a halt.
Too much bombardment would tip the planet past recovery. Better to slow down than render the world permanently uninhabitable.
The campaign ground on for four more months. Hundreds of millions of bugs died. The corpse-mountains grew so high they rivaled the fortress walls. The terrain itself had been reshaped by alien dead.
Finally, the scattered survivors were hunted down and eliminated. The Alpha Legion controlled thousands of kilometers of secured territory.
Carefully controlled orbital strikes continued destroying hive infrastructure, using the planet's own geography to channel and divide the remaining swarms for easier extermination.
Thunder rolled across blackened skies. Lightning flickered through clouds that looked less like weather and more like coagulated smoke. Gale-force winds screamed across a surface covered in ash and debris.
From orbit, the damage was apparent; bombardment craters hundreds of kilometers wide pockmarked the visible hemisphere. Fields of xenos corpses blanketed plains, hills, and mountains. Shattered hive-cities stood as broken monuments.
The six-month campaign had altered the global climate. Uncontrolled fires and debris clouds alone would have been enough, but the orbital bombardment had pushed the ecosystem to the breaking point.
Rain fell in sheets, not water, but black-grey sludge contaminated with ash and dissolved chitin. In the torrential downpour, the planet fell eerily quiet.
Runoff gathered into streams. Streams swelled into rivers. Rivers fed churning seas that slowly consumed floating xenos corpses by the millions.
At a major fortress on the central plains, Omega stood at full height in his power armor, watching the sky's violent fluctuations.
He extended one gauntleted hand and watched rain pool in his palm, nearly black, thick with suspended debris and fragments of bug matter.
His expression hardened behind his helm.
Through the command vox, he issued orders to his company commanders. "Initiate Full withdrawal. All personnel return to orbit immediately. Institute decontamination protocols for every soldier. I want thorough medical screenings across the board."
"Acknowledged!" Skor, Norton, and the others responded immediately, relaying the evacuation order.
Thunderhawks and atmospheric craft lifted entire regiments through the poisoned clouds, ferrying them to the waiting warships above.
The Imperial forces withdrew in good order. The world below would need decades of natural purification before anyone could safely walk its surface again.
On the flagship bridge, Omega studied the debris field, fragments of biological warships and countless xenos corpses drifting through the void. Despite their numbers, they looked insignificant against the emptiness of space.
The hololithic display displayed planetary conditions in real time. The atmosphere churned chaotically. Cloud formations thickened by the hour. Near the coasts, tornadic systems were forming.
The biosphere was collapsing.
Imperial Army losses had been severe, bad enough to justify the massive bombardment that finally broke the swarm.
After a year of continuous operations, Omega made an unusual call, 'no immediate warp jump.
The Alpha Legion would rest in orbit for a month, time to assess casualties, allow recovery, and give the Mechanicus forces a chance to conduct proper fleet maintenance.
Three days into the rest period, casualty reports arrived.
A significant number of mortal soldiers had contracted serious illnesses.
Actually, the problem had existed for months, but in numbers too small to notice amid battlefield losses. Many afflicted soldiers had died in combat before symptoms could be documented.
The Magos Biologis who'd succeeded Sage Russell was Rex, his former student. The tech-priest wore tattered robes over an almost entirely mechanized body. Four servo-arms extended from his back, constantly adjusting and recalibrating. His mechadendrite eye rotated as he compiled medical data.
"My Lord," Rex said, his vox-augmented voice flat and clinical. "The Astartes remain unaffected. Their armor's recycling systems have provided complete environmental isolation."
He gestured at the data-slate displaying casualty figures. "However, since the Imperial Army operated with compromised protection. The planetary environment contaminated both their air supply and food during the campaign."
"Respiratory illness, digestive failure, chemical poisoning, dozens of vectors, all stemming from extended exposure."
Omega studied the numbers in silence. Thousands sick. Hundreds are already dead from complications.
They'd won the planet. But the cost kept climbing even after the guns fell silent.
[End of Chapters]