Night Lords on Coruscant

[Kais Klip]

Wasn't sure where this is meant to go; its fan-fiction, but it's heresy related, so I was shy of the Fan Fiction crowd. Not even sure if it's acceptable on this forum, but I had both time and liquor on my hands, and it would be a shame not to share such a incredible waste of time and breach of IP.

I tried my best to channel my inner Bligh.

So, without further ado, I give you Star Wars vs 30k, Night Lords vs Jedi:

--------------------------------

Flotsam

The Coruscian system came to be discovered by a sizeable shard-element of the 328th Expedition Fleet, a force fleeing from the catastrophic failure of the Mnemonic Purgation campaign in the Thorchan cluster to the galactic north-east. The Mechanicum Sensori ships immediately registered anomalous readings. After collating their data in concert with the fleet's Navigators, the surviving fleet command echelons, rallied by the ageing Shard-Commander Vandarion Veth of the VIIIth legion, were immediately informed that their precarious situation was not yet resolved.

Their headfirst tumble into the warp, initiated to escape the vengeful Mnemonic Generation Ships, scrambled the calibration sensoria of the fleet's navigational systems so that neither the magi nor the navigator personnel could precisely pinpoint were they were. Moreover, a sizeable portion of their fleet was missing, even after the days spent waiting still in the cold void to collate navigational data.

The foremost thesis attained by the collaborating parties postulated that while successful entry was made in a more or less coherent fleet pattern, it was upon attempting to crash out of the warp that a sizeable portion of the fleet merely skimmed off its skin instead, slicing into the undefined nether-space that was neither real space, nor the full chimeric nightmare of the warp. They were caught in a bubble of realspace, it was reasoned, burrowed under the skin of reality like a richochet without the strength to penetrate into the meat within.

To make matters worse, the senior Mechanicum contingent never came through with the rest of the fleet. All that Commander Veth had was the senior nobilite of the Navigator houses, as well as a scattering of senior Martian adepts found on Legion ships. It was explained that until the correct navigational calibration could be made, a warp jump could merely drive them deeper into the dermis of non-reality.

The great astropathic beacon of terra, the ever present judging vigil on every expeditionary fleet, was both nowhere and everywhere at once, psychically diffracted by the skin of the bubble to reflect from a thousand different directions. With the scout ships reporting a potential jewel of the world up ahead, fleet command made the decision to make the most of the situation while the two houses on board worked to find a solution with which to rally the fleet.

When the reports came in, the Sensori ship command was officially reprimanded for their findings, and another a Sensori squadron was detached from the fleet to confirm their analysis. The collated data, however, came a second time, unchanged, and the findings were nothing short of miraculous, spurning the rest of the fleet to race faster across the system. A tiny system, with a solitary dwarf sun about which orbited a lone planet. But what a world. A hive city covering an entire globe, with the potential economic might and the manpower of trillions meant that this system, should it be shifted back into realspace, would be able to lynchpin an empire to rival Guilliman's in size. And this entire honour would be pinned on the breast of the VIIIth legion. The previous failures of the fleet would be laughable to consider in light of such an accomplishment.

An atmosphere of jubilation and eager haste overtook the expeditionary fleet, encouraged by an extremely favourable environment in the form of not so much as a picket fleet or tertiary-strength defense station covering the world. Void-capable craft, tiny in size compared to even the sleek shoals of destroyers found within the fleet, were aplenty, and the identified industrial mass-conveyors drifting through the system had not a particulate tendril of detectable warp-trace to convey recent warp passage. It was reasoned that this was an isolated world that had found itself surrounded by nothing but nightmares an impossible distance away, and deigned to turn its attention to itself.

Commander Veth, feeling persecuted by the positive atmosphere throughout the fleet, deigned to personally descend to the planets surface with the first Imperial delegation beckoned by established communication. One empire sent its welcome to another. It was only later, that the full meaning of "Empire" would become apparent to the expeditionary fleet. The shuttle descended onto one of the major voidport facilities, a gleaming parade of enamel-covered warriors and a million-host of citizenry hoarding together to welcome the visitors in a jubilant eruption of sound.

There is no direct account of what happened on the surface, the first remembrancer picters and vox-logs merely spooling up before disappointment struck. The following, then, cannot possibly be more than mere allegory.


Lion in a Banquet Hall


It is said that not one Imperial foot ever stood upon Coruscant in peace before the world was plunged into the fires of war. Considering the view before him, Lord-Commander Veth is credited with considerable grace and patience in allowing the landing ramp to lower, wishing to pass judgment on the world with his own eyes, unobstructed by viewport or gun-monitor.

Pausing in the hatchway, Shard-Commander Veth spent a moment taking in the thousands of faces arranged before him, before turning back inside, and ordering the ramp closed. The shuttle departed a moment later. In a glance, Veth had deigned the world to war. No objection was raised either in the shuttle, or upon his return. This was not the fleet's first expedition, and fleet command knew that with a society so pockmarked with xeno integration, no cleansing geno-agreement could ever be reached without prior bloodshed clear enough to demonstrate Imperial commitment to its demands.

When he returned to the fleet hanging above, he was pleased with its progress. Noospheric transmissions from the planets surface had been torn from void space, poured over and analysed by vast, ship-length banks of Mechanicum logic engines. Everything from military targets and seats of government, to decade-long spools of entertainment media and centuries-old radio shades roaming the system were snatched, subsumed and analysed for military data. The Mechanicum elements in the fleet, counselled patience to Veth. They wished to conclude the entirety of their Sensori findings regarding this world, the void around it, and the warp bubble without.

Xeno presence posed a curious implication. Their presence, in such vast numbers and varied type, implied system permeability. The next deduction to be agreed upon, was if navigational permeability of the bubble was merely one way. Could it be, perhaps, that the system served as the centre of a warp-current gyre of sorts, in which navigational flotsam gathered together, unable to pierce the circling current to get out?

Legion command retorted that these were questions to be answered later. With the fleet resources at hand, compliance of this world could take centuries by conventional means, decades perhaps by more draconian methods. Besides, the fleet had no wish, nor need, to go anywhere. They were a Nostraman lion, washed by flood waters into a subterranean feast banquet. If it need be, they were content to spend eternity taking the world. No expeditionary fleet could hope for greater glory than the prize before them. Their names would stand alongside those very fleets that had stumbled upon the Emperors scattered sons. Shard-Commander Veth had the vision to take the world and put his name to it, and the Mechanicum would have all the time it wished to obsess and pour over tangential data streams while the fleet worked to bring about its glory.

Vandorian Veth had almost half a chapter of the VIIIth legion at hand; the entirety of the vaunted "Vampyr" Battalion, as well as a trio of well-regulated and prestigious Imperial Army regiments. Although the Shard-Commander himself regarded the mortal elements of his command fit for little more than "scarecrow picketing", they nonetheless represented a sizeable military force capable of claiming a secondary-class system by themselves. Moreover, the Night Lord "Vampyr" battalion was almost exclusively aerially-transported infantry, backed up by a sizeable portion of high-collateral artillery pieces, including great thermobaric missile batteries capable of putting an entire city to flame and damning a subcontinent to a month-long pall of night. The lack of strength represented via armoured assets was a pleasant note of coincidence, given the little contribution armour contingents would be able to offer within a battle zone of this type.

Within an hour, an appropriate strategy was formulated and deigned into effect upon Veth's approval. With the majority of the human population, which numbered in the astronomical 600 billion, deemed acceptably within Imperial human gene-tolerance, restrictions to the damage able to be incurred on the planet's military establishment were non-existent; they could all be put to the sword, for they could be replaced many times over in but a handful of years. The same went for its infrastructure; the planets immediate source of worth was its unparalleled population number.

The strategy followed standard VIIIth legion stratagem tendencies when put to Compliance duties. Deduced military barracks, mustering grounds and surface naval facilities would be swept completely clean by orbital fire. Secondary targets for fleet ordinance included high-density population zones. The above would murder any grazing military assets, as well as establish a preferred level of stress on the planet's civil management which would hopefully tax a portion of its remaining military strength.

The fleet's ground assets would be deployed at key points of primary surface and inter-planet government infrastructure which were mainly centred in one area of the globe, with two-thirds of the expedition's Astartes strength forming the first wave. Shard-Commander Veth's mortal elements would be held in reserve, and serve as an apt instrument of embarrassment should any of the committed Astartes ground forces request reinforcement.

When the level of the atmospheric fallout reached an amount necessary to occlude naval sensors and blind orbital support, a flight of the legion's renowned Samsatian Falcon fighter squadron would dive through the ash cover, identify surviving concentrations of Coruscian military assets, preferably those besieging legion elements, and act as eyes for the guns of the naval fleet hanging above.

Notable cultural references to a formidable warrior-caste of telekines were reported by fleet analysts as well as seconded by its attached magi detachment, thus a level of caution was emphasised in the hopes to prevent another catastrophe brought about by rampant telepathic witchery which the expeditionary fleet had so recently fled. The ground forces were instructed to immediately report any instance of coherent mobilisation of the planet's civilian element, at which point the fleet's guns, would damn the geographical sector in question with indiscriminate and overwhelming orbital bombardment. The short term plan stood alongside standard operating procedure. Strategic capitulation would be achieved through the seizure of key civil facilities.

However, the plan for long-term, sustainable social compliance left something to be desired. Simply put, a coherently sized hive city of this size was never before tackled by imperial strategists, although certain approaches were formulated by more eccentric schools of thought. The following was the best Veth's brightest minds could come up with:

Human social compliance, at least to the level required for sustainable imperial government and tithe implementation, would be achieved by using economic means to turn the populace upon itself. Economically ruinous levels of bounty would be offered for every xeno head brought to the towering administratum temples throughout the mega hive, literally staining the very money of the economy with the blood of xenos. Economic hyperinflation would be encouraged, increasing acts of xeno code would become necessary for the common Coruscian citizen. A significant death rate of these every-day bounty hunters was expected and welcomed. These deaths, almost all at the hands of the prayed-upon population, would foster a perpetuating cycle of retribution that would birth legitimate discontent between the human and alien, breaking apart a population that had existed in unity for thousands of years.

The briefing continued by outlining how the growing resentment was expected to segregate the human and xeno into geographically distinct locations, which would in turn be corralled, and eradicated block by towering block by as a christening action for the mortal regiments raised upon the world. Coruscant would birth the finest city-fight regiments the Imperium, and this would all be brought about in a decade thanks for the VIIIth legion. No generation-long infiltration and political subversion would need to be undertaken as per the XXth legion playbook, and neither would the legion commit to its own bloodshed as the XIIth and XIVth would be prone to in its stead.

The first axiom of war, however, would prove to be the antithesis of this most ingenious plan.


Gedai


The fleet hangs in space, shadowed within the warm pall of night like bedside mites. No sooner does the last vessel drift into geosynchronous place that the first murder begins. The first crime against the world is both a targeted cull of military forces, as much as it is an indiscriminate orbital bombardment to stir public unrest. Spears of light slice and reave through sky-scratching urban stalagmites, reaping them at the knees and sending them crashing down on top of choking, bleeding heads. Hurtling megaton ordinance crashes through the sound barrier only seconds before uplifting whole blocks and slamming them back down onto imploding subterranean warrens. Cyclonic torpedoes peel off in silence to murder military installations and expected sites of organised resistance before they can even leave their crib. The urban jungle is murdered into a bog, ravenous firestorms consume whole streets worth of braying crowds before collapsing starcrapers bury them amidst carcinogenic ash. The sheer pall of ash damns any ariel transit on an entire half of the planet. Transit avenues, both large and small, are clogged by fiery, clinging death or the recently widowed, and the space available to rally together any sort of remaining civil reaction, military or not, is laughable.

Through the black sea of fire above their heads, alien filth and innocent denizens of Coruscant saw the clouds swell and bugle, first with ember light, then with thunder, before giving birth to hundreds of motes, scattering across the city like the expanding belly of road kill finally stretched to bursting point. A portion of these motes are nuclear torpedoes, and they form a vanguard far before the rest of the strike force spears its way through the hanging shroud of ash separating scraper and sky. Their timed, altitudinal detonations sear and blind anything seeking to coordinate ground-based macrolasers and scatterguns in an attempt to swat the deluge of threats plunging from the sky. Thrusters roaring, turbines howling and choking on the ash, the drop pods carrying the Imperial Angels of Death come next.

A score of drop pods converge on the structure identified by fleet intelligence as being the home warren of the warrior-witch cult present on Coruscant. Five drop pods slam down before the entrance to the towering, monolithic temple, and the emerging legionaries cull the scattered perimeter guard without breaking pace in their rush towards assigned positions. Of these five, threescore form up and storm the main entrance, culling the security forces with bolter fire and taking zero losses for their part. A scattering of drop pods slam around the perimeter of the temple, securing minor entry points, as well as the rear loading bays.

The assigned follow-up force, a mixed contingent of shield-bearing breacher units and veteran Dreadnought brothers is unexpectedly re-routed mid-drop elsewhere into the city. While their presence would have been appreciated in neutralising an unknown site filled with an unknown number of forces present, the commanding claw sergeant on-site makes the decision to press on, for economy of force, as well as a conservative approach towards the expenditure of its fighting force, is the VIIIth Legion way.

His second in command records his reasoning being "well to avoid being remembered as the Night Lord baying for reinforcements to assault an archival library." Nonetheless, the squads holding the perimeter are ordered to breach inwards, and to scatter their strength into two-man raiding pairs once they are sufficiently deep within the structure. A pair of Kharbydis claws drop onto the top of the structure, biting in deep with their meltas like a pair of ticks, before spilling their disease inside. Their modified missile pods aim skywards, and act as the primary projection of anti-air capability in the immediate area.

It must be noted that the first of the "Gedai" warlocks is met on the entrance, cut down by automated sentry turrets atop the midnight pods before the Astartes inside can even disembark. He is unnoted, just another unknown element slaughtered to secure the breach. The first warlock elements are reported only once breach is made, but it is not until the force is clearing the cramped, upper levels of the temple that the first legionary falls, being sown in half while his brothers are pinned down in a masterfully coordinated crossfire. The brother redeems his lacklustre performance by putting a bolter round into his murderer's back.

The Night Lords acknowledge the potency of the weapons carried by these figures, seeing it effortlessly bisect their fallen brother, and surmise it to be some sort of plasma-based bulkhead cutter weaponised for specifically dogmatic use. Meanwhile the defending forces acknowledge the tenacity of these invaders and make to retreat, not realising the Night Lords, rarely with a taste for stubborn headed casualties, already fled in order to "reposition to better prosecute the foe". Legionary casualties increase steadily rise over the course of clearing the temple warren, unable to avoid the slow but deadly plasma blasts of the security forces inside close confines.

A penetrating splinter of Night Lords encounter a substantial group of young witches, both human and xeno, attempting to flee the facility. Exchanging a pair of brothers to kill the elders accompanying them, the remaining VIIIth legion brethren are confounded by a display of plucky courage: They are assaulted by a number of the youngling survivors after they make to cull the aliens in their midst. Sidestepping their clumsy swipes, for the plasma sabres are found to be best avoided instead of parried, the Night Lords sieze the comically sized usurpers and shatter their fragile wrists within their grips to disarm them.

Throwing their pain-comatose forms into a maintenance chamber, the night lords seal it shut with one of the so-called sabres of light. Nostraman sigils, painted in mentor blood, are dabbed on the walls and act as the lambs' salvation from any roaming Legion splinter squads. The children are marked to be later retrieved by inductii serfs, and should they prove themselves to be worthy of legion rank, the senior Night Lord present decrees that those those precious few warlocks that survive induction trials and metamorphosis would be dubbed as one of the "Shattered Hands".

More experienced, battle-hardened warlocks are met with increasing regularity the further the splintered kill squads proceed into the temple. Before long, a group of life signs in close proximity flatline in quick succession by what is correctly postulated to be a senior figure, or an organised, counterattacking group within the witch coven. The Night Lords take this as a cue to regroup and lure their enemy into making a concentrated stand with the bulk of their forces, so that the final VIII legion stratagem may be sprung and the witch coven's fate finally sealed.

With night at its peak, and the Night Lords within the temple at the end of a score of feinted retreats, the situation begins to deteriorate. The regrouped mass of Legion squads find themselves pinned by overwhelming counterattack in the main archival library of temple, the Coruscian forces led by a number of the senior warrior-psykers. Having brought out the enemy in force, and now under imminent threat of being outflanked and overwhelmed, the legion trap is revealed by the remaining senior legion officer within.

With a depressed rune and a flash of light, a score of legion terminators scream into being onto the lobby concourse, the pinpoint accuracy and timing only offered by dedicated legion locus beacons affixed to every officer's helm. The "Vampyr" battalion terminator elite butcher the valiant charge mounted by a mass contingent of Gedai, whose potent weapons splutter and struggle to penetrate inches of plasma-tempered ceramic plate.

The remaining Coruscian personnel, cut down in droves by Astartes now rampaging amongst them, utterly and completely shatter in spirit and begin to rout. Turning to flee down the corridors in which they themselves only minutes before were pursing midnight-clad invaders, they found themselves face to face with the Night Lord squads inserted from the top of the temple, and, their genome having been confirmed to be within tolerable parameters, are only too ready to accept the offered surrender.

Except the battle to fully cleanse the temple isn't done, and legion forces weren't willing to allow any of the most senior of warlocks, still irritatingly absent from committing to battle, to flee and inseminate the population for coordinated rebellion. Gruesomely butchering those who refused, the temple guard were given their weapons back with an ultimatum; lead the Night Lords in the final chapter of the hunt, or be butchered and join those already being mounted onto the temple walls for every moment that resistance was not found.

Before long, first confused and then increasingly bitter clashes erupt between the herded forces and the remaining temple guard. The scene repeats itself over and over, the temple guard at the fore taking substantial casualties from their cornered brethren before the Night Lord forces commit and finish the fight at their leisure, each coming firefight replenishing their lost manpower only too quickly at the sight of the lumbering terminator clade teams backing up each sweep.

It's at this point that the situation outside the temple began to escalate. Finally displaying cohesive determination in retaking the temple, the witch-warren came becomes besieged by score upon score of troopers armed with the same plasma blaster weapons as the temple security guards, albeit more heavily armoured in overlapping plates of white and chunky rebreather helms. More and more scores of soldiers leapt from open-frame flyers to apprehend the situation; the temple surrounded and the front facade a charnel house where previous, albeit isolated, groups of troopers attempted break in amidst the confusion raining on the city above.

A substantially more determined, and equally costly, push would be made under the cover of a swarm of flyers armed with rotating racks of missiles and oscillating plasma-lance weapons, and this push would have to be made soon, before an orbital bombardment wiped the temple district entire and the force assembled on it. At the same time as the attack, a specialised Coruscian detachment would attempt to break through the top of the temple, and upon success more and more troopers from the ground would be ferried to rappel down onto the roof of the palace.

Ordering his brethren to abandon the increasingly fruitless search for survivors, the increasingly desperate Night Lords commanding officer choose instead to fortify their position, felling columns for cover, blowing open walls for escape routes, and decorating the walls with the butchered fallen to further assault the senses of the Coruscians in the coming fight. This, at last, was the real fight finally come to the invaders, and a fight the Night Lords would happily flee from to play their preferred game of cat and mouse deep within the warren of scorched and bloodied corridors.

Moments before the mockery of daybreak arrived, a storm of rocket fire and sweeping lance beams swept the front patio of the palace away and the Coruscians poured their soldiers into the vast, cavernous hallway that formed the main fore of the temple. Breathing steadily through the folds of atomised marble and searing smoke birthed by the firestorm, the Coruscian troopers advanced deeper and deeper into the cavern. Only once they were finally beyond the reach of their gunships' aid, did the first blaster shots meet pearl ceramic plate. First one by one, then dozens followed by dozens, before finally a deluge of plasma was being exchanged between the two sides, punctuated here and there by a staccato of bolter fire felling and pinning the more stubbornly-minded assaulting pockets.

Realising they were facing their own as much as the enemy, the troopers nonetheless stoically pressed on for their warlock masters, reciprocating the times the witches performed the same for them in campaigns far and wide. Fighting in this flaming canyon of marble and stone, starved of sunlight and lit only by fires and plasma blasts, it was only when the pressed force of temple guard were all but spent that the Night Lords committed themselves into the apocalyptic fight.

This, however, was but a token gesture. With an increasingly depressing ammunition count, the Night Lords began a steady but telling retreat deeper into the palace, and before long, the Coruscians found themselves victorious: the main entrance to the temple had been bought, albeit for an appalling blood price. Puzzled by a lack of a more committed stand at what was most certainly an advantageous chokepoint made no less bloody by its sheer vastness, the surviving Coruscian command rotated the spent vanguard with a fresh force, and, coordinating with the teams above having finally scoured away the tenacious kharbydis claws and melted their way through the temple roof at various points, the order was sent for a final push deep into the palace. With a practically untouched Terminator clade, and still more than half of the primary Night Lords force found within, all at hand knew the real bloodbath was yet to come, and the Coruscians could only hope the surviving Gedai elders would vengefully reveal themselves in time with their attack.

In the void however, Imperial forces were not nearly as fortunate, and it would be in orbit that the roles between hunter and hunted would be reversed in this campaign, and the Night Lords damned to purgatory on the world below.