Prologue:
Captain Garron had only been deployed to irradiated surface of Trinititus for a few weeks, and it hadn’t taken long for a dislike of the place to set in. Or at least a dislike of the burning desert his company had been deployed to, in support of some local polity’s fight over a prewar hydro plant. The local sub-flak armor, for all it’s flaws, was designed to allow troops to operate in that kind of heat for extended periods. The heavy carapace armor he and his men wore was not, and they’d had multiple heat causalities shortly after arrival, and even now, patrols outside the battalion’s FOB were a punishing ordeal. It didn’t help that after the mauling the Steel Sentinels had taken at Konor, most of their motor pool was ruined and the engineseers were busy repairing and rebuilding the damage, and had no time for something as minor as the battalion’s chimera’s and their overworked AC units.
Their so called allies were another headache. “The NCR Army” they called themselves. Garron called them a rabble of conscripts with bad gear, worse training, and leadership to match. Trying to “support” an allied force that was able to do little more than hide in foxholes and plink away with small arms was a fool’s errand, so Garron had simply resolved himself to shattering the enemy himself, and letting the NCR deal with the aftermath. At least they’d been kind enough to hand over one of their existing camps to build the FOB, which had saved time and let Garron get to grips with the enemy faster.
The enemy. That was probably the worst element of this whole mess, beyond the environment, the allies, the wildlife, all of it. This so-called “Ceasar’s Legion” made Garron’s blood boil. Garron had fought alongside the Ultramar Auxilia in the last campaign, and made many friends in their ranks. They were among the finest guardsman he’d ever might, nearly the match of his own men. It was infuariting to see this “legion” walking about wearing the look of the men and women Garron had fought alongside, while acting like a bunch of hive gangers. Garron intended to seem them pay for that insult.
And it was a good time to start making them pay, thought Garron as he surveyed the legion camp through his amplivisor. Most legionary officers had learned to run when they heard the Sentinel’s chimeras closing in, but this one had decided to hold his ground, motivated by either an excess of courage or a shortage of brains.
‘Probably the latter’ Garron thought. The camp was, foolishly, set up at the base of a hill, with only a few men outside the perimeter to act as sentries. It would be all to easy to take them down, then rain small arms fire down into the camp from the top of the hill.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it sir?” Commented Lancer Kore, the Captain’s second in command. “I’m surprised the NCR is having any much trouble with them.”
“Given the state of that patrol we passed, I’m not.” Replied the Captain. “Is everything ready?”
“It is. We’ll hit them, and the other outlying camps all once, at midnight. They’ll never see it coming.”
Garron grinned. Until the Sentinel’s arrived, night vision equipment had been virtually absent in this theatre, and his men, universally equipped with night vision lens, had been wreaking havoc on the virtually blinded legionaries, striking from the darkness with near impunity. The plan for tonight was similar. Most of the company’s lances were deployed in waiting, prepared to smash the ring of small watch camps and raiding outposts surrounding the legion’s foothold on this side of the river, Cottonwood Cove. Once the outposts were cleared, the Sentinels would be in position to surround the camp itself. Pinned down on the banks of the river, the legion would have no escape. After that, it would be a simple matter to launch an amphibious assault of his own and establish a beachhead on the legion’s side of the river. Caught between the hammer of his company and the Anvil of the NCR force massed at the hydro plant, the legion’s force would be easily routed.
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A few hours later, it was time. The two guardian pattern chimeras surged forward, all six wheels throwing up clouds of dirt as they accelerated. Their drivers rolled into position behind and among some boulders a few dozen meters away from the camp, using the massive stones as cover in case the legion had any anti-tank weapons stored away. Then they opened fire, autocannon shells ripping through tents and men with equal ease, sending the surviving legionaries scrambling for cover.
The rear doors on both IFVs dropped, and the Steel Sentinels waiting inside charged out. The squad’s grenadiers fired a few arcing shots over anything that looked promising as the soldiers charged forward. It was a textbook armored fist assault, every element acting in prefect coordination to suppress and shatter the enemy force. It would take a miracle for the legion to turn the tide of battle, and they had no miracle.
Unfortunately for the Sentinels, what they did have was a man named Vulpes Inculta, who had spent days going over reports from the survivors of the Sentinel’s attacks. He had observed several such assaults himself, and then used what he learned to plan a counter.
The first sign Captain Garron saw of that counterattack was when a half dozen legionaries suddenly shot to their feet inside the camp and raised their weapons, heedless of the gunfire scything through the camp. Two of them died before they could fire, and the others only barely managed to squeeze off a practically volley before being cut down. The shots were practically unaimed, with no chance of scoring a hit. Which wasn’t an issue, because the salvo of brilliantly burn flares didn’t need to hit a Sentinel in order to overload their night vision gear. The sentinel’s charge faltered as the temporarily blinded imperials stumbled to halt or tripped on obstacles they could no longer avoid.
That was when the explosive charges the legion has buried under the rocks went off, directly under the chimeras. The blasts tore through the thin plating on the bottom of the IFVs, and touched off the spare ammunition and fuel stored within the main hull.
As the debris from the shattered chimera’s rained down, dozens of legionaries shoved the boards covering them aside and rise from their trenches. Covered with a thin layer of dirt, they’d been all but invisible from a distance, but were now emerging right on top of the disoriented imperials.
An imperial guardsman is given some perfunctory hand to hand and bayonet drill, enough to outmatch the ill-trained rabble that they are typically expected to face but little more. Steel Sentinels are tutored by the emperor’s own space marines, and are expected to hold their own against even veteran enemies. But a warrior of Ceasars legion is not merely a veteran enemy, a legionnaire spends hours drilling in close combat every day, taking techniques and practices from dozens of tribes and forging them into a far more effective, brutal fighting style. In duel, perhaps the imperial soldier would still have an edge anyway. Their weapons are harder and sharper, their armor thicker and tougher, and their instructors the greatest warriors in the galaxy.
But this was not a duel. The Sentinels were disorganized, half deafened by the detonation of their transports, caught by surprise, and outnumbered. Despite the odds they fought tenaciously, but in the end were brought down one by one. Legion blades found gaps in their armor, hammers and axes smashed down again and again until helmets and breastplates failed. Some took their killers with them, pulling pins on grenades as they went down, and a handful escaped, fighting off their attacks and fleeing into the desert. Only a few would make it back to the FOB alive.
At every site, the same pattern played out in much the same way, and shattered fragments of the strike teams trickled back into Camp Searchlight FOB for the rest of the night. In the confusion, no one noticed a pair of sentinels slip into the abandoned fire station in the center of the town, until it was far, far too late.
