The Siege of Bethaa
It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defense forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defense forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Sergeant Rischev absentmindedly glanced around the warehouse, with his lasgun loosely gripped and hanging by his side. He did not want to be here. Rischev’s thoughts were at his house with his growing son. When Eidan had taken his first steps just two weeks back, it had been one of the happiest moments of the sergeant’s life, and so he was frustrated as all hell when his regiment had been ordered to patrol this backwater town. The inhabitants of Leadille were almost exclusively miners, and the ore they excavated was what filled the crates which were stacked nearly to the rockrete ceiling of the warehouse. The crates would be shipped to the large manufactorum in the east, which were the mainstay of the cities like the one Rischev was from. More than once, the sergeant had imagined hopping into a crate and riding it all the way back to Eidan. Every moment away was one he could be missing something special. Damn miners must have told each other so many ghost stories down in those holes that they finally started to believe them. Reports of monsters had begun to spring up, and the Bethaan 5th had responded to insure that the mines would continue to function. Rischev sighed. Two weeks had gone by and not a single “monster” had been sighted, unless you counted the commissar, as the joke went.
Rischev glanced at his squad as they neared the entryway that signaled the end of their patrol. One guardsman made his way to turn off the large fluorescent lights and another to the controls of the cargo door. Rischev had begun to make his way down the ramp of the loading dock when he heard a scream. He spun around quickly, snapping his lasgun to his cheek and looking down the barrel towards the source of the sound. The guardsman who had left the group to turn off the lights was collapsing to the ground. Rischev was shocked at how quickly the pool of blood around the man was growing, until he noticed that the poor soul’s entire arm and shoulder were missing.
“Ready!” he shouted, swallowing his fear. Most of the men began to form around Risvhev in a defensive position, but a few stood frozen in shock. Their fear cost them their lives. The air beside one man seemed to ripple, before he was raised into the air in an explosion of gore, and his remains showered another guardsman whose body seemed to shred itself in mere seconds. Rischev’s hands shook violently when he realized, with a flashback to his xenos training, exactly what was in the warehouse with his team. Rather than freeze, the sergeant’s fear spurred him into action.
“Spook! Open fire, and concentrate on anything you see move!”
Lasgun fire filled the warehouse, blanketing every direction in front of the group. Rischev was alert for any ripple or distortion that would signal the beast’s whereabouts. Their chameleonic scales were good, but not perfect. He began to wonder how they hadn’t hit anything yet, when Rischev’s answer dropped on top of the soldier to his right, pulling some rockrete from the wall with it. Rischev spun towards the blur and squeezed off a shot before it collided with him like a freight train. His feet left the ground and he spun through the air before smashing into the rockrete wall, feeling several ribs crack with the impact. The sergeant landed in a crumpled heap at the base of the wall. Eyeing his weapon just a few feet away, Rischev tried to rejoin the fight, before realizing that his legs wouldn’t move. Blood began to pool around the sergeant, and he was thankful that he could not feel the wound it was coming from.
Rischev could see the beast now. Its scales could not hide the blood that covered its body, the blood of his men. He saw the Spook, the Lictor, tear through the rest of the squad and he knew that none of them would survive. He saw his men’s screams and prayers, and he knew that the Emperor would answer neither. He saw the beast, no longer hiding, colored white and purple under the deep red of blood, walking towards him and he knew that he would never see his son grow. He saw its long talons in the air as massive clawed hands reach around his torso and the beast lifted him up to its grotesque, tendril covered face, and he knew that he was staring into the face of death. And as the Lictor forced its feeder tendrils into his nose and mouth, Sergeant Rischev saw, and knew, no more.
Commissar Lastradus was a bear of a man. His size, status, and furious temper insured that his men would fear him more than any enemy. Throughout the commissar’s entire service to the Emperor, not a single man had ever stepped out of line under his command. That all changed when his regiment came to Ledille. So ferocious and horrific were the beasts of the Genestealer Cult that Lastradus had to personally execute over twenty of his own men on the field of battle for deserting. Even then his men were hesitant to fight.
Following the discovery of a squad of guardsmen massacred in a warehouse, the commissar had launched a full scale investigation into the events the town had experienced, and he had uncovered evidence that a Tyranid vanguard force was occupying the area, including Genestealers and possibly a few Lictors. Lastradus and his men quickly located the beasts themselves, but when he mobilized to destroy the creatures, fully half of the town rose up to defend them, and the reality of the situation hit the commissar like a ton of bricks. The Genestealers had begun to create a cult. When a Genestealer infects a human, the human becomes fanatically loyal to the xenos scum, but more importantly the host’s reproductive system is affected. The human’s children will be hybrids of the two races, grotesquely mixed and easy to spot, but after a few generations the hybrids will be almost indistinguishable from normal humans. After the fourth generation, the children of the hybrids will become Genestealers again, to start the cycle anew.
Unprepared for this turn of events, Lastradus’ men had taken heavy casualties. Lastradus was forced to turn his guns on the town itself, leaving it in shambles. After two weeks of fighting, the Bethaan 5th managed to eradicate the Tyranids, but not without paying a price. Only a handful of civilians and guardsmen were left, and they were met with a horrible predicament. How were they to tell if all of the infected were dead? Lastradus would not risk letting the cult survive and restart elsewhere, for if it grew large enough it would attract the attention of a Tyranid Hive Fleet, and lead to the destruction of the entire planet. So the survivors were stuck, unable to leave or call for assistance, living in the rubble of what once was a bustling town. Following the first night alone, which Lastradus had spent collecting his thoughts, the survivors awoke to find several of their number brutally murdered, confirming that the cult still survived. The commissar was sure that the group must be low in number, and among the survivors, if they chose to attack only at night. He needed to root them out, and in order to do that he needed to get to know everyone. Lastradus gathered the survivors together in the remains of a cathedral, sat them down, and began to discuss…
