The Disaster at Mot

Chapter 2: Waging War

Having finished his inspection of their defensive positions, Gal-Uru took stock as he walked through the forested hills back to his command tent. Three weeks ago some Imperial Astartes — “Qodesh Sufetim” in high Gothic, “Holy Judges” in low — had unexpectedly arrived in system to reinforce the defenders of Mot. While of course this was a setback in strategic terms, when his tacticians had presented revised estimates of the campaign’s MPM now they would have to fight Astartes… well, Gal-Uru was far too pious a man not to take delight in what their presence meant for this war. Indeed, these Astartes had quickly endeared themselves to Gal-Uru when, rather than reinforcing the last pockets of resistance in Mot-Tertium as had been expected, the Holy Judges instead simply launched bombing runs on those hold outs. They had even done so while broadcasting a bombastic message announcing their arrival across the planet; it declared that no further defeats were to be tolerated, and any others so weak as to be found wanting like the defenders of Mot-Tertium could expect similar judgement. Truly, these were men after his own heart; though, of course, they would only get it if the High Demigaur could not rip theirs out first.

Happy though he was to face off against the Qodesh Sufetim, Gal-Uru had also immediately realised there would be problems. It seems it was Khorne’s will that the Pact be truly tested, for the Judges had exited the warp mere days after the Sirdar of the 7th had radio’d the all clear code. This meant that Kaašhk and his Nēšu Kārum had been inserted into Mot-Secundus without detection and the Death Brigade were now at their extraction point. But his men needed spiritual guidance now more than ever! Even with the strict discipline and ritual of the Sherden he had been unable to contain mass enthusiasm when word spread that battle’s intensity was about to increase exponentially. Outbreaks of insubordinate spontaneous charges upon enemy positions, petty (yet no less deadly) violence between Pactsmen, and general ill disciplined rancour, had proliferated at exactly the rate of the news of the Holy Judge’s arrival. Gal-Uru needed to reassert control, and fast, if they were not to waste themselves on trivialities.

So it was that after reasserting void superiority about the planet — not in time to prevent significant Astartes deployments into Mot-Secundus, and Mot-Quintus, in addition to their bombing run on Mot-Tertium and a Thunderhawk making it into Mot-Primus — Gal-Uru elected to lead from the front, taking personal command in the Mot-Secundus theatre. The Sufetim’s fleet was still a threat, lurking in the outer void and no doubt plotting to break through their blockade. But the Judges simply lacked sufficient void assets to risk heavy losses in open battle. What is more, Gal-Uru had seen enough to take their measure; these were a calculating lot, fighting by formula rather than gambling for glory. Since a shock-assault boarding action by the Centurion and his men had demonstrated the Sherden’s capacity to detect and neutralise any attempts to sneak past their auspex, he felt sure the Judges would not chance their limited assets until they could ensure victory. They would want time to plan, so of course that is exactly what they would not be given. Izdubar “demanded” and was granted the honour of hunting down the remnants of the Judge’s void assets, effectively granting Izdubar field commission to Demigaur-Nari; in charge of the theatre’s fleet. Gal-Uru’s only “request” was he made sure to do so while maintaining orbital dominance. Beyond that, have at it. This freed up Gal-Uru to reassert discipline on Mot’s surface.

Upon arrival planetside the High Demigaur found his siege in disarray. Mot-Secundus was a walled city, almost entirely surrounded by forested foothills that made large troop movements nigh impossible. Since the tunnel passages through those hills were sealed, the only way in or out was via the main commercial roads in the plains on the southwestern border of the city. Here the Pactsmen were preparing to breach the city walls — but they had been forced back by the Qodesh Sufetim. The Judges favoured a slow but steady advance of nigh-invulnerable troops in heavy armour, under covering fire from their tanks. Where they punched holes in a siege line, Mot’s PDF would stream in to exploit the gap. Precisely because the Pact defaulted to disciplined conventional warfare, which typically made them so much more efficient than other Khornite bands, they attempted to meet this in open battle. But here they were outmatched, so the Judges were grinding through the Sherden’s layered siege trenches. Indeed by Gal-Uru’s arrival the Pactsmen had been forced back to their fifth and final trench line.

None the less, the Sherden Pact were not down and out, for their continued void superiority gave the Sherden two advantages that made this fight winnable yet. First, due to their numbers and ability to reinforce and resupply, they could simply weigh down the Astartes, who were unable to reinforce their already small numbers. With new troop ships daily arriving from elsewhere in the Empire, even a death-to-kill ratio of a 100 Pactsmen to 1 Judge was comically in their favour. And led well they were capable of achieving a ratio more like 60 to 1. What’s more, his men’s firm faith in Khorne’s reward made them perfectly willing to pay this cost, to drown enemies with their own blood. So when the Judges launched their push on the fifth trench line, Gal-Uru ordered his men to charge as one directly into the enemy’s guns. Hours later it was with some pride that Gal-Uru watched the 16th wave of warriors from 88th Philia clamber over their erstwhile comrades to quite literally clog the joints of the last Qodeshi dreadnought with their bodies. Its guns were spinning empty and its thrashing claws growing ever more unwieldy as it toppled over, the 88th’s surviving members tearing its busted armour open with their bare hands to rip apart the snarling near-corpse within.

The Qodesh Sufetim had seemingly been banking on the psychological effect of their presence and mode of warfare rendering head-on charges impossible, and it was to their credit that upon the problem being made apparent they instantly changed their approach. Gal-Uru’s counter charge halted the Judge’s initial advance on the fifth line, but they quickly regrouped and continued the attack in a near opposite fashion. The PDF advanced out in front of the Astartes, by their sheer mass physically preventing the kind of human wave rush that had so bogged down the last push. Behind them were Astartes providing devastating fire support. Evidently they hoped to simply blast the Sherden off the field before they had time to hack through the PDF screen.

However, the sheer scale of the carnage around Mot-Secundus was most pleasing to Khorne, and he showed his pleasure by empowering the Goremages to gift worthy supplicants a visitation from His aeternal servants. This meant Blood Wolves could be raised; daemon infused Pactsmen who could simply tear through lines of soldiers like a hot scourge through flesh. Really they were more akin to missiles than soldiers, moving at a speed so great as to be invisible to unaugmented eyesight, and eviscerating mortal flesh simply by passing through it. Alas, Blood Wolves would not last more than few hours before the stress of the union led Khorne to call his servant and their host back to the battle aeternal. But that was more than enough time to carve a path through the PDF screen. The second attack upon the fifth line was by this means broken; the Blood Wolves gave their lives in the mire of Mot, and the aeternal river swelled with the blood of martyrs!

(That the Astartes did not have counter-measures prepared for this was initially somewhat puzzling to Gal-Uru, as this wasn’t the first time Blood Wolves had been deployed on Mot so the possibility should have been salient. Instead the Judges had clearly planned around the Sherden simply repeating the human wave attack. However, he realised this meant Sufetim leadership did not give full credence to the reports of PDF commanders, probably taking them for superstitious cowards making excuses for failure and unwillingness to face the enemy. As Beauty of Slaughter put it, “Victory comes only to forces united in the desire for blood.” Pleasing that his enemies suffer for ignorance of scripture. Truth, here and always, proven by combat.)

With the last attack on the fifth line blunted, the Sherden’s second void-borne advantage could shine through. The Sherden Pact had a sizeable armoured force, and it was commanded with great proficiency by Lugal Damogaur. Lugal obsessively drilled his armoured Philia to excel in rapid combat redeployment via low-orbit void assets. So, Lugal’s column had been shipped in while Mot-Secundus’ defenders had still been reeling from their setbacks and their retreating forces were being harassed by Stalk Tanks. Directed towards weak points which infiltrating Death Brigade units had pre-identified, the Damogaur’s heavy armour formed an armoured spearhead that broke open the fourth trench line. They even came out victorious in an open-field tank duel against the Qodesh Sufetim’s own armoured units attempting a counter-charge.

Gal-Uru had wanted to press the advantage, but Dumuzi had voxed in that while Mot-Primus was in a state of stalemate the siege of Mot-Quintus was broken and reinforcements were desperately needed to prevent the breakout becoming a rout that rendered their flank vulnerable. Lugal Damogaur had thus been thanked and shipped off there to stem the tide. As things now stood, the Sherden were reinforcing the fourth line and the defenders the third, warily facing off against each other in an eerie mirror to the situation in orbit.

Thus went the First Battle of Mot-Secundus. Neither side had quite achieved their goals: the Pact suddenly put on the defensive and only just able to hold on, yet the Imperials in their turn unable to actually lift the siege. There was more to be done here no doubt, but the situation was stable enough that Gal-Uru could turn his attention to his primary concern. He needed to reestablish communication with Pater Kaašhk. So it was he headed out to a base in the Murub Foothills which offered some hope of establishing vox contact with assets inside the city.

Arriving back in the camp Gal-Uru had reflected on how good for one’s soul it was to get out into nature when duty permits. The position itself was quite open, mostly consisting of tents pitched on a relatively level part of a sparsely wooded hill, and piles of crates of ammunition or machine parts scattered haphazardly round the clearing. Only a single sentry tower gave any sign of permanent construction. What marked the isolated location out as noteworthy was that it bordered a dirt road circling some of the more thickly forested regions, which together with its level terrain made it a good place to organise patrols from. That, and the fact that the camp commandant had reported being able to get snippets of vox contact through Mot-Secundus’ shielding from this location.

So far from the hustle and bustle of more urbanised spaces nothing blocked distant battles’ gunfire from being clearly heard; indeed sometimes on very calm nights one could even hear especially piercing shrieks from those more nearby skirmishes. Likewise, there’s no smog or waste to cover up the smell of death from a planet aflame with war, the air itself felt infused with Khorne’s blessings. Within days he settled into a routine, waking up and attending chapel, after washing the blood off going to work with the vox operators for the rest of the morning to try and amplify their signal, taking reports on the wider war effort and issuing orders throughout the afternoon, and entertaining himself in the evening by beating to death any prisoners their patrols captured. Yes, Gal-Uru ruefully thought to himself, even while his work here was often logistical or theoretical, he was a sentimental man; as he sat at his desk in the closed-gazebo command tent, Gal-Uru’s heart felt truly at war.

Alarm had first been raised when multiple patrols had failed to check-in at their allotted times. Seventeen minutes after the first failed check a surprisingly small and lightly armoured Judge made a show of killing the guard atop the sentry tower at camp’s edge. From on high he bellowed out a declaration that the Emperor would aid him in similarly putting down the rest of the Sherden, before casually stepping off and letting himself fall 9 metres. Their blood already up, further incensed by this vile abomination’s blasphemous invocation of the great man on Terra, many warriors broke into a charge towards the interloper without even stopping to pick up their weapons. Gal-Uru had had to break a Katogaur’s nose to restore some order while shouting commands to set up a proper perimeter, while he sent Tammuz Sirdar to check the rest of the camp for sign of incursion. Idiots who heedlessly ran at the Astartes, approaching him as a disorganised straggle, were cut down in moments; easy to take on one or two at a time. They were rightly punished for their mental and spiritual weakness through inglorious deaths. It was up to Gal-Uru to organise a defence with what remained.

He radioed in for stalk tank support, since two were out on patrol and could be here within minutes, and had plasma gunners lay down covering fire to hold the Astartes in position until the tanks arrived. While the Judge was too swift for any to score a clean hit, the stalk tanks confirmed they were inbound and the Astartes was unable to approach close enough to properly bring his shotgun or combat blade to bear. A swift victory was at hand! Or, alas, so it seemed, until Gal-Uru heard the brief discharge of a melta-rifle cut off by an all too human scream, followed by a barrage of small arms fire. Clearly Tammuz had found more Astartes.

Leaving the broken nosed Katogaur in charge of his position, Gal-Uru rushed over to the sound of new fighting. There he found Tammuz, who gave a succinct sit-rep. “My Demigaur, a second Judge has infiltrated the camp. Upon locating him in the command tent we set up fire teams here, here and, here,” — as she spoke she pointed to positions surrounding the tent where the camp’s detritus provided cover, each now fully engaged — “and sent in a kill team to finish him off. They reached the edge of the tent but upon attempting to breach they were noticed, at which point he dispatched them and we opened fire. We have him pinned, but he’s using our equipment crates for cover and Ekildae had our grenades.” Since half of Ekildae’s body was visibly splayed in front of the remaining tattered scraps of tent wall, the Demigaur immediately saw the problem.

Gal-Uru smiled to realise this was simply Mot-Secundus in miniature, and only one method would suffice. He raised his blade in the air and shouted the first stanza of a well known verse — “From rage!” — as one his men around the tent completed the couplet — “Joy!” — and followed up with a guttural roar. The Sherden charged en masse, bursting forth from cover to rush the surrounded Astartes. Ever cool under pressure, the surrounded scout’s accuracy and rate of fire was phenomenal - rattling off bolts, it seemed he only ever needed one shot to take down any target. Many charging warriors were torn to shreds before they could make it to the tent. Even those who survived were wounded so badly on the approach that their holy wrath did not suffice to shrug the pain off, falling to the floor while screaming in impotent rage.

Both Gal-Uru and Tammuz, however, actually made it into the tent. A well respected Katogaur wielding a ritual knife had been in front of them, but he was flattened by the desk — Gal-Uru’s desk, the Demigaur noted with some irritation — which the Judge had been using for cover. The Astartes simply kicked it into the man with enough force to drive him into the ammo crates marking the tent’s boundary, crushing him instantly. Tammuz was wielding her favourite axe. She was renowned for having rose to her rank by besting over 20 challengers in death matches with that axe. With a screamed invocation of the name her preferred warp patron, the daemon Utu, she made a well-aimed swing for the Astartes’ shoulder joint. Within moments, with a speed that seemed impossible, he shrugged aside and turned the momentum of her swing against her. With no apparent effort at all, he slammed his fist into her axe-arm as she stumbled past, breaking the bone and sending her flying to the ground. Two more pactsmen rushed between Gal-Uru and the Astartes, but both were just as dismissively cast aside; one falling to the floor with his leg broken by a kick, and the other having his head quite literally punched clean off after his bayonet strike failed to do anything more than scratch the paint off the Judge’s ceramite armour.

Gal-Uru let out a raucous laugh. With the death or incapacitation of the rest of the first wave it was now just him squaring off against this beast. Single combat with an Astartes! Such glory! Gal-Uru Demigaur barrelled into the Astartes just as the giant drew his combat knife, nearly bouncing off his bulk but doing just enough to make him stumble somewhat. This Astartes was strong, mightier than any mortal Gal-Uru had ever fought, but the High Demigaur had been waging war in Khorne’s name for decades now; he was infused with His power and blessed with His rage. What is more, Gal-Uru had always delighted in duels and practiced daily. So it was he successfully parried the scout’s initial strike, having seen the combat knife’s swing for the feint it was.

With the distance between them now minimised Gal-Uru put all his weight behind a thrust into the Astartes’ centre mass, energising his blade beforehand to give it a chance of piercing ceramite. The damned infidel was too fast, however, and turned what should have been a direct piercing of the lungs into a mere glancing wound. With a roar of his own the Judge tore Gal-Uru’s blade from his side and cast it aside, backhanding Gal-Uru as he did so with enough force to send the High Demigaur sprawling outside the tent. But, while the sword thrust had failed to seriously wound the Judge, he was enraged. The giant advanced on Gal-Uru’s dazed form with murder in his eyes.

Gal-Uru would later reflect that it was just as written in the word of He who Mastered the Sun — “Cowardice arises from courage.” Gal-Uru had wounded the Astartes’ pride, shown himself a genuine threat, by actually getting a blow through. With honour at stake, the Judge’s hatred honed in on a foe who’d so slighted him. But such bravery caused him to neglect other battles. And Khorne scorns those who neglect any battle - for this is the essence of cowardice. All that to say, he really should have been paying more attention to the second wave of Sherden now charging in.

A momentary lapse in focus sufficed to seal the Astartes’ fate. The Khornites were already upon him when he turned to meet them; overwhelming with their mass even as he stabbed and kicked many to death. Eventually he stumbled to his knees, dropped by the dismembered arm of some brave Pactsmen getting caught in his armour’s hip joint. A revived Tammuz used her one working hand to wedge her axe into his helmet’s eye socket. Snarling, she forced a portion of the dome off, before being knocked back by the resultant pressure release. Gal-Uru had his opening.

Crying out wordless praise to the Lord of Carnage, he grabbed a rock next to his falling place and left from the ground, setting upon the now helmet-less Astartes. Pounding and pounding with the rock, Gal-Uru Demigaur screamed in exultation as his enemy’s skull finally caved. In that moment, as the bone crunched beneath him, he felt the satisfied joy that only the truly religious know.

Dropping the gore splattered rock and clambering off the armoured giant’s body he looked around to see how many of his Philia still drew breath. He was pleasantly surprised to see at least ten of them fit to fight on, including his nasally fractured Katogaur. The most able of the bunch were already being organised into new defensive positions by Tammuz Sirdar. Gal-Uru made a mental note to reward her with a prized slave to savage as she saw fit.

After the dust settled, Gal-Uru eventually ascertained that of the 86 men who had been stationed here only 13 remained alive. The two returning Stalk Tanks had indeed managed to drive off the first Astartes, though one of them had been very badly damaged in the process. Indeed, it was this victory which had freed up the second wave of charging warriors, dooming the Astartes in the tent. While they had successfully repelled this attack, it seemed the Qodesh Sufetim were gathering intel for something. The High Demigaur needed to think about what this meant.