Chapter 2

Segmentum Pacificus
Anastasia Sector
Tanelorn System
Planet Tanelorn IV
7.981.057M40
Captain Nasser Goshin, 991st Vista Ghost Detachment

Every army, every PDF, almost every formation of every sort and type of armed forces had its elites. For the Tech-Guard of Vista, that elite force was the Ghosts. Every single member of the Ghosts was one rank above what an equivalent formation of Tech-Guard would be, and accordingly Captain Nasser commanded a platoon-sized force of seventy-two men rather than a company of more than twelve times that number.

The most manly, manliest men outside of Catachan.

Vista Forge Worlds did not have prostitution. There were no family beds. Unless you reached a high enough rank to allow for the purchase of some personal space resources, ordinarily allocated only to Third Grade Tech-Adepts and above, sleeping was done in a small cubicle that was excellent for its purpose (even compared with high-class accommodations, the mattress and pillow were amazing, molding to your body shape and shaping themselves to ensure healthy and restful sleep), and also allowed you to connect to the noosphere via neural relay or helmet (for the unfortunates who weren’t worthy of more than the very minimal enhancement).

For sexual activity, there were purpose-built rooms – for a small number of people desiring intimacy (up to six), to be booked ahead of time for a minor outlay of credits, or always open orgy rooms if you just wanted (or needed) some release and had the time and energy to spare. The ones he’d checked out in the Basilikon Astra answering to Vista were almost always full to near-capacity.

Procreation, of course, was something completely different and heavily regulated. Since it wasn’t something he cared about, it was completely outside his purview.

The captain had been so busy for the entirety of the last seven months, rebuilding his platoon after a misencounter with a nest of dragon-spiders during the exploration of a certain soon-to-be-classified-as-a-Death World, that his sleep deficit could be counted in weeks. His most recent fifteen minute masturbation session took place eight days ago, Omnissiah have mercy!

How and why in the Omnissiah’s name were most female magos on every Vista Forge World all near-perfect beauties? Rather tall ones too, this one’s head could probably reach his chin. It just wasn’t fair to his aching balls. Not that his countenance betrayed anything of the sort.

“Understood, Magos. We have infiltrated deep inside a hostile forge, and are facing its master in her lair. Ah, just one question. Is the magos in question aware that she is supposed to use non-lethal force?”

It was a very pertinent query, since the answer was occasionally ‘No’.

Everyone who survived Ghost training was a proven elite, but not everyone did.

His blood always chilled when he remembered the beautiful smile on the mesmerizing face of the female magos who welcomed the volunteers, when he was younger and much dumber and one of those, explaining how useful fatal training accidents were in removing sources of bad luck, laziness and incompetence.

This sort of exercise was invariably a graduation one, for the survivors.

“Good question, captain,” the woman smiled at him with such warmth that his spine stiffened to hide a very different stiffening.

Ghost trainers were the nastiest Magos Dominus Vista could scare up. Any one of them could kill his entire platoon in a few minutes if not seconds, even naked – since they could invariably teleport their war-walkers or advanced power armors to them (if there was no room for their war-walker), or were psykers of at least Delta-grade. Or both, of course.

“Unfortunately, I genuinely don’t know. The exercise order came directly from the Fabricator’s Lexico-Arcanus for the Inner Defense Sphere of Tanelorn, with no appended notes. I’m sure that if you try really hard, you won’t be decimated,” the magos nodded enthusiastically. “Really, the chances of that are truly very low. Calculation, not divination, I’m afraid,” she added.

Captain Nasser was not born yesterday. The disclaimer was unpleasantly specific, and even he could figure out that the chances of losing precisely ten percent of his force of seventy-two men (himself included) were so infinitesimally low as to be non-existent.

He managed to avoid any display of nerves, but his balls shrank and his libido had frozen, crystalized and shattered into countless pieces.

The captain instantly fortified his spirit with the knowledge of just how capable his men were. Every Ghost had the highest physical and mental boosts available, minimum physicals equal to the so-called champion-squads of the heavy regiments who like to boast about their power armor (endlessly... ), and minimal mental ones equivalent to gunship and starfighter pilots.

Which is to say hardened and more flexible bones, denser muscles, increased regeneration, notably increased size (most infantry warriors reached two meters in height), subdermal armor, wired reflexes, enhanced senses, highly efficient digestion to mitigate the increased need for sustenance, sense-blockers (against overstimulation, of limited use against light, sound and scent-based weapons), an internal pharmacopeia, a full nanite suite that laughed at poison and disease and provided a filtering skin-layer that also served as armor equivalent to half a centimeter of plasteel, a high class computation and processing brain-augmentation suite with at least two databases, suicide charge (the standing orders were never to be captured by Dark Eldar or Chaos, with visceral vomit and nightmare-inducing explanations and vidcasts of why), stasis trigger (up to a thousand years, void-capable), a neural link, a laser-com, and lots and lots of training.

Admittedly, none of the training related to maintaining or increasing their physique. The initial enhancements and boot-training took care of optimizing their body, and the nanites maintained it, even restoring it after any injury that required regeneration, entirely removing any rehabilitation-related downtime.

The training even included the not-terribly-pleasant experience of resisting telepathic intrusions from battle-psykers. Three of his men had actually managed to resist Eta-ranks for more than a minute, which was properly impressive. He’d personally lasted an eternal sixteen second.

One of the reasons he’d never tried Amasec was the description of the follow-up headache to indulging in that particular drink as being possibly worse than the aftermath of that bit of fun, no matter how much the Guard soldiers mocked him as a pussy. The advisory that his nanite-detoxing suite should be able to save his life from spoiled or improperly brewed drink, common with home-made stills used by creative Guard regiments, didn’t help.

The equipment Ghosts received was top-notch as well, though it did not include power armor.

Exoskeleton-reinforced void-sealed regenerating energized layered carapace bio-armor (currently on Mark XXVIII), with an ion shield, a grav-belt, a conversion field and a silenced jet-pack, powered by a compact backpack fusion reactor which also powered their energy weapons.

Cameleoline coating was the least of their stealth measures, and their vox-systems and auspexes were top-line. Pinpointing enemies through walls by their heartbeats, by means of some arcane tech-secrets he could not imagine, was just one of the wonders they could accomplish.

It was commonly known amongst the Ghosts, a high point of pride, that the Fabricator of Vista had spent more than a decade supporting an Astartes Chapter of the Raven’s blood which followed his combat doctrine, and their tactics and strategies had made a large impact on her views of war-making.

The Ghost elites were not there for raw, heavy combat power. The God-machines, Ordinatus, super-heavy tanks, knights and myrmidons served perfectly well for that purpose, as did heavy artillery, gunships, the Starfire X-wings, the Legio Cybernetica and even those vainglorious champion-squads.

Ghosts were the infiltrators, saboteurs, pin-point killers of Ork Warbosses and enemy commanders, exploding ammunition warehouses and sabotaging heavy vehicles and command centers, when they weren’t simply wired to blow. The very best of them bordered on true infocytes, but all were skilled in cyber-warfare and data-predation.

The Long War against the xenos, mutants, heretics and traitors, it had been explained to them, was not merely fought out in battlefields and crusades. Much of it, sometimes even the more vital portions, was the shadow war beneath the surface.

Ghosts were created to counter the likes of the traitorous, serpentine Alpha Legion, to end the corrupt and fallen who schemed and plotted everywhere with masks of purity, to make the light shine brighter in contrast to the shadows they lurked in.

They were also unfortunately useful for exploratory missions, as they’d recently found out to their detriment. In fact, their expertise made them very similar to Astartes in some ways, small numbers sneaking in and wreaking havoc.

He’d even heard that Rogue Traders related to Vista made use of his comrades in more commercial enterprises. Some of his comrades didn’t like that, but the simple truth was that resources needed to flow in, to provide the assets required for the furious production rates of the countless forges.

The main difference between the Space Marines and Ghosts was that the latter preferred to leave undiscovered, letting the melta charges and plasma bombs do the talking from many kilometers away, and that they never deployed in small numbers. Vista could afford to spend more to earn more victories, it was explained to them, and it sure as Holy Terra sounded reasonable to him.

There was also the fact that Astartes were considerably more prone to blasting their way in, rather than sneaking or employing overmuch deceit. Given their history of Legions engaged in an open campaign of galactic conquest, that the doctrine wasn’t upturned was understandable, though not forgivable.

“Ahhh...,” his deputy sighed as they stared down the mouth of the tunnel leading down. “So...?”

There were two basic options in such cases. Infiltration, slow, careful, methodical and quiet, or the blitz. Under the circumstances, alas, only the latter was possible.

“We blitz,” the captain nodded sagaciously, silently praising his own willpower and self-restraint. No sighs, moans or whining, unlike his idiot subordinates.

And blitz they did.

It went well, the spear-tip piercing automated defenses with speed and the occasional explosion, splitting and merging squads and fighting trios back into running formations as the tunnels and chambers allowed. Ordinary Tech-Guard troopers could maintain a speed of twenty-five KPH on the field indefinitely, Ghosts on the run could keep to nearly twice that for several hours.

Those exoskeletons worked true wonders, and not merely in strength-enhancement. In combat, speed was life. It was one of the mantras they were taught that never quite went away. That Minato fellow, whoever he might be, was indubitably a wise and experienced master of battle.

The spider-drones were a particular menace, but their shields mostly held. Twice they simply skirted slow-moving but near-impervious killer automata, and several wounded were left behind where some nasty turrets could not be bypassed or disabled swiftly enough to maintain momentum.

The command squad reached the final redoubt in less than two hours. Muscles spasming and mind blanking, he had no idea how they’d been defeated.

Segmentum Pacificus
Hydraphur Sector
Hydraphur System
Imperial Navy Starfort Resolute Faith
4.983.057M40
Lord High Admiral Seth Borealis

“The Anastasia Sector,” the hololithic display was large and sharp, and the Lord High Admiral ignored the snickers of his idiotic subordinates. The mocking got so bad his granddaughter was now commanding a battle-group in eastern Tempestus, where no one had ever heard of the Kursis Crusade and her ‘role’ in it.

“This fine mess has landed in our backyard, grox piss on it. It’s going to be huge,” Lord Admiral Yriel Temarchos was inordinately proud of his supposedly ‘common’ background compared to his exceedingly aristocratic brethren, and his speech was always peppered with such lovely words of wisdom.

Seth had no idea why some commissar or superior had failed to wash his mouth with grox piss, to show him the error of his ways.

For all that, he wasn’t wrong.

“Yes, yes, it’s a very big mess. We need to win it, too, this is a prize never-before seen. With a tenth of it, hell, even one percent, the strength and prestige of the Navy would climb to incredible heights. Trying to ignore it would get us shot,” Admiral Naismith responded with a sniff, “and rightly so.”

“So let’s get to it. What do we have that can get there in time? Naismith?” Seth asked, and the display shifted as data-stacks were fed to the hololithic displays, showing the nearest battle-groups and battlefleets.

“We can’t move the 917th, that would collapse three fucking sectors,” Yriel frowned at the light.

“Six battlefleets, fourteen battle-groups,” Seth declared. “There, there, there and there,” he pointed out the logical solution. “Analysis?” he asked the Logis present.

“83% of the forces should get there in time,” the metal-masked red-robe responded after several seconds of silence. “Blessings of the Omnissiah, the STC database will be protected. A fleet is mustering in Blessed Mars, they may have already departed. Communication request from the Fabricator. Communication request from Lord Commander Militant of the Segmentum. Patching connection ... done.”

Two faces appeared on the hololith, replacing the array of star systems and warp-conduits, and the two naturally started talking all over each other immediately, before he could offer greetings or even look them over. After a couple of halts and restarts, the high representative of the Imperial Guard took the lead.

“Not to worry, Fabricator, I have little to contribute,” the white-haired and badly-wrinkled old man in his grand uniform, Star of Terra shining bright gold on his lapel, chuckled. “Quite simply, there’s little the Guard can do to assist. The worlds and moons of Vista are airless.

“We can send some void siege specialist regiments to assist in holding the starforts, space stations and even aboard Navy ships, to assist against boarding or perform boarding actions. Some tunnel-fighters, too, if Vista has need.

“For all that, a mass mobilization of armies would be of little use here. Fighting in the void just isn’t in the Guard’s job description, that’s what Space Marines specialize in. Tell me what you need, and I can probably send them easily enough, unless you prefer skitarii in their stead.”

Every admiral grimaced, almost in synchronized unison.

The Imperial Navy had its armsmen to defend its ships and board their foes, but refusing this sort of offer might well doom hundreds of warships against what was coming. The operational command was his, and damn the old rivalry, as Naismith said, a victory here was absolutely necessary.

“Admiral Voltyrn, you will provide the number of men and appropriate gear needed to reinforce counter-boarding and boarding parties on all the vessels we are sending to Vista. You have sixteen hours to send the list to the Guard. Err on the side of more guns,” his tone turned the slightest bit threatening. “Fabricator, your turn.”

The wheezing sound of the augmetics was never pleasant, and Seth grimaced at the metallic, inhuman voice.

“Sixty-two exploratory fleets have already acknowledged their orders. Fourteen fleets will assemble on Forge Worlds within reach. The ether is thundering with responses and inquiries, only Stygies VIII being conspicuously silent. Phaeton, Gryphonne IV and dozens of far-off forges are offering cants, and perhaps additional reinforcements may be found. Only three titan legions are available.