"Enemy! Dead ahead! Large numbers of targets approaching!"
The lookout's scream exploded through the radio across every command channel at company level and above, distorted by sheer terror.
Like an icicle, it pierced the fragile illusion of order they had barely maintained by organizing their Defense Line.
Sturmerman rushed out of the forward command post hastily erected at ground level, though it was little more than a half-buried shelter enclosed by sandbags and Tank chassis.
He snatched the high-powered binoculars offered by the staff officer beside him and pressed them hard against his eyes, his fingers whitening with the effort.
He aimed them at the horizon, in the direction the sentry had indicated.
Smoke and lingering dust obscured his view, but soon countless shifting black silhouettes began to emerge. Like black pus flowing from a wound in the earth, they spread slowly and inexorably over burning wreckage and shell craters.
He adjusted the focus to its maximum range. Sturmerman's breath stopped for an instant.
He saw the "enemy." But they were not the Xenos monsters he had imagined.
They were people.
Tens of thousands of them, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, or millions.
They poured in from every direction along the horizon, like an ocean driven by an invisible tide.
They wore tattered naval uniforms, oil-stained Forge Worker coveralls, the ragged clothes of Hive City civilians, and even standard Imperial Militia or Imperialis Militia uniforms. Some clearly belonged to friendly units that had been stationed at nearby positions only hours earlier.
Their gait was strange and uniform, their steps stiff and stumbling yet unceasing, as though invisible strings controlled their joints.
They carried every imaginable kind of weapon: rusted logging axes, hydraulic wrenches from factories, civilian hunting rifles, even sharpened sticks.
More dangerous equipment was scattered among them: captured Lasguns