The Landing Craft shuddered violently, like a fragile leaf in a storm.
Every explosion in the nearby airspace sent a shock wave through its thick hull, making the metal vessel groan in agony.
The compartment was packed. Soldiers pressed together like canned sardines, the smells of sweat, machine oil, and a faint tang of urine mingling into a suffocating stench.
No one spoke. There was only heavy breathing, stifled sobbing, and the clatter of teeth chattering uncontrollably.
Major General Doram leaned against the cold bulkhead. He could feel the young soldier beside him trembling.
He tried to stay calm, turning his gaze toward the narrow porthole protected by thick Observation Window.
Outside, the sky was burning.
What should have been a rust-colored sky was now consumed by fiercer, more savage colors.
Dark green antiaircraft beams flailed through the smoke and flames like the tendrils of death. Every flash marked the end of an Imperium fighter or a small Landing Craft.
Explosions flared one after another, orange-red, stark white, and dark purple weaving together into a constantly shifting, hideous curtain of light.
More despairing still were the enormous shadows: the wreckage of ships.
Vast warships that had once embodied the Imperium's majesty and might now plunged from higher orbit like metal birds with broken wings, tumbling and screaming as they trailed kilometers of smoke and flame.
As their wreckage tore through the Atmosphere, friction made it burn and break apart, turning it into a deadly rain of blazing metal. Flames from internal ammunition detonations mingled with the debris as it poured down toward the ground.
A fragment of hull larger than a hill streaked diagonally across the sky beside the Landing Craft, carrying the promise of utter destruction. It slammed into the distant horizon, and the mushroom cloud that rose lit