"The White Scars, responding to Suiyang's call for aid."
Ding Xiu's steady voice rang out over the Fleet's communications channel, brief and forceful, like a war drum striking the decisive beat.
He and Pei Min led over a thousand elite Legion warriors, carefully selected from the rapid-response force, aboard several Stormbird gunships painted white with red markings.
The roar of heavy engines reverberated through the troop compartments. Like savage birds leaving their nests, the gunships broke free of the warships, trailing blazing exhaust as they plunged toward the planet below, shrouded in Warfire and an ominous blood-red haze.
By any reasonable reckoning, a thousand well-equipped, highly trained warriors of the Legiones Astartes, veterans of countless brutal battles, should have been able to crush any conventional rebel force on the ground, given Orbit fire support and air superiority.
Their mission should have been to establish a Beachhead quickly, stabilize the situation, and await the main force.
But war never entirely obeyed "reason."
Just as the Stormbird formation pierced Suiyang's thin Atmosphere, before it had fully emerged from the communications blackout, the burning outline of the hive city and its billowing Smoke rapidly expanded in the Observation Window—
"Dense energy signatures detected! Antiaircraft fire!"
The pilot's urgent warning exploded over the communications channel.
Almost simultaneously, several concealed positions deep within the hive city's ruins, in rebel-controlled territory, suddenly spat out dozens of searing Laser beams and anti-aircraft missiles trailing white smoke!
The density of the fire, the speed of the response, and the efficiency of its coordination far exceeded what anyone had expected from a force of "deluded civilian rebels."
Clearly, the enemy entrenched here possessed not only fanatical resolve, but also considerable heavy firepower, perhaps enhanced by profane technology.
The Stormbirds' void shields rippled violently under the scorching Lasers, while missiles