The Genestealers' plan worked beautifully. The Crimson Tide forces merely sent Thunderhawks skimming over the ground to search for survivors, never realizing that what burned below was a protective canopy rather than the wreckage of the spaceport.
By contrast, several spires caught the search teams' attention. They were so sturdy that they had pierced the spaceport wreckage, remaining upright through this epic catastrophe.
On the side of one spire, a Thunderhawk found a warrior who had driven his Power Claymore into the wall to slow his fall. He was his squad's only survivor.
The warriors aboard the Thunderhawk began searching the wreckage around him for the remains of his squadmates. It took quite some time. They had expected Genestealers to appear and snatch the bodies, but none came. Everything was bleak and utterly ordinary.
That was because all the Genestealers had gathered in the deep underground passages that remained usable, frantically moving supplies toward the Ascension Platform. Only the Purestrain Genestealer squads were fighting.
The warriors who reached the ground in Drop Pods easily cleared one warehouse after another. As they had done countless times before, they held the warehouses and waited for Transport Craft to arrive.
One unit, however, was different.
Ans walked at the rear of the formation. In a wolf pack, the powerful wolf bringing up the rear, seemingly about to fall behind, was the pack's leader.
As the current Company Commander of the Sixth Company, he roamed the battlefield ruins, gathering wounded Wolf Brothers. Genestealer claws were a baffling thing. Call them strong, and sometimes they could not even cut through an inactive Power Sword, which was only adamantium. Call them weak, and they could breach the Adeptus Custodes' auramite defenses and wound them. The Genestealers on Terra still had not been fully eradicated.
Ans gathered