[i][u]Jade Citadel, Northeastern Flank[/u][/i]

The databurst was unencrypted, a pattern of tones known only to those it was meant for and complete nonsense to any that intercepted it, easy as it was over open airwaves. 

Captain Carmen was crouched low in a pool of industrial waste, her armored form pressed against the crumbling wall of the Jade Citadel’s abhuman ghetto. Her slate grey armor had been painted black, and a cameleoline cloak was draped over her bulk, the lower edges floating gently in the toxic sludge at her chest. She started a chronometer in her helmet, time ticking up from the moment of the unencrypted transmission as she awaited the opening moves of the siege.

“They’re taking their sweet time,” Sergeant Isabel Santos whispered over the vox as if the enemy would somehow hear her words.

“They’re [i]slow[/i],” Carmen agreed, frustration building in her chest as the timer ticked past five seconds, “it is what we get for trusting the opening move to the abhumans.”

A series of explosions rippled on the opposite side of the wall, and Carmen watched curiously as debris rained down into the sludge around her.

Nine and a half seconds, she clocked the response by the felinids, “Execute.”

Five hundred black-clad Astartes rose together from their positions in the toxic pools, grappling lines soaring to find purchase atop the wall as they scrambled to begin their assault.

Outside the walls, the frontmost lines of the Meallans rose from their concealed positions in the swamp, ghillies revealing heavy weapons and anti-personnel rifles suddenly within the minimum range of the heaviest defenses on the walls–their reason for the delay.

Missiles and heavy las-weapons mingled with volkite as they systematically dismantled the anti-armour defenses atop the wall from only a few dozen metres from its base.

Though they were well under the angle of the heavy ordnance, they were not under the angle of small arms, and while most of the fighters had taken positions in good cover, the simple reality was that the enemy had the high ground and there were only so many safe paths through the toxic marshlands their local guides could show them–many of the Felinids fell to withering return fire before the last of the big guns were silenced.

At which point the deafening roar of hovercraft engines made themselves known as a set of superheavy hovercraft landing ships roared across the toxic sludge fields, spraying gunk behind them as volkite cannons and heavy anti-personnel guns raked the top of the wall.

At the same time as the bloodbath on the walls, the embedded infiltrators rose up alongside their power-armoured comrades, leading sudden companies of hastily-armed abhuman rebels in bloody scourings of local security posts, trading fire with defenders in shantytown alleyways and foetid slums.

As the Meallan tanks rolled off their hovercraft and began blowing gaping holes in the north wall, the ghillie-equipped anti-tank units fell back, their mission done as they boarded the same hovercraft currently relieving them, passing blue-uniformed infantry on their way to reinforce the locals.

Though the Meallans were genuine in their offer to free the enslaved Abhuman locals, the unspoken caveat of that arrangement was that freedom would extend to those that [i]survived[/i]–and hastily-trained infantry with old-model lasguns and stubbers and whatever basic combat armour had been scrounged from ambushed security forces or local mercenaries, simply wasn’t a good comparison for professional Pacifican soldiery–for every Pacifican that fell, at least three of the rebels were killed or badly injured.

An exchange rate that became almost reversed in the face of heavy armour, Meallan infantry, and their Power Armoured comrades in black.

“Push forward! Don’t give them a chance to regroup!” Captain mac Cormac was leading infantry this time, rather than the infiltrators, and leapt over the body of a fallen Pacifican officer to slam the butt of his rifle into an NCO still working out a jam. “Come on! Let’s show the Imperium what we’re made of!”

Captain Carmen sighted her long rifle with expert ease, each movement a deft flow of her armor and musculature to land the crosshair perfectly atop the next Pacifican to die. A junior officer 27 meters away, pointing hastily at the grappling hooks, lost his face in the explosion of a mass reactive shell. A second man, a Major by rank boards, slumped over in the command cupola of his troop transport as viscera coated the roof. A third officer’s head tumbled from his shoulders as he attempted to sprint for cover with his troopers. Carmen let each shot loose between her twin heartbeats, each shot a guaranteed kill.

“Abhumans rising, two hundred meters distant beneath the wall--” a massive explosion to Carmen’s left signaled another of the pacifican anti-armor guns reduced to ash by the Meallan assault beyond the walls, “they are pinned by armored carriers.” Sergeant Santos voxed from her position atop a crenelated watch tower.

Carmen blink-clicked her response, and a number of her closest battle sisters took off with her down the length of the ghetto wall.

They covered the distance in mere moments. A spring of such speed that Carmen simply barreled through Pacifican troopers too slow or stupid to get out of her way. She slid to a stop just above the armored personnel carriers, her rifle sighted before she had come to a standstill as mass reactive bolts found their way through driver optics and gunner ports. She heard the screams from within the machines and smiled despite not witnessing her handiwork as she would have preferred. She slung the rifle over her back, a comforting [i]click[/i] signifying the maglock mechanism had taken as expected, and she stepped off the edge of the wall.

Carmen and four black-clad Astartes fell like rocks into the formation of Pacificans beneath them, currently engaged with the Felinid freedom fighters. 

An armored figure fell atop the closest Pacifican armor and crumpled the roof beneath their armored form. The battle sister did not wait to see what damage she had inflicted with her arrival, instead, she caved in a hatch on the roof with a heavy stomp and dropped a grenade into the new entrance before jumping from the vehicle.

A second Astartes landed atop a Pacifican trooper, the resulting mess coating the nearest walls and mortals in red even before Carmen’s battle sister began to land point-blank shots with her bolter.

Carmen herself landed amid a squad of Pacificans taking cover behind a low wall. Whether it was cowardice or simply negligence that they all had to reload at the same time, it didn’t matter to her. She gutted the nearest with swings of her matte black combat blade, kicked out and crumpled the chest of a Sergeant of some kind, and brought her bolt pistol to bear on the final troopers attempting to run to her side.

“Captain mac Cormac, we are prosecuting targets as we deem fit. If your troops meet resistance you can not handle or contain, we will be available.” Carmen voxed over the shared net between the two forces. She took a bounding leap over a group of abhuman fighters that she found to be doing a fine job of keeping a Pacifican squad’s heads down and threw a grenade toward the enemy position. A pair of her sisters stormed the position just a heartbeat after the grenade thumped inside the building.

“Copy that,” Cormac replied, flinching as an explosion took out a nearby wall, then beckoning his forces forward as he remained unscathed. The Meallans were advancing militia-first, not because they believed in their prowess but because ambushes were easier to ferret out if the ones still standing when the smoke cleared had tanks and volkite weapons.

A hab-block had been putting up particularly stiff resistance; some enterprising officer had jammed an anti-materiel weapon in one of the upper storey landings and was using it to take out Meallan armoured vehicles. So far it was only their smaller support vehicles, but one of their heavy tanks had been detracked in sight of the thing and the order had come down to level the entire structure if the gun could not be disabled in time.

“As a matter of fact,” he voxxed, “We have a gun we’d like your people to deal with…”

Carmen received a rune response from her command squad signalling their readiness to prosecute the new target. She holstered her bolt pistol and sheathed her combat blade as she turned to make her best speed in the direction of Cormac’s position on her auspex.

“Inbound,” she voxed in reply to the abhuman Captain. Her squad bypassed a Pacifican strongpoint ahead by simply barreling through the adjacent habblock walls, and found themselves smack in the center of a roadway. The report of an anti-material weapon sounded from down the road, and Sister Emilia went down in a spray of blood. Carmen didn’t stop to assess her fallen sister, instead sighting her long rifle down the road. She flipped through vision modes and settled on a thermal imaging option. She sighted on the hottest thing in the building at the end of the block, and let loose a single bolt round that traveled straight down the hot barrel of the anti-material gun and connected with the freshly loaded shell at the end of the breach.

The first detonation was underwhelming, and though it signalled the removal of the threat it held no candle to the secondary explosion that followed just a few seconds later as hot shrapnel tore into the guns ammo supplies a room over. The entire face of the habblock fell away in fire and flame, several floors collapsing on each other in a vicious cycle consisting of several tons of rebar and rockrete.

“You are free to press the attack, Captain.” Carmen voxed as she turned to follow her Medicae dragging Sister Emilia to cover.

The Felinids didn’t waste time—as soon as the gun was out of commission the tanks were rolling forward again, the troopers liberating slaves as they went; blood for freedom. Most all took the offer, and they had a buffer against ambushes and flanking attacks the entire advance forwards.

Their objective was the heavily-fortified gates leading into the city proper, to break through and link up with the main body of their Imperial allies; the only problem was that the Pacificans had realised that and pulled their armour back into a cordon, forcing a brutal metal-on-metal engagement only slightly aided by the massive power of the Meallan armour and the presence of the Imperial Marines. Casualties were heavy, but when the fighting was done, it was the Pacificans footing the bulk of the butcher’s bill, and the Meallans had broken through–the abhuman ghetto was theirs, and all its valuable souls with it.

The smell of spent plasma cells, blood, and offal hung heavy in the air as General nic Lir’s tank rolled into the aftermath. She hadn’t wanted to hold back, but urban warfare was a bad place for a frontline general, and her lip curled in distaste as she saw the evidence to why.

A nearby Meallan tank had been gutted by a direct hit to their munition stowage, and the twisted metal and vaguely-humanoid slurry barely registered as having been a vehicle crewed by living people. She pulled her eyes away from the sight, ears flat against her skull as she raised the vox to her mouth. “Magh Meall to the Empire; we are through in our sector, over.”