"I would say to the men as I said to those who have joined this command: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long years of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs — Victory in spite of all terror — Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival." –Lord Commander Pacificus Churchill, at the beginning of the Sabbat Worlds crusade

=][= The following transcript is the property of the Imperial Munitorum. Any tampering with it or its contents will result in Inquisitorial intercession. The Emperor protects. =][=

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Eoshive, Verghast, Sabbat Sector, Segmentum Pacificus

3.589.768.M41

From the log of Colonel-Marshall Petkovic, 48th Visegrad Armoured

Is this damn thing on? Good. Well, here we are. Somehow we survived, praise the Emperor, even though I have no frakking clue how. One moment all's fine, the next second the hive next door gets corrupted and invades. 13 million men and women, almost the whole population of the damn city, all armed to the teeth with autoguns, flashlights, and here's the kicker: twoscore Baneblades and Shadowswords, along with their sister tanks. That alone should be enough to level half the planet, but then Vanickhive gets levelled by atomics. Seven million people, wiped out in less time than it takes for a Commissar to execute a full squad of cowards.

Apparently, Ferrozoica had a rivalry with Vanick and Vervunhives, and Vanick took the brunt of it. Vervunhive had some void shield that saved them, the bastards. Next thing we know, there's a quarter million tanks rolling down the plains and backed up by seemingly all the cultists in the frakking galaxy. Vervunhive slaps the panic button, so who gets called up? The glorified pencil pushers called the PDF and us, the heavy armour. Oh, and some first founding regiment called the Tanith or something, commissar fodder the whole lot of them. Not like those lot did much, mostly just ran around the hive looking for heretics. Now us, the Visegradites, we actually did something.

Picture 250 000 tanks. Malcadors, Machariuses, Leman Russes, hell, even Chimeras and Hellhounds. At the head, leading the charge, are 40 super-heavies. Ten Baneblades, seven Shadowswords, six Hellhammers, seven Stormlords, five Baneswords, and the worst of them all: five Stormhammers. Now about a hundred klicks to the west, on their left flank, is my command.

Four hundred and fifty-seven Russes, forty-three Machariuses, a hundred Devil Dogs, and four Baneblades. With that force, I was expected to win a war.

Well, turns out heretics don't really understand the concept of exploiting a success. So Vanickhive got flattened. The gates of Vervunhive are practically thrown wide open, and all that's standing between them and total victory is a ragtag group of Tanith orphans and the stunned PDF. So what do they do? They wait. Fifteen days of pointless milling about, yelling out heretical things and erecting shoddy temples to their various daemons. Not like I'm complaining, of course. Fifteen days is a LOT of time for an armoured regiment. For one thing, ALL of our tanks got up-armoured. Hell, not only our tanks, but our frakking maintenance Sentinels as well. Extra armour, dozer blades, camo netting, the works. Anything to give us a few extra seconds of survivability.

So where did we get all this crap, you may ask? Eoshive, where we were garrisoned, is the lucky host to a Munitorum armoury. If you think the Mechanicus hoards things, think again. There was literally KILOMETRES worth of stuff back there. For instance, in this one underground bunker, I found Soylens Viridians stacked around forty storeys high. That's around 3 square kilometres, extending 90 metres up. When you start measuring Soylens in kilometres, you know there's something wrong. Another bunker I found, it was actually pretty small. Probably could fit a thousand people in there if they sat, two thousand if they stood. But it wasn't full of people, oh no. Inside was stack after stack of pure, unadulterated GOLD. I mean there was enough to pay for a new frakking Astartes chapter! Sadly, there was a small army of clerks nearby, probably trying to figure out how much to tithe for the Nova Terra Interregnum or whatever. Oh, and a Commissar with a VERY nice bolt pistol that was uncomfortably close to my crotch. So he said he was checking the mag for any scratches. Yeah, and I'm an Ork's uncle.

Nonetheless, you get my point. A huge shitload of…stuff, and it was mine. All mine. Well within reason, anyways. For the record, I actually tried to requisition half the gold in that bunker. Backfired miserably, and got so mired up in red tape that I gave up in disgust. Managed to snag myself a decent-looking Nalwood swagger stick, though. Damned thing probably costs more than a Russ nowadays, but worth every for I had to fill out. In triplicate. With each triple copy having to be signed once again in triplicate by a member of the Ministorum, for some reason. Thank the Emperor, I found a drunken reverend who was safely separated from his flamer and got the thing.

On the bright side, I was able to pawn off most of the paperwork to some grumbling scribe-adept. Considering the amount of stuff I grabbed, he's going to be busy for quite a while. Fun fact: It's actually possible to requisition a Krieger Regiment, provided it is under half-strength. …Because that totally isn't what I did…

Okay, in my defence, those Kriegers can dig like nobody else. I told them to create fortifications stretching about twenty kilometres or so along this ridge. I leave for the day, to go supervise the up-armouring of my tanks. I come back, and there's half a frakking Kasr up there, complete with Earthshakers (I don't want to know where THOSE came from), heavy bolters, and lascannon emplacements. They found this machine that lays barbed wire out in lines of five, and started doing laps across the cliffside. Pretty sure they managed to actually empty one of the Munitorum's bunkers laying all that crap, and that's hard even for a full battle group to pull off. And that's not all: those buggers managed to find a bunch of regimental banners, so not only do they have the banner of their regiment, they have about ten other Krieger banners all lined up on top of the bunkers in order of destruction or something, with theirs at the very end.

So now I have a HUGE line of fortifications stretching across almost two dozen kilometres of wasteland, and a half-regiment of Death Korps manning it. I don't even know where the Kriegers came from, but they were there anyways and when the Orks hit the turbofan, they were VERY useful. But enough about them, this is about ME. The governor of the planet gets on the line with me, waking me up just after midnight, too. Sadly, though, when the brass calls, I answer. Not enthusiastically, nor too awake either, but that was his problem, not mine. So he goes on and says, "Colonel, I have bad news for you. The nearest Crusade reinforcements are too far away to be any help. My PDF is sadly not up to the challenge, having been neglected for far too long. The general in charge has been executed by the Commissariat, over my protests," See? Even when delivering bad news the bastard has to be uptight and indignant. That's why I was so reluctant to speak to the guy, but what can you do? So he continues along the same line, going on like "I am confident the Tanith regiment stationed in Vervunhive will be much help to you, colonel, but they are light infantry unsuited for destroying armour. That's where you come in. I recognize that your force pales in comparison to the traitors, but I hope that your skills in command far outweigh theirs. Best of luck, colonel." So basically, he says I'm screwed and if I mess up but survive, his hands are clean and I'm getting shot. Beautiful.

Well then, given such beautiful incentive to win or die trying, I give word to the troops to step up their game. Managed to 'requisition' (okay, I stole them. Totally worth it, though.) a super-heavy tank company, which is where I got the Baneblades from. Found a bunch of battle cannon turrets (legitimately, this time), had them added to my strongpoint. So now my defence line is starting to look pretty damn nice, but there's one problem: this line isn't going to stop anything. Yeah, it's going to shoot up quite a few tanks and cultists, but it's just going to be a distraction. A very dangerous distraction, but a distraction nevertheless. If I even want half a chance at stopping these bastards, I need something more.

And that, dear friends/angry Inquisitor reading this, is where my artillery comes in. By now it was rather well-known that Ferrozoica possessed thermonuclear warheads. Vanickhive did get flattened by them, after all. What wasn't as well-known, however, was that Eos had some too. Oh, not that many, but enough to put a rather large dent in an invading army. The majority of them were stored somewhere in a bunker that even I didn't have the clearance to enter, but there were a few Deathstrike launchers lying around. Now for the ordinary Imperial citizen: a Deathstrike Missile Launcher is rather simple to explain. Picture a standard Imperial Chimera transport. Now rip off all its weapons and the turret (not too violently, the techpriests might get annoyed). In their place, grab the biggest missile you can find and bolt it onto the roof. Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a Deathstrike Missile Launcher, the singly most destructive piece of artillery in the Imperial Guard's arsenal. One of these alone is enough to destroy a Guard regiment. I 'requisitioned' three.

So with all this gear, I was thinking: yeah, maybe I can win this. Sure, I'm outnumbered almost a hundred to one, not to mention those crazed cultists, but given my 'skills' as a commander I stand a pretty decent chance. Of course, during war, things never go as planned. As the old saying goes: "A battle plan never survives contact with the hated foe" (–Saint Murphius, The Militaria Laws) A horde of bulk freighters shows up out of nowhere, and my men and I start cheering. Those are our reinforcements, right? They're here to save our arses and destroy the Zoicans right? Yeah. Nope. The bloody idiots land inside of Vervunhive and proceed to expeditiously do nothing but argue. A small detachment from the standard Zoican military pulls up to the walls of Vervun and starts bombarding it, and the frakking governor of the hive waits almost five hours before turning on the shields. Then some brave Commissar tries to make an armoured sortie, and gets half the tanks in the hive shot up in the process. Only ten tanks make it back in one piece, and they crush a bunch of refugees in the process. The gates shut, and the Zoicans continue their bombardment.

Honestly, how hard can it be to get an easy victory, for once?