Kite's Nest/Vular/Erszbat

2165CE

It was midday, not a cloud in the sky. Insects were flitting to a fro, the occasional bird flying overhead. A chorus of nature, seemingly complementing the humming of the Batarian at work. The sun shone hot on Gratok's brow as he knelt next to a crop harvester, performing routine maintenance. Sometimes he wondered why these things needed so much maintenance in the first place, but usually he just hummed to himself, letting his hands do what they did best, and enjoying the serenity that came with focus.

He was humming an old folk song, cleaning one of the harvester's heat exchangers, when abruptly the notes turned sour and the world around him went quiet. He stopped humming, yet the sour notes continued someplace inside his head, right behind his eyes. A shadow passed overhead, clouds darkening the sky. But when Gratok looked up, he did not see clouds, he saw ships descending from a sickly green sky. Not a few, but dozens. Not Batarian, either. They were ugly, ungainly things, wreathed in green lightning and adorned with spikes and greebles of unknowable function. An emergency alert blared from his omnitool, startling him out of his stupor. He made to stand, to make it to his house, but by then it was too late. Aliens, unlike any Gratok had ever seen, had descended from the ships, brandishing dangerous looking rifles and even what seemed to be knives and swords, and swarmed like vermin over him faster than he could react. Before he knew what was really going on, he was trussed up like a slave and being hauled into one of the transports. He hoped things weren't as hopeless as they seemed.

In the capital city of Erszbat, at a military spaceport, SIU Captain Ka'hairal Balak was not having the best day. He and his squad had finished hunting down a particularly dangerous domestic terrorist and were preparing to return home to Khar'shan, when Erszbat had come under attack by a unknown ships. Within hours, the skies were lost to swarms of thousands of fighters. All contact with the outside galaxy had been lost, the comm buoys obviously destroyed. From what he could gather, he knew that this was clearly a slave raid. The enemy fighters were using tactics all too familiar, trying to herd civilians into groups to be picked up en masse. His first priority was to find a defensible location and lay low until they'd taken what they could carry and leave. He was of course confident that the Hegemony's retaliation would be brutal and efficient, and that its citizens and property would be returned home. His second priority would be gather as much information as possible on this new enemy, for when he inevitably returned home.

Given his current location, the best way to accomplish priority one would be to get in contact with the spaceport's commanding officer and help bolster the defenses in preparation for the impending ground attack. Unfortunately, all he and his team could really do to that end would be to add their numbers to the mix, so they headed to reinforce the entryway.

Upon arriving, it quickly became clear that this was not, in fact, just a slave raid. In the distance, just beyond the maximum range of the base's emplacements were three transports of ludicrous size. Slave raids didn't typically involve troop transports the size of office buildings, and in fact the slavers normally didn't attempt to take military installations at all, preferring to destroy them from orbit or ignore them. This was clearly an invasion, and the invaders intended to stay. Soon enough, the transports started disembarking troops, those troops immediately charging toward the base. Looking through his scope, they were ugly things, covered in fur but with scaled tails, with long snouts, sharp claws, and large buck teeth likely evolved for gnawing through bone. They were also entirely unarmored, clad in rags, and armed only with pistols and what seemed to be swords and spears. They hadn't even finished disembarking and already there were thousands of them.

The base's guns were firing as quickly as they could, but he could already tell they simply didn't have enough guns. Soon enough, the aliens entered the range of his soldiers' weapons. By the time the enemy had reached the gate, he alone had racked up 36 kills. He expected things to go smoothly from there, after all, it would simply be a matter of aiming at the front of the gate and firing. What he did not expect was for the aliens to start exploding on their own when they reached the gate. Now things started to make sense. This hadn't been a wave of soldiers, or even cannon fodder, this had been a wave of slaves, implanted with explosives, sent at the base like guided missiles.

Quickly reassessing his priorities, given that this was clearly not just a slave raid and that the base was definitely going to fall, he figured his next best move was to get his men out of this clusterfuck and try to organize a resistance to the coming occupation. Sending orders over his squad's private comms for his men to retreat to the airfield, he peaced out. Leaving the rest of the defenders to their fates, they commandeered a transport and lived to fight another day.

When contact was lost with Erszbat, the Hegemony was worried. Immediately, a fleet was assembled to investigate, and the readiness level was elevated throughout Hegemony territory. Within a week, a fleet of fifteen ships arrived in Vular, prepared - they thought - for anything they might find.

Sensor returns showed a positively massive fleet of about two dozen light frigates, split into eight packs of three each, blockading Erszbat. In geosynchronous orbit above the largest city on the planet was not only the most bizarre looking ship anyone had ever seen, but also the largest, with it being 3 kilometers across. It was shaped like a torus, on the inside of which were three spurs, each one connecting to the point of a triangular command module, and on the outside of the torus were massive hangars. As for the planet, what was happening was clear. This was a slave raid, the largest the Hegemony had ever witnessed, and that said something.

The order was quickly given to close range to Erszbat to get more recent sensor data. Despite the enemy mothership's considerable size, it paradoxically didn't look particularly well made, and there was little chance that the combined efforts of the Batarian fleet couldn't handle it. When the fleet dropped out of FTL thirty light-seconds from the planet, they made to check their sensors. The enemy ships were indeed still there, and in fact had not moved. A little over minute later, they noticed that lightning had begun to wreathe the enemy mothership's hull, and half the light frigates were making to intercept them. Just as the Batarians finished making their final preparations for battle, lightning seemed to lash out at them from the enemy command ship. The Batarian fleet scattered, of course, but as if it was seeking them out, the lightning hit nonetheless.

To the command cruiser of the fleet, it was less that the ship was under attack, and more that the very air inside was suddenly made of lightning. Eldritch energy flung itself from the electronics of the ship, seemingly seeking the eyes of one particular Batarian, the commander. Shooting past his optic nerves, into the deepest part of him, it burned his soul from within. His flesh seared and blistered, popping like sick boils as the baleful lightning danced wickedly across his skin, stimulating every single pain receptor it could find. His body contorted and twitched painfully as his eyes boiled from his sockets. Then, as the lightning jumped from his body to those of the nearest crewmen, he exploded so violently that the pressure wave knocked those around him to the ground. Within seconds, the entire crew had suffered the same fate, the cruiser left a lifeless hulk as the redundant electronics took over.

Already scattering in evasive manoeuvres, and now devoid of command, it took precious seconds for the fleet to try to regroup. It was too late. The enemy was upon them, mere hundreds of kilometers away, each enemy ship wreathed in the same lightning as the mothership. The frigates of the fleet were hit the worst. Their very hulls turned against the crew, the temperature within the ships rising sharply until the people inside boiled in their skin. The two remaining cruisers, however, were able to escape into FTL, the lightning from the enemy only leaving deep furrows in the hulls. They left the system as quickly as they were able, committed to warning the Hegemony about the alien menace.

Tune in next week for the next exciting episode of Realm of the Skaven! Will Balak survive? With the Skaven discover hand sanitizer? What happened to that poor commander's soul? How did the lightning hit a ship 30 light-seconds away? And what DOES a Skaven mothership taste like with sprinkles?