{oOo}

The battlefield was a strange one.

Thousands of years before the Imperium men had come to the system of Troy. Using vast mirrors they had harnessed the light of a sun and applied it to the nickel-iron asteroids that might at one time have been parts of long dead planets. Applied correctly, the result was bubbles of stone, and a wealth of minerals.

Most of the asteroids was nickel and iron, both of which were somewhat valuable in the quantities available. Some was other metals far more useful. The Emperor alone could guess how much of the Dark Age of Technology had been built with the metals from Troy.

All of that had been long ago. The mirrors were long gone and the miners who remained could not say what had happened. Conquered by the Great Crusade, they had paid their tithe in minerals scratched from the inside of their hollow homes and otherwise dabbled in piracy when they thought they could get away with it.

That was not the reason that the Black Legion had been sent there.

The reason was that the miners had stopped pirating, which had made the Administratium happy, and started hurling their homes off into the darkness of interstellar space upon fusion torches. Since those giant globes then ceased to send tithes to the Imperium, or to hand their pskyers to the Black Ships, neither the Administratium not the Inquisition was happy with this idea.

Storming aboard the remaining globes was the sort of job that required Space Marines, at least to force beachhead. And since it was the sort of head-on assault that would kill even Space Marines, the first wave of the attack would be carried out by the Black Legion and the second by World Eaters who would have the unspoken orders to use their bolters of the Black Legion balked.

Not that they would, of course. They were under the eyes of their reborn Primarch and more importantly, the Black Legion never had. But some wounds are just too deep.

Teleute would fight with the rear rank of the Black Legion. This was not the usual position for an inexperienced member of the Legion - usually their deployments were well forward so that those who had joined only in search of a place to die would find it quickly, those who desired to continue their service would have opportunity to show their worth and those undecided between the two extremes would be forced to choose.

It had been made clear to Telute that while she was fighting alongside the Black Legion, she was doing so as commander of the XVI Legion and thus her life was not to be given away. Her warplate was therefore the bone-white with black trim of the original Luna Wolves and although outwardly it resembled Mk 8 Power Armour she had learned that the artifice of its construction rendered it almost as durable as the mighty tactical dreadnought armour used by veteran Astartes. And then there was the Iron Halo.

The protection afforded by the suit was remarkable, but given that between her and the enemy were not only the first rank of the Black Legion but also the second rank, made up of hoary veterans that formed the backbone of the Legion, it seemed almost superfluous.

It was a surprise therefore that no sooner had she exited her boarding torpedo than she was shot at.

The stubber slugs exploded in fiery death as they struck the protective field of the Iron Halo and Teleute automatically raised her bolt pistol, dispatching the gunner as her bodyguards eradicated the infiltrator squad that had somehow eluded the first attack groups.

One look at the tactical displays demonstrated to Teleute the validity of the first principle that she'd learned from studying Miriam's gifts: in war, the plan was the first casualty. The outer shells of the globes were over a hundred kloms thick and penetrated only by a maze of interlinking passages and mineshafts. Maps provided for the operation bore little to no relationship with reality.

"Move forward," she ordered tersely, ignoring the shattered remains of the men she'd killed, now almost obscured by the flood of information across her eye-displays. "We will have to penetrate to the core. We can't expect to kill a snake by gnawing on its tail."

{oOo}

AN: And here is more of the "Heresy & Rebirth" universe~