Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rampart (section)

===The Invasion===

In the years prior to the Seventh Glasian Migration, Oglith’s portentous role in the coming war came clearer and clearer.  Multiple Tarot readings and statistical projections pointed to the same thing, from the Deathwatch to the Guard to the Inquisition: Oglith would come under brutal assault in the Seventh Glasian Migration, far worse than any other system except Septiim.  Since the total number of systems hit by the enemy would be higher than any previous wave, and each wave had ten percent more Glasians in it than the one before, the Inquisition was able to calculate the number of defenses each of the six worlds in the aliens’ path would need to fend them off.  The Blue Daggers would hold the enemy at Septiim, of course, but to the Inquisition’s disquiet, two of the worlds the Glasians were going to hit were not of modern tech levels, and two were Subsector Capitals.  The proportionate response needed to protect two targets of such vulnerability and two targets of strategic indispensability would be staggering, nearly as much as the Cloudburst Sector could afford to spend.  That meant there was no room for error.

As the Imperium began raising, arming, dispatching, and training troops, Oglith’s defenses hardened.  The Migrations are far enough apart that few humans alive for one would be alive for the next without extensive augmetics or juvenat.  Each world hit had to learn the lessons of the previous generation all over again.  Oglith, which had never been hit by a Migration, didn’t even have the advantage of second-hand experience for its own drills.  The populace had its own concerns for much of its history, with pirates and the ever-present subterranean Orks remaining a problem.  Privately, some Astra Militarum and Administratum officials wondered how in the world they were going to keep the natural emotional back-swell of the Migration from driving the Orks below into a frenzy.

As of M41.998, that became a secondary concern.  Without warning, a vast flotilla of Ork ships arrived at the edge of the Rampart system Security Zone.  The Orks blew past the shocked defenders in the outer system, who had not expected a battle for another two years.  The greenskin flotilla managed to make it within four hundred thousand kilometers of the planet Oglith before the SDF and Navy intercepted them with anything heavier than a light gunboat.  Once the Orks had closed enough to come within range of the heavy guns of Oglith’s orbitals and defense fleet, however, the greenskins ran headlong into the teeth of Imperial weapons fire.  The cannonades of the Imperial warships hulled two Ork frigates before the core of the greenskin formation pushed past them into orbit.  Immediately, the ships in orbit started landing hundreds of shuttles and Roks, disgorging tens of thousands of Orks onto the planet below.  The trip they had taken from the edge of the system to the world was a long one, over three weeks of flight, but that was not even a fraction of the time the Astra Militarum below had needed to retool their anti-Glasian defenses for Ork-hunting.  Greenskins by the battalion spilled from huge landing Roks and looted Imperial shuttles, and from contraptions of their own.  Shuttles and Roks landed more and more boyz, and the shuttles returned for more.

In orbit, the Navy and SDF have managed to contain the Ork flotilla, and have sunk or captured sixty percent of their ships of half-kilometer beam or greater.  However, the remainder dumped greenskins on the planet below as fast as they could, and the surviving ships are uneasily standing off with the Navy.  Meanwhile, the situation below became untenable for the Imperium.  The un-walled cities, normally so secure, were easy prey for the Ork armies.  These were no un-equipped Ferals, with barely more than shotguns and knives, these were marauding Ork looters with ships they had built themselves.  The Oglith Warriors and Defenders fought bravely, but the sheer number of Orks overwhelmed the defense of several cities, until there was a pentagonal section of the planet approximately eleven hundred kilometers on a side in which the Imperium had lost all control.  Worse, individual towns and settlements including several PDF bases have fallen outside the cordon, which continued to expand for months after the initial landings.  Cities with walls have had more success driving off the Orks, including the capital, but their defenses cannot hold indefinitely.

The Sector Administratum had to make a choice.  Electing to strip nearly all non-Marine defense from Septiim and send it where it was needed, the Astra Militarum Cloudburst sent over two million troops to Oglith, with more slated for departure as soon as the Migration ends.  The Blue Daggers now must defend their home system with little backup from the Guard.

If the Migration claims no worlds, then the Blue Daggers and the Guard will be able to send many of their forces to Oglith and Foraldshold, to help break the grasp of the greenskins on those indispensable worlds.  However, even throughout the pressure of a full-scale Ork invasion, the leaders of the Oglith defenses have not forgotten that their world is a Migration target too.  All told, the Guard and Inquisition have directed two million four hundred thousand troops to the site of the Ork attack, and although the number of Orks from the surface invasion has dropped somewhat, Orks are now appearing and attacking settlements on the other side of Oglith, where there have been no recorded landings.

Subsector Command must now come to terms with the fact that the Orks below the surface may well have responded to the psychic back-swell and joined the fray.  Pinning an exact number on the Ork horde below is impossible, but the Mechanicus’s most conservative estimate is one hundred seventeen thousand, with the most likely being one hundred thirty thousand and the worst-case scenario being one hundred forty-seven thousand.

If one hundred forty-seven thousand Orks join the battle for Oglith as things are, the planet is all but doomed, and its doom is sealed if the Migration hits before the Ork problem resolves.  The Subsector Command office under Lord Darren Atongwë, great-great-great-great-grandnephew of the brilliant Lord Trader Gomat Atongwë, has knelt and pled for backup from Segmentum and Sector command.  Battlefleet Rampart, fortunately, has no other demands on its forces at the moment, and so every ship in the fleet is either there already or on its way.  No fresh Ork ships have trailed in behind the initial surge, leading the Inquisition to suspect that the arrival of the Orks in Rampart may have been an accident, and their true objective was either [[Setting:Cloudburst/Oscar India Golf|Gorkypark]] or [[Setting:Cloudburst/Foraldshold|Foraldshold]], but there is no way to be sure until they capture the enemy flagship.  The current flagship of the Ork flotilla is a Killykrooza named Steel-Toof, under the command of Big Chief Squiggothrider.

Squiggothrider is a fierce and competitive Ork, who would very much like to make Gorkypark his own, but he sees the current war on Oglith as an even better use of his time.  Whatever his true objective had been when the Void Whale’s gravity shadow pulled his fleet from the Warp no longer matters.  The Ork is happier than a squig in mud, and the chance to rampage through an Imperial Subsector Capital delights him.

Imperial savants doubt that Squiggothrider even knows that there are Ferals on the planet.  Certainly, despite the potent reinforcements they represent, he doesn’t seem to know that they’re there, or if he does, he doesn’t act like it.  Meanwhile, the horde he has is more than enough to justify additional reinforcements from Segmentum Command.  The Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos would very much like to put the huge potential threat of Squiggothrider becoming a true Warboss to bed, and if that prevents Oglith and Gorkypark from destabilizing any more than they already are, great.
As such, the Inquisition has requested and received from the Senate of the High Lords permission to field a duo of Officio Assassinorum specialists.  Designated with codenames “Civil” and “Mimic,” these two killers are under orders to kill Squiggothrider as soon as possible; preferably, where all of his subordinates can watch him die.

Lord General Halwart, the blowhard but fearless commander of the Imperial Guard forces dispatched to contain and kill the Glasians, re-tasked his entire force, and collected two million more Guardsmen besides to fight off the Orks.  Oglith is fighting for its life, now, because if the Glasians manage to push past the Orks to high orbit, the surface war will upend in an instant.  Anti-siege tactics that work against Glasians simply don’t work against Orks.

Other Imperial assets are flying to Oglith as well.  So far, four Oglith Jaeger regiments, nine regiments of Stormtroopers and Scions from other worlds, and two million non-Oglith Guardsmen have flown to Oglith.  The unrelated Ork invasion of Foraldshold has drawn off several hundred thousand more men, and Oglith’s commanders are desperately begging for more, but unless Cardinal Lamarr can be pled into parting with his own mercenary army, there is likely little else to send.  A Templar Psykologis team tasked with maintaining civilian morale is also on the way from Segmentum Command, however.

The fighting has spread across the globe, with little preference by its participants for locale.  From the frigid polar landmasses to the sprawling, airy cities of the tropics, the Orks and Imperium have clashed.  The fighting has spread to the Mechanicus weather and terraforming control machines, which the Techpriests now defend with desperate vigor.  The mighty bastion fortress Lightwall has had its outer defenses challenged twice, and both times, it nearly fell to Ork kunnin’.  The fighting near the capital is now so intense that Cognomen advisors to the Astra Militarum defenders there under Lord General Halwart have quietly suggested that the time may have come for a visit from House Matraxia.

When the Glasians arrive, the entire scope of the war will shift in an instant.  The orbital battle will stay as a standoff no longer when the Glasian Sub-cylinder arrives, and the fate of the entire Rampart system will probably hinge on whether the Glasians land closer to Imperial territory or Ork territory.


====Order of Battle====
Imperial Guard (Cloudburst Region Contingent):
* 	Clegran Hunters – 3 Regiments
*	Oglith Warriors – 32 Regiments
*	Celestial Guard – 18 Regiments
*	Cloudburst Defenders – 1 Regiment
*	Septiim Guards – 8 Regiments
*	Coriolis Scharfschutze – 22 Regiments
*	Hapster Bronze Legionnaires – 12 Regiments
*	Oromet Shock Troopers – 9 Regiments
*	Nauphry Guardians – 12 Regiments
*	Cassie’s Rangers – 6 Regiments
*	Obelisk Sea Dragons – 1 Regiment
*	Hangonne Light Rifles – 4 Regiments
*	Hangonne 10th Penal Legion
*	Combine Swords – 5 Regiments
*	Thimblan Argent Swords – 40 Regiments
*	Drimmerzole Scarp-wrights – 2 Regiments
*	Grendel Cleavers – 1 Regiment
*	Maskos Warriors – 10 Regiments
*	Delving Field Guard – 6 Regiments
*	Crispin Auxilia – 2 Cohorts

Imperial Guard (Outside Cloudburst):
*	Catachan Devils – 1 Regiment
*	Ustenoran Gundogs – 3 Regiments
*	Locton Hiverats – 12 Regiments

Imperial Navy:
*	Battlefleet Rampart
*	Battlefleets Nauphry, Celeste, Cloudburst (elements)
*	Bloodsky Wing – Valkyrie formation
*	Voidscorch Wing – Starhawk formation
*	Imperial Naval Intelligence Perceiver squad

Rogue Traders:
*	House Rowsdower (elements)
*	House Arins (elements)

Astra Militarum Tempestus Scions:
*	Oglith Jaegers
*	Septiim Sharks

Space Marines:
*	Blue Daggers – 2 squads
*	Deathwatch – 2 Kill-teams

Sisters of Battle:
*	Sanguine Soul Order – 5 Preceptories

Adeptus Mechanicus:
*	Cognomen – Skitarii Legion
*	Cognomen Electro-Cult – 2 Cohorts

Officio Assassinorum – 2 Operatives

Inquisition:
*	Ordo Xenos Forces
*	Ordo Malleus Forces

Adeptus Arbites

Templar Psykologis – 3 units