Setting:Cloudburst/Rampart

System
Galactic Position	Cloudburst Sector, Rampart Subsector
System Overlord	Lord Subsector Oglith Darren Atongwë
Worlds in the system	Twelve, one inhabitable
World Type, Name	War World (formerly Frontier World): Oglith
Tropospheric Composition	75%, Oxygen 22%, Argon 1%, Helium 1%, Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%.
Religion	Imperial Cult
Government type	Adeptus Terra (officially), presently Astra Militarum Emergency Law
Planetary Governor	Yes
Adept Presence	Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Astartes, Officio Assassinorum, Templar Psykologis
Climate	Mostly temperate with bands of intense heat at equator and harsh sub-zero blizzards at the poles
Geography	Broad stretches of flat plains with extensive subterranean natural caverns, broken up by near-vertical mountains; deep ocean trenches that reach most of the way to the mantle; 1.05 times the size of Terra
Gravity	Oglith has Terran gravity
Day Length	30 Terran Hours
Economy	Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones
Principal Exports	Stone, Ores, Food, Oil, Noble Gasses, (previously) Soldiers
Principal Imports	Finished Goods, Alloy Ingots, Ammunition, Weapons, Satellites, Hovercraft, Soldiers
Countries and Continents	Oglith has no national divisions, and nine continents
Military	Oglith Defenders (medium quality PDF), Oglith Warriors (medium quality Guard), Oglith Jaegers (high quality Scions), millions of others
Contact with other Systems	Daily
Tithe Grade	Decuma Particular
Population	4,120,000,000

Description

Oglith is a world of which Cloudburst is profoundly embarrassed. This is a fresh development, but it will probably stain the world’s reputation forever.

Despite the rocky and unpleasant exterior of the planet, the Imperium colonized the world almost as soon as Explorators found it. The lack of natural predators and the natively Terra-like atmosphere, plus enormous oil reserves, meant the Administratum pressed for a colony as soon as volunteers could be found in Naxos.

The initial scans of the surface revealed that the planet had no multicellular life at all, despite obvious signs of former human colonies, picked over by scavengers at some point. The Explorators noted with interest that the planet had apparently been colonized by humanity, and that the world had fallen to Chaos or some other forces of the Warp, fewer than three thousand years before. The Explorators took this as a personal shame. This world, they knew, could have been saved from its horrible fate if the Explorators of the past had found it during the Crusade.

Regardless, the world’s total algae coverage was a clear sign that the planet was habitable at least. The taint of Chaos seemed to linger on the eroded metal skeletons of the original human colony, to nobody’s surprise. The Administratum insisted on a purge of the offending materials before any colony landed, and so the Mechanicus disposed of the tainted material by throwing it into the nearby star.

Two hundred years later, the minor terraforming needed to bring the algae in line with more oxygen-producing plants ended. The Administratum had barely begun the speculation needed to outline the future colony site when panicked scouts returned to their camps, waving ground-penetrating radar charts about.

The charts revealed at once that the planet had a more immediate problem than long-dead Chaos-worshippers. The Explorators had missed vast subterranean caverns, which the radar revealed to span the whole continent, and possibly others. Subsequent scans revealed that all but one of the land continents had these cavern networks. The Explorators and scouts revealed that they looked natural, though perhaps enlarged by the original colonists or somebody else.

Of course, huge caverns were no real problem by themselves, but if the Explorators missed that, what else had they missed? The scouts began more thorough scans, hoping to at least see what was down there. Initial returns puzzled them. Surface-piercing scans revealed what looked like mobile heat sources, and small seismic events similar to avalanches. Mineral scans later revealed that although the crust of the planet had abundant if slightly depleted metal deposits, all such deposits near the large caverns were gone.

A scout team eventually managed to penetrate into the cavern network by entering laterally through a deep fault line ravine. The scouts advanced through the caverns in tracked vehicles, searching for their mysterious heat sources.

Within hours, the scouts detected footprints on the floor of their cavern, along with extensive impact damage from various weapons. The scout team radioed their findings back to their breacher, reporting that they were not alone in the cavern. Several minutes later, the team radioed back their screams, accompanied by one phrase, repeated three times: “Contact green!”

The scout breachers sealed the gap in the canyon wall and flew back to the Administratum camp in panic. Within hours, word had reached every Imperial military asset in the system: Oglith had Feral Orks.

The colony administrator scoffed at the initial reports of the scouts and Mechanicus. How, he asked, could an Ork infestation survive the ravaging of Chaos? How had they fed themselves for two thousand years? Where could they have found the technology and labor they would have needed to survive in an area with no self-replenishing oxygen?
Where the Mechanicus took these questions as a challenge, the administrator asked them out of disbelief. It was impossible, he proclaimed, that the world could have had that many Orks. Surely, somebody would have seen them, or they would have starved long ago. Locked securely in his denial, the administrator began the colonization process.

As years went by with no sign of Orks, even in the young colony’s few surface mines, the administrator seemed vindicated. Eventually, Oglith’s economy and military capability grew enough that it became the next Subsector Capital, and the seat of Battlefleet Rampart. Shipyards sprouted in orbit, scavengers ripped the remaining ancient ruins apart for materials and archaeotech, and cities rose from the plains. Mechanicus terraforming efforts continued, despite their knowledge of the Orks below the surface. First, they introduced Terran plants grown from genestocks of the pre-Unification genolabs of Luna. Next came tiny herbivores, given a few generations to reproduce in the abundant food supply. Then came birds, then small land mammals and Grox. After a few centuries of hard work, life on Oglith became bearably comfortable.

As time wore on, it became harder for the Administratum rulers of the world to ignore the truth. Mechanicus surveyors and xenobiologists produced reams of data showing moving heat sources, depleted metal veins, and excess carbon gas production in places where there were no natural processes to yield such results. After the entire initial Administratum detachment had died or retired, the world finally gained a Planetary Governor who could admit to the facts; at last, Oglith had a leader who could admit to reality he disliked.

The Astra Militarum was finally notified of the Orks, and their response was shocked disbelief. They demanded to know how the Administratum had been so stupid, so appallingly unprepared. The new administrators proclaimed their own innocence. After all, they had turned to the Astra Militarum for aid, not denied the root of the problem like their predecessors. Astra Militarum and Mechanicus joint scans and scouting missions revealed a horrifying fact: there were now over one hundred thousand Orks in the subterranean tunnel network, far more than there had been before. As Oglith governmental tithes rose and the number of PDF and Imperial Guard rose commensurate to their new status as a Subsector Capital, the very chance that Oglith would have to go to war with itself became more real by the month.

By M40.300, the reality of the situation was obvious to all but the most obstinate holdouts of the Oglith government. For every attempt that they made to overcome the Ork problem, however, there seemed to be the perfect obstacle. When the PDF began recruiting more heavily to prepare to invade the tunnels below, a gang of pirates assaulted the world’s outer orbitals for loot and bloodshed, which demanded higher defense in the future. When a depleted salt mine’s owners offered to let the military use their mine as a staging area for an assault on the Orks below, a cave-in rendered its walls so unstable that staging an army there would have clued the Orks in on the impending invasion and let them prepare for it.

Even the Navy seemed unable to help. The Navy began orbital scans in preparation for surgical strikes on the crust to collapse specific caves and allow the PDF and Guard rapid access. However, they saw that several of the caverns that were close enough to the surface to hit with orbital weapons without destroying the planet’s atmosphere were broad enough that to puncture them would destroy several nearby cities, killing millions.

After centuries of dithering, the Astra Militarum threw up their hands. Oglith would have to solve its own problems, they said angrily, because the Emperor needed His soldiers elsewhere. Oglith’s Administratum ordered whole cities near potential egress sites to harden their defenses, even increasing taxes to do so. Inevitably, the general populace learned of the Ork presence, which nearly drove the planet to civil war out of panic. When the knowledge went public that several of the planet’s governmental, religious, and corporate leaders had known of the Orks for over a thousand years, the natural response was a sense of betrayal, which worsened the conflict.

Unrest erupted in a dozen cities and simmered in another hundred. Arbites and PDF forces had to work together to suppress riots and looting across the planet. The violence came to a skidding halt when Mechanicus Biologis surveyors hijacked public broadcast channels on every radio and holocast in the world to announce that the ambient violence had driven the Feral Orks into a frenzy, and if the populace didn’t get themselves under control, the Orks could breach the surface and attack.

The Subsector Overlord stepped in to declare martial law, and slowly, order returned to Oglith. The planet’s civil populace did not adjust well to the reality of their alien neighbors. Although the downswing in roiling emotion in the Warp prevented the Orks from detecting the humans above, the planet’s tension was still dangerously high.

It is possible that that unrest is what gave rise to the historic events of the following year. While the occasional riot or killing still continued, there was no warning at all for the sudden arrival of the Chaos psyker Ludovic the Sorcerer in the Oglith countryside. A fleet of over eighty-five thousand raiders and cultists suddenly swept in through the outer system, engaging the startled Oglith SDF and a few ships from Battlefleet Rampart. With the orbital defenses tied up, Ludovic’s army of fanatics assaulted Oglith, fueled by their master’s charisma and mind-twisting magic. Oglith’s PDF, already fully engaged in suppression, reacted quickly, but were so exhausted by a year of martial law that they barely managed to hold back the tide. The Chaos raid would have been far worse if the orbital defenses hadn’t managed to shoot down three of Ludovic’s twenty transports, but the eighty thousand men they did manage to land were enough to destroy an entire city. The Arbites and PDF of the planet eventually contained Ludovic’s army, but they bought him enough time to destroy his objective, a buried artefact of lost Chaotic power. A PDF Killteam sniped him as he rose, cackling and aglow with Warp energy, from the ruin of the Imperial bank under which the artifact had lain. He died laughing.

Ludovic’s army eventually fell to the greater firepower of the Oglith forces. Between the civil disorder and the Chaotic invasion, the damage to the world’s population was gruesome. Four percent of Oglith’s civilian population died in the fighting and riots. The world’s military and law enforcement were all but gone. If the Orks below, fired up by the – to them inexplicable – increase in the ambient psychic turmoil of the planet, had breached the surface and attacked, Oglith would likely have fallen.

By a pair of miracles, this did not happen. Although nervous Mechanicus scouts did report that the Orks of the world were growing more numerous as the psychic ripples imbued the Orkoid fungal pods with more energy, they did not make any moves towards the surface. As Oglith rebuilt, however, the second miracle happened. This one was more easily attributable to Tzeentch than the Emperor, however, as a horrible mutagen swept the planet, mutating and crippling millions, fifteen years to the second after Ludovic destroyed the artifact. The mutagen was waterborne, and affected the Orks as well as it seeped through the soil and rock to the caverns below. That may have been the world’s saving grace, as the mutagen claimed at least as many disorganized and violent Orks as it did orderly Imperial citizens, and the humans started with more people.

Ultimately, the Mechanicus asserted that the Orks remained unaware of the presence of the humans on the surface. Bolstered by the confidence that surviving a civil war, a Chaotic invasion, and a mutagenic plague brings, the new Governor and Overlord promptly settled into doing nothing about the Orks. The complacency that brought ran deep in the people of Oglith. As the planet crawled its way away from being a simple frontier world towards being a fully integrated and strategically important world of the Imperium, the knowledge of and concern about the Orks below faded, though it was never fully forgotten thanks to routine Mechanicus examinations. Periodically, Overlords Sector of Cloudburst would inquire as to their status, but the Rampart Subsector Overlords have always waved off such concerns.

As centuries passed, Oglith grew. Its percentage of developed land rose higher and higher, eventually pushing the limits of what the Administratum would classify as a Frontier World. By M41.998, the planet had emerged as a bastion of Imperial power that was beginning to truly live up to its name.

Oglith culture had always been an odd mixture of ferocity, quiet, and expression. Its status as a Frontier World lingered long after it had passed thresholds of population and industry that would have entitled it to a more informative title in the Administratum records. It remains one of the scarce worlds in the Segmentum Ultima that is both a Frontier World and a Subsector Capital. Unlike Hangonne and Lorelei, the other two Frontier Worlds in Cloudburst, Oglith does not have a rebellious streak against Imperial authority, it is its own local government it finds disappointing, never more than now.

Culturally, however, Oglith’s strength is evident. Its military is diverse and well equipped for a Frontier, in line with its responsibilities as a Subsector Capital; it is a responsibility that the Oglithers have always taken seriously. From its status comes responsibility, however, and its people are not always united in the carrying of the burdens of that task. The leaders of Oglith communities are frequently merchants and religious spokesmen, not politicians and lawyers, or Administratum officers for that matter. This means that the vested interests of the most active residents of a town are likely to be the ones most heavily supported by official policy, and they are not always for the greater good.

Those towns and cities under military jurisdiction are more orderly and disciplined in their conduct, though by little. As host to numerous Imperial military institutions and recruitment centers, these towns are well defended, but they haven’t quite yet lost their Frontier spirit. Several of the Imperial Astra Militarum bases are open-sided, without even trenches, much less walls or defense turrets. Others have some combination of the three, or all three, but most have simple chain link fences and a few sentry turrets at most. The towns themselves tend towards orderly and peaceful thanks to the presence of the base, but also grow the slowest.

Still, Oglith is not the archetypal Frontier World by any means. Most Frontier Worlds are places of lawlessness, exploration, and isolation. Oglith is a military hot spot, they have mapped every surface inch, and it’s a Subsector Capital. The populace is solidly Imperial, if resentful of their inability to appoint or support local officials that can protect them from Orks. Several towns had one hundred percent political turnover after the revelation of the Ork infestation.

Another way in which Oglith departs from the stereotypical Frontier World is its approach to industry. Most Frontier Worlds have little industry simply because they can’t afford it or don’t need it. Oglith has immense industry and a vast infrastructural base for manufacturing and shipping, but they are distributed over thousands of communities and work parks across the globe and its many orbitals. On the surface, factories and mines churn out megatons of products, albeit mostly for domestic production. In space, low-gravity metallurgic factories (mass-built in Cognomen plants) and customs and shipping platforms produce or sell more goods to passing freighters or warships, and help cover the world’s tithe costs.

Fortunately for both Oglith and the Imperium, Oglith also has some specific natural resources in fantastic abundance. Ore and stone are easy to come by on a young world, of course, but the real breadwinners for Oglith’s tithe are noble gasses and silicon. The planet has a highly radioactive core, and its crust is riddled with various natural isotopes of complex metals. Not only are these metals crucial for advanced manufacturing and electronic engineering on Cognomen, but the decay of these isotopes releases staggering amounts of noble gasses like argon and helium. Sophisticated mining machines under House Ritria control then collect these gasses and ores and sell them in great armored tanks to Cognomen, covering more than three quarters of the world’s tithe costs by itself.

The rest of its tithe comes from various exports, including soldiers for the Astra Militarum (at least until the Ork invasion). The planet’s colossal oil reserves are not easy to reach, since Orks have trapped some of it from the humans by simple virtue of being closer. However, much of its oil is instead under the sea or locked under shale formations on the coastlines, which are nowhere near the Ork caverns, and relatively straightforward to harvest.

Oglith’s two moons play a small role in its defense and economy. The first, Tremaine, is a dead ball of silicon and dust, of no value save for some simple mining. The other, Abris, is barely inhabitable. Its gravity is too low to allow unaided inhabitation for more than a few days at a time, and although its atmosphere is perfect for humans, the pressure would boil a person’s eyes in their sockets after minutes. However, the low gravity makes it perfect for two things: staging defense missile silos, and lifting ore-heavy rocks on conveyor belts to drop them into transports for shipping and processing.

Oglith Military

For most of its history, Oglith exported soldiers to the Astra Militarum. Its armored companies were never more than a token force, but its Warrior Guard and Defender PDF were competent and numerous. Oglith regiments fought in the Gothic War, as well as some of the Wars of Faith that the Ecclesiarchy Ultima waged against heretics in nearby Sectors.

The Oglith Defenders are a capable if uninspired PDF. As with many Frontier Worlds, it benefits from its members being fairly skilled with guns and self-preservation even before joining, though given Oglith’s lack of predators and other threats, most of that skill comes from self-granted self-defense training or scholastic Ork Preparedness drills. Its members garrison in their own hometowns whenever possible, both to allow them to keep families intact and to ensure that they are properly motivated if the Orks ever breach the surface. Members are encouraged to quarter with their own families. If that is not an option, apartments and barracks are provided. Weapon lockers and armory vaults dot several towns so that local Defenders can arm up and fight in no time, without leaving the confines of the city they are supposed to protect. Vehicles usually cache in garages and tarmacs outside town airfields or VTOL ports, just in case. Tanks and other valuable vehicles may park underground where possible, though these garages usually have thick metal braces on the floors to prevent Orks from burrowing up and stealing the vehicles from below.

The planet has severe shortcomings in one crucial field: surface-to-space weapons. Some of the older cities have them, but newer ones universally do not. The Astra Militarum realized that if the Orks ever took the surface, the last thing the Imperium wanted to worry about was being fired on by intact surface-to-space weaponry. Normally, Ork invasions come from space, where their slow, ramshackle ships are vulnerable to surface Defense Lasers and Defense Silos, and if they capture said weapons, they usually dismantle them. However, if Orks invading from below were to capture such weapons, they would surely salvage them to mount on ships. The Navy and Mechanicus cannot stomach the idea of their own heavy weapons turning on them as such. They instead have mounted many of the world’s defense weapons in space, either on void platforms drifting in far orbit around Oglith or on its Navy stations in medium orbit. As a Subsector Capital, Oglith benefits from a Subsector Fortress, a modified Xerxes III that houses the Subsector Overlord when he isn’t in his mansion on the surface. The modifications include larger administrative and life support areas, as well as a small shipbuilding cradle that can handle hulls up to Falchion size. The Navy plans to manufacture far larger yards once the Ork problem resolves. The very name of the system bespeaks the intent of the Navy to defend it more heavily in the future.

Other orbital defenses include the system’s SDF and Battlefleet Rampart. The Battlefleet assigned to Oglith comes from its own small yards and Cognomen, but it also has several small ships taken from pirates over the years. As a Subsector with two Frontier Worlds and as the outer border of the entire Imperium, the Rampart Subsector has had more than its fair share of pirates and raiders.

In fact and unbeknownst to the general populace, the Oglith fleet includes these pirate ships thanks to an unforeseen drop in Chaotic activity. Prior to the arrival of the Glasians, the various Chaos pirate groups of the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, and even those of the Oldlight Exo-zone, identified Oglith as a prime target for raids and theft. The Cloudburst and Mechanicus fleets fielded against many such pirates, but the criminals were so numerous and so widespread that the local defenses strained trying to hold them back. Then, roughly one century before the arrival of the First Glasian Migration, the Chaotic pirates simply vanished. Investigations by the Inquisition and Arbites revealed that the ships had disappeared to other Sectors or wiped each other out, and had done so in an eerily coordinated way.

Of course, now the Inquisition knows that this happened because Tzeentch willed it to be so, and turned his own forces against those of his evil brethren, but at the time, all the Navy knew was that its job had just become far easier. Battlefleet Rampart immediately sortied against the pirates that had remained behind, those untainted or unaware of Chaos. They were able to steal several ships from the pirates as prizes, and kept them all for the Subsector Flotilla. These successes delighted Battlefleet Cloudburst; they have authorized Battlefleet Rampart to repeat this tactic whenever it is viable.

Oglith’s PDF have few of their spaceborne brethren’s advantages beyond gumption and loyalty, however. Their tank forces are a bit of a joke, given how underfunded they are, and their planetary Killteams are murderously effective, but the rank and file Defenders are hardly Guard grade, or even Septiim Defender quality.

However, the Oglith Warriors are another story. Paid for by Oglith gasses and ore, the Warriors field the full array of Imperial Guard tanks and light vehicles, including a variety of Leman Russ tanks second only to Celeste’s. The wide, sprawling, untamed fields of Oglith provide the perfect place for Rough Rider and artillery practice, and their snowmobile rapid cavalry teams are unquestionably the best in the Cloudburst Sector, surpassing even Lorelei’s and Clegran’s. Oglith does not field a particularly large number of regiments, preferring instead to retire depleted ones and recycle their numbers, which at least allows them to ensure that most regiments remain near their optimal strength. Oglith Paratroopers are unimpressive in most regards, even compared to Septiim’s, but they have successfully fielded regiments with full Venator and Sentinel support against aliens on campaigns under Segmentum authority before and can do so again.

The ultimate in Oglith force, however, is not its well-equipped Guard or gutsy Navy. It is, instead, its cold-blooded and lauded Scion unit. The Oglith Jaegers are a Scion force trained in the capital’s sprawling Schola Progenum, raised from the offspring of slain Adepts and veterans. Like most Scions, they have few ties to their homeworld beyond having trained there, but the Jaegers are exceptional even among the ranks of the human race’s elite. The Jaegers are field specialists without compare in Cloudburst, far surpassing even the Celeste and Septiim Scions. Their standards of physical athleticism and marksmanship are high enough that the unaware might mistake them as Scout Marines.

The Jaegers field in forces of no more than a few hundred at a time, usually as special operations support for Space Marine or Inquisitorial forces. However, they have also served as the precision point of larger Guard invasions of Circuit worlds, in the retinues of Rogue Traders, or even as advance units for Imperial Crusades in other Segmentum Ultima Sectors. Jaegers do not field tanks, relying instead on air units and the variable power of the Taurox. The most successful Jaeger units have fought alongside forces as disparate as Lord Solar Macharius and the Ultramarines, and fought in the Imperial contingent for the Badab War on behalf of the Inquisition.

Jaegers also serve as part of the Cloudburst-unique ECAFs that dart across the Sector in modified Fast Clippers to provide leadership and reinforcement where needed, sometimes filling the entire infantry quotient. Such is their reputation that they have served by invitation beside Blue Dagger and Deathwatch units in the field, against Glasians and Heretics alike. The Jaegers personalize their equipment to a limited extent, usually including a feather tucked into the belt of their armor or the tightening strap of their Omni-helms. Like many Scion units, they focus on laser weaponry, but augment it with a variety of other energetic weapons like plasma, meltas, and flamers.

Unlike many other worlds in the Cloudburst Sector, the Oglith military does not field any unique weapons. However, Oglith does field some of its units out of the standard Imperial proportions, such as including armed Field Medics in units that traditionally not get them, or get fewer if they did. This extends to the Jaegers, who frequently enjoy Field Medics or even Battlefield Surgeons attached as low as squad level. This is thanks to the Oglith Medical College structure attached to one of its orbitals, where prospective medics train under Guard professionals and civilian doctors to administrate care to wounded soldiers. Many systems in the Imperium have one of these, but they are expensive, and few Cloudburst systems construct them unless needed. For a Frontier World to have one is rare in the extreme, not that anybody’s complaining.

The Oglith Medical College is yet another sign of how the Imperial Navy intends to expand beyond the borders of Oglith, towards the Galactic North and its limiting Terminus Shock. The original plan for the College was that it would accelerate and enable the training and dispatch of extra medical personnel to the crews of Imperial Navy exploration and patrol ships as their jurisdictions expanded beyond the previous Imperial borders. Although oft-interrupted by war, stellar phenomena, and the shrinking of the Astronomican’s projection range, the plan continues. The Imperial Naval command elements of the Cloudburst Sector have even gone so far as to attach a small Schola Progenum and Imperial Exchequer facility to the orbiting medical school, to raise the profile of their efforts. Cynical observers have noted that this is more likely an effort to counteract negativity over the growing and embarrassing public spectacle of Port Maxient’s jurisdictional battles, rather than an actual strengthening of the Imperial border.

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 Gorkypark or 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