"Commence planetary scan," Adam ordered, his gaze locked onto the churning, storm-choked orb of Talon II, once a proud Imperial Hive World, now a festering rebel stronghold, shrouded beneath cyclonic stormclouds and the stench of treason.
Within moments, a torrent of sensor data surged into his augmetic implants: a cascading stream of tactical telemetry, spectrographic readings, threat assessments, and energy emissions all layered in a dizzying flood of information.
Across the planet's surface, over thirty fortress-like megacities sprawled across the ashen terrain, their monolithic forms half-consumed by swirling ashstorms and punctuated by electromagnetic static.
The largest of them, the capital hive-fortress, was sheathed in a colossal Void Shield dome, its rippling cerulean barrier reflecting the light of distant stars like a second atmosphere.
Adam streamed the scan results across the fleet's interlinked data network, his neural interface translating thought into command, transmitting faster than any mortal hand could type or vox.
Within minutes, a single, concise command arrived from Qin Mo.
«Bombard the capital.»
"Commence planetary scan," Adam ordered.
His gaze remained fixed on Talon II, a storm-wrapped orb turning slowly beneath the fleet. Once, it had been a loyal Imperial hive world. Now its surface was hidden beneath cyclonic cloud walls, ash-choked weather systems, and the sprawling fortifications of a rebellion that had been preparing far longer than anyone wished to admit.
The cruiser's augur arrays answered at once. Data poured through Adam's neural implants in layered streams: thermal blooms, electromagnetic interference, atmospheric turbulence, energy emissions, mass concentrations, orbital hazards, suspected defense batteries, and the rough outlines of cities buried beneath cloud cover. His augmetics filtered the flood into tactical meaning before a mortal bridge officer could have read the first screen.
Across the planet's surface, more than thirty fortress-cities sprawled across the ashen terrain. They were not ordinary hives. Their outer districts had been reshaped into defensive belts, their manufactorum zones hardened, their transit arteries narrowed into kill corridors, and their spires studded with sensor masts, anti-orbital platforms, and shield nodes. Ashstorms crawled around their walls like dirty surf. Lightning flashed inside the clouds and vanished against layers of static.
The largest city dominated the scan. Talon II's capital hive-fortress rose from the planet's northern industrial continent, its outline broad enough to swallow smaller cities whole. Above it shimmered a colossal void shield dome, its cerulean surface rippling like a second atmosphere. Starlight broke across the barrier in pale fragments, bending around the city instead of touching it.
Adam transmitted the scan results into the fleet's interlinked command network. His neural interface turned thought into orders, annotations, target packets, and threat estimates, sending them faster than hands could type or vox officers could speak. Across the battlegroup, command cogitators accepted the data and began building firing solutions.
Within minutes, Qin Mo's reply arrived. It contained no speech, no justification, and no ritualized command phrasing.
«Bombard the capital.»
Adam did not question it.
"All hands, prepare for orbital bombardment," he ordered. His voice remained level, cold, and clear across the bridge vox. "Primary target: Talon II capital hive-city."
The cruiser's command deck answered with disciplined motion. Officers repeated coordinates. Weapon crews confirmed ammunition feeds. Red warning lumens pulsed along the gun-deck access corridors as blast shutters sealed and recoil baffles engaged.
As cruiser commander, Adam held direct authority over the escort frigates assigned to his battlegroup. The moment his order reached them, the formation shifted. Frigates adjusted attitude by fractions of a degree, maneuvering into firing arcs around the larger cruiser while maintaining enough spread to avoid a single defensive strike crippling the whole group.
Then every weapon capable of striking from orbit locked onto the capital.
The escort frigates fired first. Ten torpedoes launched in rapid succession, their engines burning bright against the void as they fell toward the planet. Each carried cluster warheads designed to saturate defensive grids, overwhelm local point-defense, and spread destruction across entire city districts once they breached the atmosphere.
Their particle lances followed. Thin, incandescent beams stabbed downward, superheated energy cutting through cloud layers and ionizing the air in their wake. Each lance was strong enough to bore through stacked ferrocrete, plasteel bastions, and armored defense towers in a single sustained strike.
The cruiser brought heavier firepower to bear. Armor-piercing torpedo salvos. Heavy particle lances bright enough to scar the upper atmosphere. Orbital bomb clusters that would break apart into hundreds of guided submunitions. Thermal lances tuned to vaporize armored regiments and hardened bunkers. Macrocannon shells the size of manufactorum silos, each capable of turning square kilometers into cratered wreckage.
None of the weapons had ceremonial names. Qin Mo had never bothered naming half of them. They were not relics to be praised, sainted, or wrapped in prayer chains. They were tools, built to solve a problem in the most direct way possible.
The problem was the capital.
The first particle lances pierced the storm cover, descending like pillars of white fire from the heavens. For a few seconds, the clouds themselves glowed from within. Across the capital hive, rebels, militia, cult officers, manufactorum workers, and terrified civilians looked upward as the sky split open.
Then the beams struck the void shield.
There was no impact. No crater. No vaporized spire.
The lance-fire vanished against the barrier, refracted and dispersed across the dome in vast ripples of blue light. The shield flared, brightened, then steadied, its surface swallowing enough energy to annihilate a city district without visibly weakening.
The torpedoes arrived next. Their cluster warheads split as they approached the shield, releasing dozens of submunitions in carefully staggered patterns. Each detonation carried enough force to crack hab-blocks apart and collapse shielded bastions. Together, they should have turned the capital's outer districts into a burning wound.
Instead, explosions bloomed across the void shield's surface like brief, furious flowers. The ancient matrix absorbed some blasts, redirected others, and diffused the rest into rippling waves of cerulean light. For one moment the entire dome shone bright enough to be visible through the storm front. Then it returned to its steady glow.
Macrocannon shells followed. Their descent shook the atmosphere, each round trailing fire and compression shock. They struck the shield and died there, their kinetic force scattered across the dome rather than delivered into the city below. Thermal beams, particle fire, and orbital bomb clusters met the same fate.
The capital hive remained untouched, sealed beneath an ocean of light.
Adam's augmetics parsed the shield's behavior as the bombardment continued. The energy response was wrong for a standard planetary defense shield. Its absorption curve was too smooth. Its recovery was too rapid. Its power distribution suggested a high-grade void shield array operating at a scale far beyond anything Talon II should have possessed in active service.
Planetary void shields were rare. In Imperial doctrine, shields of such quality belonged to warships, Titan legions, fortress-monasteries, or the most vital strongholds of Segmentum command. A dome protecting an entire hive-city was an anomaly. It might have been a relic from the Dark Age of Technology. It might have been a Mechanicus secret buried and forgotten beneath layers of oath, ignorance, and corrosion. Or it might have been something worse: a heretical gift dragged from the planet's underworld by men too ambitious to fear what they had found.
Adam saw two practical options.
They could sustain the bombardment until the shield's capacitors overloaded, assuming the array could be exhausted before the battlegroup wasted unacceptable time and ammunition.
Or they could cease fire, deploy ground forces, locate the generator complex, and disable it manually.
Adam did not make the decision. He was a commander, not the highest authority in the fleet.
Moments later, a new order entered the command network.
«Bombard the other cities.»
Adam relayed the command without hesitation. "Shift fire. Secondary fortress-cities are now priority targets. Exclude the capital from saturation fire until further orders."
The battlegroup obeyed. Weapon arcs changed. Target locks moved away from the protected capital and settled across the lesser fortress-cities scattered over Talon II's surface. These cities had walls, batteries, hardened spires, militia concentrations, and prepared defenses. They did not have the capital's shield.
The cruiser's main particle lance turned toward a secondary hive-fortress built around a vast manufactorum complex. Its skyline rose unprotected through the storm: spires, smokestacks, transit towers, fortress walls, worker stacks, ammunition yards, and defense bastions laid bare beneath the fleet.
The lance fired at full power.
A scarlet beam tore through the atmosphere and struck the city's central district. For a fraction of a second, the target area became brighter than sunrise. Then the district disappeared. Spires folded inward. Manufactorum roofs vaporized. Streets became molten channels. Defense towers collapsed as their foundations liquefied beneath them.
Even from orbit, the damage was visible: a black wound burned into the planet's surface, ringed by expanding firestorms and boiling dust.
Torpedo volleys followed. Cluster munitions rained down through the broken weather, detonating across industrial zones, barracks clusters, militia depots, and transit hubs. Macrocannon shells hammered the city's perimeter defenses, turning walls into craters and armored gates into shredded metal. Thermal lances cut through vehicle yards and fuel storage tanks, igniting secondary explosions large enough to bloom through the smoke like new stars.
The city tried to answer. Anti-orbital batteries fired upward through the storm, their shells and beams reaching for the fleet in desperate arcs. Most shots died far below the ships. A few reached interception range and were broken apart by defensive fire before they mattered.
Through the billowing clouds of dust and ash, Adam watched tactical returns collapse one by one. Power grids failed. Command nodes went silent. Defense vox traffic dissolved into fragments. Heat signatures clustered, scattered, and vanished.
The second particle lance strike ended the city as a coherent military asset.
What remained was a wasteland of shattered stone, twisted steel, radioactive ash, and burning districts. Whoever had been stationed there, rebel officers, militia regiments, rogue Mechanicus cells, heretic administrators, entire garrisons, had been reduced to numbers on a kill projection.
Adam felt no satisfaction. He felt no hesitation either.
"Target the next city," he ordered. His cadence was steady, almost mechanical, like a servitor reciting doctrine from a damaged prayer scroll.
....
The War Council
Aboard the orbital shipyard, Qin Mo and his senior officers watched Talon II burn through a massive hololithic display. The projection filled the center of the chamber, rendering the planet in spectral layers: storm systems, fortress-cities, orbital trajectories, shield responses, bombardment zones, civilian-density estimates, enemy energy signatures, and the cold geometry of war.
Every new strike appeared as a pulse of light on the display. Every destroyed city left a spreading mark of black and red.
No one in the chamber cheered.
Anruida stood beside the hololith with a stack of recovered parchment records held under one arm. The documents looked absurdly fragile compared to the living tactical projection, but they had already proven more useful than half the official intelligence gathered before the campaign.
"After we secured Talon I, I personally investigated the Spire's underground archives," Anruida reported. His voice was calm, but his eyes kept returning to the burning markers on the projection. "Most of what we found consisted of letters, inheritance records, debt ledgers, private shipping contracts, and financial transfers disguised as noble household expenditures."
He turned a page.
"The inhabitants of Talon II were not preparing rebellion recently. They had been preparing for centuries. These fortress-cities were originally recorded as industrial hubs for military-grade production. Officially, they supplied Talon I and the wider system. In practice, key industries from Talon I were quietly relocated here over successive generations."
Klein frowned. "All of them?"
"Not all," Anruida said. "The traitor governor sold off several production lines to purchase warships. The records disguise the transactions as emergency fleet modernization and anti-piracy investment. The timing suggests otherwise."
He lifted another sheet, its edges browned with age.
"As for the shield protecting the capital, it is not listed as a standard void shield array. The oldest reference calls it an ancestral relic discovered by the traitor governor's bloodline in the Underhive approximately two thousand years ago. There are no detailed specifications. Only maintenance expenditures, security restrictions, and repeated orders forbidding Mechanicus inspection."
That drew several looks around the chamber. Even officers who disliked the Mechanicus understood the danger in hiding ancient machinery from the people most likely to know how badly it could fail.
Qin Mo narrowed his eyes at the hololith. The capital hive remained untouched beneath its glowing shield, calm and arrogant while other cities died around it.
"This information," he murmured, "may have been left behind deliberately before the traitor fled. A warning, a trap, a misdirection…"
His mouth tightened.
"Or perhaps he simply found the idea amusing."
No one laughed.
One could never truly decipher the minds of those who worshipped Tzeentch, the Architect of Fate. Even simple truths became suspect when filtered through men who treated prophecy, deception, and self-destruction as tools from the same drawer.
After a moment of thought, Qin Mo issued his next command.
"Deploy all Legion regiments to the surface. Focus on the smaller cities. The larger fortress-cities remain under sustained orbital bombardment."
The officers around the hololith began transmitting orders at once. Muster zones activated across the shipyard. Troop carriers received target assignments. Logistics drones rerouted ammunition stocks toward deployment bays.
Klein raised one hand before the room fully scattered.
"I propose we continue bombarding the capital," he said. "Void shields have thresholds. Even warship-grade shields collapse under enough sustained fire. If we maintain pressure, the array will fail eventually."
Several officers nodded. The suggestion was practical. Familiar. Imperial warfare often solved problems by applying sufficient mass, firepower, and bodies until resistance ceased to exist.
Qin Mo shook his head.
"Eventually is too vague."
Klein held his gaze. "It may still be safer than a ground assault into the most heavily defended city on the planet."
"Safer for whom?" Qin Mo asked.
The room quieted.
Qin Mo pointed toward the hololith. "Every hour spent trying to overload that shield is an hour the enemy uses to evacuate command staff, activate buried systems, consolidate surviving forces, or prepare whatever cultist nonsense the traitor governor left behind. Talon II is not the only battlefield. We need the campaign finished quickly."
Focusing on unshielded cities was more efficient. Each orbital barrage could erase thousands of enemy troops, cripple infrastructure, and shatter rebel logistics before the Legion ever touched the ground. Deploying regiments against smaller cities would accelerate the collapse. They could seize supply nodes, secure landing zones, and prevent surviving garrisons from regrouping around the capital.
The capital's shield was a separate problem.
And Qin Mo already knew who would solve it.
He stood. Conversations died before he spoke.
"I will personally lead the Thunderborn to destroy the void shield generator complex."
Silence settled over the chamber.
It was not confusion. Everyone understood the order perfectly. That was why no one spoke.
Qin Mo was entering combat himself. Not from orbit. Not through an intermediary. Not as a distant commander moving markers on a hololith. He was going into the enemy capital with the Thunderborn and striking at the one system protecting the traitor's most valuable stronghold.
Klein's expression hardened with the instinctive alarm of a commander watching the most important figure in the campaign step toward the most dangerous point on the map. Anruida lowered the parchment records slightly, as if they had become irrelevant. Several officers glanced at one another, waiting for someone else to object.
No one did.
They all understood what Qin Mo had meant when he said the war had to end quickly. He did not mean within months. He did not mean after a long siege or a clean series of conventional advances.
He meant within days.
And his decision was final.
The Thunderborn began preparation immediately. Their armor crews moved with practiced urgency, checking teleport beacons, power cores, gravity shield alignment, weapon heat tolerances, and emergency recall systems. The warriors themselves said little. They had learned that Qin Mo's personal presence usually meant the mission would be either impossible, decisive, or both.
Qin Mo stepped into the deployment zone with them.
The AI Core linked to the chamber systems and began calculating optimal dimensional insertion coordinates. The hololith shifted, zooming toward the capital hive until its shield matrix became a layered geometric sphere around the city. Energy flows, distortion lines, and projected generator harmonics appeared as interlocked bands of light.
Dimensional teleportation was not a simple task, even for the AI Core. The campaign had already required a heavy number of DI-jumps: troop redeployments, emergency extractions, equipment transfers, reconnaissance insertions, and orbital-to-surface movements under hostile conditions. Each jump demanded calculations across mass, position, environmental interference, energy stability, and the unpleasant possibility that ancient enemy technology might react badly to being bypassed.
The AI Core's synthetic voice entered Qin Mo's command channel.
["Specify target location."]
"Send us directly to the core of the void shield generator complex," Qin Mo ordered.
["Exact generator location unknown."]
"Infer it."
The AI Core reallocated processing power. Across the hololith, lines converged. The shield dome was not a simple surface barrier. Its power distribution curved around the city in near-perfect spherical symmetry, with subtle deviations where the hive's spires pierced close to the upper boundary. The system's geometric center sat deep beneath the capital's central fortress district, below the command spire and above the oldest understructure layers.
If the shield had been built according to sane engineering principles, the generator would be there.
If it had been built according to insane engineering principles, Qin Mo would discover that shortly after arrival.
["Probable insertion point calculated."]
"Probability?" Qin Mo asked.
["Sufficient."]
Klein looked sharply at the nearest emitter. "That is not a probability."
["Correct."]
Qin Mo almost smiled. "Proceed."
Teleportation fields ignited around the deployment platform. Light gathered beneath Qin Mo and the Thunderborn in hard white bands. Air snapped into ozone. Armor systems locked. Weapons sealed into transport posture.
For one heartbeat, Qin Mo looked at Talon II's capital on the hololith: untouched, shielded, waiting.
Then the chamber vanished.
Qin Mo and the Thunderborn disappeared in a flash of searing energy, reappearing inside the geometric heart of Talon II's capital hive-fortress.