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"Prepare for suborbital descent." This monotonous warning came from the drop shuttle's pilot as Falinx and a squadron of ship security officers strapped themselves onto the battered metal benches of the old KX-1.

There were four others in the passenger bay with Falinx - Grimnach Navy security troopers, in dark bronze armour and black, red-trimmed fatigues, so common on board any Naval vessel. Falinx also knew that the pilot and copilot to be Air Corps veterans, and though he hadn't actually seen them, he knew they would be wearing the formal, emerald-green uniforms with the silver piping that the best men in the Corps wore.

His guards were lightly armed carrying only the customary service pistol used by theAlliance- the LF-3. They were, in fact, expecting trouble, but they could easily count on the mechs for any heavy support that would be required while on the expedition.

It took less than ten minutes for them to hit the surface of the planet, and they landed next to the other red-and-grey painted shuttle on the white marble landing pad.

Falinx and his squad disembarked quickly, noticing that the FC-9's had brought themselves into a defensive formation, taking up positions around the pad. Something had brought their combat-based awareness online, and closer investigation revealed what the mechs had already noticed.

The nearby walls of the terminal building were cratered and holed by bullets, without a doubt from some recent conflict - the casings still littered the area, and the faintest tinges of cordite still upon the air.

There were no other beings in sight, living or dead, within the landing compound, but there were several burned-out metal husks that bore the various shapes and (faded) colours of civilian skimmers and small spacecraft. Whether or not they had contained people when they were destroyed was impossible to tell.

"Send a message to Captain Steinfeldz," Falinx ordered his pilot through his helmet-mounted radio. "Something's going on down here. Signs of battle all over the place."

"Understood, sir."

A few minutes of silence passed before the pilot spoke again. "I am afraid I cannot reach the Revenant, sir." Despite the grim news he bore, his voice was as flat and toneless as ever.

"Damn it! Understood. Keep trying."

"Of course, sir."

"The rest of you, spread out and investigate." Falinx barked at the security officers. "Wikes, Jenkins, you two with me. We're going to do a little exploring." With that, he marched off towards the terminal. The inside was just as battle scarred as the exterior - worse, in fact.

Gunfire had holed the walls, floors, and ceilings, along with any furniture in the entry room. Numerous half-rotted bodies lay sprawled about, some in black bodysuits, carrying pistols, some in the blue and grey uniforms of the planetary officials, some in customs outfits, and several civilians in varying types of clothing. They sported a wide variety of wounds - most of them bore wounds that appeared as though they had been made by solid-slug weapons, others sported burns from lasers, plasma weaponry, and flamethrowers, others had been hacked into - or apart - with savage, serrated blades, and a few had died an explosive death, limbs torn from their bodies of fragmentation grenades of some sort.

Falinx strode towards the nearest window, his armoured talons crunching on something - glass or bone chips, no doubt. He had seen something, far off in the distance. Smoke. Dust. Something, out in the parklands surrounding the spaceport.

Yes, there it was. There was no mistaking it; there was a fire of some sort out in the park. Something that could hold a clue to what was going on here.

"Jenkins. You're with me. We're going to go investigate that smoke. Wikes, you finish up looking around here, then you meet with the others and wait for Jenkins and I to get back. Understood?"

"Understood, sir."

"Yep, I got it!"

"Right, C'mon, Jenkins. Let's get to it, shall we?"

"Rightio, sir!"

It took somewhere in the area of twenty minutes for Falinx and young Trooper Jenkins to make their way to the source of the smoke.

It turned out to be the burning hulk of a battle tank. Much of the paint had been peeled off, and the metal had been warped by the intense heat, but Falinx could tell that the tank was a Ravager pattern medium tank, and had once been painted with the symbols of the Twelfth Kaligan Irregulars - and beneath that, the symbols of the Eighth Kaligan Armoured Division. It had been scavenged, then.

But that was all irrelevant now. What was a Grimnach tank doing burning in the middle of the woods? It looked like it had been taken out by light cannon fire, the crew compartment riddled with large holes.

Something shifted, off in the woods, and Falinx turned to see a tide of strange men pouring out from the forest - and from the sound of it, they were coming from behind as well, and scrambling up on the sides, too.

"Down! Down on the ground! Get on the ground! Now!"

Falinx was forced to his knees by a dozen hands, and he looked up at his assailants, noting that Jenkins had been taken completely by surprise and was on the ground, hands on his head.

The men wore a motley assortment of equipment - no two looked alike. Some had bandanas, helmets, hats, no headgear, rebreathers, gas masks, goggles, oxygen tanks, flak armour, steel plating, leather, or cloth. The single thing that tied all of these men together was the red armband around their right arms, with the ancient Roman numeral for twelve stitched into it.

The Twelfth Kaligan Irregulars.

"Who the hell are you?" One of them, bedecked in a flak jacket, gas mask, and bowl helmet demanded. Given the rank markings on his sleeves, he was a staff sergeant, or the equivalent thereof. He carried a heavy rifle with one hand, and in the other he held a long-bladed dagger.

"Falinx. Commander Falinx, of the Ironguard. I'd appreciate it if you would let me up, soldier." He let an air of menace seep into his voice, allowing his anger at his rough treatment to show.

"Wha...? Nah, you can't be. What the hell would a big hero-type like Falinx be doing in a shitty place like this?" The sergeant's uncertainty showed clearly to Falinx's trained senses, despite his bold words.

"A special operation. The mission parameters are classified." He glared at the man, waiting impatiently to be allowed back to his feet.

"Got any idents? Tags?" The sergeant demanded.

"Yeah, why don't you check? Inside of the right pauldron."

After checking the identification tags engraved into the rim of Falinx's shoulder guard, the man spoke again. "...Hell, you really are Falinx. How about that. C'mon, then, get up." Despite the fact that he was now aware of the fact that he was in the presence of a bona fide legend, the sergeant showed very little respect - nor fear.

"Should we let the other fella up too, chief?" One of the men guarding the frightened Jenkins asked this question of his squad leader.

"Yeah, he's with yon dragon, so he's pro'lly good. Let him up." He turned back to Falinx. "Anyway, sir. I'm Staff Sergeant Kennedale Wellis. Orders were to either kill ya or take ya back to the base, and since I don't think it's protocol to execute senior officers, I should probably take you to the major." He paused. "At least, I'd suppose it isn't protocol. Prast! Get me the rulebook, would you?"

After perusing a battered field manual passed to him by a corporal, to Falinx's incredulous looks, the man nodded. "Ah, here it is. Yep, according to this, field executions of officers found wandering around blazing tank wrecks are generally frowned upon in the Grimnach military. That's that, then." He closed the book and handed it back to his second, the man known as Prast.

"You... What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"That was a joke, sir. Do you know what those are? I remember that officers need to get their sense of humour surgically removed to move up through the ranks, but I'd figure that you at least know what it is."

"Are you bloody well insane? Or just plain stupid?"

"Now, now, Commander, that's now very nice, is it?" Wellis shook his head slightly. "I might even be offended! Of course, it takes a hell of a lot to get me offended, but still!"

"Now, we should probably get out of he-" Falinx was cut off as a high-pitched whistling scream echoed through the air.

"Oh shit! Artillery! Take cover!" Wellis bawled at his men, who dived in every direction imaginable.

The bombardment was short but fierce, red-hot shards of metal from the shell casings whickering through the air, propelled by the blasts. Falinx saw at least three of the Irregulars cut down by these dangerous fragments, and another two annihilated by a shell coming down directly on their hastily dug foxhole.

After a few minutes of the horrendous screaming of the shells coming down and the earth quaking under their blasts, the bombardment halted abruptly, Wellis slowly emerged to survey the damage, ready to dive back into cover at the slightest sign that the lull was nothing more than a trap to lure the soldiers back out into the open to be fired upon again.

"Shit... Prast, record this in the log." He addressed the corporal. "Enemy bombardment, started oh-seven twenty four. Four dead, one wounded. Names of the dead, Private Denicko, PFC Williams, Recruit Martin, Veteran Burnside. Trooper Meheko injured, severe lacerations to right arm due to flying debris." Wellis spoke with a cold, mechanical fury as he instructed the names his second in command needed to record. He frowned, leaning forward and squinting, then pulled his gas mask back down over his face, and began speaking again. "Ground assault began at oh-seven thirty one. Now get the fuck down and grab your rifle, 'cause here they come!" As he ended his sentence, he dived to the ground, sending a rippling salvo of large-calibre rifle rounds snapping downrange towards the advancing enemy.

Falinx could soon see them. Giant men, garbed in viciously spiked and serrated armour of black and crimson, with helmet-rebreather combinations that covered their faces entirely and granted them the visages of daemons charged forward through the tree line. Most of them carried old rifles, though a few moved in the ranks carrying grenade launchers or flamethrowers, and he noted at least one team lugging a light automatic cannon with them. There were also several warriors dressed in long coats with skull helmets - grenadiers.

These were soldiers from the Maw of Hell.

The Death Brigadiers advanced relentlessly, rifles chattering.

"Hostile contact, hostile contact!" Wellis bawled at his communications officer. "Parker, get us some reinforcements here, now!"

"Really? Hostile contact?" Jenkins rolled his eyes sarcastically. "I never would have noticed that one, Captain Obvious. Now--"

Falinx never found out what else Jenkins had intended to say. An enemy round thudded into the man's head, exploding his jaw with a horrific crack. He gargled, falling flat onto his back, scrabbling at his ruined face, a pool of bright blood pouring out around him. Soon, his struggles weakened, and then eventually stopped completely as his brain informed his body that he was, in fact, dead.

Falinx shook his head grimly and threw himself up over the edge of a recently created crater, took aim at an advancing Brigadier, and fired a solid round from his combat shotgun that burst the soldier's thigh like an overripe fruit.

With a short cry, the man went down, but remained conscious - and ready to fight. From the ground, he continued firing the rifle, heavy calibre rounds slamming into the dirt in front of Falinx, some sparking off of the metal hull of the burned-out tank.

Falinx's next shot broke the glass visor and reduced his opponent's head to tatters, but then he was forced to duck down behind cover again as the support cannon began singing its horrendous song of death.

All around was insanity and carnage. Falinx saw a team of assault troops close on a foxhole where three of the Irregulars lurked. One of them tossed in a grenade, and another hosed the hole with a flamethrower, slaughtering all of the men inside. When they stormed towards it to ensure that their enemies were dead, another section of Irregulars rose from concealment, engaging the brigadiers in melee with a motley assortment of melee weapons.

The storm force was probably a platoon, given the number of support weapons - thirty or forty soldiers. The Irregulars, meanwhile, were present in small numbers, with maybe a squad or two present. They were outnumbered and outgunned, and they did not have the suicidal ferocity of the soldiers from the Maw of Hell, nor did they have the brutal training that they underwent. What they did have was a horrifically exposed location with no escape routes -but they also had ingenuity.

Another group of Irregulars, nearby, helped overwhelm the assault team, liberating the stocks of explosives from the Grenadier's coat and snatching the gas tanks from the corpse of the support trooper that had the flamethrower and tossing it towards the enemy, shooting it mid-air to make it rain fire down upon the support cannon.

There was a loud rumbling from nearby, and another tank - this one in the green and tan mottled camouflage of the Irregulars - burst into the clearing. It was a heavy Eviscerator pattern tank, with the typical energy armaments replaced with a quad-barreled 80mm cannon, the sponson guns taken out and miniguns put in. It was a terrifying engine of war, and one meant to rip through infantry formations with glee.

It barreled through the formation of Death Brigadiers, ripping up into the soldiers with all of its guns blazing. They fell back in disarray, not having come equipped to deal with armour, horrified by the ease with which they were shredded by the heavy guns.

With the fearsome warriors now in full retreat, the Irregulars gathered their dead and stripped them of all useful equipment - ammo, weapons, helmets, anything that could prove useful - and formed up around the heavy tank - which, Falinx now realised, had a strange antenna array mounted on the back of the angled turret.

A bulky, wide-shouldered figure popped up from the turret hatch, peering at the carnage his vehicle had caused. He wore a plain khaki dress uniform and a dull, unpainted-metal bowl helmet. He grinned as he looked over at Falinx and the glaring Wellis, his good humour gone with most of his men. He lit a cigar and waved the commander over.

"Major Burnis here, sir. Wellis told me about you. Now get on board, I'm taking you to see the colonel." He saluted wryly, and then looked at the sergeant. "Get whatever men you have left up on here too, if you'd like."

"Yeah, all that's left of my squad will fit there just fine." Wellis returned, gritting his teeth at the officer's carefree manner.

Falinx sent a cool look at the angry sergeant, and then nodded to Burnis. "Let's get going then, shall we?"

"Let's."