[Battle Report] Exfiltrate, By Means Of Hammerhead | Eleventh Edition | Dominatus, Incursion | T'au Empire vs. Space Marines
<<AO-41, local designation “Verwundenvelt”>>
<<Foundry city Kasr Dydd>>
<<Day 2 of planetary expedition, 17:30 local time, gue’la metric>>
Aloh’ka, his battlesuit holding position high in the air with Grey Squadron while the stealth suits reconnoitre the city, was watching video feed from the Kor’vattra surveillance drones, observing skirmishes between the local population and ves’ron forces walking directly out of the sea. For now, the gue’la were slowing the advance long enough to evacuate their civilians – a worthy activity, and proof even the Imperium were not beyond saving – but the energy readings from across the planet implied the ves’ron presence could be more than adequate to overwhelm the living inhabitants. He was paying particular attention to the troops in the heavy red armour, the Astartes. The surveillance drones, obedient to the Aun’vre’s wishes, were observing everything they did, taking metallurgical scans of their armour, trying to scan their very organs, and recording radiometric data to determine the age of their armour and potentially where it was constructed.
Rather more alarmingly, the other feed from the stealth suits showed that there were Astartes in their vicinity too. Their agent had activated his beacon, which should have been invisible among the background comm traffic of the planet to anyone not specifically looking for it. He was hiding in a tower on the outskirts, waiting to be extracted. Certainly the local gue’la couldn’t be allowed to capture him. Embracing the Tau’va was a sign of good moral character, but to the Imperium they would see it as “heresy”, and he had seen what those savages did to people they branded with that accusation. No wonder so many of their species were so desperate to escape to the more civilised empire the Tau had prepared for them.
Enough hesitation. “Stealth teams, open fire. Draw them away from the tower. Shas’nel, secure firing positions, we’re going in.”
++ Strike Force Cordacus!
++ Wide-range auspex scans indicate a xenos incursion further inland of their main push at the shoreline. Local PDF forces have already been defeated.
++ Received reports suggest the PDF managed to shoot down an enemy flyer. Crash site: abandoned minehead complex on the northern edge of Kasr Dydd. Xenos committed heavier troops and armoured vehicles. Surviving PDF routed. We leave their own officers to address this failure.
++ Kasr Dydd's garrison are already pushed hard. A second beachhead risks encirclement, division, and unthinkable defeat. Divert inland and repel the enemy.
++ Additional: Reports from surviving PDF troops are fragmented and inconsistent, but descriptions of enemy forces do not match known Necron profiles.
++ Hail to the Emperor.
Galen finished speed reading their orders and looked around the cramped confines of the shaking transport as it streaked low over the rooftops of Kasr Dydd. Their sudden diversion to engage this new threat had left him feeling off balance. As the newest member of squad Blackmaul, only recently ascended to the status of full Astartes, he was still a mere neophyte compared to his veteran brothers. He had only seen two combat deployments before this day, and both of them had been minor skirmishes, over quickly. Today would be - as Brother Kalded had helpfully reminded him - his first taste of true war. Galen knew no fear, but doubt was another matter. He had no wish to fail his brothers, especially now, with the battlespace at a crucial point.
They were about to deploy, and once deployed, commit. The dropship was needed at the city's edge, to evacuate the PDF command structure to Martyrdom's Fall and ensure an ordered defence, should the unthinkable happen and the Astartes fail in their duty.
Deceleration. The dropship swayed, slowed and turned. Energy weapons pattered against the hull - small arms, tracer fire. Galen expected to see the bilious green lance of a Gauss weapon at any second, but the sound was wrong, the impacts too brief and inconsistent. Then the hatch swung open, the mag-lock on his boots deactivated, and deep psycho-conditioned reflexes took over. He left the dropship at a run, firing his grav-chute once he was clear, and braced his pistol, aligning his descent with a target.
True war, indeed.
Sworn Hunters Agenda: Repel the Foe
Foul Xenos are here. We're not sure what they are doing, but we don't like it. Drive them back.
Da'Ieldi Enclave Agenda: Establish Contact
There's an agent hiding in the central objective. Retrieve him - or at least retrieve the data he's carrying, and do what's necessary to spare him the Emperor's ill-named Mercy.
One unit of marines wasn’t taking the bait, holding position at the base of the very tower the Tau needed to access. Did they know about the agent? Possibly, but with Tan’seri’s ground troops and mechanised fire support closing in they were possibly just bunkering down until they knew what the ground assault was going to do.
“Shas’o,” a Kor’vattra orbital observer intruded on his comm line, “Astartes reinforcements are dropping in!”
Mere moments later he saw them himself, dropping out of the sky on grav-chutes, worryingly close to where his battlesuit squads were hovering. They landed directly on the roof of the tower.
They know.
“Grey Squadron, Green Squadron, those Astartes have to be removed. Engage!” Aloh’ka had wanted to do this quietly and with respect for lives on both sides, but the Imperium’s continual disregard for life -even their own- forced his hand. If the agent was going to get out of that building alive, these marines had to go away, and if they didn’t do so willingly then they had to die.
Two teams of battlesuits entered the fray. Detecting the flash of sniper fire from a building, he directed Green Squadron to land behind them and flush those snipers out of hiding, hopefully forcing units around the tower to spring to the defence of their comrades. Meanwhile, Aloh’ka led Grey Squadron to land on a building overlooking the tower, already burned out from a previous battle presumably against the ves’ron. The Astartes on the roof looked equipped for rapid manoeuvres, but if they wanted to come get him, they would have to leave the tower to do so; and if they didn’t, he planned to concentrate fire on their position until they were no longer a problem.
The data streams on either side of his video feed were concerning. These Astartes were putting up solid resistance; volleys of Tau gunfire and missile barrages that might be expected to massacre their numbers were struggling to get through their heavy red-painted armour, and the wounds they did take were endured with a fortitude no ordinary gue’la possessed. Whatever the Imperium did to these soldiers to make them what they are, it was clearly brutal and inelegant, but the results spoke for themselves. Their offensive capabilities seemed much improved from the last time he had faced their kind too, and in short order he was getting casualty reports. If Aloh’ka had hoped to minimise loss of life, the Astartes certainly had no such compunctions. They had even been successful in hunting down the stealth teams, one unit taking heavy fire and the other team having already been nearly crushed, only one member of the team still alive.
There would be no more patience for these barbarians. Aloh’ka and his squadron opened fire, raining missiles and plasma bolts on the roof of the tower and his own burst cannon sending a torrent of fire through the Astartes standing on it. That certainly got their attention, the marines firing grapnels to fling themselves right over to where he and Grey Squadron were standing, drawing weapons for close combat.
There was no more time, but that was the opening they needed. “TX7, get on that roof and get the agent!” He turned his attention to the incoming enemy. Close combat was uncivilised, but it might have to suffice. Perhaps one more distraction tactic.
As the gunship flew in and landed on the tower roof, Aloh’ka switched on the external speakers to address the Astartes. “Comrades in the Greater Good, must we fight? Can we not cooperate as friends for mutual benefit?”
They continued to attack, firing pistols and stabbing with long knives at areas of the Tau battlesuits they thought looked weakest. Oh, of course. They don’t speak the Tau language.
He switched to the human language he had learned from the gue’vesa on Janneria. “Comrades in the Greater Good, must-”
A space marine drove his blade into a bank of circuitry on his suit and the speakers went dead. “Oh, for…” Aloh’ka stove in the marine’s skull with his battlesuit fist, only to discover there were more on him. Damage warnings were coming up on his display.
Por’ui Nairsag had only hitched a ride in the Hammerhead so he didn’t have to walk on his injured hoof, willing to find a corner in the cramped interior on a promise not to get in the crew’s way; he had not expected the tank to be the very vehicle to make contact with his agent. But as the gunship landed on the roof, his duty was clear, and it seemed time was of the essence.
He smelled smoke in the air as the tank pilot opened a hatch, and Nairsag leaned out. He had already sent a message from the communicator on his wrist to the agent’s own comms, telling him to get to the roof urgently, and within seconds he emerged. A gue’vesa, his hair and beard longer and somewhat unkempt since he had begun his mission, infiltration agent Piran Daveth looked terrified but the sight of his Water caste handler was clearly a relief to him. He rushed to the tank as quickly as he could, though he was clearly limping. Possibly his identity had been compromised and had been lucky to survive to be rescued.
“Por’ui, it’s good to see a friendly face. I have- AAAAAGH!”
Daveth fell to the floor as a metal spike on a cable pierced his thigh, and dragged him to the parapet of the rooftop, where he became stuck. On the other end of that cable, Nairsag saw with a shocked expression, the enemy soldiers with the grapnel gear were making their way back to the building. He couldn’t see what had become of Grey Squadron, nor the Shas’o leading them.
Daveth looked to him, and took a data drive from his pocket. “Here, take it!” He threw it to his handler, who almost dropped it in his panic but caught it at the last moment.
“Por’ui!” the pilot was shouting from within, “We can’t stay here any longer!”
Nairsag looked to his agent. “Daveth…”
Daveth, his teeth gritted with pain, looked him in the eye. “You know what they’ll do to me if they capture me alive!” he looked meaningfully to the Por’ui’s hip. “I serve the Greater Good. Now, as always.”
The marines were clambering over the parapet. He was out of time. Nairsag, in one quick movement, drew his pistol and fired. A small red hole appeared on Daveth’s forehead; a much larger hole blasted brain and gore over the edge of the roof, and his agent was no more.
The Fire caste gunner grabbed the back of Nairsag’s tunic and hauled him inside as the hatch closed, the gunship already flying off the roof at some speed. A flurry of bullets pelted the interior above his head, a spray of sparks landing on his hat as it found some console to destroy, before the hatch fully closed, and the Tau army – what survived of it – withdrew from the city as quickly as it could.
Nairsag spent the rest of the flight back to headquarters staring at the data drive in his hand. The one Piran Daveth gave his life to put in his hands. He resolved to make sure Daveth got proper recognition for his efforts in service to the Empire.
Garbutt's Post-Mortem
I used to play as T'au, way back. Far enough back that they were called Tau and not T'au. So although I didn't know exactly what their rules did these days, I went into the game with a rough idea of what to expect - powerful shooting, lousy melee, watch out for the damn Markerlights.
Boy, was I ever right - their first shooting phase was an eye opening experience where my opponent nominated targets they wished destroyed and suddenly there seemed to be re-rolls everywhere and things like cover or detection range became something that happened to other, luckier, people. But thankfully, I wasn't completely smooth brained and realised very quickly that rather than challenging the gunline itself, I needed to take out the spotters who were handing out all this completely unnecessary anti-Marine hate to their fellows.
Several squads were tasked to hunt down and exterminate the Stealth Teams as fast as possible. I think by the end of the game there was a lone Stealth suit still leading my lads a merry chase and simply refusing to do the decent thing and die.
Keep an eye on that one, dear Reader. You haven't heard the last of her.
The game ended with the damaged Hammerhead risking my Eradicators to make a daring run onto the central objective where its crew 'silenced' the contact they were supposed to be extracting (for the Greater Good, of course) and scored the lesser version of the T'aus primary objective. I definitely felt the benefit of the new, tougher Marine statlines but it wasn't enough to stop the T'au hammering several of my squads into oblivion - it just slowed the process down a bit.
Insult to injury happened when my Captain got his entire assault squad shot out from underneath him and heroically pulled himself back to his feet, only to get converted into a fine red mist by the Hammerhead and its railgun. Devastating Wounds - they do exactly what the name suggests. (The game got held up for several minutes at that point as we all dissolved into hysterical laughter and made increasingly improbable suggestions as to where the Captain's remains had finally ended up.)
(Kaine's rapid return to the karzi aboard his strike cruiser, via the floor, while it was occupied, was definitely my favourite.)
Tau shooting is potent.
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