NIGHTFALL PREVIEW
The Devourers Baine (PT 2)
BY PETER NEALEN
Part Two: Counterattack
Back on Gesarron, Kasallas found himself placed in command of a newly-raised phalanx, one almost entirely made up of raw recruits. Stories of his fury are still told today; he wanted nothing more than to take the fight to the Cenites’ den, yet here he was saddled with command of a unit that had almost no experience or institutional knowledge at all.
The tales of the brutal training he promptly embarked upon have survived better than even some of his exploits in battle. Determined to beat this amorphous mass of humanity into a tempered weapon to aim at the enemies of the Empire, he set goals that none of his appointed officers thought realistic. When they objected, he had them demoted to trooper or, in at least two known cases, shot.
Nearly a hundred recruits, it is said, died in the course of training. Yet what came out the other side was a machine that could nearly perform to the same level as the Six Hundred, albeit one that almost universally hated its commander. As they boarded the troopships for parts unknown, the men of the 2nd Gesarron Phalanx were determined to achieve victory in spite of Kasallas.
That would change.
The troopships rendezvoused with those of the 33rd Mortasan Phalanx, the 97th and 45th Weringen Phalanxes, the 7th Ionia Shockweavers, the 88th Utreid Chromium Brigade, and a dozen ships of the Varyagus Clan. Only then were they given their orders. They were bound for Vulmanar VII, a world thought lost a century prior. The circumstances of that loss were uncertain even then, but with the revelation of the Cenites’ presence in the Urunian Drift, the truth seemed somewhat more evident.
What they found there, as the phalanxes were brought out of cryo following the hyperspace transit, was horror.
The cities were ancient ruins, overgrown and uninhabited except by furtive bands of feral humans. Other bands roved the hinterlands, often fighting amongst themselves. Yet this was not a human world. Not any longer.
The Cenite garrison in orbit was quickly slaughtered, but the fortress on the planet’s surface would not be so easily handled. Extensive defenses were set around that fortress, extensive and powerful enough to deny the skies within line of sight all the way to low orbit. As the troopships began to descend on the wilderness outside of the fortress’s line of fire, the ships in high orbit continued to observe.
What they saw changed the commanders’ perception of what was happening on Vulmanar VII. Whereas it had initially seemed that tenacious humans had held out and survived the Cenites’ hunt, it soon became apparent that these survivors were, in fact, being kept in what amounted to a Cenite game park. The survivors were culled periodically by Cenite hunters, the Devourers always careful not to completely wipe out the population.
Kasallas did not witness this intelligence, instead riding his troopship to the surface with his phalanx. Some say he was simply determined to take the fight to the Cenites himself, while others speculate that his iron discipline was so hated by his troops that he felt that he needed to lead them personally lest they rebel once they were out from under his baleful glare.
The destruction of the orbital clawship had alerted the Cenites on the ground to the Imperial attack, and while the bombardment to soften up the fortress began, the Devourers were already moving. It is not their way to sit behind fortifications and defenses, even though they might use them temporarily for an advantage or to buy time for an attack of their own. They were spreading out, scattering like disturbed insects, before sweeping down on the landing zones at high speed.
Despite the relatively small number of Cenites on the planet, they still outnumbered the Imperial forces by a considerable margin, and Cenites do not seem to know the concept of non-combatants. They are hunters as a species, and all of their number capable of running and holding a weapon live to kill.
They moved fast enough that the first clash came before even the first few troopships were completely offloaded. Yet if there was one man who knew how to fight the Cenites, it was Kasallas. He had expected to come under attack as soon as the Devourers had any idea where they were, and there was no hiding the fiery entry path of the troopships. He knew they had to be ready to fight, so he pushed his most elite troopers out with their fast attack vehicles to scout, forcing his second-line troops to leave most of their equipment aboard the ships and dig in.
Even with that preparation, though, the raw recruits of the 2nd Gesarron Phalanx weren’t ready for the sheer ferocity of the aliens. The scouts were decimated, and the snarling packs descended on the hasty defenses, carving through the thin lines where the inexperienced phalanx troopers had failed to take their commander’s dire warnings seriously enough. Blood painted the gray dust as the Cenites tore into their prey, soon threatening the troopships themselves.
Through sheer force of personality—and some say some violence—Kasallas rallied a response, counterattacking with such concentrated firepower that the most eager Cenite hunters were simply blown apart, their remains scattered over the cooling corpses of their victims. In an hour, Kasallas had the perimeter secured, allowing for the offloading of the combat vehicles and heavy weapons, as well as pushing the perimeter out to allow more of the troopships to land.
The first attacks had sobered the survivors, making many of them realize just why Kasallas had been the brutal taskmaster he had been during training. Some still grumbled, but those who looked on the mangled remains of phalanx troopers they had complained with only hours before felt a chill and set to preparing their defenses all the more eagerly.
Those who had lived through the carnage of the first battle also remembered one key detail, one thing that stood out through the miasma of blood and horror that had enveloped the perimeter during those desperate hours.
It was Colonel James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas who had always been at the thickest of the fighting, pushing his way to the front, firing on the Cenites with an accuracy and a stark hatred that rivaled even the snarls of the aliens, all while cursing and encouraging his men in equal measure to stand and fight.
It was in those desperate, bloody hours that the men of the 2nd Gesarron Phalanx began to realize why the Six Hundred had followed this man, and a new sort of mettle was forged, heated to a white heat of hatred that would see the Cenites wiped from the face of Vulmanar VII.
To be continued.