14: After the orbital bombardment in Chapter 14, the fleet discovered that the bugs were not dead at all.

When the Imperial 37th Frontier Defense Fleet arrived in the orbit of Dead Silence-42, no one realized they were sailing into a kill zone.

The flagship, "Shield of the Emperor," was a Lunar-class cruiser that had been in service for over six thousand years and had participated in seventeen large-scale campaigns; every scorch mark on its hull was worn by the crew as a badge of honor.

Its captain was an old man who had served in the Imperial Navy for forty years, named Heinrich von Strauss, possessing a pair of eyes that had been replaced with mechanical ones after being scorched by the Warp radiation, and a heart filled with contempt for the xenos.

"The Inquisition actually deployed an entire defense fleet for a newly discovered xenos nest."

Heinrich stood on the bridge, scanning the planetary projection on the tactical table with the red gaze of his mechanical eye, "Is Inquisitor Marcus getting old and starting to make a mountain out of a molehill?"

His first officer smiled to the side but did not reply.

The first officer was twenty years younger than the captain and was still at a stage in his career where he dared not comment casually on the Inquisition.

"The target area is the northern hemisphere of the planet, the region marked as 'Hive City Ruins'."

Heinrich tapped the projection with his finger, "The Inquisition's intelligence says the xenos have built a nest underground, and the Grey Knights couldn't crack it."

"So we are here to crack it."

"Step one, orbital bombardment."

"Plow the surface of that area for me and force them to crawl out of their holes."

"Captain, the Inquisition's orders are to blockade the orbit and wait for the Astartes—"

"The Inquisition's orders are the Inquisition's orders."

Heinrich interrupted the first officer, "But the Inquisition is not on my bridge."

"I am."

"My fleet, my tactics."

"Prepare for orbital bombardment."

Three cruisers and seven frigates moved into attack positions above the planet's surface.

Lance Weapon batteries opened up, macro-cannon arrays began to charge, and torpedo tubes were filled with plasma fuel.

The Imperial Navy's firepower projection capability is second to none in the entire The Galaxy / Milky Way—raining Lance Weapon fire from orbit is the Empire's consistent attitude towards xenos: no dialogue needed, only firepower.

The bombardment arrived in the third second after the prelude began.

Ten orange-red Lance Weapon beams struck down simultaneously from orbit, like ten red-hot iron spikes piercing the planet's surface.

Everything on the ground of the Hive City Ruins was ignited—broken walls and ruins vaporized in the high temperature of the Lance Weapon beams, those Chaos altars carved with eight-pointed stars turned to ash, and the remaining creep on the ground suddenly charred under the energy impact.

The atmosphere was ionized, forming expanding rings of plasma that pushed out scorching shockwaves.

The light of the explosions illuminated the entire northern hemisphere.

Cheers erupted on the bridge.

The naval officers waved their fists, and some shouted "For the Emperor."

Decades of experience told them that nothing could survive under such an intensity of orbital bombardment—not xenos, not Chaos, nothing.

Heinrich nodded with satisfaction.

"Continue."

"Second wave."

"Turn the underground over for me too."

The second wave of bombardment was even more intense.

Torpedoes drilled into the depths of the craters blasted open by the Lance Weapon beams, detonating dozens of meters below the surface.

The strata were ripped open in large swathes, smoke and magma spewed out, forming new craters on the planet's surface.

A dead planet corrupted by Chaos was completely turned into a burning purgatory under the sustained bombardment.

"Scan."

Heinrich said.

The scan results refreshed on the tactical table.

The coverage of the creep below the surface had shrunk by sixty percent, and four of the previously detected biomass storage chambers had vanished in the bombardment.

The hatchery, defensive fortifications, and creep layers established by the xenos on the surface had suffered heavy damage.

The data looked overwhelming; it was a textbook victory for the Imperial Navy.

The Tech-Officer stared at the scanner, frowning.

"Captain... deep-scan shows dense biological signals still exist two hundred meters underground."

"Compared to before the bombardment, the intensity is actually increasing."

Heinrich's mechanical eye flickered.

"Increasing?"

"I blew up your entire surface, and you're telling me the biological signals increased underground?"

"Yes, sir."

"It is not the decay of biological signals after damage—it is a concentrated, organized redistribution of energy."

"The bombardment mostly destroyed surface units, and the proportion of destroyed underground facilities is far lower than expected."

"And those biological signals..."

The Tech-Officer zoomed in on the scan, his finger pointing at a suspicious reading, "They are moving."

"Not scattering, but gathering."

"Fixed convergence points, and the direction of movement is highly consistent."

Heinrich stared at the scan for thirty seconds.

Forty years of military service gave him the scent of an old hound—he couldn't be sure when the prey was still, but once the prey moved, he understood immediately.

Their nest had long been dug to a depth that orbital bombardment could hardly reach.

What they were waiting for was for him to send the ground troops down.

The orbital bombardment only destroyed the parts The Swarm wanted him to destroy.

The surface layer of the creep was originally a sacrificial garment, used to absorb the first wave of orbital fire and, incidentally, to give the Empire a false impression.

The real main force was not within the bombardment range at all.

He buried this judgment in his heart and did not speak it out.

The orders had been issued, the troops had boarded, and to withdraw now would be treated as cowardice.

The Imperial Navy does not keep cowardly captains.

He had no choice but to continue.

"Order the landing forces to accelerate."

He said, "Tell the ground Commander—do not disperse, do not advance rashly."

"The target may still have heavy armored units."

The communications officer relayed the order.

Heinrich stood on the bridge, hands behind his back, the red light of his mechanical eye motionless in the smoke and shadows.

For the first time, he felt that he might have underestimated these bugs.

The landing fleet passed through the atmosphere scorched by the bombardment and deployed a landing zone twenty kilometers outside the Hive City Ruins.

Forty-two landing craft landed in sequence, heavy transport aircraft hoisted eight Leman Russ Tank units onto the ground, troop carriers unloaded six hundred Imperial Guard soldiers, and engineers began to set up a temporary command post and ammunition depot.

The landing zone turned into a small military base within half an hour.

The tank crews of the armored company cursed the planet's hellish weather while warming up their engines, infantry smoked their last cigarettes in the trenches, and the army chaplain walked among the crowd, using his hand to dip into holy oil and draw blessings on the foreheads and weapons of every soldier.

They believed the Emperor was on their side, and the Emperor would not let a group of bugs block the tracks of the Imperial Guard.

The ground Commander was an armored colonel named Albrecht, a veteran who had survived the Ork wars, with the left side of his face reconstructed after being sliced off by an Ork war blade, and a permanent, unnatural twitch at the corner of his mouth.

He scanned the distant Hive City Ruins with binoculars; the ruins after the bombardment were a blurry white in the thermal imaging.

"Armored company, wedge formation."

"Infantry follow."

"Target: the bottom layer of the Hive City Ruins."

"If you encounter resistance, hold your ground and do not pursue."

Albrecht lowered his binoculars, "Our mission is to ascertain the location of the enemy's fortifications, not to win the entire war alone."

"Maintain formation, maintain discipline, maintain—"

The ground suddenly shook.

It was not an explosion.

There was no flash, no shockwave, no screeching of air being torn apart like during a bombardment.

It was just a dull vibration from underground, transmitted through the bottom armor of the tanks, shaking the dashboards in the cockpits.

Several inexperienced recruits looked at each other, thinking they had stepped on some mine.

Albrecht's expression changed.

He had been buried twice during the Ork wars—once by a landmine, once by a cave-in.

He could distinguish these two types of vibrations very clearly: landmines were sharp, and cave-ins were dull.

The texture of this vibration was a third type—it was a ground conduction wave from heavy armored units moving underground.

And it was not the engine rhythm of Imperial tanks.

This vibration was slower, heavier, and deeper.

"Attention everyone—"

When the Carnifex broke through the surface, the first leman russ tank happened to be parked right above it.

The tank chassis was overturned like cardboard under the impact force of the Carnifex, and the sixty-ton steel behemoth flipped in the air and crashed onto the troop carrier next to it.

The troop carrier was flattened by half, and the fifteen soldiers inside who hadn't managed to disembark died on the spot.

The Carnifex rose fully from the crack in the ground.

Its grey-black adamantine chitinous carapace looked like a moving fortress against the backdrop of the burning surface, and the mono-molecular bone blades made no sound as they unfolded in the air—but the air at the edges of the blades produced a faint ionized glow as it was sliced.

It did not roar, did not display threats, but charged directly at the nearest leman russ tank in the tank cluster.

The second leman russ tank opened fire as the Carnifex initiated its charge.

The main gun hit the Carnifex's left shoulder, and the armor-piercing shell exploded into a dazzling ball of high-temperature sparks on the adamantine chitin.

A light grey mark appeared on the Carnifex's carapace, and its charging posture did not change at all.

Infantry on the flank concentrated fire with plasma guns and melta weapons, hitting the joint connections of the carapace to try and create a breach—the carapace in the joint area was indeed thinner than the front, but within the range of ordinary infantry weapons, three soldiers were swept away by the Carnifex's tail before they could even aim.

The bone hammer at the end of the tail smashed their ceramite helmets during the sweep, and the sound of shattering mixed with screams was drowned out by the roar of the engines.

The Carnifex rushed to the tank, and the mono-molecular bone blade cut into the front of the leman russ tank's turret, cutting all the way to the chassis along the weld line.

The armored steel could not provide any effective resistance in front of the mono-molecular blade—the tank was cut into left and right halves like a tin can opened by a can opener, the ammunition rack was detonated during the cutting process, and the turret flew thirty meters into the air.

"Retreat! Retreat!" Albrecht roared into the communicator.

But the communication channel was already full of screams and explosions.

A third Carnifex rushed out from the flank, blocking the armored company's retreat.

Four Carnifexes wedged into the landing zone from four directions, squeezing the armored company into an increasingly smaller space.

The infantry regiment fired several volleys of lasguns at them, the reflection of the lasers bouncing off the carapace like a stone hitting a tank's reactive armor, eventually realizing that the Carnifex's carapace simply did not take kinetic and thermal damage.

In orbit, the bridge was deathly silent.

Heinrich stared at the tactical screen, all instruments were sounding alarms—the ground forces had lost more than half their personnel in just a few minutes, the armored company was wiped out, and the infantry regiment was routed.

He stared at the blue dots representing Imperial forces rapidly disappearing in the center of the tactical screen, the red light of his mechanical eye particularly glaring in the dim bridge.

He wanted to order a defensive bombardment with Lance Weapon fire, but the Carnifexes and the remaining infantry were already entangled, and orbital firepower could not distinguish between friend and foe.

"Captain—" the communications officer's voice was trembling.

"I know."

Heinrich's voice was so low it sounded like it was squeezed out from between his teeth, "Connect to the Inquisition."

"Immediately."