Chapter 41: The Banshee

Inside the strategic command sanctum, Chuck's smug demeanor dissolved from panicked disbelief into unbridled fury as pict-feed after pict-feed confirmed the systematic rout of his forces.

Fifty tactical squads. Ten thousand well-trained, heavily equipped soldiers of the Planetary Defence Forces. How could they possibly lose?

How could he fail? How could a commander of his caliber be humiliated like this? And to a rabble of primitive, stone-wielding savages! He would become the laughingstock of the world. Pex would mock him. The Lords themselves would spit upon his name...

Such an outcome was completely intolerable. It could not be permitted.

"Vox-officer," Chuck commanded, his face darkened by spite. "Get me a secure patch to the Banshee bomber squadron. Immediately."

"Banshee Leader online, General. Awaiting your directives." The response was near-instantaneous, the flight commander's voice crisp, formal, and detached.

"The urban grid of Ghana has been entirely overrun by the greenskin filth. Their numbers are too vast to contain. I am ordering the bomber squadron to scramble immediately. Payload: heavy-grade incendiaries. Execute a total carpet-bombing sweep across the designated coordinates." With a sharp click of his data-slate, Chuck fed the target vectors into the tactical console.

A two-minute silence ensued as the squadron confirmed the telemetry. When the flight commander spoke again, his voice carried a distinct edge of tension.

"My Lord General... there appears to be a severe discrepancy in the target parameters you have transmitted. The blast radius encompasses nearly half the metropolitan area. It directly overlays several of our own defensive perimeters."

"The coordinates are precise. Execute the strike." Chuck's voice was devoid of human warmth.

"But, My Lord, our infantry are still—"

"Squadron Leader, my orders are absolute and immediate. Are you declaring yourself in open mutiny against the Throne?"

"Negative... negative, General. The Emperor protects. The Banshee squadron is breaking hangar now." The military hierarchy of the Imperium was a meatgrinder that tolerated no hesitation, and compassion was a luxury that invited execution. The squadron leader knew well enough that if a Commissar had been stationed in his briefing room, a bolt pistol would already be pressed against his temple.

Yet, even after issuing the scorched-earth directive to the bombers, Chuck's malice remained unappeased. He turned back to his vox-officer. "Transmit to the Basilisk self-propelled artillery regiments and the Manticore rocket batteries: advance to their firing coordinates, lock in their trajectories, and prepare for immediate saturation bombardment upon my signal."

The vox-officer did not dare delay, frantically broadcasting the commands to the artillery batteries entrenched outside the city limits. Whether Chuck's callous desperation would reduce the entirety of Ghana to a radioactive cinder was a terrifying thought the rating quickly forced out of his mind.

Three hours later, the desperate guardsmen fighting inside the city had been utterly broken, pushed back to the outermost ring of the metropolis. Casualties had climbed exponentially; of the original force, barely ten to fifteen intact squads retained any semblance of combat capability. The Orks held total operational supremacy.

The Valkyrie transport bearing Chuck cruised into the immediate airspace above the theater. Peerless through the reinforced observation viewport, the once-breathtaking coastal spires of Ghana slowly materialized, rising above the azure swells of the distant ocean like a shattered monument.

Stepping away from his command throne, Chuck approached the glass, looking down upon the doomed city from his elevated vantage point.

"Banshee squadron, payload released. Bombardment initiated." The flight leader's report crackled clearly through Chuck's micro-bead.

From this altitude, Chuck could not see the silver wings of the atmospheric bombers, but he bore witness to the sudden, horrific birth of pillars of fire. Great geysers of incandescent orange erupted from the cityscape, violently ascending hundreds of meters into the sky like a synchronized volcanic eruption tearing through every sector at once.

The specialized heavy incendiary compounds burned with an engineered fury exceeding ten thousand degrees. No biological organism could survive such an artificial hell; it was the perfect solvent to cleanse the world of xenos contamination.

Beholding the apocalyptic inferno below, Chuck finally allowed a satisfied smirk to grace his features. If the ash of a ruined city was the price required to cremate the evidence of his tactical incompetence, he would gladly pay it.

"Once the thermal signatures subside, mobilize another fifty squads to launch a sweeping assault from the outer perimeter. Every tactical squad will be assigned direct fire-support from the Manticores and Basilisks. I want this city scrubbed until not a single trace of green remains." Chuck delivered what would be the final operational order of his campaign.

At that exact moment, observing the catastrophic incineration of the metropolis from the deep cover of the surrounding jungle was Ironklaw and his retinue of Boyz. They were not watching out of any profound grief for their kin left behind in the blast zone; greenskins possessed no such sentimentality. They were simply enjoying a spectacular show.

Ironklaw rubbed his jaw, concluding that the humie wuns actually possessed a decent bit of proppa ruthlessness. If they were going to wipe out an entire city that quickly, he would need to keep gathering his strength in the shadows, slowly bleeding the humies dry before risking a massive head-on clash.

Beside him, an Ork Boy by the name of Daff stood with his jaw slack, drool pooling on his tusks as he watched the Banshee bombers bank across the smoke-choked sky after dropping their payloads.

Deep within his engineered genetic code, something primitive was violently snapping awake. He didn't want to just watch, he wanted to build something like that. He wanted to pilot something like that. He wanted to rain fire from above. This was the singular purpose of his existence. In the guttural lexicon of the greenskins, a bomber was the ultimate expression of what it meant to be loud, fast, and completely WAAAGH!

The subsequent mopping-up operations across the ruins of Ghana dragged on for another standard week. The urban topography was incredibly dense; the collapsed labyrinths of plasteel and ferrocrete provided ample subterranean redoubts that shielded a surprising number of resilient Orks from the firestorm.

Rooting out the surviving xenos elements caused the campaign to degenerate into a protracted war of attrition, and the strategic cost was staggering. The unrelenting barrage of Basilisk shells and Manticore rockets systematically flattened the metropolis, reducing every single spire to a mountain of pulverized rubble.

Chuck's merciless handling of the campaign ignited a storm of controversy back in the high spires of the capital. Several high-society elites and aristocratic houses publicly denounced him for the wholesale slaughter of imperial citizens, demanding he face a military tribunal. However, these dissenting voices were quickly and efficiently silenced by the authority of Governor Cornwatt.

The official narrative disseminated by the planetary administration was simple: the greenskin beasts had massacred the entire civilian population of Ghana prior to the counter-offensive, leaving General Chuck no choice but to enact a total orbital-level cleansing of the infected zones. It was argued that public sentiment should show deep gratitude and leniency toward a general and an army that had sustained over ten thousand casualties in their noble endeavor to shield the sub-sector from the xenos threat.

Ultimately, the propaganda apparatus succeeded in suppressing the dissent. Chuck escaped any real accountability, receiving nothing more than a formal reprimand from the Governor's palace.

Far out in the cold void of space, Pex reviewed Chuck's battle logs from his command sanctum aboard his flagship. The expeditionary fleet was currently burning hard toward Oronia IV, sitting exactly three days out from entering synchronous orbital alignment with the planet.

It wasn't that Pex lacked the urgency to press forward, but rather that the bulk of his fleet consisted of heavy transport bulk-carriers hastily retrofitted from civilian merchant vessels. Their sub-warp engines were simply incapable of matching the velocity of true warships.

Reading through the bloody statistics of the Ghana campaign, Pex found himself feeling a rare spark of appreciation for Chuck's actions. This was precisely how one had to handle a greenskin infestation: with absolute, unyielding brutality. Any modicum of human mercy was an invitation to extinction.

Once his forces returned victorious to Oronia III, Pex mused that it might be wise to forge a closer political alliance with Chuck. A mind so unburdened by moral hesitation was exactly the kind of asset his hidden cult required to further their grand design.

Before Pex hovered a massive hololith projection, a comprehensive rendering of Oronia IV. The barren world's planetary topography, craggy mountain ridges, and tectonic rifts were detailed with exceptional clarity, compiled from the extensive data gathered during their initial long-range reconnaissance sweeps.

The scarred hull of the Glorious Knight had come down hard in the planet's eastern hemisphere, carving a massive canyon into the crust where the primary superstructure now lay half-buried under millions of tons of displaced stone. Once the dust clouds had settled enough to grant visual confirmation, the Guardian had executed several precision orbital bombardments upon the crash site, splitting the massive human capital ship into two completely severed sections. The Orks would find it practically impossible to salvage or utilize the vessel's systems now.

As for the exact disposition of the greenskin forces, the fleet's optical augurs had repeatedly flagged massive clusters of green spore-fields proliferating across the barren surface, each neatly categorized with red threat-runes on the tactical display.

This abundance of intelligence wasn't necessarily a testament to the fleet's reconnaissance capabilities; rather, it was because the vibrant green of the Ork fungal fields stood out with glaring clarity against the dead, monochrome slate of the rocky world. It was impossible to miss.

Judging by the total surface area of the spore-growth, the infestation remained localized and relatively small. It seemed Governor Cornwatt's initial assessment had been correct: Oronia IV was a desiccated husk of a world, entirely devoid of organic nutrients and completely hostile to life. Even the hyper-adaptable biology of the greenskins would find little purchase here.

Pex silently prayed that this logic would hold true. They had been given five standard months; surely, within such a short window, a world of dead rock could not have yielded too great a harvest of those savage, green monsters.