Forevermore Unto the Void

The War for Aetherius (part 2: Escalation)

1

Six Minutes to Midnight (~52,555 AFR)

Lethe stood cloaked and obscured by shadow, underneath the bulwark of one of the Syndicate's forwards operating bases in the Wastes, a squad of highly trained special ops forces behind him, all cloaked in the latest generation of stealthed power armour. Starting the mission clock on the squad chrono, Lethe advanced up, closer to the bulwark, until he was pressed against it, and began feeling his way across the wall, looking for any seam or construction seal.

After a few minutes, Lethe found the seal for which he was looking, a small series of dots along the Adamantium ridge that marked where two prefab walls had been sealed together, while not much weaker than the rest of the bulwark, the difference would mean two men able to squeeze through at a time rather than just one. Lethe removed the small charge he kept at his back from its sheath, the microfusion device, a cylindrical object that was completely smooth to the touch on the ends, with adhesive on the sides, no larger than a man's unclad forearm, and placed it on the seam.

Backing away from the small charge, Lethe gave the standby order to all his men around the base, telling them to place their charges and hold in position until his detonated, triggering all the rest to blow in sync. Once he had received the four confirmation signals, Lethe triggered the bomb to cut through the metal wall, and a blinding flash of incandescent white light spewed forth around the device for a few seconds as it melted through the reinforced Adamantium plating that covered the chrome bulwark.

The instant the device had done its work, Lethe ordered all of his squads to storm the base, sending a total of fifty men, all armoured in the fastest, lightest recon power armour available, and all armed with an array of silenced hardlight pistols and sickles; the First Thanatan Corps heralded Argus' declaration of war. They moved through the camp with the practiced efficiency of true psychopaths, butchering any and all who stood in their way before they could so much as scream. In the eldritch dead of night, fifty men hacked the base of two hundred men to pieces without being seen, getting out before a single word could be uttered, having rigged the generator to overload as they left.

Before what passed for a morning, when the baleful light hidden behind the perpetual clouds grew brighter, had arrived, the First Thanatan had hit half a dozen more Syndicate Bases across the Wastes and the Realms of Punishment. Archimedes took a dark satisfaction in the report, muted, though it was, by the knowledge that there were still scores of other bases and a long war yet to come. The readout on the massive computer that sat before Archimedes in the centre of the command room at the central research base in the Wastes, showed a grim picture of scores of Syndicate men mobilising.

As Archimedes stared at the situation, he began to turn plans and strategies over in his head, but repeatedly came up with nothing better than a stalemate. Knowing that he needed to issue an order soon, Archimedes hesitated at the prospect of a stalemate, but eventually decided he didn't have much choice.

The Syndicate forces massing on the horizon of the undulating grey planes barely fazed Lethe; he had confidence in Archimedes' plan even if some of his subordinates lacked that same faith. Behind him stood the massive war host that Argus had mustered for the first true offensive of the war: several battalions of Argus Regulars, multiple cohorts of sentinels, four squads of psychics, and three mechanised companies, comprised of a hunter-killer squad of Goliaths, a massive Nox-class machine flanked by two smaller Reaver-class machines, and a support squad of armoured vehicles. Despite the fearsome amount of fire Lethe had behind him, he knew it might not be enough with the numbers they faced.

Ever the stoic figure, Lethe stood unflinching before his army in the face of the massive army the Syndicate brought to bear, a war host easily three times the size of the Argus force. The instant the main body of the Syndicate forces came into view, Lethe fired the first shots of the battle.