CANANAAN
IN GODDAMN UNREAL TIME, 3400
And so, the Crusaders cast the die forth, the First New Army of Guynald rolling out in heavy metal and holy nuclear fire to crush the pathetic Cananaanite peoples who had always so suffered in between the Byzantines and Klavostanis. Long ago, the two sides had sworn an unholy pact in their desperately needy hyperdrive colony fleets, and with control of the ultimate high ground, plundered the land, robbing the Cananaanites of all they had, before then continuing to fight against one another for even greater share of the bounty of the worlds, until so much had been destroyed that they left - the Klavostanis leaving mostly in shame at their deeds, where the Byzantines mostly took pride in it. Certainly it was a very visible split in character between the two nascent nations, and after so much official neglect to this historical site of atrocity, the Byzantines had seen fit finally to expend a minimal official amount of support on it.
Even that tiny flexing of a muscle of a star empire provoked a massive fresh new wave of violence across Cananaan and its habitable moons, and the death machines pouring out of the Byzantine Manufactories demanded to be used, to wage death upon other humans with the weapons that had been designed to destroy humanity's foes. Having easily shed the blood of all the Cananaanites they found, the Crusaders now invaded the lands of their Jihadi foe. But the Klavostanis here were a cagey foe, and were far better-prepared to receive this tide of metal.
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Armed mainly with primitive gunpowder weapons, for which even the regressed technological base on Canaan could easily supply, these brave border fighters easily noted the earthshaking approach of this army, and raced swiftly on their camels and horses along intimately familiar paths back to alert others. Messages were dispatched back to the Lord of the Caliphate, al-Humungus, who had earned his position through strength and ferocity - if there was any force on Cananaan that could repel these Crusaders, it would be his.
But until then, these militia muj would have some surprises in store for the Byzantines. They could nibble the edge off of this adamantium herd, win ambushes to shake the confidence of the enemy before their master came to deliver the finishing blow!
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The lead Varangian Rus tank rumbled through the pass, turret traversing pointlessly as they looked around for threats, vaguely disorienting the turret crew with the motion. A single pair of eyes peeking over the ridge down at the incoming column finally decided that they had come far enough, and he motioned for his comrades to move up. Jerking on the leads and shoving the camel into position, they had provided themselves with a firing position that could handle the heavy-variant Space RPG launcher. The inexperienced, still-buttoned-up tank crew took many fatal seconds too long to notice the new threat, having learned bad habits of trying their utmost to avoid mere bullets which were all the Cananaanites had. The turret traversed to start to try and point at the Klavostanis, but it was far too late, as the missile streaked out from its complaining and alarmed launcher mount, and slammed into the turret ring of the the tank full of complaining and alarmed crew, who all horrifically burned alive in the following moments.
The Byzantine column rolled to a sudden, disorganized halt, the second tank not stopping until it slammed into the burning wreck of its comrade. Its turret traversed, and it fired a shell into the hillside that missed where the Muj had been, for they had already withdrawn. Adding insult to injury, there was another explosion, and an enormous boulder rolled down the hill, further blocking the Crusaders' path and adding to the confusion to cover their withdrawal from the successful ambush. The hillside soon became a muddy set of craters as the other tanks that could aim at it also fired, plastering the poor terrain thoroughly, before one of the Crusader officers remembered something about infantry sweeps, and had some of the IFVs at the back of the column dismount their infantry to march up to the front and secure the area to make sure the Muj were really dead - or gone, as it turned out. It took them some while more to find a tow vehicle that could get the dead tank out of the way, and the boulder, having mostly eschewed such pedestrian things as support vehicles in priority.
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Delaying actions like this bogged the Crusader army down, buying precious time for the only force on Cananaan that could possibly oppose this appalling onslaught of tanks - the personal warband of al-Humungus! Kicking up sand and dust as they rolled on towards the front, they attracted even more young Ghazi to add to their fighting force. They would need them, as they drew nearer and nearer to the thunderous flashes of nuclear weapons going off, as the Crusaders showed their displeasure with the irregulars who were impeding their progress. Even though the militias were fighting and dying at the moment, al-Humungus did not press his men to their very utmost in speed to engage in battle yet - Behind that dreadful mask and all the raw fury inside him, al-Humungus hid a cunning enough mind, it was how he had become so much more than a merely successful wasteland bandit.
Defeating an army like this would be no easy feat, and it would be quite expensive in blood to do it, but al-Humungus was hardly shy about such things if it meant victory. He was the lord of unimaginably vast tracts of land, and held the allegiance of billions. He could easily make some sacrifices to ensure that his enemies would put themselves in a position where he could make them suffer a thousandfold worse! Yes... nothing would attract Guynald's Crusaders like the city of Iram, and it could resist them... for long enough.
Leaving this wasteland city as he had the rest, he used a brutally simple method of winnowing out those of the young Ghazi he would take; only those who could keep up on foot with his motorized armada for the entire first night would be allowed to join them, for al-Humungus could find far more willing young fighters than he had weapons to give them, the cottage industries of nearly Ork-like firearms and vehicles, and the legacies of better equipment from the disgraced mercenary bands who had come here to fight and instead died, leaving the Jihadi force to be far more ramshackle a thing than their opponent.
Ramshackle, but most of al-Humungus' men were intimately familiar with their weapons, where the Crusaders smashed away recklessly like children with daddy's tools, not knowing truly how best to use them. The sun rose naturally in the morning to inaugurate another day of killing. The slit throats of the night watch were not noticed until too late, until the ululating howls of the suicide infiltration squads pierced the stillness as they attacked without fear, knowing themselves to be going to heaven as martyrs this morning already, opening up with their killyshnikovs on tents full of sleeping Byzantine troops, and then hurling themselves inside of open vehicles and triggering their suicide vests in enormous explosions that cooked off even more lethal of munitions. It was an unexpected start to the day, and it was only going to get worse for the Army of Guynald.
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As one of his very few aircraft returned from the front with their report on the enemy's disposition, al-Humungus smiled behind his mask, and raised a flare gun up to the sky, and fired off a single glowing green shell that blazed in the sky for a long time...
After a disastrously bloody breakfast, the Crusader armor began to roll forth again again along the front, kicking up such a fountain of dust behind them that the inexperienced Byzantines failed to note the dust roiling before them. Failed to note the many tanks in hull-down positions before them...
The very latest and greatest Jihadi tanks on Cananaan were from the last great railgun-armed generation of Klavostani tanks, those that were already starting to show their age when the Chamarrans arrived. However, the laws of physics were still in effect, and not even the glacis plate of a Varangian Rus could withstand such a shot. Spectacular explosions rose to the sky as the mighty armored speartip of the Horde of al-Humungus pierced into the enemy. Roaring up out of cover, these hardened road warriors knew exactly how to exploit the confusion of their ambush, and attacked into the teeth of the oncoming Crusaders.
Punching through the leading edge of tanks, the ranks of Chimera IFVs that trailed along in the wake of their bigger cousins were easy pickings for the Jihadis, as chaos instead of smooth orders went through the Crusader unit. Some of the infantry-carriers moved to flee, and others to deploy their loads of soldiers. Bolts of fantastically-fast metal slammed through the thinner-skinned vehicles with more ease than they had the tanks before. Pulling himself out of the burning wreckage that contained his dying comrades, a terrified-looking young Byzantine clutched an antitank rocket to his chest like a holy Imperial idol of protection. He raised it towards the killer of his friends, and then he fell down as the Klavostani co-ax spat hundreds of highly accelerated flakes of ammunition through him. Sightless eyes watched the remains of his unit rout in the face of the onslaught, but rather than pursue, al-Humungus’ men turned back, and beat their own retreat away from the battlefield where they had been winning so convincingly.
They made it away in good time, too, as panicked word of the resistance they faced finally made it up the chain of command - finally, a target worthy of the God-Emperor’s most holy purifying fires! Those Kondensator artillery vehicles that were laagered up and ready to fire rushed into action as they received the order to use their new favorite toys again. Great radioactive-symbol-painted shells were worked in to where the autorammer could do the rest, sealing the breech and then soon deafening all around as the railgun hurled its payload out.
But rather than delighting the Crusader artillery crews with retina-scorching fire to match the assault upon their blown eardrums, one of the treasured extra-large vehicles of al-Humungus’ horde raised its barrel skyward, large sensitive sensors splayed out all around the weapon, and then fired a counter-munition. As the two rounds neared one another, the Jihadi shell engaged its terminal guidance, sniffing out the radiological signature of the incoming Crusader nuke, and blew itself through it, shredding the weapon of mass destruction into a non-initiate-able mess that fell to the ground mostly harmlessly.
As the range opened up between the two armies, the nuclear artillery grew even more ineffective, as the Byzantines did not have sufficient concentration of artillery on-call at the moment to punch through - indeed, it had come as a complete surprise to many senior knights who’d only fought with sword, armor, and gun until this day, that simply firing a nuclear weapon on a 35th-century battlefield did not automatically guarantee the scouring of their enemies. Nor were any of the forward Crusader units in any condition to pursue at this moment, so when King Guynald was roused to his field HQ, it was said that his roars of rage were long, loud, and inarticulate, at the beguiling nature of his most hated foe!
“M’lord,” one of his senior vassals reported, wiping his beard free of his leader’s spittle, knowing best how to redirect his master’s rage, “The ill-fashioned enemy flees, but we know where to!” He gestured for the young man at the controls for the Field HQ’s holomap, who found himself bellowed at when he did not center the map upon Iram quickly enough, causing cold sweat to pour down his spine - the only thing that would calm one of Guynald’s most ferocious rages was spilt blood.
“There?!?” King Guynald snarled, staring at the image before him, in far more detail than any graph or map he’d ever laid eyes on before, though he paid attention to little of it. “I will make it their GRAVE!” He pounded his fist on the edge of the holomap, which stubbornly resisted even his most dramatic effort, as Byzantine construction standards had long since been adjusted to survive the most belligerent gesticulations of even the God-Emperor’s Space Marines. Glaring with intensity that might cleave through energy shields, Guynald decided his dignity would be best preserved at this moment with relative calm, much to the fortune of the hapless young staff crusader.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” The rest of the camp sprung into action, mounting up their fusion-powered steeds and steeling themselves for battle, alighting off after the hated foe.
Despite the spirited pursuit, they failed to catch their foe short of their stronghold, leaving the Byzantine army to draw itself up short before the city of Iram of the Pillars, a miraculous oasis and bastion of some measure of civilization amidst this region of devastated wastes. It was then that Guynald had one of his more coherent thoughts, as he stared out upon the city where al-Humungus lay in wait.
“Wait... if he wants to hide in there, we’ve got more than enough firepower to nuke him out!” Strutting back into the back of his command IFV, Guynald crudely outlined the fire mission he wanted. The front ranks of tanks and infantry remained just outside of artillery range of the city, as there were some damn Jihadi guns that had announced their presence when they drew too close. But not outside the range of the big Kondensator tubes...
In the time it took the grand host of Guynald to shake itself out into proper formation for this grand bombardment, it gave al-Humungus all the time he needed to perform the final fortifications of Iram, and prepare for the onslaught of weapons of mass destruction. It was not for nothing that Iram remained a city of significance despite the nuclear halocaust unleashed on the planet, with ancient, yet functional anti-nuclear defense weapons adding to those expensive mobile platforms. They would do what they could - and if it wasn’t enough, well, al-Humungus had planned for that, as well.
Basements became bunkers, rooftops became shooters’ perches, convenient clutter and cover became IED killzones, weapons were distributed amongst the willing populace. Out the back, the flight of women and children obscured the withdrawal of al-Humungus’ better units out of the city, leaving the expendable troops and equipment in there to undertake such a fight... From well behind the lines, al-Humungus smiled behind his mask. Let the barbarian infidel have his overconfident pride at softening up the city - accepting his invitation to battle at this place was Guynald’s mistake in the first place.
As men up the chain of command signalled their readiness, Guynald stood up out of the cupola, and slashed forth his sword imperiously, razor chain teeth gnashing angrily. “FIRE!” The grandest battery of artillery seen on this world in centuries fired as one, hurtling atomic death forth. But unlike the casual devastation they’d unleashed upon the Cananaanites, there was still much in the way of technology defending their foes this time. The most spectacular fireworks the city’d seen in nearly a millenia lit up the city brighter than the sun, as mighty forces strove to commit or deny complete and total annihilation.
However, the deployment of nuclear weapons was old hat to interstellar warfare, and long ago defenses against such had been devised. In addition to the more modern makes of mobile anti-strategic weapon vehicles that had shielded the Jihadis earlier in the battle, now the blazing beams of the famed Pillars of Iram, laser towers from the age of Cananaan’s colonization and first devastating wars, joined in the fray, obsolete but rugged systems identifying and barely tracking the swift railgun-launched nuclear shells before burning them down. It was said that the Byzantine roars of Guynald drowned out the sound of the guns, for there were no nukes initiating!
To assuage his rage, the Byzantine temporary liaison explained the intricacies of modern technology, that such contingencies had been planned for, that they should load the purple-banded Warp Shells. Such cunning weapons packed even fantastically more punch, and, better yet, did not give off telltale radiological signatures the way the common nuclear galactic yardstick of firepower did. When the barrage shifted to try and target the fixed defenses in particular, rather than an indiscriminate bombardment, one gun crew loaded the shell they were instructed to under careful watch of a tech-magos and eerie retinue, and then added their Kondensator’s fury to the fusillade. The automatic defense systems, inexpertly managed, downgraded this ‘dud’ round to the bottom of their priority lists.
With a terrific howl of tortured reality, the reinforced ancient metallicrete defense tower vanished without a trace, and the awesome explosive power of the Warp Shell was overlapped by several conventional nukes streaking in, causing complete overkill in the target area as many blocks all around were incinerated and blasted flat, killing tens of thousands in an instant.
Even obsolete gear was programmed to adapt to blatantly obvious changes on the battlefield, even if the illiterates on both sides of the battlefield were not versed at all in the finer points of nuclear combat. The next attempted warp shell found itself smoked out of existence first as the Byzantine bombardment came for another tower in the exact same stratagem, a failure this time, Iram’s defenses held for this moment.
The guns fell silent briefly, as the Archmagos of Armaments was again consulted on his mastery of belligerent ballistics, and then the crusader cannon delivered death indiscriminately in a longer, more patient siege bombardment, mixing in conventional-payload shells of high-explosive and smart submunitions with their nukes and achingly limited supply of warp shells to make sure the latter of those made it through. The defense towers selfishly prioritized their own defenses, sacrificing other sectors of the city without hesitation to the wonder if that rad-less shell was a conventional or a warp shell, and of course zapping the old-fashioned nukes as well wherever they found them. Reduced to unleashing their few remaining warp shells at random throughout the city, Guynald expressed his anger in this way, scorching entire dead sectors into Iram. Then, he decided to neutralize the towers the old-fashioned way.
Muhammad Abdul al-Muhammad clutched the rifle in his hands that he’d run his naked ass off for days ago, and shied away deeper into the dusty basement bunker-hole in which he was hiding - he’d been one of the lucky ones, not incinerated in an instant by the weapons of mass destruction, nor torn to bloody rags by the shrapnel blasts of window- and foxhole- seeking smartbombs. Outside, he could hear shouting in his native tongue. Praise Allah, it was time! Scrambling upstairs to a window, he gawked downwards over the edge.
Through the deserted streets of Iram rumbled a dust-stained column of Byzantine tanks in all their grim glory and heavy metal might, turrets panning warily about, and Muhammad’s breath caught as one’s death-gaze passed by him, but nothing happened. Moments later, there was a terrific boom as the first IED went off, obscuring the entire area with dust and smoke. Certain that it was time, Muhammad leapt up to the window with his killyshnikov out, and unleashed fully-automatic fire with his finger on the trigger, and an ululating battle cry with his throat. Holding the trigger down long after the gun had clicked empty, Muhammad was fumbling for the release when something struck him in the throat, and he fell to the floor, clutching his wound and gurgling. He had enough time while bleeding out to contemplate how stripping his clothes off to ensure he was unencumbered enough to keep up with the horde that first night had not been such a clever idea after all...
But while lightly-armed young men like Muhammad died, it was not just the women and children who fled out the opposite side of Iram with their carts, camels, and ramshackle cars; but also savage, bearded, eyepatched veterans, in their technicals and tanks. al-Humungus watched the burning city from his vantage point to the north, listening to the dull roar of battle in the distance as the Crusaders plunged head-on into the city against crumbling defenses. Giving the signal to them with another flare, his men all as one pulled on their GAY-BAN sunglasses, and forced the Byzantines to Deal With It.
It was hardly as if the Jihadis did not have their own modest stockpile of nuclear weapons, they just lacked as effective of delivery methods as their enemies. But luring them into a doomed city and lighting off a dozen devices was one good way to bring them to bear upon one’s enemies. The corpse of Iram was completely annihilated, with all the warriors inside along with it.
And then, the Horde of al-Humungus charged, driving hard into the flank of the shocked Byzantine army. Railguns and rockets began to destroy Varangian Rus tanks as they were taken by surprise, and certainly thinner-skinned vehicles suffered worse. It took the destruction of one section of Guynald’s insufficient artillery and their ammo dump to shock him into the realization he was defeated once again, instead of adding to his share of victories this day the way he deserved with so much better an army!
As both sides departed the ruined radioactive crater that was Iram, al-Humungus went to prepare himself and his armies for the arrival of his less-successful great-great-uncle Humungus al-Turbani, and his cargoship holds full of BEEEF-gotten goods and units of mercenaries. And Guynald returned to his capital, and whatever plans he had were derailed by the terror of the Nova Atlantean nanoplague that transformed his body into that of a hated xenos Tau, and his subsequent execution.