Colonel Mallorax Thane surveyed the parade ground before him. Rank upon rank of soldiers stood arrayed there in great squares, with heavy Leman russ tanks to their flanks. Yes, they might not be equipped as well as the guard, but they were diciplined, steady and most important, they were his. Pride swelled in his chest. These were his soldiers. his PDF force. And Illian IV had never seen finer men than these.

Mud and blood were flung in his direction, as another shell hit the ground, and obliterated a squad of his PDF soldiers. Mallorax turned to yell for trooper Ishmael to get him his monoculars, but the veteran crouched behind him in the trench already, the monoculars in hand. "Good man", Mallorax said. A solid soldier, that one. Seemed to know what Mallorax wanted, almost before he knew it himself. He wiped the grime from the lenses, and surveyed the war torn battlefield before him. Utter chaos consumed it, with his men fighting desperately from crater to crater, trench to trench. It had all begun three short months ago... Couldn't they see that the guvernor was soft? That he was weak, unfit for duty? It had been his right, no his duty to coup the man. For the Imperium. Under his fist, Illian IV had been solid again, at least for a couple of months. Then the Cadians had dropped from the sky. He still remembered it vividly. Almost a third of his men dead in the initial drops, another fifth unaccounted for. His men were good. Diciplined. And no match for the Cadians. They were like devils, with iron resolve, and coordinated tactics that put his officers to shame. His men were equipped with autoguns and old cotton uniforms, the cadians with high powered laser weaponry and body armor. Only one thing gave the Illians and edge. The chem-weapons. Illian IV had a long history of superb Chemical gas canisters and bombs. And Mallorax used all he could get his hands on. It was ugly stuff. Most of it burned right through regular re-breathers, and he had already seen several of his men jury-rigging protective gear that would withstand it. He allowed it. Everything that could give them an edge was worth a shot... Everything.

They had fought the cadians for weeks now, and Mallorax was beginning to get to know his enemy. They could allow no mercy, no prisoners. They called him and his men traitors, heretics even! Ever since they had been driven to the mountains, the cadians had influenced the civilians. He'd seen the vids. Seen what they made him and his men out to be. He knew he couldn't count on the civvies anymore. They were with the enemy now, many of them in the fortified camps. But he'd change that soon enough. With the attack today, they would take Ythris, the fifth largest Metropolis on Illian IV.
Several thousand loyal men of Illian had joined his cause since the cadians had arrived, and these irregulars served Mallorax well at this moment. Most seemed like little more than cut-throats or other misfits, fleeing the cadians' advance, but Mallorax saw their uses. At this very moment, over four and a half thousand millitiamen were attacking the capitol. A futile effort he knew, the cadians had entrenched the capitol city after they dropped and took control, but a useful distraction. Mallorax rose from his hidden position behind the burned out wreck of a civvy groundcar, his command squad rising with him, and he gripped the vox horn offered by his operator. "All units advance, crush them all!"

"move move move!" Mallorax' voice boomed over the din of gunfire, las-beams scorching the pavement around his feet. he fired off a wild plasma bolt towards the Cadian defence line, before hurtling into cover behind the low wall to his right. Dammit, the cadians had them. He and his command squad had been cut off from the rest of his men in a cadian ambush, and it was all he could do to stay tucked behind the low, slowly crumbling wall. The cadians had set up shield sections as a road block fifty meters ahead, and they had the command squad well and pinned. If help didn't arrive soon, they were fragged. Mallorax took quick stock of his squad. Both his lascannon operators were bleeding out on the open road, huge chunks of them burned away by precise lasgun fire. To his left, his vox operator was desperately yelling into the horn, trying to marshall nearby squads over the crump of the grenade that exploded only a few meters ahead of the wall. A futile effort. Mallorax knew they wouldn't be there in time. To his right, veteran Ishmael lay on his side, cradling his head, his autogun forgotten beside him. Dammit, now of all times for the hardened veteran to break!?

Ishmael's world was on fire. He didn't know if he'd been shot, or if he was already dead, and the warp had taken him. All he knew, was that a thousand thousand voices was screaming and whispering in his head, all at once. It felt like his brain was trying to claw it's way out of his head. He didn't know how to deal with this. Instinct kicked in, sudden and without warning, and Ishmael pushed the voices away violently, towards the cadians, as both his eyeballs exploded out of his head in two gouts of misty blood.

Mallorax had no idea what the frag had just happended. To his right, Ishamel lay on his back, whimpering, two bloody craters where his eyes should be. His uniform was torn and ragged, and mallorax saw the tumor-like growth that was spreading on the man's chest, even as he watched. It formed a spiked circle. Ahead of him, the cadians had stopped shooting. Most of them were down, blood pouring from eyes, ears, noses and mouths. A few still lived, spasming with brain damage on the rockrete road. This was interesting. This was useful.

It had taken hours of hard fighting, and the lives of a great deal of his men, but they had done it. Ythris was his. his men were bloody and ragged, and the stench of chemical pollutants hung thick in the air. Mallorax and what was left of his command stood on the rise on the edge of the great refugee camp. Over 500.000 people were mashed together in there. Rag-tag tents and flakboard buildings stood side to side amidst the sea of humanity that was amassing in a thick ring around the gates that his men were advancing through. He knew he couldn't trust these civvies. They had taken the cadians' side. They couldn't see the that he and his men were in the right. They were weak, just like the guvernor had been. Everywhere he looked, he only saw hatred and fear in their eyes. As he watched, a boy of maybe ten picked up a rock at his feet, and threw it at him. It hit him on the side of his head, and cut his brow. Blood trickled from the wound, and Mallorax understood. These people didn't want to be saved. They were already lost. With a face as emotionless as stone, he turned to Lieutenant Yrdnot, the platoon commander that had led the final assault on the cadian bunker at the entrence to the camp. A single sentence sealed the fates of Mallorax and all of his command. "Kill them all"

The womans' screams bounced around the walls of the small hab unit as Gharm shiftet the vox unit on his back into a more comfortable position. She sat on the floor in a pool of blood, cradling the broken child in her arms. Gharm knew that there had been a time where the scene before him would have inspired some emotion. Anger perhaps, or revulsion. Now all he felt was empty and cold. Urian and Ithniss was smashing out the windows, taking up ambush positions with their heavy plasma guns. The violent noise of a revving engine roared through the room as sargeant Uthmar ripped his chainblade from the gut of the man slumped against the far wall. He was splashed in blood, most of his uniform drenched through. But the worst part was his face. The once cool and professional face of Gharm's sargeant was now a rictus grin, his teeth pearly white against the dark red that covered the rest of his face. Uthmar turned, slowly, towards the woman on the floor...

Sargeant Halland lay on the ground, in a slowly spreading pool of crimson. All around him, the sounds of men dying driftet through the night air. The barracks he'd been sleeping in was turned into a charnel house. his men lay sprawled in heaps, bloody and bullet riddled. Most hadn't even gotten out of bed. At first he'd thought it'd been a Cadian night patrol. Then he'd seen that the attackers had been PDF too... He grittet his teeh against the pain and the shame, and looked up at the faceless breather mask of Agrax. He'd known the man for years. Halland's voice was wet and gurgling with blood as he spoke: "The Colonel's mad Agrax! Can't you see that! All those civvies... And us! His own men!" His voice broke with a pain wracked cough, as Halland clutched his perforated gut. Agrax looked down the barrel of his autopstol at his old friend, the smell of cordite and blood heavy in the air and said in a muffled voice: "Orders are orders, Hal. It's all we have left" and pulled the trigger.