Dredge

**Dredge** is an outpost world in the hexarchate. It is occupied by the Society of the Flourish, a polity which the hexarchate refers to as the Eels, and is visited in Ninefox Gambit.

## Geography

Dredge is located in the Entangled March, close to the Gray Marches and the realm's outer border, facing territory held by the Eels.

## Description

Dredge's sun shines on forests, cities, hills, and Eel-held orbital defenses. The planet's terrain features short stubby succulents, too short to provide ground cover, which flower quickly with a sweet watery scent and emit a cloying, stinging fragrance when crushed.

During the Kel action on Dredge, smashed tanks, smoking pits, and mangled dead littered a battlefield between a southwestern forest and the Eels' directional storm generator inside a transparent palisade on a stubby hill. The battlefield's features included an Eel-occupied ridge near the wood; an open route east and north around Hill 117; Eel field fortifications occupying a larger hill; and Hill 119, further east, topped with a silhouette that was likely an installation.

## History

Several Kel battalions from the Chain of Thorns under Brigadier General Kel Farosh were ordered to seize a directional storm generator controlled by the Eels on Dredge. The soldiers were assured in their briefing that the generators' deadly storms would be contained by weather-eaters, but were not informed that the generator operated on heretical mechanics and was itself a disruption to the local calendar, adversely affecting Kel technology.

Eighteen hours into the action, Heron Company under Captain Kel Cheris was delayed by a field grid error and communication breakdown as the rest of the 109-229th Battalion advanced. The company broke cover from the southwestern woods eighty-three minutes later, bearing east and north around Hill 117 to avoid an enemy vanguard possibly occupying a ridge nearer the wood. They discovered the weather-eaters ineffectual and most of the preceding companies demolished, while one of their servitors detected an Eel battalion incoming in two hours.

The company advanced, hoping to draw too close for the storm generator to be used against them. Kel Verab, Heron Company's senior lieutenant, noted a possible enemy installation on Hill 119, but Cheris chose to turn north anyway, forming Pir's Fan to block the directional storms. Both forces bannered and joined fire as a storm of entropic light assailed the Kel battalion, avoiding the Eel fortifications.

Realizing that the generator's heretical mechanics were thwarting formation effects, Cheris overrode Pir's Fan, modifying the formation to measure the heretical calendar's deviation from their own. She excluded her fourth squadron from the company when they refused to accept the nonstandard formation, allowing their destruction. As the storm dissipated, Cheris adapted a force multiplier from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands to protect the company from Eel invariant weapons and, despite local calendrical rot, ordered the use of calendrical swords to mow through the enemy ranks. Entropic cold struck as they took the generator, and Cheris stripped the company's computational allocations to calculate around its disruption of the high calendar, finally dispelling the entropic effects. With the generator under Kel control, Cheris ordered a nonstandard formation resembling the proscribed Pyre Burns Inward to better defend it, and reported their success to orbital command.

Unexpectedly, Farosh responded immediately, ordering the company to prepare for extraction and disregard the generator. Twenty-six minutes later, with Eel orbital defenses down and Guardhawks providing covering fire, the company was met by hoppers and medic teams which conveyed them into orbit as a waiting Kel bannermoth bombed the generator out of existence, rendering the entire battle moot.

After the action, Composite Subcommand Two acknowledged the mission on Dredge as terrible and "a waste of good officers" while ordering Heron Company broken up and outprocessed by Doctrine due to their exposure to Cheris's nonstandard formations.

## References

1. ↑ Hexarchate Map
2. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 1
3. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter Two