Korobaan War

The Korobaan War took place on the world of the same name from early 12 post VCM.M41 until 16 post VCM.M41. As one of the Foundling Worlds Wars, the war forms one part of the wider Tectonian Front.

## Invasion

The initial Chaos invasion of Korobaan consisted of a hodgepodge reaver fleet, but was more than enough to overcome the planet's meager orbital defenses. Strongest of these invaders was the Traitor Astartes warband the Bloody Horns. Numbering less than one hundred Astartes, the Bloody Horns fomented a rebellion among the planet's mutant underclass. This Pale Throng, as it came to be known, launched an asymmetrical war against the planetary defense force.

### The Destruction of Klenserhive

In the thirteenth month of the war, the planetary capital, Klenserhive, was destroyed. Its primary geothermal power plant overloaded, and the entire proto-hive was incinerated. The precise cause of this overload is debated. Some sources indicate that the defenders, beset on all sides, detonated the power plant in an act of honorable sacrifice. Another view states that it was the mutant usurpers who caused the meltdown, or that the Bloody Horns perpetrated it as part of some dark rite. Equally possible is that the destruction was an accident; an unintended side effect of the pellmell melee that erupted throughout the city's lower reaches when the walls fell.

Whatever the cause, the destruction of Klenserhive left the defenders gutted, and nearly every member of the Bloody Horns incinerated along with them.

## Escalation

Though the war for Korobaan had lasted four years and cost millions of Imperial lives, it had remained essentially a backwater conflict from the perspective of both sector command and the dread lords presiding over the forces of Chaos. It was only in 16 post, after the conclusion of the Anvil Worlds Invasion, that the events on Korobaan caught the attention of the wider war effort and entered its final, bloody phase.

### Imperial Reclamation Effort

The crusade to retake Korobaan from the Archenemy was launched in 16 post, in the aftermath of the successful defense of the Anvil Worlds. The besieged Korobaanite defense forces were bolstered by a full army group from sector Militarum command. Led by Lord Militant General Abernath Castillo, Army Group D consisted of a full twenty-eight regiments. A number of these regiments were folded into Castillo's command following the Anvil Worlds Invasion, especially the regiments orphaned after Lord Militant Bullert's capture by the Archenemy. Castillo's attack was facilitated by a battlegroup of Battlefleet Tectonia, and supported by a single macroclade of Skitarii, and a banner of House Vulker Questor Mechanicus under Baron Hector Voltaris III.

Castillo's goal was to breach the surface quickly, relieve the most beleaguered hold-out points among the defenders, and spread control from there. If the Navy could do its job in clearing the local space, he could stabilize the conflict on the ground, and begin the long process of excising the Archenemy forces by choking off its supply flow.

### Under New Lordship

Unfortunately for the Imperial fleet, Chaos forces had their own reinforcements. From out of the disaster of the Anvil Worlds Invasion, the Corpsemakers and Void Reavers made their way to Korobaan. It was Rutus Bileheart's intention to fortify the planet as a stronghold in the Foundling Worlds, and the goal of Ghor Dranas to subjugate the planet's growing motley of warp-tainted marauders and perfidious mortal pirates to his thrall. Accompanying the Void Reavers was a grouping of Questor Traitoris knights of House Vextrix.

Though control over the Chaos hordes was disputed between Bileheart and Dranas, one thing was clear for the previous tyrants of the Chaos forces on-world: the war for Korobaan was under new management, and they could either fall in line or die. Most picked the former.

## Total War

Though the Corpsemakers and Void Reavers fleet elements had been badly battered by the events of the Anvil Worlds Invasion, the Imperial Navy battlegroup present in the Korobaan system was still not prepared for a fight with Astartes-class vessels. During the last year of the war, both fleets engaged in a series of running battles in orbit around the planet, ceding and regaining ground in alternating time periods, neither side willing to commit to a potentially damning decisive battle. Grand advances were only made when surface-side elements required close-in orbital support.

The surface war did not share this hesitancy. From the moment that both reinforcements made planetfall, the war was one of all-out aggression and consolidation. There were over two hundred regimental-sized engagements in the final year of the war. This account will only cover the most important of these conflicts; the lynchpin battles which decided the fate of the planet.

### The Battle of Bracara City

After the fall of Klenserhive, Bracara City became the most critical of Korobaan's proto-hives. Located on a peninsula on the eastern shore of Korobaan's largest continent, the city proved easily defensible against an invasion force that brought virtually no naval assets with them, and which was reluctant to unleash orbital fire on a city so rich with pre-built mining infrastructure. For the reclamation fleet, Bracara City was an obvious starting place. Fully half of Castillo's forces made landfall at Bracara City in the days after the fleet made orbit. The city's spaceport churned with activity day and night, ferrying the Militarum bulk landers too and from the surface.

It wasn't long after that the newly arrived Corpsemakers made their move, rallying the renegade mortals in the planet's swamps and moving them on the city in a millions-strong horde. This wave of humanity formed an eighty-kilometer arc that swept down the peninsula and splashed against the city's defense-works. When the advance faced resistance that could not be solved by weight of numbers, the Corpsemakers deployed to bolster the line. In the first day of the assault, the 4th, 5th, 10th, and 28th Korobaan PDF were entirely eradicated, bombarded by plagueburst mortars and dissolved in their bastions by plaguespitters.

Across the next week of the advance, twelve more regiments fell to the enemy. Their losses formed the basis of dread rumors. The Slaughter of Bastion-6-5. The Massacre of Lowdown Swamp. The Curdling. The Commissariat punished the spread of these rumors with immediate, lethal consequences, but still they persisted.

But the Corpsemakers weren't alone in their ruthless calculus. Where they appeared from their horde, Castillo increased his numbers, piling on the exhausted PDF and untrained conscripts to keep the Traitor Astartes occupied until he could bring up his off-world reinforcements. The most important of these counter-attacks occurred within the city limits, on the outskirts of the spaceport itself. As the Corpsemakers advanced into the slowing press of a multi-thousand garrison of local forces, Castillo brought up his rearguard: the Vostroyan army group, and in particular the 616th Mechanized under Colonel Culpan Toschenko.

Toschenko had history with the Corpsemakers, having led a combined force of the 616th and 48th Armored against them during the Anvil Worlds Invasion. Castillo knew this made Toschenko and his Skunkheads the prime candidates for putting a halt to these monstrosities. A wise choice, for the counter-attack at Bracara's port would prove to be one of the most decisive engagements of the entire war.

The engagement was decisive, and only lasted for a local day-night cycle (a little longer than one Terran solar day). With the Corpsemakers busily slaughtering the local garrison, Toschenko was able to deploy his armored elements in advantageous firing arcs along the spaceport processional avenue. His infantry advanced through the ruined supply fanes at the base of the port, ferrying hundreds of penal legionnaires ahead of them. These penal soldiers fought against their will, their bomb collars an ever-present threat of death at the hands of the 616th's Lord Commissar, Dimitri Vlasna. Their purpose was to draw the Corpsemakers' heavy infantry elements into the open, greedy for the kill. This gambit proved successful, and the Vostroyan tanks soon pounded the Terminator elite of the traitor Astartes, killing several and driving the rest back.

Bileheart withdrew his forces when it became clear that the press of mortal bodies was too much, but not before a squad of Plague Marines, ranging far from the main force, managed to detonate one of the spaceport's primary munitions depots. The resulting explosion caved in the spaceport's northernmost ferry-spar. Administratum records estimate this damage reduced the flow of incoming men and materiel from orbit by a factor of two; well within Militarum command's operational tolerance, but a thorn in their side to be sure.

### Pride and Honor

One week after the battle of Bracara City, the proto-hive once again rocked with the sounds of heavy firepower, though of a very different sort. The true reason for the friendly fire incident between the Vostroyan 48th Armored and Knights of House Vulker was never divulged. Representatives of both sides were tight-lipped on the matter, citing "mutual weapons malfunctions" for the two-hour skirmish in the ruined dockways of South Terrace. The two commanders, Major Roscko Zivan and Baron Hector Voltaris, were well acquainted. Both were veterans of the Steel-Walker War of years prior, and during Colonel Toschenko's highly publicized trial for his actions in the exterminatus of Oxidia, Voltaris spoke in his defense.

One theory was a slight of honor between the knights of Vulker and the Vostroyans' increasingly arrogant officer class. While Voltaris may have been close with Toschenko, it's unlikely he knew Zivan well. Nominally, Zivan's armored company fell under Toschenko's supervision. It's equally unlikely that Zivan's participation in a friendly-fire incident was condoned by Colonel Toschenko, who was not present for the skirmish.

During the firing, Militarum security and Officio Prefectus agents attempted to enter the dockways to discover what was going on. Armigers of House Vulker and additional armored elements of the Vostroyan army group barred each avenue into and out of the district. When ordered to make way, the Vostroyan crews feigned a language barrier, then an order discrepancy that needed to be voxed in to headquarters, then falsified vox interference. The armiger pilots similarly claimed they were unable to move without direct permission of their liege-lords, each of whom was "indisposed in an internal matter".

Prefectus personnel on the ground were unable to ascertain anything else. Two hours later, the Questor Mechanicus knights and Leman Russ tanks emerged from the dockways. Two tanks were towed away by recovery vehicles, their flanks scored and holed by heavy munitions. Each of the knights were limping, their paint blackened and hulls dented. Two held arms that ended in spark-spewing stumps, the limbs shattered by demolisher fire. Reports differ, though most seem to agree that the scions of Vulker got the worse end of it.

### Into the Storm

In the weeks following, Imperial command sent patrols into the wasteland, attempting to contact disparate bands of loyalist insurgents and consolidate their gains after rebuking the attack on Bracara City. Most of these patrols encountered mortal resistance, facing down hordes of mutants and burning their hovel-fortresses wherever they sprouted. It was only in the outskirts of the destroyed Klenserhive that Imperial forces encountered something altogether more horrific.

Klenserhive's detonation had incinerated the majority of its citizens, but there had been survivors in the furthest districts from the epicenter. Clung together in their ruined city, without recourse to sanitation services, sickness spread like wildfire--a sickness nurtured and weaponized by Darnath Filthmonger, chief plague surgeon of the Corpsemakers. By the time the Imperial reconnoitre force made it to Klenserhive, the outskirts were crawling with legions of the shambling undead overseen by their Astartes masters.

It was under the punishing gale of an ash storm, kicked up from char-blackened bones of the dead hive, that forces of the Astra Militarum, again headed by veteran forces of the Vostroyan 616th, pushed into the core of the Corpsemakers' ring of steel and cut the heart from the infection. Though Filthmonger's shamble-horde would continue to be a presence throughout the remainder of the Korobaan War, its primary vector of infection--the Klenserhive water supply--was lost to it. The horde would not regain the numbers necessary to be a primary threat.

### Raid on Deep Space Array Gamma Six

With the surface situation deteriorating rapidly, Bileheart looked to change the tide of the orbital war in his favor. The Imperial fleet outnumbered his own, and he was unwilling to commit his ships to a decisive battle without a significant ploy of his own. Thus he marched his forces north, to the Baanite mountains, within which lay a clandestine vox outpost. The Gamma Six installation was a deep space transmission array built into the highest peak on the planet, and designed to scan the Korobaan system's Mandeville points for incoming ships, detectable by the out-wink of their Gellar field matrices.

If Bileheart could control the array, he could use it to transmit a Gellarpox into the field generators of the Imperial ships in orbit. At such a close range, the transmission output would be wide enough to catch most of the Imperial ships in a single instant. From there, they would be so busy quelling the mobs of glitchlings in their systems, they would be unable to fight off his advance.

The post's token defenses were destroyed easily enough. An Imperial commander would never view the array as a tier-one asset worth defending past the initial arrival of an enemy fleet. It would never occur to a loyal servant of the Throne, blessedly ignorant of the machinations of Nurgle, that the array could be perverted and used against its creators.

But it did occur to the Inquisition.

Just as Bileheart's army spread out to transmit its Gellar-hex, Valkyries bearing Inquisitorial stormtroopers broke the cloud layer. Many stormtroopers died minutes into the initial drop, cut down as they sought high-value targets among the Corpsemakers' officer cadre. Their deaths, however grotesque, bought enough time for the rest of their strike team, backed by local Militarum forces (and a lone agent of the Officio Assassinorum, if rumors are to be believed) to push in and secure the array, voxing communications quarantine orders to the fleet in orbit.

Foiled into yet another retreat, Bileheart pivoted focus to his last-ditch plan. If he could not hold the planet, nor the orbit, then he was committed to leaving this war with at least one thing to show for it.

### Plague and Piracy

Conflict between the Corpsemakers and Void Reavers was inevitable. Control of the Archenemy horde on Korobaan could never be shared among two warlords of such august and dark stature.