Invasion of Jingxing

Armorial of the Celestial Heralds.

The **Invasion of Jingxing** was a defensive campaign carried out by the Celestial Heralds Chapter in defence of their home world of Jingxing from an invading Ork WAAAGH!.

## Background

Following the rise of the newly installed Chapter Master Bimawen, it wasn't long after the he faced his first crisis. While sitting in the Eunuch council chamber, conferring as usual, the entire planet suddenly shook violently. A servitor entered, bowed, and reported that an Ork Rok had materialized from warp space immediately above the planet and slammed into the flatlands south of Jingxing hive. Flipping the edict in his hand upside down, Bimawen sketched out a plan of action on the back side of the legislation and handed it to his Eunuchs without a word. He activated the citywide voxcaster and walked out of the council chambers at the upper spire level and began to walk down the stairs, talking all the while.

No one was conscripted that day. Chapter Master Bimawen, the divine emblem of the Holy Emperor on Terra, simply asked everyone he saw in the hive to please run south and follow the instructions they received there. Floor by floor, he repeated his message, appearing personally before those lucky enough to be in his path, with his by now familiar voice echoing across the hab blocks. "To the south!", he repeated, and four hours later he found himself in the deepest underhives of Jingxing, filthy places where the corroded metal matched the corroded hearts of the gangers who rotted the place out. But even here, his even and regal tones drove the scum of the Zhonghua out to the surface, with crude sluggers and illegal laspistols in hand. Eight hours after the rokk had landed, not a single living human of the 26 billion hivers remained inside the city. All had been driven by faith and devotion to follow the Chapter Master's request. All except the eunuchs, who politely exempted themselves from onerous physical duties.

By the time Bimawen stepped out of the city and mounted his blue and gold bike, a seventy kilometer line was forming, a mass of billions of humans. Only the first few rows were handed guns, but the entire mob of men, women, and children alike were ready do whatever the sacred chapter master asked of them in defense of their homeworld. It took Bimawen an hour to reach one end of the line on his bike, then another four hours to bike across the entire front of the 70 kilometer line before men galvanized by his presence. The civilians at the front of the mob had been given their weapons and orders, and with Bimawen's ride they had been given their inspiration as well, and so the chapter master rode off to war, leaving the civilians behind.

Three squads of first company had been in at the fortress monastery deep within the capitol hive when the deployment call had sounded, and on their bikes they had reached the ork rokk much faster than the herd of civilians. Long experience had proven that the first seventy two hours were critical in responding to an ork incursion. Striking while they were still disoriented and damaged from the impact of landing and before the newly released spores had a chance to grow into new orks could make the difference between fighting a battle and fighting a campaign. Despite the relative weakness of the freshly impacted rok, three biker squads was far from enough to put this threat down by themselves, even with the chapter master now riding alongside them.

Rather, their job was simply to harass. The fourth, eighth, and ninth squads of 1st company killed orks when they could, mostly with chainblades to preserve ammunition, but their main task was to prevent the recovering horde from organizing. As bosses began to present themselves, the bikers zoomed in to pick them off while they were still small, then sped away far faster than anyone on foot could hope to catch them. Those with Meltas did the same, bombing mek workshops as they sprung up, then pulling out in a flash, always fleeing north to draw the horde towards the mass of civilians. But each biker knew they were only playing for time. They could only catch the targets on the edges of the budding ork society, and in the middle the constant ork infighting was building a series of more massive warleaders who would be emerging soon to challenge the capitol world. Bimawen took heads that day, and the day after, since the bikers drove relentlessly for sixty hours straight before being relieved, never once pausing, never once letting the orks get a clean shot off.

While their noble guardians were buying time for their world, the people of Jingxing walked. An array of servitors guided them, bending the front line in an arc, keeping the closest civilian never nearer than 35 kilometers from the epicenter of the ork invasion. Even civilians untrained in martial strategy could start now to see the outlines of the chapter master's plan as they saw themselves forming a huge encirclement around the orks, with five rows of armed humans acting as an unbroken fence of lasfire to contain the invasion. Few among them were very good shots, but with this many lasbeams and such a simple formation, the people began to gain confidence that the kilometers before them would be so saturated with death that no ork could dare hope to approach.

Naturally, orks being orks, some stragglers did approach. There were a mere handful of guardsmen compared to the billions of civilians surrounding them, but when the order was given, or even when a likely smudge was spotted on the horizon, a blinding red blaze of fire spread down the line for as far as anyone could see. One man's shot triggered his neighbor to shoot, whether he could see anything or not, and the sickly smell of ionized air would send those behind into coughing fits. Confidence increased and the first grumbled complaints about this enterprise soon turned to proud boasts that humanity could accomplish anything against the weak and vile greenskins.

At sixty hours the first relief arrived. Forces both Marine and Guard came into low orbit from the moon of Jingxing, Tianyue. The guard was shuttled down to participate in the encirclement and relieve the exhausted though still enthusiastic civilians. But it was the Astartes landing that proved to be a mistake. Perhaps it was due to Bimawen's lack of practical experience against Orks, and perhaps it was the sort of over-agression any space marine could fall victim to, but the drop pod landing zones were sighted in the very middle of the slowly growing ork horde that now swarmed around their cooling rok like a green tide. The blast of fifteen iron meteors launched orky bits for kilometers and out of the craters sped three more squads of elite first company bikers, speeding out through thin spots in the ork horde that had been cunningly created by Bimawen and the squads already on the ground. They left behind a trail of blood, blasted bodies, and orkish rage.

To the invading orks, this drop pod landing was a call to action, the ringing of the bell to open hostilities. Whereas Bimawen's previous raids had left the orks more confused than anything and done little practical damage, this solid blow was a clear statement in the orkish language. As one, the cry went up from feral throats, infesting the pointlessly milling mass, "WAAAAAAGH!!!!" and like an ocean current they detached from the rok that had brought them there and followed the bikers northward.

The crisis was immediately obvious, but the solution was not. The bikers slowed, firing into the crowd of orks, but they were not sons of Dorn, pointless last stands were not in their nature. As they reached the firing line, now guard reinforced but still mostly civilians, the Celestial Heralds threw everything they had at the orks and sped in a different direction, making one last play to change their course. But the orks had all the momentum of a star in its orbit around the galaxy.

As the green tide appeared on the horizon, the great mass of citizens did as they had been doing for two days and opened fire in an unnecessarily massive barrage, cooking the air for the three kilometers between the guns and their targets. With this many millions of beams, it hadn't previously mattered that many of them went wide over their target or had fried the steppe grasses well in front of the enemy. The chapter master had been counting on the fact that if you roll infinite dice, you will get infinite sixes. As long as it was just small squads and stragglers, the outer perimeter was unbreachable. But now the numbers were far more even, and Bimawen knew what would happen even before first lasgun crack, this was the failure state he had feared from the start.

At first the people fired much as they had been, fearlessly confident. But in between poorly organized volleys, the green tide in the distance didn't seem to grow any smaller. For fifteen minutes they fired, but it wasn't clear to the humans that it was doing any good. Were they even killing orks? Were these lasguns any more use than flashlights? Unbeknownst to the civilians, there was a trail of dead orks cut down by crack after crack of lasbeam, but each ork took dozens of poorly aimed, low powered shots to take down. While there were some twenty six billion people participating in the Popular Front, only the first few rows were actually armed, and only a small fraction of the total circle was being engaged by the WAAAAGH!. Lasguns still outnumbered orks, but only by about four to one, and the accuracy of the untrained civilians was about as poor as the orks themselves.

Still, the civilians of the north edge didn't try and run right away, even as they were beset by doubt seeing the green horde barreling towards them and none of their divine Celestial Herald protectors in sight. It wasn't until the orks were close enough to start putting shoota slugs into the humans that panic began to set in. They couldn't flee, the vast population behind them blocked their return to the hive, and most of twenty six billion people to their sides and rear had no idea what was happening, but they could still panic. Some panicked by freezing, others by shooting ever more furiously and screaming in harmony with the orks' gutteral roars. Neither response mattered much, and in a flash, a million human civilians were cut down in the crash of orkish weight, orkish muscle, and crude orkish choppas.

Bimawen hadn't wanted this to happen, he had hoped for a zero casualty operation, but now that the orks were enmeshed in an anvil that would take them hours to hack through, he decided it was high time for the hammer. The Celestial Heralds were down to fifty three bikes after taking a handful of casualties, and their bolters were all dry. But not a one of them, the chapter master included, hesitated for a second to plow into the orkish mass from the rear, severing green limbs with ever swing of the chainblade and crushing orks under their massive tires. At the same time, orders were handed off to the guardsmen on either flank of the ork mass to fold in and create a smaller encirclement, shooting at the unprotected back end of the enemy. Those farther afield, well clear of the main thrust, were sent marching inwards, picking off stragglers and killing anything they saw.

But under the main impact of the ork advance, humans did nothing but die. Men, women, children, the same people who had come out with nothing but devotion were torn apart without hope of resistance. They died in droves and they died in fractions of a second, but their total bulk, the sheer weight of lives pressed, so hard that the orks were still kilometers and hours from a breakthrough. Even those who tried to flee were held fast by the press of bodies who, far away, had no idea what the fuss was all about. The space marines and encircling infantry killed from the rear, but it was an opportunistic attack, not a decisive one.

In three hours, the orks dug through a billion lives and despite their caution the Celestial Herald bikers had lost eight more battle brothers in the melee. But finally Bimawen's vox-reciver dinged. The people of Jingxing had bought enough time for 10th Company Devastator captain Shi Hou and the 313th Zhonghua Artillery to deploy. The orks were pinned in a single location, and the Zhonghua artillery, famous throughout the galaxy for sheer quantity of fire they can put downrange, was cleanly sighted in. In thirty minutes, the central mass of greenskins became a red and green paste, and once the flanking and encircling guardsmen had caught most of the stragglers, the rest of the division was tasked with emptying the rations warehouses and trucking them to the great masses of people.

No one had eaten for three days, water had been scarce, and sleep hard to come by. Faith alone had sustained the people of Jingxing hive, a millions of the elderly and infirm had perished when this wasn't enough. But finally the fasting was over. The fittest of men and women were fed and asked to stay on site for a while longer, while the children, elderly, and infirm were sent back on the long walk to Jingxing hive with an extra ration each. Supplies meant to feed a regiment for years were chewed through in days, but the suffering only heightened the afterglow of victory. To those who stayed behind, the admech divisions who arrived too late for the main action fashioned an array of improvised flamethrowers to supplement the guard's stockpile, and another kilometers long human wall was formed, this one only one rank deep. In a seventy kilometer wide square, the flat steppelands south of Jingxing were torched to prevent ork spores from becoming established in the soil.

Three days after the unexpected arrival of an ork rok, the sub-sector's capitol world was again safe from the greenskin menace. For now.