First Battle of Paramar - The Fury from the Stars: The full-scale invasion of Paramar V was now an inescapable fact for the Alpha Legion, roused as the planet was for war; all that now was left to be decided upon was the methodology. The relentless slog of siegecraft and the bloody game of attrition was anathema to them in these circumstances, and furthermore it would play into the defenders' hands, allowing them to bring more of the planet's vast stockpiles of munitions and war machines -- currently inert in storage -- to bear on their attackers.The apocalyptic conflict that would likely ensue from this approach would also inevitably make the idea of taking Paramar V intact as a prize for the Traitors an impossibility, and such a failure the Alpha Legion would not countenance. Even at the distances which now separated the second attack wave of Alpha Legion warships and Paramar V, their auguries and occularis scopes could witness the Mechanicum's preparations for war turn with clockwork precision.They could see the corposant blooms of kilometre-spanning Void Shields springing up to defend scores of separate facilities across the planet's surface, and could detect the thunderous heartbeat of Titan reactors striding forth from their deep forge-fanes concealed inside the mountainous mesas of the southern polar region.They had doubtless detected also the mass deployment of the Iron Warriors' 77th Grand Battalion to the Paramar Nexus, before their damaged voidships had fled the system, and knew well the speed and skill with which Perturabo's sons could render this Mechanicum fortress yet more impregnable to assault.Speed then was of the essence, and the fleet's commander, known to the extant records as the Alpha Legion Harrowmaster Armillus Dynat, ordered his closest vessels to burn their drives well beyond safe thrust tolerances in order to press the attack as fast as possible. Where the great barques of his Mechanicum allies could not keep pace with the faster Legiones Astartes strike vessels, he had his own ships grapple and drag them, acting like improvised tugs and booster rockets to overcome their mass.This dangerous ploy was enacted to the damage and loss of several mighty warships, but Dynat cared not for its cost. So was the gap between the Alpha Legion's second wave and its chosen prey closed with frightening speed. Their attack began without preamble, the first torpedo salvos launched even as the assault fleet was decelerating into orbit and unleashed in continuous waves as they closed. Defence Lasers were loosed from planetside in blistering arcs and counter-missiles were launched from scores of hidden silos across the surface to meet the attack.Soon the skies above Paramar were ablaze will kaleidoscopic fire, as all but a handful of the spent ordnance was intercepted before it could even pierce the planet's stratosphere. But the barrage firestorm accomplished its purpose nevertheless; it blinded the world and its defenders to the exact disposition of the Alpha Legion's attack. The attacking fleet now closed and added the weight of its batteries and Lance arrays to the onslaught. The barrage reached fever pitch and, amid the covering blaze of fire, a wing of three Alpha Legion strike frigates swept in unthinkably low and rent through the storm, plunging deep into the planet's thin atmosphere, the friction of the three-kilometre-long ships' passing setting the air around them ablaze.Skimming the arid ground scant hundreds of metres above, weaponry meant for the cataclysmic interplay of void combat was unleashed to torture and shatter the earth in atomic holocaust as they targeted defence laser emplacements and ground installations in a great slashing arc near the southern polar region, ripping them from the ground like the hand of a wrathful god.Defences intended to strike at targets tens of thousands kilometres distant struggled in vain to acquire these three meteoric harbingers of death, but the tortuous stress of what these warships were attempting took its own toll. The first fell from the skies even as its kin plunged on their murderous course, its weapons still firing as it came apart, its superstructure disintegrating under the hideous gravitational forces with which it fought.A second toppled backwards as it tried to break back into orbit, its engines giving out and shattering a mountain where it fell. Only one of the strike frigates escaped back through the firestorm into the void, bleeding debris and plasma from its riven hull, but the vessels had achieved what the suicidal mission had set as its goal; a gap had been slashed brutally into the coverage of the planet's ground defences, a gap some forty kilometres to the south of the Paramar Nexus, and it was here that the true attack would fall.