The Shriven - Ambush on Limaxis: The poisonous light of a mutant star painted the brutish towers and redoubts of Dessah as Fabius Bile and Argento Corian cemented their alliance. Bile co-opted a sprawling suite of bio-warded vaults within which to continue his great works.He concealed the Ark Cornucontagious behind runic locks and servitor guns, then set his acolytes to work augmenting an initial wave of the Shriven's warriors. The Enlightener, it seemed, had lost none of the strategic cunning or charisma from his days as a Loyalist Chapter Master.Bile saw evidence of not only a prodigious private army of Heretic Astartes serving at Corian's whim, but also hordes of Chaos Cultists, mutants and rogue psykers as well as a menacing complement of Traitor warships that prowled the void beyond Dessah's orbital envelope.Bile knew he could do much with such resources, but time was of the  essence. Even as he worked upon Corian's bio-augmentations in person, the Spider urged his new employer to swift action against the approaching threats.Though he was initially fixated upon his Imperial pursuers, the Enlightener soon grasped the true scale of the more immediate peril represented by Typhus' Death Guard. He might have been expected to fly into a rage when he realised the size of the army that pursued his new ally. He did not.The elixirs Bile had injected him with had made Corian stronger, but had also plunged the hooks of addiction and dependency into his soul. Coupled with certain subtle but invasive augmentations the Spider had wrought within his nervous system, the Enlightener was now Fabius Bile's creature whether he wished it or no.Warp auguries by Corian's slave-sorcerers suggested that Typhus' flagship, the dreaded Terminus Est, was but days from exiting the Warp above Dessah. Worse, the omens told of a fleet of plague ships sailing in his polluted wake, all of them packed to the gunwales with the diseased worshippers of Nurgle.If Typhus' force was allowed to attack the Shriven in such strength then the fight might well go ill for Bile and his new allies. Even if they prevailed against the Traveller, the Shriven would be decimated, left powerless to stop the Imperial retribution forces also drawing closer by the day.A preemptive strike was required, to bleed Typhus' forces so badly that their attack would stall, or be called off altogether. The Enlightener suggested the world of Limaxis. Though Dessah shared its local space with a handful of gas giants and radiation-bathed hellscapes, Limaxis was the only nominally habitable planet that now lay between Typhus and his quarry.In the wake of whatever catastrophe destroyed its cities, Limaxis' oceans had risen to swallow all but one of its landmasses. This region, now known only as the "Drowning Wastes," had become a swampy morass from which rose the rusting cadavers of dead hive cities and long-abandoned Imperial fortifications.Such terrain was hardly the ideal theatre in which to face the relentless Death Guard or their corrupting plagues, but with their strategic options limited, Bile and Corian elected to proceed.Moving fast, the Enlightener mobilised almost half of his military assets. He and Bile led a formidable force into the void towards Limaxis, accompanied by the first batch of grotesquely altered Shriven -- known as the "Terata" -- and augmented with certain arcane technologies that Bile had accumulated over his long years.Their plan was set. The Spider was determined to drive Typhus from his trail, and cared little for what this would cost his allies.As the enemy pounded his warriors with harassing fire and probed for weaknesses, Typhus used the powers of a slave-sorcerer to contact his plague ship captains in orbit. What he learned gave the Death Guard fresh heart; successfully reforming their line, the plague ships Filthmonger, Vermian Curse and Leper’s Blood had driven the Shriven cruisers back, mauling both the Hand of Darkness and the Bloodied Talon in the process. Typhus’ captains requested permission to press their attack and smash the smaller Shriven fleet, but the Traveller refused.Instead he had the least damaged of his ships form a blockade to hold the Shriven spacecraft at bay. Meanwhile, the Moribund and the Rancid Blade settled low in Limaxis' atmosphere and unleashed carefully targeted creeping bombardments.As lance beams and plague bombs screamed down from on high, the outermost Shriven support elements suddenly found themselves in the midst of a devastating firestorm. Herded inwards by the encircling fire patterns, Bile and his forces found themselves caught between ruinous detonations to their rear and the thundering guns of the Death Guard to the fore.Worse was to follow as fresh waves of Death Guard made planetfall amidst storms of fire to the north, southeast and southwest of the crash site. From their lowered ramps issued wave upon wave of plague-ridden Poxwalkers.The grinning, groaning zombies spilled from their landing craft like vomit and encircled the Black Legion forces with the horrible inevitability of a wasting sickness. It appeared that the ambushers were now caught in their own barbed web.The Limaxis offensive had never been intended as a fight to the death, however, and Bile and Corian had their contingencies in place. Vox signals flashed northwards to where three of the Brazen Drakes' Renegade Thunderhawks and an ancient Emperor's Children Stormbird waited amidst the shadows of a rusting Imperial hangar. Not for nothing had Bile conditioned his slave clones to bring his captured Death Guard ship, the Wretch, down where they had.Tangled screens of foliage burned away as the four heavy gunships burst from concealment with a scream of powerful engines. Blitzing the Death Guard's northernmost landing site as they went, the aircraft made for the looming hulk of a drowned habblock that had been designated as the Black Legion extraction site.Led by Corian and the last of Bile's first wave of Terata, the Spider's surviving forces cut a bloody path through the groaning Poxwalkers to reach the slumped hab-stack. Transhuman warriors were dragged down and buried by mounds of grinning neverdead, their armour peeled off them bit by bit, their eye-lenses smashed out and questing fingers thrust into the gelid orbs beneath.Yet with Bile's augmented warriors rending, hacking and bludgeoning at the fore, and Corian's psychic blasts reducing swathes of Poxwalkers to ash, the Black Legion reached their objective. Bile himself led the push up the hab-stack's tilted, creeper-hung stairways and was the first to reach the lowered boarding ramp of his relic Stormbird.