Badab War - Castigation of Shaprias (910.M41): When the Loyalists entered the erratic binary star system of Lamptan, their fears were soon realised. Above the Feral World of Shaprias a ragged armada of star vessels, scows and wrecks had been assembled from scavenged hulks and pirated freighters, while auspex scans and augur-probes revealed that on the planet below vast camps and training grounds had been raised up. Here on Shaprias a new army was being forged from brutal and tainted tribal warriors enslaved to the Tyrant of Badab's cause, a disposable weapon to kill and be killed at Lufgt Huron's will.Mir'san deduced that the bulk of the enemy warships were away on some mission of plunder. There would not be a better time to strike. Swiftly, the venerable Salamanders commander configured a bold attack plan. The joint Astartes strike force made planetfall and immediately attacked the Secessionist bastions and training camps. In the meantime, their ships and naval escort immediately swept out again and set about destroying the armada as swiftly and thoroughly as possible.When the two Chapters launched their Drop Pods and Thunderhawk gunships they divided their chosen killing grounds. Though they met with firmer resistance than their Salamanders cousins, the Minotaurs were masters of siege craft, as they attacked the iron-shod bastions of the Astral Claws. Using their Thunderhawks to punch a gap in the enemy's firing lines, the gunships disgorged assault Terminators and Devastator Squads directly into the smoking wreckage.The rest of the company-strong Minotaurs force deployed directly behind this breakpoint, suffering the brunt of the enemy counterattack. Despite heavy casualties the Minotaurs' Vanguard Veterans held the ruined bastion with disciplined ferocity, not giving an inch of ground to the oncoming Secessionists. The bronze-armoured Minotaurs clashed in brutal close combat with the Astral Claws Retaliators who advanced under cover of their combat shields through a hail of bolter fire to try to re-take the sundered fortifications, only to be hurled back time and again from the mount of twisted metal and shattered rockcrete.Although in numbers the Minotaurs and the defending Astral Claws at the bastion line were roughly equal, the enemy was well entrenched, well armed and well led, lacking nothing for bravery and fighting spirit. But the Minotaurs were masters of siege-craft, and this blood-soaked close-quarter hell was exactly the kind of battlefield in which they reveled. Led by an armoured spearhead of Land Raiders and Siege Dreadnoughts the Astral Claws were pinned in place by the Minotaurs' second attack line.Chaplain Enkomi personally led a Jump Pack-equipped Vanguard Veteran Squad in storming the secondary enemy bastion and slaying all within. Encircled and cut-off, the Astral Claws were swiftly isolated and destroyed in detail. Though their progress was slow and bloody, the Secessionists could not stem the Loyalists' advance. The Astral Claws made them pay a price in dead for every fortification the Minotaurs took, but inevitably, the bastions fell one by one and victory was claimed by the Minotaurs.Meanwhile, the bulk of the Salamanders forces descended on the heart of the city-sized training camps. A secondary force, composed of a chosen wing of Caestus Assault Rams carrying aboard them a force of Salamanders Firedrakes Terminators, the greatest warriors of their esteemed Chapter, took on the task of attacking the Secessionist landing grounds. On their first pass the armoured prows and magna-meltas of the Caestus savaged the enemy transport craft caught on the ground, sundering and burning through their hulls, rupturing their fuel tanks.The Fire Drakes, assaulting from their craft into the billowing black palls of smoke turned confusion and destruction into a massacre, their Storm Bolters and Cyclone Missile Launchers sweeping the panicked foe away before any resistance could be organised.Elsewhere the main Salamanders force led by Captain Mir'san had descended into the heart of the enemy, deploying their troops and armour into a defensive ring at the centre of the training camps. Utterly surrounded, the Salamanders force at under a hundred Space Marines was outnumbered more than a thousand to one by the horde of savages and mutants, the brutal inhabitants of a dozen nearby worlds, that rose up before them.Though their position would have been considered a suicidal one by any other warriors, these were the scions of Vulkan, and they cared little for such odds. The great horde, which was leaderless and staggered by the sudden fury and shock of the Salamanders assault, were slow to react, and by the time they pressed the attack, they were met by a wall of firepower. Thousands of Heretics fell within the opening minutes of the battle as Whirlwind launchers, Predator Destructors and the ordered ranks of the Salamanders let loose with a salvo at almost point blank range.Soon the broken ground of the training fields was covered with mounds of twitching bodies. The horde only rallied when their taskmasters took to the field behind them, the blood-stained and steel-coloured power armour of Astral Claws. The Salamanders marked their true foe in the form of Retaliator Squads amid the filthy rabble of the Heretic horde, keeping up their relentless tide of fire.Mir'San sprang the second phase of his assault plan into action, as three prized Land Raiders Achilles sprearheaded a counterassault aimed directly at the Astral Claws contingent. The tanks fired their Thunderfire Cannons and multi-meltas, blasting a swathe through the ranks of the horde. As the Land Raiders ploughed through the centre of the Astral Claws force, they swung aside as the fury of the Ancients was unleashed.Six Dreadnoughts, led by the darkly famed Bray'arth Ashmantle, the "Iron Dragon," stormed into the Astral Claws' line, smashing them asunder and drenching them with purifying flame. Overmatched and overwhelmed, the Astral Claws did not yield lightly, but were slain in glorious combat, felling two of the Salamanders' Ancients.As the last Astral Claws died, the name of the Tyrant of Badab was howled with their centurion's dying breath as the Iron Dragon tore him in half and cast his carcass to the winds. With their masters slaughtered, the horde panicked and broke, the tens of thousands that remained alive fleeing in a mindless stampede away from the lords of fire and death at their backs, crushing and killing hundreds more of their own number in the rout.Deep beneath the smashed fortifications the Minotaurs and Salamanders soon discovered what secrets they were built to defend; a vast natural cavern system housing Heretek laboratories. These had been manufacturing combat drugs in vast quantities and attempting primitive gene-tampering and experimental surgery on the feral warriors of Shaprias, along with hundreds of Imperial prisoners taken in raids across the eastern Maelstrom Zone. At the lowest levels, guarded by a cadre of the hated "Corpse Taker" Apothecaries of the Tyrant's Legion and their servitors, was an armoured vault within which was a store of Space Marine gene-seed in part stolen from Loyalist fallen in battle.The conflict in orbit had also gone in the Loyalists' favour while the battle raged below, but not without cost. While the makeshift armada had been blasted to scrap and burning debris, concealed weapons platforms set to guard the fleet had inflicted damage to the Pyre of Gory and gutted the Sword-class frigate Epona which had to be abandoned as a burning hulk.Less than eleven solar days after the battle was first joined, the Gift of Fire taskforce departed the Lamptan System to undertake the perilous voyage back to Loyalist-held space, with over a thousand freed prisoners carried in the holds of its Naval light cruisers, and the priceless recovered gene-seed held in the inner sanctum of the Pyre of Glory itself.The Gift of Fire had claimed a great victory for the Loyalists and uncovered and thwarted a dark machination of the Tyrant's that if left to hatch could have had dire consequences for the Imperium. Little did any in the Loyalist high command suspect, however, that the attack at Lamptan would have immediate and unforeseen consequences that would unexpectedly alter the course of the Badab War.