Betalis III Campaign - Charge on the Tormus Delta: With no Imperial Navy support to provide air cover and Company Vengeance's heavy armour already fully engaged in the north, the Guardsmen of Company Retribution faced near impossible odds in their race to engage the Alaitoc host.But Company Retribution had two crucial factors in its favour -- time and the unforgiving landscape of the Ice World. The Alaitoc Webway portal was significantly further away from the Alacian Plains than that of the Mymeara craftworld by thousands of kilometres, and directly in the path of its land forces lay the Tormus Delta.Stretching across the entire southern edge of the Alacian Plains, the Tormus Delta was the result of millions of standard years of water erosion, a massive labyrinth of narrow canyons and gorges created at the confluence of two rivers that had frozen over millennia before. For Company Retribution to stand any chance against the Alaitoc host, it had to reach the Tormus Delta before the Aeldari craftworld's airborne armada crested its northern edge.General Myndoras Odon planned to use the Tormus Delta to shield Company Retribution from the worst that Alaitoc's pilots could unleash upon it, but this move was not without its consequences.For Company Vengeance this almost certainly meant it would soon be fighting on a second front as Alaitoc's pilots turned northwards in search of more accessible targets.Company Retribution's headlong charge to reach the Tormus Delta unopposed nearly succeeded, but just as the lead vehicles of its transport convoy were less than a kilometre away, the first of Alaitoc's Hornets, Falcons and Vypers, sleek and deadly aircraft emblazoned with its emblem of the sword of Khaine bisecting a red moon, shot over the northern edge of the delta.The moment they were spotted, the order to accelerate whip-lashed through Company Retribution's convoy. Unlike at Alnitac, there was no time to organise a rolling defence and all the troops of Company Retribution could do was hold tight and pray for the Emperor's protection.The Alaitoc aircraft's Shuriken Weapons and Pulse Lasers strafed the Imperium's convoy, but to little effect. The heavily plated hulls of the Crassus armoured assault transports ably protected the Guardsmen inside, with only a few vehicles being damaged by shots hitting their exposed tracks.However, the Guardsmen could not stay within them forever and when they reached the delta, their deployment was more of a mad dash for the shelter of its ice canyons than a carefully-orchestrated manoeuvre.As Alaitoc's pilots banked round again for another aerial attack, the first Astra Militarum squads to reach the Tormus Delta barrelled out of their vehicles as fast as they could, quickly followed by thousands more Guardsmen following close on their heels.Soon, a sea of deserted vehicles began to stretch back across the Alacian Plains until those travelling at the rear of the convoy were forced either to ditch their own transports there and make their way through the labyrinth of abandoned Crassus transports on foot or break away and enter it via one of its many other entrances further to the east or west.By the time the last Imperial troops had entered the interior of the Tormus Delta, the landscape around it was littered with smouldering wreckage and hundreds of dead and wounded Guardsmen.In contrast, Alaitoc's pilots had survived the assault virtually unscathed, and as General Odon predicted, they immediately turned north to add their firepower to that of their Mymeara brethren.