 Vrax had fallen. It had fallen for the first time since its settlement millennia before, and not at the hands of some invading enemy, no, but from within, from a mad, power-hungry cardinal and his flock of zealots and fanatics. Zafan had deposed the Munitorum and enshrined himself in a theocracy in miniature, deposing the Administratum in place of his own bespoke Ecclesiarchy regime, answerable to him alone, or ostensibly, the god-emperor of mankind. It was an affront to the structure of the Imperium, and insult to the divine orderly balance enshrined within the emperor's regime. It was also a massive security risk to all military operations in not just the sector, but the segmentum. It may then come as a surprise, or perhaps will not, that the departmental Munitorum moved slowly upon the news. The grinding cogs of Imperial bureaucracy move at tectonic pace at the best of times. The initial distressed call sent from the fortress world's astrophatic choir took time to filter two segmentum Munitorum officials, and even once it had, its severity demanded it be brought to the attention of the lords of the Administratum themselves upon Holy Terra itself, where, even upon its reception, it was sorted into the morass of competing interests and priority decisions that the management of a galaxy spanning empire demands. Months of inactivity followed, with the Munitorum anxiously awaiting a ruling from the throne world. Eventually the cogs aligned, and some lodges prelit within the palace got word of the situation, and the true scope of the fall of Vrax was finally comprehended by those with the power to do something about it. Beyond the issue it created between Administratum and Atlesiarchy, bedfellows and enemies simultaneously, the strategic position Vrax occupied within the supply chain of the departmental Munitorum was so crucial that its removal threatened imperial forces galaxy wide. Such a linchpin of logistics kept the astromilitarum, the imperial navy, even the adeptus astartes in fighting standing, and who could say what disaster may befall what critical campaign in what far flung star system should these forces suddenly find themselves without arms, armaments, or ammunition. The Munitorum was as vital a part of the god emperor's wars as any soldier, and with one of their fortress worlds lost, that position was now placed in dire straits. Readings of the emperor's tarot were doomed laden in the extreme, and many within the Administratum fretted over the potential ramifications. The 8 million strong population of Vrax and their ultimate fate never entered into their considerations, what after all is 8 million human lives to the Imperium, but a line in a ledger. Especially considering the loss of their world could precipitate something as terrible as a black crusade, the high master of the Munitorum produced a ruling. Vrax must be retaken. The question was how? No then, that this is a further record of the calamitous siege of Vrax. Once again, the cogs of the Imperium began to turn. President was cited, petitions brought forth, and orders were drawn up upon formal vellum. Terra issued a proclamation to the high command of the Astrum Militarum of segmentum obscurus, upon the world of Cadia itself, to retake the fortress world of Vrax by whatever means necessary. The wording was debated by the High Castellan of Cadia and the Lord Commander of Obscura briefly, but it was clear, retake not destroy, and with this came the dread realization of the scope of the task at hand. Vrax was a bastion with few equals. It simply had never fallen. It was considered designed to be impervious to external assault. Now, how to breach the impossible walls of such a place? And if you do so, what will be the cost? Senior segmentum obscurus and scarus sector commanders were drafted into the initial planning and consultation, for this was a task only achievable by the finest minds the Astrum Militarum could muster. Many dissented, claiming from the get-go that the idea of even attempting such a reclamation was idiotic beyond all reason. They claimed the sheer cost in manpower and material alone would render any gains of the recapture null and void, and may even escalate to the point that such a campaign, regardless of outcome, would amount to nothing but a net loss for the Imperium. Vrax was lost, I said, better to simply acknowledge it. We build the supplies lost upon another world, increase production quotas and work orders segmentum-wide to compensate, and summarily execute those under whose stewardship this disaster had occurred. In short, the Munitorum should simply move on, and accept their shame for what it is. These voices, though loud and certainly numerous, held little sway over the senior commanders who, by dint of position, were forced to consider the broader picture. Beyond the simple military exigencies, there were a myriad of political concerns currently in play. The Administratum blamed the Ecclesiarchy for failing to rein in a wayward priest, the Ecclesiarchy blamed the Munitorum for lack of security concerns, several officers blamed the Ephysio-Assassinorum for the abject failure of their agent to end the situation before it had gotten out of hand, and now all were placing pressure on the guard to act quickly. The order itself had been delivered with the seal of the Prefect to the Master of the Administratum's own office. No matter how poor one's opinion of an order was, there was little one could say when the officers of the High Lords of Terra were taking note of a situation, and seeking to direct its course. Not unless that is one wished to raise such protests upon an excruciation rack in the cells of some Ordo Hereticus dungeon. For, yes, the ever-watchful eyes of the Inquisition were upon the Vrax situation and had been for some time. The Hereticus was wary of just how far Zaphans' tendrils had burrowed, and the commanders of the Militarum were fully aware that any obvious lack of piety and diligence in pursuing the cardinal's downfall on their part would be viewed with quite lethal suspicion. No, they ultimately reasoned. The planet would have to be recaptured. Or at the very least, there would be a war for the fate of Vrax. Diligence must be done. The first and most broadly agreed upon idea for such a campaign was one that, unsurprisingly, did not place the lion's share of the burden upon the guard. The strike force assembled rapidly, with intent to strike even quicker. Imperial Navy squadrons would spearhead the move, followed by an invasion in force of the Adeptus Astartes. Not to be trite, but this is what can be considered a typical opening salvo in logistical planning by segmentum command staff. When in doubt, annihilate the enemy with the Marines should they be available. Messengers could indeed be hurriedly dispatched to relevant chapters and interdiction squadrons assembled from battlefleets Cadia and Scaras. The plan did not, unfortunately, survive contact with the reality that was the Devisio Tactica assessment of Vrax's defensive capabilities. Most within segmentum command knew of the world by reputation, it is true, but when presented with the actual dossier, blanched at the information before them. Since the first construction of the Citadel planet side, the departmental immunatorium had been incredibly diligent in maintaining and upgrading their prized holdfasts defenses to ensure that it was fully in line with the most efficient and capable of the Imperium's fortification arsenal. Knowing that, relatively isolated from major patrol picket lines, the planet was vulnerable to orbital assault, the defenses were aligned to prevent just such an attack from ever even being feasible. Over 100 operational surface to orbit defense batteries ringed the Citadel itself, enough to give an entire fleet of cruisers pause, all of which were protected by multiple overlapping and redundant void shields. To give even greater protection, the majority of these batteries were housed deep within the planet's hardened crust, offering them even greater protection than the adamantine cladding of a battleship. As one guard officer Riley observed during planning, no one could expect the navy to fight a planet. Any orbital landing over the fortress itself could be rendered impossible, owing to the sheer level of fire coming up from the planet's surface. Never mind the fact that, should any landing craft even make it through the defense laser batteries, they would then have to contend with an entirely unmolested surface-to-air missile emplacements and other anti-aircraft defenses. No ship would be able to launch its full complement of landing troops, nor would these landing troops even be able to make it to the fortress in numbers that would lead to a successful capture, just as no chapter master of the Astartes would ever countenance risking their marines for such a move. Segmentum command quietly and dejectedly shelved the initial plan as utterly unfeasible. Faced with an initially impossible frontal assault, the Lodges proposed a different solution on the other end of the spectrum, a blockade of the planet entirely, submitting it to a total shipment and communication blackout, and then a sustained distant siege for approximately one to two hundred years, with pressure on the current holders of the planet maintained by raids against them. Such raids would primarily focus on specific areas of the fortress and its defenses, aiming over the decades to wear them down by targeting specific batteries until the fortress had been depleted to such a point that the prior mooted frontal assault would be rendered a benefit for the cost. While meeting with initial interest, Tactica revisions to this plan rendered the possible timeline as stretching as far as five to six hundred years in the future. Whatever the patience of the militarum, even if none who enacted the plan would live long enough to see it delivered, it was determined that this was far too much in the opposite direction, and that the munitorum would reject it out of hand, unwilling as they presumably would be to wait a full half a millennium to have their armory delivered back to them. A third option was proposed, deemed by the Lodges a reasonable medium between the two polarities. A full-scale siege, with an initial invasion force capable of sustaining such for years, with logistical chains put in place to ensure sustainable reinforcement for the year's subsequent. It would be a war of attrition unlike any the Imperium had seen in centuries, a grinding, relentless application of force with the defenders of wracks to be worn down into dust. It was also something the Imperium was uniquely capable of, and a facet of our empire's breathtaking cruelty. If casualty rates were considered to be two or three to one in favor of the besieged, well, the Imperium would only need two or three times as many bodies. The divisiologists bent their mental acuity to calculating the necessities of such meat grinder, factoring in everything from warp travel time disparities to available manpower to the last reported ammunition stockpile quantities both on wracks and at their own disposal, as well as, finally, the possibility of sudden military demands elsewhere in the galaxy. Ultimately, it was determined that under generally agreed-upon circumstances, the operation would take twelve standard Terran years and deliver an Imperial victory. Considered by obscure's command to be the most acceptable proposal, it was promptly ratified and forward to Terra for approval, where it was rapidly granted by the now eager Departmental Immunitorum. Command moved as quickly as it was able. The 88th Imperial Guard Siege Army was thus formally founded. But just who would form the bulk of this army? Well, the world of Krieg, that blasted, radiation-soaked hellscape of a world, was not always so. Once, it was quite the opposite of its present condition. It once rumored paradise planets of prosperous plenty. In reality, it was a successful trading hub. Its hives held a population of billions, its manufacturing capabilities having not fully ravaged its biosphere. The ruling Council of Autocrats had built a model Imperial world, and for a time, it was good. However, as with apparently all things in the Imperium, vice, corruption and suspicion crept their tendrils into the aristocracy. The wealth of their coffers becoming a source of pride and greed and a font for all sorts of paranoid delusions. Becoming increasingly more insular and isolated, the autocrats and their dynasties set to ensuring the protection of their vast riches and legacies, hosting lavish balls to flaunt their decadent lives, even as they spent billions of thrones upon fortified mansions and private armies. As their citizens laboured contentedly enough, the autocrats began to resent, in a tale seemingly as old as the Imperium itself, the heavy hand of the Administratum's tithe. Why should their hard-earned wealth flow to some far-off government, even if that rule be of terror itself? Why should the work of their hands, not of their workers or their totally inherited wealth, of course, be offered up to faceless bureaucrats? Such spiralling resentment and meopic ideology came to a head in 433 M40. The high autocrat of the Council, the de facto Imperial Governor, declared Krieg independent of the Imperium, renouncing its obligations to the great tithe, spurning terror's due and even more incendiarily, denouncing the divinity of the Emperor, claiming it was a method of control for the common herds of humanity. The world immediately devolved into civil war, but the high autocrats' rebels seizing the majority of the planet's population centres with private household armies. Only Hive Ferrograd remained in loyalist imperial hands, the coalition of citizen groups under the banner of what astromilitarium regiments had been planet-side at the outbreak of the secession crisis. Colonel Yurton of the 83rd Krieg, suddenly finding himself the ranking officer of a campaign he had no opportunity to prepare for, secured the Hive and broadcast rallying cries to all loyalists that remained upon the surface of the now rebellious world. Distress calls offworld had been answered surprisingly promptly by Yurton's sector command superiors, but the news they had brought was not good. Krieg's orbital defences, as befitted a Hive world of its size, were formidable to begin with, but had been developed upon furiously by the Council of Autocrats prior to the rebellion. Nothing short of a full invasion fleet would have breached them, rendering the question of loyalist reinforcements moot. Yurton was on his own, ordered to hold until, or if, such a fleet would be seconded from the Navy and an invasion force drawn up, which, given military commitments in and out of the sector, may be a while. Fortify, bleed, and deny the heretics. This was all the Krieg Colonel could do. It was in historical retrospect the latter word that Yurton seemed to take to heart, petitioning the world's Adeptus Mechanicus Fane for their aid, the Colonel requested the unsealing of their vaults deep within the foundations of Hive Ferragrad, and the preparation of ancient weapons for unleashing, even as the Hive above became utterly surrounded. If the Emperor was unable to have Krieg, as Yurton has been apocryphally quoted as saying, no one would. Upon the feast of the Emperor's ascension, as the siege of Ferragrad escalated in bloody intensity, Yurton unleashed what he would come to refer to as the purging. Hundreds of ballistic missiles arched from ancient subterranean silos, blasting Skyward, each containing an atomic warhead. The Autocrats realizing too late to the full scope of the apocalypse the Colonel had just unleashed could only watch in horror as nuclear blooms lit up the world, blanketing the atmosphere from stratosphere to tropopause with radioactive fallout, and showering an entire world in poisonous matter. More missiles struck key centers of autocrat power, killing millions as firestorms cascaded throughout packed hives. Whilst these attacks were certainly effective, it was the atmospheric strikes that proved the most catastrophically lethal. The biosphere of the planet was destroyed almost instantly, every part of its remaining ecosystems poisoned in their totality. The sheer amount of dust choking the sky blotted out the sun, causing a nuclear winter that would stretch for decades. The attack would ultimately kill billions. Due to the radiation poisoning, starvation, or a myriad of other disease cascades that began to ravage the famine-struck heretic population and armies. The Autocrat Council had no time to prepare for such a move, while the loyalists had used every minute they had, quipping their soldiers with hostile environment gear and chems to ward off the worst ravages of the rad storms that were now brewing in Kreeg's toxic atmosphere. The world had become a man-made charnel house, a wasteland where nothing that was not poisonous existed. And yet, the civil war ground on. Even with billions of human lives lost to the ashes that now choked the skies, the men of the Kreeg regiments, and the impressed civilians raised now to military service brought their war across the ruined wastes of a world the Imperium itself had deemed unsalvageable. There would be no recompense, no relief. There was only the war. Yurton died, and yet his successors fought on. Society broke down as a conflict became generational. Born in sealed bunkers and scavenged tunnels, the children of Kreeg became the conflict that their forefathers had begun. And they were expected to continue. There was only the war, only the enemy. No other concerns or reason for existing persisted. Kreeg was ultimately returned to the Imperium in 949 M40. For 500 years, the successors of the atomic legacy of Colonel Yurton had fought to deliver their poisoned, destroyed world back to the Imperium that had written them off. They had achieved this through nothing short of total dehumanization. Those born after the Purging were not human, not in the sense that we would understand it. They had no reason to live other than to be a body in a conflict they had no knowledge of. They were meat bred for a meat grinder, the ultimate purpose of which was to deliver an end state that was no longer even required of them. The Imperium, never one to look a gifted equine in the mandibles, realized that despite losing an economically prosperous world, Kreeg yet had one resource it could dependably produce. Bodies. Better still for the sansocrats of the Administratum and the Minotorum, society, if it can even be called such, of Kreeg had metastasized into one of singular vision through fanatical loyalty to the Emperor. The Kreeg seemed now to truly believe as one that their sole purpose in their short existences was to fight and ultimately die in whatever manner the Emperor through his earthly representatives decreed they would. They willingly and eagerly offered themselves as the one resource the Imperium prizes above all else, human lives. And the Imperium was quick to move upon this new boon. Kreeg's tithe, impossible in its delivery owing to the lack of anything even approximating a livable ecosystem, would now forevermore be paid in the bodies of its citizens, and the name of the regiments that had prosecuted the great war for the planet would now be borne by the astral military armed forces raised there. The Death Core of Kreeg. The 88th siege army that was destined for wracks was to be made up entirely of regiments drawn from the death core. The siege would be long, arduous beyond human reason, and present challenges few baseline humans could possibly overcome. Indoctrinated, dehumanized, and fanatical to a literal fault, the Kreeg were the perfect soldiers for the militarum's upcoming campaign. Much has been said by command of their moral character and noble ideals of self-sacrifice, pithy pleasantries to disguise the true reality. The Kreeg were desensitized from birth to the horrors they were going to be sent into. Their ability to withstand the psychological torture of the warfare their regiments specialized in was a product of their childhoods, if they can even be called that, a product of the culture that was their unshakable dedication to the Emperor. The siege of wracks would be an unremitting attritional grind a decade or more in the prosecution. The militarum needed a force whose service people would not balk if they lost every single comrade they had ever known. Many an instance of regiments breaking under such stressors existed in the annals of guard history, because guardsmen, guardswomen, guardspeople are uniquely human. The Kreeg simply never were. Beyond their psychological resilience, if such a word is even applicable here, their regiments had developed a notable specialization in attritional trench warfare, complete with training drills, strategic experience, specialized equipment, all the things necessary for that especially hellish form of conflict. It is a trope oft common when discussing the militarum that it cares not for the lies of those under its command, but thousands of guardspeople are thrown into the fires of battle by uncaring generals far from the front lines. This is not as often the case as the omnipresent nature of the idea would suggest, but it is prevalent and in the case of the siege of wracks one can find no better example. The employment of the Kreeg rendered the forward planning of the campaign as too readily is imperial preference, simplistic in the coldest and most inhuman capacity. The deathcore lives were now a mere line item for tacticalogist calculations, whereas other regiments would scream bloody murder at such casual disregard for the humanity of their service people, the Kreeg would not. They could be counted upon that. They were an expendable cell upon a calculation sheet, to be spent as readily as ammunition, fuel, or rations. The mathematics simply spun out from there. How many lives were required to capture and then hold a certain area of ground? How did this extrapolate outwards to shells, las-gun power cells, personnel carriers, billets, starch rations, caffeine allotments, or entrenching tools? This was warfare at its most monstrously impersonal. There was no need to account for humanity and any factor of its preparation. Lives were as replicable as gas masks. One need only have a robust supply chain, and by mathematical certainty, wrecks would be delivered into the Emperor's realm once more. Overall, operational command of the 88th Siege Army was ultimately, after a short but fierce period of politicking amongst segmentum high command, granted to one Lord Commander's Zwellk. A scion of a notable aristocratic dynasty, whose authority extended in both soft and hard capacities across both navy and militarium, Zwellk was nobody's first choice, but nobody's last. Not quite objectionable, it could not be denied by any party, that his appointment was born not of ability but connections. His great-grandfather had, after all, served as an attaché to the staff of the Lord Commander Solar on Holy Terra during that particular High Lord's tenure on the High Twelve, and his social standing was impeccable. Qualifications beyond that were scant to say the least. Aside from the martial bent of his education and childhood, and a notable post-scholum instructions on the tenants of Imperial Tactica, he had nothing in the way of actual combat or command experience. High Command ultimately reasoned that the pedigree of his breeding would placate arrest of Terra. Unhappy with the delays already present, not to mention the potential visibility his appointment could place upon the upcoming war. Additionally, as the siege was appearing by all lodges calculations to be a mathematical certainty, Zwellk was considered a safe bet. Someone who was sound in his theory, and lacked the bullish or bellicose personality that may lead to flights of fancy or divergence from the strategic planning that was already assuring an Imperial triumph. In order to ensure the latter, his command staff was to be several times a normal size, ostensibly to provide robust and redundant logistical support, but also no doubt to prevent the newly minted Lord Commander from pursuing any tactical inspiration of his own. The Siege of Wrax was, to be in many ways, a study in the mechanics of the Imperium itself. It certainly, in all its aspects at this point in history, is a deeply Imperial war. Its soldiery was made up of fanatics that could barely be considered human, more akin to meat-based automata, but even less valued. Its planning was directly predicated around spending the lives of its participants as easily as coin in a strategic middle ground between unacceptably costly bloodbath and unacceptably slow besiegement. It was to be led by a stuffed shirt of a commander in place only because of political connections rather than actual ability, with the real work of the battles being undertaken by field commanders leading squads of entirely expendable troopers supported by the most vigorous logistical mathematics the Imperium could muster. It was, ultimately, all about the numbers. The Imperium's numbers has ever been its greatest asset, and by their proper application a foe would be overcome and the Emperor's justice delivered. Or at least, that was the plan of a Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.