By mid 10.012M42 General Gault was requesting as much as he could get on Hylas. A string of military defeats had seen the orks take much of the south of the planet, and the Imperial zone of control consisted of isolated settlements while the orks had taken the densely populated region of Beng and Hallen.
Berkley was clearly the next target, but the overall commander of the subsector, General Brooke, had more to worry about. Imperial intelligence suggested Thrugnik was about to join the ork Waagh! on Hylas, as his forces had been detected on Kallack, the major ork world in the Mabb Nebula.
Before Brooke had time to worry however, the Blood Angels signalled that they would take care of the threat Thrugnik posed personally. Without giving reasons for their intervention, the Blood Angels attacked the new ork forces so swiftly it was obvious they must have been shadowing the orks for some time.
Brooke wasn't too bothered about the reasons for the attack. Reports suggested Thrugnik's forces had taken serious damage at the hands of the Blood Angels and were, at least for the time being, not a factor for consideration in the war on Hylas.
Shortly after this intervention by the Astartes, Brooke received unwelcome news at his headquarters on Zadoc. On 2110.012M42 the orks under warlord Uzfang had smashed Gault's halt line between the Sump Sea and the Hylas plateau, destroying the fortifications east of Berkeley and threatening to overwhelm the defences of the city. Alarmed, Brooke requested aid from the Raven Guard, who had been nominally attached to the war in the Zadoc subsector since their arrivial earlier in the year.
The Raven Guard interevened immediately, landing in force around the imperial settlement, dropping into the heat of the battle which was now raging in the city's suburbs. Unfortunately for the imperium, the Raven Guard drop pod insertions were inaccurate and unco-ordinated, landing troops far to far from the battle and killing at least once squad outright. Suspicions abounded in Eden's Landing, Gault's HQ, that the orks had designed a new form of technology capable of interfering with Astartes drops, but they didn't dare express this to the captain of the Raven Guard, who was now in an even blacker mood than normal upon his return.
The astartes raid had been a disaster, and Gault had no choice but to withdraw from the city. The orks had overcome his halt line with ease, and now the wide expansive plains of Birego and West Coast lay before the advancing green tide in the west.
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