The place reeked of death. The weight of his fallen comrades that made up the corpse pile atop of him crushed guardsman Laryk's body. His back had been broken in several places, he was coughing up blood and he could barely breathe from the damage he had sustained to the chest; the fact that he was alive at all was miraculous and yet for what little life had been spared for him, Laryk had wished only for death.
The Genestealer Cult they had come to known as the Cult of the Poisoned Chalice went back to their meanderings following the blood soaked battle, apathetic to the regiment of Nulla Facultan 1st that they had mercilessly crushed, and yet through his failing vision something about the machinery that the cults had worked so tirelessly to maintain seemed unnatural to him, even for Xenos. The technology looked scrappy and made of junk, more inline with Ork technology than that of the Genestealer Cults. It was obvious to Laryk that the sheer number of the various Xenos factions and Daemonic incursions appearing on Vector Alpha was the result of some unholy pact, though to what end he could not fathom.
The ground below him began to shake violently as titanic spouts of fire erupted from below the moon's surface; the resulting explosion showering him with shards of rock that imbedded themselves in the guardsman's face and blinding him in one of his already failing eyes. The super heated smoke made him gasp. His lungs felt like they were on fire.
With what little vision had been left to him, Laryk looked up at the night sky to watch the stars he once loved so much before his inevitable demised, though something seemed wrong. He realised that it wasn't just the tectonic disturbance created by whatever heretical machines worked below him that was disorienting him, the stars were literally moving. Correction, it wasn't the stars that were moving, it was Vector Alpha itself, and from his limited knowledge of the system he surmised that the moon was beginning to hurtle itself towards the capital world of Python IV. He wanted to warn his comrades who were settling in relative peace on the planet as a result to the deal they had struck with the Necrons, but he could barely talk or move, much less send a interplanetary message.
The acolytes of the Poisoned Chalice begun to kneel in reverence to a figure approaching the corpse piles. The figure raised a gun to each and every stack of bodies, blasting the dead guardsmen to ensure their death. As they approached the pile Laryk has been partially buried under, they lowered their weapon realising that there was a definite survivor in their midst. They clicked their tongue disapprovingly.
"Well, well, well. What do we have here? My minions really should be more thorough. This is no good, no good at all. We can't leave anyone alive to bare witness to the great plans I have worked so hard for."
The sound of the person's voice seemed eerily familiar to Laryk, like he had heard it in a previous campaign that the Nulla Facultan had taken part in. He forced his heavy eyelids open to look upon the face of the mastermind behind the Cult of the Poison Chalice, and a great rage filled him as he began to realise just who was behind this terrible chain of events.
"LeRoy, you bast..."
A gunshot was heard, and guardsman Laryk's duty had ended.
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