A troop of Marines land on a planet they considered "a bit warm". Their enemies never stopped to realize what "a bit warm" meant to humans. -- Anon Guest
[AN: I'm from a country where it regularly gets above fifty celcius during summer. High forties are "a bit warm"... but that kind of depends how thick the air soup gets]
Space Marines have what you might call a... Reputation. Always with the ellipsus and the capital. If you want a polity or group eliminated with extreme prejudice, you call in the Space Marines. Amongst the Space Marines, there's a few subgroups who have a... Reputation. One of them is the group who come from N'Oz.
If you want raw cunning, if you want guile, if you want Space Marines who will pull a Briar Patch Manouvre into places where angels may fear to tread, you want the Space Marines from N'Oz.
One famous example is the Luring of Dagiili.
The fleets of Dagiili far outnumbered the N'Oz fleets, forcing the latter to engage in hit-and-run attacks against the outermost ships. They finally fled to a planet on the hotter edge of the Goldilocks Zone, there to hide and wait for the Dagiili to turn away.
That was, according to the Dagiili black boxes, what the fleet leaders believed.
They descended en masse onto a rocky desert world with toxic and hazardous plantlife as well as famously large arachnids. According to the N'Oz records, it made a lot of the Marines homesick.
What exactly happened on the Deathworld and in what order is vague. Magnetic ore deposits interfered with the livesuit chronometers, and some connections to the networks were spotty at best, thanks to atmospheric interference. Some records are completely out of order and very hard to place in the progression of the resulting chaos.
Some things can be put into a rough order. Fleets of dropships descended onto the landscape, their retro-thrusters setting some of the local plantlife on fire. Fires that spread with alarming speed and ferocity. The heat then disturbed the local atmosphere and begat what the N'Ozzies identified as 'firewhirls'. Tornadoes made out of flames.
Most of the native plantlife used wildfires as a means of propagation. Some of the native spiders used the updrafts of firestorms as a means of reaching new territories. Celebrated by the N'Ozzie side were the specific breed that launched with a cluster of eggs inside their abdomens. The adults perished in the flames, but the eggs were protected... and hatched on impact.
The newborn young instinctively swarmed on the nearest object not on fire to 'balloon' into the upper atmosphere and thereby escape perishing in the flames.
The Dagiili troops panicked, and scattered.
Some fell into pits concealed by thin sticks and leaf litter. Some wove through warrens of stone and trunks so confounding that they ran back into the fire. Some stood where they were, screaming, as spiders swarmed their faceplates.
Some made the mistake of removing parts of their livesuits, and soon discovered that the arachnids were highly venomous.
Some rushed back to their dropships, attempting to escape back to the safety of their motherships. According to a few surviving records, they were confounded by the firewhirls, and crashed into the surrounding landscape.
They were unable to warn the following dropships.
The N'Ozzies, hunkered in ships designed to survive the worst that bush wildfires could throw at them, watched what they could of the events as they unfolded.
They loved it. They said they hardly had to do anything.
Dagiili lost a significant portion of their troops, that day. Half the dropships following the first cohort succumbed to the flames. A decent quarter of them crashed into the rocky landscape. The few that made it to landing intact were immolated, or suffered critical failures of their systems from either the heat or the spiders.
Some reports of infestations of insects or lizards swarming the dropships for shelter have been unconfirmed.
Dagiili persisted for a planetside day and night, before they conceded defeat and left victory to the N'Ozzie Space Marines.
[Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash]
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