They came in the dark of night. Preceded by a concentrated wave of guided warheads carrying plasmatic pulsars that blew out every defensive shield and boiled away every sensor blister, leaving the spire monastery blind and naked. Then came Navy bombers screaming down from low orbit, fat with self-guided hyper-velocity penetrators, targeting the many retractable weapon hard-points and concealed launch bays dotting the spire. A hundred explosions rocked the halls and corridors of the Veiled Hand as kinetic energy translated into thermal energy with explosive force, slaying and destroying indiscriminately.

The first attackers followed only split seconds after the penetrators had done their job, null-black Adeptus Astartes boarding torpedoes screaming in a ten times the speed of sound, their near-heretical power fields and force dampeners acting simultaneously to force an entrance and preserve their occupants from instant annihilation. One hundred battle-brothers of the Deathwatch, the cameleoline skin of their armor a matte black, save for the emerald green and gold heraldry of the Chapter – the Green Knights Chapter – upon their right shoulders. One hundred Angles of Death come to claim the lives of those that fancied themselves bloody-handed slayers of men. One hundred sons of the Emperor leading the assault of the Calixian Ordo Xenos upon the Cult-Monastery of the Veiled Hand.

At their heels Inquisitorial stormtroopers guarding the cloaked figures walking between them; ten Inquisitors, one of them a Lord, and their retinues, come to oversee the ruin of the Veiled Hand and all that it had touched. If the shocked cult members had hoped that their colossal and warren-like fortress would provide some sanctuary they were sadly mistaken; crawling silently up from the main spire along hidden ducts and passageways came the infiltrator-servitors of the Lathes Mechanicus. Their task not to kill or destroy, but to flay open the technological innards of the fortress, stripping away every defense and opening every avenue for the Emperor's scourging fire...