It had come to this. Years of planning, meticulously working out each detail, surveying and accommodating incidents that weren't planned. It had all come to this. Richard was no longer calm, at least not in his mind. He was shaken, ghostly pale and white.
He eyed the pistol on the table. The monitors still blared their light into the dark hub of the room he sat in.
He watched them, mustering what little strength he had left. His eyes peering at all the monitors and screens and holograms and video feeds...
The entire Regime was in ruins. Lieutenant Liu, one of his last loyal officers was stranded north of Rising Power. There was small hope of rescue for him, despite a transport being nearby.
Richard's attention turned to his last city on the mainland... Routine Regime.
One of the commanders there awaited orders. He kept trying to contact Warrick, but Warrick motioned slowly and pressed the button to accept. He looked over to the screen:
"Leader! There is enemy forces outside our perimeter, what are your orders?"
Richard didn't stir.
"Sir?"
"Attack them. That is all."
The commander's face went cold, realizing that even his faction's leader was without hope... even so. If it prolonged the deaths of the scant populace of soldiers and their families in Routine Regime... he would do as he needed.
"Men, weapons ready."
They blasted their gatling lasers and laser rifles and other ordinance out into the fields where the seething masses of mindworms lay, their freakish broodmasters directing them. The lasers burned through and blasted into the masses of worms, hitting some of their xenos broodmasters. As they approached closer they readied their flamethrowers, scorching them as they came and burning them into festering piles of steaming sinewy organic mush and charred remains. Some of the men were overwhelmed, and the fascist soldiers experienced brutal deaths as the worms pincered their way into their skulls and injected their larvae into their heads, ripping apart their nervous systems and making them twitch and scream in jarring pain.
But at the end of it.. the attackers laid scorched, for now.
Liu was not so lucky... the last reports of him was his unit had been overwhelmed by Annihilator forces, and eradicated. His face haunted the screen as the mindworms clawed up through his body, as he bled from every orifice in his body as they wriggled their sadistic pincers through his flesh....
Soon after more native life cruelly subjugated by the Annihilator menace came to assault Patriot Port- killing its meager defenders with ease... and eventually...
Murdering them all entirely. Some of the inhabitants escaped- but down south Exterminatus forces, who were fascists in their own right (albeit with a horrific evolutionary xenos cult, Warrick surmised) and equal to the Annihilators in how much of ruthless force they are... died merely to mindworms. Even the hope of an evil displacing a currently hostile evil was lost.
Richard was only offered alliance as he would buy the Exterminatus time... which he had precisely done much to his regret. Not that he had much choice.
Some of the refugee's had managed to skirt all the way up to the northern pole of the planet, safe for now...
But others, were not so fortunate.
So much death and misery surrounded Warrick that the man was near his breaking point. He was seeing HIS regime that he safegurded and, while he was responsible for many deaths of his own people he had seen it as responsible culling in his eyes. Necessary measures for the safekeeping and purity of all... now it was all for nothing. He watched helplessly as he saw his citizens get massacred on the screens, pangs of guilt hitting him like a retributive hammer.
His officers sent him an update:
More alien forces had arrived to fight... the ever increasing number of alien forces. Mere puppets in a war between alien monstrosities. He ignored it entirely...
He sat and contemplated, as he always did. Just this time, it was a means to end his pain and humility. A broken man, the Iron Regime was his child. His carefully observed, constructed child, his safe and secure one. The son and daughter he never had- he once had a wife, but was never able to father children with her. A miscarriage was the closest thing that came to it. But that was ages ago on Earth, back on another hopeless front where chaos reigned and seething masses swarmed at the gates.
He replayed the messages of the Annihilator scum over and over and over. Watching the video feed constantly, his eyes shifting about as he tried to absorb the information.
People were panicking, and before he could even say anything, the indoctrinated soldiers were already supplying fuel to the imagery of "punished" citizens...
The tide of xenos plagued the countryside around Routine Regime. Ceaselessly adding to their number, preparing to overrun the confines of the now battered, broken fortress city and its weary populace.
Even the hope of National Waters had failed, Locusts of Chiron presumably rendering the flesh of its inhabitants nothing but gnawed meat..
It wouldn't be long now, Warrick thought to himself. It won't be long at all.
He eyed the pistol, then shifted back to the screen.
The casualties just kept piling up... the image feed was abundant with death and despair-
He eyed the pistol, then shifted back to the screen.
The annihilators had already broken through the defences, and the screams of the populace could be heard as they were ravished to nothing...
Warrick sat in his monitor hub.
He did not shift his eyes back to the screen.
He eyed his pistol.
The Annihilators had scourged the city. The Iron Regime, or what was left of it, was no more.
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