9-1 BYRGENWERTH: Roll the Die

Valtr sat in his "office" - a command variant Chimera APC, buried up to the turret for additional protection, with additional seating largely torn out and replaced with a bank of tactical displays - resting his chin in his hand, absentmindedly running a finger over where the seating plate for his ocular augmetic met flesh. He wasn't quite sure when he picked up the habit; he had no recorded instances of it from his service aboard the PRUDENTIA, so he must have started after removal process.

His undertaking was unheard of, the infiltration of a xenos cult by Mechanicus personnel, and required an "overhaul" of Valtr's augmetics. What that actually meant was a year long series of surgeries to remove the most intrusive augmetics and render Valtr as close to an unmodified human as possible. He had accepted the order without question or complaint at the time, but after years among the Choir, he couldn't help but feel a slight melancholy.

Before him, every display was identical. A red warning screen, asking for a final confirmation activation countersign. With a keystroke, Valtr would officially shift the Choir to a war footing.

Low priority labor menials across Talionis prefecture would slip away in groups no larger than four over the next week, abandoning their old lives and gathering at the Choir's ersatz headquarters in the exclusion zone. There, they would be organized into fighting units and deployed as needed according to a war plan with a level of complexity that made Valtr uncomfortable.

The Patriot Guard would be wracked with subversion. Maintenance crews would discreetly sabotage vehicles to fail. Weapons would be slightly overcharged to burn out their internals, engines made to overheat. Patriot Guard formations judged most likely to cause trouble (based on painstaking psychological profiles of their commanding officers compiled over the better part of a decade) would be denied reinforcements, given contradictory orders, separated from their logistical support or otherwise made ineffective. Choir-friendly personnel within the Patriot Guard would spread dissent and encourage inaction or desertion. Reports would be altered or lost. A greenskin incursion from the Campus Ignis would be created entirely from falsified records and status reports.

Tensions between Civil Security and the population at large would be intentionally brought to the breaking point as Choir martyrs simply allowed CS enforcers to do what comes naturally to such an organization. Grenika's underhive gangs and mutant populations, already barely constrained at the best of times, would be maneuvered into open warfare. Dedicated sleeper cells throughout Talionis prefecture would dig up long hidden weapons caches and launch suicidal assaults on critical infrastructure and CS precinct-redoubts.  Other cities and proto-hives would be engulfed in similar chaos, but as distractions and without support these efforts were almost certainly doomed to martyrdom.

The Choir would go to war and Durance would burn.

Valtr made the sign of the cog and pressed the button.

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