The 'Steel Rain' manoeuver refers to one of the many tactics penned by the Ultramarines' Primarch Roboute Guilliman in his Codex Astartes in answer to a specific tactical need, allowing the use for multiple simultaneous and devastating deep strikes using Drop Pods to prevent being bogged down.

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image [https://i.postimg.cc/bNGwzhKf/Ch02-Drop-Pod.png]

It started off as a typical Astartes deep strike mission.

Above the upper stratosphere of Hermetica IV, the Iron Lords Strike Cruiser Will of Iron launched several drop pods, one of them was with Dreadnought Vaax inside it.

Vaax was surrounded by darkness again, for a moment it was all quiet but eventually it got noisier and noisier. Soon, the intense sound of rushing air being compressed and pushed away from the hull of his rapidly descending drop pod became deafening. This time though, the familiar cacophony was mixed with a barrage of random warning chimes.

Moments ago his sensor readings were hit by an unknown disturbance and all contact with his battle brothers was lost. With his countless operational experience involving drop pods, Vaax could tell something went very wrong.

Currently, altimeter readings indicated his entry speed was still within acceptable margins, but Vaax had no idea if he was on the correct course. The rigid machine spirit residing in the drop pod did not respond to his repeated pestering for updates via the machine link.

Vaax’s mortal residue gnawed at what was left of his primal sense of fear as he recalled the atmospheric burn-out incident of fellow dreadnought Brother Kralon above the planet Pellibrura II. The notion that such a pointless death was a possibility vexed him greatly but there was nothing he could do for now. Pinned inside his ride and at the mercy of fate, Vaax started reciting one of the many litanies of his chapter.

Where the mind hesitates, overcome it.

Where the body fails, replace it.

Never waver.

Never retreat.

Never doubt.

The flesh is weak.

The weak shall be purged.

What remains is strength.

We lord over that strength.

We are the Iron Lords.

As if answering his silent prayers, the drop pod finally stabilised itself and continued its journey, though it was still a far from ideal ride. As the pod approached the landing vector its retro boosters malfunctioned and did not properly deploy, resulting in its eventual landing with a deafening bang. Vaax could tell by the juddering motions of the pod that it had hit a light structure and crashed through it.

By some miracle the drop pod still landed on its base despite the carnage it endured. Tactical smoke screen was deployed a millisecond after the Lucius pattern dreadnought drop pod touched the ground, enveloping the whole area in a cloud of thick, opaque grey smoke. A second after that the huge blast doors of his drop pod blasted open and a world of steam, smoke and dust, too thick even for a dreadnought’s enhanced visual sensors, greeted Vaax.

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As a war machine of the Adeptus Astartes, waging war in extreme environments was a routine occurrence, so the lack of vision did not deter the dreadnought from his mission. Vaax activated his sophisticated auspex array and stomped out of his tortured ride, his warrior instincts fired up as blips of positive life sign popped up one after another on his auspex readings.

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Alarmingly there were no readings of any friendly Astartes units nearby. Vaax realised he was cut off and surrounded, but such triviality was way beyond the concern of his half life.

‘It might be a good day to die.’ The dreadnought mused, not for the first time since his half living entombment, to himself.

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With that thought he activated his weapons, the assault cannon on his right arm roared as it spun to life while his auspex continued to pick up more life signs around him.

From the readings Vaax could see a swarm of blips surrounding him. Most of these contacts seemed to be running away from the site of impact, while a bunch of blips seemed to be stuck to the edges of some wall, their movement patterns spoke of panic and shock as they struggled to find an exit to escape.

‘Feeble Xenos, time to feel the wrath of the Emperor’s finest!’ Vaax scoffed. His automatic firing solution calculus began tracking all the blips and started formulating a firing solution for maximum target acquisition. However, there were so many targets that his battle cogitator in charge of calculating ammunition usage promptly went into the red, forewarning the dreadnought he could not afford to waste his rounds.

Something else odd in his readings caught his attention: almost all of the contacts were too short in stature to be normal Orks. The average Ork boyz was comparable to an adult human in height, but from the readings, the blips around him were far shorter.

So these are gretchins or snotlings? In the light of he might be surrounded by the cannon fodder subspecies of the Orks, Vaax decided against wasting his limited ammunition on such lowly foes.

‘Fine, conserving ammunition for more worthy targets.’ Vaax reasoned and stepped forth intending to bring his other tool of extermination, the massive dreadnought power fist to bear. He stomped forth towards a heavy cluster of targets in the thick smoke, every step he took producing a loud, ominous thud on the ground.

The contacts in front of him sensed his approach and went into a frenzied panic. Unable to see into the grey smoke, they scattered and darted all over the place and some of them tried to run around and underneath Vaax.

‘There is no escape!’ Vaax reached out towards a target that was attempting to run around him. With the skills he perfected from countless battles across dozens of worlds for hundreds of years, he easily caught his prey with his massive mechanical arm without visual aid.

‘Let me watch you panic and die, filthy alien!’ Vaax roared as he retracted his arm to put what he caught into his point of view. He had intended to visually confirm his first kill on this planet and then start his rampage after that. This will be the first of many, like many worlds before this — wait, what? What is this? Vaax was taken aback when the life form he caught came into focus from the visual feed.

Instead of the small, green skin humanoid he was expecting to see, there was a reptilian looking creature in the clutch of his iron fist. The animal was panicking, its taloned feet swinging pathetically in the air as it hopelessly tried to free itself from the dreadnought.

As if to further confirm his suspicions, a line of words appeared in his field of vision superimposed onto the panicked creature as the battle auspex completed its scan.

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What he caught was a miniature domesticated grox, a favourite food livestock for a lot of frontier worlds. This place must be a breeding pit of sorts for the grox. Now that he got further from his pod, the smoke got thinner and he looked around to get a better bearing of his surroundings. It was then the dreadnought noticed someone was looking down at him from an elevated platform, and that the person was no alien.

It was a human child, a small boy with a stupefied expression on his face. For a brief moment in time the boy and the Astartes war machine stood still, exchanging silent stares. Finally the dreadnought released his power fist, the grox letting out a feeble sound as it dropped to the ground and scampered off.

Vaax finally realised he was in friendly territory, and that a deep strike mishap of truly epic proportions must have happened.