Heretic Naval Raiders
The Heretic Fleet operates as a semi-autonomous entity under the command of its High Captain and other admirals. The Heretics have their own marine infantry, which often operate in small bands, striking deep behind enemy lines and executing smash-and-grab missions. They are always on the lookout for captives, loot, information, supplies, rare artefacts, and any opportunity to express their cruelty and brutality.
The Heretics maintain naval supremacy on the majority of the Seven Seas: only in the Mediterranean do the Faithful strive to maintain some parity in order to ensure the supply lines into New Antioch. Elsewhere, the Heretic Naval Raiders are an ever-present menace to shipping lanes and coastal communities.
Commanded by the High Captains, the power of the Heretic Fleet is three-fold. First, there are the Behemoth capital ships, built in mockery of the Ark that God once bade Noah to construct. These are enormous vessels, floating cities that act as mobile bases for their second strength: the fast strike craft and the insidious submarines that prowl the shipping lanes and ambush military convoys. Thirdly, for land operations, the fleets employ their infamous Naval Raiders as marine infantry.
Naval Raiders’ armour is modified to double as diving suits, allowing entire strike teams to infiltrate the shoreline batteries or harbour defences undetected. The diving cylinders of the Anointed Naval Raiders hold oxygen mixed with unnatural fumes from the Lake of Fire, providing up to sixty-six hours of breathable gas, and bestowing a high degree of resistance to decompression sickness. Thus, they can stay submerged for extended periods of time, gathering large infantry strike forces undetected right at the enemy shores.
The Heretic Naval Raiders rarely have problems finding fresh recruits. Several mighty nobles of Hell lay claim over the Seven Seas, attracting many of their worshippers to the fleets. There is plentiful loot, together with many chances for promotion and finding favour in the eyes of their infernal overlords through deeds of wanton murder – despoiling the places where saints once spread the faith of the Tyrant-God whom Heretics hate with white-hot rage.
A favourite tactic of the Naval Raiders is to sneak up on their target in the cover of night, striking at dawn in honour of the Morningstar. This serves the dual purpose of taking the enemies when they are at their most vulnerable, and enacting a blasphemous ritual in honour of the throne that the Infernal Lords will surely one day erect on Mount Zaphon after toppling the seat of YHWH.
The raids typically start with a silent stealth assault: unsuspecting lookouts will have their throats ripped open by the Tartarus claws and drills of Abyssal Commandos, while silent Naval Legionnaires emerge from beneath the waves, unleashing sudden death with poison gas grenades, silenced pistols and boarding axes. Once the alarm is raised, a bombardment by specialised Sea Hags (Artillery Witches modified for naval warfare, whose bombs can be used as sea mines and torpedoes as well as ordnance) pound the target, throwing defenders into confusion and turmoil. This shock attack is typically followed up by a charge of elite Legionnaires intoxicated by the fumes of their oxygen tanks.
Often the Naval Raiders have crept so close to their enemies that when the time to strike comes there is no time to organise defences. Lacking heavier troops or armoured support, the Naval Raiders’ combat doctrine relies on speed, surprise and savagery. Fighting is to be undertaken at close quarters, favouring automatic weapons and penetrating any lines of defence rapidly, engaging their enemies in brutal melee with boarding axes and short stabbing blades before a proper defensive line can be organised against them.
Competition for prestige and the honour of inflicting the greatest amount of pain and destruction on the Faithful lands is fierce. To provide proof of the success of their attacks (and to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies), each High Captain has their own unique way of declaring that they were behind the raid, each more depraved than the next. For example, the 112th Sea Legion, the “Virtue-Breakers”, dismembers its fallen enemies, and uses Goetic rituals to return a necromantic semblance of life to quivering flesh, leaving crawling and twitching arms, legs and screaming heads behind for any rescuers to discover. Meanwhile the crew of the Serpent-class strike ship Disciple of the Burning Water prefers to drag their opponents overboard and then cut them with underwater welding torches. They take great pride in killing their prey simultaneously by drowning and being burned alive.
Objectives of the Heretic raids vary: slave raids, destruction of shore defences or communities, gathering information, looting coastal enclaves or escorting commandos on missions to take out important Church leaders or temporal rulers through assassination. What the Faithful fear the most, however, are full-scale invasions within their heartlands, like the bloody invasion of Eire at the beginning of the 19th century, or the audacious 1872 landing that conquered Riejka and established a beachhead that sits like a dagger pointed at the very heart of the Church.
Thus the sea patrols from the Gulf of Finland to the coastal guard of the Demesne of France and the Kapudan Pasha’s fleet sailing the Sea of Arabia nervously watch the horizon, hoping that the waters off their home shores do not hide Heretic raiders. But the age of the Great War is dark, and the sea belongs to the enemies of God.
