Jungle King's Own Chimeras - Catachan Astra Militarum - Chris

Hunting and Guarding against Giant Bugs on the Jungle Deathworld

The dominant species besides man on Jungle were the Wasps. There were varied body plans among different subspecies of the Waps, but all had three body segments and of total of eight leg or wing limbs. There exoskeletons were tough, T4, and fairly resistant to lasgun and autogun fire. The Heavy Stubbers were effective at shredding their wings at range, but the Heavy Bolters and the Heavy Flamers were ultimately responsible for the most casualties.

But not far behind in their tally of confirmed Wasp kills were the combined AA and artillery fire of the Imperium Forces on Jungle. The Kings Own Chimeras, and it's supported armored forces and Mechanicus Allies managed to drive sometimes hundreds of miles out from their Fortified Habitat Compound and Voidship landing fields. The Jungle Fighters were born and raised on the surface of Jungle, and their People primarily only had three "jobs", all serving their Hereditary Jungle King who received supplies and heavy equipment from the Archeodigging Mechanicus Priests, in exchange for providing security from the Mechanicus Dig Sites, from which valuable and sometimes unique archeotech had been being removed from the Jungle Surface for millenia.

The three main jobs were Warriors, Creche Guards and Breeders, and Mechanicus Servants.

Warriors spent their days training and fighting, hunting and killing the Monster Insects of Jungle, continuously losing bits of their bodies, and eventually their lives to the Aggressive Funguses and Horrific Flying Monsters of Jungle.

Creche Guards and Breeders came from the Warriors who had managed to live past adulthood until they had lost too many parts of their bodies to the Fungus to keep usefully serving in the vehicles of the Hermetically Sealed Armored Corps of the Jungle King. They raised and taught the children before the young men and women of Jungle were apprenticed to serve their first jobs, under the experienced leadership and mentorship of the leading Warriors and Mechanicus Servants.

Mechanicus Servants were those Imperial citizens of the Jungle People who were apprenticed and tributed specifically to serve under the Archo Magus and Technopriests who searched and dug for archeotech on the surface. All citizens of the Jungle Kingdom rise, fall, and survive on their merits, but those tithed to the Mechanicus were judged, and found places where they were most effective. Problematic young people, the awkward, the unlocky, and the uncooperative, all tended to eventually become servitors, some much faster than others. But others spent their lives as drivers, equipment operators, and assistants to the TechnoPriests...enhanced with cybernetics, and sometimes sent offworld for education, training, surgery, or new equipment.

If they lived long enough, and showed the characteristics, and good genetics, they eventually were allowed to retire as Creche Guards and Breeders. Most became servitors, but enough returned to raise and educate and bear the next generation of the People of Jungle to give them all hope of serving in a comfortable pasture.

There were giant moths, and giant spiders. The worst of the spiders used bolos, and morningstars made out of sharp rocks and their infinitely-varied silk-like contstructions. Some of the Wasp subvariants also could emit and use silk, but the spiders created giant nests full of silk-sewn tunnel networks, miles aross, maintained by vast communal hive-likes colonies.

Almost all the Insects of Jungle were Social Caste-Hive Fertile Hermaphrodites, though a few subspecies included sterile drones. Most had multi-generational families of sisters/brothers, with the most succesful and effective being constantly pregnant, and laying eggs in their communal hives limited only by their ability to gather biomass to convert into more Insects and more Hives.

The different kinds of Insects did sometimes fight each other too of course, much more often between different species than civil wars between the same species-group of Insects. Spiders and Wasps formed huge region-and-continent spanning Alliances of Hives and Tribes, all related enough to smell like family to each other, dividing on the whole surface into territories and fiefdoms, cooperating most of the time and guarding their borders with each other. Cross-species impregnation was not unheard of, and the Mechanicus Medicus said that the Insects of Jungle had some seemingly magical trick that allowed them to pass the most succesful adaptive genes to each other.

This was how the Wasps had seemingly "learned" weave and build with Silk some 450 years earlier, which brought the fundamental balance of power between the Human Forces of the Imperium, and the Ruthless Insects of the Forest to hold territory on the Surface of Jungle, and their ability to take territory back from eeach other, as the vast silk fortresses high up in the canopy of the dense Jungle could no longer be reliably cleared by the Human alliances and their greatest weapons, without unsustainable casualties. The Silk of their Hives was woven into vast walls that blocked artillery, and more importantly the fire and fragments from the human weapons. When the heavy flamers of the Kings Own Chimeras could no longer reliably burn through the great hives of the flying Wasps, the Insects were suddenly able to hold the line in some cases. More meltas and heavy bolters were ordered, and the Humans adapted their tactics again.

Direct Fire Artillery from Chimeras, and the Anti-AirCraft Hydras, became more important. The Mechanicus developed defoliant and toxin rounds, that covered their explosive radius in poisons and corrosive acids, in addition to sending medium-sized sharp explosive fragments in all directions, which could sever the limbs and body-segments of the Giant Insects. These defoliants were used to create breeches in the vast Silk walls of the Wasp and Spider Hives.

High Explosive and Fragmentation rounds, with dynamic-detonation control like Giant Bolt Rounds, were still most effective against the Giant Moths.

The People raised on the Surface in the Kingdom of Jungle were tough, like the creatures and insects of their world. Humans would inevitably die within hours of exposure on Jungle's surface. Aggresive fungal spores could infest and grow within sometimes the smallest scratches on human skin. The Jungle Fighters lived hard and died young, breeding fast enough to keep their inevitable death from Attrition from shrinking their numbers, which had stabilized around 50,000 in a few tribes spread all over the surface of Jungle.

The Jungle King ruled and administrated Jungle from the Ancient and Hereditary Seat of his Kingdom, an Orbital Space Station built around and inside a particularly desirable asteroid that had been moved into a stable orbit 4000 years earlier, and kept in a Lagrange point by the ships of the Mechanicus, allowing them and the Imperial Navy to ship men, machines and supplies to support the People of Jungle, their rulers, and the Administratum Personel, who were a mixture of heridary positions in the Court of the Jungle King, and Schola Progenia or Adeptus Arbitus trained professionals born on different teaching worlds of the Imperium, far away across the stars.