Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

==== The Happalachian Hill Race ====

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When the Tau finally joined the Imperium proper, many of their Fire caste officers looked forward to the opportunity to show what they saw as the backward, stagnant forces of the Imperium the obvious superiority of the Tau's way of doing things. To their abject horror, the reintegration campaign of Happalachia gave them exactly what they'd been asking for.

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Happalachia is a planet composed almost entirely of mountain ranges and thick forests, with oceans which could be more aptly described as valleys that have filled with water, or places where the mountains dip below sea-level, rather than deep,empty expanses most associate with the phrase.  Despite being prone to seizmic activity, it is not a Death World, being almost tame by Imperial standards.  If anything, the seizmic activity is a boon, responsible for the large deposits of metals and other natural resources that made the planet worth reclaiming.  The real challenge of the planet, and perhaps the reason the humans inhabiting the world had not re-achieved spaceflight by the time the Imperium rediscovered them, is the terrain, which ranges from fortyfive-degree slopes to sheer cliffs to trees so thick they form a natural wall.  It is perhaps for this reason that the Tau, with their flight-capable vehicles and battlesuits which could handle such treacherous land, were selected to assist in reclaiming the world and assisting the newly-formed PDF regiments with clearing out the Orks which had taken root. The locals proved more of a shock to the Tau than anything the Orks could possibly have thrown at them.


The humans living on Happalachia were fairly close to the standard human form, if a bit more variable in height and size than would be expected.  They were prone to growing long, unkempt beards, with thick, black body hair and tanned leathery skin, and have been described as having a strong, bitter smell, though this may be a product of the alcoholic brews they are so fond of making.  Even the Tau could label them as 'human' with but a single glance.  The more glaring issues were regarding their society and organization- or seeming lack thereof.

The regiments the Tau liasoned with behaved more like animals than a proper fighting force, with half the troops simply not being present at any given day, either off working with their families, hunting, sleeping, or just gone without anyone knowing or seeming to care where they'd went.  Their command structure was informal in the extreme, with command of a squad seeming to change hands regularly between whichever member was deemed "gud fer gittin'" the task at hand, with arguments and disputes of orders being so common that those who could be in charge and go unquestioned were rare and regarded as masterful leaders.  Speaking of arguments, the Tau simply could not wrap their heads around the way these primitives handled disputes.  Two of them would disagree on something, tempers would flare and yelling would grow in volume, then they would set upon each other like wild animals, biting and clawing and punching in a big ball of violence that more than once caused the Tau to assume they were trying to kill each other.  And then suddenly it would stop, the first to get up would help pull the other to his feet, and moments later they'd be smiling through their missing teeth, joking and laughing with one arm around the man they'd just been fighting, the other holding a drink that would only halfway make it to their mouth because of the black eye they'd gotten.  For those who grew up being taught that Tau-on-Tau violence was a grave sin, such flippant disregard for the fact that a buddy had just left teeth-marks in your arm was something they simply could not process.

Their gear was not much better; before the Imperium arrived, the majority of the firearms on the planet had been powder-based kinetic weapons, not even the kind with explosive rounds or mono-edged blades, but simple hunks of pointed metal fired at slow enough speeds that even the Guard's flak jackets could provide reliable protection against them.  What vehicles they did have were lightly-armored civilian-grade cargo haulers, most of which were rusted and bearing oversized wheels and a shocking lack of even the most basic safety equipment, looking more like something the Orks would make than a reliable source of transport.  Though proper lasguns had been distributed as part of the effort to bring them up to speed, many of them had taken to... 'modifying' their weapons, usually by attaching telescopic hunting scopes through a combination of screws and duct tape in a ramshackle and irreverent manner that would have any cogboy who saw their desecrations seize up and sputter, their cognizator implants overloading as they utterly fail to process the sheer volume of RRRREEEEEEEEE being demanded.


So great was the Tau's utter bafflement at the state of these troops that they recommended the entire force be either disbanded or left behind to obsensibly guard the population centers.  The request was denied, for the Imperium needed the Orks culled, and so the Tau set out with their new wards, confident that they would all be dead within a week and the Tau would have to clean up.  (Un)fortunately for them, they had only scratched the iceberg regarding these "good old boys."


The terrain lent itself well to the Tau's preference for engaging at range; Orks would shake their axes and blades futilely at the Fire Warriors picking them off from the other side of the gorge, and the charges they would make when in massed numbers would bog down as they slogged their way uphill into a storm of plasma fire.  Despite the prior expectations, the natives proved equally effective against the Orks, in their own ways.  For one thing, they were everywhere; no matter where the battlefield went, several of the PDF would show up with a dozen or more "cousins" to help out.  They were also uncanny trackers, always being able to point out with fairly good accuracy where a pocket of Orks was hiding, likely to go, or had been, though it took the Tau several ambushes to stop dismissing the pointed  "Dat way's gon' getcha busted up right good, ah tell yew what."  More mind-bogglingly, to Tau and Ork alike, was their skill at laying ambushes themselves; more than one Ork attack had only just registered on the Tau before the forest exploded with gunfire, and often several screaming bearded men falling onto the Orks with knives and hatchets drawn.  This is not to say that the natives could beat the Orks in Melee combat, and more that you do not need to beat the ork when you can simply unbalance him until he falls off the cliff.  Usually the natives attempting this wore parachutes or stitched wing-gliders, cackling loudly as they drifted off out of view of the dumbstruck Tau, while the more daring took the riskier route of trying to jump back off the ork onto solid ground. It was when the Tau started stumbling into ork ambushes, only to be saved from their imminent death by highly accurate las-fire, that the brunt of the situation dawned on them.

The natives of Happalachia loved their guns; they were a means of gathering food, a protector of your family, and symbols of your personal worth all in one.  From a young age they would learn marksmanship as a means of putting meat on the table, using the primitive powder-firearms that their forefathers had used for generations, learning to shoot reliably despite bullet drop, wind interference, and other factors.  Now that they had access to lasguns, which negate most of these factors, they proved themselves to be uncannily accurate shots at ranges far beyond that expected of a lasgun.  What this meant in practice was that the backwards, unshaven, uncouth, smelly backwoods hooligans on this backwater world were putting out a similar long-range performance to that of the Tau, which combined with their knowledge of the terrain meant they were killing Orks before the Tau realized they were there. They were being better marksmen than the Tau.

The thought was too much for the Tau to stomach.   Desperate to prove that the Tau forces were undeniably superior to these hillbillys and preserve some semblance of dignity, the Tau leadership began enacting aggressive, almost-suicidal battle plans and strategies, determined to outperform the PDF by securing and holding more of the planet's surface and moving faster than the natives could, deploying forces they had previously held in reserve as "unnecessary," and generally taking it as a personal mission to prove that all their technology meant something.


The locals caught wind, and thought it sounded like fun, and what came next is now known as the Happalachian Hill Race.


The idea was simple; there were already a series of checkpoints, target areas, and objectives in place as a guideline for the reclamation.  The Tau decided that if they could take, hold, and secure more of the objectives on their own, they would prove themselves the more effective fighting force, regardless of the individual performance of the natives.  Unfortunately, those checkpoints and objectives had also been distributed to the PDF, so the Happalachians were also privy to the "rules" of the race.

What followed was several months of escalating competion, with the natives bringing in all their friends and neighbors, while the Tau brought in all their latest toys.  Tweaking their targeting systems to better deal with the forest helped the Tau regain their edge in accuracy at range, but now the natives had numbers to even the scores.  Warsuits flew over ravines and jumped over the treetops, while bolted-together technicals tore along cliff-faces, their passengers whooping and hollering as they shot at anything orkish-green that flew by.  Eventually it escalated to the point that both sides were just short of open conflict.

The event is best preserved in a holopic captured by one of the Tau battlesuits.  It depicts a gorge with a native Technical on one side, and a group of battlesuits in mid-flight on the other.  The technical has one wheel over the edge, the others frantically digging for traction, as passengers shoot at unseen Orks while yelling at the Tau, with one individual hanging his bare buttocks out the window.  The Tau are likewise firing at Orks on their side of the ravine, while one battlesuit has opened his helmet, apparently in order to yell back at the humans while making an extremely obscene gesture at them, a gesture also being displayed by two other battlesuits, though their users appear more focused on the Orks.


In the end, there was no clear winner of the race; the Tau covered more ground and ended up taking more objectives, but had trouble securing those objectives, as the increased speed had been paid for with less-thorough sweeps, while the natives proved skilled at eliminating all the Orks from an area and arriving in places quickly, they had trouble keeping up with the airborne elements of the Tau, especially when they started deploying from orbit to reach checkpoints faster.  Though the "finish line" was reached, several areas fell and had to be retaken or secured, and things only seemed to get more complicated as a group of Biel-tan warriors warped in, too late to have a chance at winning but still looking to participate- and in the end had a very good showing.  Most historians will say that the Tau won the race, as their technology once adapted greatly outpaced what the Happalachians could do, but for the Tau it was a bitter victory; though they had emerged on top, it had not been a decisive win, and many of their troops had lost some of their discipline and begun using the same uncouth, offensive mannerisms as they had been trying to prove themselves above.  The Tau from the aforementioned holopic was identified and severely punished for such a public display of disrespectful behavior, but the truth is that several Tau had begun having similar exchanges towards the end of the race. 

Shas'ui Sli'ker, the Tau fire warrior from the aforementioned Holopic, was reassigned to what amounted to a desk job in an attempt to make a public example of how crass behavior was unacceptable within the Tau military.  He would later go on to write a short book intended to advise other Tau how best to prepare for different cultures, the importance of not underestimating your allies or foes, and the importance of listening to the councel of natives more familiar with the land than you, regardless of percieved ignorance.  While the Ethereals deemed his work too dangerous to condone distributing it (his ideas on being willing to adopt aspects of local culture to build trust sounded too much like giving up what made the Tau the Tau), he was able to get published by human distributors, who found his work either comedically entertaining or useful for non-Tau who would interact with other cultures too.  The work eventually became public knowledge among the Tau soldiery, who while they mostly found it a bit too radical, found it contained useful knowledge that has soothed relations more than once.  The author himself eventually returned to Happalachia, living out his final days in what he called "the most beautiful land ever infested with hicks;" he was well-loved within the local community, and his passing was mourned greatly, with several statues being erected in his honor; one depicting him relaxing, set to look out over his favorite view, the other showing his more famous pose, placed in front of the Capitol, forever indicating exactly what he thinks of the locals, the planet, and the universe in general to the horizon.


Historians and military analysts alike have examined the events of the Happalachian Hill Race in search of explanations as to how a bunch of newly-discovered Men of Stone with inferior technology managed to challenge one of the most technologically-advanced races in the galaxy, much less challenge them in their field of expertise.   Upon closer examination, several things became apparent. Firstly, the Happalachians, while marksmen of far higher caliber than the average guardsmen (though their unsactioned scope attachments may aid in that), are not, in fact, anywhere near as good as the average Tau.  Tests performed in firing ranges and field excercises found that the Tau's accuracy and response time were far greater than that of the Happalachians, and effective at much further ranges than Happalachian lasguns could even reach, much less reliably hit.  This, of course, raised the question of how these hillbillies were getting the drop on the Orks before the Tau.  The answer lies in perhaps the two biggest contributing factors to the outcome; Terrain and Tactics.

While the Tau had come equipped with jumpsuits and drones and the means to easily cover the planet's mountainous terrain, on the planning level there had been a major failure to account for how advancing across a planet of mountains is different from advancing across a mountain range on a planet.  A gorge easily crossed in a battlesuit could contain miles of tunnels, outcroppings, overhangs, and other places where Orks could hide within the trees or shrubbery.  This meant that the intial Tau advance was very prone to accidentally overjumping patches of Orks, who would then attempt to ambush the Tau, and instead get bisected by the lasfire of the Natives.  

This was the second failing in the Tau's campaign, their Tactics.  Both Natives and Orks on Happalachia had adopted an inclination towards Ambush tactics, as massed engagements and charges were simply unfeasible on a fortyfive-degree slope.  Some Orks would even bury themselves in the ground and wait for hours or days in order to jump an enemy, which meant that on the Tau's heat-sensors they would appear as little more than slightly warmer than usual plants.  The local tactic for clearing Orks would generally involve one group acting as the "bait," driving around in one of their loud technicals, whooping and hollering and making as much noise as they could, with the rest of the locals aimed and waiting for the Orks to take the bait.  

The Tau, by contrast, were not sneaky in the least about their approach, their roaring jumpjets, clanking battlesuits, and vehicle support making their advance very loud and very noticeable.  To the Happalachians, this looked like the aliens volunteering for the most dangerous role in the hunt, and thus moved to do the obvious thing and be ready to intercept the inevitable ambush.  In practical terms, this meant that engagements with the Orks happened with the Natives already prepared to fire, and the Orks at close ranges to the Tau, who are notoriously ill-suited for close quarters.  The Tau, having failed to take the locals seriously enough to have learned or paid attention to the Happalachian's explanations on how to properly hunt Orks, mistook the native's well-intentioned support as intentional showboating, fraying tempers and leading to rash decisions and even more stubborn resistance to any sort of advice from the locals.


There were, of course, other factors; scouts who would go ahead and track groups of Orks, relaying their position through birdcalls and markings on trees; the spread-out nature of the native population, which lead to there usually being someone in the area who could point out pitfalls or add more firearms to the mix; the constant tree-cover making the Tau's vertical advantages significantly reduced; even flaws in the Tau targeting system in regards to such extreme slopes, which while not enough to render them helpless or ineffective, could slow their response time against Orks from multiple sharp angles just enough for the natives to fire first.  However, the majority of these factors tend to stem from the Tau's third and perhaps biggest blunder; their attitude towards the natives.

The intention to prove themselves better had already colored the intitial interactions with Happalachians, and once the Tau saw the way the natives behaved, they almost immediately dismissed them as hopeless fools.  This, of course, flies in the face of the fact that a population on a planet infested with Orks cannot survive without developing ways to effectively deal with their green neighbors, and that a population that thrives is likely very good at it.  The miscommunication about the standard tactics against the Orks and subsequent losses of composure at percieved slights could well have been avoided had the Tau actually listened and not dismissed the (admittedly impolitely presented) guidance of the Happalachian advisors regarding the flaws in the Tau's plan of advance.  In short, idealism and self-assumed superiority blinded the Tau, both on the Command and individual level, to their easily-corrected mistakes; a mistake that they would later take great pains to avoid making again, if only to avoid another such humiliation.


The aftermath of the Happalachian Hill Race was messy, both beauracratically and conventionally.  The Orks had been heavily culled and contained to a few manageable areas, but the Tau had lost much more of their hardware in the process than had previously been anticipated due to their more aggressive tactics, though there were also several crate's worth of pulse rifles that had mysteriously gone missing from their supply headquarters, with rumors that they had been "scavenged" by the locals going unconfirmed, as any Happalachian with a Pulse rifle would claim to have scavenged it off of a dead Tau. 

Of greater concern was the cultural impact; the Tau's self-assurance of superiority was badly shaken, as were their preconcieved notions on Humanity and the Eldar.  Tau Supremacists would use the Happalachians as caricatures of Humanity as a whole, and proof that joining these delusional primitives was a mistake that would cost the Tau dearly.  Their detractors would point out that the "primitives" had shown themselves capable of keeping up with and challenging the Tau, even with technology inferior by their own standards, and that if their forces had been more advanced the Tau may actually have lost.  A more concrete effect was had in that broad, sweeping changes to their policies regarding cooperation with other forces, mostly aimed at staying professional and not having their troops lose their cool and start a competition, but also including steps to try and prepare and acclimate the average Tau to the inevitable Culture Shock that had hit them so hard in Happalachia.  The regiments deployed to Happalachia went on to prove themselves more skilled at working with other forces than other Tau regiments, though whether this was due to having learned humility or simple relief at the relative normalcy of most other forces is a matter of debate.


For their part, the Happalachians seem to consider the Tau to be friends, if oddly stuck-up buddies who try to stay cool but can scrap with the best if pushed enough.  This may be part of their odd form of conflict-resolution, where fighting or competing with another is a way of growing closer with them, as long as you aren't trying to kill them.  Considering their abilities with firearms, blades, and hatchets, perhaps the distinction between fighting and killing is simply more well-defined than it is for others.  The race itself is remembered fondly, and has become immortalized through an actual, proper race every five years, where contestants must cross the same objectives that were the original goals, with several alternate paths and a scoring system, that is open to all comers.

There are now several Happalachian scout regiments; while their skills have proved to be mostly localized (most of the universe is not mountain ranges), they are still an asset to the Imperium, if one who's equipment is so unstandardized as to make their logistics a nightmare; this has something to do with the fact that the Admech, upon seeing their unique approach to technology, tried to declare them all tech-heretics, and while this merely led to less-conventional tech-convents setting up shop instead due to the local resource deposits, it is still very difficult to legitimately sell Admech goods to the locals. Not that this stops people from doing so, just that they do so sneakily, and in small quantities at a time.  This has the result of the Happalachian regiments being a bit of a wild card; no other scout regiment is quite as prevalent in their ability to pull out a plasma weapon or high-yield explosive they really shouldn't have at a time when it is most needed, though the opposite is also true of them failing to have some of the most basic resources an Imperial Guard regiment is expected to field.


One side-effect of the campaign was the Tau's later collaborations with Ultramar; the disciplined, regimented and well-equipped Ultramar Guard were a much more palatable and familiar face for the Tau, and while there were still initial issues with posturing and rivalry, there was also respect and appreciation of Ultramar's professionalism.  For their part, the forces of Ultramar was more than willing to provide advice and guidelines for interacting with the less "conventional" forces of the Imperium, which likely influenced the reforms the Tau would implement regarding cooperation and acclimitization with Imperial forces. It is politely disregarded that much of this advice had been given before the campaign on Happalachia, with the only difference being that the Tau were now willing to listen.


In all, the campaign was a success for the Tau- however ungraceful it may have been.  Their objective was completed far ahead of the initial projections, and the lessons were learned with a relatively forgiving people who would not hold grudges or resentment against the Tau for their behavior, unlike how worlds like Vostroya or Catachan may have developed centuries-long grudges against xenos who looked down on them.  Instead, they now have eager and willing allies, whose Regiments have often been deployed to assist the Tau in times of need (In spite of frequent requests from the Tau to "please send anyone else;" the Imperium's armies are not unlimited, so you take whatever is available.  This is most definitely not the clerks of the Administratum having a laugh at the Tau's expense.).  The Tau have ultimately improved as a result of the lessons learned on that backwater planet, and despite the jokes made at their expense, it was a learning experience that ultimately helped them better integrate into the Imperium- if mostly by showing them how maddening the universe can be.
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