Editing Battle for Europa (section)

==A Traitor's Welcome==
In the beginning of the Hektor Heresy, [[Alexandri of Rosskar]] was given the task of defending Terra and its surroundings. He quickly built up Terra itself and prepared the Sol system and its surroundings for a siege. Within Sol itself he largely stripped the majority of the system of its defenses to bolster those surrounding Terra itself and the Imperial Palace in particular.

The number of troops defending the planet also included a number of loyalists who had defected from the 9 traitor [[Legiones Astartes (Hektor Heresy)|legions]] and some from the banished [[Void Angels|V Legion]]. Alexandri was desperate for troops, but did not fully trust the 700 Astartes hailing from traitorous or otherwise untrustworthy sources so close to the palace itself. He instead opted to post them at the secondary yet strategically important location of Europa.

Europa itself was mostly unimportant. It had an abundant water supply and thriving community underneath its thick crust of ice, but that was secondary to the seventeen space ports orbiting the moon. Four of them were capable of holding capital ships, and one known as "Gamma Port" even hosted a dock built to hold a [[Imperial Navy#Gloriana|Gloriana-Class]] vessel. It was imperative that the ports be held both to deny the traitors the ability to refit, repair, or resupply their vessels within the system and to have access for the loyalist forces racing against time to arrive at Sol.

Command of this mission was given to Commander Kleisthenes. He was the first Astartes from a traitor legion to swear to the Emperor as well as an experienced leader from the [[Heralds of Hektor]]. Under his command were three hundred defectors from the Heralds, 150 Astartes from the V Legion, seventy [[Life Bringers]], fifty of the [[Eternal Zealots]], forty members of the [[Sons of Fire]] and [[Lions Rampant]], thirty [[Iron Rangers]], and twenty survivors of the [[Mastodontii]].