“Our recon forces have confirmed the Fleet’s intelligence report. Lorgar is here.”
The room stilled at this dire news and all bar one of the assembled Ultramarine officers were silent. Sergeant Taius Macrian’s pacing continued unaffected, his fists clenching so hard his suit’s servos were straining under the effort.
“Well what is there to discuss? We are here, we attack.” he stated gruffly through his vox grill. No one else wore their helmet to the briefing, but Macrian had not been seen without his in some while.
“Consider the practical Taius”, Arrias responded, attempting to soothe the choler in his battle-brother, “assaulting a primarch’s force head on without a plan is suicide.”
“What does that matter? We are all on borrowed time as it is, and we owe a debt for our absence on Calth. Spend your time discussing plans Arrias, I will see you planetside standing on that traitor’s corpse, or you will add my name to the roll of honoured dead in this ship. I care not either way.”
When the rules for Nemesis Destroyers were released, I knew they would fit in perfectly with my Ultramarines army. The rules are cool, I love the idea of the harrower bolters being a true Ultramarine approach to destroyers. Also it would let me give Tom a taste of his own medicine when I utilise chemical warfare against his Raven Guard destroyer company!
Making the models
As there are no official models for the Nemesis Destroyers, it meant my favourite thing – conversion time! Fortunately the process for this was straightforward: use the existing Destroyer models as a base and add bolter arms from my bits box.
As a result of this scrounging the arms are a mix of heresy mark 3 and 4 arms along with some 40k Death Guard pieces with different types of bolters thrown in as well. Whilst initially unintended, I love how this looks and it fits into the fluff for this unit. The squad draws marines from across the whole company and are only focused on being battle-ready. As such they are more than willing to scrounge replacement parts wherever necessary.
Painting
When it came to painting I knew they should have black armour. Not only does this reflect the depictions of destroyers in the various Forge World books (including the nemesis chapter themselves), but also ties really nicely with the fluff for my force. This is because all my marines have some part of their blue armour painted black – for them it is a sign of mourning as they were absent from Calth during the betrayal. The company sees this absence as a mark of dishonour and wear black for their shame. I had the idea that this squad was made-up of those particularly forlorn marines, those most broken by betrayal and most consumed by vengeance. This means they are less usable from a tactical perspective, and instead are used as a hammer by Arrias Cordos, the company commander, where more subtle approaches are not needed.
The paint scheme itself was simple, being a mirror of my usual Ultramarine scheme (which is mainly blue but with a black arm) so that the destroyers were mainly black but with a blue arm. I had a go at adding extra battle damage to the models, both to show that they are in the thick of the fighting but also their attitude to their armour – they do not care how they look, only that they can fight.
I will admit that I did not particularly enjoy painting these models until right at the end. I was not particularly motivated to paint them and so they sat for ages in a half finished state. Once I started weathering them I felt the models really come together and now I’m super happy with them – I just needed a bit of a push to get them over the line.
I’ve yet to get them on the tabletop, but fingers crossed I can get them into battle and see how they do! With leadership being less of a guarantee in this edition, maybe they’ll prove extra devastating…
Mutant Snake Eyes 