Tales of the 13th Necromunda- "Ma Bell"

Field Tale: “Dial V for Vengeance”

Vehicle Designation: Ma Bell – Manticore Missile System

Crew Motto: “We don’t call often, but when we do—it’s collect.”

The siege of Hive Segmentum 44-Zeta was going badly. The traitor line was dug in, triple-reinforced, and shielded by a network of stolen void-field projectors. Most of the 13th’s armored company was stuck playing meatshield while the artillery units played a guessing game with their targeting cogitators.

But Ma Bell’s crew didn’t guess.

Hunched over their strange mess of humming vox-receivers, signal rods, and a cracked dataslate permanently tuned to "something called Channel 5," the tank’s commander—Sergeant Picker—claimed to “feel” the signal more than track it.

“It’s a tone lock, lads. They’re trying to mask the grid with harmonic static. But they forgot—”

He tapped the launch console, a ghost of a grin creeping under his comms rig.

“We invented the dial tone.”

With a whisper of ancient music playing softly in the background—something about “reaching out”—Ma Bell’s launcher lifted into position. Four warheads screamed skyward, curving over the hive’s dead spires in a textbook-perfect arc.

The traitors didn’t even have time to raise shields.

The missiles hit the exact void-node junction powering the projector net. Not the area—the node itself. The explosion didn’t just collapse the shielding—it caused a chain reaction that lit the trench line like a promethium refinery.

Cheers echoed down the 13th vox channels, but Ma Bell’s crew was already tuning in to another frequency.

Sergeant Picker lit a lho-stick off the venting heat panel and leaned back, muttering:

“Next time, they can call us.”