‘From whom?’ said Issachar. ‘From where? And with what ships will you transport them? The Navy, the Mechanicus, the Inquisition — we run low on resources, brother.’ Issachar looked down at Koorland. The Excoriator was reserved where Bohemond was reckless, proud where Thane was modest. He was, it was at times easy to forget, more experienced and decorated in war than either of his junior brothers. ‘We must fortify,’ he said. ‘And prepare for the inevitable. We will break the ork’s back over the walls of Terra, just as our ancestors broke the Arch-Traitor.’
Issachar looked at Bohemond. Bohemond looked at Thane. Thane looked at them both. His thoughts placed Verpall, Cuarrion and Vorkogun, and Euclydeas too if the Soul Drinker still lived, interchangeably in their place.
He would not have the Last Wall repeat the mistakes of the High Lords before them. That would be an affront to Koorland’s memory. Whatever power struggles were to follow, he wanted no part of them. He was a Fist Exemplar above all else. There was not a system in his body that had not in some way been modified to serve him better in war, and through him, the Imperium. Always the Imperium.
That sense of duty alone was the ambit of his ambition. It was something that perhaps only one of Oriax Dantalion’s descendents could understand.
Mankind was better.
It deserved better.
Rob Sanders
Shadow of Ullanor
Capturing…
It is a law inflexible, that whatever circumstances fail to destroy a species only serve to enhance it further. Early scientists, wading through their own ignorance, came to understand this in observing the long-lost species of Ancient Terra. Our first primitive steps into the Sol System and the systems beyond confirmed these observations on other worlds. During the Stellar Exodus and the Golden Ages of Expansion, the principle was proven again and again in the dominant xenos species we encountered and studied. We discovered it in the mythological cycles and emergence of the eldar. In the extinction and terrible rebirth of the ancient necrontyr. In the genetically engineered barbarism of the orks.
Every species thinks of its development — its destiny — as its own. This is forward-looking vanity, for those who look back know that we are nothing more than the product of dark and desperate times. A species should embrace its doom. Own it. Acknowledge the part it plays in crafting body, mind, and our presence on planes beyond. The skies have long shown us the way. As the light of distant stars, thousands of years in the travelling, shone down on Ancient Terra and the surface of the Red Planet, we might have seen our fate reflected. While we were still but gawping savages, the ancient races of the galaxy were already fighting by the light of alien suns. Failing. Succeeding. Growing stronger. For only the strong survive.
Strength has many forms, however. The crumbling empire of the eldar and the tombs of the necrontyr may ring with the silence of ages, but only a fool would think their threat consigned to the dusty pages of history. They have been tried and they have been tested but they exist on. They have learned the lessons of calamity. They live the determination of a survivor race. Unlocked potential resides within the horror of their alien flesh.
Some say it is heresy to suggest such things, but like the light of those distant stars, truth finds its way through the obfuscation and darkness of ignorance. Humanity is here and we are no different. Like the eldar, our empire has faltered and we have fallen. Like the necrontyr, we have had to adapt. In many ways, though it might seem abhorrent to admit it, we share the most with the orks. To humanity, they are a plague threatening to engulf the galaxy. To others, we are no different. A scourge of soft flesh and barbarous technologies, whose stated objective — announced with bombast to the void — is to cleanse the stars of xenos presence and assimilate all into an empire. Like the orks, our dominion ebbs and expands. Our strength and appetites grow. In our every defeat lie the seeds of future victories.
First comes the darkness and the thunder, and then the light of the dawn, terrible and true.
One
Worlds ablaze. A decimated empire. A galaxy of green.
If some extragalactic species — some xenos presence, blissfully unknown — had turned its attention to the realm of man, that was what they would have found. An Imperium hollow and without hope. A people scattered, screaming and fleeing for their lives. Planets trailing the smog of destruction through the void. A broken dominion.
The orks were everywhere. They were legion, and they terrorised their victims like monsters of myth. Their brutal technologies were the heralds of apocalyptic doom. Their sheer number was insurmountable. They were a green tide rising, swallowing hive worlds whole. Entire fleets plunged into the depths of their ramshackle barbarity, never to be seen again. The greatest armies of a millennium, uncounted regiments of the Astra Militarum, skitarii legions and Frateris Militia hordes, became nothing more than a bloody sludge through which ork billions stomped as they butchered their way across planets large and small.
High Admiral Thaddeon Trassq, flag officer of the Battlefleet Solar-Rimward, held a thousand battle cruisers and escorts on station in the Fantine Nebula, uncertain of his orders while the surrounding worlds of the Phadrian Cluster burned. Too late the High Admiral realised that his armada was hiding in the path of a different ork fleet entering the subsector. Led by vanguard space hulks that tumbled ahead of the fleet like the colossal chunks of a disintegrating comet, the orks smashed through the tight formation of the Imperial vessels. As battle cruisers and heavy frigates were pushed aside and overwhelmed, a trailing swarm of capsules, landers and assault boats descended upon their majestic wrecks.
In the Nazarex System, millions of agri-worlders perished with their crops as the sudden appearance of a monstrous ork attack moon threw the Praedial Worlds into gravitational chaos. Planets drifted out of their delicate orbits, some spinning towards their colossal sun while others were flung into the frozen darkness of the void.
Entire swathes of Imperial space were left derelict and lifeless in the wake of the destruction. Subsectors crowded with Imperial worlds became planetary mass graves. Smashed cities streamed with smoke, staining the heavens an acrid black. Corpses and body parts hung from vanes and cables, off baroque architecture and shattered statues — testament to the barbarity of the towering monsters storming through streets and structures.
The cardinal world of Koryban-Proctor and cemetery moons of Pulchra V, VI and VII were but shattered remnants, hollowed by the complete eradication of their priestly populations. The Hearth Worlds had been silenced, the boom of their industry and might no more. The colossal forges were now but mountains of scrap among the vapour forests, to be pillaged by the invader.
The creature they called the Beast was everywhere. His monstrous strength was in the brute swing of every primitive blade. His fury could be heard in the crash of rattletrap weaponry. His world-devouring madness could be seen in the fang-faced savagery of the hulking abominations that butchered in his name. The Imperium tottered before his alien wrath and the green inferno that swallowed planet after doomed planet.
Subsectors went dark like candles snuffed out in a cavern. Draznak. Phaal. Trega. Moebius. Solon. Quintarsus. Vulkhano. Battles blazed in the void about the sector Naval base of Gnostangrad and across the Chatasma Deeps. Mandeville points became the sites of horrific ship-to-ship collisions as desperate captains fought to make their jumps into the warp. Others attempted to do so without their Navigators, becoming forever lost in the empyreal storms beyond.