Andy Hoare - Savage Scars

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name onuncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutantsand worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

In the year of Our Emperor 742.M41, the most glorious forces ofthe Imperium launched a crusade of conquest into the Lithesh Sector, to regain control of those worlds so long estranged from the Rule of Terra by warp storm activity and the raids of the pernicious eldar. But woe, for it was discovered that far worse a fate had befallen those benighted worlds. A previously unknown xenos species called the tau had infiltrated and undermined the proper governance of a string of worlds along the edge of the celestial anomaly known as the Damocles Gulf. Foremost amongst those to have discovered this duplicity was the rogue trader Lucian Gerrit, patriarch of the Clan Arcadius.

The Imperium could not, would not, stand by as more worlds fell from the fold. The firebrand preacher Cardinal Esau Gurney of Brimlock preached a full crusade against the tau, holding that the Gulf must be breached, the tau home world located and the entire species exterminated.

The call to arms rang out across the sector and beyond, and was answered. The Space Marines of the Iron Hands, White Scars, Ultramarines and Scythes of the Emperor heeded that call, as did a dozen planetary governors who raised new regiments for the Imperial Guard to prosecute the Damocles Gulf Crusade. The rogue trader Lucian answered the call too, his Warrant of Trade earning him a place on the crusades command council.

But so too did the figure of Inquisitor Grand, and the council soon split into two factionsthose centred around Grand and Gurney, who desired only thecomplete destruction of the xenos tau, and those allied to the rogue trader, who sought in various degrees honour, glory or profit, but not dishonourable slaughter.

The first battles were fought on the nearside of the Damocles Gulf, and saw the world of Sylkell conquered with relative ease and a tau fleet bestedat Hydass. But already the council was being torn asunder by internecine rivalries and Gerrits daughter Brielle appeared to assault the inquisitor, forreasons unknown, and flee. She was assumed dead thereafter, much to her fathersdespair, though he still had his son Korvane to stand by him.

Having purged the world of Vissel, the crusade pierced the Damocles Gulf,and fell upon the world of Prayen with the righteous fury of the faithful. Butdisaster almost befell the Emperors warriors there, for it proved that the tauwere a far greater threat than any had imagined. The tau were not some minor race residing on but a single world, but were possessed of an entire stellar realm.

As the crusade pressed in to capture the capital world of the Dalythsystem, Dalyth Prime, more tau forces closed in. The fate of the Damocles GulfCrusade would come to rest in the hands of three individualsthe White ScarsVeteran Sergeant Sarik, the rogue trader Lucian Gerrit, and his daughter Brielle, who had fallen by her own hubris into the hands of the tau water caste envoy called Aura.

Mustering its forces, the crusade prepared for Operation PlutotheDalyth Prime landings. All would depend on those landings, and the actions ofbut three very different individuals.

Extract from preface of The Truth
of the Damocles Gulf Crusade
(unpublished, author unknown)

Deep within the dense stellar cluster that was the crucible and thecradle of the alien species known as the tau, the frigate Nomad was a dark shadow against the roiling blue nebulae permeating the entire region. The cluster seethed with anomalous energies not witnessed anywhere else in the galaxy, a phenomenon that the most learned of Navigator-seers and astro-cognoscenti had entirely failed to explicate. The stars here were young and the very fabric of space somehow charged with raw potential, and the same appeared to be true of the species that had evolved here. The tau had developed from primitive nomads to a heretically advanced, space-faring empire within a handful of millennia. The taus very existence was now a threat to theImperiums rule in the area, and the Damocles Gulf Crusade had been set inmotion to restore order and adherence to the rule of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

But Veteran Sergeant Sarik cared little for inexplicable nebulae or esoteric stellar phenomena. He didnt even care a great deal about the tau or any otheralien species, so long as they adhered to the one, defining principle by which he himself led his life. That principle was honour, and to Sarik, everything else was secondary.

Sarik was standing on the bridge of the Nomad, the lambent nebulae washing his weather-beaten, honour-scarred face and causing his folded eyes to glow with ice-blue luminescence. His polished white armour glinted in the light of alien suns. Sarik was the master of his vessel, a one-and-a-half-kilometre-long Nova-class frigate bearing the white and red livery of the White Scars Chapter of the Space Marines, but truth be told, he held little love for the role. He yearned to fight on solid ground, to engage his foe not in ship-to-ship combat at a thousand kilometres but in the brutal, face-to-face savagery of close-quarters melee.

Turning his back on the lancet-paned forward viewing portal, Sarik strode the length of the bridge, reading in every step the deep throb of the plasma drives as they propelled the Nomad through the void at full speed. The air was heavy with the smoky scent of the purifying unguents used to bless the vessel, its machine systems and the crew that tended her. The scent reminded Sarik of the cold, windswept plains of home, the world of Chogoris, for the Techmarines of the White Scars worked into the incense the resin of the rockrose gathered from the uplands of the north. Dozens of sounds filled the bridge, from the chattering of the cogitation banks and logic engines to the muted conversation of the bridge-serfs as they coordinated dozens of secondary operations, none of which were of immediate concern to the master of a vessel crewed by several thousand souls.