“This is Dionys Burton, Chapter Master of the Sons of the Anathema and Commander-in-Chief of the combined Tertius fleet group!” Perhaps the cold-blooded Dionysus lacked in eloquence the fire with which Reclusiarchs and Chaplains burned in their speeches, but right now these people needed his words, and therefore Dionysus’s duty before the Emperor was to convey them to the ears, souls, and hearts of all personnel.
The small prelude was over, and it was time for risk.
“However, the place where we find ourselves is unknown to us!
Our stars are not here!
The blessed light of the Astronomican does not reach here!
A new, unexplored, and unconquered galaxy lies all around us!” With each subsequent word, the Master’s voice continued to gain strength.
“Any of you might think that this is all a punishment that has fallen upon our heads for our failures.” For as long as Dionysus could remember, the cult of the Ecclesiarchy had never been to his liking, but as the doctrines of the Sons of the Anathema stated, any means capable of helping achieve the desired victory over the enemy was worthy of being used.
Even if, in this case, the enemy was human nature itself.
“No!” Burton’s voice rolled out like a thunderclap.
“It was the Emperor who preserved the lives of His champions from the furious rampage of the unstable Immaterium!
Now He has sent us His final, most difficult trial.” The time had come to drive the last nail into the coffin lid of this new world.
“We will find a way back, no matter the cost, and if we have to conquer this galaxy to do it… So be it!” Of course, in this speech, meant to ignite and unite the hearts and souls of the people, the Master prudently omitted certain details.
For instance, the fact that for saving their lives, they should first thank the Eldar witch, and only then the Master of Mankind… Guests of a Galaxy Far, Far Away.
The Forgotten and the Damned A strike cruiser, a colossal space monster, immersed in a soothing silence for millennia.
Not long ago, all the fury and wrath of the Dark Gods had descended upon the blessed Space Marine cruiser, but even they were powerless to break the loyal servants of the Emperor of Mankind.
The ancient beast, even battered, still looked formidable, inspiring terror in the hearts of enemies by its very appearance.
Its wounds gaped as large holes in the armor, occasionally flaring up with chains of orange explosions.
The ancient plasma drive was silent, leaving the mighty machine to drift helplessly in the void of space.
A besieged world-ship desperately sent pleas for help as the fleet of the Word Bearers entered its orbit.
The company of the Flesh Tearers of the infamous successor Chapter of the noble Blood Angels had arrived to aid the doomed planet long before the approach of the crusade forces assembled by the resurrected Primarch.
Countless cultists, daemonic creatures, and heretic Astartes met their end on the chainswords of the sons of Sanguinius.
In that battle, the company captain personally gutted a skilled daemonologist of the traitors, who was responsible for defiling this world with the spawn of the Warp.
The feat cost the captain his life when the daemon prince, deprived of its enslaver, tore the Space Marine apart.
That campaign cost the company thirty fallen brothers, no fewer than half of whom succumbed to the Black Rage and threw themselves into the thickest of the enemy like relentless whirlwinds of death.
A heavy price for a dying Chapter suffering from the genetic flaws of its long-dead father.
But it was worth it if, thanks to the victory won, the Chapter’s name would be covered in unfading glory.
However, that very victory was stolen from under the noses of the sons of Sanguinius by the spawn of the Warp that call themselves the Chaos Gods.
A Warp Storm, terrifying in its power, like a tide, engulfed the planet defiled by the forces of Chaos, sucking in along with it the Flesh Tearers’ strike cruiser and the entire impressive fleet of Imperial allied forces that had arrived “to help.” The Geller Fields, raised in time, managed to protect the Emperor’s servants from the forces of the Immaterium hostile to mankind, but the Chaos Gods were not willing to let their offenders go so easily.
A single second’s failure of the bubble of material reality enveloping the ship was enough for the dark corridors of the ship to fill with the horrors of the Warp, and a brutal massacre began.
The brothers who had survived the campaign on the planet’s surface were led by a lieutenant from among the recently attached Primaris Space Marines.
The initial distrust of this “Ultramarine in red” quickly gave way to brotherly bonds after a month of brutal slaughter within the bastion of the Emperor’s servants.
The brothers honorably passed the trial that had befallen them, and in this battle against the daemons of the blood god Khorne, the sons of Sanguinius emerged victorious.
The victory came at a heavy price.
More than half of the mortal crew now fed the Dark Gods with their souls, and the curse of Sanguinius’s heirs once again fell upon the ranks of the Angels of Death, reaping a great harvest.
As it turned out, the creations of Belisarius Cawl were subject to the same genetic flaw, just like their firstborn brothers.
Therefore, after the hard-won victory over the daemons, the surviving members of the mortal crew had to face the berserkers driven mad by blood lust and the Space Marines consumed by the final moments of their Primarch’s life.
Now, Brother-Sergeant Cleomenes Agonius had just over three dozen battle-brothers who had managed to retain their sanity, two dozen madmen who had succumbed to the Red Thirst and the Black Rage, and a mortal crew scared out of their wits, of whom barely a third remained by the time they emerged into realspace.
The Chaplain, being in the thick of the fight, had been torn apart by Khorne’s daemons, so after a brief consultation with the surviving Sanguinary Priest, Cleomenes decided to lock his “fallen” brothers inside the boarding torpedoes for lack of other options.
Having passed through hell, the battered warship now more resembled a morgue filled with corpses, drenched in blood and ichor, drifting aimlessly in the void of a space unknown to the Emperor’s servants.
* * * A small group of ships emerged from hyperspace, disturbing the lonely emptiness of the surrounding space.
A rare sight for this backwater.
It seemed that all sides of the civil conflict flaring up in the galaxy had long forgotten this place on the edge of Hutt Space.
And the Hutts themselves were no “pleasant” exception to the rule.
Most of the local planets led a primitive, often not entirely legal, way of life, quickly becoming a haven for all sorts of pirates, smugglers, bounty hunters, and other such rabble.
Over long millennia of such life, a peculiar symbiosis had developed between this public and the Hutts: the free brotherhood shared a portion of their loot with the slugs, and they turned a blind eye to their existence, thereby giving the dashing folk a safe haven and a place to sell all their honestly stolen goods.
Republic fleet forces in such a hole looked as absurd as a Wookiee trying to master the art of ballet.
Nevertheless, they had arrived here, scaring away all the local pirate gangs.
As part of the patrol group of the Grand Army of the Republic’s fleet, a snow-white Venator was accompanied by three smaller-class ships.
The Corellian corvettes looked rather battered, but it was hard to expect anything else in this Force-forsaken place.
On the sides of all four warships, clearly distinguishable symbols of the Outer Rim fleet were visible.
The flagship cruiser, a symbol of the Republic, bore the burns of previous battles, spreading like black blots on its hull.
For some reason, after another battle, instead of expensive repairs, the damaged monster was decided to be written off for rear patrol duty, where its mere appearance could scare off the local rabble.
This state of affairs greatly offended the pride of Jedi Master Taron Malicos.
An experienced Jedi, a successful General, an excellent commander… was, in essence, exiled to this hole because he did his job too well.
Separatist forces had occupied a mining complex in an asteroid belt quite rich in natural resources.
No matter how cheap a standard battle droid was to produce, the factories assembling these walking abominations still required a stable supply of raw materials for producing combat units.
The presence of such a quantity of resources in the hands of the CIS greatly complicated the position of Republic forces in the sector.
Factories operating at full capacity simply overwhelmed the clone legions with freshly assembled “cannon fodder.” This could not continue for long.
The Grand Army of the Republic risked not just suffering a defeat, but losing the entire sector to the Separatists.
The task of resolving this problem fell on the shoulders of the Jedi General Taron Malicos, who had already proven himself well in battles for the nearby star systems, and his 404th Clone Legion, and by the Force, he handled it brilliantly.
The lightning attack plan he developed worked perfectly.
A combination of a diversionary maneuver and a cunning sabotage caught the enemy off guard.
Suffering minimal losses, the Clone Commandos, led personally by the Jedi General, managed to blow up the mining complex, burying most of their enemies under tons of rock.
The triumph of the victory and its significance for the Republic forces fighting on many planets in the region were obvious, but the Republic wouldn’t be the Republic if it were that simple.
The mining complex itself belonged to a large corporation that, even before the Clone Wars, was part of the “friendly” family of companies of the Trade Federation.
As it turned out, the corporates really do not like it when “thick-headed military brutes destroy their private property!” The Trade Federation representative threw a real tantrum in the Senate, accusing the military of trampling the very foundations upon which the Republic was built.
The Neimoidian, of course, preferred to remain silent about how exactly their private property ended up in the hands of the Separatists, but the damage was done.
By enhancing the effect of the public speech with visits to the offices of the right senators and important bigwigs in the Republic’s leadership, the shrimp from the Trade Federation managed to achieve the desired result.
Democracy, yet again, bent under the influence of the corporates, and the disgraced Jedi General, to be on the safe side, was ordered into exile to patrol the backwoods of the Galaxy… chasing pirate gangs and smugglers.
For a while, Taron hoped for help from the Jedi Order, but as the intensity of the civil war grew, the once galaxy-revered peacekeepers managed to lose a significant portion of their support among the people.
The wise knights, who once acted as arbiters and diplomats, trying to quell any seeds of potential war, now voluntarily led the army themselves as its generals.
Is it any wonder that by the third year of the war, the Jedi Council was up to its neck in politics?
The first alarm bell was the case of the bombing in the Jedi Temple.
Then, a very young Padawan girl was blamed for undermining the Republic’s authority.
The heavy accusation fell on the shoulders of Ahsoka Tano, the apprentice of the infamous “Chosen One,” Anakin Skywalker.
The Jedi Council, not wanting to enter into a direct conflict with Chancellor Palpatine, decided to expel the Padawan from the Order and hand the unfortunate girl over to the Republic authorities.
As it turned out a little later, the organizer of the bombing, which claimed many lives, was a student of Luminara Unduli, Padawan Barriss Offee, who had become disillusioned with the Order’s teachings.
Skywalker’s apprentice was released from custody right in the Republic court chamber, but the triumph of justice hardly managed to improve anything.
The very fact that a Jedi was capable of such things, once it hit the press, threatened a huge scandal.
Public opinion, already viewing the Jedi with a rapidly and frighteningly growing distrust, having been thrown this bone, exploded like a volcano of seething righteous fury.
After that incident, the “wise” Council decided to keep its head down to avoid provoking the public into an undesirable escalation of the conflict.
To put it simply, in cases like Taron Malicos’s, the Jedi preferred to turn a blind eye and pretend nothing was happening.
The result of this cowardly policy was the fact that even a renowned General and Jedi Master like Malicos fell victim to the millstones of Republic politics.
By the Force, at moments like this, the Jedi Master truly understood the motives that had driven the future Separatists of the CIS to take up arms.
“General, estimated time to target is ten minutes.” The familiar voice of a clone pulled the Jedi from the trap of his own memories, preventing him from digging further in this dangerous direction.
When sending Taron into exile on the edge of the galaxy, the army command had allowed the Jedi to take part of his legion with him.
Most of the legion, under the temporary command of Clone Commander T-Ray, remained fighting the Separatist forces at the front.
Malicos had no Padawan of his own, so command of the legion was entrusted to the clone and deputy of the disgraced Taron, until a new Jedi arrived at the location.
“Excellent,” Malicos nodded approvingly at the clone.
“Tell the troopers to prepare for a boarding operation… Command insists on a detailed study of the object.” Right, it wasn’t the need to deal with yet another bunch of insolent pirates that had brought the Republic’s disgraced General to this backwater.
Somehow, through the intelligence directorate, a report had reached the headquarters of the Grand Army of the Republic about the discovery of an unidentified ship of impressive size.
Just think… five kilometers in length!
Against its background, the slightly-over-a-kilometer Venator looked like a nondescript dwarf who had been sick too often as a child.
It was even embarrassing to mention the tiny Tantives out loud.
“Still, bringing a flotilla with a fully stocked Wing here…” Commander Sheldon shared his thoughts, clutching his much-abused helmet in his hands.
“Doesn’t this decision seem somewhat excessive to you, General?
Should we expect serious resistance?” The future soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic were bred to carry out any orders without asking unnecessary questions.
At least, that’s what it said on paper.
In reality, clones were not devoid of combat ingenuity, from which doubts about the competence of command could grow.
Unlike some other Jedi, like the infamous General Krell, Taron welcomed, within reasonable limits, the manifestation of free thought among his soldiers.
This fostered creative thinking, and consequently, the effectiveness of the entire unit on the battlefield skyrocketed exponentially.
“We’re needed here as a scarecrow, Sheldon.” The Jedi patted his comrade-in-arms reassuringly on the shoulder.
“To scare off the local rabble before they strip this ship down to pieces before the research group even reaches our backwater.” It all sounded simple.
In reality, Malicos knew little more than the clone himself.
The top brass doesn’t give away its secrets to disgraced Generals.
The only reason he was suddenly remembered was the time factor.
Taron’s small flotilla was the closest to the location where the unknown ship was discovered, and knowing how quickly the thugs from Hutt Space had learned to strip trophy ships for spare parts, Malicos quickly became a “necessary evil” for them.
“If the information reached us through third hands, the locals must have left nothing but a bare skeleton of this tub,” the clone objected, with poorly concealed skepticism in his voice.
It would be good if that were the case.
Taron tried to seek an answer in the Force, but it had seemed to go berserk in the last few days, and the Jedi had not managed to learn anything worthwhile.
“In that case, you can consider this a kind of time off,” the Jedi grinned.
“For once, we have a chance to step away from the patrol routes we’ve grown sick of.” “General, visual contact with the target!” one of the clones serving on the bridge reported.
As if challenging the clone commander’s words, a huge steel monster, drifting slowly in the void of space, appeared before the Jedi’s eyes.
It was heavily damaged in places, but this was clearly not the work of the local pirates.
Intelligence hadn’t lied; the steel colossus truly showed no signs of life.
“And we and the boys are supposed to board this iron?” Even being an “infantry” clone, Sheldon was an expert on warships and the specifics of their design.
This, so to speak, iron caused in the Commander what is commonly called culture shock among civilians.
A huge, ungainly monster was covered from head to toe in rather peculiar heraldry and decorative items.
A huge scarlet drop against a white disk, which in its shape resembled a circular bone-cutting saw, widely used by medical droids of various models.