Phalanx Incident

Late during the Great Crusade, the Star Guardians, the Praetorians of Terra and the Sol System, were made aware of a recently cleared warp storm close to the Sol System, deep within the Segmentum Solar. As the closest legion to the site by many thousands of light years, Shaaa Hydrades released a portion of his legions strength, drawing warriors from every Division to act as an interdiction force against any potential foes, while still leaving the defences of Terra at acceptable levels.

   Arriving in the area left open by the vanishing storm, the Star Guardians encountered a world known to its local populace as ‘Inwit’, a world of death and ice orbiting a dying and cooling red star. The population, long subjected to the ravages of the warp storm that engulfed their world, had become insular, uncaring of those outside their borders, and mutated beyond any acceptable norms. A purge was all that they had earned, something the IVth carried out without mercy or pause.

It was only in the wake of the conquest however that this small pacification would turn into something far larger throughout the Imperium, as a ship was discovered hanging in the dark space beyond the system’s star. To call this a ship however was to call a hive world a mere city, the word not doing the gargantuan vessel any justice at all. As large as an asteroid or small moon, the vessel, quickly identified from its own records as ‘The *Phalanx*’, was a behemoth, closer to the Eldar Craftworlds than a battleship, and was large enough that its forward docks could dock over a dozen Imperial Cruisers with ease.

The mighty ship quickly drew Shaaa’s attention, the Breacher Lord travelling to the Inwit system with all speed, leaving the Sol system for the first time since the Council of Nikaea. Here, his mind came aflame with ideas for the mighty vessel, plans to bring the dormant ship back into full service. They were plans that, no matter how much he wished to, he could not oversee however, his presence demanded in the Sol system, and the ship unable to be moved through the immaterium by conventional tug boats or bolted on warp engines. Even moving the vessel to Inwit was no ease feat, requiring no less than seven battleships and hundreds of small tug boats to shift the might vessel a comparative short distance, a journey that even a Gloriana could make in three weeks stretching into seven months. The implication was clear, the *Phalanx* was not made to be moved, but to move others to its will. It would not move under any power save its own, and this was the task set to Forge Lord Milten Reeve of the First Division, a warrior magos second only to Forge Lord Avalon Saros in prestige and skill, the senior tech marine likewise needed at Terra as his lord was.

Keeping only a small force of Star Guardians alongside him, almost all of them inducted into the Mechanicum’s inner secrets, along with hundreds of lesser tech priests, Task Force Phalanx worked around the clock to repair and reactivate the ancient machinery of the *Phalanx*, slowly but surely making headway as well as sending constant updates and technical information back to Shaaa directly. Few others knew about the *Phalanx*, the information about the vessel not kept secret, but also not distributed across the galaxy either, and yet still, the knowledge of the find soon travelled throughout the spider’s web, Gaius of the Consuls Exemplar turning his insidious gaze towards the Star Guardians work with an envious eye.

Mere years before the Antarus Apostasy would engulf the galaxy, the Consuls had already thrown themselves behind Antarus’s plans, and had long since experimented with dangerous and prohibited technology in the form of their secretive Dar’t Veleterium Warp technology, or Vel-Tech. Even with all their prior knowledge and facilities however, Gaius was forever wishing for more and more to expand what he saw as the final fate of his legion, requiring ways to draw his more warp dependant sons back into realspace for longer periods of time. In the *Phalanx*, he saw an answer to this, its ancient technologies perfect for his esoteric experimentation, and so he drew up plans to seize it, undaunted by the Star Guardians that currently held it.

Releasing potent, but draining, Vel-tech for the raid, the Consuls struck without warning. Using their technology, the *Phalanx* was cloaked from all sensors, trace patterns within the interference pointing to a xenos origin, and certainly nothing that a seemingly noble legion such as the XIIIth would stoop to use. Just before the interference became all encompassing to the outside universe, a single signal was sent to terra, its origin altered and warped by yet more vile Vel-Tech, bearing all the hallmarks of a Star Guardians encrypted distress beacon. Wrapped into the message was knowledge of an alien species the Consuls had long since exterminated, though the species’s death had been kept from Imperial records for just such a reason. Inwit’s new colonists could only watch as ships moved in the heavens, unaware of what was happening, even as the small ship that had borne them to the world was destroyed by the Consuls Battle Barge, leaving the world that still lacked an astropath as mute as the stricken *Phalanx* itself. The Consuls would be beyond any form of suspicion for the attack, and with that knowledge they played their next move.

Dozens of Kill Teams and even a trio of vaunted Obzhet Venatus cadre’s were unleashed against the stranded Star Guardians and their forces, the Obzhet bearing new shielding technologies to protect their warp saturated bodies from the draining effects being in realspace usually had on their kind. Landing aboard the *Phalanx*, the Consuls began to butcher all who stood in their way, even the Star Guardians in their natural element were unable to stand before the sudden assault and warp forged technology of the Venatus, falling back as their casualties rose rapidly. Soon, all aboard the *Phalanx* lay cooling in their own blood, save for the Consuls Exemplar, and Forge Lord Milten Reeve himself. Bloodied and wounded from an encounter with a single Venatus which had seen four other warriors boasting over a century of experience each slain in a matter of seconds, Reeve barricaded himself in the *Phalanx’s* bridge, welding the door closed to stave off the rapidly encroaching XIIIth. He was dead already, he knew that, just as he knew he was cut off from the greater Imperium by the Consul’s treachery. He had been tasked with bringing the vessel online and back to Terra, and in this he had failed, but he refused to allow an enemy of the Imperium to take control of such a potent weapon.

With the last of his lifeforce, Reeve introduced a Data-Djinn into the *Phalanx’s* systems, sending a surge of power through all available systems, routing all back into the great plasma reactor at the vessels core. Without cooling systems in place, the temperature of the core began to rise rapidly, spiking into the red in a matter of instants, every Consul Exemplar on board the vessel reading the sudden surge and knowing exactly what was about to happen. Here they were faced with two choices, push forward and almost certainly die as the surge went beyond the point of no return, or retreat now and survive. There was no choice, the warriors of the XIIIth not given to suicidal acts of insanity, the teleport relays of their attendant vessel locking onto the homing beacons they had carried with them, the warriors disappearing in the blink of an eye.

On the other side of the bridges blast door, Reeve slumped against the console, his pistol falling as he felt the discharge in the immaterium, knowing that he was alone aboard the critical battleship. His pistol slumped from his hand as he shunted all power from his cybernetics into his life support systems, forcing himself to live for just a few moments later. He was, in effect, the captain of this ship, and he did not intend to slip away before his ship went down. A moment later, the reactor exploded, blowing the *Phalanx* apart in an explosion that rained down death onto the new colonists of Inwit, scouring the planet of all life, inadvertently ensuring that there would be no survivors to tell the tale of what had happened.

Failing in their primary objective but having also stopped the Star Guardians and the defenders of Sol retrieving a potent weapon for the war to come, the Consuls retreated, their interference fading soon after their ship had jumped into the warp, its signature untraceable and their presence unknown, another ship in Segmentum Obscurus registering the vessel and all aboard as having taken part on a compliance halfway across the galaxy.

When the signal finally reached the Sol system, Shaaa flew into a rage the likes of which few had seen before, incensed beyond all reason by the loss of what had been one of the greatest finds of Imperial naval history. Unwilling to believe the reports, Shaaa once again left the Sol system against the council of Malchador, seeing the devastation of Inwit and the complete destruction of the *Phalanx*. Millions of Imperial Army scouting forces and Rogue Traders would be tasked with hunting down the xenos race responsible for such a disaster, though none would find the long extinct race, Shaaa’s rage turning inwards into a seething anger that demanded retribution.

It was in these days that plans would be drawn up that would not see fruition for many more years, the knowledge gained of the *Phalanx* being turned towards a new vessel that would match that of its predecessor. The hull would never be laid in the Great Crusade, the planned Jovian docks that could construct such a ship never knowing of their planned purpose as the Antarus Apostasy broke the Imperium’s back. It was only in the days after the fall of Terra, in the period of time that would become known as ‘The Frontier Wars’, that the plans would finally be realised, giving birth to a vessel that matched the long dead *Phalanx*. The vessel was Shaaa’s magnum opus, the fulcrum upon which the fall of the traitors would turn, the Praetorian's ultimate *Triumph*.