Carcharodons - Notable Campaigns: Solar Rebellions (ca. M32) - Across a hundred scattered systems in the western marches of the Segmentum Solar, Chaos Cult uprisings led by a core of Chaos Space Marine warbands drawn from the Iron Warriors, Night Lords and World Eaters Traitor Legions brought entire planetary governments to their knees in a year of blood and anarchy. With whole sectors on the brink of collapse, events took a dramatic turn when a combined force of the Adeptus Astartes emerged from the black depths beyond the spiral arm and launched a sudden and overwhelming attack directly upon the uprising's command. Though many Loyalist Space Marines fell in glory, the warlords of the Traitor factions were slain and the uprising fractured into a thousand localised rebellions which were soon put down by local Imperial forces. Subsequent Inquisitorial studies claim that these Space Marines were drawn from several Chapters, including the Carcharodons, Minotaurs, Death Eagles and Angels of Absolution. Other evidence, however, including their estimated Founding and projected deployment dates, contradict these assertions, consigning the entire event to conjecture.Astropath Wars (888.M32) - The details of this conflict remain unknown, but it can be assumed from the name that astropaths were involved in some manner.Pentarchy of Blood (860-940.M33) - During the dark and bloody episode of Imperial history known as the War of the False Primarch which plunged the Segmentum Pacificus into anarchy and is now largely lost to myth and purged from the Imperial record, the Pentarchy of Blood was convened by the High Lords of Terra to enact their judgement. Five Chapters, the Carcharodons, the Charnel Guard, the Death Eagles, the Flesh Eaters and the Red Talons, were used to systematically destroy eleven Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes judged Traitoris Perdita and lay waste to their homeworlds, finally drawing the eight-solar-decade-long conflict to a close.7th Black Crusade (811.M37) - The 7th Black Crusade was one of the Black Crusades led by the infamous Warmaster of Chaos, Abaddon the Despoiler, and his Black Legion, launched out of the Eye of Terror in 811.M37. When the Blood Angels Space Marine Chapter battled against the Chaotic horde at the world of Midian, Abaddon singled them out with implacable fury. He led a band of Khornate Berserkers into the teeth of the Blood Angels' Devastator positions. Even the Blood Angels' own Assault Marines could not dislodge the frenzied warband and recapture the bodies of their comrades. But there is an obscure reference to the Blood Angels being saved by an unidentified Space Marine Chapter of mysterious origin. Written within the The Canticle of Cassandria Lev - Vol. CVI is the eponymous Sainted Sisters' highly mythologised and oblique account of the wars of the 7th Black Crusade. Within them is found mention of a "grey-clad" Space Marines Chapter who came from "The outer night" to aid the Imperium, and whose "Jagged maw did swallow the stars..." and whose "... black gaze did mirror the void of oblivion". In the course of the canticle this Chapter's ships set upon Abaddon's forces following the disastrous defeat and routing of the Blood Angels at Midian and attacked the pursuing forces as Saint Lev writes: "... fell upon the servants of the skulled-one with great fury from the darkness, unseen as the beast that lurks beneath the black waters, death for death, blood for blood... thus were the Sons of Sanguinius bought respite, and did turn back upon their pursuers and so were the damned traitors of the false gods driven unto their ruin." Images of these events can be found upon the walls of the crypt-world of Hypasitis created to house the honoured dead of that war, depicted in repeated fresco and bar relief, but curiously the faces of the intervening Space Marines there depicted are obscured with featureless disks of black obsidian. Given the largely unknown history of the star-faring Carcharodons Chapter, accounts of their activities can only be constructed from recorded historical incidents and fragmentary records that are believed to have involved the Carcharodons on balance of evidence. This notable engagement is listed by Imperial savants as a "[Special] Probable Encounter/Recorded Sighting" of this notorious Chapter.Angevin Crusade (322-384.M39) - During the Angevin Crusade that conquered the Calyx Expanse and founded what would eventually become the Calixis Sector, the Rogue Trader Basil Horothis led his ship, the Stark Venger, and a considerable force of naval armsmen against the debased Drukhari pirates on the world of Loth. However, Horothis found his forces much reduced in the fighting on that world of perpetual night. Beneath the eternally roiling clouds, and illuminated only by the intermittent flashes of lightning, the Rogue Trader's armsmen suffered greatly from the savage hit-and-run raids of the Kabal of Shadowed Thorns. Even as Horothis realised his error and made plans to withdraw from Loth's accursed surface, the Kabal of Shadowed Thorns struck the Stark Venger. A sudden attack from a flight of Razorwing fighters crippled the Cruiser's main drives, slewing the starship out of low orbit. The damage left Horothis with only one choice. Testing his considerable skills as a ship handler, he attempted planetfall aboard the Venger. The ship did not reach the ground easily, and only through the considerable skills of Horothis and his master helmsman Orgef Keel did the Venger survive at all. However, their landing left them in an arguably worse predicament than mere death. Trapped within their beached vessel, Horothis and his crew found themselves surrounded by capricious foes. Quickly, the Drukhari encircled the ship and its hasty defensive fortifications, striking at random to kill and capture slaves. All Horothis could do was send out an astropathic plea for deliverance and use the ship's batteries in an attempt to keep the xenos pirates at bay. After a solar month, the Venger's guns were all but spent, and many of her crew whisked away into the darkness. The Kabal of Shadowed Thorns grew bold, and began to press a sustained attack into the downed voidship. The fighting reached the bridge, but as Horothis and his retainers struggled desperately against a press of cavorting Wych gladiators, help arrived. Suddenly two bolts of bruise-coloured lightning split the mass of Wyches, slaying some outright and scattering the rest. The strikes left behind two hulking, gray-clad figures, fuming with hoarfrost and reeking of ozone. Without a pause the two Space Marine Terminators tore into the Wyches with hissing Lightning Claws. In moments, the decks were slick with gore, and the panicked remnants were fleeing for their lives. The same happened all across the vessel. The survivors told of hundreds of Assault Terminators -- though there could not have been more than a dozen -- appearing wherever the battle was thickest to rip through the invaders with savage butchery. So fierce was the counterattack that the Drukhari quickly fled the Venger. On the shadow-shrouded plains beyond the hull, Thunderhawks disgorged three score gray-clad warriors armed with Bolter and blade. Confusion, fear, and rage overtook the Drukhari pirates and they flew towards the Space Marines. No doubt they intended bloody vengeance. However, the Space Marines awaited the assault implacably, drawn up in loose ranks outside their gunships. They did not fire a single shot, even when beams of dark energy began to crackle overhead. When the fastest Scourges were no more than a hundred metres from the Space Marines' lines, the Emperor's Chosen sprung their trap. The gloomy surface of Loth knew light for the first time in aeons as searing Lance beams split the clouds. In an incredible display of precision targeting, they scoured the ground around the Venger and the Space Marines to boiling lava, incinerating the Drukhari to ash. Only then did the Space Marines spring into action, hunting the survivors until they fled wailing back to their Webway gates. In the aftermath of the incident, Horothis spoke briefly with the commander of the Space Marines. Horothis later described this Astartes as deathly pale of continence, with blank, black eyes and sharp teeth. Speaking only in ancient High Gothic, he informed Horothis that reinforcements from the Crusade were inbound, and politely but firmly requested a tithe of war supplies from the Venger's vaults. He refused to identify himself or his men, and departed three solar days before the arrival of Imperial Navy outriders. It was only after the Crusade's Inquisitorial representatives questioned Horothis (now busy establishing his estates on Loth) that they realised these Space Marines belonged to no Chapter affiliated with the Crusade, and drew connections between ancient myths of a long forgotten Chapter.Against the Orks (211.M41) - The Carcharodons unexpectedly aided an Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleet against a fleet of Ork Terror Ships.Battle of Zartak (ca. 800s.M41) - On the Imperial prison world of Zartak, a warband of Night Lords and their daemonic allies descended to harvest the planet's population for sinister ends. Imperial personnel and the world's Arbitrators were swiftly cut off and butchered by the insidious Traitors. The planet however, was also a target for the Carcharodons, who intended for Zartak to be the source of their latest Red Tithe. A ferocious battle erupted in the shadows of the underground prison where the skills of both groups were put to the test. Corridors and mine shafts ran red with transhuman blood as the Night Lords were gradually cornered and rooted out. The final battle was met in the prison's primary geothermal sink shaft, where the Night Lords' leader was killed alongside his bodyguards and a daemonic ritual was narrowly halted by the Carcharodons Chief Librarian, Te Kahurangi. The remaining Night Lords swiftly retreated. The Traitors dealt with, the Carcharodons commenced the tithe of the prison and within solar days, the only soul left alive to tell the tale was a single traumatised and blood-soaked Arbitrator, surrounded by countless dead bodies.War in the Deeps (ca. 800s.M41) - As the Tyranid Hive Fleets are inextricably drawn to the light of the Astronomican, the Carcharodons saw themselves engaged in an escalating war of attrition with the endless spawn of the Great Devourer on the edges of the galaxy. The Tyranids attacked not from the Eastern Fringe as their previous brethren, but now approached from beneath the galactic plane into the soft underbelly of the Imperium. Though the Carcharodons succeeded in annihilating countless splinter fleets as they approached the galaxy's edge, even the stoic Tyberos himself saw that his Chapter's actions were merely a stopgap against the encroaching menace of Hive Fleet Leviathan.The Devourer Denied (ca. 800s.M41) - The Cult of the Star Saints was a massive Genestealer Cult infestation that had contaminated every level of the society of the Shrine World of Piety V. The cult's psychic signal was so potent that it actually began to lure in a Tyranid Hive Fleet from below the galactic plane. The Tyranid numbers were so great that Tyberos saw his Chapter faced almost certain extinction. Calling upon ancient pacts, the Carcharodons beseeched a Renegade Astartes Chapter, the Ashen Claws, to aid them. Meanwhile the 3rd Company of Carcharodons under Captain Bail Sharr was dispatched to Piety V to quash the infestation. Tyberos hoped that terminating the psychic signal of the Genestealer Patriarch would be enough to turn back the encroaching swarm. Provoking the cult into a general uprising, the Carcharodons cut through thousands of cultists until, by sheer force of numbers they were surrounded and forced into a last stand inside Piety V's primary Imperial Cathedral. However, this was all according to plan as Bail Sharr unleashed not only his Terminator Squads but also an ancient Contemptor Pattern Dreadnought that ripped through countless screeching mutants. Such bloodshed finally drew the Patriarch into the open where the foul creature was obliterated by a 3rd Company Librarian. The death of their leader threw the remaining inhuman filth into disarray, and they broke themselves upon the anvil of grey ceramite armor. The hammer blow came with the sudden arrival of Ashen Claws reinforcements and within solar hours, the Cult of the Star Saints was ground down and forced into retreat. The sudden termination of the psychic beacon caused the nearby Hive Fleet to falter in its advance and it withdrew back to the void beneath the galaxy, sparing the Carcharodons from extinction, if only temporarily. Several solar weeks later an Imperial retribution force arrived to find Piety V a ruined husk and set about culling the few surviving Genestealers. The Imperium never learned the full extent of the Carcharodons' sacrifice, or of the unspeakable horror they helped to stop.Badab War (910-913.M41) - Arriving without warning in 910.M41 the sudden appearance of the Carcharodons' Chapter fleet caused alarm for both the Loyalist and Secessionist forces operating within the Maelstrom Zone. An unidentified, fire-blackened Space Marine strike cruiser identified itself with ancient, though still valid, Imperial authorisation protocols. The unidentified Space Marine force had come to offer its aid to the Loyalist cause against the Secessionists, claiming to have come in answer to a summons from Terra itself. They identified their Chapter as the "Carcharodons Astra", using the ancient High Gothic form of their name (or the "Space Sharks" in Low Gothic), and formally requested the Loyalists' permission to enter the war zone and draw blood. Upon their arrival, the Carcharodons' Force Commander Tyberos presented the Inquisitor Legate in charge of prosecuting the Badab conflict with Notices Patent provided to the Chapter affirming the rights and titles issued to it by several High Lords of Terra and Inquisitors now long dead. Tyberos even submitted himself for psychic probing and gene-sampling. The Inquisitor Legate vouched for the Carcharodons. Lord High Commander Carab Culln of the Red Scorpions, the Magister Millitant or supreme commander of all the Loyalist forces, accepted the Carcharodons into his line of battle, although he was still wary of their loyalties and their deviations from the Codex Astartes during their long voyage beyond Imperial space. The Carcharodons were initially deployed to the Endymion Cluster after their return to Imperial space, the territory governed by the Secessionist Mantis Warriors Chapter, rather than to the Badab Sector. They systematically annihilated planets in the Cluster known to have harboured the Mantis Warriors to force that Chapter to stop using their hit-and-run tactics and mass their forces in defence of these worlds, a strategy that spared the Carcharodons from having to pursue them across the Cluster to places where their foes held the advantage of support and local knowledge. In 913.M41, during the final battle of the Badab War on Badab Primaris, the homeworld of the Renegade Astral Claws Chapter and Lufgt Huron, the Tyrant of Badab, the Carcharodons sabotaged the ancient atomic and geo-thermal reactors which powered the world's hive cities and fed its hungry planetary defence batteries with energy. This resulted in a planetary tectonic upheaval, with entire hive city sectors collapsing into yawning chasms that opened up in the ground beneath them, replaced by seas of molten lava. After the death of Badab Primaris, the remaining Secessionists from the Astral Claws, Executioners, Mantis Warriors and Lamenters Chapters were put on trial before a specially convened Consistorial Court of their peers in the Adeptus Astartes. Before departing the Maelstrom Zone for good, the Carcharodons Chapter fleet returned to the Endymion Cluster. There, with the agreement of the Fire Hawks, they struck at the Tranquility System, whose worlds were once the primary recruiting and training grounds of the Mantis Warriors. From these worlds they harvested an entire generation of recruits to renew their own losses, forcing those they selected to fight to the death to prove their worth in order to survive as Carcharodons neophytes. Thus paid in blood, the Carcharodons fleet departed, the last known sighting of them made by an Explorator augury-beacon, which marked them tacking course through the Warp, ascending above the galactic plane and into the blackness of the outer void once more. The current whereabouts and operational activities of the Carcharodons remain unknown. The Fire Hawks' own disappearance while travelling through the Warp thus left the Mantis Warriors free to return to their ancestral Chapter domains once their century-long penitent crusade was over.The Corcyran Massacre (910.M41) - The event that became known in Imperial records as the Corcyran Massacre was discovered by an Imperial Navy patrol in 910.M41. The wreckage of a smugglers' base was discovered in the dust wastes of the forlorn world of Corcyra II. Within the base was a nightmarish scene of carnage and destruction rarely witnessed before by mortals. A bloody battle had been fought between two sub-company-sized forces of Space Marines from the Executioners and the Carcharodons Chapters. These two Chapters, both infamous for their savagery and unyielding stances towards their foes, had fought each other to mutual annihilation. The base around them was ripped apart, its former inhabitants now mouldering into dust. Many of the bodies of both sides showed signs of having fought on despite suffering horrendous wounds, severed limbs and massive trauma that should have felled even an Astartes, and several were found locked in deathly, gore-splattered embraces, striking at their foes with their last ebbing strength. It is not known which Chapter's last warrior survived to the end to claim a bitter victory. Neither Chapter has acknowledged any survivors of the massacre living to tell of what happened at Corcyra II.Indomitus Crusade (Unknown Date.M42) - The world of Budor V was home to the Imperial Castellus Sanctic citadel. During the Indomitus Crusade, the citadel was captured by a force of Heretic Astartes of the Word Bearers, who repelled numerous sieges led by elements of the crusade's Fleet Secundus, Battlegroup Betaris. When the Traitors' diabolists began to summon Daemons, they were all slain in a sudden strike by Carcharodons Astartes under the command of Company Master Mannfor, whose strike cruiser Ma-tahe had allied itself with Fleet Secundus, coming and going from the void as the company master willed.