Darnath Lysander - War in the Magor Rift: As soon as the Storm of Wrath was underway, Lysander set aside all but the most vital of his Captain's duties and assumed the role of the drill sergeant he had once been. At the best estimates of the Battle Barge's Navigators, it would take fifteen solar days for the vessel to reach its destination, and Lysander intended to put every moment of that time to good use.A portion of one of the Battle Barge's decks was given over to a firing range, and Lysander now pressed it into almost constant service. The walls of this chamber were lined with the same adamantium plating as the Storm of Wrath’s outer hull. Nothing short of a Macrocannon shell could have dented it, and the Boltgun volleys that now roared across the gloomy chamber did little more than scratch it.Lysander worked ceaselessly, instilling into the 3rd Company's warriors the same lessons that Sergeant Makan had once drummed into him. Imperial Fists doctrine had long ordained twenty separate observances for the ritual of firing a Boltgun, and a further six for the replacement of a spent magazine. Most were little things, silent litanies that the Battle-Brothers quickly learned to perform out of habit. Individually, they took little toll of time and concentration, but together they dulled reaction time and accuracy by a slender, but noticeable, margin. Squad by squad, Lysander announced the nullification of a full fifteen of these observances, and decreed substantial modifications to three others. He then drilled his Battle-Brothers ceaselessly until this new litany settled into their minds as firmly and instinctively as the old.Lysander pursued his course with forthright passion, sleeping little and brooking no question to his orders. It was plain to Garadon that his Captain was a driven man, but he could not divine whether that drive stemmed from a need to atone for the harm he had wrought upon the 3rd Company, or from a desire to be unshackled from the company and returned to command of the 1st. Whatever the reason, Garadon could not argue with the results. A solar week into the journey, reaction time and Boltgun accuracy had markedly increased. As a result, when Chaplain Markov made angry complaint to the Sergeant about Lysander's breach of tradition, Garadon found himself giving his Captain full support -- a standpoint that surprised him almost as much as it did the Chaplain.By the time the Storm of Wrath emerged from the Warp, the 3rd Company was as fine a weapon of war as Lysander could make of it in the time available. Now it was time for the weapon to be tempered in battle.According to the Imperial Fists' records, the Magor Rift comprised two planetary systems in close proximity to a vast belt of debris; the remains, or so scholars had hypothesised, of a third star system. A fourth system, Viashan, was thought to lie further to the galactic east, but Warp Storms had severed it from the rest of the Imperium for more than forty standard years. Of the two systems that remained, the Jindara System was believed to be totally bereft of life, whereas the Kalin System was home to an Imperial Agri-world. Indeed, the lush agri-domes ofKalin II had for many years provided food not only for its neighbours, but also for several nearby Hive Worlds. By all accounts, it had been a rare paradise in a galaxy too often beset by terrors, a latter-day parallel to the Eden of ancient myth. Alas, it was paradise no more.The Storm of Wrath and its support fleet re-emerged into realspace in close proximity to Kalin II and in the midst of a starscape clogged with drifting wreckage. Though no one aboard the Battle Barge yet knew it, the astropathic distress hymnal that had reached the Imperial Fists had been waylaid in the currents of the Warp. Thus, a conflict Vladimir Pugh had considered to be in its early stages had, in fact, already raged for many solar months. As the Imperial Fists arrived, the remnants of the 95th Cadian Shock Troops Battle Group strove against a Greenskin tide on the planet's surface. The surviving vessels of the Imperial Navy, despatched from the orbital shipyards at Nemea, fought to blockade the near-constant flood of Ork Kroozers that Warped in-system from an unknown base. This was not a true WAAAGH!, not yet, but if it were allowed to gain momentum it could yet threaten sectors further afield.As the Storm of Wrath’s captain guided the Battle Barge skilfully through the debris field, Lysander made contact with the general of the Cadian army. Or rather, he tried to. Gathering reports from several junior officers, Lysander learned that the defence of Kalin II was all but over, and the 95th Battle Group as good as destroyed.Of some one hundred thousand Imperial Guardsmen that had deployed to the planet, scarcely three thousand remained. Most were entrenched around Shivanol, the planetary capital, giving the last of their strength to defend the refugees who were all that remained of Kalin II's civilian population. The rest of the planet lay in Ork hands, with ramshackle soot-belching factories nestled amongst the remains of the ruined agri-domes, providing a seemingly unending supply of Battlewagons and crude Ork combat walkers for the ongoing assault on Shivanol.