Commander Longstrike

To the Fire Caste, the name Longstrike is synonymous with the art of armoured warfare. Born Shas'la T'au Sha'ng, he displayed an almost preternatural gift for the Hammerhead gunship from his very first training session, handling the heavy grav-tank as though it were an extension of his own body. That raw talent would be tempered into legend in the crucible of the Taros Campaign.

Assigned to an armoured interdiction cadre fighting across the western deserts of T'ros, Sha'ng found himself pitted against the massed armour of the Imperial Guard, whose Leman Russ battle tanks outnumbered his gunships by six to one and more. Over days of grinding combat the T'au tanks were whittled away, and at the height of the fighting every one of Sha'ng's bond-mates was slain. Alone and unbroken, he fought on, loosing railgun blast after railgun blast across the dunes, each shot obliterating another Imperial tank in the distance. Most astonishing of all, he placed a single perfect shot through the head of a striding Warhound Titan, toppling the god-machine and searing his new name, Longstrike, into the annals of his sept.

The victory carried a lasting wound. The loss of his bond-mates cut so deep that when his next cadre offered to undertake the ta'lissera bonding ritual with their formidable new ace, Longstrike refused, and he has sworn never again to forge such ties, unwilling to bear that grief a second time. He fights instead with a cold, solitary precision that has made him the most decorated gunship pilot in the Empire, bearer of such titles as Gunship Ace, Titan-Slayer and Terror of T'ros.

So unerring is his aim that the Earth Caste selected him to trial the experimental XV02 pilot battlesuit, a system that fuses pilot and vehicle so completely that Longstrike can react in the same instant as the Hammerhead's own artificial intelligences. Yet for all the flawless holo-maps and sensor-feeds the XV02 grants him, Longstrike still rises to the open cupola in the heat of battle, trusting his own eyes above any array as he hunts the heaviest engines of the enemy across the field.