The Badab War

Few conflicts shame the Imperium as deeply as the Badab War, a savage civil war fought among the Space Marines themselves across the opening years of the 41st Millennium. What began as one Chapter Master's pride swelled into a decade of fratricide, ending with proud Chapters put to the sword and the birth of one of the galaxy's most feared renegade warlords.

The Tyrant of Badab

At the centre of the storm stood Lufgt Huron, Chapter Master of the Astral Claws and self-styled lord of the world of Badab Primaris. His Chapter guarded the turbulent region around the Maelstrom, a great Warp storm whose surrounding worlds swarmed with pirates, xenos and heretics. It was a thankless, grinding duty, and Huron came to believe that the distant Imperium neither understood nor appreciated the burden his warriors bore.

A gifted commander and a charismatic leader, Huron was also consumed by ambition. Over long years he gathered ever more power to himself, ruling his domain as a petty king and nursing the conviction that he, and not the faceless bureaucrats of Terra, knew best how the Maelstrom should be held.

The Withheld Tithe

The break came over the gene-seed tithe, the sacred portion of a Chapter's genetic legacy that must be surrendered to Terra for testing and safekeeping. Claiming he needed every warrior to hold his beleaguered sector, Huron refused to yield the Astral Claws' tithe, and worse, he had for years been recruiting far beyond the thousand-Marine limit the Codex Astartes allowed.

When Imperial officials arrived to investigate, they were rebuffed, and then defied outright. In effect Huron had declared the Badab Sector independent of the Imperium he was sworn to serve. Such defiance could not be tolerated, for to let one Chapter secede was to invite a hundred others to follow, and the High Lords resolved to bring the Tyrant of Badab to heel.

Brother Against Brother

The Imperium dispatched loyal Chapters to compel the Astral Claws' obedience, expecting a swift end. Instead, Huron's charisma and grievances drew others to his banner. The Mantis Warriors, the Executioners and the ill-fated Lamenters threw in their lot with the secession, and what should have been a policing action became a full and terrible war between the Emperor's own Angels of Death.

There is no fighting more bitter than that between Space Marines, for each side knows exactly how the other thinks, fights and endures. Battle-brothers who might once have stood shoulder to shoulder against the darkness now turned their bolters upon one another, and the Badab Sector became a slaughterhouse of transhuman warriors.

A War of Attrition

The conflict ground on for the better part of twelve years. Loyalist Chapters, among them the Star Phantoms, Red Scorpions, Fire Hawks, Salamanders, Novamarines and the grim, secretive Carcharodons, prosecuted a relentless campaign of void battles, boarding actions and planetary sieges across the Maelstrom Zone.

The secessionists gave ground grudgingly, extracting a fearful toll for every world and station taken. Both sides committed atrocities and acts of valour in equal measure, and the true cost was counted not only in ships and warriors but in the honour of an Adeptus Astartes forced to devour its own.

The Palace of Thorns

The war reached its climax at Badab itself, before Huron's fortress-stronghold, the Palace of Thorns. The final assault was spearheaded by the Star Phantoms, who fought their way into the burning heart of the Tyrant's power in some of the most vicious close-quarters fighting of the entire war.

In the ruin of his palace Huron was struck down and left for dead amid the rubble. Yet the Tyrant of Badab did not die. Gravely maimed, he was dragged from the wreckage by a handful of devoted survivors, who bore their broken master away into the concealing tempest of the Maelstrom before the loyalists could confirm the kill.

Judgement and Rebirth

With the secession broken, the surviving rebel Chapters were hauled before a Consistorial Court to answer for their treachery. The judgement fell hardest upon the Astral Claws, who were condemned and put to the sword. The Mantis Warriors, Executioners and Lamenters, judged to have been led astray rather than truly damned, were sentenced instead to long penitent crusades to expiate their crimes in blood.

Huron's fate proved the darkest of all. Nursing a hatred of the Imperium that had branded him a traitor, he swore his soul and those of his surviving warriors to the Ruinous Powers in exchange for restoration and vengeance. Reborn as Huron Blackheart and styling his followers the Red Corsairs, he became a corsair-king of the Chaos Space Marines, and from his hidden realm within the Maelstrom he has plagued the Imperium ever since.