The Solar Auxilia

The Space Marine Legions were the tip of the spear, but a spear is nothing without a shaft. Behind the transhuman Legions marched the countless soldiers of ordinary humanity, and the finest of them all were the Solar Auxilia. Void-hardened, iron-disciplined and all but fearless, they were the mortal elite of the Great Crusade, the human troops deemed worthy to fight at the side of demigods.

They were not the mass levies of the Imperial Army, raised in their billions and spent like water. The Solar Auxilia were professionals: career soldiers of the void, hardened by lifetimes in the killing cold of space and on the most hostile worlds that humanity had ever tried to hold.

Soldiers of the Void

The Auxilia took their name and their origin from the earliest days of Terra's expansion, when the Emperor's forces first pushed out from the Throneworld to reclaim the Solar System and the void-stations, cold-worlds and asteroid holdfasts beyond it. Fighting in vacuum and upon airless rock bred a particular kind of soldier: methodical, unflinching and entirely at home in an environment that would kill an ordinary man in seconds. Survival there demanded discipline not as a virtue but as a reflex, and the Auxilia made it the foundation of everything they were.

From these origins grew a distinct martial tradition. Where the wider Imperial Army was a sprawling patchwork of regiments and world-raised militias, the Solar Auxilia were a coherent and self-contained elite, organised into disciplined formations of cohorts and tercios and trained to a standard that few mortal soldiers could ever match. They were the troops a Crusade commander called upon when a battle simply had to be won, and could not be entrusted to lesser men.

The Iron Discipline

Discipline was the very soul of the Auxilia. Their officers commanded absolute obedience, and their soldiers were conditioned to hold a line that any sane man would flee. They advanced into withering fire without breaking, held positions long after retreat would have been the wiser course, and died in ordered ranks rather than yield a step. This unbreakable resolve was their defining weapon, more valuable even than their armour or their guns, for it let a body of mere mortals do the impossible and stand firm where terror should have scattered them.

That resolve made them the ideal companions for the Space Marine Legions. An Astartes force could shatter an enemy army, but it took disciplined mortal soldiers to hold the ground the Legions had taken, to garrison the newly compliant worlds, and to grind through the long attritional sieges that superhuman warriors were too few and too precious to fight alone. The Auxilia were the anvil to the Legions' hammer.

Wargear of the Auxilia

The Solar Auxilia went to war better equipped than almost any other mortal soldiery in the Imperium. They fought encased in heavy void-hardened plate, sealed against vacuum and toxin, and carried volatile energy weapons of ancient design, including the searing volkite guns, relics of a lost technological age that few other forces could still field or maintain. Their formations were stiffened by squadrons of battle-tanks and heavy armoured transports, and by support batteries able to level fortifications from afar.

At the core of every cohort stood its veteran elite, the storm-troopers who led the deadliest assaults and held the most desperate ground, drilled until obedience and courage became one and the same reflex. They rode to battle in heavily armoured carriers built to disgorge them directly into the teeth of the enemy, and were supported by disciplined gun-crews and demolition specialists trained for the close and murderous work of boarding actions and the storming of fortress walls. Every soldier was a professional, and every rank a specialist honed for a single grim purpose.

Behind them, more often than not, walked the war-engines of their allies. The Auxilia frequently campaigned alongside the god-machines of the Titan Legions and the tech-priests of the Mechanicum, forming a professional combined-arms army in miniature. A Solar Auxilia cohort was no raw regiment of conscripts but a complete instrument of war, capable of prosecuting a campaign from the opening orbital barrage to the final act of compliance.

Beside the Legions

For two centuries the Solar Auxilia fought in the vanguard of the Great Crusade, often bearing the brunt of campaigns the Legions could not spare the numbers to see through alone. They earned a reputation as the most reliable human soldiers in the Imperium, and Legion commanders who would trust few mortals came to rely upon them absolutely. To fight beside the Astartes and to hold your ground was the highest honour a mortal soldier of the age could claim, and the Auxilia claimed it again and again, on battlefield after battlefield, world after world.

Divided by the Heresy

When Horus turned against the Emperor, the Solar Auxilia were torn apart like everything else in the Imperium. Cohorts that had long been stationed alongside traitor Legions, or whose commanders were swayed by the Warmaster's cause, went over to rebellion; others held fast to their oaths to Terra. In the battles of the Horus Heresy, loyal and traitor Auxilia met and butchered one another with the very same cold discipline they had once turned upon the Emperor's enemies.

Void-hardened soldiers fought some of the war's grimmest actions, the sieges and the boarding-assaults and the last stands on doomed worlds, where their sheer refusal to break made the difference between a line held and a planet lost. They died in their thousands, mortal men and women standing firm amid a war of gods and monsters that dwarfed them utterly.

Legacy

The Solar Auxilia did not endure the Heresy as a distinct order. In the great reforging of the Imperium that followed the war, the mortal armies were reorganised into the vast and faceless institution that would become the Imperial Guard of the present age, the endless regiments that still fight and die in humanity's name across the galaxy.

But the memory of the void-hardened elite endured. Something of their iron discipline lives on wherever ordinary human soldiers, unaltered and unafraid, stand their ground against horrors that no mortal should ever have to face.