 The first shots had been fired, and loyal Estartes blood had been spilled. The seizure of the Firehawk's chapter cruiser Red Harbinger had left the situation in Badab at a tension hitherto unfathomable. The chaptermaster of the hawks, Cyborg Lezarek, ordered a full withdrawal of the Estartes under his command from all ongoing operations possible, and for a general muster to take place in the Maelstrom Zone. The first battlegroup to arrive was intercepted at Galen by a flotilla of ships belonging to the Mantis warriors and the Astral Claws. The tents stand off ensued. Captives were exchanged, with Firehawk prisoners returned to their chapter, all with threats being flung back and forth between the two sides. No actual hostilities emerged, as neither side was in a position to offer anything other than baseless threats. The Firehawks withdrew to await the arrival of the majority of their fleet from the Golgothan Wastes, including their flagship, the Raptorus Rex. Similar in character to the indomitable Phalanx, mobile fortress monastery of the Imperial Fists, the Raptorus Rex was a pre-imperial star fortress, whose origins were supposed to have lain within the dark age of technology, and whose secrets were jealously guarded by the Firehawks. Retribution raids were attempted during this muster period, probing attacks into the Badab Sector and the Indemian Cluster, intended to assay the lay of the land and provide intelligence. In reality, the Firehawks accomplished little, saving for heightening the tensions and defensiveness of the Maelstrom Chapters. The defenses in place by the Tyrant were impenetrable to the forward elements of these Firehawks, and efforts to pin down the elusive Mantis warriors proved impossible, and their ships consistently evading those of the Hawks in the dense asteroid fields and nebulae of the Indemian Cluster. The home field advantage was in full effect for the Warder Chapters, and the Firehawks were perhaps beginning to realize the extent with which these Astartes had made the incredibly dangerous region of space their own. Delegating an offensive action to the Carthen Lords, the Firehawks used their allies to distract the forces of the Tyrant in a font attack. Under the cover of the offensive, the Hawks launched a full invasion of the Agriworld of Iblis, on the extreme fringes of the Indemian Cluster. Torching the verdant world's veldt and massacring its innocent civilian population, the Firehawks had intended to bait the Mantis warriors into open warfare. The genocide of their client worlds, however, seemed to bother the secessionists as little as committing it did to those who opposed them. The Mantis warriors' hit-and-run attacks upon Iblis had been a distraction, and headed to winnow the Firehawks and draw them away from the system the secessionists truly desired. Sagan An Administratum-controlled polity, Sagan was a trade hub of decent profitability but sterling location. With the large orbital anchorage and sector-class astropathic relay, Sagan was the hub from whence Maelstrom's own trade flowed out from the region to the Imperium at large. It was a liminal area, yes, but a pivotal one, the importance of which was never highlighted until the conflict emerged. The Mantis warriors had accomplished their task, drawing the Firehawks to a provincial backwater and allowing the hammer of the secessionists to fall upon ill-defended Sagan. A combined fleet of astral claws and lamentor's vessels seized the port in a matter of days. Its Karthan-controlled troops and planetary defence forces crushed under the power-armoured boot of the Astartes. The Butcherie was stunning, the new height for the conflict. Karthan forces fled in an utter rout from the system, which was now firmly within the Tyrant's Claw. The Administratum Tithe Fortress in the planetary capital contained not only bullion and data on the wealth of whole sectors, but also the Departmental Munitorum Armory and Stockpile, all of which was promptly looted by the Warders and sent back to Badab in haste. The capture of Sagan had completely upended the strategic situation in the zone. Few worlds could match it for importance in the layout of the conflict. Its fall was a massive blow to the Karthan lords and their Astartes allies. It necessitated a complete withdrawal of the Firehawks from Iblis, whose primary supply line into the zone had now been completely severed. The Lance Batteries of the Raptorus Rex petally scoured what Metropolis still stood, consigning the civilians of the world to fire and death, and likewise claimed the life of the Mantis warrior's starship, Sacred Tetrarch, in its passage out system, the only vessel of her class the Maelstrom Warders could claim. It was scant recompense for the loss of Sagan, as the Firehawks retreat was a mark of deep displeasure for the Astartes chapter that had been on the back foot since the conflict first brood up. As so often happens in these types of asynchronous conflicts, the Comherative Lull settled upon the volume following these events. Wary of overextending, the Badab's secessionists consolidated their gains around Sagan, fortifying the system and replacing key personnel with those loyal to Huron. The Karthans were in such disarray as to be unable to mount anything approximating resistance, let alone a fence, leading to the majority of all actions being undertaken by the Firehawks. The Maelstrom Warders were clearly well aware of this. The pressure they placed upon the Hawks was now unrelenting. The chapter forced into dozens of skirmishers across the zone's border regions as it attempted to block secessionist raids and mount whatever pressure it could muster in response. This desperate period was eventually mitigated by the arrival of Astartes reinforcements on the Imperial side, in the form of the Marine's errant chapter, Reaching the Warp, in 710-904-M41. Six whole companies aboard a sizable fleet had answered the call of the Firehawks, although their precise motivations for doing so were currently undeclared. Ostensibly, they had been mustering for a crusade into an indeterminate reach of the galaxy, but had responded to the plea that the Firehawks, ancient allies of old, had placed upon them. Keen not to look a gift equine in its mandibles, the Firehawks immediately pressed their new allies to join in an offensive push to regain the momentum, but it appeared that the secessionists had outmaneuvered them yet again. A renewed push by the Tyrant to claim Imperial shipping routes outward from Sagan immediately commanded the attention of the Marine's errant, as the Pale Star's shipping lanes were now under immediate threat from Badab. This pattern continued for solar months. All attempts by the Marine's errant and the Firehawks to muster any sort of coherent force were quashed by secessionist raiding. The Marine's errant, based within a flotilla of highly mobile strike cruisers, were of course deeply suited for this role, but as time progressed, the true scope of the situation was likely becoming far more apparent to these newcomers. Caught between the bellicosity of the Firehawks and their insistence on attack and the wailing pleas of the Carthan Lords to protect their sector, the Marine's errant were pulled in a hundred directions as responsibilities clashed. Further complications were added to their plight by their ancient ties with the Mantis warriors. The chapters had served together in the Corinth Crusade, developing deep bonds of blood and honor, but now found themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield that spanned two whole sectors. In many cases, where the erstwhile battlebrothers met, the Marine's errant only sought to drive the Mantis warriors off with warning shots, or fuselards designed only to rattle the void shields of their ships, while the Mantis warriors applied much the same degree of force. This giving of quarter stirred discontent on both sides of the conflict, with the allies of both chapters voicing doubts as to their commitments to their respective causes. Now that the brush-fire war of the volume had been lit and was proceeding without any form of decisive engagements, more and more systems found themselves being pulled inexorably into its conflagration. The Firehawks and the Carthan Lords were unable to recover their initial footing, and whether through conquest or intimidation, dozens more worlds fell under the rule of the tyrant of Badab. Where previously only that sector had been considered firmly under Huron's Claw, the war afforded him and the mails from Warder's All almost total control of the entire zone by the end of the year. More worlds besides, Sagan being but one of the planets seized and held despite the efforts of the Firehawks. Matters only worsened for the Carthan Lords in 915-904-M41, when the Marine's errant were made aware of the entrance of the Executioner's Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes into the war on the side of the Secessionists. Huron had apparently called upon an ancient blood oath sworn between the Astral Claws and the Executioners, which the latter was clearly intending to honour in force. The first arrival in the mails from Zone was the warship Night Hag, the full company of Astartes, bringing word that the bulk of the mysterious Chapter's forces were mustering at Stygia Aqualon. The news sent the Carthans into an even deeper panic. Despite having two Adeptus Astartes chapters upon their side, they were now facing four, and nothing about the war had gone in their favour. Every offensive had been blunted, every defence put on the back foot. Every meager victory soured by a dozen losses. The war was bankrupting the merchant cartel. Shipping had ground to a standstill as Chartist captains refused to take their ships through volumes preyed upon by Secessionist raiders. But even if they had preceded a pace, their holds would have been barely half full. Resource extraction, even on Carthan-controlled worlds, had plummeted. Tides to Terra were now painfully overdue, and Satrap Canig knew that the eyes of the throneworld, however ponderous, were inexorable. In purest desperation, he commanded that an offensive be hurled at the deeper worlds of Kaimara and Viania, in the western reaches of the Maelstrom zone. Only recently taken under the purview of Badab, Canig reasoned that the worlds would yet have had their resources claimed for the tyrant, and that the Secessionist hold over the sparse volumes of that region was less of a priority for Huron. What could be extracted would help the Carthans pay off their debts, and hopefully keep the oculari of the Administratum elsewhere, if only for now. The Strike Force, Canig assembled for the push, was quite honestly as best as one could expect given the speed the Satrap had ordered it formed. Calling in as many favours owed as he could, Canig had impressed the Chartist Highliner, Cardinal Urdeneta into military service, bearing in its massive bulk as many regiments as could be mustered in time. Twenty armed freighters accompanied her, and while all bore what guns they could toward off raiders, the true muscle of the convoy lay in the gothic class Dreadchild, second lid from battle fleet Carthago, and Group Mercurio of the Marine's errant, comprised of a sole strike cruiser and sixteen smaller escort craft. It was the last gasp of Satrap Canig's reeling against the Secessionists, a far from helpless convoy, to be sure, but a far cry from the forces the Carthan lords had begun the conflict in possession of. The ease at which it entered the zone, and made its way to its target worlds, should likely have been the first sign that something was amiss. Not one raiding party, not a single Astartes strike vessel, was discerned on all speck sweeps, but the human commanders of the Flotilla dismissed it as mere good fortune. The Emperor, smiling upon their endeavor, the warnings of the Marine's errant fell upon willfully deaf ears. After so many months of defeats, the Carthans accepted this easy prize with untrammeled glee. The Secessionists, of course, had been aware of the convoy before it had even slipped anchor. The supposedly secret muster had been anything but to the eyes and ears of the Dabbs agents. Huron waited until the convoy had fully glutted themselves upon the wealth of the depot worlds, before leading an attack upon it personally. The main elements of the fleets of both the Astral Claws and the Lamentors encircled and then savaged the Flotilla, painstakingly boarding and capturing each ship one by one in vicious and bloody void actions. Despite the desperate, one hesitates to call it heroism, of the Navy crews and Carthan armsmen, no hold could be placed upon the transhuman ferocity of the attacking Astartes. Only the Marine's errant strike cruiser Star Jackal escaped the blockade, punching her way through and limping to the system's Mandeville Point with heavy damage. It was almost certain that Huron permitted its flight. Better that word of the disaster reached Carthan ears than the convoy simply disappeared. The gothic cruiser Dreadchild and the Highliner Cardinal Urdeneta, as well as some 23 other vessels, were taken as prizes by the secessionists. With a stroke, the last iota of power projection the Carthans possessed had been taken and merely added to the arsenal of the Warders. It effectively removed them from the conflict, delivering the secessionists a crushing victory and placing the Imperial elements in absolutely dire straits. With unaugmented human forces effectively neutralized, the secessionists faced but one more barrier to their total control of the Maelstrom Zone, the Astartes' opposition still mounted by the firehawks and the Marine's errant. The Astral Claws wasted little time in this. They pushed the hawks hard in the Golgothan wastes, inflicting grievous casualties on the already wounded chapter. Curiously, despite the efforts of the firehawks to reap their own tally upon the claws, the Astartes of Huron seemed to suffer no depletion of strength, apparently maintaining the savage operational efficacy they had begun the conflict with, even if many of their victories thus far had been hard fought and bloodily bought. Thanks to this, the hawks were at this point so severely depleted as to be barely considered an effective combat force, and were forced into a general retreat from the Zone to lick their wounds. Elsewhere, the Mantis warriors succeeded in drawing a significant number of Marines errant to the industrial moon of Balerophon's Fall. The satellite was considered an especially critical point in the supply chains and navigational networks of the Zone, and had been severely contested since the outbreak of hostilities. Some of the most vicious fighting of the war so far occurred at this point, with the Marines errant and the Mantis warriors no longer sparing any quarter in their battle, but the masterstroke would lie with the latter, who succeeded in drawing the first and third companies of the Marines errant into the industrial waste zones of the Fall, callously excising their command structures in surgical strikes. The chapter master of the Imperial Astartes fell there, and the toxic spoils of resource extraction, along with the significant quantity of the chapter's most veteran Astartes. This caused a disorganized and rapid extraction of the remaining Marines errant that would, had they been on augmented humanity, almost earned the classification of a route. The twin disasters of Golgotha and Balerophon's Fall sundered the alliance that had been tenuously maintained between the Marines errant and the fire hawks. Both chapters bitterly accused the other of misrepresenting everything from operational exigencies to combat prowess to effective dispositions, all while being forced into a general retreat to salvage what they could of their fleets, their armories, and their gene seed reserves. The secessionists were now effectively unopposed, making significant gains for the remainder of the year. By the turning of the calendar, the entirety of the Meals from Zone, and many other systems besides belonged to the secessionists, and thus to Huron. At this point in the Chronicle, given the sheer amount of actual warfare between nominally imperial elements, one's acolytes could be forgiven for wondering, either to themselves or allowed, as to why none of the Cyclopean bulk of the Imperium had seemingly noticed it. You must remind yourselves of the sheer vastness of this galactic empire, the degree to which the degradation of its critical functions has metastasized over its glorious, bloody, 10,000 year reign. It is far from uncommon for planets to vanish from record, for fleets to remain unaccounted for, for pocket regimes to prosper clandestinely, for Terra herself only to get word of nigh apocalyptic disasters centuries after they have been wrought. Imperium, to put it mildly, does not function. It is sustained to the sheer overwhelming inertia granted to it by the forces that originally set it in motion, and the unending toil of the literally countless souls that work its bellows, oil its cogs, and fuel its furnaces. Such a statement is not heresy. If anything, it is a testament to all those who breathe the God Emperor's air and turn their labours to the exaltation of his divine systems. But it is ponderous. It takes time for anything to be noticed and for anything to be done in response. By 016-905 M41, Terra was finally forced to act on the Badabskism. Five chapters of the Emperor's own Angels of Death were in open warfare, and a sixth was rapidly approaching the conflict. Of the side considered nominally in alignment with Holy Terra, both chapters had been savaged past the point of combat efficacy, and the rebelliousness of Huron and the secessionists showed no signs of abating. If anything, they were emboldened. Imperial intelligence highlighted numerous systems outside the Maelstrom zone that were in dire risk of secessionist attack and annexation. The war was proceeding at the pace that risked it becoming even more severe than the Four Quadrant Rebellion, perhaps even the War of the False Primarch. Terra could no longer abide the strife it was causing, nor any further casualties. Armsmen from a merchant cartel could be easily replaced. The startys far less so. A trio of Imperial Leggots were dispatched to the Maelstrom zone on behalf of the High Lords of Terra, the single highest governing body within the Empire. The triumvirate were accompanied in kind by a significant detachment of inquisitors from his most divine majesty's holy Ordos, specifically from the Ordo Hereticus. Such a presence is highly common within the Imperium. Any deviation from the Legg's imperialis is, of course, deeply suspicious and the eyes of the Inquisition are ever watchful for the potential taint of chaos within seemingly mundane heretical musings. The interdepartmental cooperation was likely undertaken to satisfy the inquisitorial representative upon the High Lords, who almost certainly would not have authorized the deployment of Senatorum Leggots without having agents to report back to them upon the civilian findings. The naval battlegroup, seconded from Battlefleet's solar itself, was also accompanied by Administratum Tithe Gallions, bearing within them auditorious adepts keen to assay quite how much of Terra's dew was being withheld by the schism. The differing parties immediately divided themselves between the various worlds of the zone, sailing under unimpeachable codes of Terran authority to gather as much information as they could. The scrutiny was intense. Despite secessionist efforts to veil whatever they could, the Inquisition is nothing if not deeply resourceful. While an inquisitor may announce their presence, gambling that on even the Astral Claws would be so bold as to fire upon them, their agents would be hard at work penetrating every level of the Maelstrom Zone's infrastructure and bureaucracy. What was uncovered was damnable indeed. Naturally, there was incontrovertible evidence provided that the Maelstrom Warders had engaged in piratical behavior upon imperial shipping lanes. But charges were also laid against the Astral Claws specifically for their dereliction of duty in gene-seed tides and perhaps most worryingly in misreporting their active Astartes' disposition, now believed to be far in excess of the strictures laid upon them by the Codex Astartes. Even beyond this, the Carthan Lords found themselves in the inquisitorial hot seat, charged with gross negligence, incompetence, arrogance, and waste of the Emperor's divine resources. Their misrule and belligerence had exacerbated what had been a taxation and trade dispute, at least in the eyes of Terra, and was to be treated with a similar severity to the recklessness of Huron. The Legates arrived at a resolution rather quickly, at least for imperial bureaucrats. The Badabskism was no longer a mere sector spat to be resolved by mediation. It was a breach of Lex' imperialist defense parameters. No civil conflict. This was a matter of internal imperial security, escalating at insoverity sharply. An immediate ceasefire was demanded for all hostilities, and despite the incompetency of the Carthan Lords, it was upon the secessionists that the call for a full surrender to Terran Authority was placed. Their actions were the largest threat to internal security, and the deviation from protocols placed upon Astartes' chapters to ensure loyalty were being completely and utterly violated. The demands were rejected outright by Huron. He stated in his formal response that the proclamation of the Legates was untenable, that acceding to them would leave our brave worlds and Emperor-given charges naked before the enemy. The only response possible for such brazen defiance of the High Lord's own plenipotentiaries was the issuance of arrest orders for the chapter masters of the Astral Claws, mantis warriors, lamentors, and executioners, as well as a seizure in full of their worlds, armories, fleets, goods, archives, subjects, and, pending judgment by the highest authorities of the Lex Imperialis, possible execution. It was an announcement full and total, one whose passing was to be carried out by all those who countered themselves loyal to the God Emperor and to his worldly representatives, the High Lords of Terra. It was the will, the hand of the Imperium, and it now fell upon the secessionists of Adab with all the force of a galaxy spanning empire of countless trillions. Any who stood by the side of Huron would feel its wrath. The feud that had boiled throughout the Maelstrom zone and its surrounding volumes was no longer a mere border crisis, the conflict of personalities and authorities muddled by the cogs of a gargantuan feudal system. It was a war of heresy, a battle no longer of just vindictive astartes, but those who were loyal to the throne and those who had turned from its light. This was the true beginning of the Bedab War. Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis, Terra. This video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to Patreon.com slash Oculus Imperia. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.