+++INCOMING TRANSMISSION+++
+++FID Indicator - Alpha+++
+++Via Astropath HJ8P39FXX+++
+++Via Astropath A7L009BN4S9+++
+++Via Astropath DD7ME23+++
+++BEGIN TRANSMISSION+++
RE: Ork Threat to Admantium Production on Volarus
Cross Reference: [Ork][Greenskin][Xenos][Sector: Armageddon][Admantium]
Lords,
I write in haste from orbit above Volarus, where our scout servitors have
collected some minimal information about the Ork threat to the admantium assets
stationed in the city of Tsaragrad.
I have enclosing a data tablet with the basic information regarding these Orks,
a copy of which will be routed to the Imperial Archives.
It is believed that these Orks comprise a small warband of mixed cultures who
follow a lesser Warboss known as "Rikburgiz." It seems plain that this warband is
a splinter from the great greenskin incursion against the Armageddon sector
circa 998.M41, which originated from Golgotha.
The city now appears mostly ruined, although a small Imperial garrison continues
to stoicly defend the western half of the city.
For now, the admantium reserves and mining equipment are secure, but
it is unclear how much longer the battered garrison can hold out.
I would submit a request for reinforcements, but our forces in the Sector are
already stretched too thin. For now, their ingenuity, bravery, and faith in the
Emperor must suffice...
The Emperor Protects,
V.Adm. Ramsos
+++DIGITAL SIGNATURE DETECTED+++
================================
Vice Admiral Tagron Ramsos
His Will Be Done XVII - Dominator Class Cruiser Mk.III
Batlefleet Armageddon
His Imperial Navy
999.M41
================================
+++END SIGNATURE+++
+++ATTACHMENT: ENCRYPTED CACHE MXX000937.41+++
+==============================================================================+
| - Planet of Origin: Golgotha [suspected; unconfirmed by Imperial Navy] |
| - Current Planet: Volarus, a mineral-rich planet on the edge of the |
| Cicatrix Maledictum settled by the Imperium as an |
| admantium mining outpost. |
| - Known Engagements: The Battle of Tsaragrad |
| [IMPERIAL ARCHIVE XREF: #729103.3314] |
| - Known Affiliations: Waaagh! Gazkghull |
| - "Clan" membership: No single allegiance; cross-clan mix of Goffs, |
| Deathskulls, and Bad Moons |
| - Force Leader: Ork Warboss (sic. "Big Boss Rikburgiz da Krusha") |
| - Other Notable Figures: Mek-Boss Grukktoof |
| Wuzgob da Seer [++WARNING: CONFIRMED PSYKER++] |
| - Primary Colors: Yellow & red-orange |
| - Markings & Sigils: Longhorn bull skull glyphs |
+==============================================================================+
+++END ATTACHMENT+++
+++END TRANSMISSION+++
The Ork warband known as "Da Ironbullz" represents a loose alliance of necessity among the remaining members of forces from three Ork Clans—Goffs, Bad Moons, and Deathskulls—who survived the crash of the Ork Kroozer, Da Iron Bull, on Volarus sometime around the Third Battle for Armageddon.
Prior to joining Waaagh! Gazkhull Thraka after the Second Battle for Armageddon, the members of Da Ironbullz originally existed as three rival tribes among the many hundreds of Ork tribes littering the Ork-controlled planet of Golgotha. As idle Orks wont, these three tribes frequently raided and traded with each other, comprising as close a faximily of a volatile, brutal Orkish economy as can be imagined. The Bad Moons, under the command of the cunning "Mek-Boss" Grukktoof, were the richest and most technologically advanced of the three warring tribes, and naturally, their spoils and wargear were frequently pilfered by the neighboring Deathskulls, led by their mystic shaman Wuzgob da Seer, or outright taken by force by the Goffs of Big Boss Rikburgis da Krusha.
These three tribes coexisted for unknown decades in an endless state of looting, bloodshed, and competition on the surface of Golgotha until two key events changed their fortunes for good.
First, in Commissar Yarrick's vain attempt to pursue Waaagh! Gazgkhull all the way to the surface of Golgotha during the aftermath of the Second War for Armageddon, a light strike cruiser from the Imperial Navy was split in two by bombs from an Ork Killa Kroozer in the battle above the surface of Golgotha. The strike cruiser plummeted from the sky, crashing into the toxic yellow sand dunes of Golgotha. The eager meks from Grukktoof's Bad Moons tribe were lucky enough to discover the wreckage first, and in true Orkish fashion managed to salvage the wreck into a functional—if small—Ork Kroozer, which they named Da Iron Bull.
Second, as has been well-documented by Imperial scribes, Gazgkhull was not idle following his first defeat at Armageddon and quickly subjugated all other Orks on Golgotha and neighboring systems to rebuild his Waaagh!. Among these were the three tribes of Rikburgis, Grukktoof, and Wuzgob, who were no match for the legendary Goff warlord and were largely spared thanks to Gazgkhull noticing the rusty silhouette of Da Iron Bull and realizing it would be a valuable addition to the burgeoning starfleet needed for his revenge on the Armageddon system.
Temporarily placated by the prospect of an even bigger battle to be found, the three tribes put aside their decades of rivalry and boarded Da Iron Bull, which set a course towards the Armageddon system as part of Waaagh! Gazkghull.
Yet Da Iron Bull was never destined to make landfall on Armageddon. In the early hours of the first contact between scouts from the Imperial Navy and Waaagh! Gazkghull's armada en route to the Armageddon sector, Da Iron Bull's makeshift engines were easily disabled by a broadside hit from an Imperial turbo laser. Left behind the rest of the fleet, Da Iron Bull floated listlessly in space for weeks.
Finally, the ship was caught in the particularly strong gravitational pull of a small, unremarkable planet known as Volarus, an extremely dense, mineral-rich planet set apart from any major planetary system. Unbeknownst to the Orks aboard Da Iron Bull, the planet had been lightly settled by Imperial forces several centuries ago as an admantium mining outpost, the resources from which were shipped directly back to forge worlds near Armageddon for the production of tactical dreadnought armor and the repair of Imperial Titans.
After months in space, and having missed out on the thick of the fighting on Armageddon, Da Iron Bull thudded down onto the surface of the small mining world. The orks that emerged from the wreckage were restless and eager for a fight. At first, infighting broke out amongst the survivors of the three long-rival tribes, until Rikburgis—by far the largest and most brutal Ork among them—bellowed for them to stop and pointed at the horizon.
There, against the backdrop of the dull red-brown mountains of the mineral-rich planet, could clearly be seen a sprawling urban center. In fact, what the Orks from Da Iron Bull had spotted was one of the key admantium processing & shipping depots on Volarus, a small, gritty Imperial city known as Tsaragrad, where a small planetary defense force was garrisoned.
Although their bloodlust was at its peak after months in space, the Orks knew their equipment and wargear was in poor shape, as much had been damaged in the crash of Da Iron Bull. Rikburgis, being the de facto leader of this nascent Ork coalition, roared for the Orks to hold their tenuous ceasefire a bit longer, and summoned Grukktoof and Wuzgob to meet him in his "Boss' Kwarterz," which he had dubbed the tangled wreckage of Da Iron Bull's command bridge.
When the three Ork bosses emerged minutes later, it was apparent the winds of fortune had changed. The three Orks seemed unified. Rikburgis stomped his mighty ironshod feet to quiet the ladz, before explaining in a blunt, unsophisticated Orkish fashion that the three tribes would join as one under the new name of Da Ironbullz, and would set off to conquer this new planet starting with Tsaragrad, the city they had spotted on the horizon. In his short, brutish speech, he relayed that Wuzgob had a vision while floating in space aboard Da Iron Bull: Gork and Mork had splintered their ship from the rest of Gazgkhull's fleet to prevent them from heading to their inevitable defeat on the sands of Armageddon, and had sent them to this planet instead to dominate it as their own. Unable to deny the will of the Orkish gods spoken by a true Seer, the newly-minted members of Da Ironbullz bellowed in agreement at the prospect of the bloodshed, looting, and glory to come.
Temporarily unified around this new vision of conquering Volarus, the meks and grotz from Da Ironbullz immediately set about rebuilding the vehicles, armor, and weapons they would need to seige the nearby city of Tsaragrad. To their dismay, they quickly discovered that all of their Orky "kommunikashunz" devices aboard Da Iron Bull had been pulverized during the crash. There would be no help from other Orks in the fight to come. They were on their own.
And after a frenzied week of hammering, racheting, and headbutting, a rag-tag horde of Orks thundered westward towards Tsaragrad, clad in the bright yellows and reds that once adorned the hull of Da Iron Bull. May the Emperor himself protect the citizens of Tsaragrad in the years to come...
At the frontier of the T'au Empire's Fifth Sphere sits Kor'shan, a nascent T'au Sept comprising a small cluster of planets to the galactic south-west of the Startide Nexus. Being among the most far-flung of all T'au from their native homeworld, the T'au of the Kor'shan Sept are known as pioneers with a penchant for bravery--or, in the eyes of many in the Etheral Caste--recklessness.
The Kor'shan Sept was founded thousands of light-years outside the heart of the T'au Empire. Few of the Kor'shan have ever travelled through the Startide Nexus back to visit the Empire; thus, most of the Kor'shan haven't borne witness to the glory and customs of the T'au Empire proper. As a consequence, these T'au are somewhat nomadic and estranged from the main arteries of T'au society. This is not to say that the Kor'shan culture is any less regimented than other T'au Septs or that it fails to adhere to the dogmatic belief in Tau'va, or The Greater Good. Indeed, all Kor'shan believe that their role in the T'au Empire is to serve as explorers and frontiersmen, capable of prospecting new planets to expand the limits of T'au colonization.
This core tennant of the Kor'shan may be enough to explain how they first arrived on Volarius, many light-years away from the T'au's Fifth Sphere. As a rule, T'au are not ambitious interstellar travelers, instead usually seeking to cautiously expand their Empire one neighboring world at a time. So too has the Fifth Sphere of the T'au Empire slowly expanded in a tight radius around the Startide Nexus. However, the ruling council of the Kor'shan hold a different philosophy: that the T'au will be best served by expanding their knowledge of the galaxy and in so doing provide the Empire with a stronger foothold when determining how best to continue growing the Fifth Sphere.
It was for this reason that the Supreme Commander of the Kor'shan Sept, Shas'o Gal'eth, commonly known as Commander Dawnbringer, was ordered by the Kor'shan Ethereal Council to assemble five small coalitions of Kor'shan T'au drawn from each caste and strike out from the farthest edges of the Fifth Sphere expansion to chart the neighboring galaxy. Dawnbringer himself joined the third of these expedition forces, which was tasked with exploring the systems west of the Sept's eponymous home world. Aboard a small fleet of state-of-the-art Il'Fannor-class cruisers equipped with ZFR Horizon Accelerator Engines, Shas'o Gal'eth and his hand-picked cadre of his most resourceful, hardy Fire Caste warriors bravely charted a course into the unknown and left behind the safety of the entrenched Startide Nexus Septs.
At first, Dawnbringer's expedition was uneventful. In fact, it would be fair to characterize it as largely unsuccessful, having failed to discover many--if any--noteworthy systems on their course. They passed countless small planetary systems, but the advanced orbital reconaissance modules developed by the Kor'shan Earth Case detected little reason to make planetfall on any of these systems. Staying true to the Kor'shan philosophy of fearless exploration, Commander Dawnbringer and his coalition pressed ever onwards, steadily drifting farther from their origin on Kor'shan until the fleet had ventured so far that it stretched the limits of even the sophisticated T'au interstellar communication relays, compromising the coalition's ability to communicate with the T'au of the Fifth Sphere worlds. The pragmatic, cautious instincts drilled into every new Shas'la at the Fire Caste academies began to lurk on the peripheries of Shas'o Gal'eth's conscience and he began to doubt the value of venturing any further compared to the grave risk of being cut off entirely from the T'au Empire.
It was at the very moment that Commander Dawnbringer had finally resolved to halt the expedition and return to Kor'shan empty-handed when the fleet's Air Caste pilots spotted an anomalous reading on their crusier's scanners. They had detected a small planet--perhaps it wasn't even a planet but a large moon--on the fringes of a nearby system that was remarkably dense and exhibited an intense local gravity. The explanations for this reading weren't immediately obvious, but the geo-engineers of the Earth Caste aboard the expedition proposed that it could be caused by a remarkably large cache of heavy metals, such as admantium, which were critical raw materials when manufacturing the T'au's signature elegant-yet-durable buildings, armor, and battlesuits.
Shas'o Gal'eth knew well that securing the immense deposit of resources implied by their scanner readings might be the perfect solution to shoring up the Fifth Sphere's tenuous defenses around the Startide Nexus. If this planet did indeed carry an exceptional trove of rare metals, claiming the planet for the T'au might catalyze the local production of more battlesuits, strike cruisers, and orbital defense systems on Fifth Sphere worlds, thus avoiding the lengthy shipping process from the T'au Empire through the Startide Nexus. Yet his judgement was clouded by doubts: surely we are not the first race to discover this mineral treasure, Dawnbringer thought to himself, and what could we do if we find this planet heavily fortified against us? Will we be swift enough to turn back before being spotted and assailed? Or are we walking at great risk into a trap that may lead to our demise?
What the Shas'o didn't realize was that his pilots had detected the planet Volarius, a small Imperial admantium mining outpost on the outer reaches of the Armageddon sector. The Imperium had colonized the world several millenia ago precisely for its admantium deposits, which aided in the production of the Titan legion that safeguarded Armageddon Prime. Successive decades of catalysmic conflict had decimated the Imperial forces in the Armageddon sector, and Waaagh Ghazghkull's most recent invasion had caused nearly all Imperial forces to abandon Volarius in order to reinforce Armageddon itself, leaving Volarius virtually unguarded aside from a small planetary defense regiment.
Commander Dawnbringer thought back to his years of tutelage at the Kor'shan Fire Caste Academy. What would his mentors advise if faced with such a choice? Should he risk the survival of every loyal member of his Expedition Force for the possibility of securing invaluable resources for the Empire? Or should he remain cautious, instead making the years-long journey back to the Kor'shan Etheral Council for further guidance and reinforcements?
Gal'eth stood deep in thought on the bridge of the fleet's flagship Il'Fanor cruiser, surrounded by his closest advisors. One minute passed. Then another. Nearly ten minutes passed in contemplative silence before the Commander spoke.
"Kor'el Aru," he spoke at last, addressing the Air Caste Commander of the third Expedition Force, "we are the Kor'shan. It is our duty and honor to venture beyond the horizons seen by any T'au before us, even if we must pass into peril. We will not turn back. Set our course towards this planet... and ensure there is a place for me and my brothers on the first Manta dropped into orbit. The Fire Warriors of the Kor'shan Sept will claim this world for The Greater Good!"