Kryptman

Inquisitor Fidus Kryptman is an Ordo Xenos inquisitor of the Imperium who devised the Kryptman Line, a cordon of sacrificed worlds set against the Tyranids. He served within the Inquisition, the Emperor’s secret police, in the Ordo charged with the study and containment of alien threats. He is remembered as one of the Imperium’s foremost students of the Tyranids, the extragalactic swarm also called the Great Devourer. His name is attached to the most drastic strategic proposal made in response to the hive fleets: that the Imperium should deliberately destroy its own worlds in the swarm’s path rather than defend them.

Kryptman’s reasoning rested on how a hive fleet feeds. A Tyranid swarm consumes the biomass of a world and carries it onward, so each populated planet that falls strengthens the fleet that moves on to the next. The Kryptman Line, in the accounts that describe it, was a cordon of worlds to be burned, or stripped of life by Exterminatus, ahead of the advance. The intent was to leave the swarm with nothing to consume, so that it starved and slowed before it reached more valuable systems. It followed the invasions that began with Hive Fleet Behemoth and continued with Hive Fleet Kraken and Hive Fleet Leviathan, and it belongs to the long defence of the Eastern Fringe and Segmentum Ultima. Accounts differ on how far the Line was completed and on the dates of its first proposal and adoption.

A second stratagem, the Kryptman Gambit, is attributed to him. It held that the Tyranids might be drawn towards the Octarius sector, where a vast concentration of Orks was already at war, so that the two species would exhaust one another. The proposals were controversial from the start. Other Inquisitors and Imperial authorities objected that they meant the deliberate loss of billions of Imperial subjects on the strength of a calculation. The Inquisition is recorded as having declared him a traitor, or Excommunicate Traitoris, for ordering the cordon. His status is now given as missing, and later tradition holds that he may still be travelling the void in pursuit of Tyranid spore-trails. His contemporaries in the Ordo Xenos and the commanders who faced the hive fleets continue to cite his analysis of the Tyranids, even where they disown the casualties of his methods. In the setting, Kryptman stands for the argument that a war against a devouring enemy may require the Imperium to destroy what it would otherwise protect.