Nero Vipus

Nero Vipus is a sergeant of the Luna Wolves, later Sons of Horus, who commanded Locasta Squad of the Tenth Company. He served as one of the Legion’s junior officers during the opening years of the Horus Heresy, the galaxy-spanning civil war in which primarch Horus turned against the Emperor of Mankind. Vipus is recorded as a close companion of Captain Garviel Loken, with whom he shared a long-standing friendship dating from earlier campaigns of the Great Crusade, the Imperium’s preceding era of military expansion.

Within the narrative of the Horus Heresy, Vipus’s career is bound closely to that of Loken and the Tenth Company. He took part in the Legion’s operations during the Isstvan system campaign, in which loyalist and traitor elements of the assembled taskforce were still nominally united under Horus’s command. When the Warmaster’s treachery was revealed at Isstvan III, loyalist Astartes, including elements of the Luna Wolves under Loken, were deliberately targeted by their former comrades in what is remembered as the Dropsite Massacre. Vipus is recorded as having fought and been gravely wounded in this action, losing an arm and later receiving an augmetic replacement, and as continuing to serve alongside the surviving loyalists in the fighting that followed.

Within the wider account of the Horus Heresy, Vipus is significant chiefly as a representative of the ordinary Astartes sergeants whose loyalty to the Emperor set them against their own Legion following Horus’s turn to treachery. His standing derives less from independent command than from his proximity to Loken, through whom much of the Tenth Company’s experience of the Isstvan campaign and its aftermath is related. He is regarded as an illustrative figure of the personal cost exacted on the Sons of Horus by the Heresy’s opening betrayal.