Event · M41

Assault on Black Reach

The Assault on Black Reach was an Ultramarines campaign fought in 855.M41 against an Ork Waaagh! led by Warboss Zanzag on the world of Black Reach. The Chapter despatched its 2nd Company, under Captain Cato Sicarius, after Zanzag’s horde overran outlying garrisons and reduced most of Black Reach’s hive cities to ruin within weeks. Zanzag’s forces, tens of thousands of Orks built around Boyz mobs and Nobz with Deffkoptas and Killa Kans under a Big Mek, opposed an Ultramarines detachment of tactical squads, Sergeant Telion’s scout snipers, Terminator veterans, and an armoured Dreadnought, all committed under Sicarius’s command. The Ork host is recorded as bursting into the Black Reach system through Jorgund’s Eye, a wormhole thought to connect to the Aeldari webway, engulfing Black Reach and the neighbouring worlds of Jede’ogh and Voldermach before Imperial forces could react. Black Reach’s dense asteroid fields made the system hard to observe from beyond its borders, allowing an Ork force there to go undetected within reach of Ultramar itself. With Ultramarines high command on Macragge already committed against Tyranid hive fleets pressing the eastern reaches of Ultramar, only the 2nd Company could be spared to answer Black Reach’s distress call, and Sicarius was ordered to break the invasion and, where possible, kill the Warboss leading it. Sicarius opened the campaign with an orbital bombardment from the strike cruiser Valin’s Revenge before landing outside Ghospora Hive aboard his Thunderhawk gunship Gladius, supported by a Tactical Squad and Terminators of Squad Helios under Brother Agnathio. He engaged Zanzag directly amid the bombardment, reflecting the Ultramarines’ judgement that an Ork Waaagh! loses cohesion once its Warboss is killed, but Zanzag broke off and escaped. When the Orks renewed their assault on Ghospora, a screen of Thunderfire cannons that Sicarius had pre-positioned cut down the attackers, allowing him to turn south and relieve the Planetary Defence Force garrison besieged at Sulphora Hive. The hunt for Zanzag was left to Sergeant Telion’s scouts, who tracked an Ork submersible back to a cavern lair hidden beneath a waterfall. Sicarius returned to lead the assault on the cavern himself; after hours of close fighting that cost several Ultramarines, including a Terminator, Zanzag was killed and the lair sealed with demolition charges. Within three days, Sicarius’s remaining strikes broke the organised resistance of the Ork host. Rival Nobz and lesser Warbosses attempted to seize control of the survivors, but Waaagh! Zanzag did not recover as a unified force. The Ultramarines withdrew once the campaign’s objective was met, leaving the Black Reach Planetary Defence Force and Imperial Guard garrisons to clear the surviving greenskins, and later accounts describe the fighting as having left the world’s northern continent devastated and its population heavily reduced. The Assault on Black Reach is remembered as a demonstration of how a single Space Marine company, striking precisely at an enemy’s command structure, can offset a far larger Ork host, and it took place against the wider strain that Tyranid incursions further east were already placing on Ultramar’s defences.

See where Assault on Black Reach occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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