Event · M41

Battle of Optera

The Battle of Optera was a Badab War engagement of 908.M41 in which the Minotaurs Chapter destroyed the Lamenters as a fighting force in the Optera System. The system lies in the Pale Stars, in the Maelstrom Zone of Ultima Segmentum. By that year the Lamenters, one of the Secessionist Chapters allied to Lugft Huron, the Tyrant of Badab, had suffered heavy losses guarding convoys and Secessionist supply lines in the southern Badab Sector, and Huron had recommitted them to defend the Pale Stars against the Minotaurs’ raiding campaign. Intelligence supplied by Legate-Inquisitor Jarndyce Frain led the Loyalist command to regard the Chapter as an expendable shield for Huron’s southern flank that could be removed. The Minotaurs found the Lamenters’ fleet resupplying in the Optera System. Accounts differ on the vessel at the centre of the action: one places the Chapter barque Mater Lachrymarum in orbit of Optera IV, while another describes the Minotaurs crippling the engines of the battle barge Daughter of Tempests. Unwilling to abandon their principal ship, the Lamenters concentrated their forces to defend it rather than withdraw, as was their usual practice. The fighting lasted some seventeen hours, ship to ship in the void and on the surface of Optera IV, and the Minotaurs prevailed through weight of numbers despite heavy casualties of their own. Minotaurs Sergeant Zelaos was promoted to Brevet-Captain for his part in the battle. The surviving Lamenters, 311 battle-brothers, most of them wounded, surrendered and were held in a prison orbiting Sagan II; the Chapter’s remaining forces elsewhere were estimated at fewer than a hundred. The Chapter Master, Malakim Phoros, was reported missing, believed killed in the loss of the Daughter of Tempests, and both the barque and the battle barge passed to the Minotaurs. The battle removed the Lamenters from the war and, with other Loyalist successes that year, left the Secessionists on the defensive from 909.M41.

See where Battle of Optera occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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