Event · M30

Carinae Retribution

The Carinae Retribution was a campaign of the Great Crusade fought in the Carinae System, whose sun held no planets but was ringed by the so-called Thousand Moons, immense void-cities left by a power long lost to Mankind. Their inhabitants, organised as the Carinae Sodality, refused all overtures of compliance, and a Raven Guard task force of nearly thirty thousand legionaries, with Imperial Army contingents twice that number, was sent to bring the system to submission. The Night Lords, under Konrad Curze, joined the operation soon afterwards. Rather than besiege the system as a whole or fight the Sodality’s combined fleets, Corax directed his Legion to strike the void-cities one at a time, exploiting the isolation that had always been their weakness. On the moon-city Zenith-312, the city’s Arch-Comptroller, whose name is rendered variously as Agarth or Argath, released an Age of Strife anima-phage, reducing citizens and the attached Imperial Army garrison alike to a mindless horde. The Raven Guard proved largely resistant to the agent, but were compelled to destroy tens of thousands of their former allies to contain it. The Arch-Comptroller fled to a remote station in the corona of the system’s star. Moritat kill-teams destroyed every vessel of its flotilla but one, and Corax himself listened over the open vox for four hours as the station broke apart, hearing the Arch-Comptroller rage and plead until the screams ended. The pursuit allowed Carinae’s remaining defenders to consolidate, and the campaign dragged on for almost seven further months, at a cost of many thousands of lives. Later in the fighting, Curze turned on members of his own command, executing recruits who had murdered civilians for sport and then bombarded a city to conceal the killings. Amid the resulting ruins, Corax, accompanied by a Raven Guard force, confronted Curze and his retinue under Sevatar; the two primarchs came close to open violence before Curze, heeding Sevatar’s counsel, withdrew.

See where Carinae Retribution occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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