Event · M33

Red Stars Campaign

The Red Stars Campaign was a series of wars fought by the Dark Angels from 732.M33 to 822.M33 to secure the Kulgotha system for the Imperium. The mineral-rich system had been overrun by Orks, and the Dark Angels Space Marine Chapter fought to scour it of its xenos occupiers and claim it for Imperial rule. The campaign’s place within the wider galaxy is not recorded, and no segmentum can be confirmed for it, even though Kulgotha and the world of Vermilac Prime, where the war’s climactic battle was fought, are both named in surviving accounts of the campaign. The war arose from the presence of a large ork Waaagh! (a tribal ork war-horde) led by the warboss Zogax da Great, whose forces had seized Kulgotha and its resources. The Dark Angels fought in many of the engagements that followed over the campaign’s long span, though the whole Chapter was committed only at the climactic battle on Vermilac Prime. There the Dark Angels moved to cut off the Waaagh!, hoping to use the Deathwing, the Chapter’s Terminator-armoured elite, to teleport close enough to Zogax to kill him outright. The plan was disrupted when Zogax’s Meks (ork artificers) deployed a jamming device that stopped the Deathwing teleporting near the warboss. Supreme Grand Master Alloken instead led his command squad and the 3rd Company directly against Zogax’s elite bodyguard, the Mega Nobz, but the Orks’ mechanised war machines ground the attack down, and Zogax, wielding a chainaxe, cut Alloken down and reached for the Lion Helm, one of the Chapter’s relics. Cypher, present on the field, fired a plasma pistol through gaps in the Mega Nobz’ armour plating and put bolt-pistol rounds through Zogax’s remaining eye and his bionic eye, killing the warboss who had just killed Alloken. He then dragged Alloken’s body and the recovered relics into a trench and fled; other Dark Angels, unable to identify him amid the wreckage of the ork machines, fired after him rather than at the surviving Orks. Once the jamming device was neutralised, the 1st Company teleported into the field and secured it.