Event · M41

Second Battle of Damnos

The Second Battle of Damnos, also called the Second Damnosian War, was fought in 999.M41 and ended as an Ultramarines victory. It took place on Damnos twenty-five years after the Necrons had conquered the world. One account of that first campaign, the Damnos Incident, says the planet was destroyed when a reactor detonated, which conflicts with its later reconquest; Marneus Calgar did not fight in that first campaign. In 999.M41, Watch Captain Lazarius brought Calgar orders from the High Lords of Terra to retake Damnos; Calgar objected but accepted that the earlier failure had to be remedied and that Imperial morale was at stake. Five companies, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th, more than five hundred Space Marines, were gathered with Imperial Guard and Deathwatch support, and Calgar offered Damnosian refugees the chance to fight, which almost every adult among them accepted. A shorter account says Calgar returned at the head of the Ultramarines, Imperial Guard, and Deathwatch, and that the Imperium took heavy casualties as Necrons rose repeatedly from the ground. At the height of the battle the Necron lord known as the Undying unleashed the Baleful Necropolis, a tomb complex that fired blasts of entropic energy; Calgar’s own actions destroyed the Necropolis and released a Transcendent C’tan shard caged inside it. Both armies then fought the shard, which Cato Sicarius destroyed with a vortex grenade, and the Necron leaders were slain and the stasis-crypts destroyed so that the Necrons could not resurrect. A longer account of the opening says Calgar had the fleet emerge at the gas giant Utima, in the same system, using a radioactive asteroid belt for cover; the Victrix Ultra detonated warheads that knocked asteroids toward Damnos, and the fleet flew in with them while drop pods landed automated weapons as a feint, allowing strike cruisers to land the real force before the Necron gauss pylons could re-aim. On the ground Calgar saw the Undying’s floating Necropolis and ordered a precise orbital bombardment while teleporting in half of the 1st Company; Chief Librarian Varro Tigurius warned him by a mind-linked message that a C’tan shard was trapped inside and had to be neutralised. Scouts of the 10th Company damaged a pylon, and Calgar fought his way to it and, with the Gauntlets of Ultramar, turned it to fire on the Necropolis, bringing down its shield and freeing the shard, which Sicarius later destroyed. The planet was retaken in five days; no battle is recorded as having been fought on Utima itself. Sicarius’s own part in the reconquest is recorded in detail. When the Deathwatch reached Macragge with the High Lords’ orders, he is said to have broken protocol by meeting his old squadmate Davian Imocles before the official greetings had been observed, and Imocles later gave him a Nihilus vortex grenade. When Calgar announced the return to Damnos, Sicarius smiled for the first time in decades, and in the lead-up to deployment he trained so hard that he slept in the training cage-vault. On Damnos he fought with his command squad, the Lions of Macragge, against Flayed Ones. When the escaped C’tan Shard of Yggra’nya passed over him and a Flayed One lord, he dropped to one knee and impaled the distracted lord, then leapt over the remaining Flayed Ones and hurled the vortex grenade, which drew the shard into the Warp. The fighting continued over the following five days until the remaining Necrons were defeated and the planet retaken.

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

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