Gardinaal

Gardinaal, also styled Gardinaal Prime, is the capital world of the Gardinaal dominion, a single-system human civilisation within the region known on Imperial charts as Astrid’s Necklace, Ultima Segmentum. The system passed through the Age of Strife intact and thereafter renounced warp travel altogether, its people content within a cluster of eleven worlds — among them the hot gas giant Gardinaal Quintus and the sunless, nitrogen-glaciered Gardinaal Undecimus — together with hundreds of moons and thousands of asteroid and orbital colonies, sustaining a population exceeding 100 billion. Society was organised as a strict and efficient caste order beneath the High Lords of Gardinaal, mythic rulers held to stand outside death itself; the old and infirm were put to death and their substance recycled into the state. The dominion fielded gene-engineered soldiery, some capable of surviving unprotected in vacuum, armed with gamma-radiation weapons, and defended by small, fast particle-beam warships.

Following a hostile first contact, Imperial forces invaded the system, and in the Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal in 869.M30 the dominion was broken by troops under the primarch Ferrus Manus, who razed the capital city and personally overcame the last of the High Lords. Famine and widespread hardship followed the conquest, yet much of Gardinaal’s heavy industry endured, and its worlds subsequently became valued possessions of the Imperium.