SIEGE PERILOUS: A WARHAMMER 40K REBEL QUEST

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor of Mankind has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Man for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat to humanity from aliens, heretics, mutants -- and far, far worse.

Today, this year, this day, you will be one of them. You may be a mutant. You may be a heretic. You may be worse.

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Zelung Delta. Hive planet. Home of heroes.

Dozens of years ago, the foul xenos known as the 'Tau,' espousing their false and naive doctrine of the Greater Good, bent weak willed optimists and dreamers in Segmentum Thrax to their cause. The sector was aflame with treason and insurrection. The treasonous rogues were as worms, burrowing into the edifice of the Imperium and gnawing at the root. Rightful authority forgotten, churches burned, the good folk of the Sancta Imperialis impaled arse to mouth and electrocuted, like common heretics! Every depravity was embraced, if you could see the vile Tau with their sewage brown abominata mechanica in the orbits of the planets of the Imperium no whip could flay it from your memory.

Yet the Emperor protects, and His wrath comes that and right soon. The purgation of the taint of the xenos burned through Thrax Sector in the form of a great crusade. The Astra Militarum and the Adeptus Astartes, hand in hand, made a woe of the houses of the Heretics. The ships of the mighty Imperial Fleet burned planets to ash as an object lesson to the xenophiles, and the war…

Oh, it's gory glories lay heavy on the mind.

The clash of the fleets, the embarkation of armies, many stories and careers were made that day. The foul xenos fled like mist before the sun, only choosing to stand and fight when the crusade fleet had burned every one of their outposts to cinder.

What did those heretics think, when they saw their sponsors so humbled?

You want to know. You feel some kinship to them.

You were a commander in the Crusade. You fought for the Imperium, true, but you were really fought for the Thrax Sector. It was your home. You were born on Zelung Primus, an oceanic world, and had the luck to be sponsored into a billet in the Astra Militarum, where you rose to command a tithe-regiment. Your boys spilled their blood on Zelung Delta. Your boys fed their bodies to the machine. And what did you get out of it?

Some fragging scum suck from a sector you never heard of as the sector governor, opressing the good folk with taxes and tithes. Because the Thrax Sector was too tainted with treason. Did you not part with your arm and your eye for the Imperium? Not even in Thrax, no, they hauled you all the way across the Segmentum and you lost them fighting Orks. Where do they get off, calling you a traitor?

If it went differently, you imagine that you could have spent your life commanding your regiment. A comfortable nobody. But because of a tangential connection to a rebel (you were somewhat friendly to a known rebel in boot camp) you were booted out of the service in disgrace. In fact, the majority of officers from Thrax were shuffled off. Some were executed, some, like you, were cashiered, expelled from the service.

So you rebelled. A prior ring of discontents, half disgruntled Imperial officers who were similarly given the boot, and rebels the Inquisition never managed to catch scooped you up while you were doing your level best to give yourself a chemical lobotomy via amasec. To a man, they are equally as dissatisfied with the Imperium, who they gave so much and received so little in return, as they are with the Tau, lying noseless bastards who talk a big game but vanish like mist when the heat's on.

No more Tau, no more Imperium, the sentiment goes. The taxes to the Administratum can bloody well stay in the Thrax Sector. No more ten percent from every planet marching off to fight for some foreign bastard's war, be it double eagle or Tau insignia. For years, the Conspiracy spread its influence, persuading amenable planetary governors and receptive naval forces. It is commonly judged that with a Tyranid incursion coming in from the galactic south, Imperial efforts will be diverted. It needs, they tell you, a concrete military loss that will tie up the majority of the Imperial military assets in Thrax, letting the Conspiracy's militaries sweep the rest of the sector.

And then, independence.

The Conspiracy elected you to be the firestarter. For what reason?

[]- Your Personal Charisma: Like thousands of other officers, you lead from the front. All you have is a laspistol and a dueling saber, and you charge in front of your regiment, shouting, asking if they want to live forever. You make friends easily. Your comrades all like you. Invariably, whoever joins your unit will cheerfully die for you after a month. Is that a gift?
[]- Your Technical Credentials: Your heart pumps engine oil. You breathe promethium. Is it the machine spirits, or is it your own aptitude? In any case, you were an artillery officer. Your battery of big guns never choked, not once, to the frustration of the Mechanicus. There's no one better to personally see to the defense of Zelung Delta. You dream of anti-orbital guns gutting battleships.
[]- Your Intelligence Competence: Military intelligence might be a contradiction in terms, but you've made the best of it. Rising up as a radio officer, you eventually commanded the signals battalion for your regiment before the regiment entire. You are suspicious, calculated. What to others look like openings looks to you the most obvious trap. In another life, you would have made a good Inquisitor.

You and your diehard partisans, the tattered remnants of your regiment, entered the Zelung System disguised as run of the mill travellers. Soldiers on pilgrimage, to pay homage to the site where the Tau were expelled from the Imperium. True. You hope to add one more holy deed to be worshipped on Zelung Prime. You want to say to your descendants, here is where we won our freedom. This is holier ground than Terra itself.

Years before you were even inducted, the Conspiracy was already at work in Zelung Prime. They wooed allies to your cause, and though it is agreed that it would be better for the new government-to-be's military arm to do the bloody deed, you would find it quite impossible to decapitate the hive planet's government without them. You would find it doubly impossible to hold it without them.

Who did you recruit to coup Zelung Delta?
[]- The Chem-Barons: Despise them as two bit Slag brewers if you want, these men and women hold the hearts and addictions of teeming billions in their iron fists. When they snap their fingers, entire underhives mobilize. Some of them are ice cold sociopaths who want a retirement a bit more secure, others have the immense power of self delusion. They think that they'll actually help the oppressed when they turn legitimate. All have the same thought: those inbred bastards up on the spires, we can do a better job…
[]- The Rogue Traders: Ultima Ratio Regum, and nothing Ultima Ratios like a small armada of Rogue Trader Cruisers. The captains there made bad bets: they threw in with the Tau. Their involvement was hidden, but it's a matter of time before they vanish into an Inquisition blacksite. Ergo: they've sworn to aid you and the future government in every way they are able. All you can do is hope that this time, you won't go the way of their last allies.
[]- The Number Two: The lieutenant governor reached out to you, first. Foreigner she may be, she's intimately aware that the current planetary governor has no plans to move his ass out of his seat any time this century. You have to respect the daring of this woman. Her first move is to engineer an entire traitor coup. The Conspiracy doesn't think that she'll be loyal all the way, no, but if she wants to play ball, why not use her? Just keep a gun to her back in case she tries to sell out again.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.