That's not seemed to be the consensus among the people familiar with the lore. Are you familiar with the lore and disagree?
It would be better to delay any conflict until we are better armed and informed.
I don't think zealots care much for logic; additionally, the Marines are the people they send to "shoot them all". Their reaction may be morr trigger happy than a random member of the IoM.
Yes, but that's mostly because "The lore has a lot of interpretations, which pretty much boils down to 'How much does today's writer want to make this look like a nonfunctional parody' ". The Imperium very much
is an edifice that continues to exist primarily based on a constant outpouring of Literal Miracles to continue existing despite breaking physical laws of reality at every turn to continue doing so (The whole Hive World Problem where you can somehow pack trillions of people in one place with unreliable logistics and little to no understanding of how it all works, and
completely being incapable of self-sustaining themselves. But somehow, a single shipment from an agri-world being a month late--which is positively gentle for a Warp delay--doesn't kill half the population from starvation when they're already riding on the ragged end of what a human being requires to not melt down. Despite this, Hive Worlds are
Insanely productive despite being indescribably wasteful and only existing because of fairy dust and wishful thinking).
Typically, Space Marines aren't exactly who you expect to hold ground, they're special forces in the modern day, who exist to deliver extreme amounts of force to hard targets. If they're sending a
Space Marine on a scouting expedition blindly, this suggests a couple possibilities.
A) They've already abandoned the Codex Astartes out of neccessity and broken the limits on their numbers enough that they can have an observer even on high risk-dubious reward operations, meaning that they've already taken the first step towards not being unreasonable dogmazombies.
or
B) They literally cannot trust anyone else to do a half decent job of it, so they need to spend a transhuman super soldier to run herd on an exploratory mission, which means they're desperate--which means we have room to bargain.
Space Marines are warrior-monks, who exist to be broken out when the need is greatest, not to be used for every brushfire that ever pops up. They
might deign to get involved in one for their own reasons, but that's not the default assumption. The fact we're
directly dealing with one is informative in its own right. More importantly, we're looking at a Blood Angel successor here more than anything else--and while they definitely have
problems, they're well contained and typically among the best of the Astartes in terms of "Not being complete pieces of shit". They're positively saints compared to, say, the Dark Angels, who regularly abandon entire battlefronts because they got a dubious hint that an old shame was spotted somewhere.
They can and
do delegate, because at the end of the day, an Astartes is a large investment in training and manpower, and poorly suited as solo operators where they can be singled out and rushed down--or god forbid, captured. Yet he's here leading a scouting mission. That's
important, and that's an
opportunity to make contact on favorable turns.
But that gets a lot more difficult if we start spouting bullshit that
Will eventually out. Space Marines have
very long memories, and access to Bullshit of their own--like divination and telepathy at the higher ends, even disregarding what a Scout Veteran might be able to pull off in terms of infiltration. If we lie, we're
committed to that lie, and at the end of the day, we
Will be caught, because it's a lie that we don't fully control all of the information related to it.
It's best to be
mostly truthful, at least in the sense that we're sticking to facts that they can't
disprove without having an overwhelmingly advantageous position on us to begin with, at which point we might as well kiss our ass goodbye anyway, or hope our goodwill so far has earned a measure of forebearance.
They're a threat, but they're also an opportunity, and we have a net bonus of
+23 on negotiation rolls thanks to Victan now. I'm willing to bet on straight-shooting with them over assuming it's a failure to begin with and preparing for total war against transhuman super soldiers, even if they're holding the line against who-the-fuck-knows what in the Sector.
It's a good chance to do some Problem Alchemy after all, I was very careful when I came up with the Threat List, to make sure no two groups were l ikely to be willing to cooperate very closely. If they're being pressed in on multiple fronts, even just being able to go "Our Southern/Eastern/Western flank is secure because they'd have to get through Denva first" is impressive bargaining power given the numbers limitation (And you cannot mass produce Astartes and expect them to be very good at their jobs, every single one is a twenty, thirty year investment just to get to the point where they'd qualify as a line trooper, not even an elite! That's not something you can handwave off). And we can assuredly do better if we don't fuck up our Diplomacy.
