Sandino's Snakes: Part One.

The Belter Amalgamate didn't fly. So I'm trying again. I warn you, though, it's still not conventional.

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Colonel Ersteno Sandino spent much of his military career in "special operations". As a sub-altern, he led a platoon in more than a dozen commando raids and surgical strikes with the 81st regiment of the Harakoni Warhawks. As a captain, he was in command of the Imperial Guard strikeforce that Inquisitor Stasio Zomosa inducted to cut the head off the Alfanian Insurrection on Bistula VI. And as a Colonel, still seconded to the Ordo Xenos, he formed and trained a regiment-sized unit of the Imperial Guard (called Sandino's Snakes) that accompanied Inquisitor Zomosa on her final expedition.

Soon after the Inquisitorial expedition left, Goge Vandire's Reign of Blood subsumed the Imperium into the Age of Apostasy, and it wasn't until centuries later that anyone in the Ordo Xenos began to wonder what happened. The last recorded contact with the Inquisitor's expedition was shortly before they entered the Perdian Expanse of the Segmentum Pacificus, a vast, uncharted region of space where Navigators are blind and warp jumps must be calculated manually over distances of no more than 3 to 5 light years. The Inquisitor reported rumours of a major Xeno artifact site several hundred light years within the Expanse, informed the Ordo Xenos that he intended to investigate, and set off aboard a commandeered Imperial Navy destroyer.

In truth, Inquisitor Zomosa found what he was looking for. In truth, he collected the contents of the artifact site and brought them aboard the destroyer. In truth, as the expedition made it's way painstakingly back out of the Expanse, a warp storm and a micro-second's breach of the ship's void shields allowed an entity of Chaos to enter the ship. In the ensuing conflict, the Inquisitor, and every psychically active human aboard was killed quite horribly, along with many of the crew and many of Sandino's Snakes. In truth, the crippled ship made it out of the Expanse (thanks to the effects of the warp storm, more than a century had passed) and was found by a massive transport barge. The destroyer was taken under tow and, despite a horrible outbreak of plague aboard the barge, arrived only a month later in the isolated system of XXXXX. And there both crippled destroyer and plague-devastated barge remained, cut off from the Imperium and stranded on a world which, while far from being neo-barbaric, was depressingly parochial and backwards.

The idea of having to spend the rest of their lives there did not please the Snakes, and Sandino's anger and frustration led to a near-violent argument with the local monarch. As a result, the Snakes were not even allowed to disembark from their crippled ship in orbit. And there they were forced to remain - over a thousand angry commandos, cooped up aboard ship, and growing more and more restless with every passing day... week... month...

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I'll leave this here for now, and pick it up again tomorrow.