Inquisitorial Report: Cainite Sanitation Guild 2 - The Advertising Incident
This report barely needs to be classified, as the incident that required its writing is widely known throughout the Damocles Gulf, but damage control is still being run well over a decade afterwards, and this witnessed and notorized report is necessary for showing to newcomer inquisitors to the sector, as otherwise they would never believe it when told.
Shortly after the time when we calculate the Cainite Protectorate Sanitation Guild took delivery of their first flotilla of starships, numerous Imperial star systems along the frontiers of the Cainite Protectorate sensed Warp blips in their outer systems, which went away again almost immediately. As far as anyone could tell, one or more ships had re-entered the Materium on the outskirts of each system, stayed for no more than 5-10 minutes, then left again.
Despite most of the systems going into high alert for several days, nothing came of it, and so people went about their business. What we know now, that couldn't have been known at the time given the delayed nature of Astropathic communication, is that these blips all occurred in a 3 standard day window. How the perpetrators were able to be so accurate with warp travel is still unknown to us, but we suspect daemonic interference in the warp currents. Indeed, Astropaths have since claimed they heard low girlish giggling in the aether around then, but given the nature of other far nastier things they regularly hear that way, they thought nothing of it at the time.
Given the nature of what had been secretly perpetrated, nothing more was noted for another standard week, until the day of the Festival of Saints. This was obviously carefully arranged, as on this feast day most imperial citizens are released from their normal duties to give thanks to the Emperor. It is also the day in the Imperial calendar that the highest number of Imperial citizens are wed, in the hope that the Saints will bless their marriages. The short range auspex arrays for every inhabited planet in each affected system suddenly started picking up multiple fast moving objects, with one heading towards the vicinity of every major settlement on each planet.
The PDF's of each planet unsurprisingly panicked, as most of their high commands were at Temple services, marriage ceremonies, or parties, leaving them without effective leadership (although that isn't so different from most days). Despite some of them managing to scramble their interceptors, the objects, now identified as exceptionally large and unusual looking torpedoes, had evidently been gaining speed in their journey across the star systems, and were moving at a pace that made them almost impossible to intercept. The few that managed to get off shots discovered that the torpedoes had been equipped with miniature void shields. The torpedoes soon entered the various upper atmospheres, and the end was assumed to be coming.
However, the torpedoes were suddenly witnessed to be firing retros and deploying drags, slowing themselves right down. They then aimed for open areas in the middle or on the outskirts of the cities, often public squares in front of the grandest cathedrals, where either opulent weddings of the most important nobles, or vast marriage ceremonies for the masses, were being performed. As the torpedoes approached the ground the heads started to spin, and as they set down they drilled themselves into the ground, leaving them standing upright. As the mass panic died down due to this anti-climax, compartments started to open on the side of the new structures, and incomprehensible mechanisms came to life without tech-priestly intervention.
Then lights flickered to life in midair, and the torpedoes were revealed to be massive hololiths, of a size previously unheard of in the entire Segmentum. They projected test images of exceptional quality, and then settled, projecting an enormous image, hundreds of meters high and visible for miles around, of a very tall, muscular and handsome man, later identified as the Black Commissar, Ciaphas Cain. He was wearing an unornamented black peaked cap, and had a short black towel wrapped around his waist, and that appeared to be it. He also appeared to have been thoroughly oiled all over. The image then opened its mouth and began to speak, revealing that the hololiths also had vast and powerful speakers in them, which echoed the length and breadth of the conurbations. The message was as follows:
"Hello ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me, but if he stopped using Imperial unscented bodywash and switched to Slayer Soap, he could smell like he's me. Look down, back up, where are you? You're on a Starship with the man your man could smell like. What's in your hand, back at me. I have it, it's a bolt pistol with two magazines to kill that thing you hate. Look again, the bolts are now vials of Panacea. Anything is possible when your man smells like Slayer Soap and not an Imperial puppet. I'm on a Tank."
The image, which had changed throughout to emulate these strange sentences with downright weird effects (whether by sorcery or image doctoring, we still do not know), then faded, and was replaced by what we now know to be the Slayer Soap logo of a bare chested, orange mohawked Kin holding a chainaxe in one hand and a bar of lathered soap in the other. The sound from the speakers changed as well, now emitting a very pleasant and cultured sounding female voice, which started talking about the health benefits of Slayer Soap, how it could fight Nurglite corruption, and how it could be easily obtained at very reasonable prices from any reputable Rogue Trader. Every 30 minutes the projection of Cain would be repeated, to general consternation.
While this was happening, the various PDF's which had managed to get their act together were trying to break through the void shields surrounding the hololiths, using small arms, breaching charges, and even tanks. None succeeded, their available munitions being too weak, and fortunately (or possibly miraculously) no one was mad enough to fire a starship weapon at one of our own cities when there weren't any actual enemy combatants.
They eventually shut down of their own volition after about 12 standard hours, as far as we can tell due to the internal plasma generators that powered them having run low on fuel. They had one last surprise however. As the shields shut down, the mechanisms retracted, the hatches closed, and a series of muffled explosions were heard.
Once they were cracked open by the Mechanicus (who right across the sector had been standing around all day, examining the devices from a distance in what can only be described as a state of near rapture), they discovered to their great sorrow and anger that the internals were gone, the inside of the torpedoes were scarred with the telltale marks of melta charges, and all that was left were cooling puddles of liquid metal in the bottom of the cylinder. The empty shells were of course removed and painstakingly examined, to very little result.
The aftereffects of this debacle were subtle but far reaching. Given the hundreds if not thousands of torpedoes that made landfall that fateful day, the spectacular size of the projected images, the sheer volume of the produced sounds, and the enormous populations in the areas around where they landed, it was impossible to contain them. Hundreds of millions if not billions of humans saw and heard the advertisement. Tens of thousands of weddings were called off that day, with one or both parties claiming to have lost interest in the other. The number of cases of confiscation of Slayer Soap from people at all levels of society, which while contraband isn't actually heretical, increased across the region by approximately 300,000%, and the protocols for inspecting the cargoes of Rogue Traders when they are delivered onto a world have had to be enforced far more rigorously than ever before.
Additionally and possibly more seriously, pict captures and recordings of the hololith image of Ciaphas Cain have been confiscated en-masse, with the social groups guilty of possessing them mostly being heterosexual females and homosexual males aged 16-55, and numerous cells of an illegal and heretical social organisation, called "The Ciaphas Cain Fan Club", have been shut down across the sector.
Furthermore, Astropaths claim that they can sometimes still hear echoes of the recording bouncing through the Warp, as though someone or something were playing the recording over and over again, occasionally accompanied by faint squeals of feminine ecstasy. The Ordo Malleus have refused to investigate this, as they claim it sounds too silly to be real.