Hernan de Leon and the Conquerors
By author Perfidious Albion
The Fifth Primarch: Hernan de Leon
Name:
Hernan de Leon, also known as the King of Lions.
Appearance:
A tall, handsome man with sunbronzed skin and locks of wavy dark hair. Thus he looks somewhat alike to the Emperor, though he is taller (the Emperor is of human height) and lacks the glowing golden eyes. De Leon is below average height for male Primarchs, which is to say, he is still absurdly tall compared to mortal or Astartes men. In battle he wears armour in his Legion's colours and a helmet shaped like a roaring lion's head. The whole right arm of his armour has been converted into a massive plasma cannon which can blast through thick walls in colossal bursts of sound and light. In his left hand he wields a Power Lance, grandiosely titled Kingslance.
Talents and Personality:
De Leon is a man of three parts: noble, courtly, charming and polite most of the time; respectful, deferential and solemn to those whom he sees as his superiors; and harsh, entitled and demanding to those whom he sees as his servants. There are very few he treats as superior to him: the Emperor, sometimes Malcador the Sigillite (depending on how he interprets Malcador's role within the Emperor's circle), and, semi-secretly, Aurora Starchild, whose extraordinary number of Compliances intimidates him. When people reject his friendly, charming approaches, he turns cold and formal, but scrupulously polite. Indeed, him being formal and polite is a better sign that he is angry than a red face or other common signs of rage.
De Leon's temper does not run hot. It runs cold. He does not burst into fiery rages which soon fade away, as others do. He stews and holds grudges long after others have forgotten the incident behind them.
De Leon listens often to art and music, especially those glorifying himself and his sons. His true love, however, is military victory. Not the battle, not the bloodshed; he is accomplished at them (of course, being a Primarch) but those are merely means to an end. The King of Lions is quite vain. He loves to march through the streets of a conquered city with colourful banners, letting everyone know and see that it is he who rules now and they are under his power.
Hernan de Leon is an excellent engineer and scientist, with a fondness for discovering things for himself and consequently a deep mistrust of the Mechanicum (the feeling is mutual). He is a talented administrator and skilled at commanding massive, grand projects on the scale of hundreds or thousands of star-systems, albeit usually without a great deal of regard for human life.
Homeworld:
Naranjomundo. Orbiting a massive blue star called GH-2101465, greater and brighter than Sol, Naranjomundo is a warm world of many continents, nested in one enormous ocean called the Great Sea. Its continents are small, none of them broader than eight-hundred miles across, and separated by the vast, stormy expanse of the Great Sea. This led to political division in the era prior to de Leon's arrival. The polar regions of Naranjomundo are warm, comparable to what the Mediterranean coast on ancient Terra used to be like, before runaway global warming in the 3rd millennium changed the Throneworld's climate forever. Olives and oranges grow readily. The regions around the equator are deserts so hot that a human without a specialised life-support suit would die of heatstroke.
Before de Leon's pod landed, Naranjomundo was an Agri-World. Today, it is extremely heavily industrialised to the point that it is one of the greatest Forge Worlds in the Imperium. Starships pour in every day from the planets it rules, the Naranjomundan Worlds, feeding in raw materials to sate the voracious appetite of the manufactora. Nearly every square inch of land is covered with hab-blocks crammed with serf labourers or manufactora belching out fumes. The orange trees for which Naranjomundo was named hardly exist anymore.
The GH-2101465 star-system lies in the extreme galactic east. It is as far from Sol as anywhere in the Imperium is.
The V Legion's fortress-monastery on Naranjomundo is not just their main fortress-monastery; it is their only one. Accordingly, it is one of the largest fortress-monasteries in the Imperium. It occupies an entire Naranjomundan continent, four-hundred miles across. It is less monastic than the fortress-monasteries of other Legions, as can perhaps be deduced from the fact that its name is the Palace of the Conquering King. Inside, there are magnificent halls of red sandstone and yellow gold (the Legion's colours), decorated with the paintings of a million artists, all depicting the noble warriors of the V Legion, the planets they have conquered or the battle-scenes of their victories. The palace's exterior, however, is tough and heavily armoured. De Leon is well aware of how centralised his empire is and he has made sure that its centre is not a point of vulnerability. With that armour, its shields and its huge, powerful anti-starship guns, the Palace of the Conquering King is nearly invincible against attack from the void and is a very formidable fortress against attack from the ground. Whatever their love of finery, the Conquerors are still Astartes, and it would be unwise to forget that.
Psychic potential:
Hernan de Leon is not one of the dedicated psyker Primarchs. He cannot open Warp portals, break gates with a wave of his hand, or conjure Warpfire from his fingertips. He does, however, have one psychic ability: compulsion. When de Leon gives a command, almost anyone obeys. They have no choice, for they are compelled by the psychic might of the Primarch of the Conquerors. De Leon can walk into an army of his enemies, say "Kneel", and they will be on their knees before their brains know what they are doing.
This gift is not strong enough to compel another Primarch or the Emperor or xenos beings of strength comparable to those. Nor would it work on a Blank. For everyone else, be they Astartes or mortal, obedience is instant and unquestioning. Possibly—just possibly—someone exceptionally strongest-willed might be able to defy one of de Leon's orders, although the effort would be extreme and incapacitating, like lifting a multi-tonne weight off your back. Therefore, a person with such extraordinary strength of will could maybe disobey an order to surrender to de Leon, but even they could not actually fight him.
Background:
Land sculpts people, and people sculpt the land. Perhaps nowhere in the galaxy is this more obviously true than the planet Naranjomundo.
Naranjomundo has always been a warm world, due to the vast size and brightness of its blue supergiant star, GH-2101465. During the Golden Age of Technology, it was an Agri-World producing olives, oranges (hence the name, 'Planet of Orange-Trees') and other warm-weather fruit and vegetables to feed the teeming quadrillions of people of the Terran Federation. Naranjomundo boomed as it drank from the rich well of interstellar trade. Faster-than-light starships carried fruit and vegetables out of Naranjomundo, and they brought fertiliser and machines of advanced technology in return.
The onset of Warp Storms, due to the Eldar's depravity creating an incipient Chaos God, tore all of that happiness to shreds. The Warp-capable starships of mankind could no longer ply the stars. Unlike less fortunate, more urban worlds, Naranjomundo did not starve. That did not mean it did not have its own problems. The critical lack which shaped the fate of Naranjomundo was this:
Fresh water.
Naranjomundo is teeming with water in the Great Sea which dominates its surface, but all of that water is salty, and rife with alien chemicals from the planet's crust which are undrinkable to humans—as it would have to take an astonishing coincidence for Naranjomundo to have the exact same chemical composition as Terra. On many planets, mankind does not have this problem, but that is not because the planets' chemical composition is naturally Terra-like; it is because of extensive terraforming performed in the Golden Age of Technology. Naranjomundo lies in the far galactic east, as far from Terra as anywhere in the human-inhabited parts of the galaxy. It was such a newly colonised planet when Old Night fell upon mankind that there was no time for extensive terraforming to have happened yet. The terraforming of Naranjomundo was 'quick and dirty': the atmosphere had been shifted from an instantly lethal mixture of methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide and sulphuric acid to a nice, breathable nitrogen-oxygen mixture by genetically engineered bacteria, and then the first colonists had moved in. That may sound reckless to modern ears. But why should they worry? After all, there was a whole human interstellar empire out there, ready to help them…
…until there was not.
The Naranjomundan people depend entirely on water purification machines which were built during the Golden Age of Technology. Every day, these machines convert toxic saltwater pumped from the planet's salty rivers into freshwater that humans can drink. This necessity sculpted the social system of Age of Strife-era Naranjomundo. The ancient machines of water purification are totally necessary to sustain human life on the planet. Therefore, whoever controls the local machine of water purification holds the power of life and death over every other human being. They might as well be a god.
This led to the birth of one of the harshest, most rigid feudal systems in the galaxy. The overseers of the water purification machines turned—slowly, over the passage of centuries—into an aristocratic caste. Social mobility was nonexistent. You were born to be a lord or you were born to be a labourer and to serve your lord. The lords of water tolerated no defiance from the people they ruled. Any defiance could result in being cut off from water, and that was death. There was no escape from this harsh rule. Fleeing from the farms into the wilderness was possible but pointless. If a peasant ran away from the only source of drinkable water on the planet, he or she was signing his or her own death warrant. The lords of Naranjomundo demanded unquestioning obedience, and the peasants learnt to give it, if they wanted to live.
Naranjomundo's population was quite small in the Golden Age of Technology: just a few million humans, tending and overseeing the machines that kept food flowing from the planet's enormous farms to the outside galaxy. Those machines were not Abominable Intelligences, just automated farming equipment, and in the Age of Strife they eventually broke down, due to wear and tear, and the lack of any spare parts for maintenance, as the Eldar-wrought Warp Storms cut off Naranjomundo from the urban, industrial planets which provided them. Because of the loss of these machines, in the few centuries after the Age of Strife began Naranjomundo devolved into a medieval-like technological state. Luckily, the water purification equipment still worked, despite other machines breaking down, because a solar-panel-powered vat which sits still in a chemical plant, peacefully converting water, suffers a lot less wear and tear than a plough being dragged over the earth. Otherwise, all human life on Naranjomundo would have been extinguished.
Over millennia, feuding lords fought wars against one another, and dukes and kings arose from among them, demanding the same absolute obedience that lords demanded from their peasants. Kingdoms arose on Naranjomundo. The planet was far from united. The communications technology for planetary unity simply did not exist. The geography of the planet also lent itself to division: every continent on Naranjomundo is no more than eight-hundred miles across, most of them smaller, and there are many different continents like dots scattered around the Great Sea. And because of the planet's extreme high temperatures, air turbulence is furious, so the Great Sea is stormier than any ocean on Terra. Not a single Naranjomundan kingdom ruled any land outside its home continent, because it was too difficult to exert power across the breadth of the huge, stormy ocean which dominates the planet. And plenty of kingdoms did not even rule a whole continent. A lot of the continents were politically divided, with multiple kingdoms upon them.
For millennia, the peasants of Naranjomundo toiled on their farms in a culture of cruel serfdom. Serfs were totally under the power of their lords. They could not be bought and sold, but other than that, they might as well be property, not people. And as this was the main base of social relations on Naranjomundo, it also governed the larger structures—duchies and kingdoms—which formed later than the lordships. Lords were just as under the power of their dukes, and dukes under their kings, as peasants under their lords.
That is not to say Naranjomundo was in stasis. Time is anathema to stasis, and no state of society lasts forever.
With the passing of the centuries, mankind climbed slowly back up the technological ladder. Tiny wooden fishing boats, used only to ply the rivers, became bigger, bolder ships, able to traverse the horrifically storm-ridden Great Sea. Over uncounted generations, the sailors of Naranjomundo learnt to sail waters more vicious than anything on Terra. Mankind rediscovered the secrets of the electromagnetic spectrum: microwaves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet, radio. People took pictures on photographic plates. They even learnt to fare the sky. By the time a mysterious scientist on distant Terra was gene-forging his first Thunder Warriors for his Unification Wars, Naranjomundo's technology was roughly analogous to late-2nd-millennium early-3rd-millennium Terra… but only very roughly. It was, of course, far ahead in some areas and far behind in others, because Naranjomundo and Terra had different resource-bases. Notably, Naranjomundo had no fossil fuels, because it simply did not have fossils. Terra had had billions of years of life-forms to fossilise. Naranjomundo had had no life at all until the arrival of mankind shortly before the Age of Strife began. Instead of coal, oil and natural gas, the Naranjomundans had learnt photovoltaics—solar panels, drawing on the abundant light of their supergiant star—by reverse-engineering some of the tech-relics left behind from the Golden Age of Technology. As they lacked fossil-fuel hydrocarbons to make them from, the Naranjomundans also lacked all plastics. In return, they did have an understanding of semiconductors and of super-light ceramics which would put 4th-millennium Terra to shame. From the perspective of one of those few galactic inhabitants educated in mankind's ancient Terran history, the resultant technology base would look schizophrenic in the extreme. Sleek, light aircraft with exquisite nanoscale electronics flew in the skies of a planet that had never sent a single rocket into orbit because the whole idea of burning hydrogen-based chemical fuels for energy was foreign to them. In war, solar-powered electric war-bikes clashed against each other on battlefields that had never seen a tank, because such a heavy vehicle would obviously be impossible to move. All Naranjomundo's vehicles were light ones.
Time changed many things on Naranjomundo, but it did not change the dependence on water purification machines. These were jealously guarded by the aristocracy as the source of their power. A lord who controlled the only local supply of drinkable water still held power of life and death over his subjects. On account of that, it remained true that a lord held absolute power over his peasants, and a duke over his lords. Peasants might work in manufactora as well as fields, but it had not changed that.
Here, to this world, the pod of the Fifth Primarch of the Imperium of Man came careening out of the Warp. It crashed through the roof of a warehouse and landed on the head of a particularly luckless peasant who was stacking oranges for his lord, on the continent of Arianta. The overseer of the work gang came hurrying out to see the commotion. Espying an infant nestled in the pod, the overseer decided, sensibly, that this was way above his pay grade. He brought the infant boy to his overseer, who brought him to the warehouse's ultimate owner: Duke Fernando de Leon, of the great House de Leon, one of the highest-born families in the Kingdom of Arianta. Duke Fernando and Duchess Maria de Leon were not exceptions to the vicious classism that pervaded Naranjomundan society. Were it not for this baby's origins, they would probably have dumped him on a peasant. However, the overseer's tale of a baby sent from the stars intrigued them. They adopted the baby boy, named him Hernan, and raised him as their own.
Surprisingly, the Duke and Duchess de Leon were good and loving parents. Human beings are strange, that way. The same person who is cruelly callous to a starving peasant can be pleasant, even kind, to someone they see as of their own class. Young Hernan grew up to adore his adoptive mother and father. Naturally, then, when they told him of their ideology, their impressionable young child believed everything they told him: the natural, inborn hierarchy of social classes. A lord is above his peasants. They exist to serve him. Their needs and desires are of no importance. Likewise, a duke is above his lords. And likewise, His Exalted Magnificence José the Twenty-Second, King of Arianta, is high above him, a god among men, and the likes of Hernan exist to serve him.
Hernan de Leon was not the eldest son of Duke Fernando. It is unlikely that the Duke and Duchess de Leon would have adopted him, if that were so. In a society that believed so strongly in aristocracy, they would not wish to deny their own blood. Because Hernan was not due to inherit the Duke's estate, he joined the army of the Kingdom of Arianta. He was much too young for that, given a Primarch's accelerated ageing. He pretended to be older. His parents faked his age when they filed for him to join the Army with an officer's commission.
Of course, being a son of the Emperor of Mankind, de Leon proved himself an excellent soldier and leader of men. He could wield an army like a scalpel, and in person none could match him on his war-bike: the way the Naranjomundan aristocracy traditionally fought. He rose swiftly through the ranks of the Ariantan Army in King José's wars against the other kingdoms of Naranjomundo. In a matter of mere years, the young man, not yet ten years old, got his first promotion, from lieutenant to captain—no small thing in the Ariantan Army, where seniority often mattered more than talent. He rose shockingly quickly to major, colonel and beyond. By the time he was fourteen, he was a general, serving alongside men who were almost all wrinkled white-haired men in their seventies and eighties. Some in the Army were jealous of this dizzying rise, but de Leon paid them no heed. He was more talented than they were and he knew it. It did not take a genius to notice. As his mother the Duchess de Leon had told him, a duke's son should pay no heed to the petty resentments of his inferiors. And he was the best general on all Naranjomundo. With brilliant tactical and strategic masterstrokes, he led the Ariantan Army to victory over the neighbouring Kingdom of Quelegon. Entire Quelegonese armies were masterfully cut off from supply, isolated, and precisely sliced apart. De Leon's victories doubled the size of the Kingdom of Arianta by conquering an entire continent.
A victory parade was organised in the capital city of Arianta to honour the victorious army. General de Leon attended in all humility. He did feel a little dismayed and slighted when the parade made no mention of the victorious general, but he pushed down those emotions, hard. His parents would be ashamed of him for that. Young as he was, he truly believed in what they had taught him: that he was born inferior to King José the Twenty-Second, and it was his privilege to serve his king as best as he was able.
All of this lasted until de Leon met the king himself.
José the Twenty-Second, of the House de Arianta, was not an idealist like Hernan de Leon. He knew perfectly well that the feudal system which placed him on the top of the ladder was an artificial creation, easily disturbed by a man of talent and charisma… such as this sincere, deferential, beaming young general who (José had been told by his informers) the common soldiers of the Ariantan Army would follow into anywhere and anything. Perhaps even if he told them to dethrone their king.
When Hernan de Leon was finally brought before the King of Arianta, it did not go as he expected. De Leon expected to be congratulated for his victories, maybe thanked. At the very least, acknowledged as a loyal and useful servant to His Exalted Magnificence. Instead, he was berated. In a rambling speech, the balding, overweight King José accused his general of incompetence for every casualty and every minor setback in the near-flawlessly executed offensives that had won the war against Quelegon for Arianta. The accusations were ludicrously unfair. Worse, de Leon knew it. All the inherited ideology in the galaxy could not change this. He might defer to the king, but he was a general and he knew his trade, and he knew that if he had acted differently in the ways the king now suggested he should have, he would have lost his battles.
Mere public humiliation was not the end of it. After this long tirade, José ordered de Leon to be clapped in irons. The soldiers leapt to do their royal master's bidding. Despite de Leon's popularity in the army, no-one came to help him. De Leon looked around and finally realised that the officers here were all those who had resented him and whispered against him. All his own supporters had not been invited to the parade.
At last, the Primarch's patience was spent. At last Hernan de Leon looked upon his king with clear eyes, undeceived by inherited dogma, and what he saw was this: a fat old man with a crown perched on a receding hairline, scared to death of a general who would have died for him and died happy.
A single flex of de Leon's arms, and his irons snapped. Another, and the men around him were thrown away like toys of an impatient child. From where he had been kneeling before his king, de Leon rose to his full, imposing height. He towered over King José the Twenty-Second. A sharp, rank smell came out. King José had pissed himself. De Leon wondered: how had he ever believed this man was superior to him?
The king shrieked a command. Hundreds more soldiers came rushing down to tackle this defiant upstart. Many pointed guns at him.
And Hernan de Leon spoke:
"Kneel."
And they knelt. The soldiers. The whole parade. The crowd. They knelt in their hundreds, they knelt in their thousands, they knelt in their tens of thousands. A few of the more strong-willed wavered on their feet, trying to stand, trying to be masters of their actions themselves, trying to resist the will of that irresistible voice. They failed. They too fell to their knees.
The kneeling rippled out like an avalanche. Where it had started, it was impossible to stop. Soon the entire crowd was kneeling. In the vast public square where the parade had been held, not a single person was standing, except de Leon. Even King José jerked up from his throne and practically fell over his gaudy purple robes to get down on his knees before de Leon.
It felt right. It felt natural.
De Leon thought to himself: He understood now. His parents were right: there was a natural order. Some people were superior to others, and those others lived to serve their betters. He did not disbelieve his parents in this principle, nor would he ever. They had just been wrong about who was superior to whom. He was superior to the King of Arianta. Not he of the House de Leon, a son of a ducal house; but he the man taller than any other man, the child who grew to manhood in a mere few years, the boy who had been sent from the stars. He was different from everyone else. He was better. So of course it was his right to rule them all.
From that moment, Hernan de Leon was acknowledged as King of Arianta and Quelegon. His opponents lost all taste for resistance when their king, unchained, swore fealty in public to him. (Unchained, at least, by physical chains. Mental ones were another tale.) That was not enough for him. He led his armies to conquer Naranjomundo's other continents. It was a hard-fought war—Naranjomundo had dozens and dozens of continents, of which de Leon ruled only two, and many of the others formed a coalition against him. Nonetheless, he triumphed. If a few million peasant soldiers died in that war, what of it? They were of the lower classes, he the highest of the high. They lived to serve him. It was not as if their lives actually mattered.
De Leon knew he was a Primarch, though he did not know the word. He knew his inborn gifts were superior to everyone else's. Following the ideology he was raised with by his adoptive parents, that meant he was born to rule, and others were born to serve. For others to defy him was not just evil, it was an affront to reality itself, a denial of the natural order of things.
De Leon brutally subjugated the other kingdoms of Naranjomundo. He deposed dozens of foreign kings and carved new estates out of the lands of those foreign lords who refused to surrender and acknowledge him as their feudal master. These estates he granted to his own loyalists in the Ariantan Army and nobility. Thus he created a class of landholding aristocrats deeply loyal to him alone, the new king, the new order, for without it they were nothing. However, those lords who did surrender to him without a fight were permitted to keep their lands and privileges intact. This was done on purpose to give people an incentive to surrender. Later in de Leon's wars of Naranjomundan unification, even some kings surrendered without a fight. These, too, he granted the right to keep their lands and privileges. All that he demanded of them was that they obey him, they pay taxes to him, and they change their titles from 'king' to 'duke'.
Twelve years of bloodshed after the epochal moment when King José of Arianta was made to kneel, the last kingdom fell. Hernan de Leon was not King of Arianta and Quelegon. He wore a new title: King of All Naranjomundo. The first in all of time.
As king, de Leon led the Naranjomundans to escape the surly bonds of their planet's gravity. He invented satellites, then nuclear fusion reactors—which had long been known to be possible by Naranjomundan scientists, but never achieved—then spacecraft to extract hydrogen gas from GH-2101465 III, IV, V and VI, the gas giants of the GH-2101465 star-system. (Naranjomundo itself was technically GH-2101465 II, the second planet from that star.) Finally, more than a century after planetary unification, he invented something even more extraordinary: a true starship, capable of travelling faster than light. Or so it seemed to his awe-filled subjects. What de Leon actually did was to dissect a rusting starship that had crashed in the Great Sea, Naranjomundo's planet-dominating ocean, millennia ago, thoroughly enough to figure out how its Warp Drive worked inside. An impressive feat of reverse-engineering, to be sure. But nothing like single-handedly duplicating the invention of Warp Drive, as his admirers would claim—an invention which mankind only achieved in the 18th millennium, sixteen-thousand years after the first spaceflight. De Leon was a Primarch and thus a genius, but he was not enough of a genius to equal sixteen millennia of human technological progress. Nobody is.
With Warp-capable starships in his possession, powered by nuclear fusion reactors and fuelled with gas from the gas giant planets of his home star-system, de Leon put forth his strength to the stars. The armies of Naranjomundo were borne across the void by starships which, lacking Navigators to follow the Emperor's light, had to skim across the surface between Materium and Immaterium. Slow though they may have been compared to Imperial starships, they were good enough for de Leon to conquer world after world after world. Every planet of the Naranjomundan Empire was ruled by a man titled 'Viceroy'. The meaning of this was not by accident. 'Vice', meaning, they were only a sort-of king, acting on de Leon's behalf. They were not true kings. Their planets did not belong to them. They belonged to de Leon. The Viceroys were placeholders for their true leader.
By the time the Emperor arrived, the King of All Naranjomundo ruled an empire of seven-hundred worlds. De Leon had time to establish such an empire because he was the last Primarch to be found, many centuries into the Great Crusade. Nowhere in the galactic disc is as far away from Terra as Naranjomundo is. Still, the Emperor did come, eventually. He found de Leon a mere one-hundred years before the beginning of the Ullanor Wars.
When the Emperor came to Naranjomundo, Hernan de Leon knew fear for the first time in a long while. This enemy had a mighty war-fleet, far exceeding that of the Naranjomundan Empire. There could be no doubt that the Naranjomundan Empire would lose in a fleet confrontation. Speaking by vox transmissions, the leader of the enemy fleet sought de Leon's surrender, which was of course denied. Then the stranger proposed single combat with no weapons except their swords, with the loser to swear fealty to the winner. At that, de Leon was delighted. It was obvious that he would win. This stranger might come from a mightier civilisation, with greater numbers of planets, so as to have the industrial capacity to produce a fleet like this; but he could not possibly be as mighty as de Leon.
De Leon showed up for the duel in his flagship's amphitheatre, wearing elaborate Power Armour and a beautiful blade he had made by himself. He looked every bit as regal as the stranger, who wielded a flaming sword and armour hued in gold. When the signal was given for the fight to begin, with Naranjomundan warriors and the Legio Custodes together watching, the golden stranger raised his sword and took two steps towards de Leon, honouring the terms of the duel. De Leon did not. He simply said: "Kneel."
The psychic force of the Primarch's command blasted through the amphitheatre. The word fell heavy as a hammer, forcing men to their knees. Every man knelt. They could not not kneel.
Every man in the amphitheatre, except one.
+KNEEL.+
And they knelt. The Naranjomundans; the Custodes; the people in the amphitheatre; the people in the rest of the starship. Of course they knelt. They had no choice but to kneel. The golden stranger's psychic command outshone de Leon's as a dwarf star is outshone by a supergiant star. It could not be resisted. That word—not a word, a thought, something beyond speech—hit like the pronouncement of a god, written in stone at the beginning of time. It would be just as easy to fly as to refuse to kneel.
Even Hernan de Leon fell to his knees. His force of will resisted valiantly, but he could not overcome the will of the golden stranger. For so long, ever since the moment he had subjugated José the Twenty-Second, he had been, as far as he knew, the greatest human being in the universe. Now, that had been taken from him. Shocked, stunned, to see his tactic turned against him, to see his own body turned against him, he turned a rage-filled face beset with tears of humiliation up to look at the stranger…
…and saw him smiling. "Well met, my son," said the Emperor of Mankind.
Surprisingly, this discovery mollified de Leon. He was no longer the single greatest human being in the universe, and yes, that was a blow to his pride. But he was the son of him. He was of the most important family in the galaxy, the family of the conqueror of the galaxy. He might not be the biggest fish in the pond, but he was in a much bigger pond, and he was still of the blood royal. If he had discovered that he was something insignificant, he would not have been mollified. He had not, though. He was still royal, still important, indeed, important on a greater scale than he had ever been before: the whole galaxy. This pleased de Leon's ego. He was still near the top of the ladder. His father was ahead of him, and that made sense. In the society of Naranjomundo, sons should always defer to their fathers. De Leon duly did so, swearing his fealty to the Emperor.
With this discovery, everything made sense. No wonder he was so superior to everyone else. The Emperor was, too, and he was the Emperor's son. Now that de Leon knew of the existence of the Emperor, it made rational sense of his own existence, as per his feudal view of the universe. No longer was de Leon a strange exception to his own worldview, a figure that had come mysteriously out of the stars in a fallen pod. He now understood his origins and why he was mightier than those around him. He had a name for what he was: 'Primarch'. The Emperor was the greatest human being in the galaxy and therefore deserved to rule over everyone else. His children were the second-greatest, inheriting some measure of his greatness, and therefore deserved to rule everyone under him. The Astartes were their children and should rule under them. De Leon heard the news of the Emperor, the Primarchs and the Space Marine Legions and interpreted it through the lens of the feudal ideology he had been taught since childhood, and he found it was good. Everything fit.
With the Emperor's arrival and de Leon's submission to him, the Naranjomundan Empire became part of the Imperium. Formally, it was renamed the Naranjomundan Worlds. That was just a renaming. De Leon's empire continued to be governed the same way.
The Emperor also granted de Leon command of his gene-sons, after a suitable period of learning and adjustment. When they were reunited with their Primarch, the V Legion were known as the Lions of Sol. De Leon changed the Legion's name, as did most of the Primarchs when the Emperor found them. De Leon did not, at the time, know what a lion was, because there are no predators on Naranjomundo except pitiful feral descendants of domestic cats and dogs. The humans who terraformed Naranjomundo into an Agri-World for growing warm-weather crops had no reason to bring dangerous predators there. When he heard of them, however, de Leon liked the idea of an animal thought of as fierce, proud and noble, the king of beasts. And he noted the similarity to his own name, which he deemed proof of the workings of Fate. Therefore, despite changing the name of the Lions of Sol to the Conquerors, he had their lion symbol stay the same and he took it for his own sigil. Because of this sigil, his kingship and his rule as Primarch over the former Lions of Sol, Hernan de Leon became known as the King of Lions.
The V Legion: the Conquerors
Name:
The Conquerors. Formerly, the Lions of Sol.
Insignia and Appearance:
The Conquerors' Power Armour is yellow with red trim. Their gauntlets and helmets are red, and their helmets are shaped like the heads and manes of snarling lions, to strike fear into the hearts of their foes.
The right pauldron of every Conqueror, of any rank, displays the symbol of a lion, rampant and roaring. This symbol is unchanged since the days before they found their Primarch, when the Conquerors were known as the Lions of Sol.
A Conqueror's left pauldron displays markings of his formation and rank, in gold filigree. The higher the rank, the more beautiful and elegant the golden artistry.
Gene-seed Status:
The gene-seed of Hernan de Leon has been remarked to be excellent in its stability, on a level with the gene-seed of Jiun Xiao, the Primarch of the Scourge. It bonds to virtually anyone who is male and of the right age to become an Astartes. By rights, then, the sons of de Leon ought to number more than the 130,000 they do. The reason for this paucity is the Conquerors' insistence on recruiting only from the Naranjomundan Worlds' nobility.
Legionary Assets:
130,000 Space Marines.
The flagship of Primarch and Legion is the Gloriana-class battleship Claw of de Leon. She was named the Lion's Claw before de Leon took command of the Legion.
By far the greatest asset of the Conquerors is the Naranjomundan Worlds: an empire-within-an-empire of tens of thousands of inhabited worlds. In theory, the Naranjomundan Empire disbanded when de Leon pledged himself to the Emperor. In practice, it just changed its name. And it has expanded greatly since de Leon joined the Imperium, since every planet conquered by the Imperium's V Legion has been brought into de Leon's empire. The Naranjomundan Worlds pay their tithes to Terra like other Imperial worlds, but they also pay tithes to Naranjomundo, and they are governed by the King of Lions and his appointed servants. De Leon retains the title King of All Naranjomundo and continues to be spoken of as "His Exalted Magnificence".
The Coronal Starshipyards. This is a vast ring of space stations for starship construction, built in orbit of GH-2101465 I, an uninhabited planet, innermost to its star, which has been brutally strip-mined for ore. The planet GH-2101465 II is more commonly known as Naranjomundo. The Coronal Starshipyards is the only starshipyards in the Imperium outside Mechanicum control which is capable of constructing any kind of Imperial starship, even the greatest of them: Gloriana-class battleships. De Leon spent decades building it up and improving its capabilities. The Coronal Starshipyards' existence is one of many reasons the Mechanicum despise the Conquerors, and the feeling is mutual.
Legion Organisation:
The organisation of the Conquerors is the same as that of the I Legion, the Thunder Warriors, which all the Legions shared prior to the finding of their Primarchs. De Leon saw no need to change a system that works.
—A squad is of 10 Space Marines, led by a Brother-Sergeant.
—A company is of 100 Space Marines, led by a Brother-Captain.
—A chapter is of 1,000 Space Marines, led by a Brother-Commander.
—A brigade is of 5,000 Space Marines, led by a Brother-Brigadier. The Legion usually operates in brigades, with each Brother-Brigadier as almost an independent commander in the Great Crusade. A brigade of Conquerors, plus its huge armies of auxilia, is enough to conquer most kinds of planet.
—A march is of 50,000 Space Marines, led by a Brother-Marshal. This is the largest subdivision, under the full Legion.
Expertise and Combat Doctrine:
When they were reunited with their Primarch, the V Legion were known as the Lions of Sol. They specialised in sudden, coordinated ambush-attacks with speed and shock, great numbers of Legionaries attacking together as a team (just as lions do, being the only social cats), to stun and overwhelm the enemy before they can understand what is happening to them. When Hernan de Leon took command of his sons, he changed this military doctrine profoundly. He kept the idea of Astartes attacking en masse and with speed, while he ditched the element of ambush, preferring other methods.
The most distinct feature of the way the Conquerors fight, compared to other Space Marine Legions, is the system named encomienda. Under this system, enormous numbers of mortal humans, known as encomendados, are recruited to serve the sons of de Leon. Every encomendado has a lasgun. That is often as much as the Conquerors give them. The quality of encomendado regiments is highly variable. Some are plentifully equipped with tanks, antitank weapons and artillery, albeit greatly inferior to the tanks and artillery used by Astartes. Others are little more than hordes of helpless lasgun-wielding infantrymen. Encomendados are treated extremely poorly. Their lives mean almost nothing to their Astartes overlords. They are often used in human wave attacks to probe for weaknesses and soften up the enemy before the real Conquerors move in. Formally, in the political structure of the Imperium, the encomendados are the V Legion's auxilia. The way they are actually used, however, they bear almost no resemblance to the auxilia of other Legions. Encomendados' role is not to fight easier fronts while the Astartes take the tougher fighting. Nor is it to keep the pressure up on enemies already defeated by the Astartes main force. They are there to throw themselves into the thick of the fray and die in droves while their masters coldly search for a point of weakness in the enemy defences. The Conquerors' encomendados exist in breathtaking numbers, hundreds of millions—as many as the auxilia of any five other Legions combined.
Theoretically, encomendados are all volunteers. The literal meaning of the word is 'committed' or 'entrusted': encomendados are men who have been committed to duty. However, in the patriarchal culture that was common on Naranjomundo before the Primarch's landing and has therefore been enforced by de Leon's legal system in the rest of the Naranjomundan Worlds, young men only reach the age of majority at twenty-one. Until then, their elders make the decisions for them. Many families volunteer their sons and grandsons to join the encomendados without their sons' consent because those families are cripplingly poor and need the money. In the deprived, resource-extraction economies of the Naranjomundan Worlds, the wage paid by the Conquerors is the best that an impoverished peasant family can hope to get. To be fair, some encomendados do volunteer themselves. But the majority of them are not volunteers; they are volunteered, sent to near-certain death by their own parents or grandparents. An encomendado who reaches the age of twenty-one has no right to waive the contract agreed for him when he was below the age of majority. Encomendados serve for ten years, so a young man sent by his family at age sixteen is obliged to serve until he is twenty-six. He is highly unlikely to live that long.
When the Conquerors invade a planet, it is common for the fighting to go on for weeks, or rarely months, before the defenders lay eyes on a single Space Marine. Instead, waves of lasgun-armed encomendados in incredible numbers throw themselves into the teeth of the enemy defences. These human wave attacks may seem careless, but they are not. Despite appearances, they are directed by the superhuman intellect of a Primarch. The encomendado waves are carefully calibrated to seek the weakest point in the defence—just with an utterly indifferent attitude to the human lives expended in the process.
Once that weakest point has been identified, the Astartes themselves strike. The Conquerors hit fast and hard, riding jetbikes which have mounted automatic guns of the sort too heavy for even an Astartes to carry by hand. The heavy weapons mounted on their jetbikes give a great weight of fire to the Conquerors' attacks. This habit originates with the military culture of the Naranjomundan aristocracy, who often fought upon electric war-bikes; de Leon himself learnt such things when he served in the army of the Kingdom of Arianta in Naranjomundo's endless internecine wars.
Jetbike-mounted Astartes smash a hole in the enemy defences. Once that has been done, more encomendados pour in through the gap, overwhelming the defenders through sheer weight of numbers, exploiting the breakthrough and spreading out into the enemy-held territory. The jetbike-riding Conquerors race ahead of the encomendado hosts, moving stunningly fast, inflicting total devastation and paralysing shock on the enemy defences. They take casualties while doing so, inevitably, if the enemy is competent. But the strike-forces of the V Legion are not mere squads. They come in great hosts: a tight fist packed close together, at least a thousand Space Marines strong. They are both fast and sizeable enough to absorb the damage inevitably taken in a hard-hitting shock attack. And hordes of mortal serf-soldiers rush in behind them, crushing the enemies stunned by the Astartes rapid assault before those enemies have time to come back to their senses.
The Conquerors' rate of bringing new planets into Imperial Compliance is unmatched among all the Legiones Astartes. Other Legions which were reunited with their Primarchs sooner may have a higher number of Compliances, highest of all the Bringers of Light, but they had a head-start. No other Legion can boast it is increasing the Imperium's number of inhabited planets as quickly as the Conquerors are. This is a source of much pride to de Leon's sons: they boast that they are the best of the Emperor's Space Marines. However, this success comes at a great cost. The populations of planets conquered by the Conquerors do not just fail to grow; they actually shrink, because the rapacious Conquerors levy so many of their young men to serve as cannon fodder. To redress the gender imbalance caused by this reaping, de Leon has embarked on the controversial policy of polygamy. Multiple young women have to marry men too old to fight, while the young men are snatched up and fed into the Conquerors' ravenous war machine.
For this sake, a lot of other Legions do not admire the Conquerors' extraordinarily high rate of Compliances. As Urgrond, the blunt-spoken Primarch of the VIII Legion, put it: "The Conquerors conquer new worlds by bleeding the old ones dry."
Because of the sheer scale of the Conquerors' reaping of conquered planets' male population into the near-slavery of encomienda, planets brought into Imperial Compliance by the Conquerors are much more rebellion-prone than those from other Legions. Most of these rebellions are poorly armed peasant revolts, easily put down by local militia. However, sometimes, the local militia—themselves of the peasant class—join the rebellion. In those cases, revolts grow to consume entire worlds, whereupon they require offworld Imperial forces, led by Astartes, to suppress them. Nearly always, these Astartes forces are from the V Legion, but not always. The King of Lions would actually prefer that no other Legions helped him suppress rebellions in the Naranjomundan Worlds, which he regards as his private domain. But it happens anyway because, sometimes, Space Marines from another Legion are the nearest group of Space Marines to a new outbreak of rebellion in one of the Naranjomundan Worlds. This is at least theoretically a rebellion against Imperial authority on a planet of the Imperium, although in truth most of the rebels would be happy to be part of the Imperium outside the domain of de Leon if they knew what it was like. Therefore it is the duty of any nearby Legion not urgently engaged to go to suppress this revolt, as per the Emperor's standing orders to the Legiones Astartes.
At various times, five other Legions have had to suppress rebellions on V Legion-conquered worlds. One Legion went so far as to send a complaint to the War Council of the Imperium on Terra. They complained that, while the Conquerors gain the glory of lots of Compliances very quickly, the Conquerors' ill-treatment of populations provokes excessive numbers of rebellions and thus imposes an unfair and unnecessary burden on the other Legions who have to come in and clean up their mess.
Legion Weaknesses:
The Conquerors are best at doing what is in their name: conquering. They excel at attacking enemy armies or fixed fortifications. They prefer to be able to wait at their leisure, throw their armies of encomendados at the enemy to find weak points, and then move in, in strength. This makes them weaker when they are on the defensive or when they are against fast-moving enemies who seize the initiative and attack.
Encomendados, being mortals, are more vulnerable than Astartes to psychic influence or simple fear of the enemy. They are much more likely to break in the face of a terrifying enemy than true Space Marines. Therefore, against the more horrific kinds of xenos, the Conquerors have to fight without their usual tactics, putting them at a disadvantage.
The Conquerors love their jetbikes. They fare poorly when fighting in tightly enclosed spaces where they cannot use them, such as the corridors of a starship in a boarding action.
The sons of the King of Lions fight on their jetbikes with their guns, mowing down the enemy at high speed and at range. They are poor in melee. They consider vulgar brawling undignified and prefer other options, though they will resort to it if it seems necessary. Even when they are in melee, their main melee weapons are Power Spears and Power Lances: long-range, by the standards of melee warfare. These weapons grant them a long reach, at the cost of being vulnerable to an enemy who manages to get close enough to make such long weapons awkward. Of course, that weakness is only by the standards of Astartes. A Conqueror in close-up combat would still be a nigh-unstoppable super-warrior by the standards of mortals.
As they usually fight in large hosts—at least of chapter size, often brigades—the Conquerors are not suited to small-unit warfare.
Because of their manner of discipline which emphasises loyalty and obedience and refuses to punish for failure—where Astartes can be punished extremely harshly for disobedience and are safe as long as they obey orders, even if those are bad orders and obeying them leads to a bad result—the Conquerors are incentivised to be inflexible. They are extremely disciplined (in obeying orders, not in avoiding looting) and will follow a given plan to perfection. Low-level initiative in response to changing circumstances is rare, because a battle-brother who disobeys orders knows that if he does not succeed, he might be shot for disobedience.
The Conquerors are disliked by the more morally upstanding Legions because of their brutal ill-treatment of mortal populations. 'Disliked' is perhaps not strong enough a word. More like 'loathed'. To the likes of Nyx, Primarch of the Black Nineteenth, the wellbeing of ordinary humans is the whole reason for the Great Crusade; de Leon, an empire-builder and oppressor of humans, is the antithesis of what she wishes the Great Crusade to be. Nyx, who is silent and unreadable, says nothing of this. Others are not so restrained. A sizeable number of Legions refuse point-blank to work with the Conquerors, ever.
Beliefs and Practices:
Hernan de Leon sincerely believes in the ideology of feudalism as he was taught it by his adoptive parents. He believes, completely and unshakeably, that feudalism is not just the morally right way; it is the only way that works. Without feudalism, there can never be a stable, functioning government that lasts for more than a few hundred years. Opposing feudalism is not just evil, it is also insane, doomed to failure, because it contradicts human nature: rival leaders will tear civilisation apart competing for power, unless there is the stability provided by a rigid hereditary system. Any attempt to establish a non-feudal society will either evolve into proper feudalism or collapse into anarchy, chaos and catastrophe.
Of course, in a civilisation of hereditary rule, the ruling family should be the one best suited to it. And who is best suited, if not the Primarchs and their golden sire? To de Leon, it makes sense that the Emperor should rule the galaxy, because he is old and strong and wise and immortal. The Primarchs, being the Emperor's children, also immortal, also powerful albeit not as much, are naturally to be in second place, deferring to their father as every child should defer to his or her parent. The idea that the Legiones Astartes are meant to serve mankind, not rule it, which is eagerly pursued by Primarchs such as Nyx and Aurora makes no sense to Hernan de Leon. Of course Primarchs should rule. They are powerful and immortal. They are thus the best-suited to ruling. It is their right to rule. It would almost be a dereliction of duty if they were to choose not to. The King of Lions is an empire-builder to the bone.
Not all of the Conquerors agree with their gene-sire's beliefs on Astartes' natural superiority and right to rule. Many, though not all, of the Solar-born Space Marines disagree. Those Conquerors born in the Naranjomundan Worlds, however, agree adamantly with the feudal ideology of de Leon, the founder of their interstellar empire.
The Conquerors do not love killing. They are warriors, of course, they enjoy a good fight as much as any Astartes do, but it is not their overriding passion. To the Conquerors, fighting is a means to an end. Victory is that end. Parading through a defeated enemy's capital with a million voices screaming his name, seeing the faces of the men whom he has conquered, knowing that he can do whatever he wants to them, and knowing that they know this and are helpless to stop him… this is what Hernan de Leon lives for.
The Conquerors are great patrons of the arts. In their halls, painters paint portraits of warriors, fearsome landscapes of their victories in battle and gorgeous landscapes of the beauty of the planets they have brought into the Imperium. Sculptors, too, are welcome among the Conquerors. Playwrights write plays glorifying the sons of the King of Lions. Musicians play great orchestral works in honour of the glory of their deeds. The Conquerors vaguely enjoy these works of art honouring their deeds, but aesthetic appreciation is not the point. The Conquerors are not doing this for beauty or the pleasure of the arts. Rather, this is to impress and overawe mortals with the power and status of the V Legion. It is a statement of power. Power matters. It is the only thing that matters.
The Conquerors are also infamous for looting. Countless priceless relics and works of art and historical heritage have disappeared from planets brought to Imperial Compliance by the Conquerors, soon to reappear in the museums and exhibition halls of Terra. They have been looted by the Conquerors and sold off to rich men and women in the Imperium, to raise funds for de Leon's conquests.
Hernan de Leon professes not to care about the fact that many other Primarchs think he is scum, but inside, he is bewildered and embittered by it. He has grown close to those few of his siblings who do not disdain him. He is fond of Jiun Xiao, Primarch of the Scourge, who shares with him a love of speed in war and a contempt for civilian wellbeing, and of Hanna bar Arcmit, Primarch of the Adamantium Coalescence, with whom he shares a hatred of the Mechanicum and a mutually beneficial commercial partnership. Curiously, he also admires Aurora Starchild, the Lady of the Dawn, despite her being seen as one of the most ethical Primarchs contrary to himself, for she is one of the few of his siblings not to scorn him, despite the Bringers of Light being much more humane to civilians than the Conquerors are. He has no idea that, secretly, Aurora thinks his methods are just as bad as everyone else does. She also thinks that she herself is a filthy disgusting abomination, the worst and foulest Primarch of all, ergo she has no right to judge any other Primarch as a bad person. Were it not for Aurora's self-hatred, she would regard de Leon with the same contempt as the rest do. Nonetheless, de Leon comforts himself with Aurora's politeness to him, being unaware of the reason for it. If the Lady of the Dawn who is idolised by the people of the Imperium sees no fault in him, he cannot be as bad as others say. For that kindness, de Leon is fond of his golden sister.
Recruitment and Discipline:
Discipline among the Conquerors is a curious mixture of the strict and the generous. There are ironclad rules stating that a superior officer cannot punish a subordinate merely for failure. Nor for a great number of other things, such as looting and mistreatment of civilians, which are punished in other Legions but regarded as non-issues among the Conquerors. However, there is one misdeed which does merit punishment: disobedience. A superior who finds a subordinate guilty of disobeying a lawful order can give him any lawful punishment, with no right of appeal, up to and including death by firing squad. On the positive side, problems with disobedience are practically non-existent. On the negative side, it incentivises every Conqueror to stick to his superiors' orders exactly, even if the situation changes in a way that was not foreseen when the original plan was made. If he follows bad orders, he cannot be punished for it. It is not his fault. If he takes the initiative and changes the plan and his attempt does not succeed, he can be shot dead.
The Conquerors recruit exclusively from their homeworld Naranjomundo and the other Naranjomundan Worlds: the planets of Hernan de Leon's empire-within-an-empire, sworn to his service. They used to recruit from the Sol system, when they were known as the Lions of Sol, before their Primarch was found by the Emperor. For a time, this continued under de Leon's leadership. However, he soon put a stop to it. De Leon found that many of his Solar-born Space Marines were uncomfortable with the feudal ideological direction in which he was taking his Legion. In response, he did not dismiss the Solar-born from their earned ranks and promote his own men in his place, as did the ill-fated Primarch of the Abandoned Eighteenth, but he did exile them from the circles of those who give him personal advice. De Leon's close friends among his Legion are all Naranjomundan-born. When he found this out, the King of Lions decided to stop recruiting from the Sol system. Thus, in time, the V Legion will be all-Naranjomundan. The very worst of the Solar-born, those most defiant of de Leon's principles, were given positions of great honour leading the charge against deadly enemies. That took care of that.
Furthermore, the Conquerors recruit solely from the nobility. This is in keeping with de Leon's ideology, taught to him by his adoptive parents and practised by him ever since. The Fifth Primarch believes sincerely that feudalism is the natural order of the universe and of mankind. The higher social classes are born to rule. The lower classes are born to serve. That is their natural place, the way they always should be. Inferiors must obey their superiors. The Emperor stands at the summit of mankind as the most powerful and perfect of humans. The Primarchs, being the Emperor's flesh and blood, are one step below him. The Astartes are inferior to the Primarchs and superior to mortal humans. As such, ascension to Astartes status should only be for the nobility, not serfs. Allowing peasant boys to become transhuman warriors would make them superior to noblemen. It strikes de Leon as a gross violation of the natural order of things.
The Conquerors do make use of young men from the peasantry. They are too pragmatic not to. Most people are peasants, after all. But those young men are for the Conquerors' auxilia only. They will never become Space Marines.
Conqueror recruitment goes like this: first, young men born to the nobility of the Naranjomundan Worlds who volunteer are brought to military academies on their homeworlds. Typically these are not the eldest sons, for those are destined to inherit their fathers' estates. They are to be administrators, not warriors. They are secondborn and thirdborn sons, or nephews or cousins with no inheritance. There they are trained as warriors and leaders of men, and there they go through a series of trials, designed to pick out the fittest and fastest and most cunning and strongest, those most worthy of ascending to the ranks of transhumans. These tests focus just as much on leadership skills as they do on personal combat skills. Personal combat remains important, of course, as for every Space Marine. But de Leon does not expect his sons to be mere warriors. They are not servants of mankind. They are its rulers, its superiors. That means they must know how to lead armies of lesser men. After two years, the best of those young men are siphoned off to become Astartes. They are taken on-board the Conquerors' transport starships and brought to Naranjomundo, to the Palace of the Conquering King. As per the centralised nature of the Naranjomundan Worlds, this vast cyclopean edifice is the one fortress-monastery for the entire V Legion. This is but a fraction of those attending the military academies. The rest of the young men have not wasted their time. The Naranjomundan system does not throw them away. Only the truly incompetent are discarded. Those men who pass their training, just not with the high distinction to become Astartes, are the source of the officers who rule with iron fists over the encomendados, the Conquerors' auxilia.
In the Naranjomundan Worlds, a young man in a military academy does not know whether he is being prepared to be an officer over the encomendados or a transhuman son of de Leon until two years have passed. Similar skills of battle and leading men are expected of both.
Young men who are brought to the Palace of the Conquering King have not yet won Conqueror status. They are Aspirants now, not Neophytes. They face further tests. Unlike some Legions, there are no journeys through the wilderness or suchlike. De Leon views such things as pathetic ritualistic extravagance. Instead, the Aspirants are trained and tested in the skills that they will require if they are to serve as sons of their king. A Conqueror must be a warrior, of course, as any Space Marine must. He must be swift and strong in battle, capable with bolter and chainsword, though it is fair to say the Conquerors place less emphasis on swordsmanship than most Legions would. But he must be more than that. A Conqueror is more than lesser Space Marines just as a Space Marine is more than lesser men. He must be an excellent pilot for one. The Conquerors arise from the culture of Naranjomundo, a planet whose warfare specialised in light, fast vehicles when the Fifth Primarch's lifepod landed there three-hundred years ago. Naranjomundo had no coal, oil or natural gas because it was a new colony at the time the Age of Strife began, still in the process of being terraformed from a once-lifeless ball of rock, and fossil fuels are formed from a previous history of life. The modern Imperium does not use fossil fuels in its vehicles of course; it uses prometheum, refined by high technology from substances extracted from gas giant planets; but fossil fuels are a workable low-tech substitute on many primitive planets, letting those planets create primitive 3rd-millennium-style tanks which bear a crude resemblance to modern Imperial tanks, though they operate very differently under the surface. Naranjomundo was not like that. It had a curious technological paradigm that cannot be mapped to any era of Terran history. Without fossil fuels, it had no plastics. When de Leon landed on Naranjomundo, the Naranjomundans had photovoltaics, semiconductors, nanoscale electronics and super-light ceramics on a level like 6th-millennium Terra, yet none of the heavy ground-vehicles or combustion-based engines that mankind invented in the 2nd millennium. The modern Conquerors are, of course, well-acquainted with technology of the modern Imperium. They are well aware of tanks and other heavy vehicles. They use them for the encomendados and even for Astartes to a minor extent. But their way of war is a way inspired by the traditions of their ancestors and perfected by de Leon through subsequent centuries of technological ascension, practice and experience. For the most part the Conquerors prefer to remain light and highly mobile. The sons of de Leon do not plod along the earth. The kind of war fit for a Conqueror is to rush forward on his jetbike, as swift as the wind, with engines howling, mowing down his enemies in a hail of gunfire.
It is not only jetbikes. The Conquerors are generally great in the air. Their aerospacecraft, all built on Naranjomundo, are built with modern Imperial technology, far exceeding old Naranjomundo's best, with a Naranjomundan philosophy of design: light and fast, sacrificing armour for superior speed and agility. In the hands of bad pilots, these aerospacecraft would be death traps. In the hands of Conquerors, they are deadly. Every Conqueror is expected to be a pilot that would put other Legions to shame. For that to happen, he needs to be taught it.
Aspirants of the V Legion compete in jetbike races so dangerous that anyone outside the Legion would consider it insane. On a variety of rocky moons of the giant planets GH-2101465 III, IV, V and VI—gas giants close to Naranjomundo, which is the second-innermost planet in the GH-2101465 system—young Aspirants race each other in vicious obstacle courses with sharp bends, surprise rocky outcrops, and sometimes tunnels where the pilot must rotate his aerospacecraft to fit it through, or else die. Their skill in these races are closely monitored. Only the best pilots of the Aspirants get to become Conquerors. The Conquerors are particularly fond of setting up surprise obstacles with very little warning, because it tests an Aspirant's ability to think on his feet and react quickly, decisively and wisely to an unexpected threat. That is, of course, a vital skill in war.
Sometimes a young man eager to prove his worth to the Conquerors tries to navigate an obstacle too close to shave a hair off his race-time or takes a turn too tight for his ability to control. He crashes and dies. This is not celebrated in the V Legion but it is not overly lamented either. It teaches a lesson to the others. Like any male Space Marine Legion, the Conquerors attract lots of bold, ballsy young men. To get this far, these men have to be physically excellent beyond almost all of their peers, and they know it. They are confident, eager to win and disdainful of danger. One of the things that these young men need to learn is their limits. One should not push oneself beyond one's ability to go. The sombre experience of a too-bold classmate dying in a crash is one of the few things that can shock some ice-cold sense into men like that. This is serious.
It is not just spectacular piloting that Aspirants are taught, though that is a large part of it. They are also instructed as strategists and tacticians. If they enter the Legion, they will likely find themselves one day commanding a huge army of encomendados. It would be a disservice to their king if they cannot wield this army effectively. With the aid of advanced holographic technology, Aspirants are put in immensely detailed simulators, somewhat similar to the Mimetic Arenas of the Adamantium Coalescence. However, where the Mimetic Arenas focus on young women's skill as warriors, the Conquerors' simulators mostly focus on skill as leaders. Aspirants are given scenarios from the history of the Naranjomundan Empire, re-enacting old battles from the many conquests of planets by Hernan de Leon before he was reunited with his father the Emperor. They are challenged to lead thousands or millions of soldiers in battles, campaigns and wars and win. They must wield their resources of genetically unmodified humans, their battle-brothers and themselves optimally to achieve victory. The Conquerors are a rare Legion: every battle-brother is expected to be able to be a general.
In these simulations, sometimes the Aspirant is the only Conqueror there; sometimes he has ten or a hundred or a thousand of his brothers. Sometimes Aspirants are imagined in the role of a small-scale commander tasked with securing a village and surrounding hinterland. Or they might be boarding a space station or a starship. Other times they are conquering a city, a subcontinent, a continent, an entire world. They are judged on how quickly and effectively they annihilate resistance and bring more conquests for their king. They are judged for courage as well. A Conqueror should not hesitate to throw encomendados into the fray to die in droves, but he should not hesitate to throw himself into the fray if need be, either. An Aspirant who avoids the fight when his presence would be useful does not belong in the V Legion. To the Conquerors, heartless expediency is a virtue but cowardice is a vice.
They are judged also for obedience. The simulators do not always have the Aspirant be the person in charge. If he has a simulated superior, it is vital that he obeys everything asked of him. In training, Aspirants are drilled in the habit of total obedience, in preparation for the ironclad discipline which Conquerors practise on the battlefield. Even if your superior orders you to charge into a nest of automatic guns to certain death as a distraction, you do it. To the strictly hierarchical, orderly V Legion, disobeying orders is the supreme sin. Disobedience will not only get an Aspirant ruled out from consideration as a Conqueror; he will not even be allowed to be an officer of the encomendados. The armies of the Naranjomundan Worlds have no use for an officer who will not obey. He is thrown out in disgrace.
One factor they are not judged for is the loss of men. What matters is if they achieved the objective. Encomendados are a plentiful resource. There will be enough.
Final success is not judged by one grand trial. It is a steady accumulation of what the Conquerors observe of their Aspirants over years. Those Aspirants who have most consistently performed well in the simulators and consistently excelled against their challengers in sword-duels, jetbike races and other tests of aerospacecraft piloting skill are rewarded by entry to the Legion. These Neophytes undergo further training, interspersed by visits to an Apothecarium for implantation of Astartes organs and medical check-ups on their bodies' transformation. Upon completion of training and gene-seed implantation, they must take their oaths. By the Emperor's insistence, Neophytes of every Legion must swear fealty to the Emperor at the moment they officially become Space Marines. To get around this, the Conquerors do have a ceremony where Neophytes are officially inducted as Space Marines of the V Legion and they swear fealty to the Emperor. It is a dry, formal, unheralded affair: a few words muttered in front of the Emperor's representatives, with an unenthusiastic group of Remembrancers bearing witness.
The ceremony where the Neophytes become Conquerors is on the day before. Legally, this ceremony means nothing. The word "Conqueror" carries no status in Imperial law. All the fancy-sounding names of the Space Marine Legions—Conquerors, Thunder Warriors, Crimson Guard, Abyssal Shades, any of them—are mere nicknames. Their only names in law are "the [insert numeral] Legion". They can call themselves Conquerors or anything they like, whenever they like. But to the Conquerors, this is the ceremony that is truly important. There is a massive celebration in their honour in the Palace of the Conquering King. The Neophytes are feasted and toasted by the elite of Naranjomundan society with exquisite food and wine. They listen to stunning orchestras by the best musicians and watch dances of the most gifted and beautiful dancing girls. And in the end, they kneel before the throne of the King of Lions, be he upon it or away on campaign, and they swear everlasting loyalty to the Naranjomundan Worlds and their king, Hernan de Leon. There is no mention of the Emperor at all.
Characters of Interest:
Brother-Marshal Diego de Uragon—Born on Naranjomundo, the aristocratic Brother-Marshal of the First March is the exemplar of what the Conquerors have become under de Leon's leadership. Haughty, cruel, and infamous for looting worlds, Brother-Marshal de Uragon has an eye for fine art, an utter disregard for the lives of the lower classes, and a talent for spotting the perfect opening for an attack.
Juan de Leon, Equerry to the Primarch—A great-grandson of the King of Lions' adoptive mortal brother, Juan is the first of the de Leon family to be able to become an Astartes. His elder relatives were too old by the time of the arrival of the Imperium. Despite the darker aspects of his character, Hernan de Leon does love his mortal family and he takes comfort in keeping Juan close.
Brother-Brigadier Rodrigo de Vaca—Born as a second son of a Naranjomundan aristocrat on one of the Naranjomundan Worlds, albeit not Naranjomundo. Impatient and hungry for power and glory, Brother-Brigadier de Vaca is the man who led the 14th Brigade in the infamous, brutal Compliance of Macragge. An up-and-coming star among the Conquerors.
Brother-Marshal Marcus Caedea—Former Legion Master of the Lions of Sol, demoted to Brother-Marshal when Hernan de Leon took command of his Legion. Solar-born, of course. At first delighted to be reunited with his gene-father, he became progressively more and more appalled at the direction de Leon was taking his beloved Legion in. Brother-Marshal Caedea spoke out in disagreement with de Leon's contortion of the Emperor, Primarchs and Astartes towards an ideal of biological superiority with Astartes being superior to ordinary humans. He found himself on the front lines against a particularly vicious empire of insectoid xenos. Deceased.
Brother-Brigadier Horatius Portilius—The highest-ranking Solar-born officer from the Lions of Sol who is still alive today. In the one-hundred years between the discovery of the Primarch and the beginning of the Ullanor Wars, all the other Solar-born officers of Brother-Marshal or Brother-Brigadier rank have been killed in action, some of them put in especial danger for disputing de Leon's change of direction, others of them simply from the ordinary risk of death in battle that accompanies any military force. Only Portilius remains. Deep down, he disapproves of what de Leon has done to his Legion, but he says nothing. De Leon thinks him a coward, thoroughly broken—oh, not a coward on the field of battle, where (if anything) he charges a bit too fearlessly eager to get to grips with death, but a moral coward, too afraid to speak out. Yet there is a spark of defiance inside Brother-Brigadier Portilius which grows every time he is insulted. He might just surprise his gene-father.
Battle-cry:
When facing xenos, or the very largest and most powerful of rival human empires, the Conquerors use the battle-cry "THE GALAXY IS OURS!"
More often, when facing humans who are to be brought into Compliance, their battle-cry is "DIE OR KNEEL!"
Legionary History:
In the early days of the Great Crusade, when the Imperium was starting off as nothing more than the Sol system, the V Legion recruited many of its new recruits from the human habitats in the Sol system outside Terra: the hot-worlders of Venus, the dwellers of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and so on. It was for this that the Legion gained its first non-numeric name: the Lions of Sol. In the era when the Legiones Astartes were new, the I Legion was oldest and greatest in number, the II Legion was second-greatest in number, and so on. Thus, for decades, the V Legion was one of the mightiest Space Marine Legions. However, as time went on, younger Legions were reunited with their Primarchs—the XX Legion first, then the XIX, the X, and so on—and the V Legion was not. As such, the Lions of Sol fell further and further behind. When de Leon was eventually found—last of the Primarchs to be rediscovered by the Emperor, because his homeworld Naranjomundo was so far from the Sol system—the Lions of Sol rejoiced.
Some of them would change their minds, once they learnt about the nature of their gene-sire.
The Naranjomundan Empire was supposedly dissolved when de Leon bent the knee to the Emperor. In practice, it was not dissolved at all. It was renamed the Naranjomundan Worlds and it became an empire-within-an-empire. De Leon is relentlessly engaged in empire-building. It is not uncommon among the Legiones Astartes to have one's own interstellar empire—for instance, the Bronze Shields and their Helladic Cluster or the Trenchwalkers and their Kalanguld Expanse—but the Conquerors are unusual in that literally every planet they conquer is made part of their private empire within the Imperium. And the way the Conquerors treat that empire is particularly unpleasant.
By the order of Hernan de Leon, the Conquerors impose a strict, rigid, hierarchical system on every planet they bring into Imperial Compliance. If there is a native aristocracy and they surrender without a shot fired, they are granted status in the Naranjomundan feudal system and welcomed into the ranks of the aristocracy of the Naranjomundan Worlds. If there is not an aristocracy, or if there is one and they fight, the local government is destroyed utterly. New aristocrats are imported from Naranjomundo to rule over the hapless populace. Either way, the vast majority of the planet's people are turned into serfs, if they were not already. Serfs have almost no rights. They cannot be bought and sold. It is not chattel slavery. But other than that, they are almost totally at the disposal of their feudal masters. For example, if one serf accuses another of theft or rape or murder, the justice system is that the dispute is brought to their lord. He then decides who is guilty. Serfs have no right of appeal to authority higher than their lord.
Those Conquerors born in the Naranjomundan Worlds regard this system as perfectly right and fair. Many Solar-born Conquerors, too, have melded steadily into the Naranjomundan Worlds' aristocratic culture. Depressingly, many of them have found it easy to assimilate to a culture which holds transhuman Astartes to be superior to the common man they once swore to serve and protect. Some of the Solar-born Conquerors resisted this, arguing loudly against de Leon's policies. These vocal men were used as the first wave of assaults in de Leon's battles until there were almost none left. After that, those of the Solar-born Space Marines who had any discomfort with de Leon's policies learnt to keep their mouths shut.
The social model of the Naranjomundan Worlds is fundamentally extractive, even colonial. Naranjomundo itself is now a heavily industrialised planet, a Forge World in all but name, albeit one unaffiliated with the Mechanicum. All of the planets it has conquered are turned into little more than sources of raw materials and manpower, provided to the great smoke-belching manufactora of Naranjomundo. Their own native industries are gutted deliberately. Those planets are to serve no purpose but resource extraction.
Two campaigns serve to illustrate the nature of de Leon's regime, both of them in the galaxy's far east where the Naranjomundan Worlds lie: the Compliances of Macragge and Nuceria.
Macragge was a Civilised World with no significant mutant or xenos taint. Its people were even capable of Warp Drive, albeit only skimming the Warp's surface close to the Materium, hence making their travel much slower than what Imperial starships with Navigators are capable of. Certainly, it had some barbarians on distant frontiers, but the bulk of the planet was ruled by a well-ordered civilisation with two Consuls holding equal power. At the time the Conquerors arrived, the Consuls were both honourable men: Velo Gallan and Henricus Guilliman. On the whole, most Legions would have considered it a planet ripe for an easy diplomatic Compliance.
A war-fleet carrying a brigade of five-thousand Conquerors dropped out of the Warp. Over the vox, they gave a brief, terse introduction of the Imperium's nature and the goal of uniting mankind which lasted for only a few minutes. Then they immediately demanded the planet's surrender and integration into the Imperium. The Macraggians were alarmed, but also cautiously optimistic at the possibility of reunion with the rest of mankind. They sought to hear these Imperials' terms. The terms were not to their liking. The Conquerors demanded crushingly high tithes (because they would have to be paid both to Naranjomundo and to Terra) and the imposition of a clear, single ruler for the planet. They were not impressed to hear that there were two rulers, ruling equally. There being a single ruler was necessary for Macragge to be integrated into the Naranjomundan Worlds' feudal system. The Conquerors simply refused to talk unless they were talking to a single leader. Meanwhile, the Macraggians were hopeful of reunion with mankind but they wanted some leeway to have their own system of government and society, within the greater system of the Imperium.
Talks lasted only a few hours. Ultimately, the Macraggians rejected the Conquerors' harsh, uncompromising terms. This was exactly what the Conquerors had been waiting for. Starships of the V Legion blasted clear landing zones near Macragge's major cities, and then came the encomendados, huge hordes of serf-soldiers, poorly armed and treated like cannon fodder. The encomendados were duly fed into the teeth of Macragge's defences. Once the weakest point was felt to be clear, the true Conquerors struck. Within two weeks of the Conquerors' arrival in the star-system, the Astartes were parading through Magna Macragge Civitas. Five-thousand Astartes, plus who-cares-how-many mortals, had conquered a world. Both Gallan and Guilliman were hanged. A Naranjomundan duke who had never been anywhere near Macragge in his life was proclaimed Viceroy of Macragge. All resistance was crushed by a host of encomendados who were left behind as a garrison. These ill-treated men took out their frustrations by brutal treatment of Macraggian civilians. Meanwhile, the Conquerors and the vast majority of their encomendados journeyed onward to the next world.
A stark contrast is the Compliance of Nuceria. There, when the Conquerors arrived and demanded Compliance, the cowardly 'high-riders' who ruled the planet—slaver-lords who forced their planet's lower classes to fight in gladiatorial campaigns—panicked. Out of sheer self-preservation, the high-riders elected one of their own to be their supposed king. This king negotiated with the Conquerors and soon achieved a peaceful Compliance. The Nucerians would pay the extortionately high tribute that was necessitated by the demand that they must pay tithes to both Naranjomundo and Terra—it was the lower classes who would have to provide the back-breaking labour for it, not the high-riders, so no problem—and the system of rich free citizens (high-riders), poor free citizens and slaves was steadily reformed over the next few decades into classical feudalism. The chattel slaves became serfs, a minor improvement in their condition. The poor free citizens who had cheered the bloody deaths of the slaves in the gladiator pits became serfs too. Any resistance to this was crushed by an encomendado garrison, which was quite a lot smaller than the garrison that was needed on Macragge to maintain the imposed system there. There would be no more elections for the high-riders' king, or Viceroy of Nuceria as he now was. He would pass his position down to his son. What the high-riders had intended to be a fake, figurehead single leader turned into a real single leader.
Still, the high-riders of Nuceria were not displeased. In reward for selling their people into serfdom, the high-riders became accepted as part of the Naranjomundan Worlds' aristocracy, under the Conquerors' protection, and with offworld armies to crush any revolt. For the high-riders, it was a happy ending.
Not everyone in the Imperium, however, is happy with the Conquerors' way of war.
The Conquerors have a deep enmity with the Mechanicum, to whom they stubbornly refuse to defer. Other Legions would give the Mechanicum one in twenty of the inhabited planets they conquer, as is mandated by the Treaty of Olympus Mons between Terra and Mars that founded the Imperium. The Conquerors did not. The King of Lions refused to give up any planets to the Mechanicum at all. As far as he is concerned, what he has conquered is his, and no-one can take it from him. Furthermore—perhaps even worse, from the Mechanicum's point of view—de Leon continues to experiment with heretical innovation, inventing his own equipment. This is tech-heresy and cannot be tolerated.
It is not only the Mechanicum. There are also complaints from other Legions, regarding the high number of rebellions on planets brought to Compliance by the Conquerors, which they have sometimes had to step in and suppress. And the Imperial Army's opinion of de Leon is, of course, utter loathing. Numerous aristocrats, corporate executives and governors have links to the Imperial Army and share the Army's contempt for a man who treats genetically unmodified humans appallingly.
The Mechanicum of Mars is supposed to be co-equal with Terra, as per the Treaty of Olympus Mons. The Mechanicum is not supposed to have the Legiones Astartes walk all over it. Under political pressure from the more anti-Imperial factions in Mars's byzantine internal politics to not let insults go unanswered, the then Fabricator-General of Mars, Voroc-Bej, made a fateful decision. In protest at the Conquerors' repeated offences, the Mechanicum stopped sending supplies of Power Armour, vehicles, ammunition and weapons to the V Legion. De Leon, outraged, complained to Terra. This brought the dispute to the attention of the War Council of the Imperium, and, ultimately, to the Emperor.
The Emperor of Mankind sought to determine who was to blame. He heard both sides of the argument: the mechadendrite-clad cyborgs of the Mechanicum and the passionate Naranjomundan aristocrats of the V Legion. And he ruled in favour of the Mechanicum. The Mechanicum were right, said their Omnissiah. The Conquerors had indeed breached the treaty. He insisted that the Conquerors must turn over a certain number of worlds to the Mechanicum, to become Forge Worlds.
The Mechanicum were permitted to choose the most industrial planets they wished out of de Leon's empire, those most suited to become Forge Worlds in their own judgement, except Naranjomundo. Of course, all of those planets were thoroughly de-industrialised, except Naranjomundo. The Mechanicum grudgingly took a set of barely functioning mining planets, long stripped of their native industry by the Conquerors, to turn into Forge Worlds. Still, they felt they had been deceived. Their Omnissiah had supposedly ruled in their favour, yet he had granted them a false prize. This incident strengthened the hand of anti-Imperial factions in the politics of Mars, opponents of Fabricator-General Voroc-Bej. The most radical of those factions believe that the Emperor might not really be the Omnissiah.
Meanwhile, de Leon was genuinely shocked. He did not expect this outcome at all. The Primarchs are meant to be the Emperor's sons and daughters, subject to no will but that of the Emperor. Yet the Emperor rebuked him, choosing a set of cyborg fools over his own son. In de Leon's feudal understanding of the galaxy, dukes are meant to be loyal to a king, and the king should not interfere with how the dukes govern their lesser subjects. He sees the Emperor's intervention on the Mechanicum's behalf as an affront to his liberty to govern his subjects as he sees fit. No, worse than an affront—a calculated insult.
De Leon stews on the injustice done to him, turning it over and over in his mind, trying to understand it. He cannot. Slowly, his shock hardens into cold rage.