Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==Achillus Crusade==

The Achillus crusade started when a group of eldar farseers got a vision of a massive Webway gate, big enough to fit a Craftworld, located in the Jericho Reach. By the standards of the Old Empire it was an outdated thing, built-in the days in which the eldar still ferried fleets around to war rather than having one gigantic Empire linked through numerous small gates that they mostly stuck to, but by the standards of the modern Imperium it was a miraculous discovery. Exactly what happened to the gate varied from vision to vision, but there was no doubt the gate existed. The elder weren't sure where the other end was, but they knew it was somewhere in the Segmentum Obscurus, it wasn't destroyed, and it wasn't being squatted on by Crones or Dark Eldar (it's possible this is the gate that [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Lugganath|Lugganath]] claims they found).

A stable Webway gate of that size between the Segmentum Obscurus and Ultima would be a really big deal. It would drastically reduce travel time across the Galaxy, and being such a large and "hardened" artery of the Webway, it might be stable enough to even allow regular traffic from voidships rather than small groups deemed safe enough to avoid damaging the Webway.

The Jericho Reach is located just west of the Hadex Anomaly, the "fuck you this is our universe" Warp storm that Chaos created in response to the Harrowing that fucked over several nearby sectors as a side effect. However, the anomaly was slowly receding, and it was predicted that the amount of Chaos corruption in the Jericho sector would soon drop from "Chaos everywhere" levels to merely "highly corrupted", making it possible to travel there.

The bad news was that the farseers also saw that the Jericho reach was home to a heavy Necron presence, and this was in M40, just after the Silent King and the Imperium had their little brushfire war and the Silent King was looking to expand his power. There was a brief window of opportunity between the ebbing of the anomaly and the waking of the Necrons. The plan was to secure the Jericho sector, secure the Webway gate and move it out of the region of possible, and finally try to take the Necrons apart piecemeal before they could become fully active and drive them out.

Oh, and bring the Deathwatch, the farseers say, you're going to need it.

The plan goes poorly from the start. First, the flagship of the operation, containing Lord commander Achillus, suffers a catastrophic Geller field failure before even getting to the Jericho reach. Achillus was considered a good commander with a decent field record. His replacement, Solomon Tetrarchus, was not.

Oh, make no mistake, there was no indication that Tetrarchus was a bad commander before, but he completely unraveled during the crusade. He micromanaged everything and would promote and demote people on a whim. Half the crusade consisted of people doing things behind Tetrarchus' back just to get stuff done. Tetrarchus was also paranoid about the tau (had no problem with eldar or other species though), who had only recently joined the Imperium (there may have been personal reasons behind this), which was a problem because this was a major joint operation.

Tetrarchus claimed the tau were only helping because they wanted the worlds of the Jericho Reach for themselves. The tau say yes, it would be nice to colonize some of these worlds, but they were more interested in keeping Chaos off their doorstep than claiming dibs. This kind of mistrust made it very hard to coordinate operations in the Jericho Reach, which was infested by Chaos, orks, and Chaos orks. Then a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathans or Kraken gets thrown into the mix.

Then the necrons of the region wake up in full. They blitz the combined forces in the Jericho Reach, Imperial, Chaos, ork, and tyranid alike, to the point that the scattered survivors realize the only reason they were still alive is because the necrons arbitrarily decided that they had cleaned out the local area surrounding their Tomb World to their satisfaction (which was like two-thirds of the Jericho Reach) and the surviving Imperial forces happened to be far enough away from the ensuing splash zone. It wasn't even a fair fight. The necrons had gotten what they wanted and didn't give a shit about the rest of the sector.

The good news is the supposed location of the Webway gate is just outside of the Necron's currently imposed zone of control. The Imperium has been planning another campaign to get the Webway gate under the Necron's lack-of-a-nose, taking it out of the sector, and clearing out as much as they can close to the Hadex Anomaly, but whether they can is another story.

Post-Crusade, Solomon Tetrarchus is looking at a demotion/dishonorable discharge for his screw-up of the Crusade, and the Imperium is debating whether to bring in an assassin to deal with him discretely out of fear that he to turn to Chaos. If he took responsibility for his failings that would be one thing, but there is a fear he will try to blame it all on the tau and sent fractures through the then-fragile alliance. However, in a nice little self-fulfilling prophecy, Tetrarchus is getting nervous about the possibility of an assassin, because he knows the Imperium knows he is a potential risk of falling and could possibly decide to send an assassin. Farseer predictions at the time are going in both directions and are no help. This having happened in M40, the events of which already happened and the consequences of which are playing out.