Editing Space Sharks (section)

====Chimeric Geneseed====
As another wrench is thrown in, in Robbie MacNiven's Black Library novel ''Red Tithe'', it is heavily hinted that there are, in fact, ''multiple'' gene seeds utilized by the Space Sharks, primarily Raven Guard, Night Lords, and World Eaters. Given the typical canon conflicts that the Black Library is known for, this should be looked at with skepticism at least and as a half-assed excuse to explain why they have traits of all three Legions at best. Hopefully, this will be elaborated on in the future but for now, we can only theorize what this entails.

It is possible that the Carcharodons once consisted of Blackshields of Raven Guard and both loyalist Night Lords and World Eaters during the Horus Heresy, and after a time they were reformed into their own chapter and the traitor aspects of their origins were buried away. This ''could'' explain why their combat doctrine is an odd hybrid of their three supposed predecessors, any mutations they have are hard to connect to anyone Legion, why their equipment is so old and haphazard, and why they were sent out in the void of space due to their origins. Until we have hard evidence from Forge World itself on any such Blackshields, however, this is up in the air.

Another, simpler explanation is that, given the nature of the Space Sharks to scavenge whatever they find, it's possible that they harvested the gene-seed of the fallen marines they have killed. It's never explicitly said that their gene-seed is comprised of ''only'' the three suspected Legions; rather, it just happened to just be mostly the aforementioned three. For all we know they could trace back to every Legion through a small percentage of their gene-seed. Though admittedly, this train of thought makes their origin even harder to pinpoint as we don't have a clear-cut predecessor.

And it should be kept in mind that a good chunk of this information in the novel was divulged to one of the Space Sharks by a daemon. ''A daemon,'' for shit's sake. As we've seen with [[Magnus]], Chaos usually doesn't give accurate information.

This said, this is practically confirmed in HH6, where the Ashen Claws (Raven Guard) raid the Nostromo Sector to take their gear and geneseed. So if the Carcharodons are the Ashen Claws or a related group/successor, then they're Raven Guard and Night Lords. As of the novel ''Outer Dark,'' sequel to ''Red Tithe,'' it has been confirmed that the Carcharodons are related to the Ashen Claws and have a shaky pact with them. When the Carcharodons' Red Tithes can't refill their ranks fast enough, they are permitted to conscript young boys for augmentation from the fragmented domains that the Ashen Claws hid in beyond the Imperium's borders in exchange for war material and fresh Corax-derived gene-seed. It also seems their relationship is a shaky one prone to conflict. This suggests that the Carcharodons origins may lie with the Raven Guard exiles but the two groups split over whether to remain loyal to the Emperor or not. Regardless, both are willing to secretly come together against threats from beyond such as the [[Tyranids]]. When exchanging gene-seed and wargear for aspirants and fleet support, however, the Ashen Claws make a point of confirming whether the gene-seed being offered had been "contaminated with their disgusting breed", implying either widespread degeneration and mutation, or chimeric gene-seed among the Carcharodons. Given how things were during the heresy, it's perfectly reasonable that there's some gene-seed from the Nostramo campaign in there, as well as some "loyalists" who joined up as Blackshields, seeing as they spent the Heresy as an independent force at the edges of the Imperium waiting out on whether the traitors or loyalists won to decide whether to hide out the total collapse the former would result in or continue the status quo of nominal loyalty and de facto independence the latter resulted in.
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