Glasian

The Chapter is tasked with defending the Cloudburst sector from the invasions and depredations of the Glasian species, an extragalactic race of strange aliens.  These aliens – long believed to be fleeing the Tyranids – are arriving in the Galaxy in waves of ships, each wave slightly larger than the last.  They fly across the void of space from another, as-yet unknown galaxy, in giant tubular ships that strongly resemble the ancient Human O’Neill Cylinders.  These tubes serve as combination warships, colony vessels, and tenders, and are each in control of hundreds of smaller vessels.  Inside, the Glasian people live in squalor and madness, as the combination of thousands of years of containment and inbreeding mingle with the strange energies of the Warp.  For it seems that the galaxy from which the Glasians come does not contain the Warp or anything like it, and they can neither comprehend or control it.  As they enter the galaxy, though, they fly through the Warp turbulence which marks its borders, and in the ensuing Warp storms, the Glasians are driven mad by the Chaos god Tzeentch.  Though the Master of Schemes does generally not exert direct control over his new-found slaves, neither does he disregard them, and he is greatly amused by the lemming-like behavior of the Glasians.

Once inside the galaxy proper and beyond the Warp Storms, the aliens fly their ships with reckless abandon into the range of the Astronomican, usually bypassing some planets they could conceivably inhabit beyond the Emperor’s light.  They make a direct line for the Cloudburst sector for reasons that are as-of-yet not ascertained by the Inquisition, and there they have not proceeded onwards.  As soon as they enter the sector, they begin assaulting Imperial worlds with a ferocity and terrible vigor that any Imperial would find disheartening, and though they are tainted by Chaos, they retain a deadly, regimented approach to war that the Imperium has observed in every wave.  This, despite the fact that the individual waves don’t seem to contact each other in any way, and at times, seem unaware of the fact that there are more waves before and after them.

The Glasians are, taxonometrically, mammals, but they look and behave more like birds than primates (not unlike the Vespid).  They are warm-blooded, and not particularly strong, physically; the average healthy human male could easily wrestle one to the ground.  They have bone structure that suggests vestigial wings, and indeed what few tiny pieces of their culture survives their madness and taint suggests a sort of nostalgia for their winged state, though this may be a simple toy for the amusement of Tzeentch, given his avian form and theme.  In addition, Magos Biologis researchers have determined that the evolutionary divergence between the Glasians and their flying ancestors seems to be many millions of years in the past, so perhaps this aspect of their culture is simply retrograde nostalgia.

The Glasians are akin to many of the enemies of the Imperium of Man, in that they have lesser grasps of the fundamentals of advanced technology, but they have retained their entire technological heritage and awareness.  Thus, though individual pieces of technology in their arsenal are superior to that of Humanity, their overall awareness of the sciences and the underpinnings of metallurgy, synthetics, cellular biology, Warp science, and the forces of energy is lacking.  As such, the Mechanicus has theorized that it is at least feasible that the aliens are similar to the Tau, in that they were conquered from within and force-marched through technological development, though if a parallel exists within Glasian biology for the equivalent of the Tau Ethereal Caste, no subject fitting the description has ever been captured.

One aspect of the Glasians that seems utterly foreign to the Imperium is the complete lack of religion among them.  Instead of worshipping their mutator Tzeentch, they seem to regard his whispered orders as a sort of shamanistic rite.  Instead of religion taking the fore in their rotted minds, they instead observe a tenet called Passage, which seems to be a product of their exodus from their home galaxy.  Declarations of action or loyalty are made to the Passage, the word is carved in their armor and hulls, and any sacrifices that need be made to burrow deeper into Imperial space are made in its name and to its betterment.  Exactly what it is has not yet been determined, but it may be as simple as a cultural impetus on behalf of the ruling cadres to keep the populace alive in the trying circumstances of extragalactic migration.

Glasian weapons are a mix of accelerated slugs and low-tech lasers, but their more deadly armament comes in the form of what the Mechanicus has dourly called ‘Ruin Guns.’  These devices seem to focus a ball of plasma in a coil of magnetic cobalt, and then discharge it.  Unlike Imperial and Eldar plasma, however, these weapons arc the plasma along streamers of ionized air, ‘painting’ the targets with writhing streams of radioactive, hyper-energized gas.  This process is inefficient, but shockingly effective at cutting through armor, and their warship-mounted weapons are horrifying to behold, as they seem to simply set their enemies ablaze with shivering waves of blue fire.

This process, thankfully, is also bulky and loud, and so their weapons generally rely on simple lasers or caseless bullets, like the Imperial Guard’s equipment.  Their heavy weapon teams are, understandably, a very high priority target for sharpshooters and artillery.  Their air and space fighters use a mixture of these Ruin Guns and dumbfire rockets, which corkscrew through the air or vacuum on streamers of propellant gas, and impact with fire and shrapnel.  They also have proximity-fused weapons that operate using radio and other forms of lightspeed radiation to detect range, and a form of flamer that is immediately recognizable as such.

Their vehicles are generally hover-pad equipped, using a technosorcerous device that looks quite unlike those that the Imperial military uses for their Land Speeders and fighters.  The exact method of their devices’ operation is unknown, but smaller than the Imperial version, and utterly silent – a common observation among Septiimi Guard officers is that all enemy raids are stealth raids, until they start shooting.

Glasian paint schemes were the first sign the Imperium had that the aliens were tainted by Tzeentch, during the First Contact incident six hundred years past.  Their vehicles, for all their technosorcerous might, are daubed and splashed with random splotches of color, rust, and scoring, in a pattern even an Ork would find distasteful.  The ugly, spiky bodies of their vehicles are further draped with chains, sigils of unidentified clan structures, and colonies of rust, in no pattern a sane mind can detect.  Their Techpriest analogues are a caste of dedicated mechanics, but unlike Techpriests, will often ride to battle in the second or third line of their attack formations, both to enact field repairs and to serve as ablative armor for their machines, a practice the Mechanicus finds to be both a relief, for its lack of foresight, and disquiet, since it reveals just how damaged by Tzeentch the aliens actually are.  The fact that all their equipment is tainted by the Great Enemy means that it cannot be safely reverse-engineered or even disposed of, necessitating careful removal of all scrap and wreckage by sanctioned excoriation servitors.  This is a time-consuming and expensive process.

In reality, however, the Glasians do have a purpose, though the Imperium (and the Glasians) remain unaware.  Tzeentch sees them as an experiment.  By driving them to incurable madness and then leaving them be, they are a sort of test bed for his incursion techniques into the Imperium.  They are hopelessly mutated by the Warp Storms at the peripheral shock of the galaxy, beyond his control, though he’s happy to exploit it.  To interfere would be to tamper with the results of the testing, and that is not something Tzeentch is yet willing to do.  Why, precisely, Tzeentch would bother with this is unknown to all but him.  One definite result has been the routine massacre of millions of alien souls, and not far fewer human ones, which is always a plus to him.  However, the assaults by the Glasians have also hardened the defenses of the Imperium in the area dramatically, which does not serve his ends at all.  Such is Tzeentch.
The Lord of Change jealously guards his experiment.  He has closed all of the efforts he had begun in the sector prior to the Glasian Migrations’ arrival, and endeavored to scuttle any attempts by his rivals to start up their own efforts in the sector.  Nurgle has been most persistent; the Imperium became aware of this after stumbling across the remains of four Tzeentch-worshippers ships destroyed by the Terminus Est.  The wrecks had slammed into a microplanetoid at the border of the Naxos sector and the Hapster subsector of Cloudburst, and been found by a Naval patrol from Fabique.  Likewise, though Tzeentch regards the rise of the Free Corsair Coalition with interest, he does not yet wish to stop them.  After all, they could be a part of the outcome of his experiment, and therefore as worthy of examination as the Imperium is.  Tzeentch is less pleased that the Orks of Gorkypark and other, smaller Orkholds remain in his way.  There is nothing to learn from Orks, and they are but a potential contamination in his experimental data.
Tzeentch, however, is aware that his project may not be infinitely sustainable.  The Glasians come from other galaxies, and though they are fleeing the Tyranids, that suggests that their numbers will eventually run out.  The Tyranids do not leave survivors.  Though the time-stasis Warp barrier he uses to contain the Glasian fleets is holding, and Abbadon’s little Crusade may allow him to strengthen it, the intermittent trickle of trans-galactic Cylinders will eventually end.  When that happens, he shall carefully use up his supply of trapped alien ships, then plunge the sector into the flesh change.  That is a fitting reward for the humans who have so thoughtfully served as his ideal test subjects.  Tzeentch estimates that the flow of Glasian assets from their home galaxy will run out in eighty four Terran standard years, and his stockpile, thus reinforced, will run out in eight hundred.