Void Hazards
See Also:
Void travel has its hazards too. Of course, there are foes who might act with hostility against Imperial vessels – but in addition, despite the vastness of space, it is not as empty of environmental hazards as one might believe. Within a star system, a Captain might encounter dense and deadly fields of asteroids or the debris of some forgotten battle. Void shields are built to withstand such things, but they can be easily overwhelmed but multiple impacts. Closer to stellar bodies, naturally occurring hazards such as strong magnetic fields, captured clouds of corrosive or explosive gasses or geomagnetic storms can easily be the end of the incautious Captain.
The stars, the pulsing hearts of the galaxy, can be just as deadly as beautiful. Though few would be stupid enough to approach the immediate sphere of a star without due caution, they are unpredictable – sudden solar storms and flares can wash systems in deadly radiation overloading shields and ship systems, or vent superheated stellar gasses that will incinerate even the mightiest warship. For this reason, any ship will cautiously monitor nearby stars for even in death they can be deadly – everyone knows the supernovas that mark their final death throes are apocalyptic events. Even in death a star can leave deadly remnants – neutron stars, nebulas, and reality-warping black holes – all of which are best avoided by sensible Captains.
Beyond systems, regions of gravitational fluxes and unusual stellar phenomena are often unique to their regions of space. Perhaps the most common are nebulae, areas of dense gasses that can be formed from the death of stars as well as other natural causes – gas from a nebula can be dangerous to a ship, or simply form major navigational hazards that confuse auspex readings and block conventional communications. It is no surprise that they are favoured hiding spots of pirates and other outcast ships.
Given the infinite variety of space there are infinite hazards to be found from dark matter storms to blue shifted energy, exotic matter to rogue planetoids. Perhaps the greatest threats at deep void are black holes. These stellar hazards are mercifully rare phenomena that warp spacetime close to them, tearing vessels caught in their grasp apart in tidal gravitational forces, before crushing them to infinite density within the singularity at their centre. Before that ultimate fate, ships and planets trapped on the edges of black holes are subjected to chrono-distortions which can result in causality problems – a million years can pass in the wider galaxy while, aboard a trapped ship, only a few years may pass.
There are many non-natural hazards when travelling the void. Many of the above natural phenomena can be created by the unleashing of ancient and deadly weapons of the Dark Age of Technology and xenos races. More common, however, is the detritus of war. In a galaxy riven by near-constant warfare, the void is filled with ruined wrecks of forgotten battles, abandoned minefields, and malfunctioning automated defence systems that still function despite the wars they were built for being long-forgotten. The abandoned echoes of war are as deadly as any natural hazard, and perhaps the most ironic of deaths a voidship can suffer is to be struck by rogue munitions fired centuries before they were even constructed. This is why many Imperial void munitions are fused and why void gunners are ordered to only fire when they have a targeting solution. ‘Eyeballing it’ can be grounds for Commissariat punishment, for a misfired shot may be a harbinger of doom long after all those who remember the battle in which it was fired meet their final end.
Of all the non-natural hazards, space hulks are perhaps the most dangerous. They can be the ancient wreckage of a single starship left travelling through the void, or a mangled amalgamation of the twisted remains of many ships and artificial debris. Both are found drifting through the galaxy, many so huge that they possess their own gravity and atmosphere. More disturbingly, debris comprised of such vessels may have multiple malfunctioning warp cores impacted into their superstructure, leading them to exit and re-enter the Warp seemingly at random. Even if they remain on the right side of the Empyrean, they are a deadly temptation for the unwary captain. The promise of forgotten treasures can lead many to a life of damnation trapped within the hulk, or death at the hands of xenos creatures or other lost and damned souls trapped aboard. At their worst, they are vectors of invasion. They can form crude transports used by that can appear at random above an unsuspecting world to unleash hordes of xenos and heretics upon it – or, worse, simply smash into that world, with those invaders that survive being a horrific aftershock following the devastating impact of the mass itself. To this end, the Imperium does its best to catalogue and analyse these structures, labelling them with names so they can be easily identified for the dangers and treasures they are recorded to hold.
Major Void Hazards of the Prosperitas Sector
The Prosperitas Sector has many of the common navigational dangers for Void Captains as the wider galaxy. The sector’s stable navigational routes and systems are choked with the detritus of the wars that the Prosperitas Crusade fought to take them. There are several small nebulae and multiple stellar hazards but only a few regions and unique phenomena are worthy of note.
22-32-Azhdahā – is named in the Ruwwad tongue of Niqash – it is the only known black hole in the Sector. Located close to Naximus Prime, it has acted as a natural defence to the Forge for millennia. Its gravitational fluxes make void travel in the region difficult without following routes tightly controlled by the Naximan warfleet – but, in addition, 22-32-Azhdahā has a unique impact upon warp travel in the region, making it impossible to bypass by travelling through the Empyrean. It is theorised that this unique stellar phenomena, is in, part the reason that Naximus and its surrounding systems were not so devastated by the Lash of the Eye as those nearby systems. Hemmed on its westward side by a chain of Adeptus Mechanicus monitoring stations, the Priests of Naximus monitor and map the fluctuations of the hole constantly, fearful that one day their greatest defence will consume their realm.
The Shard Reef is a vast debris field near to the Persephon System, believed to potentially originate from some planetary disaster millennia ago. The region is subject to various unusual anomalies. For example, on the largest object within the reef, Lilim-1249, Sector Geological Survey teams have found its surface wracked by geological conditions impossible in any natural environments. Rivers of fire flow throughout the asteroid; lightning storms wrack its surface; tectonic disturbances shake its form; glacial formations freeze its depths and heights. All these phenomenon coexist together, a bizarre microcosm worldscape wracked by the elements. Further exploration of the reef has been impossible due to high piracy – but even pirates keep away from the deeper parts of the debris field, fearful of some imagined horror.
The Môr Draenog is a vast region of space, within a rough triangle between the planets of Kydos, Kirkcud and Carthusia. Imperial Captains have picked up superstitions from natives about this region, and few will travel through it. Vessels that dare this place rarely return. It is believed that a cluster of unilluminated nebulas simply make it impossible to navigate without becoming lost, but there are more grandiose rumours of ghost ships drifting within the region, of void-kraken and worse within this feared and blighted area of space. The Môr Draenog is subject to all manner of wild and incredible folktales – each more ridiculous and incredible than the last.
Space Hulks of the Prosperitas Sector
A legacy of war has resulted in many lost hulks drifting within the Prosperitas Sector, but none are as famous as sacred Durovera’s Sorrow and blighted Durovera’s Pain. The two twin Space Hulks are young by the standards of the Imperium. They were created in the early years of the Prosperitas Sector during the Battle of the Line, in which Warmaster Jacinta Durovera broke the back of the Regency Navy.
During the battle, the reactor of the battleship Helios’ Fury collapsed into a micro black hole in the middle of Regency and Imperial lines – this shattered the Regency line allowing the more numerous Imperial fleet to recover and exploit the gap to gain victory. The victory, however, came at a terrible cost. Multiple vessels were trapped in the gravitational flux, and crushed together into a massive twisted hulk. In the aftermath, this bulk split in half. One formed around a compacted core of the Helios’ Fury, floating freely in the real void, while the other exited realspace in a spectacular eruption of multiple breached warp reactors.
Since that date, the realspace hulk Durovera’s Sorrow has drifted across the void of the Prosperitas Sector, occasionally having its course adjusted by Imperial tugs. The misshapen mass has been transformed into a holy site by the Ecclesiarchy; its vast twisted corridors have become a shrine to the dead of the Prosperitas Crusade. Many pilgrims travel to the wreckage when it passes through their system, to etch the names of loved ones onto the walls of the great shrine-wreck. Tended to by the Ecclesiastic Order of the Sacred Exile, this unusual nomad-shrine is not uncommonly escorted by warships on ceremonial guard duties.
The twin of the Sorrow, Durovera’s Pain, has returned from the warp time and time again, an ill omen of death and destruction. Some say its very presence is corrupting, spreading madness amongst those worlds it appears over when it tears from the warp – but this tainted hulk carries far worse things, foul warbands of the Archenemy have been known to ride upon its wake or within its twisted halls, spilling from it like foul insects from a hive when it appears above a civilised world, raiding the planet that fall in the hulks shadow. Numerous attempts have been mounted to clense or destroy Durovera’s Pain over its history: it vanished after the last attempt in 311.M41 and the blight was believed gone. This was proven false hope in 592.M41. Durovera’s Pain appeared out of the warp in the Strayvian Gateway followed by a wake of Creeping Death and Renegade Warships, breaking through the Imperial blockade there before vanishing once more, appearing weeks later over the Shrine World of Nivalis where it was used by the Archenemy to stage raids on the planet until its seemingly random departure during the fall of the Temple.