The Logistician's War

When death came for Abnu Šimé Katoguar, it found him curled in a ball, deliriously repeating his cult’s mantra with his final breath—“hut… hut… hut...” History would record this as the Battle of Gírzu, a tale of heroic Pactsmen defeating heretical fanatics in the Cult of the Operator. In places with a large Loxatl population, Gírzutide would even become a children’s holiday, its plays portraying Šimé as a buffoonish villain, gleefully vowing absurd over-the-top evils: “MWHAHAHA! Now I can bring peace and love to the entire galaxy!”, and the like.

But in truth, his end was pathetic—a broken man barely able to lift his gun, his final breath dissolving into the freezing air just as his soul vanished into the warp. How had it gone so wrong?

Having achieved the rank of Katoguar, Abnu Šimé had been reassigned from the front lines to a desk job on Atrahasis Prime. There he'd found religion and narcotics. With synthetic clarity, he became certain that Khorne was speaking to him directly — and that the Blood God had chosen him to revive the Empire.

Like many born on recently conquered worlds, Šimé despised the Sanguinary Utnapishtim being a multi-species empire. His bitterness deepened when a Loxatl rival won the promotion to Sirdar rank Šimé coveted. When he complained, colleagues replied with data proving that integration raised the integrated Empire’s Murder-Per-Moment ratio—evidence, they said, that Khorne cared not whence the blood flowed. Šimé simply took this as proof that logistical reasoning itself was the problem.

He founded the Cult of the Operator under the guise of a fight club—an innocent-looking after-work brawl circle. But in secret, Šimé preached his gospel: that the Empire’s logisticians and xenos-sympathisers were conspiring to weaken humanity, denying each warrior’s divine right to embody perfect violence. Only by purging the Loxatl could mankind reclaim Khorne’s special favour. The cult’s ultimate plan—the “Operation”—was simple: detonate a stolen thermonuclear device in Ālumušṭuru, the largest Loxatl population centre in the system.

At first, everything went smoothly. Operators hijacked a transport ship carrying a warhead slated for decommissioning, and landed at Gírzu, the nearest void-port outside Ālumušṭuru’s defences. They simply needed to drive the bomb a few miles into Ālumušṭuru.

Then their fuel didn’t work. The local grade was incompatible with their stolen vehicle, and, lacking appropriate boots to traverse the terrain, they could not carry the warhead by hand. Trapped in Gírzu, they searched for alternatives as an ice storm swept in. Lacking winter-wear or appropriate accommodation, Operators began dying of the cold.

Three days later, marines from the S.U.N. vessel Lamented Dawn tracked the cult to Gírzu—by tracing the serial numbers of the aviator sunglasses the Operators wore religiously. The squad stormed the “compound” and made short work of the frostbitten survivors.

Abnu Šimé Katoguar was shot by a warm, well-fed, marine of average skill, who later enjoyed a distinguished career in the Office for Ceremonial Calculations as Assistant Deputy Sub-Prefect for Skull-Stack Audits.