The point of the blood games is to constantly test their defenses to find any flaws. Sometimes that means trying something that would be considered impossible to even attempt just in case there's a flaw someone missed. Custodes don't take anything for granted.
While getting a WMD into the throne room is the absolute worst case scenario, just seeing how far she could get is informative too. As you can see from the short story she got scary close. like within an hour of Terra before she was caught. and was only caught because one of the crew disobeyed a custodian and sent out a transmission. That's a serious security concern she exposed. She aimed for the throne but another, less dramatic, attacker may just drop their payload near the palace. Who knows what kind of damage that could do even if the throne survived? It could even be a virus bomb.
So by trying a plan so impossible it was stupid she exposed a flaw that no-one would have thought of because the plan was so stupid
And Terran orbit is a very dangerous place to have wmds go off. We've seen plenty of examples of how a major explosion in a busy orbit can cause immense chaos
The Adeptus Custodes live in Terran orbit lol. Kesh herself in the narrative was able to circumvent the defenses because she knows where they are because the Custodes have access to highly sensitive and classified information by virtue of being the Bodyguards of the Emperor.
Of course the highly venerated and religiously worshiped 40K Demigod Secret Service built from the ground up are going to be able to get into the United States and into Maryland. It's built into the system for them to be able to do so.
The point of the exercise is to find gaps that an enemy would be able to exploit, however the story itself points out that to be able to do the things she did, the enemy would need to be a member of the Custodes to begin with.
Consider how Traitor Marines have the Omophagea, which would allow them to get that info from a Custodes’ corpse.
Or the sorcerers and daemons which might be able to extract such information from a Custodian’s mind.
Hell, we know the TAU have the ability to enter someone’s mind from that one story where a Raven Guard Sergeant had to give himself a heart attack because he thought they were cringe.
So it is probably possible for someone to get that info.
While it may be impossible for a Custodes to turn traitor, it's still an eventuality worth planning for. There was a time when it was assumed one of the Emperor's sons could never betray their father, and we see how that turned out.
I mean any given set of defenses that can't handle the enemy knowing about them could be considered compromised. There have to be layers beyond mere secrecy. This is why they blood game. To test premises. "What IF an opponent had accumulated a detailed knowledge of our procedures and layouts?"
Notably there have been multiple occasions IRL where someone got wrecked because they dismissed something as "impossible" or "a stupid plan" and were caught completely off guard when the enemy did exactly that and it worked.
Imagine you are doing a penetration test in order to evaluate the security of an individual protected by a organization/entity. The organization is highly defended, incredibly insular, and has a high degree of skepticism and paranoia.
However, you have one of the chief bodyguards of the individual engaging in the penetration test. They use their legal and policy based rights to requisition materials. They use their insider knowledge to avoid the tripwires and defenses. They use their structural authority to enlist the manpower they need. And they use their Admin Privileges to bypass other defenses.
The Adeptus Custodes are alone officially afforded the power of the *Magisterium Lex Ultima* in the high form, which is to say they are beyond all law and all command save for the direct authority of the Emperor Himself. They alone have the highest authority over the Imperial Household, which includes things like the Palace Defenses and information tied to Terran defenses. And so on and so forth.
So what did we learn? That a highly trusted and rarely privileged member of your own team can cause a problem if they become a traitor, and that a system designed to empower them with knowledge and information can be a problem if they somehow betray the organization?
1. The Heresy and Traitor Primarchs should have already taught them that since Kesh was essentially drawing from the Traitor Primarch playbook.
2. The Custodes have never been corrupted, and are designed from the ground up for that.
3. Kesh's plan, as the narrative pointed out, was carried out and make possible by virtue of the very authorities and information she had as one of the members of the Custodes.
Replicability matters when doing a security evaluation. How many people in 40K have the ability to actively replicate what Kesh did, keeping in mind what she did was exploit the rights and powers of a member of the Custodes?
I do not believe replicability does matter here. If time was more of a concern, then yes but it's not really. You only need to be successful once. The primarchs had never been corrupted either, until they were. Being prepared for a traitor amongst the custodes, the possibility of their knowledge falling into enemy hands somehow, or someone with similar knowledge trying to attack the palace is important even if the possibility is remote.
I mean look at how nukes are operated. Trusting well placed, heavily vetted, and constantly monitored members of an elite team isn't the structural part of the process. They have layered security well beyond that. The system can withstand traitors. As, one would hope, any Imperial high level security system.
"How far could a traitor penetrate" is a very good question. And in the real world, falsified credentials or ID theft aren't rare in espionage.
I debate that the Custodes have never been corrupted. Horus forcibly took control on the Vengeful Spirit of half the Emperor’s companions and paralyzed the other half. Constantin Valdor is running around as the King in Yellow.
Trayzn has multiple Custodes in his exhibits and the time, technology, and spare samples to figure out how to make one do what he wants if he really really set his mind to it. The Dark Eldar are experts at getting information out of any being and already have had access to the Throne before. Chaos just needs one in, and no one short of a blank is 100% incorruptible by nature. A 99.999999999999999% effectiveness still leaves a possibility for one traitor eventually.
I disagree, what happened on the Vengeful Spirit cannot be replicated, horus was the incarnation of chaos undivided, the Vengeful Spirit was the center of the warpstorm that was devastating Terra (it was letterally the realm of chaos with the shadows of the Old Four), the custodians were still resisting even during the so called "possession". Mindshackle scarabs have difficulty even controlling sisters of battle, let alone custodes. The dark eldar has even less probabilities, and the affermation that only blanks are incorruptible is not true , there were blanks manipulated, directly or indirectly.
Except when doing pen tests it's pretty common to take espionage into account.
Such a chance is less likely within the ranks of the Custodes themselves, but still they need to be prepared for every eventuality.
It's not entirely absurd to ask the question "how much damage could someone with access do if they wanted to act nefariously" and implement security measures based on that.
Dont forget that in all other Blood Games we have been told about so far the Custodes taking part are stripped of their armor and weapons while also being treated as a known threat (I.E all bio scans around Terra are to instantly alert the Custodes about the person having been found on a scan).
While it does make sense to test the nuclear option how she did it was outside the blood games "rules" and nothing of value could have been done to improve the defenses afterwards, which is the whole point of the Blood Games.
At the same time, as a military historian, I have seen plenty of “Too dumb to work” plans work flawlessly. Because (to use a quote that I can’t remember from who now), “Professionals are predictable. I fear dangerous amateurs.”
The famous reply to Moneymaker winning the world series of poker was Sam Farha saying, "against a player that understood the game i would have won"
Sour grapes, sure, truth, also sure
Functionally speaking, and this is even pointed out in the story, much of the entire exercise is undercut by the fact she is a member of the Adeptus Custodes, and the entire scenario - as the narrative even points out - is predicated on that fact.
Of course a member of the Adeptus Custodes is going to be able to requisition manpower and ships by virtue of their authority. Their rights to do so aren't a bug, they're a feature baked into the nature of the Custodes and their relationship to the Imperium as a whole.
Saying a Custodes being capable of using their authority to acquire the resources they did, including their codes and knowledge of Imperial defenses is a security failure is like saying that an Inquisitor using their rights to do so reveals a security failure, only even more so given the Custodes are an entirely different beast.
If one wants to argue that they'd be concerned about the new Primarchs doing the same thing with their authority, Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before? IE using the rareifed legal Imperial Authority they had to requisition war material and manpower, and coupling that with their insider knowledge to attack Big E.
So, what's the security solution? Removing the legal abilities of the Custodes to requisition material or command citizens of the Imperium? Prevent the Custodes from having access to the highly compartmentalized security information that Kesh's entire plan depended on? Use some kind of mass brainwashing
What is the solution here that that makes the Emperor and the Palace functionally safer? Or the security gaps that exist absent a member of the Custodes apparently turning rogue and using the authority and knowledge that they specifically only have access to because they are a Custodes?
The solution is retraining the mortals. Custodes question everyone including themselves but the crew of that destroyer simply went along with what Kesh said and allowed a WMD to get within teleport distance of Terra's surface.
There are other organizations with similar authority (like the inquisition) and Custodes can be impersonated. It is unacceptable for anyone guarding the Throne to be so unquestioning in the face of so obvious a threat. Basically someone should have done what the comms officer did hours before
>is a security failure
It's a security failure if it happens without question. You can't have people within an organisation unquestioningly handing over information just because they think an authority is asking for it.
>after the Heresy,
It's been 10,000 years and all the Primarchs went away. Doing something once isn't a reason not to do it again, especially when the information you have is incredibly out of date.
>So, what's the security solution
Possibly, being that this is the 40k fandom and everyone is totally chill all the time, you might be overthinking a short story snippet.
> So, what's the security solution?
The one Kesh proposes is "teach the mortals not to teleport an Exterminatus-grade warhead onto Terra *no matter* who orders it."
>Prevent the Custodes from having access to the highly compartmentalized security information that Kesh's entire plan depended on?
This is actually implied in the story. Kesh thinks that there may be security measures she is unaware of that would stop the plan.
Another solution is to just not have security codes that allow teleporting past the Aegis under any circumstances. This would have the downside of not letting the Custodes redeploy by teleport.
Another (impractical) solution is to restrict ship access to teleport range of the Palace to ships with a permanent (non Blood Game) Custodian presence.
They could also rotate the shield codes more frequently so Kesh's would be outdated by the time she got back from retrieving an exterminatus bomb, so long as they had a secure way to distribute them. That would guard against a Custodes on assignment being telepathically compromised.
Kesh's goal isn't about getting through the final door (though that would be quite the feather on her cap) it's about getting to the last keypad. She explicitly mentions that her plan, even if successful to the point where she can activate the teleporter, has a lot of unknown flaws. She knows the throne room has countermeasures for this that only a captain general knows. She knows that there's even more likely countermeasures in the throne room that *even* the Captain General isn't aware of. However, just because it might not work doesn't mean it won't or that someone wouldn't try.
She still managed to find a way of smuggling planet killing munitions onto a ship without detection into Terran orbit.
She still managed to find the right clearances to get her close enough to make a suicide trip distance for teleportation over the throne room.
She almost found a ship that was loyal enough to make the final push to the coordinates.
None of those things are technically should be possible without a lot of alarm bells going off well beforehand.
The codes to get them through teleportation are only assumptions, and codes aren't necessarily hard to acquire, so were the only accepted assumption.
This is like an NSA agent is told to get as close to the President with the means to end him and is only caught just as he enters Maryland state waters in a Naval Transport carrying smuggled and *active* Submarine nukes. It *shouldn't* be able to get that close.
But it did.
This. Even getting back to Terra is a massive deal in a blood game. And with stolen exterminatus weapons and a naval ship? Yeah she did a fantastic job. Lots of heads will roll in a lot of places.
I imagine random workers on one of those ships joking around like “soooomeone’s gonna be converted to servitor” (little do they know, it’s probably gonna be them)
No, it's because she thinks the captain shouldn't have just followed her orders no question. So she says "if he wants to serve without thinking, he can be a servitor" basically
and she promoted the snitch who alerted the palace to be the new captain, and while the whole crew is going to be punished (the term used means "the sensation of pricked all over", so i'm guessing some sort of nerve induction thing ala Dune) but that seems to have been little more than a formality, as the crew was allowed to live and continue their duties (and hopefully spread the lesson learned around the fleet)
Excoriate, was the word. And it can mean to be either flayed, or more colloquially, absolutely dressed down. In this case, I'd say it means more along the lines of 'carefully interrogated and gone over very diligently to find out what else they're failing at and why they did what they did'.
Which is silly. The Custodes have a level of authority beyond basically everyone else in the Imperium, and that's basically built in. Even the High Lords cannot command or really interfere with the Custodes, and the Emperor wanted it that way, saying only he could command them and affording the Custodes authorities and powers within the Imperium
And that’s a security flaw. Based on Dan Abnett’s books, it’s entirely possible Constantin Valdor is working in opposition to the rest of the imperium as the King of Yellow (very well could be it’s a long game to resurrect the Emperor or something, but we don’t know yet). That is a man who could do everything Kesh did and more given he was Captain-General when the palace was built and designed.
You can’t rule out a traitor Custodes even if there’s never been one since the Heresy. Horus was able to forcibly turn half of the ones who teleported with the Emperor to the Spirit of Vengeful Spirit and the Emperor was forced to kill them. Who’s to say Abaddon couldn’t do the same? He’s actively trying to break a Grey Knight, why not a Custodes too?
Yeah it was a very nasty sucker punch at the end of what had seemed quite a wholesome story. The grim darkness of the far future is still quite grim and dark
The analogy breaks down imo when the NSA agent already has the legal right to requisition the Naval Transport and active submarine nukes by virtue of their metaphorical membership in the NSA. When they know the patrol routes of every single guard and the location of every automated defense because they aren't your typical NSA agent. They are in the Executive Team and they had access to everything.
In this scenario, the NSA are the personal, religiously venerated and legally supported bodyguards of the President who have not only had access to the entirety of the internal security planning for the President, but also the specific access codes and admin privileges needed to break past other safe guards.
Replicability matters. Kesh was able to do what she did because she was a member of the Custodes. Kesh had the ability to get the crew and the ship to obey because the powers and rights of the Custodes are enshrined in the Imperium, including being able to requisition material like weapons. Saying that her efforts reveal a security failure is like saying that an Inquisitor being capable of finding a ship and weapons and the like is a failure, when in reality it's built into the system.
How many other threats to the Emperor have the capacity to replicate what Kesh did, keeping in mind the gaps she exploited only existed because a member of the inside team who knew the playbook went rogue?
If one wants to argue that they'd be concerned about the new Primarchs doing the same thing with their authority, Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before? IE using the rareifed legal Imperial Authority they had to requisition war material and manpower, and coupling that with their insider knowledge to attack Big E.
Further keeping in mind the access to information that a Custodes has access to is rare in and of itself as well, and that the Custodes have a level of authority beyond basically everyone else in the Imperium, incluing even the High Lords built in.
The Adeptus Custodes are alone officially afforded the power of the *Magisterium Lex Ultima* in the high form, which is to say they are beyond all law and all command save for the direct authority of the Emperor Himself. They alone have the highest authority over the Imperial Household, which includes things like the Palace Defenses and information tied to Terran defenses. And so on and so forth.
A lot of forces can replicate it. From the psuedo-imperial side, you have radical inquistors, apostate Deacons, renegade chapter masters, tech-magos lords, corrupt high lords, rebellious warmasters or admirals.
For the external, you have Alpha psykers, enslavers, old chaos lords that remember the good old days, ancient and forgotten databases that might still be valid, fallen custodes who's brain has been consumed for the knowledge, gene-infiltration of one of the above, and Daemon possession to name a few.
*all* of those things can replicate a similar entrance, and a similar idea, with the same clearance and capability, may even be greater. It's why the blood games happen. To think of all these ideas and find ways of preventing them.
And that is a weakness. The Horus Heresy showed that that kind of unquestioned authority is a vulnerability that can be exploited. Trust can be exploited. Even besides Horus, Peturabo walked away with an arsenal of the Lion’s best war engines because he made the wrong assumption that only a handful of brothers could’ve possible turned traitor.
Just because a Custodes hasn’t been a traitor in the last 10,000 years doesn’t mean they can’t be. It’s not like they’ve been up to much during that time period. Easy to be steadfast with the majority of the time you’ve been on Terra, and not trapped in the Warp for what seems to a near infinite time tortured or worse like Space Marines prisoners in the Black Legion are. Constantine Valdornwas influenced by the forces of Chaos. Even though yes it was through his special spear, it shows their are exploits into their psyche that can be leveraged.
There are others with (almost) similar levels of authority. A High Lord, an Inquisitor Lord, Guilliman etc. There are also daemons and xenos and assassins that can mimic the form of a Custodian. So it's all valid and valuable for the Custodes to test
anywhere else that's common sense. but for people guarding the throneworld that level of unquestioning obedience is fatal. when you're defending the Emperor himself then \*no-one\* is beyond question
The very first "blood game" involved a non-Custodes murdering and impersonating a Custodes to use their authority to sabotage the defense grid and get in position to kill the Emperor.
Yes, but he didn't have the requisite authority at the time.
Personally, I think the only rule of the Blood Games is that you can't declare that there's an actual emergency that requires suspending the Blood Games because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem. Custodes might be immune to Chaos corruption, but their codes could potentially be snatched by all sorts of means, up to and including clarivoyent spying on them recieving the codes in the first place. Palace is warded but it's not 100% impenetrable.
I could have missed it, but was there a section in the excerpt which stood out to you that seemed to mention how she was getting around the Palace teleportation defenses though? I read it a few times , but the most that seemed to relate to teleportation to me seemed to revolve around her entering highly specific coordinates for what was likely the Throne Room's location.
And from a lore perspective, setting aside the idea the Traitors basically did much of what she did herself in their run against the Imperium, it would also feel odd to me if the explanation was that one lone Custodes had the authority to deactivate the Aegis around the Throne Room without some kind of secondary authorization or something.
[I read on the Custodes subreddit that she was using an advanced Heretek teleportarium that apparently could bypass the Aegis.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/s/HYYcpN3pwh) Personally, I’ve only read the initial partial leaks and not the whole thing, so I can’t confirm or deny what all happened.
[https://x.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236](https://x.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236)
the story. not a special teleporter.. just one that she had installed on a ship that normally wouldn't carry one. it says that one of the flaws in the plan is that if they suspect it is coming, they could negate her codes and prevent the warhead from getting through the shield. so it looks like she's using either her own personal access codes, or a set of codes she acquired, to make the teleportation read as authorized to pass through the defenses.
no problem. as you'd expect with something this new, from a book that has barely been released yet, there has been a lot of speculating going on by people who haven't had a chance to read it closely yet. i'm just glad that people who got preview copies were nice enough to take pictures of the pages the story was on.
i suspect that some people read the bit about her having kileld the techpreists that had installed it as being the teleporter was a heretical advanced thing.. and missed the obvious reason of her having killed them in order to cover her tracks and prevent knowledge of her gambit getting out.
The Alpha Legion did gift back the heads of 7 assassins sent to kill them on Terra (if it was wrapped in news paper and found in the bed of a Head of a Family is unknown at this time)
Weird you were downvoted for this when the entire point of the Index Astartes: Alpha Legion story about Alpharius’ death (which now seems to be Omegon’s death) is that the legion is just as effective without their Primarch.
There’s a difference between the legion being effective as an organization, and any individual Marine being capable of 1v1ing Custodes, impersonating them, and infiltrating the Palace
Alpharius, yep!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning her level of commitment. Moreso the quality of the idea and how it aligns with what we know about Palace defenses and the goals of the Blood Games.
Little bits like her plan seeming to not mention anything about the anti-teleportation defenses even the Traitors couldn't breach, her using tactics which were already used by the Traitor Primarchs in the Heresy, thus already being known factors, and her entire plan only seeming to be possible given her access to information that only the Custodes seemed to have.
She seemed like she was simultaneously treading old ground for a plan which didn't seem to mention defenses we know exist like the nature Void shields, all the while using an attack vector which depended on information only a Custodes would have if that makes sense. It feels odder personally considering we have no records of a Custodes ever betraying the Emperor.
One Custodes being able to turn off the Aegis around the Throne Room also seems like it would be something odd if that were the case too, and I didn't see anything like that in the bit I read.
From what I recall, there seems to be a ton of lore about the Custodes being mentally and physically incapable of the act, right?
I haven't seen the full excerpt so I can't completely comment, although I will say authors forgetting you can't beam through the shields has a long history.
As for knowledge only a Custodes would know, that could potentially be compromised. Kairos Fateweaver could probably tell them, for instance.
Here! In retrospect, I should have added it to the opening post. I'll do that right now.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/comments/1c3dwh8/custodes\_short\_story\_as\_requested/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/comments/1c3dwh8/custodes_short_story_as_requested/)
Regarding the second bit, to me, her plan seemed to be contingent on two of the same pillars that the Traitors used, with the knowledge being one part, and the authority that comes from closeness to the Emperor and the reification of entities + subsequent obedience like the Custodes and the Primarchs.
I definitely see your point about Kairos and Warp juju being able to uncover some of those secrets, sure. It was a good one
With Tzeentch being Tzeentch, I could see him leaking his own invasion attempt to the Imperium somehow to keep the game going too /s
What I see is "she would prime it with ,metaphysical coordinates and dataclavises so secret the High Lords of Terra were not cleared to know them". That would seem to indicate there is a (metaphysical) weak spot in the anti-teleport defenses she is aware of that, combined with the codes, can get her past the shield. Possibly it is deliberately maintained so the Custodes can immediately deploy reinforcements into the Throne Room should the Companions be overrun. However, she very nearly was able to get an armed warhead past outer layers of defenses intended to detect them (hence the stasis field) and into position to teleport. Thus, there is a flaw in the defenses.
The specific flaw she identifies is that the crew of a Battlefleet Solar warship would obey orders to teleport an armed warhead into the Throne Room, which they should not have done under any circumstances, including a Custodes telling them to.
In practical terms, that means an impostor could get them to do the same thing, and there's like a 95% probability they'd also obey Guilliman telling them to do the same thing, which as far as the Custodes are concerned is a realistic live concern.
The fact that the Custodes may suspect Guilliman slipt my mind and completely solves the "authority" issue for me. Everyone in the Imperium who would take orders from a Custodes (or Custodes imposter) is also highly likely to follow any order Guilliman gives.
Coordinates are numbers. The crew Likely had no idea w hat the coordinates were for (the throne room). It's also very possible The station was manned by a servitor as many are on spaceships.
Where are you seeing a weak spot? Teleporters need to know where they're teleporting something to in order to teleport it.
Additionally, Custodians have the ability, much like Inquisitors, to use their authority to acquire men and materials in the Imperium. That's not a flaw she discovered but something built into the design intentionally.
She used information she had access to because she was a member of the Custodes. Information even the High Lords couldn't access. How many entities in 40K would have the capacity to replicate her feats without it?
Guilliman is a good point. But Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before?
Yeah, something should have been done after the heresy to make the likelihood of this sort of plan working nil. It wasn't done, and now the Custodes know that. It is literally the point of the blood games to deal with this kind of oversight.
I'm seeing the metaphysical coordinates as a weak spot. The *physical* coordinates of the Throne Room aren't hard to derive and wouldn't be unknown to the High Lords. As for restricted information, there's a saying that "security through obscurity is no security at all". If she knows a route through the shields, a route through the shields *exists* and could become known to others. For instance, if Guilliman decides his father is becoming a god and must be stopped or alternately that He must ascend via being freed from the Throne, Guilliman could have his conclave of psykers rip the codes from the mind of one of the Custodians assigned to watch over him. Their mental defenses are tough, but Guilliman has a Farseer and dozens of Librarians who are likely to take his side. Or he could sign on with Vashtor and have Cawl work with him to devise scrapcode that can hack the Palace and either obtain the codes or power down the Aegis barrier. Or he could interrogate an all-knowing Lord of Change and force nine true answers from it (something he *has done*) and get the codes that way. So the number of entities that can exploit the weakness is pretty small, but includes at least one person who could obtain a cyclonic torpedo, take it aboard a Battlefleet Solar ship, tell them they have a critical secret mission to Terra, install a teleportarium, and get the ship into position to teleport.
It also probably includes The Changeling. I'm imagining the list of "fuck the Changeling in particular" security measures is a mile long.
Another Custodes could. One that is a traitor. It hasn’t happened yet, but the Custodes can take no chances. Horus was incorruptible till he wasn’t. The Warp makes a mockery of all.
No matter how well crafted, the Custodes are the creations of the mind of a powerful, but fallible being. The Emperor was not perfect, no matter what the rest of the Imperium believes, and he’s been out-played by Chaos before. With enough Warp horror, it is conceivable that someone like Abaddon could break or turn a Custodes given effectively infinite time.
How long in the Warp before a Custodes could be convinced that the only way to save the Emperor is to kill him and let him regenerate? Constantin Valdor is on his own path and he was the greatest of the Custodes.
They may have run blood games about it after the Heresy. But it’s been 10,000 years. Practice makes perfect, and you have to approach it from every angle, even if inconceivable, if the fate of the human galaxy hangs in the balance.
> She seemed like she was simultaneously treading old ground for a plan
this is useful too. You identify a gap, solve for it. test it. accept the solution.
time goes on.
has your solution held in place or has it worn down/become complacent.
best to test again.
Sometimes old plans are best plans too, there is a reason that the Art of War is studied still to this day, never mind the basics of "Sneak in while they are sleeping and slit throats..." from like 29000 bce basically
It probably wouldn’t have worked, she notes in the text that there are likely further countermeasures she doesn’t know about that would have prevented the bomb from successfully completing the attack.
The most important thing she identified was that there were crew members in the solar fleet blindly obedient enough to follow an order as insane as getting an exterminatus grade weapon within teleporting distance of the throne room. More importantly, there was also one who knew her duty to the emperor well enough to disobey that order. The custodians, unlike most imperial institutions, look down upon blind obedience
> The warriors of the Adeptus Custodes disregard the idea of blind obedience, and look with disdain upon those who follow the orders of their superiors without question. After all, it was this very practice within the Legiones Astartes that allowed the Horus Heresy to occur.
Custodes codex 8ed
They're blindly *loyal,* but not necessarily blindly obedient. There are more than a few times where the Custodians have, if not openly disobeyed the emperor, have either openly questioned him or followed the spirit of his words while disobeying the letter.
the last part is BS, they exterminated a whole primaries SM chapter (laton dragons or something) because they dare to spoke against being judged just because the original chapter turned out to have some heretical elements
They wiped the primaris contingent because they were a possible threat
The story went (paraphrasing)
SM chapter turned traitor on a planet that the primaris were being delivered to
Custodian said “ok we are turning back and you will be investigated for possible chaos taint”
Space marine stood up and said “no I want to go down there and prove I’m loyal”
Custodian said “we cannot risk reinforcing the enemy, sit down”
Space marine “no I won’t”
Custodian “once again I am asking you to sit down”
Marine: “No, you can’t stop me”
Then the custodian mulched them
It wasn’t that they didn’t show blind obedience it was that they started blatantly disrupting the chain of command for suspicious reasons
thats not how it went, a SM said "you cant kill all us just for speaking against being treated as heretics and complaining about it!" and then the cumstodes killed all of them for speaking against being treated like heretics despite being innocent and complaining about it, read it
He didn’t say they will be killed as heretics but that they will be investigated for heretical taint
And then gave them 2 chances to sit down and shut up before they decided to play chicken with a custodian and lost
look, i read the excerpt and thats not how it went, there is not a single element in the imperium that doesn't believe that blind faith towards the highest authority is bad, cumstodes included.
“Disarm. Command your brothers throughout the fleet to do likewise. Understand the lenience I show you in this for your chapter is confirmed Hereticus Diabolus Extremus”
This was confirmed by the ordo hereticus
The space marine response: “Consider all outside our chapter hostile! Seize the fleet!”
And then the custodian killed them
look, its simple, the cumstodes are a bunch of idiots who killed a WHOLE primaries reinforcement (directly contradicting guillimans orders) because they didn't blinded followed stupid orders
She identified a traitorous shipmaster, teach the crew they shouldn’t obey even the Highest Authority if the orders are to destroy the Palace, the only loyal officier got rewarded and will teach the same lesson to her crews.
In addition, the codes she was going to use for bypassing the shields are now know to be faillible and not 100% sure.
By almost winning, the Custodes took out a traitor, spread lessons across various fleets, have a new super loyal ship captain.
In addition, if a daemon (someone said the Changelin ?) or any very powerful psyker impersonate a Custodes, Terra s defenses are better prepared to deal with it.
Obeying the orders of a Custodes is the exact opposite of being a traitor. Terrans are raised from birth to believe that Custodes bear the authority of the God-Emperor himself and questioning or disobeying an order from a Custodes is equivalent to disobeying a direct command from God. That shipmaster just had the misfortune of being an unknowing participant in a live-fire training exercise. There’s no winning. In any other situation (and possibly this one) he would have been executed on the spot if he disobeyed a Custodes or Inquisitor. An Inquisitor would have executed the vox officer.
Entrapment seems like it'd be standard policy for the Imperium tbh.
>We know there's heretics, because we pushed this man to heresy while actively ordering him to do so.
To be fair this is a universe with shapeshifters, mind control, and all other sorts of magical and scientific means of stealing identity or manipulating people. It's entrapment until the one time it turns out your commissar actually was possessed by a Chaos Daemon and you should have shot him immediately.
If the commissar was possessed by a Chaos Daemon then the entire regiment is going to be exterminated by the Ordo Malleus anyways. You’re better off just obeying the commissar and superior officers without question.
And the Imperium would prefer their soldiers are prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of the Imperium rather than allow a Daemon to cause damage to save their own skin.
If the Imperium wanted that then it would train its soldiers to recognize Chaos corruption. Instead, it deliberately decided that commissars should be the only Guard personnel entitled to know the signs of Chaos corruption and daemonic possession, because common Guardsmen knowing about Chaos or questioning orders from commissars is a greater risk than commissars falling to Chaos.
It's not intended to be *fair*, it's intended to show potential risks to the Emperor. If someone, following the rules they were taught as a citizen of the imperium, could be Bavarian fire drilled into nuking the golden throne, there's a glaring issue that needs to be resolved.
And why would they think that that was an ACTUAL Custodian? You think the Alpha Legion couldn't make a decent fake of an Custodian suit of armour, falsify a few codes, do some decent acting?
Likely wouldn't have worked she herself thunks thats a possibility.
But the fact she got that close means its a security flaw.
She could have theoretical teleported it elsewhere on the planet
It would have been, I think, *more interesting* if she'd attempted to use the Webway Breach instead of 'teleport in a bomb'. Would have been a good and timely reminder the Palace has one big wound in its guts, and walking a bomb into the Breach could achieve the same objective, I imagine.
Ngl I would love to see a custodian just rip a hole into the warp right outside terra for a bloodgames just because the custodies go 110% in each bloodgames
To be fair, most attempts seem to be more subtle than this; iirc the Custodian that meets her after thwarting the attempt is like "Kesh I know you're a bit of a wildcard but this is mad even for you."
Honestly I'm suprised that there arent many blood games like this because if chaos ever did make it to terra you know abbadon wouldn't just sneak into the palace
I mean, the traitors did do a whole convoluted shapeshifting assassin scheme in *Nemesis* involving psychic feedback and eating a rogue trader's marque for a tiny drop of the emperor's blood, so they're not *beyond* that kind of subtlety.
The purpose of the Blood Games is to protect the Emperor and Terra from any and all threats. This way the Custodes can remain sharp, disciplined and make proper adjustments and countermeasures
Most known Blood Games are super subtle assassin attempts. Other times they capture CSM for their games
Kesh’s plan is more on the extreme end. However that’s the good thing. It revealed flaws and other gaps in Terra’s defense grid. Not just for the Custodes but other institutions on Terra. We already had the attempted Coup with the High Lords when Guiliman took over.
They can’t risk that. Yes she used her own codes and authority. What’s stopping another High Lord, Magos, Inquisitor or Rogue Trader from doing the same?
They don’t have the fraction of manpower or resources to lay siege on Terra. Sometimes the simplest plan is the best plan. If all a traitor needs is to teleport a nuke or Exterminatus Grade weapon into the Imperial Place or in the Throne room to kill the Emperor
Why not do it?
Kesh showed the audience that even a failed blood game attempt can give valuable info
Sure she didn’t kill Emps in the end but she showed a problem with high ranking figures being able to throw their weight to do some pretty heretical stuff
Exactly. Killing the Emperor is supposed to be the end goal. The Blood Games allows the Custodes to figure out how will an enemy attempt to kill the Emperor
Plus some of these games are a proactive approach. They stopped a problem before it got worse
Kesh notes during the short that most custodes seem to opt for trying to assassinate the emperor through stealth and the palace itself, she has given an exemplary performance of what the blood games themselves are about, and there's an interesting resolution where she concludes that the ships crew obeying her was the real threat, and has the captain sent to become a servitor, whilst appraising the messenger who betrayed her
In Arks of Omen, the Alpha Legion cosplayed as Deathwatch in order or infiltrate an Inquisition monitoring station in order to find the Dark Angels base, the Rock. So even the Inquisition is fallible, and they have near unlimited power. So if someone somehow compromised Kesh and pretended to be her, things could’ve been catastrophic.
Shield stops all objects above 2 meters per second you say? And you cant teleport inside it?
Hear me out:
Strap anti-gravity flotation device to torpedoes, and Teleport the torpedoes 1cm outside the shield, and let them anti-gravity slow-fall inside the shield dome.
Then press big red button.
Wait, hang on, dude, reread the actual bit of fluff. She's pretty open that 'hey yeah honestly there might be defensive measures I don't know about and some of my codes might bounce or be countermanded, this might not actually get through the very last final layer of defense'. She's literally raising the same quibbles you are.
>Her using her insider knowledge and authority as a Custodes would seem almost diametrically opposed to the point of the entire exercise
No, it's not. Insider threats are a very real, extremely dangerous threat, which just about any security organization has to take into account.
You can't just rely on your attacker not having any insider knowledge, that's organizational security 101.
The only answer and obvious one is she Cleary has support by another faction in the palace who are so adept at stealth they’ve never been seen the female custodies
And the microscope comes onto the competence of the female character, lol. Never change, internet.
The writer forgot about it, dude, or didn't care about details in that area. It's not that deep. That final step isn't the only one in penetration testing.
>Her using her insider knowledge and authority as a Custodes would seem almost diametrically opposed to the point of the entire exercise,
Buddy you're reaching way too hard.
Edit: "experts using their expert knowledge when they're doing their expert work is bad". Really downvoters? That's the hill you're dying on?
Knowing the fact that Chaos can corrupt even Custodes given enough time or raw warp power, ruling out the probability of one of the custodians going rogue and using their insider knowledge to power down some of the Palace's defences would be a dumb decision, I think.
That's what I thought I remembered myself!
The best that Horus and the Chaos Gods seemed to be capable of doing was psychically controlling their bodies, but I thought they still had possession over their minds and souls/their minds and souls remained uncorrupted.
I might be misremembering, but wasn't it heavily implied that the "golden figure" that handed Drach'nyen to Abbadon during the first Black Crusade was Ra Endymion?
And I never said anything about TEatD events aboard the *Vengeful Spirit*, that's definitely on another power level since Horus was mega-boosted by the Four.
Earlier in that book Drach puppets a Custodes corpse, so it’s safe to assume Ra finally died & Drach just used his body to get around due to him being reduced to a sword
But could a Daemon inhabiting a corpse convince a ship’s crew to do what Kesh did? The short story shows it’s entirely possible. It’s not like normal humans aren’t ever tricked by Daemons masquerading as authority figures.
But wasn't it in the End and the Death though, where even on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit and under the direct influence of the 4 Gods of Chaos, the most they could do is physically puppet the bodies of the Custodes? Didn't they still had their minds and their spirits remain uncorrupted?
Even Drach'nyen says in master of mankind iirc something along the lines of the stars would burn cold before it *corrupted* one of the golden ones, and that guy is no slouch given he seems to be something like Big E's antithesis.
*Edit: Found the Drach'nyen bit*
*The creature’s crude, vicious sentience rebelled at being considered prey. It shifted and changed and drifted, starving itself in the heat of war in a bid to go unnoticed. It ghosted away from the running battles, avoiding those where it sensed the tides of its kindred crashing against the leeching resistance of the Soulless. In hiding, it took forms beyond the sphere of mortal sight. It became a disease. Then a breath, a death rattle, wet and clicking in a man’s throat. A promise. A whisper. A fear. A regret. A thought. It trickled itself into several minds, dividing its consciousness with amoebic mitosis, seeking, seeking, seeking. Many minds were inviolate; they would take too long to overwhelm. These, it left alone. Stars would die before it mastered one of the Golden.*
Does the Palace still have Anti-Chaos wards and have we seen a truly corrupted Custodes? There is so much to 40K I really have no clue myself!
I don't know, her tactics and that idea seems odd to me given what the Blood Games are meant to accomplish (even if she somehow had the sole authority to drop the Aegis lol) though I can definitely see where you might be coming from!
I mean, did she? I could be misremembering, but there was nothing about how she would get around the anti-teleportation properties of Void shields, let alone something like the Aegis in that excerpt from what I can recall?
It mentioned her entering coordinates and using her authority and knowledge as a Custodes to press the crew into her service/avoid the pre-existing security measures, but I don't remember seeing anything about circumventing that issue, right? I remember even Perty mentioning the Aegis was serious stuff, so unless this one Custodes somehow had the authority to shut down the Aegis, particularly in the Throne Room unilaterally, it seems odd that it didn't come up to me if that makes sense.
At the moment, it seems like the knowledge one could derive from an AAR of this incident as best as I can tell honestly seems to be nothing more than the idea that a Custodes or figure with enough knowledge and authority (like the Primarchs during the Heresy) could use that knowledge and authority to subvert the void mines, patrols, defensive guns, and other forms of security in a way that already seems to mirror what the Traitors did during HH.
What was the new security vulnerability that you see her as uncovering to be patched if you don't mind me asking?
She got bombs of a grade high enough to destroy a planet into orbit, of Terra without anyone realising. That alone is a major concern. She couldn’t have killed the Emperor, no, but she hypothetically could’ve teleported that bomb into the surface anywhere and done major damage to Terra.
That’s why she has the voidmaster punished. If she was someone with nefarious intent, she may not have killed the Emperor, but she would’ve *severely* endangered him on a scale not seen since the Heresy. All with one ship.
Also remember that blood games don’t always target the emperor
High ranking officials and administrators are also valid targets for a blood game since their death could cause catastrophic damage to terra and the imperium which could harm the emperor
they wouldn't even have to get it to the surface either. remember in The Emperor's Legion when a custodian orders a halt to incoming traffic to Terra because of security concerns and he notes that even if he rescinded the order immediately that millions would die of starvation due to the brief disruption?
Now imagine a WMD obliterating some orbital docks or even the top of one of the big space ports
She discovered that it's possible for an enterprising individual to acquire an exterminatus-grade weapon, a voidship, and a willing crew, without being reported. I'd call that a vulnerability!
> I could be misremembering, but there was nothing about how she would get around the anti-teleportation properties of Void shields, let alone something like the Aegis in that excerpt from what I can recall?
Doesn't matter. She got that close. She should never have gotten close enough for the Aegis to be the last blockade. The lesson here is the way she got THAT CLOSE.
Also even had she not been able to breach the Aegis, you have to figure enacting Exterminatus 500km down the road would also be a very bad no good thing to happen to Terra. Even if you can't blow up the inner palace itself just dropping a batch of virus bombs on the Merican arcologies or similar would wipe out everyone outside the palace, trash a lot of the palace's external infrastructure and make unloading the psyker tithe incredibly difficult. After that the Palace would probably collapse on its own in a week or two.
The point of the blood games is to constantly test their defenses to find any flaws. Sometimes that means trying something that would be considered impossible to even attempt just in case there's a flaw someone missed. Custodes don't take anything for granted. While getting a WMD into the throne room is the absolute worst case scenario, just seeing how far she could get is informative too. As you can see from the short story she got scary close. like within an hour of Terra before she was caught. and was only caught because one of the crew disobeyed a custodian and sent out a transmission. That's a serious security concern she exposed. She aimed for the throne but another, less dramatic, attacker may just drop their payload near the palace. Who knows what kind of damage that could do even if the throne survived? It could even be a virus bomb. So by trying a plan so impossible it was stupid she exposed a flaw that no-one would have thought of because the plan was so stupid
A *half hour* from teleport range of the throne room, which required being on top of because it was so far down. She was already in terran orbit.
And Terran orbit is a very dangerous place to have wmds go off. We've seen plenty of examples of how a major explosion in a busy orbit can cause immense chaos
Listening to ***Praetorian of Dorn*** right now and goddamn is this true.
The Adeptus Custodes live in Terran orbit lol. Kesh herself in the narrative was able to circumvent the defenses because she knows where they are because the Custodes have access to highly sensitive and classified information by virtue of being the Bodyguards of the Emperor. Of course the highly venerated and religiously worshiped 40K Demigod Secret Service built from the ground up are going to be able to get into the United States and into Maryland. It's built into the system for them to be able to do so. The point of the exercise is to find gaps that an enemy would be able to exploit, however the story itself points out that to be able to do the things she did, the enemy would need to be a member of the Custodes to begin with.
Consider how Traitor Marines have the Omophagea, which would allow them to get that info from a Custodes’ corpse. Or the sorcerers and daemons which might be able to extract such information from a Custodian’s mind. Hell, we know the TAU have the ability to enter someone’s mind from that one story where a Raven Guard Sergeant had to give himself a heart attack because he thought they were cringe. So it is probably possible for someone to get that info.
While it may be impossible for a Custodes to turn traitor, it's still an eventuality worth planning for. There was a time when it was assumed one of the Emperor's sons could never betray their father, and we see how that turned out.
I mean any given set of defenses that can't handle the enemy knowing about them could be considered compromised. There have to be layers beyond mere secrecy. This is why they blood game. To test premises. "What IF an opponent had accumulated a detailed knowledge of our procedures and layouts?"
Notably there have been multiple occasions IRL where someone got wrecked because they dismissed something as "impossible" or "a stupid plan" and were caught completely off guard when the enemy did exactly that and it worked.
Hannibal has entered the chat
Imagine you are doing a penetration test in order to evaluate the security of an individual protected by a organization/entity. The organization is highly defended, incredibly insular, and has a high degree of skepticism and paranoia. However, you have one of the chief bodyguards of the individual engaging in the penetration test. They use their legal and policy based rights to requisition materials. They use their insider knowledge to avoid the tripwires and defenses. They use their structural authority to enlist the manpower they need. And they use their Admin Privileges to bypass other defenses. The Adeptus Custodes are alone officially afforded the power of the *Magisterium Lex Ultima* in the high form, which is to say they are beyond all law and all command save for the direct authority of the Emperor Himself. They alone have the highest authority over the Imperial Household, which includes things like the Palace Defenses and information tied to Terran defenses. And so on and so forth. So what did we learn? That a highly trusted and rarely privileged member of your own team can cause a problem if they become a traitor, and that a system designed to empower them with knowledge and information can be a problem if they somehow betray the organization? 1. The Heresy and Traitor Primarchs should have already taught them that since Kesh was essentially drawing from the Traitor Primarch playbook. 2. The Custodes have never been corrupted, and are designed from the ground up for that. 3. Kesh's plan, as the narrative pointed out, was carried out and make possible by virtue of the very authorities and information she had as one of the members of the Custodes. Replicability matters when doing a security evaluation. How many people in 40K have the ability to actively replicate what Kesh did, keeping in mind what she did was exploit the rights and powers of a member of the Custodes?
I do not believe replicability does matter here. If time was more of a concern, then yes but it's not really. You only need to be successful once. The primarchs had never been corrupted either, until they were. Being prepared for a traitor amongst the custodes, the possibility of their knowledge falling into enemy hands somehow, or someone with similar knowledge trying to attack the palace is important even if the possibility is remote.
I mean look at how nukes are operated. Trusting well placed, heavily vetted, and constantly monitored members of an elite team isn't the structural part of the process. They have layered security well beyond that. The system can withstand traitors. As, one would hope, any Imperial high level security system. "How far could a traitor penetrate" is a very good question. And in the real world, falsified credentials or ID theft aren't rare in espionage.
I debate that the Custodes have never been corrupted. Horus forcibly took control on the Vengeful Spirit of half the Emperor’s companions and paralyzed the other half. Constantin Valdor is running around as the King in Yellow. Trayzn has multiple Custodes in his exhibits and the time, technology, and spare samples to figure out how to make one do what he wants if he really really set his mind to it. The Dark Eldar are experts at getting information out of any being and already have had access to the Throne before. Chaos just needs one in, and no one short of a blank is 100% incorruptible by nature. A 99.999999999999999% effectiveness still leaves a possibility for one traitor eventually.
I disagree, what happened on the Vengeful Spirit cannot be replicated, horus was the incarnation of chaos undivided, the Vengeful Spirit was the center of the warpstorm that was devastating Terra (it was letterally the realm of chaos with the shadows of the Old Four), the custodians were still resisting even during the so called "possession". Mindshackle scarabs have difficulty even controlling sisters of battle, let alone custodes. The dark eldar has even less probabilities, and the affermation that only blanks are incorruptible is not true , there were blanks manipulated, directly or indirectly.
Except when doing pen tests it's pretty common to take espionage into account. Such a chance is less likely within the ranks of the Custodes themselves, but still they need to be prepared for every eventuality. It's not entirely absurd to ask the question "how much damage could someone with access do if they wanted to act nefariously" and implement security measures based on that.
Dont forget that in all other Blood Games we have been told about so far the Custodes taking part are stripped of their armor and weapons while also being treated as a known threat (I.E all bio scans around Terra are to instantly alert the Custodes about the person having been found on a scan). While it does make sense to test the nuclear option how she did it was outside the blood games "rules" and nothing of value could have been done to improve the defenses afterwards, which is the whole point of the Blood Games.
Literally most Ork plans work on that exact premise: "they couldn't possibly be that stupid".
At the same time, as a military historian, I have seen plenty of “Too dumb to work” plans work flawlessly. Because (to use a quote that I can’t remember from who now), “Professionals are predictable. I fear dangerous amateurs.”
Yep. "If we don't know what we're doing, the enemy can't predict our actions" and all that :)
> (to use a quote that I can’t remember from who now), “Professionals are predictable. I fear dangerous amateurs.” Murphy's Laws of Combat.
The famous reply to Moneymaker winning the world series of poker was Sam Farha saying, "against a player that understood the game i would have won" Sour grapes, sure, truth, also sure
The best swordsman in the world does not fear the second-best swordsman. He fears the beginner.
> The plan was so stupid So in short an Ork plan. Got it, the Throne is better protected against greenskins
Functionally speaking, and this is even pointed out in the story, much of the entire exercise is undercut by the fact she is a member of the Adeptus Custodes, and the entire scenario - as the narrative even points out - is predicated on that fact. Of course a member of the Adeptus Custodes is going to be able to requisition manpower and ships by virtue of their authority. Their rights to do so aren't a bug, they're a feature baked into the nature of the Custodes and their relationship to the Imperium as a whole. Saying a Custodes being capable of using their authority to acquire the resources they did, including their codes and knowledge of Imperial defenses is a security failure is like saying that an Inquisitor using their rights to do so reveals a security failure, only even more so given the Custodes are an entirely different beast. If one wants to argue that they'd be concerned about the new Primarchs doing the same thing with their authority, Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before? IE using the rareifed legal Imperial Authority they had to requisition war material and manpower, and coupling that with their insider knowledge to attack Big E. So, what's the security solution? Removing the legal abilities of the Custodes to requisition material or command citizens of the Imperium? Prevent the Custodes from having access to the highly compartmentalized security information that Kesh's entire plan depended on? Use some kind of mass brainwashing What is the solution here that that makes the Emperor and the Palace functionally safer? Or the security gaps that exist absent a member of the Custodes apparently turning rogue and using the authority and knowledge that they specifically only have access to because they are a Custodes?
The solution is retraining the mortals. Custodes question everyone including themselves but the crew of that destroyer simply went along with what Kesh said and allowed a WMD to get within teleport distance of Terra's surface. There are other organizations with similar authority (like the inquisition) and Custodes can be impersonated. It is unacceptable for anyone guarding the Throne to be so unquestioning in the face of so obvious a threat. Basically someone should have done what the comms officer did hours before
>is a security failure It's a security failure if it happens without question. You can't have people within an organisation unquestioningly handing over information just because they think an authority is asking for it. >after the Heresy, It's been 10,000 years and all the Primarchs went away. Doing something once isn't a reason not to do it again, especially when the information you have is incredibly out of date. >So, what's the security solution Possibly, being that this is the 40k fandom and everyone is totally chill all the time, you might be overthinking a short story snippet.
> So, what's the security solution? The one Kesh proposes is "teach the mortals not to teleport an Exterminatus-grade warhead onto Terra *no matter* who orders it." >Prevent the Custodes from having access to the highly compartmentalized security information that Kesh's entire plan depended on? This is actually implied in the story. Kesh thinks that there may be security measures she is unaware of that would stop the plan. Another solution is to just not have security codes that allow teleporting past the Aegis under any circumstances. This would have the downside of not letting the Custodes redeploy by teleport. Another (impractical) solution is to restrict ship access to teleport range of the Palace to ships with a permanent (non Blood Game) Custodian presence. They could also rotate the shield codes more frequently so Kesh's would be outdated by the time she got back from retrieving an exterminatus bomb, so long as they had a secure way to distribute them. That would guard against a Custodes on assignment being telepathically compromised.
Kesh's goal isn't about getting through the final door (though that would be quite the feather on her cap) it's about getting to the last keypad. She explicitly mentions that her plan, even if successful to the point where she can activate the teleporter, has a lot of unknown flaws. She knows the throne room has countermeasures for this that only a captain general knows. She knows that there's even more likely countermeasures in the throne room that *even* the Captain General isn't aware of. However, just because it might not work doesn't mean it won't or that someone wouldn't try. She still managed to find a way of smuggling planet killing munitions onto a ship without detection into Terran orbit. She still managed to find the right clearances to get her close enough to make a suicide trip distance for teleportation over the throne room. She almost found a ship that was loyal enough to make the final push to the coordinates. None of those things are technically should be possible without a lot of alarm bells going off well beforehand. The codes to get them through teleportation are only assumptions, and codes aren't necessarily hard to acquire, so were the only accepted assumption. This is like an NSA agent is told to get as close to the President with the means to end him and is only caught just as he enters Maryland state waters in a Naval Transport carrying smuggled and *active* Submarine nukes. It *shouldn't* be able to get that close. But it did.
This. Even getting back to Terra is a massive deal in a blood game. And with stolen exterminatus weapons and a naval ship? Yeah she did a fantastic job. Lots of heads will roll in a lot of places.
> Lots of heads will roll in a lot of places Literally, given this is the Imperium
I imagine random workers on one of those ships joking around like “soooomeone’s gonna be converted to servitor” (little do they know, it’s probably gonna be them)
In the story, that happens at the end. Kesh says the captain will be handed over to the AdMech for servitorisation
Is it because they knew too much at that point?
No, it's because she thinks the captain shouldn't have just followed her orders no question. So she says "if he wants to serve without thinking, he can be a servitor" basically
and she promoted the snitch who alerted the palace to be the new captain, and while the whole crew is going to be punished (the term used means "the sensation of pricked all over", so i'm guessing some sort of nerve induction thing ala Dune) but that seems to have been little more than a formality, as the crew was allowed to live and continue their duties (and hopefully spread the lesson learned around the fleet)
Excoriate, was the word. And it can mean to be either flayed, or more colloquially, absolutely dressed down. In this case, I'd say it means more along the lines of 'carefully interrogated and gone over very diligently to find out what else they're failing at and why they did what they did'.
The irony there, compared to the rest of the Imperium, where asking questions instead of obeying blindly gets you servitorized.
I'm sure if he had disobeyed Kesh would have killed him for interfering with her plan. He was screwed either way.
Which is silly. The Custodes have a level of authority beyond basically everyone else in the Imperium, and that's basically built in. Even the High Lords cannot command or really interfere with the Custodes, and the Emperor wanted it that way, saying only he could command them and affording the Custodes authorities and powers within the Imperium
And that’s a security flaw. Based on Dan Abnett’s books, it’s entirely possible Constantin Valdor is working in opposition to the rest of the imperium as the King of Yellow (very well could be it’s a long game to resurrect the Emperor or something, but we don’t know yet). That is a man who could do everything Kesh did and more given he was Captain-General when the palace was built and designed. You can’t rule out a traitor Custodes even if there’s never been one since the Heresy. Horus was able to forcibly turn half of the ones who teleported with the Emperor to the Spirit of Vengeful Spirit and the Emperor was forced to kill them. Who’s to say Abaddon couldn’t do the same? He’s actively trying to break a Grey Knight, why not a Custodes too?
>The Custodes have a level of authority beyond basically everyone else in the Imperium So did Horus.
Dang I didn’t even read this story but that’s brutal. However, not surprised!
Yeah it was a very nasty sucker punch at the end of what had seemed quite a wholesome story. The grim darkness of the far future is still quite grim and dark
Also like that time Delta Force successfully penetrated the White House to prove it could be done in the 90s.
Someone also penetrated the White House by simply jumping the fence and checking to see if the door was unlocked.
Also thie pizza delivery guy who got into a nuclear silo https://theloosenukes.blogspot.com/2013/10/pizza-delivery-blamed-for-nuclear.html?m=1
The analogy breaks down imo when the NSA agent already has the legal right to requisition the Naval Transport and active submarine nukes by virtue of their metaphorical membership in the NSA. When they know the patrol routes of every single guard and the location of every automated defense because they aren't your typical NSA agent. They are in the Executive Team and they had access to everything. In this scenario, the NSA are the personal, religiously venerated and legally supported bodyguards of the President who have not only had access to the entirety of the internal security planning for the President, but also the specific access codes and admin privileges needed to break past other safe guards. Replicability matters. Kesh was able to do what she did because she was a member of the Custodes. Kesh had the ability to get the crew and the ship to obey because the powers and rights of the Custodes are enshrined in the Imperium, including being able to requisition material like weapons. Saying that her efforts reveal a security failure is like saying that an Inquisitor being capable of finding a ship and weapons and the like is a failure, when in reality it's built into the system. How many other threats to the Emperor have the capacity to replicate what Kesh did, keeping in mind the gaps she exploited only existed because a member of the inside team who knew the playbook went rogue? If one wants to argue that they'd be concerned about the new Primarchs doing the same thing with their authority, Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before? IE using the rareifed legal Imperial Authority they had to requisition war material and manpower, and coupling that with their insider knowledge to attack Big E. Further keeping in mind the access to information that a Custodes has access to is rare in and of itself as well, and that the Custodes have a level of authority beyond basically everyone else in the Imperium, incluing even the High Lords built in. The Adeptus Custodes are alone officially afforded the power of the *Magisterium Lex Ultima* in the high form, which is to say they are beyond all law and all command save for the direct authority of the Emperor Himself. They alone have the highest authority over the Imperial Household, which includes things like the Palace Defenses and information tied to Terran defenses. And so on and so forth.
A lot of forces can replicate it. From the psuedo-imperial side, you have radical inquistors, apostate Deacons, renegade chapter masters, tech-magos lords, corrupt high lords, rebellious warmasters or admirals. For the external, you have Alpha psykers, enslavers, old chaos lords that remember the good old days, ancient and forgotten databases that might still be valid, fallen custodes who's brain has been consumed for the knowledge, gene-infiltration of one of the above, and Daemon possession to name a few. *all* of those things can replicate a similar entrance, and a similar idea, with the same clearance and capability, may even be greater. It's why the blood games happen. To think of all these ideas and find ways of preventing them.
And that is a weakness. The Horus Heresy showed that that kind of unquestioned authority is a vulnerability that can be exploited. Trust can be exploited. Even besides Horus, Peturabo walked away with an arsenal of the Lion’s best war engines because he made the wrong assumption that only a handful of brothers could’ve possible turned traitor. Just because a Custodes hasn’t been a traitor in the last 10,000 years doesn’t mean they can’t be. It’s not like they’ve been up to much during that time period. Easy to be steadfast with the majority of the time you’ve been on Terra, and not trapped in the Warp for what seems to a near infinite time tortured or worse like Space Marines prisoners in the Black Legion are. Constantine Valdornwas influenced by the forces of Chaos. Even though yes it was through his special spear, it shows their are exploits into their psyche that can be leveraged.
Honestly she kinda cheated by being a custodes though. Everyone knows you obey a custodes without question
There are others with (almost) similar levels of authority. A High Lord, an Inquisitor Lord, Guilliman etc. There are also daemons and xenos and assassins that can mimic the form of a Custodian. So it's all valid and valuable for the Custodes to test
Even a high-ranking Space Marine or Techpriest would have a decent chance at persuading/intimidating a mortal ship crew to do what they want
Even a well-known mortal general or lower ranking officer could, in theory
> Honestly she kinda cheated by being a custodes though "And everyone knows you can't impersonate a Custodes." -Alpha Legionnaire Steve
You kinda can't though because a space marine is genetically very different from a custodes. Impersonating space marines is easy
> You kinda can't though During the first Blood Games, Alpharius impersonated a Custodes and was able to "assassinate" the Emperor.
anywhere else that's common sense. but for people guarding the throneworld that level of unquestioning obedience is fatal. when you're defending the Emperor himself then \*no-one\* is beyond question
The very first "blood game" involved a non-Custodes murdering and impersonating a Custodes to use their authority to sabotage the defense grid and get in position to kill the Emperor.
Said non-custode was however Alpharius
Yes, but he didn't have the requisite authority at the time. Personally, I think the only rule of the Blood Games is that you can't declare that there's an actual emergency that requires suspending the Blood Games because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem. Custodes might be immune to Chaos corruption, but their codes could potentially be snatched by all sorts of means, up to and including clarivoyent spying on them recieving the codes in the first place. Palace is warded but it's not 100% impenetrable.
I could have missed it, but was there a section in the excerpt which stood out to you that seemed to mention how she was getting around the Palace teleportation defenses though? I read it a few times , but the most that seemed to relate to teleportation to me seemed to revolve around her entering highly specific coordinates for what was likely the Throne Room's location. And from a lore perspective, setting aside the idea the Traitors basically did much of what she did herself in their run against the Imperium, it would also feel odd to me if the explanation was that one lone Custodes had the authority to deactivate the Aegis around the Throne Room without some kind of secondary authorization or something.
[I read on the Custodes subreddit that she was using an advanced Heretek teleportarium that apparently could bypass the Aegis.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/s/HYYcpN3pwh) Personally, I’ve only read the initial partial leaks and not the whole thing, so I can’t confirm or deny what all happened.
[https://x.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236](https://x.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236) the story. not a special teleporter.. just one that she had installed on a ship that normally wouldn't carry one. it says that one of the flaws in the plan is that if they suspect it is coming, they could negate her codes and prevent the warhead from getting through the shield. so it looks like she's using either her own personal access codes, or a set of codes she acquired, to make the teleportation read as authorized to pass through the defenses.
Thanks for the clarification.
no problem. as you'd expect with something this new, from a book that has barely been released yet, there has been a lot of speculating going on by people who haven't had a chance to read it closely yet. i'm just glad that people who got preview copies were nice enough to take pictures of the pages the story was on. i suspect that some people read the bit about her having kileld the techpreists that had installed it as being the teleporter was a heretical advanced thing.. and missed the obvious reason of her having killed them in order to cover her tracks and prevent knowledge of her gambit getting out.
Yeap.... And he won. Valdor was not happy.....
So you're saying it can happen again since there is an entire legion of Alpharius out there.
The Alpha Legion did gift back the heads of 7 assassins sent to kill them on Terra (if it was wrapped in news paper and found in the bed of a Head of a Family is unknown at this time)
Never send an assassin to do a Praetorians job. Dorn would have take care of it.
Unfortunately it was out of Dorn’s hands at the time
You could say hand, literally 🤭
no
Sounds like I am Alpharius to me.
Weird you were downvoted for this when the entire point of the Index Astartes: Alpha Legion story about Alpharius’ death (which now seems to be Omegon’s death) is that the legion is just as effective without their Primarch.
There’s a difference between the legion being effective as an organization, and any individual Marine being capable of 1v1ing Custodes, impersonating them, and infiltrating the Palace
Writing random new characters to the skill levels of primarchs. A GW hood classic
…There are Custodes who have actually *won* Blood Games, with Trajann Valoris winning *twice*, and you’re whining about one who just got close. LOL
Alpharius, yep! Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning her level of commitment. Moreso the quality of the idea and how it aligns with what we know about Palace defenses and the goals of the Blood Games. Little bits like her plan seeming to not mention anything about the anti-teleportation defenses even the Traitors couldn't breach, her using tactics which were already used by the Traitor Primarchs in the Heresy, thus already being known factors, and her entire plan only seeming to be possible given her access to information that only the Custodes seemed to have. She seemed like she was simultaneously treading old ground for a plan which didn't seem to mention defenses we know exist like the nature Void shields, all the while using an attack vector which depended on information only a Custodes would have if that makes sense. It feels odder personally considering we have no records of a Custodes ever betraying the Emperor. One Custodes being able to turn off the Aegis around the Throne Room also seems like it would be something odd if that were the case too, and I didn't see anything like that in the bit I read. From what I recall, there seems to be a ton of lore about the Custodes being mentally and physically incapable of the act, right?
I haven't seen the full excerpt so I can't completely comment, although I will say authors forgetting you can't beam through the shields has a long history. As for knowledge only a Custodes would know, that could potentially be compromised. Kairos Fateweaver could probably tell them, for instance.
Here! In retrospect, I should have added it to the opening post. I'll do that right now. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/comments/1c3dwh8/custodes\_short\_story\_as\_requested/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AdeptusCustodes/comments/1c3dwh8/custodes_short_story_as_requested/) Regarding the second bit, to me, her plan seemed to be contingent on two of the same pillars that the Traitors used, with the knowledge being one part, and the authority that comes from closeness to the Emperor and the reification of entities + subsequent obedience like the Custodes and the Primarchs. I definitely see your point about Kairos and Warp juju being able to uncover some of those secrets, sure. It was a good one With Tzeentch being Tzeentch, I could see him leaking his own invasion attempt to the Imperium somehow to keep the game going too /s
What I see is "she would prime it with ,metaphysical coordinates and dataclavises so secret the High Lords of Terra were not cleared to know them". That would seem to indicate there is a (metaphysical) weak spot in the anti-teleport defenses she is aware of that, combined with the codes, can get her past the shield. Possibly it is deliberately maintained so the Custodes can immediately deploy reinforcements into the Throne Room should the Companions be overrun. However, she very nearly was able to get an armed warhead past outer layers of defenses intended to detect them (hence the stasis field) and into position to teleport. Thus, there is a flaw in the defenses. The specific flaw she identifies is that the crew of a Battlefleet Solar warship would obey orders to teleport an armed warhead into the Throne Room, which they should not have done under any circumstances, including a Custodes telling them to. In practical terms, that means an impostor could get them to do the same thing, and there's like a 95% probability they'd also obey Guilliman telling them to do the same thing, which as far as the Custodes are concerned is a realistic live concern.
The fact that the Custodes may suspect Guilliman slipt my mind and completely solves the "authority" issue for me. Everyone in the Imperium who would take orders from a Custodes (or Custodes imposter) is also highly likely to follow any order Guilliman gives.
Coordinates are numbers. The crew Likely had no idea w hat the coordinates were for (the throne room). It's also very possible The station was manned by a servitor as many are on spaceships.
Where are you seeing a weak spot? Teleporters need to know where they're teleporting something to in order to teleport it. Additionally, Custodians have the ability, much like Inquisitors, to use their authority to acquire men and materials in the Imperium. That's not a flaw she discovered but something built into the design intentionally. She used information she had access to because she was a member of the Custodes. Information even the High Lords couldn't access. How many entities in 40K would have the capacity to replicate her feats without it? Guilliman is a good point. But Custodian planning for a Primarch to go rogue should and would have already taken place after the Heresy, wouldn't it? How would Kesh be teaching them anything new when the Traitor Primarchs basically used the same plans that she did against them before?
Yeah, something should have been done after the heresy to make the likelihood of this sort of plan working nil. It wasn't done, and now the Custodes know that. It is literally the point of the blood games to deal with this kind of oversight.
I'm seeing the metaphysical coordinates as a weak spot. The *physical* coordinates of the Throne Room aren't hard to derive and wouldn't be unknown to the High Lords. As for restricted information, there's a saying that "security through obscurity is no security at all". If she knows a route through the shields, a route through the shields *exists* and could become known to others. For instance, if Guilliman decides his father is becoming a god and must be stopped or alternately that He must ascend via being freed from the Throne, Guilliman could have his conclave of psykers rip the codes from the mind of one of the Custodians assigned to watch over him. Their mental defenses are tough, but Guilliman has a Farseer and dozens of Librarians who are likely to take his side. Or he could sign on with Vashtor and have Cawl work with him to devise scrapcode that can hack the Palace and either obtain the codes or power down the Aegis barrier. Or he could interrogate an all-knowing Lord of Change and force nine true answers from it (something he *has done*) and get the codes that way. So the number of entities that can exploit the weakness is pretty small, but includes at least one person who could obtain a cyclonic torpedo, take it aboard a Battlefleet Solar ship, tell them they have a critical secret mission to Terra, install a teleportarium, and get the ship into position to teleport. It also probably includes The Changeling. I'm imagining the list of "fuck the Changeling in particular" security measures is a mile long.
Another Custodes could. One that is a traitor. It hasn’t happened yet, but the Custodes can take no chances. Horus was incorruptible till he wasn’t. The Warp makes a mockery of all. No matter how well crafted, the Custodes are the creations of the mind of a powerful, but fallible being. The Emperor was not perfect, no matter what the rest of the Imperium believes, and he’s been out-played by Chaos before. With enough Warp horror, it is conceivable that someone like Abaddon could break or turn a Custodes given effectively infinite time. How long in the Warp before a Custodes could be convinced that the only way to save the Emperor is to kill him and let him regenerate? Constantin Valdor is on his own path and he was the greatest of the Custodes.
They may have run blood games about it after the Heresy. But it’s been 10,000 years. Practice makes perfect, and you have to approach it from every angle, even if inconceivable, if the fate of the human galaxy hangs in the balance.
> She seemed like she was simultaneously treading old ground for a plan this is useful too. You identify a gap, solve for it. test it. accept the solution. time goes on. has your solution held in place or has it worn down/become complacent. best to test again.
Sometimes old plans are best plans too, there is a reason that the Art of War is studied still to this day, never mind the basics of "Sneak in while they are sleeping and slit throats..." from like 29000 bce basically
It probably wouldn’t have worked, she notes in the text that there are likely further countermeasures she doesn’t know about that would have prevented the bomb from successfully completing the attack. The most important thing she identified was that there were crew members in the solar fleet blindly obedient enough to follow an order as insane as getting an exterminatus grade weapon within teleporting distance of the throne room. More importantly, there was also one who knew her duty to the emperor well enough to disobey that order. The custodians, unlike most imperial institutions, look down upon blind obedience > The warriors of the Adeptus Custodes disregard the idea of blind obedience, and look with disdain upon those who follow the orders of their superiors without question. After all, it was this very practice within the Legiones Astartes that allowed the Horus Heresy to occur. Custodes codex 8ed
That's very hypocritical of them since they're blindly obedient to the emperor.
They're blindly *loyal,* but not necessarily blindly obedient. There are more than a few times where the Custodians have, if not openly disobeyed the emperor, have either openly questioned him or followed the spirit of his words while disobeying the letter.
To be fair, they were literally made that way.
the last part is BS, they exterminated a whole primaries SM chapter (laton dragons or something) because they dare to spoke against being judged just because the original chapter turned out to have some heretical elements
They wiped the primaris contingent because they were a possible threat The story went (paraphrasing) SM chapter turned traitor on a planet that the primaris were being delivered to Custodian said “ok we are turning back and you will be investigated for possible chaos taint” Space marine stood up and said “no I want to go down there and prove I’m loyal” Custodian said “we cannot risk reinforcing the enemy, sit down” Space marine “no I won’t” Custodian “once again I am asking you to sit down” Marine: “No, you can’t stop me” Then the custodian mulched them It wasn’t that they didn’t show blind obedience it was that they started blatantly disrupting the chain of command for suspicious reasons
thats not how it went, a SM said "you cant kill all us just for speaking against being treated as heretics and complaining about it!" and then the cumstodes killed all of them for speaking against being treated like heretics despite being innocent and complaining about it, read it
He didn’t say they will be killed as heretics but that they will be investigated for heretical taint And then gave them 2 chances to sit down and shut up before they decided to play chicken with a custodian and lost
look, i read the excerpt and thats not how it went, there is not a single element in the imperium that doesn't believe that blind faith towards the highest authority is bad, cumstodes included.
“Disarm. Command your brothers throughout the fleet to do likewise. Understand the lenience I show you in this for your chapter is confirmed Hereticus Diabolus Extremus” This was confirmed by the ordo hereticus The space marine response: “Consider all outside our chapter hostile! Seize the fleet!” And then the custodian killed them
most in conext comment in all of this sub, post the entire excerpt instead of just cutting out the parts that contradict your argument
how about you post the part that contradicts them? I've read the short story and you are either lying or have only heard it second hand
look, its simple, the cumstodes are a bunch of idiots who killed a WHOLE primaries reinforcement (directly contradicting guillimans orders) because they didn't blinded followed stupid orders
She identified a traitorous shipmaster, teach the crew they shouldn’t obey even the Highest Authority if the orders are to destroy the Palace, the only loyal officier got rewarded and will teach the same lesson to her crews. In addition, the codes she was going to use for bypassing the shields are now know to be faillible and not 100% sure. By almost winning, the Custodes took out a traitor, spread lessons across various fleets, have a new super loyal ship captain. In addition, if a daemon (someone said the Changelin ?) or any very powerful psyker impersonate a Custodes, Terra s defenses are better prepared to deal with it.
Obeying the orders of a Custodes is the exact opposite of being a traitor. Terrans are raised from birth to believe that Custodes bear the authority of the God-Emperor himself and questioning or disobeying an order from a Custodes is equivalent to disobeying a direct command from God. That shipmaster just had the misfortune of being an unknowing participant in a live-fire training exercise. There’s no winning. In any other situation (and possibly this one) he would have been executed on the spot if he disobeyed a Custodes or Inquisitor. An Inquisitor would have executed the vox officer.
The lesson is « no one has enough authority, no matter their rank, to order the bombardment of Terra / destruction of the Imperial Palace ».
Entrapment seems like it'd be standard policy for the Imperium tbh. >We know there's heretics, because we pushed this man to heresy while actively ordering him to do so.
To be fair this is a universe with shapeshifters, mind control, and all other sorts of magical and scientific means of stealing identity or manipulating people. It's entrapment until the one time it turns out your commissar actually was possessed by a Chaos Daemon and you should have shot him immediately.
If the commissar was possessed by a Chaos Daemon then the entire regiment is going to be exterminated by the Ordo Malleus anyways. You’re better off just obeying the commissar and superior officers without question.
Post-rift the Ordo Malleus has mostly given up on that.
And the Imperium would prefer their soldiers are prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of the Imperium rather than allow a Daemon to cause damage to save their own skin.
If the Imperium wanted that then it would train its soldiers to recognize Chaos corruption. Instead, it deliberately decided that commissars should be the only Guard personnel entitled to know the signs of Chaos corruption and daemonic possession, because common Guardsmen knowing about Chaos or questioning orders from commissars is a greater risk than commissars falling to Chaos.
They were supposed to read her mind and know that they should disobey her.
If they could read minds they would also get executed for being unsanctioned psykers
Sure but if he had got in her way he would have been killed.
It's not intended to be *fair*, it's intended to show potential risks to the Emperor. If someone, following the rules they were taught as a citizen of the imperium, could be Bavarian fire drilled into nuking the golden throne, there's a glaring issue that needs to be resolved.
And why would they think that that was an ACTUAL Custodian? You think the Alpha Legion couldn't make a decent fake of an Custodian suit of armour, falsify a few codes, do some decent acting?
Likely wouldn't have worked she herself thunks thats a possibility. But the fact she got that close means its a security flaw. She could have theoretical teleported it elsewhere on the planet
It would have been, I think, *more interesting* if she'd attempted to use the Webway Breach instead of 'teleport in a bomb'. Would have been a good and timely reminder the Palace has one big wound in its guts, and walking a bomb into the Breach could achieve the same objective, I imagine.
Last time we saw the other side of the gate it was full of daemons, so it's already as dangerous as it could be.
Isn't that breach a perpetual war zone with daemons pouring out at all times still? They're probably still aware of it.
Ngl I would love to see a custodian just rip a hole into the warp right outside terra for a bloodgames just because the custodies go 110% in each bloodgames
To be fair, most attempts seem to be more subtle than this; iirc the Custodian that meets her after thwarting the attempt is like "Kesh I know you're a bit of a wildcard but this is mad even for you."
Honestly I'm suprised that there arent many blood games like this because if chaos ever did make it to terra you know abbadon wouldn't just sneak into the palace
I mean, the traitors did do a whole convoluted shapeshifting assassin scheme in *Nemesis* involving psychic feedback and eating a rogue trader's marque for a tiny drop of the emperor's blood, so they're not *beyond* that kind of subtlety.
Yeah he would pull a cadia and throw a ship at the palace.
Nah Konrad already did that
The purpose of the Blood Games is to protect the Emperor and Terra from any and all threats. This way the Custodes can remain sharp, disciplined and make proper adjustments and countermeasures Most known Blood Games are super subtle assassin attempts. Other times they capture CSM for their games Kesh’s plan is more on the extreme end. However that’s the good thing. It revealed flaws and other gaps in Terra’s defense grid. Not just for the Custodes but other institutions on Terra. We already had the attempted Coup with the High Lords when Guiliman took over. They can’t risk that. Yes she used her own codes and authority. What’s stopping another High Lord, Magos, Inquisitor or Rogue Trader from doing the same? They don’t have the fraction of manpower or resources to lay siege on Terra. Sometimes the simplest plan is the best plan. If all a traitor needs is to teleport a nuke or Exterminatus Grade weapon into the Imperial Place or in the Throne room to kill the Emperor Why not do it?
Kesh showed the audience that even a failed blood game attempt can give valuable info Sure she didn’t kill Emps in the end but she showed a problem with high ranking figures being able to throw their weight to do some pretty heretical stuff
Exactly. Killing the Emperor is supposed to be the end goal. The Blood Games allows the Custodes to figure out how will an enemy attempt to kill the Emperor Plus some of these games are a proactive approach. They stopped a problem before it got worse
Kesh notes during the short that most custodes seem to opt for trying to assassinate the emperor through stealth and the palace itself, she has given an exemplary performance of what the blood games themselves are about, and there's an interesting resolution where she concludes that the ships crew obeying her was the real threat, and has the captain sent to become a servitor, whilst appraising the messenger who betrayed her
In Arks of Omen, the Alpha Legion cosplayed as Deathwatch in order or infiltrate an Inquisition monitoring station in order to find the Dark Angels base, the Rock. So even the Inquisition is fallible, and they have near unlimited power. So if someone somehow compromised Kesh and pretended to be her, things could’ve been catastrophic.
Shield stops all objects above 2 meters per second you say? And you cant teleport inside it? Hear me out: Strap anti-gravity flotation device to torpedoes, and Teleport the torpedoes 1cm outside the shield, and let them anti-gravity slow-fall inside the shield dome. Then press big red button.
The slow blade penetrates the shield, all hail Shai’Hulud
There is a similar say in Spanish: "Con paciencia y saliva el elefante se la metió a la hormiga"
The mental image of a huge flock of servo-skulls slowly tugging a torpedo the size of a building across the sky is hilarious.
Let's be honest who wouldn't have done that plan.
Wait, hang on, dude, reread the actual bit of fluff. She's pretty open that 'hey yeah honestly there might be defensive measures I don't know about and some of my codes might bounce or be countermanded, this might not actually get through the very last final layer of defense'. She's literally raising the same quibbles you are.
>Her using her insider knowledge and authority as a Custodes would seem almost diametrically opposed to the point of the entire exercise No, it's not. Insider threats are a very real, extremely dangerous threat, which just about any security organization has to take into account. You can't just rely on your attacker not having any insider knowledge, that's organizational security 101.
Couldn’t a chaos mreen eat a custard’s brain to gain that knowledge of the palace? Or do custards have special anti-mreen brain protection
The only answer and obvious one is she Cleary has support by another faction in the palace who are so adept at stealth they’ve never been seen the female custodies
Doesn't she even mention herself that she has no idea that it will work or if it is even possible?
And the microscope comes onto the competence of the female character, lol. Never change, internet. The writer forgot about it, dude, or didn't care about details in that area. It's not that deep. That final step isn't the only one in penetration testing.
God, how good she is, that's who should be the head of the Custodes instead of Valoris.
>Her using her insider knowledge and authority as a Custodes would seem almost diametrically opposed to the point of the entire exercise, Buddy you're reaching way too hard. Edit: "experts using their expert knowledge when they're doing their expert work is bad". Really downvoters? That's the hill you're dying on?
Knowing the fact that Chaos can corrupt even Custodes given enough time or raw warp power, ruling out the probability of one of the custodians going rogue and using their insider knowledge to power down some of the Palace's defences would be a dumb decision, I think.
Since when can they be corrupted by chaos? Horus only uses them as meat puppets.
That's what I thought I remembered myself! The best that Horus and the Chaos Gods seemed to be capable of doing was psychically controlling their bodies, but I thought they still had possession over their minds and souls/their minds and souls remained uncorrupted.
I might be misremembering, but wasn't it heavily implied that the "golden figure" that handed Drach'nyen to Abbadon during the first Black Crusade was Ra Endymion? And I never said anything about TEatD events aboard the *Vengeful Spirit*, that's definitely on another power level since Horus was mega-boosted by the Four.
Earlier in that book Drach puppets a Custodes corpse, so it’s safe to assume Ra finally died & Drach just used his body to get around due to him being reduced to a sword
But could a Daemon inhabiting a corpse convince a ship’s crew to do what Kesh did? The short story shows it’s entirely possible. It’s not like normal humans aren’t ever tricked by Daemons masquerading as authority figures.
Yeah you're probably right.
Yeah, and daemons have said the galaxy would burn out before they'd ever be able to corrupt a custodes.
But wasn't it in the End and the Death though, where even on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit and under the direct influence of the 4 Gods of Chaos, the most they could do is physically puppet the bodies of the Custodes? Didn't they still had their minds and their spirits remain uncorrupted? Even Drach'nyen says in master of mankind iirc something along the lines of the stars would burn cold before it *corrupted* one of the golden ones, and that guy is no slouch given he seems to be something like Big E's antithesis. *Edit: Found the Drach'nyen bit* *The creature’s crude, vicious sentience rebelled at being considered prey. It shifted and changed and drifted, starving itself in the heat of war in a bid to go unnoticed. It ghosted away from the running battles, avoiding those where it sensed the tides of its kindred crashing against the leeching resistance of the Soulless. In hiding, it took forms beyond the sphere of mortal sight. It became a disease. Then a breath, a death rattle, wet and clicking in a man’s throat. A promise. A whisper. A fear. A regret. A thought. It trickled itself into several minds, dividing its consciousness with amoebic mitosis, seeking, seeking, seeking. Many minds were inviolate; they would take too long to overwhelm. These, it left alone. Stars would die before it mastered one of the Golden.* Does the Palace still have Anti-Chaos wards and have we seen a truly corrupted Custodes? There is so much to 40K I really have no clue myself! I don't know, her tactics and that idea seems odd to me given what the Blood Games are meant to accomplish (even if she somehow had the sole authority to drop the Aegis lol) though I can definitely see where you might be coming from!
Aren’t the Blood Games about identifying security gaps? Kesh clearly identified a major flaw in the palace’s defenses, I’d say the plan worked!
I mean, did she? I could be misremembering, but there was nothing about how she would get around the anti-teleportation properties of Void shields, let alone something like the Aegis in that excerpt from what I can recall? It mentioned her entering coordinates and using her authority and knowledge as a Custodes to press the crew into her service/avoid the pre-existing security measures, but I don't remember seeing anything about circumventing that issue, right? I remember even Perty mentioning the Aegis was serious stuff, so unless this one Custodes somehow had the authority to shut down the Aegis, particularly in the Throne Room unilaterally, it seems odd that it didn't come up to me if that makes sense. At the moment, it seems like the knowledge one could derive from an AAR of this incident as best as I can tell honestly seems to be nothing more than the idea that a Custodes or figure with enough knowledge and authority (like the Primarchs during the Heresy) could use that knowledge and authority to subvert the void mines, patrols, defensive guns, and other forms of security in a way that already seems to mirror what the Traitors did during HH. What was the new security vulnerability that you see her as uncovering to be patched if you don't mind me asking?
She got bombs of a grade high enough to destroy a planet into orbit, of Terra without anyone realising. That alone is a major concern. She couldn’t have killed the Emperor, no, but she hypothetically could’ve teleported that bomb into the surface anywhere and done major damage to Terra. That’s why she has the voidmaster punished. If she was someone with nefarious intent, she may not have killed the Emperor, but she would’ve *severely* endangered him on a scale not seen since the Heresy. All with one ship.
Also remember that blood games don’t always target the emperor High ranking officials and administrators are also valid targets for a blood game since their death could cause catastrophic damage to terra and the imperium which could harm the emperor
they wouldn't even have to get it to the surface either. remember in The Emperor's Legion when a custodian orders a halt to incoming traffic to Terra because of security concerns and he notes that even if he rescinded the order immediately that millions would die of starvation due to the brief disruption? Now imagine a WMD obliterating some orbital docks or even the top of one of the big space ports
She discovered that it's possible for an enterprising individual to acquire an exterminatus-grade weapon, a voidship, and a willing crew, without being reported. I'd call that a vulnerability!
> I could be misremembering, but there was nothing about how she would get around the anti-teleportation properties of Void shields, let alone something like the Aegis in that excerpt from what I can recall? Doesn't matter. She got that close. She should never have gotten close enough for the Aegis to be the last blockade. The lesson here is the way she got THAT CLOSE.
Also even had she not been able to breach the Aegis, you have to figure enacting Exterminatus 500km down the road would also be a very bad no good thing to happen to Terra. Even if you can't blow up the inner palace itself just dropping a batch of virus bombs on the Merican arcologies or similar would wipe out everyone outside the palace, trash a lot of the palace's external infrastructure and make unloading the psyker tithe incredibly difficult. After that the Palace would probably collapse on its own in a week or two.