Caitlen Station erupts in violence

By the latter half of 025.M42, as the wars of the Aleph Sector ground on without decisive resolution, the attention of many competing factions once more drifted toward the colossal void installation known as Caitlen Station. Once the pride of the Imperial Navy and the lynchpin of the strategic defence grid of the Zadoc Subsector, the station had—over decades of warfare, xenos incursion, and Imperial retreat—fallen far from its former glory. What had been a monumental fortress system had degraded into a lawless sprawl of shattered infrastructure, adrift in a system marred by neglect and predation.

Caitlen Station was never a single edifice but an immense conglomeration of void-facilities:

• Titanic drydocks capable of servicing battleships and grand cruisers.

• Vast container fields holding centuries' worth of matériel, much of it lost to record.

• Forgotten weapons vaults, some dating to the Great Crusade.

• An immense starfort, still half-functional despite millennia of piecemeal repairs.

These structures were spread across drifting planetoids, orbital rings, scattered platforms, and a dense mass of debris-fields that had once formed part of a coherent defence network.

In the wake of the Imperium's loss of much of the Zadoc Subsector, Caitlen Station had been abandoned to its fate, left to decay at the edge of civilised space. In the years that followed, it became a haven for scavengers, pirate enclaves, and warbands of every persuasion. By the time Imperial tacticians once again took an interest in 025.M42, the station was a morass of infestation and internecine violence. Tyranid bioforms, spawned from drifting spores and derelict bio-ships, nested in the internal superstructure; Ork freebootas prowled the docking caverns; and innumerable smaller bands—Traitor Astartes kill-clades, human renegades, and unknown xenos—vied for whatever spoils they could carve out.

Yet even in this state of ruin, Caitlen Station remained a prize too valuable to ignore. Its weapons caches contained relics of forgotten wars. Its hulked vessels could be stripped, reconstructed, or cannibalised. Its remaining infrastructure, if secured, offered unmatched strategic advantage.

Thus, across 025.M42, the factions of the Aleph Sector dispatched small, elite infiltration teams into the labyrinthine depths of the station and its outlying facilities. Each sought a different objective:

• The Imperium, hoping to reclaim or at least deny crucial matériel.

• The T’au, seeking technology or safe harbour for future expansions.

• The Orks, eager simply for loot and a good fight.

• The Chaos warbands, drawn by both opportunity and the echoes of ancient corruption.

• Rogue Traders, pirates, and mercenary groups, each with their own ambitions.

These expeditions rarely encountered one another directly, for the station’s immensity allowed teams to vanish into the dark between bulkheads. But their actions—sabotage, scavenging, purges, and skirmishes—echoed through the station’s fractured ecosystems, creating a shifting battlefield of deception and opportunity.

Though no faction would claim full control of Caitlen Station by year’s end, the conflicts of 025.M42 ensured it remained a site of vital strategic interest—and a nexus of future confrontation. For in the Aleph Sector, ruins are never truly abandoned, and the shadows of Caitlen Station still promise wealth, power, and death in equal measure.