The Still Order troop moves cautiously through the lightless depths. Their helms' lenses gleam with faint green light, the amplifiers within rendering the dark in shades of green and grey. Rebreathers cycled disciplined breathes, training overcoming humanity's natural uneasiness with the dark. 

A vox-click had the squad ready their weapons, a mix of webbers and massive tranq-guns with shock mauls as backup. Weapons designed to capture and subdue, not kill. The Order members were here to collect something, something terrible.

Distant howls sounded in the dark. Grotesque hooting and roaring, with an edge of actual speech. The Still Order sirdar hissed orders, the squad moving into a long maintenance corridor with a blocked off end and no side tunnels. They set up their weapons and waited for the quarry to come.

A rumble of fleet but heavy footfalls sounded. The roars grew louder at first, but as the stomping run came closer, tapered off into a painful silence. Then in a wash of green-grey, bodies appeared at the corridor mouth. Shining pale in the false light, the hulking forms raced forward. As strings of web and large-caliber needles shot towards them, the forms were revealed. 

Ogryns, or at least a variant of the abhuman strain. Massive humanoids with pale skin and blank eyes, hands and mouths shining black with blood in the false light of the amplifiers. Broken claws and horns roughly implanted in their skin, the maddened mutants strained past the sticky webs and chemical tranqs to reach the warm flesh in front of them. Closer and closer they came, those in back stomping over their fellows who were taken down by the ranged incapacitants. The Order switched to their mauls, the powered stun charges sending lightning bursts across the corridor's walls.

Technology and discipline fought raging fury and mutated genetics. The Still Order smashed mauls into pale skulls and chests, the Ogryns battered aside defensive forms and ripped limbs from body. The snarling melee lasted for mere moments before the last Ogryn fell.

++ Sirdar Nilfus to Control. Send the pickup team to Corridor Fol-IV-A. Twelve Red Maw captured. ++

++ Casualties sirdar? ++

++ Four dead, three wounded. ++

++ The best result yet sirdar. The Navarch will be pleased. ++

++ Just send the pickup team and a new set of recruits. I have more work to do down here. ++

++ Copy sirdar. We serve the Night. ++

The Red Maw

Shrikeborn Mutants

"Keep the hatches sealed. If you hear breathing in the dark, it's already too late."

— Still Order patrol maxim

The Red Maw are among the oldest and most unsettling remnants of the Shrikeborn's long exile. Their origins can be traced to the Ogryn auxiliaries who once served alongside the VIII Legion during the Great Crusade. Those abhuman warriors accompanied their masters into the darkness of the void, surviving the Horus Heresy and the centuries that followed aboard the Shrikeborn's wandering fleet.

Time was not kind to them.

Generations spent in the forgotten underdecks of ancient warships, sustained by scavenged flesh, recycled air, and the corrupting touch of the warp, transformed the Ogryn descendants into something far removed from their original stock. Their skin became corpse-pale from a lifetime without sunlight, their eyes clouded and atrophied until most are nearly blind, their minds regressed into a state of feral savagery, driven by hunger and little else.

In the deepest reaches of Shrikeborn vessels, entire colonies of the Red Maw lurk among rusted maintenance tunnels and abandoned cargo vaults. There they wage endless tribal wars over territory, food, and crude idols fashioned from bones and shipwrecked machinery. Crewmen who stray too far from safe corridors occasionally vanish without a trace, joining the countless generations of victims consumed by the clans below. Savage, barely understood rituals are performed by the walking beasts; the bones, teeth, and horns of daemons are stabbed through their mutant limbs and bodies in a show of strength and warrior mastery. Haunting roars and howls echo through the darkness, just enough humanity ringing in the cries to chill those who hear.

Yet the Shrikeborn have found a use for these monsters.

Before major campaigns, the Still Order conducts great conscription-hunts through the underdecks, rounding up packs of Red Maw with shock prods, sonic lures, and bait cages filled with fresh meat. These hunts inflict serious casualties among the new Order recruits, who provide the bulk of the manpower to subdue the mutants, but makes those that survive bloody survivors unafraid of monsters in the dark. Once restrained, the Maw are unleashed upon enemy fortifications as shock troops or among distant civilian populations as nocturnal terrors. Their sudden appearance, accompanied by guttural howls and a frenzy of cannibal violence, has shattered more than one disciplined defense line and caused mounting dread among the enemy populace. The rapid, mutant regeneration of the Red Maw makes them ideal for repeat and frequent deployments, as their wounds are healed quickly, if sometimes in strange ways.

A rare few of the Red Maw retain enough intelligence to respond to simple commands. These specimens are immensely prized- fitted with crude neural enhancers and flooded with combat stimulants, they serve as bodyguards for senior officers of the Still Order and feared enforcers of their will. These rare specimens are armed with massive weapons made from scavenged metal, heavy axes and clubs that rip through armor as easily as their brethren’s teeth and nails go through flesh. Though barely lucid, these hulking guardians display flashes of ancient loyalty buried beneath generations of degeneration.

The Red Maw are monsters, they are weapons, they are a grim reminder of what becomes of those abandoned too long to the darkness. Another tool for the Stained Lord and his followers to use against the tyrant on the Golden Throne.