Three days ago I wrote that I couldn’t care less about the jetbikes in the Custodes Support Battle Group, which was a daft thing to put in print before I’d looked anything up. I went into that piece wanting to talk about the book and the Captain-General it’s named after. The Gyrfalcons and the Pallas were scenery I drove past. Then on Monday night I opened the Pallas entry in Horus Heresy Book Seven: Inferno properly, and I’ve been slightly annoyed with myself since.
The Pallas Grav-attack was built to replace vehicles that were already in service. Inferno names the Jocasta pattern grav-attack, which it calls a relic of the Unification Wars, and the Hermes grav-sled, which it describes as highly agile and swift while offering little in the way of combat survivability. Somebody in the Legio Custodes went through the motor pool and signed both of them off the roster.
The Ten Thousand keep buying new cars
That’s a procurement decision with a before and an after, which is not a shape the Custodes normally come in. Inferno goes further and dates it, saying the Pallas was one of the most recent designs to enter Legio Custodes service prior to the Burning of Prospero.
Everything else about the Adeptus Custodes is arranged to resist that idea. Their armour gets maintained across millennia, which is why the Aquilon plate still turns up on the table wearing the same silhouette it had during the Great Crusade. Each warrior is made and named individually, in numbers small enough that the Ten Thousand could tell you who is currently wearing any given suit. A lot of the faction’s appeal comes from that, the sense of a 30th Millennium institution still operating in the 41st on its original terms.
The Pallas didn’t arrive out of nowhere either. Inferno has it built on repulsor-lift work already proven in the Coronus grav-carrier and the Caladius grav-tank, scaled down into something with one seat in it. There’s a development line running through the Custodian grav fleet, big hulls first and the light attack craft derived from them afterwards, which is how you’d expect an actual engineering programme to go.
There’s a line in Imperial Armour Volume 2 (Second Edition)’s entry on the Relic Javelin Attack Speeder that I keep coming back to. It lists what the Emperor’s Custodians once rode to war: Sky Hunter jetbikes, the Orgus Flyer, the Javelin. Then it says: “Of these, only the Javelin survives into the 41st Millennium, and even then only as a relic held in stasis to be called forth when the need is truly dire.” Three named patterns of Custodian air support, and by M41 the Imperium can put one of them in the air, occasionally, under conditions it defines quite narrowly.
Although I’ve been sitting with this for a day and I’m not sure it carries the weight I want to hang on it. A grav-sled isn’t a person. Every army in the setting cycles through vehicle patterns, and my Imperial Fists have rotated Rhino marks without anybody suggesting the Chapter abandoned its principles. Maybe I’m reading a supply chain as a philosophy. Then again the Custodes run their own procurement, inside the Palace, for a fixed and tiny user base, keeping the Adeptus Mechanicus at arm’s length while they do it. They still obsoleted two designs and commissioned a third. Somebody in that organisation sat down and decided the old thing wasn’t good enough.
What’s in the Custodes Support Battle Group
The box goes up on 12 September, £150 in the UK and $230 in the US, six models: a Telemon Heavy Dreadnought, four Gyrfalcon jetbikes, one Pallas. Each jetbike takes an adrathic devastator, a lastrum bolt cannon, a twin Corvae las-pulser, or the new Arachnus volley cannon, and the rider’s power lance can be built held or stowed. The Pallas mounts a twin Arachnus blaze cannon or a twin Iliastus accelerator fusil, slotted under the cockpit. Horus Heresy rules for all three sit in Liber Custodes.
The Pallas also, according to Inferno, incorporates manoeuvring and autonomous response systems recovered by Arkhan Land. Same Land who dug the Land Raider and the Land Speeder out of the Librarius Omnis on Mars, which means the Custodes’ hunter-killer skimmer and the boxy thing my Fists have been riding around in since fifth edition share a grandfather. I did not know that on Sunday.
One Pallas in the record has a name. Inferno’s vehicle plates identify the Reshep-Alpha as the lead element of an attack squadron in the Prosperine Censure Force, which is the body of Custodians sent to burn Tizca, and describe the marking it carried on its panel: a blade and wreath denoting both authority and the right to enact judgement upon any of the Emperor’s subjects. That’s a fair amount of remit for a one-seat skimmer. Its standard loadout is a twin Arachnus blaze cannon, which the book describes as a laser able to fire rapid individual pulses or concentrate them into a single blast-beam, and it carries a flare shield and its own machine spirit. I’ve only seen that name in the one source, so treat it accordingly.
The resin one is still in a drawer
I bought the Forge World resin Pallas somewhere around 8th edition, forty-odd quid, on the strength of a photo. It turned up with one of the outrigger fins bent about fifteen degrees off true. I did the hot water trick, held it wrong, and set the bend into a gentle S-curve that looked worse than the original problem. Then I did it again, because apparently I learn nothing. It’s been in the second drawer down ever since, wrapped in the bubble wrap it came in, and every couple of years I take it out, look at it, and put it back like a man checking whether an old injury still hurts. Pete has offered twice to fix it. I keep saying I’ll get to it.
Inferno came out in 2016, which is longer than I’ve owned the car I actually drive, and in all that time the Pallas has been a resin kit that arrives from Nottingham in a padded envelope and a state of chance. There’s a resin blister on the shelf at my local store that’s been sitting in the same spot since before my kid started school, and everyone who works there has stopped pretending it’s going to sell.
What an Agamatus squadron is actually for
So, yeah. Agamatus. Gold blokes on flying motorbikes. That was roughly the depth of my understanding until this week. The Gyrfalcon-pattern jetbike is heavier than the Scimitar the Legiones Astartes rode, closer to an armoured one-man speeder, with the grav-repellors augmented by a plasma-thrust motor for short bursts of speed. Fine. Fast. Gold. I assumed the point was getting places quickly.
Inferno describes their battlefield role as elite cavalry: screening the main Custodian force against encirclement, reacting fast enough to blunt an attack, and hunting down any foe which breaks and flees, ensuring the utter extermination of the enemy.
Read that last bit again. A meaningful chunk of the Ten Thousand’s fast attack arm exists to catch people who are already running away. When a force facing the Custodes decides it wants no further part of this, the Agamatus are the answer to that decision. Warhammer Community’s copy for the kit renders the same role as “reaping a bloody toll on their battle lines,” which is the version you write when you’re selling four jetbikes, and I understand the choice.
The riders carry a power lance and a misericordia. Every Custodian carries a misericordia, so there’s nothing distinctive about an Agamatus having one, though it’s the short blade used to finish something already beaten and it sits oddly well next to a job built around catching the fleeing. My favourite detail on the kit is smaller than that: you can build the rider with the lance stowed. Four bikes, and you get to decide which of them is still hunting.
The sources don’t fully agree on what the thing carries, incidentally. The Gyrfalcon’s own entry gives it a lastrum bolt cannon as standard. The Agamatus squadron entry, citing the same page of the same book, says iliastus accelerator cannon. Both then offer the adrathic and the twin Corvae las-pulser as swaps. GW’s plastic kit dodges the whole argument by putting four guns in the box and letting you pick, and I’ve read the two entries three times now without working out which one is the mistake.
Something else moved quietly. Inferno calls them Agamatus Jetbike Squadrons. Warhammer Community’s copy for the new kit calls them Agamatus Sodalities, and the Journal Tactica brings in Adjutorum Sodalities on top of that, so the standard noun for a Custodian formation seems to be drifting. Tiny thing. I only clocked it because I’d spent the previous evening with the old wording.
There’s a wrinkle I can’t resolve. The Gyrfalcon’s own lore entry ends by saying it’s unknown whether the pattern is still used by the Adeptus Custodes in the 41st Millennium, and the Pallas entry says the same thing about itself. Meanwhile the 40K app will happily charge you 225 points for a unit of Agamatus Custodians and 100 for a Pallas, today, in 11th edition. So the units are current, the fluff is hedging, and I genuinely don’t know which of those is meant to be authoritative. My guess is the entries were written when both were Horus Heresy-only kits and nobody’s gone back to update the sentence, but that’s a guess.
I also don’t want to oversell how much of this is new. The Agamatus have been an army list entry since 2016 and the Telemon has been getting written about all summer. What changed in June is that GW put them in plastic, which is the part that actually determines whether any of it shows up on a table near you…
If your resin versions are built and painted, this box does nothing for you and you can skip the whole thing quite happily. Mine’s in a drawer with a bent fin, so I’ve got 12 September in the calendar.
