Straken is a son of Catachan, that infamous death world whose very plant life is a predator, and he embodies its savage ideal more completely than any officer alive. The Catachan regiments are the Imperium's supreme practitioners of the jungle ambush and the close-quarters kill, and Straken is the bloody yardstick against which every one of them is measured. He rose from a footslogging grunt to command of the Catachan II “Green Vipers” in the footsteps of his mentor, Colonel Greiss, earning his rank not through birth or patronage but through sheer, murderous competence in the field.
His famous name was bought in blood. Straken lost an arm, and more besides, to the jaws of a Miral land shark, a monstrous predator of his homeworld. He killed the beast moments later, tearing its throat open with his bare teeth, and had the ruined flesh replaced with a bionic “devil's claw” powerful enough to punch through a ferrocrete wall. It was only the first of many such repairs; across his long career his ravaged body has been rebuilt piece by piece, until it gleams with an ever-growing lattice of augmetics.
As a commander, Straken is irascible, gutsy and utterly without patience for cowardice or incompetence. He leads from the front with an energy that belies his years, and his soldiers drive themselves to the very edge of death rather than fall short of his brutal standards. For all the augmetics that hold him together, he throws himself into the thickest of the fighting as though he were still a green recruit, and the sight of their grizzled colonel wading in ahead of them drives the Green Vipers to a redoubled ferocity of their own. To fight under Straken is to be held to the measure of Catachan itself.
His deeds are legend across a dozen war zones. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Moden's Ridge, the Dulma'lin Cleansing, the Ulani Aftermath and the desperate evacuation of Vartol City. At the Battle of the Red Rain he faced the Drukhari Archon Yrekh Drash in single combat and crushed the xenos' skull to pulp in his whirring bionic fist. In an army that spends its heroes as freely as its ammunition, Straken endures, a living emblem of the death world that forged him.
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