Whispercutter

The Whispercutter was a type of light transport aircraft that was once used solely by the Raven Guard Legion during the latter days of the Great Crusade and during the Horus Heresy. Constructed on Kiavahr, the Whispercutter is an open-topped air-frame flyer that uses gravitic impellers and was capable of dropping up to ten Legionaries into a war zone in utter silence and with practically no chance of detection.

History
By the time the Corvus Corax took command of his Legion, the Great Crusade was over a century old. Corax was quick to impose the style of war he had perfected in the dungeons of Lycaeus over that which had come to define the XIXth Legion, melding stealth and guile with vigilance and swiftness. During the restructuring of the Legion, they commissioned several innovations from the forges of Mars, all of them cunningly wrought to further its mastery in the arts of stealth and speed. It was during this time that the Whispercutter, along with other craft such as the Shadowhawk variant of the Thunderhawk. Such technology was created not by the Martian Mechanicum nor any of their Forge Worlds, but by those master artificers of Kiavahr who formerly served the tech guilds. Utilising strands of machine canon unknown to the mainstream of the Mechanicum, the Kiavahran guild artificers created all manner of systems at the behest of the Raven Guard and in time the Legion's Techmarines were inducted into these mysteries, although it has been speculated that the Kiavahrans might have been declared outcast by the jealous lords of Mars, were it not for the patronage of so august a body as the Legiones Astartes and the Primarch Corax.

Combat Role
The Whispercutter was used by the Raven Guard Legion to deploy their elite infiltration troops, such as the Dark Fury Assault Squads and Mor Deythan. The Dark Fury squads leaping from great heights to descend upon the silenced retro thrusters of their jump packs directly onto the heads of their unsuspecting targets. Due to the open-topped nature of the Whispercutter it was unable to drop from orbit like other assault craft, the vehicle would have to be delivered to a planet's surface via other means.

Notable Campaigns

 * The Day of Vengeance (ca. 008.M31) - The Raven Guard Legion infiltrated the prison-world on Carandiru with Whispercutters, Elite infiltration squads of Mor Deythan landed covertly in the capital, seizing plasma generators and overloading the city's power grid, thus disabling anti-air defences and shrouding the entire capital in darkness. This campaign became known as one of Corax's closest brushes with defeat, with the creation of a superior type of Legionary sometimes referred to as "New Men" or Legiones Superior. Equipped with experimental technologies of unknown and esoteric designs, these monstrosities, which were created by the Emperor's Children Fabius Bile, successfully overcame Lord Corax himself, capturing him, until a task-force of Raven Guard Legionaries under former Commander Gherith Arendi, disobeying the Primarch's orders, arrived in the nick of time to save their Primarch's life.