hh1节译：星际战士的创造

From the outset of his re-taking of Terra, the Emperor genetically modified warriors within his forces and in these early enhanced troops lay the origins of what would later become the Space Marine Legions. Terra under the Old Night had seen more than its fair share of augments and 'super' soldiers created both from bio-alchemy and cyber-augmentation, and as early as the 25th Millennium the Horiax Treatise mentions the use of bioenhancements in the wars of Ancient Earth. Since that time gene-breeds, war-wights and ironsides had all carved their bloody names in history as part of the incessant conflict between the techno-barbarian tribes and city-states of Old Earth as war raged unabated for thousands of years. But it was the Emperor's own Thunder Warriors—named for the thunderbolt and raptor's head heraldry of their master—that were to prove superior to them all. A gestalt mix of unprecedented superhuman physical power, gene-programmed resistance to environment and even psychic attack, warlike spirit and the Emperors own strategic genius, the Thunder Regiments were an army unlike any that had come before them, and the forces of the powerful tyrants of Earth had nothing to match them. But despite their many early victories in the Unification Wars,the Thunder Warriors were far from perfect. Some were mentally unstable, others suffered catastrophic biological failure after an unpredictable span of years, their own superhuman physiques turning against in the end. As the Remembrancer Dolvar put it: Alas for them, the warriors of caged thunder and with whom lightning smote,they have burned the brightest in glory, but burned brief. 

从收复泰拉的开始阶段，帝皇就在他的军队中使用基因改造战士，星际战士军团也起源于这些强化部队。旧夜时期的泰拉已经见证了过多的由生物炼金术和义体植入所创造出的强化造物和“超级”士兵 而且早在第25个千年，《霍利亚斯著录》中就提到古老地球的战争中使用了生化增强战士。从此，随着战争有增无减地进行了数千年之久，基因培植术士、战争亡灵师和铁甲武士们都参与到了旧地球上科技野蛮人部落与城邦国家间无休止的冲突，他们都在历史上留下了自己血腥的名讳。但只有帝皇的雷霆战士们（这些战士们因自己主人的雷霆与猛禽鹰首纹章而得名）被证明冠绝群雄。这些战士完形地融合了前所未有的超人类身体力量、对于环境甚至灵能攻击的基因调整耐性、好战的秉性与帝皇本人的战略天才，雷霆战士团是一支前无古人的军队，地球上的强大暴君们的部队也无法匹敌他们。但尽管他们在统一战争时期取得了许多早期胜利，雷霆战士也远非完美。某些人精神不稳定，其他人则在（经过）不可预测的数年时间后出现了糟糕的生理恶化，他们的超人体质最终也变得虚弱崩坏，就像记述者道瓦尔所记录得那样：唉，他们（曾）是困住雷霆的战士，痛击闪电的勇者，他们燃烧生命夺取了最为璀璨的荣耀，但他们燃烧的时间也如此短暂。

It seems obvious in retrospect that the Emperor knew early on that a more permanent and stable force of enhanced warriors was needed, so even while the Thunder Warriors waged war in their early days the Emperor gathered about him a team of savants and gene-wrights，some willing and others as captives taken from his foes, and constructed new genetics laboratories deep in the vast dungeons of his Terran fortress. Labour here went on for decades in absolute secrecy and here was first created the Primarchs and the wonders of gene-craft known and unknown, and foremost of these were theLegiones Asrartes. Into their creation went all the secret history and lore of the Age of Strife, hard wisdom gained through the successes and failures of the Thunder Warriors who were their prototype and the Emperor's own inimitable genius. The first among them were hand-picked men from the Emperor's personal bodyguard. These volunteers were subjected to surgical, genetic and psychological modification.With rigorous training and appropriate mental conditioning they became not only immensely strong and tough, but iron- willed and disciplined, an unstoppable force whose loyalty to the Emperor was unflinching. Quickly the process was refined and systematised, and the numbers of these new enhanced warriors, at first armed and armoured as the Thunder Warriors had been, grew swiftly and they were organised into twenty distinct regiments numbering at first no more than a few hundred warriors each. Although it remained a dire secret at the time, it is now widely believed that this division was more than a merely administrative one,as each regiment contained variant 'gene-seed' encoding drawn from a different primogenitor Primarch. This often manifested its influence in subtle and unexpected ways, not least of all in influencing the psychological character of the remade and enhanced warrior. With the regiments expanding rapidly into Legions with the intake of new blood from the areas Terra that had already joined cause with the Emperor, the new warriors quickly eclipsed and replaced the mighty but far less disciplined and unstable Thunder Warriors and victory followed victory in quick succession. As time went on the regiments became Legions as the Emperor recruited men from amongst the newly conquered tribes of Old Earth and hundreds swiftly became tens of thousands. These superhuman troops dominated the Wars of Unification, easily defeating all their Terran opponents and forcing the Techpriests of Mars to sue for peace. They fought with righteous zeal and it was they who first referred to their mission as a 'Crusade' and by their efforts for the first time in unrecorded millennia the Earth was united under the rule of one man.

从事后来看，很明显帝皇似乎早就知道自己需要一支更为长久稳定的强化战士部队，所以早在雷霆战士们发动战争的同时，帝皇就聚集起了一群学者和基因工匠——有些人是自愿的，其他人则是被帝皇的部队所俘获，并在泰拉要塞的巨大地牢中建造了一座新的基因实验室。此地的实验在绝密的情况下持续了数十年，研究者们首先创造出了基因原体和各种已知未知的基因工程奇迹，而其中最重要的成就便是阿斯塔特军团战士。他们的创造融入了纷争纪元的所有隐秘历史和知识、从雷霆战士（他们是阿斯塔特战士的原型）的成功和失败中获取的艰深智慧与帝皇本人无与伦比的智慧。第一批阿斯塔特战士是从帝皇本人的卫队中亲手挑选出来的人选，这批志愿者接受了外科手术、基因和精神上的改造。通过严格的训练与适当的精神调控，他们不仅身体变得极其强壮坚韧，而且拥有了钢铁般的意志与纪律性，这股忠诚于帝皇的力量坚定不移、势不可挡。改造过程很快就被改良和系统化，起初，许多这些按照雷霆战士的标准进行武装的新型强化战士们快速成长，他们被组建成二十个独立的团，每个团最初的人数都不超过数百名战士。尽管阿斯塔特团在当时依旧保持着高度机密，但人们普遍相信这种区分方式并不仅仅是一种行政操作，因为每个团都保有了来自不同始祖基因原体的各种“基因种子”编码。这一事实经常以微妙和意想不到的方式表现出它的影响，尤其是在影响改造和增强战士的心理特征方面。随着从已经加入帝皇事业的泰拉区域补充了新鲜血液，星际战士团快速扩张为星际战士军团，这些新战士很快就使强大但远为缺乏纪律性且不稳定的雷霆战士相形见绌，并最终取而代之，一场又一场的胜利也接踵而至。随着时间流逝，帝皇在新近被征服的旧地球部落中征召士兵，数百之众的星际战士团也快速发展为数万之众的星际战士军团。这些超人部队支配了统一战争（的走向），他们轻松击败了泰拉上的所有对手，并且迫使火星的科技神甫们向帝皇请求和平。他们怀着义愤进行征战，也正是他们第一次将自己的任务称为“远征”。通过星际战士们的努力，在没有记录的千年里，地球第一次统一在一个人的统治之下。

Crusade and Expansion

远征和扩张

The unity of the Sol system under the Emperor proved the second great catalyst for the expansion both in numbers and capabilities of what  were now being referred to as the Space Marine Legions, and confirmed their destiny as the principal fighting force by which the Emperor would liberate the galaxy from the predation of the alien and the malignancy of superstition and oppression. That there is such a strong link between the Primarchs and their Legion suggests that they were crucial in the Invention of the Space Marines. Certainly the Space Marines share genetic material and some physical and mental traits with their Primarch. So strong is this link that as the Primarchs were encountered in turn they became the natural and obvious leader of the Legion with whom they had so much in common. In many cases the Primarch's adopted world became the new base of operations for their Legion and they were known henceforth as the Legion's homeworld, the Primarchs recruiting their loyal followers from its people into the ranks of their Legion while others were given rights to draw fresh blood from suitable warlike worlds liberated as the Crusade progressed. This served in fact to head-off an impending crisis that was not widely known of at the time outside of the exalted ranks of the Council—the diminishing stability of the gene-seed itself through over use and the increasing need for ever greater numbers of Space Marines in the field. This was a matter that only worsened as the Great Crusade pushed on ever wider afield into the galaxy. Forces could no longer be concentrated as easily as before, and attrition was taking its toll as years of near-constant battle became decades. To relent the pace of the Crusades progress was for the Emperor simply not an option and so the simple truth was that more Space Marines were needed and faster than before. A secret conclave of gene-wrights under the Emperor's direct supervision posited the solution that became known as Grabiya's Theorem, which demonstrared that a Primarch's genetic code could be used to stabilise and expand gene-seed stocks with what was hoped to be 'minimal deviation'. Alongside this accelerated gene-culturing techniques previously unavailable were put into effect, reducing processing time to create a battle-worthy Space Marine to a single year in some cases. Such accelerated gene-seed techniques, along with absent, inadequate or over-forceful psycho-indoctrination techniques were later found to have unseen fundamental flaws. Many since have come to believe that the drive to create larger Legions at speed had a prime role in the degradation in the sanity and physiological make-up of certain Legions and paved the way for the horror that was to come.

太阳系在帝皇治下的统一被证明是这些现在被称为星际战士军团的超人部队在数量和军事武力上扩张的第二种重要催化剂，这一事件也确认了星际战士军团的宿命：他们是一支主力战斗部队，帝皇将会凭借着他们把银河系从异星人的掠食和恶毒的迷信与压迫中解放出来。原体和他们的军团之间存在着一种极其强烈的联系，他们对于星际战士的创造都很关键。星际战士们确实与原体们共享着基因物质和某些生理与精神上的特质。这种联系是如此的强烈，以至于在原体们与各军团依次相遇后，他们就成为了这些与自己有诸多共通之处的军团自然而明确的领袖。在很多情况中，原体定居的世界会成为军团的运作基地，这些世界从此会被称为军团母星。原体们会从母星人民中征召忠诚的追随者们加入军团的部队，同时其他军团会被给予在大远征所解放的合适的尚武世界上补充新鲜血液的权力。事实上，这些举措有助于阻止一场迫在眉睫的危机，而且这次危机仅为泰拉议会中那些最为位高权重的成员所知——基因种子本身的稳定性在由于过度使用而下降，而战况对于更大量星际战士的需求在增加。随着大远征向着更广阔的银河系推进，这一情况只会恶化。帝国不能再像之前那样轻松地集中力量，而且随着几乎不断的战斗从几年延长为几十年，伤亡也在缓慢增加。对帝皇而言，减缓大远征步伐根本就不是一个可选可不选的选项，简单的事实就是：相比于之前，帝国需要更多的星际战士，而且需求更为急迫。在帝皇的直接监督下，一个由基因工匠组成的秘密团队提出了被后世称为格拉比亚定理的解决方案，该理论证明原体的基因编码可用于以“最小偏差”稳定和扩大基因种子库存。伴随着以前无法实现的基因加速培育技术的应用，某些情况下创造一名能够战斗的星际战士的时间被减少到一年。这种加速（培育）基因种子技术，以及有缺陷、不充分或过分有力的心理灌输技术，后来被发现具有不可见的根本缺陷。从那以后，许多人开始相信：快速创建更大军团的冲动在某些军团的理智和生理退化问题中发挥了主要作用，并为即将到来的恐怖事件铺平了道路。

Process of initiation

植入程序

A Space Marine of the Legiones Astartes is transformed from mere hunun frailty by a threefold process of genetic manipulanon,surgical augmentation and psycho-conditioning that in ideal circumstances takes place over a number of years over the course of the individual's adolescence. That the process is conducted while the subject body is undergoing maturation represents the highest chance of survivability and the lowest chance of tissue rejection, and although (at least partial) enhancement with adult subjects is possible, it is extremely dangerous and often unpredictable in result. The process by which Space Marines are created relies inherently on the hormonal and biological make-up of the human male, meaning that only males can be subjected to the transformation. In practice only a small percentage of potential candidates will for one reason or another be regarded as suitable either because of genetic, environmental or psychological factors. The resultant Space Marine is in many ways no longer functionally human, but in others massively advantaged in terms of physical strength, durability and reflexes over even the most physically adept unaugmented human warrior. Their bodies are also phenomenally efficient biological engines,resistant to disease, contamination, radiation and poison. In addition they are also all but impervious to the natural consequences of aging and cell decay to the extent that other than by extreme physical trauma or incremental toxin and contaminate damage, they may in fact be functionally immortal or at least have life spans far beyond that of the human stock from which they were taken.

阿斯塔特军团的星际战士是由普通人类经过基因操纵、手术增强和精神调控的三重改造过程转化而出，在理想的情况下，受试者会在自己青春期的数年时间中经历整个改造过程。在进行改造过程的同时，受试者的身体也正在成熟，这代表了最高的存活机会和最低的组织排斥可能性。尽管对成年人进行强化改造（至少在部分上）是可能的，这这个过程通常极其危险，而且结果不可预料。创造星际战士的程序在本质上是依赖于人类男性的荷尔蒙和生物构成，这意味着只有人类男性能够接受转化。在实际情况中，只有少部分潜在候选人由于基因、环境或心理要素被认为是合适的。由此创造出的星际战士在很多方面都不再是普通人类，他们的体力、耐力和反应力相比于那些身法技能最为熟练的未改造战士都更占优势。他们的身体也是非凡高效的生化引擎，你抵抗疾病、污染、辐射和毒素。另外，他们也几乎不受衰老和细胞衰变的自然影响，除非遭受极端的物理创伤或递增的毒素和污染损伤（否则他们不会死亡）。事实上，他们的机能或许是不朽的，或者他们的寿命至少远超他们所脱胎自的凡人。