Featured in the sixth novel of Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series, Straight Silver, Aexe Cardinal is an Imperial Agri-World made up of different nation states. For forty standard years, a war has waged between the Loyalist nations states, known as the Aexe Alliance, and the rogue nation of Shadik. The forty-year war has resulted in the battlefields marked with blasted trees and muddy crater marked earth. Vast trench networks are dug along the frontlines, with both sides fighting a long-drawn war of attrition.

The soldiers of the Aexe Alliance are armed with bolt-action autoguns, solid round weapons, primitive tanks, and propeller-driven aircraft. The Imperial Guard, which the Ghost’s were part of, were sent to Aexe Cardinal to reinforce the Alliance to break the stalemate. Unbeknownst to the Imperial Forces and Alliances, the armies of Shadik were being reinforced by the Blood Pact.