V2 Chapter 1: Ten Years Before the Crusade
The lights in the Northwind's private command room had been deliberately dimmed, leaving only the vast tactical hololithic table to cast its blue-green light across the chamber and illuminate the broad silhouette at its centre.
Marshal Slaydo sat quietly in his wide command chair.
His hair and heavy beard had gone grey-white. A scar ran across his broad, high forehead, permanent and deep. Age had gathered on his frame, but the Marshal's eyes were still sharp, carrying the restless, undeniable energy of a man who brooked no disagreement.
He held a tactical data-slate in his hand, eyes moving quickly across the screen. These were the last of the mission reports from units arriving at the assembly point before the Sabbat Crusade's formal launch.
The Imperium's vast and cumbersome war machine was turning itself over by slow degrees. Tens of thousands of reports reached his desk every day, the great majority of them cold numbers and dry attrition tallies.
Then his eyes stopped.
In the field for mission-executing unit, bold black text: Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment.
In the upper right corner, a photograph of a face that had already made an impression on him. Colonel-Commissar Duvette. The man in the photograph had cold eyes, the signature wide-brimmed peaked cap, and a composure in the line of his brow that could only have been tempered inside mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.
Slaydo read the report's detailed content carefully. On paper, it had been a routine logistics escort assignment: the 112th stationed aboard and guarding a massive transport carrying strategic materiel to the assembly point.
During the transit, the fleet had been caught in Warp turbulence of extreme and unusual intensity.
The report's language was restrained. The near-total despair behind the words was easy enough to read between the lines.
Under the force of the Warp storm, the transport's Gellar Field had suffered severe fluctuation and partial failure.
A Gellar Field's local collapse was the equivalent of stripping the ship's protective shell while still inside the Warp. Chaos corruption began spreading through the lower decks. Immaterium entities tore through the veil between realspace and the Warp and poured through.
In a disaster that would have unmade any conventional Astra Militarum regiment, it had been Colonel-Commissar Duvette who held his soldiers in place against the tide of daemons. They held the line with flesh and fire, shielding the accompanying tech-priests until those same tech-priests managed, in the depths of that crisis, to restart and repair the Gellar Field.
This sudden catastrophe had come within a fraction of consigning the enormous transport to permanent loss inside the Warp's depths. They had come through. Somewhat later than schedule, they had arrived at the crusade's assembly hub world of Pyrite.
At the bottom of the report, stamped in deep red: the rosette seal of the Inquisitorial Conclave.
It meant the Conclave had intervened, conducted a rigorous investigation, and confirmed that Duvette and his 112th had emerged from a full Warp incursion without a trace of Chaos corruption. Their souls were clean.
The Marshal lifted his eyes from the screen toward the officer who had been standing quietly in the room's shadows throughout.
"Macaroth. Come and look at this." The Marshal's voice was low and carrying.
The relatively young senior staff adjutant stepped out of the shadows and came to stand beside him. Macaroth's eyes carried a sharpness and a depth of judgement that went well beyond his years. He lowered his head and studied the mission brief on the data-slate.
In the quiet command room, only the faint sound of breathing. A moment later, Macaroth raised his head. His steady face showed very little, and when he spoke, it was in the measured tones of someone who prefers analysis to emotion.
"Another inconceivable engagement."
At that, the hard face of the Marshal broke into a slight smile, showing a flash of white teeth.
"Indeed." He set the data-slate on the table and lifted his gaze to the hololithic display, where the dimly rendered star map of the Sabbat Sector spread across the projection. "Anyone who can survive a Gellar Field failure in the Warp with their regiment intact. Believe me, they will be the sharpest blade in this crusade."
****
755.M41. Pyrite, hub world. City of Klassya. 112th Regiment barracks.
Duvette walked into the 112th's sprawling garrison with something that, on anyone else, might have passed for tiredness.
He raised his head and looked at the cold, familiar lines of Gothic architecture around him. A brief, disconnected moment of unreality passed through his mind.
When had he last been here? Five years ago, roughly?
He did the quiet mental arithmetic. That was not right. By absolute standard time in realspace, a full ten years had passed since their last rest period on Pyrite.
That was the nature of Warp travel. Unruly, irrational, and entirely unwilling to follow human schedules. This storm had not only brought daemons down on them, it had also made a thorough game of them on the scale of time itself.
Under the Warp turbulence's distortions, the flow of time had warped severely, consuming close to half of what had been allocated as crusade preparation time. The waste of it was considerable.
But they were here, intact and whole, and in the end that was what mattered.
"Commissar. Any further orders?"
The voice at his shoulder was steady, even, and carried no inflection at all.
Duvette stopped and looked across. Evan was standing to his side at parade-straight attention, expression composed, waiting for instructions.
Looking at the young man now, something moved briefly behind Duvette's eyes.
The boy who had needed protecting was gone. Evan had shed every trace of that youth and become a thoroughly competent Astra Militarum adjutant, and it was visible in every line of him. His height had matched Duvette's own. The breadth of his shoulders and the hard geometry of his face spoke plainly of what those years in places of extreme violence had built into him.
In individual combat capability and tactical judgement, Evan now stood without concession alongside the veterans of the 112th, alongside Stroud, Anderson, and the other company commanders who had worked their way out of the worst situations the galaxy had produced.
"No. That will be all. Let them rest."
Duvette spoke with the same calm register he used for most things. "Go and relax. The crusade will begin formally before long. After that, we are unlikely to find our way back to anywhere resembling comfortable."
"Yes, sir." Evan came to crisp attention, gave a clean salute, and the hard lines of his face abruptly failed to hold. He grinned, the wide, uncomplicated grin of someone genuinely young enough to mean it. "Then I am taking Lena into the city."
He turned and walked away into the depths of the garrison at a long, unhurried stride.
"Keep an eye on Stroud!" Duvette raised his voice at the retreating back. "If that man causes trouble in the city again, tell him I will shoot him myself."
"Understood, sir!" Evan waved one hand without turning around.
Duvette shook his head. These people were getting more undisciplined by the year.
He turned and walked toward a corridor inside the garrison. His boots on the metal floor made a flat, regular sound. When he reached the end of the corridor and stood looking at the closed door there, he raised an eyebrow without quite intending to.
If memory served, it had been in this same room, ten years ago by the reckoning of realspace, that he and Venus had concluded their arrangement.
A great deal had changed in ten years. Almost immediately after the Warp transit ended, her communication had come through.
He had learned that Venus had by now entirely cleared all internal obstacles within the dynasty and formally taken her position as the true heir of the Carpé Rogue Trader dynasty. As for her brother Julius, the unfortunate young man had met his end in 748.M41 during a resource survey in an outer system, the victim of a "catastrophic communication failure that prevented the fleet from reaching him in time," and had "regrettably" been lost to an unidentified xenos threat.
That had also been part of Duvette honoring his side of the arrangement. The blood-sealed investment that moment had represented was precisely what had deepened his working relationship with Venus across the years since.
The Carpé family had sent their best individual equipment and materiel to him in those years, in exchange for the 112th's absolute combat capability in certain non-official contexts. The quality of that logistical support had lifted the regiment's individual fighting ability and equipment standards to a level that was, without exaggeration, among the very finest of any Astra Militarum regiment operating across the entire Pacificus Sector.
Especially once he had advanced the System's skills. He had absolute confidence that in a controlled engagement environment, a single squad of his veteran soldiers could trade evenly, without losses, against Astartes in full power armour.
That was not arrogance. The Warp storm transit had demonstrated it completely.
On that transport, as the Gellar Field failed and turned the lower decks into something that did not belong in realspace, the mortal soldiers of the 112th had held against the daemon tide for hours, using flesh and firepower to build an absolute defensive line, shielding the tech-priests until the Field was restored.
Lena's presence had been decisive in that engagement.
Her Echo of Miracles ability had, at the most critical moment, when the daemons were about to tear through, given Duvette the advance warning he needed to lay interlocking fields of fire before they breached. He had sealed every entry point before the assault landed and turned what would have been a massacre into an organised killing ground.
The 112th had taken casualties in that defensive action. But coming through a Gellar Field failure in the Warp with a regiment intact was something that, in the Departmento Munitorum's established understanding of the possible, even Astartes struggled to achieve. The mortal soldiers of the 112th had done it.
He pushed the door open and walked into the simply furnished rest room.
He sat down on the hard bunk and pulled off the heavy greatcoat. He needed to rest, genuinely. He had been without sleep for close to five days. The crusade could sound its horn at any moment, and he needed to be at his peak when it did.
Before lying down, he closed his eyes out of habit and opened the Soul of the Legion's command panel, surveying the assets currently at his disposal.
[Current Command Authority: Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment]
[Total Strength: 3,121 (all personnel included)]
[Heavy Vehicles: 45 Leman Russ main battle tanks, 60 Chimera APCs, 15 Hydra flak tanks, 2 Trojan ammunition carriers, 50 Mars-pattern Sentinel walkers]
[Experience: Epic (21%)]
[Overall Supply: 100%] [Overall Loyalty: 100%] [Overall Morale: 100%] [Overall Sanity: 100%] [Chaos Corruption: 0%]
[Skills: Flesh Engine | Iron Crusade | Blessing of the Omnissiah | Eye of Judgement | Silence]
He looked at the fused advanced skills at the panel's base and gave a quiet nod.
Across the past ten years, he had accumulated Emperor's Wrath through several operations. The only path to unlocking the skill called Purification required breaking down and reforging the assortment of lower-tier skills first.
The merged results the Soul of the Legion had delivered after that expenditure were stronger than anything he had allowed himself to expect.
The first was the Flesh Engine, formed from the fusion of Veteran's Frame, Indomitable, and Limiter Break:
[Passive: The metabolism and physique of all Legion members reach the theoretical limit of mortal capability. Complete immunity to standard fatigue and extreme environmental conditions. Sleep and food requirements at minimum. On receiving a non-instantly-fatal critical wound, the wound locks down and the body temporarily stabilises, forcibly maintaining combat capability.]
[Active: On activation, the genetic limiter on all Legion members is forcibly released. For the duration, all warriors attain physical qualities and strength that violate mortal physical law. Duration: one hour. Cooldown: 12 hours.]
In plain terms, this skill allowed the 112th to sustain combat without resupply until the enemy broke first.
The second was the Iron Crusade, formed from Steel Ring, Burn the Boats, and Forced March, the soul-chain that kept this army from ever collapsing:
[Passive: All Legion members traverse any complex or difficult terrain as if on flat ground. Daily morale and sanity are permanently fixed at an extremely high level.]
[Active: On activation, all members become immune to every negative state caused by fear, terror, or Warp whispers. Morale and sanity are forcibly locked at 100%. Duration: one hour. Cooldown: 12 hours.]
In practical terms: even facing the direct pressure of a Greater Daemon, his soldiers could raise bayonets and advance without changing expression.
The third was the Blessing of the Omnissiah, the regiment's ultimate firepower reserve, formed from Focused Volley and Overload Drain:
[Active: Once activated, vehicles and weapons in concentrated fire are touched by the Machine Spirit's favour. Ammunition and energy seem drawn from somewhere beyond normal accounting, effectively inexhaustible. Soldiers can hit their target's vital point with eyes closed, the Machine Spirit correcting their aim. On expiry, weapons are no longer permanently damaged as before but can be repaired and returned to service.]
The fourth was the Eye of Judgement, formed from Emperor's Gaze, Threat Sense, and Fatal Mark:
[Passive: Provides a permanently active 360-degree danger and killing intent warning system with no blind spots. Any Chaos corruption resolves as a visible high-luminescence red in the bearer's perception. Enemy weakness markers can be shared directly with all forces and other individuals.]
Lying back against the headboard, thinking through these skills that bordered on outright cheating, his mind drifted without effort to the hardest single battle he had fought in the past few years: the campaign at Gerlatuus Decimus.
Orks again. As the universe seemed to prefer.
What had made that campaign truly memorable, though, was not purely the violence of the fighting. It was that when the Departmento Munitorum's campaign designation notice reached him, he had immediately recognised the name from another life: Ibram Gaunt.
He had seen him, in the final battle that decided the planet's fate.
The 112th's armoured element had been assigned as the spearhead to breach the Ork defensive line, tasked to drive directly through Tropius Crater Nine and take the head of an Ork Warlord named Ergoz.
The image was still clear: an unusually clear day. Sunlight reaching through the smoke drifting above the crater. Every vehicle in the Ash Watchers 112th with its engines already running, the track units cutting deep channels into scorched earth.
He had stood at the highest point on the crater's rim in his black greatcoat.
He had raised his field glasses and looked coldly down at the Ork army covering every surface below. The heavy guns of the rear artillery were still hammering the Ork fortifications. The ground had not stopped shaking.
He stood there, watching, waiting for the order to advance.
Then, through the awareness that the Eye of Judgement gave him, he had sensed something: a gaze from behind and to his flank, carrying unmistakable and intense interest.
He had turned his head and looked toward the source.
In the trenches of the 8th Hyrkan Regiment on the flank position, not far from where he stood, a young man of approximately his own age in a cadet commissar's uniform was standing straight behind a sandbag line, staring at him without looking away.
Duvette had not known, at that moment, that the young man with the composed, determined face would one day be the Commissar whose name echoed across the entire Sabbat Sector.
He had registered the look briefly, taken it for some newly commissioned cadet regarding a Colonel-Commissar of established reputation, and had looked away.
Then the signal cut across the battlefield, sharp and clean.
The 112th had not disappointed anyone. In the instant the assault tone rang out, the armoured element activated Flesh Engine and the Blessing of the Omnissiah simultaneously.
What followed was a mechanised assault worth documenting in any military textbook. More than a hundred heavy vehicles drove through the outer Ork defensive line like a steel pack at full run, unstoppable, with an impact and weight of fire that no Ork position had been built to absorb. No other Astra Militarum force in that engagement advanced harder or faster.
In the thunder of the guns, Duvette had stepped out of his command vehicle. He had taken the master-crafted power sword, its hilt engraved with his name, its blade bearing the Eternal property that ensured it would never break, and moved directly under the Eye of Judgement's marking to find the Ork Warlord Ergoz, a creature built on the scale of a small hill.
In that moment, every Imperial soldier and every greenskin on the battlefield was watching.
With the Flesh Engine's inhuman strength and the Eye of Judgement's weakness analysis both running, the power sword's blue force-field edge traced a lethal arc through the air.
He drove forward with a shout that was not entirely under his control, and the blade cut clean through the Warlord's thick neck, and he raised the ugly, enormous green head high.
Every human soldier in that crater erupted. Whether they had served under him, whether they had heard of the 112th, whether they knew his name at all — in the instant the Warlord fell, a sound like thunder filled Tropius Crater Nine. "For the Emperor!" rang from every direction.
Young Gaunt was among those who raised his voice, and what was in his eyes in that moment was not easily named.
Lying against the headboard, recalling that image, Duvette found the corner of his mouth move.
He knew perfectly well that the honour of killing an Ork Warlord before a million soldiers was not, in the original course of events, meant to belong to him.
It had belonged to Commissar-General Delane Oktar, Gaunt's mentor, and the commanding officer of the 8th Hyrkan.
He had taken it with information and strength, standing in the middle of the Orks' encirclement and cutting the head off with his own sword. When the Warlord's hot blood had hit him, the question of who a particular honour had once been destined for became a very small consideration.
What had genuinely altered his sense of the future's shape, the first time he had felt true uncertainty about the course of events ahead, was not that appropriated honour. It was what he had done about Delane Oktar's appointed death.
In the original course of things, this respected Commissar-General had been fated to die at the victory celebration after the battle, drinking wine that the defeated Orks had laced with slow poison before their collapse. He was to die on a sickbed, painfully, over days. On his deathbed, in the grip of the poison, he had signed Gaunt's promotion to full Commissar. It was that loss, at that moment, that had broken and remade Gaunt's character in the most essential way.
Duvette had intervened. He had prevented the poisoning. Delane Oktar had lived.
He knew what Oktar had meant to Gaunt. The man had been mentor in tactics and, given that Gaunt's actual father had died when Gaunt was very young, something closer to a father in every way that counted.
Now, when all forces pulled off that planet, Gaunt was still wearing a cadet commissar's insignia. He had not experienced that particular loss. Oktar was still a mountain standing in his path.
Gaunt had the ability. He had demonstrated it on the battlefield beyond any reasonable doubt. What Duvette could not be certain about was whether saving Oktar had set something loose in the shape of what was coming.
"Perhaps, without that catalyst," he said quietly to the dark room, "if the opportunity comes, I should try to save Tanith."
The First and Only. The regiment that would distinguish itself in the crusade ahead. Their homeworld was destined to be consumed by Chaos.
If Gaunt's path had already changed, what would become of Tanith?
He exhaled and put those thoughts away. There would be time for them later.
The greater matter was a separate accounting. He pressed his hand against the coat pocket and felt the cold shape of the data-chip he had carried since Omicron-Nine, solid through the cloth.
That was the key with the potential to change almost everything.
Five full years he had kept it on his person, and he had not yet found a safe or appropriate way to transmit it.
Sending intelligence at this classification to Cawl required a communications node of the highest grade. Duvette had raised the matter with Lord Inquisitor Juno obliquely on one occasion, asking whether she had any access to such a thing.
She had been as sharp as a bloodhound that has caught a scent it recognises. She had narrowed that single red eye and regarded him with a smile that was not entirely a smile, and asked him directly what he was trying to do.
Her answer, when it came, was accompanied by a particular kind of amusement.
"No one asks about those things without a very specific reason, Commissar." A slight turn of her mouth. "Unless the need is extremely pressing."
But Juno had given him the answer in the end. She had shaken her head and explained that cogitator arrays at this classification level touched the very core of Imperial communications security. Even she, as a Lord Inquisitor, would need an explicit and documented heretical threat or a military emergency to formally request access.
"If you want to use one privately, Duvette, that is nearly impossible."
That avenue had closed. He had tried the next approach through Venus and the Carpé dynasty's smuggling network, asking her to quietly seek out a high-powered encrypted array through the black market's back channels.
As of today, there was no confirmed answer.
"If nothing comes of that either..." He frowned at the dark ceiling. Perhaps during the Sabbat Crusade itself, a path to controlling a communications node would present itself.
A clean electronic tone cut through the room.
The military data-terminal on the table lit up, its screen projecting a sharp beam of light into the dark.
His thoughts came back immediately. He swung his legs off the bunk without hesitation and crossed to the table.
He narrowed his eyes. His pupils contracted slightly as they resolved the content on the screen.
A highest-priority mobilisation order, transmitted directly from Marshal Slaydo's flagship, the Northwind. All units garrisoned on Pyrite were to end their rest period immediately and assemble at the orbital starport for embarkation.
In the quiet rest room, Duvette held the data-slate and stood without moving for a long moment.
Then he turned the screen off, took the black commissar's greatcoat from where it hung and drew it across his shoulders in a single practiced motion, pressed the peaked cap down over his eyes, and closed his hand around the hilt of the power sword at his hip.
"Finally." The word carried the particular quality of something that has been waiting a long time. "Is it beginning?"
Duvette drew a slow breath, pushed the door open, and walked out into the corridor.
Beyond the door lay the brutal star-sea that was about to be consumed by fire and blood — the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, at last begun.