V2 Chapter 2: Operation Codename: Scelian Red Dragon
Duvette boarded Marshal Slaydo's flagship, the Northwind, ahead of the 112th.
This Emperor-class battleship was everything its designation implied: a pinnacle of Imperial Navy power rendered physical, its enormous hull a Gothic fortress suspended in the cold void, macro-cannon batteries and void shield generators covering every surface.
The briefing order had just reached him from the Departmento Munitorum.
The moment it arrived, he issued clear instructions: Deputy Commander Major Dylan and Adjutant Evan were to remain at the starport with full authority over the regiment's subsequent boarding and materiel loading. He would take a naval shuttle ahead of them.
Walking through the Northwind's broad metal corridors, Duvette registered the change in atmosphere immediately.
Every Imperial officer and commissar he passed, on catching sight of the rank insignia on his black greatcoat's shoulders, would stop and offer a respectful nod. The lower-deck naval ratings standing watch along the corridor walls came to rigid attention and rendered him deliberate, formal salutes.
Duvette matched each acknowledgment precisely, his pace unbroken.
His accumulated reputation had clearly preceded him to every officer and enlisted rating aboard this ship.
A signal officer guided him without delay to an extraordinarily large strategic briefing hall.
He had arrived early. The semicircular hall was already full.
Duvette found a position at the rear margin and let his gaze move across the assembled company.
He was, without much question, the lowest-ranking officer in the room.
Every commander in that hall had decorations across their chest in numbers that represented full careers of service. Several wore exceptionally expensive augmetic limbs. The ranks present were almost universally Major General or higher.
Compared with the peer-rank officers he had passed in the corridors, these senior commanders showed very little awareness of a Colonel-Commissar's existence. No one moved to approach him. The atmosphere in the hall was extremely tense, the generals gathering in small clusters and exchanged intelligence and logistics in voices held deliberately low against the weight of the occasion.
Duvette stood in place and made no effort to join any of those circles. He did, however, catch a familiar silhouette across the hall: Commissar-General Delane Oktar.
That settled it. From what he remembered, Gaunt had participated in this campaign as well. There would likely be another encounter.
Before long, the heavy alloy doors at the front of the hall slid upward.
The murmuring conversations ceased entirely. The hall fell silent enough to hear every footfall. An elderly man in a sharp military uniform, a master-crafted breastplate fitted over it, strode into the hall at a broad, unhurried pace.
Every officer present snapped to attention and rendered honours. This was the supreme commander of the Sabbat Crusade: Marshal Slaydo.
Slaydo moved directly to the raised speaking position at the hall's centre.
He was old, but he moved with absolute purpose, and the Marshal's eyes held the same restless, concentrated energy they always had.
He turned slowly, his sharp gaze sweeping across the assembled senior officers. When it reached the hall's rear rows, it paused briefly on Duvette. Then moved on.
Slaydo drew a long breath. Then, in a voice of carrying, penetrating force that surprised everyone present with its sheer volume, he announced:
"Children! We have the holy war we have long craved! The Sabbat Crusade!"
The declaration rang under the hall's high dome.
He set both hands on the tactical lectern and told the assembled officers that the faces before him represented only a portion of the crusade's senior command. At this same moment, similar pre-deployment assemblies were underway simultaneously at the hub worlds of Sanshin, Oscraye, and Ptolemaes.
"This crusade will be the largest military operation this sector has seen in a thousand years!" Slaydo's voice rose further. "One billion Astra Militarum soldiers are in position. Thousands of warships fill the orbital lanes. The Titan Legions are warming their reactors. The Emperor's Angels stand with us!"
He straightened suddenly to his full height.
"Every one of us has a single objective: the complete liberation of the Sabbat Sector! We will crush Nadzybar and every Chaos bastard who serves under him with our own hands!"
With those words, Slaydo drew the military sabre from his hip. The cold blade pointed at the ceiling, and he bellowed:
"For the Emperor! For Saint Sabbat!"
"For the Emperor! For Saint Sabbat!" The entire hall answered as one.
The pre-deployment speech ended. The barely contained intensity in the hall settled by degrees.
Slaydo sheathed the sabre and moved to the operational briefing.
The crusade's first engagement, and its most critical. The blow that would strike the enemy hardest from the start.
The hololithic display illuminated. A vast star map unfolded.
"The first phase of this crusade has four objectives: Formal Prime, Longharunt, Oskade, and Indryd." Slaydo's hand moved across the star map, marking each world. "These four worlds and their systems occupy the strategic throat of the Sabbat Sector. Take them, and the crusade force gains secure footholds inside enemy-held space, a platform from which to project strength as reinforcements arrive. These are the nails we drive into the enemy's heart."
He named the codename for this multi-axis operation: Scelian Red Dragon. In ancient totem tradition, the Scelian Red Dragon was a multi-headed serpentine creature with lethal venom that, once it seized its prey, never released its grip.
Of the four objectives, Formal Prime was the most critical.
A hive world with a fully developed heavy industrial base. Whoever held it held the largest frontline armory and fleet repair installation in the theatre. The largest concentration of Imperial naval and ground forces assembled here on Pyrite had one assigned target: this single world.
Slaydo pressed both hands to the table and delivered his final operational directive.
"I will lead the assault personally. Six weeks. This world will fall in six weeks."
The briefing ended.
The generals filed out at pace, each carrying their operational orders. Duvette turned and walked toward the hangar, to the shuttle that would take him back to his transport.
Walking across the cold metal floor, he allowed himself a long, quiet exhale.
He had genuinely not expected to be handed the most dangerous engagement of the crusade's opening phase before the crusade had even properly begun.
He had a very precise understanding of what Formal Prime would cost.
The Battle of Macragge had been brutal because the enemy was a numberless swarm that consumed everything through pure biological instinct. Formal was a different category of killing ground entirely.
On that world, they would fight in mud-soaked trenches and in the structurally labyrinthine, heavily contaminated ruins of a hive city, against Khornate devotees who were well-equipped, well-trained, and maintained a state of fanatic fury that never dropped below its maximum. Those heretics felt no pain. They knew every underground conduit and every reinforced shelter beneath the hive. Retreat was not a concept they possessed. Every engagement would become close-quarters combat, floor by floor, room by room.
In the campaign's later phases, the Astra Militarum would pay hundreds of lives for every metre of advance. Formal Prime was Stalingrad — the 41st Millennium's Stalingrad.
Slaydo had declared six weeks in that hall with complete conviction. In the course of events as Duvette remembered them, this war had lasted months, grinding endlessly, consuming regiment after regiment in the ruins, until the White Scars Chapter had finally broken the deadlock with a lightning assault and ended the bloodbath.
He stopped walking and looked through the corridor's blast-proof viewport at the black, boundless void outside.
Then again: the 112th was already here. Six weeks was what Slaydo wanted. His soldiers had been forged in death often enough to know exactly what they were capable of.
It was time to find out what those Blood Pact were made of.