V2 Chapter 68: What in the Emperor's Name Has Happened to This Age?
The return voyage from the stargate to the Sabbat Worlds was long.
The Inquisitorial black cruiser was not like the Carpé family ships with their concessions to comfort, and nothing like the Ark of Omen with its perpetual mechanical prayers and drifting servo-skulls. The corridors were narrow, the walls carved with Inquisitorial sigils and devotional text, and the air carried a persistent combination of incense and recycled atmosphere.
When they first boarded, Duvette personally led Markus and the twelve Shadow Wolves to their designated quarters. The thirteen figures in their black armour and grey cloaks moved through the corridors in silence. Every crew member and Storm Trooper they passed responded with the same instinct: head down, step aside, no questions asked about the tall black-armoured Astartes and where they had come from.
As they passed a mid-level chapel, Markus stopped.
The twelve behind him stopped with him.
Duvette followed the direction of their gaze. The chapel doors stood half-open. Inside, a tall statue of the Emperor stood in the incense smoke. Several Ministorum priests were murmuring their scripture in low voices. Dozens of crew members knelt on the metal floor with their heads bowed toward the statue in prayer.
Markus looked at it for a long moment without speaking.
Then, quietly, he said one word.
"God?"
The Ark of Omen had not offered scenes like this. The Inquisitorial cruiser was different.
Duvette did not answer immediately.
Markus continued, his voice still low. "If the Imperial Truth still stands, why do they kneel before the Emperor as they would kneel before a god?"
The instant those words were out, Duvette glanced at the priests inside the chapel, then looked back at Markus and said under his breath: "Do not say that in front of anyone outside this group. Not in this era."
Markus turned to look at him.
Duvette exhaled. "I know you have many questions. This is not the moment to answer them. Once you are settled, I will have materials prepared for you covering this age."
He looked at the kneeling crew through the chapel doorway, and added quietly: "You will come to understand everything about this era in time."
Markus said nothing further. He gave the Emperor's statue one last look, then followed Duvette and continued.
For the remainder of the transit, the thirteen Shadow Wolves stayed in the quarters that had been cleared for them. They asked for almost nothing beyond a training area, a weapons maintenance space, data terminals, and sufficient quiet. Those were the things they used.
Duvette arranged deliberate contact between them and the 112th.
It began with basic close-quarters combat training. Stroud approached this with considerable enthusiasm and maintained the private conviction that his speed and adaptability gave him a fighting chance against an Astartes over a sustained engagement.
He was carried back to the medical bay by Anderson at the end of the first day.
"I think they were not using full strength." Stroud lay on the medical bunk with the particular tone of a man finding consolation in a situation that had very little to offer. "Which is deeply insulting, if you think about it."
Elias, watching from the adjacent bunk with his right arm in a field splint, produced a humourless sound. "At least you can still form sentences."
The 112th had, collectively, been comprehensively beaten.
Astra Militarum training covered bayonet work, short-blade combat, unarmed fighting, and close-range engagement drills as a matter of course. But what the 112th genuinely relied on was shooting, coordinated fire, positional shifting, and small-unit tactics. Against veteran Astartes, and particularly against these Shadow Wolves who had come from the Great Crusade with ten thousand years of combat instinct, unarmed or blade-to-blade fighting offered essentially no viable outcome.
Even Anderson, with his crude biochemical augmentation and his considerable physical presence, had managed only a few additional exchanges against Markus before the result arrived.
Duvette stood at the training area's edge and watched without feeling that anything about this was embarrassing.
He had never expected the 112th to win a close-quarters engagement against Astartes. That had never been the objective.
What he wanted was for his soldiers to learn: how to read an Astartes charge line and move out of it, how to coordinate support for a breakthrough assault, how to pour fire through the gap the moment it opened. They could not rely on the skills indefinitely. Those were not permanent conditions, and good soldiers needed to function when the amplification was gone.
After several days of training, Markus offered no compliments about the 112th's physical capability.
But he acknowledged that these mortals understood when to open fire, when to withdraw, and how to channel an enemy into a killing zone.
He looked at the soldiers reforming in the training area. "In tactical terms, they are more developed than I expected."
From Markus Sevian, that was a considerable assessment.
After training, the Shadow Wolves worked through the historical material that Heinz had been asked to compile. Duvette had specified the contents: post-Heresy records, the Second Founding, the rise of the Ecclesiarchy, the War of the Beast, the Black Legion, Abaddon's Black Crusades, and the current Sabbat Crusade archives.
It was not enough.
The human Imperium had produced vast quantities of records across ten thousand years and had not managed a single coherent, internally consistent, publicly accessible history from them. Different sectors contradicted each other. The Inquisition, the Ministorum, the Mechanicus, the Chapters, and the Departmento Munitorum each maintained their own version of events. A single incident might be dated to one year in one archive and to a point several centuries or even millennia apart in another.
Duvette was fully aware that this particular chaos would not begin to improve until Guilliman returned and established institutions specifically tasked with reconstructing Imperial history. He was equally aware that he was not going to say this out loud.
So in the end, Duvette delivered the history himself.
His stated source remained the same simple answer: the Emperor's visions.
In a sealed conference room, thirteen Shadow Wolves sat along one side of the long table, and Duvette stood in front of the star-map projection, working through what he was able to tell them.
He told them that the Legions had been broken apart by the Codex Astartes that Guilliman wrote, and the Astartes had become Chapters. That was not pure punishment. It was the cost the Imperium had paid to prevent a second Legion rebellion from being possible.
He told them that the Imperial Truth was gone. The Ecclesiarchy had become the spiritual foundation of the human Imperium. Countless ordinary people called the Emperor the God-Emperor and treated prayer as the thing that let them survive another day.
When he reached this point, Markus's face went cold.
Duvette did not stop.
He told them about the War of the Beast. The end of the Heresy had not brought peace. The Imperium had been torn apart by one crisis after another. The orks had very nearly pushed humanity to the edge of extinction a second time, and every Imperial victory had come at the cost of continuing to bleed.
He told them about the Black Legion.
When he said Abaddon's name, all thirteen Shadow Wolves raised their heads at the same moment.
Markus did not interrupt. His hands closed slowly.
Duvette told them that the remnants of the Sons of Horus had not disappeared. They had shed the old name and become the Black Legion. Abaddon had become one of the most dangerous enemies the Imperium had faced in ten thousand years, launching one Black Crusade after another from the Eye of Terror, dragging world after world into ruin.
He told them the Word Bearers were still spreading corruption, that Erebus remained one of the names the Imperium most deserved to see destroyed. He told them the Devourer, the Death Guard, the Emperor's Children, the Thousand Sons, the Iron Warriors, the Night Lords — the Traitor Legions had not ended with Horus's death. They were still in the galaxy. Still carrying the poison of the Heresy forward into the ten-thousandth year after it.
Then Duvette described the Imperium as it was today.
Bureaucracy heavy enough to crush entire planets. The Departmento Munitorum routing orders to war zones that had been destroyed a century prior. The Administratum issuing tithe demands that could starve a world through a famine winter.
The Ecclesiarchy's faith sustaining humanity, and the Ecclesiarchy's Inquisition burning anyone deemed insufficiently devout. The Inquisition protecting the Imperium, and the Inquisition destroying entire planets over a probable risk.
He offered no defence of this era.
There was nothing worth defending.
He simply told these Shadow Wolves: this is the world you woke up in.
When he finished the final section, the conference room fell into a silence that lasted.
Markus and the twelve other Shadow Wolves said nothing.
They sat with the weight of ten thousand years pressing down from the information they had just received, letting it settle.
Duvette looked at them and found that he did not feel well either. He could understand what they were experiencing. These men were looking at the human Imperium of the forty-first millennium and finding almost nothing they recognised from the golden age of the Great Crusade.
Reason. Exploration. Unity. Truth. Hope.
Those words still appeared in certain texts and declarations even in M41. But more often they had been replaced with prayer, fear, bureaucracy, sacrifice, and endless war.
He even caught something in Markus's eyes that looked, briefly, like revulsion at the state of the Imperium.
Not rebellion. Not rejection.
The instinctive response of a Loyalist from a different age, seeing for the first time what the future had become.
Now they understood what Duvette had meant when he said the Imperium had in some sense lost the war. Horus had not taken the Throne, so the traitors had lost. But the future the Emperor had wanted for humanity had never arrived. In that sense, the Imperium had also lost.
Duvette said nothing further on the subject. He understood these truths could not simply be accepted on the spot, and he had no intention of demanding an immediate response from any of them.
He switched off the star-map projection and stepped back, giving them time.
He was turning to leave when Markus spoke.
"We came ten thousand years too late."
Duvette stopped and looked back.
Markus rose slowly to his feet. The black chest plate in the dim light carried no insignia. The grey cloak hung behind him like a piece of shadow that had been cut away from where it belonged.
"Terra no longer needs our warning. Loken cannot hear our answer. The Emperor sits on the Golden Throne. And our Legion's name has been dragged through the mud by the traitors."
One by one, the other twelve Shadow Wolves stood.
Some looked down at their black armour. Some closed their fists. Some appeared to be silently saying a name that no longer had a place in the present world.
Markus looked at Duvette. His voice was low and steady.
"But we are not dead."
He raised his right fist and pressed it hard against his chest.
"If we could not reach the Battle of Terra."
The other twelve made the same gesture simultaneously.
"Then let us reach the last day of the traitors."
Duvette looked at them for a moment. Then he nodded.
"The Sabbat Worlds have enough traitors."
"Then that is where we begin," Markus said.
Duvette allowed himself a thin smile.
"Welcome to the forty-first millennium, sergeant."