Chapter 90: The Oath of Moment
After the long, suffocating wait, the order arrived. Duvette led the survivors of the Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Regiment through the flagship's corridors to Macragge's Honour's enormous hangar bay.
Standing inside it was the first time the mortal soldiers could genuinely appreciate the scale of a Gloriana-class battleship at close range.
The vaulted ceiling climbed high enough to disappear into darkness. The air was dense with promethium fuel, sacred incense, the acidic bite of coolant, and the deep, unmistakable smell of blood from the casualties of the recent withdrawal. The noise was continuous: engines, metal, voices, the machinery of a warship still fighting its way through an orbital engagement.
Every soldier in the 112th who could stand was here. Carapace armour scraped and marked but cleaned. Laser cells charged and fitted. The regiment stood in formation, ready.
The most immediately visible figure was Anderson.
He had been rearmed from the ground up. The wreckage of his old kit had been replaced with heavy reinforced carapace armour from the Ultramar Storm Trooper regiments, a breastplate built for a heavier-than-standard frame, intended for elite mortal soldiers or possibly for Astartes recruits during light-armour conditioning training. On Anderson's frame it fitted as if it had been measured for him.
What drew eyes even more than the armour was what he was carrying.
A power maul on a long haft, finely crafted and heavy enough that looking at it left no reasonable doubt it could reduce a Carnifex's skull to fragments with a single strike. Duvette had requested it directly from the Ultramarines' Quartermaster on Anderson's behalf. The three Tyranid Warrior kills at Cold Steel Ridge had earned it, and Calgar's personal promise of highest-level resupply had made the request answerable without argument.
Power mauls of this quality were rare enough in senior Astra Militarum officer inventories to be noteworthy. Anderson held this one one-handed, with the relaxed ease of a man carrying a tool he intends to use and is comfortable with.
The combination of his iron-tower build and the weapon resting in his grip made Anderson look like something that was waiting for a reason to move forward. The soldiers around him gave him half a step without being asked.
Duvette looked at Anderson and gave a brief nod. In urban terrain against concentrated Tyranid organisms, the maul would do exactly what it was built for.
Without extended ceremony, the 112th's soldiers began moving in organized lines toward the assault craft assigned to them.
As Duvette directed the final boarding, something at the edge of his field of vision caught him.
Ahead of several blue Thunderhawk gunships, thirty power-armoured Ultramarines were kneeling in formation on the hangar deck. Helmets removed, faces scarred and composed, right fists pressed to left chests.
Sergeant Titus was at the head of the formation. Before them all, standing rather than kneeling, was a Chaplain in black power armour, crozius arcanum in hand.
Several Chapter serfs in robes stood at the perimeter of the formation, holding between them parchments covered edge to edge in scripture, ritual blades, and candles burning with heavy, pungent incense.
The thirty Ultramarines spoke together.
The sound they produced when they did it was not volume for its own sake. It was the sound of thirty people who mean exactly what they are saying, projected with the full capability of an Astartes' voice in an enclosed space. It overrode everything else in the hangar without effort.
"We swear in the name of the Primarch. We will defend great Macragge to the last drop of blood!"
The Chaplain received the burning incense candle and dark-red sealing wax from a serf's hands. His voice had dropped to a low, continuous intonation as the hot wax fell in precise drops onto the prepared mounting points on each warrior's shoulder guard or breastplate, one after another, steady and without error.
A serf brought the parchments. The Chaplain placed each one against the hot wax on each warrior's armour. From another serf's hands he took a brass seal engraved with the Ultramarines chapter symbol and pressed it down, one by one, until the oath was fixed to the ceramite with a permanence that was not symbolic.
"The Emperor watches over you. The Primarch judges you." The Chaplain's voice carried the register of a pronouncement rather than a statement. "The oath is sealed. Nothing releases it but death."
The oath was complete.
The thirty Ultramarines rose from their knees in a single movement. Helmets went back on. The cold red of their eye lenses came to life. They boarded their Thunderhawks without a word, and without looking back.
Duvette had watched all of this without moving.
He understood what he had just seen. This was the Oath of Moment, an ancient tradition that dated back ten thousand years to the era of the Great Crusade, when the Primarchs still stood at the head of their Legions. A living contract between these warriors and their gene-father, expressed in hot wax and sealed parchment pressed into ceramite armour. While that parchment was on the armour, there was no ground to give and no retreat to make. The oath ended in one of two ways: total victory, or death.
And now these warriors, who had spent most of the galaxy's history at a level of capability that most mortal soldiers could not approach, were about to descend into the same bottomless grinding engagement as the 112th's people.
Duvette turned away and boarded his transport without looking back.
If both formations came through the coming hell alive, they would meet again on the burning streets below.
All personnel aboard. The docking clamps disengaged with a series of dull, sequential snaps. The plasma engines rose to their full voice and the hull shuddered with the power behind it. The hangar doors descended and closed out the light.
The assault craft launched like rounds leaving a breech, pulling clear of Macragge's Honour's hangar and driving directly toward the planet below, which lay wrapped in dense crimson-violet spore clouds that reached from the upper atmosphere to the surface.
Under those clouds: Macragge City, consumed entirely by combat.
Inside the craft, red tactical jump lights pulsed at their fastest rate, catching every tightened face in rapid flickers of crimson. The turbulence from the atmospheric entry threw the transport sideways and back with force that suggested the airframe's limits were being seriously tested.
Duvette reached up and pressed his vox bead. His voice went out simultaneously to every 112th transport in the formation.
"Warriors of the Emperor."
"We have seen what waits for us. Those alien creatures believe they are the undefeatable predators of this galaxy. Today we teach them otherwise. Today we show them who the real hunters are."
He drew a breath and let the rest of it come through with everything behind it.
"Fix your bayonets. Spend every round. I will be with you, and together we will not stop until Macragge's soil has drunk the last of the alien's blood."
"All forces. Prepare yourselves. We go to meet our battlefield."
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