Seven days later.
At the foot of a chain of mountains on the outer edge of Macragge City, las-fire flickered occasionally from the grey distance. With the Synapse network's collapse, the catastrophe that had consud the entire system had entered its final phase. The surviving Tyranid organisms, stripped of coordinating intelligence, had beco scattered individuals. Ground forces moved across the devastated terrain under Astartes direction, clearing what remained in a thodical advance that had the character of work rather than battle.
Duvette sat in his temporary command tent, working through the sector clearance reports.
The wounds that had accumulated across the underground campaign were healing at a rate that Doctor Wayne had not stopped comnting on. Indomitable and Veteran's Fra were doing what they had been built to do, the passive reinforcent running constantly beneath the surface of his biology, accelerating the repair of tissue beyond what any field dic would have assessed as the natural tiline. The right shoulder, which had been penetrated by the ceramite pipe during the crash, had grown new tissue across the wound. It moved without restriction.
Wayne had changed his dressings that morning. Looking at what was healing where open wounds had been, the old physician had shaken his head in that particular way he had and muttered sothing about how "the bodies of these people are becoming more and more like sothing that isn't quite human, remarkable, though I'm not sure remarkable is entirely the right word."
Duvette had offered no response. He was wearing a new black commissar's greatcoat, delivered that morning from the quartermaster's stores.
The tent's entrance moved aside. A Munitorum official in Ultramar uniform, escorted by Evan, stepped inside and ca to a formal halt. The official's bearing communicated the institutional weight of what he was carrying before he spoke a word. With both hands he presented a sealed letter bearing the wax impression of an Astartes Chapter insignia and delivered his ssage.
"Commissar Duvette, sir. The Macragge clearance campaign is effectively decided." He inclined his head with precise formality. "To honor all who shed blood and made sacrifice in defense of Macragge, Chapter Master Calgar has directed that a grand victory ceremony will be held at the Triumphal Square of Hera Fortress one month from today. All surviving mortal auxiliary forces and Astra Militarum regints will send selected representatives."
Having delivered the official statent, the Munitorum official paused and looked up. When he continued, the professional register was still there but sothing underneath it was not entirely contained.
"Sir, the account of you and your regint engaging and killing the Hive Tyrant in the underground tunnels has already spread through the entire defense force. Chapter Master Calgar has personally directed that you and the 112th will occupy the front position in the formation at the awards ceremony, to receive the honors that belong to you."
Duvette allowed one eyebrow to move slightly. He gave a calm nod and expressed his thanks. He watched the official and his escort leave.
He walked out of the tent and exhaled a long breath into the cold air.
A ceremony. He understood its purpose exactly. Calgar was doing this for the soldiers, yes, and for the dead. He was also doing it for sothing larger, the morale of an entire planet and an entire sector that had been ground down to a level that required institutional intervention to recover. Macragge had won. It had won at a cost that made the word victory feel inadequate. The planet's capital had been devastated in ways that would require not years but generations to address. A hundred years, perhaps, before Macragge City resembled what it had been.
And the Behemoth hive fleet had not been destroyed entirely. What survived of the bio-ships had dispersed into smaller formations and was moving deeper into the Imperium, shadows heading for systems that did not know what was coming yet.
He stood looking at the distant front line where las-fire still flickered occasionally against the grey landscape.
"I participated in one of the most genuinely apocalyptic engagents in Imperial history," he said quietly to no one in particular, "and I'm still here."
The System notification appeared in his field of vision.
[You participated in the First Battle of Macragge and survived.]
[Epic Battle]
[ 800 Emperor's Wrath]
Duvette's eyes went wide.
Eight hundred.
---
One month later. Hera Fortress. The Triumphal Square.
There were no cheers. No thrown banners. No noise of the kind that belongs to straightforward victory.
What had been done to cover the fortress walls' wounds was visible in its intent. Enormous lengths of fabric bearing the double-headed eagle and the Ultramarines chapter symbol had been draped across the surfaces, their purpose to fill the eye with sothing other than the evidence of what the battle had cost the stone. Hundreds of servo-skulls drifted at low altitude across the square, spraying heavy sacred incense from brass nozzles and relaying Ecclesiarchy funeral hymns and requiems for the dead at a volu that reached every corner of the space without urgency.
Two formations occupied the square, separated with a clarity that needed no markings.
On one side: the surviving mortal representatives. Ultramar auxiliaries and Astra Militarum, assembled in dress order to the degree that dress order was possible for soldiers who had co through what these had. The burn marks and the dried blood on their armour were visible from any distance. The regintal standards they held overhead were damaged in ways that told their own accounts, shredded, scorched, reduced to fractions of what they had been, raised regardless.
On the other side: the Ultramarines who had survived. Assembled by company in formations that had the quality of blue statues, the composure of transhuman warriors who had stood in the center of sothing catastrophic and had not broken. Their silence had the weight of beings who had spent centuries becoming difficult to move.
The 112th occupied the front of the mortal formation, as the Munitorum official had told Duvette they would.
When he actually stood in that position, in front of the formation, with the full weight of the assembled square pressing against his back, it produced a feeling that did not have a clean category. He was aware of the weight of it in a way that required a mont to locate.
He turned his head to the left.
On the Ultramarines side of the square, at the position that would normally belong to the 1st Company, the space was empty. Not a single Terminator-armoured veteran occupied it. At the front of that empty space, planted in the flagstone, was one damaged company standard. The fabric had been stained so thoroughly with dark blood that whatever colour it had originally been was no longer recoverable. It stood alone.
The 1st Company had gone to the North Polar Fortress. They had held the anti-ship artillery installations that kept the Tyranid fleet from operating against the surface defense without interference. They had held them until there was nothing left to hold with. Every man. Not one exception.
The ceremony began.
Chapter Master Marneus Calgar ascended the observation platform and read the victory declaration in a voice that reached the square's farthest corners. The words were asured and final, acknowledging in the formal language of a commander the scope of what had been won and what it had cost to win it.
After Calgar stepped back, the Ultramarines Master of Sanctity, Ortan Cassius, ca forward.
He wore the skull helm. He had not removed it, as Calgar had. During the fighting, the acid that certain Tyranid organisms deployed as a biological weapon had destroyed most of what had been, by the accounts of those who served with him, a face that communicated exactly what kind of man wore it. The damage was extensive, the wounds having been sutured rather than properly treated, and the body that carried the scroll-length parchnt unrolled in his hands was clearly still engaged in recovering from sothing serious. He stood with the posture of a man who had decided that the injuries were not relevant to the task of standing.
The amplification system carried his voice without effort to every point in the square.
He read the nas of the Astartes being honored. Brothers present. Brothers who had died on the ice plain and in the underground passages and in the polar fortresses, and whose nas were being written into the Chapter's mory here rather than beside their bodies. Every na received the square's total silence.
When the Astartes list was complete, Cassius did not stand aside.
He raised his gaze across the square and located the direction he had in mind with a precision that left no doubt he knew exactly where to look.
He accepted a second roll of parchnt from the mortal attendant beside him, unrolled it to its reading length, and engaged the amplification system at full output.
"Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regint. Colonel-Commissar. Duvette Erdmann."
The na traveled across the open square in the cold air and settled.
Cassius began the citation.
The rearguard at Cold Steel Ridge: the final steel barrier that held the approach road against the swarm's primary assault force and gave the main body the ti it needed to reach orbit. The underground passages of Macragge City: a mortal regint in close-quarters combat through multiple kiloters of Tyranid-controlled tunnel network, turning the tide in an engagent that the garrison had been on the verge of losing. And at the end: a Colonel-Commissar of the Astra Militarum, a mortal officer, in the final mont of an engagent with no remaining support and no remaining System resources, standing against a Hive Tyrant and finishing the work by his own hand.
Duvette straightened his greatcoat.
He walked out of the formation at the asured, deliberate pace that the mont called for, covering the distance across the square to the Master of Sanctity's position under the eyes of the assembled thousands. Cassius looked down at him from the altitude his ceramite gave him, and a mortal attendant stepped forward carrying a velvet-lined case.
Inside the case was a single dal. The Macragge Honour, the highest award the realm of Ultramar could bestow.
The sound of heavy Terminator armour approaching behind him preceded Calgar's arrival by a second.
The Chapter Master ca forward personally. At his side walked an armoury-sergeant carrying two weapons on a presentation cushion. One was a plasma pistol, master-crafted, the work of the Ultramarines armoury's finest, designed with the specific intention of having nothing to apologize for in any engagent. The other was a power sword, the guard engraved with the Ultramarines chapter symbol in diamond-cut detail, and along the flat of the blade, in the High Gothic script used for things that were intended to be permanent, two inscriptions: Duvette's na, and the words Honour of Macragge.
Calgar's Terminator armour placed his shadow over Duvette before he stopped walking.
He spoke at a volu pitched for the two of them rather than the square, but the quality of the voice that ca through the armour's vox made no real distinction.
"You defended Macragge's honor with mortal flesh and blood." The words carried the weight of a statent rather than a complint. "Macragge will rember what you gave here, Commissar. The realm of Ultramar regards you as a brother."
He took both weapons and placed them in Duvette's hands himself.
Then he raised his remaining hand, the left, still wearing the Gauntlet of Ultramar, and pressed it onto Duvette's left shoulder with a weight that communicated exactly the mass of what he was wearing and the intent behind the gesture.
"You have earned this honor, Commissar Duvette."
The silence that followed lasted for exactly the mont it needed to.
Behind Duvette, in the 112th's formation, sothing gave way.
Stroud was the first sound, then Anderson and the other veterans, the ones who had been in this regint since Farrak IV, the ones who had been there for all of it. They were red-eyed and not doing anything to address it. Rifle butts hit the stone of the square with a sound that was, technically, a breach of formation discipline, and what ca after it was a roar that had nothing disciplined about it at all.
The mortal auxiliaries assembled behind them caught the wave. A mortal legend was standing in front of them, alive, ard by a Chapter Master's own hand, with a dal that bore the na of their howorld. Whatever composure the occasion had been maintaining broke, and the square filled with the kind of sound that does not require direction.
Duvette turned his head. He assessed the situation with the instinctive authority of a commissar who has spent years keeping formations orderly.
He chose not to use it.
He drew the power sword. The force field blazed to life along the blade, blue and violent and new, the disintegration energy humming with the particular intensity of a weapon that had been made to be used.
He raised it toward the sky.
"The Emperor Protects!"
The Astartes and the mortal soldiers of the square raised their weapons together, and the sound they produced rolled outward across the ruins of Macragge City.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!!!"
****
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