V3 Chapter 121: The Unveiling of the Primaris Project
Duvette followed Cawl back through the passage, expecting Guilliman to have already gone on ahead. Instead, he found the towering figure in blue power armour standing at the far end of the corridor, waiting for them, his face unreadable.
Cawl's massive mechanical body came to a stop. Guilliman looked at him, and asked, calmly, "You must have something else to show me."
"Correct, honoured son of the Omnissiah." Cawl answered. "It concerns the task you gave me ten thousand years ago. That project is complete now. The time has come for its formal delivery."
Guilliman nodded, and after a moment's silence, connected to the Ark Mechanicus's own comm channel.
"Notify all twelve High Lord seats — whoever currently holds each one, whether formally or by proxy — to come to the Zar-Quaesitor. Also, notify the Imperial Fists. Have them send a representative aboard."
The order went out over the encrypted channel toward the Moon and Terra alike, and Guilliman turned his gaze back to Cawl. "This project is a good deal more fit to be seen than what's behind you."
Cawl raised no objection to that, only lowering his body slightly to indicate he'd have everything ready. Duvette stood quietly to one side; there was nothing more for him to do now anyway, he just had to watch Cawl put on his show.
The wait ran longer than Duvette expected. Travel for Terra's High Lords involved a great deal of security procedure; they were used to bringing along a retinue befitting their station, and the destination's transit route and interior had to be checked in advance.
But Guilliman had only just finished cleaning out Terra's own power structure, and the fate of the Ecclesiarch and the rebel High Lords stood as a warning fresh in everyone's mind.
Faced with a summons issued personally by the Imperial Regent, no one dared ask him to wait any longer than necessary.
Several heavy shuttles arrived one after another at the Zar-Quaesitor's hangar, guided down to their designated platforms by ground-crew machines and tractor beams.
Before the hatches had even fully opened, attendants and guards were already laying down temporary steps — clearly, everyone had been rushed the entire way there.
Duvette watched the High Lords hurry out of their shuttles, and gave a small nod. Timely enough, at least.
The ceremonial retinues that would normally have stretched on for hours had been cut down drastically; only the necessary guards and scribes remained at their sides.
All twelve High Lord seats were represented in full, several of the vacant positions filled by authorised proxies.
They came to a stop before Guilliman, bowing to the Imperial Regent, several of them stealing the occasional glance toward Duvette, standing off to one side.
Duvette didn't care in the least. He simply stood with his hands behind his back, and kept waiting.
After the rebellion and three months of the purge that followed, he'd long since grown used to the way Imperial officials looked at him.
Last to arrive was the Astartes representative sent by the Imperial Fists — a company captain in yellow power armour, who came down from his shuttle with two veterans and saluted before Guilliman.
Once he'd joined the group, Guilliman turned to look at Cawl.
"Everyone's here." Guilliman said.
Cawl let out a short binaric chirp, then turned and started deeper into the ship.
The High Lords and their attendants followed behind him, the Custodians and Honour Guard keeping Guilliman shielded at the centre, and the Imperial Fists' representative walking along the side of the group.
Duvette watched the procession, and reckoned the scale of it was considerably smaller than what he remembered from the original timeline.
Guilliman hadn't yet assembled his expeditionary fleet, and the number of people who could arrive on short notice was fairly limited, though that hardly affected what was coming next.
Guilliman clearly meant for all twelve High Lord seats to witness the existence of the Primaris Space Marines with their own eyes.
Otherwise, if Cawl suddenly produced several hundred thousand brand-new Astartes out of nowhere, someone among this lot, only just having lived through the Great Purge, might genuinely faint on the spot.
They pressed on deeper along the Ark Mechanicus's main corridor, passing several heavily guarded equipment vaults on the way.
Rows of new-pattern power armour stood mounted on metal frames, alongside great quantities of bolt weapons and heavy equipment never yet issued to the Imperium's forces.
Several of the High Lords slowed their steps without meaning to, and the Mechanicus representative's optical augmetics kept adjusting focus.
Farther on stood armoured vehicles of an entirely new design, and from sheer numbers alone, this equipment was enough to arm many full Chapters over.
Cawl didn't stop to explain any of it. He led the group into a sealed gallery, and finally arrived at a viewing platform overlooking a large cargo bay.
Once everyone had settled into place, Guilliman stepped forward and turned to face the twelve High Lords.
"What you're about to see is a project I ordered myself, ten thousand years ago." Guilliman said. "Cawl carried it out under my command. Every responsibility, and every final decision concerning it, is mine to bear."
Everyone present bowed their heads, and Guilliman gave Cawl a signal.
The Archmagos raised a mechanical arm, and the lighting beneath the viewing gallery came on one after another, the great cargo bay slowly emerging from the darkness below.
What followed was more or less what Duvette remembered.
A hundred towering warriors in grey power armour stood at the centre of the cargo bay, no Chapter markings anywhere on their plate, each one holding nothing but a combat knife.
As a gate on the far side opened, a great mass of heavily-built mechanical constructs marched into the bay in tight formation.
Turn the lights on, let the Primaris Astartes make their entrance killing some servitors — oh, no, wait, when did this turn into the gelded Men of Iron instead.
Duvette glanced at Cawl, then at Guilliman's unreadable face. Was Cawl actually trying to use this moment to say: don't worry about the Men of Iron slipping out of control, because he had the Primaris Astartes as a backstop regardless?
Though the High Lords couldn't tell these were the gelded Men of Iron, or that they'd been deliberately fitted out with incomplete arms and armour for the occasion.
Right now, their attention was already fixed entirely on the new Space Marines.
The engagement began at a single word from Cawl.
The grey-armoured giants spread out fast, closing on the constructs, tearing apart their joints and armour plating with nothing but the combat knives in their hands.
Even under-armed as they were, the Men of Iron still retained the ability to judge the battlefield, shifting formation fast, trying to surround any Primaris warrior caught alone.
But the grey-armoured giants moved far faster than any ordinary Astartes. Covering one another, they made short work of the constructs pouring into the bay, destroying them one after another.
By the time the fighting ended, twelve of the Primaris warriors lay fallen across the cargo bay floor, and several more carried wounds of varying severity.
The rest reformed their ranks, standing in neat order among the wreckage of the destroyed constructs.
"My lords, what you have just witnessed is the final result of a project ten thousand years in the making." Cawl spread his mechanical arms wide, his voice carrying through the cargo bay's own amplifiers into every ear present. "They possess stronger bodies, and a far more stable gene-seed. This is my genius, made manifest!"
The metal partitions around the cargo bay began to shift, wall after wall unfolding amid a mechanical roar.
Countless stasis pods appeared before them all, each one holding a sleeping Primaris Space Marine in grey power armour.
The pods stretched away to the very edge of sight — two hundred and forty thousand Primaris Space Marines in total.
They carried the gene-lineage of nine loyalist Primarchs, and had already completed the vast majority of their training; they needed only to be woken from stasis to be sent into war.
A stifled gasp of astonishment rose among the High Lords, and someone stepped back without meaning to.
Tens of thousands of Astartes, gathered together inside a single Ark Mechanicus, was more than enough to change Terra's current military balance entirely.
Guilliman's expression remained calm, exactly as Cawl had expected.
The Imperial Regent had already seen the Shadow Wolves of Luna, converted to Primaris, back at Macragge, and had only just laid eyes on three hundred and fifty thousand Men of Iron besides — two hundred and forty thousand Primaris still fell well within what he could take in stride.
"You've completed the task I gave you, Cawl." Guilliman said, in a formal tone. "The Imperium will remember what you've contributed."
Cawl lowered his body, then declared that these Primaris warriors, along with their weapons, power armour, armoured vehicles, and ships, would all now stand under Guilliman's command.
Guilliman looked over the stasis pods, and asked, "How many Primaris Astartes have you made in total?"
Cawl gave an exact number.
It was a figure far beyond the scale of several Legions combined. Whatever composure the twelve High Lords had only just recovered vanished again, and the Imperial Fists' representative turned his gaze on Cawl as well.
Guilliman's brow furrowed slightly. He too hadn't expected Cawl to have assembled a force this vast over ten thousand years.
A moment later, he turned to face the assembled High Lords and the Imperial Fists' representative.
"I will begin revising the Codex Astartes myself, to establish a proper structure for these new warriors." Guilliman said. "The Imperium will also begin the Ultima Founding. Some of the Primaris will form new Chapters. The rest will, for now, be enrolled as the Unnumbered Sons, and deployed into battle alongside the expeditionary force."
These grey-armoured warriors would reinforce the Imperium's existing Astartes Chapters over the course of the campaign, and the Primaris technology Cawl now held would be handed over, gradually, to any Chapter willing to accept it.
Guilliman had no intention of letting a force this vast go on sleeping. He needed these warriors on the battlefield, immediately.
"I will launch a Crusade." Guilliman looked out over the assembled crowd, his voice carrying the length of the entire viewing gallery. "The Imperium has yielded ground to its enemies for far too long. We will reclaim the territory we've lost, and pull humanity back from ten thousand years of decline."
The twelve High Lords bowed their heads, and the Imperial Fists' representative brought a fist to his chest.
Duvette stood off to the side, watching Guilliman. He knew that, from this moment on, the road ahead for the Imperium had already changed.
This Crusade would become the first step in Guilliman's reshaping of the entire Imperium.
And it would become the will that carried him through the next ten thousand years.
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