V2 Chapter 26: Reform Is My Life's Dream
The banquet finally wound down. With Slaydo's signal to depart, the generals began leaving the hall in ones and twos.
Commissar-General Delane Oktar and the newly promoted Gaunt both let their gaze rest for a moment on the Star of Terra pinned to Duvette's chest, their eyes carrying undisguised respect.
They exchanged a brief word with Duvette, gave him a solemn military salute, and turned to join the departing crowd.
The hall emptied quickly. What had been a noisy, opulent space became hollow. Only Duvette, Marshal Slaydo, and the few key figures who had stood on the podium remained.
Slaydo turned and faced the Inquisitor in the black coat and the Archbishop holding the burning crozier.
The Marshal lowered his voice, speaking with a hardness that left no room for argument. Whatever he communicated was brief. The Archbishop's face showed a flash of barely concealed resentment. The Inquisitor's expression went completely rigid. He fixed those eyes, cold and precise as a poisonous snake's, on Duvette for one long moment, eyes full of warning and the clear promise of a future reckoning, then both men turned without a word and left the hall.
The immediate crisis was resolved. Slaydo turned his head, gave Duvette a slight nod, and walked toward the officers' private passage on the side of the hall. Chief of Staff Macaroth followed immediately behind.
Duvette understood the signal. He fell into step.
Their footsteps echoed through the empty steel corridors as they went.
No one spoke. The silence held the entire way.
They moved through the battleship's intricate network of passageways until they arrived at a hidden recess deep within the Absalom.
A small private observation deck. One large glass viewport.
The warship was anchored quietly behind the dark side of Formal Prime.
The star's light was blocked by the planet's mass. Through the viewport there was only the deep, boundless darkness of space, and stars scattered across it like diamonds.
Formal Prime's silhouette showed faintly in the darkness, like a sleeping giant.
General Macaroth stopped, gave Slaydo a precisely formal salute, and retraced the path back along the corridor, leaving the hidden space to the two of them.
The Marshal stood with his back to Duvette, hands clasped behind him, looking out at the starfield through the viewport in silence.
Duvette stood three paces back, at attention, and waited. He knew the conversation that was about to happen would entirely determine the shape of what came next.
"This medal should have been in your hands ten years ago."
Slaydo finally broke the silence, his voice carrying a certain weight in the emptiness of the observation deck.
Duvette was briefly caught off guard.
The Marshal turned and looked at him with a steady expression. "At the time, it was the Ultramarines' own Chapter Master, Lord Calgar, who personally signed the application for you. You demonstrated mortal courage in a situation that was nearly certain death, and he believed you had earned it."
Duvette looked down at the medal on his chest. Macragge, ten years ago. The blood and the Tyranids felt immediate still.
"But even with the Ultramarines' endorsement behind it, even with my own repeated urgings over the years, this Star of Terra only arrived in your hands today." Slaydo's gaze sharpened somewhat. He fixed his eyes on Duvette and asked: "Do you have a view on why that might be?"
Duvette thought for a moment. He considered the Administratum's thoroughly dispiriting approach to paperwork, and said: "Efficiency problems?"
Slaydo shook his head. His mouth showed something that had nothing warm in it. "It is more than efficiency problems. Duvette, the Imperium has existed for ten thousand years. Its internal structure has become so vast, bloated, and rotten that it drives anyone who looks at it clearly toward despair.
"In the Imperium, even the smallest matter must pass through countless pointless procedures before it can be completed."
The Marshal stepped forward, closing the distance between them. Those eyes that seemed capable of looking straight through a person focused on Duvette's. "What do you think is the Imperium's greatest problem right now? Its greatest enemy?"
Duvette's brow came together slightly. He calculated quickly: was the Marshal testing his political awareness? As a commissar, the standard answer was almost automatic.
"Chaos." He answered without hesitation. The Warp rifts tearing reality apart, the unspeakable Ruinous Powers, undeniably the Imperium's greatest threat.
Slaydo shook his head.
Duvette considered and tried again. "Xenos? The Orks. The Tyranid swarms. The Eldar lurking in shadow?"
Slaydo shook his head once more.
"The traitors?"
Still a slow shake of the head. Slaydo let out a sigh, turned back to the viewport, and looked at the starfield. His voice carried a deep and settled exhaustion.
"None of those. The Imperium's greatest problem, its greatest enemy, is the Imperium itself."
Duvette was quiet.
That sentence from any ordinary soldier's mouth would have been grounds for a commissar to shoot them ten times over. From the mouth of a Marshal commanding hundreds of millions of troops, it carried a different weight entirely.
"The Imperium is too vast." Slaydo gestured at the stars beyond the viewport. "So vast that even the High Lords of Terra, even the highest commanders of the Departmento Munitorum, do not know exactly how many worlds we hold."
"The Imperium's population runs into the hundreds of trillions. Most Imperial citizens spend their entire lives labouring in factories or in fields. They have never seen any alien enemy. Many have never even seen an Astra Militarum uniform. Measured against the Imperium's unimaginable scale, the brutal wars we fight are forever confined to a few conflict zones on the star maps."
He turned, his gaze burning as it came to rest on Duvette.
"We lack nothing. We have an inexhaustible population, resources stripped from countless worlds, an endless flow of soldiers, and ancient technologies preserved by the Mechanicus that most living men will never see used.
"We have everything. And yet the Imperium can never properly deploy what it has. The front line bleeds while rear-area supplies sit stalled at the spaceport because a single stamp is missing from a form. We are like an aged man in his final decline. His body is still enormous. But his mind has completely rusted and can no longer effectively direct any of his limbs."
Duvette looked at the Marshal in front of him. He knew what was coming.
In this universe, intensely conservative and hostile to change, attempting to alter the existing order, attempting to challenge the bureaucratic machine that had been running for ten thousand years, was more dangerous than standing in front of a Bloodthirster.
A daemon wanted only your life. The entrenched bureaucrats and the High Lords would reduce your soul along with everything around you to powder.
Seeing Duvette's expression grow more serious, Slaydo's lined face showed the trace of a smile. He knew the young commissar had guessed.
"So I want to reform." Slaydo's voice was not loud. "I have no idea how to manage internal politics, and I have no interest in playing word games with the politicians on Terra. But I know military affairs. I understand all too clearly how completely foolish the existing Astra Militarum command structure is.
The fire in the Marshal's eyes was unmistakable.
"Follow my battle zone reorganisation plan, cut out the useless intermediary links, sever the Departmento Munitorum's endless redundant supply chains, and the entire Astra Militarum's operational efficiency will make a qualitative leap.
"Battle lines that would normally cost millions of lives and years of attrition to push through, we can take months ahead of schedule. This is my life's dream. I want to use one perfect crusade to prove to Terra that this rusted machine can run again."
He looked at Duvette, and his tone became more serious than it had been at any point in the conversation. "You are something different, Duvette. You are in your thirties and you have already received the kind of recognition that many men cannot reach in several lifetimes. I know what happened in the upper spire. Joghaten Khan of the White Scars did not include it in his official report, but he told me everything privately. I know that something happened to you that does not follow normal explanation."
Duvette's heart made a sharp beat. He opened his mouth, ready to say something, to offer some version of this being an extremely dangerous coincidence, or to put distance between himself and the word that could get him killed.
Slaydo simply raised his hand with a slight smile and stopped him.
"You don't need to explain."
The Marshal's gaze went somewhere distant.
"When I was young, I grew up on the stories of Saint Sabbat. She was nothing but an ordinary shepherd girl with no distinguished background. She heard the God-Emperor's call, and in the end she led the Imperium's armies to conquer this entire sector and became the saint revered by all. For the young man I was, that was absolute inspiration. Even a mortal can create miracles."
The Marshal turned again and looked out toward Formal Prime.
"This Sabbat Crusade is not just a military operation for me. It is a pilgrimage. I know what happened to you is not ordinary, Duvette. You saw it in the banquet hall tonight. The Inquisition's hounds and the Ministorum's zealots were all staring at you. They all want to take you away and determine exactly what happened.
"But I stopped all of them." Slaydo turned, his gaze iron. "I used my authority as the expedition's supreme commander, and I used the morale of the entire battle zone as the guarantee. I have forcibly kept you where you are."
Duvette looked at the Marshal in silence.
"I am willing to trust you." Slaydo stepped forward, his eyes locked on Duvette's. "I know that with my own capabilities alone, pushing reform through in this enormous and rotting machine is absolutely impossible. I need people beside me. Juno Carol is one. I believe you could be another."
The observation deck went utterly silent. Only the faint sound of airflow through the ventilation ducts.
Marshal Slaydo looked at the young commissar before him wearing the Star of Terra, and asked the final question with complete seriousness.
"Will you help me, Duvette?"
50+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces