Forgot to add disclaimer: I do not own Warhammer 40,000 or anything related to it. Warhammer 40,000 is property of Games Workshop, (insert relevant legal stuff here).
Part One, Chapter One
Captain Sophion stood at the command dais of the Rebuker's bridge, surveying the small planet that turned slowly before his view through the transparent viewport of the strike cruiser. The veteran Space Marine was fully arrayed in his ornate artificer armour, the night-black of his Chapter's colour lined with silver, the white skull and claw of the Life Takers set into the blood-red ceramite of his armour's shoulder pad. He gazed silently out of the viewport with hard-set blue eyes, his weathered face worn and drawn by centuries of war.
The world he was looking upon was a small planet named Salthion, a planet once colonized by the Imperium of Man but largely abandoned after its sparse resources were depleted. A desolate world of mountains and rocky plains, its only city was left a collection of hollowed-out hab-shells inhabited by feral humans who had long forgotten their origins. Left forgotten by the Imperium, the world had somehow become a battleground for warbands of orks and heretics. Recent reports had reached the Life Takers several weeks ago, indicating that a warband of Chaos Space Marines, apparently members of the Death Guard, had arrived and begun an assault on the planet, attacking the ork clans that inhabited Salthion's surface. For what purpose, Sophion didn't pretend to care, nor did he ever want or need to. He was here, along with his battle-brothers of the First and Second Companies, to carry forth the Emperor's divine will. That was all that mattered.
As it happened, the strike force of Life Takers assigned to the strike cruiser was too few to undertake a full-scale crusade against the heathen and heretics on Salthion. The Chapter was currently occupied with simultaneously fending off a splinter tendril of the tyranids and suppressing a particularly vicious insurgency of heretics in a nearby sector. In fact, Sophion felt that they there was little to warrant an operation here, in this little nowhere backwater, but orders were orders, and it was the captain's duty to carry them out regardless of his opinion.
The bridge was quiet due to the absence of any Chapter serfs, with only servitors wired to the various control stations of the strike cruiser. As such, the noise made by the doors of the bridge opening and heavy footfalls was clear to Sophion's enhanced hearing. Sophion turned to face the newcomer, and immediately gave him a short nod of respect.
Chaplain Terrion strode calmly onto the bridge, coming up to the captain. Terrion was young for a Chaplain, barely five or six decades old, but Sophion knew the company Chaplain was one of the most accomplished heroes of the Chapter. Like the captain, Terrion was clad in his full power armour, the ancient vestment adorned with countless purity seals, prayer strips bearing long and intricate verses in High Gothic, and the signature rosarius of the Ecclesiarchy hanging around the Chaplain's neck. Terrion did not wear the typical full-faced skull mask of many Chaplains; instead his Mark VII helmet bore the facial section of a bleached skull upon its forehead. The Chaplain's honours were many: a blood-red adamantine mantle flowed out behind him almost like a river of blood, and affixed to his left wrist was a master-crafted 'Terminatus' pattern storm bolter, the very same used by the mysterious Grey Knights of the Inquisition. The young Chaplain had earned both the storm bolter and the admiration of the Grey Knights themselves a decade back, in a joint crusade where the Life Takers assisted the Grey Knights in storming the foul den of a mighty greater daemon of Slaanesh, Terrion leading the vanguard of both Life Takers and Grey Knights and eventually banishing the foul daemon back into the Warp single-handedly.
"Brother-captain," said Terrion in a calm, yet resonant voice that echoed around the command chamber. "I see we have arrived at last."
"We have indeed, Chaplain." Replied Sophion, who turned his attention back to the planet beneath them. "Although I can hardly imagine this tainted rock being a lost reliquary of the Imperium." Said the captain after a moment of silence.
"His will is beyond our imagining, brother-captain." The Chaplain walked up next to Sophion, an equally-impressive sight as the veteran captain. "But we are not needed to comprehend it. We simply obey."
"Of course. As always."
The strike force aboard the Rebuker had come to Salthion at the behest of the Ecclesiarchy, whose scribes had contacted the Life Takers insisting that during the time that Salthion remained an Imperial holding, the Ecclesiarchy had maintained a small but notable mission there, which had established a sacred reliquary to safeguard several holy artefacts and sacred texts. Their most pressing objective was to find and secure the reliquary before its remains could be desecrated by either the xenos taint of the orks or the foul heresy of the Traitor Legions, and recover whatever relics may remain. Due to the severity of xenos and heretic presence on Salthion, the Chapter Master had authorized the deployment of several First Company veterans as well as two squads from the Second Company.
A servitor peeled off a string of machine-code, an unintelligible buzz that Sophion had taught himself how to understand. The Rebuker had always been relatively undermanned, and as such most of the command structure that served aboard it took the effort to learn some of the binary language that the servitors spoke. They could not replicate such a metallic, grating noise without a bionic vocabulator unit, but at least they could understand what the servitors were saying.
"We will be within deployment range of the planet within the hour, Chaplain." Said Sophion.
"Good. The plan, brother-captain?"
"I will take the veteran squads from the First Company to draw the attention of the hostiles outside the city, as well as sergeant Kallius' assault squad." Sophion handed the Chaplain a data-slate showing the battle plan. "You will lead the others into the city itself to search for the reliquary."
"I will join our brothers at the drop bays, brother-captain." Terrion bowed his head, a gesture of farewell.
"Go with the Emperor, Chaplain." Sophion nodded, as the Chaplain left the bridge through the doors. The captain returned his gaze to Salthion, the planet slowly revolving around the nearby yellow star. From orbit, one could hardly tell that its surface was a contested battleground, but the Rebuker's sensorium arrays had already identified numerous clusters of ork infestation near their target. The planet was far from the pristine Imperial world it used to be several hundred years ago.
Another servitor sounded off a buzz of machine-code informing the captain that the strike cruiser was about to enter high orbit around Salthion. Turning wordlessly from the command dais, Sophion headed through the doors and made his own way to the drop bays, reflecting as he went.
They were Space Marines. War was beckoning, and it would not do for them to be late.
