Ultramarines Honour Company

The Ultramarines Honour Company is an elite specialist formation that was created ten millennia ago, following the devastation caused by the Horus Heresy. The Honour Company is composed of rotating Astartes officers and squads from Ultramar, as well as warriors from the Ultramarines' many Successor Chapters to guard the Cadian Gate.

History
Ten thousand years ago, in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines, decreed that his Chapter would stand ready to oppose the Traitors that fled to the Eye of Terror should they ever return to plague the Imperium. The Ultramarines took no part in the Battle of Terra, as they were fighting half a galaxy away, and Guilliman was determined that his Chapter would never find itself unable to respond to such a threat again. The solution was to ensure a continuous presence in the vicinity of the Eye of Terror, by maintaining an honour guard made up of individual squads from different companies. In time, the Chapter's commitments across the Imperium necessitated that the other Primogenitor chapters - the Second Founding successors of the Ultramarines, should also provide squads. For the last ten thousand years this guard has maintained a presence at the Cadian Gate, standing firm alongside the other Chapters stationed there to challenge any Black Crusade that threatens Cadia's defences. At the outset of the 13th Black Crusade, this elite force was comprised almost entirely of Ultramarines squads, alongside which stand a number of detachments from the Chapter's successors. The honour guard had already seen action in a number of engagements, notably the Defence of Narsine and the Sarlax Reprisals, lending the legendary courage and honour of the Ultramarines and their kin to the defence of the Cadia Gate.

The current commander of the Honour Guard is Captain Echion of the Patriarchs of Ulixis Chapter, a veteran leader of many centuries of service fighting the servants of the Ruinous Powers. It is unusual, though far from unheard of, for an officer not of the Ultramarines Chapter to lead the company, though with the Chapter's resources stretched by Tyranid incursions on the Eastern Rim such a situation is set to become more common.

The Honour Company distinguished itself early in the war, the first action being a bold, space-borne counter-assault against Abaddon's fleet as the deadly Planet Killer closed on the Agri-World of Lortox on the outskirts of the Agripinaa sector. The action bought the world's Planetary Defence Force time to evacuate a significant proportion of the population before the world was destroyed by the Despoiler's horrific weapon of planetary destruction.

In the aftermath of the Lortox Evacuations, the Honour Company redeployed to Cadia and the surrounding systems, launching a series of operations to hinder Abaddon's forces as they assaulted the Fortress World. These attacks included a series of highly successful boarding actions against the lumbering Space Hulks being used to transport vast hordes of the Lost and the Damned to reinforce the Despoiler's siege of Cadia. In total, three hulks were disabled on the outskirts of the Cadian system, stranding an estimated 600,000 traitors, mutants and Chaos Cultists to freeze in the cold depths of interstellar space. A fourth hulk, codified the Herald of Grief, was destroyed as an Honour Company boarding force succeeded in activating a seismic detonator deep within its core, causing the hulk to splinter into a hundred fragments and killing every one of the estimated 200,000 enemy on board.