Marius Gage

Marius Gage stood as the most senior of the Ultramarines' Chapter Masters, the Master of the First and the officer to whom Roboute Guilliman most often entrusted the running of the Legion's vast war-machine. A veteran of the earliest days of the Great Crusade, Gage embodied the Ultramarian ideal in its purest form, a commander as fluent in the cold arithmetic of logistics and fleet movement as in the brutal immediacy of the firing line. He was no mere administrator, however, for his personal record of war stretched across more compliances than most legionaries would ever see.

At Calth, when the Word Bearers' ambush tore the muster apart and severed the chain of command, it fell to officers of Gage's calibre to hold the Legion together amid catastrophe. He fought to preserve what could be preserved of the fleet and the ground forces alike, his experience a steadying weight against the panic that treachery on such a scale might have bred. In the long aftermath, as Guilliman turned to the grim work of Imperium Secundus, Gage remained what he had always been, the dependable spine of the Thirteenth, the master to whom the First Legion of Ultramar looked when the galaxy itself seemed to be ending.