Ordo Aequitas

"You can't escape the Ordo Aequitas. We have eyes on every world, on every ship, and hands on every weapon. There is no hole for you to hide in that is deep enough, or dark enough, to escape the light of the Emperor's justice."

- Ordo Aequitas Inquisitorial Agent to a heretic prisoner.

The Ordo Aequitas one of the Ordos Minoris of the Inquisition, recently created in the Era Indomitus. It is one of several such branches based on Terra itself. The Ordo Aequitas is dedicated to serving as enforcers of the Emperor's will and to ensure civil obedience and moral purity of the populace of the worlds of the wider Imperium, a task made all the more daunting to the formation of the galaxy-wide tear in reality known as the Great Rift. The Ordo Aequitas also oversees the operations of the Ordo Polis, a specialist Space Marine Chapter created during the recent Ultima Founding, and is comprised entirely of newly revealed Primaris Space Marines.

Foundation of the Ordo Aequitas
The Ordo Aequitas was found in the wake of the Age of Apostasy in the late 36th Millennium. They were created in order to monitor, investigate and help ensure order was maintained within the ranks of the Adeptus Arbites. During this tumultuous era, the Imperium of Man was consumed by interstellar civil war. The struggle began when control over the Imperium's government was essentially seized by a single man, the mad High Lord of Terra - Goge Vandire - who commanded both the Administratum and the Ecclesiarchy and ruled the Imperium according to his own whims instead of the Emperor's will. There were those unscrupulous planetary governors who take advantage of the strife and discord, committing various crimes of sedition and treason, including not keeping up with their primary obligations of paying the Imperial tithe. With the instillation of weak-willed and often corrupt leaders, the Adebtus Arbites' recruitment pool became diluted with local criminals and cutthroats, to ensure that their loyalty could be easily bought by those corrupt nobles that lorded over the planet. Those that were supposed to help ensure they maintained the peace and civil order, instead became susceptible to corruption through blackmail or coercion.

During this chaotic period, whole sectors became riddled with criminality and sedition, as crimelords were left to their own devices, preying on their own population and lording over large areas of a hive city. Due to the inadequacy of the local forces and the compromised forces of the Adeptus Arbites, waves of anarchy broke across thousands of worlds from disobedient anger at Adeptus rule, or the criminal loss of discipline in the face of disaster or famine. Crimes of destabilisation, committed on scales taking in whole planetary populations occurred. Blasphemy, heresy, the spreading of freethinking propaganda, and the deliberate and knowing defiance of Arbites law became commonplace, as were physical and moral assaults on the instruments of Imperial rule. This led to the fall of multiple sectors, which allowed the forces of the corrupt High Lord Goge Vandire to sweep in and take over these corrupted worlds and bring them under the rule of his iron grip.

The Dark Imperium
As the 42nd Millennium dawned, the Imperium faced its ultimate test in the form of the 13th Black Crusade, the largest invasion by the Forces of Chaos, led by the Warmaster of Chaos, the dreaded Abaddon the Despoiler. This dreadful campaign culminated in the destruction of the fortress world of Cadia, which resulted in the destabilisation of the veil between the Immaterium and material realm. This caused a titanic warp rift to tear across the galaxy, spreading from the Eye of Terror to the Hadex Anomaly in the Eastern Fringe. Called the Cicatrix Maledictum or the 'Great Rift', the galaxy became riven with warp storms of unprecedented fury. These storms cut thousand of worlds off from the light of the Emperor in the form of the Astronomican, and countless civilisations are caught in their shadow and terrorised, enslaved or altogether destroyed by legions of daemons, or otherwise suffer mutation or planet-wide insurrection.

Within the massive mega-cities of the industrial complexes of Imperium's various hive worlds, scum, xenos and heretics all dwell beneath the faithful servants of the God-Emepror, eroding the backbone of the Imperium's war machine. Corrupt planetary nobles, seditious terrorists and hidden Chaos cultists all plot to bring a planet to their knees, inciting disorder and mayhem in order to take over a world from within. It falls to the Adeptus Arbites, the Imperium's planetary Enforcers of the Emperor's law, to maintain the day-to-day civil order. However, with the coming of the Great Rift, over a million planets were cut off from the Light of the Emperor as the Astronomican went dark. During this time, the Imperium ceased to be - each planet became isolated, a realm unto itself - a mere speck in the wider galaxy buffeted by a raging tempest. This warp storm was greater in size and power than anything that had ever been recorded since the dark era of the Age of Strife.

The Imperium of Man was engulfed by what came to be known as the Blackness, as all long-ranged astrocommunications proved impossible. Warp transit was also all but impossible as those who were brave (or foolish) enough to traverse the Immaterium were either outright destroyed or subjected to the worst warp turbulence their crews had ever experienced. Uncountable lives were lost in the turmoil. But this was only the beginning of the travails of the Imperium as Daemon legion soon followed in its wake, a vanguard force followed hard by the Traitor Legions and the ragged masses of the Renegades and their associated Chaos cults. Every realm touched by the Cicatrix Maledictum was blighted by intense Daemon storms, howling tempests that carried a thousand types of death upon their fell winds. Where those baleful hurricanes blew strongest, the scions of the Dark Gods would stride from the aether and bring battle anew to the defenders of Mankind's realm. Hundreds of battles. Uncounted billions of casualties.

Era Indomitus
As the Imperium gradually realised the extent of the nightmare conditions created by the Great Rift, they tried to adapt to the horrifying new dynamic.

To help combat this moral threat, several Lord Inquisitors of the Ordo Aequitas proposed the creation of a new Chamber Militant, to help augment their forces that were already stretched to their extreme limits, deployed across the width and breadth of the Imperium. The newly returned Ultramarines Primarch Roboute Guilliman, now the acting Lord Commander of the Imperium, saw merit in their proposal and granted their request, offering up a large contingent of the newly revealed Primaris Space Marines - a new generation of transhuman warriors - created as the ultimate contingency plan to help defend the Imperium in its darkest hour.

Nearly six hundred of these newly revealed Primaris were requisitioned from the ranks of the Unnumbered Sons, the legions of unassigned Primaris Space Marines that were drawn from the lineage of all nine Loyalist Primarchs who led the Legiones Astartes against the Traitor Legion forces of the Arch-Traitor during the Horus Heresy. Specifically, this new Chapter was drawn from the lineage of the Ultramarines - as their gene-seed was deemed the most pure and pre-eminent across the Imperium. Formed into the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Aequitas, the Astartes of the newly incepted Ordo Polis took their sacred duty with the usual relish typically displayed by the Scions of Guilliman.