Guarding the Word: Science Fiction

The marines were uneasy. They were used to guarding dignitaries: ambassadors, head cooks, sons of rich and powerful families who had their brothers gunning for them, the usual. Guarding a word was, well, weird. The word was written on a canvas, painted inside their helmets, and locked away in a hypno-secured portion of their minds, so that if any of them survived, so would the Word. That was unsettling enough, since it essentially turned all of them into targets instead of collateral damage or obstacles. If they lost the banner and the book, they still had to guard at least one other of themselves who might escape with the word. I mean, they'd been blood-bound to each other for years. They would have saved each other anyway, when they could, and eaten the dead to preserve their skills when they couldn't. But this set them all up as targets for elimination. At least, as the tusk-commander had joked, this package wouldn't make them follow it into whorehouses....


Inspiration: Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines.
Story Potential: High? Medium? This is not my usual, at all, but it could be fun if I felt like writing space marines.
Notes: I have no idea what that actually is, but I tried to imagine it.