[Perturabo.]
[Fourth Legion, Iron Warriors. The Hammer of Olympia. Lord of Iron.]
[A Primarch who had spent his entire existence building things and breaking things with equal and total dedication, who had mastered siege craft and construction technique to a degree that made him the most dangerous attacker of fortified positions in the history of the Legiones Astartes, and who had spent that same existence in the grinding awareness that his particular gifts were treated as a tool rather than a distinction. The comparison to Rogal Dorn had followed him for as long as both of them had been known: steel and rock, the two Primarchs most defined by walls, one building them and one dismantling them, sworn to oppose each other by the logic of what they each were.]
[Of all the traitor Primarchs, nearly all of them were broken in one direction or another: the grandiose, the maddened, the corrupted, the willfully simple. Perturabo was different. He had looked at the Imperium with clear eyes and arrived at conclusions about it that, regardless of what those conclusions had led him to do, were not the conclusions of a man who had lost his mind. He had chosen. That made him arguably the most dangerous of them.]
[He had also, in the siege you were now inside, caused more damage to Terra's defenses than any other single actor on the traitor side.]
[The battlefield outside Bhab Bastion told the story in physical terms.]
[The walls that had stood through centuries were dilapidated at their crests, the stone ground down by sustained bombardment, the reinforced sections crumbling where they had absorbed more than their designers had imagined they would need to. Across the forward terrain, wrecked vehicles lay at every angle, some of them having been there long enough to accumulate layers of ash and dust that smoothed their outlines into shapes that no longer suggested the machines they had been. Bodies underneath added to the topography. The front was not a line. It was a condition.]
[The Titan battle was the largest component of it.]
[Thousands of god-machines engaged across the broken terrain around the palace, the scale of the confrontation producing effects that registered at ground level as seismic events. Laser destructors and volcano cannons discharged in overlapping sequences, each shot carrying enough energy to vaporize a bunker line, the combined output of both sides creating a sustained energy exchange that lit the ash-sky from below. Void shields took the fire where they held. Where they failed, the Titans fell, each one going down like a building collapsing, secondary explosions working through their reactor systems as they hit the ground and continuing for minutes afterward.]
[The loyal Titan Legions were losing ground. Slowly, and at enormous cost to the traitors, but losing it.]
[Then twenty-five of them came through the palace walls.]
[Warlord-Sinister class. Psi-Titans of the Ordo Sinister, each one crewed not by conventional princeps and moderati but by psykers integrated into the machine's consciousness at a fundamental level, the forbidden technology of the Dark Age of Technology turned toward the specific problem of Warp-touched enemies. They moved with the unhurried confidence of weapons that had been held back until the moment they were necessary and had now been released. Their Vortex weapons discharged in sequence, each shot tearing a hole in material reality at the point of impact, and the Chaos Titans and Daemon engines caught in those tears ceased to exist in any conventional sense.]
[You watched one of the Chaos Titans come apart from the inside as a Vortex round found it, the explosive light of the secondary detonation following a moment later, and you understood what the Ordo Sinister's deployment meant. The Emperor had committed the last of what He had been holding in reserve. Everything that had been kept back was now on the field. The margin had reached its limit.]
[You exhaled.]
[You turned from the bunker's viewport and looked at the two combat squads of Imperial Fists waiting behind you.]
[The golden power armor you were wearing was Rogal Dorn's spare. The fit was close enough: Dorn and Nolan had converged to a comparable scale, and the armor had been adjusted sufficiently that nothing immediately betrayed the substitution. The adamantium helmet covered your face. The storm shield was in your left hand and a chainsword in your right. From a distance, in the chaos of an active front line, you were Rogal Dorn conducting a personal sortie.]
[The plan had not come from a pleasant conversation.]
[Perturabo, commanding from a position of comprehensive advantage, would not accept an engagement with an unknown Primarch appearing from nowhere. He had no incentive to, and the Iron Lord did not take risks without reason. But Rogal Dorn, the defender of Terra itself, choosing in desperation to carry the fight personally to the traitor siege command: that was a story Perturabo would not pass. The grudge between them was old and deep and had enough mass to override tactical caution. If the target was Dorn, Perturabo would come.]
[You checked the storm shield's grip and started moving.]
[The Imperial Fists fell in behind you without a word. The trench system absorbed your passage, the walls of compacted debris and reinforced ferrocrete channeling you forward through the forward ground between the bunker line and the Iron Warriors' forward positions. The sounds of the Titan battle were everywhere, conducted at a scale that made the trench feel like something that existed at the wrong level of reality for the conflict happening above it.]
[When you had covered enough ground, you stopped calculating and moved.]
[You came up out of the trench and onto the open surface in one continuous motion, the golden armor catching the light of burning Titans and reflected weapons fire, and you found the nearest Iron Warriors fortification and ran at it.]
[A group of Iron Warriors Terminators had just come through the fortification entrance. You hit the leading one before he had processed what he was looking at, the storm shield driving him sideways at a velocity that put him through the fortification wall rather than into it. The chainsword was already moving through the cluster of figures behind him, the teeth finding the gaps in Terminator plate that existed if you knew where to look and hit them at the right angle, and the Iron Warriors in the immediate group were reduced to the component materials of Iron Warriors very quickly.]
[Behind you, the Imperial Fists came over the trench lip and into the fortifications, bolt pistols firing in coordinated pairs, melta weapons targeting the heavy gun emplacements before the crews could redirect.]
[The fortification's fixed weapons swiveled.]
[You gave the order for dispersed engagement before the first shots came through, and the Imperial Fists scattered into the cover available inside the fortification complex, drawing fire in multiple directions, making the targeting problem larger than the fixed guns could efficiently solve.]
[You pushed deeper into the Iron Warriors' forward line, and the golden armor went where it went, and the Iron Warriors who saw it reported what they saw.]
[Everything was in place.]
[The only piece still missing was the Lord of Iron himself.]