A low, continuous hum resonated through the vibranium plates of Nolan's power armor, felt more in the chest than heard with the ears.
Around him, the void offered nothing but silence and cold, the distant stars reduced to pale smears behind the churning scarlet wall that filled the space astern. The Warp storm's edge was a living thing, its boundary pulsing and reaching, always reaching, as though it had specifically chosen the fleet for its appetite.
Nolan did not look back at it. He did not need to.
He could feel it.
Four pillars of Empyrean Qilin divine power still poured from his body, coiling and braiding through the void in streams of light that bled across every color at once. The construct they sustained was vast enough to cast a shadow over the entire fleet. The Empyrean Qilin hung in the void behind the ships like a mountainous illusion, its dragon head alone the size of a planetary satellite, its limbs — each one comparable to the span of a battle barge — trailing slowly as it turned to face the oncoming storm.
A portion of Nolan's consciousness lived inside it. That was the only way to drive it.
From inside that projection he could feel the scale of what he was pushing against. The Warp storm's energy was not heat or wind or force in any ordinary sense. It was pressure applied directly to the mind, a weight pressing on the architecture of thought itself, and the only counter he had was will.
He still had will.
The Beast opened its jaws and unleashed another torrent. Energy that could have erased a starship in a single exchange struck the storm's advancing tide, and for a moment — for a few precious seconds — the scarlet wall stopped its advance.
Then it crept forward again.
Nolan gritted his teeth. That was acceptable. Stopping the storm permanently was never the goal. What mattered was that the fleet kept moving. What mattered was that none of the ships behind him fell into that red nothing. He could buy them time. He could buy them distance.
He continued to pour.
Some time later — he had long since stopped tracking the minutes — other vessels had appeared around the fleet. Mechanicus mining ships from Triplex Phall, bulky silhouettes with their characteristic arrays of drilling rigs and processing towers, had gathered alongside the fleeing formation. Civilian transports, too, low-grade hulls whose Gellar field ratings were never meant for something like this. They had been caught in the corridor and had nowhere else to run.
Nolan registered their presence without shifting his attention. If the Beast held, they would all reach the star port.
The Empyrean Qilin divine power in his body continued to drain.
He could feel the reserves thinning. Pools that had felt endless at the start now had a bottom to them, a cold edge where fullness used to be. He found that edge and leaned past it, squeezing harder, pulling from whatever remained. The construct flickered once, twice, then steadied as he bore down.
He was running on something that was not quite strength anymore. Something older. The part of a person that keeps moving not because they can, but because they have decided to.
Another torrent erupted from the Dragon Beast's jaws. The storm recoiled.
Then, from somewhere at the edge of his awareness, carried across the hull on a frequency barely above background noise, came a voice.
It might have been Kahurangi. It might have been Tyberos. The words were clear enough, though Nolan heard them as if through deep water.
"Lord Primarch! We have arrived near the star port of Triplex Phall..."
Something in Nolan's chest simply let go.
It was not a decision. His body made it without asking him. The tension that had held every muscle in rigid coordination for hours released all at once, and he felt himself begin to fall even before he understood he was falling. His skull helmet tilted downward. His knees found the hull plating. The magnetic boots kept him from drifting off into the void as he dropped onto both hands, then slowly lowered himself the rest of the way.
His eyes closed.
Out in the void, the Empyrean Qilin dimmed. The vast construct, already translucent from the drain of sustained effort, shed the last of its light and came apart in silence. There was no collapse, no detonation. It simply ceased, as a candle ceases when the last of the wax is gone.
When Nolan opened his eyes again, the void was gone. He was inside the Nicor.
He was lying on a deck, surrounded by the familiar smell of recycled ship air and machine oil. He did not move immediately. He listened first.
Reditus was talking. That much was obvious from the pitch and tempo before a single word could be resolved. The servo-skull's voice had a particular quality when it was genuinely agitated, a clipped, precise fury that carried further than intended. From the content — which became intelligible in stages as Nolan's cognition reassembled — Reditus appeared to be moving through the assembled Astartes one by one, addressing each of them in turn at close range.
Nolan lay still for another moment and listened.
The gathered Terminators were not responding. They were accepting it. Tyberos, enormous even in the context of a ship's corridor, stood with his arms at his sides and his expression appropriately blank. Kahurangi stood slightly behind him, his Librarian's hood lowered. Dozens of Terminator-armored warriors — a mixture of Black Templars markings and Lamenters yellow — occupied the surrounding space in silence, every one of them kneeling on one knee.
The scolding continued.
Nolan waited until Reditus shifted from general rebuke into something warmer, which was when the servo-skull's language became considerably more personal in its specific complaints about each warrior's conduct. That was the signal.
He pushed himself upright.
The Terminator armor groaned as his power armor's systems cycled back to full active mode. Every head in the room turned toward him. Reditus stopped mid-sentence.
Nolan raised a hand before anyone could speak. He stepped forward through the kneeling warriors, meeting each face briefly as he passed, and said what needed to be said: that they had done well, that he was not dead, and that whatever they were currently blaming themselves for was not their fault. He kept his voice measured and even, because that was what the room needed. The Astartes remained kneeling until he gave them leave to rise, which he did after a moment, because this was not a ceremony and they had things to do.
Then he looked at Tyberos.
"Report."
The Chapter Master's voice carried the particular flatness of someone who had been rehearsing a situation for some time and was glad to finally be in it.
The Carcharodons fleet had reached the low-orbit star port of Triplex Phall in full. Every vessel in the formation — battle barges, cruisers, strike cruisers, the escort screen, the support hulls, every ship that had been with them when the storm first appeared — had arrived. Not one had been lost to the Warp. Not a single crew. The Mechanicus mining ships that had gathered alongside the fleet during the transit had also come through, as had several civilian transports that had been caught in the corridor and had been in serious danger before the Beast pushed the storm back.
Nolan absorbed this.
"The storm?"
Still present. The Warp storm had weakened significantly but had not fully dissipated. The outer systems of Triplex Phall's star zone remained hazed by its edges. Until it cleared, direct communication with the Forge World below was limited to light signals — tight-beam pulses between ships and the orbital installations. From what those signals had conveyed, there were no major crises on the surface.
Nolan nodded slowly. His body still felt hollowed out, the reserves that normally sat low and comfortable simply absent, as though the compartments had been cleaned and left empty. He would recover. He always did. But there was a specific quality to this particular depletion that reminded him how far he had pushed it.
"And the Magi?"
Tyberos confirmed that the Forge World's Tech-Priests had been watching.
That part required a brief explanation. Triplex Phall was an old world, set in its ways, and one of those ways was a particular wariness toward anything connected to Mars. Decades of friction had produced an institutional posture that was, at best, professionally indifferent to delegations bearing Mechanicus credentials. The auspex arrays and detection equipment that lined the forge world's orbital installations were sophisticated enough to have tracked the entire transit in real time, and the Tech-Priests monitoring those stations had watched a single figure stand on the exterior hull of a battle barge and summon something the size of a small moon to fight a Warp storm on behalf of ships they had never met.
The conversation on the Forge World's side of the light-signal exchange had apparently taken a different tone after that.
Tyberos delivered this information without editorializing. He did not need to. The next piece of news made the implication clear enough.
While the storm was still active, while the outer edges were still dragging their red light across the system, a single Thunderhawk had detached from Triplex Phall's orbital infrastructure and made the crossing to the Nicor. Its passenger was a senior member of the Forge World's Mechanicus hierarchy, a figure whose rank the light signals had already suggested was considerable.
The meeting had been handled by Reditus and Kahurangi, since Nolan was unconscious at the time. The Magos had moved with appropriate caution through the ship's corridors, inspecting nothing he was not invited to inspect and asking questions in the measured, precise register of someone accustomed to managing their own reaction time.
Then Kahurangi had mentioned that there was a Primarch aboard.
There had been a pause, Kahurangi reported, that lasted several seconds longer than the question required. The data-processing coils embedded along the Magos's neck and jaw had emitted an audible hum during that pause, the sound of a system running considerably faster than its baseline.
The meeting had concluded shortly after, with courtesies exchanged and nothing committed to yet on either side.
But before the Warp storm surrounding Triplex Phall had fully cleared, the Nicor's auspex had begun tracking additional contacts.
One after another, Thunderhawks lifted from the orbital installations and the surface approach stations below. They climbed through the weakening storm boundary, adjusted their bearings, and set course for the flagship. Each one carried the same category of passenger: Magi, senior Tech-Priests, and in at least two cases, the command-rank officers of the Forge World's Titan Legion.
They came without announcement. They came in numbers. And they came in the direction of the ship where a Primarch waited.
Whatever reservations Triplex Phall maintained about delegations from Mars and the Mechanicus at large, those reservations were a separate matter entirely from their feelings about the Emperor. And about the beings who could, in any meaningful sense, speak for him.
Nolan listened to the last of Tyberos's report and said nothing for a moment. He looked at the far wall of the corridor and worked through what this meant: the resources available on a Forge World of this classification, the standing of a Titan Legion, the production capacity of a planet that had been manufacturing war materiel for the Imperium since before most living institutions could remember.
Then he straightened, rolled one shoulder where the armor had settled slightly wrong, and told Tyberos to have the hangar prepared to receive guests.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~