The Psychic Ray was Reditus's finest piece of work on the Starfire Glory to date.
Nolan turned the concept over while the servo robots completed the final fitting checks, his thoughts moving to a half-memory from the other universe: Vision, Tony's creation, the synthetic being with the Mind Stone embedded in his forehead, capable of emitting a focused beam of concentrated cosmic energy from the Stone itself. What Reditus had managed to inscribe into the helmet was not the same thing, and Nolan was not going to pretend otherwise, but the functional principle was close enough to be recognizable. A way to draw energy from the Mind Stone and direct it outward without requiring the Stone's full activation. Without the Infinity Gauntlet. Without the cascading systemic load of attempting to use a universal origin point as a weapon at full scale.
He had allowed himself, briefly, to consider the alternative.
The Mind Stone at full activation in the Warhammer universe could theoretically reach into every organic mind in the galaxy simultaneously. The Chaos Gods fed on emotion and cognition. A weapon that could strip those things from every living being would cut off the source completely. Starve the gods in the Warp by eliminating the psychic output of an entire galaxy's worth of sentient life.
He had set that thought down and left it where he had found it.
It was the kind of reasoning that arrived wearing the face of a solution and was something else entirely. He did not need to pursue it further to know that.
The final seal clicked into place on the Starfire Glory's gorget, and the living metal responded to his presence, flowing across the vibranium surface of the armor in its familiar pattern, covering the helmet and sealing the gaps with the organic efficiency of Necrodermis operating at room temperature. The Mind Stone in the helmet's brow caught the foundry light for a moment and then settled back to its baseline.
Nolan spent the next hour working through the Psychic Ray with Reditus running calibration commentary from a few meters away, the servo skull's anti-gravity engine carrying it in slow circuits while it assessed each output. The results were convincing. Under sustained emission, the Ray would work through vibranium given enough time. Against standard materials it was considerably faster. As a long-range attack option to complement the Ten Rings, it filled a gap he had been aware of without having had the means to address.
He told Reditus as much, with the specific phrasing that Reditus responded to best: direct acknowledgment of the technical achievement, stated plainly, without excess.
Then Reditus asked if it could come.
The request came with the particular quality of something that had been prepared and delivered with deliberate casualness, as though the asking were a minor administrative matter rather than something Reditus had clearly been building toward. It had apparently mentioned the Carcharodons fleet's trajectory to David at some point, and David had confirmed the destination: a Forge World called Triplex Phall, in the far galactic east. Reditus had drawn the obvious conclusion. Mars was not accessible. A Forge World with a full complement of Tech-Priests and Magi was the next best option, and Reditus had enough accumulated knowledge to arrive there as something other than a supplicant.
Nolan thought about it with his head down for a moment.
He did not refuse.
He told Reditus to clear its current foundry obligations within a reasonable window and make whatever arrangements were necessary for the work to continue in its absence. And, because a servo skull was a fragile transport for an entity with Reditus's value, he told it to take the Armiger-class Knight as its primary chassis for the journey. A laser beam or a stray bolter round could end a servo skull. An Armiger was a different equation.
Reditus received both conditions with the red-optical equivalent of enthusiasm and began making arrangements immediately.
The group that assembled in the circular square a short time later was compact by the standards of previous departures: the two Raven Guard champions, Lexicanium Ukari with his force staff in hand to manage the transit, Reditus in the Armiger chassis that made it look considerably more imposing than it had as a skull with a small engine, and Nolan with the resupply crates David had staged.
Ukari worked the ritual of the space crack with the practiced efficiency of a psyker who had done this enough times that the process was automatic. The tear appeared in the air of the square and held, and they went through it one by one.
Nolan's magnetic boot had barely cleared the threshold before the ship tried to take him off his feet.
The pressure differential hit the power armor from three directions simultaneously, not the standard atmospheric variance of an Astartes vessel but something external, the ship moving against forces that the hull was designed to redirect and currently struggling with. He activated the magnetic adhesion in the boots before the next oscillation came and felt the grip take hold.
Behind him, the others cleared the transit. The space crack sealed itself in the humid air of the corridor and was gone.
Nolan turned and found Kahurangi.
The Stormseer was already moving toward him, the force staff recovered from where it had been dropped on the deck, his expression carrying the compressed urgency of someone who had been waiting for this moment and had too much to say to sequence it properly.
"My Lord Primarch. Your timing is not ideal. The fleet is at full thrust in realspace, trying to stay ahead of a pursuing Warp storm. The entire Carcharodons fleet."
"Warp storm."
Nolan let the words settle for a moment. A Warp storm was not a navigational inconvenience. It was the void's way of informing you that the rules governing the safety of transit had been suspended in your vicinity, and that the duration and terms of that suspension were not negotiable. For a fleet of void ships, it was the worst category of event the cold universe offered.
He told Reditus to begin a ship systems assessment and went to the bridge.
The bridge of the Nicor was operating.
That was the first thing Nolan registered: the crew was at their stations and the servitors were at their posts and the work was being done, the navigation calculations and systems management and communication coordination running in their proper channels with the particular focused intensity of people who understood that the gap between adequate and inadequate right now had consequences. Tyberos stood at the center of it the way a standing stone stands in a field: fixed, oriented, present, serving as the reference point for everything else.
The screens around the bridge perimeter showed the outside.
The void was wrong.
Behind the fleet's navigational track, the darkness that should have been empty was not empty. Scarlet. Moving. The colour had the particular wrong quality of Warp energy bleeding into realspace, and the mass of it was following the fleet's trajectory with the purposeful tracking of something that understood where the fleet was going and intended to close the distance. The tendrils of it extended in a pattern that reminded Nolan of something reaching rather than something drifting.
He walked forward to stand beside Tyberos.
"How far are we from Triplex Phall?"
Tyberos did not turn.
"By star map and current bearing, nearly within visual range, my Lord Primarch. The Forge World can be observed with optical magnification. But we are running on auxiliary drives at maximum output. If the storm wraps the fleet entirely before we reach the orbital approach, where we end up and when we arrive — or whether we return to realspace at all — becomes a question for the Void Father to answer."
The scarlet tide on the screens moved closer in the time it took him to finish the sentence.