The fleet's composition was not something Nolan needed to review. He had built it, or inherited it, or earned each piece of it through one kind of cost or another, and every ship in it occupied its own particular weight in his awareness.
At the core of it were the two battle barges: the Nicor, flagship of the Chapter and fleet both, and the Storm Daughter, which served the same function for the fleet's rearward elements. The Tyrant-class cruiser White Maw. Four strike cruisers assigned to the other companies of the Chapter, and the fifth strike cruiser, recently renamed Jackrax, now operating under the Raven Guard's colors. Forty-five hulls of Sword-class frigates and Cobra-class destroyers, the backbone of the fleet's combat capability in any engagement where the battle barges could not be brought to bear without risking more than the situation warranted.
Beyond the warships: the supply transports, the agricultural ships, the mortal vessels that kept everything else moving, and the Steel, the foundry ship, the largest non-combat hull in the fleet and the one that was most difficult to replace.
Hundreds of ships in total. Accumulated over centuries of service, loss, recovery, and expansion, each one representing a commitment of time and resources and lives that could not simply be regenerated. The Carcharodons did not acquire assets quickly.
And the Warp storm behind them was not interested in the difficulty of replacing what it consumed.
The scarlet tide was visible on every screen in the bridge, advancing along the fleet's wake at a pace that the calculations on the navigation displays had been revising upward every few minutes. Elsewhere in the void, across millions of kilometers of the transit corridor leading toward Triplex Phall, other ships were making the same calculation and reaching the same conclusion: full thrust, every auxiliary drive at maximum output, close the distance to the Forge World before the storm's leading edge caught the hull.
Some of them were not going to make it.
The civilian transports were the first to fall behind. Their engines were older, their hulls not designed for sustained extreme output, their speeds sitting below the threshold that the storm required them to exceed. Nolan watched on the screens as the Mechanicus mining fleet's rearmost element was overtaken, the scarlet tide rolling over it without particular interest or malice, and then the ships were gone, swallowed into the depths of the Warp without leaving a visible mark in the void where they had been.
Whether those crews would return to realspace somewhere, somewhen, was a question that had no reliable answer.
Tyberos had already been reviewing the fleet composition data before the first civilian ships were taken.
"Shipborne communication servitors: relay to all captains. Gellar fields to be raised immediately, full coverage, across every hull. Do not wait for the storm to close further." He did not look up from the display. "Additionally: captains are to notify all mortal crew aboard supply transports and agricultural ships that in the event of storm contact, those vessels must prioritize clearing the lane and buying time for the combat hulls to accelerate. This is a standing order, effective immediately."
The order was cold in the way that necessary mathematics is cold. The supply transports and agricultural ships carried tens of thousands of mortal crew each. Taken together across all the non-combat hulls, the personnel count ran into hundreds of thousands. Tyberos's order had just informed all of them that their ships were now officially considered expendable in service of the fleet's combat elements surviving the transit.
A Gellar field failure in a Warp storm was not survivable for organic beings. Not over any extended period.
Nolan had already opened his mouth when the mining ship vanished from the screen.
He closed it.
He took a breath through his nose and held it, and looked at the display where the ship had been and where the storm was now, and let the order transmit.
Tyberos turned.
"My Lord Primarch. This is a necessary sacrifice. The mortal crew of those ships understand what service to the fleet and to the Void Father requires of them. This is not a new understanding for any of them."
"I know the logic." Nolan's voice came out level. "It is precisely because I understand the logic that I find it harder to accept, not easier. I can face greenskins and Tyranids and Daemons in numbers that fill a battlefield without flinching. A Warp storm does not care what I can fight. In this, a Primarch is no different from any mortal on any one of those ships."
Tyberos said nothing. He was preparing to say something else, the preliminary motion of someone choosing words for a situation that did not have good ones.
Nolan's expression changed.
It was not a gradual shift. Something arrived in his thinking all at once, the connection between two things that had been in his awareness separately snapping together into a single recognition. His brow creased and he raised one hand, the vibranium gauntlet pausing in the air in front of him as the thought completed itself.
"I do not know if this is possible. But the situation is what it is, and attempting it costs nothing we are not already committed to losing."
He lowered his hand.
"Tyberos. Reform the entire fleet into the tightest arrow formation the captains can manage. Maintain maximum acceleration throughout. Do it now."
He was already turning before he had finished the sentence.
The skull helmet responded to his intention, the living metal creeping up from the gorget and across his jaw and skull and sealing into its full configuration as he moved out of the bridge and into the passage beyond.
His magnetic boots took the corridor at a run, the footfalls sending vibrations through the deck plating, and he went through the upper level passages toward the outer hull with the particular focused speed of someone who had committed to a course of action and was now only interested in covering the distance to where the action would happen.
The maintenance airlock at the outer hull boundary cycled through its pressure equalization sequence. He stepped in. The internal pressure bled out into the compensation system and the outer seals disengaged.
The void opened in front of him.
He stepped through onto the hull exterior, his magnetic boots locking to the metal surface beneath him, and stood in the absolute cold and silence of unshielded space with the entire fleet stretched out around him in the arrow formation the captains were assembling on Tyberos's order. Behind the fleet, filling a significant portion of the visual field even from this distance, the scarlet tide of the Warp storm moved.
Nolan raised one vibranium palm forward.
The words were quiet inside the skull helmet, said to no one and everyone at the same time.
"Emperor's blessing on us."
"Come forth, Empyrean Qilin."