Nolan evade and remaining five Ten Rings crossed the settlement in formation, driving into the Nurgle daemon from angles that ensured it had no clear target to address, the rings cutting and hammering alternately while the daemon attempted to track them with its remaining eye. The attempt was not successful.
The Librarian finished the last Bloodletter with a focused psychic discharge from the force scepter, his arm shaking visibly from the effort of maintaining the grip.
The settlement was quiet for one second.
Then Cyrus threw the melta device.
His throwing form was the product of a great deal of practice: the arm motion was efficient, the release point precise, and the bomb went up and came down exactly above the Nurgle daemon's crown, where the modified casing had the best surface-area relationship with the target below it. The detonation was not what a standard melta bomb produced.
The fireball reached a hundred meters in radius before it stopped expanding.
The thermal output cleared the snowfall from the air above the settlement for several seconds. The shockwave moved across the frozen ground and displaced the snowpack outward from the blast center in a ring that left the charred ground beneath it briefly visible. What the Nurgle daemon had been was now several categories of dispersed material distributed across the landscape, none of which retained the organization that would be necessary to constitute a threat.
The Librarian, on one knee in the snow, blood still leaking from the seal at his chin, stared at the epicenter.
"Cyrus." His voice was hoarse and unsteady and entirely itself. "What exactly did you add to that? The yield is significantly beyond anything I've seen from standard design."
He appeared to consider the question genuinely worth investigating even in his current condition.
The Ten Rings returned to Nolan's forearm. He began withdrawing them into position when the sound of rapid footsteps in the snow reached him, and he turned to find the Librarian driving himself upright through what appeared to be primarily determination, the force scepter used as a support pole, moving toward him at a pace that aggravated at least three things that should not have been aggravated.
The Librarian stopped two meters away and went to one knee.
Nolan registered the expression: exhausted, pale from blood loss, with something newly present in the eyes that had not been there sixty seconds ago. The look of someone who has recognized something that changes the frame of the entire situation.
"The mysterious-art Chief Librarian of the Blood Ravens, acting mission commander: Jonah Orion." The voice was formal under the exhaustion. "I pay my respects to the Primarch."
Cyrus, who had been watching from a few meters off, looked at Nolan once more with the evaluating attention of someone running a reassessment, and then also went to one knee.
"Blood Ravens 10th Company Scout Sergeant: Cyrus. My respects to the Primarch."
Nolan looked at them both.
"Get up. I don't require that from anyone." He turned Forgebreaker in his grip, settling the weight of it. "Blood Ravens. I'm not familiar with your Chapter. Can you tell me your parent Chapter? Or your gene-father?"
Jonah Orion stood. The motion cost him something, but he completed it.
"That question is one the Blood Ravens have been asking since the Chapter's founding, Lord Primarch. Our origins in M37 are documented. The identity of our gene-father is not." He paused, with the careful quality of someone who has thought about this a great deal and still finds it unresolved. "The record is simply absent. No successive Chapter Master has been able to fill that gap."
He met Nolan's eyes directly.
"But if you are willing, Lord Primarch, then the Blood Ravens could become your genetic descendants by your acknowledgment. That is, if you'd allow it."
Nolan regarded him for a moment without answering that specific point.
He reached under the power backpack and extracted two medical compounds from the storage interface, handing one to each of them. Orion took his and swallowed it immediately, with the directness of someone who has stopped having reservations about medical compounds after reaching a certain threshold of injury. Cyrus accepted his, examined it briefly, and put it inside his scout armor.
The color was already returning to Orion's face within the minute, the compound doing the work that several hours of rest would otherwise require.
"Aurelia Prime," Orion said, once his voice had steadied. He gestured at the frozen settlement around them. "This is our homeworld, Lord Primarch. Or it was. The planet was drawn into the Warp some years ago and only recently reappeared. The Chapter sent vanguard teams to assess the situation here. We were among them." He looked at the bodies in the snow. "We found the planet occupied. Chaos daemons and Black Legion traitors, in numbers that suggest deliberate deployment rather than opportunistic settlement. The surface is significantly compromised."
He stopped.
The ruddy color that the compound had restored faded slightly at the edges.
"Our team was separated from the other vanguard groups in the early engagements, which we attributed to battlefield conditions. The ambush that followed we attributed to tactical misfortune. But the losses we took..." He lowered his head briefly. "I gave incorrect orders. My planning was inadequate for what we encountered. The brothers who died here died because of decisions I made."
He said it clearly, without the particular inflection of someone performing accountability. It was simply the statement of a thing he believed.
Cyrus had been quiet throughout the account. He spoke now, with the tone of someone who has been deciding whether to say something and has decided.
"With respect to the Librarian Commander: I don't believe the separation or the ambush were battlefield misfortune." He looked at Orion, then at Nolan. "The Blood Ravens deploy their psyker assets at a ratio significantly higher than any other Chapter. Our tactical planning uses psychic precognition as a standard tool. Before any engagement, we arrange contingencies based on predicted outcomes."
He paused.
"On this planet, from the first engagement onward, the enemy has concentrated its attacks on our Librarians and our command elements. Not on force strength. Not on weapon concentration. On the people responsible for our planning. The degree of precision in that targeting is not consistent with the enemy simply being capable fighters." His jaw set. "Someone told them our methods. Someone told them where to look."
The scout sergeant kept his eyes on Nolan.
"I have no evidence that meets the standard I would require to make a formal accusation. What I have is thirty years of experience reading the difference between an enemy that is good and an enemy that has been informed. What happened to us on the approach to this settlement reads like the second category."
Nolan said nothing for a moment.
A traitor within the Blood Ravens was not an accusation to be treated lightly in any direction, and the corollary that Cyrus had not stated but that was implicit in his analysis was also serious: if someone was leaking Blood Ravens plans on Aurelia Prime, the question of how long that leak had been operational was one that could not be answered quickly.
"We note it," Nolan said finally. "But we don't act on it without more than intuition. Not on something like this."
Cyrus nodded, with the specific nod of someone who expected that response and accepts it.
They returned to the scene of the engagement and moved through it in silence: checking the fallen brothers, confirming what the snow had hidden or the daemons had taken, recording what could be recorded. The work was done with the efficiency of people who have done it before and have learned to complete it without letting it take more time than it needs.
When they were done, Cyrus oriented himself, consulting something internal that seemed to be a reliable map of the settlement's geography, and pointed the way forward.
Nolan followed. Orion followed. The blizzard closed back in around them.