The plan was simple and Nolan laid it out quickly.
Two combat teams. Team one: Gabriel and Cyrus, carrying the Cyclone missile launchers and the heavy weapons, responsible for long-range fire support and flanking. Team two: Nolan and Orion, frontal assault, drawing the enemy's attention and holding it there. The two teams would move separately and coordinate by comms when the objective was reached.
Everyone understood and began moving.
They were forty minutes into the march when the Blood Ravens' command channel, which had been silent since their arrival on Aurelia Prime, produced a voice.
The voice was low and deliberate, with the measured quality of a senior officer who was accustomed to giving orders that were obeyed without discussion. The speaker identified himself as Captain Kyras, commanding officer of the Blood Ravens warband on this operation. His message was brief: all surviving Blood Ravens were to abandon current engagements and tasks, consolidate at designated coordinates, and board the Thunderhawks that had just set down on the surface to return to the flagship.
Immediately.
Nolan listened without interrupting.
When Kyras finished, Orion connected to the channel. He said very little: the force currently operating on the surface included a Primarch. It was said conversationally, almost as an aside.
The channel went dead.
No response. No acknowledgment. No question. No sound at all from Kyras's end. The silence was complete and immediate, the cut so fast that it left no room for a technical fault as the explanation.
Nolan did not say anything for a moment.
He did not need to. The Blood Ravens around him had arrived at the same place he had through the same information. When the silence had settled long enough to be readable, Nolan simply looked ahead along their route and continued walking.
The implication was noted. The mission continued.
Twelve hours of travel through the blizzard brought them to the mountains.
The terrain rose sharply here, the frozen stone beneath the snowpack forcing the path into steep approaches and narrow ledges that required careful footing even in powered armor. Above the treeline, if this world had ever had one, the exposed rock was black against the white of the snow, and scattered across one of the broader peaks in a configuration that was clearly deliberate rather than geological were the ruins of a large fortified structure.
Orion narrated as they walked.
The Blood Ravens' fortress-monastery on Aurelia Prime had trained generations of the Chapter's warriors on this ground. The commanders it had produced were, by the Chapter's historical assessment, among the most dedicated and loyal in the Blood Ravens' long service to the Emperor. It had stood on this mountain through the period before the planet was drawn into the Warp, and when the planet returned, it returned with the monastery still present.
Occupied now by something else.
The atmosphere in the group changed when the ruins came into view. The Blood Ravens moved with the quality of people looking at something they recognise from inside rather than outside, and they did not speak about what they were seeing.
Nolan gave them the time they needed to resupply and rest, during which he stood at the edge of the ridge with Forgebreaker resting across his forearm and looked at the fortress-monastery across the distance.
He raised one hand in Cyrus's direction.
The scout sergeant swallowed the last of his ration bar, collected his rifle, and went forward into the mountain terrain without any discussion of what he was going to do or how long it would take.
Cyrus came back with snowflakes frozen to his scout armor and an expression that communicated the report before he opened his mouth.
He delivered it to Nolan, Gabriel, and Orion standing together.
The interior of the fortress-monastery held over a thousand Chaos believers. Daemon elements were present in larger numbers: Bloodletters and Plaguebearers primarily, distributed through the internal spaces. Multiple Black Legion Chaos Astartes teams were positioned defensively throughout the structure. Araghast was not directly observed, but the defensive posture was consistent with a protected high-value position deeper inside.
"We cannot engage this force directly at our numbers," Cyrus said. "The only viable path to success is fast and specific: find Araghast, eliminate him, and end the operational command of the force before they can sustain a longer engagement." He paused. "Time is not on our side. The longer this extends, the more advantages accumulate to their side."
Gabriel spoke next, standing with his hands wrapped around the haft of his hammer.
"We cannot reach the flagship for reinforcement under the current circumstances." He looked at the fortress across the mountain. "And even if we could, I would not rely on Captain Kyras to commit forces in our support."
He said Kyras's name with a specific flatness.
"What we have is what we have. But we have one thing the enemy does not: they don't know where we are." He looked at Nolan. "And before the ammunition from your stores runs out, Lord Primarch, our long-range capacity is essentially inexhaustible." His expression settled into something close to satisfaction. "Give these Chaos traitors a proper introduction to what a Cyclone barrage from several hundred launchers simultaneously feels like."
Nolan paced once through the group, the Vibranium power armor moving with the steady weight of full systems.
He stopped and turned to face the assembled Blood Ravens.
"Cyrus. Gattus. Every launcher in the storage goes out on remote serial trigger. We cover every approach to the fortress-monastery across all the slopes."
He looked at the storage interface for a moment and drew.
The Cyclone Missile Launchers came through in quantity. Then in further quantity. Then in quantity that required everyone present to step back from the immediate area as the piling-up of them exceeded what the visual field could organize: hundreds and then more hundreds of the launcher systems emerging into the snowfield, stacking across the flat ground and the slopes nearby, the number eventually approaching something that would take serious time to count.
Cyrus and the Techmarine Gattus worked through the modification process with the methodical speed of people who understood exactly what they were doing and had done analogous work before: each launcher's independent firing circuit bypassed and connected into a remote serial network, the trigger for the entire array consolidated into a single relay that Nolan could activate from any position within comms range.
It took time. The Blood Ravens deployed the modified launchers across the steep terrain in teams, climbing to the high points and the angle positions that gave the widest coverage of the fortress-monastery's outer structure.
When the last launcher was positioned and the relay was confirmed active, Nolan looked at the mountainside covered in the waiting artillery.
He opened the team channel.
"Fire."
The sound was not individual explosions. It was a continuous event: the combined launch signature of hundreds of Cyclone Missile Launchers firing in rapid serial sequence producing a roar that displaced the wind as a relevant phenomenon, the missiles filling the sky between the launch positions and the fortress-monastery in a density that converted the air above the mountain into something that moved rather than simply existed.
The fortress-monastery's remaining structures met the salvo.
Ancient stonework that had survived the Warp's passage came down in sections as the first impacts found load-bearing elements. Secondary and tertiary detonations propagated through the debris as each successive wave found new material to work with. The noise of the whole event rolled outward across the mountains and returned from multiple directions at once, multiplied.
The wall of sound reached the hiding positions and continued past them.
Inside the fortress-monastery, a very large number of things that had considered themselves safe were discovering that they were not.
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