Ukel did not survive the Volcano Cannon's output.
This was not immediately obvious from outside, because the thermal energy involved in the exchange had other effects: the ice and snow within a kilometer radius converted from solid to rain in the time it took the beam to cross the nave, and the rain fell in a spattering hiss against the monastery's remaining stone. The walls that had survived the Cyclone barrage chose this moment to address the structural issues they had developed, and the collapse of the outer sections added their roar to the general noise.
Forty seconds after the beam found Ukel, nothing remained of him except a quality of the air.
Not even that for long.
Nolan let the Volcano Cannon's barrel vent its cooling discharge into the surrounding atmosphere and went to one knee. The vibranium power armor registered the recoil load in terms that the medical system found interesting enough to act on: the last of the stored medical compound was released into his bloodstream from the suit's reserve, the quantity smaller than he would have preferred but sufficient for immediate purposes. He breathed. The compound worked.
The Blood Ravens came across the debris field at a pace that suggested they had been watching and had been ready to move the moment the beam stopped.
They were careful with him. Hands found the pauldrons and the upper arms and helped him down from the vehicle chassis to the floor without rushing, and the quality of care in it was the quality of warriors helping someone they have chosen, not someone they are obligated to.
Nolan stood with both magnetic boots on the floor and took a full breath.
He looked at the Blood Ravens around him: the ceramite of their armor carrying the accumulated record of the last several days in scars and burn marks and impact craters. He raised one vibranium palm and pressed it against the nearest pauldron. Then the next. Then each one down the line, the contact brief and without oratory, the acknowledgment of something that did not require language to communicate.
Then he turned to the work.
"Cyrus. Orion. Full sweep of the monastery. Every section. Anything that might still be drawing Warp energy, anything that might still be connected to the seal that held Ukel: destroy it. I won't have this ground give us the same problem twice."
The scout sergeant and the Librarian separated without comment, taking the sections they were individually best suited for.
Nolan sat with his back against the vehicle chassis and let Techmarine Martellus work on the power armor's remaining damage while he talked through the problem with Gabriel.
The problem was Kyras.
The evidence was not legally assembled, and the evidence was also unnecessary: the pattern of events since they had arrived on Aurelia Prime was consistent and one-directional. Kyras had access to the Blood Ravens' communication architecture and had been using it in ways that benefited the Chaos forces. He had attempted to recall all surviving Blood Ravens before the monastery engagement using a tone that suggested the recall was more important to him than the state of the planet. When Orion had mentioned a Primarch's presence, Kyras had ended the communication immediately and had not attempted to reestablish it.
A Chapter Master who learns a Primarch is operating with his forces does not end that communication.
The secondary problem was the size of the unknown. How many Blood Ravens had been actively drawn into Kyras's orbit versus how many were following Chapter orders in good faith versus how many were completely uninvolved and would respond correctly to the facts? Without knowing the distribution, any action plan carried significant risk of unnecessary fratricide.
Nolan laid out his approach.
As Primarch, his authority superseded Chapter command in the tradition of the Astartes Chapters without ambiguity. Blood Ravens who were loyal to the Emperor would recognize that and respond accordingly; they would not fight against a Primarch on behalf of a Chapter Master who had chosen Chaos. Those who had been fully corrupted or who had committed irrevocably to Kyras as a personal allegiance rather than an institutional one: that category was beyond recovery, and Nolan said so without softening it.
Gabriel and the other Blood Ravens present considered this.
The consideration was brief, because the alternative analysis led somewhere worse. If Kyras's corruption became public knowledge beyond the Chapter before the Chapter had dealt with it, the Inquisition's response would be the response it always produced for that category of event: a sin-crusade against the Blood Ravens in full, with all that meant for the Chapter's survival. A Primarch standing visibly at the Blood Ravens' side when the accounting came would not prevent accountability, but it would make accountability navigable rather than terminal.
They were agreed.
Martellus declared the power armor satisfactory after three more hours of work, and Nolan stood in the restored suit and tested the joints and found them acceptable.
The immediate problem was departure. The Blood Ravens' main fleet would arrive in the system at some point that could not be precisely predicted, and arriving in a hostile fleet aboard a stolen Thunderhawk without established communication was a different kind of problem than arriving with a position already established among the crew. They needed to leave Aurelia Prime before the fleet made that calculation moot.
Cyrus solved the departure problem with the patience and indirection that Cyrus applied to most problems. Working through the Blood Ravens' intercepted communication channels, he found a landing platform and identified three Thunderhawks that had arrived recently and had not yet departed. He also found, as a secondary product of the intercept, that Gabriel and Orion had been formally designated as traitors by Kyras's authority.
This simplified certain decisions.
The landing platform guards were twelve Blood Ravens with boltguns and prepared positions. The approach of Nolan at the front of the group produced a tactical situation that the guards had not been issued instructions to address: a figure in pale gold vibranium power armor, moving without concealment at the pace of something that does not consider cover necessary, accompanied by known Chapter officers and several Blood Ravens brothers the guards recognized.
The guards fired a handful of rounds.
Then they stopped firing, because the rounds had not produced results consistent with the decision to continue firing, and because the figure in gold was still walking forward, and because there were Blood Ravens they trusted telling them that a Primarch was present and that the Chapter Master was corrupted.
Some things do not require extended argument.
They went to one knee.
Orion spoke to them carefully, with the specific care of a Librarian who understands what is being asked: to reverse a loyalty they have maintained, to accept information that contradicts what their institution has told them, and to do it in the middle of a crisis with limited time. He was thorough because he respected the difficulty of what he was asking.
The guards' doubts, when they articulated them, were not about Nolan's identity or about the facts of the engagement on the planet. They were about Kyras: specifically, about the behavioral changes they had observed over the preceding months. The Chapter Master who had commanded their loyalty had been a man of considerable psychic learning and patient judgment. The Chapter Master who had been issuing orders recently was neither patient nor judicial. The guards had noticed. They had not had a framework to put it in.
Orion provided the framework.
Three Thunderhawks lifted from the platform as the snow resumed, the engines carrying them through the cloud cover and into the cold void above Aurelia Prime.
They split there.
Gabriel took the first toward his Company's strike cruiser: his purpose was direct and his methods were the methods of a captain who has been doing this for a long time. He would tell his remaining battle-brothers exactly what had happened and exactly what was required of them.
Cyrus and Techmarine Martellus took the second, their approach the opposite of Gabriel's: no identity revealed, no early contact, the Thunderhawk presenting as a routine return from surface operations. Their destination was the battle-barge Omniscient Mystery, the Blood Ravens' fortress-monastery flagship, where Kyras himself operated. Their role was surveillance and patience.
Nolan went with Orion in the third.
Their destination was a space wreck designated the Corpse Judgment, where, according to Orion's knowledge of the Chapter's current dispositions, one man was likely to be found: Apollo Diomedes, Captain of the Blood Ravens' Honor Guard and the officer who commanded the Chapter's veteran first company.
"If he has been taken," Orion said, during the transit through the void, "then we end it quickly and accept the consequences."
He was quiet for a moment.
"But Apollo Diomedes has never been a man who commits to a position he has not fully interrogated. Even Kyras could not change that quality in him." A pause. "I believe he can still be reached."
Nolan looked at the void through the Thunderhawk's viewport.
"Then we reach him," he said.
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