The Aurelia sector was not a simple place even before the Great Rift.
After it, the complexity had a different quality: the kind that accrues when multiple factions with incompatible objectives are operating in the same volume of space and none of them have sufficient strength to compel the others to leave. Tyranid vanguard elements, reading the disrupted Warp geography as an invitation. Ork salvagers working through the debris fields that the Warp storm had scattered across the outer system approaches, looking for material that could be worked into something their engineering tradition would call a warship. And somewhere in the sector's deeper reaches, a Craftworld of the Aeldari, present for purposes that Aeldari do not typically explain.
Nolan had learned from Gabriel, in the hours on Aurelia Prime, that it was the Aeldari who had first noticed the signs of Kyras's corruption. They had found a Blood Ravens officer and conveyed their assessment. Gabriel had confirmed the assessment was correct.
He had also confirmed, with the specific flat tone of a captain reporting a completed action, that the Aeldari in question were no longer a factor in the sector's political balance.
The Corpse Judgment was a space hulk of the category that made navigators uncomfortable: large enough to have its own micro-gravitational field, assembled from components across several centuries of drift and collision, its interior a non-Euclidean accumulation of corridors that connected by rules developed in the absence of any guiding architecture. The Blood Ravens had taken it recently, which in the context of a space hulk meant they had cleared a perimeter and were working inward.
The Thunderhawk docked at an external berth, and Nolan and Orion stepped into the cold interior and waited.
Orion opened a private communication on a channel that was not the Blood Ravens' general network. The conversation was brief, Orion's side of it visible to Nolan as brief statements and pauses. He did not mention the Primarch.
Seven minutes later, footsteps came down the access corridor from the hulk's interior. Heavy footsteps, the weight of someone in Terminator armor who was not making particular effort to be quiet. The figure that appeared at the corridor's end was broad even by Blood Ravens standards, the red Terminator plate carrying its own accumulation of campaign records in the wear of its surfaces.
He was moving fast for someone in that armor, and the quality of his movement suggested he had been making his own time estimates about how this encounter was going to go.
He saw Nolan.
He stopped.
The stop was not the stop of someone who had been expecting this and was following protocol. It was the stop of someone whose immediate processing has outpaced their prepared responses. He stood in the corridor for perhaps three seconds, and then he stepped forward and went to one knee on the hulk's metal floor, and the voice that came from inside the Terminator helmet was not at a volume appropriate for the distance between them.
"Blood Ravens, Honor Guard Captain Apollo Diomedes. I greet the Primarch."
Nolan looked at him, then looked at Orion.
Orion's expression confirmed what the communication before the meeting had already suggested: he had not told Diomedes.
"Get up," Nolan said. He walked toward Diomedes as the captain rose. "You haven't been told who I am, and we've never met. How did you identify me?"
Diomedes straightened.
The quality of his attention was different from Gabriel's, different from Cyrus's: it was the attention of someone who has been living with a specific reference point for a very long time and has just encountered the thing that reference point was made from.
"My Lord Primarch." His voice had stabilized. "You may not recall the occasion. Before I completed my augmentation surgeries and became an Astartes of the Blood Ravens, I was a child on a world in the Aurelia sector. One of the prayer support missions that brought a Primarch and a Terminator Guard force to the surface. I was there." He paused. "I saw how you fought. The decision to endure the augmentation surgeries followed shortly after."
Nolan retrieved the memory from the general archive of several years of simulator missions.
He did not retrieve a specific one, because there had been a great number of them, and the mortal children on those worlds blurred together in the aggregate. He filed the confirmation that Diomedes was one of the outcomes and let it rest there.
"Very well," he said. "Then you know what this conversation is likely to be about."
Diomedes had not come here believing that Orion was a traitor.
He had come because a man he had served alongside for decades had been declared one, and Diomedes's method of handling declarations he doubted was to go directly to the subject and determine the truth in person. If the declaration turned out to be a misunderstanding, he could intercede with Kyras. If it turned out to be accurate, he was fully capable of addressing it himself.
He said this clearly, without apology for what it implied about his intentions toward Orion if the investigation had gone the other way. He was a straightforward man.
"I still do not believe that Chapter Master Kyras has fallen," he said. He said it with the specific tension of someone who genuinely does not want to believe a thing and is therefore holding the position firmly until the evidence becomes impossible to hold against. "Kyras is the most learned Blood Raven I have served under. The idea that someone of his knowledge and capability could be corrupted without my notice is not one I can accept without direct testimony."
Nolan gave him the testimony directly.
He described Kyras's behavior during the communications they had intercepted, the pattern of Chaos targeting against Blood Ravens planning capabilities on Aurelia Prime, the Gremlin network's intelligence gathering, the sequential disadvantaging of every element that could oppose him from within the Chapter. He was not emotional about it. He laid out what he had observed and what it indicated.
Diomedes listened.
The anger that had been in his face when he arrived had been transitioning for some time into something more complex, and when Nolan finished, it had completed the transition into the particular focused quietness of a man who is reassessing a large number of conclusions simultaneously.
"I have wondered," Diomedes said, quietly, "about several things. Over the past months. The orders that did not follow the Chapter's established patterns. The targeting of our Librarius in engagements where that focus was not tactically explained." He stopped. "I deferred to the Chapter Master's authority. I should have trusted what I was seeing."
"You trusted your Chapter Master," Nolan said. "That is not a failing. The failing belongs to Kyras, and you will help address it."
It was not a question. But Diomedes heard it correctly.
"I will," he said.
They moved into the space hulk's interior, toward the section where Diomedes's Terminator veterans were established. The corridor was low and poorly lit, the metal walls carrying the accumulated rust and cold of a vessel that had drifted without heat for a long time before anyone had found it useful.
They were forty meters from the veteran position when the psychic contact reached Orion.
The Librarian's stride changed before any of the others perceived anything: a brief irregular pause, the kind that indicates processing at a different level. He stopped entirely and stood with his eyes closed for the seconds it took the transmission to complete.
When he opened his eyes, he looked at Nolan.
"Cyrus," he said. "From the Omniscient Mystery."
He relayed it without preamble.
Kyras had contacted an Inquisitor operating in an adjacent sector and had extended an invitation to assess the Chaos situation in the Aurelia sector. The Inquisition fleet was en route. An Inquisitor who finds Chaos corruption at the scale visible in the Aurelia sector, and who judges the situation uncontrollable, carries the authority to issue the order that ends all planetary life rather than permits it to remain contaminated.
Nolan worked through what that meant.
"He wants the Inquisitor to do it," Nolan said. "Not as a suppression measure. As a sacrifice. A system-scale death toll offered to whatever Kyras is serving." He looked at Orion. "He knows we're here. He's moved his timeline. We don't have the time to build alliances gradually."
He turned to Diomedes.
"You and your veterans: we board the Omniscient Mystery now. Direct action against Kyras, immediately, before the Inquisition fleet gets close enough to observe whatever he's planning to use them for."
Diomedes did not hesitate.
"Knowledge is power," he said. "We serve the Primarch."
Thirty Terminator veterans, assembled in the space hulk's interior chamber, heard the context from their captain in brief terms and confirmed with the specific efficiency of warriors who have been waiting for something definitive to do.
Nolan looked at Orion.
"Open every channel available to you. Psychic transmission, shipborne communication, anything that reaches across this sector. Broadcast it once, clearly, to everything that can hear it: an Emperor's Primarch is in the Aurelia sector. Every force present has one choice. Kneel and declare loyalty, or face what comes next."
Orion straightened.
"The Inquisition fleet as well?" he said.
"Especially them," Nolan said.