The Antarctic continent was not a place that welcomed visitors.
It was vast in the way that only truly indifferent things can be vast, white and featureless from horizon to horizon, the kind of landscape that did not care whether you were there or not. The penguins that dotted its shorelines were its only genuine inhabitants, and they had the good sense to stay near the coast. Everything further inland was ice, wind, and silence.
Or it had been, before Hydra found it useful.
The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station had once been a legitimate scientific research installation operated by North American interests, one of the more recognizable names on a continent full of nations quietly planting flags through academic proxies. Over time, through the particular brand of patient institutional rot at which Hydra excelled, every position within it had been quietly replaced. The researchers went first, then the support staff, then the cook who had worked there for eleven years and made excellent coffee. Now, even the cook was an elite soldier who believed in Hydra's philosophy and kept a loaded energy weapon within arm's reach of the stove.
The soldier currently pulling the short straw on the outside sentry rotation had lost a card game the previous night. He wore every layer he owned, his gloved hands wrapped around a Hydra-issue energy gun, and he was thinking approximately nothing as he shouldered open the metal door and stepped out into the cold.
He made it five or six steps into the white before he saw them.
Five figures in iron-gray power armor, standing in the snow. The bodies of his comrades were nearby, already cooling, already coming apart in ways that bodies are not meant to come apart. Someone had done that with their hands.
His eyes went wide. His mouth opened.
The lightning claw came down from above before any sound could escape. Blue arcs jumped along the blade's edge for the fraction of a second it took to complete its work, and then there was nothing left of the sentry worth describing.
Tyberos straightened. He shook the lightning claw once, and a few drops of red fell into the white snow, spreading into small bright circles.
The five guards were already moving. They split apart and went for the surrounding buildings without noise, without communication, in the silent and absolute manner of predators who have done this enough times that coordination is no longer necessary. From the inside of each structure came sounds that lasted briefly and then stopped.
Three minutes later, Nolan walked out of the cold.
He was carrying one of Hydra's elite soldiers by the arm, the way a person might carry something they needed to put down somewhere. The soldier's limbs were bent in directions that limbs do not naturally achieve, and he was alive only in the technical sense. Nolan came to a stop in front of Tyberos and held the man up without apparent effort.
"He was helpful before the end," Nolan said. The Warscythe's green light shifted slowly across the snow at his feet. "The entrance to the main base is directly beneath the research station ahead. Approximately fifty meters down. He did not know the full layout."
He paused.
"David suppressed all outgoing transmissions before we landed. It is currently working to seize administrative control of the base systems. Progress is not going well."
The body dropped into the snow with the flat sound of something that had stopped mattering. Nolan glanced toward the station building and continued:
"It does not matter. The resistance inside is lighter than I expected. Without heavy vehicles or concentrated aerial bombardment, they cannot threaten us significantly."
The guards had already regrouped. They moved back toward the main station building in a loose formation, carrying chainswords and boltguns from the supply Nolan had provided, their ceramite shells freshly decorated with the dark evidence of the outer perimeter's elimination. The chainaxes in their hands rose and fell, and the station building began to come apart.
It was not built for this. Research stations on the Antarctic continent are constructed to resist cold, wind, and the occasional structural stress of shifting ice. They are not constructed to resist five Astartes guards methodically dismantling them from the outside. The insulation panels and prefabricated walls gave way piece by piece, and in the grey light from the overcast sky, when nearly half the structure had been removed, the metal hatch in the ground below became visible. Heavy, sealed, built to delay rather than to stop.
Tyberos stepped forward. He scanned the hatch for a moment, reading it the way an experienced soldier reads an obstacle, then raised both claws and drove them down through the metal.
The sound was sharp and repetitive, fragments of hatch material scattering across the surrounding snow. From below, red emergency lighting strobed upward through the growing gap, painting the Terminator's ceramite in alternating shadows. The hatch gave.
Hydra's Antarctic base lay open beneath them.
The five guards went in first, dropping through the entrance with the chainaxes already running. A half-second later the sounds of their arrival reached the surface: heavy bolter fire, the crack of energy weapons, the lower roar of whatever Hydra had managed to position between the entrance and the elevator at the far end of the passage.
Nolan went in right behind them.
The corridor was wide, built for vehicle access, lit by strip lighting and the continuous pulse of red emergency alerts. At the far end, in front of a large freight elevator that clearly descended further into the base, Hydra had done exactly what trained soldiers with preparation time and a position to defend would do. Heavy steel plates, crate stacks, sandbag equivalents fashioned from whatever had been on hand. Behind that improvised barrier, dozens of agents in full tactical gear were working heavy machine guns and energy weapons in coordinated arcs, the physical rounds skipping and sparking off ceramite as the energy beams left visible tracks in the air.
None of it was doing much to the Astartes. The guards' armor was picking up new scratches at a rate that suggested mild inconvenience rather than genuine danger. They had planted themselves in place and were returning fire with the calm patience of people who understood that they were not the ones in trouble.
Nolan pulled the masterwork boltgun from his hip and joined them, working the weapon in short controlled bursts at the gaps in the barrier, keeping Hydra's heads down and their attention fragmented.
Tyberos came through the entrance last.
He took one look at the fire position at the end of the corridor, at the sustained weight of fire coming from behind it, at the dozen or so agents who were sustaining that fire with focused and professional determination despite the fact that none of it was visibly affecting their opponents.
"Tenacious," he said. His voice through the helmet carried something that might have been approval if you knew what you were listening for. "This is the first time today that these heretics have reminded me of something worth fighting."
Then he activated the ancient Terminator's full drive systems, planted both magnetic boots against the floor, and charged.
The corridor was wide, but he filled most of it. The lightning claws, "Hunger" and "Slake," crackled at full power on each massive fist. He crossed the distance in a sustained, building acceleration that the word "charge" barely contained, something closer to the approach of a large vehicle that had been pointed at a wall and told to find out what happened next.
Hydra's fire defense stronghold found out what happened next.