Nobody in the plaza stopped what they were doing.
The ten-meter mechanical body was loud, and the pixel face on its chest screen was furious, and none of it changed the immediate math for anyone present. Nolan kept moving between the remaining tanks, the Warscythe tracing green arcs through armour plate and engine housing alike. The Astartes guards noted the new arrival, categorised it, and continued dismantling whatever was immediately in front of them. Tyberos, for his part, had not yet finished with the last cluster of octopus robots.
Nolan had expected something like this. Hydra's doctrine, insofar as it had one beyond the slogan, was conservative and hierarchical. Important bases had important people in them. Important people did not trust their important bases to machines and soldiers alone. It was as reliable a constant as gravity, and about as interesting.
The guards who had run their bolters dry reached over their shoulders without looking and pulled chainswords and chainaxes from the backs of their power packs. The weapons bit the air with that familiar hungry sound, and the guards resumed their work.
As for the Carcharodons' general indifference to a ten-meter robot announcing itself at volume: the explanation was twofold, and simple. First, Astartes were not, as a rule, easily startled, and the Carcharodons in particular had spent enough decades in the void hunting things that made ten-meter robots look like a minor scheduling conflict. Second, and more practically, they could not understand a word Arnim Zola was saying. Nolan communicated with Tyberos in the Imperium's common tongue with help of the system. Whatever language the pixel face was screaming in had never been part of the equation.
Tyberos tore the last robot in half at the midsection, dropped both pieces, and turned.
He crossed the plaza in a charge that built from a standing start to something that a locomotive might envy, the ancient Terminator's drive systems at full extension, and hit Zola's mechanical body at the knee joints with both lightning claws simultaneously. Metal fragments went wide in every direction. The mechanical body staggered, swayed, and compensated by extending both fists downward on telescoping struts, slamming them into the floor to arrest the fall. The impact cracked the concrete in a rough circle around each fist and left twin craters several centimetres deep.
The guards arrived from four angles. Chainswords and chainaxes found the gaps in the lower body's armour, working the joints the way experienced hands work a problem they have seen before, not elegantly, but effectively.
Zola's body responded by raising both fists overhead and spreading the fingers wide. Launch mechanisms in each fingertip cycled open and began firing: large-calibre solid rounds in continuous bursts, sweeping downward across Tyberos and the surrounding guards in overlapping arcs. The impacts produced shallow craters in the ceramite shells, sent fragments skipping across the floor, and pushed each target back by fractions of a step.
None of them retreated. They increased the intensity of their attack on the lower joints.
The chainsaw teeth were loud against metal, that specific grinding shriek of fast-moving teeth on resistant material. Tyberos worked both lightning claws in tight, focused strokes at the structural connections where the legs met the pelvis assembly, not sweeping, not showy, just finding the load-bearing members and cutting them. When the last structural connection gave way, both mechanical legs detached simultaneously, and the body came down hard, the chest screen taking the impact and cracking along one edge, the pixel face flickering before it restabilised.
"A bunch of damn bugs!" Zola's voice through the damaged audio system had taken on a slightly distorted quality. "Did you think destroying this body would win the battle? Wishful thinking! I am Arnim Zola, and I am immortal! I have completed the perfect evolution beyond the limits of flesh! I have an endless number of bodies waiting!"
The pixel face, even fractured and flickering, managed to convey considerable self-satisfaction.
"Cut off one head and two will grow back! Hail Hydra!"
Nolan had finished with the last tank. He came through the wreckage at a run, the Warscythe trailing its green light behind him, passing through the gap between Tyberos and the fallen body's torso. His magnetic boots hit the broken lower body and he used it as a launch platform, both legs driving hard, and he went up.
At the apex of the jump, the Warscythe's blade came down through the center of the cracked chest screen. The liquid crystal panel shattered outward in a ring of fragments, and the green pixel face disappeared in a wash of static and broken light.
From somewhere inside the body, the audio system activated on a backup channel.
"Haha! Come on! Come on, my Hydra mechanical citizens! Tear these insects to pieces! Leave no one alive!"
The voice was distorted now, compressed and buzzing through damaged hardware, but the instruction it carried was clear enough. From the far edges of the plaza, new shapes were appearing: five-meter humanoid frames, dozens of them, emerging from access corridors in groups, accompanied by a fresh wave of octopus robots flowing around their feet. The replacement bodies had arrived.
Nolan landed. He reached into the storage compartment at the rear of his power pack, pulled out a melta bomb, primed it with one hand, and placed it against the torso of the fallen body at his feet.
"Back."
He drove the power armour hard in reverse. The Carcharodons moved with him without needing to be told twice, the guards pulling away from the body in a fast outward spread, Tyberos stepping back with the unhurried efficiency of someone who has calculated the blast radius and is confident in their positioning.
The melta bomb detonated.
The temperature it produced was not an explosion in the conventional sense so much as a localised conversion of solid matter into liquid matter, very quickly. Zola's fallen mechanical body became a spreading pool of glowing metal that ran into the cracks in the plaza floor and began to cool in rivulets. The light from the detonation lit the entire underground space from wall to wall, bright enough to wash out the overhead strips entirely for a full second before fading.
Tyberos rolled his shoulders inside the Terminator and raised both lightning claws. Around him, the guards reformed, chainswords and chainaxes running, facing the incoming wave of replacement bodies and robots. He gestured with one claw toward the approaching forms, a simple and unambiguous indication of direction and intent, and took his position at the point of the formation.
Nolan was about to move up alongside him when something came through his comm that stopped him.
He stood still for a moment, processing what David had just said. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Chapter Master Tyberos." His voice was calm and carried easily over the sound of the incoming mechanical wave. "We don't need to spend any more energy on these machines."
Tyberos paused without turning.
"David has broken through the base's network defenses. He has found this man's critical weakness." Nolan let a small beat of quiet settle before he finished the sentence. "It's time for the Man of Iron to take the field."