Thor had barely finished speaking when the lightning claw came down on his shoulder.
It landed with a sound like a structural failure, not a tap, not a gesture of greeting in any recognisable sense, but the full measured weight of a gauntlet that could tear tank armour being placed on a shoulder that was not a tank.
The two rows of blade teeth, each one roughly the size of a mortal's closed fist, stopped approximately one centimetre from Thor's face. Tyberos had not bothered to moderate the force of it. The concrete beneath Thor's boots cracked in a rough ring outward from each foot, and Thor, God of Thunder, Prince of Asgard, descended from a lineage of beings who had existed since before most of the things currently alive on Earth had been conceived of, sank visibly into the ground by what appeared to be about an inch.
Tyberos's helmet eyepieces moved from Thor's face to Nolan's, and he spoke in the common tongue of the Imperium.
"I cannot understand his language. But if this psyker can withstand a standard greeting without breaking, he will be of genuine use to the Primarch. His resilience is adequate."
Nolan had already driven the power armour forward. He extracted Thor from Tyberos's proximity with the practised ease of someone managing a situation that had gone exactly as expected, and positioned himself between the two of them.
"Thor, the Chapter Master says you are remarkably strong and that he considers you a valuable ally."
Thor, who was maintaining a smile of the kind that requires active muscular effort, waited until there was sufficient distance between himself and Tyberos before he exhaled.
"Brother Nolan." His voice was very quiet and very controlled. "Where did you find that man. Please tell me there is a human being somewhere inside that armour, because my shoulder believes it was just struck by a Frost Giant."
"He is completely human, I can confirm it without reservation. His physique is simply somewhat above average for his kind." Nolan kept his expression neutral. "You will adjust to him."
Tyberos, unprompted, placed one enormous hand briefly on Thor's other shoulder as he passed, which caused Thor's smile to freeze at a new angle. Then the Chapter Master moved on, and Thor subtly increased the distance between himself and his new acquaintance by several additional steps.
The hand that had landed on his shoulder was going to be sore for a while. He was not going to say that out loud.
The sound of the Iron Legion's arrival preceded it: thruster wash cutting the air from multiple directions simultaneously, and underneath that, briefly audible and then lost again, the pulse of rock music from whatever Tony was listening to inside his helmet on the approach. Thirty-odd suits of varying dimensions and configurations came down out of the sky in a loose formation and settled onto the platform surface with the combined impact of a moderately serious structural test.
Tony's faceplate opened the moment he touched down.
"Did anyone miss me?" He looked at Nolan first, then found Thor. "And you, specifically. You left without me. I had thirty-one suits in formation and you looked at them, decided you were bored, and flew away. That is genuinely disloyal behaviour."
Thor had recovered enough to look elsewhere with great interest at something that was not Tony.
Nolan stepped in, placed himself between them as a matter of efficiency, and began introducing Tyberos and the guards. Tony's eyes moved up, then further up, taking in the Chapter Master's full dimensions with the focused attention of an engineer encountering a load-bearing problem he had not previously considered. Tyberos, apparently having concluded that one friendly greeting was sufficient for the day, simply moved his helmet in Tony's direction and let that serve as acknowledgement.
Tony, wisely, accepted it.
The base's main conference room had been cleared and prepared. Overhead lighting, operational maps spread across the central table, the steady background noise of the defence forces and servo-robots moving through the corridors outside. It had the functional quality of a space that had been built for exactly this kind of purpose, which was, in fact, what it had been built for.
Doom arrived in silver power armour with a dark green cape across his shoulders, which was an aesthetic choice that somehow worked despite all reasonable expectations. David came in alongside him, the blue light in its eyes steady. Tony had already counted heads twice and was visually cataloguing the room's occupants with the expression of someone recalculating a threat assessment he thought he had already completed.
"I am going to need you to explain some of this at some point," he said to Nolan quietly, indicating the room in general with a small gesture.
Nolan ignored this and stood.
David provided the visual support, projecting maps and imagery from eye-level, translating simultaneously into the Imperium's common tongue for Tyberos and the guards. The operational picture assembled itself clearly: Baron Strucker, commanding Hydra's strongest faction by paper metrics, operating out of a primary base in Sokovia with eleven secondary installations distributed across the European continent. Ground armour, air capability, trained personnel in volume. Not a trivial target, and not one that could be approached as a single-point problem.
The plan Nolan laid out addressed that directly. High-capability units would take the secondary installations in parallel, clearing the distributed support structure before the combined force converged on Sokovia. Four medium bases: Nolan, Tyberos, Doom, Tony. Seven smaller installations: the five Astartes guards and Thor, who could cover ground faster than any ground unit. Thor and Tony, both capable of independent flight, would serve as the flexible reserve, available to reinforce any assault that ran into complications after completing their assigned targets.
David would manage coordination from the base, maintaining communication between all teams and suppressing any outgoing intelligence from the engagement zones.
Silence in the room when Nolan finished. People looking at the maps, running the geometry of it in their heads.
"One question." Tony's voice was measured and careful. "Survivors. The Hydra bases will have personnel beyond the committed fanatics. There may be people in those facilities who are there under varying degrees of choice. Are we establishing any policy on that?"
He looked around the table, then back at Nolan.
Nolan met his eyes.
"Tony. Do you remember the conversation the three of us had when we decided to form the Inquisition? The specific reason we agreed it needed to exist?" He kept his voice even. "It was because certain decisions need to be made that others will not make. Because the cost of half-measures, in wars against organisations like this one, is paid later and paid by people who had no part in choosing it."
He let that sit for a moment.
"Hydra does not have bystanders in its bases. It has members, assets, and prisoners. Prisoners we extract. Everyone else is Hydra. For those who have chosen to serve an organisation that has spent decades betraying humanity..." He shook his head once, slowly. "We remove them completely. That is what it means to root something out."
The room was quiet again, a different quality of quiet than before.
Nobody objected.