Nolan had a reasonable sense of what was going on with Tony.
He had watched him during the flight back, the particular quality of silence that settled over a person after they had witnessed something they had helped create and were now quietly working through what that meant.
The firestorm catalyst was Tony's engineering. Standing above Hydra Island while it burned had done something to him, not regret exactly, not doubt about whether it had been the right call, but the specific weight that came from being the person who built the thing rather than simply the person who used it. The slums were still in him somewhere too. One large fire was survivable. Two in the same stretch of months sat differently.
Or possibly it was simpler than that: a succession of large-scale engagements in a short period, and a mind that was sharp enough to extrapolate forward, running the calculation of what it would mean if something equivalent came to New York.
Either way, Tony was a member of the Inquisition. He had made his commitments. The remaining Hydra faction, Pierce's operation in America, was inside his operational capacity, and if it turned out not to be, Nolan would receive a communication and they would solve it together in the straightforward way they solved most things. He did not spend energy worrying about it.
A team of Scyllax Guardian-automata was left on Hydra Island with instructions and enough supplies to hold it until the initial assessment and renovation work could begin. The island's position was inconvenient but its infrastructure, what the fire had not consumed, was extensive. Renamed and repurposed, it would serve well as a Pacific sub-base. The name would need to change. That decision could wait.
Tony and Thor said their goodbyes at the Latveria base and departed in their respective directions. Doom, arriving back from Sokovia with the particular look of a man who had managed a great deal of complicated business in a short time, received his promised week of leave from Nolan without ceremony before the group headed back north.
The Thunderhawks carried them home through clear sky, the Antarctic cold arriving against the hull in the final approach, and the Twin Islands base came up white and stark below them in the thin light.
It was only after they had landed and the immediate post-operation logistics had been absorbed by Procellas and the support teams that Nolan turned his attention to the Carcharodons.
Tyberos and his guards had just under a week remaining before the Warp portal back to the Ghoul Stars would open. David began assembling the supply packages that would travel back with them: ammunition, provisions, the accumulated stockpile that had been part of the original agreement and would continue to be. The logistics were straightforward. The conversation Nolan wanted to have was less so.
He found a moment when the base had quieted to its working rhythm and asked Tyberos, carefully, whether the Chapter Master would be willing to extend the operational relationship. Not permanently, not a commitment of forces, but a standing arrangement: when Nolan needed them and the timing aligned with the Carcharodons' own operations, they would come.
Tyberos considered this for a moment in the particular way he considered things, without visible deliberation, the answer apparently forming in silence rather than through any process Nolan could follow.
What they had done together, Tyberos said, had been a warm-up. If the Primarch needed them, they would come.
Nolan accepted this without making it more than it was. Then, because the question had been sitting in him since Tyberos first arrived, he told the Chapter Master plainly: his responsibilities, through the Pharos Lighthouse and the Emperor's blessing, extended to support operations across different Imperial battlefields at different times. The full picture, enough of it to be honest.
Tyberos received this without obvious surprise. He was quiet for a moment, and then he asked, with something careful in the phrasing that was unusual from him, whether Nolan had ever encountered the Primarch Corvus Corax.
Nolan told him the truth without hesitation. He had fought alongside Corax. He had seen both the Loyalist and Traitor Primarchs on multiple occasions, in circumstances that were difficult to explain briefly and that he would explain at length if Tyberos wanted to hear it.
Tyberos did not ask for more than that. But something in the angle of his head shifted, and Nolan filed it away.
The six-armed Terminator was fully reassembled and sealed. Tyberos's power armour had been serviced by the foundry teams on Second Son Island. The Astartes guards had cycled through overhaul alongside their Chapter Master, and they moved with the loose, recovered confidence of combatants who had been repaired properly and knew it.
Everyone knelt in the underground rotunda before the Emperor's statue. The prayer was brief and silent. Then Nolan opened the Golden Throne interface and selected a support mission from the available list: a Rogue Trader fleet somewhere in the Imperium, reporting Chaos Astartes contact, the success probability sitting at just above thirty percent.
The space crack opened, expanded, and they stepped through.
Ten hours passed in the rotunda by Twin Islands time.
When the crack opened again, the first thing through it was the six-armed Terminator, marked across every surface with bolt impacts, deep scoring on two of the servo arms, ceramite chipped and cracked in the pattern of sustained close-quarters combat. Tyberos followed, his ancient armour carrying its own damage record. The Astartes guards came last, battered and functional.
The mission had taken half a month in Warhammer time. A Rogue Trader fleet, hijacked by a Chaos Astartes warband that had refused to identify itself throughout the entire engagement. Forty of them, heavily modified, skilled in long-range suppression, patient and efficient in a way that pointed clearly at their lineage: Iron Warriors by their methods, most likely stragglers from a warband rather than a disciplined force, but dangerous in the specific way that remnants of Perturabo's training always were. Killing efficiency as philosophy. No wasted movement, no excess. They had held the fleet for the full duration, and breaking them had cost time and effort that a lesser force would not have survived.
The Throne Coin appeared in Nolan's palm with its familiar weight and golden surface. He held it up briefly so Tyberos could see it through his eyepiece.
"The Emperor's reward," he said. "For the mission."
Tyberos looked at it without particular covetousness. It was the Primarch's gift. That boundary was clear to him.
They went up to Second Son Island and the foundry teams absorbed the damaged armour immediately, servo-robots moving in around the Terminator with assessment tools and replacement ceramite. Nolan left them to it and went to repair and rest with the others.
In the remaining days, Tyberos raised one more point. If Nolan needed more Throne Coins in future, the Carcharodons would be willing to return and assist with further support operations.
Nolan thought about it honestly.
"It's not that I wouldn't want the help," he said. "The remaining missions are harder than what we just did. Significantly harder. Even bringing the full Intelligent Control Corps, the survival probability is low. And the Carcharodons are Corax's descendants, not my Chapter. I'm not going to spend your brothers' lives to fund my own progression."
Tyberos heard this and said nothing, which was its own kind of response.
The offer was declined, and the subject was closed, and there was no friction in the closing of it.
The days remaining to the Carcharodons settled into something almost restful by the standards of the base. Tyberos and his guards were not given to extended leisure, but they found the Gang Dogs' training grounds, and what followed was the kind of sparring session that left every Gang Dog who witnessed it reconsidering their understanding of the word "intense." None of them were seriously hurt. All of them were significantly impressed.
Nolan and Tyberos used those remaining days to work through the practical shape of the ongoing relationship: communication protocols through the Diplomacy system, what a request for support would look like and how much lead time was realistic, what the Carcharodons would need from the supply arrangement to keep it sustainable on their end.
The details were unglamorous and necessary, and by the time they were finished both sides understood what the alliance actually was, which was a better foundation than most alliances started on.
The day the portal was scheduled to open arrived in the way days do, without announcement.
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