[The displacement engines of the Thunderhawks fill the hangar with a sustained roar that you feel through the deck plating before you hear it.]
[One by one, the transports lift clear of the Daedalus's flight deck and slide out through the launch bay into the cold dark beyond, accelerating toward Terra's orbital approaches. The Primaris and the Chapter's newer battle-brothers are aboard. Roughly half of the veterans have remained on the flagship. They have their orders: hold, watch, and wait for a signal that may require them to drop onto a target with no time for a second thought.]
[You watch the last Thunderhawk clear the bay, then move to the porthole.]
[Phalanx hangs in the middle distance: the Imperial Fists' great fortress-monastery, older than most of the institutions that claim authority over this system, a drifting citadel of stone and metal that has endured for ten thousand years of continuous war. It is magnificent in the way that things built to outlast empires tend to be, and it is damaged. The scars of the 13th Black Crusade are not subtle. Entire sections of the superstructure are open to the void, their interiors dark, the repair work barely begun. You study the damage for a moment and set the observation aside.]
[Then Terra itself comes fully into view, and you go still.]
[No amount of data in Moloc's memory stream fully prepares you for the reality of it. The Throneworld fills the porthole: a vast, dim sphere wrapped in the haze of its atmospheric processors, brown and grey and ancient beyond any easy reckoning, its surface almost entirely consumed by the largest hive city that humanity has ever built. And at the center of the continent that was once called Asia, rising from the bones of the Himalayas themselves, is the Imperial Palace.]
[Even from orbit, it is unmistakable. Not because it catches the light, though it does, but because everything else on Terra seems to organize itself in relation to it, the way a landscape organizes itself around the highest point. Ten thousand years of building have not diminished it. They have made it something that no longer resembles architecture at all, but rather a geographic feature of the planet itself, as though the mountain range beneath it simply grew upward into something that could receive the prayers of a trillion people and not be crushed by the weight of them.]
[Every year, billions of pilgrims cross the void to walk those approaches, to prostrate themselves before the state temples, to sit in whatever proximity they can manage to the place where the Emperor endures. For most of them, Terra will be the last journey they ever take. They spend their lives preparing for it and arrive already spent, and they consider themselves fortunate.]
[And pressing against the outer walls of that same Palace, in the dark zone you identified from the bridge, the Terran people are dying by degrees, trapped in streets without food or water, caught between the heretics and an administrative apparatus that has decided not to extend itself on their behalf.]
[The data stream in your mind turns this over without needing instruction. Guilliman is gone. The Indomitus Crusade demands everything he has, because nothing less will stop what the Great Rift has unleashed across the breadth of the Imperium. The worlds going dark, the supply lines breaking, the Astronomican flickering at the edge of perception: these are not problems that resolve themselves while a Regent attends to politics on Terra. He made the right choice, and the High Lords know it, and they intend to use it.]
[The Council's conservatives understand that Guilliman cannot govern an empire from the front of a crusade. So they do not act. They let the chaos inside the walls fester, and they calculate that eventually the situation will become untenable enough to force his return, at which point they will be waiting with conditions attached to his continued authority.]
[They are letting the Terran people starve and die to make a political point.]
[You exhale slowly.]
["I wonder whether I should say the Emperor truly knows how to make use of every available tool, or simply that He sees everything that is coming long before the rest of us." ]
[You let your gaze rest on Terra for another moment, then turn away from the porthole.]
[Guilliman may already have plans in motion. His message told you as much. But plans aimed at the High Lords and plans aimed at the people trapped in the outer settlements are not the same plans, and the second kind requires someone who is already here.]
[You think you understand now why the coin landed the way it did.]
[The Thunderhawk drops through Terra's defense network without incident. The clearance communications were processed correctly. Whatever the Imperial Fists think of the Minotaurs' sudden appearance in the Solar System, Garadon's people are professionals, and procedural compliance is a language they understand regardless of political temperature.]
[Lion's Gate Spaceport opens below you: a vast platform of gray stone and prefabricated plascrete, its approaches lined with surveillance arrays and defense batteries in numbers that remind you this is still a wartime installation. Your Thunderhawk settles onto the landing pad and the ramp drops.]
[You step out before the engines have finished cycling down.]
[The scanning beams hit you before your magnetic boots find solid ground. Multiple sources, multiple factions, some of them obvious and some of them not. You walk through them without slowing. The Minotaurs are known here: known for who they serve, known for what they have done in that service, and watched with the particular careful attention that is given to an organization that has proven it will carry out any order it receives. On Terra, that reputation does not make you friends on either side of the current division. Both the reformists and the conservatives consider you a variable they do not fully control.]
[They are correct.]
[A figure detaches from the line of Imperial Fists waiting at the edge of the pad and comes toward you. Stocky, unhurried, gray at the temples. His power armor is yellow Mark X Tacticus plate, the right gauntlet replaced by a massive powered fist that hums with barely contained energy at low cycle. Even before the data stream confirms it, you read him correctly.]
[Tor Garadon. Captain of the Third Company. The longest-serving combat officer in the Imperial Fists Chapter. A man who has been tested by things that broke lesser Astartes and who carries the experience of it in the set of his jaw.]
[ "I am Tor Garadon, Third Company, Imperial Fists. Chapter Commander Moloc."]
[He does not shout the address. He does not need to.]
[ "Your fleet entered the Solar System without prior authorization and without responding to summons. Explain the purpose of your arrival."]
[ "The Minotaurs were engaged against a Death Guard raiding force six weeks ago. Our casualties were significant."]
[You meet his gaze and hold it while you speak.]
[ "Our purpose here is gene-seed replenishment. As for the question of authorization: if your Mountain Array began tracking us before we received any formal communication from the Senatorum Imperialis, then the sequence of events speaks for itself."]
[You reach up and lift your reddish-brown helmet from the clip at your waist, settling it over your head without hurry. Garadon watches you do it with the expression of a man who has been given an answer that is technically correct and tells him nothing he actually wants to know.]
[ "We are here. We are not leaving. Whatever pressure you need to demonstrate on behalf of your garrison command, find another target for it. You will have more than enough demands on your attention before long." You reach back and draw the Black Spear and the Minotaur Shield from the mounts on your power pack, settling both into your hands.]
[The movement is deliberate. It is not a threat precisely, but it is a reminder: you are armed, and you have not been asked to disarm, and everyone on this landing pad understands what that means.]
[The Astartes squads flanking both of you adjust their weight almost simultaneously. You do not look at them.]
[Garadon's powered gauntlet emits a brief grinding pulse as his right hand moves fractionally. He stops it.]
[Several seconds pass. Then:]
[ "Stand down. Let the Minotaurs through." He does not look at his soldiers as he gives the order. He is still looking at you. "The Chapter is granted access to the Spaceport."]
[ "Thank you for your cooperation, Captain."]
[You take a step toward him and extend your left hand, the Minotaur Shield still buckled to the forearm. It is an unusual angle for a handshake, made slightly awkward by the shield's mass. Garadon looks at the offered hand for a moment with an expression that suggests he is calculating something, then reaches across with his own left hand.]
[Your gauntlets close around each other with a dull clang of ceramite on ceramite.]
[When you release the grip, a corner of folded parchment, small enough to be missed in a casual search, sits between two of Garadon's armored fingers. His expression does not change, but his eyes drop to his hand for a fraction of a second before returning to your visor.]
[He is a professional. He does not ask you what it is in front of both companies of soldiers. He closes his fist and steps back.]
[ "We will meet again soon, Captain Garadon."]
[You walk past him without waiting for a reply, the Primaris forming up behind you as you move toward the Spaceport's interior, and Holy Terra opens up ahead.]