Piece by piece, the modified vibranium power armor settled back onto Nolan's frame, each section guided into place by the servo arms of the dressing station with the low hum of electro-fiber bundles engaging. When the last seals locked, he stepped off the platform and turned to look at the assembled force waiting for him in the chamber beyond.
Two companies of Lamenters. Three companies of Stormtroopers. Speed-type power armor and auxiliary power armor respectively, every warrior fully armed and standing in ordered ranks.
David stepped forward with a cryogenic storage box held in both metal hands. He opened it without ceremony.
Inside, nestled in their individual compartments, were vials of the Emperor's blood: each one approximately the size of a finger, sealed in reinforced glass, the contents a deep gold that caught the light and held it.
The First Company Commander of the Lamenters stepped forward from the front rank and came to a halt with a slight bow in the direction of Nolan and David. He reached out and accepted the first vial with both hands.
Then, as one, the entire assembled force dropped to their knees.
The sound of several hundred armored warriors going to one knee simultaneously was not subtle.
"Astartes! What is your duty!"
"To dedicate ourselves to the Emperor's will!"
"Astartes! What is the Emperor's will!"
"To fight unto death!"
"Astartes! What is death!"
"Death is our duty!"
The First Company Commander moved down the first rank, passing the vials one by one. Behind him, the four Chaplains of the two Lamenters companies moved in parallel, pressing the purity seals they had prepared onto the shoulder armor of each warrior as the Emperor's blood was received. The ritual moved through the ranks in sequence, the responses from the assembled warriors growing louder and more certain with each repetition, until the chamber walls carried the sound back from every direction at once.
The Stormtroopers were not Astartes. They would not become Astartes within any timeline anyone in this room would live to see. But they received the vials and the seals alongside the Lamenters, and they roared the responses without hesitation, and when Nolan looked at them, he did not see mortals performing a ritual that was not theirs. He saw warriors who understood that the next thing coming was not going to ask them for their gene-sequence before it killed them.
The Chaos blessing was arriving. Whatever form it took, everyone standing in this room was going to be part of the answer to it. The Emperor's blood was the preparation they could receive. They received it.
The underground passage to the circular plaza widened as Nolan advanced, the walls stepping back in measured intervals as he moved deeper into the base.
The plaza itself had changed since the early days. David had been thorough. The space was now five kilometers across and a kilometer from floor to ceiling, the original dimensions expanded through months of careful excavation by servo robots working around the clock. The floor and surrounding walls looked, at a casual glance, like plain metal construction. They were not. Melta bomb arrays and twin automated turrets capable of firing both laser beams and solid rounds were built into the structure at intervals, dormant but live. The Intelligent Control Corps complement stationed here maintained a quiet, constant readiness.
At the center of the plaza stood the Emperor's statue, unchanged, its face turned slightly upward. Before it, the Pharos Lighthouse rose from its blackstone foundations: dark and faceted and entirely indifferent to everything that had been built around it.
Nolan walked to the base of the statue and knelt on one knee on the cold floor.
He prayed without words for a moment, eyes lowered. When he raised his head, the statue's expression was what it always was.
He stood. Took a breath. Opened the simulator.
The Chaos sacrifice pages appeared in sequence, and Nolan turned his attention to the Holy Numbers with the particular focus of someone who had been watching these numbers for a very long time and was now watching them with the awareness that the end of a countdown was close.
Slaanesh's Holy Number was the lowest. Six remaining. Nearly at zero.
He was calculating probabilities, locations, scope of effect, when the pages changed.
All four of them, simultaneously.
The change was not gradual. One moment the pages were the static display he had become familiar with. The next, they were alive in a way that had no clean description.
Tzeentch's page resolved into a deep blue crystalline pattern that shifted and rotated as he watched: a maze-like structure that would, he suspected, be genuinely disorienting if he held his attention on it for more than a few seconds. He did not hold his attention on it.
Khorne's page became brass and blood: a surface covered in the crests and skulls of countless species, races and creatures and things he could not immediately identify, inlaid into a dark metal field that pulsed faintly with something that moved through it the way rage moves through a person before it becomes action.
Nurgle's page bloomed. Flowers and vines spread across its surface with the speed of stop-motion film, lush and colorful and, if he looked closely, rooted in something that was not soil: wet and dark and full of the shapes of things that had once been other things.
Slaanesh's page became something that had the texture of living skin. It moved with a constant slight tremor, and every movement revealed fragments of figures, faces, bodies, expressions that had lost the ability to care what they revealed.
Nolan took a measured breath and began marshaling his willpower against the low persistent pressure each page was exerting on his peripheral attention.
Then the Golden Throne page appeared.
It did not rise from below or descend from above. It simply arrived, occupying the space at the center of the four Chaos pages with the decisive calm of something that had decided the location was appropriate and had no interest in being questioned about it.
What happened next was difficult to describe in terms that assumed rational actors.
Tzeentch's crystalline page drifted toward Khorne's brass-and-blood surface and appeared to conduct a negotiation. The content of this negotiation was not legible to Nolan. What he observed were the results: Khorne's page, which had been trembling with the accumulated rage of something counting down toward a specific target, redirected. It struck Slaanesh's page with considerable force. The collision was visible even through the simulator's abstracted representation.
Both Holy Numbers reset to their maximum simultaneously and locked.
Nolan frowned at this.
Before he had fully processed it, Tzeentch's own Holy Number began dropping. The pace was not the gradual tick he had observed before. It was accelerating, dropping faster with each passing moment, approaching zero at a rate that suggested minutes rather than days.
The Golden Throne page moved again.
Khorne and Slaanesh, their own countdowns now frozen and stable, were redirected toward Tzeentch's page with a precision that was either the Emperor's active will or something so far beyond coincidence that the distinction no longer mattered. Both struck Tzeentch simultaneously.
Tzeentch's Holy Number reset to maximum and locked.
Three pages now held stable at their peaks, their countdowns frozen.
Only Nurgle's page continued to move. The flowers bloomed faster. The vines spread and tangled. The Holy Number ticked downward with the unhurried certainty of something that had not been persuaded to stop and had not been struck into stillness. It reached the end of its count.
The blessing mode resolved. The selection locked.
Group.
Nolan stared at the simulator for a moment with his jaw set.
"Emperor." He said it quietly in the empty plaza, to the statue above him and to whatever was behind the statue. "I need to ask whether this was done for my benefit or yours, because from where I am standing, the distinction is not immediately clear."
He did not receive an answer.
He had not expected one. He also had not expected to be in this position: the three Chaos Gods whose blessings presented the most manageable problems had been neutralized and locked by what appeared to be direct divine intervention, leaving the one God whose blessing was specifically the most difficult to handle.
He was not afraid of Nurgle's blessing. He had faced worse.
But Nurgle was particular. Nurgle's interest was in things that spread, in things that persisted, in infections that could survive being handled incorrectly and then become much harder to handle afterward. Individual scope would have been containable with certainty. Group scope introduced variables.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
Then he opened them and began planning.