Raditus had no answer.
The servo skull sat in silence inside its crawler housing, the red glow of its eye sockets dimming slightly as the weight of David's words settled over the room. There was nothing to refute, and it knew it. After a moment it simply turned its attention elsewhere, directing the crawler form into a corner where it settled with a low mechanical hum and began reviewing tactical feeds from the Intelligent Control Corps instead. Let David handle the strategic arguments. That had always been David's domain.
When it came to actual combat operations, Raditus knew exactly what it was: a Tech-Priest who happened to fit inside a superb fire support platform. For now, that was enough.
David watched the crawler settle, then turned back to Tony and Thor.
The conversation continued. Coordinates, defensive line timings, flamer advance rates along the quarantine corridor. Thor asked a question about the six-armed Terminator's joint tolerances under rapid movement. Tony pulled up something on his armor's internal display and leaned in to look at it. The room found its working rhythm again.
The situation outside had grown beyond what any single factor could resolve neatly. Nolan had resources that many mid-sized nations could not match, and the forces he could mobilize would grind through conventional opposition without taking serious casualties. Against human organizations, even significant ones, there were options: dispersed tactics, attrition, pressure applied at the right points. Astartes and Stormtroopers operating in mobile units could generate disruption that would take months to counter.
But the enemy was not a human organization.
Nurgle's daemons could not be negotiated with and did not respond to political pressure. And the emergence of Chaos Astartes, the Death Guard's soul-consciousness manifesting from corrupted flesh, changed every calculation. This was not a rapid clearance operation. This was a siege, and the siege would be measured in days and in people.
If the situation continued to deteriorate, the weapons staged at the outer perimeter would eventually be turned inward. Whirlwind missile strikes to sterilize wide sections of terrain. The Firestorm Catalysts Raditus had left in storage at the Twin Islands base. Against Chaos, there was no method of fighting that did not cost something. The only question was what.
That had always been the answer, and it had never been a comfortable one.
The asphalt was cracked and buckled where the plague had worked through it, roots of something organic pushing up through the surface from below. Each magnetic boot strike came down on ground that felt slightly wrong underfoot, the surface giving fractionally where it should have been solid.
Nolan kept moving.
The Warscythe was in his right hand, its blade retracted, the haft resting across one shoulder. Five Lamenters in speed-pattern power armor moved behind him in a loose formation, their heavy boots leaving clear impressions in the softened road surface as they advanced. No one was running. The pace was measured, steady, covering ground without burning what reserves remained.
More than ten hours had passed since Natasha and Hawkeye had been ordered out of the combat zone. Both had reached the point where continued operation would have become a liability: reaction times slipping, the cumulative toll of sustained close-quarters fighting against Nurgle's plague walkers. They had gone without argument, which told him more than a protest would have. Even Doom, who had wanted to stay, had accepted the order and returned to the temporary command center to help David coordinate the follow-on forces and manage the problems accumulating at the rear.
Nolan had used the time.
Without the need to regulate his pace for mortal companions, he and the Lamenters had broken through plague walker concentrations across four separate towns, moving fast and hitting hard. Four flesh foundries, each one a grotesque engine of Chaos production, now burned behind them. Every scrap of intelligence gathered from those sites had been compressed, stored, and transmitted to David.
The assessment was not encouraging.
Looking at the density of Nurgle's plague walkers across the territory they had covered, and the degree to which the environment itself had begun to change, the realistic options for any surviving civilian population were narrowing. Whirlwind missile strikes to sterilize infected zones was likely the kindest outcome available to most of what remained. The Firestorm Catalysts at Twin Islands had been designed for exactly this kind of area denial.
The good news, such as it was, came from one specific observation. The Chaos Astartes production rate from the surviving flesh foundries was measurably slower than the rate at which Nolan was finding and destroying them. Whether that was because Nurgle's processes struggled to adapt to this world's conditions, or because the enemy had simply not anticipated how aggressively Nolan would respond, the result was the same. The production line was not outpacing the destruction.
But that advantage was not going to hold indefinitely.
Lucknow was ahead. The largest population center in Uttar Pradesh, the state capital. If Chaos Astartes had fully manifested anywhere in this territory, they would be there, where the concentration of converted flesh and the depth of the plague's penetration would be greatest.
"All stop. Fifteen minutes."
Nolan brought his magnetic boots to a halt. The Lamenters spread out immediately, moving to the low walls and collapsed structures on either side of the road, checking angles, then dropping to one knee as one. Melee weapons came off backs and into hands to be inspected. The Astartes recovered quickly; it was one of the things that made them what they were.
Nolan scanned the surroundings. No movement that registered as a threat. The silence here was thick in a different way from normal silence, heavier, the absence of insects and birds as much as the absence of human activity.
He raised one hand and tapped the side of his helmet.
"David. I have sent our direction and current coordinates. Pass them directly to the Lamenters' company commanders and get them moving toward our position as fast as the Taurus assault vehicles can carry them."
"Also, give me the situation at the command center."
David's voice came through immediately.
"Received, my Lord. The coordinate data has been distributed. The Lamenters companies already aboard the Taurus assault vehicles are en route and will reach you shortly. Mr. Doom has returned to the command center. He has completed all isolation and decontamination procedures and is now integrated into the coordination team. Niwa of S.P.E.A.R. has been instrumental in the negotiations with local official departments. I expect the result we need on jurisdiction will be reached soon."
"The Intelligent Control Corps has begun construction of the isolation wall under Raditus's direct supervision. Thanks to material support coordinated through Divine S.P.E.A.R. and the local authorities, we have sufficient large container stocks to complete the barrier structure. By my calculations, the full perimeter around Uttar Pradesh can be closed in approximately seventy-two hours."
"The reorganized Wehrmacht Guards, operating alongside the Stormtrooper companies, are advancing inward using Flamers as directed, burning section by section. However, this approach has generated significant resistance from the local official departments. The real footage of Chaos Daemons has been placed in front of their representatives directly. They understand the threat. They still insist that the economic and political consequences of what we are doing will outlast the immediate crisis, and that we are destroying their nation's future."
Nolan let the silence sit for a moment.
Then he said, without particular heat, exactly what needed to be said.
"The future?" A short sound that might have been a laugh. "David, you can tell every single one of them: as long as Chaos pollution is not fully eradicated, there is no future. Not for the South Asian subcontinent. Not for any human being on this planet."
"They want to win this war without paying a price." His voice was flat. "That does not exist. Not even in their dreams."