Ninety-six hours in.
A ceramite fist came down on the metal table and left a purple palm print in the smeared Tyranid blood. The wolf's gray hair had come loose from whatever had been holding it, and sweat had plastered it to the sides of his face and neck. He was looking at Nolan with the particular expression of someone who had been fighting for four days without stopping and had arrived at a number they did not like.
"The Gryphonne Titan Legion has taken catastrophic losses. Twenty-two of the original seventy-two Titans are still operational." He said it without softening it. "House Winter has fewer than fifty Knight suits left in the field. House Cadmus has around a hundred that can still deploy. The Skitarii Vanguard that started this battle at over a million strong is nearly gone. The Rangers are below a hundred thousand." He spread his hands. "When the Rangers are finished, we are defending with whatever is left of the Guard and a few thousand Kastellan Robots."
He held Nolan's gaze.
"If you have something left that you have not tried yet, now would be the time."
Nolan's expression had settled into something that was not calm but had the same surface quality as calm. He reached up and wiped a few drops of purple blood off his face with his vibranium palm. He did not look away from the wolf.
"The fighters in the line are being supplemented," he said. "I issued the order fourteen hours ago. The Ecclesiarchy priests are recruiting volunteers from the major hives. Millions of them. They will be issued lasguns and led to the battlefield by the priests."
The table left the floor.
The wolf hit it from below with enough force to send it across the command center, and then he was on his feet, and the snow-white fangs were fully visible.
"Are you completely out of your mind?" His voice had gone beyond volume into something colder. "Untrained civilians on that battlefield. What do you think they accomplish out there other than providing the swarm with additional biomass? That is not a defense. That is feeding the problem."
"Our duty is to protect mortals. Not send them to die for nothing."
"Then you tell me what to do."
Nolan stood up. His voice had dropped rather than risen, each word coming out separate and deliberate.
"The armored vehicles still running require operators who know how to run them. Should we hand that to people who have never seen the inside of a tank? The moment the heavy vehicles stop rotating and the missile launchers go cold, the swarm walks through the gaps we have been maintaining at enormous cost. They walk through our positions. They walk through the industrial hive. And the mortals you are trying to protect die anyway, except they die in their homes instead of with a weapon in their hands."
He took one step forward.
"What are we fighting? Not a Chaos warband I can negotiate with, or outmaneuver, or find a way around. Not an enemy that has political objectives I can complicate. The Tyranids have one objective and it is not negotiable. They will keep coming until either the planet is consumed or they decide the cost is not worth it."
His voice dropped further.
"Wolf cub. Listen to me. We are not holding on until we win. We have been delaying the arrival of failure since hour one, and buying as much time as we can in the process. Do not confuse those two things."
The command center had gone quiet. The Tech-Priests and Magi who had been working their stations had stilled. None of them were looking directly at the two figures, but none of them had gone back to their work.
The wolf stood with his fists at his sides. His breathing was controlled and even and the expression on his face was that of someone absorbing a truth they already knew and had not wanted to hear stated plainly.
"I know you're right." He said it without the anger in it now. "I know the limit we have reached. I cannot make myself accept it easily."
He exhaled.
"I am not willing to give up. I would rather see the swarm pay more before the end."
Nolan looked at him for a moment. Then he glanced around the command center at the assembled Mechanicus personnel. They understood what that glance meant and returned their attention to their stations.
Nolan dropped his voice.
"Even if the situation is genuinely unrecoverable, there is one option remaining." He paused. "Cypher's proposal to burn the entire planet's atmosphere was sound in principle. We do not have the promethium stockpile to execute it at the scale he envisioned, and Gryphonne IV's structure limits what is possible with what we have."
He let that sit for exactly one beat.
"But the Mechanicus records contain something else. According to what I pulled from their archives, this forge world has Death Strike missiles stored in sealed arsenals deep beneath the primary foundry complexes. Nuclear warheads. They have always been there."
The wolf looked at him.
"Which means," Nolan continued, "that even if Gryphonne IV falls, we can ensure that what the swarm consumes here comes with a price significant enough for the Hive Mind to remember."
The command center was absolutely silent.
Then, one by one, the Tech-Priests and Archmagos around the room stopped what they were doing and turned. They looked at Nolan. Several of them went to one knee. The rest followed.
"My lord Primarch." The voices came from different places in the room, some with the mechanical layering of augmented larynxes, some without. "We would rather destroy this forge world with our own hands than see it consumed and added to the hive fleet's mass. Give us more time, and we will rebuild Gryphonne IV's capacity on another world. Give us the order."
Nolan looked at the wolf.
The wolf's expression had gone solemn. He met the look and held it, and some of the tension in his frame resolved into something harder and quieter.
Nolan opened his eyes and gave the order.
"Notify all units to prepare for the launch of every available Death Strike missile. Gryphonne IV will leave the Hive Mind with a lesson it will not recover from quickly."
The orders went out in pieces rather than all at once.
The Guard and the millions of civilian volunteers with their lasguns advanced. The armored formations rolled back into the engagement, throwing themselves at the Tyranid tide in a continuous offensive that the swarm would read as desperation and answer accordingly. The Warlord and Warhound-class Titans still operational opened sustained long-range bombardment on the bio-titan units and began pulling back from their forward positions in increments that looked, from the swarm's perspective, like a gradual withdrawal under pressure. The nine remaining Reaver-class engines moved with the advance, their presence anchoring the forward line in a posture that committed them entirely.
The command level did not brief the forward troops on what was coming. They could not. Every soldier and civilian in that advance needed to hold the swarm's attention completely, and they needed to hold it without knowing why, because the ones who knew might flinch at the wrong moment.
The Knight suits of House Winter and House Cadmus, their combined numbers down to roughly a hundred, received orders for temporary repair and maintenance assessment and filtered back from the line.
Then the Death Strike missiles rose.
From the sealed arsenals beneath the foundries, they came up through launch apertures that had not been opened in this generation's memory, climbing on their drives in numbers that darkened the sky above Gryphonne IV. Hundreds of them, then more, the trails crossing and recrossing as the salvos overlapped.
The Hive Mind sensed it. The pattern of the swarm's behavior changed in the seconds before impact, a coordinated reorientation that only something with simultaneous awareness of millions of organisms could execute. It tried to pull the swarm back from the kill zone.
The mortals and the armored columns holding the forward line did not let it.
The brief and brilliant lights came one after another across the whole surface of Gryphonne IV. Then the shock waves, and then the fires behind the shock waves, rolling across everything that the fires could reach.
Every inch of land on the forge world was covered.
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