"Fear?" The wolf brought his ceramite fist down on the map table hard enough that the display surface cracked along one edge. "That word does not exist anywhere in me."
He leaned forward over the table.
"Fine. I will go mad alongside you if that is what this is. But tell me what you are actually planning. Are you genuinely going to lead Guard soldiers into a hive fleet's landing zone and call it a strategy?"
Nolan stood up slowly from behind the table.
He raised one hand and snapped his fingers, a quiet, precise sound in the enclosed space. The Ten Rings disengaged from their orbits around his forearms instantly, rising and forming a loose ring above his power pack. A purple energy halo condensed in their wake, hovering there with the particular quality of light that had no mundane source.
"You should read more." Nolan's voice was patient in the specific way that patience sounds when it has already decided not to be argued with. "This is a forge world, yes. Which means that beyond the Mechanicus and their Skitarii, what does Gryphonne IV actually contain?" He did not wait for the answer. "Industrial hives. Millions of civilian workers. And those workers have the strongest faith in the Imperium of anything on this planet, precisely because the Mechanicus has been suppressing their religion for centuries."
He looked at the wolf steadily.
"For a hive worker who has prayed to the Emperor every day of their life and never once seen an answer, a Primarch appearing in their city is not a military asset. It is the Emperor himself sending a response. That kind of loyalty does not need to be commanded. It needs to be pointed at something."
He paused for one beat.
"And do you think Cypher was preparing to flee before? He has been meeting with the Ecclesiarchy priests on Gryphonne IV since we arrived. The Mechanicus has suppressed the faith here for as long as the forge world has existed, but it has not eliminated it. The Ecclesiarchy still has reach into every hive, through every level of the civilian population."
"So." He looked at both of them in turn. "Once we hold command authority over the Guard, the soldiers will answer to me directly. And once the Ecclesiarchy and the civilian population are unified under the same authority, who do you think controls this forge world? Us, or a council of Tech-Priests who have difficulty processing any information that does not arrive in binary?"
The wolf stared at him. Then he turned his head toward Cypher.
"You planned this together."
Cypher spread his hands with an expression of mild exasperation.
"We are variants of the same person operating across different timelines with different information. If both of us arrived at the same conclusion independently without discussing it, that tells you something about how obvious the conclusion was. Did Fenrisian hypno-conditioning consume the relevant parts of your cognition, or has Khorne been eating your strategic thinking along with everything else?"
The wolf's jaw worked for a moment.
"Fine," he said. "Tell me who to hit and I will hit them."
He blinked twice, slowly, and the cyan wolf-eyes moved from one to the other with something that was not quite defeat but was adjacent to it. He had made his assessment and updated it. The argument was over.
They moved quickly after that.
Cypher took the Mechanicus. He needed to work through the senior Tech-Priests to unlock Gryphonne IV's full supply and manufacturing capacity, drawing on whatever combination of persuasion and authority would produce compliance fastest. He was also carrying a secondary directive that he and Nolan had not needed to speak aloud to agree on: if the command-level Magi refused to cooperate when cooperation became critical, they would need to be removed. It was a significant risk before the hive fleet arrived. Set against the lives of the forge world's billions of inhabitants, it was the smaller of two risks.
Nolan led the wolf to the Astra Militarum garrison.
They found the first soldiers in the outer assembly yard, and Nolan activated the wings.
The black and red pinions unfolded from the power pack in a slow spread that caught every eye in the yard before anyone had processed what they were seeing. The Ten Rings' purple halo burned above him, and the totality of it, the scale of him, the light, the unmistakable geometry of what a Primarch looked like when he chose to be visible, hit the assembled Guardsmen the way a wave hits a shore.
They went to one knee. Not in sequence, not by order. All at once, as a single body, the way people respond to something that bypasses the part of the mind that deliberates.
"The Primarch."
"Emperor protect us, it's an angel."
The voices overlapped and built on each other across the yard in a rising current of noise that was too raw to be organized but too unanimous to be anything other than real.
The Tech-Priests who had followed from the temple understood what was happening within seconds, and their calculation of what it meant for their authority on this forge world arrived a few seconds after that. Two of them began to turn.
The wolf stepped into their path. The C'tan phase sword came up in one hand, its green light running along the blade with the patient luminosity of a weapon that had never needed to hurry.
He was smiling.
"The Primarch has instructed you to remain at the garrison and assist with heavy vehicle maintenance." He looked at each of them in turn. "One of your colleagues was generous enough to give me this armor. I have not forgotten that. Cooperate fully and I will personally guarantee your safety."
The Tech-Priests looked at each other through their optical arrays.
"We will obey the Primarch's orders," the senior one said.
The command structure assembled within the hour. Ten regiment commanders, standing in a line before Nolan in the garrison's central hall: four armored regiment commanders, three mechanized infantry, two heavy infantry, one artillery. Their reports were precise. The artillery regiment was the smallest, at approximately three thousand personnel. The remaining nine regiments each exceeded ten thousand. Total effective strength across the Corps exceeded ninety-three thousand soldiers, not counting the armored assets attached to each regiment.
Those assets were considerable. Leman Russ Vanquishers. Exterminators. Conquerors. Chimera transports. Medusa Siege Guns. The regiment commanders listed them in the clipped, inventory manner of officers who had spent careers knowing exactly what they had and what it was worth.
Nolan listened to all of it with the detailed map of Gryphonne IV spread across the table in front of him. Then he began issuing orders.
The armored and mechanized infantry regiments were to maintain full operational mobility. Every vehicle was to be inspected and fueled and loaded with a complete ammunition and supply complement. They needed to be ready to engage in mobile warfare at any point in the landing zone, responding to wherever the tide broke through.
The heavy infantry and artillery regiments had a different task. Working alongside the engineering servitor cohorts and every piece of construction equipment that the forge world could deploy, they were to begin excavating. Layered underground passages beneath Gryphonne IV's primary industrial city, wide enough where time permitted to accommodate vehicle traffic, and ground-level trench networks covering the approaches. Complex enough that the Tyranids could not simply flow around them.
Word had reached the soldiers by then. The hive fleet was coming. The primary mass, not a tendril. Every regiment commander in that hall understood what that meant.
Their expressions did not break.
What moved through the assembled Guard instead, spreading outward from wherever a soldier had spoken to another soldier and passed on what they had seen in the yard, was something harder to name than morale. A Primarch had come to Gryphonne IV. Had come to them. Had accepted command of their Corps and was already issuing orders with the calm certainty of someone who had decided that the situation was manageable.
The Emperor had not forgotten this world.
That was enough. For soldiers who had spent careers fighting in places the Astronomican's light barely touched, it was more than enough. It was everything.
Perhaps it was simply the personal reality of what a Primarch was, made present in a way that banners and sermons could approximate but never quite reach. Or perhaps it was something more fundamental: that even soldiers who know the odds are impossible need someone standing at the front who is not afraid of them.
The Corps went to work.