Time moved in the particular way it moves when every hour is being consumed by preparation.
Across the entire surface of Gryphonne IV, forces that had never expected to be mobilized together were being mobilized together. In the industrial hive cities, the Ecclesiarchy priests had done their work: the Primarch's arrival had been announced from every pulpit and vox-caster the faith could reach, and the civilian population had responded with the compressed, desperate energy of people who had been told that the Emperor had noticed them. Workers who operated foundry presses and ore conveyors and chemical processing lines were now digging and carrying and fortifying alongside the Astra Militarum engineers, because that was what the Primarch had asked for and the Primarch was here.
The senior Magi had noticed, of course. They were not slow. They had understood within the first hours of the Guard mobilization exactly what Nolan and his companions had done and what it meant for the forge world's internal authority. They had swallowed it. Against the weight of a primary hive fleet inbound with two systems already gone silent, the political cost of a Primarch consolidating civilian loyalty was simply not the largest problem in front of them.
Then the Magi had done something none of the three had fully anticipated: they had voluntarily arranged the introductions.
The commanders of the Gryphonne Titan Legion came to meet Nolan. So did the House Winter Knight commanders already on the forge world. The Magi had also relayed news of House Cadmus, currently in transit from their garrisoned world of Laisa and moving at best speed toward Gryphonne IV.
The reason the Magi had chosen cooperation over resistance came out during that meeting: two of the eight mineral-rich systems that orbited Gryphonne IV as part of its resource network were no longer responding. Every astropath who attempted contact with those systems had either broken under the attempt or returned with nothing but the fragmentary, fading impressions of billions of voices being extinguished. The biomass acquisition was already underway. The hive fleet's approach vector was now confirmed by the silence it left behind.
The wolf had listened to this and then fixed the assembled Archmagos with a look that had nothing patient in it.
"And now you are willing to cooperate." His voice was level in the way that level voices are when the alternative is something much louder. "Your stubbornness cost two systems. Every soul in them became material for the swarm because you took too long to accept information you didn't want to hear."
He stopped himself from continuing. The fangs were visible at the edge of his expression.
Nolan raised one hand and the wolf went quiet.
"What happened to those systems was not your intent," Nolan said to the Archmagos, his tone giving them nothing to push against. "Responsibility is not the useful question right now. What we have gained from it is the fleet's approach direction, which tells us where to concentrate our defense."
He looked at the assembled commanders in turn.
"The Mechanicus will begin securing all technical schematics and STC materials immediately and transferring them to vessels in orbit. One-third of the forge world's fleet will be repositioned to the planet's far side, out of the hive fleet's direct approach vector. If the defense fails and the situation becomes irreversible, that fleet has one mission: leave Segmentum Tempestus carrying everything necessary to rebuild this forge world's knowledge base somewhere else."
He paused, and his voice did not soften for what came next.
"The civilian population cannot be evacuated. I have already conducted war mobilization throughout the hive cities. If we attempt a selective evacuation now, the question of who survives and who doesn't will produce riots we cannot contain, and those riots will destroy the defense from the inside before the Tyranids reach the walls. The civilians will hold their positions. I will pray as their Primarch that the Emperor watches over them. But if the battle goes against us past the point of recovery, they will live and die with Gryphonne IV."
The wolf's eyes went wide. His body had already started to move forward.
Cypher put a hand on his arm.
"The Primarch left something unsaid," Cypher said, to the room rather than to any one person. His voice carried the quality of someone reporting a fact. "We do have a viable defensive objective. The hive mind is not sentimental. If we can reduce the efficiency of the Tyranid tide's biomass acquisition sufficiently, if the cost of consuming this planet exceeds the value of what it yields, the hive mind may recalculate and withdraw."
He let that settle.
"If it becomes necessary, we can ignite the atmosphere using Gryphonne IV's promethium reserves. The logistics of executing that precisely, and a reliable estimate of subsequent losses, are beyond what I can calculate standing here. But compared to the alternative of this world becoming a stripped rock that feeds the next tendril's growth, I would call any price acceptable."
The room was completely still.
Even the Archmagos, who expressed nothing through biological means and registered emotional states only through the mechanical sounds their augmented frames produced, were audible: a low, involuntary cycling of gears moving through the assembled senior Magi like a shared breath.
They had resented the loss of command. They had been calculating how to recover it, or at least constrain the damage, since the Guard mobilization began. But standing in front of a Primarch and an Astartes who had just described igniting their planet's atmosphere as a viable tactical option and meant it, the resentment became something smaller and less relevant.
They did not have this kind of thinking. They were capable of it, in the abstract. Enacting it, in the specific, was different.
The meeting concluded.
What followed it, over the next several hours, organized itself with the efficiency that large military forces achieve when they are given clear direction by someone who knows what they are asking for.
The Titan Legion's contribution was significant. Six Skitarii cohorts with armored support formed the ground element. Forty Reaver-class Battle Titans, twenty Warhound-class Scout Titans, ten Warlord-class Battle Titans, and two Imperator-class Titans. Seventy-two engines of war in total, representing roughly half the Gryphonne Titan Legion's full complement. The rest were dispersed across Segmentum Tempestus with no time remaining to recall them.
House Cadmus arrived from Laisa and made the journey faster than their estimated transit time. Their head was Baron Roland, a middle-aged noble with the particular ambition visible in men who have spent their careers answering to institutions they believe they deserve to lead. He learned on approach that Gryphonne IV was under the command of a Primarch. He led every Knight captain under his authority to meet Nolan in person, and he swore allegiance to him in front of an Archmagos without waiting to be asked.
When Nolan found a moment to ask him why, Roland told him: House Cadmus had made a protection compact with Gryphonne IV long ago, and had spent generations fulfilling it while bowing to Mechanicus authority they had never fully accepted. A Primarch changed the terms of that arrangement entirely.
Nolan accepted the oath without ceremony and said nothing further about it. House Cadmus now answered to him. The productivity of the home territories he already controlled could absorb one Knight House without difficulty. As for Cypher having already quietly acquired copies of the most critical technical schematics from the Mechanicus evacuation fleet before anyone thought to restrict access: the Magi had enough to concern them without adding that to the list.
House Winter contributed nearly three hundred Armiger-class Knight suits. House Cadmus added over two hundred Knights of mixed class. More than five hundred Knight armors, alongside the heavy weapon emplacements that a forge world never ran short of, would meet whatever the hive fleet's first wave sent at the surface.
Across Gryphonne IV, the last preparations finished. Trenches cut. Tunnels braced. Ammunition loaded. Engines primed. Every living thing on the planet that was capable of holding a weapon or operating a machine had been assigned a position and a purpose.
Then the auspex arrays running at full capacity began returning new contacts.
Not scatter. Not ambiguity. Dense, overlapping returns moving in from the system's edge with the signature that bio-ships produced, that mass and that biological irregularity that no mechanical vessel replicated. Hive ships. A great many of them.
The Tyranid tide had arrived.
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