The ancient ceremonial hall at the top of the Nicor received them with its habitual silence.
The warp portal tore open along a seam of displaced air and the three of them stepped through onto the metal floor, the hall's dim lighting closing around them as the rift behind them should have sealed itself. It did not. The mark on the back of Nolan's hand was burning with a dull light that pressed through the vibranium gauntlet, and behind the three of them the portal had widened rather than closed.
Heavy footsteps on metal, slow and deliberate, each one announcing considerable weight.
Twenty-one Knight suits came through the portal one after another, their armored forms filling the ceremonial hall, the ancient scarring and battle damage on their hulls marking decades of continuous service. Each one crossed the threshold and took its position on the floor, the sound of their arrival accumulating until the twenty-first Knight stepped down and the hall held its new arrangement of occupants in silence.
Nolan exhaled hard and closed the portal.
He caught a throne coin out of the air that he had been holding, more from habit than intention.
"That is more difficult than I expected," he said, without looking at the other two. "Moving a larger force through would require significantly more than the mental effort of combat. The physical and psychic pressure scales faster than the numbers suggest."
Cypher nodded once. He had already been watching the Knights.
The wolf grinned, unimpressed, and walked toward the nearest Knight suit as its entry hatch began to cycle.
Tyberos arrived within the hour, having been informed of the new arrivals through the ship's internal vox. He had grown accustomed, over the course of this deployment, to the sight of three versions of his Primarch occupying the same space. That had stopped requiring adjustment some time ago.
The information that the twenty-one Knight captains and their suits were antiquities, hundreds of years old, preserved through circumstances that the Carcharodons' records would not have anticipated: that gave him a moment's pause. He recovered without comment and accepted the situation with the practical acceptance of a Chapter Master who had learned that the Primarch's operations produced conditions outside the scope of standard protocol.
He would house the Knight captains at the highest standard the Carcharodons extended to honored guests. Nolan had already told him that the arrangement was temporary. These were not permanent additions to the fleet's complement; they needed to be transferred onward. The Nicor was a transit point.
Tyberos absorbed this information with the visible relief of a man who had been briefly calculating the logistics implications of twenty-one Knight suits requiring ongoing technical support, and had arrived at a conclusion he preferred not to have confirmed.
After the Knight captains were settled and Tyberos had been dismissed, Nolan remembered the question that the conversation on Laisa had left open and turned back.
"Tyberos. Is there an established forge world anywhere in the Ghoul Stars?"
Tyberos considered it. "Lord Primarch, from my knowledge of this region, there is not. If there were, we would have..." He paused briefly, choosing his phrasing. "Engaged with it. The nearest forge world to the Ghoul Stars is at the junction of the outer fringe territories and the far frontier. They conduct occasional trade with us, gray tax transactions, nothing formal. They have no footprint in the Ghoul Stars themselves."
Nolan nodded and waved him out.
He opened the simulator's diplomacy page.
Two new entries sat in the diplomatic register: the Gryphonne Titan Legion and House Cadmus, both at a standing somewhere between respect and high regard. Gryphonne IV itself appeared as a name only, marked "under reconstruction," everything else behind a row of question marks.
He looked at it for a long moment.
"Is time here linear, or does it operate on some structural principle I have not worked out yet? The forge world should be an established fact by now. Unless my suggestion was enough to create the potential without being enough to fix the outcome, in which case it exists and does not exist simultaneously depending on when the observation is made." He closed the page. "Schrödinger's Forge World. Either that, or the simulator has its own sense of timing."
He shook his head.
"It does not matter. It was a casual suggestion, not a guarantee. If nothing comes of it in the Ghoul Stars, there are other ways to secure forge world access." He paused. "Less charitable ways. Bah. I mean productive cooperative arrangements with existing Mechanicus infrastructure."
He drove the power armor forward and turned to face the room.
Over the weeks that followed, the wolf and Cypher ran support missions alongside Nolan, the two of them and a rotating complement of Terminator escorts providing the additional weight that made the most demanding assignments manageable. Nolan's throne coin count crossed double digits and kept climbing until it reached thirteen.
Then the wolf stopped.
He had taken serious injuries on three of the last several missions and had declined to mention this as a factor until it became unavoidable. What he said instead was that even the warp, in his experience, did not produce this density of catastrophic battlefields in ordinary circulation. This kind of output was specific to Nolan, a feature of whatever it was the simulator recognized about him that it did not recognize about anyone else. He could not extract the same results from the same missions. He was done.
Cypher made no announcement. He simply indicated, at a quiet moment, that there were other matters requiring his attention, and that he had remained longer than he had originally planned out of consideration for the original Nolan's circumstances. He seemed to consider the statement complete.
Nolan had no strong argument against either of them. The responsibilities they carried were not smaller than his own, and he had known since Commorragh that their paths ran parallel to his rather than alongside it.
In the Nicor's ceremonial hall, the three of them stood before a webway portal that Cypher's beacon had summoned, its surface holding the mirror-quality of a fully established gate.
Nolan looked at the wolf first. Then at Cypher.
"When we meet again, I hope we are all still alive and carrying our responsibilities without having been broken by them." He paused. "You are me, but you are not me. You have your own paths, your own duties, things I cannot carry for you and that you cannot carry for me."
He held the look for a moment longer.
"May the Emperor bless you in all of it. See you later, brothers."
The wolf's grin broke open, wide and genuine. He reached across and hit Nolan's shoulder armor once with his palm, a solid impact, and then turned and walked straight into the portal's depth without looking back.
Cypher's expression carried something that was almost warmth. He gave a single small nod in Nolan's direction.
Then he turned and stepped through without hesitation, and the portal closed behind him with a low hum that faded before the echo of it reached the walls.
The metal floor was empty. The hall was quiet.
Nolan stood there for a moment.
"Alone again," he said, to no one. "Well. The home world needs attention, and the Knight captains need to go where they are going. It has been long enough."
He activated the power armor and walked toward the ship passage without looking back.