The shaking had not stopped.
The nuclear exchange was over, but the earth had not accepted that yet. It continued to shudder in slow, rolling waves, deep subsurface movement that had no particular direction and no intention of settling. The sky above had become a continuous ceiling of black smoke and rolling fire that the wind moved slowly across but could not clear. Every building that had been standing on the surface above the underground command center was collapsed or collapsing, the shock waves having taken from them whatever structural tolerance they had accumulated over their years of standing.
Nolan did not register the blood running down from the corner of his forehead. He spat dust out of his mouth and looked at the people around him, at the surviving Tech-Priests and Magi picking themselves up from the floor of the command center, and he began issuing orders.
The Ten Rings were already in motion above his head, destroying the largest pieces of falling debris before they could come down on anyone.
"Every Tech-Priest who can breathe and move: check the people around you for injuries. Send a team to the hangar immediately to assess the Devourer-class transports and the Titan lifters. Those are our primary evacuation assets." He did not raise his voice. "Get the astropaths who are still functional to reach the escape fleet in orbit. I need bulk transports and fighter escort down to us as quickly as they can manage."
He turned.
"Wolf cub. Take whoever is mobile and get outside. Assess the surface situation. Pull out anyone you can find. When I give the evacuation order, you turn around and leave. I will not say it twice. Do you understand?"
"Do you need to tell me that?"
The wolf shook the dust off his face with one sharp motion, pulled the C'tan phase sword from its mount, drove the blade through the section of collapsed metal blocking the command center's exit, and left at a run without looking back.
The Mechanicus personnel steadied themselves in the way that people steady themselves when the first shock of an unprecedented event has passed and the habits of training reassert themselves. A nuclear explosion at close range was outside the documented operational experience of the Gryphonne IV Magi. The habits held anyway. They moved to their stations and began the process of accounting.
The most important schematics and STC materials had already left on the escape fleet. Every senior Magos in the command center had voted for the destruction plan. None of that made it simple to look at the preliminary casualty estimates and the list of production lines that were gone. Centuries of accumulated manufacturing capacity, measured against the cost of feeding it to the swarm, and the calculation had come out clearly in one direction. That clarity did not remove the weight of it.
Nolan looked at the numbers once.
Then he gave the evacuation order.
Gryphonne IV had served its purpose. The strategic assets worth dying for had been removed or destroyed on terms the Mechanicus had chosen. What remained on the surface did not justify holding position to defend it.
In the ground hangars beneath the ruined outer city, the last god-machines of the Gryphonne Titan Legion moved in procession through the dust and rubble, each step cracking the damaged floor further, filing into the Titan lifters with the patience of things that had been walked into battle and out of it too many times to be rushed. The surviving Knight suits of House Winter and House Cadmus were being loaded into the Devourer-class transports under the direction of servitors and Tech-Priests moving at double time, the armored shells of the Knights carrying the damage of the full engagement in dents and burn marks and missing components that the artificers would have months of work waiting for them.
Logistic personnel moved in chains, carrying whatever could be taken in the time that remained.
The surface split open.
Across the outer ruins of the industrial hive, the ground buckled upward from below in multiple places simultaneously, and the Trygons came through it. They erupted from their tunnels and drove forward toward the survivors without transition between burrowing and running, their segmented bodies carrying the low, fast momentum of organisms that had been moving underground and had not needed to stop to surface. Behind them, Hormagaunts followed the holes they had made, pouring up through the cracks in numbers that spread across the ruined cityscape like something being poured.
The Hive Mind had not retreated.
A thousand Kastellan Robots stepped forward. Their weapons came up and the fight resumed, filling the rubble-landscape of the outer hive with gunfire and the sounds of the close combat that followed when the ranges closed.
Nolan came through the command center's exit at a run, the Warscythe in hand, and he hit the Trygon line like a steel train without slowing. The Ten Rings dispersed ahead of him and tore through the mass in multiple directions simultaneously. The Warscythe moved in tight, continuous arcs, green light tracing each cut, and the Trygons that reached him came apart before their limbs could find the vibranium armor's tolerances. He did not stop moving forward.
The depression and the weight of what the last four days had cost pressed outward through the only channel left open for it. He split the Tyranid attack formation cleanly in half, cutting through the center of it and continuing, and the Kastellan cohorts on either side filled the gap behind him.
"Don't wait for me. Everyone continue to evacuate."
He did not turn his head.
The Kastellan units that had begun moving toward him stopped and redirected.
A salvo of Whirlwind missiles came from somewhere behind the Tyranid formation, cutting through the smoke overhead and detonating among the Trygons attempting to flank around Nolan's position. Then a dark red figure was through the gap, both weapons moving, clearing a channel through the mass with the same economical brutality the wolf always brought to close work.
"What in the Allfather's name are you doing?" The wolf's voice was right beside him. "You are the commander. You are the backbone of this operation. If you get eaten by the swarm, the Imperium becomes a very expensive joke."
"They're just bugs," Nolan said.
"I went to find survivors. The ones who could be found and dug out easily are already on the transports. We don't have the time or equipment to reach the ones buried deep in the lower hive levels." The wolf cleared a space around them with one wide sweep of the phase sword. "The escape fleet has already engaged the Tyranid ships above us. The bulk transports are waiting."
He signaled the nearest Kastellan formation and turned his head toward Nolan.
"Retreat. We lose this one. There will be opportunities to make the Hive Mind regret it later."
"Later?" Nolan raised his head.
The expression on his face had settled into something that was almost calm, but was not. The days of controlled command, of watching Gryphonne IV's defenders consumed piece by piece, of calculating what each loss bought and what it cost, had reached whatever limit he had been holding them behind.
He reached up and raised his right hand above his head, palm open, the Ten Rings orbiting in their tight formation around the gauntlet.
"I will give it a gift now."
Four pillars of warp energy erupted upward from the rings: each a different color, each impossibly bright against the black smoke above, driving upward through the cloud cover and through the atmosphere and into the void beyond. They climbed toward the Tyranid fleet holding position above Gryphonne IV, twisting around each other as they rose, converging into a single point deep in the orbital engagement zone.
In the void above, something took shape.
An energy construct the scale of which had no precedent in the battle below: a dragon's head, its form holding together through the pressure of the warp power sustaining it, as large as a small moon, opening its mouth above the densely packed bio-ships of the hive fleet with the patient enormity of something that had nothing pressing to do except this.
The energy it released was not a beam. It was a torrent: scorching and sustained, carrying within it something that was not describable in physical terms, the compressed anguish and rage and sacrifice of the billions who had died on Gryphonne IV in the last four days, finding an outlet through the construct that Nolan's power had built for it.
It hit the nearest hive ships.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.