One by one, the Devourer-class transports and Titan lifters punched through the cloud layer covering Gryphonne IV and climbed toward orbit. The void above the forge world was contested, Tyranid bio-ships pressing the escape fleet from multiple angles, but the fighter formations and frigates holding the corridor open bought the seconds each transport needed to reach the fleet's formation. When the last of the transports had made it through, Cypher, commanding from the fleet's lead vessel, gave the acceleration order without hesitation.
The remaining thirty-odd Mechanicus ships ran for distance, the fighter screen and the frigates sacrificing themselves in the rearguard action to buy the interval the larger vessels needed. When they were far enough from the Tyranid fleet's immediate reach, the Geller fields came up across the formation and the ships dove into the warp together.
Gryphonne IV fell away behind them.
The observation room was one of the ship's quieter spaces, buried under several decks of armor plating, its viewports looking out at the churning unreality of the warp passage rather than anything worth watching. The wolf sat cleaning his weapons with the focused attention of someone who had decided that this task was the only thing he was thinking about. Nolan stood with his arms folded and said nothing.
Neither of them looked up when Cypher entered.
"Our destination is Laisa, the home world of House Cadmus." He crossed to the center of the room and looked at them both. "The surviving astropaths have already transmitted word of Gryphonne IV's destruction to the surrounding star systems and to Terra. Whatever forces the Imperium can assemble in response should be adequate to intercept or repel the hive fleet's main advance from the forge world."
Silence.
The wolf set down the weapon he was working on and looked at the opposite wall for a moment.
"This battle taught me something," he said. "One person can win a fight. One person cannot win a campaign alone." He turned his head toward Cypher. "I need help. People I can actually rely on. Do you have any suggestions?"
Cypher's expression shifted very slightly.
"I told you already: your battlefield is not here, and someone is waiting for you. After you meet them, your question may answer itself. But be ready to die in battle at any time. Once you make that choice, there is no going back from it."
"Riddler." The wolf picked up his weapon again. "If I see you doing that Eldar prophet routine in front of me one more time, I will put a sword through you. I mean it."
He turned toward Nolan.
"Hey. Primarch. Are you still there? What are you thinking about?"
"People who don't use their brains do seem to live more comfortably." Nolan unfolded his arms. "I am working out the balance sheet. Gryphonne IV is gone. But the most critical STC data and technical schematics were evacuated before the end, and the Magi came through with almost no casualties, which means the knowledge they carry in their own augmented memory banks also survived. Give them a planet in a suitable location and a new forge world will exist within a generation."
He paused.
"That is the calculation from the Imperium's side. What do we actually walk away with?"
He looked at Cypher.
Cypher reached into the Space-Time Crystal and produced a metal module roughly the size of a human head, and tossed it across. Nolan caught it.
"Leman Russ Vanquisher schematics. Exterminator. Medusa Siege Gun. Chimera. I also managed to copy the Volcano Cannon blueprints." Cypher's tone remained level. "If the STCs had not been physically enormous and guarded by Tech-Priests who treated them as sacred objects, I could have acquired several of those as well."
Nolan turned the module over in his hands and transferred it carefully to the simulator's storage. Insurance against any unexpected losses.
"Good." He set the question aside. "Next steps."
"The Titan Legion is not available," Nolan said before Cypher could raise it. "The senior Magi will not relinquish command of those engines regardless of the friction between us, and the return portal will not accommodate something that size in any case." He looked at the wolf. "But House Cadmus is in a different position. They publicly declared for a Primarch's authority in front of Mechanicus witnesses. If we don't take responsibility for them, the Magi will make their situation on Laisa unpleasant for the foreseeable future. For the sake of what that oath means, they come with us."
He turned to the wolf.
"Wolf cub. Go find the Cadmus people. I want to speak with them."
"Why does it have to be me?"
"Because," Cypher said pleasantly, before Nolan could answer, "you have chosen not to engage your brain for the foreseeable future, so at least your physical energy should be put to use."
He nodded toward the door with a slight smile.
The wolf picked up his weapons, said something in Fenrisian that was not meant as a compliment, and left.
The Mechanicus escape fleet reached Laisa.
Nolan met with the leaders of House Cadmus in a series of private sessions that required no announcement and produced no formal documentation. What they produced was the kind of trust that comes from direct speech between people who have just survived the same catastrophe, and from a Primarch who had stood on the same ground as their Knights and made the same decisions for the same reasons.
The younger generation rallied around Orlando, one of the heirs to the Twelve Barons of the House. They chose to follow the original Nolan and continue fighting.
The older generation, led by Sir William and Baron Roland, accepted a different responsibility: hold Laisa, maintain the compact with the Gryphonne IV Magi, and begin the work of establishing a safe house in the region that could serve multiple purposes over the long term. The suggestion had been Cypher's, offered quietly and without emphasis. The conditions suited everyone involved. After consideration, Nolan agreed to it.
Not long after the arrangement was settled, a delegation of the Gryphonne IV Magi came to him looking for guidance on the forge world's reconstruction. The question was where they should rebuild.
Nolan thought about it and gave them a direction without issuing an order.
Every established forge world occupied a position in a prosperous, well-connected star system, which meant that any new forge world competing for the same resource networks would face entrenched opposition from the start. Mineral transport routes alone would become an obstacle that no amount of technical capability could simply overcome. But the Ghoul Stars were different. Distant, poorly charted, avoided by most of the Imperium for reasons that had accumulated over centuries. No one was competing for territory there. The mineral planets in the region were largely untouched, and the logistics of supplying a new forge world from them would be entirely under its own control.
He said it as a suggestion. He did not say it as a command. He knew what the Ghoul Stars were, and he was not going to order anyone to rebuild their civilization in a region where even the Tyranid swarms, according to the oral histories of the Carcharodons who knew those stars better than anyone, occasionally became someone else's meal.
But if they asked him where there was room to build something new without anyone in the Imperium standing in the way, the Ghoul Stars was the honest answer.
What lived out there was their problem to negotiate with, if they chose to go.