The Thunderhawks came down through the yellow haze in waves, their engines producing the low, carrying roar of craft designed for contested insertions into hostile atmospheres. The landing zones around the star port received them one after another, each ramp dropping to release fully armed warriors who moved with the practiced efficiency of people who had not needed to be told what the mission was.
Carcharodons and Raven Guard, in separate groups, stepped onto the surface of Triplex Phall.
The Forge World's personnel watched the disembarkation with the careful attention of an institution that understood power and was currently reassessing its local distribution. But there was no opposition. Fabricator General Wesley had not disclosed the nature of his suspected Chaos involvement to the Forge Council. As far as the senior Magi were aware, their Fabricator General had negotiated a mutual agreement with a Primarch, and the Primarch's forces were now present as a consequence of that agreement. In the current state of the Imperium, with the Great Rift open and news from the wider empire arriving months or years late when it arrived at all, the addition of a Primarch's military presence to a Forge World's defense was not a thing that required explanation.
Triplex Phall understood its own situation well enough. Regent Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade was a name they knew, but the events of it reached them as history rather than news, filtered through the distance of the Far Eastern Frontier. The Forge World had repelled Tyranid hive fleet incursions more than once, its production infrastructure converting raw ore into weapons faster than most worlds could deploy them, and that track record had built a certain confidence in the local institution's capacity to handle its own affairs.
A Primarch's arrival was not a threat. It was a significant upgrade to the existing defenses.
Nolan had counted on exactly that reception.
His deployment orders had been given before the Thunderhawks launched. The Carcharodons, whose relationship with the Magi tended toward productive friction under the best of conditions, were directed to the central forge-palace and assigned there permanently. Their orders were specific: remain in position near Fabricator General Wesley's inner chambers, maintain readiness, and intervene without hesitation if Reditus signaled danger or if the Fabricator General's behavior indicated active Chaos corruption. They were not there as an honor guard. They were there as a last resort that the Fabricator General would find impossible to overcome, should one be necessary.
The Raven Guard received different orders.
Most of them descended, making themselves visible, presenting the expected profile of a Primarch's escort force moving through a newly acquired world. And then, once they had passed out of the direct observation of the local Magi, they performed Shadow Step and dispersed.
By ones and pairs, they moved through the industrial arteries of Triplex Phall: into the foundry complexes, the ore processing nests, the ancient manufactorum districts that occupied entire city-sectors. They were looking for the same symptom that had identified the Gremlin in Wesley's palace. Unexplained mechanical failures. Calculation drift without a diagnosable source. The particular aversion that Warp entities carry toward the blood of the Emperor's sons, a sensitivity that did not require a Librarian's training to exploit in detection. The Raven Guard would find the population of Gremlins that had almost certainly established themselves across the wider Forge World, and they would either deal with those findings themselves or coordinate with the local population to do so.
Nolan did not believe the creature in Wesley's palace had been unique. Gremlins were never unique.
The Forge Council Hall occupied a central position in the administrative tier of Triplex Phall's upper city. It was built with the Mechanicus preference for function expressed at a scale that communicated institutional permanence: high ceilings crossed by overhead gantries, wall surfaces lined with calculation arrays and sensor feeds, the air carrying the specific smell of machine oil and recycled atmosphere that the Forge World's senior Magi apparently found comfortable.
Nolan had already met with the commanders of the local Titan Legion before entering the hall. That meeting had gone well. The Titan Legion's officers were pragmatic people who understood large-scale force ratios and had arrived at accurate conclusions from the available data.
The Forge Council itself was next.
He was working through the senior Archmagos one by one, the kind of formal recognition that a new commanding authority owed to the people who would be executing his orders, when the interruption arrived.
The Archmagos from Mars had not been on Nolan's list.
He was a permanent presence on Triplex Phall in the administrative capacity: the Mechanicus of Mars maintained a representative at most Forge Worlds as a matter of institutional oversight, and the specific individual currently holding that role also commanded several Skitarii legions whose deployment on Triplex Phall had originally been framed as support against local disobedience to Martian directives. He had, over the course of his tenure, developed opinions about the correct relationship between a Forge World and its parent institution, and those opinions had apparently survived his encounter with the current situation without significant revision.
He spoke in the mechanical register common to heavily augmented Magi, his voice carrying an absence of inflection that still somehow communicated certainty, and what he said was the following:
A Primarch without official Imperium recognition required the support of the Adeptus Mechanicus to acquire legitimacy. That support carried conditions. The Primarch would commit to respecting all Mechanicus decisions and directives. Additionally, acting in the name of the Primarch, Triplex Phall would immediately transfer to Mars the STC templates and unique technological blueprints that the Forge World had long withheld from their rightful custodians.
The hall was quiet when he finished.
Nolan rubbed his chin slowly with one vibranium palm, his eyes moving across the Archmagos's augmented form with an expression that had not quite settled into anything definable. He blinked once, then again.
Then he asked the Archmagos to repeat what he had just said.
The Mars Archmagos began to process the request.
He did not finish processing it.
Nolan's bronze face had been settling, while the Archmagos spoke his demands, into the particular flatness that those who knew him had learned to recognize as a terminal condition for the conversation it appeared in. It was not anger. It was closer to the absence of further consideration. He let his eyes move sideways, briefly, toward where Tyberos stood.
Tyberos was already moving.
The ancient Terminator armor's systems engaged at full sprint, a charge that covered the distance between Chapter Master and Archmagos in a fraction of a second. The Triplex Phall Magi who had been watching acted without instruction, binary attack protocols streaming invisibly through the air to find the Mars Archmagos's defensive architecture and lock it down, firewalls collapsing under a concentrated simultaneous assault.
The Claws of Maelstrom discharged. The energy field they carried shredded through the Archmagos's emergency shield before it had fully extended. What followed was efficient and brief: the lightning claws worked through the augmented mechanical body in a controlled sequence that produced a great deal of scattered debris and then stopped, because there was nothing left that required further attention.
Tyberos stepped back, the Terminator armor settling to a standing position, and returned to his place beside Nolan.
Nolan looked out at the assembled Archmagos of the Forge Council.
"The Archmagos from Mars has unfortunately been lost to the Warp storm." His voice carried no particular weight on any individual word. "Triplex Phall conducted an extensive search operation and suffered considerable cost in the attempt to locate him. The search has been called off. May the Machine God preserve his soul."
He let a moment pass.
"I have finished speaking." He looked across the room with the patient attention of someone who genuinely wanted to hear a response before proceeding. "Who agrees? Who opposes?"
The vibranium wings behind his power armor extended slightly, not fully, not in any posture that could be described as aggressive. Simply present. A quiet addition to the atmosphere of the room that did not require explanation.
The Archmagos who had moved first against the Mars representative stood. They bowed toward Nolan and declared that the Lord Primarch's decision was also theirs, and offered no qualification.
The others processed the situation at machine speed, their augmetic systems running through the available outcomes with the efficiency of hardware designed for exactly this kind of calculation. The Terminator Guards were visible from every position in the hall. Tyberos stood at the Primarch's shoulder. The conclusion that each set of calculations reached was not a difficult one.
They stood. They offered their support, each in turn, without reservation.
It had taken very little time.
In the minutes that followed, the practical consequences were worked out with businesslike efficiency. The Skitarii legions that had been under the Mars Archmagos's command were formally redistributed by Forge Council authority acting in the Primarch's name, their organizational structure intact but their chain of command updated. The Oberon-class warship that had served as the Archmagos's personal vessel, currently berthed at the star port, transferred to the Primarch's fleet by the same authority.
Nolan had not planned for the confrontation to go this way. He had made a commitment to Fabricator General Wesley that carried real weight, and the commitment was to Triplex Phall's dignity and the Mechanicus's continued function under new authority rather than under conquest. If the Mars Archmagos had exercised any of the situational awareness available to him, none of what had just happened would have been necessary.
But the Archmagos had chosen his moment and his demands, and the moment and demands had chosen their own consequence.
Mars was far away. The Great Rift had made it farther. Whatever accounting Mars would eventually demand for the loss of its representative and his assets was a problem for a future version of Nolan's political situation, and that future version would, by any reasonable projection, include a meeting with Regent Guilliman and the successful resolution of a particular matter concerning the Lion. When that accounting came, the political ground would be different.
For now, Triplex Phall had a new Fabricator General in everything but title, and the Forge Council had reached a unanimous decision.
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