The module accelerated.
What had been a controlled rotation became something faster and less regular, the internal components cycling through configurations that produced sounds at the upper edge of what armored warriors could tolerate without activating their helmet dampers. The blue energy bleeding through the module's seams had stopped being threads of light and become a continuous luminescence, the entire unit expanding outward into a sphere of contained teleportation energy that distorted the air around it.
Above the assembled warriors, a teleportation barrier materialized from nothing.
It spread outward at ceiling height across a radius of dozens of meters, a boundary of displaced space that made the air inside its perimeter look slightly wrong, as though the distance between one side and the other was not quite what it should be. Everything within the barrier's coverage existed in two places simultaneously for the fraction of a second before the transition completed.
The red light inside Reditus's silver skull faceplate pulsed rapidly, cycling faster than its normal operational rate, the data computing systems inside the Armiger pushed to their maximum output. A brief voice came through the communication channel: a final technical advisory, and then silence as the last of the processing capacity was committed entirely to the coordinate lock.
The Astartes were already in formation.
They had organized without instruction, each warrior moving to the position that gave their weapons and the warrior beside them the best available coverage, combat teams resolving from individual soldiers the way droplets resolve into surface tension. Boltguns and melee weapons at ready, melta bombs secured to armor.
Nolan stepped forward.
He moved past the front rank of the assembled warriors and took position directly ahead of all of them, between his Astartes and whatever was on the other side of the coordinate lock. He closed his grip on the warscythe and Forgebreaker.
He looked back at the Armiger.
A single nod.
The barrier activated.
The sound it produced was not a sound in any conventional sense. It was the transition itself, the moment of displacement, and then Triplex Phall's atmosphere and the dim light of the Forge World's haze-filtered night were simply gone.
The Ark of Omen's interior smelled of old metal and organic matter that had been in contact with metal long enough that neither was entirely itself anymore.
The passage was wide enough for a Dreadnought to move through without obstruction, its walls lined with cable bundles that ran floor to ceiling in organized layers, each bundle anchored to the hull structure at intervals by brackets whose original purpose was no longer entirely clear. Between the cables, other material had grown. Organic hyperplasia, flesh and machine fused at the molecular level, the boundary between biological growth and mechanical component resolved into something that was both and neither, pulsing faintly in the dim reddish light that came from no visible source.
Nolan's magnetic boots connected with the metal floor.
The twenty Raven Guard and the Carcharodons warriors around him came through in the same moment, the transition delivering them in a dispersed cluster across the passage's width, each warrior immediately establishing situational awareness of the new environment.
The communication channel opened.
"Primarch." Reditus's voice arrived fragmented, cutting in and out across interference that the Ark of Omen's systems were apparently generating without specifically targeting anyone. "Success. No. Casualties. But. The interference here. Everyone. Scattered. Inside the Ark. Many. Chaos Astartes. Don't. Run away. If you. Dare."
The channel distorted and went quiet.
Nolan assessed the communication's content and filed it.
Boarding successful. No deaths in transition. But the Ark of Omen's internal environment had disrupted the coordinate cohesion of the teleportation, scattering the eighty-eight warriors across the vessel's interior rather than delivering them together. Every Astartes who had come through was somewhere inside this vessel, alive, separated from the others by unknown distances and an unknown amount of hostile terrain between them.
He did not treat this as a crisis.
The Carcharodons had operated this way since before Nolan had known them. For a Chapter whose tactical doctrine was built around void combat and boarding actions, fighting dispersed inside a hostile vessel was not an unfamiliar situation. The Raven Guard's training made them precisely suited to the same environment by different methods. The problem was the terrain: an Astartes entering hostile ground for the first time without intelligence on the layout was vulnerable to being drawn into prepared positions by enemies who knew every junction in the corridor network.
That was a problem. It was not a reason to stop.
Nolan activated the magnetic boots and moved forward into the passage without pause, the twenty Astartes forming up behind him and transitioning from their landing positions into a standard advance formation, weapons oriented outward to cover the passage walls.
The sound reached him before the enemies did.
Footsteps on metal, the specific rhythm of human-proportioned bodies moving at speed in numbers, coming from deeper in the passage. Not the heavy cadence of Chaos Astartes. Something mortal, and many of them.
The chanting arrived with the footsteps:
"The God of Machines bless our flesh and blood! The Lord of the Furnaces forge our broken souls!"
The cultists came around the visible limit of the passage in a press of bodies, their weapons already raised, expressions that had gone somewhere beyond fanaticism into the territory where a person no longer had any competing calculation running against the one that says charge. Their weapons were integrated with their bodies to varying degrees: gun barrels emerging from flesh, blades grown from the joints of fingers, cable connections running between palm and trigger that removed the distinction between holding a weapon and being one. They charged without formation or tactical consideration.
The opening salvo from both sides filled the passage simultaneously.
Las-fire and solid projectile rounds came in from the cultists, the volume of fire concentrated on Nolan's vibranium armor by the instinctive priority-targeting of people facing something that looked like the most dangerous thing in the space. The bolt rounds from the twenty Astartes went the other way in a sustained exchange that turned the cultists' front ranks into overlapping explosions, each bolt detonating after penetration and doing the internal damage they were designed to do.
Nolan absorbed the fire on his armor and kept walking.
At ten meters he transitioned to a run.
Forgebreaker swung in a horizontal arc that built lightning across the hammer head before it connected, and the connection released that accumulated energy through the first dozen cultists it touched in a sustained discharge that did not limit itself to the point of impact. The lightning propagated outward, jumping between the ferrous elements in the cultist formation, and those it reached stopped moving the way things stop moving when the nervous system has been overloaded entirely.
The warscythe took the next wave differently.
The blade's edge went through the cultists' weapons and the flesh fused to them without distinguishing between the two, and the drain the warscythe imposed as it cut activated as it always did, pulling the blood from the bodies it passed through with a force that had nothing mechanical about it. The cultists that fell to the warscythe did not simply die. They desiccated, the scarlet life draining from them in visible threads that followed the blade's path back, leaving behind the particular stillness of things that have been emptied completely.
The twenty Astartes moved through the gaps Nolan created, clearing the wounded and the disoriented with efficiency that did not require discussion.
The initial wave of cultists came apart in under a minute.
A second wave was building from deeper in the passage. Nolan could see the movement in the dim light, the press of bodies reorganizing, and he could see the individual at the center of the incoming group: a cultist holding something against his chest, arms wrapped around it with the careful deliberateness of a person who has made a calculation about themselves and their cargo that does not include survival. The other cultists around him formed a moving barrier, absorbing fire to keep the one carrying the melta charge protected long enough to close the distance.
They were running.
Nolan registered the melta charge and the distance to it and adjusted his weapon angle accordingly.