Triplex Phall's day lasted forty Terran hours, and its night lasted sixty.
The transition between them was not a gentle gradient. The industrial sky shifted from one state to the other the way a furnace door closes: definitively, with a quality of finality that suggested the planet had long ago settled its arguments with astronomy and moved on. When the dark came, it came complete, pressing down through the exhaust haze and the cloud layers to settle across the city-spanning forge complexes below.
And in the dark, the Great Rift was visible.
From the top of the forge-palace, standing in air that met the minimum threshold for breathability and not much more, the scar across the sky was inescapable. It ran horizon to horizon in a deep and violent red, as though something had taken the night sky at its thinnest point and pulled until it tore. The light it produced was not light in any ordinary sense. It was the illumination of somewhere else bleeding through, and the color it gave to everything beneath it turned the already ochre atmosphere of Triplex Phall into something that read in the eye as a slow emergency.
The rest of the galaxy had its own names for it. The Aeldari called it something that translated roughly as the Cicatrix Maledictum. The orks had versions involving grinning. Other civilizations, older and stranger, had their own designations: the Scarlet Road, the Maw of Destruction, the Devourer of Hope. Thousands of names across thousands of cultures, each one shaped by what the naming culture feared most, and all of them pointing at the same rupture.
For the human planets of the Imperium's dark side, it was simpler than any of those names. It was the thing that had ended reliable communication, disrupted Warp navigation across most of the eastern territories, and made every planet in its shadow into an island. It was the reason Regent Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade was news that arrived like archaeology. It was the reason the Great Rift, every night it appeared in the sky above Triplex Phall, looked less like an astronomical feature and more like a wound that had not yet decided whether it intended to close.
Nolan sat in a metal chair at the top of the forge-palace and looked at it.
The top-secret reports from the Forge Council were spread across the armrest in data-slate form, and he worked through them steadily, the Great Rift providing an entirely appropriate backdrop. Triplex Phall's own time distortion added an additional layer to the atmosphere of the session. The planet was currently in a phase where the flow of time between its day and night periods did not fully agree with itself: some nights ran to their end in hours, others stretched across what felt like days. The Forge World's senior Magi had taken careful measurements and produced careful records and had ultimately concluded that this was happening, which was the extent of what could be stated with confidence.
The reports, at least, were straightforward.
Triplex Phall's inventory of STC templates and weapon production records covered a range that justified the Forge World's reputation. The ground vehicle and individual weapon templates were numerous, many of them variants not widely distributed elsewhere in the Imperium's eastern territories. Those were significant. But what held Nolan's attention were the strategic-level assets.
The first was an ancient pattern of siege gun, a long-barreled crew-served weapon designed to fire Hellfire missiles, currently maintained in a stasis field because the original manufacturing tolerances for its frame were no longer reproducible with current tooling. The weapon itself was a museum piece. The Hellfire missile technology it had been designed to deliver, however, was another matter: the Forge World's Magi had spent generations studying it, and current production capacity could generate Hellfire munitions at a meaningful scale, available for delivery by whatever launcher could accept them.
The second was the Volcano Cannon.
Triplex Phall was the home world of its Titan Legion, which meant it held manufacturing capability for weapons that most Forge Worlds only repaired. The Volcano Cannon, a directed energy weapon of sufficient output to threaten a void-shielded Titan, was the most consistently produced heavy weapon in the Forge World's catalogue. It could be integrated into a Warlord-class Titan's weapon hardpoints as a primary arm. It could also, with appropriate mounting solutions, be installed on ground vehicle chassis for independent deployment. Both configurations were in regular local production.
Nolan set the data-slates down and was quiet for a moment.
Then he stood, spread his wings, and glided down from the top of the palace into the levels below.
The situation was straightforward in its logic if not in its execution. The Warp storm surrounding Triplex Phall had not cleared. Until it did, the Carcharodons fleet was grounded in orbit and the fleet's patrol and rescue operations in the surrounding sectors were suspended. The fleet could not go to the dark side of the empire.
The simulator could.
Nolan dispatched the unmanned probe ships first, small automated vessels with cogitator cores and servo-skull crews, sent out through the lesser intensity edges of the storm to try to establish communication links with the nearest Imperial planets. The Warp disruption made this unreliable, but unreliable was better than absent.
Then he assembled the strike group.
Thirty-five Terminator Guards in full plate, drawn from the combined pool of Black Templars and Lamenters warriors who had been rotating through the Nicor's complement. Half the veteran company of the Carcharodons, led by Tyberos himself. A Raven Guard combat team under a company champion. They gathered in a private palace that the Forge World had assigned to the Primarch's use, moving through the dim internal passages in silence, the only sounds the weight of armored boots on stone and the faint hum of void weapons charged and ready.
At the center of the private palace's main chamber, Nolan raised a hand to the skull helmet and engaged the simulator interface. The Mind Stone embedded above the brow emitted a faint illumination, brief and contained. The Throne Coin page opened in his awareness, and he selected the next prayer support mission with the focus of someone who had done this enough times to make the process efficient.
Seconds later, a Warp portal opened above the chamber floor.
Nolan walked through it first. The Terminator Guards followed without pause. Tyberos and the Raven Guard combat team came after, and the portal sealed behind the last of them and dissolved into the air.
The private palace was quiet for approximately ten minutes.
Then the portal reopened.
Nolan stepped out carrying the warscythe in his right hand and Forgebreaker in his left, both weapons filmed in purple ichor that had not yet dried. His vibranium power armor was decorated with Tyranid viscera across the chest and left pauldron. Thirty-three Terminator Guards followed, most of them similarly marked. Two did not return. Tyberos came through with the Raven Guard champions, the whole group moving with the specific deliberateness of warriors who had just expended a significant amount of effort and were not yet fully certain the expenditure had stopped.
Nolan caught a throne coin that he had flipped with his thumb and turned it once in his fingers. He looked at Tyberos and inclined his head toward the corridor.
Tyberos went.
Within a quarter hour, a group of Techmarines arrived at the private palace carrying resupply crates: ceramite repair materials, replacement ammunition, field maintenance tools for power armor systems. They worked through the chamber methodically while the Astartes stripped damaged sections from their plate and fed their weapons new shells. Tyberos returned with a supplemental delivery: melta bombs in quantity, and several heavy plasma rifles for the warriors whose primary weapons had taken too much damage to field again immediately.
Nolan selected the second mission.
The portal opened. They entered. The chamber was empty again.
This time they were back in eight minutes.
More purple blood. One more Terminator did not return. The warriors who came back moved with slightly less in reserve than before, and the repairs this time were more extensive. Nolan walked to the center of the chamber and stood still for a moment, running his own damage assessment on the power armor's systems, and then selected the third mission without comment.
The third return brought Tyranid viscera again.
Nolan stood in the center of the chamber with his weapons at his sides, his expression providing no information. He had encountered Tyranids in two out of three consecutive missions, and the statistical coincidence had, apparently, reached its limit of what he was prepared to absorb without response.
He looked at Tyberos.
"Find me a Magos," he said. "Now."
Tyberos's pace out of the chamber suggested he had anticipated this outcome.
The sound of demolition reached the private palace before Tyberos returned.
It started as a distant concussive thud and became, over the next several minutes, a consistent rhythm that vibrated through the palace's stone floors. When Tyberos eventually appeared at the chamber entrance, he was walking ahead of a vehicle.
The Volcano Cannon occupied a heavy-duty transport chassis that had been designed for moving large industrial equipment around a Forge World's internal districts. The chassis was not especially elegant. The cannon mounted on it very much was: a sleek, dense, directed-energy weapon of a caliber that communicated, without ambiguity, what it had been built to do. Behind the vehicle came an attendant cart loaded with Hellfire missiles in storage racks, their casing marked with the maintenance stamps of Triplex Phall's production floor.
The walls of the corridor leading into the private palace had been widened in several places to admit the vehicle. The widening had been accomplished quickly.
Tyberos stopped at the chamber entrance, the vehicle idling behind him, and looked at Nolan with an expression that had reached some kind of equilibrium between professional competence and personal enjoyment of the situation.
Nolan looked at the Volcano Cannon. He looked at the Hellfire missiles.
He turned back to the simulator interface and began selecting the fourth mission.
Whoever was waiting on the other side of the next portal would find out, in due course, what it felt like to have attracted the undivided attention of a Primarch who had been denied variety in his enemies.