The circular square was a kilometer across.
Its walls and floor were covered in a pattern that repeated with the precision of something applied by a mind that understood both mathematics and iconography: octagonal frames, within each an eight-pointed star, within each star a gear motif, every surface of the chamber from floor to ceiling carrying the same image in overlapping layers. The pattern was old. The metal it was engraved into was older.
At the center stood the array.
It was tens of meters tall and had no single definable shape, because shape implied a limit and the array did not appear to have limits in the conventional sense. It was built from gear mechanisms of every size from hand-sized to architectural, all of them in contact with each other at points that should not always have allowed for contact, the whole assembly interlocked into a structure that rotated as a single system despite its apparent internal contradictions. Thick cables entered the array from every wall at once, penetrating inward through the gear assemblies and disappearing into a center that Nolan's eyepieces could not resolve into a specific location. The cables pulsed. The gears turned. From the motion of the whole thing, faint wisps of turbid steam rose and dispersed, and occasional threads of electrical discharge found their way out between gear teeth before being absorbed back into the structure.
Nolan looked at the array and understood what it was.
The Chaos energy that moved through the Ark of Omen's weapons and propulsion and life support was not generated by conventional ship systems. It was being transited through this mechanism, processed and distributed like blood through a circulatory system, the gear-heart of a vessel the size of a small planet.
Something else struck him immediately after.
He had Primarch-level senses. He had been moving through the Ark of Omen for over an hour. He had been in this chamber for ten seconds before he had perceived any of this. The array had been here, operating, during those ten seconds, and he had not registered it through any sensory channel until the moment he looked directly at it.
The array existed in the gap between perception and reality, visible only to the first observer who arrived with no prior information and no prepared attention.
Nolan filed this information carefully.
Then he reached into the simulator's storage interface and began extracting melta bombs.
They came out in a steady flow while he moved around the chamber's circumference, placing them at intervals he calculated would produce overlapping coverage across the entire floor space. The distribution took time and he used that time purposefully, continuing to move, continuing to monitor the array and everything adjacent to it, continuing to assess the chamber's geometry for exits. Remote detonation receiver clipped to his belt when the last bomb was placed.
He approached the array.
The warscythe and Forgebreaker were in his hands. The Ten Rings detached from his forearm and moved ahead of him toward the nearest cable cluster, the rings positioning themselves for a simultaneous strike against the multiple cable lines.
"If I were you, I would not do that."
The voice came from no specific direction. It came from everywhere the chamber had volume, filling the space without effort, mechanical in character but not in the way that servitor or cogitator vocalizations are mechanical. This was the mechanical quality of something very old that had long since abandoned anything it did not need.
"Even a Primarch should not be in the immediate vicinity when a direct conduit to a Warp energy source is ruptured. The result is not something the armor will fully manage."
Nolan stopped the Ten Rings.
He turned the skull helmet slowly, searching the chamber's full field of view. His eyes went to the array.
The gears were still moving. Then they weren't. The pause lasted perhaps half a second, less than a heartbeat, and when motion resumed the character of it had changed: the cables and gear assemblies were not rotating anymore. They were reshaping. The organic quality that the flesh-cable hybrids of the Ark of Omen had already demonstrated extended here to the entire array, every component moving with the deliberate fluidity of material that has been given a specific instruction.
The shape that emerged from the condensing mass was upper-body only, the lower half remaining merged with the floor and the cable infrastructure, but the upper body was extensive. A head at the top carried two curved horns of black metal, and the face below the horns was a vast geometric plane of interlocked gear-work, the features not sculpted but functional: eye-sockets that were apertures through which orange-red Chaos flame bled outward, a mouth that was a grid of vertical bars through which the same flame moved when the entity spoke.
The height of the upper body alone was more than ten meters.
"When we first meet." The voice was the same. It came from the mouth and from the walls simultaneously, or perhaps the distinction was irrelevant. "I am Vashtorr. The Creator. Those who serve in the Warp call me by other titles: Lord of the Soul Forges, God of Machines. Some, in the darker reaches of the Mechanicus, have used the name Dark Omnissiah."
The flame-eyes angled downward toward Nolan.
"You are smaller than I expected. Primarchs always are, when encountered directly."
Nolan had already converted the vibranium wings to propulsion mode. The energy output behind his armor built to launch threshold in the fraction of a second it required, and then he left the ground and drove upward toward the vast mechanical face at combat speed with the warscythe leading.
Vashtorr's eye-apertures did not track him. They did not need to.
The vibranium power armor stopped.
Not because something struck it. Not because a force field or energy barrier intercepted the trajectory. The armor simply ceased to move, every component of the suit's mechanical and servo systems arresting simultaneously with the completeness of something that has been switched off at the source. What had been Nolan's defense became, in the same moment, his cage: the vibranium locked at every joint, the propulsion systems offline, the arm servos frozen at their current extension angle. He hung in the air at the height the launch had carried him to, held there by the suit's last position rather than by any continuing force.
"Primarchs," Vashtorr said, with something in the voice that might have been genuine resignation. "I have observed many of your kind over the years, and the pattern is consistent. Has it occurred to any of you that a conversation might occasionally be worth attempting before the charge?"
The suit did not move.
"Additionally: I am not present here in any physical sense. This is an expression through the array, not an embodiment. Destroying it would damage my logistics on this vessel. It would not damage me. What you are attempting has no useful outcome for you."
The metal walls behind Nolan moved.
The passage he had entered through closed as the surrounding wall panels rotated into place across it, the gear pattern on their faces interlocking with the gear pattern on the adjacent sections until the seam was invisible. The chamber was now complete. No visible entrance.
The power armor resumed mobility.
Nolan descended to the floor, the magnetic boots connecting with the metal surface, and stood facing the vast mechanical face above him. His breathing inside the helmet was controlled and even. He reached up with both hands and lifted the skull helmet from his head, holding it at his side, and looked up at Vashtorr directly.
"I have nothing to discuss with Chaos," he said. His voice was level. "Your category of existence doesn't operate in good faith. The only offers you make are ones where the terms are already working against the recipient before the conversation starts."
A thin smile, implied by the movement of components around the flame-mouth rather than by any facial musculature.
"That is a reasonable assessment of several of my colleagues," Vashtorr said. "Whether it applies to me is a more interesting question."
Nolan's eyes moved across the chamber. The bomb locations. The cable arrays. The geometry of the walls. The distribution of the gear machinery between him and the passage entrance that no longer existed.
He kept the entity talking.
"Make your point, then."
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