Vashtorr's voice filled the chamber at a volume that did not require effort.
Nolan divided his attention between the words and the problem of the armor, not equally.
"I will break this impasse with some transparency," Vashtorr said. "The Ark of Omen was given one purpose: to locate the artifact fragments called the keys. I forged the Obelisk, the Chaos Beacon, specifically to guide it through the Warp without difficulty. Under the Obelisk's guidance, the vessel should not have become lost, and it should not have encountered a Warp storm. And it certainly should not have arrived here."
The flame-eyes shifted fractionally.
"And yet. Here it is. And here you are. And here I am, speaking to a Primarch aboard my own flagship because the warband and believers I entrusted this mission to decided, without my instruction and against my interests, to attack your Forge World." A pause. "If I tell you that this was not my intention, what is your assessment?"
Nolan's expression did not change.
But something in his reasoning connected: the Warp storm that had pinned the Carcharodons fleet at Triplex Phall, the Ark of Omen's arrival at exactly the wrong moment for Vashtorr's stated purpose, the particular signature of an intervention that served no one's interest except a party that wanted Vashtorr's operation disrupted.
"The Warp storm was deliberate," Nolan said. "Someone diverted your Ark to Triplex Phall on purpose." He looked at the vast mechanical face above him. "That big one. The one with all the blue-feathered servants."
Vashtorr was quiet for a moment, which in a being of his evident processing capacity was the equivalent of a considered pause.
"The four Chaos Gods have held their positions in the Warp for ten thousand years," he said. "They are not a unified force, but they share certain interests, and one of those interests is the continued exclusivity of their number. When your Emperor of Mankind became a presence in the Immaterium powerful enough to constitute a fifth power, the four were not pleased. They have, however, reached a grudging accommodation with that reality. He is there. He will remain there."
The gear-work of the vast face adjusted in a way that communicated something beyond the neutral mechanical movement.
"There will not be a sixth. On this point, all four are in absolute agreement, and they enforce that agreement without mercy. I am the sixth candidate. I have been a candidate for a very long time. And yes: the Lord of Change has made several arrangements on my behalf recently that I did not request and would not have chosen."
Nolan said nothing. He was listening with the part of his attention that could be spared from the armor.
The armor's joint resistance was not uniform. Vashtorr's control over it was total in aggregate but variable at the component level, and the variable points moved in patterns that Primarch-level sensory processing could track if it had enough data. Nolan had been building that data since the armor locked. His lips had started bleeding from the effort of testing the seals at their weakest points.
"I am a businessman," Vashtorr continued. "The only one in the Warp who can accurately claim that description. My contracts are honored. My agreements are kept. Even the four Chaos Gods, who hate what I represent as a potential sixth power, acknowledge this about me. I do not corrupt. I transact."
The flame-eyes looked down.
"This makes me, by some margin, the most reasonable entity of significant Warp presence that you will ever speak with. And I am speaking with you now to propose something that benefits both of us."
Nolan's eyes had moved to the simulator's storage interface, open at the edge of his awareness. Something in the available inventory had caught his attention. He held his expression level.
"A sixth chess player in the Warp," Vashtorr said, "who holds genuine neutrality toward the Imperium of Man, is not an asset to be dismissed. I have Warmaster Abaddon as an ally on your side of the board. But Abaddon's loyalties are to Chaos and to himself, in that order. An ally on your side who deals in contracts rather than corruption is a different kind of arrangement."
The voice dropped slightly in register.
"I am asking you to sign a Warp contract. The terms are minimal. In exchange: a gear-daemon army equal to the Black Legion in scale, additional Arks of Omen placed under your direct command, and when you face enemies that exceed your current capacity to deal with, my forces can be called upon to assist. All of this in exchange for a formal agreement that costs you, in practical terms, very little."
He let that sit.
"Your Primarch intuition already knows that the enemies ahead of the Imperium include things that even a Primarch-level force cannot address alone. I am offering you an instrument against those things. The only condition is that you acknowledge me as a legitimate party to a contract."
Nolan stood in the sealed chamber, Vashtorr's avatar above him, the armor immobile, the hundreds of melta bombs distributed across the floor around him, the detonation control on his belt, the simulator storage open at the edge of his awareness, and the one arm that he had spent the last several minutes identifying as the weakest point in the armor's lock.
He took a breath.
"I'll tell you exactly what I think," he said. "Chaos is not a spectrum. Every piece of it, from the smallest Gremlin to the oldest God, is the same material. Some pieces are dressed differently and some pieces are more patient than others, but the material is the same." His jaw set. "You want a contract? Here's my position: Chaos creatures are a heap of filth. The Chaos Gods are just larger and older pieces of that heap. And you, Vashtorr, who has not yet made the transition to full god, are a lesser piece telling me about the quality of its composition."
The flame-eyes burned.
"Bigger chips have been offered to corrupt me than what you're proposing. They haven't worked. What makes you think the offering of an army changes the fundamental problem with the transaction?"
He gritted his teeth.
The force he put through the one weakest joint of the armor's right arm was not the force of servo-assisted ceramite movement. It was Primarch muscle acting against a mechanical lock, and the difference in what those two things can generate is not small. The veins at his temples and throat stood out against the skin. His lips split at the pressure point where his jaw had clenched, and pale golden blood ran down his chin.
The joint moved.
The arm came free.
His two weapons disappeared from his hands in the same instant, pulled into the simulator's storage interface, and from that same interface something else came forward: a Hellfire missile on a disposable launch frame, the warhead already armed, the frame balanced against the floor in the position the storage interface had identified as optimal.
The warhead was pointing at Vashtorr's enormous mechanical face.
The launch trigger was within the radius of Nolan's free palm.
He hit it.
The Hellfire missile's ignition produced a blast of scorching propellant exhaust that caught Nolan at close range from behind and threw him off his feet, the skull helmet engaging automatically as it always did under high-threat conditions, the visor sealing before the exhaust could reach his face. The Hellfire warhead crossed the chamber in the time it takes to blink and connected with the gear-work of Vashtorr's avatar at center mass.
Nolan was still moving through the air when he opened the simulator interface.
He did not look at what mission he selected. He pulled a prayer support at random, the only criterion being that it would open a Warp portal, and a portal opened in the air behind him at the point his trajectory was carrying him toward.
His other hand found the melta bomb detonator on his belt.
The switch required no grip and no precision. He pressed it.
The circular square became fire simultaneously from three hundred points across its floor, every melta bomb detonating in the fraction of a second that the signal took to propagate, the overlapping thermal events merging into a single sustained roar that traveled through the Ark of Omen's hull as a shockwave the entire vessel could feel. The gear array at the chamber's center received the concentrated heat of hundreds of military-grade melta warheads and did what any mechanical structure, however ancient or however protected, does when the temperature around it reaches that level.
Nolan entered the Warp portal as the fire wall reached him.
The portal sealed behind him.
He had one moment before the transition completed, and he used it to look back through the closing aperture at the chamber, and to say, at full volume, the words he had been composing since Vashtorr had started speaking:
"Vashtorr! The Lord of Mankind sends you his greetings!"