The Warp portal opened above the private palace's floor and Nolan stepped through it.
He was covered in green.
The Tyranid spore residue that coated his vibranium power armor had the consistency of something that had been alive recently and was still in the process of deciding whether that was entirely over. It had accumulated across the chest, the pauldrons, and the lower leg sections in layers that suggested at least one engagement had involved close-quarters contact with something biological and very large. Tyberos came through behind him carrying similar evidence of the session. The Terminator Guards who followed had the hollow efficiency of warriors who had been going hard for hours and were prepared to continue.
The Techmarines were already waiting with flamers.
The decontamination procedure for Tyranid biological matter was not complicated, but it was not optional either: spores left active in the atmosphere of an enclosed space would become someone else's problem within hours. The flamers worked through the group methodically, the high-temperature wash burning the spore residue from armor surfaces while the warriors stood in place and accepted this.
Nolan was still within the flamer's range when the passage outside filled with the sound of armored boots at full sprint.
Kahurangi came through the doorway without slowing, his power armor working hard to keep pace with his urgency, the power scepter in his grip still charged from whatever he had been doing before the run.
"Primarch. Chapter Master." He got both titles out without pause. "The Forge World is under Chaos assault. Forces calling themselves Vashtorr's Gear-Daemon Army have made surface landings. Emperor's Children traitor Astartes came with them."
Nolan's skull helmet turned.
The Mind Stone embedded above the brow emitted a brief, contained pulse of energy, there and gone in a fraction of a second.
"Wesley," Nolan said. "Any sign of corruption? Did Reditus report to the fleet?"
Kahurangi shook his head. "I have had a continuous psychic observation on the Fabricator General since we arrived, Lord Primarch. Nothing. No trace of active corruption that I can detect." He paused a beat. "As for the invasion itself: a Raven Guard captain consolidated his infiltration teams' findings before the attack began. His conclusion was that the Gremlins distributed across the Forge World were not here to cause damage. They were serving as targeting beacons, transmitting the Forge World's position and defensive layout to whatever was coming. The Chaos attack followed the intelligence they provided."
The flamer finished its work.
Nolan stepped out of the cleaned area, reached over his shoulders, and drew the warscythe and Forgebreaker in a single practiced motion. He turned to face Tyberos and the Terminator Guards still in the decontamination wash.
"All Carcharodons to the battlefield. Full mobilization." His voice carried the specific flatness of orders that have already been decided rather than considered. "Recall the Raven Guard from their infiltration positions across the Forge World. Contact the Devourers and direct them to the front line to support the Skitarii. And notify the Titan Legion to commit their Knights immediately." He looked at Tyberos. "The faster we end this, the less the Forge World loses."
He turned to the wall.
The hole that Tyberos had widened for the Volcano Cannon was still there. Nolan's vibranium wings extended, shifted configuration into propulsion mode, and he launched through the opening and into the dark red night outside at speed.
The Thunderhawks were already over the streets when he cleared the palace exterior, laying suppression fire in dense patterns across the sectors where the cultist landing fragments had come down. The exhaust trails from their strafing runs crossed the haze-filtered sky in orange and white.
Below, the Skitarii had reorganized.
Vanguard squads advanced from the surrounding street networks, using ground vehicles as mobile cover, pushing inward from multiple approach angles toward each impact site. The advance was methodical and it was working, and then the daemon engines appeared and made it considerably less straightforward.
Soul Grinders emerged from between the fallen wreckage fragments in pairs, their eight-limbed chassis carrying them forward at a speed that the Skitarii vehicles could not easily maintain distance from. They were recognizable: the fused anatomy of machine and daemon, the organic components wrapped around and through the mechanical ones until neither was clearly distinguishable from the other. Their cannon arms tracked and fired on the move, each shot capable of ending a ground vehicle engagement outright.
Behind them came the Forgefiends.
The centauroid daemon engines moved with a low-slung aggression that suggested they had been designed by something that understood the visual grammar of predation and had wanted to use it deliberately. Their Hades Autocannons cycled as they advanced, the high-rate fire they produced tearing into the Skitarii defensive line in extended bursts that did not stop until targets were confirmed destroyed. The pressure they put on the encirclement front was immediate and substantial.
And then the cultists changed the nature of the problem entirely.
Without instruction or apparent hesitation, groups of Vashtorr's faithful turned to the nearest mechanical objects capable of movement and initiated contact. The transformation was not gradual. The merger of flesh and machine that the Chaos blessings allowed them produced something that had been neither before: gear-shaped daemon constructs roughly the scale of a large servitor, geometric and fast and entirely without self-preservation, throwing themselves at Skitarii positions with the specific kind of commitment that comes from not having a survival instinct left to override.
The sound hit before the figure did.
A low, rising hum, the kind that the inner ear registers as a pressure change before the conscious mind has processed it as noise, and then the impact of Nolan landing in the middle of the nearest daemon engine cluster, Forgebreaker already in its arc.
The thunder hammer's head connected with a Forgefiend's side chassis at full Primarch velocity, and the Forgefiend left the ground before it understood it was moving. It came down in pieces. The lightning field that Forgebreaker's head carried on impact scattered the daemon animating the frame in a burst of dispersing energy, and Nolan was already moving before the pieces settled.
The warscythe went through the cultists around him with the efficiency of a weapon wielded by someone who did not need to aim carefully. The blade's indestructible edge did not negotiate with the altered biology of Chaos-touched flesh, and the small gear-daemon constructs that closed on him from multiple angles met the Psychic Ray before they closed the last few meters: sustained beams from the Mind Stone in his skull helmet striking each construct in sequence, burning through the mixed mechanical-daemonic material faster than it could compensate.
He moved across the battlefield like a current.
Whichever engagement looked worst, he went toward it. Soul Grinders that had pinned Skitarii vehicle columns took Forgebreaker at point-blank range and did not survive the experience. Forgefiends that had been systematically dismantling the encirclement line lost their Hades Autocannons to the warscythe before they could bring the weapons to bear on something that moved as fast as he did. The Psychic Ray handled the gear-daemon constructs in volume, the beam traversing through groups of them rather than targeting individually.
The Carcharodons reached the battlefields.
Each squad that arrived changed the local arithmetic immediately, the chainweapons and storm bolters they carried converting contested positions into resolved ones with the directness that defined the Chapter's approach to combat. The Emperor's Children who had still been holding their bunker position were surrounded and systematically reduced. The cultists, numerous but not coordinated in a way that accounted for the Carcharodons' presence, found the character of their engagement shifting from assault to containment within minutes of the first Carcharodon squad making contact.
The ground battle was not won. But the shape of it had changed.
An explosion in the upper atmosphere drew Nolan's attention upward.
Through the eyepieces of the skull helmet, he tracked the source: more debris fragments working through the anti-aircraft network's fire, some of them succeeding, most of them not. And beyond them, at the edge of the atmosphere, the Ark of Omen's outline resolved against the continuous barrage the combined void fleet was directing against it. The lasers and energy lances reflected off the assembled hull mass in scattered patterns that made the vessel's true shape difficult to read, but its scale was not difficult to read.
Nolan opened the command channel.
"Terminator Guards: find Reditus and bring him to me." He switched frequencies. "Tyberos: accelerate the current engagements. When the immediate threat is neutralized, gather all Astartes on my position."
He looked at the Ark of Omen through the atmospheric haze.
The daemon engines, the cultists, the Emperor's Children, the falling debris: all of it had come from that vessel, and all of it would continue coming from that vessel until the vessel was no longer capable of producing it.
The Ark of Omen was the next objective.