The Leman Russ tanks had found their rhythm.
They worked in overlapping fire zones, each tank's main gun cycling through reloading before the previous shot had fully resolved, covering the impact zones where cultist landing fragments had come down with a continuous barrage that did not give the debris piles time to be used as cover effectively. The Skitarii Vanguard moved behind this wall of fire, pushing forward from multiple angles, preventing the Chaos forces from finding a stable defensive line to exploit.
Above it all, Nolan cut through the night sky.
The vibranium wing propulsion kept him elevated, his trajectory shifting constantly to avoid the weapons tracking him from the daemon engines below. The warscythe and Forgebreaker moved in alternating arcs, each pass over a daemon engine cluster leaving wreckage that had not been wreckage thirty seconds earlier. The Ten Rings preceded him where the melee weapons could not reach. The Psychic Ray, continuous and precise from the Mind Stone in his skull helmet, punched through small gear-daemon constructs in sequence as they surged up toward him from the debris zones.
A cultist amalgamation of flesh and cable rose from a collapsed foundry wall.
The Ten Rings went through it before Nolan had consciously registered the threat.
He landed heavily between two burning debris piles, magnetic boots snapping to the ground, and the communication channel opened before the dust settled.
"Lord Primarch." Reditus's voice carried across the channel with the characteristic quality of someone who had just covered ground quickly while also monitoring half a dozen data feeds. "I have reached the battlefield. What are your orders?"
Nolan looked up at the Ark of Omen's outline against the upper atmosphere.
"You brought the space-time platform's teleportation module with you," he said. It was not quite a question.
"I did."
"Calculate internal coordinates for the Ark of Omen. I am taking the Astartes aboard."
There was a brief pause of the specific variety that indicated very fast calculation.
"Lord Primarch." Reditus's tone shifted. "The teleportation module has not completed its standard testing sequence. Experimental teleportation under those conditions introduces significant coordinate uncertainty. The safety correction systems will prevent material overlap during transit, but if the coordinate calculation deviates outside acceptable parameters, everyone involved in the teleportation will not arrive aboard the Ark of Omen."
"They will arrive in the void."
"I understand," Nolan said.
"At terminal vacuum exposure," Reditus continued, with the persistence of someone who had a specific professional objection and intended to register it fully. "At which point there would be no meaningful distinction between a boarding party and a target. Lord Primarch, I can work with these systems, but a failed coordinate lock on an unknown vessel interior is not a trivial failure mode."
A small gear-daemon construct crested the rubble to Nolan's left. The Psychic Ray found it without Nolan turning.
"Reditus," he said. "This is an order. Execute it."
Silence for a moment.
"If you want me and every Astartes in that teleportation to survive arrival, then put everything you have into the coordinate calculation. Every system available to you. I have complete confidence in your ability to make this work." His voice carried the specific weight of someone stating a fact rather than offering encouragement. "Do you understand?"
A sound from the channel that was somewhere between a sigh and a calculation running to completion.
"Oh, Omnissiah. If something goes wrong, David will reduce me to base components before the Emperor even gets the chance." Another brief sound. "Lord Primarch. Let us gamble. Emperor's blessing. Machine God's blessing. Give me the time I need."
Nolan activated the propulsion wings and launched upward, cutting through a corridor in the anti-aircraft fire that briefly opened between daemon engine positions. He opened the command channel to all frequencies.
"All Astartes currently in the field: approximately two-thirds of present strength to converge on Reditus's position immediately. Carcharodons void-brothers and Raven Guard battle-brothers both. Tyberos, you take the remaining Terminator Guards and assume ground command. The surface battle is yours."
He was already flying.
The Ark of Omen's weapons arrays tracked him across the upper atmosphere as he moved, near-misses detonating close enough to rock him sideways twice. He adjusted trajectory each time and kept moving, cutting across the battlefield toward the location the Armiger's signal was transmitting from.
Reditus had found a cleared space in the wreckage of a collapsed processing structure.
The Armiger stood at the center of it, and from a panel in its lower chassis that had hinged outward, a metal module had been extended and deployed on the ground. The module was roughly half a meter on each side, its outer casing giving no indication of its interior's complexity. But the interior was complex: through the seams in the casing, blue teleportation energy bled out in hairline threads that bent the light around them slightly, and the internal structure could be heard rotating in sequences that bore no relationship to standard mechanical motion.
Nolan landed.
He felt the reaction immediately, not as an external force but as something internal: the Mind Stone in his skull helmet responded to proximity with the Space Stone energy in the module, a resonance too subtle to quantify but distinct enough to locate. He raised one hand and touched the helmet's brow.
The shadow operators of the Raven Guard came first, materializing from the surrounding building debris in groups of three and four, power claws and bolters carried at ready, each warrior confirming presence with a nod toward Nolan before taking position in the cleared space. Behind them came the Carcharodons, their chainweapons still coated with the residue of the last hour of fighting, power armor showing the extensive ceramic scarring that came from sustained daemon engine proximity. They moved through the space with the controlled velocity of warriors who had been in continuous combat and had not finished.
A Raven Guard company champion and a Carcharodons third company captain stepped forward within Nolan's field of view.
"Thirty-six Raven Guard company, Lord Primarch. Additional brothers still committed inside the battlefield."
"Third company of the Carcharodons Astra, fifty-one void-brothers. At the Lord Primarch's disposal."
Eighty-eight Astartes stood in the cleared space.
Nolan looked at them for a moment.
Then he reached into the simulator's storage interface and extracted the melta bombs that had been held there, pulling them through in a steady stream and setting them on the ground in front of the assembled warriors. Each bomb was collected without being asked.
He waited until everyone had taken what they needed.
"You know what this is," he said. His voice was level. "A boarding operation against the Ark of Omen. We go in, we destroy it, we eliminate whatever Chaos forces are aboard. No covering fire. No reinforcement available. The teleportation is experimental, and if the coordinates are wrong we arrive in the void instead of aboard the vessel."
No one moved.
"This is a one-way ticket. You may not see the next dawn." He let that sit for exactly one second. "But that has always been true. That will always be true. This is what we are."
He looked across the assembled faces, the skull helmet's eyepieces moving from warrior to warrior.
"Astartes." His voice carried into the surrounding wreckage without effort. "Tell me what your duty is."
The answer came back without hesitation, from eighty-eight voices simultaneously.
"Dedicate ourselves to the will of the Emperor. To the will of the Voidfather. To the will of the Primarch."
"And what is that will?"
"Fight to the death."
Nolan raised one vibranium palm above his head.
"For the Emperor."
The roar that answered him was not one voice. It came from all of them at once, and it was loud enough that it carried over the continuing sounds of the battlefield in every direction, over the tank fire and the daemon engine weapons and the anti-aircraft network still working in the sky above:
"For Nolan."