The ten rings moved before Nolan had fully decided to move them.
The lta bomb left his palm on the rings' trajectory, knocked upward and redirected, and the rings carried it into the Gorkanaut's remaining structure at the precise mont that Nolan pulled the Heart of the Furnace from his waist and leveled it at the warlord pressing toward him from the front.
The lta bomb detonated against the Gorkanaut's claw chanism. The heat that ca back across Nolan's shoulders was significant and imdiate. The claw that had been descending toward him ca down as molten tal instead, spreading across the ground in a wide splash that took a swathe of the surrounding Orks with it in a chorus of screaming. The formation that had been closing around him broke apart as the burning tal reached them.
Nolan stood.
The Heart of the Furnace was already cycling its next plasma burst, and he walked it into the warlord continuously as the Warscythe ca up in his other hand. The warlord's body was large and dense and built to absorb damage, and it absorbed a great deal before the accumulated heat of repeated plasma bursts found enough of the biology inside the armor to end it. The last sound it made was a roar that still had anger in it, which was a very Ork way to finish.
Nolan stood in the cleared space and looked at the Ork lines still pressing against the human position.
"Co on then," he said, to no one in particular, and pulled Frost Fang off the back rack.
He did not finish the sentence.
The sound reached him before the visual did: a series of impacts from above the atmosphere, overlapping, the particular register of large objects entering from orbit at speed. He looked up through the eyepiece.
Ork fleet wreckage was coming down across the mining world in a dispersed pattern, trailing fire, the pieces large enough that the impacts shook the ground through his magnetic boots. And between the falling wreckage, moving in the opposite direction, blue-shelled drop pods were driving through the atmosphere on columns of fla, their trajectories already resolved into landing coordinates across the battlefield.
Along the horizon, in formation, Thunderhawk transporters and heavy fighters were visible, driving hard into the air units the Ork forces had scrambled in response.
The Corinth Crusade fleet had arrived.
The sound that ca from the Lanters' trench line was not a battle cry. It was sothing more raw than that: the release of people who had been holding sothing for five days and had just been given permission to put it down. It lasted for several seconds and then converted directly into forward motion as the Lanters and the mortal fighters poured over the parapet and into the Ork lines that had already begun to lose their cohesion under the weight of what was descending on them.
Ten minutes later, Ultramarines in blue power armor and Mortifactors in black and yellow were moving across the battlefield from the landing zones, their heavy weapons compressing the surviving Ork pocket from multiple directions. A drop pod at the center of the field opened and a figure in blue Terminator armor stepped out with both power fists active and an honor guard behind him, and drove directly into the densest concentration of Orks without breaking stride.
Marneus Calgar had co personally.
The outco of the battle stopped being a question.
Twelve hours later, the last coherent Ork resistance had been reduced to dispersed pockets being thodically cleared by Mortifactors combat squads. The noise of the battlefield had beco sothing manageable.
Then two companies of Ultramarines turned in formation and encircled the Lanters' position.
The movent was precise and deliberate. The Lanters who still had strength straightened and looked at their battle brothers across the line of bolters. Chapter Master Foros moved through his Astartes quietly, laying a hand on shoulders, a word in ears, keeping the tension below the threshold of action. The mortal fighters gripped their improvised weapons and watched.
Nolan was sitting on the edge of a trench. He pulled the vibranium helt off and held it in his lap, and the blood on the outside of it caught the light.
"Foros," he said, without raising his voice. "Go find Calgar."
Foros had not yet turned when Calgar ca through the encirclent from behind.
The Terminator armor moved with the particular weight of sothing that had been walking over battlefields for a very long ti. Calgar's face, when it found Nolan, carried exhaustion that he had not chosen to conceal, and no emotion that Nolan could clearly read beneath it. He stopped a few paces away and looked down at the figure sitting on the trench parapet.
Foros stepped forward before anyone else could.
"Chapter Master Calgar. In the na of the Lanters Chapter, in the na of the Blood Angels and all their successors, and in the na of the Emperor himself, I give you my personal assurance: this lord is a genuine Primarch."
Calgar looked at Foros for a long mont.
"Do you understand," he said, his voice flat and cold, "what the Lanters' actions here could have cost the Imperium? Do you imagine that only the mortals on this mining world require saving? If this crusade fails to stop Skagol, if his forces reach the core worlds of this system, then those sa millions of Imperial citizens you have fought to protect will lose everything anyway. Their hos. Their lives." He let the weight of it sit. "Can the Lanters Chapter carry that responsibility? Can you, personally, carry what it would an if I had brought the fleet here and the crusade failed because of it?"
The question was addressed to Foros. Nolan answered it.
"Chapter Master Calgar." His voice was even, unhurried. "Have your Librarians or Chaplains confirm my identity. That can be resolved quickly." He looked at Calgar directly. "On the other question: I do not believe the Lanters have done anything that requires defending. The Astartes exist to protect the people of the Imperium. That is the foundation. The battles, the crusades, the glory of campaign, all of that is built on top of it. Do not reverse the order."
He held Calgar's gaze.
"It is the sacrifice of countless ordinary n and won that holds the Imperium together. Not the other way around. The Imperium does not exist to spend its people. Its people are what the Imperium is." A brief pause. "I am told Krieg has developed a different philosophy on this point. If others attempted the sa, the Inquisition would likely have an opinion about it."
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