Nolan stood in the circular square and looked like a man who had decided to bring everything.
The C'tan Phase Sword, the Warscythe, Frost Fang, and several Antarctic vibranium power swords were distributed across the back of the power pack in overlapping rows. The Heart of the Furnace and the Masterwork Bolter sat at the waist alongside them. Around the full circumference of the armor's belt, freeze grenades and high-explosive grenades alternated in a solid ring, the freeze grenades having waited long enough for a situation that actually warranted them.
The ten rings sat on his forearms and cycled their purple light slowly, running through what had become their idle pattern.
David, beside him, had shed the standard Astartes disguise in favor of something more honest about its nature: the six-armed Iron Cavalry Terminator, standing considerably taller than Nolan, with two additional storm bolters fixed to the lower palms. The result was less a disguise and more a declaration.
Five hundred Scyllax Guardian Automata and five Intelligent Control Mechs equipped with Hellhammer lascannons completed the rescue complement, each unit carrying melta bombs in addition to its standard loadout. Nolan would have brought more, but the space crack had limits. Too large a force risked attrition on the transit itself, and accidental losses before the mission began served no one.
The flag had been David's suggestion in its simplest form, and they had worked out the specifics together in the time it took to finalize the loadout. A green sickle overlaid on a golden gear, mounted above the power pack of the six-armed Terminator. The green for the Warscythe and everything it represented about Nolan's preference for xenotech. The gold for David and the Intelligent Control Corps that Raditus had built. Something to put between themselves and the enemy in the eyes of any allied force on the ground.
When the preparations were complete, the full rescue force assembled in the circular square, still expanding at its edges under the continuous work of the servo robots. Nolan and David turned toward the Emperor's statue and bowed once, briefly, then straightened.
Nolan opened the simulator and selected the Lamenters support mission without hesitation.
The sound the space crack made when it opened was different this time, subtler, a vibration that settled in the chest rather than the ears. The crack itself was wider than any previous transit, wide enough for the full complement to move through without compression.
The circular square emptied.
Darkness. The smell of deep rock and stale air and something older beneath both.
Nolan's magnetic boots found the floor and held. He swept the eyepiece across the immediate space and found rough stone walls, low ceiling supports, passages extending in multiple directions from a central chamber. The light his helmet provided was the only light available.
"My lord." David's Terminator frame turned slowly, sensors active. "Based on my initial scan, we are in the deepest section of an abandoned mine. The surface is several hundred meters above us."
"Send the Scyllax ahead to find the route up," Nolan said. "I want contact with the Lamenters on the surface before we commit to a direction."
A combat team of Scyllax units moved out immediately, splitting across the available passages with chain swords at idle, tentacles feeling the walls and ceiling for structural information as they advanced. Nolan and David led the remaining force forward along the passages as the scouts cleared them, moving at a measured pace through the dark.
The passages were not empty of history. The eyepiece picked up detail as Nolan moved: snow-white bones distributed across the floor in patterns that told a story about how their owners had died. Mummified bodies reduced to skin over nothing, pressed against the walls or slumped in alcoves. For someone who had never seen what Greenskin captivity produced, these were shocking. For anyone who knew what Orks did with prisoners, they were expected.
Faint now, but growing: the sound of explosions above them. Overlapping detonations, the particular quality of sustained artillery exchange, the deeper concussions of something large collapsing.
The signal from the advance Scyllax came through half an hour after entry. Route confirmed.
Nolan accelerated without instruction, moving past the forward elements of the force, pushing toward the light growing at the end of the ascending passage.
He came out into daylight on the side of a mining hill and took in the scene through the eyepiece in a single sweep.
The hills above him were covered in Orks from the ridge line down to the base. The scale of the horde was not a number so much as a condition of the terrain: green bodies spread across every surface, moving constantly, the noise they generated a physical pressure in the air. All of it was directed toward a single Astartes company holding a defensive line in dark yellow power armor, fighting on the forward edge of a larger mass of mortal slaves who were sustaining themselves with whatever weapons they could lift from Ork dead or tear from the hillside.
The Lamenters were still standing. They would not be standing much longer at the current rate.
Nolan spoke without turning back.
"David. Half the Intelligent Control Corps breaks off and engages from a separate direction. Draw their attention away from the Lamenters' flank. The rest charge with me."
He pulled the Antarctic vibranium power sword from the back rack with one hand and closed the other around Frost Fang, and drove the power armor straight into the rear of the Ork formation at full acceleration.
The Scyllax followed him in, chain swords spinning up to combat speed, tentacles raised.
An Ork at the formation's edge heard something, or felt something, and turned with a rusty axe already moving. The Ork was large even by Ork standards and appeared to be forming the beginning of a rallying shout when Frost Fang's blade came across and separated its head from the rest of it in a single horizontal cut.
Nolan did not slow. He drove through the gap the momentum created and entered the mass of the formation, both blades moving, the vibranium shell carrying him through anything that tried to slow him from the outside. The Orks around him were large, heavily built, and completely unprepared for something hitting them from behind with this velocity. The Frost Fang and the power sword worked in alternating arcs, and the Orks that filled the space between each arc did not fill it for long.
On the far side of the hill, David's half of the Intelligent Control Corps opened fire.
The Ork formation split its attention. The outer edge of the horde began to turn, compelled by the new threat on their flank, pulling away from the Lamenters' line. The pressure on the yellow-armored Astartes dropped by degrees as the reorientation propagated through the mass of the horde.
Behind Nolan, the Scyllax plowed into the body of the formation with the particular violence of machines that had no reason to be careful. Chain swords carved through Ork torsos and limbs without distinction. Mechanical tentacles seized, bound, and tore. The Orks who turned to meet them fought with the same ferocious energy they brought to everything, axes and shootas and improvised metal striking against metal snake bodies, and the exchange was deafening and close and without any clear margin on either side.
The battle reached its full intensity within minutes of contact and stayed there.