Nolan was moving toward the Lamenters' line when the engine noise hit him.
It came from deep inside the horde, building in volume until it was louder than the fighting around it, a grinding roar that carried the particular quality of something very large and very poorly maintained being pushed past its tolerances. An Ork battle truck came through the crowd ahead of it, the vehicle a rough box of welded metal plates, its mass simply crushing any Ork that failed to move fast enough out of its path. The Orks that scattered from it did not look resentful. They looked like they had expected this.
Behind the truck, following it as a herald follows a lord, came the boss.
The suit of heavy armor on it stood over three meters tall and had clearly been assembled from whatever had been available and welded together with more enthusiasm than engineering. It was moving slowly, but it was moving with the particular momentum of something that had decided it did not need to hurry.
"Move! Move!" the boss was shouting, sweeping its gaze across the Orks around it with open contempt. "Useless cowards, every one of you. A squig has more fight. Watch how it's done, you lot. I'll deal with this one myself."
Its mismatched eyes, one larger than the other, found Nolan and settled there. The heavy armor began its charge.
Nolan recalled the ten rings and drove them at the approaching figure in a concentrated volley.
They hit. Every one of them hit.
The heavy armor absorbed all of it and kept coming. The boss raised one of its hydraulic clamps to cover the unprotected head and lowered its gaze behind the makeshift shield, and the ten rings that struck the clamp produced a ringing series of impacts that accomplished nothing beyond announcing that the rings had arrived.
Nolan retreated, keeping his distance, the rings cycling back to him while he thought.
The heavy armor closed the gap regardless. It was slow, but the battlefield did not give him room to keep retreating indefinitely. The clamps were already rising into their attack position.
He stopped the magnetic boots hard and reached to his waist.
Three freeze grenades came off the ring in one motion. He activated them without looking, let them spin once in his palm, and threw the cluster low and hard at the boss's lower body.
The ice detonated across the boss's legs and one partially raised clamp in a burst of expanding crystal, locking both limbs and the clamp in place from the knee down.
A moment of silence from inside the heavy armor.
"Ice?" The voice carried genuine personal offense. "You cheat! I'll kill you for that!"
The boss was still shouting when Nolan's magnetic boots hit the ground twice in rapid sequence, the recoil of each step carrying his whole body upward. He went above the level of the clamp, above the level of the unprotected head, the Warscythe already in motion on the way up.
The blade came down through the raised hydraulic clamp and continued through the green skull beneath it.
The crash of the boss hitting the ground shook the ice fragments around its frozen legs loose.
The effect on the horde was immediate and visible.
The Orks nearest to the fallen boss went quiet for the length of a breath, and then the noise that replaced the quiet was not a war cry. It was the specific vocal register of Orks who had just recalculated their situation.
"The boss is dead!"
"The little shrimp bit back! Run!"
The fighting spirit that had been driving the horde forward for hours began to dissolve from the center outward, moving through the mass of green bodies like something draining. The charges became hesitant. The hesitation became visible.
From the Lamenters' position, someone saw it.
"For those we hold dear! We die with honor!"
The battle cry broke across the hilltop and the dark yellow line surged forward, the Astartes driving into the faltering horde with the energy of men who had been holding a diminishing margin and had just seen the margin reverse. The mortal slaves behind them, most of them without proper weapons, followed anyway, throwing themselves into the gaps the Lamenters opened.
Nolan turned the Intelligent Control Corps inward and drove the pursuit into the broken center of the horde.
An hour later the last Ork still on its feet was crouching with both arms over its head, and the Warscythe resolved that.
Nolan shook the blade clean and turned toward the Lamenters.
The Astartes had begun removing their helmets. Chapter Master Foros stepped forward from among them, his expression carrying the particular exhausted warmth of a man who had been certain of dying and was still sorting out what to do with the alternative.
"Unfamiliar battle brother," Foros began, "our thanks for your support..."
The wings came out.
Nolan had not planned it as a statement. He simply stopped compressing the psychic appendages and let them extend from the back of the power pack as they wanted to, the black and red spread filling the air behind him.
The effect on the assembled Lamenters was instantaneous and total.
Chapter Master Foros went to one knee. The Chapter Chaplain beside him went to one knee. Every Astartes within sight followed, the motion spreading outward from the front rank in a wave, and the greeting they offered was not a greeting in the usual sense. It was a declaration, delivered in unison.
"The Lamenters Chapter greets the Twenty-Second Primarch!"
Nolan stood still for a moment.
"How do you know my identity?"
He retracted the wings and pulled off the vibranium helmet, studying the faces in front of him.
Foros looked up from the kneeling position with something that was almost a grin despite the blood and the exhaustion coating his face.
"My lord, every Chapter that traces its lineage to the Blood Angels makes the pilgrimage to the monastery on Baal to stand before the sacred battle standard. And there we hear the account of the Primarch who descended from the void, who fought alongside Lord Sanguinius and Lord Leman Russ, and who gave the Great Angel his counsel." Foros rose as Nolan waved them all to their feet. "It is not only the Lamenters. Every Blood Angels successor Chapter carries this account. Any of our brother Chapters that you encounter will know you, my lord. And any of them will follow your orders."
Nolan held the information quietly for a moment, then set it aside.
"We can discuss the past later. First: are these all the mortal slaves you have recovered?"
Foros and the Chapter Chaplain exchanged a look that carried the specific weight of a number neither of them entirely wanted to say aloud.
"My lord," Foros said, "the mortal slaves still alive on this death ore world number close to three million."
Before the words had settled, the count began proving itself. Dark openings in the hillside and along the mine faces began producing people: mortal slaves who had been concealed in the passages beyond, watching, waiting, moving now toward the light and the sound of the battle having stopped and the presence of something that felt like it might be going somewhere that was not here.
They came out in streams from a dozen directions at once, their faces carrying the particular blankness of people who had run out of the energy required for expression. They moved toward the Lamenters' position with the slow, collective certainty of people who had decided that wherever this was going, it was better than where they had been.
The streams kept coming.
Nolan looked at the scale of it and said nothing for a long moment.