Night on Prefetia's surface. The mineral world had no weather worth calling weather under normal circumstances, but the electromagnetic interference thrown off by the competing fleet operations above had churned the atmosphere into something less cooperative: a sustained dust storm that moved in low rolling walls across the broken terrain, carrying enough charged particulate to flatten vox signals and compress augur ranges to a fraction of their operational envelope.
In the middle of it, a formation of black-painted Thunderhawks held station ten meters above the surface, riding the buffeting with their stabilizers working hard. Their rear hatches opened, and the Raven Guard came out.
They fell without sound. The dust enveloped them before they reached the ground, and they landed in it like shadows absorbing shadow, each warrior settling into the storm's noise and disappearing from any sensor sweep that was not specifically calibrated to find them. It was the kind of insertion the Raven Guard had been perfecting for ten thousand years.
Nolan came last. The wings of the Starfire Glory snapped open behind him as he stepped from the hatch, catching the air and converting the drop into a steep controlled glide. The pale gold of the armor was lost almost immediately in the swirling dust, and the Warscythe in his hand left no light trail for a sensor to track. His magnetic boots hit the sand with a soft crunch, sinking to the ankle before the pressure equalized, and he straightened into the storm.
The vox was already active. Shadow Captain Kyrin Solaq's voice came through the interference in fragments, but with enough clarity to matter.
"Lord Primarch. Latest intelligence: minutes ago, a Tau landing force broke through the fleet's defensive perimeter at the cost of roughly a third of their ships and successfully put troops on the surface. The nearest element of that force is several thousand kilometers from our current position. It will not reach us in time to affect a decapitation strike."
Nolan raised one arm, the Ten Rings orbiting the gauntlet in slow circles of purple light.
Solaq continued. "What the intelligence pattern suggests is that the Tau command structure places the Ethereal's safety above the outcome of this engagement. They are willing to accept significant fleet losses to guarantee the extraction."
"Of course they are," Nolan said. "To the Tau, the Ethereals are something close to what the Emperor is to us. Losing one is not a military setback. It is something closer to a religious wound." He let that settle for a moment, then turned his eyepiece toward Solaq through the dust. "Have you located the landing point?"
The Shadow Captain's helmet dipped once in a nod, then tilted slightly in qualification.
"The electromagnetic interference has degraded our Thunderhawks' augur arrays significantly. What I can confirm is that the Ethereal's escape pod came down within a twenty-kilometer radius of our current position, with an error margin of two to three kilometers." He paused. "The complication is this: my helmet display is showing multiple pod signals. Dozens of them. I cannot determine whether that is instrument error caused by the interference, or whether the Tau have deliberately seeded the area with decoy pods to screen the real one."
Nolan heard him out, then made a short sound inside the skull helmet that was not quite a laugh.
"Decoys. They want to make us chase phantoms while they move the real Ethereal." He raised a gauntleted hand and let it fall forward, the gesture of a decision already made. "Then we do not let them set the pace."
He turned to address the assembled Fifth Company.
"Thunderhawks, go to altitude and begin aerial reconnaissance. Cross-reference every pod signal you can acquire and start narrowing the field. Fifth Company, with me. On the ground, at pace. We reach the Ethereal before their reinforcements reach us."
He did not wait for acknowledgment.
The magnetic boot moved forward into the storm, and then shadow power moved with it. It rose from somewhere deeper than the armor, spreading along Nolan's frame in slow dark currents, and without any deliberate command the Shadow Step took him. The sandstorm simply stopped being an obstacle. He moved through it the way a current moves through water.
Around him, the Raven Guard felt it happen.
It was not something Nolan had instructed or even intended. The shadow power reaching out from a Primarch of Corax's lineage did something to the gene-bond that lay dormant in every Raven Guard's gene-seed, and the response was immediate. Warrior after warrior, all across the Fifth Company's line, slipped from visible to invisible as the Shadow Step took them in sequence, each one triggered not by their own will alone but by some resonance with what was moving beside them.
In moments, the entire company was gone from any sensor that relied on light or heat or sound. Black armored Astartes moving through a sandstorm at speed, invisible, with a Primarch burning shadow-bright at their center.
For warriors who had trained in Corax's methods for their entire lives, it felt like memory. Not a personal memory but something older, carried in the architecture of the gene-seed itself. The Great Crusade. Columns of Raven Guard moving behind the Raven King through darkness that had never expected to be crossed. Worlds freed. Enemies that never saw the blade before it arrived.
They ran.
The first Tau Pathfinder scout teams never heard them coming.
Fragmentation rounds punched through the light armor of each fire team in short, controlled bursts, and the Raven Guard were already past the position before the last body had finished moving. The process repeated across a wide front, the Astartes cycling in and out of Shadow Step between engagements, striking and withdrawing and reappearing from a different angle before the Tau could establish a coherent response.
Nolan moved differently through all of it.
He had found a rhythm with the Warscythe that consumed his full attention in the best possible way: the weapon's arc required commitment, and committing to it in a firefight against multiple targets meant reading the space around him in constant motion. Green light cut wide wheels through the dust as he drove forward, pulse rounds and rail rifle accelerator slugs coming in from three sides at once, the Starfire Glory drinking in the kinetic punishment and storing it.
He bore it until he had enough.
Then he locked his boots.
Nolan stood upright in the center of the storm, surrounded on all sides by Tau Pathfinders whose fire was tracking in from every angle, and released everything the armor had collected in a single outward pulse.
The kinetic wave went out in a ring. Fire Warriors inside its radius were thrown upward, armor and bodies alike tumbling through air that shouldn't have been able to move them, rising a dozen meters and more before gravity reasserted itself and brought them back down hard onto ground already thick with the evidence of how this engagement had been going.
The Ethereal's escape pod was close. The augur reading was still cluttered with decoy signals, but Nolan had stopped trusting the sensors ten minutes ago. He was navigating by something older and less precise and considerably more reliable.
He kept moving.