The kinetic pulse had scattered the Tau defenders across a wide radius of scorched sand. Nolan was already moving before the last of them came back down.
His magnetic boots found purchase in the soft ground and he drove forward, the Warscythe coming up and beginning to move. He reached the escape pod at full stride. The hatch was sealed, the exterior undamaged, every surface indicator suggesting an occupied and functional unit. He gave the Warscythe a single full rotation and took it apart anyway: the green light carved the curved hull into sections that separated and fell outward, and when the interior was fully exposed to the dust storm and his eyepiece, there was nothing inside except a drone, already split cleanly down the center by the weapon's last arc.
Nolan took a slow breath.
"All units. No Ethereal at this position. Disengage from any remaining contacts and follow me to the next target."
He did not look back. He recalled the Ten Rings to his gauntlet, reactivated the armor's full drive, and moved out through the storm again, the boots cutting through the sand and the blood-wet ground beneath it. The Raven Guard abandoned their engagements without hesitation. The Tau Fire Warriors they left standing in the storm knelt where they were and gave quiet thanks to the Greater Good for outcomes that should not have gone in their favor.
The second pod was the same. Hull intact. Interior: one more drone, one more false signal, no Ethereal.
Nolan stood in the wreckage and thought it through quickly. The decoy network was effective because it relied on sensors, and their sensors were already degraded by interference. Chasing signals was going to lose this race. He needed a different filter.
He raised the vox.
"Solaq. Pass the following to the Thunderhawk formation. Stop scanning for pod signals. Instead, look for the largest concentration of Tau personnel gathered around any single location. Specifically: look for the Ethereal Guard. They dress differently from the Fire Caste, lighter equipment, more distinctive markings. The Ethereals don't travel without them." He crushed the head of a Fire Warrior underfoot without breaking stride and kept talking. "Also: if the pilots spot any Orca wreckage on the surface nearby, that is a reliable indicator we're close to the Ethereal's actual position. The decoys are drones. The real pod would have come down from one of those transports."
Shadow Captain Solaq emerged from the dust at his flank, armor ghost-pale under its coating of sand, and acknowledged the order with a nod before forwarding it up the chain. Nolan walked while he waited.
The response came in fourteen minutes.
Solaq came back at pace, and there was a sharpness in his voice that had not been there before.
"Primarch. The Thunderhawks have a location. Several kilometers east: a large formation of Tau personnel matching Ethereal Guard equipment profile. They have deliberately abandoned the pod in their vicinity, the one that would have been broadcasting a signal." He paused just long enough for the significance to land. "If there are no other explanations for what the pilots are describing, that is the Ethereal's true position. We have their trail."
Nolan's skull helmet turned east.
"Thunderhawks: commence air interdiction on that position. Hold them in place. No heavy ordnance near the center of the formation until I say otherwise."
He looked at the Raven Guard assembled around him.
"Everyone. Now."
He stepped into the Shadow Step and the storm swallowed him.
The Fifth Company followed, the shadow power flowing through them again the same way it had at the insertion point, and the entire unit simply ceased to be present on any wavelength the Tau's instruments could track. Dark shapes moving through darker air, crossing kilometers of sand and broken terrain in a silence that the storm itself could not quite compete with.
Above them, the Thunderhawks arrived first.
Their engines dropped to combat pitch as they came over the dune field and the lascannons opened up, las-fire walking through the Ethereal Guard's shield formation in sustained, measured strikes. The shields were good technology. They held the first several salvoes, flickering and brightening under repeated impact, and the Ethereal Guard moved with the discipline of warriors who had been protecting something irreplaceable their entire careers. Each firing position they took was calculated. Each movement of their principal deeper into the dune network was covered.
But the Thunderhawks did not stop, and the shields began to fail.
As each projector burned out, the gap it left in the formation opened another angle. The Ethereal Guard fought for every meter, and some of them were skilled enough to take brief engagements with the Raven Guard advance elements before being overwhelmed. Brief. The technology gap that made Tau Pathfinders a credible threat at range disappeared entirely at arm's length, and the Ethereal Guard's role had never been designed for sustained close-quarters work.
They were holding a line they could not hold, buying time for something they were not sure was still behind them.
Dong dong dong.
Nolan and the Fifth Company emerged from the ground shadows at a run, the pale gold of the Starfire Glory suddenly visible against the dust as Nolan disengaged the shadow power and drove the armor forward at full thrust. The Raven Guard peeled into the flanks of the guard formation, pressing from multiple angles at once.
The Ten Rings left Nolan's gauntlet in a spread, each one trailing purple light as it crossed the distance to the nearest Ethereal Guard shield projectors. The projectors that had survived the Thunderhawks' work went dark in sequence, the rings punching through the emitters and the lightly armored bodies behind them with the same motion. The Ethereal Guard line contracted inward, trying to put mass between what was coming and whatever was at its center.
Nolan activated the armor's propulsion and came off the ground.
He had located the most elaborately dressed figure in the Tau formation by the time he was three meters up, and everything after that was trajectory. He drove toward Ethereal Aun'Va at the angle of something that had not been fired so much as aimed, the Warscythe back and ready, the distance between them closing with a speed that the Ethereal Guard's remaining shield projectors could not account for in time.
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