The Tau called it Kauyon.
The word carried two meanings simultaneously in their language: patience, and the hunter. In practice those two meanings were not separate concepts but the same concept approached from different angles. Kauyon was the art of the patient trap, of laying bait and waiting with absolute stillness until the prey committed itself past the point of withdrawal, and then closing the distances from all directions at once. It was old doctrine, refined over generations of expansion campaigns, and it had worked against the Imperium before.
Nolan's forces did not speak Tau. But Astartes who had spent their lives studying the mechanics of ambush did not need to.
The White Scars moved first, in full visibility. Thunderhawks rose from the strike cruiser's deck in a formation that any Tau surveillance asset in range would have recorded and transmitted: white-painted transports carrying Kor'sarro Khan's Third Company to the surface of Prefetia, along with a complement of ground vehicles and gunships.
The White Scars fleet then turned about and drove toward a distant void corridor, its departure trajectory suggesting orders from the War Council to support a separate engagement elsewhere. To any Tau intelligence assessment, this looked like the Imperial forces thinning themselves, pulling strength away from a world they had already effectively conceded.
At the same time, the Raven Guard fed the Tau's own intelligence channels something they had not been given: confirmation that the Primarch who had killed Ethereal Aun'Va was personally present on the surface of Prefetia.
The bait was in the water.
Whether Shadowsun would take it, and whether the ambush would hold if she did, remained open questions. But to give the deception weight, and to press the actual objective of retaking the planetary fortress, Nolan led the Lamenters guard and the twenty-two surviving Black Templars to the surface and went directly at the Tau defensive positions.
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A railgun round passed close enough to the Starfire Glory's shoulder plate that Nolan heard the pressure differential through the armor's hull sensors before the impact plume went up behind him in a column of displaced sand and debris. He had already moved. The magnetic boot that had been where the round was heading shifted its weight forward, and the armor kept driving.
The Ten Rings left his gauntlet in sequence, each one accelerating as it crossed the ground toward the railgun turret that was already cycling for a second shot. The rings hit the traverse mechanism and the barrel housing in quick succession, and the turret stopped moving.
Nolan locked his gaze upward.
Three Crisis battlesuits were dropping out of low atmosphere in a tight spread, jets burning for a combat landing. He folded his wings into the propulsion configuration and launched himself off the ground to meet them before they reached their chosen altitude. The Warscythe began moving before he had fully closed the distance, and the suits came apart in the order they had been arranged: first, second, third, each one reduced to spinning metal fragments that the crosswind carried downrange while Nolan was already reorienting.
He had a moment to select a new target below, and then did not have that moment anymore.
The Hammerhead gunships came around the edge of the planetary fortress wall in a line, their railguns already depressed to the engagement angle, and they fired into the Lamenters' advance formation without preparation time. Railgun rounds at that range against Terminator plate were a calculation that ended badly. The first volley tore through four Terminators in immediate succession, the armor's defense rating overwhelmed by the kinetic delivery of the projectiles. The warriors inside were killed before the second volley came.
Nolan came down on the lead Hammerhead's turret housing with both magnetic boots and the full weight of the armor behind them. The impact crumpled the turret's rotation ring. The Warscythe followed through and separated the barrel from the receiver in two cuts. He had four seconds before the drone escort responded with massed pulse and rail fire, and he used three of them to read the positions of the remaining Hammerheads.
The fourth second he used to absorb what was incoming.
The fire concentrated on him and the Starfire Glory drank it in, kinetic energy stored in the alloy's lattice structure until the suit had taken everything the combined drone salvo could deliver in that window. Then Nolan released it.
The kinetic wave went outward through the Hammerhead hulls and into the crew compartments inside. Metal resonated at frequencies the pilots' bodies were not equipped to survive. When the wave passed, the three Hammerheads and the drone formation were inert, and the Lamenters' advance line had clear ground in front of it.
Nolan raised a fist.
"For the Emperor!"
The answering roar from the Lamenters came back from every direction at once, low and sustained, the particular sound of heavily armored warriors who had been waiting for the word.
"For Nolan!"
The Terminator charge hit the Tau defensive platform like a physical wall meeting another physical wall, and the question of which would give first began to resolve itself in the Imperium's favor.
Then the ion accelerator found him.
The Riptide's shot came from above and to his left, where the XV104 had positioned itself in the upper level of the fortress approach, and the energy transfer when it hit the Starfire Glory's side was not enough to breach the vibranium but was more than enough to push him. Nolan's boots dragged across the surface of the nearest Hammerhead wreck, fighting for grip, and for a moment he was pinned against the hull by the fire's sustained pressure, the suit unable to generate enough thrust to break through the continuous delivery.
The Coldstar suits came down around him during that moment. Five of them, each more than three meters tall, the XV86's jets cutting out as they landed in positions that sealed every viable exit angle. The Riptide held its altitude, keeping its angle of suppression while the Coldstars settled their weapons.
A voice came through the external speakers in clipped, grammatically careful Low Gothic.
"In the name of the Greater Good. By order of Commander Shadowsun. I am O'Shas Oshalas. Human commander: know that I am your ending. Revenge for Ethereal Aun'Va."
Nolan stood inside the fire suppression with his teeth set and his weight low.
He listened to all of it.
Then he made a small adjustment to his stance, centering his mass differently against the continued pressure of the ion fire, and waited the single additional second he needed for the kinetic storage to reach the threshold he wanted.
He released it.
The pulse went outward in a rough sphere and the sustained suppression broke apart as though it had never been organized. Coldstar suits were thrown off their landing positions. The Riptide's fire angle lost its lock.
Nolan activated the propulsion and drove straight at the Riptide.
The Warscythe was already moving. Behind him, the Ten Rings lifted from his gauntlet and split into separate trajectories, each one taking a different Coldstar suit as its target, chasing the retreating battlesuits through their evasion patterns with the patience of things that did not get tired.
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