The Coldstar suits had held. Their eclipse refractor fields absorbed the Ten Rings' impacts in rapid sequence, the experimental shielding technology flickering under each strike but not giving way, and the suits used the window to reposition while the Riptide ejected two missile drones from its shoulder housings.
The drones launched their payloads at close range.
Nolan's Warscythe was already moving when the first missiles crossed into the space between them. He read the trajectories as they came and split each warhead before detonation: a single precise cut through the nose of the first, another through the second, the third caught at the angle where the force of the swing carried through cleanest. The detonations went off in the sand behind him as he stepped through the smoke they left.
Close combat range. He was inside the Riptide's ideal engagement envelope now, where its ranged systems became a liability rather than an advantage.
The Riptide activated its Nova shield in the same moment Nolan brought the Warscythe up. The shield bloomed outward in a bright ring of deflection energy and the Warscythe cut through it anyway, the green light shearing through the field and continuing into the Riptide's left mechanical leg, severing it at the upper joint.
The suit's jetpack ignited immediately, trying to buy separation, and the leg came away cleanly as the suit pushed back.
It did not push back far enough.
The Coldstars poured fire into Nolan from the flanks. He took it on the Starfire Glory's surface without breaking stride, felt the kinetic storage rising, and activated the armor's propulsion in a single movement. He came off the ground and drove himself into the Riptide's chest before the damaged suit had finished processing that its jump was incomplete, the full weight of the Starfire Glory meeting the Riptide's heavily armored frame with a collision that sent both of them down.
Nolan landed on top of it.
His magnetic boots locked to the suit's surface before they had finished sliding. He pulled the Warscythe free from where the initial impact had driven it into the suit's backpack assembly, taking the jetpack housing with it, and began working on the chest plate in short, controlled strokes. Each cut went deeper. The heavy armor resisted the first two and yielded to the third, and after that the resistance became structural rather than material, the suit's internal components compressing and folding rather than blocking.
Around him, the Raven Guard came out of the ground shadows.
They moved onto the Coldstars before the suits had fully processed the change in the engagement, each Astartes materializing from a shadow position that had been invisible until the moment it was not, and the Coldstars' repositioning fire lost its coherence as the close-quarters fighting pulled each suit into its own separate problem.
Nolan kept working on the Riptide.
The damage had reached the crew compartment. Through the eyepiece he tracked the expanding breach until the Tau pilot became visible inside it: a blue-skinned face framed by the wreckage of what had been a formidable weapons platform, expression carrying everything that expression could carry when the gap between what you expected to survive and what is actually happening becomes undeniable.
He reached in and took hold.
The neck was slender relative to the architecture around it. He pulled, and what came free was more than just the pilot, the white spinal column following in a long clean curve as the body separated from the suit's internal supports. He held it at arm's length, looked at it for a moment, then looked down at the Riptide's sensor cluster, which was still active, still transmitting, its red indicator light pulsing steadily.
"Commander Shadowsun," Nolan said, in a voice calibrated for the transmission pickup. "If you want satisfaction for this, come and take it yourself. I will be here."
His boot came down on the sensor cluster. The transmission cut off mid-pulse.
The Coldstars were finished by the time he stepped off the Riptide's hull. The Raven Guard had worked quickly and without sentiment. Nolan gestured toward the scattered battlesuit wreckage and gave the order to recover anything worth keeping, then turned toward the sound of fighting still running across the rest of the fortress perimeter and went to find it.
In hindsight, O'Shas Oshalas had almost certainly been a test.
A commander of Shadowsun's caliber did not commit her personal presence to engagements without intelligence. She would have seen the bait for what it was: real, but also framed. Oshalas was the probe, sent to engage Nolan directly, observe his methods, assess his threat rating, and report. The execution had been efficient enough for her purposes regardless of its outcome. Oshalas had demonstrated everything she needed to see.
What followed confirmed it. The Tau fleet in the void regrouped and pushed a second assault package toward Prefetia, and this time the Raven Guard fleet's interdiction was calibrated to allow a significant fraction through. Tau battlesuit formations and high-speed hover assault groups descended to the surface in a sustained airdrop sequence, expanding the Tau ground presence across the mineral world's broken terrain. The engagement had moved from a focused decapitation operation into something broader and more expensive.
Nolan received partial War Council approval to draw on additional support, and a Cadian armored regiment moved into the theater. When their vehicles rolled onto the desert floor, the nature of the conflict shifted again.
Tau Piranha skimmers crossed the storms in tight formations, each one carrying Pathfinder elements, running intercept courses against White Scars jetbike squadrons that used the terrain and their superior agility to keep the engagements from going to range. On the flat desert stretches away from the dunes, Leman Russ tanks moved in slow methodical lines against Hammerhead gunships, each side working its optimal range bracket against the other's vulnerabilities. Above them, Razorshark Strike Fighters and Thunderhawk gunships contested the airspace in turning fights where neither side established lasting dominance.
The war had become a war of attrition, and attrition favored whoever was willing to spend more.
Shadowsun did not appear.
No intelligence from the Raven Guard's network placed her anywhere in the Prefetia system. No behavioral anomaly in the Tau tactical response suggested her presence in any local command structure. Nolan spent some time considering whether the totality of his prior actions had produced the opposite of the intended effect: not a commander eager to settle a personal account, but a commander who had decided the risk was not proportionate and was now managing the campaign from a distance.
The Tau attack patterns around Prefetia gave no sign of the characteristic hesitation that would indicate command disruption. Whatever else Shadowsun was doing, she was not ignoring the battle.
Commander Shadowsun was confirmed absent from the surface. Nolan drew that assessment and moved away from the decapitation objective, redirecting his attention to the campaign as a whole. The Raven Guard elements that had been held in reserve for the ambush were released into the general engagement, assigned to counter the highly mobile battlesuit formations that the Cadian armor could not track effectively through the dunes.
He was in the middle of directing a Lamenters Terminator squad through a teleport strike on a Tau fire support position when the message arrived.
Chapter Master Severax.
Killed in action. In personal combat. By Commander Shadowsun.
She had been on the surface the entire time.