The relief that moved through Reditus after Nolan finished speaking was something that even a servo skull could not conceal entirely.
He circled the room three times on the anti-gravity engine, rapid and slightly irregular in the way of something that does not know what else to do with itself, before the pattern slowed and settled. When he came to rest again on the edge of the table, the quality of his attention had changed: the specific low weight that had been present in his responses since the return to Triplex Phall was simply gone, released with the completeness of something that had been held long enough and then was not.
"I have never doubted your judgment," Reditus said, and meant it.
The two of them worked through the practical conclusions in the time that followed. The near-term situation was manageable. No one outside this room knew Reditus's identity, and the Great Rift's disruption of intelligence flows across most of the Imperium made the propagation of that information a slower and less reliable process than it would have been before Cadia. As long as Reditus maintained his current standing, a Mechanicus sage who had chosen to follow the Primarch as a matter of personal conviction, he would attract no more attention from Mars than Nolan's other unconventional acquisitions already attracted.
Reditus offered one addition to the plan before they moved on: if the simulator's prayer support missions produced anything touching Mars, he wanted to be included. Even a partial view of what existed there now, after ten thousand years, would be worth something.
Nolan considered this for approximately three seconds and agreed.
Reditus accepted the answer and then immediately turned the full weight of his recovered vitality toward the servo-automata working on Starfire Glory across the room. What followed was several minutes of mechanical invective delivered at a volume and specificity that Nolan had not heard from the servo skull in some time. The automata made no adjustments to their work that he could observe, but the criticism of their technique was detailed enough to suggest that Reditus had been saving it up.
Nolan gathered the parchment scrolls he had not read, stood, and left.
He did not look back. He had learned, across more encounters than he cared to count, that the faster a person left when Reditus reached this particular register, the better the subsequent hours tended to go.
The Blood Ravens' ships completed their maintenance over the following days: hull plates sealed, drive systems recalibrated, weapon arrays serviced. The Omniscient Mystery received the most extensive attention, its internal structure still carrying the evidence of the boarding action that had ended Kyras, and the Triplex Phall dock crews worked through it with the methodical efficiency of Mechanicus engineers for whom structural repair was simply another application of known principles.
While they worked, the loading operation ran in parallel.
Transport ships throughout the fleet took on survival supplies in quantities calculated for an extended campaign cruise: rations, potable water and reclamation equipment, medicae stocks, fuel and drive components for every ship class in the formation. Then the military cargo: weapons production runs from Triplex Phall's forges, heavy vehicles in sealed transit bays, ammunition and energy cell reserves at a scale that the Twin Islands foundry could not have supplied alone. The forge world was, as Nolan had known since acquiring it, a force multiplier in every sense. A fleet that left Triplex Phall carried the capacity for sustained operations that it could not have maintained otherwise.
The Raven Guard's intelligence network, meanwhile, continued to expand into the surrounding star regions from the hub the Raven Guard had established during the months of the standoff. The intelligence it returned was not encouraging in most respects.
Chaos activity in the immediate region had subsided somewhat since the Ark of Omen's destruction: without Vashtorr's forward operation to organize the local manifestations, the scattered incursions were smaller and less coordinated. This was the most positive finding in the reports.
Everything else trended worse.
The Tyranid vanguard elements that had been operating in the outer reaches of the Eastern Fringe were not retreating. They were advancing and consolidating, the hive fleet's tendrils pushing into systems that had been marginal six months before. The Tyranid method of war left nothing behind it: not survivors, not agriculture, not minerals, not the raw material of recovery. A world that fell to the hive fleet was a world that was finished, in any useful sense, regardless of what happened afterward.
The Ork situation was, in different ways, equally troubling. Several systems where greenskin forces had been contained or suppressed before the Great Rift had since tipped: the Ork population in each case had crossed the threshold where containment became futile, and the warbands that had emerged from those systems were actively seeding adjacent worlds. Among the intelligence fragments the Raven Guard had assembled, there were repeated references to Warlord-grade commanders appearing in the greenskin tide: figures of the scale and ferocity that could hold a fractious Ork force together long enough to accomplish something genuinely catastrophic.
None of this made the new Legion's next phase simpler. Nolan had known it would not be simpler. The question was the order of operations.
Before the fleet departed, two small detachments were transferred to Triplex Phall's surface and assigned to remain.
A Librarian detachment from the Blood Ravens Great Company: five warriors, their specific function the maintenance of the intelligence relay that the Raven Guard had established, receiving information from the network's outer nodes and ensuring it reached the fleet's next position regardless of distance. Their secondary function, unstated in the orders but present in the assignment, was to be present on the forge world when the fleet was not.
A Raven Guard combat team: twelve warriors, chosen from the Shadow Captain Sorak's most experienced operatives. Their function was to continue expanding the network from Triplex Phall itself, to operate in the adjacent systems, and to serve as a rapid-response element if the forge world encountered anything in the fleet's absence that required an Astartes solution.
Reditus, in the Armiger chassis, had assured Nolan three times during the planning of this arrangement that Wesley Phall harbored no secondary ambitions and would not require monitoring. Nolan had listened politely and confirmed the security assignment anyway. He explained it to Reditus as mutual insurance: an assurance to Triplex Phall that the fleet would return, and an assurance to the fleet that Triplex Phall was in reliable hands. Both things were true. They were also not the only reason.
Then the fleet moved.
Hundreds of ships in the fleet formation, gathered from their dispersed orbital positions and arranged into the traveling configuration, began accelerating away from Triplex Phall one by one. The dock crews watched from the orbital platforms. The Magi who had assembled on the viewing levels of the administrative district watched from the surface. The forge world's weapon arrays did not track the departing ships.
The void swallowed them in sequence.
Nolan had discussed the fleet's general campaign direction with the Great Company commanders in the planning sessions before departure. The consensus had not taken long to form. The Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar lay at the edge of the Eastern Fringe, adjacent to the theater where the Indomitus Crusade was grinding through the Segmentum Obscurus and the Ultramar region both. Guilliman was personally committed to that campaign, which meant he was across the galaxy from the Eastern Fringe's actual position.
What Ultramar held, regardless of where Guilliman was, was what Nolan needed: Ultramarines and their successor Chapters in quantities significant enough to make a difference, and the Primaris augmentation protocols that Belisarius Cawl had developed under Guilliman's authorization. Access to those protocols could change the Legion's growth rate in ways that standard Astartes recruitment timelines could not.
The prerequisite was straightforward and unwelcome: the Eastern Fringe had to be stable enough for the fleet to operate freely within it before Ultramar became a viable destination. Leaving a deteriorating situation behind while pursuing reinforcements was not strategy. It was optimism with a fleet attached.
So the fleet moved through the outer Eastern Fringe systems in campaign configuration, not transit. The Raven Guard's intelligence feeds flagged distress signals continuously, the psychic and vox channels carrying the accumulated calls of populations and garrisons that had been fighting for months or years without meaningful support. The fleet assessed each one, and combat teams transferred to Cobra-class destroyers for rapid insertion at the positions rated most critical.
The first major operation of the Primarch's Legion targeted an agri-world three jumps from Triplex Phall.
The world had been under Ork occupation for eleven months. The greenskin force that had taken it was substantial, embedded in the planet's lowland agriculture zones, and growing: the Ork instinct for treating a captured human world as a source of future recruitment was operating exactly as expected.
The assault was teleport-led. Tyberos took one full Carcharodons company down in the initial strike, the teleporter assault seeding them directly into the primary Ork concentration while the planet's atmosphere was still filling with the signature of their arrival. A Librarian detachment from the Blood Ravens Great Company went in simultaneously: fire support and psychic suppression for the greenskin Weirdboyz that any Ork force of this size would carry.
Under the Armiger chassis's command protocols, the Thunderhawk transport formations and heavy vehicle carriers began their atmospheric approach on the heels of the teleport strike, timed to the interval that would put them on the ground as Tyberos's initial contact forced the Ork concentration to commit.
Nolan remained on the bridge of the Omniscient Mystery.
His presence was a reserve condition, not a primary engagement requirement. Against a standard Ork force without Warlord-grade leadership, the Carcharodons Astra did not need a Primarch. They needed room, ammunition, and the specific kind of patience that came naturally to warriors who had spent centuries fighting every form of xenos threat the void could produce. They had all three.
He stood at the bridge's primary display bank, the virtual screens carrying the real-time battle feed from the surface: Tyberos's force driving into the Ork line, the telemetry from the Thunderhawk formations as they closed the distance, the Librarian detachment's psychic output reading as a regular suppression pattern across the relevant channels. The operation was developing the way operations developed when the force deployed was adequate for the task and understood what it was doing.
Then the bracelet on his wrist flashed.
The device was black, worn against the skin on his left wrist, and it carried a function specific to its design: contact with his network across a very different kind of distance than the void between stars. The signal it produced was short and rapid, repeating three times in close succession, the eye-catching urgency of something that could not wait for him to think about it first.
He looked down at it.
The battle on the agri-world continued in the screens above him, unaffected.
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