The ten rings moved before Nolan had fully decided to move them.
The melta bomb left his palm on the rings' trajectory, knocked upward and redirected, and the rings carried it into the Gorkanaut's remaining structure at the precise moment that Nolan pulled the Heart of the Furnace from his waist and leveled it at the warlord pressing toward him from the front.
The melta bomb detonated against the Gorkanaut's claw mechanism. The heat that came back across Nolan's shoulders was significant and immediate. The claw that had been descending toward him came down as molten metal instead, spreading across the ground in a wide splash that took a swathe of the surrounding Orks with it in a chorus of screaming. The formation that had been closing around him broke apart as the burning metal reached them.
Nolan stood.
The Heart of the Furnace was already cycling its next plasma burst, and he walked it into the warlord continuously as the Warscythe came up in his other hand. The warlord's body was large and dense and built to absorb damage, and it absorbed a great deal before the accumulated heat of repeated plasma bursts found enough of the biology inside the armor to end it. The last sound it made was a roar that still had anger in it, which was a very Ork way to finish.
Nolan stood in the cleared space and looked at the Ork lines still pressing against the human position.
"Come on then," he said, to no one in particular, and pulled Frost Fang off the back rack.
He did not finish the sentence.
The sound reached him before the visual did: a series of impacts from above the atmosphere, overlapping, the particular register of large objects entering from orbit at speed. He looked up through the eyepiece.
Ork fleet wreckage was coming down across the mining world in a dispersed pattern, trailing fire, the pieces large enough that the impacts shook the ground through his magnetic boots. And between the falling wreckage, moving in the opposite direction, blue-shelled drop pods were driving through the atmosphere on columns of flame, their trajectories already resolved into landing coordinates across the battlefield.
Along the horizon, in formation, Thunderhawk transporters and heavy fighters were visible, driving hard into the air units the Ork forces had scrambled in response.
The Corinth Crusade fleet had arrived.
The sound that came from the Lamenters' trench line was not a battle cry. It was something more raw than that: the release of people who had been holding something for five days and had just been given permission to put it down. It lasted for several seconds and then converted directly into forward motion as the Lamenters and the mortal fighters poured over the parapet and into the Ork lines that had already begun to lose their cohesion under the weight of what was descending on them.
Ten minutes later, Ultramarines in blue power armor and Mortifactors in black and yellow were moving across the battlefield from the landing zones, their heavy weapons compressing the surviving Ork pocket from multiple directions. A drop pod at the center of the field opened and a figure in blue Terminator armor stepped out with both power fists active and an honor guard behind him, and drove directly into the densest concentration of Orks without breaking stride.
Marneus Calgar had come personally.
The outcome of the battle stopped being a question.
Twelve hours later, the last coherent Ork resistance had been reduced to dispersed pockets being methodically cleared by Mortifactors combat squads. The noise of the battlefield had become something manageable.
Then two companies of Ultramarines turned in formation and encircled the Lamenters' position.
The movement was precise and deliberate. The Lamenters who still had strength straightened and looked at their battle brothers across the line of bolters. Chapter Master Foros moved through his Astartes quietly, laying a hand on shoulders, a word in ears, keeping the tension below the threshold of action. The mortal fighters gripped their improvised weapons and watched.
Nolan was sitting on the edge of a trench. He pulled the vibranium helmet off and held it in his lap, and the blood on the outside of it caught the light.
"Foros," he said, without raising his voice. "Go find Calgar."
Foros had not yet turned when Calgar came through the encirclement from behind.
The Terminator armor moved with the particular weight of something that had been walking over battlefields for a very long time. Calgar's face, when it found Nolan, carried exhaustion that he had not chosen to conceal, and no emotion that Nolan could clearly read beneath it. He stopped a few paces away and looked down at the figure sitting on the trench parapet.
Foros stepped forward before anyone else could.
"Chapter Master Calgar. In the name of the Lamenters Chapter, in the name of the Blood Angels and all their successors, and in the name of the Emperor himself, I give you my personal assurance: this lord is a genuine Primarch."
Calgar looked at Foros for a long moment.
"Do you understand," he said, his voice flat and cold, "what the Lamenters' actions here could have cost the Imperium? Do you imagine that only the mortals on this mining world require saving? If this crusade fails to stop Skagol, if his forces reach the core worlds of this system, then those same millions of Imperial citizens you have fought to protect will lose everything anyway. Their homes. Their lives." He let the weight of it sit. "Can the Lamenters Chapter carry that responsibility? Can you, personally, carry what it would mean if I had brought the fleet here and the crusade failed because of it?"
The question was addressed to Foros. Nolan answered it.
"Chapter Master Calgar." His voice was even, unhurried. "Have your Librarians or Chaplains confirm my identity. That can be resolved quickly." He looked at Calgar directly. "On the other question: I do not believe the Lamenters have done anything that requires defending. The Astartes exist to protect the people of the Imperium. That is the foundation. The battles, the crusades, the glory of campaign, all of that is built on top of it. Do not reverse the order."
He held Calgar's gaze.
"It is the sacrifice of countless ordinary men and women that holds the Imperium together. Not the other way around. The Imperium does not exist to spend its people. Its people are what the Imperium is." A brief pause. "I am told Krieg has developed a different philosophy on this point. If others attempted the same, the Inquisition would likely have an opinion about it."