Chaplain Manu's original plan was straightforward in structure, if not in its moral assumptions.
Through sustained tracking across multiple systems, he had established that the Pierced Rose Kabal selected humans of specific bloodlines from inhabited worlds to serve in their killing rituals. The rituals were deliberate, controlled, and served a precise purpose: generating the particular quality of spiritual sustenance that delayed Slaanesh's consumption of Dark Eldar souls. The Pierced Rose were more systematic about it than most Kabals, which made them predictable.
Genetic assessment, carried out over years, had confirmed that Ilaya and her son Jonah were among the last survivors of the bloodline the Pierced Rose specifically sought. Possibly the only survivors.
The plan had been to use that fact as bait: place mother and child within reach of the Kabal's intelligence network, allow them to be identified, and follow the response back to whoever held the Void Stone.
As for Jonah himself: Manu had also provided a more complete account of the boy's condition. The simplest description of it was wrong. He was not intellectually diminished. His soul was, by some quality that no available instrument could measure with precision, extraordinarily clean: without the accumulated noise of ordinary experience, without the layers of fear and desire and small corruptions that built up in any living human consciousness across a lifetime. That purity was suppressing something, holding his self-awareness at a threshold below where most people's began. The Dark Eldar, for whom the soul's flavor was a matter of practical concern, would find Jonah and his mother essentially irresistible.
It was a reasonable plan. Nolan had acknowledged that, briefly, before rejecting it entirely.
The Lamenters came through the deck hatch in full Terminator plate, bolters and assault cannons distributed across the formation, and took up positions with the practiced efficiency of a unit that had been doing this since the Heresy era. Tyberos arrived behind them with the hunting team in order, his lightning claws at rest, his pale face carrying no particular expression about anything.
What Nolan had not expected was the Pale Nomad.
Te Kahurangi stepped out of the passageway in full armor, his dark eyes finding Nolan across the deck. When Nolan's expression asked the question without him needing to voice it, the Chief Librarian showed the edge of his teeth in something that was adjacent to a smile.
"My Lord Primarch. Do you remember the account I gave you once? Regarding my history with the Chapter? There is a part of it I omitted." He kept his voice low. "My mother and relatives all died in the Tyranid incursions. Only one brother survived that period of my life alongside me."
Nolan looked from Kahurangi to Chaplain Manu, standing at the edge of the assembled force, and then back.
"Chaplain Manu is your brother."
"Yes, my Lord."
Nolan was quiet for a moment. Then he raised a vibranium palm and set it on Kahurangi's shoulder armor.
"For family, and for what you owe. I understand. Just make sure when the mission begins, I see two hundred percent of what you have." He removed his hand. "No less."
"No less, my Lord Primarch."
Several minutes later, the Thunderhawks' engines built to a roar that moved through the hull of the Nicor from beneath. The transports carried the force away from the battle barge and toward the Gladius-class frigate waiting in the void nearby: the Gray Shark, stripped down and fast, the kind of vessel the Carcharodons used when they needed to be somewhere without announcing themselves.
In the transport cabin, Ilaya and Jonah sat in seats built for beings twice their size, dressed in carapace armor that had been fitted down to something approaching adequate, small refractor field generators clipped at their belts. Jonah's feet did not reach the floor. He was looking at the cabin's ceiling with the expression of someone who found it interesting.
Nolan had not wanted them here.
Ilaya had made the counterargument with the same directness she had applied to her speech in the hall. Manu had supported it. The bloodline was a necessary component of the plan even in its revised form: the Pierced Rose needed to detect the correct genetic signature to be drawn to the correct location. Nolan had weighed this, found no satisfactory counter-argument that would not compromise the mission, and made his position clear to Manu.
If anything happened to either of them, the Chaplain and his hunting team would not need to look far for the consequences. The Pale Nomad was included in that calculation. This was understood by all parties.
Jonah looked away from the ceiling and found Nolan's face across the cabin.
"Door," he said, pleasantly.
The garden world had no name on most charts. Its coordinates were the kind that circulated in certain networks and did not reach others.
The light at dusk came down through clear atmosphere onto a warm sea surface and went straight to the bottom: thirty meters of water transparent enough to read like glass, strange marine shapes moving through it at irregular intervals. From the deck of the luxury cruiser called the Emperor's Wish, the view was a thing of genuine beauty.
The Pierced Rose agents had arranged themselves across the ship's upper and lower decks in the pattern of a predator that has found a population and is working through it methodically. The sound of Splinter fire carried over the ambient noise of the sea. A Kabalite warrior in the livery of the Pierced Rose was working a power whip across the upper deck: an Agoniser, the weapon's spiked length cracking against the air before it found targets, the warrior's expression carrying the particular absorption of someone who is doing exactly what they are designed to do.
A tall woman went down on the deck and stopped moving.
The warrior looked at what it had produced with the focused satisfaction of a collector.
The Ten Rings arrived before any other part of Nolan's force did.
Ten arcs of purple-wrapped metal cut through the sea air and found the warrior before it had finished registering that anything was incoming. What had been standing upright was no longer a coherent collection of anything.
The Terminators materialized a half-second later across the length of the ship's main deck, teleportation displacement crackling at the air around their plate. Bolters and assault cannons came up simultaneously.
The sound that replaced the ship's previous ambience was complete and comprehensive.
Nolan came through the interior at a pace that the Kabalite agents on the lower decks could not adequately respond to. The Blood Scythe's green-lit blade found gaps in Dark Eldar armor that were narrower than they looked, because the right angle at the right speed made most armor cooperative. A dozen agents in the span of thirty seconds, the last few trying to reach a weapon that was already irrelevant by the time their hands closed on it.
He emerged onto the upper deck through a hatch and looked up.
At the railing of the topmost level of the ship, a figure in Dracon's armor stood watching. The armor was better than the Kabalite grade below: darker, fitted to a frame that carried itself with the ease of someone who had held rank long enough to forget when it started. The pale face above the armor's collar looked down at the deck below and showed, briefly, something close to amusement.
"Target located. Keep the Dracon alive. No one activates a Webway gate."
He sent it through the vox and was already moving.
Half the Terminator formation broke for the interior passages at the order, cutting toward wherever an emergency Webway access point would be built into a vessel of this type.
Nolan found the exterior hull with the Warscythe and drove the blade into the plating: a handhold, then a foothold as he drew it out and drove it higher. The vibranium armor was not light, and neither was he, but the problem of moving vertically up the side of a cruiser was primarily a structural one rather than a strength one, and the Warscythe solved the structural part.
He came over the top railing onto the upper deck.
The Dracon had not moved from the railing. Its pale eyes found him without surprise.
"You climb well." The Low Gothic was clipped and slightly inflected. "It will not help you when you are in our hands. I make this promise: when that moment arrives, even Slaanesh's appetite will seem restrained by comparison."
Nolan set the Warscythe against his palm and looked at the Dracon across the empty deck.
"You are going to want to survive the next few minutes," he said. "I would think about that."
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