What had started as a straightforward void rescue operation had become something else entirely: a careful, methodical space hulk boarding, every corridor treated as hostile until proven otherwise.
Nolan voxed Chief Lexicanium Kahurangi through the short-range channel and relayed everything he had observed so far. Kahurangi's knowledge of the Ghoul Stars' outer reaches was extensive, but even he had no specific record of this alien form. The far eastern frontier of the Ghoul Stars, beyond the reach of the Astronomican, contained alien races in numbers and varieties that the Imperium had never fully catalogued. Some of them generated legends in the human colonies they occasionally touched. Records were incomplete by nature.
Nolan told Kahurangi to hold the Carcharodons company in reserve and not to launch reinforcements. Then he led four Lamenters in Terminator plate and resumed the careful advance toward the upper decks.
The seriously injured Lamenter had taken a dose of panacea and activated his armor's emergency life support system. He was left inside the empty bridge with the life support cycling, waiting for proper medical attention.
What Nolan knew at this point: the Kryptos would only abandon a host if the host body was severely injured. Physical attacks did nothing to the alien itself. Plasma and melta weapons could destroy them directly.
About an hour into the upper deck sweep, a vox report arrived from one of the teams working the lower cabins. They had found something useful.
Powerful electrical discharge could also drive a Kryptos out of a host body without killing the host first.
They were certain of this because they had verified it multiple times. Working without energy weapons, the lower deck team had improvised with the ship's own power conduits and discovered the effect by accident. The only drawback was that the battle-brothers used as the discharge medium had experienced what the vox report carefully described as severe electrotherapy.
A wrist-thick cable line, torn free from a conduit in the metal bulkhead, came down hard against a Terminator's ceramite plate.
The Lamenter kneeling under the shock convulsed visibly, one knee dropping to the deck, smoke rising from the armor joints. A green cloud rose from inside the suit, surging upward, pressing toward the wall to pass through it.
The Heart of the Furnace was already raised.
Plasma spheres drove through the cloud form repeatedly, tearing it apart on each pass, until nothing remained in the visible spectrum.
Nolan lowered the weapon and dropped the cable. It hit the floor still flickering with current.
Across the corridor, the Lamenters from the second combat team lowered their bolters from the original host's body and were quiet for a moment. Then they drove their Terminator suits forward and, one by one, reached out and gripped the cable themselves.
The convulsions. The smoke. The absence of any green cloud rising from any of them afterward.
They were clear.
"The Kryptos can absorb the host's memories, combat skills, and knowledge completely. What they cannot replicate is the blood-bond between genetic descendants and their Primarch." Nolan watched the team recover through the skull helmet's visor. He spoke slowly to the Lamenters around him. "That is why I identified the problem early. The battle-brother kept aiming his storm bolter at my head."
He walked forward and personally lifted the formerly parasitized Lamenter from the floor. One vibranium palm came down on the thick shoulder plate, firm and brief.
The squad's count was back to nineteen. They moved.
The approach to the strike cruiser's mid-deck arsenal brought them to a corridor intersection. Heavy footfalls echoed from the far end of the passage before any figure was visible — a distinctive sound, heavier than a mortal and deliberate in its cadence.
Black power armor. A black cross robe over the plate.
Black Templars.
Neither side spoke. The bolters in the Black Templars' fists opened fire the moment they had a line of sight, and the Lamenters answered in kind. Mass-reactive rounds detonated against power armor on both sides, ceramite fragments scattering across the dark passage, the detonations briefly illuminating everything in stuttering flashes.
The Lamenters' Terminator plate held under the sustained fire. The gap in numbers was compensated by the armor's thickness.
And Nolan was already moving.
The Ten Rings came free from his vibranium fist and spread through the corridor air, threading between the Lamenters and finding the joints and power backpacks of the Black Templars' armor with precision. He was not trying to kill them. Disabled, they could still be saved. The Kryptos could be driven out. Every Black Templar who came through this alive was another body added to the foundation of what would come next.
The bolter fire from the Black Templars concentrated on Nolan as he drove forward through the corridor. Rounds struck Starfire Glory continuously, detonating across the chest and pauldrons and arms. Through the skull helmet's visor, the eagle head on the right shoulder pauldron was visible at the edge of the eyepiece: the eyes were lit, pulsing red, the vibranium shell cycling through wave after wave of rippling energy beneath the surface as the kinetic accumulation built.
Nolan took the last step and extended both vibranium arms.
The stored energy released.
The shockwave expanded outward from Starfire Glory in every direction simultaneously. Every Black Templar within range went down: some to one knee, some flat to the deck, the force of the discharge hitting ceramite plate like a hammer stroke.
Green mist rose from the downed bodies in seconds, the Kryptos abandoning their hosts under the impact.
Nolan already had the Heart of the Furnace up.
He pulled the trigger and did not stop.