With the Black Templars Astartes having granted him their preliminary recognition, Nolan arrived at the outskirts of the strike cruiser's main training hall, escorted by the Lamenters guard. They broke the seal on a heavy metal hatch and stepped through into a space thick with the smell of old blood.
Corpses filled the bay. Cold and hard, broken in every position, they lay in dense rows across the deck plates: bodies of the expeditionary force's Marshal and several of his Astartes brothers, their armour cracked open, their faces set in the last expressions they had worn. Seeing it, Nolan no longer had any reason to doubt a single word the Chaplain had told him.
Even so, he did not immediately stand the crew down.
Instead, he led the entire boarding party through the vessel section by section, compartment by compartment, until they were certain no alien presence remained aboard any ship in the fleet. Only then did Chief Lexicanium Kahurangi personally lead a contingent of Carcharodons onto the Black Templars strike cruiser.
The survivors of the expeditionary force were given time to consider their situation. They chose to keep fighting, to follow Nolan, this unknown and nameless master who had emerged from the void and pulled them back from the edge of annihilation. Some of that choice was faith. Some of it was simple arithmetic: without psykers and a full complement of mortal crew, no ship in their fleet could leave port.
In the days that followed, Apothecaries from the Carcharodons worked quietly and methodically through the strike cruiser's medicae facilities. They recovered more than twenty Black Templars gene-seeds. They also stabilised the critically wounded Lamenter who had taken the worst of the fighting aboard. The expeditionary force was supplemented with mortal crew members and psykers drawn from the wider void fleet and formally absorbed into Nolan's command structure as a temporary auxiliary element.
Some time later, Chapter Master Tyberos completed his grey tithe arrangement with the Adeptus Mechanicus and returned to the fleet. Nolan handed command of the combined forces back to him without ceremony. Tyberos, however, had brought more than supplies from his negotiations. He had also brought news, and very little of it was good.
Since the fall of Cadia and the tearing of the Great Rift across the breadth of the Imperium, the regions that lay beyond the Astronomican's reach had been changing rapidly and badly. Without the Emperor's light to drive back the darkness, entire sectors had become hunting grounds for every breed of heretic, Daemon, and alien that could navigate the Warp. Regent Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade was making progress, pushing hard along prioritised vectors, and there were even scattered reports from certain remote worlds that the Cursed Legion had been sighted in the void. But the overall situation across the dark side of the Imperium remained desperate for the countless millions of human lives caught within it.
Nolan listened to all of it. Then he and Tyberos talked for a long time.
What emerged from that conversation was a two-pronged approach. The Carcharodons Astra would take responsibility for patrolling the entire Far Eastern Frontier, mounting small expeditions to every human world they encountered or received psychic distress signals from. At the same time, Nolan himself would personally lead the Lamenters guard and the newly sworn-in Black Templars volunteers on support missions, using the simulator's disregard for conventional space and time to reach struggling human worlds across the dark side far faster than any conventional force could manage.
The purpose was not merely survival. It was to slow the rot, to hold the line long enough to matter, and in doing so, to create pressure that would work in Guilliman's favour as the Indomitus Crusade ground forward.
The moment the orders were formalised, the entire void fleet shifted into a war footing. The Carcharodons had been given certain privileges as part of their remit: following each successful rescue mission, they were permitted to collect a share of the local blood tithe and grey tithe from the world they had saved. The condition attached to that privilege was equally clear. This collection could not be conducted in any way that would impair the world's continued survival or functioning. For the Carcharodons Astra, a Chapter whose relationship with mortal lives in combat had always been one of indifference at best, that condition required them to learn new habits.
Nolan's force, meanwhile, opened its first portal and stepped through.
There were five missions in all. They faced Chaos Astartes, Ork warbands, and hosts of heretic rebels. The Black Templars had begun those first operations with some lingering uncertainty about exactly who and what Nolan was. That uncertainty did not survive long past the opening of the first engagement. The moment they saw what a prayer support mission truly looked like, they stopped asking questions. They simply fought.
They were extraordinary at it. If the Carcharodons had inherited the silence and patience of the Raven Guard, moving like deep-water predators through the dark, pulling their prey apart without ever announcing their presence, the Black Templars were something else entirely. They charged. Into whatever stood in front of them, regardless of the odds, they charged and they roared the names of the Emperor and of Nolan into the face of the enemy until the enemy broke or died. There were moments when that pure, uncompromising fury achieved what careful and methodical advance could not. There were engagements where the Lamenters, grinding forward behind their Terminator armour and sustained weight of fire, would have taken longer and spent more to win what the Black Templars simply seized by force of will.
Nolan contributed in his own way, either leading from the front with targeted strikes against enemy commanders or coordinating the overall engagement from a position that kept the whole force coherent. The five missions were five victories. Not one battle-brother was lost in any of them.
A Warp portal hummed and widened above the ancient hall inside the flagship. Nolan stepped through, the pale gold of his armour dulled and scored with the marks of sustained combat, his expression flat with the particular exhaustion that came not from physical damage but from five consecutive operations' worth of decision-making and controlled violence. Behind him came the Lamenters guard, their ceramite carrying the layered evidence of everything they had moved through. The Black Templars Crusader squad followed last, walking with the same blunt, forward momentum they carried into every situation they encountered.
The portal collapsed behind them.
A throne coin, palm-sized, dropped from the closing light and landed against Nolan's armoured hand. His fingers closed around it.
He turned to face the assembled warriors and said, in a voice that left no room for argument:
"Five to seven days of rest, effective immediately. Use the time to let the Techmarines work on the armour and to recover your physical reserves."
The Lamenters guard and the Crusader squad both offered variations of the same response: that they could continue, that rest was unnecessary, that they were ready. Nolan looked at them with his eyes slightly narrowed and said nothing further, simply waited until the force of his silence was enough. Then he formally stood them down and watched them file out of the hall.
He walked to the metal throne at the far end of the chamber and sat down. The weight of the armour settled around him, and he let his eyes close for a moment.
Five missions. Five victories. No losses. He was not naive enough to believe that record was entirely the product of competence. Somewhere in those margins was the Emperor's luck, and he knew better than to treat luck as a permanent resource.
It was also why he had stopped at five.
"In the time ahead," he murmured to the empty hall, "I need to increase the number of Astartes. At this rate, we will grind to nothing on manpower alone."
The throne coin rested in his armoured palm. He sat with it, eyes closed, the hall quiet around him.