He magnified the representation of the battlescape. Signifier-runes had identified most of the vessels in the oncoming fleet.
Death Guard and Sons of Horus.
Neither Legion was noted for subtlety. Both were renowned for ferocity. It was upon this latter characteristic that Admiral Brython’s provocateur strategy hinged.
The Enlightenment led a racing fleet of six fast-attack vessels, and it was their task to seduce the traitors into the teeth of the orbital platforms.
‘There you are,’ said Argaun, picking out the crimson sigil representing the Vengeful Spirit and feeling a thrill of anticipation travel the length of his augmetic spine. The Enlightenment and its accompanying ships were far beyond the reach of the orbital guns. They were exposed, but Argaun wasn’t worried. He’d heard Tyana Kourion say that to see the Legions at war was to witness gods of battle, but that was typical Army nonsense.
In the void, a warrior’s prowess counted for nothing.
A lance strike or a torpedo detonation would kill a legionary just as easily as a deck menial, and any captain careless enough to let a Space Marine ship get close enough to launch a boarding action deserved everything they got.
‘Time to firing range?’
‘Eight minutes.’
‘Eight minutes, aye,’ said Argaun, opening a vox-link to the rest of the provocateur force.
‘All captains, my compliments,’ said Argaun. ‘Begin your launch sequences for prow torpedoes. Full spread, and good hunting.’
‘Torpedoes in the void,’ said Maloghurst, watching as holographic salvoes crawled across the plinth’s display.
‘Time to impact?’ asked Horus.
‘Do you really need me to tell you, sir?’
‘No, but do it anyway,’ said Horus. ‘They’re playing their role, so let’s allow them to think we’re playing ours.’
Maloghurst nodded and estimated the travel time of the enemy torpedoes. ‘I make it ninety-seven minutes.’
‘Actually it’s ninety-five,’ said Horus, steepling his fingers and watching the inexorable unfolding of the battle before him.
‘Ninety-five, aye,’ said Maloghurst as the battle cogitators confirmed the Warmaster’s calculation. ‘Forgive me, sir, it’s been a while since I’ve needed to work deck duty. It’s not a task for which I have any enthusiasm.’
Horus waved away Maloghurst’s apology and nodded in agreement.
‘Yes, I’ve always hated void war over other forms of battle.’
‘And yet, as in all forms of war, you excel at it.’
‘A commander shouldn’t be so far removed from the surging ebb and flow of combat,’ said Horus, as if Maloghurst hadn’t spoken. ‘I am a being wrought for war on a visceral scale, where force and mass and courage are death’s currency.’
‘I almost miss it sometimes,’ replied Maloghurst. ‘The simplicity of an open battlefield, a loaded boltgun in my hand and an enemy in front of me to kill.’
‘It’s been a long time since anything was that simple, Mal.’
‘If it ever was.’
‘There’s truth in that,’ agreed Horus. ‘There’s truth in that indeed.’
Another truth of void war was that until warships came together in murderous congress, there was very little to do but wait. The closure speeds of the opposing vanguards were enormous, but so too were the distances between them.
But when the dying began, it began quickly.
Multiple salvoes of ordnance erupted from both vanguard fleets, each torpedo fifty metres in length and little more than a huge rocket booster capped with an extraordinarily lethal warhead. As scores of torpedoes surged from their launch tubes, barrages of armour penetrating shells blasted from prow batteries.
Each volley was silent in the void, but brutalising echoes reverberated through every gun deck like the pounding drumbeats of titanic slave overseers, deafening those not already insensate to the unending clamour.
Glimmering plasma trails intersected between the fleets, then split apart as they hunted for targets.
First blood went to the Enlightenment. A spiralling torpedo, launched from its starboard launch tubes by Master Gunner Vordheen and his seventy-strong munition crew, smashed through the armour plating of the Sons of Horus frigate, Raksha.
The impact triggered a secondary engine within the torpedo that hurled the main payload deeper into the guts of its target. Like an arena killer whose blade finds a crack in his opponent’s armour, the torpedo ripped through dozens of bulkheads before its primary warhead exploded in the heart of the starship.
Raksha’s keel snapped in two and over a quarter of its seven hundred crew members were immolated in a storm of atomic fire. Sheets of armour plating blew out like billowing sailcloth in a storm. Pressurised oxygen burned with brief intensity as compartment after compartment was vented to the void. The debris of the frigate’s demise continued moving forward in an expanding cone of tumbling iron, like buckshot from an armsman’s shotcannon.
The Imperial destroyer, Implacable Resolve, took the next hits, a torpedo to its rear quarter and a lance strike that sheared off its command tower. The vessel broke formation in a veering yaw, spewing a comet’s tail of debris and vented plasmic fumes. Without captain or command deck to correct her course, the ship fell from the vanguard until the raging hull fires finally reached the ventral magazines and blew it apart in a seething fireball.
Three more vessels were crippled in quick succession; Devine Right, Cthonia Rising, and Reaper of Barbarus. A pair of ‘fist-to-finger’ impacts penetrated the Imperial vessel’s prow armour and a superhot plasma jet roared the length of its long axis. Gutted by searing fires, Devine Right exploded moments later as its weapon stores cooked off. The Death Guard destroyer was reduced to a radioactive hulk and critical reactor emissions that lit up the Imperial threat auspex like a beacon fire. The Sons of Horus frigate simply vanished, dead in the water as its power and life supporting mechanisms failed in the first instant of impact.
Both vanguards had been savaged, but the traitor ships had taken the worst of the engagement. Four vessels remained battle worthy in the Warmaster’s vanguard, though all had taken hits in the opening shots of the engagement.
Their captains were hungry for blood, and they fired their ship’s engines, eager to tear into the enemy at close range. Behind them, the fleets of the Death Guard and Sons of Horus followed suit.
Battle would be joined and the dead avenged.
The Imperial ships would learn what it meant to face the Warmaster.
But Battlefleet Molech had no intention of going head to head with a vastly superior fleet. No sooner had the ordnance struck the traitor vanguard than Captain Argaun issued orders to turn the provocateur fleet around. His remaining ships raced back to Molech and the cover of its orbital weapon platforms.
And, just as Lord Admiral Semper had planned, the blooded fleet of the Warmaster gave chase.
‘Remember the moon, he says,’ grunted Abaddon. ‘As if any Cthonian even took part in that fight.’
Unable to make any sound within the frozen vacuum of the tomb ship, the First Captain’s voice sounded in Kalus Ekaddon’s helmet over the vox.