This is it. This is what I missed.
‘Tomb ships,’ hissed Admiral Semper, seeing notations on an instructional primer from his cadet days writ large in reality on the hololith. ‘Throne, bloody almighty, tomb ships. They’re fighting the subjugation of the moon all over again. The thrice damned bloody moon.’
The hololith told a tale of horror. Of a plan in tatters, of arrogance and, ultimately, death.
‘If it had been anyone else but the Sons of Horus, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ whispered Semper. ‘Who but the Warmaster would have the audacity to launch a full quarter of his fleet into the void and hope they arrived in time and at the right location?’
Except, of course, the Warmaster hadn’t hoped the tomb ships would arrive where he needed them. He’d known. Known with a certainty that chilled Semper to the bone.
‘The orbital platforms are gone,’ said his Master of Surveyors, hardly daring to believe the evidence of the hololith. Semper shared the man’s disbelief.
‘They’re worse than gone, the enemy has them,’ he replied, watching as the most powerful platforms, Var Crixia and Var Zerba, cracked open the orbitals that the enemy assault forces hadn’t seized. Var Sohn had launched – and was still launching – spreads of torpedoes into his hopelessly scattered fleet.
‘Is the day lost, Lord Admiral?’
The answer was surely obvious, but the man deserved a considered answer. The Lord Admiral swept his gaze over the catastrophic ruin of what had begun as an ironclad stratagem.
He laughed and the nearby Thallax rotated their torsos at the unfamiliar sound. Semper shook his head. He’d forgotten the first rule of war regarding contact with the enemy.
Semper’s rightmost battlegroup was no more. Every vessel gutted by treacherous fire from the captured orbitals. As the warships foundered in the wake of the shocking reversal, the Death Guard surged into them like ambush predators picking off herd stragglers. Alone and overwhelmed, each Imperial ship was brutalised until it was no more than a smouldering ruin.
The crippled hulks were then driven into the gravitational clutches of Molech by snub-nosed ram-ships. Wrecks plunged through the atmosphere. Blazing re-entry plumes followed them down.
Semper had traced the trajectories, hoping against hope that the wrecks would hit the atmosphere too sharply and burn to ash before reaching the surface. Or be too shallow and bounce off, careening into deep space.
But whoever had calculated the angle of re-entry had been precise, and every missile of wreckage was going to strike Molech with the kinetic force of heavy battlefield atomics.
The Sons of Horus swarmed the Adranus, its nova cannon useless at close quarters and its broadsides unable to hold off the raptor packs of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds and Dreadclaw assault pods slamming into its flanks.
With its escorts crippled by the orbitals, the Dominator was easy prey and was being gutted by vultures. An ignoble death, a bloody death. The Dominator was going down hard.
Screaming vox blurts told of thousands of Legion warriors and things of howling darkness ripping it apart from within. He’d ordered the vox shut off, the screams of the Adranus’s crew too terrible to be borne.
Only the centre yet endured.
Admonishment in Fire had been manoeuvring when the first assault teams hit the orbitals. Its captain ordered an emergency burst of the engines which undoubtedly saved her ship. For now. Its lance broadsides had demolished Var Uncad and reduced it to a smouldering ruin.
Solar’s Glory was ablaze, but still in the fight. With the destruction of Var Uncad, it had been spared the full force of the fire intended to cripple it. A handful of light cruisers had weathered the swarms of torpedoes, but none were in any condition to take the fight to the traitors. At least six would be dead in the void within minutes, and the remaining four could barely manoeuvre or muster a firing line.
There would be no crossing-the-T this day.
‘Yes, the day is lost,’ said Lord Admiral Semper. ‘The rest is silence.’
Five Stormbirds flew the flaming gauntlet from the Vengeful Spirit on an assault run. Four streaked forward to take up position alongside the fifth. They peeled away from the Warmaster’s flagship as its vast engines fired, manoeuvring it towards the mighty form of Guardian of Aquinas as it swung in.
The two flag vessels were closing like champions in the crucible of combat, seeking one another out in the midst of slaughter.
It would be an unequal fight. The Vengeful Spirit was old and tough, its marrow seasoned and its blackened soul ready to taste blood. Collimated blinks of light streamed between the two ships, high-energy pulse lasers intended to strip shields and ablative coatings of ice.
Deck after deck of guns boomed silently in the void, hurling monstrous projectiles through the space between them. In void terms, the two warships were at point-blank range. Two swordsmen too close to use their main blades and reduced to stabbing at one another with punch daggers.
They moved in opposition like stately galleons, sliding through clouds of molten debris and listing wrecks with impunity. Bright hurricanes of light streamed back and forth, explosions, premature detonations of intercepted munitions, crackling arcs of squalling, scraping void shields. Hull plates buckled and blew out as both ships traded blows like punch-drunk pugilists.
In their wake, streams of molten debris and shimmer-trails of frozen oxygen glittered in the star’s light. The escorting Gothics attending Guardian of Aquinas came in hard beside her, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory hurling thousands of tonnes of explosive ordnance at the Vengeful Spirit.
The Warmaster’s ship shuddered under the impacts, but it was built to take punishment, built to bully its way through harsher storms than this.
The Endurance came in low, oblique. Shadowed by burning orbitals and pulsing reactor detonations. Its prow weapons savaged the Admonishment in Fire and crumpled its hull as if with a fiery sledgehammer. The stricken ship’s gun decks burned and its weapons stuttered in the face of the Endurance’s assault.
It kept shooting even as the Death Guard vessel rammed it amidships. Millions of tonnes of iron and adamantium moving at speed had unstoppable momentum. The Endurance’s reinforced frontal ram ripped through the weakened armour of its target and drove its grey bulk through the very heart of the Admonishment in Fire.
The Gothic simply ceased to exist, its keel shattered and its exposed interior compartments raked by unending broadsides. The wreckage spun away, spiralling clouds of flash-freezing atmosphere blooming from its shorn halves.
The Solar’s Glory, already ablaze and choking on its own blood had already stopped shooting and its rear quarters vanished in the light of a newborn star. A reactor breach or deliberate overload, it didn’t matter. A white-hot sphere of plasma bloomed from the vessel and engulfed the flanks of the Endurance.
Almost as soon as the fiery explosion flared to life it began to diminish. An inverted hemisphere was gouged in the Endurance’s hull and intense oxygen fires burned with raging intensity before the void snuffed them out.