The Chaos fleet had ceased to maneuver as a coherent battle line. Every surviving ship now obeyed one imperative: reach the Warp rift before Talon's guns reduced the withdrawal to wreckage.
Cruisers crowded around the battleships in overlapping defensive rings, sacrificing clear firing arcs for proximity to the larger vessels. Their batteries fired past one another at dangerously narrow angles. Macro-shells, lance beams, and torpedoes crossed the void toward the advancing Talon formation, forcing its leading ships to divert firepower from the pursuit to interception.
The barrage delayed the pursuit, but it did not stop it.
Talon cruisers advanced in measured echelons behind luminous energy shields. Whenever a damaged Chaos ship tried to escape along the edge of the formation, dimensional apertures opened across its projected course and Talon frigates emerged already aligned for attack. Particle lances cut through engine housings. Precision salvos struck exposed weapons decks and reactor conduits. The pursuit was systematic. Talon fire dismantled the screen around the battleships even as the larger vessels used those ships' sacrifice to gain distance.
Every void-shield network in the Chaos fleet had overloaded during the earlier arc-blast assault. Crews struggled to cycle the generator banks back online, but fused relays, burned-out projectors, and ruptured power conduits prevented most vessels from raising even a single stable layer. A few ships managed to produce wavering local fields over their most vital sections. Those patches collapsed after one or two hits.
In a void engagement, an unshielded warship was already dying. The only uncertainty was how long the process would take.
The battleships still possessed armor thick enough to absorb punishment while their crews fought to restore defensive systems. Most of the cruisers did not. Their hulls were split open in dozens of places, venting atmosphere, debris, and bodies in pale streams. Some had lost entire gun decks. Others trailed burning plasma from damaged reactors or listed as maneuvering thrusters fired out of sequence.
The worst-hit ships had suffered catastrophic drive failures. Their main engines ignited for several seconds, drove them forward in stuttering bursts, then died again as emergency cutoffs tripped. Each failed cycle allowed the rest of the fleet to draw farther ahead. Talon targeting systems marked the crippled vessels automatically, assigning weapons until their projected survival time fell to zero.
Several captains understood the arithmetic before their crews did. Rather than die while crawling toward a rift they could no longer reach, they halted their efforts to withdraw and ordered their ships about.
Damaged cruisers rolled onto attack vectors one after another. Surviving engines rose to emergency output. Reactor governors were disabled, ammunition safeties overridden, and every remaining gun that could bear was fired forward, even when its mounting had never been designed for that angle. The ships charged the Talon line with their armored prows aimed like blades.
There was no coordination in the counterattack, only a choice between two kinds of death.
Most never reached ramming distance. Talon batteries tore away their engines, split their hulls, or detonated their reactors before contact. A few retained enough speed and mass to strike the energy shields surrounding the leading vessels.
The reinforced prow-rams had been built to survive the passage through Imperial void shields and bury themselves in armored hulls. Talon shielding turned the collision into something else. The field spread the impact across a broad plane of compressed energy, arresting millions of tonnes of metal within a fraction of a second.
Sometimes the outer shield layer shattered. The attacking cruiser always fared worse.
Its prow flattened. Structural members buckled through decks behind the impact point, and the sudden deceleration traveled the length of the ship like a physical blow. Restraint harnesses tore from their mountings. Crewmen were hurled through consoles and bulkheads before alarm systems could finish sounding. Gun turrets ripped free of their bearings, ammunition cages burst open, and entire compartments folded as the hull convulsed into an uncontrolled rotation. Adamantium resisted longer than flesh, but not by much.
On the command deck of the Vengeful Spirit, Abaddon watched the sacrifices register across the tactical display. Red vessel-runes vanished one by one, replaced by expanding clouds of debris and casualty estimates no one would ever verify.
He did not waste time mourning ships whose fate could no longer be altered. His gaze moved from one withdrawal vector to the next, measuring distances, acceleration, and how quickly Talon's pursuit was consuming his rearguard.
"At least forty cruisers will be lost before this withdrawal is over."
His estimate passed through the vox-link to the Terminus Est. Typhus's response began as a furious snarl, but whatever accusation followed was swallowed by a detonation aboard the Vengeful Spirit, a blast hard enough to throw static across the transmission.
Far across the retreating formation, Typhus watched Abaddon's bridge through a degraded hololithic feed. The image lurched sideways. Officers seized consoles. Suspended tactical projections warped as their emitters lost alignment. Abaddon remained upright beside the command throne, the talons of his power claw driven through one armrest to anchor himself against the deck's violent roll.
Typhus opened his mouth to demand an explanation. A second explosion thundered through the link before he could speak. This one was deeper, followed by the groan of stressed bulkheads and the sharp howl of atmosphere escaping somewhere beyond the bridge.
Abaddon did not need a damage report to understand the sequence.
Before the withdrawal order, a Talon lance had penetrated the Vengeful Spirit's portside armor near the forward weapons galleries. The initial strike had ignited fires among the shell-handling systems. Damage-control teams had contained the worst of it, or believed they had, before being redirected to shield relays and engine compartments.
Something had continued burning behind a sealed bulkhead. It had now reached one of the ready-use magazines. The first detonation had breached the neighboring loading galleries. The second had consumed whatever ammunition remained inside them.
"Seal port compartments eighty-one through ninety-six," Abaddon ordered. "Vent the forward galleries. Isolate the magazine spine and reroute power around it."
Bridge officers relayed the commands without hesitation. Across the flagship, armored shutters descended through smoke and flame. Compartments still containing survivors were opened to the void before the fire could reach the primary magazines. Thousands died in silence as their atmosphere vanished. Thousands more were incinerated where ammunition lifts had become chimneys for the blast.
Between the two explosions, perhaps ten thousand crew had already perished. The number would rise when sealed sections were opened and damage parties began counting bodies.
The Vengeful Spirit carried hundreds of thousands more. Its guns continued firing. Its engines continued pushing the ship toward the rift. For the moment, that was enough.
Abaddon tolerated no avoidable defect aboard his flagship. He remembered its scars, knew which batteries responded slowly, and demanded explanations for failures that lesser commanders would have dismissed as the ordinary decay of an ancient warship. Yet even the Vengeful Spirit was not the most important asset under threat.
The campaign's continuation depended upon the Blackstone Fortresses.
Abaddon turned toward the central hololith. The tactical map showed both ancient constructs withdrawing behind the surviving battleships. Moments earlier, the fortresses had completed another exchange with the Celestial Engine. Their warp-vortex cannons had discharged almost together, hurling converging distortions toward the immense Talon war machine. The Celestial Engine had answered with beams that burned across the fortresses' black surfaces and left whole regions glowing with trapped heat.
Now the fortresses' Warp drives were charging for withdrawal. Their propulsion systems, however, refused to maintain thrust.
Drive plumes ignited along their immense flanks, pushing each continent-wide structure toward the rift. Then the plumes vanished without warning. The fortresses continued to coast, but their acceleration fell below the minimum required to escape before the Talon fleet overtook them. A few seconds later the thrusters reignited, only to shut down again.
The pattern repeated without any mechanical rhythm.
The propulsion failures were only the latest anomaly.
Throughout the battle, weapon emplacements had opened from sections of blackstone that Abaddon's crews had believed inert. Energy beams had erupted from galleries no survey team had found. Defensive batteries had tracked Talon vessels without receiving targeting solutions from the command crew. At times, the fortresses had altered their orientation on their own to keep the Celestial Engine within their firing arcs.
They had displayed more initiative in the last hour than during all the years Abaddon had possessed them.
"Have you noticed the behavior of those fortresses?" Abaddon asked. "I've never seen them so... animated. I wasn't even sure they had weapons beyond their warp-vortex cannons. Now they're opening batteries we never knew existed and fighting as though they live and bleed for me."
"Maybe if you gave me one, I could tear it apart and answer that question," Typhus snapped back.
"You would turn it into a plague barge before you found the answer."
"Then at least it would obey."
Abaddon ended the exchange before Typhus could turn irritation into another argument. The Vengeful Spirit had entered the rift's outer distortion zone. It was not gravity in any conventional sense, but it pulled at mass, light, and thought with enough force to make the distinction irrelevant. Stars stretched across the viewports. The deck developed a slow, nauseating tilt even though the flagship's internal gravitic systems reported normal function. Several mortal officers began bleeding from the nose.
The rift was close enough for final translation. It was also close enough that any delay could scatter the withdrawing formation through the Warp.
"Lyras."
The veteran Black Legionnaire turned from an auxiliary strategium station. He had already sealed his armor and transferred local command duties to the officer beside him. The speed of the response was one reason Abaddon entrusted him with problems that could not survive discussion.
"Board the Will of Eternity," Abaddon ordered. "Find out why its drives keep failing. Make certain no one sabotages the fortress during the final withdrawal. If its crew cannot make it obey, you will."
Lyras bowed once. "It will reach the rift, Warmaster."
He moved immediately to the bridge's teleport platform.
Warp-based teleportation was never safe. Under ordinary conditions, a transit of this range between two vessels maneuvering under fire would have risked materializing Lyras inside a bulkhead, spreading him across several decks, or delivering something else alongside him.
The open rift changed the calculation. The barrier between realspace and the Immaterium had already been torn apart, reducing the power required to force a path through it. The Will of Eternity's immense mass and active teleport beacons strengthened the destination lock, extending the system's range and improving its accuracy. The risk of daemonic intrusion remained, but Lyras considered that a problem for whatever daemon was foolish enough to arrive within reach of his blade.
Warp-light closed around him. The Vengeful Spirit vanished.
He rematerialized inside the Will of Eternity's command chamber with one hand already resting on his weapon.
The room was an almost perfect cube, nearly sixty-five meters to a side, its floor broad enough to muster an armored company. Black walls rose without seams, rivets, or visible support structures, absorbing most of the light cast by the banks of machinery grafted onto them.
No one knew what purpose the chamber had served when the fortress was built. Abaddon's crews had selected it because conduits buried beneath the walls responded to control inputs here more reliably than elsewhere. The Dark Mechanicum had filled it with command thrones, hololithic projectors, cable trunks, sacrificial power couplings, and interface pylons driven directly into the ancient blackstone.
The additions looked less like a control system than a parasite attempting to reach the nerves of a much larger animal.
At the chamber's center, a Dark Mechanicum magos shouted commands in a mixture of Low Gothic and machine-speed binary. His augmented underlings scattered between consoles. Servo-skulls carried data wafers from one station to another while combat servitors hauled emergency power lines across the floor.
A hololithic representation of the fortress hung above them. Hundreds of propulsion units covered its surface in red and amber markers. Some belonged to the original structure. Others were Chaos-built plasma drives, maneuvering engines, and void tugs mag-locked to the exterior over years of modification. Even as Lyras approached, the magos ordered another bank of auxiliary thrusters connected to the aft power grid.
"What's the situation?" Lyras demanded.
The magos glanced at him, finished transmitting a stream of binary instructions, and answered with admirable bluntness.
"I don't know."
Lyras stared at him.
The adepts of the Dark Mechanicum, traitors to Mars, possessed a fanatical fascination with technologies long forbidden by the Imperium. In temperament, however, they differed little from their loyalist kin.
Had anyone else responded that way, Lyras would have tested whether a human body could be divided into exactly six hundred and sixty-six recognizable pieces. Unfortunately, the Warmaster had personally selected this magos to oversee the Will of Eternity.
"Why do the thrusters keep shutting down?" Lyras asked. "Even the units you have just installed?"
"Because this damned fortress is cursed, and now the thrusters are cursed with it!" the magos snapped.
He struck a console with one metal hand, throwing several displays open around Lyras.
"Power reaches every drive. Fuel pressure remains within tolerance. Control signals are received and acknowledged. Ignition proceeds normally." The magos stabbed a claw toward a sequence of engine reports. "Then the command pathways go dead. No overload. No thermal fault. No severed conduit. No hostile transmission. The engine simply ceases to accept that it is an engine."
"Can you restart them?"
"Every time."
"Then keep restarting them."
"I have been!"
As if to support the complaint, the fortress lurched beneath them. The chamber's gravity remained stable, but hanging cables swung toward one wall as another cluster of drives ignited. On the hololith, dozens of propulsion markers changed from red to green. Six seconds later, half returned to amber. Three went black.
The magos released a burst of binary profanity violent enough to make several lesser adepts turn away.
Lyras studied the failure pattern. It did not move along a power grid. It did not follow the age, origin, or location of the affected machinery. Newly mounted thrusters failed beside ancient systems, then restarted without repair. Whatever was happening, it was not a conventional malfunction.
If the Dark Mechanicum could not find a machine to blame, Lyras had little chance of doing better. He could kill a saboteur. He could seize a command post. He could not threaten an engine into obeying when the engine itself remained functional.
"I do have something you can help with," the magos said.
A servo-skull descended between them. Its brass casing bore fresh impact scars, and one of its stabilizer vanes had been replaced with a crudely welded strip of metal. The magos gestured toward its glowing ocular lenses.
Lyras allowed his armor to establish the link. As soon as the connection formed, a compressed data stream entered his helm systems and burned across his vision.
The image came from one of the fortress's interior galleries. The servo-skull had accompanied a security sweep after unexplained alarms began spreading through the lower transit network. Five thousand armed mortal thralls had been sent through the surrounding passages, supported by ten Chaos Space Marines drawn from several warbands.
The formation had spread across multiple galleries, but the servo-skull traveled with the leading contingent. Ahead stretched a corridor wide enough for armored companies to advance abreast. The walls were bare blackstone. The floor offered no machinery, alcoves, or structural supports that could serve as cover.
The patrol had advanced only a short distance when blue light appeared across the passage.
At first, dozens of luminous seams appeared. They widened into upright apertures, each stabilized by pale geometric lines that carried none of the distortion or color of Warp sorcery. More opened farther down the corridor, then throughout the adjoining galleries. Within seconds, hundreds of blue rifts filled the surrounding passages.
An armored Space Marine stepped from each one.
The arrivals did not pause to orient themselves. They emerged in complete squads, weapons already trained on assigned firing lanes before their boots touched the floor. Massive yellow armor enclosed every warrior. Black-and-white checkerboard markings broke the color across knees and pauldrons, while a bleeding heart marked every left pauldron.
The final two figures appeared behind the Astartes line. One wore an unfamiliar pattern of golden powered armor. The other was unmistakably xenos, though the servo-skull's recognition systems could not identify its species. It carried a luminous device and swept it through the air in short, deliberate arcs, wielding the instrument like a ritual dagger.
Lyras recognized the heraldry before the data-runes finished presenting their useless conclusion.
The Lamenters.
He had fought them before. Their reputation for catastrophe had encouraged many enemies to mistake them for incompetents. Those enemies usually discovered, shortly before dying, that misfortune had never made the Lamenters poor warriors. It merely ensured that victory cost them more than it should.
These were not the depleted, mismatched battle-brothers Lyras remembered.
Every one of them wore standardized Tactical Dreadnought armor suited to a mass corridor assault, rather than the scattering of relic suits normally reserved for squad leaders and veterans. Storm bolters and assault cannons leveled down the corridor. Plasma weapons charged, while thunder hammers and shields rose with the advancing formation.
Then they opened fire.
The leading ranks of mortal thralls disappeared beneath coordinated volleys. Storm-bolter shells struck bodies, detonated, and hurled fragments into the men behind them. Assault cannons swept across the formation at waist height, cutting through armor and flesh faster than the packed ranks could fall. Plasma fire passed over the mortals and struck the Chaos Space Marines directing them from the rear.
The corridor's vast size became a liability. There were no bulkheads to shelter behind and no side chambers close enough to reach. The thralls could only advance, retreat, or die where they stood. Conflicting orders came from the Chaos Marines, each demanding obedience from troops who belonged to different masters. The result was momentary paralysis.
Hundreds died during that hesitation.
One Chaos Space Marine forced his way through the retreating mortals and fired a bolter into the nearest Lamenter. Explosive rounds burst across the Terminator's breastplate and pauldron. The Lamenter rocked backward, corrected his footing, and returned fire with three shots. The first broke the traitor's weapon arm. The second penetrated his gorget. The third detonated inside his skull.
Another traitor charged with a chainaxe, using the mortal thralls as moving cover. A Lamenter carrying a thunder hammer stepped forward to meet him. The hammer struck once, folding the traitor's breastplate inward and driving him beneath the feet of the advancing formation.
The Lamenters did not break stride. Squads moved past one another by turns, front ranks firing while those behind reloaded or shifted targets. When the mortals attempted to spread into adjoining galleries, new blue apertures opened ahead of them and more Terminators emerged to seal the routes.
The xenos raised its glowing device again. The image distorted. For an instant, the feed fractured into overlapping glimpses of blue light reflected across blackstone walls in galleries far beyond the servo-skull's position.
The boarding force was not entering through a single breach. It was propagating through the fortress.
A storm-bolter round struck the servo-skull. The final image spun through yellow armor, red mist, and black flooring before collapsing into static.
"This is insane," Lyras said.
The words emerged more quietly than he intended. He had not seen Tactical Dreadnought armor deployed at such density since the wars of the Great Crusade, when Legions rather than Chapters possessed the industry to equip entire assault formations with it.
Surprise lasted only a moment. Lyras severed the link and opened a direct channel to the Vengeful Spirit. He transmitted the recording, marked the probable boarding routes, and requested immediate reinforcements. At the same time, he ordered the fortress crew to seal access corridors leading toward the propulsion nexus, mine every junction that still obeyed them, and redirect the nearest Chaos Space Marines to establish layered defenses.
As the report ended, a petty and thoroughly treacherous thought intruded. Khayon had been one of Lyras's oldest rivals. If anyone deserved to become the unlucky bastard responsible for stopping an army of Lamenters in Terminator armor, it was him.
Too bad.
Khayon was having an even worse day.
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