A halo of slashing retro thrusters wreathed the
Stella’s bow in fire as it skidded around, the machine spirits in the hull screaming in protest at the high-g maneuver. The onrushing
Fulmen knifed its own thrusters, trying to compensate, but with its main engines damaged it was not a race it was going to win.
As it became apparent that the Dauntless was going to miss several dozen kilometres to the
Stella’s stern, gun-deck auger officers on the
Fulmen abandoned command discipline from the bridge and screamed at their gun captains to simply fire as they bear. On the turning
Stella Rosa, Thane’s reductor-magi locked in their targeting cogitators, and calmly unleashed hell.
Flame-wreathed macro slugs, plasma-bright lances and comet-tailed missiles scorched across space at murderously close range, punching vapourised holes in armour and slashing open weapons decks. Consecrated skull-icons were flensed away from the hull of the
Stella Rosa, while its return fire bit deep into the Imperial cruiser to ignite missile stores and rupture plasma reactors.
Secondary explosions fired off down the
Fulmen’s spine, showering off red-hot hull plating and pieces of gun turrets. The ship rolled away, gutted and ablaze, spun by trailing plumes of atmosphere, fuel and water mist that the thrusters could no longer correct for. Individual turrets fired sporadically as gun captains remained faithfully at their posts, but it was clear to all that the Imperial cruiser was done.
+ + + + + +
HDMS Fulmen
On what was left of the command deck, captain Tapken wiped away the blood screening his vision and looked upon a scene of chaos. The arti-grav had failed, only for a moment, but it had been enough to rip columns and consoles from their place and send them whiplashing back across the deck. Glass screens were shattered, control terminals were blind with static, and the one remaining hololith showed that they were drifting away from the battlezone, propelled by what was left of the sputtering, undirected engines.
Behind the splintered balustrade where Tapken leaned for support, the whole command crew was down. Executive officer Verov was dead, chief magos Al-Fulani was dead, and his faithful astropath was dying beneath the crushing weight of a stone aquila. There seemed something singularly wrong about that to Tapken. A man who had served with nothing but faith and integrity for twenty years, struck down by the sacred symbol of the empire he had never failed to honour. There were plenty on the
Fulmen who had considered theirs a strange friendship, even an unhealthy one - the captain and the warp-touched, soul-bound psyker. But it had been friendship nonetheless, and now it was ending in the slowly-spreading pool of blood that leaked out from beneath the stone aquila.
“I can’t see…” the psyker whispered, blinking his blind eyes as if the motion would bring back his second sight. “Too much screaming…did we get them?”
“Yes.” Tapken lied. “Broke their spine.”
The astropath heard the strain in his voice. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”
“No.” Tapken told him. “You’re going to sleep.”
“Oh…” the astropath said faintly. “Good…” He let out his breath in a sigh, and didn’t draw another.
Alone among wreckage and twitching, moaning casualties, the
Fulmen’s captain pulled out the automag at his waist and aimed it at the already-dead magos Al-Fulani. The man who had insisted they hesitate. The man who had given the treacherous Adranteans their victory. Grimly, he pulled the trigger, once, twice and again, the gunshots echoing hollowly across the ruined bridge.
+ + + + + +
Objective secured: Eliminate the Fulmen
New objective: Extract Glom expeditionary forces
HDMS Mors Indecepta
Hovering like a vulture at the edges of the orbital battlefield, commodore Thark watched events unfold from a command throne bathed in the glare of flashing hololiths and sweeping alert lights.
“Where’s that mercenary destroyer?”
“Not sure, commodore. We received the astro about the approaching squadron but they’ve since disappeared from our scopes.”
Thark tapped the arm of his command throne in irritation. Perhaps the Gallowglas witch had been blasted to atoms by the Imperial fleet, or perhaps she was executing some low-cunning strategy that she didn’t feel the need to communicate to him. He did so hate bloody mercenaries.
Either way, they couldn’t wait for her. They were here to save what forces they could from the orbital ring, and the Falchion squadron would buy precious little time for them to do that.
“Signal
Exitos and
Stella Rosa.” Thark ordered. The mechanicus cruiser, he saw, had reduced its target to a drifting hulk and was now retiring back towards the flagship. The blunt, over-armoured strike frigate, on the other hand, had remained close to the orbital ring to maintain contact with its Nebula boarding troops. “Tell them to start recovering their men now. Anyone who doesn’t get off the Glom in the next thirty minutes is getting left behind to play with the crusaders.”
“Commodore.” an officer at the sensori hub called, “Enemy squadron is leaving the
Fulmen and plotting an intercept course with
Stella Rosa.”
Thark smiled a grey-wolf smile. “We had better cover for them. Come about to zero-seven-zero plus ten and ready the nova cannon.”
As the Dominator-class cruiser swung out of its holding orbit and towards the planet, its antagonists burned forward thrusters and slowed for combat. Gun bays thrummed into life as the Imperial warships bared their teeth. The
Accipiter moved with its two escorts flanking, more like a parade flyby than an attack formation.
“Complacency.” Thark muttered.
The officer who had been approaching his chair with a nova firing solution in hand checked in confusion. “Sir?”
“The holy fleet always did have a problem with complacency.” Thark explained. “Too much washed teak and gleaming brass; not enough speed, modernity and professionalism. Fire when ready.”
Mors’ engines flared bright, and its internal arti-grav fields braced hard, both to absorb the recoil as a kilometre-long bolt of plasma flared from the monolithic launch tube slung below the cruiser’s prow. An answering flare bloomed a split second later, ahead of and below the enemy squadron. All three ships’ shields were stripped instantly in scattering flares of warp green.
[M] War in the Void - Patriots IC
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