Chapter Text
Void war was often likened to regicide by armchair admirals and after-action analysts.
Vessels deployed on a flat, stately board. Moves and counter-moves, creeping towards and breaking down grand strategies. Two commanders sacrificing ships and warriors to build their position within a system. Propaganda vids and memorial picts always portrayed the bridge of an Imperial vessel as a bastion of absolute control, quiet as a chapel. A web of order centred around a stoic, silent captain.
Lieutenant Adras had little interest in Imperial pastiche. He had even less in how the common man believed a voidship should be run.
‘Confirm that damn clipper!’ he roared from the command throne, pounding a grey gauntlet on the reinforced sidebar. It crumpled slightly. ‘Batteries three through five to cycle shells! What’s the latest from fleet?’
A chorus of assent rose from the gunnery officers, hands dancing on consoles and orders passing through vox-sets. The Vigilance shuddered as macrocannon batteries volleyed fire across the void. The sustained barrage terminated a fast-attack vessel bearing an eight-pointed star. Crippled by a previous attack and left drifting, the Black Legion clipper had been trying to turn what remained of its guns towards the battle.
Little threat there, but Adras had not lived to serve the Imperium for two centuries by taking chances. Even a clipper could wound an Imperial warship if their void shields failed. For all that they were the enemy, the Black Legion did not lack for courage or skill at arms.
‘No response from Sirius, lord!’ called the communications officer, her mien harried. ‘We still have transports coming cross-system, into the Archenemy deployment. Chatter is thinning - they’ll have their guns on us again soon.’
Adras shook his head. Time bought in Militarum lives, and unknowing ones at that. The Sirius - battle-barge of the Storm Warriors, his proud Chapter - had screened a Warp jump from the evacuated ruins of Cadia to a fall-back system. Black Legion outrunners had been on their heels almost immediately. The void predators lacked the muscle to bring down an Adeptus Astartes warship. But they reaped a terrible toll on the wallowing hulks that transported Astra Militarum regiments across the stars.
The Lieutenant longed to turn his strike cruiser back, to smash and scatter the Archenemy fleet elements. But to do so would expose his vessel, carrying the remnants of Fourth Company, to sure destruction. Even now, opposing capital ship moved through the Warp towards them. To charge under their fire would be suicide.
‘See if you can raise Ilyan’, Adras growled, studying the ever-changing hololith. The number of ships within the Storm Warrior’s protection was small, but growing. ‘They may have better luck cutting through this interference.’
‘Aye, lord.’
‘Batteries cycled and ready, lord!’ reported the chief gunnery officer. ‘We’ve no shortage of targets!’
Adras was on his feet now, blood truly up. A Space Marine’s journey through the ranks of his Chapter exposed him to a bevy of doctrines - he was expected to master them, to become a true paragon of war. For all that, some resonated with particular callings more strongly than others. Adras would have remained a Devastator for eternity, had his experience and tactical acumen not earmarked him for a leadership role.
Even in the command throne of a warship, he still felt that kinship in his soul. Heavy weapons were simply in his blood. He lived a life of kill-zones, fields of vision - and overwhelming firepower.
‘At will, by the Emperor!’ Adras bellowed. ‘Send them all screaming back to the Warp!’
Vigilance was not a fast ship. It had not been built to engage in dizzying manoeuvers or daring evasion. The outrunners could, quite literally, fly rings around it. None of that mattered. Space was not the calm, orderly, flat plane of a regicide board. It was not a battle of open fields, it was a war of angles, and the Vigilance’s guns were dialled into the attack runs of Archenemy vessels before they even began them.
The Black Legion vessels charging down the fleeing transports disappeared in a wake of explosions. Broadside after broadside rippled from the Vigilance, tearing apart burning hulks, leaving nothing but dispersing trails of twisted metal.
Those Archenemy vessels that saw the fate of their fellows broke from their pursuit. Desperate evasive action followed.
Adras grinned as those, too, were met with withering macrocannon fire - though not from his guns.
Many Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes would have been long gone from this system. Even those that counted themselves as brave and honourable would weigh the risk of remaining, of shepherding the slothful Militarum vessels and break for the Warp. There was wisdom in that consideration. The Space Marines and their equipment were far more difficult to replace than the endless churn of weapons and those to wield them that the Imperium produced. None would condemn them for making that choice - except those they left behind, and even then, not for long.
‘My compliments to Captain Sovak,’ Adras nodded to the communications officer. ‘Good work raising Ilyan. Do they have contact with Sirius and Chapter Master Calan?’
Breaking through the oceans of interference that surrounded any pitched void battle was no simple feat. The officer glowed with deserved pride at the compliment. Rather than interfere with the bridge crew’s concentration or her lord’s processing of battle, she had shunted the gunnery and positional data across as soon as the link had been established.
The Ilyan - a strike cruiser of similar heft to the Vigilance - had immediately adjusted her position to cover the lanes of retreat out of her sister ship’s broadside. The overlapping fire had been ruinous. No Black Legion vessel dared attempt another approach. They contented themselves with the slaughter of Imperial transports across the system, beyond the reach of immediate retribution.
Breathing room. What stragglers remained were safe under the guns of the Storm Warriors - for the moment.
‘We have revised orders, Adras,’ the crackling voice of Captain Sovak answered the question from the command throne’s speaker, rather than the communications officer herself. The Lieutenant nodded again in approval - she’d anticipated and acted accordingly. ‘Astropathic sendings state that the bulk of this Black Crusade has continued towards Ultramar rather than breaking the Cadian Gate proper.’
‘Can they be trusted?’ Adras replied with a frown. ‘The Rift damn near killed my astropaths. They’re in no condition to send or receive anything.’
‘The source is Ultramar itself. If any choir can cut across this darkness, it’s theirs.’
‘Good news at last. We can expect reinforcements from the Ultramarines, then?’
‘Not quite, Lieutenant. They’re relaying directives to Calan.’
Adras snorted, amused. ‘Directives? I know they’ve got an ego, but we’ll not be ordered about, not even by Calgar himself.’
‘These come from a higher power than Marneus Calgar. They say…’ A moment of silence, interspersed by the crackle of interference across the vox. Sovak was a veteran, a warrior of esteem, considered by many to be the prime successor of the Chapter Master when his time came. Yet even he grappled with the import of the words he would speak. ‘They say the Primarch has returned, Adras. Roboute Guilliman himself. Revived in this dark hour, he shattered the first assault on Macragge itself and even now makes all haste to Terra. He has commanded those who survived Cadia to reinforce the outlying systems. To make them ready to defend against invasion, while he musters the Imperium’s strength to strike back. We stall the Black Legion here, and their Crusade will wither on the vine.’
‘Throne,’ Adras breathed, shocked. ‘The strategy is sound, but… Guilliman himself?’
‘I find it hard to countenance, yet why would there be any deceit?’
‘The Primarch.’
‘Aye, Adras.’
‘I’ve read his book, you know.’
A scratchy chuckle. ‘Aye. Sirius will hold a blocking position, along with Tempest’s Reach. You’ll take a number of Militarum transports under your wing to the Turas system. They’re being designated and their commanders informed now.’
Seating himself again at the command throne, Adras watched as data spooled through the hololithic display. Titles and information of the Imperial vessels that would depend on him and the Vigilance for the foreseeable future. He felt a strange ache in his hearts. The Storm Warriors had come to Cadia in their full strength, the Chapter arranged for war in a way never before seen in their history. Though they had taken casualties and failed to hold the world, it had set a fierce fire within him. To operate with all his brothers, their serfs and armsmen had felt… right.
Now that fellowship was being broken, each set to their own task and objectives once more.
‘Any word of Captain Unta?’ Adras asked though he did not expect to like the answer. Unta was the leader of Fourth Company but had vanished in fierce fighting through the mazelike Cadian kasr. None had seen him since.
‘No word,’ came Sovak’s reply. ‘We fear he and his legacy perished with Cadia.’
Adras did not ask the question aloud. It did not need to be. ‘Emperor rest him. We have the deployment data now. My staff are pulling the transports into formation now. Anything else, Sovak?’
‘We’ll be back, brother.’ The heat in the Captain’s voice penetrated the static. ‘Abaddon had to break the planet rather than face us blade-to-blade. We have their measure, all those Warp-spawned traitors and bastards. We’ve seen their faces. They are no legend, no myth, no monster out in the dark. We’ve fought them now. We’ve made them bleed. We’ll leave this system full of their shattered ships, we’ll break them on the Gate worlds, then we’ll run them right back into the Eye. Mark me, brother. I swear it.’
‘I hear your oath, brother-Captain,’ Adras replied formally. He raised a gauntlet to the upright sword on his pauldron, flanked by two fierce bolts of lightning. ‘Bring down the storm.’
The vox-link closed, and Adras' attention turned to organising his motley flock for Warp translation.