The Pit grew quickly in the oculus as the fleet accelerated towards its target. The Indomitus Crusade was vast in size. Dozens of capital ships led many sub-fleets. The artificial stars of their engine stacks flared brightly as they manoeuvred into attack positions. Guilliman had the armada arranged like a five-toed claw. The long talons were individual battlegroups, arrayed in lines to pound the enemy as they passed. The palm was a wall of ships, with the Macragge’s Honour at its centre. The primarch intended to trap the foe against the mobile fortress of the palm as the fingers of the claw slowed and closed, as surely as a clenching fist, around the rear of the enemy fleets.

A further battlegroup ran outwards from the main line of advance towards the Pit. Within the knot of vessels at its centre, the Null Ships of the Sisters of Silence flew protected by three battleships. Kilometres long, the battleships were cathedrals of war, unused to escort duty, but the move was justified: for the foe they faced, these mighty vessels were not the battlegroup’s deadliest weapon. The ships of the Sisters – large, black and swift – were the key to success.

The command crew of the Macragge’s Honour were a mixture of standard human, Space Marine and Primaris Space Marines. Humans predominated. Though they wore the uniforms of Ultramar, they had been gathered to the Indomitus Crusade from all across the Imperium. Their diverse origins had been no barrier to Guilliman forging them into an effective unit.

Above the vox pits, the Master Divulgatus swung his command pulpit around. Tall banks of organ pipes, each one a powerful voxmitter, hid him from the neck down. His head was encased in a bulky communications unit. Only his mouth was visible. ‘The Null Ships will be in position in an hour, my lord.’

‘Seconded,’ said the Master Augurum from his own station high up on the stepped walls of the command bridge, a sub-kingdom of screens and hardwired servitors.

Runic icons blinked on the hololithic tacticarium orb, dotted lines flickering into being, describing their trajectory and ultimate position.

Before the crusade, the Macragge’s Honour had undergone an extensive refit in shipyards of the Ring of Iron around Mars, and the command deck had been entirely reconfigured from Guilliman’s day. Archmagos Cawl’s stamp was on everything. New machines and unheard of configurations of old devices replaced equipment that had been in use for tens of centuries. The tech-priests had been outraged, but Guilliman had silenced them, and Cawl had had his way.

The result was worth upsetting the Adeptus Mechanicus’ religious sensibilities. The machinery still had the ugly look of 41st millennium technology, but Guilliman reckoned there was a ten per cent increase in tactical responsiveness alone. Multiple redundancies and newly integrated systems allowed for better survivability. Dozens of tech-priests from Cawl’s faction laboured to keep the archmagos’ finely balanced design working, but it did work, and excellently so.