As he slashed apart another victim, the skorpekh lord felt a disturb­ance in the cortical matrix strong enough to distract him from the slaughter. A massive disruptive wave passed along his communications field and into his awareness. He briefly glimpsed his tomb vault ablaze, wracked with arcs of escaping power. A looped inflection command confirmed that the restoration tomb was not responding, and neither were hundreds of others.

He felt one of his warriors perish to the detonating ammunition of the armoured warriors and its presence flickered into nothing.

No recall, no reanimation. Finality.

It was a sensation Zozar had not experienced for an untold age, in slumber and then in unlife. Mortality. An ending to everything.

Was this what he had craved all along?

No! The Destroyer did not fight to be destroyed! Death before other life had been exterminated was failure. He was the bringer of ruin and after his elimination who would continue the great work?

Magnified visual inspection via one of his subordinate constructs showed the tomb ship aflame in the upper atmosphere, on the verge of total structural collapse. His resurrection protocols were aligned to Simut’s matrix, and now that node had been severed.

With a roar, Zozar realised that he was trapped here with his cohort. Until new protocols were established there would be no translocation and his forces would dwindle. The battle had changed.

Now it was no longer about righteous extermination. Zozar was in a fight for life or death.

‘Lieutenant, the enemy are breaking away.’ Shipmaster Oloris grinned as he relayed the news, the first sign of humour he had shown in weeks. ‘I think the plan worked.’

Praxa­medes looked to Lerok at the patched-up augur station. Half the screens were blank and two servitor ports were empty, the corpses of their previous occupants removed by the tech-priests.

‘Energy surge in Orestes III’s atmosphere, lieutenant. Could be a ship entering.’

Next to feel his gaze was Officer Geltas at the vox-terminal. He nodded, one hand clamped to his headpiece.

‘Getting confirmation that the gunships extracted the boarding force, lieutenant.’ The officer smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, all attack craft were safely away from the target before it pitched into the gravity well. They are traversing the upper atmosphere to avoid attack.’

‘And now their secondary fleet has scattered,’ Praxa­medes said with some satisfaction. He had expected a fight against the second capital ship, but it had used its extraordinary engines to power away, and was still accelerating as it looped above the orbital plane to come back towards the doomed necron vessel, almost too fast for the scanners to follow. Its mission was unclear – there was no chance it would be able to launch rescue boats in time, and the captain’s attack flotilla was safely inside the atmospheric envelope of Orestes III. Given the speed of the xenos’ strategic collapse, Praxa­medes was momentarily at a loss regarding what to do next.