‘Phetos, begin the assault,’ he commanded the royal warden standing ready at the foot of the dais. Simut flung out a hand as though standing at the forefront of his host. ‘Unleash the might of my army. Full attack!’

Messenger beams flared back and forth across the fleet, ascending and descending along protocol-hierarchies, activating time-honoured responses. The fastest ships accelerated into an outer picket line, forming a mobile attack force that would respond as enemy ships manoeuvred. Their task would be to frustrate any attempt to form solid battle lines, pinning down isolated vessels while the slower harvesters moved into range with overwhelming weaponry. Should they be threatened by any significant counter-attack, like skirmishers of old they would simply fade back into the main fleet and shelter behind the longer ranged weapons of the capital ships.

The humans were terribly four-dimensional in their thinking. Being wholly reliant on the neversea for their interstellar transport, their defens­ive structures had been placed into orbital spheres coordinated with the arrival of astromantically traversing craft. The drives of the necron warships suffered no such restrictions and had dropped out of cross-system flight at an angle unanticipated by the architect of the ring of human stations. Still gathering speed, three human flotillas converged now from defensive platforms in the orbits of the outer planets, scrambling to intercept the enemy that had, to their eyes, miraculously appeared at the system’s edge.

Simut had learned during his first system assault that it was unwise to decelerate too far into the target system if it was defended. An unwelcome attack against his fleet from outer system ships while in orbit had forced him to delay the placement of the resonator. Now he was more circumspect, eliminating the void threat before taking up station to move the resonator into position. Even with their inertia-dampeners, there was a limit to how quickly the necron ships could traverse the stellar distances within the system, and the human vessels would certainly take some time before bringing the arriving fleet to battle.

Fearing boredom as the opening moves took place across the outer system, Simut slipped into a temporal weave, detaching his consciousness from the external passage of time. His artificial synapses firing at an almost infinitely small fraction of their normal speed, it seemed to Simut as though the universe accelerated. Moons sped about their planets with cosmic haste and asteroid rings spun wildly through the heavens. The target world had completed a hundredth of its stellar orbit in what would have been a handful of heartbeats, were he still to have such a crude organ sustaining his existence. Enemy squadrons formed while his fleet broke into four waves to meet the oncoming foe.