Disengaging the weave, Simut felt a mental jolt, so that for an impossible moment it seemed as though the entire universe stood still. It seemed the very same sensation that had come to him at the moment of biotransference, when his consciousness had been transposed into its artificial body. All of creation had held its breath for that instant.

The feeling passed as soon as it occurred but for a little while longer the passage of the ships across the void seemed tediously slow. Simut was tempted to accelerate his perception again but decided against it – there was a risk he would miss the battle entirely if he shunted into the temporal weave with the enemy so relatively close.

Instead he amused himself by moving his awareness from one ship to another, often to look at the majestic lines of his own tomb ship from without. The base of the ship was a massive crescent along the horizontal plane, its tines forming a twin prow. At the greatest width of the curve was set a sarcophagus-like superstructure upon which was raised the command pyramid, gleaming gold in the light of the star; a stepped ziggurat that had been bodily lifted from Simut’s place of internment for the Eversleep, now given wings to fly the void like a hunting falcon. Within this structure was the corpus of the army, from the royal warden and lychguard down to the lowliest canoptek scarab. The wing of the ship contained numerous weapons capable of obliterating other vessels, along with particle effect systems that could eliminate surface targets from high orbit.

As he admired this extension of his will, a flurry of data signals drew his attention to the approach of the first enemy flotilla. It numbered as many ships as his fleet, but far smaller in average mass. Scanners detected no astromantic readings at all. The poor, stunted things could not even escape the gravity of their birth-system! It occurred to Simut that perhaps these humans were not part of the star-spanning dominion he had previously encountered, but some regressive offshoot that had been abandoned to fend for itself like the runt of a livestock litter.

Using the sensory banks of the closest ships, Simut realised the error of this assessment. The incoming craft were blunt-nosed, brick-like vessels that looked more akin to castles in the void than starships. The double-headed eagle that was the symbol of their fractured empire adorned a keep-like superstructure. Their flanks bristled with weapon turrets, including powerful light-based weapons that sprang into life as soon as his Jackal-class scout ships were barely within range. The beams of red and blue flared across the void with little effect, the crude tracking systems of the human vessel barely able to keep up with the swift manoeuvres of the Jackals.