The light of the distant sun picked out the smooth, sleek curves of an eldar vessel and next to it, one that looked alike but for its contrasting jagged lines and barbed fins. There was the blocky, geometric form of a class of ship belonging to a mysterious race that Gdolkin only knew as a name - the ff eng, and many more designs of ship that the Iron-Father had no knowledge of.

Then the targeting locators of his augmetic eye locked onto a more recognisable form, a long, slender craft with a saw-toothed prow that belonged to the nekulli. There was even a ship that resembled a tomb-ship of the eons-dead necrontyr although, as the Iron-Father knew from bitter personal experience, such craft might not always be as lifeless at they at first appeared, even after millions of years lost to the void.

Some craft looked as if they had collided in the warp and become fused. There was a sheed cruiser locked in a deathly embrace with an ancient, hull-scarred baroque leviathan that appeared to be human in origin, but pre-dated anything Gdolkin had ever seen in use amongst the fleets of any sector battlefleet. The sheed ship had harpooned the ancient human vessel amidships. The command tower of the ship's bridge was half broken off, frozen as it toppled, it appeared, in the zero-g of open space, one wing of the eagle statue standing beneath the bridge drooping forlornly.

The human ships trapped within this space junkyard covered the whole gamut of mankind's wanderings between the stars. The beams of the Ajax's own high intensity spotlights traced the name of an Imperial warship which declaimed, in letters twenty metres high, that this was the Indomitus Rex, lost for who knew how many years, decades, centuries - millennia even.

There were Ecclesiarchy missionary cruisers, rogue trader vessels, massive Titan transporters and an Adepta Sororitas ship bearing the towering image of sightless fate: a maiden, blindfolded and holding a sword and shield. Her face had been forever scarred by meteorite fragments. Gdolkin even saw the long, threatening dagger-form of one of the black ships of the Inquisition, bearing the image of a trisected T, a hundred metres high, on its flank.

Eventually running lights ignited all along the hull of the Ajax again, outlining comms-arrays and weapon turrets. Shields were restored, surrounding the ship with a shell of coruscating amethyst energy, the plasma engines fired and the strike cruiser was no longer just another wreck adrift in this cemetery of lost ships.

The vessel powered forwards, setting a course for the fourth planet from the system's sun, a bloated green gas giant, and the small dark moon circling the leviathan world.

Having battled the turbulence of the warpstorm it was as though they had now entered the calm at the eye, Iron-Father Gdolkin thought. Through the lattice-worked armacrys dome that projected from the outer hull of the ship, he could see the dead hulks of the interstellar wrecks. The dark, lifeless face of an ork kill kroozer drifted past, its prow sporting long, twisting scars, dotted with circular blisters that looked like they had been caused by suckered tentacles, but tentacles that must have been several hundred metres in length.