The fleets of the three Legions fired first. The capital ships trained their biggest guns on the Veritas Ferrum. A third of the other vessels did as well. The rest of the fleet hammered the resurrected ship’s escort. The barrage was simultaneous, coordinated between the flagships. The daemonic fleet sailed directly into explosive hell. The salvo vaporised four of the Veritas’ cloud of escorts in an instant. The ghoul ships returned to oblivion, skeletons shattered into fragments. A curtain of blasts spread out behind the enemy fleet as lance fire reaching past the ships smashed approaching fragments of the necrosphere.

On the bridge of the Samothrace, Shipmaster Altuzer said, ‘They can be destroyed.’ Carminus shouted the same words on the Red Tear. Across the fleets, in hundreds of ships, a roar of defiance met the success of the bombardment. The great barrage at the gate over Pyrrhan had led to nothing, but here, enemy vessels vanished. Others limped on, broken, on the edge of falling back into the tomb that had spat them out.

The triumphant refrain lasted as long as the Veritas Ferrum was obscured by the star-death brilliance of scores of plasma blasts and multiple nova cannon hits. An angry dawn bathed the void. Then the abomination emerged from the fire. Streams of flame ran along its length and wreathed the huge, moving gargoyles. The silhouettes jerked in anger. The skull of the prow gaped wide, its roar raging across the psychic aether and resounding in the minds of every soul in the Imperium’s ships. There were craters on the hull. Portions of superstructure slumped like candle wax.

But the craters vanished, filled in by the flowing excrescences of disease. New pillars of brass and bone shot up around the superstructure, reinforcing it, rebuilding the massive fortress of clustered, jagged towers. It weathered the barrage and drove on towards the fleet, its speed undiminished, its hunger growing with its wrath.

The daemon fleet returned fire. A storm of warp energy scythed through the Legions. The barrage took the form of entwined lightning and flame. The void tore open at the passage of the blasts, filling the space between the closing formations with clouds of blood. The storm hammered void shields and triggered emergency activations of Geller fields. Where the defences fell, metal burst into unnatural fire and hulls warped into carnivorous life. The huge jaws of the Veritas Ferrum vomited black flame against the Samothrace. The Ultramarines battleship ploughed into a burning maelstrom that swept over the entire hull. The void shields shrieked with strain, flaring like suns. A chain-reaction collapse began as the Samothrace came out of the fire. Its prow turned up gradually, and the ship, trailing smoke and burning gas, began to rise above the direct line of fire of the skull.