The flagships took the brunt of the first daemonic salvo. There were losses in the fleets, mostly frigates, a first culling of the smaller ships. But the numbers of the Legions were vast. The ships of the Imperium outnumbered the daemonic several times over. The formations were undiminished. They tightened up as the moment of collision approached. Unscathed vessels drew up beside the damaged ones, ready to draw fire and support their comrades.

The Veritas Ferrum appeared to lunge forwards. It came at the Legions with the speed of nightmare. Its path was a straight line, as if the ship was too massive to manoeuvre, or too powerful to divert. It battered through the lance beams and cannon fire. Wounds opened and closed on its hull. The mouths on its flanks chanted a psychic chorus that came ahead of the ship like a bow wave. The choir shouted in triumphant wrath as the Veritas plunged into the heart of the Ultramarines wedge, its guns firing to port and starboard.

The Samothrace, already rising, narrowly avoided a collision. The behemoth passed just below its stern. The barrage of warp fire had the effect of a supernova in the heart of the fleets. Multiple beams burned through the Glory of Fire and the Legendary Son. The ships seemed to freeze in their forwards motion, transfixed by a hundred spears of night. Their atmospheres vented in moments, gales blowing out of multiple killing breaches in their hulls. The Glory of Fire’s engines went critical. The shockwave from the plasma detonation crashed against the void shields of a dozen ships, breaking open their defences, leaving them vulnerable to a new deluge of enemy fire. The Glory of Fire vanished in its self-immolation. The Legendary Son went dark. Tears half a mile long raked its hull. Its engines were silent. Its decks had collapsed and fused with one another. Tens of thousands of crew were crushed to a thin slick of pulp in fused ruin.

The Veritas Ferrum was a bludgeon, breaking open the wedge, forcing the vessels into evasive action, the impact rippling out over the entire span of the fleets. As the shockwave from the Glory of Fire had expended its fury, corrupted light ran down the length of the Legendary Son. Its hull grew spines, and it accelerated again, turning its guns on the Unbroken Vigil. The other ships hit by the daemonic barrage also transformed into corrupted wraiths. They attacked, burning the vessels that had come to their aid. The formations of the Ultramarines collapsed. Disorder grew exponentially. Ships that had not yet died succumbed to the infections of their festering wounds. Machine-spirits screamed in madness. They fell into oblivion, but the madness lived on, and summoned them forth again, transformed into monsters. Metastasising cancer reached more deeply and widely through the ships of the XIII Legion. The attack that had begun from the front was now coming from every direction.