The charge of the Veritas Ferrum disrupted the forwards movement of the Imperial fleets. The daemonic ships multiplied. Immediate, proximate fire forced the Legion ships to turn away from the advance and bring their weapons to bear on the revenant vessels. The wedge formation turned into a melee.

The Veritas Ferrum moved deeper into the formations, spreading ruin with its monstrous broadsides. Its escorts followed closely. With the Ultramarines stalled, the Dark Angels and the Blood Angels used the forwards momentum they still had to bring the angles of their attacks inwards. Their crossfire decimated the rearmost ships of the daemonic fleet. Behind the enemy came the great swarm of bones. The shell had fractured into clusters ranging in size from a single grave to planetoids. The arriving storm drew the focus of the I and IX Legions. The shell disintegrated under fire, but the storm was infinite. For hundreds of thousands of miles, the void was grey with rushing death. More than half the ships had to use their guns to keep the battlefield clear. And still some of the larger chunks came through. Meteors of bone slammed into flanks and superstructures. The skull with the spiked crown, larger than a hive city, smashed into the bridge of the Blood Angels Nine ­Crusaders. The collision destroyed the skull and decapitated the ship. It surged on through the void, rudderless, its officers dead. It disappeared into the grey tempest, battered into darkness, at last dying in fiery paroxysm.

The Samothrace climbed above the Veritas Ferrum, then came about. Altuzer expected the Veritas to have put real distance between them by the time the Samothrace had finished its turn, but the daemon ship had slowed. It was where it sought to be, in the midst of its prey. Everything was lesser before it, and everything died, only to rise again as a hideous disciple, spreading its message of devastation.

‘All ships,’ Altuzer voxed across the fleets. ‘If you are crippled, enact self-immolation.’ The Glory of Fire had not risen from oblivion. Its destruction had been complete. ‘Take the enemy down with you.’

The Veritas Ferrum was in close range. It was under fire from every ship not already engaged. The efforts were futile. The salvoes were small, and impacts healed as fast as they formed. If the initial strikes had had so little effect, it would take something catastrophic to break the spine of the beast.