The World Eaters did not try to run. Their formation attacked the Ultramarines as if the fleet had been drawn into a trap, and the traitors were not surrounded by a closing gauntlet. The strike cruisers Bellatorus and Creuisse led the charge. They were up against the battle-barge Gauntlet of Glory, the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, the Chronicle, the Glory of Fire and twenty more ships beyond them. The World Eaters fired all their forwards guns at once. The barrage was a roar of defiance that cut through the Chronicle. The cruiser became a cloud of ignited gas and debris, moving forwards on momentum. Its kin repaid the attackers in kind; the Suspiria ­Majestrix’s nova gun hit the Creuisse head-on. The blast split the ship in two, the halves parting like jaws, then peeling back from the gathering eruption.

In the midst of the Word Bearers formation, the Annunciation turned against the flow of the retreat. It accelerated as if it sought to escape from the cluster of ships. It had ceased to respond to hails shortly before the arrival of the Ultramarines fleet. The Cavascor­ pulled away from it, and the Annunciation drove straight for the Orfeo’s Lament. The light cruiser was still turning when the larger ship closed in on it. It abandoned its manoeuvre and tried to accelerate on a tangent. The Annunciation struck it just forwards of the stern. It broke the Lament in half. It barrelled through the hull in a storm of explosions. Statuary from both ships, colossal embodiments of metaphor and the lessons of the dark, flew off from the collision in a swarm of tumbling fragments. The Orfeo’s Lament howled its last, and the plasma cry swept over the Annunciation. The strike cruiser’s bow was a ruin after the collision, twisted and fused. Tremors swept the hull, damage feeding damage until the ship was a bomb awaiting the signal for detonation. The signal came from the Cavascor, when Hierax remotely triggered melta charges he and his Destroyers had left behind. The raging holocaust grasped at the retreating squadron, scraping the void shields, striking at the vessels with a foretaste of the XIII Legion’s anger.

The full measure of this wrath came from the Ultimus Mundi, and the Gauntlet of Glory, and the Praetorian Trust, and the Triumph of Espandor, and the Unbroken Vigil, and the Aquiline, and scores more. The fist of the Ultramarines closed with convulsive fury. Not a single ship of the Night Lords, the World Eaters or the Word Bearers translated to the immaterium. Overwhelming force turned them to fire, to ash, to the dissipation of gas, and to the silence of dust. Cold, devastating precision annihilated the warriors of terror and of rage. But when it came to the sons of Lorgar, there was a shout that echoed on the bridges and in the halls and in the weapon bays of every ship involved in their destruction.