The Monarch of Fire fired even as it burned. A fifty-metre-wide wound gleamed with the light of internal explosions from where a kinetic shot had punched through its skin. The shot had missed vital systems by a few metres, but left flames drawing through its decks.

Lines of plasma poured from its spine and port batteries. A scythe of light cut across the face of the closing Iron Warriors battleships. There were twelve of them, main force class all, skinned by metal and wrapped by dozens of void shields. Each of them could weather a point-blank broadside from a ship that was its equal. But the Monarch of Fire was not their equal. She was an empress of destruction and they mere lords.

The void shields on five of the Iron Warriors ships vanished, collapsing one after another, flashing as they overloaded. Plasma flooded across their hulls. Plasteel and stone flashed to gas, melted, scattered into the dark. White vapour fumed from the Monarch of Fire as coolant breathed through its guns and hull. Its remaining opponents did not hesitate. Beams of turbo laser fire raked its shields as they flickered.

On the Monarch of Fire’s bridge, Lord Castellan Halbract felt the ship judder as it drew breath to bellow again. Lights dimmed. The surge of vox-traffic chopped and quieted. Tactical displays faded to hololithic snow. A moment of quiet and stillness fell as the great vessel inhaled power from its systems to fire upon its foes.

They had pulled back to the volume around Oberon. Ships and supplies still streamed from the last moon in loyalist hands. It would not remain that way for long. A cascade of explosions had stripped it of most of its defences, but even if they had still been in place, its fate was sealed. The Iron Warriors had moved through the orbits of Uranus bit by bit, taking what they could and destroying what they could not. Where they met resistance they applied more force, brought more ships from the Elysian Gate, and replaced the ships and soldiers that fell with more.

At the star fort Phuran, unable to break its void shields, and with troops prevented from advancing beyond their beachheads, they had deployed two vast ships to overwhelm the defences. The pair had lost their names and become codes in the data-looms of the IV Legion: I-D-I and I-V-II. Both ships had been grain haulers taken from the Imperial supply lines. Their cargo gone to feed the forges supplying the Warmaster’s armies, their guts became city-sized barracks for tens of thousands of gang fighters harvested from the worlds around Ullanor. Kalma soporifics had been pumped through their holds to subdue the human cargo for transit. As they closed with the Phuran, the gas mix changed and frenzon and slaught fogged their holds. The tens of thousands of gangers began to wake, and kill each other.