The lights on the Monarch of Fire dimmed, but deep in her hull, power had already been syphoned to her engines. She pushed loose of Oberon’s orbit. The rest of her fleet was already falling into formation, ships breaking off and turning their prows towards the distant light of the sun. Signals reached after them from Oberon, pleading and railing and cursing, carrying the rage of people who knew that their fate was sealed. Halbract listened to them all, hearing the bitter words as the Monarch of Fire made for the cold depths. As predicted, the enemy did not chase them. They were cautious, and besides, they had won.

The signals from Oberon stopped as they reached the edge of deep sensor range. Halbract cut the link as the last whisper became static.

‘Signal Terra,’ he said, taking the helmet off his head. ‘Uranus belongs to the enemy.’

The officers around him bowed their heads at the words.

‘We are beyond the enemy’s likely interception range,’ said the senior tech-priest overseeing the ship’s signal and auspex systems. ‘Do you wish to send the rendezvous codes, lord castellan?’

Halbract nodded, his eyes on the damage and casualty reports from the rest of his fleet. It had taken Dorn’s personal word to convince him of this part of the strategy. It went against almost every instinct. Faced with an enemy, no matter how strong or numerous, one advanced, or stood and trusted to the strength of shield and sword and bolter. You did not yield ground that the enemy desired.

But that was what they were doing now, and what they had planned to do since before the ships of the traitors had breached the gates.

‘Now, in this moment, walls and strongholds are not our battlefield,’ Rogal Dorn had said, his voice strong even through the distortion-laced signal from Terra. ‘Our battlefield is time, and the battles we fight are to deny that to the enemy. They thirst for time, need it and cannot waste a second of it. And so we must deny it to them. Everything must be measured against that. We cannot stop them, my son, but we can make them bleed in time and strength before they reach the walls of the Palace. That is worth more than any fortress or line that is not on the soil of Terra.’

‘I will do what is needed,’ Halbract had replied and sent three hundred ships from the defence of Uranus into the night to wait.

He had bowed his head then, and he did so again now…

Over three hundred ships hanging in the lightless gulf between Uranus and the core of the system… Over three hundred guns that had not spoken to hold back the enemy from the Phuran, or Cordelia, or Oberon, or…