‘Fleet- and defence-wide transmission,’ he said, the rich accent of the Nordafrik Conclaves weighting his words. He saw the thousands of units under his command come to readiness in his helm-display. The echoes of a hundred warships’ acknowledgements and salutes whispered across the vox. He breathed out and spoke.

‘For the light of Sol and the earth of Terra, we stand. For the oaths we made, we stand. For the blood in our veins, we stand.’

He heard it then, growing in the air outside his armour as the hundreds of crew on the Monarch of Fire’s bridge took up the words.

‘For the stones laid by our ancestors, we stand.’

And now the words were echoing across the vox, overlapping from thousands of mouths.

‘For the days that have passed and the days that shall come, we stand.’

The swirl of dust in the sphere of the gate was moving faster, the light growing brighter.

‘For the living and the honour of the dead, we stand.’

Shapes formed in the glare, blinking into sight like shadows cast by the flash of lightning. The inner ring of gun platforms around the gate began to fire. Hundreds of shells blazed into the flashing dust. Some exploded, some vanished. The multicoloured swirl contracted. The gun platforms kept firing. Then the dust and light burst outwards.

A split opened at the gate’s centre, black beyond night. Across the gulf of the vacuum, the humans on the nearest gun platforms flinched as a ululating scream filled their ears. The dark hole flexed, its edges growing like a tear pulled wide in ragged fabric.

The fire from the gun platforms was a deluge now. Shells tumbled into the spreading breach. Those that exploded burst like water as they touched the warp. A trio of shapes appeared in the dark. Bloated and monstrous, they pushed into reality.

They had been macro-transporters once, made to shift the output of worlds across the galaxy. Each was bigger than even the largest warships. Slabs of raw iron had been welded to their flanks, and clusters of void shield generators blistered their skin like boils. They had borne other names in their former, ponderous lives, but the will of Perturabo had remade them, and had given them new titles to bear. Alekto, Megaera and Tilphousia were their names, and they had been reborn to die in the first moments of this assault.

The second cordon of defences opened fire. Long-range turbo lasers burned hundred-metre-wide channels through the blazing dust in the gate. The Alekto, Megaera and Tilphousia pushed onwards, molten metal weeping from their prows. Their void shields lit. Fresh storms of lightning blazed through the dust clouds, as ether-charged Siren Dust kissed the forming skins of energy. The deluge of fire began to find its mark as the three huge ships shot forwards.