'Maintain heading,' said Russ. The stars grew swiftly. The ships of the Vlka Fenryka were under full motive power, still accelerating, their velocity approaching a substantial portion of the speed of light.

Playful curlicues of fire licked out from the twinned suns to meet them. Radiation flare danced over the ships' void shields. The Hrafnkel groaned as it bumped over frame ructions in space time ploughed up by the stars' conflicting mass. Mortal crew moved to adjust the integrity fields that held the ship together.

'Auspexes are blind. Augur eyes and picter units non-functional, my king,' spoke a kaerl.

'Good,' said Russ. 'If we cannot see, the enemy will also be blind to our approach.'

That was the gambit. Punch through the boiling space between the stars and take Horus by surprise. Russ calculated taking the more dangerous route would gain his fleet a precious six and a half hours where they would not be seen, reducing the time of their visible passage in-system towards the Vengeful Spirit to a mere three. That was six and a half hours less of manoeuvring time for the arch traitor. Six and a half hours less to loose long-range torpedoes and mass strikes towards the wolf fleet.

Six and a half hours could win a war.

Russ grinned. He could imagine the look on Horus' face as the Vlka Fenryka burst out of the broiling zone between the stars, and it made him happy.

Naturally, they had to perform this feat first. Naturally, Russ expected his men to succeed.

Long ribbons of energised gas glowed across the straits. Faint at first, they grew more visible the nearer the ships sailed, sketching in the lines of conflicting rip tides. The vox was a squealing howl of competing stellar voices, angry pulses of natural radio waves that sounded, at times, as if intelligence lay behind their emissions, and secret messages were hidden within. The red light intensified. Never bright it grew thicker, until it saturated everything and wounded vision with its strength.

Alarms blared. The Hrafnkel entered the straits proper. Shouting kaerls raised the opacity of the oculus' armourglass. Far-flung stars went out. The suns remained, darkly forbidding.

The flagship groaned. It dropped and swerved, its course upset by the arguments of the twins. It ran the knife edge between two gravity wells, teetering one way then the other, threatening to slip down to fiery min. The activities of Russ' ship kaerls - off-worlders in the main, for the natives of Fenris were poorly suited to manning void ships - picked up tempo. They shouted their communications where before they were muted. The peaceful toil of the bridge took on the aspect of battle, but this time, physics itself was their foe.