"Notice: The Pectaro is initiating a transverse attack. All vessels clear the horizontal engagement plane."
The Imperial captains who received Axion's warning could not fathom the intent behind the command. Nevertheless, they ordered their augur-crews to fix their sights on the vessel Guilliman had personally designated as an ally, hoping to discern its combat characteristics and find a way to coordinate.
Confusion soon rippled through the observation decks.
"The Pectaro is correcting its horizontal attitude... it is orienting itself perpendicular to the fleet formation."
"Angular thrusters detected. The vessel is entering a high-speed axial rotation."
As the Imperial captains watched the ship stand on end and begin to spin, memories of the Dark Mechanicum's previous fate surged to the surface. They recalled the beautiful, death-dealing lattice of light that had swept across those traitor hulls, leaving nothing but silence in its wake.
"Emergency thrust! Clear the horizontal plane!"
The Imperial fleet, which had been maintaining a tight mutual-defense formation against the incoming fire, scattered like a startled shoal of fish, diving violently "downward." Faced with the surrounding Chaos fleet, the threat from the planetary defense batteries below suddenly seemed the lesser of two evils.
Watching the bizarre maneuvers of the Loyalists, Abaddon sensed a trap. Instinct honed by ten millennia of war compelled him to order his own ships to follow suit, plunging the fleet to lower altitudes.
As the Imperial ships dove, the silver, rotating pillar of the Pectaro was left exposed in the center of the void.
The Chaos vessels naturally took note of the Pectaro in its vertical, spinning state. When magnified pict-feeds confirmed that a single, oddly-shaped ship was twirling like a top, derisive laughter erupted from the throats of daemons and rebels alike.
"Hahaha! A vessel so pathetic it cannot even maintain its own attitude control!"
Abaddon failed to recognize the ship; when he had last encountered the Pectaro, its configuration had been entirely different.
Then, the familiar ribbons of light erupted from the spiraling hull, resembling a bioluminescent jellyfish spinning in the deep. Densely interlaced bands of radiance swept outward, raking across the tightly packed Dreadfleet.
Simultaneously, the Second Fleet, engaged with the enemy periphery, executed an emergency breaking maneuver.
This time, the target density was immense. The thin filaments of light merged into a broad, cohesive ring of radiance that sliced through nearly a hundred Chaos vessels in a single revolution. Most of the high-energy particles exhausted their charge after piercing four or five hulls. The remnants drifted into the void, though some stray beams caught the Arks of Omen anchored at the edge of the theater.
The massive halo of light was visible even from the surface of Wyrmwood below.
There was no explosion. No bloom of fire.
A bewildered Abaddon stared at his fleet displays. Status reports indicated only minor superficial damage to most hulls. The attack appeared to be a grand, meaningless joke.
But as Abaddon opened his mouth to mock the display, he received a report that defied description.
Nearly two hundred ships had become ghost ships.
The rebels, the cultists, the Black Legion overseers, and the Astartes of various renegade warbands… not a single soul among them remained alive.
A terrifying report from a vessel that had not been entirely transfixed by the beams sent a chill down Abaddon's spine. Upon contact with the high-energy particles, flesh had begun to rot and disintegrate at an impossible rate. Such scenes were usually reserved for the most virulent of Nurgle's plagues.
Yet, unlike a Nurgle rot, these collapsing bodies showed no signs of mutation. They simply dissolved into pools of bloody slurry. The particles had lanced through the physical form, slaying every individual cell and rendering bone as brittle as ash.
The power armor that once protected the Astartes had become high-quality cans. Deprived of the bodies that filled them, the suits toppled to the deck, spilling "soup" from their joints. The Heretek Priests and their corrupted flesh-servitors were reduced to heaps of scattered metallic skeletons.
Deprived of the Hereteks' iron-fisted control, the ships spiraled into madness.
Unlike the Machine Spirits of the Imperium, Chaos vessels were often powered by daemonic entities crudely extracted and bound into the ship's systems. These "spirits" were subjected to eternal torment, forced into compliance by profane shrines and sub-routines.
With the crews dead, these daemonic intelligences reclaimed their chaotic nature. The tortured entities howled with predatory joy as they shattered their shackles, eager to vent their millennium-old fury.
In an instant, all tactical cohesion vanished. Fleet formations and fire priorities were discarded. The targets were no longer limited to the Loyalists.
The battlefield became a chaotic snarl of wayward energy as malevolent warp-cannons and macro-batteries fired indiscriminately. Two hundred Chaos vessels began firing wildly at both friend and foe alike. Ships began to engage in brutal brawls with their own kind. Without the Dark Tech-priests to maintain them, void shields flickered and died, and entire hulls blossomed into fireballs under the friendly fire of their peers.
Abaddon realized the catastrophe unfolding. The remaining Dreadfleet vessels scrambled to clear the kill-zone, turning their guns toward the approaching Second Fleet as the Arks of Omen began their slow, ponderous advance.
Against conventional warships, the relativistic particle projectors were devastating. However, the Arks of Omen, armored by the fused wreckage of countless lost ships, possessed hulls too thick for high-energy particles to fully penetrate.
Having completed its sweep, Axion decelerated the Pectaro and brought it back to a level attitude, using its plasma batteries to pick off the Chaos ships already reeling from the daemonic infighting.
The other Imperial vessels followed suit. They coordinated their fire to overload enemy void shields, then watched as the rebels were vaporized by the batteries of their own maddened sister-ships. The unshackled daemonic machine spirits cared nothing for allegiance; they sought only to broadcast their agony and hatred.
Abaddon watched his fleet dissolve into anarchy. Enraged, he signaled the Vengeful Spirit to initiate a saturation strike on the Pectaro.
Colossal lances and massive macro-cannon batteries unleashed a deluge of fire. Beams of raw energy and high-explosive ordnance slammed into the Pectaro's energy shields in a continuous, deafening thunder.
"Shield recharge rate nominal. Defense threshold rising to 55%."
Axion glanced at the shield load and felt a flicker of genuine surprise at the enemy's firepower. During the Federation era, void shield technology did not exist; most ships relied on energy shields. Restricted by power consumption, the shields on smaller craft could barely deflect micrometeoroids. Only on capital ships did they have true tactical utility.
It was only after the Iron Men began equipping dark matter reactor cores as primary power sources that these obscenely thick energy shields first gained the capability to withstand the concentrated fire of an entire enemy fleet.
Aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Abaddon watched as the silver ship emerged unscathed from the curtain of fire. In a fit of fury, he slammed his claw onto a nearby console, leaving a jagged, deep furrow in the metal.
——————
If you want to read ahead of everyone, go to my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)