Chapter 11: Chapter 11

The Imperial fleet roared towards the system’s inner asteroid belt unopposed. With an extermination force of just over a hundred capital ships along with their escorts, the captains and admirals were confident in their victory, even with the knowledge of the potentially high cost of victory.

Each captain was willing to pay the price in blood to secure that victory for the Emperor and the Imperium, though some didn’t mind having another ship or two pay it for them instead.

The vessels of Legion formed the vanguard of the extermination force, as was their duty. Each primarch present led from their respective flagships, seeing through the regretful action despite their own reluctance.

Each primarch save for one.

Legion Master Lhorke of the War Hounds, now renamed the World Eaters, stood utterly still on the bridge of the Conqueror. His dreadnought walker chassis allowed him to mask the uneasiness he felt at the whole situation.

He had not expected to be awoken from his stasis by the primarch himself. Neither was he expecting Angron’s un-broken state. With nobility and humbleness replacing Angron’s unbridled rage and bloodlust, Lhorke had thought it all a dream caused by an imbalance in the tank of his amniotic fluid.

When Lhorke was even more unprepared when, joining the senior officers in the great feasting hall of the Conqueror, he witnessed Angron bowing before his legion, and offering a most remorseful apology.

“I have failed you,” the once-broken primarch spoke softly, though his deep voice still carried throughout the chamber. “I allowed myself to be broken, and in that moment of defeat, uncaringly allowed you, my sons, to break yourselves.”

Lhorke double-checked his dreadnought sarcophagus' telemetry and diagnostics. He was definitely awake, and Angron was most definitely kneeling before the legion’s officers.

What had happened to cause this?

“I let my failures fester within me. I let myself wallow in my loss. I do not deserve to lead this legion. I do not deserve your loyalty.”

Murmurs arose at that, and Lhorke’s visual sensors picked up Kharn jerking back in surprise. Something must have transpired to elicit that response.

Angron rose up, his gaze exuding sorrow and regret. Lhorke shifted uneasily in his sarcophagus, a foreign urge rising within him that wanted to do anything at all to banish such sadness from his liege. He had not expected to sympathize so deeply for his primarch.

“As I am undeserving, I will step down immediately as commander of the XIIth World Eaters Legion.” Audible gasps rose in the room, and all eyes turned to the dreadnought when Angron nodded towards Lhorke. “Effective now, Legion Master Lhorke will take command, either as my replacement, or as interim commander until the legion finds itself a satisfactory leader.”

Despite the deafening protest that followed, which Lhorke himself joined in, Angron was adamant in his decision. Threats and pleas did not dissuade him in the slightest, and so Legion Master Lhorke found himself leading the World Eaters legion against his will for the foreseeable future.

The bridge crew of the Conqueror were just as uneasy at his presence, as was former equerry Kharn and several captains from various companies. They had updated him on recent events, and he struggled to comprehend the leadup to this Exterminatus. If not for the very proof of his genesire’s restored state, he’d have a hard time believing it.

An isolated world had the means to break the Luna Wolves, and its mortal leader defeated two primarchs, and dared to defy and antagonize the Emperor of Mankind.

The Exterminatus edict was easily warranted just by that summary, but further details made Lhorke hesitate just as much as the captains debriefing him. This mortal leader, Sev, had healed their primarch, and had not massacred their Luna Wolf cousins. Though he had clearly provoked the Emperor’s wrath, some had dared argued that the Imperium’s trespass warranted such a response.

It was what Angron had believed.

It was what Lhorke could…understand.

As the fleet approached the asteroid belt, the legion master tried several more times to contact his primarch, but Angron remained silent, locked away in his personal chambers for the time being.

“When you need me on the battlefield, Legion Master, I will obey,” his primarch had said. “But until then, I shall keep away from legion command. I have corrupted this legion enough.”

Despite the virtual absence of their primarch, the World Eaters remained overall united and accepted their new leader. Some captains, Kharn especially, had extended their sympathies to Lhorke, while others simply treated the legion master as regent until Angron returned from his…troubles. So when Lhorke relayed the commands sent by the Bucephelus, the World Eaters complied without question.

The legion warships formed a protective screen as the Mechanicum vessels moved to prepare for the first phase of the Exterminatus. Asteroids were knocked out of orbit with precise applications of firepower, or through use of the machine cult’s exotic technology. Each planetoid was given a trajectory that sent it hurling towards the Nexus Unity’s homeworld. Each qualified as a biome-killer in their own right, and in the span of four hours the Mechanicum had shunted or hurled more than fifty asteroids towards the Nexus.

Lhorke was quietly impressed; whatever insult Sev had given, it had reaped a bounty of the Emperor’s wrath.

With the first wave delivered, the fleet began to move once more, keeping in formation as it followed behind the barrage of planetoids. The Nexus Unity should have detected this by now, but other than the repositioning of their small fleet, little was detected by the system-wide augurs. They’d go down fighting then. Lhorke could respect that.

“Relay the following, legion-wide,” he ordered, “If we have to board their ships or assault their fortresses, grant these people the mercy of surrendering…or a quick kill.”

It was the least the legion could do for having their primarch healed.

*****

Archmagos Simulos gave in to the weakness of the flesh as the Omnissiah’s judgment approached the Nexus Monstrosity. These backwater heathens would have to try their most desperate best to even clear the wave of asteroids, and that was just the first wave. As the fleet passed the fourth planet, the corrupted mirror of holy Mars, a task force broke away to orbit the rust-red world. Orbital bombardment commenced as soon as they achieved the optimal formation, and the mirror-Mars was slowly shattered and rendered an incandescent ball of magma.

At the same time, the second phase of the Exterminatus began. Nova cannons roared out in a simultaneous barrage, hurling macro-plasma, vortex and other continent-breaking shells behind the asteroid screen. A second barrage followed, and then a third, both just as precisely timed. With the blessings of the Omnissiah, the appropriate calculations and modifications were effected for each payload; the shells would travel only slightly faster than the asteroids that shielded them. They would set the world’s atmosphere ablaze, from the troposphere all the way up to its exosphere.

Assuming they did not obliterate any Nexus ships in the way first, of course.

The puny defenders of the Nexus Monstrosity finally began to move, the augur arrays pinging back their futile last stand as all measly thirty-one ships that comprised of their fleet sliced through the void to form a defensive line. There were a lot of hidden variable to estimate how long they would last, but on the face of it, it’d seem that at the very best, these heathens would be obliterated by the first volley of Nova shells.

Archmagos Simulos had to actively adjust the chemical balance exuded from his brain. Warranted or not, feeling such strong emotions was not meant for one so enlightened as he.

The Imperial fleet cruised behind the barrage, and all guns were at full combat readiness once they began entering tactical auspex range. Combat - if such a thing even occurred - would begin in just under 53 minutes.

Four of the Nexus’ capital ships broke from their defensive line in a suicidal bid to meet the oncoming bombardment. Energy readings spiked from the otherwise obscured emissions of those vessels. The flurry of projectiles they launched were fast and small, void missiles that screamed in heavily encrypted code through several frequencies, exchanging some sort of chatter with the capital ships they were launched from.

Simulos took a few milliseconds to process the information. The Nexus Monstrosity was using such methods of delivering a sensor sweep? Was there a weakness in their tactical-level sensors? Judging from their trajectories, the missiles would clearly slip past the waves of space rock and macro-ordnance shells. It spoke of highly effective calculations on the defender’s end, but having a harmless volley of screeching missiles still puzzled the archmagos.

No matter, the ships still have to deal with the aster-

The fleet-wide auspex weren’t able to pick up the energy spikes this time as the ships lashed out with their macro-lasers and -plasma batteries. The volleys were enviously precise, shattering asteroids with just enough force to cause their shattering rather than piercing through them. By the fourth volleys, a hole was punched in the waves, and the Nexus ships were lashing out at the Nova shells.

The space between Imperial and Nexus ships lit up in a storm of roiling fire as macro-ordnance was set off and vortex warheads briefly tore a hole through reality. The missile swarm from the latter flew through it, and would harmlessly fly past the Imperial fleet as the ships began to spread out in all three axes to begin the last approach to swarm the defenders.

Four defiant ships remained still before the coming of the Omnissiah’s wrath. Archmagos Simulos recorded every second of their last stand…

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And then they were suddenly gone.

*****

They had been AIs created specifically to serve in the great ocean of space. Twenty-four digital brothers and sisters lived within a dedicated floor within the server complex of Antartica. They interacted with their distant sibling AIs, like Eva, Cabal, and Legion, and even with their creator Sev and some humans, but mostly this tight-knit family kept to themselves as they ran simulations and helped to build up the Nexus Unity’s space combat doctrine.

Only nine had been lucky enough to be given physical bodies so far, and the trespassers had affected the build schedules of the other Galactica battlecruisers. It was the first time the AIs with their limited sentience had known irritation.

Still, nine was better than none. As the first amongst his siblings, Adama was also the first to inhabit a metal shell. The Galactica was built to the optimal specifications researched by the ship AIs through countless simulations, and Sev himself added only aesthetic changes to the hull, such was his respect for their knowledge.

“If the design fails, at least we got a foundation to build on afterwards.” He was also a bit too unworried about expectations and standards, Adama sometimes felt. A minor complaint that was shared by the other AI groups apparently, even Eva had lamented fondly on their creator’s over-valuing of lives as a resource, even digital ones.

Though the Li String Particle Network that kept the ships connected to the main server-base would allow Adama and his siblings to treat their ship bodies as expendable, and Sev wholly expected it, it felt utterly…wrong to waste their creator-father’s effort so casually.

So they had decided to prove themselves on this first showing, to do what they could to ensure that the guns of Tupile would not need to be fired. As the main mastermind, Thrace was part of the four to sally out, along with Adama, Caprica and Agathon. The asteroids and exotic warheads in their way were easy enough to deal with, so they trusted their other five brothers and sisters to clear up the rest while the four of them would take the fight to the enemy.

Their spread of missiles had been avoided for the most part, and the enemy seemed not to want to waste the effort of shooting them down. That meant that there were far more teleport beacons for the four of them to choose from than what they had expected.

“This would be…interesting,” Agathon remarked with amusement in their network, a sentiment that the others shared as Thrace finalized the calculations.

“Optimal deployment found, relaying orders.”

Adama went through the updated battleplan and found no issue with it. A quick ping was sent to greenlight the plan, and after Caprica and Agathon joined in, they commenced the second-last part of the stratagem. “Commencing jump…now.”

A near minute of verifying and re-verifying calculations was proven true as the four ships locked onto the frequency of one particular missile and engaged the Kobol Spools. Quantum metanatural matter transference sent every atom to the pre-designated space in less than a second, with no corruption of atomic data or lingering metanatural radiation. Probably due to precise, redundant triangulation provided by the other transmitting missile beacons.

In a blink of an eye, the four Galactica battlecruisers had tactically teleported at the back end of the Imperial fleet.

“Status report,” Adama called out, and received all clears from his siblings. Milliseconds in and with no immediate Imperial response, the four ships nonetheless kept their shields fully powered.

Thrace had the honors of initiating the last stage of the stratagem. “In Sev’s name…”

Shooting the Imperials.

“Dalek.”

*****

Horus watched in surprise as four whole ships blinked out of existence, and then reappeared in the midst of the Exterminatus fleet.

An Ark Mechanicus was the first to die. The Mechanicum’s war relic suddenly caught in the middle of the Nexus’ ships simply vanished from the tactical holo, and the primarch’s superhuman senses picked through the torrent of auspex readings to discover it’s cause of death, a volley of overwhelmingly powerful laser lances that tore through the starship’s void shields and hulls.

“How did they-”

“Evade damn, it! Ev-zzzkt.”

“...out for crossfire! We can’t…”

The vox flood of confused and panicked captains followed a few seconds later, but by then three more ships - a heavy cruiser and two Emperor-class battleships - had winked out of the holonet’s existence. Fleet cohesion was lost, as the Army and Mechanicum elements that formed the rear were desperately fleeing or blindly engaging the Nexus ships.

Despite the panicked states, the firepower being vomited out into the void was still overwhelming, if unfocused. But as Horus had first encountered, the four ships seemed unaffected by the storm of fire as they dove through the void and lazily obliterated more ships.

Fighter and bomber wings were hastily launched, but the primarch was grimly unsurprised that they were fare more quickly silenced.

The enemy had sowed destruction and panic with just four ships, but even as a response was coordinated, the Legion ships that formed the vanguard continued to meet the rest of the Nexus fleet which remained unmoving from their defensive line.

The asteroid and Nova barrage was being cleared up, and Horus let out a sigh as it seemed that extreme-ranged bombardment was ineffective.

How much more so would this vanguard be, he wondered?

“This is folly,” Sejanus said behind him, staring darkly at the bridge’s holo projections. “We are being sent to the slaughter.”

Abbadon shook his head defiantly. “Asteroids and shells do not shoot back, and we still have the weight of numbers. Our speartip will hold.”

“So we’re orks now?” Aximand commented, earning a glare from the First Captain.

As his Mournival debated, Horus’ equerry voiced the thought that now plagued the primarch’s mind. “You think we stand no chance, my lord?” Maloghurst’s question was a bare whisper, the treacherous words buried by the other voices in the bridge.

It took several seconds before he gave a fraction of a nod. “I think I…we should have supported Angron in voicing against my Father’s plans.”

“Maybe it’s not too late?”

Horus glanced at the projections, then out through the bridge’s windows. The Nexus defenders had begun moving towards them.

“It seems that it is. Call for battle stations across the legions. We engage the Nexus fleet as ordered.”

For the first time, Horus did not feel the blaze of conviction when he uttered the next three words.

“For the Emperor.”

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