The Anuari system lay two hundred light-years to the galactic east of Cadia. Its dusty planets and cold moons sat on the forgotten edge of Segmentum Obscurus.
Black Legion intelligence described it as lightly patrolled and poorly defended. There was little worth conquering and almost nothing capable of resisting a fleet.
That suited Abaddon's new purpose. He wanted to destroy worlds and widen the ritual breach near Cadia. Anuari offered targets he could reach without fighting through another fortress system.
He didn't care where the planets shattered, only that they shattered.
The desert planet nearest the outer approaches would be first.
The Chaos fleet translated at the system's Mandeville boundary. Cruisers emerged ahead of the battleships, their augurs sweeping for defenses. Behind them came the New Will of Eternity and the crippled Vengeful Spirit, still moving between its towing ships.
On the flagship's bridge, the system map resolved around a scattering of planetary markers. No orbital defense platforms appeared. No warning beacons challenged the intruders.
There was only one hostile contact.
A Talon Navy escort frigate.
It had been patrolling the outer approaches. Now it turned away from the arriving fleet, its weapons coming online.
The leading Chaos cruisers opened fire without waiting for Abaddon or Typhus. After Cadia, recognizing a Talon hull was enough.
Black Legion ships accelerated toward it. Death Guard cruisers followed, while Red Corsair vessels spread outward to cut across its course. Lance beams struck first. Macro-shells and torpedoes followed.
The frigate's defensive barrier flashed around its hull. Point-defense lasers swept through the incoming torpedoes, destroying the closest threats while its light lances fired at the pursuing cruisers.
Abaddon watched from his throne. He would have joined the attack, but the Vengeful Spirit had lost two primary drive units. Its surviving engines could barely assist the cruisers keeping it under tow.
He had to settle for watching other ships take the kill.
"Have the Will of Eternity crack the planet. Attack squadrons, keep after that ship. Tear it apart!"
The fortress acknowledged. Around the command pit, officers relayed his orders while the cruisers continued closing on the escort.
Typhus's hololith flickered beside the throne. Static crawled across his swollen face and corroded armor.
"That escort is mine. Call off your dogs," the Herald of Nurgle growled, his bloated face swimming behind corrupted optics.
"Heh." Abaddon scoffed, dismissing the demand with a turn toward the viewport.
On the magnified feed, two cruisers had caught the frigate between their firing arcs. One pressed its starboard quarter. The other crossed ahead of it and turned to bring its broadside to bear.
The escort fired back, but its narrow lance strikes could not stop either ship. Most of its smaller weapons were occupied with torpedoes. It destroyed one salvo, only for another to arrive behind it.
Abaddon leaned forward as the cruisers fired again.
The frigate rolled, presenting its bow to the heavier barrage. Its barrier brightened until the entire hull was enclosed in white light. Inside, its power systems struggled to feed both the shields and the charging dimensional engine.
The next broadside broke the barrier.
"Target shielding has collapsed!" a weapons officer called.
A cruiser's lance battery locked onto the exposed command section. Abaddon watched the targeting lines converge.
Then blue light wrapped around the frigate. Its outline broke into luminous strands as the dimensional field formed. Before the killing shot reached it, the ship vanished.
The lance passed through empty space.
Abaddon's brief smile faded. Driving the escort away had cleared the approach to the planet, but it had not silenced the patrol.
Why had there been only one ship?
At Cadia, Talon's escorts had operated under the protection of heavier vessels. Had their commanders spread the fleet too thin or was the frigate's support somewhere his augurs could not see?
"I recall you once dispatched a probing fleet into the Talon sector… a few years ago," Abaddon said, turning to Typhus. "You should know something about their tactics…"
"They never returned," Typhus replied flatly. "To this day, I don't know if they fled or died. Not everyone volunteers to be cannon fodder, you know."
Abaddon held his gaze for a moment. Typhus had no answer and was plainly enjoying that fact.
Abaddon let the matter drop. There were more important matters at hand.
"Watch for dimensional arrivals," he ordered the augur pit. "Forward squadrons, clear the fortress's firing corridor."
The cruisers began adjusting their positions. Several remained crowded together after the pursuit, their damaged drives slow to answer the new orders.
Behind them, the Will of Eternity finished charging its Warp Vortex Cannon. Violet light gathered along its radial arms as the immense structure rotated toward the desert world. Its power readings held steady. The final targeting alignment was still incomplete.
Ten seconds passed… and yet the fortress did not fire.
An alarm sounded.
"New contacts beside the planet!"
Abaddon turned toward the tactical display. Blue seams were opening along the world's outer orbital approaches. They widened into apertures, each large enough to admit a warship.
No Warp translation flare accompanied them.
The first hulls appeared in broken sections of reflected light, then became solid as their dimensional fields closed. More ships followed, taking widely spaced positions around the largest arrival.
The Talon Navy.
Abaddon recognized the battleship immediately. He had watched that same prow gain on the Vengeful Spirit throughout the retreat from Cadia.
Talon's Wrath.
Seven cruisers emerged around it, followed by twelve destroyers and twenty more frigates.
The patrol had carried its warning back to the nearest Strategic Node. Its sensor record gave the waiting ships an enemy position and a clear picture of the invasion force. The formation had jumped into arrival areas already surveyed by the frigate.
This was only the force immediately available at that node. The warning was reaching the rest of the battlegroup, and more ships would follow.
Abaddon looked at the empty marker where the patrol had been. It had not needed to defeat his cruisers. It had needed to escape them.
Talon's Wrath emerged with its weapons charged. Its forward particle lances aligned on the Vengeful Spirit while the accompanying cruisers spread to either side. The frigates moved outward to screen them.
"Flagship targeted!"
"Bring our prow toward them," Abaddon ordered. "Tow ships, match the helm. Forward batteries, engage!"
The deck trembled as the towing fields changed their pull. The Vengeful Spirit began turning, far more slowly than he wanted.
Talon's Wrath fired.
White particle beams crossed the void toward the flagship. Torpedoes followed, their drive exhaust drawing bright tracks across the augur display.
At the edges of the Talon formation, the destroyers released their own weapons.
Black cubes dropped from deployment cradles and vanished as soon as they cleared the hulls. They crossed no interception zone and offered no approaching target for the Chaos point defenses.
Instead, intrusion alarms began sounding inside the enemy ships.
Forty Void Mines had been deployed. Twenty-eight materialized within hostile hulls, a seventy percent strike rate. The crowded Chaos formation had left Talon's targeting systems little room to miss.
"Void Mines!" Abaddon sprang up from his throne.
Kossolax had warned him about the cubes. They bypassed shields and lodged within a ship's structure before detonating. Armor offered no protection against a weapon already inside it.
"Increase separation!" Abaddon snapped into the fleet channel. "All ships, report internal intrusions!"
His gaze swept across the bridge floor, then stopped on the vox-officer. The man was listening to engineering reports, one hand pressed tightly against his receiver.
"The Vengeful Spirit was not struck, my lord!"
"Good." Abaddon exhaled, sinking back into his throne.
The officer hesitated as another report arrived.
"But... Terminus Est was hit by one."
Abaddon's lips curled.
"Even better."
After their last battle, Typhus had stood on this bridge and chuckled at the magnified image of the Vengeful Spirit's scorched port flank.
Abaddon glanced toward his hololith. The image had frozen as emergency traffic overwhelmed the link from the plague ship.
Now it was Typhus's turn.
....
Aboard the Terminus Est.
The black cube sat beside the central command station, its lower half embedded in the bridge floor.
Typhus stared at it. Wet tissue pulsed around the casing. The ship was trying to engulf the intrusion, but the mine remained fixed in place.
A mortal attendant backed away from it, leaving a strip of his robe trapped beneath one corner. He reached the nearest console and gripped its edge with both hands.
"Back," Typhus ordered.
His lieutenants pulled the remaining crew clear. Two Plague Sorcerers approached, studying the cube from beyond arm's reach. There were no exposed cables to sever and no obvious mechanism to disable.
"Corrode it!"
One sorcerer lowered his staff. Dark droplets formed on the casing and hissed against the deck. The surrounding metal blistered. The cube remained untouched.
"With what time?!"
A lieutenant caught the sorcerer's wrist before he could begin a second working. Heat was already building around the mine. The flesh pressed against it shrank away.
The sorcerer looked down and offered no answer.
Typhus shoved them aside. Cutting the weapon free would take too long. The sorcerers were still trying to understand it. Meanwhile, the deck beneath his boots was tightening around the intrusion, preparing to bury it deeper.
He felt the movement through his bond with the Terminus Est and stopped it.
"Flush it!" Typhus bellowed. "Have the ship eject it, now!"
The order was meant for the ship itself.
The deck answered with a violent contraction. Metal bowed upward around the cube. Bands of muscle pulled tight beneath the plating, then tore out the section of floor fused to the weapon.
A service shaft opened below it.
The Terminus Est could not separate the mine from the deck, so it sacrificed the deck instead. The cube descended with a ragged plug of steel and tissue still attached.
Farther down, hatches opened along the route to an exterior vent. Air began rushing into the shaft, dragging loose cables and scraps of flesh across the bridge floor.
"Hold fast!" a lieutenant shouted.
Crewmen seized rails and console frames. The sorcerers retreated onto a raised station while Typhus remained beside the opening.
The cube caught on a support rib. The ship forced it downward, bending the obstruction until it snapped. The weapon dropped out of sight.
Typhus followed its movement through his connection to the vessel. The outer vent was open. A surge of escaping air drove the mine toward it.
Almost clear.
Part of the cube had crossed the hull. The rest was still inside the discharge trunk.
It detonated a heartbeat later.
White light flashed up the shaft.
The blast struck the bridge through the deck supports and the air remaining in the passage. The floor leapt beneath Typhus's boots. A roar followed, drowning the alarms as the command station burst apart.
Lieutenants crashed into bulkheads. A sorcerer struck an overhead beam and dropped through the wreckage. Consoles tore loose, trailing sparks and severed cables.
Typhus's magnetic boots held for an instant. Then the plating beneath them ripped free and threw him against his throne. Its frame buckled beneath his armored weight.
He forced himself upright as shattered glass rattled across his pauldrons.
The central bridge floor was gone. Atmosphere poured through the opening, dragging debris into the ruined decks below. A crewman clung to a cable until its mounting broke; both vanished into the breach.
Typhus snarled and pushed away from the throne. He crossed the surviving strip of deck, locked his boots to it, and looked down.
The explosion had gutted a full kilometer of the vessel's interior.
From the bridge, he could see lower decks that should have been hidden behind layers of armor and machinery. Broken girders crossed the cavity. Corridors hung from severed supports, spilling bodies and wreckage from their open ends.
Organic conduits writhed among the torn pipes. Green ichor sprayed from ruptured vessels, while molten plating dripped onto machinery still twitching beneath it. Another section of corridor collapsed as he watched.
The Terminus Est shuddered under his feet. Through their bond, Typhus felt the extent of the wound.
He gripped the railing until it bent in his fist. The mine had been almost outside his ship. Now he could look straight into its gutted depths.
"Nooooooooo!"
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