Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Additional background Section 43: The Battle of Corbellus (part 2)==




<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">On Catachan, they had a saying. ‘When a devil’s jaws close around you, you must strike harder and faster than ever before. Strike fast, and strike again. Though the devil has you at its mercy, the flesh at the back of the gullet is softer, the scales less dense.’

Admittedly, it lacks a certain poetry the truisms of other planets might possess, but nevertheless, the Catachan saying has many analogous applications.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

As it transpired, at the ambush at Corbellus, this phrase seems to have been absorbed by the warriors of Pentus. Like the unfortunate jungle fighter, they were on the brink of being consumed by the hordes of Perturabo and Angron, that flooded in from all directions it seemed. 

On the one hand, Perturabo was a genius; he had managed to catch effectively the entire strength of the Pentus host in one area.

On the other hand, Perturabo had been foolish; he had managed to catch effectively the entire strength of the Pentus Host in one area.

Cornered on all sides, both the Travesty and Pentus Primarchs knew there was only one option open to the ambushed force. They would have to fight with all the fury and monumental power they could muster, and there would be nowhere to retreat. Thoughts of the Phall system ghosted in Perturabo’s memories. A great victory. A crushing ambush. But the victory hinged upon the flight of his foes. To flee was to reveal your vulnerable backs to the enemy.

Corbellus would be different. Corbellus was more akin to throttling a serpent studded with needles, or swallowing a struggling scorpion whole. If he succeeded, the Imperium pentus would be extinct, but if he failed, they would escape and his force would crumble. His force of daemon engines, devils and posthuman monsters did not outnumber the Pentus force by a significant fraction. He would have to rely on more than simple numbers to carry the day.

For the Primarchs Pentus, to their credit if the ambush had fazed them, they only registered this for the briefest of instants, before they utterly restructured their plans. They were not improvising, as one might assume; their minds simply abandoned their previous plan, devised half a dozen new ones, performed hypothetical scenarios with each approach and decided and fixed the new plan within their minds, all within the space of fifteen heartbeats. The main weapon of a Primarch was not merely their herculean bodies, but also their incredible minds. It took them marginally longer to elaborate their plans tot heir professional yet bewildered generals and bridge officers.

As the fleet reordered itself, the Travesty fleet closed the noose, forming an ever tightening sphere formation around the smaller, dense, spiny sphere of Pentus ships at their heart.

Thus, the battle of Corbellus began.

Space battles, as elaborated upon in previous sections, are not really one battle at all. They are a war in microcosm; each boarding actions or teleporter assault is a desperate epic battle, with the battlefields themselves battling each other. Conflicts can be won upon the war torn decks of a cruiser, only for the entire battle to become meaningless when a rogue lance strike bisects the vessel and leaves it as an airless tomb full of pointless corpses. And the clash of ships, with the gigaton weaponry, layered shielding and meters thick armor, are fought on a scale of distance and time larger than a mortal man could easily envisage. Skirmishes last for hours, across millions of kilometers, and pitched battles might last days. And all these conflicts occur at once.

To an outside observer, after the opening gambits of the battle, where the smaller ball of Pentus ships seemed to suddenly grow a sheath of spikes, as battleships led escort fleets in preemptive assaults against the enclosing Travesty, the overall fleet action looked as though it lost its coherency, becoming a hetregenous ball of warring ships, almost ten light minutes in diameter. But in fact, the two fleets clashed and began to swirl between each other, in a silent, deadly ballet of infinite complexity. It seemed deceptively tranquil from afar, but in truth, it was a churning mass of vessels, only visible in the void thanks to the relentless blazing of their engines and their furious gun batteries, filling the spaces between them with multiple hues of plasma fire, hypersonic kinetic contrails and flights of guided projectile ordinance glittering in the dark.

In the first phases of the battle, the layered shielding of the two fleets meant that combat boiled down to relentlessly pounding against one another’s forcefields until one side gave in. Battleships scattered squadrons of cruisers, while cruisers duelled with one another, and frigates and destroyers hunted one another through the expansive battleground. Each fleet movement was ordered by the primarch admirals and their advisors, and each manoeuvre was implemented by dedicated and skilled captains, who tried their best to keep their cool amidst a veritable ocean of targets and friendly vessels; one wrong move could mean disaster.

It would be impractical to describe each and every action and counter action performed by the warring fleets. Nor would it be possible to depict every event in a chronological progression, as most of the manoeuvres and vector assaults performed by the protagonists of this epic naval drama occurred at similar times. Instead, I shall focus on the actions of a few major and important vessels and historical figures of significance that were mentioned multiple times in the collected histories of this historical battle. These actions are roughly chronological, but as previously iterated, the order of events might have been different. One must bear in mind that this battle was fought across a massive area of space, so much so that the light from one side of the battle would not reach the sensors of ships fighting on the opposite side for at least ten minutes.
The chaos fleet was a menagerie of mechanical terrors. Some of the steel and yellow chevroned vessels looked almost like normal vessels of human or alien construction, if only slightly warped and asymmetrical. Thers were demented things, like colossal golems of living metal and hell fire. One vessel, nicknamed the Kraken by the Wolf brothers as soon as they spotted it, looked almsot like some grotesque mechanical squid, complete with articulated tentacles, each as long as a frigate. Another vessel was simply a series of interlocking rings festooned with gun ports and thrusters, eternally swinging around one another like some demented gyroscope. The Goliath Engine, that grotesque fusion of factory, asteroid and bloated steel beetle, was by far the largest and most impossibly threatening. Its great torpedo bays and tiered pyramids of chittering macrocannon batteries, pounded vessel after vessel into scrap metal; metal which was then drawn towards the lumpen mass with grappling hooks, increasing the size of the Goliath Engine each time it made a kill. Many were the forms of the chaos fleet, but all were united in their foulness.

The Antioch, the great flagship of the White Lancers and the Lion’s mighty chariot, plunged into the fray almost immediately with the commencement of battle. With the cool, calm precision of a surgeon, the Lion ordered gun ports open, and mustered a force of escorts to follow in the ship’s wake as it took the fight to the chaos forces. The first weapon to activate was the great white spear. A dorsal silo at the centre of the Antioch’s spine peeled open with silken precision, as the mighty lance turret rose like the head of a cobra. The scorching white lance beam wreaked havoc as the Antioch closed into rang eof its foes. The spear beam moved amongst them, carving open shielded escorts and cruisers with equal ease. Ships were bisected, sometimes five at once, as the obscenely powerful weapon. The Antioch moved in odd patterns, banking and rolling or turning end over end through space to engage targets at theoptimal vectors of attack; where the enemy’s shields were at their weakest, or into a volume of space the Lion knew an enemy ship was about to enter. The Spear of Antioch kept the larger vessels at long range, but eventually the smaller, nimbler chaos escorts manage dto get within range with their own weapons. This forced the Antioch to rely upon its dedicated gun crews on the starboard and port batteries to hold them off.

As the enemy neared, the pectoral hangars of the forbidding black capital ship unfurled. From here descended a flight of Dothrak class Commandery gunships, sleek replacements of the long outdated thunderhawks. The craft which led them from Antioch’s holds was a gleaming white marvel of warcraft. Somewhere between the size of a thunderhawk and one of the Tau manta ships of old, the sleek vessel dwarfed its escorting gunships, but there was not even a hint that this size in any way slowed the spacecraft. Its forward-swept wings were equipped with a variety of unique weapon systems; demi-lances, coilguns, conversion beamers and missile pods. It also carried heavier missile systems internally within a bomb bay. This vessel was beautiful, etched with beautiful images of white winged pegasi and gryphons. This vessel was known simply as the Stormrider. This was its first flight in battle, but it would not be its last. The forces of chaos would come to curse this vessel’s name, for it was no mere fighter. It was the winged chariot of Jaghati Khan himself.

The Stormrider and its squadrons swooped between the escort craft like hawks in formation, neatly carving away the defensive turrets and gun decks of the enemy, before planting missiles into key communication and navigational systems. At a glance, even while evading defensive turret fire, the Khan could immediately discern the weakpoints of enemy ships, and struck hard and lighting-fast in their figurative jugulars. As more and more ships were dragged into the battle, the void began to fill with fighters and flyers from both sides. The Khan picked up new fighter wings every few minutes, as he swept between the citadels and towers of enemy and friendly capital ships alike, like a white ghost riding the waves of gunfire as if their were foam on a turbulent ocean. 

Around the largest chaos capital ships, what at first seemed like millions upon millions of decorative gargoyles and grotesques, were revealed to be flight after flight of screeching heldrake daemon engines. As the pentus fighters tried to attack the larger ships, flocks of heldrakes descended upon them with daemonic fury. Even the Khan was hard pressed to fight his way through the relentless waves of clawed monsters. Through these flocks, manned hell talons darted through to attack the Pentus capital ships, but few managed to get through the turrets and laser grids of the mighty vessels.

The Kraken lunged forwards through the void, its thick hide ignoring the bombardment of the battleships rushing to intercept it. Instead of ink, the thing spewed clouds of superheated plasma vapor, accelerated to near relativistic speed. These clouds rippled across void shields, shorting them out in quick order as layer after layer failed. Once shields were down, the kraken powered itself to within a few thousand kilometers, before firing its tendrils forwards, drawing in unfortunate vessels towards it colossal tentacles, and the churning beak-like maw of the mechanical horror. Ships were digested slowly, their crews desperately trying to flee as they were consumed in fire and agony.

The gyroscope daemon engine simply maneuvered itself so as many enemies surrounded it as possible, before unleashing its tremendous batteries in all directions, heedless of who or what it hit.

From the Phalanx, Vulkan directed a hundred different naval engagements simultaneously; he lured ships into traps, where his cruisers could surround them and pound their rear armour to scrap, or he made certain areas oft he fleet appear weaker, so that the enemy were drawn towards these volume sof space, while the actual weak points were given half and hour or so to lick their wounds before another flight of escorts or some new horror came to test them. The Phalanx itself seemed impervious to every direct assault made against it. Lances blistered the void shields, but little else. Macro shells and torpedoes plunged through the shields slowly, but their gigaton blasts we all show, rippling up in mushroom clouds within the atmosphere of the asteroid, but doing little more than scorching the sixth of a mile thick hull plating that clad the battle station.

The Conqueror pressed its attack with the irresistible animal fury of the Primarch that commanded it. Smashing aside lesser vessels with sheer weight of fire, the World Eater vessel had one target for its gargoyle-snouted guns and serrated dagger prow; the Sleipnir, the chariot of the Wolf King. The Sleipnir too thundered through the storm of the unfolding battle. Like two Dark Age champions fighting through a scrappy melee to reach their opposite number, the ships smashed apart cruisers and shuttles who were not swift or maneuverable enough to evade them. One was driven by a mad berserker daemon, hungry for glory and the pleasure of ripping apart his greatest rival. The other, outwardly, seemed driven by the same frenzied bloodlust, howling like a mad hound as Hrothnar and his Rout echoed his call. But Leman Russ had calculated this engagement. He knew that Angron would throw everything against the Wolf King, and kill any friend or foe that impeded him. Russ knew that if he kept Angron focused upon him, Vulkan and his brothers would have a chance to balance the terms of the engagement. He had to draw Angron’s fleet away from Perturabo’s somehow. Indulging Angron in his manic dreams of combat was one such method.

The Rout and the Wolf Brothers, and all their attendant hunting fleets, clashed seemingly as one against the World Eaters, the Beasts of Annihilation, and all their diverse fleet elements of their Blood Pact allies. Conqueror and Sleipnir, shields at full power, unleashed a veritable hellstorm of ordnance against one another. Torpedoes and missiles, macro cannons and coilguns, particle accelerators and plasma batteries. The six thousand kilometers between the two ships became a solid wall of multi-hued fire. Shields were pounded down as quickly as they were repaired and reactivated, the mortal repair crews and tech priests working strenuously to keep their respective ships functioning under such intense bombardment. With shields up, mundane teleport assaults were impossible, but the two forces, desperate to come to grips with one another, launched their gunships, dreadclaws and boarding torpedoes in the hope of crossing blades with one another. The devil-possessed Beasts of Annihilation threw themselves into mad, sprawling battles with bestial demi-wulfen, claws and fangs robbing these battles of any semblance of skill. Howling Wolf Brothers and the forces of the Rout leapt from their boarding ships with axes and whirring chainblades drawn, only to to be met with equally bloodthirsty and fearsome Khorne Berserkers and cackling bloodetters. This naval engagement was like a fleet battle within a fleet battle; a burning arc of clashing ships on the edge of the chaotic ball of engaged vessels that formed the main part of the wider conflict.

Sleipnir and conqueror’s defenses prevented any mundane boarding attempts. Despite himself, Russ found this frustrating. Though he was a masterful naval commander, he was born to be the red right hand of the Emperor; his personal executioner. Closer quarters were where he was most at home.

Russ would get his chance roughly three hours into the battle. Though standard teleport beams were consistently baffled by the Sleipnir’s mighty void shielding, they could not prevent the more esoteric and infernal means at the disposal of the Travesty. Skalvad Fenrisborn, a captain of the Wolf Brothers, was put in charge of the routing of any enemy who managed to enter the Sleipnir itself. The Old Imperial Astartes was an ancient warrior, with a great white beard and fangs as long and sharp as any Space Wolf veteran. He was called into action when the mortal serfs toiling in the gunnery decks of the Sleipnir sent out a desperate distress call; they were under attack. They only managed one word more before the vox link was severed. Bloodthirsters.

A dozen of the greater daemons wrought bloody havoc across the gun decks of the Sleipnir, ripping apart the macro cannons and the helpless mortals who crewed them. The gun dck was like a butcher’s yard, and echoed with the bovine bellowing of impossible monsters. One amongst them roared with a voice deeper and more terrible than a thunderstorm. The servants of Russ’s children were not cowards, but though they drew their axes and rifles in defiance, they were all too easily crushed and crippled by the red-raw daemons of Khorne. By the time Skalvad reached them, a whole company of the Rout lay broken in the wake of the bloodthirsters, who slaughtered and maimed in the middle distance. Snarling in rage, the old Imperial Wolf Brother ordered his Astartes forwards, unleashing a torrent of bolter and missile fire into the flying monsters. Each of the bloodthirsters were subtly different creatures; some had larger horns, some had tusks like a boar, others had the faces of men or bulls. But one of them was different. It was a hulking red mass, like the rest, but this beast was different. It killed with effortless precision, married to khornate’s marshal bloodlust. Its twin axes cleaved all who strayed towards. This fiend made the bloodthirsters seem like artless brawlers by comparison. When the winged nightmare turned its face towards the attacking Wolf Brothers, Skalvad recognized the vile features of the beast, set upon a thick neck veined with snaking cables and oily vines. This was Angron himself. Angron was there.

Skalvad fought down the instinctual fear that gnawed in his gut, and pressed on his assault. When his bolter was spent, it was said that the ancient space marine took up a fallen power lance from a dead comrade, bound an orchard of grenades to tis tip, and cast it forth like a mighty javelin. It covered 200 metres in a matter of seconds, sailing towards the mighty Daemon Primarch. But Angron was fast, and snatched it from the air moments before it struck. Then he smiled, as the grenades exploded, wreathing him with a halo of scorching fire. Sword drawn, the veteran nevertheless charged the primarch and his bloodthirster retinue. Even as his own command squad was cut down around him, he continued his charge. Even as he was lifted from the air by Angron, his battlecry remained undimmed. Even as his frostblade shattered against Angron’s hardy skull, he did not stop striking him. Angron didn’t even bother to cut Skalvad’s head off; he simply closed his mighty fist, and grinned as the space marine’s body began to give way. First his power amrour buckled, then his bones cracked, and finally he felt his organs bursting. Only then did Skalvad fall quiet.

As his mournful howl died on his lips, so another, infinitely greater howl erupted around the ruined halls of gunnery. Angron turned to face this new foe with perverse relish.

“Release him, you craven coward!” roared leman Russ, as he entered the blasted hall, his great pistol raisd and his wickedly sharp frostblade drawn, stepping through a field of dead and broken Astartes. Angron casually tossed Skalvad aside like a broken toy, and stepped down from the sundered macro cannon he had perched upon. Angron’s voice was deep and grating, raw as an open wound.

“So the wolf has come. But he is no wolf, is he? He was the Emperor’s loyal dog, just as he is Vulkan’s dog now,” Angron growled darkly, sparks and sulphur pouring from his slavering maw as he drew his bronze axes. The eleven bloodthirsters turned towards Leman Russ as Angron spoke, readying their own axes and fiery lashes.

“You fled your father to serve under another master’s lash. You slaved yourself to the Luna Wolf’s pack. You, Angron, are the cur in the collar, yet I am the dog?” Russ snarled in response, pointing his blade towards the burning brass collar smouldering around the thick neck of the daemon Primarch.

At this, Angron screamed a deathly scream, a sonorous bellow that shook the gun deck to its core. All who witnessed this exchange between demi-gods were heedless of the naval battle raging just beyond the armoured skin of the Sleipnir’s hull.

Russ smiled disingenuously. “In the old days, the scholars and the wise of the Imperium used to ponder the hierarchy of the Primarchs. Who would best who? Who might be the strongest? They always used to compare us; the wolf and the hound, the two berserkers. But we both know the truth of that don’t we? You are a brute, and a bully; always have been. I would always triumph over you, for you are broken. Now come, let me finish the task the slave masters of your birth world failed to accomplish!” Russ roared as he fired his mighty pistol. The flurry of shells exploded before Angron, the projectiles cut fromt he air in the blink of an eye by the impossible speed of Angron the Red Angel.

“Perhaps, perhaps not, hound. But it matters not; that was then, Wolf King, this is now! I was tethered by flesh and my butcher’s nails then, and I was young. But now I am old and strong! The Travesty flows through my veins! I am the stronger now and forever, little brother! I shall break you!” Angron bellowed again, like a braying Titan’s war horn.

With a gesture, Angron sent his bloodthirster retinue forwards, axes drawn and ready to slay Russ. The Primarch leapt into combat with a howl of glee, frostblade singing as it clashed with daemon-forged iron and blood-forged brass. The daemons were winged terrors, taller even that Russ, but as he charged, he howled an ethereal howl, that seemed to ripple through dimensions and wail the heart of the most brutish daemonspawn. His sword turned axes, and his pistol blasted fang-filled maws to fizzing ichor. No lash could bind his limb,s for he severed them with his chill blade.

But eleven bloodthirsters was a foe few could hope to summount alone, and it looked as if, for a moment, the barbarian king might falter in his headlong charge. But fortunately, he was not alone. Wolf Brother reserves poured into the chamber, mounted in mighty land raiders, as the Thunderwolves of Old.*These heavy weapons drove off the bloodthirsters, who flew to engage the armour units entering the fray.

This left Russ with a clear path to Angron. Angron laughed with infernal hatred as he charged to meet his nemesis. The first hundred blows and coutnerblows landed by the two demi-gods were near invisible, as their speed and unfathomable reflexes warred for advantage. Russ fired into combat as he duelled, bathing the Red Angel in fire and shrapnel, slowing the daemon just long enough to allow the Wolf King to press forwards, raining blow after blow against Angron’s guard. Angron, seeking to break this pattern, desperately struck out with a kick, his hoof connecting squarely with Russ’s chestplate. The primarch was sent flying bodily, impacting the deck wth a sonorous clang.

Moments later, Angron launched himself into the air on his bloodied pinions, before plunging towards his hated foe. Russ barely rolled aside as he slammed into the deck. The shockwave was like the discharge of a magma shell, carving a five metre crater in the adamantine floor. Slowly, Angron rose from the partially-melted metal, a towering monster, taller that his opponent by several metres. Russ rose too, and looked up at the giant with undisguised contempt.

“I have killed bigger,” he mocked, as he charged his fallen brother once more.

The fight raged from deck to deck, level to level. They wrestled and fenced, bit and slashed with fang and claw. They threw one another through walls and bulkheads with the ease a man might shatter a pane of glass. As the duel continued, one of the daemonic axes of Angron was knocked from his hand, while Russ’ pistol lay smashed upon the floor, stamped into a million useless shards. Angron snatched up a fallen lascannon turret by the barrel, and using it like a club, shattered it across the head of Leman Russ, who staggered backwards, bloody froth tainting his thick beard. Russ dodged the follow up blow, and with a mighty bound, he leapt up to grasp Angron by the collar at his neck. Howling his ethereal howl, Russ thrust his head forwards, and head butted the Red Angel square between his soulless reptilian eyes. It was Angron’s turn to stagger.

Elsewhere in the Corbellus system, the naval battle entered its second phase. The first of the void shields were going down; battered down by relentless exchanges of ordnance and lance fire. With their fall, the teleport assaults began in earnest. The local warp was alive with teleport beams, flashing invisibly between the mass of ships. Such dense traffic was utterly lethal to some, for to find one specific ship amidst all the rapidly manoeuvring fleet vessels was a difficult task. Some were teleported into bulkheads, others into deep space, or into the entirely wrong ship. Other would be boarders accidentally attempted to breach shielded vessels, and were rebuffed, trapped forever in the sea of souls. But enough soldiers from both sides managed to reach their destinations to instigate battle. Terminator assault teams killed everything they came into contact with, fists swinging and bolters roaring as they wasted no time on establishing perimeters or scouting out the ships they invaded.

The kai Bane Host did not deploy via teleport assault. They had their own vast assault modules, construsted in the form of great three-legged crustaceans, as large as an imperator titan. They were known as helwasps. These helwasps were fired from Iron Warrior forge ships directly, like vast torpedoes. Once they impacted on a vessel’s sides, they would anchor themselves to the hull using their titanic limbs, before unfurling a great drill from the central mass of the module. The whirring teeth of the drills were forged of daemon iron, and no hull could hope to resist the spinning, chewing power of them. Like a parasitic fly, this drill-tipped proboscis injected its internal contents inside the enemy vessel. Unfortunately for the stricken vessels involved, their contents were Kai bane warriors. Each module held hundreds of the mighty daemon engines, alongside their larger defiler cousins. Just a few helwasps impacting on a ship was enough to flood the vessel with lethal daemonic supersoldiers. Perturabo had ordered that he preferred that his brothers’ vessels were captured, so that he might bolster his own fleet, and hasten the destruction of the Pentus crusade. The Kai bane Host was to kill all who resisted, and then iron Warriors and other lesser servants of the Scourge of Olympia would be deployed to take command of the engine rooms, gun decks and command bridges of the captured vessels.

Many pentus ships fell to this ploy, for the kai bane Host were terrifyingly powerful. Their daemon-forged bodies were immune to all but the heaviest fire; even bolter rounds pattered harmlessly against them. They were as big and as powerful as Cataphracti terminators, but moved with the swift, relentless energy of a tactical marine, their oversized kai gun daemon weapons felling the mightiest of Astartes. If the Astartes were struggling to contain them, mortal security teams and naval provosts were almost pitifully outmatched. Undreds of ships fell in this manner, and within a few hours, their guns came back online, but turned against their former allies.

But the Kai Bane Host did not have it all its own way. Onboard the command vessel of the Confederaiton of Justice, their troopers sensibly avoided open combat with the kai bane, and instead used mortars and repurposed macrocannon propellant to hold off the dameon engines, giving their IEU pilots time to reach their battlesuits. Once embarked, they engaged the kai bane Host on much more equal terms, stalemating the enemy on several of their main troopships. Captain Thezon of the Iron Hands, a master of boarding actions and counter boarding techniques, used all his cybernetic warriors to maximum effect in the narrow confines of his vessel, the Anvil. Though his bolters were ineffective, he managed to lure some kai bane warriors into kill zones of autocannon and meltagun emplacements, or held them off with controlled demolitions. Even as he coldly sent in wave upon wave of servitors into the guns of the Kai Bane to stall them, his techmarines started refitting his Commandery with unstable, flux-core ‘vengeance’ bolter rounds. They were shorter range than normal rounds, but Thezon rightly predicted they would penetrate the daemon engines much more effectively. Soon, he and his men pushed the kai bane back to their helwasps, before transmitting his findings to his fellow Commandery Leaders.

Disasterously, the shields of the primary conveyor for the Thunder Lizard Tank legion was also breached by the fearsome helwasp assault modules; dozens of the gigantic vehicle clamping themselves to the undergunned transport ship. While the Thunder Lizards were mighty planetside, they were considered near helpless while in the cargo holds of their conveyors. The only defenders of the ship were the standard armed ratings and security teams of mundane naval ships. A great despairing cry arose amongst the pentus forces as it seemed their great anti-titan war machines were doomed to be captured by the enemy. 

However, both the enemy and even the Thunder Lizard Legion’s allies had underestimated the resolve of these recklessly brave tankers. The Commander of the Tyrannosaurus would not sit idly by while the conveyor was torn apart around him. Gathering a force of Megasaurs around his colossal command tank, he directed their fire to a specific weak point in the cargo bay’s hull structure, concentrating their fire to blast a great hole into the void itself. Magnetizing their tracks to prevent being blown into space, the Tyrannosaurus Rex led its battalion of super heavies out onto the expansive, eleven mile long outer hull of the conveyor. There, they engaged the helwasps directly; a move not even the demented strategists of the Travesty had anticipated. Witnesses from the crew of the conveyor watched in dumbstruck awe as a phalanx of super heavy tanks rolled across the city-like skin of the vessel, their engines and flashing weaponry silent in the void. The sky above them was alive with the wider conflict of Corbellus, but the Tyrannosaurus was focused upon its goal. The helwasps themselves had no armaments, and were forced to instead open their flanks and deployed the Kai bane warriors, maulerfiends and defilers to the outer hull of the ship. Though the daemon engines fought with the fearlessness of the arcane and the perverse, they were utterly outmatched by the Thunder Lizards. One by one the helwasps were purged, and their passengers destroyed by high energy lance and cannon. The Tyrannosaurus ended the aborted ship incursion in spectacular style; severing the three docking limbs of a helwasp, before ramming the last remaining module out into the void. As it rose up from the ship’s hull, the Tyrannosaurus planted half a dozen missiles into it, blasting it apart in a cascade of purple energy. The ship’s void shields reactivated moments before the next wave of ordnance could impact upon the hull. The cheers resounding within the tank conveyor were deafening.

Meanwhile, the great kraken engine wreaked a dreadful tally amongst the Pentus fleet, ripping apart ship after ship with its claws and articulated tentacles. The Crato, a Fire Beasts/Nemenmarines attack cruiser, barely escaped the clutches of the grand cruiser sized daemon machine, as the Crato rushed to try and aid Russ’s beleaguered fleet elements on the perimeter of the battlezone. However, the vessel was not left unscathed. The kraken ripped off a towering chunk of super structure, and plunged it like a dagger into the spine of the Crato. In a case of spectacular bad luck, the wreckage smashed into the primary command bridge, located in the middle of the vessel, as well as gutting the dorsal, starboard and port weapon batteries when the ammunition magazines were detonated. The burning ship spiraled out of control, only just managing to escape the follow up strike of the kraken. But the first blow was bad enough. Thousands were dead, including the Two Captains of the Commanderies onboard, and most of its weapons were rendered useless by the catastrophic damage that had nearly bisected the cruiser.

The Devil of Catachan, the vast war factory of the Pentus crusade, held off Beasts of Annihilation incursions, kai bane assaults and its wings of fighters and assault craft swept the void around it of anything large than a landing craft. However, the Devil of Catachan had one weakness; its pectoral ship yard was a vast space open to the void, for it was designed to allow battlecruisers and smaller naval ships to enter safely for repairs. It was said the Ryzan tech priests were still repairing the battlecruiser Gheist inside its pectoral factory yards when the Ryzan-Catachan Plasma Commandoes, led by Marella Harker, fought off wave upon wave of Blood Pact troops that entered the space via assault boats normally too large to be used in normal naval incursions. The Blood Pact troops were backed up by Kai bane engines and Iron Warriors, along with some of Angron’s berserkers. The plasma weaponry of the Commandoes was sufficient to destroy Kai bane shells though, and levelled the playing field significantly during the six hour long battle in the hangar. During the battle, the un-finished Gheist was damaged further by the fearsome tides of chaotic slaves flooding the decks. Heist was secured to the Devil of Catachan by a mighty crane, which anchored the cruiser to the internal umbilical's of the Devil. The Gheist’s weapon systems were not yet installed, its warp drive and manoeuvring thrusters were non functional, and the ship only had air in the bridge and engineering sections. The vessel within the Devil of Catachan was useless to the war effort at that moment. That was, until the Gheist’s own captain had an idea...

Back on the Sleipnir, things were not going well. Fires raged throughout the Wolf King’s vessel. With so many of tis guns rendered inoperable by Angron’s daemons, the ship had taken a pounding form Conqueror and its vile lesser kin. Without retaliation, Conqueror had been able to batter down Sleipnir’s shields, and boarded them with a veritable tide of berserkers and possessed marines, alongside regiments of Blood Pact recruits and Barghesi mercenaries. Hrothnar the fanged led the desperate defense, his Rout at the forefront of every attempt to repel the latest assault. He fought with a a powered glaive and a storm bolter, howling curses in every language of the Imperium Pentus as he cut down foe after blood-mad foe.

As the battle was being lost around him, Russ himself seemed to be regaining some measure of advantage in his personal battle against Angron. The two beings were laced with scars and red raw skin which was rapidly healing around their grievous injuries. They traded hundreds of blows every moment, each blow backed with all the power they could muster behind their blades. Sparks and plasma fire rippled front of their weapons as the energies unleashed sublimed metal and ionized the vapours, setting light to the ground around them as they battled. But Angron, no matter how many times Russ got past his guard and slashed his flesh, could not be undone by mere force alone. Every wound energized him, and drew more and more energy from the warp which infused the Travesty region of space like poison in a man’s veins. Russ finally hacked apart Angron’s second daemon axe, but the red brute, without pausing, snatched the Wolf King with both hands, plucking Russ from the ground, before rising up on his dark pinions. Leman Russ was cast back to the floor with all the force of a comet. He plunged through five decks of the Sleipnir, before he struck the fighter deck of the battlebarge, a sonic boom erupting from the crater his body made in the ferrocrete floor.

Angron followed Russ down, swooping like a sparrowhawk descending upon its prey. He burned with the dark fire of Khorne, and his face was filled with all the evil of his accumulated sins over his sixteen thousand years of existence. His colossal arms were outstretched, claws drawn and fangs barred like some feral godling. 

Russ did not roll to avoid the descending nightmare, this dreadful giant who dwarfed the Pentus Primarch and who looked as if he could crush a mountain with but a fist. Leman Russ did not dodge or feint or attempt to fend off his wayward brother. No, he drew his frostblade, and braced it against the deck beneath him. And Angron, consumed by his hate and his single-minded desire to crush Russ once and for all, only saw this coming a fraction of a second before it happened. By then, he was falling at too high a velocity to hope to avoid what came next.

Angron drove himself into the blade with tremendous force, matched only by the strength of Russ pushing upwards into his impaling strike. The weapon embedded itself up to the hilt. The tip of the weapon erupted from Angron’s back, smashing through his spine and parting his wings with the force of the blow. The daemon Primarch roared in pain, a roar that could shatter castles and deafen mortals a thousand times over. Russ screamed in his face, both warriors mere inches from one another then. Summoning up herculean strength, Russ rolled Angron onto his back, and embedded his blade into the deck. The runes along its length blazed with light, as the Wolf King began to sing the songs that drove the maleficarum out in the old days, when the Rune priests still walked amongst men. Angron thrashed and roared, cursing his brother in the thousand forbidden tongues of the daemons. His fists, as big as dreadnought claws, closed around Russ’ neck, desperately throttling the Wolf King, crushing his throat and breaking the bones of his spinal cord. Russ knew Angron was killing him, but he continued his bitter song, channeling all his latent psychic might through his blade, into the daemonic filth which wore his brother’s face. Even if he did die, Angron would die with him.

Alas, the fight was ended before this deadly pact between the two could be concluded. Angron’s minions, who were winning the naval battle, feared that they might win the ship to ship engagement, but lose their master. The bridge crew locked onto the psychic signature of Angron, and drew him back towards the Conqueror, leaving Russ half strangled on the deck, his frostblade impaling thin air. When Angron returned to the Conqueror, he slaughtered his bridge officers in a demented frenzy, and only the thought of destroying the Sleipnir prevented him from murdering the rest of his crew in a petulant rage.

Onboard the Crato, two unlikely heroes were rallying the survivors of the living wreck. Sergeant Castron of the Nemenmarines led the repair teams and rescue parties through the mangled guts of the ship, while sergeant Alistor of the Fire Beasts managed to reach the secondary bridge, bringing the rescued reserve officers with him to take command of what remained of the Crato. The two sergeants bickered constantly throughout this arduous, time-consuming progress. Castron insisted they needed to repair the ship thoroughly before they could rejoin the raging fleet action unfolding all around them, while Alistor was chomping at the bit to rejoin the fight as soon as possible, and to warp with the consequences. As they worked for hours and hours to repair Crato, the partial ruin of a vessel drifted further and further away from he battle, forgotten by the rest of the world at that point.

Phalanx and the Goliath Engine, the largest and most powerful vessels in the battle, had begun to orbit one another towards the climax of the seven day battle. Their seemingly inexhaustible batteries battered one another’s shields over and over again, each trying to crack the other in half through sheer weight of fire. Other ships tried to join the developing duel, but each was lost in turn, smashed apart by the grand ordnance of the two battle stations. A Dorn Revenants frigate suicidally attempted to ram the goliath engine, but was cut in half by a passing lance beam. The tumbling remnants careened out of control, before the Astartes strike craft impacted the Phalanx itself. Only a few Astartes managed to escape the ship before it impacts, teleporting at the last minute using authentic Pentus codes, allowing them to deploy within Phalanx itself.

A Salamander squad arrived to greet the first group of gold-armoured Dorn Revenants. The Dorn Revenant techmarine leading the squad embraced the Salamander sergeant warmly. Then, he ripped the sergeant’s head off with his servo arm, and his fellow Revenants gunned down the rest of the stupefied Salamanders; for the techmarine was a son of Rogal, but he was far from being a Pentus loyalist. Honsou the Half-Blood had taken over the Pentus frigate early in the battle, and had taken on the memories and armour of its former crew. Through his cunning, his team were the only invaders to have breached the Phalanx’s formidable defences throughout the battle.

His mission was monumental. Perturabo had tasked him with turning Vulkan to the side of the Travesty. To achieve this, the Warsmith Honsou had been gifted with a deceptively simple item; a cube, as large as a die but inscribed with infinitely small lettering and runes. The artefact had a name, but chilled the hearts of the sane to so much as utter it. It was a weapon of the deep warp, and it was intended to release an evil quite alien to mortal minds. It was a passage built for Draziin-maton. All Honsou had to do was unleash it upon Vulkan, and the Draziin-Maton would do the rest. This was all well and good in theory, but reaching Vulkan was no easy task. The Phalanx was a labyrinth, and Honsou already suspected Salamander and revenant patrols would already be on his tail by then. Thus, he and his loyalist-disguised retinue set off at speed. Honsou fought off the smaller patrols, fleeing deeper and deeper into the battle station as he did so. However, he could not run forever.

Eventually, he was cornered by a Salamanders terminator assault squad, led by a Librarian. The psyker held him in place like a fly in amber, and his temrinators easily slew the retinue of the turncoat Honsou. Desperate to escape, the Iron Warrior threw the cube at the Librarian, who at first caught it neatly in his gauntlet. The psyker recoiled as if stung, dropping the cube with an uncharacteristic yelp of alarm. The cube hit the ground with, heavy as neutronium. Honsou dropped to the group, forgotten by the terrified Librarian. The chaos space marine wasted no time, and fled into the opposite direction.

Then, the cube began to slide open. Angles along its flanks peeled back, and unfurled through dimensions a mortal may not perceive. Looping gates were coiling out of the rent in space and time being torn into the deck of the Phalanx. The Librarian, normally so immune to fear, fell to his knees, weeping blood and gibbering in childish terror. His brother terminators were not psykers, and did not feel the dread he felt for the abstract things wading through the portals like languid swimmers in a pond. They simply opened fire upon the Draziin-maton. But mundane weapons were useless; bolter rounds mutated and became screaming, formless daemonthings before they could touch the Draziin-maton, swords turned to seven-headed serpents that ate themselves over and over again. Powerfists became faces, that devoured and merged with those who sought to strike the neverborn.

The Librarian’s force sword fared only slightly better as he finally charged at the loping, impossible fiends. But within a few minutes, he was mutated and deformed beyond recognition, and he jointed the ranks of chaos spawn that followed int he wake of the Draziin-maton. The Kai Bane Host might have been the most terrible of warriors, but Draziin-maton were something else entirely. They crawled across the fabric of realspace like scuttling flies on a corpse. Thin air was as solid to them as an adamantine bulkhead, and metal was just as permeable to them as said air. Whatever they neared became a spawn, those with a weak mind fell sooner than those with minds of stolid resolve, but few could truly resist the taint that followed in their wake. Squads of Astartes bravely died and mutated as they desperately fought to contain the mere handful of Draziin-maton released into the Phalanx’s winding corridors. Vulkan witnessed these abominations through the whimpering servitor pict-recorders installed throughout the ship. He saw the creatures, and how they moved without any sense of coherency. Limbs seemed to simply appear before folding back into their blank, expressionful, faceless, morphing forms. His men were being massacred, and he couldn’t even see clearly what was killing them.

“Damn monsters! If only they stood still, we might have a chance to spill their guts. We can’t afford to lose any more men to these things my lord,” T’Sulon, hissed with false bravado as he too watched the carnage.

Inspiration struck Vulkan then. “Pin them in place... Their forms are chaos, in its purest form. You cannot catch that which is formless, except in a picture. Like capturing a fireball in a still-frame picter. A snapshot in time...”

Before his men could even ask him what he meant, Vulkan swept from the command bridge, and rushed to the ship’s nearest armoury. After taking what he needed, the coal-skinned Primarch marched to face the Draziin-maton. The fiends sensed this, and rushed to meet him. Vulkan forbade anyone to follow him, so what happened next was witnessed solely by the internal pict-servitors of the Phalanx.

Vulkan stood before the Draziin-maton defiantly, straight-backed and magnificent in gold and green dragonscale. But his spear was not drawn, and nor was his mighty inferno pistol. His hands were raised before him, clenched into fists. The Draziin-maton appeared, and the corridor around him began to warp and buckle, flowing and rippling with the deep Warp’s currents. But as they neared, he opened his hands, and let the grenades fall. Stasis grenades are some of the rarest artefacts ever constructed by humanity, and their designs were lost long ago. As the grenades fell, time slowed to a crawl, then to a stop. The grenades, mere inches from the floor, never landed. Vulkan became a statue with a victorious smile sculpted upon his black head, red eyes glittering. The Draziin-maton froze too. They became seven spindly, multi-limbed, surrealist purple ghouls, but the forms of the seven creatures were fixed in that seemingly endless moment of time. When the effects of the stasis bombs eventually wore off, Vulkan found himself standing alone in the corridor. He had somehow vanquished the Drazin-maton, though even he knew not precisely how he had done so. **

As the Draziin-maton rampaged, Honsou made for the launch bays, hacking his way through any serfs who got in his way. He was only stopped when he encountered Aktonus. Aktonus the Strong was famous across the Imperium Pentum as the ‘Imperial Swordsman’, a title given to only the mightiest non-Primarch warrior in the entire Imperium. Aktonus the Dorn Revenant had fought in the swordsman tournament, beating rival master duelists from the Fires beasts, Jade Princes and Iron Hands to win the right to wear the bone-white experimental power armor of the Imperial swordsman. He was Pentus’ champion, and Honsou, ancient and corrupt as he was, knew he could not beat him fairly. Thus, he tried to shoot Aktonus with a meltagun, but the champion was too fast, hacking the gun in two with his power sword, before pummeling the warsmith to the ground with the pommel of his weapon. Honsou offered to turn on his chaos allies; he bore no true loyalty to any faction, but he hoped to achieve a stay of execution. Aktonus spat in the warsmith’s face, before he raised his blade for the final blow. A gigantic black hand gently landed on Aktonus’ shoulder.

“No. Not this one, my Champion. Not yet,” Vulkan said, his glowing red eyes glaring into Honsou’s very soul.

Conqueror and its fleet were killing the Wolves of Russ in space. Sleipnir was limping towards the shelter of a nearby planet, as world eater ships chased it and its escorts like feral hounds nipping at the legs of a stricken stag. Russ’s ship was too damaged to fight back effectively, and Angron’s forces were too many. As Sleipnir made for the planet, Conqueror began to orbit the planet’s small moon, to use its gravity to slingshot his vessel and allow him to catch the damaged Rout ship at last.

From the secondary bridge of the Crato, Alistor and Castron watched this horrid scene unfolding.

“Russ will die if we do not stop him. Throne damn it, even if Russ survives, with Angron’s kill fleet here, Perturabo can just use his numerical superiority to whittle us into dust,” Alistor growled in impotent rage, pacing up and down. “We have repaired the engines, we have warp and we have half power to the plasma drives. We could gun the engines and ram the Conqueror! Kill the damned Red Angel like the filth he is!”

Castron shook his head. “We are too far away. They would see our engine bloom and evade us, then kill us at their leisure,” he explained somberly. 

Conqueror had almost made a circuit of the moon at that point. It was then that Alistor had another idea.

“Do we have weapons? Lances? Torpedoes?”

Castron checked the lists given to him by his serfs. “One operable tube, but we only have planetary bombardment munitions remaining.”

“And cyclonics?” Alistor asked, smiling.

“Cyclonic torpedoes wouldn’t damage the Conqueror sufficiently.”

“Then let’s not hit the Conqueror,” Alistor replied.

Just as the Conqueror reached the end of its orbit of the moon five cyclonic torpedoes, fired one after another, punched into the moon’s surface. Within minutes, the small planetoid broke apart in a tide of sudden, apocalyptic volcanism. Huge boulders slammed against the Conqueror’s port side, ripping great chunks from the flank of the arrow-shaped leviathan. In fury, Angron searched out the fools who had struck him. He found the Crato, fleeing as fast as it could towards the warp translation point at the Corbellus system’s edge. Angron’s Conqueror made a sudden course change, and accelerated at full speed towards the fleeing strike cruiser. His whole fleet followed the Conqueror, like lesser sharks drinking in the red wake of a meglodon.

Crato was trying its best, but Conqueror would catch up with it. It was inevitable

“He’s mad now,” Alistor noted blandly.

“Of course he’s mad, he’s Angron. This is the worst plan you have ever had, Fire Beast.”

“I thought you like plans?”

Castron did not reply to Alistor’s taunt, as they neared the warp translation point. But as they did so, they felt the entire ship shudder, as one of the Conqueror’s vast harpoons impaled the Crato through its starboard side. Alistor then ordered something that was so recklessly dangerous, he even surprised himself.

He ordered Crato to go to warp, with the Conqueror still attached. Needless to say, this was a deranged and thoughtlessly dangerous thing to attempt.

The Crato opened a warp portal in front of the ship, and plunged into the Sea of Souls. Conqueror, unwilling to release the harpoon, was dragged into hell right alongside them. One moment they were there, the next, there was naught but empty void. Angron’s pilot fish fleet dived into the warp after him, leaving Perturabo’s fleet alone against the Imperium Pentus.

The balance had shifted, quite suddenly (as it the way with many battles in history).

Meanwhile, Gheist was lowered from the bowels of the Devil of Catachan. Half-finished and already falling apart, Gheist’s captain requested that the devil’s great crane turn his vessel, for he could not maneuver it himself. Then, he began to power up his plasma engines. His engineers knew what was coming, and they put everything they could into the engines, maximizing their output as the docking clamps were finally released. It only took a few minutes for the Gheist, once released, to accelerate to 0.7c. At that point, the ship was moving too fast for even a primarch to follow with his sight. It struck several smaller vessels on its way, killing the Gheist’s crew and vaporizing the frigates and destroyers which had hit it. At that point, roughly five seconds into maximum burn, it didn’t matter. Gheist couldn’t be stopped. Like the galaxy’s largest kinetic kill vehicle, Gheist surged towards its target. The daemonic kraken had about 3.24 seconds to react to the approaching gheist. It was likely the daemon didn’t even realize what was happening before it hit.

The blast was like a new sun, born int he heart of battle, expanding outwards for half a light second in all directions. When the expanding plasma shell finally dispersed, the kraken simply didn’t exist, alongside its escorts unfortunate enough to be nearby.

The Goliath Engine found itself under attack at every turn. Khan and the Stormrider, The Lion and the Antioch, the Phalanx and Vulkan, and all the might of the Imperium Pentum bore down upon him. Four Primarchs stood now against one. The element of surprise was lost, as was his advantage in numbers. Perturabo realized then that he was outmatched. With a hollow scream of frustration, he ordered his fleet to withdraw. The Pentus force harried his fleeing forces all the way to the translation point. Though he left in defeat, Perturabo also left with many hundreds of captured Pentus ships, almost a thirteenth of the crusade’s vessels. 

Honsou was amongst the fleeing forces; somehow he ad escaped the Phalanx on a stolen gunship, though none could say how or why.

The Pentus crusade realized that by sticking together, they could be ambushed and risked utter annihilation each time they fought a battle. This would not work. Thus, the Primarchs decided to split up. They would each hunt down their fallen brothers, and either destroy them or return them to the side of life and sanity.

Victory had been won at Corbellus, but only narrowly.

*(Some chronicles of M41 erroneously consider the Thunderwolf cavalrymen to have literally ridden wolves. To me, this seems obvious allegory on the part of Old Imperial scholars of the time. Why would an advanced army of rapid reaction posthumans ride large wolves into battle? It is much more like the ‘Thunderwolves’ were a form of specialist land speeder of land raider formation, like the legendary Deathwing or Ravenwing of the Dark Angels Chapter. We do not assume the Ravenwing rode giant corvids do we, so why is it so easy for scholars to accept the Fenryka did?)
** (''Draziin-Maton are as much conceptual creatures as they are physical, and once fixed into place, they were no longer entities of potential. They were real. And as soon as they became fixed, they faded.'')</div>
</div>