The command deck of the ship was quiet.
Above the planet Orar, the Imperial fleet hung in a scattered arc battered cruisers, frigates, and the shattered remains of system defense craft. Their formation was tighter than it should have been, like soldiers instinctively bunching together in the dark.
On the hololithic display before Admiral Spire, green runes pulsed, surrounded by an expanding tide of red.
The red icons were not just ships.
They were predators.
His vox-net was a constant low hiss of panicked voices and clipped reports. Somewhere in that noise, the enemy was laughing.
"Admiral," the augur-master said, voice low, "contact confirmed … Emperor preserve us… Terminus Est."
No one moved. The name carried its own weight. Typhus. Death Guard. Nurgle's chosen plague, as if one maleficarum was not enough.
Spire's jaw tightened. "Signal to all ships hold the line. No retreat. If they breach the blockade, the planet behind us would be vulnerable."
"Aye, sir," the vox-officer answered, already barking orders down the line.
Orar filled the viewport below them, a once-verdant world turned to a bruise. Days of orbital bombardment had flayed its continents oceans boiled to steam, cities reduced to lightless scars, the air thick with ash clouds that swirled in the upper atmosphere like blood in water.
Down there, millions had died screaming. Those still alive were in the dark, choking on dust, listening to the sky burn.
And now the enemy wanted the ground.
The first salvo hit like a hammer.
Lances of coruscating energy ripped through the void, gouging at the ship's forward void shields. The deck shuddered. Somewhere deep in the hull, bulkhead alarms wailed.
"Shields at seventy percent!"
"Portside gun deck reporting overheating in macro batteries three and five!"
"Starboard picket frigate Anthemon destroyed reactor breach!"
Spire's voice cut through the reports.
"Return fire. All ships, focus on the Maleficarum's escort screen we thin their numbers before they reach brawling range."
The fleet obeyed. Macro cannons roared, hurling shells the size of land crawlers across the gulf. Torpedoes streaked forward in a glittering line. For a moment, the void was a kaleidoscope of fire.
Then the enemy closed the distance.
—
Arkham's flagship did not so much dodge incoming fire as slide through it an unholy grace carrying the jagged black shape across the stars. Gun batteries flared along its flanks, molten fire that burned through the shields of the cruiser Tyrant's Aegis, gutting her from bow to stern. The vox was filled with her crew's screams before the signal cut.
On the Plague Ship's approach vector, things were worse. The Terminus Est seemed to wade through the fight like a corpse-bloated leviathan, shrugging off torpedo detonations with its rotting armor.
Where its guns failed to kill, its warp-fed contagions did vox-reports came in of entire gun crews dropping dead at their stations, lungs filling with black pus before the enemy's shells even struck.
"Admiral, Volatrix Squadron reports hull breaches on the Hammerfall. They can't plug them fires spreading."
"Tell them to ram something before they go."
The vox-officer swallowed but relayed the order.
Seconds later, the Hammerfall vanished in a burst of light, taking two enemy frigates with her. The rest of the Chaos formation barely noticed.
—
It was a slaughter.
The enemy broke through the left flank in twenty minutes. A wedge of escort destroyers punched a hole in the screen, and Arkham's ship followed lances carving through crippled Imperial vessels, each kill deliberate and contemptuous.
Spire knew what Arkham was doing. He wasn't racing for the planet yet. He was killing ships first, breaking the fleet's will before the real push.
"All ships, regroup on my mark," Spire ordered, voice hard. "We force him into the center. Make him fight for every meter."
The fleet pulled tighter, a shrinking ball of guns and desperation. It bought them minutes, maybe. But every minute cost ships. Every volley meant another light winking out on the hololith.
"Enemy troop landers detected," the augur-master reported. "They're using the gap in the left flank."
Spire's hands curled to fists. "Gun them down."
—
They tried. Emperor knows they tried.
Fifty troop transports fell in the first pass. Another thirty the second. But too many got through bloated barges of rust and spikes, herded in by Chaos escorts. Some were already shedding smaller craft, fast dropships diving for the planet's burning surface.
The blockade was failing.
On the viewport, Orar grew larger.
Firestorms bloomed in the clouds as drop-capsules punched through the atmosphere. The vox was already catching garbled distress calls from the surface PDF commanders shouting about the falling pods.
—
The ship shook under another impact. Warning runes flared crimson.
"Shields down! Decks seven through ten venting to space!"
"Medical bay overwhelmed casualties in the hundreds!"
Spire could feel it slipping. Not just the battle but the war.
If they lost Orar, the Gothic front would fracture. But there was no stopping it now. Not with what he had left.
"Admiral," came a voice on the fleetwide channel Captain Orvein of the Iron Thorn. His voice was raw, shaking. "Permission to engage in close quarters ramming action."
Spire knew what that meant. The Iron Thorn still had her reactor.
"Granted. May the Emperor guide you."
A moment later, the Iron Thorn lit her drives and plowed into a Chaos cruiser head on. Both ships vanished in a sun-bright flash. The cheer that rose from the bridge crew was brief, almost ashamed because another two enemy cruisers were already sliding into the gap.
An hour in, the line broke completely.
Arkham's ship and the Terminus Est punched straight through the center, guns scything at anything in reach. A half dozen Imperial cruisers tried to block them, and were reduced to wreckage in minutes. Their escorts scattered some crippled, some running.
Chaos ships poured toward Orar like a tide. Landers followed in their wake hundreds now. Thousands.
Spire didn't order a retreat. He didn't have to. The fleet was too battered for that.
—
When the ship finally pulled clear, her armor was half melted, her guns silent, her crew down by a third.
Behind them, the planet burned again. Through the viewport, Spire could see the drop fire glowing in the night side, spreading like infection across the continents.
They had failed.
He stood at the viewport a long time after the noise on the bridge died down. He could still hear the last screams on the vox, the crash of collapsing bulkheads, the wet static that came when plague took a crew before the shell hit.
He could picture Arkham on his command deck, smiling without humor. He could picture Typhus wading through some shattered hab on Orar, rot spilling from him like breath.
Spire's hand closed on the armrest until the leather creaked.
—-
Where clouds had once rolled over temperate seas and patchwork continents, there was now only a smear of blackened ash, threaded with the faint green of chemical fires. The light of its star reached the surface in sickly beams, fractured through layers of dust and vaporized stone. It was a world breathing its last, and every breath carried the taste of cinder.
The bombardment had not been clean. Orbital strikes had carved kilometers-wide scars into the crust, glassing plains and turning mountains into broken teeth. Whole oceans boiled into choking mist, now drifting endlessly over the horizon in ghostly veils. What remained of Orar's surface was a patchwork of death collapsed hives, slagged manufactorums, empty silos, and stretches of nothing but charred earth.
There were still cities under imperium protection. But outside imperium fortifications, it was completely lifeless. Maybe some mutants now survive after the bombardment.
The Chaos fleet came in ragged and limping. Hulls were scorched, plating torn, entire gun batteries ripped from their mounts. Great swathes of corrupted armor still bled molten ichor from battle damage. But they had made it through the fire.
The Maleficarum was the first to breach atmosphere its warped silhouette casting a long shadow over the shattered plains, its hull studded with cyclopean gun towers like a floating cathedral of nightmares. The vox relays carried its presence across the wastelands, not as signal but as an infection half-words and whispers slithering into comms channels, seeding unease in every ear.
Behind it, plague ships dropped through the sky on wings of toxic flame. Typhus' flagship descended slow and steady, a leviathan ignoring the crossfire of the few remaining orbital defense batteries. Even its wounds looked alive pustules of metal swelling, rupturing, and knitting back together as it fell toward the surface. Where it passed, the clouds curdled green.
They didn't strike at the fortified cities directly. This was not a battle for glory. This was the slow knife. And they themselves needed resources and time before attempting anything of that sort.
Landing zones were established along the skeletons of dead slabs of ferrocrete and manufactorums, their shattered shells now serving as cover for the mustering of troops. Astartes warbands spilled from landing craft some in the livery of the Death Guard, moving with implacable weight; others in jagged, black red armor that drank in the light. Cultists followed in droves, driven by fevered chants and the promise of blood. Twisted vehicles rumbled down from grav-barges, their engines coughing smoke into the air.
In the shadow of a collapsed hab-spire, Arkham himself stood surveying the plains through a cracked visor. His voice was low when he addressed his lieutenants.
Arkham ordered them. "Food, water, promethium. Metals for repair. Flesh for the rites. Take their laborers alive if they are fit for work. Burn the rest."
Further across the wasteland, Typhus' forces set about their own work with grim precision. The Death Guard did not rush. Plague cauldrons were planted in the blackened soil, their contents burbling and hissing as they bled filth into the wind. The goal was not merely to kill, but to make the land itself an ally.
One Nurgle champion stood with rusted arms spread wide, letting the ash fall on him like holy rain. "This world will be a garden," he rasped through his helm. "And its cities will be the first to flower."
Above, the few surviving Imperial vessels still hung in low orbit, bleeding smoke. They could not mount a counter offensive; they could barely hold their stations. Frigates with half their decks gutted kept watch over the fortress cities, hoping to give early warning of any large scale assault. Every captain knew it was only a matter of time before their fuel ran dry.
Outside the cities, Chaos scouts moved through the ashen plains with the precision of predators. Small bands slipped through the ruins, picking over wreckage for anything useful fuel cells, munitions, intact armor plating. Others hunted refugees trying to cross the wastes toward the enclaves, cutting them down or dragging them screaming back to the landing zones.
One such raid struck a minor promethium depot in the eastern sector. The defenders fought like cornered animals, holding the barricades for over an hour before a squad of Traitor Marines smashed through. The last vox transmission from the depot was a single voice, ragged but defiant: "Tell Primus… we burned the tanks. They get nothing." Then static.
The Chaos forces didn't seem to mind the losses they took. For every warband gutted in an ambush, two more landed in its place. For every raider cut down, another rose from the dust, armed with whatever had been taken from the last Imperial corpse. The slow knife kept turning.
By the end of the first week, the map of Orar's habitable zones was bleeding red.
—-
Word Count: 1938
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