XVII: Roche Limit
----------------------------------------
The primordial era of every solar system is a roiling froth of plasmas and ice and dust, sown liberally with light elements and less so with the heavier. This cauldron churns and whorls - no part of it any greater than the barest gasp of wind or handful of sand - made mighty not by density but by scale, drawn taut by the laws of gravity. Carbon dust reaches out for shards of iron. By gentle hands hydrogen tugs helium and about the greater of the metals accumulate gatherings and audiences of those less blessed by atomic mass. In time the dust becomes pebbles, which become rocks, which become more until within the undifferentiated, swirling gauze of matter - which is like as to a galaxy, rendered in minute form - come little points of relative emptiness, where the clouds are drawn away. Drawn away and down, pulled closer to each knot of gathering matter, which settles more comfortably into grooves etched deeper and deeper into the comforting shawl that is space-time.
At times these knots cross paths. Those of larger scale call out to their lesser siblings and jolt them from their new-carved grooves. By long persuasion these knots swing closer, closer, a dance from near to far and near again, until the moment comes, the moment of pause, when breaths are taken and each cluster pauses, on the threshold - and then tips over. Two become one. Four become two become one.
The grooves deepen. The knots swell. The clouds recede.
In long time, hydrogen fuses and casts light. By universal constant, photons are flung far and wide and they fall, in their own short times, across the descendants of those early clusters, who now swell massive and cyclopean, crushed down beneath their own glory, compacted into ideal form.
Spheres.
This latter generation mark out lives about the star, following routes laid down by their antecedents, made averaged by interaction of mass and energy and trajectory. They become such that a new name is laid about them: planets.
Still remnants of maverick lineages find their own paths, lumpen and misshapen, never to reach the latter-day glory of their more weighty and influential peers. These were worlds-that-never-were, the spilled-aside feed of a celestial family that has become full. Asteroids and comets, planetoids and rogues, Trojans and moons. The basal nutrients form them: iron and hydrogen, oxygen and carbon and silicon. More, and rarer: platinum and gold, iridium and cobalt. Morsels left unsampled, crumbs fallen from a cosmological dish.
One world, rocky and warm, vibrant with a living core and humming magnetism, retains a handmaiden. It is a fraternal twin, one parasitized by its greater half, left stunted and malformed in the womb of the star. Where the greater world will one day see rains of liquid water, which will bring saline seas and later organic molecules, which will one day become life, the lesser twin will never live. Its core cools, stillborn. Its mantle becomes slush, its crust solidified. It is a lump, a marker, a world-that-never-was, forever bound to its hungrier twin.
Together they pass the aeons together, caught forever in an eternal dance, held at arm's length.
Each year, the dead moon slips a little farther. The world it orbits is careless. Its grip is loosened. The distances are fractional. A micron. A millimeter. A centimeter.
In time, the moon would slip. It would drift beyond the grip of its brother, and it would be flung free. Left alone, to spin beneath the light of the grandfather star, given final rest in the lonely tracks of endless, endless space.
In seventy-two hours, in a scale so short as to be incomprehensible, a sliver of a fraction that cannot have a name, by the judging of these ancient worlds, it has, impossibly, moved.
In seventy-two hours, it has halved its distance from its killer. The dead moon, parasitized, left to starve, has upended the Law. It is coming back.
----------------------------------------
Yadraig loomed large and menacing, as menacing as a natural body could be. Ascribing intent to a celestial body smacked of ritualism, but the human mind wished to find itself in all things. Yadraig's stubborn, relentless march brings to mind the threat-posture of a foe. A broadened chest, puffed out, matched to intimidating, sudden steps forward. An ancient display, a universal display: to appear bigger, greater, deadlier than a being was.
Yadraig loomed large. At apoapsis and periapsis, the moon dug in its heels. Tylos Rubio, remaining in meditation, tracked the moon's progress. He felt the swell of power, he felt the way space-time bunched up like a carpet caught underfoot. He felt the ripple within the Immaterium, coinciding: a soundless, wordless cry as some intelligence, some power, spoke not in human tongue nor any tongue of any creature living, for what it spoke was not bound to mortal language, but a meaning clear. It rang platonic, a perfect knife, a single meaning to transcend all meanings, a bell with a single, ultimate note.
Tylos Rubio, around tensioned brow and clenched jaw, interpreted that meaning thusly:
STOP
It was the moment of utter cessation. When absolute zero was achieved, when all energy exhausted. It was the moment between breaths, before neurons fire to inhale. It was the perfect equality of emptiness, a void in which no molecules hung, where gravity wobbled between asymptote of nothing and everything.
It was the expression of complete subjugation to stillness.
To the millions of eyes on Eboracum and in the space beyond, this expression was a shudder that rippled across Yadraig and a visible tremble in its motion. The atmosphere of the moon, made of gentle, liquid hydrocarbons, swirled and rippled and sloshed. The gravity of the moon was so minor that it spilled, disturbed so greatly by the command that tidal waves never seen, not even in the earliest times of the star system, washed outward from the leading hemisphere of the moon. Concentric waves swept across valleys and plains, mares and uplands, until meeting at the trailing side of the moon, converging into growing splashes that soared a hundred kilometers and more: until the silvery, semi-liquid atmosphere leapt free.
Yadraig sported a tail now, a ribbon of gauzy silver that spiraled halfway around its orbit as it dissipated.
In that trail, the constriction of the moon's orbit was writ in visible, taunting clarity.
For seventy-two hours, Roboute Guilliman had exhausted every consideration. He had conferenced with his Captains, he had deliberated with his shipmasters, he had consulted with the Magi. The grim offer of Shipmistress Vaul he denied, seeing the need in her bitter eyes to act in some way, to redeem her belief in a 'failed' command. Mantallikes, her beloved battleship, she offered on the altar of sacrifice. The warp engines might be shaped into a spatial weapon of incredible potency. Let the battleship die in a blaze, casting the coming moon into the non-space of the Warp.
Roboute Guilliman was not as trained in the ways of the Immaterium as some of his brothers and it was not a realm he had ever considered needing to study. Calth stripped away that belief and in the months since he had, in mounting horror at how little he knew - at how much he had allowed a significant and fundament part of the universe pass by his considerations - accounted for this lapse by the tutelage of Codicier Rubio and the other Lexicanium along with the honored persons of the Navis Nobilite. He admitted his knowledge far from complete, as even his tutors understood enough to understand they themselves barely scratched the surface. Calth and the damned Word Bearers, the traitors of the Seventeenth, planted a tree that fruited only in uncertainty and terror.
Yet he knew enough. Always had he leaned away from the usage of the greater weapons in the arsenal of the Imperium: virus bombs and phosphex, rad and vortex weapons. Their place was understood, though their necessity was a travesty, which is why the Destroyers remained among the ranks of the Ultramarines. This was not a scenario in which Roboute allowed the foolishness of morality to infringe on his practicality; no, this was a situation of utmost prudence.
The detonation of a vortex weapon of such size - improvised or not - in the near-orbit of Eboracum would likely be a catastrophe beyond the scale of a lunar collision. A warprift of suitable size to neutralize the moon itself would be, at best estimations, entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Placing aside the esoteric, the most practical solutions evaded also. Thunderhawks scoured the surface of Yadraig endlessly, auspex digging deep into the crust. Destroyers hung in higher orbits, using their far greater arrays to attempt to prise open the secrets of the moon. As known from the destruction of the Republican world of Sernpidal and most recently Kalarba, this was an active tactic that required a living dovin basal of the Yuuzhan Vong bio-weapon breeds. All those of warp-touch agree there was a living basal whose gravity-shaping power continued to draw the moon down.
That was the simplest solution. Locate the basal and slay it. Yadraig had not yet reached the point of no return. The Roche limit was not far, but still several orbits away.
Frustratingly, the vong spun this trap well. Each cry of the basal was for but moments, taunting auspex to narrow down its gravitational influence. Instead of a constant song, the biot optimized its actions to minimize discovery. Worse still, while its location was narrowed down to half of the moon, indications pointed to the basal not merely being hidden, but buried, so deeply buried, in fact, that some feared it might even rest at the very core of the moon.
Roboute need not review the documents. He knew how much time remained. The moon already groaned under the stress of its approach. Not quite a sphere now, but growing oblate. Eboracum felt groundquakes across the globe. Small tidal bores lapped and followed in the moon's path. The lower limit approached, the point when the greater influence of Eboracum would pull the moon apart and see the rest of the job completed by Eboracum itself.
All the while, the Yuuzhan Vong squadron watched and waited. Like a cluster of asteroids, dominated by their single battleship, they lingered two light-seconds away. Too far to engage with any weapon systems and far enough from the well of Eboracum to flee at the slightest indications of hostile approach.
The Primarch carefully unpicked his fingers from the fists they had formed. He did not like being mocked.
Thirty-six hours remained, pessimistically. At optimistic estimates, a further seventy-two. Each pulse of the basal proved different, slowing the moon at different rates. There was not enough data for a proper estimation. What reason there was for the basal to be variable was debated. Perhaps the weapon-creature needed to muster energy for each pulse, and like any living being, had irregularities based on its own stamina. Perhaps it was some complex calculation by the alien intelligence, where it moved the moon at a schedule known only to its cold and calculating malice.
Thirty-six to seventy-two hours. Opolor's Vow and her squadron remained at Fondor, impossible to bring to aid, though extraneous even if they could be. One further grand cruiser and her escorts would not meaningfully change the Primarch's calculus.
Macragge's Honour alone could do as he required.
He merely need give the order.
----------------------------------------
Mantallikes loomed over Eboracum Orbital like a protective, roosting avian. The battleship, crippled, still menaced with entirely deadly spurs. Her drive sections were gutted, first by weapons fire of the Seventeenth and demolition teams attempting to prevent the warship's escape, then lately by Mechanicum adepts who excised, with due humility and proper appeasement, the remaining, functional elements. Mantallikes would never sail again, but her sacrifice would bolster the remaining ships of the 4711th. Likewise, many of her other systems were slowly cannibalized and removed over the previous months. Shipmistress Vaul watched over it all with heat in her throat and a menace of impotent tears kept locked deep, deep down beneath decades of stoic professionalism.
Just because she understood the theoretical, did not mean she could not despise the practical. Often, she would whisper to her beloved command, apologizing as she rose each morning for what new injustice would be inflicted upon its venerable spirit.
Beneath the shadow of the battleship, Eboracum Orbital had begun to approach the lesser yards over Calth. The slapdash construction had none of the careful and obvious construction of those fêted - and woefully lost - structures, but its agglomerate formation was perhaps all the more impressive. Eboracum Orbital was a necessity built of rapidity, more honest by its making. Gutted transports, as massive as a battle-barge but unarmed and unarmored languished in half-deconstructed splendor, like picked-over carcasses of pelagic cetaceans.
They bore the soldiers and material of Ultramar from the hellpit of Veridia, and in return for their service, they became the feed for Eboracum Civitas, for the Pharisan Redoubt, for stockpiles of supply to bolster the warships of the 4711th. An ignoble end, perhaps, but one fitting for the Excertus. Waste none, want for none.
Modules and segments were welded onto Eboracum Orbital until it became a delicate patchwork quilt, reinforced by long spars of reinforcing frames, by flexible tethers, by magnetic clamp. It even bore void shields, borrowed from a retired mass conveyor.
This was to say that Eboracum's local orbit, in static defenses only, between Eboracum Orbital and Mantallikes, bore a great weight of potential counterfire than any world for a hundred parsecs in all directions. Likely more.
Aside from Lord Admiral Regil's squadron, the entire rest of the tonnage of the 4711th lingered nearby. Samothrace, recalled from her patrol rounds, glinted in the far distance. Her engines were lit, her voids hot, and the battle barge waited patiently. Fourth Honor, ancient and weathered and nearly as massive as a Gloriana in sheer density, hewed closer to the Orbital and her crippled sister. Numinus, still undergoing repairs, lingered in a slightly higher orbit for simple access from the surface and the Orbital. Cruisers patrolled in two tracks, opposing circles, prowling like sharks. Destroyers, those not tasked to scrying Yadraig, tagged along with the larger Murder-class cruisers.
Lording over them all, the true queen of the fleet was Macragge's Honour, all twenty kilometers of cobalt-blue and gold adamantium armor.
And on her secondary bridge, peering out through armored glass, the Primarch watched as Yadraig rose over the horizon.
The cruisers slowed. They came about, abandoning their circuits. Samothrace's engines fumed, alongside Numinus. Slowly, the 4711th began to burn prograde. All but Macragge's Honour, Fourth Honour and Mantallikes.
Three battleships, all of wildly different design, mien and character, remained alongside Eboracum Orbital. The rest withdrew, elevating their orbits, fleeing the coming moon.
Roboute Guilliman exhaled. There was no benefit to delaying, and only negatives. He spoke the order. Confirmation was requested and he verified in triplicate. The shimmering, flickering images of Shipmistress Vaul and Shipmaster Asha inclined their heads, heeding the Primarch's command.
----------------------------------------
Eboracum Civitas sat empty. Her streets were silent, bereft of traffic both foot and vehicular. Wailing klaxons continued to rise and fall, heard by none. The landing fields, once an endless riot of activity, unceasing for months, were abandoned. Hundreds of square kilometers of tarmac steamed under the afternoon sun. Not a single ship remained. The gates were locked. In the far distance, where the local mountain range began, the Pharisan Redoubt likewise matched the hollow silence of Eboracum.
Beneath the surface, buried away in reinforced bunkers, the citizenry of Eboracum Civitas sweated and trembled and waited. Ultramarines, bereft of plate, garbed instead in togas that did not soften their transhuman bulk, paced through the packed bunkers offering quiet words of encouragement and acting as touchstones of calm. Veterans of Calth and the Excertus loudly told stories of the Crusade and the impossible odds they'd seen before, laughing perhaps a little too loud at how mundane and routine today was.
In outlying townships, those that had been touched, but not entirely plowed under, by the Imperium, there were still bunkers provided, but more than a few still held distrust for the offworlders and did not heed the warnings or alarms. They watched the sky and the swelling moon and hoped, deep and barely acknowledged, that those damned Imperials were as good as their word.
Yadraig swept toward apoapsis and another thumping pause in its transit.
This time, the moon was met. Her attending swarms of Thunderhawks had fled. The destroyers, hammering away with auspex, burned hard retrograde, rapidly growing distance from the celestial body.
The lances arrived first. At lightspeed, columns of energy whickered through the thin, silvery hydrocarbon atmosphere of Yadraig in less than an instant. The hydrocarbons normally were not volatile, unless terajoules of energy were suddenly introduced to their freezing environment. The distance at which Macragge's Honour, Fourth Honour and Mantallikes fired meant that their lance strikes converged, as if focused through some great lens, to saturate an area of less than ten square kilometers.
Yadraig's atmosphere fused. Atoms mashed together, ejecting blooms of radiation across the spectrum. Rock dissolved, eroded in moments. Deep, frigid permafrost of ice-slush and strange states, buried for a billion years, were ripped open, pierced through by white, hot light. As a surgeon's scalpel, the 4711th's lance strike clove desperately deep into the crust of Yadraig, reaching nearly the mantle. Kilometers in an eyeblink.
This was the prelude.
Following the energy of the lances came the lagging shots from macrocannon. Diamantite tipped shells packed with hyperexplosives punched into the terrain, into the puncture wound carved by lances. They were designed to overmatch starship armor, to counter metals and alloys forged by tens of thousands of years of materials mastery. Against carbonates and phyllosilicates, against graphite dust and methane clathrates, against salts and olivine-rich achondrites, there was no contest. Each shell plunged hundreds of meters, if not kilometers down before finally erupting. This was by design. Each subterranean detonation formed short-lived vulcanism, rupturing and shattering the surface of the moon. From a precise stab-wound, the growing injury in Yadraig became a ragged-edged, desperately steep crater.
Like cracking the plastron of a warrior, to allow a thin blade through, so too did the three grand battleships of the 4711th split and churn and tear the flesh of Yadraig wide.
Two-stage torpedoes followed. Precious, limited, supremely dangerous - only by order of the Primarch were these unleashed. They were launched by one single warship alone. Macragge's Honour.
The gash in Yadraig tore down to the mantle, ripping a wound in the moon forty kilometers deep. One, two torpedoes flashed into the injury.
Melta projectors lit. The torpedoes dug deep. Elsewhere on the moon, a Shaper placed their crustacean fingers on an agitated dovin basal, the biot crying out as it sensed its end.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Two-stage cyclonic torpedoes were designed to split worlds. Against a moon of just over a thousand kilometers in diameter, they were, perhaps, overkill.
They both struck the small, nickel-iron core of Yadraig.
And the moon shattered.
----------------------------------------
Warleader Malik Carr's lips were pressed tight, yet not out of frustration nor concern. The blazebugs struggled to demonstrate the raw power unleashed in the orbit of the infidel world, but Malik Carr paid them little attention. His claw clacked tak tak tak on coral underfoot as he allowed Blood Spat in Wrath's yammosk to sing to him directly, to feed to his eyes and his senses the actions of the Impeerials unfiltered. He saw local space as the yammosk did, through the sensor-pits and membrane-sheltered eyes of the fleet. He watched the moon shatter - not gently but violently, a sharp and eruptive, plosive detonation like a sparkbee flask.
Already, bolides were lighting the atmosphere of the world below, the first outriders of the shattered moon, ejected with such violence and force as to cross the intervening distance in moments. Tens of thousands of kilometers per second. Alas for Malik Carr, these were the tiniest of fragments, those able to be accelerated so violently. None would reach the surface, fuming instead into short-lived flares in the upper atmosphere. He eyed instead the greater fragments, moving much slower, but all the more massive for it. Ones which would retain enough to survive passage through the flames of re-entry.
Each a bomb flung by Malik Carr at the heathens below.
He watched the three Impeerial warships, including the largest of them all, as they began to reach out with laser and plasma and solid shot at the debris of the moon. At his request, the yammosk contracted muscles in the outer hull of Wrath, contracting sight-biots beneath their void-proof lenses. His vision swam with momentary vertigo, until the mightiest Impeerial dead-ship filled his sight.
His gut churned at such an icon of sin, but he was Warleader and he allowed the disgust to come, go. Malik Carr could admit the scale of the ship was impressive and its potency moreso, but there was more than one way to kill a radank.
His eyes fell on the scars along the flanks of the warship. Against the gold-and-blue of the rest of the battleship, long patches of dull, colorless patching stood out clearly. To Malik Carr's trained eye, the patches, the scars, indicated the ship had once been boarded. Had it been scarred in battle, the repaired patches would be irregular and scattered. These patches were rectangular and precisely positioned, spaced out evenly along two kilometers of the lower flanks of the ship. They ran in line with each other, as if ships had once come alongside and burrowed into the dead-metal flesh of the Impeerial ship.
The Warleader issued orders of his own.
----------------------------------------
Yadraig came apart like a shrapnel bomb with very little fire. The world-killers were made to induce mass-instability in a celestial body - cleansing fire was extraneous to that purpose. Oscillating and exotic fields of Dark Age tech-sorcery rang pressure waves through the internals of the moon. On a small yorik coral cruiser, buried deep within the mantle, there was a split-second of alarm before everything biological - which is to say, everything but the coral shell of the ship - was pulped into a mass of slippery, undifferentiated organic slurry.
Then Yadraig burst.
"Target priority matrices are locked in, my Primarch."
"Fire at will," Roboute Guilliman ordered.
No fragment of the moon larger than thirty kilometers in diameter remained. It had been pulverized, shattered, torn to bits. From the vantage point of the 4711th, the moon appeared destroyed.
Appeared to be and was were different creatures entire.
The two-stage torpedoes were designed to shatter worlds. They did so through arcane methods that the Mechanicum barely comprehended. They were rare and precious weapons, archaeotech unmatched by contemporary creations. Each relic spent was one less in the arsenals of the Imperium, never to be used again.
Breaking a world was sufficient to kill everything on the surface. When utilized in the Great Crusade, that was enough. In the grave and rare instance Exterminatus was required, a world was crushed and the Crusade marched onward. The remains of these worlds were of little concern. What happened to the debris, to the remains, was not a matter the Imperium cared about. The threat was expunged and mankind could march on.
Thus: the torpedoes broke a world: they did not destroy it. There was no cauterizing flash and atomization, for such destruction was a waste of resources.
When Yadraig shattered, the moon massed something north of nine hundred and ninety quadrillion tonnes. Perhaps a trillion - even a hundred trillion - tonnes had been vaporized or otherwise reduced to dust by the initial lance and macrocannon bombardment. This left, approximately, nine hundred and ninety quadrillion tonnes of moon.
Codicier Rubio felt the dovin basal's death. It felt like a blanket, thin, barely noticeable, was whipped away from the local Immaterium. He breathed a sigh of relief, immediately voxing the bridge.
The Primarch, receiving the news, barely reacted. A slight shift of weight, a twitch of the cheek. The basal's death was expected. The biot was gone, removing the risk of the entire moon coming down on the world. All that meant, to the Primarch, was that the task was merely beginning.
----------------------------------------
In the secondary bridge, now the primary after Lorgar's machinations, a most minute, barely perceptible rumble thrummed through the deck underfoot. For those without transhuman senses, it would pass beneath notice. Roboute felt it. It was the thunder of guns, firing ceaseless. Macrobatteries hurled shells out into the void nonstop, barrels running hot and reload mechanisms entreated endlessly by Magi. Lances struck again and again, slashing through fragments of Yadraig, halving and quartering slabs that once were broad plains and sides of ancient mountain ranges.
Roboute watched it all. He could do nothing more. In his grip, a stylus creaked, ominously yet delicately for the immense strength bound within his hands. As ever, he remained in utter control of the body his Father shaped for him; the strain on his stylus and dataslate an affectation. A minute, fractional outlet for the helpless frustration that boiled in his breast.
Between Macragge's Honour, Mantallikes and Fourth Honor, they had a weight of megaweaponry that could sear a world's surface or break the back of most fleets. Clumps and chunks of moonrock were as far from adamantium as could be. Each flash of lance rendered a tumbling mountain into harmless gravel. Each smack of macrocannon shell cracked asteroids into pebbles. Blasts of plasma created swirls of molten rock.
The three battleships used their replaceable ammunition. Lances drew only upon the raw power of annihilating reactions in the churning hearts of the warships. Macrocannon shells were immense, but simplistic, already replaced in the foundries of Orichi-Mu's barque and assemblages on the surface. Plasma cannon required only reactants, easily drawn and refined from chemical processes. The three battleships could fire for days without cease.
The moon - or rather, the cloud of cosmic shrapnel that had been a moon - was not a day away. It was hours. Already, Roboute watched glowing streaks in Eboracum's skies below them. Half of the moon's mass was blown into higher orbits, or remaining, generally, in the same orbit it had been. The other half was ejected retrograde or into lower orbits. Nine hundred and ninety quadrillion tonnes. Half: four hundred and forty-five quadrillion tonnes.
There would be impacts. It was unavoidable. Legio Lacassex stood ready alongside the Pharisan Redoubt, prepared to fire on those that might land in or near Eboracum Civitas. The cannons and launchers of the Redoubt, paired with the mighty volcano cannon of the Warlord Sanguinum Oculi stood ready and fully capable. Auspex tracks were inloaded to targeting manifolds. Restive fingers danced over trigger-runes.
But there would be impacts. Guilliman, teeth clenched, calculated the likelihood of extinction-level impactors. One in five. Most of the largest fragments, those that could kill a world, were imparted with far less velocity from the breaking of the moon. They would not fall for days yet, without the influence of the dovin basal to force them along. Even those knocked into lower orbits, decaying orbits, would have a full pass or more around the world before the interface of atmosphere began to affect them. Those slung into higher orbits were less of a threat, though still on irregular tracks that might fail over weeks, or even months.
Exhaling tightly, Guilliman recognized the victory the Yuuzhan Vong were able to shape. It was a well-plotted gambit. Whomsoever led the invaders, he would mark them a true threat. Instead of pinning all their hopes on a single gambit, the vong constructed a scenario in which the 4711th could only choose from poor options. Seventy-two hours he spent, constructing hundreds of plans. All were some degree of loss. Some were a loss far worse than the collision of the moon, intact, with Eboracum. Shipmistress Vaul's suggestion was one of the latter options.
Take the time to hunt for the basal: waste time until the moon reached a point of no return, and fell to the world. Act swiftly before hunting: potential to overreact, wasting ordnance, creating a far greater danger, should they have been able to find the biot. Detonate warp engines, to remove the moon from play - expose an Imperial world, the only Imperial world to the raw, unfiltered Warp. Shatter the moon, as he had decided upon: fill Eboracum's orbit with an endless amount of debris. Threaten the world with constant bombardment. Endanger all ships to pass into Eboracum's influence by way of innumerable debris at orbital velocities.
Yet the three battleships continued to fire. From their retreat, Samothrace and the other ships of the 4711th pulled higher, distancing themselves from the coming spray of Yadraig's ruin, preparing to add their own weight of fire from a higher, safer orbit.
Roboute watched the first major rock to fall. With a gesture, his dataslate revealed the specifics. It fell, at relatively low speeds, already blushing red from friction. A hundred meters in diameter, jagged, shaped like a shard of glass. Catching the denser atmosphere, the fragment spun and tumbled until, overstrained, it airburst with enough force to flatten forests for a thousand square kilometers. Blown into a thousand pieces, it came down in a spray as devastating as a heavy artillery barrage. It was the first and it would not be the last.
----------------------------------------
The infidel's grand cruisers were engaged. Three remained huddled near to the world, clearly willing to risk their survival to protect the Impeerial's delicate space station. The others fled higher, running from the moon's demise. Blazebugs danced, revealing more esoteric information. In their glow they spoke not of warships and weaponry, but of the complex play of gravitational influences. The moon's death was a ripple on space-time, the fabric thrumming to the senses of yammosk and dovin basal. The more the broken remains of the moon expanded, the more diffuse its press of gravity became.
Malik Carr watched and watched, baring his teeth as the first shards fell to the world. He watched as the debris field swept closer to the infidels, saw as their strange and ephemeral defense barriers began to crackle as first dust and gravel reached them, then larger chunks of moon, then more. Interestingly, one of the grand cruisers appeared to sport no barriers at all, bearing instead each impact against its hull direct. Damage? Design? It mattered little. For several hours he watched, remaining erect, shoulders back, feet planted. The command grotto murmured with quiet activity. He bided his time.
Still the three warships continued their fruitless, futile barrage.
The larger parts of the moon approached. Malik Carr consulted the yammosk. Tak, tak, tak clicked his claw against the coral underfoot. Gravity influences smeared and stretched. The infidels would never understand the subtleties of space-shaping. Their hollow machines could never match the brilliance and technique of the living.
"Enact," the Warleader intoned. At his right hand, Harrar of the Deception Sect swung a censer, wafting rare and precious incense in a sudden stream of eye-watching, nose-tingling spiral.
----------------------------------------
Guilliman had kept an eye on the distant vong squadron throughout. When the moon broke - they did not move. When Eboracum's skies began to light with streaks of fire - they did not move. When his flagship and her two sisters lit the sky in other ways, with collimated beams of energy and muzzle-flash of macrobatteries - they did not move. Macragge's Honour's voids hummed and popped unceasingly. Mantallikes as well. Fourth Honour's meters-thick slabs of adamantium bore the coming barrage stoically. Thus far, the debris was minimal. None were larger than a Land Raider, with the energy of a minor cannon shell.
Yet it was only the vanguard. The far, far larger pieces of the moon were yet to arrive.
Eboracum, below, was bruised. Smoke from fires rose across the continent. No major impact had landed - yet - but the time would come. Void shields hummed now over Eboracum Civitas and the Pharisan Redoubt. Patrols of Auxilia and Excertus, along with Ultramarines, ranged out to gather, by force if necessary, the populations of outlying towns. Perhaps it should have been done sooner. Perhaps it needn't be done at all. Eboracum Civitas bore the great majority of the population, and the thousands that might die beyond the boundaries of the voids were a minor, negligible loss.
Captains Argant and Paston disagreed. Roboute did not countermand them.
He had turned away from the crystalflex viewports some time ago. There was no need to watch.
He didn't need to see another world burn.
Eboracum was not Calth. He spoke this, again and again, a mantra that occupied but a fraction of his prodigious, posthuman focus. Calth died. Eboracum would be wounded, perhaps gravely. There would be ashfall and storms, there would be surges of waves. Its orbit would be interdicted for the foreseeable future, requiring all ships to come with voids lit (or shields up) and defensive batteries tracking. Some time ago, in this galaxy, Roboute had read a report of their very capital besieged by a handful of asteroids, rendered invisible.
The death of Yadraig, the planetary ring to come, would be entirely visible, but all the more frustrating for it. There simply were not enough guns, enough void-shields, enough plasma projectors or lances to stop them all.
So Roboute planned for the future. He plotted the coming moonfall on the world, estimating areas most like to suffer impacts. The choice to destroy the moon just as it rose over the hemisphere Eboracum Civitas inhabited was calculated. The first waves of debris would fall long, passing over the Civitas and coming down well away, perhaps thousands of kilometers away. All to buy as much time as possible for the capital city.
He sketched out recovery operations. In truth, the surges of emigration supported by SELCORE were beginning to actually, truly stress the 4711ths capacity to employ them all. The Mechanicum worked tirelessly, around the clock, to raise new manufactories, new hab-blocks. There was only so swiftly the red-robed children of Mars could work. Guilliman envisioned recovery crews, sent out to gather valuable resources from the craters. Fire-fighter brigades, to work to snuff out continent-wide forest fires. Construction brigades, to supplement the servitor-driven machinery of the Mechanicum.
The vong forced Roboute to lose, but in losing he might shape a form of victory instead.
Focused as he was, as he had abandoned the bridge's viewports, he did not witness a flicker of pseudomotion, close at hand.
----------------------------------------
The cruiser was small, comparable in size to a Republican Nebulon-B or similar class. Its name did not matter, but its crew were dedicated. Fanatical. The cruiser slipped through the complex web of gravitational influences, spearing out from Warleader Malik Carr's squadron to thread the needle right into the center of the 4711th's grand cruisers. The dovin basal that drove it was wise, canny, and old. Macragge's Honour loomed not thirty kilometers distant.
The cruiser was a flea against a carnodon. Turrets already tracked. Macrocannon battery trained. The dovin basal did not prepare to project fields. The cruiser drifted, undirected. The dovin basal had one single task: it reached back along the narrow route it flew and flexed. Spacetime relaxed. A channel opened.
A dozen lumpen shapes flickered away from Malik Carr's squadron.
They appeared, moments later, tugged from hyperspace by the cruiser's dovin basal switching its focus from smoothing space to deepening the gravity well of Eboracum.
Then a dozen macrocannon shells tore through the cruiser, turning it into a cloud of coral and slaughtered Chosen.
Its task was complete.
A dozen asteroids nosed against Macragge's Honour's flanks. They bore no yaret-kor, no tendrils for coralskippers to nurse at. They were misshapen and ugly, shaped not of yorik coral but of nickel-iron, dusted in ice. Asteroids, stolen from the system's belt, hollowed out, implanted with youthful dovin basals.
At a distance of ten kilometers, they tumbled from hyperspace in a loose clump, delivered precisely by the interdiction of the cruiser's dovin basal.
Had a Republican tactician seen the actions of the martyred cruiser, they might have recognized the gambit. Modified slightly, filtered through the lens of the Yuuzhan Vong - but recognizable nonetheless. They called it the 'Thrawn Pincer'. To the Chosen of the Gods, it was Bar-Kuret's Gambit. Warleader Malik Carr paid homage to the ancients.
Before Macragge's Honour could train its guns on the new arrivals, the asteroids shattered. Each one, like miniaturized recreations of Yadraig's recent destruction. From their hollowed bodies swarmed yorik-trema. Hundreds. The troop transports sprinted, desperate, crossing the tiny distance to the Imperial flagship in moments. Still, dozens were swatted from the sky by rapid reaction interception fire. Hundreds of warriors and chazrach died in the void, choking and seared.
It was not enough. Yorik-trema thumped against the hull of the Gloriana flagship, not against the dense adamantium slabs that covered most, but against the patchwork repairs. Here the armor was thinner, lesser. Caustic acids, sufficient to melt lungs in seconds at the slightest whiff, dug into the flagship's flesh. Muscled, lithe and snakelike biots lashed and bit into armor, chewing and ripping away acid-softened chunks and hurling them aside. Atmosphere gusted out, blooming into little puffs and clouds of crystalline ice and oxygen.
The biots latched jaws over each rupture, exhaling, equalizing pressure.
Through the breaching wyrms swarmed the warriors of Domain Shai, the name of their Warleader and martyred Commander on their lips. Exhorted by Malik Carr, promised the redemption of the honour of their Domain, their eyes were lit with fervor, their limbs driven by frenzy.
In grim mirror to the attempts of the Seventeenth, many months ago, Macragge's Honour was breached.
This time, unlike the abortive attempts of Lorgar's get, thousands of Yuuzhan Vong warriors and chazrach set clawed boots on the hallowed halls of Macragge's Honour.
And then the slaughter began.