Chapter 249: The Great Evacuation (Patreon)

The flagship of the Lamenters, the Daughter of Tempests, slipped into a dimensional jump, her form dissolving into shimmering distortion before vanishing from the void entirely.

Every vessel in the system, friend or foe alike, noted her sudden departure, yet none had the strength or will to truly care. The battle had become too consuming, every ship locked in its own struggle for survival.

The Chaos fleet abandoned both the Titan Legions and the mortal thralls still chained to the Celestial Engine. They fled with only the Traitor Astartes, dragging them away aboard their retreating warships. Deliberately, the Chaos Astartes were crammed into the three surviving battleships instead of the fragile troop transports, a calculated cruelty by their commanders.

This time, the bait to draw fire was not cruisers, but the transports themselves.

Having lingered too long in orbit of the accursed superweapon world, the Chaos fleet was still under heavy pursuit. Every passing minute, another transport was annihilated, its hull torn open by lance batteries or obliterated in the incandescent glare of nova cannon fire.

....

On the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, the interim commander, a scarred veteran of the Long War, pressed unwillingly into temporary command of the Black Legion fleet, knelt in silence. Cradled in his gauntleted arms was the broken body of Ezekyle Abaddon, Warmaster of Chaos, Lord of the Black Legion. Blood soaked through the Warmaster’s baroque warplate, his massive frame limp, his fate uncertain. The sight filled the veteran with both grief and unbearable indecision.

The ancient warrior’s twin hearts clenched. He had fought for ten thousand years across ten thousand battlefields, yet never had he seen the Warmaster so close to true death.

Two hours earlier, a mysterious giant axe of impossible origin had manifested from nowhere, cleaving into the enemy’s Iron Planet super-construct and rendering it inert. The blow had opened the way for a surface assault upon both Cadia and the superweapon world.

But had the Warmaster not realized that the enemy void-fleet still held overwhelming superiority? Even if the Iron Planet fell, what hope was there against the Talon Navy’s encirclement?

The veteran’s brow furrowed as he gazed upon the lifeless giant.

“Warmaster…” he whispered, desperation thick in his voice. “Tell me… tell me what I must do.”

Abaddon gave no reply. His wounds were catastrophic, so severe that ragged holes in his armor revealed daylight clear through his body. Sorcerers and apothecaries alike had declared that he was not yet dead, but his life-force ebbed with every passing heartbeat, a candle guttering in the void. His mortal wounds were both physical and psychic in nature, intertwined into a precarious balance of ruin. None could say what outcome awaited, or how such a wound might ever be healed.

Then, against all reason, Abaddon’s eyelids trembled. His one remaining arm twitched. A lone finger tapped faintly against the deck.

The veteran froze, then hurried to grasp that hand, believing the Warmaster wished to impart final orders.

But no words came. Instead, with agonizing effort, Abaddon traced circles with his fingertip upon the warrior’s palm. Again and again, faltering, barely able to continue the motion.

“A circle…” the veteran mouthed. Then his eyes widened. “The Vortex Torpedoes! He means the Vortex Torpedoes!”

The Vengeful Spirit still held a hidden arsenal of Vortex Torpedoes. Not one or two, but twenty-five in total.

Abaddon had once gifted a single Vortex Torpedo to Typhus, claiming it was the last of its kind in his possession. Both giver and receiver knew it to be a lie. Since the opening gambits of the Long War, no one’s words could be trusted more than half.

“I’ll see it done, Warmaster.” The veteran rose. He dipped his blade into Abaddon’s blood, raising it aloft as he strode toward the armory.

The torpedo vault was guarded by warriors who answered only to Abaddon himself, Long War veterans who cared nothing for the hierarchy of the Black Legion, only for the will of their lord.

When the bloodstained blade entered their sight, they did not wait for explanation. They moved at once.

The Vortex Torpedoes were loaded into the launchers. Not loosed in a single salvo, but one by one, every five minutes was one launched at steady intervals, like the tolling of a death knell.

Even half-dead, the Despoiler had foreseen this moment. Whether or not the Iron Planet fell, even in failure, he would bleed the Talon Navy white. The Vortex Torpedoes would scatter them and perhaps even wound them grievously.

The first torpedo screamed from the Vengeful Spirit’s sole surviving launcher. It cut past the Chaos warships, streaking straight toward the Talon blockade.

Impact. Reality tore open. A swirling violet wound blossomed in the void, a vortex of screaming warp-energy clawing outward. At once, Talon warships triggered their highest emergency protocols, plunging into dimensional transition to escape annihilation.

Though weakened by the active Blackstone Pylons, the vortex still possessed the power to unmake any vessel it touched.

The ravenous singularity careened wildly through the system. Qin Mo, already intervening in the pursuit, was forced to turn his full strength to contain it, twisting local space to cage its trajectory away from the Talon Navy. His will stretched like chains of glass and iron, forcing the beast of raw warp to heel. Under his control, the vortex began drifting toward the retreating Chaos fleet.

Qin Mo could not command the weakend vortex directly, but he could reshape the space around it, bending its path away. Yet another presence stirred. A power vast and malignant, one of the Dark Gods themselves had taken interest. A claw of divinity seized the vortex itself, dragging it toward the Talon line.

Qin Mo strained harder, folding space until the rift’s distances stretched near infinity. To mortal eyes it appeared frozen in place, yet the contest raged unseen.

A second torpedo was fired, only to be caught mid-flight. Qin Mo twisted its trajectory, hurling it straight into the first vortex. The two anomalies devoured each other in shrieking silence.

The duel of wills lasted until the vortexes were spent. Only then could Qin Mo redirect his strength against the fleeing Traitors.

Now free, Qin Mo turned his power upon the Chaos fleet. Their vessels, steeped too long in the Eye of Terror, were saturated with warp-taint, their very substance half-detached from the material universe. He could not simply tear them apart with his C’tan influence. Their corruption was armor as much as curse.

But, as with the vortex, there were always ways to interfere.

One by one, he wrenched the battleships and cruisers back toward the Celestial Engine’s orbit, undoing every inch of their desperate retreat.

Just as the Talon Navy prepared to reduce them to molten wreckage with a storm of lance fire, the Terminus Est unleashed its torpedo.

The detonation birthed another warp rift. The watching Dark God seized upon the scrap of energy it released, pitifully weak beneath the Blackstone’s suppression, yet still usable. The Terminus Est unraveled, its mass torn into a gate to the Immaterium. Its destruction was not an ending, but a door forced ajar by damnation.

Qin Mo considered amplifying the Blackstone Pylons to maximum, to scour the system of warp-stain forever. But that would burn away the souls of his own kin as well. So he relented.

“So, you want to escape through the gate? Very well.” He twisted the space around the Chaos fleet. They surged at full speed, yet advanced not a single meter, trapped in a snare of warped distance. Making it impossible for them to approach the portal the Terminus Est had transformed into.

Psykers and sorcerers aboard the traitor vessels convulsed, their bodies bursting apart. At the instant of death, their souls should have bled forth in torrents of raw power. Yet the Blackstone reduced them to mere droplets. Even so, the gods took every drop.

The gate writhed. Tentacles slick with ichor and studded with pustules lashed outward, some sprouting feathers of blue, others crawling with eyes, wrapping around ships and dragging them screaming into the warp.

When it was done, the Dark Gods withdrew their gaze.

Beneath the tyranny of the Blackstone Pylons, the gate of flesh and tentacles was all that their combined might could achieve.

If their servants could not seize this chance to flee, then let them be forgotten in fire.