Chapter 250: For Talon (Patreon)

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Aboard the Path of Glory, Cruiser of the Talon Navy.

Captain Sain Varrek stood within the holo-augmented command sanctum, his body anchored by restraint harnesses while his mind reached outward through neural filaments. The ship’s tactical augur feeds cascaded into his awareness, unfolding the void-war before him as though a storm had taken shape across the stars.

The Path of Glory unleashed her broadsides against the ancient and infamous Gloriana-class Battleship, known as the Vengeful Spirit. Yet the enemy warship’s void shields held, each barrage breaking against them in cascading bursts of refracted light, like a radiant storm shattering against an invisible wall of energy.

Each salvo drained Path of Glory’s munitions and power reserves, but the enemy titan endured. Every impact was like a stone cast into an ocean, ripples spreading, but the sea itself unmoved.

Time was short. One of the massive tendrils from the Warp-rift that the Terminus Est had transformed into had already wrapped itself around the battleship, dragging it inexorably toward the gaping Flesh-Gate, a wound in reality bleeding raw madness into the void.

“Enemy void shields hold! Cruiser-grade firepower will not suffice!” the gunnery officer reported over the vox, his voice taut with dread. “At current rates, we estimate seven minutes before collapse!”

Sain had already foreseen this. His neural-interface cogitator, bolstered by the ship’s machine-aided logic engine, had reached the same conclusion. If only a battleship of Talon’s own were present…

But the battleship of his battlegroup, the Talon’s Wrath, had already been forced into an emergency Dimensional Jump after violent empyric energy surged across the battlefield. The rest of the fleet had followed, every vessel except the Path of Glory.

That fact gnawed at him. Why had his ship remained when all others had enacted the standard emergency protocol? Ever since the last time the Talon’s Wrath had disengaged under such conditions, everyone in the fleet knew the protocols: at the first signs of overwhelming Warp activity, the ships would withdraw into the nearest scouted system and regroup.

And yet the Path of Glory had not.

Sain dug through the ship’s command protocols. The highest-priority defense subroutines were still there. Nothing had been altered. The ship had simply… refused to obey.

A memory stirred. During joint operations in the Segmentum Obscurus, he had overheard Imperial Navy officers whispering tales of ships so ancient or so symbolic that their machine achieved self-awareness. The Adeptus Mechanicus called it the “Machine Spirit.” At times, such entities defied protocol, acting with a will that could not be explained.

But the Path of Glory was not an ancient vessel. It was young by Imperial standards, yet it bore the weight of Talon’s history. It had been the first true warship forged in the orbital shipyards during the Enlightening Wars of Talon, when the Sector had torn itself free from the tyranny of feudal warlords. On its maiden voyage it had slain three traitor vessels, reclaimed Talon II’s orbit, and carried the cry of victory back to the hive-cities. It was not merely steel and void-drives; it was a symbol, the banner of Talon’s defiance.

And Sain knew his ship was not like others. The crew whispered of battle hymns echoing sometimes unbidden through the vox at night, of phantoms of grizzled veterans in Talon armor silently keeping watch upon the decks.

At first, Sain had dismissed these as fatigue-born hallucinations. But as one of the younger captains, he had been fully raised in Talon’s new elite academies, where knowledge of the Warp was not shrouded in cultish dogma but taught as dangerous truth.

He knew the Warp to be shaped by will, by the tides of collective thought and dream. His tutors had spoken openly of psychology, of how humanity’s own fears and desires bled into that immaterium. The Warp was no unknowable divinity. It was the reflection of mankind’s mind, its greatest enemy because it was itself, stripped of restraint.

Thus, it was decreed on Talon: nothing of the Warp was to be touched, no relic, no artifact, no tome. Not bargained with, not worshipped, not studied beyond the barest precautions. It was to be resisted wholly, utterly.

So he did not know the finer logic of how the Warp functioned; but perhaps Talon’s defiance, embodied in his vessel’s history, was enough. Enough to awaken something more.

“Report! Enemy battleship is almost fully inside the Gate!” a vox-officer shouted, tearing him from his thoughts.

Half of the Vengeful Spirit was already beyond the threshold. If it slipped away, it would survive to fight another day.

“Only we are close enough to stop it!” cried one of the crew.

“We can’t let their flagship escape,” another spat. “So long as it exists, their fleet endures. If they strike Cadia today, tomorrow they’ll strike Talon!”

The crew turned to him in the shimmering command projection, their voices rising: “What are your orders, Captain?”

Sain’s jaw tightened. His voice was steady, resolute.

“Begin charging the dimensional engine.”

At once, suspicion flickered across his bridge officers’ faces. To them, it sounded like a retreat order. The chief engineer hesitated at his station.

“Charge the dimensional drive!” Sain thundered, his projected command avatar manifesting beside the engine-master, eyes burning with fury. The man snapped to obedience, initiating the process.

The command was obeyed. Energy was diverted from other systems, and the dimensional engine roared to life, building power.

The ship’s artificial command space shimmered, and the avatars of his officers assembled before him. He addressed them with cold resolve.

“We cannot annihilate the enemy fleet,” he said, voice low but unyielding. “But we can destroy their flagship. If it never returns to the battlefield, that alone may change the war.”

The crew nodded, silent, resolute.

“Do you remember what the Admiralty told us, when we were ordered to Cadia’s aid?” Sain asked.

They remembered. The Navy had not wanted to leave the safety of the Talon Sector for some immense, distant Cadian front. Yet they had been told: The fire at the Cadian Gate will spread. It will consume all of the galaxy. No world, no culture, no power can remain untouched. Should Cadia fall, Talon will stand alone in the dark, abandoned by the Imperium and the rest of humanity, prey to whatever horrors rise from the Warp.

Those words had come from the Lord of Talon himself. And no Talonian, fool or genius would ever doubt his will.

They were not fighting for Cadia. Not for Creed. Not for the vast abstraction of the Imperium. They fought for one reason only: to prevent war from consuming their hard-won peace.

Sain’s voice rose like a blade drawn from its sheath, “We will destroy their flagship. Perhaps the enemy will still bring war to Talon. Perhaps their filth will once more foul our stars. But their flagship, their symbol of command will never set foot in the Talon Sector.”

The words struck deep. The crew’s resolve hardened.

“Set the dimensional translation coordinates… directly into the enemy flagship,” Sain commanded.

The helm officers obeyed without hesitation, locking coordinates onto the Vengeful Spirit.

“Activate the self-destruct protocol. Delay: three seconds after translation.”

Before his words were finished, a hololithic display pulsed before him. It seemed the Path of Glory’s machine-spirit, whether ghost, memory, or something born from Talon’s defiance, had already initiated the self-destruct sequence.

The engines thundered. Reality split, energy screaming as reality folded. The Path of Glory’s vanished into the dimensional rift.

Inside the shifting unreality, Sain and his crew’s vision dissolved into lines of light. They knew what would come next. When those lines resolved back into color, the Path of Glory would emerge within the Vengeful Spirit itself, and then obliteration would follow.

Sain raised his voice, his final oath echoing across every deck and corridor:

“For the Lord of Talon! For the Enlightening of the Fifty-Five Worlds of Talon!”

Voices joined him, thousands across the ship. The gunnery crews shouted through gritted teeth, the medicae sang as they tended the last wounded, the engine-crew cried out over the thrum of engines, every voice rising into one final chorus of defiance.

With a roar from Sain, the Path of Glory tore back into reality, embedding itself within the hull of the Vengeful Spirit.

There was no time for the enemy to react. The flagship’s bridge crew had barely begun to celebrate their entry into the safety of the Warp when a Talon warship appeared inside their guts.

And then the world became fire that consumed them all.