Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 178: The Great War Begins (Thanks to Boss CodeVision for the Alliance!!)

"If they want it, let them come and take it."

Enemy bomber wings had strafed the Spear of Fearlessness twice, both runs inflicting devastating damage. The bridge was now a smoking ruin, and half the command officers lay dead.

Cogitator arrays were melting, belching thick black smoke.

The hissing screech of escaping atmosphere periodically erupted from the punctured bulkheads. Servitors remained shackled to their stations by a tangle of cables, their fluids and blood pooling thick upon the decking.

"Three targets closing fast."

A Tech-Priest, drenched in blood, gripped the primary control console as a corpse slumped over beside him.

"Open fire on all targets."

Sporting a fresh, jagged gash across his forehead and looking as though he had been thrown down a flight of stairs, Mydias leaned heavily against the bridge railing, bellowing curses through an augmitter to overpower the shrieking klaxons.

The ship's hull shuddered violently once more as it returned fire.

He had already issued the order to abandon ship, but he refused to leave until the very bitter end.The Spear of Fearlessness positioned itself squarely in the path of the pursuing Ork armada, flanked by the final three surviving allied vessels—against the oncoming storm, they were as fragile as autumn leaves.

Merely half an hour prior, he had exploited the Orks' inherent greed, first ordering the fleet to reduce their rate of fire to lure the enemy closer. Then, just before the enemy warships could launch their boarding actions, he had emptied the ship's entire torpedo payload in one staggering volley.

Their battle results had been surprisingly solid; at least five greenskin capital ships had vanished into thin air amidst the overwhelming torpedo bombardment.

But that had glaringly enraged the commander of the Ork armada.

"Two solid impacts recorded."

The First Officer's voice remained defiant.

"But two more targets are entering extreme close range. Auspex signatures indicate a high probability of boarding craft."

"Focus all fire on one of them!"

Mydias looked back at the hololithic projection of the battlespace. Under the intense interference of surging energy fields, the runic identifiers were blurring.

He watched helplessly as the Orks reduced a ship attempting warp translation into blazing debris, and witnessed another turn to fight, only to be shredded the moment it opened fire.

The threat rune representing the Grounded was swelling ominously in his vision.

"Find a way to establish a link with Captain Michel."

The green-eyed Vox-Officer was bleeding profusely, half his face masked in crimson, but he didn't even pause to wipe it away, simply nodding and returning to his duty.

Suddenly, the warship lurched violently again.

"Void shields have failed completely! Recalibration impossible!"

"We have a link, my lord!"

The Vox-Officer shouted. Mydias immediately established the connection, but the incoming audio was heavily distorted by static.

Michel was also commanding a Dauntless-class cruiser, though his ship was younger than the Spear of Fearlessness. The two men had graduated from the Naval Schola Progenium together; they were both comrades-in-arms and lifelong friends.

"Mydias!"

Michel's voice was practically a scream. Mydias could hear a horrific grating noise, like hail hammering against sheet metal—the unmistakable sound of solid slugs impacting armor.

"The enemy has boarded our ship!"

Another deafening crash echoed, this time sounding like a sledgehammer shattering a great bell.

Mydias's heart seized. He roared into the vox:

"Abandon ship immediately! Evacuate!"

"Evacuate? Where the hell are we supposed to evacuate to?"

Michel let out a low, grim chuckle. Mydias glanced at the hololithic display.

"I'm not running, brother. I'm going to push forward and butcher as many of these xenos bastards as I can."

In Mydias's memory, Michel had always been somewhat reckless, sometimes speaking without thinking.

But in that moment, he still managed a smile.

"Then good hunting, my friend."

A long pause stretched out, answered only by the drumming of gunfire against armor.

"Same to you, Mydias. I'll see you beneath the Emperor's Golden Throne."

The muffled reply finally came, followed immediately by the link severing.

Suddenly, a massive impact rocked the Spear of Fearlessness, throwing Mydias to the deck.

Several armored viewports shattered, sending a cyclone of glass and twisted metal tearing through the bridge alongside the howling shriek of venting atmosphere.

The battered corpses of men and women lay everywhere, droplets of blood suspended in the roaring wind.

As the oxygen rapidly depleted, the bridge klaxons began screaming warnings of critical atmospheric pressure and oxygen loss.

"Main engine failure! Enemy boarding parties have secured the launch bays."

"Bring the port broadside to bear on the enemy."

Mydias hauled himself up and wiped a streak of blood from his eyes, staining his entire glove crimson in the process.

"Arm all remaining personnel. Form a defensive line just outside the starboard flank; the armor there is still holding."

"My lord, what about you?"

"I'm staying right here."

Several smaller greenskin warships locked into a fatal embrace of steel and fire with the Spear of Fearlessness. Xenos hordes flooded into the hull's interior, plunging into desperate melee with the armed crew.

But they were unaware that every functional weapon battery remaining on the Spear of Fearlessness was now tracking the incoming tide of Ork vessels.

At point-blank range, lance batteries and plasma projectors shattered void shields, tore through crude armor, and gutted greenskin boarding craft, reducing several of them to tumbling scrap.

But the rest were entirely unphased, crashing against the outer hull of the Spear of Fearlessness like a tidal wave without a second's hesitation, vomiting their lethal cargo deep into the ship's guts.

Mydias couldn't see the specific details, but he could feel his ship trembling as the greenskins pushed deeper and deeper inward.

Though the defensive lines were fragmented, they were held with unyielding, fanatical resolve.

Gun-servitors locked down every major intersection, establishing kill-zones with overwhelming storms of bolter fire.

Human ratings fought back with combat shotguns and lasguns, while a reserve force of labor thralls remained ready to be thrown into the most desperate breaches.

It was a blisteringly brutal fight. Everyone who had chosen to stay, from the lowliest deckhand to the highest-ranking officer, understood exactly what was expected of them.

Believing they were facing naught but stubborn resistance, the Orks swore to grind the defenders into paste, continually throwing more Boyz into the meat grinder.

The Spear of Fearlessness was dying, but Mydias was absolutely determined to make the enemy understand that they would pay a butcher's bill for her death.

"Are you ready?"

He looked toward the Tech-Priest. The cyborg hauled himself up from a console overflowing with blood and nodded.

"Liturgies of Preparation are complete."

"Thank you."

Those simple words were entirely insufficient to express his profound respect, but the Tech-Priest offered no verbal reply. He merely pressed his hands to the cog-amulet resting upon his chest, bowing his head.

He was offering his final prayer.

Mydias nodded and activated the ship-wide vox-caster; the crippled comms-array would carry his final words to whatever living souls remained.

At that exact moment, on the tactical display, Michel's ship blossomed into a blinding miniature sun, dragging an Ork warship several times its size down into the void with it.

"This is Mydias."

His voice echoed through the vox, shockingly calm.

Mydias paused, wanting to say more, but he truly didn't know what else needed to be said.

"May the Emperor's will be done."

With those final words, he severed the link. He remained silent for exactly one second before issuing his very last command to the Tech-Priest.

"Now!"

Five seconds later, the dying Tech-Priest executed his final duty.

Mydias remembered that this man had never once questioned a single order, displaying neither hesitation nor excitement. For every single one of them, he felt nothing but overwhelming admiration.

The plasma reactors of the Spear of Fearlessness began to undergo catastrophic overload.

For a split second, it maintained its structural integrity, floating silently in the pitch-black void, covered from bow to stern like a bloated tick by Ork boarding craft.

A heartbeat later, an earth-shattering detonation vaporized everyone left inside the ship, along with their Ork enemies!

Torrents of hyper-accelerated plasma erupted from the sun-hot core, washing over the surrounding sector. Colossal chunks of armor plating were hurled outwards on the shockwave, smashing into the nearby Ork capital ships, collapsing their defensive fields, blinding their auspex arrays, and burning out their rangefinders, leaving them deaf and blind.

Regardless of what happened next, it seemed this minor skirmish was finally over—

"We are too late..."