The Beast Arises полностью

At the other end of the scale were the four battleships. Like the Colossus each was a fortress teeming with a crew of thousands, several miles long and laden with enough weaponry to raze cities and lay waste to continents. Colossus was not suited to the main line of battle, hence the flagship’s position with the other carrier assets at the heart of the fleet. Kulik’s role, along with the cruisers Majestic, Knightly Endeavour and Lasutia, was to provide fighter and bomber support for the rest of the fleet. From this position, Admiral Price would also be able to monitor the progress of the battle and make adjustments to the plan as required.

The massive Ascension-class battleship Honourable Destruction was leading the port line under the command of Captain Tiagus, while the Unfriendly Encounter and Bloodhawk, two Retribution-class vessels, formed the point of the starboard flotilla.

Behind the behemoths came an assortment of grand cruisers and cruisers, arranged as per the orders of Admiral Price to deliver a spread of torpedoes, weapons battery fire, lance shots and some minimal launch capacity.

Their plasma engines leaving trails across the firmament, the two lines of ships forged through the void towards the glittering spread of the ork-held asteroid belt. There were tens of thousands of individual asteroids in the field, millions probably, scattered across thousands of cubic miles. Many were chunks of ice no larger than fists — but on the larger and more stable asteroids the orks had built fortresses equipped with missile batteries, energy weapons and strange warp-powered displacement cannons. Added to this were the so-called rock forts — large asteroids fitted with engines and shields, turning them into crude starships.

More conventional ork vessels were loitering within the cover of the debris field too — blunt, gun-heavy raiders and larger attack ships the equivalent in strength to cruisers. For the moment they were trying to hide, lying dormant until the lead elements of the fleet came into range. However, whatever advances the orks had made in their gravity and warp technology, their discipline and radiation shielding had not improved with them. Flares of energy and sensor bursts constantly betrayed the orks’ positions to the more sophisticated scanning arrays of the Colossus. This information was relayed to the rest of the fleet as they continued to close with the enemy.

Thirty-seven ships of the line in total. Thirty-seven capital ships gathered in one place for a single purpose — to crush the ork outer defences. Along with the two dozen escort vessels that swarmed around them, these ships would have been enough to stir Kulik’s heart and fire his resolve. The fact that they were only a third of the Imperial Navy forces in the system almost made him burst with pride and excitement.

Sweeping on an arc a few hundred thousand miles in-system of the rimward fleet was Lansung’s immediate command — the expedition force of the Battlefleet Solar. There were no less than seven battleships among the eighteen capital ships in the taskforce: enough firepower to wipe out entire civilisations. Lansung’s ships would interpose between the rimward flotilla and the hundred or more ork ships in close vicinity to the attack moon in orbit around the sixth world.

Further out towards the system edge, a hundred thousand miles from the Colossus, Commodore Semmes was leading the remains of the Segmentum Solar coreward fleet. Under the tentative command of Acharya the fleet had lost nearly a third of its strength to repeated ork attacks, although it was still roughly equal to the rimward fleet in raw numbers. More damning had been the sapping of morale, Kulik was sure. He knew Raphael Semmes by reputation, and, although another of Lansung’s favourites, the commodore certainly was regarded as bolder and more decisive than Acharya. At the moment his flagship, the Torrent-class battleship Widow’s Grief, was leading the coreward fleet on a charge to unite with Price’s command. The two fleets would intersect the asteroid field from opposite directions roughly fifty thousand miles apart. At that stage the coreward fleet would come about alongside the rimward fleet and together at last they would turn and rendezvous with Lansung in preparation for the next phase of the attack.