The range of any heavy weapon aboard the Hope-class Warships was more than twice that of the Chaos and Ork fleets. To defeat the Hope-class Warships, they had to close in, while the Hope-class Warships merely needed to adjust their engine output and slowly withdraw to counter this tactic.
The Chaos and Ork fleets could see no hope of victory across the vast distance of destruction, and even turning around to flee could not change their fate of annihilation.
The only thing that gave the expeditionary fleet trouble was the countless floating objects spewed out by the Degraded Void Station. The expeditionary fleet was highly elite, but it was outnumbered. Its short-range anti-air firepower could not stop every floating object, and some ships were even parasitized by them.
Fortunately, the expeditionary vessels were clean and orderly inside, lacking the conditions to breed all manner of monstrosities. This made their internal defenses exceptionally tight, and they eliminated the invading Degraded Ones without any real danger.
Jaghatai Khan had also devised a solution to the expeditionary fleet's lack of numbers: move closer to the surviving Imperial fleet and have them provide close-range fire support for the expeditionary vessels.
Jaghatai Khan's voice reached the Imperial fleet, where they were holding a high-level emergency meeting. At the heart of that meeting was the ancient elder held in immense esteem by the Space Wolves—Bjorn.
"All Imperial forces are to remain where they are. We will move toward you."
Jaghatai Khan's transmission contained only that brief sentence, yet the matter-of-fact certainty within it left the assembled Space Marines unable to find fault with it. The Inquisitors, renowned for their suspicion, wore dark expressions as they fiercely resisted the inexplicable urge to obey rising within them. Some of the fanatical Canonesses even flushed bright red after hearing