"The enemy offensive is weakening! All ships, maintain formation, extend your fire, and drive off the remaining hostiles!"
Rockefeller, Chapter Master of the First Word Bearers Chapter, stood on the towering Bridge of the battleship Law of Faith. His steady voice carried throughout the fleet over the encrypted command link.
On the enormous tactical Holographic Star Chart before him, the crimson points representing the Second Legion's traitor fleet receded like an ebbing tide from Saar City's orbital region, shrinking and fading, leaving swathes of grey markers denoting wreckage and silent ships.
Communications with Angron remained a wash of shrill static. The connection had been lost completely.
But the state of the battlefield did not lie.
The traitors were disengaging. Whatever their original plan had been, the main Word Bearers fleet's stubborn resistance and the unexpected stalemate on the ground had clearly forced them to change their minds.
The scales of victory were tipping ponderously, slowly, toward the loyalists.
Though the cost was so horrific that Rockefeller's heart clenched every time he glanced at the list of lost ships.
Yet retreat did not mean rout.
A cornered beast still fought, and a defeated army could still tear flesh from its hunters. Within the traitor fleet, some ships, grievously damaged or already committed to death, chose to cover the retreat.
They turned their bows toward the pursuing Imperial Fleet and launched desperate countercharges, buying time for their comrades to withdraw with their last volleys and whatever ramming attacks they could manage.
One Battle Barge belonging to the Second Legion had a hull riddled with holes, its armour belts torn open in multiple places. Its engines spewed erratic flames and thick smoke; it had clearly lost most of its fighting capability.
But rather than retreat with the others, it swung its battered prow