The Imperium, standing ready for battle, was the first to sound the Horn of war.
"Entire fleet, assume Battle Formation! Main Gun Batteries, lock onto the advancing enemy front! Charge Lances! Load Macro-cannons!"
The orders passed through layer upon layer of encrypted channels, becoming countless specific instructions that flowed into every "nerve" of the steel behemoths.
The vast, orderly Imperial Fleet began to move like the inner workings of a precision clock.
Battleships and cruisers slowly turned, presenting their heavy broadsides to the surging green tide. Covers slid back from countless turrets, Lance Batteries, and Missile silos, revealing launch ports that gleamed with a deadly cold light.
Escort frigates and destroyers prowled like agile hounds through the gaps between the capital ships and along their flanks, forming a three-dimensional web of crossfire and interception screens.
Void Shield Generators resonated with a low hum, their energy barriers shimmering like ripples across the ships' hulls.
"Targets have entered optimal range!"
"Fire!"
In an instant, tens of thousands of searing white, azure, and golden-red beams of destruction erupted from the towering hulls of the Imperial Fleet!
These were Lances. Their dazzling beams tore through the icy void in perfectly straight, unadorned trajectories, like a volley from the Imperialis Militia's Lasgun ranks magnified to a stellar scale. Bearing an utterly pure will to destroy, they stabbed straight into the oncoming mass of Ork ships, packed so densely that they almost blotted out the Sea of Stars!
"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!!!"
In the soundless cosmos, the light of explosions took the place of noise, blooming across observation screens and retinas in one blinding flower of death after another.
Every Ork ship struck directly by a Lance, from crude ramming craft to somewhat larger ramshackle cruisers, had its relatively flimsy armor vaporized in an instant