"Sanguinius is here?"
Lorgar, who was changing his armour in his Personal Quarters and cleaning the thick green Ork blood and the Drukhari's strange purple-black bodily fluids off himself, abruptly froze.
The news coming over the Communications Channel brought an instant flash of undisguised delight to his bronze face.
He quickly stripped off his filthy, battered dark grey Power Armour and tossed it to a waiting Servitor. Without even taking time to clean himself properly, he hurriedly wiped his face with a damp cloth, grabbed a clean, dark Casual Clothes jacket, and threw it on. Then he strode down the long corridors of the Law of Faith, almost breaking into a run as he headed for the Bridge.
By the time he stepped onto the Bridge, the vast, chaotic battle was nearing its end.
Beyond the viewports, the Imperium's warships cruised slowly through the Sea of Stars like silent, immense whales, clearing the battlefield.
Shattered Ork wreckage, burning fragments of Drukhari ships, and countless pieces of cold space debris formed the brutal price behind this victory.
Angron's War Hounds Fleet and Curze's Night Lords Fleet, like two teams of scavengers with utterly different styles but equal efficiency, were methodically clearing the area, securing valuable wreckage, and hunting down the last scattered pockets of enemy resistance.
The abandoned or captured Drukhari warships, intact or otherwise, would all be towed under heavy guard to the nearest Adeptus Mechanicus Forge World.
There, they would be dismantled, analysed, and studied. The secrets of their bizarre technology and construction would be unravelled by the Imperium's cold logic, ultimately becoming another silent string of data in its vast repositories of knowledge, or the inspiration for some new weapon.
Before the Observation Platform at the centre of the Bridge, a figure was already standing quietly in wait.