Megaera Bolas was known to be the Chief Navigator of the 82nd Expeditionary Fleet temporarily joined with the 4th Expeditionary Fleet.
Officially her position was that of a young but respected scion chosen for her merits as a Navigator and the personal selection of Galtine Ailbe, Primarch of the Second Legion.
But she did not consider herself a Navigator.
She considered herself a sword.
And she loved being a sword.
A howling blade cleaving across the arteries of an unimaginably vast beast reminding it of a sensation it had long forgotten.
Pain.
Real, lasting pain.
Scars that would outlive the stars.
As part of the blade Megaera would leave a mark on the aether that none of her kin could imagine. Her bones could be turned to dust, her name scratched out of eternity and still, the Immaterium would remember her. It would remember with pain. It would remember with fear the scars running through every level as she cut her way through.
Megaera would never deny that she was a stern woman. She did not find much worth smiling about and refused to fail live up to the standard of her ancient house.
But that thought made her smile through clenched teeth, it was worth the pain to enjoy that feeling of triumph. She was aware of how frightening a figure she struck.
On her tall throne she abandoned trivial notions of modesty and embraced her form.
The interlocked plates along her fully mechanized arms rose up to reveal a series of uplink plugs which the arms of the throne greedily thrust themselves into, the process was repeated along her neck back and thighs. Chained clamps latched onto her mechanical spine and her arms.
The miniscule cords hidden among her long platinum mane came to life and injected themselves into the mesh of the throne. Her horns hummed as the cracked and stretched to reveal the gleaming white metal beneath and extending another half-foot into the sky conducting into the focusing lenses injected into her third eye.
Her cloven hooves of steel split into thousand of stabilizing components implanting into the throne.
Over her remaining flesh hugged an integrity field better suited for protecting from capital ship bombardment than obscuring view of her form behind a veil of shifting light patterns. Protection and paying some lip service to typical morality.
She reveled in that she seemed more like a glorious god of kaleidoscopic light than a simple mutant.
She sat in the heart of the many tiers of the Avalon's bridge, outside of warp transit the throne would sit between tiers, overlooking the lesser command pools and in turn overlooked by the higher commands.
When the time came to enter the Sea again, a metallic cocoon would rise from her sides and hermetically seal her within as she sat now.
We are preparing for final breach, her beloved friend echoed in her mind. Is the previous estimate still accurate?
Adjust for a two minute, twelve second delay, she growled the thought.
Her implants served many purposes beyond giving her what some fool assassin of a rival sister had taken, when he had stripped her of her ability to walk.
She could see past the white abyss between the calm world of the fleet and the screaming abyss beyond, her eye was at the very edge of the horizon riding at the tip of the blade.
It was painful to attune to her implants like this, her eye was strained by the strength of the projecting shell even with the energies of the Authority flowing through the altered pathways of her brain and the strengthening oculus giving her sight without compare. It was like starring at a star in its full glory, streams of tears pouring out from the strain and intermixed with soothing liquids coursing through the construct. The burning warred against the strain of catching the images of the Immaterium beyond before they burned away, making the necessary calculations through the systems of the throne which she was quickly becoming like a secondary brain and making the minute adjustments to her course.
Her burden and augmentation were both far more severe than the changes made to the others in the fleet, the Authority's protective shell required a degree of coordination between the ships that a conventional fleet would have no need for. It was her burden to reconcile the information from every ship and Navigator and adjust their needs to those of the fleet.
She reveled in it regardless.
Granted, that particular journey and those that the fleet would face in years to come were a newer challenge than the initial travels of the Avalon.
They had sacrificed much of their speed to stretch the shell in order to engulf the entirety of the 4th fleet as well as their own.
It required interacting with the pesky hand-typed messages from the unaugmented navigators a number of additional factors, impossible were the task not made easier by the decreased speed of their transit.
She forced her mouth open just enough to lick her lips in anticipation, she would enjoy what came next more.
Do restrain yourself, Mendicant Onyx echoed within the depths of her ward-etched skull. She could sense the Machine Spirit's own mounting bloodlust in that thought.
They had been summoned by a carrion call, the death screams of an exploration vessel whose crime had been declaration of the truth.
There would be no guilt or hesitation behind what came next.
Their slaughter would be just, but it would be a slaughter.
Thirty seconds to breach, she called out as her mouth began to echo out her message into the rest of the Second Legion vessels and felt them reverberate beyond her cocoon.
"We ask for your leave," She asked the master of the Second as the sunburst over her collarbone glimmered. She felt the force of the Mendicant weaving itself into her mind, digital thought cycled into psychic thread sheathed in the oblivion of Authority. Her question was matched by the dour voice of Dinadar as the words of every Navigator was echoed by dozens of Sect-masters and Oathmasters.
The satisfaction echoed in her gut as the deep, cold words echoed back.
"We are of Onyx," she growled out the words in short, biting movements as the ships shield began to heave its way into reality. "We are the wrath of Calengwag given wings to soar across the stars, may our claws hook into their bones, may our fangs puncture their hearts. You will learn to fear us and you will carry that fear into the Void beneath the world."
The shield shattered to reveal the world beyond while she felt the weapons and shields of every warship in the fleet humming to life. She could feel the thrumming of the Sixteenth preparing their forces like wolves sharpening their fangs while looking for supple flesh to sink into, the esoteric chanting of the Mechanicum warships rousing the interest of long sleeping spirits and convincing them to begrudgingly raise their ancient power.
Before them was a sphere of green and blue, shining light-clusters of cities rising into rings of steel like silver-chased egg. Evaluatory data superimposed itself on their eyes which danced over the thin-strips of bio-technological mesh which sheathed her eyes, evaluating the properties of the defenses and rising warships before they could even properly muster and learn that their treachery would not go unanswered.
Their technology is not unlike ours, Megaera surmised with a disappointed frown. I had hoped for something more exciting. Less treacherous as well.
You dislike engaging a foe of similar fleet design? The Machine Spirit asked. I could rely on external data aloneā¦
Never! She howled internally as her protective cocoon fell away and gave her sight of the bridge. I will not step away from our fleet's maiden battle.
She could hear the Ship-Master bellowing order from his frown but she paid him little mind, the same links ran along his upper-back. She could feel what the man wanted as much as what Onyx desired.
They were all part of the same blade, the blade of the Second. That blade was the Onyx Guild, the Astartes, Navigator, Ship-Master and Spirit alike were merely extensions of a single murderous will.
The fleet splintered into its distinctive groups moved in answer to the commands of a thousand masters.
That was their way.
The Second in dozens of formations as the psychic strain of hosting the Mendicant dominating her and her brothers and sisters across the fleet.
The Avalon's engines roared forwards as a wall of torpedoes beyond count launched from the Avalon and the other ships of the Legion.
The enemy ships attempted to move away from the torpedoes only to scream moments later as the plasma volleys and macro-lasers of the Second cut into those that evaded into the predicted routes.
Those were trace damages but enough for the greatest strength of the Second to hum to life as Megaera enacted her plan and the world became white for an instant before the void before them became the image of a burning ship beneath them.
In a heartbeat the fleet had become dozens of white flashes, disappearing and reappearing within mere miles of the enemy ships before unleashing fearsome blasts from Nova Canons into their engines even while their power cores redirected to their rear thrusters and forward shields.
Megaera exalted in the rumbling of the ship as the Avalon drove through a dreadnought while another Battle Barge burst through the a different segment, perfectly passing each other without concern as the calculated strikes prevented any such risk.
She was barely aware of the battle raging between their allies and the bulk of the enemy as the ships bit through the heaviest of the warships like the bite of a great beast.
The hesitation only lasted for another moment before the they burst out and into existence again.
She paid little heed to the blood trickling from her nose at the strain, it was a predicted consequence of pitched battle.
The men and women shouted orders as the fleet shot more swarms of torpedoes forwards before diving forward again.
She heard reports of their allies cutting a bloody swath through the lesser vessels of the foe even while reports of more enemy arrivals came about at system's edge.
It was pathetic of them, compared to the strain of guiding the fleet through the Authority it was trivial to emerge into the proximity of a planet.
They would arrive to the ruined corpses of their allies and the waiting maw of the imperial fleet.
Foolish.
So revoltingly cowardly.
Pocket vectors calculated, She supplied to Onyx.
Dispersing along predicted entry paths, Onyx idly primed the weapon trajectories of the auxiliary weapon systems and began to fire off volleys of macro-cannon shots towards the predicted points. Their speed slowed to arrive just as the ships were emerging from the Immaterium.
The fleet kicked into its final stage as their last jump saw them over the rings and firing off hundreds and thousands of boarding torpedoes into the rings along predicted routes as the Onyx Guild unleashed its Astartes unto the poor creatures beneath them.
An hour into the fight, the combined fleets had cleaved through the enemy force.
Within three hours the rings' command points were held by the Onyx.
Within six the armies of Fleet were descending on the world below as the Expeditionary Fleet turned to prepare for the relief forces which would eventually arrive.
Megaera was flush with battlelust at that point.
Words were inadequate the relief as she took a breath and allowed the sweat to be wiped from her brows by one of her retainers while another held a container of water so that she could sip it through a straw.
I suspect that we have dealt with the bulk of their forces already, Onyx commented. This was quite the polity I suspect, the defensive fleet would not have been able to be maintained by an fewer than a dozen worlds assuming that this one was irregularly under-developed.
Megaera nodded, That is disappointing.
And that is bravado, the spirit lectured while Megaera rolled her eyes.
