A/N: I'm still alive. Just very, very busy. Anyways, here we go!
Disclaimer: In this particular reality, I do not own Warhammer 40k or Code Geass.
Chapter Three: Flight of the Damocles
Black Knights Destroyer Avalon
Seventy-Two Hours From Holy Terra
The Avalon was one of the few ships in the Black Knights fleet to have an Orbital Planetary Assault Wing permanently assigned to it. The destroyer was small and nimble, its low mass allowing it to enter and exit the Warp with little difficulty, while still being large enough to operate independently from the main fleet for extended periods of time. Ships such as the Avalon nearly always made up the first wave of any Black Knights campaign, quickly dispatching enemy patrols and depositing troops onto the ground while the larger and more powerful capital ship were still en route.
The Avalon gave off a sickly green glow as it sped towards Holy Terra, courtesy of recent Warp drive upgrades. While its FLEIJA volleys had quite handily blown the Scythe-class harvest ship to pieces over Deneb, enough of the ship survived for the ground forces to recover several fragments of its inertialess drive. Their best scientists could extract nothing but the most basic operating principles from the fragments, but even that proved enough to make the already-fast vessel even faster. In just the last twenty-four hours, the Avalon had covered more distance than it previously could have in a week and could execute jumps with even an even greater degree of safety and precision.
Even then, the trip would take nearly a week, and the crew was determined to make the most out of it. Their days were spent in endless drills, honing their skills and reactions. Being able to put a volley of FLEIJA warheads on target five minutes after exiting the Warp was no longer good enough: they would need to get it down to three and a half. The Imperial Twilight, as many of the crew had taken to calling the campaign, would undoubtedly prove to be the toughest campaign the Black Knights had faced in millennia. Chaos ships weren't as advanced or as powerful as Necron designs, but their crews, undoubtedly motivated by the promises of endless power and blessings from their dark gods, would not hesitate to use their ships as battering rams when their weapons proved ineffective. The Avalon was a tough ship, but colliding with several kilometers of adamantium could still hurt it severely.
If the crew of the Avalon was nervous, though, the OPAW unit stationed aboard was even more so. OPAW units were kept small to facilitate rapid response times, but that also meant that they were almost always outnumbered by their enemies. The few times they had faced the forces of Chaos, they had fought against overambitious warlords with no idea of what they were facing. This time, they were up against the near-infinite hordes of the Despoiler. The first twenty-four hours after landing would determine the fate of the Imperium, and every minute had to count. The Avalon had an entire deck dedicated to the OPAW unit, and the soldiers wasted no time in converting a bulk of it into a battlefield.
The sight of an entire Orbital Planetary Assault Wing conducting combat maneuvers on the disembarkation deck was impressive, to say the least. Even the fact that their hadron carbines were dialed down to the level of oversized laser pointers, as to avoid damaging the Avalon or each other, did nothing to diminish the effect. Cherry-red bolts crisscrossed the cavernous chamber as the members of the 5th OPAW honed their skills against one another. Nobody had any idea exactly what to expect when they arrived at Terra except for chaotic, close-quarters combat. Crates were strategically stacked all around the chamber to simulate the tight confines of an Imperial hive city. The lights were dimmed, to simulate low-visibility and night conditions.
The air waves were saturated with chatter that would prove bewildering to the outsider, consisting almost entirely of abbreviations and alphanumerical designations. Team cohesion was absolutely critical in the small OPAW units, and getting information quickly to where it is needed comprised a huge part of that. The gibberish exchanged between the OPAW troopers was designed to be as information-dense as possible, saving precious seconds by eliminating extraneous parts of speech.
The OPAW officers overseeing the exercise were suitable impressed, seeing all the destructive potential coiled within an OPAW trooper let loose. They held no illusions of an easy victory, however. No matter how well the operation went, many of the men and women firing at once another down below would return to the fleet in body bags.
Imperial Battleship Glorious
Outskirts of Terra System
The Inquisitor watched from the bridge of the Glorious as a nearby Luna-class cruiser took one hit too many. The ship went dark, spinning through space for a second before its plasma reactors overloaded. A new star was born in the midst of Battle Fleet Ultima, before quickly burning out and dissipating. The Navy could always transfer some personnel from the Emperor's Vengeance and recruit some hivers from Terra or Mars to make up the difference, but the ship itself… Part of him winced at the amount of technology lost: that particular cruiser was easily a thousand years old, and built with techniques and materials long since lost to the Mechanicum.
The battle fleet was making an admirable show of itself, holding out despite the enormous odds against them. Along with the Ultramarines chapter fleet, they only numbered seventy-five ships in total. The enemy vanguard consisted of twice that amount, many built with a technology base superior to the one currently possessed by the Imperium, and the Navigator had detected a much larger fleet, perhaps as many as a thousand ships, behind it. There were few doubts that an even larger main fleet was just behind, perhaps even under the leadership of the Despoiler himself. The Inquisitor muttered a prayer to the Emperor as he contemplated the situation.
He watched as a Dominator-class cruiser fired its Nova Cannon into the thick of the enemy fleet, blowing one Chaos vessel clean in half and ripping a huge chunk out of another's stern. It proceeded at flanking speed, quickly imposing itself between two Chaos cruisers and unleashed a brutal broadside with its short-ranged plasma batteries. The Chaos weapons batteries peppered its hull as one of the cruisers spun away, gaping holes torn into its left flank. An adjacent frigate attempted evasive action, but was just a moment too slow, the out-of-control hulk slicing it clean in half. The enemy second cruiser lasted a little longer, but it was clear that the Imperial vessel had taken a few good hits itself. Its return fire was steadily slacking off, and an adjacent ship rushed to assist the besieged Dominator.
A squadron of Chaos destroyers swooped in from the upper plane, emptying their forward torpedo batteries into the rapidly-failing ship as the cruiser it was dueling spun away, leaking atmosphere. The outdated Tyrant class-cruiser, a class that had fallen out of favor in the thirty-ninth millennium due to its lack of long-range firepower, that had rushed to assist the Dominator arrived just a moment too late. Its plasma batteries managed to destroy two of the Chaos destroyers, and disable a third, before the ship was knock off-course by debris from the destroyed Imperial cruiser.
All throughout the confused jumble of ships and attack craft and debris, the Inquisitor could make out the occasional flashes of explosions. Several ships had pulled up alongside one another, probably teleporting troops onto the other ship in hopes of finishing it off. He could see several pinpricks of light as a trio of light cruisers made an ill-fated charge at the Desolator-class battleship. None of them even got close before the enemy ship's defensive guns ripped them to shreds. The few torpedoes they were able to offload beforehand did little more than annoy the monster.
A fast-moving streak of light caught the Inquisitor's attention. Nothing the Imperium currently possessed, or at least anything he knew of, moved that quickly. The crew of the Glorious seemed to have noticed the object as well, as he could feel the slight rumble in the deck plates as the Oberon-class battleship swung its massive hull around to greet the new threat. He could sense as the captain's voice took on an undertone of panic as the gunnery station reported the object moving far too quickly for the logic engines to calculate a firing solution. Five unsuccessful attempts later, the captain ordered the gunnery crews to simply saturate the area with weapons fire, in hopes of hitting the thing.
Damocles (Design Unknown)
Fifteen Minutes from Battle Fleet Ultima
The Damocles continued on its course, steadily counting down the seconds until it would be in firing range. All the while, it performed damage checks on itself: the time it had spent submerged in the atmosphere of Saturn had not been kind. Most of its vital systems were intact, and absence of a crew allowed for the diverting of power from life support to other systems. The ship wasn't sure what reactivated it, but it knew its mission. Humanity was under siege, and it needed to buy time. Time for what, it didn't know.
The battle at the edge of the system was intense enough that the Damocles could sense it from the orbit of Saturn via energy signatures. None of the signatures matched up with the data in its computers, and the IFF signals were valid, but absent from its registry. How long had it slept? Its chronometers had been one of the first systems to be knocked out of commission, though from the positions of the stars, it could extrapolate that something to the order of twenty thousand years had passed. Twenty thousand years, and some of the designs seemed to be of a lower level of technology than its time.
One of the ships in the distance gradually swung around, exposing one of its broad flanks to the Damocles. The ship continued on its course, the other ship having taken no aggressive action yet. Even then, the Damocles began to calculate a firing solution: from that sort of distance, even hitting a target several kilometers across was a chore. When the ship started firing, the Damocles began to assess the threat. Most of the weapons fire seemed to be defensive in nature, mostly mass drivers and lasers, and of too short a range to hit the Damocles from that sort of distance. A sensor echo indicated large, hollow spaces inside the other ship, marking it as possibly a fighter carrier type.
The Damocles regarded the other ship with indifference. From that sort of distance, its weapons batteries had little hope of hitting a target as small as the Damocles. The indifference faded away somewhat when the other ship opened up with what appeared to be its primary batteries: high-powered beam weapons that the Damocles hardly avoided. Even with the vast gulf in technology—the Damocles could have easily made such a shot with its own weapons—there was no doubt that a few solid hits from those beams could damage the Damocles.
The distance to the enemy fleet was rapidly closing, as power surged through the Damocles' weapons, bringing ancient technologies never seen since the Dark Age of Technology humming to life. The battle had evolved into a chaotic jumble of ships, but the battle lines were still quite clearly drawn. Had any living crewmembers been aboard, they would have heard the subtle whirring sound as the Damocles built up its plasma stores, which would be fired out at the enemy in long streams. There was a clanking sound on some of the forward compartments, as breacher torpedoes were hoisted into firing tubes.
The Damocles decelerated at a pace that would have sent any crewmembers flying out of their seats. The great streams of plasma being poured into the engines reduced in volume, enough to keep the ship at combat velocities. The slow-down bought it time to identify and analyze its targets.
The first thing the Inquisitor noticed was that the rapidly-approaching object was a ship. It had finally slowed down enough for the sensor array to get a decent image, and it was quite unlike anything he'd ever seen before. For one, it was small, maybe a third of the size of a destroyer at most. What it lacked in size, it certainly seemed to make up for in speed, as the thing had closed from outer sensor range to firing range in a matter of minutes. It flew closer and closer to the Glorious, until the Inquisitor was certain that it intended to ram them. At the last moment, the smaller ship veered away, becoming little more than a blur as it made its way towards the Chaos fleet.
The Inquisitor watched the smaller vessel as it made its doubtlessly-suicidal rush towards the Chaos fleet. The design was nothing like modern Imperial warships: part of him dared to hope that it was some lost design from the fabled Great Crusade, or even the mythical Dark Age of Technology, if such an age of wonders ever even truly existed. Even if that were true, what chance would one ship possible have against…
His train of thought cut off as he noticed the ever-present background chatter had stopped. Turning around, he quickly focused on the hololith that had captured everyone's attention. An Imperial ship was close enough to the new arrival to see it in action, and had distributed footage to the other ships in the fleet. The bridge crew of the Glorious watched as the new ship inverted itself, diving towards a traitor Armageddon-class cruiser.
The enemy cruiser put up a furious barrage of weapons fire, but the smaller ship simply moved too fast for an effective lock-on. Some lucky shots peppered the smaller vessel's shields, but to no apparent effect. The traitor vessel began some belated evasive maneuvers, but it was already far too late. Several beams lanced out from the smaller vessel, pounding its shields with long, thin streams of plasma. The Armageddon's shields flashed for a few seconds, straining to absorb the impact, before finally flickering out with the fourth hit. The fifth beam pierced the ship all the way through, and a sixth blew the ship in half.
The crew was silent as they digested what they had just seen. Whatever that new arrival was, it had just taken out a traitor cruiser in five hits, using weaponry of incomprehensible technology. The feed continued, as the smaller ship quickly twisted around, rocketing away from the wreckage of the traitor Armageddon as it fired a full spread of torpedoes at a nearby Lunar-class. That particular vessel was apparently a fresh convert to Chaos, the only markings of its new allegiance being a few sloppily-painted Khornate symbols. The torpedoes punched straight through the shields and impacted the armor directly. Several torpedoes were shot down by defensive fire, but the second spread put the ship down.
Chaos Battleship Eternal Carnage
Fifteen Minutes After the Damocles' Appearance
The Chaos Warmaster stood impassively in front of the hololith, his many thralls giving him a wide berth. It didn't take a psyker to sense the waves of pure anger and frustration emanating from him. The violence contained within his corrupted Astartes physique seemed poised to be released, and nobody wanted to be near him when it was. He had been given nearly two hundred ships, and ordered by Abaddon the Despoiler himself to clear the way for the main fleet! He'd been so close! Such paltry resistance, then a single ship arrives and ruins it all!
What was it, some sort of new Imperial design? He quickly ruled that possibility as impossible. Those dogmatic fools in the Mechanicum were too absorbed in their old ways to ever think up anything so advanced. Perhaps it was an STC artifact? But then why would the Imperium wait so long to play such a card? Nothing fit! He was snapped out of his concentration by a distinct snapping sound. Looking down, he saw handrail that had bent under his rip finally broken. A slight squeak alerted him to the thrall cowering on the ground behind him, his forehead practically touching the ground. He let the thrall sweat for a little while longer before acknowledging him.
"My-my lord. T-t-two s-sh-shi-ships w-w-were j-ju-just d-de-destroyed."
The Warmaster mulled over the news for a second, and he could see the thrall's shoulders sag in relief at the prospect of being allowed to live. No luck. With a roar of rage, he picked up the thrall by the neck, taking some satisfaction of the thrall's gasping and struggling for breath. He let the pitiful creature struggle for just a moment longer before snapping his neck with a swift motion of his fingers. He left the lifeless body fall to the ground, feeling much calmer than he was before. He turned around to the rest of the bridge crew.
"What are you doing? Get back to work!" he roared.
His crew couldn't comply fast enough. It was probably more due to his twitching towards his bolt pistol than what little loyalty his crew possessed. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied another blue triangle on the hololith winking out, no doubt due to that accursed new arrival. Whatever it was, though, it couldn't possibly take on the first invasion wave, some one thousand ships strong. Should the Warp currents be favorable, the armada would arrive within one hundred and ten hours.
Turning back towards the hololith display, he barked an attack order to the thrall at the helm before ordering the communications thrall to signal the fleet to do the same.
Imperial Battleship Glorious
Ten Hours After the Damocles' Appearance
The bridge crew of the Glorious devolved in clapping and cheering and the Inquisitor could sense that similar scenes were playing out all over the fleet. The hololith told the reason why: the swarm of red triangles was at barely half its initial size, and was currently retreating into the Warp. The captain of the Glorious shot a nervous sideways glance at the Inquisitor, unsure at what he was going to do in response to such a lack of discipline. The Inquisitor turned his head, allowing a reassuring smile to surface.
"Captain, your men have won a great victory today, and deserve a moment's celebration. The Chaos fleet is on the retreat," the Inquisitor reassured him, giving the captain a firm handshake as he did so.
Taking a sidelong glance at the hololith, he noticed the mysterious ship holding steady several kilometers from the Glorious. His eyes widened as picts from a reconnaissance squadron appeared over the sensor readout: it was pitted and scratched and faded, but he could still recognize the malformed trident painted on the ship.
He turned towards the captain once again, "I want a boarding party prepared. Until further notice, the investigation of that ship falls under the jurisdiction of the Ordos Xenos."
Damocles (Design Unknown)
Twelve Hours After Initial Appearance
The empty halls of the Damocles were suddenly lit up with teleporter flashes as a Terminator Assault Squad materialized. The ten Terminators fanned out, the hallways surprisingly wide wide enough for them to pass through without scraping the walls or ceiling. The Inquisitor aboard the Glorious had given them an emergency briefing: the malformed trident had been sighted across the galaxy recently, and the insignia's owners seemed to be fighting, and winning, multiple battles against Orks, Tyranids, and even Necrons. Needless to say, the High Lords of Terra and the Inquisition were very interested.
The ship was small, at barely a hundred meters in length, and the Assault Terminators covered very quickly. The ship's lights flickered at times, and some portions showed signs of great age, but they could still tell that the technology used to construct the ship was far superior to that of the Imperium. Logic engines of an unknown pattern drove much of the ship, and the crew could not have numbered more than a few hundred at most. The ship's design had the same clean lines as Eldar designs, but the visible signs of high technology associated with the Tau. Yet, there was a distinctly human feel to it as well.
The majority of the ship was pronounced clear of hostiles within four hours, and the Inquisitor arrived via teleportarium shortly after. Two Enginseers flanked him, accompanied by a large number of servitors. The Mechanicum would no doubt want to see what technologies could be reverse-engineered from the ship, should it prove to be an STC artifact. The Enginseers practically salivated over all the secrets such a ship might hold. If such a ship could be duplicated, they could push Chaos back into the Eye of Terror and extend the borders of the Imperium further than ever before.
The Enginseers and their respective retinues left for other parts of the ship, accompanied by the Assault Terminators, no doubt to glean technological secrets from the ship's myriad systems. The Inquisitior, however, was more interested in the bridge. The Terminator Assault Squad had given up trying to open the blast doors, and were about to use a melta bomb to breach them, when they slid open on their own. The bridge was cleanly-designed and uncluttered and brightly lit. The seats behind the consoles were large enough to comfortably seat a Custodes, but only a particularly lanky, unaugmented human could have comfortably sat in the command throne.
The details of the bridge escaped both the Inquisitor and the Assault Terminators, who were instead focused on the banners flanking the door. One had long since crumbled to dust, leaving only a dark shape on the wall to prove its existence. The other was crumbling, but the lightning bolt was unmistakable. This ship was the Damocles, the Emperor's own command ship, though lost before the Great Crusade.
Edge of the Terra System
Fifty-Four Hours Later
The exact identity of the "new" ship as none other than the Emperor's command ship was quickly and easily suppressed by the Inquisition: the official story passed it off as an STC artifact recently uncovered and restored, and those aware of its true identity were too loyal to reveal what they knew. Even if they did speak up, the fact would have been buried under preparations for the second Chaos assault. For the next six hours, the shattered remnants of the Chaos vanguard conducted hit-and-run attacks, culminating in an all-out assault on the newly-reinforced Battle Fleet Ultima. The Damocles forced its way through the enemy fleet and heavily damaged the Chaos battleship Eternal Carnage, forcing the enemy to retreat.
The Chaos objective, it seemed, was no long to break the Imperial defenses, but to destroy the Damocles. Should the deceptively-small juggernaut be destroyed, the defenders' morale would plummet, making Battle Fleet Ultima easy pickings. The Battle Fleet, once a desperate provisional arrangement, now stood between Chaos and Holy Terra, desperately buying time for Battle Fleet Solar, scattered throughout what portions of the Segmentum remained in Imperial hands, to regroup. That slim chance of survival was dashed when a much larger Chaos fleet, nearly a thousand vessels, was detected approaching the opposite side of the system. The last two days had been spent trying to move Battle Fleet Ultima across the system, and several ships had been lost when their engines overloaded from the strain.
The fleet had hardly fallen into formation when the first wave, nearly two hundred ships, dropped out of the Warp. The opening salvoes did little in the ways of damaging the other side: they served only to force the enemy out of their carefully-planned formations. The Damocles surged forward, its fearsome torpedoes and beam weapons carving a swath of destruction through the Chaos fleet. Clouds of attack craft and interceptors engaged one another as bombers attempted to carry out attack runs on the larger ships. Despite being exhausted, the crews of Battle Fleet Ultima fought ferociously, knowing that the next few hours could make all the difference: ships of the mighty Battle Fleet Solar were slowly tricking into the system, but the oldest and mightiest of Battle Fleets was so large that it would take days to account for every ship.
The outnumbered and outgunned Battle Fleet, aided by the Ultramarines chapter fleet, held the line for several hours, even gaining ground at some points. The surprise flanking maneuver by the Grey Knights chapter fleet sent morale soaring, and some dared to hope that they would not only survive, but win the battle. The arrival of the second wave of Chaos ships, an addition three hundred twenty vessels, including a trio of Desolator-class vessels accompanied by a Despoiler-class, dashed those hopes.
The masses of attack craft and weapons fire launched by the new arrivals ripped through the Imperial defenders, destroying ships left and right. The few elements of Battle Fleet Solar currently in the system raced to the scene, but even the closest elements were at least five hours away. Even the most optimistic gave Battle Fleet Ultima only thirty minutes at most with the current rate of attrition. Several ships attempted to close in and launch torpedoes in a last-ditch attempt to cripple the vessels, or engage them at extreme ranges with their lance batteries, but the volume of firepower actually striking them was negligible.
The Chaos vessels especially concentrated on the Damocles, compensating for their lack of accuracy with sheer volume of firepower. Anti-ship torpedoes nearly as long as the ship itself slammed into its shields. It sped through the Chaos fleet, going as far as ramming several vessels. Its torpedo bays nearly depleted, the Damocles switched to its beam weapons, inflicting frightening damage. Closing in on the closest Desolator, the Damocles made several high-speed attack runs, peppering the behemoth's shields with its weapons. The Chaos ships around the Desolator ironically did more damage to the ship with their weapons fire than the Damocles itself. Several well-placed beams broke the Desolator's keel, causing it to snap in half. The bow half plowed straight into the Despoiler-class, triggering a plasma reactor explosion that destroyed both ships.
The Damocles was accelerating towards the second Desolator when its formidable shields finally flickered and died. Lances and torpedoes began impacting the ship's unprotected hull, disabling subsystems and collapsing bulkheads. The ship was too far along its attack run to disengage and wait for its shields to recharge: it pumped more energy into its engines, diving towards the Desolator-class ship. As weapons fire blew away great chunks of its hull, the Damocles launched the last of its torpedoes.
Imperial Battleship Glorious
Outskirts of Terra System
The Inquisitor watched as the Damocles scored three confirmed kills: two Desolator-class vessels and one Despoiler-class. Even though the Enginseers eventually concluded that the technology was too far beyond their comprehension to reverse-engineer, the vessel had proved their trump card during the battle. The bridge crew let out a few restrained cheers at the news. Those conservative cheers turned into outright despair as the armor of the Damocles began cracking. Miniature explosions erupted all over its hull, before the vessels' reactors went critical. A tiny star was born, burned brightly for mere seconds, and then flickered out.
The final hope of Holy Terra's salvation was gone.
A/N: Sorry! No omake today! I originally wanted to do a report to the Inquisiton regarding wreckage found at Deneb, but I couldn't make it flow properly, so I scrapped it.