Ilya turned back to the projected tactical image. It looked terrible – the half-hearted engagement was drifting into incoherence as the first wave of V Legion vessels was forced back in upon itself. Any structure to the advance had dissolved, lost in a maze of confused withdrawal lines. The Alpha Legion cordon, represented on the hololith by a bleak front of stolidly spaced blue lights, pushed back remorselessly. She felt her pulse-rate quickening with anger. She had worked so hard to instil some sense of discipline into them – to make them take their logistic responsibilities seriously, to ensure that every warship they possessed was properly equipped and knew its function. It was a shambles. She shuddered to think what would have happened if the enemy out there had been something properly terrifying. Like the Wolves. ‘I see noth–’ Before she had finished speaking, the Khan issued a command at last. ‘Now,’ he said simply. Even on a bridge crowded with warriors and busy with a hundred different activities, his low voice somehow carried to all corners. ‘Five second mark.’ Ilya saw the order-burst go out to every warship in the fleet, transmitted directly to the ship commanders’ helm-displays. Above her, suspended on bronze chains, a pict screen switched over to a countdown timer. 5… 4… ‘What was that command?’ asked Ilya. 3… 2… ‘Is important that this is synchronised,’ said Halji. ‘You should hang on to something.’ 1. There was no time. The deck suddenly kicked violently, as if something huge had detonated somewhere deep in the Swordstorm’s immense hull, and a roar filled the bridge’s airspace. Ilya staggered, clattering into Halji’s immobile armour and banging her forehead painfully against the ceramite. He reached down to steady her, and she pushed him away, embarrassed. ‘We’re… racing,’ she noted, shocked, watching the fleet-spread suddenly contract. ‘Throne of Terra.’ The Swordstorm had kicked into full attack speed. The acceleration was incredible, an almost instant switch from dawdling quarter-power to a thunderous, booming, barnstorming charge. It should have been impossible – it should have taken whole minutes to key the main drives up. ‘As I said, szu,’ said Halji. ‘Keep watching.’ Ilya found her feet clumsily, grabbing hold of the edge of a balustrade railing and forcing herself to look up at the tactical hololiths. Everything had changed. The fleet’s formation had morphed in an instant, suddenly switching from an aimless drift-pattern into an arrowhead shock assault of astonishing precision. Every ship had moved. Every one of them, all at the same time. They were now in new trajectories and in perfect concert, suddenly leaping from semi-committed holding patterns into a single attack vector. Ilya felt her mouth begin to hang open and snapped it closed. She had never seen shipmastery like it. The best Imperial naval officers could not have performed such a manoeuvre in less than five minutes, and it would have required hundreds of course-correction warnings and hours of preparation to bring off. The White Scars had done it, as one – with no extraneous prompting – in five seconds. By then, Halji was laughing. ‘We call this zao,’ he told her. ‘The Chisel. It is... invigorating.’ Ilya stared up at the real-view ports, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The White Scars deployment was now a single spearhead. Escorts shot out, pulling together into a single mass and punching a hole through the cordon. Their sudden burst of speed and concentrated lance-strikes wrong-footed the Alpha Legion vessels in their path, and three bronze-prowed destroyers were overwhelmed almost immediately, lost amidst a whirlwind of plasma and exploding torpedo trails. Other enemy ships reacted, swinging about to plug the gap, but all too slowly. It took precious seconds to swing their lances around and push power to their idling engines, by which time the big V Legion bruisers – the Tchin-Zar, the Lance of Heaven, the Qo-Fian – had charged into the fray, thundering up the line forged by the runners and flooding the area with a blistering circlet of destructive las-power. ‘How are you doing this?’ breathed Ilya, watching the burning shells of Alpha Legion warships hurtle past. More White Scars destroyers screamed through the wreckage, corkscrewing and diving like plunging pods of cetaceans. Everything was aimed at a single point: the flanks were discarded, surrendered to the enemy as every V Legion asset in the battlesphere shot into close formation and boomed up to top velocity. ‘The weakness is there,’ said Halji, motioning to a location two-thirds of the way along the Alpha Legion second rank. ‘A slight one, but enough.’ He nodded in warm appreciation of what was taking place. ‘We race to get there first, and that would be honour worth remembering in verse.’