Xana Incursion - Shadow of the Angel's Wings: While the power of the three gifts was being so emptily and murderously demonstrated on Xana-Tisiphone, in the void the opposing fleets met. Unimaginable forces of destruction were unleashed as beam lances wove traceries of annihilating light across the void, waves of torpedoes slammed into thunderous barrages of counter-fire and atomic explosions rippled like dying stars across the firmament.The Imperium's battleships formed a conical wedge to protect their lethal entourage of fire ships from attack, their escorting frigates and destroyers darting madly around them to intercept any torpedo salvoes or servitor-fighters that broke through the titanic barrages of the Amphion and her sisters, some paying with their lives to carry out their bloody task, interposing their own frail hulls against the fury.Slowly, Xana II's fist of iron closed around the Loyalist fleet, and though scores of Mechanicum hunter-killers perished, torn to spiralling fragments by the macro-cannon and plasma cannonades of the Loyalists, and entire war-arks were sliced in half from stem to stern by the Amphion's prodigious giga-scale primary lances, the attacking fleet began to falter and shrink.One of the Loyalist battleships, the Dequenne's Fury, fell out of formation, a burning hulk, then soon after a second, the venerable Sceptre of Io, spiralled out of control, the beasts of steel gnawing and coiling across her hull like ravenous ghouls, Thallax Covenants and Castellax battle-automata injected like poison into the battleship's veins as the Solar Auxilia armsmen aboard fought desperately for survival to little avail.The Loyalists' defensive shield forced open, its escort screen stripped away, the fire ships themselves began to flare brightly in their death throes. Slowly, and at great cost, the Xanite Mechanicum were winning the battle: the Loyalist fleet would never reach striking distance of the bounty ships hidden in the debris belt.The weapons platforms in the murky stratosphere of Xana II had fallen silent at last, their munitions spent, as had the ground silos on Xana II, discharged in full. In the void distant, the matter was now being decided by the brutality of a close-range void battle in which they would play no part. So it was that the Mortis-XI defensive station at the heart of the debris belt's defence network began to cycle down its systems to a defensive posture, the Tech-priest chorus cyber-bonded to its control gyre reaching out with their djinn-sight to the dozens of weapons platforms they controlled, reporting status and correcting positional anomalies in their deployment caused by their now-reduced mass.Suddenly, their auguries screamed with a new hostile contact, a warship impossibly close, not beyond in the void of space, but beneath them in the thick atmosphere of Xana I. The Mortis-XI station died in an eruption of nothingness, vortex torpedoes ripping it out of reality in a squall of disintegrating wreckage.In its place a sable-black ship sliced out of the mirk, long and wicked as a blade, the near-seamless armour of its surface featureless save for a single crimson icon across its low prow, graven in the image of a winged sword.The sable ship turned almost lazily in an arc towards the dozens of lumbering transports and freighters whose protection within the debris belt of Xana I was worthless now against this wolf among the flock, and she began to kill. Secondary plasma batteries and defensive lasers spat from the spent weapons platforms towards the murderous vessel but they were too little to even give her pause.On Xana II the cold minds which ruled the forge-fanes quickly identified the vessel, for she was a unique killing engine alongside which their own forces had fought many solar decades before during the Rangdan Xenocides. She was no mere Legiones Astartes strike cruiser, but a lone relic of Old Night, a thing recovered from the permafrosts of Ganymede by the Emperor's own hand. Her name was the Dark Sovereign, and she belonged to the Ist Legion, to the Dark Angels.