Signus Campaign - Dark Tidings: The warships of the Blood Angels Legion finally moved upon the capital world of Signus III, known as Signus Prime. Mysteriously, the two moons of the third planet were gone, and had been destroyed through clearly unconventional means. The satellites of Signus Prime had simply been stolen from their orbits, lost to the unknown; and with them had gone multiple orbital shipyards, barracks and manufactoria for the Signus Cluster's system defence forces.The fate of the Signusi defence forces themselves was apparent. The shattered shells of the vessels that had comprised the Signusi fleet were cast adrift across the orbit of the third planet in a thick, ragged shroud. A cowl of dense wreckage from countless obliterated vessels and orbital complexes hung close to the edge of Signus Prime's atmospheric interface -- military and civilian ships alike, everything from suborbital wing-shuttles never designed to venture beyond the stratosphere to interstellar juggernaut haulers.All had been killed close to the capital world and left to float in the void where they fell. Plasma fires still burned in the cores of some of these wrecks, leaving streamers of radiation in their wake. Great slicks of debris flowed from the insides of cracked hulls and thickened the stew of fragments. But the dead voidships were not just the fallout from the brutal beheading of an entire colony world; the silent vessels had been turned into a barbed shoal of debris, which any who approached would be forced to penetrate if they meant to make planetfall. And more than that, they were there as a silent, monumental threat: vessels broken and skinned alive, hung dead in the sky like the bleeding trophies of a wild killer.This horror might have been enough to chill the heart of even the most experienced of the Imperium's warriors, but this exhibition was not the end of the bleak, voiceless message left by the conquerors of Signus Prime. For where there were thousands of murdered voidships there were ten thousand times that number of human dead drifting bloated and frozen in the vacuum.The pilots of the Blood Angels' interceptors brought the images to the Red Tear’s command deck, and Sanguinius looked upon them without speaking, sorrow and anger robbing him of words. Others who saw the same picts were similarly silenced, unable to frame the grotesque reality of what lay before them. Each body had been brutalised in a way that went beyond understanding, their bones subsumed from the meat of them, stolen away like the vanished moons of Signus Prime by the same unknowable process that had claimed human lives on Holst and elsewhere in the cursed star system.Millions of corpses floated in fusions of flesh, twisted into repulsive monuments, glossy with coatings of frozen blood. They had been compacted into dolmens and rings, carved like soapstone. Some of the shapes had rigid angles and toothed spires made of cut limbs; others were flattened into discs and wicked curves, meat-red and shimmering. The sign of the brazen eight-pointed star that had burned across the world of Phorus was also repeated, over and over, like an offering that only something with eyes as large as mountains would be able to see.Without warning, malevolent energies surged across the void, attacking the minds of the psychically sensitive mortal crewmen of the Blood Angels' Expeditionary Fleet. Navigators and Astropaths were crippled or killed in the initial onslaught, their brains fried by the dark malice of Chaos. The crew-serfs all around the Astartes on the fleet's warships began to scream in a great cacophony. The Blood Angels fleet had been ready for every form of attack save this one. A psychic cry from Signus Prime that went beyond a voice exploded out into space towards the assembled vessels of the IX Legion.A vast hurricane of psychic shock, created from the bottled murder-essence of millions of surrendered human souls, resonated out from the shrouded world. It swept across the crimson starships in a shuddering, immaterial wave. Void Shields could not halt the ethereal power of it, and the bulk of adamantium hulls and plasteel bulkheads was penetrated as easily as if they had been made of paper. The sheer, monstrous force of the psychic shockwave battered at every living mind aboard the ships of the Blood Angels' flotilla.The Space Marines of the IX Legion were able to meet this psychic attack and weather its raw power. It was only later that the Blood Angels would come to understand that they had never been the intended targets of the psychic assault. It was not a force aimed at them, but a weapon of denial seeking the weakest links in their chain of war. Every mortal human -- every unaugmented human but one -- in the flotilla was united for a fleeting moment in a single, soul-tearing scream that burned into their minds and beat them down.It killed many at the point of contact, those who were utterly unready for such crushing, black despair. Some would live a little longer before their hearts gave out, some would walk into airlocks or use knives and Lasguns upon themselves or others. The psychic screaming went on and on, and none would be unmarked by it. Every heart and mind amongst the Blood Angels fleet was tested to the limit, and many would break under the strain. The strongest would survive, scarred forever, tormented to their graves. The weakest became unhinged, seeing horrors wherever they turned, their minds fracturing like brittle glass. The opening shot in the Signus Campaign had been fired, and would mark the beginning of the first major contact between the forces of the Imperium and the daemonic entities of the Warp during the Horus Heresy.