Vengeful Spirit tanks Nova Cannons

The ship gave a tremendous shudder beneath another barrage. The lights sputtered across the chamber.
‘That was no lance strike,’ I said.
‘Look.’ Lheor drew my attention back to the oculus. ‘That’s not good.’
Three vessels sailed in an elevated engagement sphere at a stand-off distance, too far from the wrath of our guns unless we broke off from the Eternal Crusader. Their delineation runes marked them as vessels unfamiliar to the Vengeful Spirit’s memory banks – Crusade-era Victory-class cruisers belonging to no Legion. I watched as the rearmost of the three daggerish vessels, thick with the flies of its lesser escorts, trembled in the void as it fired a city’s worth of ship-wide stabilisers.
The impact struck us even before the ship’s prow-mounted accelerator coils had flashed with their release. The Vengeful Spirit heaved around us, metal groaning under tension, bruises discolouring Ultio’s dusky skin.
She gave a snarl that had no place emerging from a human throat.
Lheor grunted as the ship stabilised. ‘Shieldbreakers,’ he said.
‘Sailing with minimal escorts,’ I replied. ‘That is bait if ever I saw it.’
‘Sure enough, but it’s one hell of an opportunity.’ He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘What’s more important here? Killing Sigismund or claiming resources for the Long War?’
He had a point, and I was of a mind to encourage his rare tactfulness. I opened a vox-link to Abaddon, where he waited in his boarding claw. ‘Ezekyle…’
‘We felt it,’ his voice crackled back, marred by interference. ‘Nova cannon.’ He paused, doubtless reviewing the data from within his helm’s tactical feeds, calculating how much damage they could inflict upon us before we reached the Eternal Crusader. If the imagery suffered battle interference up here on the bridge, it was likely little more than a spread of distortion across a helmet’s retinal feed.

Black Legion