"'Maintain heading,' said Russ. The stars grew swiftly. The ships of the Vlka Fenryka were under full motive power, still accelerating, their velocity approaching a substantial portion of the speed of light."
- Wolfsbane

"It did not seem so long ago, and yet there were countless years of time measured by Terran clocks that he had lost in the confusion of the warp, in cryogenic stasis and through the strange physics of near-light speed travel. Garro had been there as the Emperor crossed the galaxy in search of his star-lost children – Sanguinius, Ferrus, Guilliman, Magnus and the rest. With each reuniting, the Lord of Mankind had gifted his sons with command of the forces that had been created in their image. When at last the Emperor came to Barbarus and discovered the gaunt warrior foundling leading its oppressed people, he had located the avatar of the XIV Legion."
- The Flight of the Eisenstein

"Several light-minutes inside the orbit of Eris, the Phalanx exploded from a warp gate with violent concussion, sending sheets of exotic lightning radiating out and away into the void. Delicate sensory devices dotting the surface of the tenth planet registered the new arrival and immediately communicated reports to relay stations on Pluto and Uranus, where in turn they would be sent onward by astropath to Terra and her dominions. The return of the Imperial Fists to humanity’s cradle was long overdue. By rights there should have been celebrations and great ceremony on many of the outer colonies of the solar system to mark it. Instead, the Phalanx came in with speed and ruthless purpose, not in a stately cruise about the solar system’s outlying worlds.
The mammoth craft did not fly the pennants and banners associated with the triumphant arrival of a heroic vessel. Instead, the colours on her masts and the laser lamps about the Phalanx’s circumference were lit for urgency. Patrol ships made way, no captain daring to challenge the Master of the Imperial Fists for his haste. Drives flaring like captured stars, the fortress-vessel passed in through the ragged edges of the Oort Cloud at three-quarters the speed of light, down into the plane of the ecliptic, crossing the orbit of Neptune in a flicker of dazzling radiation."
- The Flight of the Eisenstein

"An alarm sounds. A red hazard light starts to blink on a burnished copper console.
The officer of the watch, at his station on the bridge of the Samothrace, reacts swiftly but with some confusion. Are the ship’s systems notifying him of a malfunction? It is a high-scale alert.
He presses an ivory-cushioned key to access clarification. On the small glass screen, a phrase appears in luminous green characters.
[Weapons discharge, company deck]
That can’t be correct. Even if it somehow is, a weapons discharge must be accidental. The officer of the watch is, however, highly trained and well disciplined. He knows that answers, clarifications, corrections and explanations are secondary issues. They can wait. Even informing the captain can wait. He understands protocol. He reacts as he has been trained to react.
He activates the vox systems and rouses deck protection. His hands move with rehearsed agility over the keys. He sounds general quarters. He starts to systematically close the bulkheads fore and aft of the company deck space, and to lock out the through-deck access points and elevators.
Within four seconds of the alarm sounding, the officer of the watch has begun the procedure to cordon and secure the entire company deck, and to place deck troops at all access points. His response is exemplary. Within thirty-five seconds of the alarm sounding, a full, regulation lock-down would have been enforced.
But thirty-five seconds are not available.
The captain has heard general quarters sound, and has started out of his seat to join the officer of the watch and examine the issue. There is a frown on his face.
‘What’s going on, Watch?’ he asks.
His words are drowned out by another alarm. Then another alarm. Then another. Klaxons, bells and hooters overlap, screeching and booming.
The proximity alarm.
The collision warning alert.
The course defect advisor.
The detector array.
The passive auspex.
The primary orbital traffic alert from Calth System Control.
Something is coming at them. Something is moving into the dense and rigorously controlled shipping formations spread across the close orbit band. Something is sweeping through the orbital high anchorage without approval or authorisation.
The officer of the watch forgets, for a second, what he was in the middle of doing.
He looks at the main screen. So does the captain. So do the bridge crewmen.
What happens next, though they are looking straight at it, happens too fast for them to see.
...
The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.
The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.
Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.
There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.
Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.
It does not hit Calth.
There is something in the way.
...
The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.
It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.
It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.
Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.
The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.
The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.
The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.
...
Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.
Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea.
The Campanile is still moving. Its shields finally fail and it is just a solid projectile, a mass of metal. It annihilates two more slipways, and the ships within them, cripples the anchored carrier Johanipus Artemisia, and then rams through the data-engine hub in the centre of the yard structure. All the data-engines are destroyed instantly. The automatics fail. The noosphere experiences a critical and fatal interrupt. Another thirty-five thousand individuals perish as the yard’s core is obliterated.
Impact has virtually erased the unshielded mass of the Campanile. Its structure is atomised, except for the largest chunks of it, which punch onwards as the ship breaks up, still travelling at immensely high realspace velocities, communicating billions of tonnes of force. The largest surviving piece, a part of the Campanile’s solid-core drive section, spins out like a ricochet and kills the battleship Remonstrance of Narthan Dume like a slingshot pellet to the brainpan.
The final pieces of the Campanile clear the far side of Calth Veridian Anchor and spray on out across the planet, scattering, dipping and burning like meteorites.
This entire catastrophe has taken less than a second to occur. It has been entirely silent, a light-blink in the soundless void.
All that any observers – either on nearby vessels or the surface of the planet – would have seen was a blinding flash, like a star going nova, that was instantly replaced by a propagating series of overlapping, expanding fireballs that consume the entire sky."
- Know No Fear

"Warp technology permitted travel at tremendous – albeit relativistic – inherently incalculable speeds, but intra-system transit remained as arduous as it must have been in the pre-expansionist epoch. At their current relative positions, Thennos was five light hours from Medusa. From the vibrations in the decking, Stronos could tell that the Clan Vurgaan system frigate, the Onslaught, was still accelerating towards its maximum velocity, about ninety-five per cent of light speed."
- The Eye of Medusa

"Bringing anything aboard was time consuming and that cost money, so they mostly didn’t use the catch-bay for catching anything, but instead employed it as an ad hoc store, keeping things there that had nowhere else to live. Salvage for the Sheldroon was an opportunistic sideline. Sheldroon was a blind old thing, its sensorium weak, not intended to find motes of wealth in the grand sweep of the void. The ship’s elderly machine-spirit spent its time peering ahead for danger. The mag-prow pushed aside most particulate debris, but anything bigger than half a tonne posed a threat, no joke at near-light speed."
- Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter

"Elver stopped, and started again. ‘My lord,’ he managed, stronger now. ‘This craft is not warp capable. The place you indicate is three light years from our position.’
‘What is the speed capability of this vessel?’ asked the primarch.
‘Three quarters of light speed is the fastest it has ever gone, my lord,’ he said, robotic from long practice; the ship’s capabilities were among the first lessons Overton had given him upon arrival, and he was – had been – rightfully proud of its speed. ‘I am forced to ask your forgiveness, lord, and allow me some honesty, because I don’t know if that was Overton bragging or not. I have never seen the ship attain that velocity.’"
- Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter

"‘Warp translation was successful,’ the Excoriators commander mumbled with ill-disguised truculence.
‘Speak up, sir!’ Kersh barked. ‘This is the tactical-oratorium. You’re not talking to one of your bridge drones now, corpus-commander.’
Bartimeus glared at the Scourge. Raising his voice a little, he reported, ‘We are approaching from the edge of the system at quarter sub-light speed.’
‘Why the hesitant approach? Were not my orders to reach the cardinal world at best possible speed?’
‘That is the best possible speed,’ Bartimeus snapped back. ‘The system is crowded with Adeptus Ministorum craft and the like on similar approaches.’"
- Legion of the Damned

"For the second time in less than an hour, space tore open. The reality fissure leapt and crackled like a luminous cephalopod, lashing tendrils of warp energy into real space that twisted out, fizzled and faded. Non-baryonic light flared brilliantly through the tear, backlighting the arriving ships. Monumental silhouettes, they were shot forward into real space.
They did not slow down. They were moving at cruise speed. Attack speed.
Shumlen blinked. The arriving ships were just dots against the glare-spot ahead of his squadron, but his pattern recognition systems began to hoot and warble.
“Hostiles, hostiles, hostiles,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We have hostile vessels in system and advancing. Flight leader to screen elements… accelerate to attack velocity.”
 ...
“Hostiles reported!” the ensign sang out, a tremor in his voice.
“Battle stations,” said Sodak. The sirens began to wail. “Shields up. Arm batteries. Power to main lances.”
“Shields aye!”
“Fighters are engaging,” said the flight controller.
Sodak gazed at the flickering images on the actuality sphere. “Increase magnification. Get me a clearer picture.” At the current resolution, the holographic display was overlaying tag cursors and disposition icons. Code numbers were jumping and blinking.
“Tenfold mag aye!” said the ensign.
The tactical image enlarged rapidly. It looked like three enemy ships, possibly four, but the overlay icon of the fighter screen was making it hard to read the details.
“Take out the fighter icon,” snapped Sodak, and an aide cancelled the overlay image of the Berengaria’s attack squadron.
Four ships. One of them very large. And they were moving. Point seven five light at least, cutting straight towards Herodor.
“Enginarium,” said Sodak. “Flank speed, please. Reactor output to ninety per cent. Last ready call for weapons.”
“Weapons aye. All green.”
“Firing solutions, all batteries and lances. Target the big one.”
“Aye sir.”"
- Sabbat Martyr