Chapter 43: Death Rock

High in the void above the dead world, Pex stood upon the bridge of the Guardian, casually conversing with the cruiser's captain and exchanging notes on fleet command.

"Commander! The forward base has come under sudden attack by greenskin xenos!" the bridge vox-officer suddenly bellowed, his voice fracturing the calm. "They are advancing in a massive wave from all vectors!"

"So soon?" Pex muttered. Even though he had anticipated an attack, the sheer speed of the Orks' offensive caught him off guard.

He had known the greenskins would strike; they were a bio-engineered warrior race, and expecting them to suppress their hardwired instinct for slaughter was an exercise in futility.

In his initial tactical projections, Pex estimated he wouldn't face a maximum-scale greenskin offensive until the planetfall element had grown to roughly one hundred thousand boots and established a proper, interlocking defensive perimeter.

If that plan had held, the dug-in surface forces would have acted as a massive meat grinder, attriting the bulk of the xenos' strength. From there, Pex would have funneled continuous reinforcements into the meat grinder, deploying the full weight of the Crusade's forces to break the alien host.

By that stage, the Crusade's projected victory margin would have risen to fifty percent. All that would remain would be a systematic, methodical purge; clearing the planet sector by sector, burning out the spore fields, and collapsing the subterranean hives.

But the very first step of the operation had dissolved into chaos. Before the fortifications could even be completed, and with only fifty thousand Imperial troopers on the ground, the Orks had lunged.

"Route the tactical feed to my command console," Pex ordered, stepping toward his hololithic table.

The glowing projection of Oronia IV shrank, condensing down around the coordinate grid of the drop zone. It displayed the entirety of the forward base and the surrounding valley topography.

Utilizing the fleet's high-altitude orbital surveillance, the main hololith split into over a dozen auxiliary feeds. It mapped out exactly where the greenskins were spawning from, which vanguard units posed the highest threat vectors, and where their primary axis of advance lay.

Several critical feeds immediately arrested Pex's attention. First were the subterranean breeches, massive sinkholes and tunnel mouths from which an unending stream of green meat was vomiting forth.

"No wonder they mobilized so quickly and crept so close to our perimeter. They've turned the planetary crust into a damn warren," Pex spat under his breath.

The second display was a matrix of smaller screens, each capturing various configurations of greenskin heavy ordnance, some of which he had never encountered before.

There were long-range heavy artillery pieces (grotesquely misshapen Big Gunz), mechanized columns (salvaged Trukks and mismatched Battlewagons, no two armored hulls alike), infantry support weapons (Tankbustas, Burna Boyz, and Big Shoota heavy gunners), and shock-infantry echelons consisting of heavily plated 'Ard Boyz and towering, scarred Meganobz.

This was indisputably the main force of the greenskins. Pex realized with cold dread that he had severely underestimated the evolutionary velocity and industrial capacity of these aliens. In a mere five months, they had cultivated a horde of this scale, bristling with such lethal, jury-rigged armaments.

Against a green tide of this terrifying magnitude, the forward base would be overrun in minutes.

"Order the second wave of the Expeditionary Force to deploy immediately! I want every armored division dropped into that grid now!" Pex's roar reverberated across the vox-network. "Tell the base commander on the ground that I don't care about his casualty reports! I want him to hold that line for one standard hour!"

Turning on his heel, Pex faced the cruiser's master. "Captain, form up the fleet immediately. Prepare for a mass orbital bombardment."

The master of the Guardian offered a grim, severe nod. "Commander, calculating the firing solutions and aligning the weapons grids will take at least one hour. Can the forward base survive that long?"

"If they cannot, they will die trying," Pex answered coldly. "The target density of these damn xenos is incredibly high right now. This is our best chance to break their back. The Emperor's soldiers exist to expend their lives in His service."

Following their previous fleet engagement, the Oronia System Fleet had been reinforced through the logistics of the Departmento Munitorum. They had been assigned a Cobra-class Destroyer and six star-vessels configured as Escorts, the absolute maximum commitment the Munitorum could spare for this theater.

This brought the total fleet strength to one Cruiser, two Destroyers, and six Escorts.

Before the Crusade set sail, Pex had ensured these vessels were laden with planetary-yield bombardment ordnance. The original intent was to vaporize mass concentrations of Orks and crack their underground fortresses, but he had not anticipated deploying them so early in the campaign.

As the human fleet in the sky maneuvered into standard bombardment formations, the greenskin hordes on the surface were whipped into a state of sheer, unadulterated ecstasy.

Spearheading the charge were the Speed Freeks. These were Orks utterly consumed by a pathological worship of velocity. They slathered their Warbikes and Buggies in thick coatings of red paint, entirely dismissive of structural reliability or safety; they demanded only one thing: speed.

Recently, they had also developed a manic obsession with human rock music. Massive, crude vox-casters had been welded onto every single chassis. Across the plains, the booming, distorted chords of Power of the Horde, a track Darrius had belted out within the echo of the Warp, reverberated through the dust like a symphonic death march.

"Storm! Blacken the sky!"

Countless crude rokkits and artillery shells erupted from the greenskin lines simultaneously, tearing through the atmosphere and slamming into the Imperial earthworks. The deafening roar of detonations and the shrill screams of the dying merged into a seamless wall of sound, as the blinding flash of high explosives and promethium fires illuminated the forward base in stark, flickering white.

"Earth! Hear our warcry!"

The Speed Freeks rammed their vehicles directly into the Imperial wire, firing every gun until their barrels melted. They had no intention of stopping unless a solid bulkhead tore them apart or they detonated against an Imperial hull.

The entire desert basin groaned under the weight of the endless green mass, the bedrock trembling as if caught in a violent, localized cataclysm.

The defending Imperial Expeditionary Force had formed a desperate, makeshift defensive line. Chimera Armoured Personnel Carriers and Leman Russ Battle Tanks fired alongside heavy weapons teams, fighting tooth and nail to hold the perimeter. Their disciplined fusillades were taking a heavy toll on the charging xenos, cutting great swaths through the flesh.

"Fire and lightning give us strength!"

From high above, a collective, ear-splitting "WAAAGH!" descended from the clouds. Hundreds of Stormboyz, propelled by volatile, flame-belching rokkits strapped to their backs, plummeted into the human lines.

Upon impact, they hurled bundles of Stikkbombs, tearing the newly established trenches into bloody craters. Some of the more unhinged, Waaagh-maddened Boyz deliberately steered their rockets straight into the hulls of Leman Russ tanks, obliterating themselves alongside the vehicles' turrets in spectacular blinding bursts.

Searing bolts of green, ectoplasmic lightning cracked down from the sky, blasting several heavy weapon emplacements into molten slag as the Weirdboyz in the rear channels began to unleash their psychic filth.

The Imperial troops were spending their lives dearly to hold the line. In the center of the base, heavy atmospheric landers were constantly touching down, disgorging fresh armored columns and elite detachments into the fray.

Yet despite these desperate infusions of steel, the defensive perimeter was on the absolute brink of total collapse. And a mere half-hour had passed...

On the eastern flank of the outpost, at the most exposed salient, the main greenskin charge finally collided with the outer works. The Imperial line held for less than three minutes before it was utterly shattered.

Several massive, ten-metre-tall Squiggoths trampled over the ruins of the sandbags, throwing their horned heads back and roaring at the darkened sky.

"Death! Is the greenskins' greeting! WAAAGH!"