Chapter 45: The Loyal Stand

The impact of the initial charge blew right past Darrius's expectations. He had only deployed a tenth of his Boyz. Well, it looked like a lot more than a tenth, but that was definitely because some of the lads hadn't listened to orders and had tagged along anyway!

Yet even with their numbers slightly bloated, he never expected that a single wave would leave the human base buckling. Their defensive lines had been torn to shreds in short order, and the battlefield had already pushed deep into the facility's interior, raging right around the landing zones.

If not for the endless stream of reinforcements pouring down from the human transport ships in the sky, this base would have fallen long ago.

"How'ze dey dyin' so quick?! Ain't no fun iv dere ain't no moar humies leff ta krump!" Darrius grumbled, thoroughly underwhelmed.

While Darrius was busy lamenting his lack of a challenge, up in the cold void of space, Pex looked like he had seen a ghost. The elite armored divisions he had deployed below couldn't even halt the greenskin vanguard.

They couldn't even hold for a single hour!

His head throbbing, Pex closed his eyes. He stood in silent contemplation for a full minute before opening them again, his gaze heavy with exhaustion.

"Captain, signal the fleet. Initiate full orbital bombardment."

The grim-faced Captain of the Guardian offered no objections. He didn't argue that their own troops were still down there, or that the bombardment wouldn't cover the entire battlefield effectively.

He merely nodded in solemn silence and relayed the order to the fleet.

With the heavy, groaning screech of mechanical gears, the bombardment bays at the underbellies of the warships swung open. The munitions known as the Imperial Truth slowly poked their noses out into the void.

Seized by gravity, the 'Truth' screamed through the atmosphere, hurtling down toward Oronia IV.

Down below, within the perimeter of Forward Base, the soldiers of the Expeditionary Force were still fighting back-to-back with the greenskins around the shuttle gantries. Wounded men were shoved into transports to be shuttled back to the Guardian, while fresh dropships continued to dump reinforcements directly into the meatgrinder.

These soldiers weren't holding the line out of sheer willpower; they were fighting because they had nowhere left to run. It was combat or death.

The bombs falling from the sky extinguished their final spark of hope. Colossal mushroom clouds erupted across the plains, and a searing firestorm incinerated everything in its path, turning human and Ork alike to ash.

"Command! What in the Throne's name are you doing?! We are still down here! Why have you initiated orbital bombardment?!"

Inside the landing zone's makeshift command post, the base commander was screaming into his vox-caster.

"What do you mean 'we are cleared to extract'?! We agreed to hold for an hour! Extract? With this kind of orbital fire raining down, how is a transport supposed to lift off?!"

"What do you mean 'it's up to us now'?! Dammit—hello? Hello?!"

Slamming out a few more curses, the commander threw the vox-caster to the floor.

Looking outside, a blinding white glare washed over the world. Without his heavy visor, the commander would have been instantly blinded.

Against the backdrop of the rising mushroom clouds, the resolve of the Expeditionary Force finally broke. Some men suffered total psychological collapses; others wept openly as they pressed the muzzles of their lasguns beneath their own chins.

Yet the Orks kept coming. It was madness. They didn't show a flicker of fear or hesitation, if anything, they bellowed louder, growing more ecstatic the worse the carnage became.

Tightening his jaw, the base commander patched into every available comm-channel, activating the base's external loud-hailers to broadcast across the entire sector.

"Orbital bombardment has commenced! Further resistance is meaningless! All personnel are ordered to board the nearest transport and evacuate immediately! Evacuate now!"

With the broadcast finished, he took off his cap and slammed a storm trooper carapace helmet onto his head. "Command squad stays. We hold the line here to buy time for the extraction."

Issuing his final command, the base commander slipped his twin power claws over his fists and stepped out of the temporary command bunker. Flanked by his Kasrkin bodyguard, he roared a final battle cry for the Emperor as they crashed headlong into the Ork vanguard.

With the bulk of the Ork horde distracted by the immediate fighting, the pressure on the airfield eased just enough for several transport craft to seize the moment, firing up their thrusters to flee the surface.

Time waited for no man, and neither did opportunity. Some were lucky enough to scramble aboard a ship in the chaos; others were left behind.

Even making it onto a transport offered no guarantee of survival. As the dropships clawed their way into the sky, they flew through a dense wall of 'plenty-ful' Ork anti-air fire from below, while the 'Truth' bombs rained down from above. In the end, only a meager handful of vessels managed to break orbit.

Amid such catastrophic chaos, those who escaped wept tears of overwhelming relief. With their emotions pushed to the brink, it was only natural that minor operational errors went unnoticed, and certain anomalies went completely overlooked.

"Dem humies are dead zoggin' mean, I'ze took a bit of a loss dis time," Darrius mused, looking out over the plains that were being thoroughly pulverized by the orbital strike.

"Dunt ya worry, Sneaky Boss! I'ze rememberin' dis debt fer dem humies too," Smarty chirped, hopping up and down around Darrius. "Juz' wait until our Great Gargant iz done. We'ze gonna fly roight up dere an' drop every single shell we got onto dere 'eadz, let 'em see what it feelz loike gettin' bombed from above!"

"Oh, right! Da Great Gargant!" Darrius slapped his forehead, remembering the crucial project. Since there was no more fighting to be had, he might as well focus on work. It was always good to have plenty of Mekboyz around.

Darrius wasn't the only one disappointed; the other Warbosses who hadn't gotten a piece of the action were thoroughly miffed. As for the casualties caused by the bombardment, nobody cared. The Orks blasted into paste today would just turn into a fertile patch of mushroom spores tomorrow, growing even more Boyz.

"Sneaky Boss, dere's sumfin' else," Smarty rattled on, his mouth moving at a mile a minute as he followed Darrius. "Da Kommandoz said dey snagged a few humie tongues for talkin'. If ya wanna interrogation 'em, ya gotta hurry up, Boss. I'ze worried da Kommandoz kan't keep 'em safe from da uvver Boyz. I seen da uvver lads droolin' just lookin' at dem humies."

"And dat Boss of derez... da one called Ram-bfa or sumfin'... 'e's gone. Prettie sure 'e ate a big humie shell. I told 'im 'e shoulda painted 'iz camo blue, but 'e wouldn't listen, insisted on paintin' it da exact same color as da humie uniform."

"Rambo is gone?" Darrius stopped in his tracks, looking back at Smarty in genuine surprise.

"Yeah, Boss! I saw dem Kommandoz come back, an' only 'alf of 'em made it. Dere biggest Boss wasn't wiv 'em, I definitely didn't see 'im wrong," Smarty stated with absolute certainty.

It seemed giving the lad a legendary name hadn't brought him any extra luck. A waste of good expectations.

Next time he found a promising Kommando, he'd make sure the lad painted his face blue. The Boyz firmly believed that 'Red goez fazta, Blue iz lucky,' and in the Ork paradigm, that logic was ironclad.

Darrius rubbed his smooth chin. "Tell da Kommandoz to drag da humies over ta da Great Gargant. I'ze ask 'em a few fings on da way. Da humie ships already ran off anyway, so whatevva dey say wunt matta much."

"Roight ya are, Boss! Ya go on ahead, I'ze roight behind ya!" Smarty yanked the cord on his jump pack and went rocketing into the sky with a loud whoosh.

Sigh. What a bore. Didn't even get a proper scrap out of it.

Orks needed fighting to grow stronger; continuous, escalating, brutal combat. He was already so massive that without a truly apocalyptic war, he was likely going to stay stuck at this size for a very long time.

Letting out a soft sigh, Darrius resigned himself to the reality of his ongoing boredom.