Chapter 293: The Ork Warship
The Aquila shuttle cleared the atmosphere of Secundus-496b and accelerated into the deep void.
Once the navigation system had the Ork warship locked as destination, Kian left it alone and ran an inventory of the cargo hold.
The Captain's modifications had been thorough. The aft compartment had been stripped and refitted with four additions: a high-output long-range vox-caster, capable of reaching Hive Tenebris across the intervening distance; a chemical oxygen recycler to keep the cabin atmosphere breathable for the full journey; a waste collection and conversion unit, which was a sophisticated way of saying a zero-gravity toilet; and a small bunk secured to the bulkhead with restraint straps.
The toilet, he noted, retained everything it collected. The Captain had thoughtfully included a note explaining that in a genuine emergency, the contents were technically reconstitutable as nutrition. Kian decided he would sooner die and respawn than reach that point.
The weapons loadout was considerably less restrained.
A 30mm rotary autocannon mounted on the nose: 1,200 rounds per minute, armour-piercing explosive rounds, enough to punch through 40mm of plate, 3,000 rounds in the feed. And thirty-eight 300mm rocket pods distributed across the wings and ventral hardpoints, each rocket carrying 500 kilograms of explosive charge.
The shuttle was technically overloaded. In atmosphere this configuration would have torn the airframe apart under its own weight before reaching any meaningful altitude. In vacuum, with no gravity and no air resistance, it was simply a question of whether the drives could push the combined mass, which they could.
The tradeoff was that the shuttle was now encased in high explosives on every exterior surface. A single enemy round finding a rocket pod would set off a chain detonation that would reduce the craft to debris. And the loadout ruled out any atmospheric entry for the duration of the mission.
Kian completed the inspection, found nothing to object to, and began his training routine.
He donned the Heavy Reactive Power Armour, engaged resistance mode, and started working against it. In zero gravity without deliberate high-intensity exercise, bone density and muscle mass degraded rapidly. He had no intention of arriving at an Ork warship in a weakened state. Between strength sets he drilled psychic technique, running through shockwave generation, kinetic null fields, and lightning lances until his focus reserves ran low, then switched back to physical training until the reserves rebuilt.
When exhaustion finally hit, he stripped the armour, wiped down with a damp cloth, strapped himself to the bunk, and slept standing up.
This rhythm continued for fifteen days.
On the fifteenth day he was strapped to the bunk running through a handheld strategy game when the navigation console began chiming.
"Warning. Destination approach. Enemy vessel located 2,000 kilometres ahead. Current velocity: 15 kilometres per second. Initiating graduated deceleration sequence on your command."
He dropped the game unit, unstrapped, and dropped into the pilot's seat.
The deceleration sequence ran in stages: 15 km/s to several km/s, then down to hundreds of metres per second, then tens of metres per second. At that point the autopilot disengaged and handed control back to him.
Kian buckled in, gripped the controls, and looked through the forward canopy.
Four kilometres of rust and salvage hung against the stars.
He had studied it through telescope lenses from a planetary surface. That was one thing. Being here, close enough to see the individual plates, the welds, the jury-rigged buttresses and improvised hull sections hammered together from unrelated metals, ceramite blocks, and raw rock: that was something else entirely. The warship was three kilometres tall at its highest point and two kilometres thick at its widest. It was shaped roughly the way an Ork was shaped: enormous, dense, and apparently unconcerned with aesthetics.
He began a slow circuit of the vessel, staying thirty kilometres out, keeping to the aft section.
The aft was where the Aeldari lance strike had connected. A massive breach was visible near the engine compartment, edges fused and blackened. That section would be flooded with radiation. The Orks couldn't get to it, which meant the weapon systems back there were unmanned and cold.
The mid and forward sections were the risk. If Orks were alive and functional up there, they could bring the warship's guns to bear on anything in range.
He kept circling the aft, watching. Nothing fired.
He pushed in to one kilometre.
At one kilometre, a shuttle next to a four-kilometre warship was roughly equivalent in scale to a fly next to an elephant. One automated weapons system waking up would end the mission immediately.
The warship sat silent.
He triggered the shuttle's radiation scanner and pointed it at the breach.
Five hundred times above safe threshold.
Confirmed. The Aeldari lances had pierced the drive section cleanly, the reactor had vented, and the resulting contamination had killed every Ork in the aft third of the ship and rendered the section permanently uninhabitable.
He ran the bioscan next, sweeping the nearest few hundred metres of interior structure through the aft hull plating. The scanner's range wasn't deep enough to map the whole ship, but it could read through several hundred metres of steel.
No life signs.
Kian pushed the controls forward and brought the shuttle in toward the hull.
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