Chapter 294: Boarding the Warship
Kian brought the shuttle to rest on the top surface of the warship's aft third, eased the landing struts down, and activated the magnetic docking clamps. The craft shuddered once and held fast against the hull.
He left the pilot's seat and began suiting up.
The Heavy Reactive Power Armour had been rebuilt to his post-surgery dimensions. At 2.3 metres in the suit, he genuinely looked like a budget Space Marine from a distance. The force-output was proportional: he estimated a full-power strike in this armour would land at roughly eighty percent of what a standard Astartes could produce in equivalent kit. The reactor pack on his back had been upgraded for void operations, rated for more than six months of continuous field use.
Weapons: two power swords sharing a single cross-draw scabbard mounted horizontally across his lower back, both accessible in a single draw. The shuriken pistol on his hip with ten ammunition blocks. Two heavy-barrel lasrifles welded to the left forearm plate, power feeds running back to the reactor pack. A bolt carbine welded to the right forearm plate, fifty-round drum loaded. The logic was clean: left arm for unarmoured and lightly armoured targets, right arm for hardened elites. Both hands free for the shuriken pistol, the power swords, or a fifth and sixth weapon if needed. Four weapons simultaneously was a realistic operating ceiling.
He picked up a modified 20mm Heavy Stubber with an oversized rectangular ammunition box containing 150 rounds of armour-piercing shells.
Sacred Coolant Oil applied. Strength and endurance stimulant injectors delivered automatically through the suit's internal system.
Stats: Strength 63, Endurance 63, Focus 70. Peak mortal capacity. Sub-Astartes but not by much.
He lit a cigar, let the helmet seal around it, and stepped out of the shuttle.
The magnetic boot-plates activated. He stood on the exterior hull of a four-kilometre Ork warship in the silent vacuum between stars.
The surface was chaotic: rusted plating, improvised buttresses, sections of hull that had clearly been added at different times by beings with no consistent design philosophy. Beneath his feet the armour plating creaked audibly through the suit's contact sensors. The section was already beginning to come apart. With the Ork population reduced and their collective psychic field weakening, the physics-defying structural compromises that held Ork constructions together were quietly reasserting the laws of reality.
He oriented himself and moved forward.
Five hundred metres in, he found a blast door.
He drew the power glaive, activated the field with a psychic pulse, and cut through the door in two strokes. A kick finished it. The door came open.
No atmospheric blowout. No rushing vacuum. The interior pressure had already equalised with space through other breaches further in. The warship was venting. The WAAAGH-field was losing its grip on the inner hull.
He dropped through and began moving through the interior.
The corridors were wide by necessity: Orks were not small beings, and the passages had been built to accommodate large numbers of them moving quickly. The construction was exactly what the exterior suggested: a patchwork of mismatched steel plates, riveted and welded without regard for aesthetics or structural theory, held together by collective belief rather than engineering.
His suit's bioscan covered roughly fifty metres of hull thickness. Clean. No life signs in any direction.
He activated every light source the suit carried: weapons lamp, shoulder lamps, helmet lamps. The corridor lit up like midday. He moved at a steady pace.
A hundred metres in, something drifted toward him through the darkness.
He caught it.
An Ork Boy. Basic infantry unit. Green-skinned, approximately two metres tall, hunched musculature, pronounced jaw with jutting lower teeth. Dead.
Kian squeezed the upper arm experimentally. Dense. Roughly twice the firmness of a human male's equivalent muscle mass. He applied pressure until the arm broke and examined the cross-section. The bone was at least two and a half times the density of human bone.
Every baseline stat superior to a human's. Aggressive by nature. Violent by inclination. Completely fearless.
Orks reproduced through fungal spores. Any fragment of Ork biological material that reached a planet's surface would eventually germinate, producing mushroom clusters that hatched new Ork Boys. They never stopped growing. A freshly emerged Ork Boy stood 1.8 metres. Given time and enough fighting, he would reach 2.5 metres and become a Nob. Keep growing, reach 3 metres with a dominant record, and he became a Warboss candidate. The largest Ork Warbosses reached four or five metres: forces of nature in personal combat, equivalent in threat profile to a Space Marine Chapter Master.
There was almost certainly no Warboss on this ship. If there had been, the ship wouldn't have gone dead in space after an engine hit. A Warboss would have fixed it through willpower and personal intimidation.
The Ork Boy had no visible wounds. The suit registered 400 times safe radiation levels in the surrounding corridor. The corpse showed extensive tissue lesions consistent with radiation sickness. Orks were fungi-animal hybrids, capable of photosynthesis and resistant to environmental hazards, but resistance wasn't immunity. Prolonged exposure to this concentration had killed him slowly.
Kian released the body and kept moving.
His route tracked inward and forward: from the aft toward the mid-section, dropping a deck level periodically to stay below the most contaminated zones.
Twenty minutes of movement brought him to the geometric centre of the warship, roughly equidistant between bow, stern, port, and starboard.
He dropped through a deck panel to the level below.
His helmet display updated immediately.
Normal gravity detected. Magnetic boot adhesion disengaged.
Atmospheric pressure nominal. Air composition within safe parameters.
Ambient temperature: 23 degrees Celsius. Radiation: within normal range.
Large warships carried artificial gravity systems that maintained both gravitational field and atmospheric pressure within their operational zones. The transition had been instantaneous: one deck above, vacuum; one deck below, shirtsleeves environment. The system was still running.
Which meant the forward two-thirds of the ship had power. And power meant Orks.
He took three steps forward.
The bioscan lit up.
Red contact, directly ahead, around the next corner.
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