Chapter 300: A Man's Tears
Fortunately, Kian had mag-boots.
In vacuum, with his boots locked to the deck, he could actually run — and run fast. He bounded forward in great leaping strides, rocketing through the corridor like a man-shaped missile.
The Nobz had no vacuum gear. Moving in hard vacuum was a nightmare for them.
They kept colliding with each other mid-crawl, tangling up, knocking each other off the walls. Within moments the pursuing mob had collapsed into a chaotic jam, with only a few dozen managing to keep pace and stay on his tail.
Those few were the real ones. Enormous, experienced, frighteningly well-adapted — they moved through vacuum with their bodies angled just right, fingers hooked into the metal wall plating, launching themselves forward in great surging bursts like green missiles every time they pushed off.
Kian rounded a corner ahead and disappeared from their view. The Nobz didn't slow down. Didn't hesitate. They came after him anyway.
Two minutes of pursuit.
Then the leading Nob saw it — a breach ahead, directly open to space.
Any normal person would have pulled up short. You go through there and you float into the void.
Nobz were not normal people.
They kept coming.
The biggest one, the fastest, surged to the front. He moved through vacuum like it was nothing — fluid, experienced, completely unfazed — and reached the breach in moments.
He started scanning for the human —
And froze.
A massive shuttlecraft was hanging right outside the gap, close enough to touch. Its nose-mounted rotary autocannon was rotating slowly, barrel cluster already coming to bear.
The Nob stared through the cockpit glass. Kian stared back.
And drew one finger slowly across his throat.
The next moment, Kian slammed the trigger.
The rotary autocannon opened up.
A thick tongue of fire erupted from the nose mount — 1,200 rounds per minute of 30mm armour-piercing explosive, pouring into the breach.
Against a weapon like that, the Nobz in the doorway were paper.
One round hit, and a body came apart.
Three short bursts. That was all it took. When the gun stopped, there wasn't a living Ork in the breach. There weren't even complete bodies — just fragments drifting outward into the dark.
Kian checked the sensor suite. Deep in the corridor, the seismic returns showed hundreds more Nobz still charging for the breach.
He smiled.
His hand moved across the fire-control panel. He found the red button. Pressed it.
In the ventral rocket pod, a 300mm rocket motor ignited.
The round flew straight through the breach and into the corridor beyond.
Inside the hull, the Nobz were still fighting each other for space, all of them screaming to be the first one through the door to kill the human.
The rocket arrived first.
It punched through a cluster of them, bodies shattering on impact, and kept going — travelling deep into the ship, killing everything in its path in a corridor-length spray of violence. It finally struck the wall at a bend deep inside the vessel, and the 500kg warhead detonated.
Vacuum doesn't carry sound.
But Kian felt the Ork hulk shudder beneath his shuttle.
Then, two or three hundred metres ahead, the armour plating blew outward.
A 500kg bomb, detonating inside the hull's lower decks, deep in the corridor network — the destructive effect was catastrophic. A section of hull nearly the size of a football pitch tore free from the main structure and began drifting slowly into deep space.
On a normal warship, even a tonne of conventional explosives wouldn't produce hull separation on that scale. But this was an Ork hulk. The WAAAGH-field was already dissipating. The entire garbage-mountain structure was falling apart from the inside. Kian had just given it a firm kick and accelerated the process considerably.
The explosion tore through the ship like a tectonic rupture — an entire football pitch of welded scrap, rebar, sheet metal and salvaged junk, punched clean away from the main body and flung into the void.
Debris scattered in every direction. Kian yanked the shuttle back ten-plus kilometres to clear the expanding field of wreckage.
He pulled up the mission panel.
That one rocket had pushed his counter to 739/1,000.
Kian tilted his head back and let out a long, slow breath of pure satisfaction.
He turned back to the hulk. The explosion had left a crater in the hull roughly the size of a football pitch — internal chambers, conduits, structural members all exposed, like a chunk of flesh carved out of a living creature.
Then he saw it.
Something underneath the rubble. In the debris field where the garbage-mountain armour had peeled away.
His eyes sharpened. His heart rate spiked.
No. That can't be —
He took a slow breath. Adjusted the shuttle's attitude. Brought the targeting scope up to maximum magnification, aimed at the newly blown breach —
And fired again.
The shuttle shuddered. A second rocket flew true.
The silent detonation lit up the void.
This time the damage was even greater. The garbage superstructure across the top of the hulk began to collapse — roughly three football pitches of layered scrap separating from the main body and drifting slowly away into space.
And underneath it, the real hull was exposed.
Kian stared at it.
The feeling in his chest hardened into certainty.
Over the next half hour, he worked methodically — picking his shots, threading rockets into exposed conduit runs so each detonation punched deeper and peeled back more of the outer layers. Twelve rockets total. Six tonnes of explosive delivered with precision, one careful shot at a time.
Like peeling an onion.
Layer by layer, the garbage armour came away.
And what was underneath?
He maxed out the scope magnification and swept across the craters and breaches he'd torn open.
Heavy plating. Uniform. Organised. Occasionally, just barely visible —
An Aquila. The two-headed eagle of the Imperium.
Clean, solid, deliberately-engineered armour plating — utterly unlike the chaotic welded garbage covering it. A completely different design philosophy. A completely different hand.
Human hands.
This was a human vessel. He couldn't identify the class yet, but the architecture was unmistakable — an Imperial Navy warship, hull intact, buried under four kilometres of accumulated Ork scrap.
This four-kilometre Ork hulk — all those layers of garbage, all that welded wreckage — had been built around a human ship.
The core of the hulk was a warship of the Imperium of Man.
Kian cried.
He actually cried. Two tears traced lines down his face, and he didn't wipe them away.
His hand moved across the control panel. Rested on it. Like he was touching the ship through the screen — reaching across the void to the clean, unmarked hull now visible through the wreckage, emerging from the garbage-mountain after who knew how long.
"I knew you were in there," he said softly.
"I knew you were waiting for me. I always knew."
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