Chapter 306: Extinction
Kian had patience. After clearing the hulk, he took the shuttle out, accelerating to roughly a hundred kilometres an hour relative, and just let it run for a month straight.
A month later, water and food reserves had dropped into the danger zone. Any longer out here and the return trip would have involved recycling his own waste in ways he'd rather not think about.
He turned the shuttle around and headed back.
His working theory: the Orks would either decay below the threshold needed to sustain basic bodily function and simply die, or they'd turn on each other completely and wipe themselves out. Either outcome worked fine for him.
The results, when he docked and went back inside, were excellent.
He spent over an hour exploring. Bodies everywhere. Evidence of fighting in every direction. He eventually found the Warboss.
Caved-in chest — explosive or mob-stomping, hard to say which. An axe buried in his skull. Most of his teeth missing, presumably looted by an opportunistic Gretchin post-mortem. About as dead as it's possible to be.
The elite Nobz around him had killed each other to the last body. The deck was a solid layer of armoured corpses.
He kept moving and found a pile of Gretchin.
Curled together in a corner, dead. Their height had shrunk down to about sixty, seventy centimetres — severe atrophy. Gretchin started weak compared to the Boyz, so when the field collapsed across the whole warband, they'd been the first to go. The Boyz had just gotten thin and feeble. The Gretchin's systems had simply stopped.
Kian clicked his tongue, picked his way past several thousand desiccated little bodies, and reached the mushroom fields.
This was the breeding chamber — where Gretchin cultivated the spore-fungus that produced new Boyz, kept watered and fed to keep the supply constant.
What he found instead: a massive chamber, walls and floor coated in thick fungal growth, all of it completely desiccated. Dried husks. He picked one up and crushed it between two fingers — it disintegrated instantly into fine dust.
"Huh. Even the spores died off completely. The WAAAGH-field really is a double-edged sword."
He was about to move to another section when the entire ship rumbled. The deck shuddered under his boots.
He locked his mag-boots instantly, anchored himself flat against the corridor plating.
The vibration lasted about two minutes before stopping. He had no idea what had caused it and kept moving.
Then, glancing through a viewport, he understood.
The hulk was disintegrating.
A roughly kilometre-long section of the garbage superstructure had just separated from the human ship at its core. The whole vessel had been built as an unauthorised extension off an Imperial hull — and now that every Ork holding it together was dead, the WAAAGH-field that had been (somehow) keeping that structurally absurd mess from falling apart on its own was gone too. The whole thing was coming apart at the seams.
He watched the massive debris field drift away into the dark and murmured, "Well, that's convenient. Saves me the trouble of demolishing it myself."
Give it ten days, two weeks at most, and the rest of the garbage layers would peel away on their own, leaving the Imperial hull clean.
Confirmed: no living Orks remained anywhere on the ship.
He picked up his pace, heading for the Warboss's throne room.
He'd seen something up there, back when he was up on the statue delivering his speech. Welded into that scrap throne. Something that looked very specifically like an Astartes helmet.
He'd had to suppress that excitement at the time — he'd been mid-execution on a psychological demolition plan and couldn't afford to break character. Now there was nothing stopping him.
What was an Astartes, really?
In an Imperium that spanned a million worlds, the total number of Space Marines numbered only in the low millions. Spread across that many planets, that worked out to roughly one or two per world, on average.
A post-Implantation Astartes stood well over three metres tall even before armour. Add a suit of ceramite power armour and you had, functionally, a walking superhuman tank with the reflexes of an Olympic athlete and the durability of a main battle vehicle.
Ten Astartes could take a planet. A hundred could hold dominion across several systems. A full Chapter — a thousand-plus Space Marines — could project power across an entire sector.
Astartes and bolters. Demigods given form. Living symbols of the Imperium's will, the Emperor's sharpest blade against the alien and the heretic alike.
That helmet on the throne meant something significant. He needed it.
Kian broke into a run, following the sensor suite's structural map back to the great chamber and the throne.
When he arrived, the throne had become an Ork graveyard. Bodies stacked in layers, dozens deep in places, and the throne itself was almost entirely buried under them.
It looked like the fight for the throne had been brutal. Once the Warboss died, every surviving Ork wanted the seat. Nobody would defer to anybody else. So they'd settled it the only way Orks know how — through open combat for the right to sit there.
Except the field was collapsing the entire time. Every single one of them had died in the process. The throne stood empty, surrounded by the casualties of its own succession crisis.
Kian half-waded, half-climbed through the corpse pile, boots sinking into the mass of dead greenskins, working his way toward the throne one careful step at a time.
He pulled several bodies aside, clearing a path, slowly exposing the structure underneath.
A few minutes of effort later, he'd cleared enough to see it properly.
A large, green-painted Astartes helmet.
"This is... a Son of Vulkan?"
Vulkan, the Lord of Drakes — one of the Emperor's Primarchs, and by most accounts the largest and physically strongest of them all. His sons inherited that legacy directly: towering, powerfully built warriors. Post-Implantation Salamanders regularly stood over three metres even by Astartes standards.
Kian looked down at what might well be a son of Vulkan and felt something close to genuine respect settle over him.
The Imperium's Astartes came from many different gene-lines, many different Chapter cultures. Some had stopped considering themselves human at all. Some considered themselves something beyond human. A few barely registered mortals as people in any meaningful sense — willing to spend millions of civilian lives without hesitation if it served the mission. There were Chapters with genuine sadistic streaks, ones who found cruelty toward mortals entertaining.
The Salamanders were different.
Tall, green-armoured, dark-skinned, red-eyed — these were the people's army. The ones who actually cared.
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