Chapter 396: Engaging the Ork Warships
Seven Ork scrap-ships of assorted sizes came barreling in from the direction of Primo-496a, every comm channel drowning in bellowed WAAAAAGHs.
It was obvious the greenskins had already seized air superiority over the Forge World, and any human warships in orbit had either been destroyed or fled. The seven Ork junk-heaps hadn't found a good scrap in a while, and the sudden appearance of Trasolh's fleet sent them into a frenzy, engines pinned wide open as they charged straight in.
The order to engage came down from Trasolh's flagship, the Sleepless Eye, and every warship and armed merchant vessel in the fleet swung into firing formation.
Human warships hit incredibly hard, especially broadside, essentially Age-of-Sail vessels reimagined for the void, guns stacked deck upon deck along their flanks. That's why the standard human tactic when closing with an enemy was to circle them and bring the heaviest broadside to bear.
Trasolh's fleet finished its firing realignment quickly, every ship's guns swinging to face the seven oncoming Ork wrecks head-on. Trasolh roared from the bridge:
"By the sacred command of His Most Holy Majesty, bring ruin upon these filthy xenos! Fire! Macro-cannons, full salvo! Lances, unleash!"
In that instant, hundreds, nearly a thousand macro-cannons and lance batteries erupted at once, lighting up the void for a heartbeat.
The seven charging Ork ships took the brunt of it head-on, blooming with explosions one after another. Macro-shells punched deep into the scrap-hulls before detonating, sending debris scattering in every direction. High-energy lance fire melted tens of tons of steel instantly, carving glowing craters of molten metal into the junk-heaps.
Battered as they were, the Ork ships didn't return fire right away, instead relying on their sheer bulk to keep closing the distance. Ork weaponry was a chaotic mess of macro-cannons, lasers, and every kind of improvised rocket and missile imaginable. All of it worked like a shotgun blast: enormous burst damage, but terrible range, which meant they needed to get in close before any of it counted for much. Until they did, all they could do was soak up fire.
That wasn't as bad as it sounded, though. Ork ships were thick-skinned, wrapped in hundreds of meters of scrap-steel and stone fused together. Even firepower capable of leveling a mountain would take a good long while to grind them down.
The exchange dragged on for over half an hour before the barrage finally crippled one of the smaller Ork vessels. The remaining six pushed through and closed to point-blank range, roughly a hundred kilometers out, and the two fleets began trading fire face to face.
The Ork ships unleashed everything they had, an absolute mess of weapons firing at once, rockets and missiles swarming out like a hive of angry insects. Their gun batteries were denser still, a whole forest of barrels in every caliber imaginable, all blazing away.
The most absurd part was that the Orks weren't above launching pieces of their own ships as weapons. One Ork bridge section, over a hundred meters of scrap plating, got an engine bolted onto it and was simply fired off wholesale, hurled at the human fleet as a kinetic projectile. This was a race that fought without the slightest regard for its own survival. Given the chance, they'd hack off their own left arm and swing it at your head with the right, if it seemed useful.
Most of these improvised Ork weapons had terrible accuracy, plenty simply tumbling off into the void and vanishing. A luckier few flew true toward the human ships, only to be stopped cold well short of the hull by void shields.
Void shields were a piece of Imperial technology built to protect large targets. Rather than absorbing an attack directly, the shield worked by shunting the kinetic and explosive energy of any incoming impact straight into the Warp the instant it struck. When a shell hit a void shield, you'd see a brilliant flash of color, the shield briefly cracking open a channel into the Immaterium to dump the impact energy through.
Void shields weren't infallible, though. They could overload. Enough concentrated firepower against a shield in a short enough window could outpace its capacity to redirect energy, punching through it temporarily, at which point the shield would need a long recharge before coming back online.
Void shields had another weakness too: they couldn't stop slow-moving targets. The system was built to recognize high-velocity threats only, and simply didn't register anything moving slowly. That was exactly why, even in an era of interstellar warfare, boarding actions still had a place in Warhammer 40K. Send troops out aboard boarding torpedoes or assault boats, launch them at low speed to slip past the shields entirely, and let them latch onto the enemy hull. From there, melta charges or boring drills could chew through hundreds of meters of armour plating and deposit troops right inside the enemy vessel. Pull off a successful boarding, and the payoff could be enormous, which was exactly why nearly every species in the galaxy treated boarding actions as a standard tactic.
Right now, the Ork fleet kept charging at Trasolh's ships, firing the whole way in, fighting like lunatics. Most of the incoming fire was still being soaked up by the void shields, but mixed in among it were plenty of strange, improvised boarding devices.
Kian and his team held position behind an armoured bulkhead near the bridge. The bridge was one of the most critical facilities on any warship, the brain of the whole vessel, where the Astropath and the ship's captain were both stationed. Kian, his retainers, and the Inquisitor's own security detail were all posted nearby to defend it.
Just then, Trasolh's anxious face flickered up inside Kian's helmet display.
"Count! Get your people to Bridge Sector A3, immediately! Three heavy boarding torpedoes just struck there. Over three hundred greenskins have broken through!"
"Move out, boys! Kill every last one of those green bastards!"
Kian shouted, leading his retinue and troops in a charge toward Sector A3.
He grumbled to himself the whole way there. Three hundred Orks, was that really worth him getting personally involved? The ship had plenty of combat personnel. Send a few hundred regular troops and be done with it.
But the moment Kian arrived and heard the furious roar of WAAAAAAGH echoing down the corridor, he understood exactly why the Inquisitor had called him in specifically.
Every single one of these Orks stood over two meters tall, massive and powerfully built, and every one of them was wearing power armour. The armour was painted a dull iron-gray, gear-shaped ornamentation worked all across the plating. Their equipment was absurdly good for greenskins. Beyond the powered armour, every single one carried at least one heavy gun, each with a barrel practically the width of a man's fist, spraying storms of metal down the narrow corridor.
The ship's anti-boarding crews caught in that crossfire had been torn to shreds, their remains smeared evenly across the corridor's armour plating.
By the time Kian's team reached the scene, the three hundred-plus power-armoured Orks had already pushed deep into the narrow corridor, wiping out three full anti-boarding squads along the way.
The moment the armoured greenskins spotted Kian's group, they didn't waste a second, raising their heavy guns and opening fire.
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