Chapter 400: Warboss Blackiron
Over the next roughly five days, Trasolh's fleet wiped out every Ork vessel in Primo-496a's low orbit, shipyards included.
The Forge World's low orbit had once been home to a large network of space stations, massive shipyards used for vessel construction. By the time Trasolh's fleet arrived, most of them had already been hit repeatedly, leaving only a scattered one or two stations still standing, and even those had fallen into Ork hands.
Trasolh had the fleet close in immediately and blew every Ork-held station apart with ship-mounted guns. With that, space over Primo-496a was fully back in human hands.
The fleet settled into low orbit, and Trasolh opened a comm link with the Planetary Governor. A moment later, the Governor's face filled the screen.
"Lord Trasolh, are you here to reinforce us, or here to root out heresy?"
The man on screen was middle-aged, in uniform, not heavyset but visibly exhausted. His tone made it obvious he had no love for Inquisitors.
Trasolh answered evenly. "My fleet has a million elite troops aboard, requisitioned from nearby systems for this campaign. What exactly do you think I'm here for, Governor?"
The Governor studied Trasolh's face for a long moment before speaking again.
"Understood. Then please, Inquisitor, deploy your forces to the hive city. We'll provide a briefing session to get your troops up to speed on the battlefield conditions here as quickly as possible. Long live the Emperor."
The channel cut out. Trasolh gave the order.
"All hands, prepare shuttles. Deploy the full million-strong force to the hive city for staging."
Shuttles began ferrying troops down to the surface in waves, with local transports pitching in as well. The full deployment was expected to take roughly five days.
Kian asked Trasolh, "Are you heading down to the surface yourself, my lord?"
Trasolh shook his head.
"No. I handle internal matters. The priority on this world right now is exterminating the greenskins, and if I show up on the surface, it might spook the hive leadership. And frankly, in a crisis like this, if I go down there and happen to see something I shouldn't, do I act on it or not? Better not to put myself in that position."
Right now the only thing that mattered on this world was killing Orks. Everything else took a back seat. If the hive leadership decided to bend a few rules to get through the crisis, an Inquisitor witnessing it firsthand would be an unwelcome complication. Better to simply not go.
Kian rubbed his hands together eagerly.
"Well then, my lord, it's my favorite time of day: side-hustle time!"
Trasolh waved him off. "Go on, then. No telling how long this Ork situation drags on. Emperor only knows when we'll finally get to leave."
Kian hurried back to the Sanctum, geared up in his power armour, and headed to the deck. A shuttle from the Forge World happened to be there loading passengers, and Kian simply climbed straight into the copilot's seat. The pilot started to wave him back to the passenger hold, took one look at the power armour, and thought better of it.
Kian pulled out a cigarette and tossed one to him.
The moment the pilot saw it, he started shaking.
"Ah... ah... real tobacco... actual plant tobacco!"
Their Forge World barely had tobacco, let alone plant life of any kind to spare.
Kian lit his own without waiting and asked, "So, friend, tell me about your planet."
He took a slow drag while the pilot huffed his secondhand smoke like it was the finest thing he'd ever breathed. Kian, unimpressed, just handed him the whole pack.
The pilot clutched the pack of cigarettes like buried treasure and launched into the story.
About twenty years ago, before the greenskins ever showed up, the Forge World's low orbit had held over a hundred shipyards, more than a hundred vessels under construction at once.
Then one day, an Ork fleet appeared out of nowhere, more than thirty scrap-heap ships. The instant they appeared, the whole planet went to full alert. Every human vessel, every station-mounted gun battery, opened fire on the Ork fleet.
The Ork ships weathered the barrage and closed in on the planet, dumping orbital drop-pods onto the surface the whole way. Hundreds of thousands of pods rained down across the entire globe. Some carried specialized drilling structures and burrowed thirty or forty meters underground before stopping.
The Governor and his administration knew exactly what that meant. The Orks were seeding the world with fungal spores, meant to infest the surface and trigger a full greenskin bloom.
But there was no stopping it. There were simply too many pods to intercept.
The Governor could only order the planet's forces to sweep the surface, hunting down landed pods and burning the ground around them, hoping to kill off the spores before they could take root. But the sheer number of pods made it impossible to catch them all, and plenty had already burrowed too deep underground to find.
The Ork fleet in orbit turned out to be even more ruthless. Once they realized they couldn't outfight the human warships, they simply stopped trying. The maddened greenskins pinned their engines wide open and dove straight for the surface.
It was a disaster on a planetary scale. A dozen or more Ork vessels punched through the planet's defenses and slammed their kilometers-long hulls directly into the ground.
It wiped out one primary hive and two secondary hives outright, along with a huge swath of factories, mines, and forges. Close to five billion people died instantly, and the earthquakes triggered by the impacts caused a horrifying wave of secondary casualties on top of that.
Planetary governance essentially collapsed in the aftermath and didn't stabilize again for close to a year. And while the human authorities were consumed with disaster relief and restoring basic order, the greenskin spores scattered across the world had already begun to grow.
It started with Gretchin crawling up out of the ground. Weak little creatures, easy for any ordinary adult to handle. But Gretchin were never the real threat. They were just labor, the workforce of greenskin society, and their true purpose was tending the mushroom fields.
Under their cultivation, what had started as scattered, small fungal colonies spread rapidly across the surface. The Gretchin watered and fertilized them constantly, growing the mushrooms fat and strong.
Finally, about two months after the spores first hit the ground, the very first Ork Boy clawed his way up out of the earth, ready for a fight.
That first Ork charged the nearest human outpost and slaughtered nearly a hundred human miners. Right before he killed the very last one, that miner managed to hit him with an improvised fuel-oil firebomb. The Ork howled in agony as the flames scorched his skin black.
He tore the man apart anyway, and claimed the whole mining site for himself.
From there, with the Gretchin tending the fields, fresh Orks kept clawing their way out of the mushroom beds day after day. They gathered around that first Ork, repurposed the human mining equipment, and built themselves into a proper Ork tribe, all bowing to the strongest, first-born Ork as their leader.
Because of the burns that had scorched his skin black in that first fight, the other Orks came to know him by one name, reverently: Warboss Blackiron.
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