Chapter 5: Guerrilla Warfare on the Space Hulk
Besides scrap metal, Number 1 had also picked up some more useful finds.
Beneath a pile of smashed Imperial consoles, he turned up a scattered collection of weapon components.
A few short steel blades with slightly bent edges, and a tactical goggle unit with half the housing cracked.
What genuinely relieved Rosen was that Number 1 had found a standard M-G short-barrel Astra Militarum lasgun beside the half-eaten skeletal remains of a Guardsman, along with three functional charge packs in a blood-soaked ammo pouch nearby. Enough for roughly sixty or seventy shots by remaining capacity.
The lasgun, nicknamed the "flashlight" by those who looked down on it, was nowhere near as powerful as the Locke-pattern boltgun in Rosen's hands. But against unarmoured Gretchin, or landing shots on the vulnerable eyes and throat of an Ork Boy, it was still lethal.
For Number 1, who had nothing in his hands right now, having a gun was a significant improvement over going up against greenskin cleavers with a short blade.
It was time to move.
With only one Death Warrior at his side, there was no way Rosen could afford to sit back and manage from a distance.
More to the point, there was no such thing as a safe zone anywhere on this space hulk, in any physical sense.
Packs of greenskins could be lurking in every shadow. A nest of Genestealers could be waiting around any corner. And somewhere in the deepest layers of those ancient ships, something nameless from the warp might be sleeping.
Rosen moved quickly down the corridor. Using the coordinates from Shared Awareness, he linked up with Number 1 at a four-way intersection on Deck Seventy-Six in short order.
Number 1 immediately held out the lasgun and spare charge packs.
Rosen waved it off and pushed it back. "Keep it. Use it for covering fire. I'll use the boltgun."
They got to work immediately, using whatever the environment offered, laying down kill traps throughout the intersection and the adjoining corridors.
A true Catachan jungle fighter's most lethal weapon was the mind, honed by the brutal culling of a death world, and the ability to turn any environment into a killing ground.
The booby-traps and frags Rosen had been carrying were all spent on the Ork Boyz earlier. They had no explosive charges left of any kind.
That wasn't going to stop them.
Working with what the hulk provided, they designed a set of mechanical traps built on gravity and stored kinetic energy, making full use of the hulk's complex internal structure.
"See that row of spare condenser pipe racks hanging overhead? The ones with the broken, sharpened ends."
Rosen pointed up at over a dozen rusted steel pipes fixed to a load-bearing beam six metres above the deck.
Number 1 immediately climbed up with the agility of a jungle ape, and physically wrenched the mounting bolts free one by one until only a single stress point remained holding the entire rack.
Down below, Rosen wound his recovered monofilament wire tightly around that single critical load-bearing latch, then fed the other end of the wire along a path through a ventilation gap and into the ceiling crawlspace.
At the right moment, one sharp pull on the wire would release the latch. Those heavy pipes, each end broken into a spear point, would come down under gravity like a steel rainstorm.
The oldest rockfall trap in the Catachan jungle, rebuilt in iron.
That wasn't enough on its own. On the opposite side of the corridor, Number 1 gathered a large pile of metal fragments with jagged, saw-toothed edges.
Using several severed high-voltage cables that were still leaking weak current, Rosen rigged them into a crude spring-loaded shrapnel sling, hidden behind a half-open blast shutter.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Waaagh!"
"Find him! Get that humie out here! Pull his guts out!"
"I smell blood! That way!"
The noise Rosen had made on Deck Seventy-Seven had been substantial enough to draw every nearby greenskin warband toward it.
From the density of the footsteps and the overlapping war cries, the number charging in wasn't dozens. It was hundreds.
Rosen wasn't stupid enough to stand in an open corridor and go head-to-head with several hundred Orks in a frenzy.
An entire assault force of seven thousand fully armed Guardsmen had already died on this hulk.
Which meant the greenskin population aboard was a number large enough to be genuinely demoralising.
"Fall back!"
Rosen made the call without hesitation.
The Catachan way valued maximum efficiency in both survival and killing. Guerrilla warfare was the only doctrine that made sense here.
The ventilation ducts and maintenance crawlspaces threading through the space hulk's interior like a spiderweb gave them exactly the right conditions to work with.
Rosen looked up and locked onto a ventilation opening in the ceiling corner, its grille half-rotted away.
He grabbed the pipe edge with both hands, drove with his arms, and pulled himself up and in.
Number 1 followed right behind him. Before entering, he swept a torn piece of cloth across the floor with professional efficiency, scattering the footprints they had left. Then he reached back and took the main trap trigger line from Rosen.
Less than twenty seconds later, a blinding wave of green flooded into the intersection below.
Leading the charge, as always, were the Gretchin, used as cannon fodder and scouts. They shrieked as they ran, driven forward by kicks from the Ork Boyz thundering behind them.
"Move it! You idiot! Get out of my way!"
One Ork Boy swung the flat of his rusted cleaver down on a slow Gretchin's skull and put it on the floor.
The mass of greenskins shoved and jostled each other, fighting for space in the corridor.
Then the five Gretchin at the very front came scrambling into the centre of the kill zone.
"Fresh green blood ahead! This is the way! Go!"
Number 1, still in the shadows of the ventilation duct, yanked the line hard.
The instant the load-bearing latch was ripped free, over a dozen heavy, sharpened steel pipes dropped simultaneously from six metres up.
Clang! Clang clang clang!
The crash of metal against metal shook the entire compartment.
Dust, rust, and a spray of green blood rose together and blotted out most of the view below.
When the dust began to settle, the five Gretchin were no longer recognisable as anything that had once had a shape.
Driven by the crushing acceleration of gravity, those pipes had hit like bolts from a siege ballista.
One, coming down at the sharpest angle, drove almost vertically through the front two Gretchin and pinned them flat to the deck plating, producing a sight that would have been impressive under any other circumstances.
The other three were punched through and crushed by the remaining pipes in various ways, each ending their noisy existence in a different undignified posture.
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
Using the chaos as cover, Rosen and Number 1 fired simultaneously from their concealed positions at the Ork Boyz they had already targeted.
Close range. Pre-sighted. No room for error.
Headshots, every one.
System prompts fired off in rapid succession. Three Ork Boyz, souls purified, added a solid count of Life Points to Rosen's reserves.