Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

A new wave of airdrops began.

With anti-air fire weakened, the heavy units that had been held back for fear of losses could finally be committed in force.

Heavy landing craft carried the surviving Leman Russ and Thundergod Mechas through the bubble shield to the surface of the Attack Moon.

Orks were orks — they had no systematic way to stop the firepower net covering the landing.

But once those units touched ground, the fighting shifted onto terrain the orks knew best.

Unlike on Cath Maximus, where the Astra Militarum could dig in behind fixed lines and wait patiently for the ork assault, this smaller force was now the one on the offensive.

The Astra Militarum’s reinforcement made the orks recognize the human threat, and that recognition burned away the contempt they’d built up after crushing the Proletarian Crusade.

Every ork on the Attack Moon, including the warlord’s own retinue, converged on the front line.

Curving around the landing zone, the orks used their numbers to encircle the Astra Militarum, hurling themselves again and again against the human line. Endless waves of Ork boyz mixed with Killa Kans surged forward.

But the Astra Militarum, having looted a fresh batch of weapons from Mars, were no longer what they’d been — they now carried ample meltas and ion weapons. Add to that the Skitarii, which in Lin’s eyes were expendable enough to throw away without a second thought.

They held off the Killa Kans and Ork boyz without paying much of a price.

The Astra Militarum even leaned on the two Mechanicus Knight houses to launch a counteroffensive, pushing their line outward and giving the siege tanks more room to maneuver.

“Push forward, clear space for the artillery!”

Acting as mobile self-propelled guns, the siege tanks roamed behind the line. Their wide operating range and ability to relocate quickly meant they had nothing to fear from ork counter-battery fire after a volley. The newly arrived hydra anti-air vehicles also blunted the ork boyz’s habit of diving their own planes straight into the ground as makeshift bombs.

And the penetrating shockwave cannons only needed a single barrage to collapse an entire section of the ork advance.

The orks weren’t entirely without a plan.

They used a feint — striking east while shouting west — to trick the Astra Militarum into misjudging their true axis of attack, then threw their Gorkanauts against the real target.

They meant to break the human line in one furious push.

The Astra Militarum’s line did nearly buckle under that reckless assault, but the timely arrival of the Deathless shattered the orks’ hopes.

By now, Lin had reshaped the Deathless into something rare in the whole grim setting of Warhammer — a genuinely mobile force.

In an Imperium where combat still moved to the blare of a charge horn and the tempo of turn-based skirmishes, the Hellhound war-vehicles and the upgraded siege tanks stood out as some of the only truly mobile vehicles anywhere.

Marines in CMC powered suits could move at more than half the speed of an Astartes at a full sprint. That made them Lin’s chosen firefighters for the battlefield.

Whenever a section of the line looked ready to fall, they always arrived in time to stabilize it.

That kind of tactical flexibility was something ordinary Astra Militarum commanders could barely imagine — they kept reserves too, but those reserves usually didn’t reach the front until the line had already collapsed, turning what should have been reinforcement into a grinding effort to retake lost ground.

Even so, the Deathless weren’t yet at full strength. They outperformed the Astra Militarum overall, but they weren’t especially suited to hard frontal assaults.

Whenever a stretch of line fell to the orks and had to be retaken, Lin — unwilling to spend his own men needlessly — would pull the Deathless back and let the Astra Militarum and Skitarii handle the retaking.

He had no intention of feeding his own followers into the meat grinder of seizing strongpoints the way the Astra Militarum did.

As the Ultimate Wall began concentrating Terminator Armour for the coming teleport decapitation strike, Lin realized he needed to find similar equipment for his own mortal army.

The Marauders from StarCraft might make a decent model. But unlike standard power armour, heavy Terminator-class armor for mortal Imperial troops simply didn’t exist anywhere.

The only comparable gear existed as a handful of custom builds within the Inquisition — getting his hands on something similar would take real effort.

Setting aside that problem, which he couldn’t solve until he left Terra, Lin turned his attention back to the battlefield at hand.

He’d summoned the Proletarian Crusade to hold the line, backed the Astra Militarum to anchor the defense, reinforced them with the Deathless, and kept the Black Templars and Iron Knights already on the Attack Moon on decapitation duty against the ork bosses.

The coordination between forces inflicted heavy losses on the orks. But their earlier victory seemed to have let the orks finally count up their own numbers, and they kept coming in relentless waves — the fight had settled into a stalemate.

That balance could hold only as long as the Astra Militarum’s supplies lasted.

By Lin’s rough estimate, what they’d brought from Mars would sustain this rate of attrition for roughly half a month.

If he could “persuade” the Fabricator General again to prioritize Mars’s recovering production for the Ultimate Wall, they could hold out longer.

Unfortunately, a war of attrition made little sense here — attrition was the one thing orks never feared.

But as long as he kept up the appearance of having all the time in the world, it would be the orks — unable to read his true hand — who grew anxious first.

Because for all their tolerance of losses, orks were also the least patient race around.

“Tell Christina she can bring the upgraded Thundergods into the fight.”

The Gate of Fate moved out. Three Thundergods, led by a Warlord-class Titan, marched with heavy steps into the battle between man and ork. Inside the Sarcophagus, the Hunter piloting the Thundergod had been itching for this moment.

“Feel the power of the Thundergod!”

The four 250mm guns on its shoulders leveled out and opened fire across the entire line, suppressing the charging Ork boyz. High-value targets like the Gorkanauts were picked off by ion cannon fire from the Thundergod’s arms, reduced to scrap in single, precise shots.

The siege tanks already on the line had left the orks with no good options; once the Thundergods joined, the orks were forced to retreat.

The orks were still charging forward, but their line was falling back.

Realizing that the humans’ kill rate had actually outpaced the greenskins’ charge speed, the ork warlord in command of this sector flew into a rage.

“Stop lettin’ our Gargants pick mushrooms back there — get ’em up front!”

What orks feared most was other boyz thinking they were weak. He’d held back the ork Titans earlier, worried some other boss would call him not waaagh enough. Now that the enemy had escalated things first, that worry no longer applied.

Five Gargants, each over twenty meters tall, began appearing on the battlefield one after another.

These war machines, cobbled together from scrap and brute force, had once been the nightmare of the garrison on Cath Maximus. But now the Thundergods simply strode forward to meet these ork Titans head-on.

The clash of steel began.

The upgraded void shields adapted well to the chaotic conditions of this harsh battlefield. When the orks’ Ion Cannons fired, the void shields absorbed every one of those high-threat blasts, the impacts flaring into dazzling arcs of electricity on the outer surface.

But the Gargants, protected only by ion shields, took the Thundergods’ retaliation full-on.

Two precise ion beams struck a Gargant square on, barely neutralized by its jury-rigged ion generator. But the solid shells that followed were more than the already-strained ion shield could stop.

An armor-piercing round tore straight through the Gargant’s scrap-heap plating, punching through the greenskin technician inside along with the machine’s power core.

Marked as the priority target, that Gargant staggered, then crashed to the ground and erupted into a burning wreck.

“One down,” the Hunter said inside the Sarcophagus, quite pleased with the result.

The death of a mere grunt only made the orks more savage. The remaining four Gargants showed no hesitation at all. Realizing they were outgunned at range, they shoved their control levers to full and charged, engines roaring, straight at the Thundergods.

“I reckon close combat’ll solve this!”

Two Gargants came straight on while the other two swung wide to flank. The maneuver did split the Thundergods’ fire.

“Watch the flanks!” Christina called out sharply. She steered the Warlord-class Titan against the two flanking Gargants, its superior maneuverability giving her room to keep them tied up.

The Thundergods weren’t built the same way.

“Focus fire on one first!”

The Hunter made the call, and the other two Thundergods joined him in pouring fire onto the Gargant on the left flank, reducing it to scrap.

They swung their guns toward the last one, but that Gargant, already close enough, kept its momentum through the barrage, powered through the fire, seized its power claw, and slammed it hard into the Thundergod’s chest.

“BOOM—!”

The Thundergod’s armor buckled under the blow, and inside the Sarcophagus the Hunter’s head spun from the shock.

Before he could recover, the Gargant’s other arm — mounted with a rotary cannon — swung to aim at the joints of the Thundergod, spewing out a dense storm of solid rounds.

The crude but lethal shells punched through the Thundergod’s void shield and slammed into the armor at the joint. Shrapnel from the shattered plating sprayed outward, hydraulic fluid spurted free, and the entire mech tilted slightly.

That Gargant was soon finished off by the other two Thundergods firing from range. But its desperate last stand had already done real damage.

By the time all five Gargants were destroyed, the ork warlord could see the Thundergods’ armor plating scarred and battered, with broken cables visible through some of the damaged sections.

Five wrecked Gargants hadn’t cost the humans a single downed Thundergod or Titan.

Even the orks knew that trade wasn’t a good one, but the ork warlord remained brimming with confidence:

“No matter, we’s still winnin’!”

The Attack Moon held more than just those Gargants, but the humans’ big cans already looked battered enough. Even the smartest boy around would’ve shaken his head at the sight.

All he had to do was send word to the Great Warlord asking for a few more Gargants. Not only would he beat those big cans, he’d have the whole battle wrapped up easy!

“Good work, boyz! Tomorrow we go crush them shrimps!”

Confident and pleased with himself, he called up a few more Gargants, ready to humiliate the shrimps who’d lost their Thundergods the next day. But when the scout he’d sent out came scrambling back to report, his eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

The three Thundergods smashed to pieces the day before now stood on the battlefield completely intact, gun barrels gleaming, armor without so much as a scratch.

“That’s not possible! I saw ’em torn apart with me own eyes!” he roared. “This has to be some shrimp trick!”

He pushed the Gargants into a fresh assault, but the Thundergods’ fire — just as sharp and deadly as the day before — proved this was all too real.

The new Gargant offensive was repelled once again. Completely baffled, the ork warlord felt like he might actually be growing a brain.

“What’s goin’ on! Who’s really green here, me or them?! This ain’t waaagh at all!”

Once or twice, he could chalk it up to human trickery. But after three, four days of the same three Thundergods showing up fully repaired, even the orks knew something was off.

Rumors started spreading among the greenskins that they were fighting Gork and Mork’s chosen — otherwise they couldn’t imagine how these shrimps kept an endless supply of Thundergods.

“That’s the beauty of the Reanimation Protocols — use a limited number of troops to trap the enemy in an endless war,” Lin summarized.

The raw materials spent so far could have built several more Thundergods outright, but the ability to restore combat readiness instantly mattered far more than adding a few extra units.

After several rounds of this, even the greenskins found their morale worn thin.

The surge of Waaagh! Energy the orks had gained from defeating the Proletarian Crusade started to falter under the string of repeated failures.

Those Gargants didn’t grow out of the ground like ork boyz did — even if ork scrap materials cost nothing, they couldn’t be burned through at this rate forever.

The ork warlord gave up thinking it through entirely. His only remaining plan was to call in as many boyz and cans as possible and simply overwhelm the Ultimate Wall’s forces outright.

“Them shrimps ain’t like them High Lords — we gotta wipe ’em out for good! Otherwise their mechs’ll keep growin’ back faster than Squigs in the dirt!”

His demand won the backing of the Great Warlord Gorok.

The elite greenskins who served as the warlord’s palace guard were called out, and more than ten Gargants, alongside heavy ork Grot tanks and bomber squadrons, advanced en masse against the line held by the Astra Militarum.

This was the strongest offensive the orks had yet mustered, and for the first time on this battlefield, they achieved real air-ground coordination.

The handful of Valkyrie couldn’t stop the ork air force’s reckless charge. When the ork Blitza-Bommer, never intending to pull up in the first place, turned themselves into bombs and dove straight for the ground, the siege tanks behind the line were forced to fall back and relocate to avoid the worst of it.

The lull in artillery fire gave the ork main force its opening, and the Gargants seized the initiative once more.

Relying on sheer numbers — enough that the Thundergods couldn’t destroy them all quickly through focused fire — the orks buried the Astra Militarum’s position under a tide of cans and tanks.

Even with both Knight houses fighting to the death, the Astra Militarum could only fight a retreating battle. Having already glimpsed the landing zone the Ultimate Wall had carved out earlier, the orks howled with excitement — victory felt within reach.

“The orks have reached the landing zone! Our forces are completely cut off! Where are the Deathless? We need them to plug the line!”

The Astra Militarum commanders tried appealing to this battlefield fire brigade for help, but Hays turned them down.

“Their elites have a more important task.”

“Then what does High Command mean by that…?”

“Same as before. Hold firm, and there’s a way through.”

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