Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The yellow-armoured Astartes picked their way carefully across the still-heaving ground. The greenskins' gravity weapons had carved deep wounds into the planet's geology, leaving the terrain chaotic and unrecognisable. Lava oozed freely from fresh fissures and rubble choked every path, and after several hours of searching, Lin's team had advanced only seventy or eighty kilometres — with no sign of any living Imperial forces.

Against the scale of an entire planet, that was less than a drop in the ocean.

"I'm starting to think we won't find anything useful on this rock," Sergeant Arlo said with a sigh. "Maybe we've arrived too late. Every Imperial unit that was still putting up a fight could already be gone."

Lin answered without turning his head. "Patience. Of all the virtues, the sons of Dorn should never be short on that one."

Sergeant Arlo and the others exchanged glances. An awkward silence settled over the warriors who had been strong-armed into their yellow powered suits — but Lin paid it no mind. He was lying flat behind a boulder, studying a cluster of greenskins in the distance.

"Besides, we're not empty-handed. Look."

Following Lin's direction, Admir and Sergeant Arlo spotted a crashed Strike Cruiser in the distance.

A fair number of greenskins were swarming over the wreck, and whatever livery it had once worn was now too scorched and battered to identify. But its presence here meant that Astartes had fought in this battle — that much was certain.

Lin waited for Admir and Arlo to work it out for themselves — and was met instead with blank looks.

Lin blinked, then remembered: during the Great Crusade, dedicated fast-strike vessels like battle barges and Strike Cruisers — ships built specifically to deploy Astartes — hadn't yet entered service. Compared to regular warships, these fast-strike craft were something of a consolation prize, a workaround born from the Codex Astartes mandating that Astartes Chapters could not maintain dedicated line-of-battle warships — though certain Chapters did, for special reasons, operate full cruisers or battleships. But such cases were the exception.

He gave them a brief explanation of the ship classes designed for the Astartes of this later era. It was met with incomprehension from both Admir and Arlo.

"Why? Our physique lets us reload macro-cannon shells faster than any mortal or Servitor. If there's a class built exclusively for Astartes, the obvious answer is to bolt on two more macro-cannons and hit harder — why would you strip them out instead?"

"If you were allowed to fire two extra guns, it wouldn't just be the xenos losing sleep. The High Lords in the Terran senate would be right there with them."

Admir and Arlo stared at each other. In Lin's answer they could taste something of the uncomfortable position the Astartes now occupied within the Imperium.

But this was not the moment to dwell on that. Now that they knew Astartes had definitely been on this planet, Lin intended to make that the anchor point of his tactical plan.

"Astartes are hard to kill. Even if the geological upheaval caught them off guard at the start, there is no way the greenskins wiped them all out in a mere three days."

Lin laid out his reasoning: "But staying put on this planet is also a slow death. If any of them still want to make contact with the outside world, they'll need to reach the communications equipment aboard one of these ships."

"So the plan is to attack the greenskins around the wreck, and draw out any surviving Astartes who are already heading there?" Admir understood. "That tracks — if there were no enemies left, this mob would already be tearing each other apart until one Ork boss came out on top. But right now there are only Ork Boys here, which means survivors are definitely still out there."

"Exactly. The moment we make a move, anyone who sees it as an opportunity will follow our lead. But remember who you are — you are warriors of the Imperial Fists. If surviving Astartes do show up, do not reveal any identity beyond that!"

Lin rose to his feet. He fired a single shot into the air to get everyone's attention, then raised high the yellow company banner he had recently fashioned — white fist embroidered at its centre — and roared like a commissar rallying a doomed regiment:

"For Dorn! For his glory and the glory of the Lord of Terra!"

The yellow-armoured warriors fanned out behind him in a line. They raised their upgraded silver-white Phobos-pattern bolt rifles — modified by Lin — and sent large, precisely aimed bolts hammering into every greenskin on the wreck carrying a ranged weapon, dropping them where they stood.

Silver Rathalos materials could ordinarily be used to craft bows or bolt throwers back in Monster Hunter. But unlike melee weapons, which had lost none of their killing power in the Warhammer setting, ordinary bows were poor fit here, and Lin hadn't yet worked out how to make bolt throwers slot in properly either.

After mulling it over with the forging knowledge he'd acquired, Lin had settled on incorporating the Silver Rathalos materials into bolt rifles instead — reasoning that since bolt rifles were basically just launching bolts to do the fighting for you, they weren't so different from bolt throwers anyway. The result was bolt rifles that had already qualified as holy relics in their own right, now made deadlier still.

The bolts, their warheads packed with explosive fluid from Bazelgeuse's blast glands, found their marks with uncanny accuracy — burying themselves in the greenskins' fuel canisters and triggering a chain of catastrophic secondary detonations. Severed limbs and green chunks of flesh were blasted skyward, and the fires that followed burned Orks and spores alike to ash.

But the attack didn't frighten the Orks. Quite the opposite — the sight of a proper fight after so long sent them into rapture. Bellowing with delight, they hoisted whatever scrap metal they had to hand and launched a counter-charge.

The yellow-armoured warriors met them without flinching. Their ammunition spent on clearing the ranged threats, they set down their bolt rifles and raised their motley assortment of close-quarters weapons, wading into the melee.

These greenskins — stranded on a ruined planet, starved of proper equipment, practically regressed to feral savagery — were nowhere near Admir's league. They kept coming in waves, but they couldn't stop Lin's team from pushing forward.

The real difficulty with fighting Orks was never the assault. It was holding the line when the tide came rolling back in.

"Get inside the cruiser! Hold every entrance!"

Lin stormed into the Strike Cruiser's wreckage and split open a mekboy who had been stripping salvage with a wrench, one axe-blow ending the conversation. The presence of these greenskins — specialists in that unique school of 'WAAAGH-tech' that only Orks could practice — told Lin the defensive battle ahead was going to be ugly.

But with another wave of Orks, drawn by the noise of combat, already closing in from the distance, Lin held his position and gave the order:

"Hold them as long as we can. Let's see if any surviving Astartes come to us!"

——

"By Dorn… what in the warp was that?"

Kurande had barely caught the sound of their Imperial Fists battle-cry. His ears, battered by continuous fighting, were no longer what they had been. He asked the dozen-odd brothers still with him for confirmation — and got it from all of them.

Someone was shouting their battle-cry. And the direction it came from was exactly where they were already headed — the crashed Strike Cruiser.

Other Imperial Fists survivors had clearly had the same idea. They were not alone after all.

PS: I think I'm—

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