Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Gadda's fleet made for an unimpressive fighting force by any conventional measure: one battleship converted from a strike cruiser, four cruiser-class Ork warships, and seventy or eighty assault craft smaller even than Sword-class frigates.

"Those Orks actually managed to rebuild a cruiser into a fifteen-kilometre battleship..." Commander Hays stared at the feed from the recorders, shaking his head in disbelief. "How in the Emperor's name are they running something that size on cruiser engines?"

"Doesn't matter. We don't need to understand every little thing about Orks." Lin never troubled himself over that sort of question.

A hulking brute of a vessel was a genuine threat in a straight slugging match — but against harassing tactics, it was nearly useless. Lin had no intention of following the traditional Imperial doctrine and holding the fleet in planetary orbit until the last possible moment.

Instead, he had already passed orders through Hays for the fleet to seek out opportunities to harry the other two Ork fleets on their own initiative.

The Orks' methods of rebuilding ships defied all logic, but even their WAAAGH energy — that strange force where what they believed became real — was not omnipotent.

They could, apparently, make a cruiser-hull monstrosity move at battleship scale. But the sheer clumsiness of the thing was plain to anyone with eyes.

Hays's expeditionary fleet, led by his Retribution-class battleship, was roughly a match for a single Ork fleet in raw firepower. But in terms of manoeuvrability, a Retribution with its twenty-four macro cannons looked practically nimble compared to that Ork behemoth — like a hound alongside a barge.

A pitched main-fleet engagement would see the expeditionary force bogged down and surrounded, pummelled from every direction. But long-range harassment? The Ork fleets would have no answer for it whatsoever.

It wouldn't gut the greenskin strength quickly, of course. But so long as it bought enough time to delay the arrival of the other two fleets, Lin considered that a victory.

"The Ork fleets lack the capacity for orbital bombardment. From here on, the battle will be decided on the ground."

Lin clapped his hands, drawing every eye in the room to him. "Gentlemen — carry out the plan as we discussed. Everything rides on what comes next."

Against the incoming Ork fleet, the first guns to speak were those of the Forge World Cath Maximus orbital defence network, now operating under Lin's direct command.

Ork warships carried no void shields, but the sprawling scrapyard covering every surface of their hulls served as their own peculiar armour. The defence array's cogitator systems shrieked in frustration, unable to calculate the vital points on the Ork vessels — in the end, random targeting based on sheer luck proved the most effective approach available.

Yet a Tier Three Forge World's orbital defences were thin things at the best of times. The priests manning the heavy lascannons poured everything they had into the barrage, but the weak lances of light could not inflict any meaningful damage on the Ork battleship charging at the head of the formation.

The priests tried a torpedo salvo next. The results were no better — the torpedoes vanished into the Ork battleship like stones thrown into a river, and the priests couldn't even pick out the flash of an explosion anywhere on the hull.

The priests — certain their torpedoes' machine-spirits had been tuned to peak condition — exchanged bewildered glances.

How in the Omnissiah's name do you stop a torpedo from detonating? What manner of power was this?

But before the priests could puzzle it out, the charging Ork battleship had already brought the orbital defence stations into its own firing solution.

"They've got the nerve to shoot iron rods at us! Right, lads — stuff the rods back down the cannons and fire 'em back! Let the little shrimps know what it feels like to be humiliated!"

Gadda himself heaved up one of the great iron lumps that had just been shot into his ship. He wedged the torpedo into the barrel of his personal favourite — the "Very Heavy Cannon" — and fired it himself.

The torpedo punched through the station's outer hull and buried itself in the command centre.

The priests stared at one another again.

What was this? Were the Orks sending it back because it hadn't gone off, and they wanted them to check it over?

A few of the bolder priests actually stepped forward and interfaced with the torpedo to assess its status. The moment they established the connection, their expressions shifted from grave concern to outright terror.

"It's armed! And it's about to blow!"

Nobody cared any longer why the torpedo hadn't detonated aboard the Ork battleship. Everyone scrambled for the exits at once — but the explosion swallowed every last one of them before they could escape.

Forge World Cath Maximus's orbital defences collapsed in under ten minutes.

As the station bloomed into a ball of fire, Gadda's greenskins roared their approval. Gadda himself stood with chest swelling and eyes gleaming — he could already picture it: this shrimp-folk planet conquered and under his boot, the other two Ork warlords standing before him with barely-concealed fury, having no choice but to kneel.

"Sweep the shrimps' space structures clean!" he declared with swaggering satisfaction. "Get me a mountain of rocks — we're going down there to stomp every last shrimp on the surface!"

"WAAAGH!"

The greenskins answered their boss with thunderous enthusiasm. They gutted the entire spaceport in short order, then dragged asteroids fitted with crude engines up onto the deck.

Wave after wave of Ork boys clambered aboard the hollowed-out rocks. Those still on the ships either shoved the asteroids off the decks or rammed them into cannon barrels and fired them out. Within moments, the sky above Cath Maximus — still broad daylight — was lit with a spectacular meteor shower.

The rocks fell mostly around the Secondary Hive. The Orks had evidently worked out where the Imperial garrison was concentrated, and they intended to hit it hard from the first moment of contact.

Not a single soldier spared a thought for the spectacle. Every one of them gripped their weapons tighter and watched the blazing streaks of light scratching down through the sky with something between awe and cold dread.

No orders were needed. The Astra Militarum's Hydra flak batteries had already opened up, their dense curtains of fire shattering some of the boulders mid-descent. But it wasn't nearly enough — they even swung their Petrified Lizard artillery pieces skyward in desperation.

Weapons not designed for anti-air work were nearly useless for the purpose, but at this point accuracy hardly mattered. Even shells flung blindly into the air sprayed enough shrapnel to knock down a handful of unlucky greenskins on the way in.

But it made no real difference. The Orks were hitting the ground in their thousands — a few unfortunate casualties on the way down couldn't slow the green tide now.

The Ork boys couldn't claw their way out of their rocks fast enough. Realising there was a proper fight waiting for them, they let out earth-shaking howls at the Astra Militarum troops, mouths wide and eyes blazing with pure joy.

"WAAAGH!!!"

The roaring wave shook the nerve of more than a few soldiers — but the weapons in their hands and the commissars at their backs steadied them once more. They raised their lasguns and opened fire on the howling Orks, and for a brief moment, the greenskins who'd just made landfall found themselves pinned and unable to advance.

But that was only ever going to last so long.

An assault boat with a blade-like prow drove itself nose-first into the ground, and through the billowing clouds of dust that followed, a great war machine some six metres tall loomed into view before every eye on the battlefield.

Gadda, aboard his great iron tin, had arrived.

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Author's Note:

The official Ork weapons classification system:

Small Shoota, Big Shoota, Very Heavy Cannon, Very Long Cannon, Squeaky Cannon.

This is the official Ork nomenclature.

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