Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

It was exactly ten days later that the greenskin assault began once more.

Orks might be every bit as bad at counting as Ogryns, but for war they possessed a natural acuity and instinct all their own.

Having already grasped that the Secondary Hive was too tough a bone to gnaw, the greenskins did not fixate on hammering at the Secondary Hive itself. Instead they threw their main strength against the resource zones Lin had laid out, which extended from the hive into the open wilderness.

Here there was no natural barrier of hive architecture, and although Lin and the Imperial Fists had gone to enormous trouble to throw up fortifications across the plains, the Ork host was nevertheless able to fully deploy across the ground.

Their numerical advantage was here put on the most lavish display.

The Orks drove their Squigs and Gretchin out before them, and like a rising tide they launched their first wave of attack upon the foe.

The Astra Militarum strained every nerve to repel that first wave, beating back the Gretchin with lasguns and autoguns. But all of it had only ever been a probing strike meant to wear down their stamina and their ammunition.

The true killing blow was on its way.

A bizarrely shaped four-wheeled buggy opened the curtain on the Ork main attack, rumbling its way toward the Astra Militarum positions.

Onto the buggy's front armour plates were welded several battered metal crates, and behind it dragged a string of discarded car tyres. The Ork serving as its driver sat upon a homemade control console, his two enormous bare feet planted directly on the accelerator pedal.

It didn't even have a steering wheel!

"WAAAAAUUUGH—" The great loudspeakers bolted to the buggy were blaring some sort of grotesque music, and the Orks aboard were swaying along to the beat in wild frenzy — they didn't look like soldiers on the attack in the slightest.

But none of this dampened the buggy's combat power one bit — it had been the high-explosive shell from this very vehicle that had moments earlier blown a great swathe of empty ground through the Astra Militarum line.

The soldiers tried to rake the bare-framed buggy with lasguns and autogun fire, but apart from gunning down a few of the Orks singing on top of it, they did precisely nothing to the vehicle itself.

Watching the buggy bear down on his stretch of the line, the company commander in charge tore his cap from his head in fury.

"Where's the gun crew?! Where in damnation have they gone?!" he bellowed. "Get your heavy weapons up here and give this thing a proper greeting!"

An anti-vehicle long cannon was hauled up to the front. Its firepower was easily enough to punch a Leman Russ clean through the flank. Half a dozen men wrestled the long cannon into position and trained it on the still-advancing buggy.

The Orks aboard the buggy paid the long cannon no heed whatever. With nothing in their skulls but the desire to bag plenty of shrimpies, they kept pouring fire into the most thickly packed clumps of men.

Their behaviour put the gun crew at ease — usually the first to be singled out for attention the moment they appeared on the line — and the gunners shoved a shell into the breech, brimming with confidence over what their round was about to achieve.

But underestimating the enemy was, in itself, the cardinal sin of fighting Orks.

The crew had plainly aimed at the buggy's weakest point, yet the shell, snapping out of the barrel, behaved as though dragged by a magnet — it slammed instead into that heap of welded-on scrap on the front of the buggy and, having buried itself in the junk, simply went silent.

"What in hell is that?!"

"Never mind that! Fire!" the veteran barked sharply.

A dense storm of fire poured into the Ork war-machine. Most of it skipped harmlessly off that lopsided, ramshackle buggy, but the few shells that did connect scored fair results. The vehicle, which had shrugged off single shots without so much as a scratch, was obviously no match for saturation fire; it began belching sparks and black smoke, and was already teetering on the verge of detonation.

But the Ork at the wheel, far from being alarmed, was delighted. He stamped the accelerator flat to the floor, and the war-machine streaked into the Astra Militarum positions like an arrow loosed from the string. He howled with savage glee: "Shrimpies, 'av a taste o' me mushrooms!"

The buggy that had piled headlong into the Astra Militarum lines blew apart with a sharp crack, the greenskin driver torn to shreds by the blast — but what greeted the Astra Militarum was not the spray of blood and severed limbs they had been braced for. It was a billowing cloud of green spores.

"What the hell is this?!" Every soldier stared in stunned disbelief.

Not knowing what it was made the Astra Militarum's tension worse, and their ragged, heavy breathing only drew yet more of the spores into their lungs. As dizziness and a sapping weakness set in, the Astra Militarum troopers — their fingers no longer able to keep a grip on their lasguns — finally realised that this stuff was something a great deal more terrible than any ordinary bomb.

"A bio-weapon?!" Only now did the Astra Militarum commander understand. "Damn it — everyone, gas masks on!"

But it was already too late. The other Ork war-machines had seized the moment and were charging in.

Their designs were enough to leave a man's jaw hanging — some war-machines were cobbled together out of planks and scrap iron; some didn't even have round wheels; and one was, quite simply, a vastly oversized rubbish bin that had been hammered into a vehicle. Yet these "toys" were fitted with proper, no-joke killing weapons, and there was nothing remotely half-hearted about their firepower.

This frenzied, utterly chaotic assault left the Astra Militarum at a loss for what to do. Even seasoned Astra Militarum veterans felt themselves overcome with deep bewilderment in the face of so absurd a battlefield.

"This is bloody well demonic — where in the hell are these greenskins springing from, who in the void could have built a pack of freaks like this?!" the commander roared into his vox.

No one could answer him.

Although the humans were still throwing everything they had into holding the first line of defence, the line had been so thoroughly churned to pieces by the high-speed Ork vehicles that it could no longer mass concentrated, effective firepower. Before the Astra Militarum had even finished mopping up these scrap-heap buggies, tens of thousands of three-metre-tall Killa Kans had already rolled into view.

The serried advance of the iron cans set the whole earth gently shuddering, and the Gorkanauts threaded in amongst those Killa Kans drove the Astra Militarum on the line into outright despair.

The commanders were still battling to throw together some sort of fresh resistance — but a vast mecha, ten and more metres tall, rising upon the distant horizon, utterly shattered whatever thought of holding the Astra Militarum had left.

Mortal armies could not stand against these mechanised Orks. The Astra Militarum's defeat was already a foregone conclusion.

On Hays's authority, the regimental colonels at the front began to organise the withdrawal of their troops — but this retreat was nothing like as orderly as the one of a few days earlier.

Even an Ork could tell the difference between a fighting withdrawal and a rout, and as he watched the shrimpies break and run, Gadda was very pleased indeed.

He hadn't even needed to bring out the Gargant, and already he'd torn open a breakthrough on this scale — these shrimpies were even more pitiful than he'd reckoned.

"Wivout dem tin-can shrimpies, dey ain't nuffin'!" he declared in triumph. "Boyz — forward!"

The greenskins erupted in cheers once again.

Close to a million of their main force followed Gadda, pouring through the breach that had been torn open in the Astra Militarum line and flooding into the defences proper. The rest of the iron-can host fanned out toward other points along the line — they meant to make this great crusade, launched in the name of Gork and Mork, burn ever hotter.

Fortunately, the Orks who had peeled away did not bring all that many vehicles and iron cans with them, and the Astra Militarum reorganising the line elsewhere, with the pressure suddenly slackened, could still just about hold their own.

But the breach that had been forced open was the heart of the matter — if the Orks broke through there, the Secondary Hive, which served as the present industrial centre, would be cut off from supply.

Once the resource-extraction grounds were lost, the reserves of Cath Maximus — already stripped nigh dry by the magi who had fled before — would not last even a week.

This was the most fatal weakness within Lin's defensive design, and the very reason why Maximus Sorn had not been keen on the plan from the outset.

Orks of course understood none of these niceties — yet so long as they could be massed together into a single coherent body, they could always, by sheer unconscious instinct, make precisely the right choice.

Perhaps Gork and Mork — those two brothers — truly were guiding them from beyond the veil?

Watching from afar, Lin knew that this battle had now reached its single most critical moment.

Victory or defeat — it would all be decided in this one engagement!

He gave the first order of the decisive battle: "CMC units — move out!"

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