Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

For six hundred Astartes to take the head of an Ork warlord amid nearly a million greenskins—such a feat, measured against the whole span of Warhammer, could fairly be called extraordinary.

This record would likely be surpassed only by the Second Battle of Armageddon, when Tu'Shan, Chapter Master of the Salamanders, faced the million-strong host of the Bonebreaker and yet held his ground for three days and four nights.

But Lin's situation was different from Armageddon's.

At the Battle of Armageddon, the Imperium had the Blood Angels, it had the Ultramarines, it had the Salamanders, and several regiments of the Astra Militarum besides. On top of that, Armageddon itself was a world boasting several industrial hive cities. Grueling as that battle was, their reinforcements never ran dry, and they held far more cards than Lin held now.

Whereas the Cath Maximus of the present day...

Lin didn't want to put it too rudely, but its overall productive capacity at this moment truly fell short of a single industrial hive world that didn't even belong to the Mechanicus.

The crippled production lines meant that some scrapped heavy weapons could scarcely be resupplied, and on this world without a Planetary Defence Force, the numbers of the Astra Militarum were just as hard to replenish.

As for the Space Marines—although the Gene-Seeds of those two hundred fallen Astartes had mostly been recovered, they clearly couldn't count on those seeds to help the Astartes swiftly replace their ranks, not when even the shortest reconfiguration still took four or five years.

Even the Titans were half-crippled.

The statistics compiled and reported by Director Lifar showed that of three million Astra Militarum, there were a million casualties. Of the ten million Orks, roughly five million had been annihilated in this battle, while the rest had scattered into the wilds across every corner of the planet.

They were rapidly degenerating, and at the same time forming tribes great and small that warred among themselves—in the short term, they did not look likely to pose a threat to humanity.

Provided no new warlord came to this world.

The greenskins were a most curious fungus: they would degenerate swiftly upon losing a boss, and would likewise make a great leap forward upon gaining one. So long as a warlord mightier than they arrived here, these greenskin tribes would be integrated at terrific speed, reclaiming the abilities they had degenerated out of and merging into the new warlord's army.

And as it happened, there really were two other warlords here...

But for reasons unknown, those two warlords were in no hurry to invade Cath Maximus. Their fleets merely cruised between the systems.

Lin had earlier dispatched an expeditionary fleet to conduct guerrilla harassment, the aim being to entangle the fleets of the other two Ork warlords and keep them from reaching Cath Maximus so soon.

But he hadn't expected that those two fleets truly never came.

Through Hays, Lin got in touch with the commander of the expeditionary fleet, Matt Horner.

This was a young fellow only just promoted to battleship captain—so young one might suspect him of being a man with connections—yet Hays placed great trust in him.

As overall commander of the expedition, Hays was no expert in void warfare, so this battleship captain had become the de facto commander-in-chief of the expeditionary fleet.

Matt Horner had indeed displayed his talent in fleet engagements, but the Orks' strange movements had nothing to do with his abilities. He reported the prior void battle to Lin by the book:

"We have resolutely carried out the tactic of harassing the Ork fleet. The tactic proceeds with cruisers firing lances from afar, a portion of the frigates and destroyers closing in to release torpedoes, and the battleships holding the line at a safe distance."

"In this process the Orks had one battleship crippled by our forces, three cruisers destroyed, and roughly forty assault craft. However, our side also lost three frigates to boarding actions by the Orks' assault craft, and one Gothic-class cruiser was damaged and has temporarily withdrawn from the battle order."

To achieve such results with so slight a force—Horner's ability was truly first-rate. But this loss was still far too trifling for the Orks' main fleet.

Lin couldn't fathom why they wouldn't disregard such losses and charge headlong toward Cath Maximus, but instead played house with the expeditionary fleet out in the void.

How very strange—since when were the Orks so considerate?

This wasn't greenskin behavior at all!

He could catch a whiff of conspiracy from this, but the very thought that greenskins might be devising a conspiracy made the matter, on another level, downright chilling.

The initiative, after all, was not in Lin's hands. He could only encourage Horner to press on and keep up the good work, then cut the comm.

No matter how one put it, the greenskins could not defy the laws of their own species.

They could indeed develop the capacity for void travel, but they were not by nature a void-faring race.

Their half-creature, half-plant nature meant they needed almost no supply when fighting on a sunlit world; but if they remained for long aboard warships unable to fully receive a star's radiation, these greenskins would, on the contrary, fall into famine faster than humans.

—After all, every human ship carried machines for producing corpse-starch.

That contraption was perhaps the most widely disseminated piece of technology in the entire Imperium.

So Lin was quite certain they would eventually descend upon Cath Maximus. And if the greenskins were scheming something, all the more reason he should use this hard-won spell of peace to restore Cath Maximus's military strength as best he could.

The technology of solid-state holographic casting was no small help to Lin. Though this primitive technology from among the stars couldn't match the black-tech inherent to Warhammer in efficiency, in production flexibility it far exceeded Warhammer's original level.

Unlike the production lines of other Forge Worlds—which, once built, would go centuries or even millennia without the slightest modification—solid-state holographic casting could swiftly provide templates for any component Lin required. He need only dismantle a few corresponding weapons as samples, and the holographic solid-state casting technology could produce every matching part.

This let Lin repair those malfunctioning heavy weapons at terrific speed. And beyond repairs, the surplus parts produced could even be cobbled together into new weapons.

Although this was worlds apart from the efficiency of an integrated production line, this decomposed method of manufacture could at least give the Astra Militarum a measure of resupply.

Such resupply freed up room for the production of other weapons, and the slight surplus in melta-charge output led Lin to begin attempting to craft new Monster Hunter weapons.

He combined the gunlance with the melta, attempting to integrate the principle of the melta gun into the gunlance.

The combination process, unexpectedly, took little effort. Its power would be proven in the next engagement.

As for troop numbers, the Astra Militarum's losses also urgently needed replenishing, yet a Forge World plainly had no PDF for the Astra Militarum to conscript in an emergency.

Lin could only turn his gaze to the Forge World's slave-workers.

There were, after all, many human slave-workers on the Forge World. The cogboys did not rely solely on Servitors and priests to complete production, so ordinary human laborers existed on the Forge World as well.

Although the cogboys had always worked people like machines, because Forge Worlds all produced promethium—and the nutrient bars that were a byproduct of promethium—the physical condition of these slave-workers on the Forge World was actually somewhat better than that of the common folk on other worlds within the Imperium.

These slave-workers who had mastered the skill of turning screws on the assembly line counted, in the Warhammer world, as rare and valuable high-grade talent. If all were normal, these slave-workers would be nothing less than one of the cogboys' precious assets. But on Cath Maximus a great many production lines had been abandoned, and these slave-workers, having lost the assembly lines they depended on to survive, had nowhere to ply their skills.

Lin had no intention of feeding these idlers for nothing; this was a time of war, and everyone ought to do their duty faithfully for the Forge World.

These slave-workers, though lacking combat experience and training, were not the only kind in an army—an army was not made of frontline soldiers alone. After a brief discussion, he and Hays decided to give these workers simple training and fold them into the rear technical corps, firing artillery or driving troop transports.

The subtle part was that such a policy actually provoked resistance from the slave-workers.

Lin had once promised them that they could join the Astra Militarum and, upon discharge, regain their freedom. But rather than joining the Astra Militarum to win back their freedom, they clearly preferred to spend their whole lives as slave-workers on a Forge World where they could eat their fill and stay warm and clothed.

Such an unambitious attitude pained Lin considerably, but the slave-workers' resistance was so fierce that he was forced to guarantee that after the war they could still return to the Forge World's assembly lines and go on turning screws—only then could this measure be pushed through.

The slave-workers joyfully joined the Astra Militarum, and even some of the Astra Militarum grew tempted to become slave-workers.

This led directly to the commissars' interview rooms and the little dark cells of solitary confinement being packed full in the first few days after the policy was rolled out.

But setting all else aside, this at least reinforced the Astra Militarum with about three hundred thousand troops. With these men helping to hold the defenses, the Astra Militarum could at last free up its hands to deal with the greenskins scattered into the wilds.

They detached small units, with flamer-equipped Chimera transports as their backbone, and one after another swept the smaller Ork tribes.

But the Orks were simply too good at running, and the thinly numbered Astra Militarum also had to use flamers to repeatedly cleanse every inch of soil where fungus had grown. This made their extermination of the Orks extremely inefficient.

This was no surprise—after all, the greatest trait of the Orks was simply survival.

In the Battle of Armageddon in 40K, humanity routed nearly a hundred million greenskins in two years. But even Commissar Yarrick, the bane and slayer of Orks, took more than twenty years after those two years to completely wipe out the greenskins remaining on the planet.

By Lin's estimate, before those two warlords arrived, they could clear at most another million or so greenskins.

This number was far from ideal. But like the five million exterminated earlier, it was already the best that Cath Maximus's existing defensive strength could manage.

But to put it another way... they still had at least some twenty-four million greenskins yet to face.

Among the high command directing the war, not a single one felt optimistic about that figure.

The refining factories in the resource zones had been running at overcapacity throughout this period; on this planet, apart from production and sweeping the Orks, every other bit of labor still able to move was thrown into the extraction work of the resource zones. The harvested resources, after rough processing, were swiftly transported into the Secondary Hive for storage.

Such preparations improved the defenders' situation. Unlike before, when they had to hold the resource zones at all costs, the present reserves ensured that even if all the outer resource zones fell, Lin and the others would have the option of a scorched-earth defense.

But the figure of twenty-four million greenskins was simply too despairing. Even with abundant resources to hold the hive, Hays reckoned they could not last more than three months.

The logic-analyzer told Lin that Hays's judgment was correct.

At least, that was so if reinforcements were not taken into account.

Although there should by now be other Imperial Fists successor chapters that had answered the Ultimate Wall's call, converging here across vast distances, no one knew when they would actually arrive.

Lin could not factor faint, intangible reinforcements into the constants of his calculations.

He had to produce a new countermeasure.

As a cogboy, the only countermeasure he could produce was new technology.

"I call it the Thundergod Mecha. What do you think of this thing?"

Facing Christina, whom he had invited over, Lin pointed to the large mecha before him—his latest creation.

This mecha, standing a full eighteen meters tall, had its body clad in heavy adamantium and ceramite. These armor plates presented a deep-gray metallic texture utterly unlike a Titan's, plainly cast directly from templates supplied by holographic solid-state casting. Its rugged appearance displayed a mechanical aesthetic that Imperial equipment—plastered all over with prayers—generally lacked.

The mecha's overall silhouette was an angular, squared-off form. Its power as a whole was supplied by the plasma reactors already quite mature in the Warhammer world, and the plasma reactor likewise powered the two giant plasma cannons on this mecha's two arms.

These giant plasma cannons, derived from StarCraft, could hardly be called high-end technology; their principle was far inferior to that plasma gun from Ryza in Lin's possession. But their size and mass-producibility made up for most of their shortcomings.

Beyond the two plasma cannons, the rear of the Thundergod's shoulder armor carried four 250mm artillery pieces. In ordinary times these guns could serve as anti-air firepower, and when necessary could slide up onto the shoulder armor to provide a firepower barrage covering lightly-armored ground targets.

As for the place where missile launch tubes should originally have been mounted, Lin had stuffed in a shield generator.

This shield generator provisionally employed the Energy Shield technology Lin had already mastered. Although the Energy Shield's hallmark was that it could block anything, its energy consumption was likewise utterly staggering.

At present, fighting on home ground on the Forge World, this problem could be ignored. But if it came to fighting one grinding battle after another, the void shield—which intercepts only high-speed weapons and energy weapons—was clearly still better suited to the native character of the Warhammer world.

But to Lin's dismay, Cath Maximus had no production line for void shields, and Lin could only settle for the next best thing.

At least he had already built a heavy firepower platform, sized between a Warhound-class and a Reaver-class Titan, whose firepower against non-heavily-armored targets could match that of a Warlord-class Titan. Other optimizations could, like the siege tank, be discussed another day.

The reason the Thundergod could possess firepower comparable to a Warlord-class Titan at this size was its compactness.

This experimental Thundergod that Lin had cobbled together did not, like a Titan, have internal passageways for crew to move through. Instead, only at the front was there a slightly protruding section, the protruding part protected by a tempered-glass canopy, within which sat a small single-person cockpit.

Christina, invited over to observe, gave a noncommittal reply: "It hardly looks like a creation that should belong to humanity."

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