Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Having brought out the new technology, Cath Maximus—now in the throes of mass production—was undergoing a fresh, drum-tight round of war preparations.

Although the aim of these preparations was to counter the remaining two greenskin warlords, at this very moment those two greenskin warlords were still piloting their own fleets, frolicking about the cosmos.

A game of chase really is addictive. Especially after using his own micro-management to pick off a few of the shrimpies' frigates, the Priest felt distinctly that he hadn't yet had his fill.

Goldtooth, however, was gradually becoming unable to endure such days. As the most extreme of the feral Ork warlords when it came to battle, he hungered for everything that had to do with fighting.

Though he understood that the reasoning—let Gadda take the vanguard while they held their forces in check—did make sense, his craving for a WAAAGH! could no longer be borne.

"When do we finally get to charge onto the shrimpies' turf?" he roared at the Priest, who was engrossed in his fleet micro-management.

"Then let me ask you this—do you want to be the top boss among the warlords?"

"I don't care! My big ship got crippled by the shrimpies a while back and still ain't fixed, and me and my boyz are all so pent up we're huffin' steam! I wanna go kill right now, I wanna go choppin'! Anyone who dares stop me from bein' boss, I'll chop 'em dead along with the rest!"

His previously all-conquering silver tongue had now hit a wall; the Priest understood that he could no longer rein Goldtooth in.

As the faction with the smallest strength, he naturally did not dare to anger Goldtooth utterly. He could only summon over one of the boyz at his side, and reckon up how much time had now passed.

In a place with no alternation of day and night, the very concept of time was blurry to begin with. Still less for Orks, who had no notion of time in the first place.

But seeing that the boyz under his command had by now begun to take on a yellowish pallor, the Priest reckoned that his world-shaking wisdom was just about at the moment to draw in the net.

He nodded toward Goldtooth: "We'll go find the shrimpies and Gadda right now—and when we get there, we'll first take out Gadda's fleet parked in orbit."

Goldtooth roared in satisfaction. The greenskin boyz below at once raised a chorus of WAAAGH!s.

The two fleets now no longer cared about the human fleet's obstruction; they wheeled about and charged straight for Cath Maximus.

Matt Horner relayed this news back to Cath Maximus at the first opportunity. He commanded the fleet to attempt harassment several times, but the Orks, their minds made up, bore through the light-lances and torpedoes and bull-rushed onward in a banzai charge.

But the closer they drew to Cath Maximus, the more the Priest felt something was wrong.

Watching the frozen greenskin meat flit past his flagship, the Priest felt rather bewildered.

"Why are there greenskin boyz' corpses here?"

As the warship advanced, he found that the corpses of greenskin boyz grew more and more numerous. These greenskins, who had stopped thinking out in the frigid cosmos, were now frozen by the vacuum into desiccated husks, drifting aimlessly through the void—as though proclaiming Gadda's tragic fate.

This left the Orks somewhat agitated.

Orks do not fear death; being chopped, cut, or minced to bits was, in truth, all the same to them—but dying out in the vacuum with a face full of ferocity was, after all, a touch terrifying.

This business of dying before they'd even gotten their WAAAGH! going was not something they could accept.

The Priest, too, did not understand why it had turned out this way.

For the sake of the plan—letting Gadda land on the shrimpies' planet first, and then, once he'd been worn down enough, going up himself to kick the backside—the Priest was quite certain that Gadda had already taken the bulk of his boyz down to the planet, leaving only those few large warships of Gadda's fleet up in orbit.

So then, what was the deal with these Ork jerky-husks drifting through the cosmos?

But soon enough, upon arriving at Cath Maximus, he learned the answer.

In the dark of space, countless fragments great and small drifted quietly like ghosts.

They had once been part of the Big Mek Gadda's flagship. But now, the wreckage of this warship had merged forever with the stars, becoming an eternal memorial hall in low orbit.

The largest piece of wreckage was a full several dozen kilometers long—which showed that the hull itself had not suffered a fatal blow. Through the wreckage, the Priest could see that this warship's massive plasma-engine core had already been utterly destroyed; the twisted metal structures and the melted ceramic heat-shielding silently recorded the end of this warship.

It seemed to have died of self-destruction.

Lin had not done anything to this warship; its becoming what it now was had merely been one of the enormous chain reactions produced by the Ork warlord's death.

Gadda's death not only triggered the rout of the Orks on the ground. Those creations augmented by the power of his Orky 'I reckon' had also suffered grievous damage.

Junk-heaps that, under the Orks' 'I reckon,' had originally been able to function now turned into actual junk; some of the relatively more reasonable creations could still barely operate under such circumstances. But an Ork flagship upgraded from the wreckage of a cruiser-killer up into a battleship was clearly not among them.

The Priest was shocked: "There's a real expert among the shrimpies! Everyone, pull back, quick!"

The Orks could not tell the difference between self-destruction and being destroyed. But even Goldtooth understood that Gadda had, in all likelihood, already gone stone-cold.

The hot blood that had originally rushed to his head cooled off quite a bit; even though he craved battle, he did not, at this moment, oppose the Priest's words.

The Ork fleet that had come rushing in a streak now streaked right back out, taking another round of wild bombardment from Horner's commanded fleet along the way. This forced Goldtooth to go up in person to demand an explanation from the Priest.

"Priest! Take a look at what kind of Gretchin nonsense you've gone and done!" He boarded the Priest's flagship hauling his own Beast-Choppa. "This is your plan? That Gadda lad's already dead as a doornail—we don't even need to go kick his backside!"

A feral warlord over five meters tall standing before the two-and-a-half-meter Priest was quite intimidating. The Priest, deep in thought, didn't want to pay him any mind. But gazing at that choppa hanging over his head—a blade about as long as he himself was—the Priest still steeled himself and answered:

"My plans have always followed the guidance of the two brothers, Gork and Mork!"

"You fart even better than a Squig! Could Brother Gork and Brother Mork ever let us go die before we'd chopped anyone? Take a look at that Gadda fellow—the boyz under him died something awful!"

"That can only mean the shrimpies are a bit stronger than we thought! And besides, how is this not within the plan of the two brothers, Gork and Mork?"

"What're you gettin' at, lad?"

The Priest squeezed out an eager smile: "It must be that the two brothers Gork and Mork favor you more! They want you to be the great warlord, so they had that Gadda lad kick the bucket!"

Goldtooth turned thoughtful: "Sounds like there's somethin' to that…"

Seeing Goldtooth take the bait so easily, the Priest continued to coax him along step by step:

"In any case, the shrimpies' strength has surely been ground down in part by Gadda too. But to be on the safer side, I think we ought to make a few more preparations."

"How do we prepare?"

"First we'll go make lots and lots of big rocks, and then we'll smash that bunch of shrimpies to death with 'em!"

"Not bad, sounds not bad. As expected, you're the lad with the ideas!"

The Priest led his and Goldtooth's fleets to the other planets within the star system.

These planets were, to humans, thoroughgoing death worlds, but to Orks they were just barely survivable. They flung their boyz onto these worlds and set them to mining whatever resources they could gather.

Though their skills fell short of the Big Mek, the tech-boyz under the two of them could still churn out things like Ork asteroids.

They soon stockpiled a great batch of rocks.

Matt Horner relayed the news back to Cath Maximus, and such news left Lin clicking his tongue.

This situation actually corroborated, with the earlier fact that the two Ork warlords had been so slow to arrive… but since when had there been such a brainy existence among the Orks?

Had they invited the Supreme Commander to possess them?

Still, the Orks digging up rocks was indeed a threat. The initiative in void warfare was not in Lin's hands; all he could do was invest a little more of Cath Maximus's scant production capacity into anti-air weaponry.

But this also won Lin more preparation time than he had anticipated.

He could rely on this time to produce more weapons and sweep up more of the Orks on the ground. More importantly, though, the probability of their waiting out the arrival of reinforcements had been raised by no small amount.

The Ultimate Wall's reinforcements were surely on their way at this moment; though no one knew when they would arrive, Lin believed they would definitely come.

After all, this was the allied host of the Ultimate Wall, not that of the Ultramarines.

What Lin did not anticipate, however, was that the first to learn the news of his side's reinforcements arriving would not be them, but the Orks.

Listening to the urgent message relayed by Matt Horner, Lin—who was busy in the factory hand-assembling Leman Russ tanks and Thundergod Mechas—shot abruptly to his feet.

"What did you say?" Doubting whether he had misheard, he confirmed once more with Matt Horner, but the other party's reply was utterly certain.

"There's a battle barge boarding the Orks?!"

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