Chapter 19: Picking Up the Pace
The Ork Boyz came down the corridor with heavy cleavers and crude shootas, their iron plate armour grinding and scraping with every step.
Through Shared Awareness, Rosen held everyone still.
The Gretchin scouts had already crossed over the trap without triggering it. They were too light — less than twenty kilograms each, nowhere near the minimum pressure threshold on the fuse line.
The traps weren't set for Gretchin.
The Ork Boy main body followed behind, boots hitting the deck plates with a rhythmic weight. The lead Ork was notably large, each footfall sending a dull vibration through the metal floor, the Gretchin behind it stumbling and lurching from the shockwave.
Five metres. Three metres.
Rosen counted down in his head.
Contact.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The daisy-chained grenades detonated almost simultaneously.
In a sealed corridor, that level of explosion produced a shockwave and fragmentation storm equivalent to setting off a small rocket inside a tin can.
The five Ork Boyz at the front took the full force.
The fragmentation spread in a forward arc. Hundreds of high-velocity metal fragments swept through those five Ork Boyz from head to foot in under three tenths of a second.
Two died immediately.
The other three went down with fragments driven deep throughout their bodies.
The Gretchin packed in behind the Orks fared considerably worse.
More than twenty were slammed directly into the corridor walls by the shockwave, reduced to a smear of green and red across the metal plating, flesh and shattered bone pressed flat as though someone had thrown them there.
Then —
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The second cluster of high-explosive grenades on the ceiling, daisy-chained to the load-bearing pipes, caught the shockwave from the first detonation and fired in chain sequence.
The Ork Boyz who had survived the first wave looked up at exactly the wrong moment.
The blast tore a three-metre section of load-bearing pipe free from the ceiling. Half a metre in diameter, several tonnes of dead weight, it came straight down into the middle of the greenskin formation.
System notifications came in a dense cascade. Life Points jumped rapidly upward.
But there were too many of them. Both waves had torn through the front ranks, but Ork Boyz and Gretchin were still pouring out of the corridor behind the wreckage, stepping over and across their dead without breaking stride. In greenskin logic, dead companions only meant one thing — there was a fight up ahead worth reaching.
"Fire."
Rosen pressed the trigger on the heavy boltgun.
Number 1 and Number 3 opened up from the right-side firing position simultaneously. Their crossed fire turned the corridor into a kill zone with no safe angles.
Number 5 stood ahead and to Rosen's left with the power shield raised. The force field flickered with blue-white light as stray fragments and wild greenskin shots struck it in rapid succession.
One Ork Boy, soaked in blood from the explosions, clambered over its dead and got within ten metres of Rosen. Its left arm was gone at the elbow, blown off in the blast. The right hand still held its cleaver. It came forward spraying green blood from its mouth, forcing out a hoarse "Waaagh" with whatever was left in its lungs.
Rosen switched weapons.
He handed the heavy boltgun to Number 5 to hold, drew the Catachan Fang in his right hand, and pulled the chainsword from his belt with his left.
The moment he thumbed the activation stud, the densely packed teeth along the chainsword's blade began spinning at several thousand revolutions per minute.
The weapon hummed hard in his grip.
The Ork Boy reached him.
Rosen rolled his body to the side, letting the full-force lateral swing go wide. The blade passed within five centimetres of his face.
He stepped in tight along the Ork Boy's right side.
The Catachan Fang went first.
The wide serrated blade went in at a precise angle into the gap at the right armpit — a structural dead angle that no armour covered regardless of how much plate was bolted on. The blade sank into flesh, severing the brachial artery and the deltoid attachment point.
Then the chainsword followed from the left.
The instant the spinning teeth made contact with the Ork Boy's neck, the air cracked with a sound that set teeth on edge and a mist of green blood burst outward.
A chainsword's killing mechanism wasn't cutting. It was shredding.
The high-speed chain teeth bit into the Ork Boy's thick neck muscle and vertebrae, destroying tissue at a microscopic level with each revolution. In under a second, the neck had been ground down to a deep channel that nearly crossed the full width of the throat.
Useful. Against a thick-skinned target, at least thirty percent more efficient than the Catachan Fang alone. But the chainsword ran five to seven kilograms, and the gyroscopic effect of the spinning chain made sustained use punishing on the arm. Good for decisive moments. Not a primary weapon.
The fight kept going.
Three more Ork Boyz pushed through the fire line.
"Fall back to the second firing line."
Rosen pulled back with Number 5. Number 1 and Number 3 retreated in step, alternating cover. Number 2 and Number 4 took over the fire output from the second line, las-beams drawing hot red lines through the smoke-filled corridor.
The last three Ork Boyz were brought down one after another in the crossfire.
The corridor went quiet.
Rosen did a fast scan. Casualties and returns.
No Death Warriors lost. The power shield's force field had burned through roughly a third of its charge. Number 2 had taken a graze on the left arm from a stray greenskin shot — skin only. Rosen didn't spend Life Points on it.
Life Points and Refined Steel both climbed steadily as the post-combat collection ran through his totals.
Rosen opened the Death Warrior panel.
"Summon."
[Consuming: 300 Life Points, 3 cubic metres Refined Steel.]
[Summoning: Catachan Jungle Fighter x3.]
Three visible distortions in the air appeared before him in rapid succession.
Three Catachans, each one ninety-five, solidified one after another, right fists pressed to their chests.
"Loyalty!"
"Number 7, Number 8, Number 9."
Rosen pulled three lasguns, three Catachan Fangs, and the corresponding magazines from Armoury storage and distributed them to the three newly arrived Death Warriors.
"Draw chainswords and grenades from the Armoury. Full loadout for everyone."
Eight fully armed Catachan Jungle Fighters.
With Number 6 holding the weapons bay in the rear, he now had nine Death Warriors.
Rosen divided all nine, himself included, into three combat groups.
"Number 1, Number 7, Number 8 — Alpha group. Reverse back along the route those greenskins came from. Set ambush points as you go. Any isolated greenskin patrol you find, destroy it."
"Number 3, Number 4, Number 9 — Bravo group. Push into the right-flank decks. Collect Refined Steel. If you meet serious resistance, pull back. Don't get into a straight fight."
"Number 2, Number 5, with me — Charlie group. We push forward and map the terrain ahead."
All three groups moved out simultaneously.
The Shared Awareness network stretched across his mind like a grid. Nine sets of eyes, ears, and senses feeding in at once — nine simultaneous feeds running in the back of his awareness, each one distinct, none of them crowding the others out.
He had long since stopped noticing the load.
Nine perspectives at the same time was just nine things to keep track of. He had handled far more than that before.