David led the remaining Intelligent Control Corps back to the main position and brought the six-armed Terminator frame to a stop near Nolan. The Lamenters moved to acknowledge the arrival, several of them stepping forward to offer thanks, and then David removed the helmet and the Lamenters got their first look at what was inside it.
The black metal skull brought them up short. A brief, collective stillness.
The Lamenters Chapter was not the kind of organisation that calcified around tradition to the point of losing its ability to respond to new information. After the initial moment passed, they stepped forward anyway, politely and genuinely, and offered their thanks to David directly. David received this without comment, its optical sensors cycling once.
Nolan gathered Foros, the Chapter Chaplain, and David, and they worked through the situation together.
The mining world was a significant resource node for the Ork invasion force. The minerals extracted here fed directly into their weapons and vehicle production, which meant that Ork command, to whatever extent that concept applied, would not accept the loss of this position without an immediate response. David processed the technical data a Lamenters sergeant provided and gave his assessment: less than twelve hours before the first reinforcement wave arrived.
Seven days until the portal reopened. No way to know when Calgar's fleet would respond.
Nolan made his decisions without hesitating over the ones he could not change.
The Lamenters would use their power armor's capabilities to excavate. Not individual foxholes but a connected system of battle trenches, complex in structure, threading between the mine openings and linking the natural cover of the terrain into a continuous defensive network. It would take time and it would take every Astartes available, but it was the only way to give three million unarmored people a survivable position against what was coming.
David, guided by a handful of mortal slaves who knew the layout of the mine's storage areas, located the mineral stocks the Orks had not yet transported off-world. What followed was David doing what David did: working directly with the raw material, fabricating melee weapons and basic protective equipment at a rate that no human craftsman could approach. Not good equipment, but functional. A spear will stop an Ork from reaching you for a fraction of a second longer than bare hands, and in the mathematics of survival, fractions of seconds accumulate.
The mortal slaves did not resist being armed. Nolan had expected some of them to, and he had prepared the argument for why taking a weapon and fighting was a better probability than the alternative. He did not need it. The people who had been surviving in the mines under Ork captivity understood the calculation already. The ones who could fight picked up what was offered. A considerable number of women whose physical condition allowed it volunteered for the front line without being asked.
Nolan attempted to put the Ork ranged weapons to use. The big shootas and assorted firearms scattered across the position after the battle were available in quantity. The attempt produced several explosions and no useful shooters. Even the mortal slaves willing to try it were not willing to try it twice. He abandoned the idea and moved on.
The sky above the mining position was dark and getting darker, and not from weather.
The silhouettes of Ork transport ships were recognisable at distance simply by the fact that nothing built by any other species looked quite like them: asymmetrical, over-engineered in some directions and completely absent in others, held together by a logic that was more biological than mechanical. They descended toward the mining world in a loose formation, and the first wave of aircraft broke from their bays before the transports had fully committed to their descent.
Ork helicopters: rotary-winged, forward-mounted circular saw blades spinning on the lead craft, and greenskin crew leaning out of open fuselages to hurl explosive packets at the ground below with the enthusiasm of people who found this genuinely enjoyable.
Nolan ordered the civilian population deeper into the mines immediately. The armed mortal fighters went into the trenches and pressed flat against the forward faces, using the earth itself as cover against the first wave.
The Lamenters spread to firing positions, boltguns tracking the incoming aircraft.
Nolan braced on top of the mine's high ground, the Masterwork Bolter in one hand and the Heart of the Furnace in the other, and pulled both triggers as the first helicopters crossed into effective range. Bolt rounds and plasma tore through fuselages and rotors. The Lamenters opened up from their spread positions simultaneously, and the sky above the position became crowded with the falling trajectories of burning aircraft.
Ten minutes of sustained fire brought most of them down. The crashes and secondary detonations rolled across the position in overlapping waves.
The transport ships had already grounded on the mountain approaches by then. Ork troop carriers came grinding out of their loading ramps in a column, misshapen and loud and moving with the particular urgency of Orks who had heard explosions and wanted to be near the source of them.
Nolan sent the Intelligent Control Corps forward to meet the column.
The Lamenters pulled back into the trench system and established firing lanes, conserving ammunition for the breakthroughs rather than the approach.
The Scyllax hit the troop carrier column with chain swords cycling, tentacles spread wide. Several of the lead carriers went over as the Scyllax drove underneath them and leveraged them off their wheels, the overturned hulks creating an obstacle line that forced the column to halt and redirect. The Orks inside poured out of the stalled vehicles and engaged on foot, and the melee that followed was the kind of close, grinding exchange that suited neither side's preferences and suited the Orks less than it suited the Scyllax.
The first Scyllax unit to reach critical damage did not wait for the choice to be made for it. It activated the melta bomb in its core and took the cluster of Orks pressing against its hull with it. The detonation cleared a wide circle of ground around the point of impact and bought the adjacent Scyllax units a moment of open space before the next wave filled it.
More Orks came. They always did. The ones who had watched the detonation came faster than the ones who had not, because that was how Orks processed that kind of event.
From behind the advancing infantry, the killing machines appeared: heavy armored units pushing through the Ork ranks toward the forward line.
The five Fortis Intelligent Control Mechs turned their lascannon muzzles toward the new targets. Red beams crossed the full width of the battlefield in straight lines, finding the heavy armor of the killing machines and pressing against it with the sustained intensity that only a lascannon could produce.
The fighting settled into its shape, and neither side was near done with it.