In orbit above the mining world, the Lamenters' battle barge was the last Imperial vessel still fighting. It was holding, barely, against the repeated pressure of the Ork fleet, and the fact that it was still there was its own kind of news.
The better news arrived from the sky.
The ships that had been destroyed in orbit came down in pieces across the battlefield, and the wreckage that landed on the human side of the trenches carried with it something the position desperately needed: food supplies, sealed and intact in the cargo sections that survived the descent. The Ork offensive that had been building in the hours before the impacts lost its shape as the falling wreckage disrupted their staging grounds and killed a significant portion of the force assembled for it.
David put the remaining functional Scyllax units and mortal fighters to work immediately, moving through the wreckage fields to strip anything usable. Several lascannons from downed Thunderhawk transports were recovered intact. A double-linked heavy bolter came out of one section in workable condition. From a frigate fragment David located a batch of laser array components that could not be fully repaired but could be configured as overload devices. None of it was enough to change the strategic situation. All of it extended how long they could hold it.
Six hours after the wreckage stopped falling, the Orks came again.
The scale was reduced compared to the earlier assaults, the Ork command structure apparently still reorganizing around its losses. It was still more than the Lamenters and their mortal fighters could comfortably hold, and the fighting that followed was the grinding attrition kind: no dramatic breakthroughs in either direction, just the slow erosion of everything on the human side that could be eroded.
Nolan and David used every panacea capsule remaining in the power armor's storage on the Astartes who were closest to the threshold. It bought the Lamenters back from losses that would otherwise have been permanent, and it emptied the supply entirely.
By the fourth day, fewer than two hundred Astartes in the entire Lamenters force could still stand and fight, and every one of them was carrying wounds. The mortal casualty count had stopped being a number that could be tracked and had become something Nolan measured differently: the women, the elderly, and the children who had been sheltering deepest in the mines were now appearing inside the forward trench sections, filling the gaps, doing whatever their hands could manage. When a population reaches the point where its children are holding the line, the line has been held for a very long time.
The Ork command had also adapted. The warlord's forces had shifted from massed assault to siege and attrition, using their numerical superiority to maintain continuous pressure rather than concentrating it. They did not need to break through. They only needed to wait.
Nolan searched for the orc warlord on the battlefield repeatedly across the fourth day and did not find it. The huge figure that had driven the earlier assaults was not visible anywhere in the Ork lines.
In the early hours of the fifth morning, David's alert pulled Nolan and the Lamenters out of the few hours of rest they had been able to take. Another Ork transport fleet had grounded on the mining world during the night.
The room the news left for optimism was narrow. The portal would not reopen for two more days. Calgar's fleet had not appeared. The Ork numbers had just increased.
Nolan did not share what he was thinking. He put the helmet back on.
The first light of the fifth morning came through the smoke and the ruins and landed on a battlefield that looked like it had been used for exactly as long as it had. Blood had run across enough of the ground that it had stopped looking like anything had spilled and started looking like the natural color of the terrain.
Then the footsteps began.
Each one shook the ground enough to feel through the soles of the magnetic boots. Ten meters tall, armored in the particular layered way of something that had been built rather than grown, the Gorkanaut came forward from the Ork camp in a slow and absolute advance, each step deliberate, the weight of it settling into the earth like a statement.
Nolan ordered the Fortis Mechs to concentrate fire immediately.
The lascannon beams crossed the field and hit the Gorkanaut in sequence. The armor absorbed them. The Gorkanaut did not slow.
The lascannons that could stop a Death Dreadnought could not stop this.
Nolan pulled the remaining melta bombs from storage and moved.
Three Lamenters battle squads followed him out of the trench and into the open ground, the Astartes pouring the last of their explosive ammunition ahead of them as they advanced to clear the approach. When the launchers were empty they threw them aside and brought up chainswords, following Nolan's pace into the mass of Orks pushing to intercept the assault.
Nolan had stopped thinking about form. The Warscythe moved because his arms moved it, and the ten rings worked the spaces around him, and Orks fell, and he moved forward. Every few meters one of the Astartes behind him went down under the weight of numbers and did not come back up, and he did not stop to mark it because stopping was not an option that existed.
The assault squad was down to a single combat team by the time they broke through to the Gorkanaut's position. Nolan had the melta bomb in his hand and was pulling it from his waist when the ground shook differently.
The Ork warlord came through the press of bodies like a charging animal, its power claws already open. The combat team had no window to respond. The claws swept through them.
Nolan activated the melta bomb in the same motion he threw it at the Gorkanaut, not waiting to see where it landed, and turned the ten rings on the warlord at close range. Full volley, continuous, buying distance and time rather than expecting penetration.
The melta bomb detonated behind him. The heat wave rolled across his power pack hard enough to register through the armor's systems, and something in the Gorkanaut's movement pattern changed: the impacts that followed were heavier but less controlled, one side of the machine losing coordination.
He had not finished processing this when a force closed around him from behind.
The Gorkanaut's remaining functional claw had him. It lifted him off the ground and threw him down with the full weight of the machine behind it.
The impact drove through the vibranium shell and into the body inside it. He coughed blood against the inside of the helmet, the taste of it light and golden, and pushed himself onto one knee.
In front of him, the warlord advanced with its power claws raised, pressing forward step by step. Behind him, the Gorkanaut brought its remaining claw up for a downward strike, the arm moving in the imprecise way of something that had lost part of its drive system but retained enough of it to matter.
Nolan's hand found the second melta bomb at his waist.
"For the Emperor."
He pressed the activation stud.
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