Chapter 252: Alien Fleets
Orks.
Green-skinned, bellicose, and constitutionally incapable of doing anything except fighting. An Ork's entire existence is a single sustained act of aggression against everything within reach.
Their adaptability is frankly offensive. Hand an Ork a pile of scrap metal and he'll build a functional weapon. Hand him a mountain of scrap and he'll build a warship. The biology is worse — grind one up and scatter the pieces, and inside a season the soil will be sprouting fresh Orks, waving cleavers and screaming WAAAGH at anything that moves.
Orks represent one of the Imperium's most persistent and intractable alien threats. They don't have objectives. They don't have grievances. They just want a fight, and they will find one whether you consent to participate or not.
The Aeldari are something else entirely.
Ancient, elegant, and deeply convinced of their own superiority — a species that predates humanity's first fire, now a shadow of what it was. They look disturbingly like humans. Genetically, the overlap is uncomfortable. Temperamentally, they are worse: contemptuous of lesser species, prone to raiding human settlements for resources, and entirely comfortable treating human lives as either obstacles or entertainment.
Two apex predators, closing on a single agri-world.
The Spire descended into controlled panic.
Every fortress gun on the hive's exterior swung toward the sky. PDF regiments across the planet were recalled to defensive positions — though a significant portion of the front-line units simply ignored the order. The 109th was among the minority that complied. They marched back into Hive Tenebris and began preparing for a siege.
Whoever had decided to inform the civilian population had created an additional problem.
The Mid-Hive had erupted.
Knowing the void held alien warships, significant portions of the civilian population had concluded that normal social rules no longer applied. Spontaneous looting had broken out across multiple districts — shops stripped, some set alight, anti-Imperial sentiment surfacing in the chaos like something that had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.
The Adeptus Arbites mobilised in full. They were outnumbered and outrun. They called the PDF.
The 109th Regiment's first assignment back inside the Hive was suppressing rioters.
Kian took the charitable approach. He put himself on the pintle gun of a Chimera transport and drove it to the front of the column, aimed the Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubber straight up, and fired.
DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA.
The muzzle flash lit up two metres of air above the barrel. The noise at close range was extraordinary. The crowd ahead took one look at what was shooting and decided somewhere else was preferable.
One man in the scattering mob had, apparently, not received the message. He produced an incendiary bottle and drew back to throw.
Kian's gun came down.
One short burst. Large-calibre rounds at that range left very little to bury. The bottle hit the ground where the man had been standing and completed what the gun had started.
Kian lit a lho-stick and watched the crowd disappear around corners.
"Throne Almighty," he muttered. "This feels genuinely apocalyptic. I'm starting to stress."
He found himself running the numbers. This planet was a mess even before alien fleets showed up. Civil war unresolved. Infrastructure degraded. And now:
Two alien species landing simultaneously, deciding to fight each other and incidentally destroying whatever they stood on. Whatever slept in the deep rock below the Hive — and the deep rock always held something — getting shaken awake by the noise. Maybe a Genestealer cult surfacing at the worst possible moment. Some ambitious Chaos worshipper deciding this was the right time to open a portal.
Then Hive Tenebris, overwhelmed, putting out a distress call. A few companies of Space Marines dropping in to fix it. And then it really would be a full-spectrum Grimdark catastrophe.
The Captain's freighter — the Great Ivan — was sitting in low orbit right now.
Should I call ahead and ask him to hold a berth?
He was still thinking about this when he noticed Ash peeling off from the column and heading toward a shop front.
"Hey. What are you doing?"
Ash emerged carrying a bundle of something.
"Heh. Sorry, boss. It's in the genetic code. Can't help it."
Kian told him he was an embarrassment to his bloodline.
He pulled up the operational map, checked their assigned district against the current situation, and made his assessment.
"Per standing orders from command, our designated patrol area is clear. Rioters dispersed."
He jumped down from the Chimera.
"We're done. Pack it in."
He climbed into the command Chimera, reclined in the commander's chair with both feet up on the navigation console, and cranked the climate controls to maximum. The command vehicle's long-range vox suite was considerably more powerful than a standard unit, and he used it to place a call to Reynaud up in the Spire.
The line connected.
"Talk to me. What's actually happening with the observatory data? When are these fleets making landfall?"
Reynaud had, in recent weeks, apparently attached himself to a wealthy and well-connected patroness who moved in circles with access to real information.
"Good news might be incoming, actually.
The Ork fleet is five scrap-ships. Smallest one is over three kilometres stem to stern. The Aeldari are running a single light escort — under a kilometre.
Here's the thing: when the two fleets got close to the planet, they started shooting at each other."
Kian sat up.
"That is good news. If they destroy each other, we only have to deal with whoever's left."
"Exactly what everyone's thinking. You have no idea how bad it got up here when the initial contact came in. The high nobility are all trying to book passage off-world.
Remember your friend the Captain? He's gone from being ignored for a decade to being the most popular man in the Spire. Lords are showing up at his bar every night with gift cases of amasec, trying to buy a seat on the Great Ivan."
"What's his position? Is he planning to run?"
"He's not, actually. His reasoning: the Aeldari cruise at five times his top speed. If they win, running is pointless — they'd catch him before he cleared the gravity well. Better to stay put, let them raid whatever they want, and wait for them to leave once they've taken enough.
If the Orks win, he'll quietly extract maximum payment from every panicking noble in the Spire, fill his hold, and depart at his leisure."
Kian shook his head with something approaching genuine respect. That man has nerves like void-hardened steel.
He told Reynaud to keep the line open and relay any updates as they came in. Reynaud agreed.
The battle lasted over a week.
Two fleets engaging in the void above Agri-World Secundus-496b, every day bringing fresh reports of damage and debris, neither side pulling back.
When it ended, nobody had predicted the result.
Both fleets were destroyed. Complete mutual annihilation.
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