Chapter 253: Mutual Annihilation?
The Hive Tenebris observatory tracked the engagement in real time.
When two fleets both targeting the same world encounter each other in the approach corridor, the tactical logic is straightforward: you cannot bombard a planet while enemy warships are threatening your flank. The Aeldari and the Orks had arrived at the same destination at roughly the same time, found each other in the void, and done what comes naturally to both species.
They started shooting.
The Aeldari vessel was a thing of predatory elegance — sleek, crystalline, built like a thrown spear. Fast and high-output, designed to strike and disengage before the enemy could respond.
The Ork fleet was five scrap-mountains. The lead ship had an enormous Ork face painted on the prow in steel plate and red paint, presumably intended to be intimidating — and, to be fair, it was. Ork vessels are built from whatever the builders found lying around, which means no two are alike and none of them should work. They are held together less by engineering than by the collective belief of the crew that they work, and the weapons tend toward the spectacular and the inaccurate.
On paper: one fast precision-strike vessel versus five slow heavily-armoured scrap-fortresses. In practice: the Aeldari danced.
The observatory watched the Aeldari ship weave through the Ork formation at speeds the scrap-ships couldn't match, lancing precision beams into hull sections and drive systems while the Ork return fire blazed spectacular and mostly harmless in every direction. Their macro-cannons fired shells that vanished into deep space, never to return. Their rockets — each one apparently guided by either a salvaged electronic component or a Gretchin stuffed into the warhead — launched in vast salvoes, half of them chasing the Aeldari ship uselessly before being outrun or shot down, and a meaningful percentage executing tight turns and flying straight back into the Ork ships that had fired them.
Whether this was Chaos interference, rogue machine spirits, or homesick Gretchin navigators remained unclear.
Day one: the Aeldari vessel worked over the smallest Ork ship methodically, staying outside its effective weapons range, until it broke apart.
Day two: fourteen hours of sustained fire into the engine section of the second ship. Something critical detonated. The ship came apart in a slowly expanding cloud of debris.
Day three and four: a two-day engagement with the third vessel. Same result.
Day five: the Aeldari turned its guns on the fourth ship — four kilometres of stacked scrap — and after just two hours, the thing simply stopped. Engines cut out. Dead in space, weapons silent, no apparent cause.
Classic Ork technology. The Waaagh Field had simply stopped cooperating.
No longer a threat, the Aeldari ship ignored it and turned to face the last and largest vessel in the fleet.
Ten kilometres long.
The Aeldari escort was under one kilometre. By any conventional measure, the Ork flagship dwarfed it. But the Aeldari had spent a week demonstrating that size was irrelevant when one side couldn't hit anything, and the flagship's guns had barely troubled them.
Kian listened to Reynaud's running commentary and made his own assessment.
This Ork fleet has been in transit too long. No fighting. No victories. The Waaagh is low. They haven't worked themselves up to anything dangerous yet.
But that was changing. Every exchange of fire was waking something up in the Ork genetic substrate. The longer this went on, the more dangerous they'd become.
The Aeldari need to finish this quickly. If the Orks hit their stride—
They did not finish it quickly.
The Aeldari spent several days chipping at the ten-kilometre flagship with weapons that were, frankly, too small for the job. Each shot removed a section of hull plating. The ship's effective hit points appeared to be infinite. After days of this, the Aeldari commander apparently decided that precision attrition wasn't working and reached for something heavier.
First: systematic destruction of every visible weapon mount and firing aperture on the Ork flagship. The Aeldari vessel spent hours on this, stripping the hull clean.
Then it closed to thirty kilometres.
In void combat terms, thirty kilometres is extremely close. Close enough that the Aeldari commander clearly believed the threat was neutralised — hull stripped of weapons, engines apparently cold, no visible response to targeting locks.
A torpedo was loaded.
In void warfare, torpedoes occupy a specific tactical niche. Warship shields are generally calibrated to deflect high-velocity projectiles — the kinetic energy makes them easy for deflector systems to register and redirect. A torpedo moves slowly and deliberately, which makes it nearly invisible to most shield configurations. The tradeoff is that a slow projectile is easy to shoot down in transit, and hit rates are poor against a maneuvering target.
Against a dead ship with no functional point-defence weapons, the hit rate was one hundred percent.
The torpedo was a four-metre-diameter, twenty-metre-long conical mass of whatever the Aeldari used for warheads. It crossed thirty kilometres in seconds and hit the Ork flagship in the stern section.
The detonation was visible from the planetary surface.
The observatory's telescope lenses burned out. Enginseers scrambled to replace them. When observation resumed, roughly fifteen minutes later, the assessment was unanimous: the Ork flagship had lost at least half its physical mass. The entire stern section was gone. Molten metal drifted in expanding halos around the wreck, cooling into irregular half-spheres as it moved.
In the Spire command center, someone started looking for a bottle.
"Throne be praised, that abomination is finished."
"One alien species neutralised. Now we only have to worry about the other one."
The consensus in the room — and among every Imperial planner who had run this calculation — was that the Aeldari were the preferable opponent. Their technology was superior and their raids were destructive, but their logic was comprehensible. They had craftworlds — vast ship-sized civilisations drifting through the void — and no particular interest in occupying planets. They raided, they took what they wanted, they collected the occasional human for purposes best not examined too closely, and they left.
Orks didn't leave. Orks fought until they ran out of opponents, then generated spores that infested the soil and grew more Orks, who resumed fighting, indefinitely, until either they or every human on the planet was dead. And sometimes, for reasons entirely internal to Ork psychology, they just stopped, built ships out of whatever was left, and flew away to find a better fight — leaving the surviving humans staring at a ruined world wondering what had just happened.
Given the choice between a precision raid and a generational infestation, everyone preferred the raid.
The bottle was found. Two, actually — the Red Lady's vintage and the Sister Teresa label. The group went for the Sister Teresa. Someone said the label reminded him of his first love. Someone else asked who was actually selling that wine and whether they understood what they were risking, using Ministorum Sisters as a marketing device, and how they'd managed to avoid the pyres this long.
The Omnissiah-blessed Enginseer at the telescope controls had just received his replacement lenses and was re-establishing observation when he made a sound that stopped every conversation in the room.
"Wait. Something— Omnissiah preserve us. The Ork ship is— it's—"
The main display showed the Aeldari vessel circling the wreck in a slow, satisfied loop. The posture of a hunter confirming the kill.
And then the half-destroyed Ork flagship exploded.
Not the slow structural collapse of a dying ship. An instantaneous catastrophic detonation — as if something in the Ork vessel's core had been building pressure for days and finally released. Debris expanded outward in every direction. At those distances, metal fragments against an Aeldari hull presented minimal threat — their shielding and armour were more than adequate.
The Orks had evidently considered this problem.
The explosion wasn't the attack.
The attack was the prow.
As the ship detonated, the enormous armoured face that decorated the Ork flagship's bow — steel-plated, red-painted, the proud warboss countenance of an Ork fleet commander, or a Mekboy's masterwork, or possibly a religious icon of Gork or Mork, nobody would ever know — was caught by the expanding force of the detonation and launched outward.
Ten kilometres of mass, blown apart from within, funnelled entirely into that single forward section.
The Aeldari ship never had a chance.
Thirty kilometres. At the velocity the prow section reached in the first seconds of detonation, the distance closed before any helm response was physically possible. The Aeldari vessel's speed and agility — its entire tactical advantage throughout the engagement — required time to express. It had none.
The prow hit the Aeldari escort amidships.
A ship built like a crystal cathedral met several hundred thousand tonnes of armoured steel moving at terminal velocity.
The Aeldari vessel came apart like glass.
In what felt to every observer like a final editorial comment, the Ork prow — that enormous red face, expression frozen in what anyone watching chose to read as a death-grin — continued on its trajectory, carried by momentum, and sailed into the deep void. Shrinking. Gone.
In every person watching, something resonated. Something that, if it had been translated into sound, would have been:
WAAAAAAAAAGH.
The observatory control room was silent.
People looked at each other. Some of them were still holding wine glasses. Nobody could quite decide whether to drink or put them down.
Two alien fleets. Total mutual destruction.
A planet-extinction threat, resolved by the universe apparently deciding to sort it out itself.
The crisis was over.
Nobody was entirely sure what expression they were supposed to be wearing.
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