Chapter 427: Ork Bike Squadron
Kian's heavy strike force tore across the desert at speed, driving straight for the Deathmine.
Nearly two hundred armoured vehicles advanced in combat formation, kicking up a rolling wall of dust behind them. A column that loud, that visible, was never going to slip past unnoticed.
Kian's squire-suit rode strapped down inside a Battlewagon transport when a comm connection opened in his mind, Boothe on the line.
"My lord, the vehicle-mounted auspex has picked up a large Ork column twenty kilometers out, mostly bikes and high-speed buggies. Behind that fast-moving column, a substantial tank force is following, over a hundred vehicles."
Kian gave the order.
"Keep accelerating, full speed ahead, don't stop, we solve this problem on the move. All units, big guns on the tanks, small guns on the bikes, allocate sensibly, keep it efficient."
Once the order went out, every soldier in the column snapped to alert, weapons swinging toward the horizon.
A few minutes later, dust appeared ahead, and soon the Orks were visible with the naked eye.
"WAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Engines roared as the Ork bike squadron surged forward like madmen. Solo bikes, two- and three-man rigs, machine-gun jeeps, every one of them tearing along past a hundred and eighty kilometers an hour. Thousands of them packed the horizon, closing the distance to Kian's column in a matter of moments.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
RATATATATAT!!!
Kian's troops didn't wait for the enemy to close, opening fire immediately. Heavy tank guns, mounted machine guns, even bolts of blue plasma tore into the oncoming swarm of bikes.
High-explosive tank rounds landed straight in the pack, sending scrap bikes flying skyward in violent blasts. Heavy machine-gun fire and high-energy laser bolts tore bikes apart on contact, or turned a hit Ork rider into a burst of green mist. The plasma bolts hit hardest of all, spreading star-hot radiation outward on impact. Anything caught in a direct hit, rider and machine alike, melted instantly, and anything just outside the blast radius caught fire from the heat alone, turning speeding Ork bikers into literal streaking torches, sparks and lightning made flesh.
The moment the two sides met, Kian's column unleashed a devastating volume of fire, tearing the Ork bike column apart, scattering wreckage in every direction.
The surviving bikers screamed WAAAGH the whole way in, firing back with whatever scavenged weaponry they had. Solo bikes carried twin linked machine guns mounted up front. Two-man rigs had a shoota mounted on the rear seat. Three-man bikes carried a rocket launcher slung on the back rider. Every kind of weapon imaginable fired back at Kian's column, though most missed outright, and the few hits that landed mostly bounced off thick armour plating.
One three-man trike closed on a Chimera and fired a rocket. The oversized round slammed into the transport's front armour and detonated violently, leaving a large dent, but the hull held. The Chimera's forty-millimeter autocannon swiveled toward the trike and fired a quick burst. The trike disintegrated instantly, its three riders erupting into scattered gore.
Kian, holding full command authority over the column, tracked every vehicle's status through the network of onboard cameras. Seeing the Chimera take that hit, he opened a comm.
"Vehicle 13, I show you took a rocket hit. Report status."
"Sir, front armour held, no breach. Lost the co-gunner to spalling from the impact, ricochet debris. Vehicle's still combat capable."
Kian said, "May his soul return to the Golden Throne. Keep advancing. Keep fighting."
The column pressed forward without slowing, guns blazing the whole way. The Ork bike squadron lacked any serious heavy weaponry and couldn't punch through the frontal armour of a Leman Russ or a Chimera head-on. Forced to adapt, the surviving Orks split off to either flank, hoping to swing wide and hit the column's weaker side and rear plating instead. Cunning as ever, they'd worked out that the human vehicles packed most of their firepower forward, hitting the flanks looked like the smarter play.
What they didn't know: Kian had already positioned militant transports along both flanks of the column ahead of time.
Those long, red armoured carriers each held twenty militants, rifles extended through firing ports, sighted and ready, giving the flanks devastating coverage.
The Ork bikers had barely started their flanking swing when they got caught in a brutal crossfire. Militant weapons ran mostly semi-automatic, which in a fight this fast and chaotic looked like a low rate of fire. But that lower speed bought something far more valuable: extreme precision, and a near-guaranteed kill on every hit.
Rad-guns fired rounds with brutal radiological penetration. Arc rifles discharged a massive current on impact, frying nervous systems and detonating onboard fuel tanks outright. And the men firing them were militants, heavily augmented cyborgs with mechanical optics and dedicated processing cores wired directly into their brains, effectively aimbotting every single shot.
The bikers had barely reached the flanks before the semi-automatic barrage tore into them. Arc bolts and rad-rounds punched through Ork bodies and cooked their brains with surgical precision, turning speeding bikes into tumbling scrap in an instant.
The militants' kill efficiency was staggering. One shot a second, and every single shot dropped a bike outright. The heavy column rolled on without slowing, and the Ork bike squadron melted away like snow, littering the ground with scrap metal.
But the bikers had only been the appetizer. Now came the real course.
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAHG!!!"
Several hundred Ork tanks and armoured vehicles surged into view ahead, a wall of them stretching across the horizon, kicking up dust thick enough to pass for a genuine sandstorm.
Slower than the bikers, sure, but their thick armour and the terrifying, oversized barrels bolted to their hulls snapped every tank crewman in Kian's column to full attention instantly.
Major Noa, riding as tank commander aboard one of the Leman Russ, spotted the incoming wall of Ork armour and roared:
"Load armour-piercing high-explosive! Target the lead tank! For the Emperor, blow it apart!"
The loader complied instantly, ramming a round into the breech. The gunner sighted, and without hesitation, stomped the firing pedal.
A deafening boom, and the shell tore free of the barrel, streaking straight toward the Ork tank column. It punched clean through the lead tank's front armour with a resounding clang, boring into the hull, obliterating one Ork gunner into a fine paste that coated the interior. The round detonated inside a heartbeat later, triggering a chain reaction with the tank's own haphazardly stored munitions, blowing the whole vehicle apart into what practically looked like scattered factory-fresh parts.
That single shot kicked off a full-scale tank melee, both sides' guns opening up without restraint.
☆☆☆
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