Chapter 432: Sandstorm Standoff, Part 2
Kian said, "You're hurt, fall back outside the perimeter. Everyone else, keep pushing forward with me, careful and steady, all the way to the mine shaft. We pull the Astartes out and leave immediately."
With the order given, Kian pressed forward himself, firing as he advanced. His squire-suit, after its major refit, now carried four arms. The upper pair each mounted a triple-linked plasma cannon. The lower pair, positioned where a normal person's hands would be, were a set of precise bionic hands, four-fingered, each gripping a chainsword.
He fired one plasma cannon into the storm every few seconds. Through his thermal display, an Ork war-machine charging toward him out of the haze burst into molten slag with every hit.
Still remembering the last engagement, where overheated weapons had left him fighting with cold steel alone, Kian kept his fire disciplined this time, reserving the plasma cannons strictly for genuine threats like Ork Dreadnoughts. As for the Gretchin-piloted killer-cans, he didn't bother with the cannons at all, just let them come in close and cut them down with the chainswords instead. Their armour was paper-thin, one swing of a chainsword was enough to split one clean in half.
With Kian leading the push, the rest of the force matched his pace, refusing to fall behind. Guns roared, lasers streaked through the haze, and the whole column advanced together, grinding down every Ork unit in its path, until the column finally reached the mouth of the great shaft.
Apothecary Desai, drenched head to toe in Ork blood, sprinted to the edge of the massive pit and stared down into it, desperate. The shaft ran too deep to see anything. But his armour's advanced life-sign detector showed his brothers still down there, locked in combat with Ork infantry below.
Desai roared, "Get that lift moving now! My brothers are down there, bring them up!"
Boothe and a handful of assistants rushed to the shaft, working the hoist controls, and the massive iron cage of the lift ground open.
Kian shouted, "Infantry, onto the lift, reinforce below. Kill every xenos you see down there and bring the Angels home."
He then planted both massive chainswords into the ground, reached back with a mechanical arm, unclipped the nuclear missile pod from his own back, and mounted it onto the yellow squire-suit instead.
"Ride down with them. Use the timed detonation function and fire the nuke deep into the shaft, take out the Orks' oil refinery down there entirely."
Yellow acknowledged and strode onto the massive freight lift. Boothe worked the controls, and the lift ground to life with a deep, rolling rumble, gears the size of houses turning, carrying a squire-suit and five hundred elite infantry down into the depths beneath the surface.
Boothe called out, "My lord! Several of the lift's drive motors are damaged, a round trip will take at least ten minutes. Hold this position for at least that long!"
Watching a squire-suit and five hundred elite troops sink slowly out of sight into the mine, Desai felt some of the tension in his chest ease slightly. Then he turned and disappeared straight into the storm.
Kian, catching the movement, was genuinely surprised. He'd assumed the excitable Apothecary would ride down with the rescue party to save his own brothers.
"My lord, where are you going? There are too many Orks out here, it's dangerous, stay with us!"
Even as he called out, Kian kept firing a plasma bolt or two into the storm at intervals. The Chimeras and Leman Russ ringing the shaft never stopped firing either, and the thousand militants scattered across the perimeter kept lancing out deadly beams and arc discharges of their own.
Every so often, the Orks answered back, a shell tearing a Chimera apart, or a rocket reducing a handful of red-robed militants to scrap.
Desai didn't even look back, weaving through the storm of incoming fire, pushing deeper into the haze.
"Count, I have a duty to fulfill. I need to recover my brothers' gene-seed. I've already located their remains. Don't worry about me."
Recovering the gene-seed of the fallen was a sacred obligation for any Apothecary. His brothers trapped underground now had reinforcement from Kian's elite infantry and were no longer in immediate danger. That left him free to finish his true task, recovering the gene-seed before the survivors made it back up and the whole force pulled out.
Watching his resolve, Kian didn't push the matter further. All he could do was wish the man the Emperor's blessing.
By now, the dust kicked up by the orbital strike had begun to thin, which meant humanity's sensor advantage was starting to fade with it. Plenty of Orks who'd been hunkered down, blinded by the storm, began stirring again, crawling out of cover and converging on the gunfire echoing from the mine shaft.
The pressure on Kian's position kept mounting. Every weapon roaring at once, his three plasma cannons pushed right to the edge of overheating just to hold the line.
By the five-minute mark, the storm had settled almost entirely, leaving only a faint haze that no longer obstructed vision. A rolling chorus of WAAAGH erupted across the battlefield as every Ork regained full sight and surged toward Kian's position at the shaft with renewed, gleeful savagery. Bizarre war-machines, tanks, and armoured vehicles came on, swarmed by Ork Boys and Gretchin alike, the whole mass charging with wild, joyful violence.
Kian fired two more plasma bolts, melting a pair of Dreadnoughts and killing a swath of Orks caught in the blast radius. He was about to fire again when his suit's internal vox crackled a warning.
"Excessive plasma cannon usage detected. Barrel temperature critical. Further discharge risks catastrophic detonation. Safety lockout engaged. Forced cooldown initiated. Countdown: five minutes."
Kian swore. Both his primary ranged weapons, gone. He immediately folded both mechanical arms back behind him, tucking the vulnerable plasma cannons out of the line of stray fire, then brought his two remaining bionic hands up, chainswords humming to life, adamantium teeth roaring, and charged straight into the battlefield ahead.
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