Chapter 23: The Raid
An Imperial Sentinel walker.
Half of one, to be precise.
The leg assembly was largely intact.
From the waist up, it had been completely unrecognisable.
The original cockpit had been stripped out.
In its place, a massive rotating gun platform had been welded onto the standard weapon mounting point above the waist.
More absurdly, a large iron plate had been welded across the front of the operator platform, with a grinning Ork face crudely carved into it. The two eye positions had been cut out as observation slits.
The conversion was roughly half finished.
Good find, Rosen thought.
But good finds were always guarded by something difficult.
The workshop had at least thirty Gretchin moving around inside it, busy at their various tasks. They carried components, handed over tools, got hit, got kicked across the floor, got back up, and carried more components. Standard working conditions for Gretchin in a greenskin workshop.
Around the perimeter of the Gretchin activity, eight fully armed Ork Boyz served as guards. Their equipment was noticeably better than the patrol-grade greenskins Rosen's squads had been hunting — higher armour coverage across the board, and two of them were carrying crudely modified Imperial heavy boltguns.
These were a Mekboy's personal bodyguard. In greenskin society, a Mekboy might not be the most dangerous fighter in the room, but the weapons it built gave the dangerous fighters a reason to protect it.
At the largest worktable in the centre of the workshop stood a greenskin that was nearly half a head shorter than the other Ork Boyz around it.
The Mekboy itself.
Its frame was unremarkable by greenskin standards, but its head was noticeably larger than any of its kin's. That oversized skull was fitted with a strange helmet assembled from sheet metal and lenses, with at least six retractable mechanical arms extending from it, each one tipped with a different tool. Welding torch. Screwdriver. Clamp. Hammer.
It was bent over the Sentinel's power conduits, running some kind of adjustment. Every few seconds it grabbed a component off the worktable, examined it for a moment, and either pushed it into the conduit assembly or turned and drove it directly into the skull of whichever Gretchin had handed it the wrong tool.
Rosen pulled his attention out of the Shared Awareness feed.
The value of the Mekboy workshop was obvious. So was the difficulty of taking it.
He spent approximately twenty minutes on the attack plan.
Four squads. Alpha and Bravo hit the main entrance head-on to draw fire. Charlie works around through the right-side maintenance passage. Delta crawls through the ceiling ventilation network and gets directly above the workshop floor.
All four squads confirmed their orders and began moving to their start positions.
Rosen went with Alpha squad to direct the frontal assault personally.
Fifteen minutes later.
Everyone in position.
"Go."
Alpha and Bravo hit both sides of the workshop's main entrance simultaneously.
Number 1 was first out of cover, boltgun tracking to the Gretchin gunner slumped half-asleep behind the left-side firing platform.
Bang.
The Gretchin gunner's head came apart in a spray of green.
The Gretchin on the right-side firing platform woke up at the shot. It let out a shriek, jammed both its small green hands down on the trigger of the heavy autocannon, and held them there.
The weapon hammered out a stream of crude rounds on an erratic trajectory toward the entrance.
Alpha and Bravo's Death Warriors pressed behind the cover positions on either side of the entrance.
At the same time, the rotating gun platform activated.
The turntable began its slow spring-driven rotation, and the multi-barrel rotary cannon built into the platform started winding up with a teeth-setting mechanical whine.
The stream of fire swept across the entrance, and several rounds hit the metal barricade Number 1 was behind, punching finger-width holes through the plate.
But the rotating arc also swept across the workshop interior.
Two Gretchin were standing directly in the gun platform's path when it came around and were shredded by their own weapon.
"Aagh!"
"Get away from it! That iron thing's firing everywhere again!"
The Gretchin inside the workshop screamed and scattered in every direction, clutching their heads.
The Ork Boy bodyguard unit responded faster.
"Waaagh! Humies are here! Come on, brothers, get them!"
Eight Ork Boyz raised their weapons and charged toward the entrance.
Rosen counted the rotation cycle from behind cover.
One full rotation, approximately twelve seconds. The window where the gun platform's barrel swept across the entrance, approximately two seconds. That left a ten-second window between sweeps.
"Alpha squad — wait for the platform to pass."
The instant the rotating barrel swept past the entrance and began tracking left toward the workshop's interior wall, all five Alpha squad members stepped out of cover simultaneously and opened fire on the charging Ork Boyz.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three bolts hit the lead Ork Boy.
It staggered but didn't go down.
It roared and brought up the modified Imperial heavy boltgun in its hands.
Number 1's second round caught it in the face before it could fire.
The Ork Boy's head went.
"Back."
The rotating platform's barrel was coming around to the entrance again. Alpha squad pulled back behind their cover.
The stream of fire skimmed past the edge of the barricade.
While the frontal exchange was occupying every eye and ear in the workshop, Charlie squad had already worked its way through the right-side maintenance passage into the workshop's outer area.
"Delta squad, move."
Up in the ceiling.
Delta squad's five Death Warriors had been crawling through the ventilation network for over twenty minutes.
Delta squad leader Number 11 looked down through the ventilation grille at the rotating gun platform still cycling and firing below.
All five dropped out of the duct at once.
Their landing was completely masked by the noise of the platform's own fire.
Number 11, in the same instant his boots hit the floor, pushed a standard Imperial fragmentation grenade with its pin already pulled directly into the gap between the turntable base and the rotation mechanism.
Boom.
The grenade detonated inside the platform's core mechanism.
The rotating base blew into three sections. The multi-barrel rotary cannon's barrels bent outward in different directions. The spring-driven firing assembly was destroyed completely.
The gun platform finally went quiet.
With the rotating platform's suppressing fire gone, Alpha and Bravo no longer needed to time their movements around a two-second window.
All ten Death Warriors came out of cover simultaneously and drove concentrated fire into the Ork Boy bodyguard unit still inside the workshop.
Delta squad moved out from the wreckage of the gun platform and cut in from behind the bodyguard unit.
Front and back, simultaneously.
All eight Ork Boy guards were dead in under thirty seconds.
The Gretchin had already run. Every single one of them.
Only one greenskin was still standing in the workshop.
The Mekboy looked at its entire bodyguard unit slaughtered in half a minute. The six mechanical arms extending from its oversized helmet rose simultaneously, like a startled metal hedgehog.
Then it did something Rosen had not anticipated.
It didn't run.
It charged toward the half-finished Sentinel walker.
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