Chapter 26: Orks and Genestealers Start a Fight
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Little Wrench ate with juice running down its chin, green grease dripping from the corners of its mouth and soaking into its chest.
The Waaagh energy entered its body and the dormant greenskin instincts lit up all at once.
The big humie killed the old Mekboy.
The big humie has good food.
The good food has the taste of Waaagh in it.
Which meant the big humie was the new boss. A new boss who was stronger and harder than the old Mekboy.
Little Wrench swallowed the last piece of meat and dropped back onto its knees in front of Rosen with a thud.
"Big humie boss!"
"Big humie boss is the strongest! Little Wrench will follow big humie boss! Turn screws for big humie boss! Clean guns! Hand tools! Do anything!"
Its large ears flapped with excitement. The monofilament cord around its neck pulled taut from the force of its movements.
Number 1 looked down at the small thing tied to his belt. His expression didn't change, but through Shared Awareness Rosen caught a rare and faint flicker of something from Number 1. Confusion.
Rosen hadn't expected the reaction to be that immediate either.
He looked down at the small greenskin kneeling on the floor.
Big humie boss.
Not an accurate title and not a flattering one. But in the context of everything else he was dealing with on this hulk, a Gretchin calling him big humie boss barely registered on the scale of absurdity.
Little Wrench began taking on simple maintenance tasks around the base.
In the meantime, Rosen had never relaxed his watch on the Genestealer nest.
Since the brief encounter with the purestrain at the end of Charlie line, he had established two fixed long-range observation posts five hundred metres outside the nest's perimeter. Number 22 and Number 28 were concealed in two separate ventilation ducts, monitoring the main corridors leading toward the nest from two non-overlapping angles.
Rosen received both observers' full visual and audio feeds in real time from the base. The two posts maintained cross-observation between them — if either one was discovered or came under attack, the other could transmit a warning immediately.
The double cross-observation system had been running for three days without incident.
Rosen was at the base checking the force field generator.
The portable greenskin force field generator stripped from the Mekboy's body had been mounted above the barricade at the base's main entrance, creating a semi-transparent energy barrier across the chokepoint. Its sustained duration was limited — approximately three to four minutes of continuous coverage — but in the right moment that was enough to absorb a single heavy assault.
Then Number 22's Shared Awareness signal spiked sharply.
Rosen switched to the feed immediately.
The Genestealers and the greenskins were fighting.
From the direction of the nest, a large number of Genestealer hybrids were surging forward.
Hybrids were distinct from purestrains. Purestrains were the Tyranid advance seeding organisms — pure xenos, four arms, sharp chitin blade-limbs. Hybrids were the offspring the purestrains cultivated by infecting a host species, carrying forward the distorted skulls, additional limbs, and grey-purple skin of their alien heritage in the first and second generations.
What Rosen saw through Number 22's eyes was primarily first and second generation hybrids.
At least two to three hundred of them.
Behind the hybrid mass, Rosen counted at least three purestrains.
They were considerably larger than the hybrids around them. All four arms were spread wide. The massive serrated claw-limbs at the end of their upper arms caught the dim light and reflected it in an unsettling bone-white.
From the north end of the corridor, the greenskin side was a standard green tide.
At least five to six hundred greenskins — Ork Boyz forming the core, Gretchin packed in around them — screaming and charging toward the Genestealer line.
Among the Ork mass, Rosen picked out at least two Nob-scale figures. Both stood a head taller than the Ork Boyz around them, cutting a path through the front rank with their massive power cleavers.
"Waaaaaagh! Cut these purple bugs apart! Waaagh!"
The battle cry rolled through the sealed corridor and set the metal walls resonating.
The two forces collided in the centre.
The Genestealers fought nothing like the greenskins.
Orks fought on raw strength and numbers — charge in, hack everything apart, and if you got hacked apart it didn't matter because there were more behind you.
Genestealers were a precision killing mechanism.
The hybrids moved in tactical groups of three to five, each group coordinating at a level no vox-comm could replicate, bound together through the Patriarch's psychic awareness network.
When an Ork Boy raised its cleaver to hack at a hybrid, the two hybrids flanking it had already read the blade's trajectory and were moving simultaneously into the Ork's dead angles on both sides.
One hybrid caught the full-force cleaver blow on its chitin blade-limbs. A second drove its claws into the Ork's armpit from the other side. The third came in from the front, all four arms driving together, forcing the Ork Boy to the ground. The lower claw-limbs found the neck and severed the spine.
Three seconds, start to finish.
One Ork Boy down.
But greenskins had numbers.
One Ork Boy fell and three more came over its body.
The two Nobs were something else entirely. They moved through the hybrid mass like a pair of green industrial grinders.
The Nob on the left swung a large power cleaver in wide horizontal arcs, each pass cutting through two or three hybrids simultaneously. The chitin plates that stopped standard weapons meant nothing against a power field — every hybrid it connected with was separated cleanly at the midsection.
The Nob on the right had dropped its weapon entirely. It waded into the hybrid mass with nothing but its fists. It drove one into a hybrid's skull and caved it in. It grabbed a second hybrid by both chitin arms and tore the creature apart at the middle with its hands alone.
Purple fluid sprayed across its face. It opened its mouth wide, stuck out its tongue, and licked some off.
"Waaaaaagh! Good taste! More!"
Green blood, purple blood, shredded flesh, severed limbs, broken weapons, and crushed bone blended together into a slick across the corridor floor.
But what made this battle genuinely dangerous to watch were the three purestrains.
They were fast in a way that left no room for response.
One purestrain broke from behind the hybrid mass and accelerated across the battlefield in a single charge. All four arms spread fully in motion. The massive serrated claw-limbs on its upper limbs drew four lethal arcs across everything in its path.
Four Ork Boyz were cut in the second it passed through them and dropped in sequence.
The purestrain reached the front-rank Nob.
The Nob threw a punch.
The purestrain bent sideways at an angle the human body had no joint for. The blow that would have crushed steel passed within two centimetres of its face.