Chapter 30: A Chance to Restock
Rosen leaned against the barricade and started running numbers in his head.
He had ninety Death Warriors.
The equipment looked solid on paper — lasguns, boltguns, grenades, chainswords, the weapons bay and the Mekboy workshop between them having supplied the initial build-up period. But the sustained high-intensity hunting operations were eating through his ammunition reserves at a rate he hadn't planned for.
Boltgun ammunition was the worst offender.
Every .75-calibre round was a physical cartridge with no replacement source. The stockpile in the Armoury had dropped to numbers that were starting to make him frown.
Lasgun charge packs were theoretically rechargeable using standard Imperial power connections, but the hulk's power grid had been dead for a long time. The Death Warriors were running on scavenged spare packs, and those were finite.
Grenades and demolition charges were running shortest of all.
Number 6 was still faithfully holding the weapons bay, managing the inventory and restocking the Armoury as space opened up — but there was nothing anyone could do about a fixed supply. That bay was the only ammunition source he had, and every round spent brought the total down permanently.
Finding another weapons bay like it?
Rosen thought through the composition of the hulk.
It was not a single intact Imperial warship. It was a compression of dozens of different vessels — Imperial warships, civilian freighters, xenos craft, and ancient wrecks from eras no one could identify anymore — all of it crushed and fused together by the warp into a single enormous steel graveyard.
Imperial warship sections were present, but scattered across a structure one hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter.
Without an intelligence source comparable to what Fezekks had provided, finding another undiscovered weapons storage compartment inside this metal maze was an exercise in hoping for coincidence.
Rosen shifted his thinking to a different angle.
Before Fezekks died, it had confirmed that the weapons and equipment carried by the 88th Strike Force had been looted by the Orks and hauled back to their camps.
Seven thousand soldiers of an Astra Militarum strike force. Even by standard Imperial Guard equipment loadouts, the ammunition and heavy weapons they would have been carrying represented a substantial inventory.
Now Little Wrench was telling him that a large warband leader called Iron Fang Grukk was calling in every nearby tribe and preparing to march out in force against the daemonic forces on the lower decks.
March out in force.
The phrase turned over in Rosen's mind a few times.
A greenskin army marching out meant the camp behind it would be empty.
If the Iron Fang tribe's camp was holding Imperial equipment stripped from the 88th Strike Force...
The corner of Rosen's mouth moved.
He pushed orders through Shared Awareness to Alpha squad leader Number 1 and Bravo squad leader Number 7.
"Take two men each. Infiltrate northeast. Locate the Iron Fang tribe's camp and confirm its position, scale, defensive layout, and supply inventory. Do not be detected."
Number 1 and Number 7 each took two Death Warriors and departed on separate routes.
They worked northeast along the general bearing Little Wrench had indicated, using the hulk's internal ventilation network and maintenance crawlspaces to avoid the corridors.
Shortly after, Number 1's Shared Awareness feed came back with clear visuals.
Rosen switched to the feed immediately.
The Iron Fang tribe's camp had been built inside a large cargo hub station on Deck Sixty-Nine.
The hub was at least ten thousand square metres of floor space.
Ceiling height close to twenty metres. Roughly a dozen cargo corridor entrances of varying sizes around the perimeter.
The camp's central zone was surrounded by a rough wall constructed from scrap metal and salvaged armour plate, approximately three metres high, with various trophies jammed along its top edge.
Inside the wall was a standard greenskin tribal camp.
No human observer would have described it using the word orderly.
Several hundred crude shelters assembled from scrap sheet metal and bone were scattered throughout the space. The open ground between them was stacked with refuse, bones, broken weapons, and unidentified organic matter in various stages of decomposition.
Rosen ran a quick population estimate.
Gretchin were everywhere, packed densely into every corner — at least three to four thousand of them. They swarmed like insects, hauling scrap, fighting over food, brawling with each other, and performing various other greenskin activities that defied any outside observer's attempts to find a purpose.
Ork Boyz numbered somewhere between three and four hundred.
Rosen picked out at least five figures that were substantially larger than the Ork Boyz around them. Nobs. They were positioned at different points throughout the camp, each one with a ring of Ork Boy bodyguards around it.
On the eastern side of the camp, Number 1 found what made Rosen's attention sharpen.
A supply storage area covering at least five hundred square metres.
It was stacked with salvage of every description, the vast majority of it Imperial military equipment.
Dozens of standard Imperial ammunition cases were piled haphazardly in the corner. Some had already been pried open, their contents rifled through and scattered by greenskin hands. But Rosen could see large quantities of .75-calibre bolt rounds glinting in the light — brass shell casings, ignored by the Orks because the ammunition was far too small for their own weapons, which ran on oversized crude-machined rounds.
Heavy weapons were distributed across the storage area.
Heavy boltguns. Three Lascannon hunter-pattern anti-tank weapons. At least two complete Imperial multi-barrelled Vulcan mega-bolters. Several more items covered by canvas wrapping that couldn't be identified from this angle.
Rosen drew a slow breath through the Shared Awareness feed.
This was not a routine resupply opportunity.
This was a strategic operation that could deliver a step-change in his squad's combat capability.
Number 7's scout team transmitted supplementary intelligence from the second approach angle.
Number 7 confirmed twelve primary access points into the camp. Six faced the hub's cargo corridors. Four connected to staircases and lift platforms between deck levels. Two were improvised passages the greenskins had punched through the hull.
Number 7 had also observed something happening around the camp's outer perimeter.
Small greenskin warbands were converging on the Iron Fang tribe's camp from multiple directions.
Each one ranged in size from a few dozen to a few hundred fighters, all of them moving in with their own weapons and loot, flooding into the Iron Fang camp to join the forming army.
It confirmed Little Wrench's intelligence.
The Iron Fang tribe was assembling its client warbands and massing for the push toward the lower decks.
The assembly was still in progress.
Rosen estimated that once all the subordinate warbands had arrived, Iron Fang Grukk's total force would be at least six thousand strong.
Six thousand greenskins marching out meant the camp would be left with only a small garrison.
This was a function of greenskin nature.
In Ork society, being left behind was a mark of shame. Any Ork Boy who considered himself to have any capability at all would fight to march with the main force. In greenskin values, missing a Waaagh was worse than death.
The ones left to guard the camp were always the weakest, the most useless, the ones who couldn't be argued into being wanted on a battlefield.
For a greenskin army of five to six thousand marching out, the garrison left behind typically ran between five and ten percent of total strength.
Which meant after the Iron Fang tribe marched, the camp would be holding at most a handful of Ork Boyz and a portion of the Gretchin population.
Possibly considerably fewer than that.
patreon.com/Twilightsky588 - 30 advanced chapters