Chapter 5 : Escape From Sector 7
Forty Orks. Maybe sixty.
Nash pressed flat against the collapsed wall section and counted what the system couldn't give him exact numbers on. Ramshackle vehicles — trukks, the knowledge supplied, open-topped transports with bolted-on armor and guns that looked like they'd been assembled by angry children. Cook fires burning something that smelled like charred rubber and meat. A crude banner driven into the ground, some clan sigil in red and black, and beneath it a circle of Orks arguing over a pile of salvaged weapons.
The camp sprawled across what had been an industrial transit hub. Two hundred meters of open ground between the pipe exit and the nearest intact building. The Orks' attention pointed north — toward something they were preparing to attack, formations of boyz drifting in that direction, their guttural barking carrying on the smoky wind.
"They're staging for an assault. Which means they're busy, distracted, and facing the wrong way. That's the only reason we're not dead already."
Nash pulled back behind the wall and gathered the group. Eight faces, caked in dust and promethium residue, staring at him with varying degrees of terror. Vasquez had gone still — the pre-combat quiet the soldier dropped into, his jaw set, lasgun cradled.
"Here's the situation," Nash said, keeping his voice low enough that it wouldn't carry. "Ork camp between us and any route south. Forty-plus hostiles, armed and armored. They're facing north, preparing for something. We can't go through them. We can't go back."
"So what do we do?" Davos clutched his data-slate with white knuckles.
"We go around."
The system was already mapping it. Ork movement patterns traced themselves across his vision — patrol routes emerging from the chaos, because even Orks had routines, habits, paths of least resistance through their own camps.
[PATROL ANALYSIS: 3 MOBILE PATROLS — IRREGULAR INTERVALS]
[OPTIMAL CROSSING WINDOW: 28-34 SECONDS BETWEEN PATROL OVERLAP]
[RECOMMENDED ROUTE: SOUTH ALONG COLLAPSED STRUCTURES — 180 METERS TO COVER]
Nash crouched and drew the route in the grit with his fingertip. South wall to rubble pile. Rubble pile to burnt-out vehicle. Vehicle to collapsed building. Building to alleyway. Each leg between twenty and fifty meters of open exposure.
"We move in pairs. Thirty-second windows between patrols." He pointed at each section. "Vasquez covers from here. When I signal, first pair moves to the rubble pile. When they're in cover, second pair goes. Everyone goes exactly where I point. No deviations."
"What if we're spotted?" Maret's voice was barely above a whisper.
"Then Vasquez shoots and we run. But we won't be spotted if everyone stays low and stays quiet."
He locked eyes with each of them. Priscilla — grim, jaw tight, ready. Venn — composed, medical satchel pressed to her chest. Davos — terrified but holding. Maret and the other civilian woman — holding each other's hands. Geel, the transit operator — sweating, pale, fingers twitching at his sides.
Something about Geel's posture set off a warning in Nash's skull. Not from the system — from instinct, the kind built from years of managing teams through product launches that went sideways. The hollow stare. The shallow breathing that wasn't controlled fear but the edge of something breaking.
"He's going to crack."
Nash moved Geel to the middle of the formation. Flanked by Priscilla ahead and Venn behind. Older women, steady hands, calming presence.
"Geel. Look at me."
The transit operator's eyes focused. Barely.
"You follow Priscilla. You go where she goes, you stop where she stops. Don't think about anything else. Just follow the person in front of you."
Geel nodded. The nod was too fast, too mechanical. Nash filed it away, turned to Vasquez, and gave the signal.
First pair: Nash and Priscilla. They moved low, knees bent, scrambling across open ground to the rubble pile. The Ork patrol — three boyz with shootas, laughing about something — passed forty meters to the north. Nash counted heartbeats. Twenty-six seconds after the patrol turned the corner, he waved the second pair forward.
Davos and Maret. They ran hunched, Davos clutching his data-slate, Maret's breath hitching. Made it. Tucked behind the rubble beside Nash.
Third pair: Geel and Venn. Nash watched them start — Venn's hand on Geel's elbow, guiding him, steady and purposeful. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
A cook fire flared to the north. An Ork threw something onto the flames that popped and sparked, sending a shower of embers into the air. The flash lit the transit hub in orange light.
Geel saw the Orks.
Not the three on patrol — the main camp, fifty meters away, dozens of hulking shapes silhouetted against fire. His body locked. Froze mid-stride, feet planted in the open ground between rubble pile and pipe exit, fully exposed.
"Move," Nash hissed.
Venn pulled at his arm. Geel didn't budge. His chest heaved, a whimper building in his throat.
"No. No, no, no—"
Geel ran.
Not toward the rubble pile. Not toward cover. He ran east, across open ground, screaming — a raw, animal sound that ripped through the staging camp's ambient noise like a las-bolt through paper. His arms pumped, feet slapping ferrocrete, the scream not stopping, not even pausing for breath.
The Orks heard it.
A chorus of guttural bellows erupted from the camp. Heads turned. Bodies moved. An Ork with a massive choppa spotted Geel sprinting across the plaza and howled something that set three others charging after him.
"Contact!" Vasquez snapped the lasgun up from the covering position.
Davos surged out from behind the rubble pile. "Geel! Over here — over HERE!"
"Davos, get down—"
The tech-assistant didn't hear Nash. He ran toward Geel — stupid and brave and fatal, arms waving, trying to redirect the man toward cover. Geel didn't see him. Geel didn't see anything. He ran in a straight line until an Ork caught him from behind, a choppa coming down in a brutal arc that ended the screaming.
Davos skidded to a halt fifteen meters from the body. The same Ork turned toward him. Davos raised the data-slate like a shield — a useless, pathetic gesture, the reflexive defense of a man who'd never been in a fight.
The choppa split the data-slate in half and kept going.
Vasquez fired. The las-bolt caught the Ork in the neck. It staggered, turned, roared — and a second bolt punched through its eye socket. But the camp was awake now. Boyz pouring toward the commotion, shootas barking, slugga rounds sparking off rubble.
"Move!" Nash grabbed Maret's arm, pulled her into a sprint. "Collapsed building — south — NOW!"
They ran. Not the careful, timed crossing Nash had planned — a desperate scramble across rubble-strewn ground while Ork slugga rounds chewed the air around them. Vasquez fired and fell back, fired and fell back, each shot buying three seconds. Venn had appeared beside them — she'd made it to the rubble pile during the chaos, her face blank with shock.
A building — gutted, its ground floor torn open by something explosive, but walls still standing. Nash shoved the group through a gap in the brickwork and pressed himself against the inside wall, chest heaving, lungs burning.
[HOSTILE PURSUIT ACTIVE — 8-10 ORK BOYZ CONVERGING ON POSITION]
[RECOMMENDED: IMMEDIATE EGRESS — STRUCTURE NOT DEFENSIBLE]
The building connected to an alley. The alley led to a drainage channel — a deep-cut trench with a ferrocrete lip, running south between ruined blocks. Nash didn't stop to think. He dropped into the channel and the others followed, landing in ankle-deep filth, running hunched below the lip while Ork voices bellowed above them.
They ran until Nash's legs gave out. Then they walked. Then they crawled.
The drainage channel fed into a larger tunnel — an actual constructed drainage system, wide enough to stand, walls marked with faded Planetary Defense Force stencils. Sector designations. Direction arrows.
[PDF INFRASTRUCTURE MARKERS DETECTED — SECTOR 12 MILITARY ZONE]
[ESTIMATED DISTANCE TO NEAREST DEFENSIVE POSITION: 400 METERS]
Five survivors. Nash, Priscilla, Vasquez, Venn, Maret.
Five out of nine.
Davos's face — the data-slate raised like it could stop an axe. Geel's scream, wordless and broken, the sound of a mind snapping under weight it was never built to carry.
Nash's hands trembled. Not during the escape — they'd been rock-steady then, locked into the cold clarity of crisis. Now, in the relative safety of the drainage tunnel, the shaking started. Fine tremors running from his fingers up to his elbows, his body cashing checks his adrenaline had been writing.
He pressed both palms flat against the tunnel wall and breathed.
"Four people dead since the bunker. Hendricks. Geel. Davos. The guardsmen before that. I'm keeping count because someone should. Because the system records them as data points and someone has to remember they were people."
Venn knelt in the tunnel, forearms on her thighs, head down. Tears cut tracks through the grime on her face, silent and steady, and Nash didn't have words that would help. Nothing in the project management handbook covered this. Nothing in the system's data-dumps either.
Priscilla put a hand on Venn's shoulder. Said nothing. Held it there.
Vasquez checked his lasgun's power cell. His face gave away nothing, but his fingers were deliberate — slow, precise, the ritual of a soldier processing loss through action.
"How far?" Vasquez asked.
"Four hundred meters. PDF markers."
"Then we walk."
They walked.
The tunnel ended at a ferrocrete wall reinforced with scrap metal and sandbags. Gun slits at chest height. A painted Imperial aquila, crude but recognizable, above a blast-welded door.
Voices on the other side. Human voices. Clipped, tense, military cadence.
Nash pressed his palm against the cold metal and closed his eyes.
"Home. Or the closest thing left."
Maret sank to the ground behind him and put her face in her hands.
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