Kerensky watched through camera feed superimposed upon his vision as the hangar walls fell away while the Fafnir ascended on the power of it's VTOL thrusters. When it cleared the lip of the hangar's threshold, he was afforded a view of the outside, completely obscured by tons upon tons of dust thrown up by the rapid clearance of so many artificial mountain ranges.
Hundreds of other ships were rising with the Fafnir all of them were either destroyers, corvettes or frigates. They simply did not have time to reactivate the larger warships, and it would be several hours before the first cruiser grade ships were launched into space, and even longer for the capitals and supercapitals. Which was a shame, Tarson would have preferred to have a few dreadnoughts under his command for the assault on the space hulk. Alas there was little to do but clear out the orks orbital units and secure the Federation's assets outside the Oort cloud. Namely the Citadel.
He turned his attention to the impending attack. The orks had greater numbers, but were unevenly dispersed, meaning they were ill prepared to counter his flotilla's egress into low orbit. Back in the 25th Millennium, ork fleets had been a very rare sight, as the eldar typically held their numbers in check, and even then these fleets tended to number little more than a dozen vessels. He was now facing an ork fleet numbering in the several hundreds. Presumably they had come with the space hulk, likely piggybacking on the colossal warp turd's random jumps into the unmentionable beyond, overwhelming any civilized world they happened upon.
Kerensky briefly wondered what happened to the Eldar, to have them allow the orks run rampant. Perhaps their Empire had finally fallen? If that was the case, he would be the first to raise a glass to it's demise. Ever since humanity had encountered the arrogant creatures, they had done nothing but interfere with mankind's progress. He had been vocal in his protest against aiding the refugees of their failing nation; he had long ago stopped even thinking about trusting their misbegotten kind. With any luck, the race was now extinct – and no longer posed a threat to the cause of mankind.
"Fucking aliens..." Tarson muttered under his breath.
"Amen, admiral," Adeline said, reminding the elderly military leader that he had spoken out loud. The admiral was not feeling his best, he had been popped from a cryostasis tube, rushed into a military briefing, and now he was leading a fleet into battle. Despite the wake up stims, he still felt somewhat lethargic.
He looked around the War Room, at the fresh young faces that surrounded him, mixed in with the grizzled veterans. All of them were filled with a vitality that Tarson had long forgotten. Nearly every single human being in the Federation Enclave was the product of many generations of masterfully implemented gene therapy, and enhancement. Tarson was old enough to remember what mankind had been like before the Iron War; aimless and pathetic, enslaved completely to technology. Though humanity today still depended on technology to thrive in the galaxy, it's effectiveness was now supplemented by true strength, rather than simply doing all the work so some lazy bastard did not have to leave the comfort of his sofa, and let his mind rot to oblivion. No wonder some called it the Dark Age of Technology.
Humanity now lived in harmony with it's creations. At this moment, Tarson was simultaneously aware of the ships under his command, the physical condition of the souls in his direct vicinity, and summarized updates of the battles raging across the planet as the Federation Army eradicated the xenos infestation. And even a report from OSI that informed him the last of the world's resident psyker population had been put down; a genuine relief, it would not do to have such mutants running rampant.
Kerensky had arranged the flotilla into three groups formed into horseshoe formations, spreading out by orders of hundreds of kilometers as they approached the stratosphere. The ships held position sixty kilometers from the surface.
The moment all groups were in position Tarson initiated the next phase of the attack. "Task Force actual to Missile Control, fire mission requested. Clear the skies."
From within the sprawling dust cloud, bright flashes illuminated the dark voluminous mass, followed by narrow forty-meter long spears riding upon tails of ion-wash. They thrust toward the murky grey sky at break-neck velocity, hitting vacuum a mere fifteen seconds from exiting the launch tubes. Upon entering space, the torpedoes only accelerated further, their tails burning white as gravitons shaped the flow of thrust.
The Ork fleet had barely any time to react before the first torpedoes met their marks. A kroozer was struck amidships by a seismic torpedo, the volatile physics core of the munition emitted an enormous concussive blast of gravitational eddies vibrating at a fraction of the speed of light, all Orks within were immediately liquified by the blast, and the ship was ripped to countless pieces an instant later.
A scene of pure celestial devastation played out over the planet as more and more torpedoes found their marks, rupturing crudely formed hulls, obliterating armor, and scattering survivors. When the torpedoes stopped coming, there was a wide gap in the Ork blockade, where only a wide field of scrap lay scattered.
Kerensky's task force immediately burned all the way up into space, the sleek predatory hulls of the warships finally being embraced by the stars for the first time in fifteen-thousand years. Acting in perfect coordination, the advanced warships promptly began firing upon the rattled survivors.
Ever since it was first pioneered by the first ancient colonists of the Sol system, void combat has long been viewed as the closest one could get to Hell by the average spacer. Back when there were no shields, and ships were so fragile that a finger sized tungsten slug fired from a primitive coil gun could compromise the hull. All nine Solar Wars were remembered as terrible times of tragedy and loss, and from each of those conflicts rose more and more powerful breeds of fighting vessels. The rules twisted and changed, being completely rewritten when protective shielding was first implemented. When ABACOS was first used by the fleet, it revolutionized the way humans had fought in the stars ever since.
Modern void combat was all about strategy and coordination. But most of all it was about information. The Abacus network allowed a fleet to exercise it's full tactical potential; targeting data, navigation, sensors, everything was shared. During the Iron War this was vitally important, it was the only thing that enabled human fleets and armies to match maneuvers against a gestalt consciousness the size of a galactic arm. And even then, they were losing worlds and their populations hand over fist to the machine menace.
When mankind finally triumphed over the Iron Men, the Federation turned it's attention on the destabilizing Eldar Empire. Kerensky had personally signed the extermination warrants of thousands of worlds that were supporting massed piratical raids on human space. Mankind's mastery over war had evolved to such lengths that the eldar's weakened and fragmented military could not stop his fleets from drowning their outer colonies in an abyss of molten fire and radioactive ash.
Therefore despite being heavily outnumbered, Kerensky's task force was well suited to the occasion. The torpedoes being fired at the crude vessels were designed to take down capital drone ships of the Iron Men, weaponry normally used by missile dreadnoughts and large orbital defense platforms. Most of the orks capital ships had already been thoroughly obliterated when the flotilla hit vacuum.
By sharing navigation and targeting data, the frigates Helsinki, Maxwell, Toran, and Fair Weather seamlessly fell into a screening formation, their rapid-firing anti-fighter missile launchers spraying furious deluges of smart munitions into the waves of ork fighters rushing in to intercept. Sentry drones deployed by ships throughout the task groups collaborated in covering neighboring vessels from enemy reprisal.
The orks were already making mistakes in their response to the Federation Navy's incursion into their blockade, Kerensky and his tacticians both AI and human sprung upon these blunders immediately as they appeared, adjusting the fleet's strategy as the enemy's cohesion deteriorated.
Kerensky clasped his hands behind his back and allowed a small smile to stretch across his lined face. It was good to be back at work again.
"For the glory of Terra, CHARGE!" At the command, hundreds of mechanically filtered voices unleashed a savage battle cry as their owners joined battle with their hated alien foes.
Sergeant Veronica Kincaid snarled behind her visor as the blue HUD in front of her face filled with the crimson highlighted silhouettes of barbaric aliens. Her mnemonically enhanced intellect cranked over time as she dropped one screaming brute after another with her plasma gun. The product of hundreds of generations of carefully controlled breeding and evolution far preceding the EEP's attempt to uplift the general population; Veronica was a true born warrior committed to the destruction of mankind's enemies.
Oversized ballistics tore into and caromed off her armor's shields, the field integrity indicator on the HUD flashed warningly as the shimmering field began to destabilize under stress. With exasperation she dropped into cover behind a cluster of rocks, her entire squad wordlessly followed suit. A split second check through the link told her that all her soldiers were still in prime condition, before she worked out a quick plan of advance.
The entire area around her was filled with the din of battle; quartets of looming Sentinel battlemechs supported the advancing Guards with furious fusillades of coordinated firepower; squadrons of Baneblades stormed inexorably over the terrain, their mighty rail-cannons blasting apart every enemy vehicle that dared to stand in their line of fire; Eclipse light hover-tanks launched lightning fast assaults into the horde's flank, unleashing alternatively discordant blasts from sonic disruptors to shatter hulls and flay bodies, and virtual hailstorms of hypervelocity railgun sub-munitions that annihilated entire prongs of greenskins in seconds.
A trio of Land Master ultra-heavy assault vehicles were pushing deep into the center of the ork lines, their tremendous wheels crushing enemy armor and infantry like insects, as their titan grade pintle armaments stitched iridescent plasma detonations into the hapless beasts as they drove by.
But still the orks fought with everything they had, she could hear choruses of their foul laughter even as they were slaughtered wholesale. To them it did not matter that they were being systematically exterminated, this was the fight of their lives, and they were doing their damnedest to enjoy it.
Her indicator chimed as her shields fully recharged, she jacked into the vid feed of one of the UARV drones darting through the skies overhead, supplying her with a live snapshot of the action ahead of her squad, superimposed upon her mind in tantalizing detail. Their objective was a walled hamlet on the outskirts of the nearby city that the orks were using as an ad hoc staging ground to lay siege to said city. Command's first impulse was to bombard the town from afar to destabilize the enemies command and logistics structure without spending the lives of good soldiers. But stealth drone flyovers had uncovered the presence of large numbers of human prisoners that the orks were using as living shields (or more likely emergency rations), a risk and cost assessment was rapidly calculated and Command dispatched the Terran Guards to liberate the hostages and cleanse the town of alien infestation.
Right now her Terran brothers and sisters were driving the aliens from the hastily dug earthworks, which were lined with green corpses that had been stacked upon each other like sandbags to convey a scant measure of protection to their still living fellows. The action in front of her position was particularly heavy with resistance.
The immense forms of six gigantic squiggoths, easily matching the size of the Land Masters, bore gun laden bunkers upon their sloping backs. And behind the great beasts waddled a towering mechanical horror of scrap sheet and improbable engineering, an ork gargant. It was formed in the crude likeness of an ork, but it's stumpy misshapen appearance totally belied it's combat effectiveness. As if to highlight that thought, a coruscating bolt of red energy blasted from the right gun mount of the gargant, incinerating a pair of Sentinels and disabling one of the Baneblades in a hellish conflagration, nineteen fatality marks scrolled down in her mind's eye, followed by calm requests for medical assistance.
The gargant was protected by an unseemly powerful reflective energy field. Whatever fevered imagination that had possessed the ork clan's big mek to create this gargant had to have been potent indeed. Explosions bloomed across the golden envelope warding the primitive titan, the Guards were throwing everything they had into it.
Intel had said nothing about this machine being in the area, and it was simply too large for the orks to have possibly hidden, the same thing went for the squiggoths, it was as if they had simply appeared from out of thin air.
The squiggoths thankfully were a simple matter to handle, apart from their heavy gauge armored barding, the war beasts had only their tough fungal hide to protect them, which mean that they were being torn to shreds, but they were still tough. One of them survived a direct hit from a wave-force artillery gun mounted upon one of the Judicator Baneblade variants, carving a wound channel large enough to fly two skimmer cars through side-by-side.
But the threat of the gargant was still paramount. She angrily swore to herself that she would invoke a trial of grievance upon the heads of every fool in InOps for dropping the ball on this mission. They had to have missed something, Veronica refused for even a second to believe that orks could build and operate something as advanced and intricate as a telaporter. It was inconceivable.
"All units, brace for level-3 orbital bombardment. ETA 35 seconds."
The Federation had uncountable ways of raining destruction upon a planet, from deploying a nanophage to disintegrate all life on the surface, to simply nuking the crap out of it. A level-3 was far less drastic, it involved a satellite based weapon, in this case a super-sized ion cannon.
The Mark XXIII 'Spyglass' fire-support satellite was the premier unmanned planetary assault platform used by the Federation Navy. It consisted of a long, segmented barrel connected to a large spherical section, itself the center of a flattented torus section that supported four struts which housed the gravitic thruster assemblies that were used to point the massive cannon at targets on the planet surface.
It was a simple design, easy to anchor in orbit and easy to take down. It was a cost effective method of destroying enemy ground forces without investing in permanent defense platforms or calling in a specialized ship. This particular platform was one of three that the Federation had launched into orbit following the fleet's thrust into the ork light of recent developments groundside it had been a wise precaution.
The tips of the pylons glowed softly as the satellite aligned it's primary weapon on the designated target below, the leaves of an iris hatch shifted silently open, and a deep blue glow poured out from the open barrel. Thirteen spheres imbedded into the torus structure winked open, emitting crimson beams that fell to the world below.
"Oi! Wotz dat flashy fing doing in da sky?!" Kaptin Boltbrainz bellowed from his position on top of the gargant. Thirteen shafts of bright red light now surrounded the horde, forming a circular cage of photons. Ever since the 'shiny 'umie gits' landed in on the WAAAGH! everything had gone to Gork, with one problem coming after another.
The humies flashy dakka had krumped too many boyz, and while they were getting pounded good by the gargant for now, it was still not enough to win. And now there was some weird thingy in the sky, too high up for him to smash it or blast it.
"Dose sneaky humie gitz are doings somethin' sneaky like!" Mek Nailfist claimed, his bionik eye flashing red as he focused in on the thing above them. "Dem nasty grot luvas got 'emselves a spess hold!"
"Get da big krooza gang on da voicy box, I want dat fing smashed!" Boltbrainz hollered over the sound of his gargant's roaring cannons.
"Dey's not dere! They must be gettin' smashed up right propa!" Nailfist responded.
"Den we's on our own now!" Boltbrainz growled, "Tell all da runtz and squigz dat dere ain't no turnin' bak now. We'z da only right propa orkses left on this 'ere plannit! We'z gonna have ourselvz a WAAAGH! get yer choppas and shootas ready boyz! It's on now!"
A spear of blue light fell down from the heavens, landing upon the gargant and making all orks look upwards, suddenly rendered silent by surprise. The clouds above swirled and parted away from the beam like the eye of a storm.
"So purddy..." Nailfist said admiringly. The thirteen red points of light converged in a tightening ring around the gargant until they all intersected. Suddenly the blue shaft tripled in intensity, followed by a loud crash as a blinding lance of actinic white energy struck the earth with the might of an angry god.
The initial flash of the strike caused her optics to darken to maximum polarization. Her HUD flickered slightly as the following electromagnetic pulse rebounded off the NBC shielding in her armor. The light receded and revealed a blazing white impact crater where the Gargant once stood, the entire thing gave the impression of looking into a crucible filled with burning hot magnesium. 'So pretty.'
"Forward elements, advance and eliminate the survivors." Major Falkirk's voice barked over the comm-link. Soon after, her platoon leader updated the HUD's navigation display with a new set of waypoints and objective markers.
Veronica's squad advanced on foot upon the walled village, the orks had defaced the walls with their savage iconography, the slanted faces crudely daubed in thick ruddy paint. They had also made an attempt at further fortifying them with jagged metal battlements, and towers festooned with guns and rotting trophy kills.
The wall proved to be a minor obstacle, as the Terran Guards pushed through the heavy fire under the support of the Sentinel battlemechs; the booster packs built into their power armored suits allowed the soldiers to vault onto the wall while blasting the panicked greenskins off it.
The path leading into town was a flattened ruin, no doubt caused by the gargant and the squiggoths when they ran out to meet the assault force. As Federation forces progressed into the village, they encountered scattered resistance from the broken and demoralized orks.
When they finally fought their way to the center of town, they came upon the prisoners.
Hundreds of blank, haunted pairs of eyes gazed out at their rescuers. There were no cries of joy and relief, no cheering, most simply wept silently, mumbled unintelligible prayers, or simply remained unmoved. Each and every one of them was malnourished and rake thin, many sported signs of physical abuse.
Veronica had seen this countless times during the Iron War. When a populace is subjected to constant horror, they become increasingly detached from reality. She could see it in the way they reached out to touch their liberators as if they were imaginary phantoms.
As the medivac dropships began touching down, Veronica looked up to see bright streaks caroming through the atmosphere as the shattered remains of orkish vessels burned up in reentry. Mankind had prevailed.
The flotilla had defeated the blockade, and now it was time for the final push towards the space hulk. Only a handful of Federation warships received damage, and even then it was trivial. With continued support from groundside orbital defenses, Kerensky had cleared the planet's orbit of greenskin naval elements.
The orks retreated to the relative safety of their looted space hulk, the ugly construct was riddled with large barreled turret emplacements, all of them trained at the flotilla and firing non-stop. Kerensky was content to let them waste ammo, the orks no longer had the numbers necessary to retake their hold over Hydra Volantis. The Federation has already won.
Now all that there was left to do was to polish off the remaining resistance starside, and wait for the dreadnoughts to be reactivated so they could begin destroying the space hulk in earnest.
Particle projectors criss-crossed the space between the two forces with silver beams of concentrated kinetic energy, powerful enough to disable shields and punch holes clean through the primitive hulls of the orks from a safe distance. Unfortunately the armaments on escort sized warships were not terrible powerful, had he been able to bring up a few sub-capitals or a full capital ship, the fight would not be going on as long.
-Warning, warpspace rupture detected-
Tarson's eyes widened slightly as he perceived the rippling tears in the fabric of the materium as swirling blotches over the three-dimensional image of the space hulk. He knew what was happening even before Adeline blurted it out, "The Space Hulk is falling into the Warp!"
"Kerensky to fleet, disengage and fall back to the planet, that rock is making a jump!"
The fleet raced to follow his order, the ships turned about and raced back toward the planet. Two ships weren't so lucky.
When the space hulk did fall into the warp, it dragged everything that was too close to it along for the ride. The destroyers USM Arrowhead and USM Wings of Hermes were snagged into it's unstoppable pull, both ships, along with the surviving elements of the ork fleet disappeared with a flash.
Kerensky gritted his teeth as the transponder signals of the two ships disappeared from overview. All in the war room was silent as the loss of their brothers and sisters in arms slowly dawned on them. The war for Hydra Volantis was finally over. But none present felt in the mood for celebration.
A/N: Not sure if I did particularly well on this chapter. I just wanted to end the battle and continue on to greater things. I'll probably rewrite it later.
