Chapter 8Forge
In a muddy trench on the war ravaged Civilised World of Broadmeadow a brave heroic gas masked guardsman of the Death Korps of Krieg 942nd Siege Infantry Regiment stood his ground, firing unrelentingly into a charging scrum of massive ugly orks with high energy laser beams from his Lucius Pattern Number 98 Lasgun from his position in the trench gun line.
The local Pax Sector was in the Segmentum Tempestus, the same Segmentum as the planet Krieg in the nearby Uhulis Sector, it was only natural that many regiments of the elite Death Korps of Krieg were in the area to answer the glorious call for aid in battle.
The planet Broadmeadow was a Civilised World not an Agri World, but it was an agriculture heavy Civilised World that was attempting to take up the task of shouldering some of the immense burden of feeding this starving sector. The planet was massively increasing its food production output to attempt to ease the famine and this fact made Broadmeadow a planet of critical importance to the survival of this sector.
To protect this critical planet 16 huge regiments of Krieg guardsmen had been deployed on Broadmeadow to help in the defence, the 16 regiments further grouped together into four Line Korps each consisting of four regiments, and the four Line Korps were further grouped into two gigantic Siege Armies each consisting of two Line Korps or 8 regiments per Siege Army.
These two Krieg Siege Armies were fighting alongside the allied regiments of the entire Broadmeadow Planetary Defence Force, as well as many other imperial guard regiments from other planets across the Pax Sector and beyond, reinforced by air wings of the Imperial Navy, a detachment Maniple of god engines from the Titan Legion Legio Mathematicus of Ferrous Prime, and even a single company of the Marines Errant space marines. The planet was heavily defended but the orks were relentless attackers.
Taking highly disciplined care the heroic Krieg guardsman in the trench shot an ork directly in the middle of the bare blue painted forehead, burning a deep smoking hole with a flash of light and smoke in a small explosion. The ork didn't even flinch, continuing to run forwards with a hole in his head, the ork skull bone so thick that it could shrug off small arms fire without harm to the ork's brain.
Other Krieg guardsmen in the trench fired precise shots at the heads of the onrushing orks, burning holes in the ork skull bones but doing little more than annoying the berserk charging orks.
Preceded by an ominous whistling sound, a huge basilisk artillery shell suddenly exploded amongst a particularly thick cluster of onrushing orks with a deep bone jarring BANG of noise. Orks might be tough, but chunks of tough ork flesh and thick ork bones still flew everywhere from the raw power of an explosion this powerful.
The orks didn't even slow down as more artillery shells whistled down, the orks merely spread out more so that the artillery shells would kill less of them if they got hit. The shells continued to fall but the orks were soon scattered out so widely that the shells only killed at most two or three orks per shell. Artillery ammunition was extremely limited in the war ravaged Pax Sector and could not be wasted on such tiny kill to shell ratios, the distant basilisk artillery batteries ceased their bombardment, saving their shells for more profitable targets.
The local sector forge world of Ferrous Prime produced prodigious quantities of artillery shells on a daily basis, indeed battlefield weapons and ammunition of all kinds were produced on a vast scale each and every day, but the war against the orks was so intense in scale that even this vast ammunition supply was stretched thin. Ammunition had to be used as sparingly and strategically as possible for maximum effect, the Imperial Guard had far more potential ork targets than they had artillery ammunition to attack all of them.
The section of muddy flat no man's land field the orks now charged across was mined with landmines and heavily screened with overlapping fields of fire from multiple platoons of the Death Korps of Krieg, it ought to be IMPOSSIBLE for the orks to advance across this field with only light ork infantry unsupported by combined arms support, yet the orks were barely taking a casualty now that the artillery had ceased.
The huge ork boots sunk deep into the muddy ground as they charged forward across no man's land, followed immediately by underfoot explosions from landmines. Ork feet were mangled by the exploding landmines, ork toes and even entire chunks of ork feet spraying everywhere.
The orks lost their balance for a moment from having parts of their thick feet blown off, many falling over to set off more mines with their heavy bodies with gruesome resulting injuries, but then they simply got up and rebalanced on their bleeding foot stumps and just continued charging forwards with only a few orks bleeding out and dropping dead from the landmine injuries!
The orks were fungus based aliens and their fungal flesh was ridiculously tough against physical damage, they shrugged off injuries that would kill humans, they were relentless in their charge forwards!
Heavy bolters finally opened up across gun emplacements in the Krieg trenches, expending their very limited ammunition only now that the orks were certain of posing a threat to the trench line. The roar of rocket propelled heavy bolter rounds filled the air with contrails of fire and smoke as heavy bolts screamed towards the onrushing orks.
The first bolt hit an ork in the middle of the chest, the ork was huge and wore blue painted metal plates of stolen imperial steel across his chest as a crude form of armour, but the heavy bolter round punched clean through the thickest chest plate and into the ork's chest. The ork's entire chest exploded from the inside a split second after penetration, sending his arms and head flying away in three different directions, leaving only a ruined abdomen stump atop his blue trouser clad legs!
Other bolts found targets, blowing orks to pieces in a spray of blood and ork body parts. The orks were dropped in droves.
But the orks were very numerous and devoid of fear, those that the bolts missed kept charging forward with savage glee, firing huge ork slugga pistols at the heavy bolter crew in return fire. Krieg gun crew had their arms and heads blown clean off from single shots from the huge ork pistols, the rain of defensive fire faltered from some of the heavy bolters as crew were killed.
The surviving orks were almost at the trenches now, charging forward awkwardly on their lower leg stumps after repeated mine stepping had blasted away more and more of their feet until their feet were completely gone. The laser fire dropped a few orks from repeated head shots burning deeper and deeper holes all the way to their brains, but enough wounded but undaunted ork stragglers remained to barrel down into the trench with whoops of savage joy.
"Dis fight is great! Waaaaagh!" An ork bellowed with childlike joy as he stood on his bleeding ankle stumps in the bottom of the muddy trench.
The ork was easily two metres tall even with his feet blown off, bleeding all over from laser holes burned into his head and face and arms and torso, his entire face painted blue with body paint, his trousers and crude armour also painted a horrid gaudy blue. His arms were thickly muscled and very long with huge hands, and in his hands he held a loudly buzzing chainsaw of obviously stolen imperial origin, the chainsaw obviously a civilian lumberjack chainsaw meant for cutting down trees, the chainsaw blade a full metre long. The ork also had a huge pistol inelegantly stuffed into the belt of his trousers with obvious haste moments before reaching the trench, the ork clearly keen to use only his chainsaw in the trench battle.
Our Krieg guardsman hero took up his trench shovel stoically and swung it with all his strength at the ork's neck. The sharpened shovel dug shallowly into the ork's thick tough neck with a meaty sounding thud that drew a small amount of blood, but the shovel stopped far too soon and bounced back out of the shallow wound.
"You call that a whack you weedy little git?!" The ork said disgustedly at this attempt to kill him.
The ork reached out with a huge hand to grab the Krieg man by the shoulder in an unbreakable grip, easily manhandling the Krieg guardsman around to face his trousered bottom to the ork. The ork then revved his stolen chainsaw and rammed the roaring spinning blade straight up the Krieg man's arse!
The Krieg hero screamed with agony into his gas mask for a few moments before the end of the chainsaw erupted out of the middle of his upper back, killing him at this point. The ork wasn't satisfied with merely killing him and proceeded to chainsaw the man completely in half with a shout of joy and great fun.
"Now THAT is how you whack a git!" The ork laughed to the severed in half body, and then continued to chainsaw massacre the rest of the trench line with howls of happiness.
…
The trench rang out with screams and chainsaw noises as the thieving ork gitz of the Death Skullz Clan enthusiastically rammed their stolen chainsaws up either end of the humie Krieg boyz. The chainsaws had originally belonged to a bunch of humie lumberjacks in some forest up in the mountains when the orks first came to "Broadmeadow", the thieving gitz had happily crumped these lumberjacks and stolen their swell chainsaws.
Broadmeadow was a nice enough place as planets went, it had seas and mountains but mostly it had lots of broad meadows hence the name of the planet. The humies used the meadows to grow food and stuff, but they also cut trees in the mountains and dug up minerals and stuff from the rocks, oh and they also fished the seas for food and stuff. It was one of those so called "Civilised Worlds" that did a little bit of everything but specialised in nothing in particular.
The humies were getting hungry and desperate since the orks crumped so many of their horrid Agri World farm planets that grew most of the humie food. The humies were now trying to grow as much food as they could on Broadmeadow and a bunch of other Civilised Worlds that were good for farming, Broadmeadow was now infested with Agri World grade corn and soy crops that hadn't been grown there much before. In the past according to the native feral orks in the mountains Broadmeadow had grown pretty much every sort of crop and farm animal, it had been much nicer food to steal than this higher yield corn and soy rubbish now!
Hunger and desperation made the humies concentrate military forces on food producing planets like Broadmeadow to protect what little food they had left, making it a great planet to visit to find a really swell fight.
The orks of the "thieving gitz" tribe were proud members of the ork Death Skullz Clan that were originally native to a chaotic region of space known as the "80000 Asteroids of Eta Dawkins", a completely war torn pirate infested asteroid belt in orbit around the red dwarf star of Eta Dawkins. It might be called 80000 asteroids, but in reality it was just 80000 of the really big asteroids that were counted in the name, there were millions upon millions of smaller asteroids.
The 80000 Asteroids of Eta Dawkins was in the Pax Sector but outside of Imperial jurisdiction, it was infested with illegal human mining settlements frequented by rogue traders, black marketeers, smugglers, chaos cults, law breaking merchant cartels, refugees and renegades from the Imperium, drug dealers, cold traders, and of course huge numbers of human pirates. These human outcasts had built great wealth mining the asteroids for any minerals of value and with this wealth had sprung up petty warlords vying for control of this wealth.
The rival warlords had desired mercenaries to fight in their bloody wars over the asteroid mines and in their greed for mercenary forces they had foolishly welcomed vicious ork mercenaries to fight in their armies. The war over the asteroids had raged for centuries with each rival warlord having his own mercenary army of orks and other creatures. Millions of orks had been attracted by the fighting to migrate to the asteroids, and millions more had been born in the numerous abandoned pressurised already exhausted mine tunnels in the asteroids, the ork spores growing in the damp dust of the tunnels to create more orks.
For as long as the human warlords could supply the ork mercenaries with constant battles to fight the orks were happy, and for centuries the orks had thrived in this environment of constant warfare, making them strong and swelling their numbers enormously. New tribes had sprung up from the new orks born in the deserted tunnels, these tribes fighting against each other and absorbing each other when one tribe was defeated by a stronger tribe. The thieving gitz had been one of many of these tribes.
Over hundreds of years of fighting the warlords eventually could sustain the constant war between each other no longer, the wealth of the asteroids was growing less and less from centuries of constant heavy mining and with this loss of income the warlords could no longer afford to stay at war. This had been the warlords' doom.
Without war to satiate their battle lust the millions of ork mercenaries had turned on their employers with savage wrath, fighting and killing all of the human warlords and their human and remaining xenos forces in a green tide of violence. With the humans dead the ork tribes and mercenary bands had then fought each other, with defeated tribes joining the ranks of the stronger tribes that had defeated them, the tribes gradually absorbing together under the banner of the strongest tribe.
In all of this anarchy it had just so happened that the thieving gitz tribe of the Death Skullz Clan had proved to be the strongest thanks to all the weapons and equipment they had stolen, with their stolen weapons giving them the slightest advantage needed to be the last tribe standing.
Battle hardened from centuries of war and now many tens of millions of orks strong, this tribe had had no one left to fight so had proceeded to suddenly attack the nearby imperial worlds of the Pax Sector to vent their overwhelming battle lust. On many planets the thieving gitz had encountered local feral orks who joined their ranks and swelled their numbers, the ork army growing bigger with every feral ork tribe they encountered so that their ranks expanded faster than battle casualties could cull them.
Now over a hundred million orks strong the thieving gitz were rampaging across the meadows of Broadmeadow, encountering (among other things) the huge trenches and earthworks erected by the Death Korps of Krieg 942nd Siege Infantry Regiment, supported by local artillery from the Broadmeadow Planetary Defence Force 85th Artillery Regiment.
The trench was now taken and the orks regrouped. Weedy grots cleared a safe logistics path through the minefield (mostly by being force marched in a straight line until they detonated all the mines with their feet). Mad doks moved down this logistics path to the trench and got stuck in stitching wounds and transplanting new feet, (flesh or bionic), onto the blasted ankle stumps of the maimed orks.
Ammunition and other supplies were carried to the trench by grots as the orks got stuck in looting the trench for everything of value. Fresh mobs of ork reinforcements moved to the trench to mob up with the original survivors to replace their numbers.
The orks were fully mobbed up tightly in the trench now and about to go over the top to attack the next line of trenches. Then they felt a huge heavy rumbling reverberating in the muddy ground.
The orks poked their heads above the trench and saw a huge big Leman Russ battle tank rumbling towards them, not just one but an entire armoured company of tanks, flanked by a company of chimera armoured transports with mine clearing dozer blades. The humies were counter attacking!
The orks cheered with joy to see this great fight coming their way and boyz with portable crude rocket launchers got these weapons set up to bust some tanks.
Whistling sounded overhead and artillery shells suddenly landed inside the trench with perfect accuracy, turning the entire line of tightly packed orks into a red paste of shrapnel studded chunks of flesh, killing more than half of the orks in the span of ten seconds of apocalyptic explosions.
The surviving orks laughed with joy at this awesome artillery barrage obliterating their mates, its the way they would've wanted to go down. It was just beautiful explosions, truly beautiful the orks all felt in their happy hearts.
More artillery shells set the trench ablaze when they hit an ork ammo pile full of burna fuel, the wooden retaining walls of the trenches blazing in the inferno, the damp mud no match for ork napalm. The fire spread along the trench, forcing the remaining orks out of the trench to avoid being roasted down to a pile of blackened bones.
The humie tanks and chimeras opened fire into the exposed orks, battle cannons and multi laser beams dropping the orks like flies. The orks ought to be routed on the spot, but the survivors cheered and charged towards the tanks, launching a barrage of crude rockets that exploded one of the Leman Russ tanks in a giant explosion, damaging other tanks non fatally.
The chimeras disembarked their Krieg infantry, and the infantry provided impressive supporting fire with their lasguns.
Many orks were killed but the survivors still didn't flee, the orks taking cover in shell craters and firing their rockets and other weapons in return fire, destroying another Leman Russ with rockets and killing over 20 Krieg men with small arms fire.
More ork reinforcements were arriving down the logistics path to join the fighting, these orks leaping over the blazing trench to charge at the tanks with savage glee. The imperial counter attack was now on the defensive as huge numbers of portable ork rockets were fired at the tanks by an endless stream of fresh orks.
More artillery pounded down the ork logistics path with perfect accuracy in a creeping barrage that crept forwards up the path, obliterating the tightly packed line of reinforcements all the way back to the original ork lines.
The tanks and mechanised infantry moved forward but still encountered resistance from the orks taking cover throughout the heavy cover of the shell craters, the orks making this counter attack as difficult as possible.
Appallingly inaccurate ork artillery shells suddenly started falling upon the Imperial forces, some ork artillery big guns in the area now aware of the counterattacking force. Most of the shells missed but disembarked infantry were atomised to a red paste when they did get hit.
Counter battery fire from the local imperial PDF artillery soon found and silenced these distant ork guns, but not before over a hundred men were dead from lucky shots annihilating entire squads with sprays of heavy rusty shrapnel.
The Imperial counter attack reached the burning trench and paused, the intense heat of this blazing inferno too strong for even the Krieg men to get too close.
Inaccurate gunfire sprayed the stationary counter attack, the ork front line beyond the burning trench was very much in firing range and the distant ork trenches could see them.
The lead chimeras fired their smoke launchers into the burning trenches, smoke grenades bursting into suffocating white clouds inside the flames that starved the fire of oxygen. Huge white clouds of smoke rose from the trench, completely obscuring the counter attacking force from view.
The force spread out and took cover. Some ork stragglers with chainsaws leapt out of deep craters in places to disembowel guardsmen in gory horror, the rest of the force fighting these stragglers in desperate close range combat.
The fire was smothered by the smoke grenades and the grey smoke of dying fire added to the white smoke, rendering the visibility impossible.
New orks suddenly charged over the smoking trench, forcing the Imperial Guards to engage the ugly berserk brutes in close combat with gruesome results for the humans.
At an order from the Line Korps command the Imperial Guards Krieg men embarked back into their chimera transports to protect them from close combat with the orks, using the inbuilt lasguns in the sides of the chimera's to safely attack the orks without being hit by the orks' brutal close combat chainsaws. The Line Korps command did not want more casualties than necessary during this counter attack, they needed as many men alive as possible to break through the ork lines and capture forward trenches.
Imperial navy Air Force units flew overhead to provide reconnaissance and air support for the coming push. The Leman Russ battle tanks dug in behind the smoking trench with front mounted dozer blades, going hull down for added protection, the tanks would provide long range fire support as the mechanised infantry stormed the ork trenches beyond no man's land.
Airborne bombs flew down from high altitude marauder bombers, softening up the orks out in the open with heavy shrapnel. Krieg heavy mortar towed artillery teams from the trench behind fired blind over the smoking trench into no man's land to disrupt possible ork counter attacks. Basilisk heavy artillery was spotted for by airborne reconnaissance, artillery shells falling with extreme accuracy into the trenches of the ork front line.
The mechanised company of Krieg Guardsmen in chimeras sped forward at this point, the tracked chimeras easily crossing the burning trenches and lowering their dozer blades to push aside landmines as they penetrated into no man's land.
The orks were distracted by all of the combined bombardment but they quickly noticed the chimeras and opened fire with portable rockets and deffgun lasers and auto shells, pounding the chimeras with enormous firepower that mostly missed but destroyed chimeras spectacularly when the shots hit.
Units of guardsmen disembarked from their burning transports with haste but not desperation, the Krieg men stoic in their suffering and potential death. These men provided supporting fire with their lasguns as the remaining chimeras moved forward to overrun the ork trench. The dug in Leman Russ battle tanks pounded the ork trenches with battle cannon fire to suppress the deffguns and rockets.
The chimeras reached the enemy trenches and the soldiers disembarked. The Krieg men immediately began lobbing grenades down into the trenches to kill the orks, but the grenades did little more than enrage the orks into climbing out of the trenches to penetrate the guardsmen with roaring chainsaws, blood and guts sprayed everywhere as orks laughed with joy.
Krieg men with flamers had more success, dousing the trenches with so much burning fuel that even the orks were roasted in the heat. The fire spread through the trenches, detonating ammo and driving all of the orks out of cover.
This was bad news for the orks but even worse news for the guardsmen who were swiftly skewered on spinning chainsaws with shrieks of agony, the orks almost impossible to kill in close combat fighting.
The entire mechanised company was rapidly decimated by more than half, only the vehicles and some stragglers remaining alive. The chimera multi laser turrets burned huge holes through dozens of orks, with supporting fire from the Leman Russ tanks and distant high precision artillery.
The orks still refused to give up and chucked tank busta bombs at the chimeras, blowing them apart in huge smoky explosions until the remaining chimeras were forced to disengage and flee to conserve vehicles for a future assault mission.
The orks hooted and laughed mockingly as the decimated chimeras fled the battlefield, the orks then began a fresh assault, recapturing the smoky trench from before after first blowing up the dug in Leman Russ battle tanks with a lot of rockets and tank busta bombs.
The Krieg boys were tough and brave but ain't nothing tougher and braver than an ork!
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