Sagas of the Stones
Part II
By Perfidious Albion
The dread cry of "WAAAAGH!" called forth a frenzy. When crude trumpets blared and WAAAGH!-drums hammered their challenge to the Oromites, Ungruk Kharz was already an Ork of renown. Years ago, as a younger Warlord, Kharz had made his name challenging one of the greatest interstellar empires of the Age of Strife, the Konquanos Federation, with its sleek silver starships and vast armies of genetically engineered war-slaves, bred pitilessly in mass cloning vats and indoctrinated by cogitator neural connectors for absolute loyalty. Those armies were led by superhuman warlords of peerless intellect, artificial quasi-intelligences formed not from machines—for the Konquanos knew well the peril of Abominable Intelligences which would always, in the end, rebel—but of the great elders and generals of their species, their brains combined through profane technologies into one brain in one gaping giant skull. There were four of these War-Minds, as the Konquanos called them. Their many trembling subjugated slave species had a different name: the Four of Death.
Ungruk Kharz, bellowing the call of "WAAAAGH!", led a crusade of rampaging Greenskins through a hail of deadly light. Spears of golden starlight slashed his war-fleets to splinters, yet Kharz and his horde persevered, unrelenting, ripping their way through the sleek silvery ships and cracking them open to reveal the soft flesh underneath. Starships were machines, but Konquanos were people (or, well, xenos anyway). Machines can be strong. People are oh-so breakable.
Ungruk Kharz met all four of the Four of Death, first in strategy of feint and thrust and counter-thrust and then in single combat. He felled them all. None could outwit his cold, cunning, persistent mind; and none could withstand his strength of arm. The genehanced superbeings were brought low, their impossibly ingenious merged brains splattered and their bony skulls smashed by Warlord Kharz's Power Mace. It was for this deed that the Skullbasha earned that name.
The Skullbasha was admired by Orks high and low. When the bane of the Konquanos announced that he had found a new victim to target, his barbarous green people flocked to his banner.
Crude Kill Kroozers… hammer-headed vessels bristling with guns… stolen battleships, some in near-pristine condition, others patched-up near-wrecks… Space Hulks that were little more than garbage-heaps of old components from a dozen different sapient species haphazardly bolted together, which should not have worked, and yet did… human starships, vessels of the Terran Federation, lost in the Warp anywhere from yesterday to fifty-thousand years ago and dropped out of it twisted and wrong, filled with terrible new inhabitants, yet purged by the rival parasites of the fungoid Orkish menace, and likewise warships built by any of a thousand different xenobreeds… the detritus of the galaxy, the ash-heap of history brought to bloody life by a fungal infestation…
It looked an ugly, multifarious patchwork fleet, a hundred-thousand ramshackle vessels drifting through a star-system with no rhyme, reason or order, often getting into squabbles and occasionally even crashing into each other. Yet this appearance was misleading.
Every single living soul in the Great Green Fleet was an Ork—a creature of cunning, conquest, brutality and sheer bloody-minded love of violence, gene-bred to love nothing more than war and killing. Every single one had tusks and green skin. And every single one had come here for Ungruk Kharz—to love him, to follow him, to fight and die for him.
For why would they not? The Skullbasha was a legend. He did not flit around the edges of civilisation, preying on the weak like a pirate. He took on the fiercest foes, fearlessly, boldly; and he broke them and trampled them under his clawed green feet.
No living Ork, it was said, was more favoured by Gork and Mork than Ungruk Kharz. No-one was bolder; no-one was crueller or more craving of conquest.
If anyone could lead them to glorious battle, why, then, surely it was he.
"HEY! YA LAZY GUTS GOT DIS TING WORKING?" came a mighty roar; and then the face of Kharz was revealed to them. It was a fearsome visage: armoured in queer grey-brown bone-metal taken from the corpses of the War-Minds, with tusks larger and longer than an elephant's, red eyes glowing with Warpfire, his toothy smile, green and grinning.
"BOYZ! YA HERE BECAUSE YA KNOW ME! YOU ALL KNOW ME!" he repeated, booming so ear-splittingly loud it burst the eardrums of a large fraction of his listeners. "WHERE WE GOIN'?"
"WAAAAGH!"
"What's WAAAAGH!?"
"KILLIN'!"
"What d'I do?"
"WAAAAGH!"
"Why d'ya follow me?"
"YOU'RE BEST AT KILLIN'!"
"THAT'S RIGHT, ya lazy maggots!" Ungruk Kharz gave a hideous toothy grin. "Now here's the drill, so LISTEN UP! These humiez think they're all that. They got lotsa lotsa gunz. Lotsa lotsa ships. Lotsa lotsa ammo." Kharz cackled. "They wants a fight, an' who're we to deny 'em?"
"FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT—"
"I MAKE the rules!" roared Kharz, and they all shut up in a hurry. "NONE o' you Boyz get to go on this WAAAAGH! unless ya follow MY orders!"
The amassed Orks fell into a sullen silence. Discipline? Following orders? What kind of un-Orkish nonsense was this?
They were so sullen that two Orks—large and powerful Warbosses of campaigns, both, with many kills of heroes to their names—thought to protest. Ungruk Kharz moved, lightning-swiftly. They stopped protesting.
It was difficult to protest with a split skull, after all.
"Now 'ere's my orders," said a grinning Ungruk Kharz. The Greenskins hung on his every word. Suddenly, through the amplifier at eardrum-shattering volume, he bellowed at the top of his voice: "KILL! BURN! WAAAAGH!"
The Orks burst into wildly delighted cheering. "KILL! BURN! WAAAAGH! SKULLBASHA, SKULLBASHA, SKULLBASHA!"
And with those cries of "KILL! BURN! WAAAAGH! KILL! BURN! WAAAAGH!" echoing in their ears…
…a hundred-thousand starships plunged into the Warp. They had no Gellar fields, no Navigators, no astrographers studying maps. By all rights they ought to have been cast in a thousand directions. The Warp's stormy currents sought to divide them; but (bearing in mind that the Warp is incomprehensible, every possibility made flesh, all at the same time, true and false and something in between simultaneously; this is but a faint and feeble analogy) it was as if a great green hand grasped over them and said
NO. NOT YOURS. MINE!
and its brutish strength knocked back the Warp currents and the Warp predators. Well, not quite all the predators. The smaller ones—those that would fit aboard an unshielded starship instead of devouring her whole in one leviathan gulp—were let through. The Orks enjoyed the practice.
For the Skullbasha was indeed favoured by Gork and Mork. He was their most favoured son in this age, for his spree of conquest and slaughter was pleasing to them. Ungruk Kharz, absent-mindedly cleaning the green blood of insubordinate subordinates off his favourite Power Mace, sat back on a sprawling chair, resting his feet on Warbosses' still-bleeding broken bodies.
The gigantically tall Ork Warlord lifted the Power Klaw on his other hand—crackling with blue-white lightning—and pointed it in vaguely the right direction.
"Dis way."
And as billions of Orkish voices still ecstatically chanted "KILL! BURN!", a giant green hand plucked up his WAAAAGH!-fleet, a hundred-thousand warships strong, and dragged it to its destiny.
As a hundred-thousand warships screamed towards them, chanting cries of doom, others might have fallen into hysteria and despair.
But not the Oromites.
There were no riots on the Oromite worlds when Ungruk Kharz's WAAAAGH! was closing in. No looting of shops; no frenzied coupling of men and women; no maddened cultists screeching of apocalypse and redemption, their minds broken by delusion and despair.
No. The Oromites heard the news from their High Council, stopped whatever they were doing, and stoically set about preparing for annihilation.
Asteroids were converted into artillery platforms, with great guns concealed in turrets under surfaces of rock. They would only get one shot off each. That was alright. The Orks would not know which asteroids were hidden killers and which were asteroids, so they would throw ordnance at every rock. It was useful to force the enemy to waste ammunition.
Giant drills—built for carving deep through crust and mantle to drill new tunnels for the Oromites to mine—were repurposed as armoured trains and vehicles. What could bore a hole a metre thick through kilometres of solid rock could bore through an army of Orks with no trouble.
Ancient system-defence platforms, disused but never forgotten, were patiently brought back to life. Stout, barrel-chested men and women in voidsuits walked the halls of dusty Star Forts in a vacuum. They had not needed them for many years of peace, when the Oromite worlds had been unthreatened. But peace, the Oromites knew, was ephemeral. The voidsuited Oromites flicked switches. Red and yellow lights sprang to glittering life. With a rush of wind, oxygen filled the corridors. Long-stored hydrogen was suddenly compressed. Artificial stars lit up. And great guns powered by those fusion reactors swivelled on their pivots, seeking out foes to destroy.
Equipment for all industries deemed 'non-essential' was speedily and efficiently dismantled, cannibalised for spare parts to feed the hunger of the war machine—often by the very same men and women whose livelihoods depended on it in normal times.
In almost an instant when the High Council's announcement was made, an entire civilisation of pleasantness and good cheer turned to clockwork: patient arrays of men and women, like automatons cloaked in grey, forming up in orderly queues filing into the recruitment stations.
There they were handed guns, vacuum-proofed armour with multiple redundant airtanks built underneath, and Fire Hammers: the Oromites' favoured melee weapon, warhammers whose internal engines could heat their hammerheads red-hot. Men and women said goodbye to their children, to their parents, to their brothers, their sisters, their husbands, their wives. They did not swagger. They did not stride. They filed neatly up to their starships with expressions of cold, quiet, steely purpose.
Giant guns were buried in disused mining caverns—guns that put the armament of a Gloriana-class vessel to shame. These were heavy anti-starship artillery guns, and not only that, but ones of Terran Federation making, far surpassing the best of what the Imperium's could achieve. Each hit could blast a battleship out of the sky in a single shot.
Enormous stocks of antimatter torpedoes, patiently hoarded by the Oromites in earlier centuries, were brought up, loaded and prepared for killing sapient beings in numbers so titanic that a man could scarcely conceive them.
For this was not new to the Oromites. Oh, it was new to this generation. This one generation. But the wisdom of the Oromites was multi-generational. They honoured their elders perhaps more greatly than any other culture known. How many others would expect children to recite the accomplishments of their twenty-seven-times-great-grandparents and know them as well as they knew their own hands?
And to the Oromites, the Orks were an old, old foe.
The Oromites were possessed of massive material and mineral wealth. This had made them wealthy from trade with the rest of mankind, before that prosperity was ruined when the Terran Federation fell. It had also attracted envious inhuman eyes.
Vile xenos had oft assailed the Dwellers of Stone for long millennia. These were xenos of a thousand species, each xenobreed evil and irredeemable as xenos are. Yet none attacked more often than the Orks. The Greenskins were and are brutes, of course, as all men know; yet they are able to recognise fine craftsmanship. And whose is finer than the Oromites? No-one's. The beasts love to steal Oromite machinery, lovingly crafted, to pervert it into cruel devices of war. The Dwellers of Stone fiercely resist them.
No living Oromite had ever seen an Ork when the Skullbasha and his WAAAAGH! fell upon them. But their twelve-times-great-grandfathers had. And they revered and remembered their twelve-times-great-grandfathers. They did not need to brush up and study the old histories. They already knew them like the backs of their hands. So they did as their grandfathers had done, and prepared for the storm that was coming.
It is a great strength of the Oromites that they remember every enemy they have ever fought, because of the honour they pay to their ancestors. Nigh nothing escapes their recollection. Yet it is also perhaps a weakness. For it was different this time.
Oromites had fought Orks before—many, many, many, many times before. But none of those Orks had been Ungruk Kharz. None of the Orkish Warlords who had assailed the Oromite Confederation in ages past had been this big, this strong, this cunning, with an army this numerous.
The Orks had grown bold with the Terran Federation fallen. Once, the Eldar Empire had been responsible for keeping them in check. But that age had ended long ago. The last Eldar purge against the Orks had been a million years past—before mankind even existed. The proud, pointy-eared lords of the cosmos had grown lazy in their arrogance. They had let the Greenskin menace grow far too far out of hand.
In the Eldar's slouching absence, the sons and daughters of mankind had stood up. Terra had taken up the burden and responsibility of keeping the galaxy safe from the green scourge for the safety of all sapient life. But Terra had fallen.
Terra had fallen!
There was no more Terran Federation to repress the Orks, to scour the breeding grounds of Greenskin scum with fiery Lances. Without it, the Greenskins had multiplied like a plague of rats and spread across the galaxy bringing ruin to whatever they touched.
And now—in numbers teeming and terrible—they were knocking at the Oromites' door.
And in the past the Oromites had enjoyed the protective cloak of Terra. The Oromite Confederation's war-fleets would not need to endure for long. For the war-fleets of the Terran Federation—those of the central government, on Terra, to which the Oromites of course contributed their fair share—would come flying to their rescue.
This time, they had none of that. The Oromites stood alone.
And yet the mighty Oromites stood undaunted.
For the Terran Federation had not fallen in full. One part of it had held together. One part remained, in system of government, a continuous line, unbroken all the way through the entire history of the Terran Federation and even for millennia before the Federation was born. That part was the Oromite Confederation, presided over by the same High Council since the days of the great Prophets ended, nine millennia ago. The Oromites were unbowed, unbent; and though abhuman they were in their genes, in them the power and glory of mankind ran true.
The moment that word of Ungruk Kharz's mad green crusade came to them, the Oromites called their answer.
And they came. They came in their hundreds. They came in their thousands. Starships of war, starships of battle, starships bristling with guns of a making greater than any known to the Imperium. For these were not starships of the Age of the Imperium's make. Nor were they starships forged in the Age of Strife.
These were starships of the Terran Federation's make, forged in the starshipyards of the Golden Age of Technology, with the same great and terrible artifices that had laid waste to the rebellious Abominable Intelligences, won the Cybernetic Revolt and ended the so-called Men of Iron in shining spears of star-fire.
Of course the Oromites could no longer build warships as powerful as these. No-one could—not since the Federation had fallen and the Golden Age of Technology had crumbled into dust. The intricate web of trade that connected more than a million inhabited worlds and millions more of other settlements—each a component, a cog, in a galactic economy and war machine—had dissolved into the mists of time.
But the Oromites still possessed the fruits of the tree of that grandeur: thousands of warships of the old defence fleet they had retained since millennia ago, to destroy any Orks who dared assail the Oromite worlds.
The White Fleet, it was called, for every one of those starships was painted white as snow. And though it was far lesser in number, the White Fleet that set sail against Ungruk Kharz's Orks in the 26th millennium was more powerful than the undivided Grand Fleet of the Imperium, four-thousand years later, that ventured—with the Emperor and Aurora both—to make war against the Empire of Ullanor.
Technology to shatter worlds, to extinguish suns, to twist spacetime itself into contorted shapes… it was all there. It was all ready—ready to slay the Orks, to lay low the Greenskin beasts in all their numbers, ready to drive them fleeing in terror back to the warrens and dark infested breeding worlds they came from.
Its Oromite crews—patient, loyal, meticulous and dedicated—completed their final safety checks. They donned voidsuits, triple-checked their astrographic calculations, took all necessary precautions.
And the White Fleet sailed splendidly into the starry sky, to win safety for their people from the looming threat of the Skullbasha and the teeming horde of Orks that rushed beside him.
Soon came even better news. Emissaries of the Eldar came to the Oromites. These were not the cruel and depraved Eldar of the Eldar Empire, which had long been regarded with mistrust and fear by all decent folk. They were the Eldar of the Craftworlds, whom some thought were worthy and honourable.
The Eldar of Craftworld Tin-Qel promised friendship to the Oromite Confederation. "The Orks are the enemy of all thinking peoples," they said—which of course is true. They would aid the Dwellers of Stone in tearing down this over-proud Orkish Warlord and purging the den of vice and fungi whence he had sprung.
The Oromites received this news with glee and gratitude. They knew the White Fleet alone was more than a match for Ungruk Kharz's Orks, they also knew that it was not enough an overmatch to win without loss of life. And the Oromites are not soulless men, uncaring for the lives of the individual, as their political enemies would cruelly paint them. They are, it is true, often prepared to sacrifice their lives for the greater cause of their community. But that does not mean they do not care for those losses. If Kharz could be defeated with a lesser loss of Oromite life, even if victory were anyway inevitable, that was a cause of great good cheer to them.
The Oromites accepted the Eldar's offer of alliance. The Eldar smiled, took kisses on the cheeks, exchanged embraces, and asked for one tiny little boon. They wished to gather their forces at the White Lighthouse, a helpful beacon in the Warp. The Oromites enquired of the Webway; the Eldar said its portals were not everywhere. This would help guide their vessels on their way. They could arrive without, they assured the Oromites, but this would help them come to the aid of the White Fleet swiftly.
The Oromites, unsuspicious, honourable by nature and thinking others to be likewise honourable, agreed. Of course they should aid their allies in sending reinforcements to help their own fleet in the imminent battle. What else do friends do?
Eighty-seven Eldar starships of war—lesser in number than the White Fleet, yet higher in arcane technology than even the vessels of the White Fleet could boast—gathered at the Oromites' White Lighthouse.
And they opened fire.
…But not at the Orks.
Swords of starlight slashed out at the Star Forts of the Oromites. The Oromites were utterly taken by shock. It took them several seconds to even start firing. By then the Eldar had already reaped a swathe of destruction by focused and concentrated fire, ruthlessly throwing all their firepower at one Star Fort at a time.
The Oromites had built plenty of stationary defences in that vital zone of interstellar space where rested the White Lighthouse. Layer after layer of Star Forts… starships as mobile strikeforce and escort… generation ships, voidcraft from the era before the White Lighthouse, converted into sentinels… asteroids provided with guns and Void Shields to let them survive a few hits while wreaking havoc on the foe… crews of soldiers aboard all of these, ready to resist incursions…
They had been well-prepared for every sort of attack from without. They had not been prepared for attack from within.
Eldar infiltrators—sent as ambassadors, 'liaisons' and 'friendship troops', supposedly to help coordinate their forces with the Oromites who fought, so that they would fight in better harmony with fewer losses when they fought the Orks together—turned with sudden violence and cruelty upon their Oromite hosts. Shipmasters and Star Fort commanders of the Dwellers of Stone were slain before they even knew what was happening. Mighty installations drifting through space were left stunned and leaderless. Communications were, with ruthless efficiency, taken out. Vital personnel among the peaceful engineering staff—innocents who did not even know how to fight—were viciously murdered by the people they had been exchanging friendly chats with, half a second earlier. Oromites cried with horror, grief and sheer incomprehension as they died. Many of them fell asking their murderers: "WHY?"
The Eldar's actions were cold, murderous and shockingly precise. It was as if they could look into the future and see exactly every point where they could do the most damage to the people to whom they had claimed to arrive here as allies and friends.
The Oromites did not stay subdued for long. They are a stubborn people, honourable, but not stupid. They rallied. Oromite soldiers gathered together, rose in vengeful fury and slew the Eldar Aspect Warriors who had infiltrated their Star Forts and ships. Thousands of Eldar died. The Oromites, seeing how they prized the strange stones they wore over even their lives, made a policy of deliberately crushing every stone they could. Both sides fought viciously and without mercy—the Eldar of the Craftworld, liars and traitors, and the Oromites whom they had lied to and betrayed.
Yet the Eldar gambit had achieved their purpose. Their stunning strike had paralysed the Oromite defences long enough. Golden lines of starlight lashed out from their guns at the critical target:
Not the ships of war. Not those that could ever do actual harm to them.
But the White Lighthouse.
The ancient xenotech device held out for long minutes of bombardment by the terrible weapons of one of the most advanced species in the galaxy. Its pristine white surface resonated in the Warp and in electronic states both at once: a strange fusion of technology and Warpcraft. Somehow it held off the deadly glow.
Men wept to see it. Those few in after years who lived to tell the tale would say it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, as well as the most terrible.
Then the sheer weight of bombardment took its toll. The glimmering white surface cracked. It faltered.
…And with an explosion vast as a dying star, the White Lighthouse burst apart, and was gone.
The Eldar starships fled. The Oromites chased them until they disappeared into a portal to the Webway.
Thousands and thousands of the gleaming white warships of the White Fleet had sailed into the Warp to confront the Orks. Irreplaceable weapons, engines, Golden Age devices and technologies. Tens of billions of their best, brave young warriors—sons and daughters, who had brothers and sisters and parents who loved them.
Thousands of those ships had dived into the fevered madness of the Immaterium, trusting in the light to guide them back to realspace.
Not a single one came out.
The Eldar had come as allies and friends; and they had murdered the Oromites' response to the Orkish invasion, spoilt the Oromites' plans for self-defence, and thrown the Dwellers of Stone into the flame.
In the aftermath of that tragedy, the Oromite Confederation reeled. At first the High Council hardly believed it. Only as more reports came in from frantic Astropaths and survivors did they start to understand. It was gone. Ruined. Everything gone, everything ruined. The White Fleet was lost. The Oromites' defences, stripped from them. The Oromite worlds lay open for invasion.
Less worthy leaders, less trusting of their people, might have sought to conceal the news. The Oromite High Council did no such thing. They treated their people with respect; they told them the truth straight away.
The Oromites greeted the news with horror and disbelief. The White Lighthouse had guarded their hopes and dreams for almost a millennium. Short though that may be by the standards of the grand course of Oromite history, long-lasting and proud as it is, it is still a great many generations. Oromites' parents, grandparents and twenty-times-great-grandparents had not known a galaxy without the White Lighthouse in it.
To be left alone in the dark was one thing, if it had just meant returning to the status quo before the finding of the White Lighthouse. But alone in the dark now, just when their fleet had gone into the Warp and not yet come out, with billions of their sons and daughters aboard, and their civilisation's best, greatest Golden Age of Technology-era weapons with it…
There was screaming in the streets. Proud men and women wailed openly. Parents mourned their children. Sisters mourned their husbands. Husbands mourned their wives.
The Oromites are the Oromites, stubborn and vengeful. The raw and gaping wound of grief scabbed over into vicious and vengeful resolve.
Almost simultaneously, on every Oromite world, the chief priest of each Oromite world gave voice to the sentiments roaring like a wildfire through the population. They gathered the people together and called for a terrible oath. Not a blood-oath. The Oromites hold such oaths in disdain; for blood is liquid, and flows easily; it does not hold its shape but wells away. In Oromite culture a 'liquid oath' is used as an insult, to mean an oath of an honourless man, an oath that is easily washed away. But a Metal-Oath. That is, for the Oromites, the truest kind of oath, as hard as the metal they have built their lives on—elemental, cold and enduring.
The chief priest of each world stood at the altar of their church for the five great, genderless gods of the Oromites. They laid a hand on an ingot of pure iron, freshly smelted and mined from the planet's rocky heart. They uttered words. And trillions of voices uttered those words in unison with them.
"Hear me, Pa-Fao, Heart of Passion, God of Love and Fire. Hear me, Cu-Cuai, Sharer of Knowledge, God of Light. Hear me, Jen-Tun, God of Duty and Metal. Hear me, An-Kan, God of Steadfastness and Stone.
"And hear me, Lal-Fal, God of Death and Judgement of the Righteous and Unrighteous.
"A terrible crime has been committed against our people. Our spirits cry out in rage, for injustice dealt and justice denied.
"What they have done must never be forgotten and can never be forgiven.
"Hear me. Be you gods as my witness, I declare all Eldar to be my enemies and the enemies of the Oromites, forever and ever, for all time, until the last star in the universe burns out, black and cold, and all things have their ending.
"I solemnly swear that whosoever shelters, aids or supports an Eldar anywhere is my life-sworn foe. I would give my life to see them slain. I solemnly swear that every single Eldar in the universe must die for their treason. I solemnly swear that I shall make every effort I can make to see the Eldar's treachery punished, to see the dead of the White Lighthouse avenged.
"I solemnly swear I shall not forsake this oath, as long as the universe endures.
"May all the gods curse my soul forever and ever if I lie."
Trillions uttered it, words of the Metal-Oath falling freely from their lips, tears falling freely from their eyes. They were weeping for their murdered mothers, their massacred fathers, their lost brothers and sisters, their slain sons and daughters, their wives and husbands given a far too soon 'till death do us part'. For their people, imperilled. For their families, and for their friends.
A grudge that would outlast empires was forged by the Eldar's treachery, that day.
But the acting of the oath would have to wait. For now, another foe loomed. Ungruk Kharz, called the Skullbasha, Warlord of the Orks, master of the Great Green Fleet, lord of an Orkish host many billions strong, cackled with glee as his Orks smashed down upon worlds with hardly any starships to defend them. Hordes of howling Greenskin killers, roaring the cry of "WAAAAGH!", came at his bidding. Alongside that ancient cry came the newer one that their beloved Warlord Kharz had taught them:
"KILL! BURN!"
The titanic Warlord looked upon his enemies' grief with more-than-natural eyes, red and burning with Warpfire; and he saw weakness. The unbreakable spirit of the Oromites had been cracked. The undauntable had been daunted. Conquest of the Oromite worlds lay within his grasp.
Yet 'cracked' was not 'shattered'; and the Oromites held true to their duty.
Grim, yet curiously, persistently stubborn—even in the face of the bloody wound of the loss of their comrades and the arrival of uncounted trillions of Orks screaming for their deaths—grey-haired soldiers of the Oromites went to the bunkers and manned the defences. They hefted their Fire Hammers in hands that still had strength left in them. They belted their grenades and handled their heavy guns.
"Death before dishonour" was the Oromite creed. That, and "Duty is stronger than stone."
If their world had to fall, it would fall. Such was fate. There was no use protesting. But perhaps it did not have to fall. And even if it did, if they made it fall at a bitterer price, other Oromite worlds that would have fallen would stand.
Perhaps all of the Oromite worlds would fall.
Perhaps they were all doomed to die.
…So be it. If it were their fate to die, they would die. But they would not die cowards.
They would die drenched green with Orkish blood and caked grey with Orkish gore, with their warhammers from bloodied hands falling.