Herald of the Stars: Chapter Eighty (Patreon)

Much gratitude to koala, John Growcott, TheSoraRyuu, and Ryo5678 for your greathearted gifts. Thanks to your efforts I have the courage to sit down and write everyday.

I leave Thorfinn’s office and return to my quarters where I remove and dismantle my armour, checking it for defects. While my power armour is stuffed with sensors, there is no guarantee they are all working properly, no matter what is reported to the armour’s machine-spirit.

The machine-spirit is excellent at ferreting out discrepancies, but I took some hard hits against the warboss and I entrust my life to my armour; performing a proper visual inspection is necessary precaution.

E-SIM and the dragon machine-spirit have repaired my armour well, but I’m glad I checked as while the seal is good, when I test it in a press, the repair dents slightly. Another two tests and some detailed scans reveals that the repair is twenty-three percent weaker than the surrounding material. With E-SIM’s guidance, I dig through the logs and realise the nanites can’t replicate the extreme density of ceramite formed in a high pressure press.

I replace the damaged scales and pop them into a glass jar. Engaging the warp and weft module, I disintegrate the damaged scales and reassemble the powder into small silver and grey balls of plasteel and ceramite, ready to be reforged into new shapes.

With my armour repaired, I relax a little, sparing some time to watch the first wildlife documentary filmed on Marwolv, knowing this is the first and last time many of these creatures will be recorded, unless I dedicate resources to restoring them and their habitats.

After the documentary, I still feel restless after my duel. I turn off the holoprojector, lie on the sofa and close my eyes. I even pause my additional thought streams and let my thoughts wander.

Eventually, it is time for my watch and I return to the bridge. During my watch, the groundside reconnaissance attempts to get close to the ork position. After they return, I watch the record of their attempt and realise they’re going to fail once I spot how swampy the ground has become.

The heralds quickly realise this too and their one tech-adept sends out a servo-skull to try and get close, but the bad weather is too much for its anaemic anti-grav drive and the skull is grounded within minutes and sinks into the muck.

With no success, the team retreats and I spend the rest of my watch helping Aruna refine its calculations from the amalgamation of sensors we have available.

My next watch starts just in time for me to coordinate with Errudition’s Howl to push the shipyard out of its holding position and back into a stable orbit.

Commander Muire retreats the stellar corps and Distant Sun alters its angle and increases its thrust. Several dozen orks, who were hopping across the rok hoping to take advantage of the retreating heralds, are hit with a violent stream of particles and blasted from the rok’s surface, which heats up and ablates as the manoeuvre continues.

I chuckle as I watch them flail on the sensors and are scattered into space.

Before the yard reaches its new orbit, I send a secret message to Bola with the vox I left him, telling him to escape.

Six hours later, the yard is back in a stable orbit, though twenty centimetres of the front quarter of the shipyard has been scoured away by Distant Sun’s thruster plume. With the eroding material, we lose two cable anchors during the process and one of the rebounding cables lashes Distant Sun’s main thrusters, causing minor damage, though it doesn’t reduce our thrust profile.

I send a congratulatory message to all crew and thank them for their hard work, getting us through this crisis and rescuing those trapped upon the shipyard and Iron Crane from a catastrophic impact.

Once the yard is in position and cables have been stowed, Errudition’s Howl and Distant Sun reposition and begin their bombardment of Green Tick, steadily cutting through two kilometres of metallic asteroid with macro shells. The ork vessel is helpless and cannot retaliate.

We don’t miss a single shot and my watch ends before we can dislodge them. I choose to stay, keeping an eye on Eire as she practises with the increased neural load from the command throne during light combat.

Even without shields, Green Tick is resilient and remains logged in the Iron Crane. On the twenty fourth volley, Green Tick begins to crack. The orks finally realise they’re in for a proper krumping, however, and what few remaining craft they have flee to Marwolv, using the bulk of the yard to cover the first part of their retreat.

Once they’re out of cover, Errudition’s Howl fires up its CIWS and blasts another nine craft before the orks reach the atmosphere and it becomes too challenging to target them.

I’ve no idea if Bola made it but he’s a sneaky cockroach and I’ve no intention of betting against him.

Any remaining orks make a final push for the yard and Iron Crane, breaking through with some boring machinery and pour out into the hollow docks inside the Iron Crane. Most are left floating about and are picked off, but a few have jet packs and try to escape into the ship. The heralds gun them down and Commander Muire communicates that all borders have been repelled, but it will be many hours until we can be absolutely sure.

Distant Sun ceases its attack and manoeuvres away from the yard, leaving the final blows on Green Tick to Errudition’s Howl. Taking position above the grounded rok, Distant Sun fires a single lance through the churning clouds upon the ork position below.

Coordinating with the ground forces and planetside sensor net, we fire three more lances over thirty minutes, trying to get the best shot we can with little more than passive seismic, gravity, and light sensors to guide us. Once Aruna is confident it’s struck the ork position and isn’t going to harm our own forces, we follow it up with a macro-cannon bombardment, firing melta rounds at the orks below.

The rounds accelerate out of the cannon at zero point one C and part the turbulent clouds. For a short moment I get a glimpse of the rok, then the eight shells strike, sending vast plumes of heat, light and particles into the sky, obscuring the target with eight mushroom clouds.

I see a few people on the bridge lift their arms as they cheer, but no sound gets through their helmets and they quickly settle down.

Rather than rest, I remain on the bridge. I don’t have to do much when it’s not my watch as I don’t want to metaphorically breathe down peoples’ necks more than I already am, but I also don’t want to miss a moment of the conflict as it is a rare chance for some experience outside a simulator.

There aren’t any live vid-feeds of the ground conflict as the interference is still too bad and I have to piece everything together from out of order recordings brought up every six hours on a D-POT.

E-SIM puts together an amazing simulation of the battlefield from the recordings from a bird’s eye view, making it much easier to understand what is going on.

To get around the bad weather, the D-POTs have sealed their air intakes and are using their void reaction mass, and the grav drives normally reserved for vertical take off and landing, to fly like skimmers.

Normally, in atmosphere, the D-POTs can use their micro-fusion reactors to compress and heat air and use almost no fuel to travel, but with the intakes sealed, they’re burning through reaction mass and fuel sustain their momentum and power the grav drives as they manoeuvre the stellar corps and sustain their supplies. I didn’t know they could fly like this and I am impressed by the pilots’ ingenuity.

While the fuel and reaction mass is a minor problem for now, the maintenance on the grav drives is more serious, changing the maintenance flight to down time ratio from twenty-four to one, to six to one as each hour of skimming is like the equivalent of twelve launches and landings.

The swampy ground isn’t great for tracked vehicles either and I start looking into a refit for the D-POTs to better handle this kind of load when the orks send out a raid directions, mounted on trukks, an armed, janky buggy, with their wheels replaced by a squig leather skirt billowing with air.

The low-tech hover-craft takes both me and the stellar corps by surprise and three of the groups, some two hundred vehicles in total, slip between our first ring of scattered defensive positions, their approach obscured by the torrential rain and low light conditions.

The difficult terrain is stymying the three engineering companies, two of whom were flown in from the other fortresses. Even with three servitor companies and four logistic companies assigned to assist them, they haven’t had enough time to establish our advancing first line, or in this case, float, as they’re casting ferrocrete barges and building bunkers on top of them, then towing them into position with D-POTs.

Our second line, three kilometres behind the first, isn’t suffering from swampy ground and they are much better prepared with sixteen fortified forward operating bases built in a circle, fifty kilometres in diameter. The ground in between is littered with a series of pits offset with each other, indicating the beginnings of a trench network.

Somewhat predictably, the orks don’t try to break out of encirclement and instead charge the eastern most fortified position, Dôl East Prime, as it is the largest and therefore offers the best fight.

Dôl East Prime is a two hundred metre diameter octagonal fortification of interlocking, four metres tall, ferrocrete fencing. Chimeras move back and forth with their dozer blades, pushing earth into a berm against the outside edge of the ferrocrete fencing while multiple diggers requisitioned from civilian building sites around the planet plunge their plasteel buckets into the earth and rock, excavating a series of interconnected, narrow trenches, twenty metres from the growing earth and ferrocrete berm.

Two line infantry companies are hard at work dismantling the plasteel crates that all their supplies are shipped in, reusing the material to reinforce the trench walls while two more companies are dragging back timber from all the downed trees with their chimeras.

Special weapon teams watch over the toiling heavy infantry from behind repurposed aggregate bags, filled with earth, just behind the trench.

The crassus armoured transports assigned to Dôl East Prime’s garrisoned companies are nowhere near the base as they’re currently assisting the D-POTs, transporting construction materials from Drumbledrone.

While I love the improvisational attitude, our defence would have been a lot easier if we had specialist earth moving equipment assigned to the engineering companies and more than just ferrocrete fencing ready to go. If we were planning an assault, we’d have all the right equipment made in advance, but clearly our emergency deployment supplies and protocols require work.

The moment Dôl East Prime receives notice of the incoming orks, the heralds tumble into their half formed trenches. The base has an artillery battery and an anti-air battery assigned to it and within thirty seconds of the orks being detected, the eight basilisks open fire. Only three shells manage a glancing blow, killing a handful of the orks stuffed in their open topped vehicles, and flipping one hover-trukk over.

The basilisks manage two more rounds before the orks get too close. Their second and third salvos are much more accurate and hit nine hover-trukks directly. The explosive disassembly sends ork flesh and metal spinning through the air and lights up the twilight gloom for fractions of a second.

Once the orks reach the two kilometre line, the special weapon teams start firing their lascannons and heavy bolters disabling another seven vehicles, then over the next minute, they destroy twenty-four vehicles. Over two hundred orks leap from their broken vehicles and start sprinting for our position.

A little over a minute later, the hover-trukks reach the one kilometre line and start exchanging fire with Dôl East Prime. The sixteen chimeras, who were previously pushing earth about, just finish spreading themselves out in front of the berm before they start taking hits from the ork hover-trukks.

Sixteen chimeras quickly pop smoke to obscure themselves and much of the base. Targeting data from Dôl East North East and Dôl East South East gets transferred to the heralds and their machines, and then twelve chimeras return fire through their own smoke at the estimated positions of their enemies while the machine-spirits chatter back and forth with command assigning targets and coordinating fire. The other four ignite their flamers and wait for their chance.

Behind the berm, the crews for hydra-anti air sprint to their vehicles and start their engines, then drive towards the east gate, opposite to the ork assault. Their quad-linked auto-cannons swivel down from the sky and point forwards, ready to repurpose their strike-craft shredding guns for a ground focused fire mission.