In orbit above the mining world, the Lanters' battle barge was the last Imperial vessel still fighting. It was holding, barely, against the repeated pressure of the Ork fleet, and the fact that it was still there was its own kind of news.
The better news arrived from the sky.
The ships that had been destroyed in orbit ca down in pieces across the battlefield, and the wreckage that landed on the human side of the trenches carried with it sothing the position desperately needed: food supplies, sealed and intact in the cargo sections that survived the descent. The Ork offensive that had been building in the hours before the impacts lost its shape as the falling wreckage disrupted their staging grounds and killed a significant portion of the force assembled for it.
David put the remaining functional Scyllax units and mortal fighters to work imdiately, moving through the wreckage fields to strip anything usable. Several lascannons from downed Thunderhawk transports were recovered intact. A double-linked heavy bolter ca out of one section in workable condition. From a frigate fragnt David located a batch of laser array components that could not be fully repaired but could be configured as overload devices. None of it was enough to change the strategic situation. All of it extended how long they could hold it.
Six hours after the wreckage stopped falling, the Orks ca again.
The scale was reduced compared to the earlier assaults, the Ork command structure apparently still reorganizing around its losses. It was still more than the Lanters and their mortal fighters could comfortably hold, and the fighting that followed was the grinding attrition kind: no dramatic breakthroughs in either direction, just the slow erosion of everything on the human side that could be eroded.
Nolan and David used every panacea capsule remaining in the power armor's storage on the Astartes who were closest to the threshold. It bought the Lanters back from losses that would otherwise have been permanent, and it emptied the supply entirely.
By the fourth day, fewer than two hundred Astartes in the entire Lanters force could still stand and fight, and every one of them was carrying wounds. The mortal casualty count had stopped being a number that could be tracked and had beco sothing Nolan asured differently: the won, the elderly, and the children who had been sheltering deepest in the mines were now appearing inside the forward trench sections, filling the gaps, doing whatever their hands could manage. When a population reaches the point where its children are holding the line, the line has been held for a very long ti.
The Ork command had also adapted. The warlord's forces had shifted from massed assault to siege and attrition, using their nurical superiority to maintain continuous pressure rather than concentrating it. They did not need to break through. They only needed to wait.
Nolan searched for the orc warlord on the battlefield repeatedly across the fourth day and did not find it. The huge figure that had driven the earlier assaults was not visible anywhere in the Ork lines.
In the early hours of the fifth morning, David's alert pulled Nolan and the Lanters out of the few hours of rest they had been able to take. Another Ork transport fleet had grounded on the mining world during the night.
The room the news left for optimism was narrow. The portal would not reopen for two more days. Calgar's fleet had not appeared. The Ork numbers had just increased.
Nolan did not share what he was thinking. He put the helt back on.
The first light of the fifth morning ca through the smoke and the ruins and landed on a battlefield that looked like it had been used for exactly as long as it had. Blood had run across enough of the ground that it had stopped looking like anything had spilled and started looking like the natural color of the terrain.
Then the footsteps began.
Each one shook the ground enough to feel through the soles of the magnetic boots. Ten ters tall, armored in the particular layered way of sothing that had been built rather than grown, the Gorkanaut ca forward from the Ork camp in a slow and absolute advance, each step deliberate, the weight of it settling into the earth like a statent.
Nolan ordered the Fortis chs to concentrate fire imdiately.
The lascannon beams crossed the field and hit the Gorkanaut in sequence. The armor absorbed them. The Gorkanaut did not slow.
The lascannons that could stop a Death Dreadnought could not stop this.
Nolan pulled the remaining lta bombs from storage and moved.
Three Lanters battle squads followed him out of the trench and into the open ground, the Astartes pouring the last of their explosive ammunition ahead of them as they advanced to clear the approach. When the launchers were empty they threw them aside and brought up chainswords, following Nolan's pace into the mass of Orks pushing to intercept the assault.
Nolan had stopped thinking about form. The Warscythe moved because his arms moved it, and the ten rings worked the spaces around him, and Orks fell, and he moved forward. Every few ters one of the Astartes behind him went down under the weight of numbers and did not co back up, and he did not stop to mark it because stopping was not an option that existed.
The assault squad was down to a single combat team by the ti they broke through to the Gorkanaut's position. Nolan had the lta bomb in his hand and was pulling it from his waist when the ground shook differently.
The Ork warlord ca through the press of bodies like a charging animal, its power claws already open. The combat team had no window to respond. The claws swept through them.
Nolan activated the lta bomb in the sa motion he threw it at the Gorkanaut, not waiting to see where it landed, and turned the ten rings on the warlord at close range. Full volley, continuous, buying distance and ti rather than expecting penetration.
The lta bomb detonated behind him. The heat wave rolled across his power pack hard enough to register through the armor's systems, and sothing in the Gorkanaut's movent pattern changed: the impacts that followed were heavier but less controlled, one side of the machine losing coordination.
He had not finished processing this when a force closed around him from behind.
The Gorkanaut's remaining functional claw had him. It lifted him off the ground and threw him down with the full weight of the machine behind it.
The impact drove through the vibranium shell and into the body inside it. He coughed blood against the inside of the helt, the taste of it light and golden, and pushed himself onto one knee.
In front of him, the warlord advanced with its power claws raised, pressing forward step by step. Behind him, the Gorkanaut brought its remaining claw up for a downward strike, the arm moving in the imprecise way of sothing that had lost part of its drive system but retained enough of it to matter.
Nolan's hand found the second lta bomb at his waist.
"For the Emperor."
He pressed the activation stud.
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