Chapter 453: The Substation
"Get a MOVE on, or I'll be kissin' your backsides with my boot!"
At the intercontinental substation, Three-Arm, Blackiron still slung across his back, waved his Ork armour and tanks forward into the charge.
The substation had only a token force of Astra Militarum defenders, pitifully few heavy weapons among them, and the moment the fighting started, the Orks had already smashed straight into the city.
The Ork armour and walkers ran wild through the streets, tearing the place apart, but before long the novelty wore off. These human shrimp-tin-cans were far too weak to put up a real fight, and the Orks started slacking off.
On the human side, a regimental commander shouted furiously into his comm:
"Xenos armoured assault hitting the substation! We need reinforcements, NOW!!"
The comm crackled back:
"Rapid response units deploying now, hold your position!!"
A few minutes later, a squadron of Astra Militarum atmospheric fighters appeared overhead, opening up on the Ork forces below with cannons and autocannons.
The las-cannons mounted on those fighters hit hard, and coming from a top-down angle, virtually every Ork armour unit caught in the strike went up in flames.
Seeing human fighters appear overhead, Three-Arm barked an order: "Get da Rippa fighter wing up there, GO!!"
He waved a hand, and five or six hundred Rippa fighters burst out of the high cloud cover behind him.
The Rippa fighter was the standard Ork atmospheric interceptor, wasteland-scrap styled after something like a MiG, armed with three or more autocannons apiece.
Performance-wise, it was inferior to human fighters across the board, weak firepower too, its cannons not even reliably capable of punching through a human flyer's armour.
But it had one thing going for it: sheer, absurd numbers.
When five or six hundred Rippas surged into view at once, they blotted out the sky, engines of dubious quality trailing thick streams of black smoke behind them.
"WAAAAAAAGH!!!"
A roar of Ork war-cries rang out across the sky, the Ork pilots flying just as recklessly as their junk-built machines, throttles jammed wide open.
Engines redlined, the Rippas surged in speed, but the scrap-metal airframes couldn't handle the strain. Forty or fifty of them exploded and disintegrated mid-air on the spot.
The survivors, held together by nothing but raw WAAAGH energy, powered on and drove straight for the human fighter squadron.
The human squadron numbered barely twenty aircraft, heavy flying slabs of armour bristling with las-cannon arrays and autocannons.
Their firepower was devastating. In just this short span of time, over three hundred Ork armour units on the ground had already been wiped out.
They'd spotted the Ork Rippa swarm well in advance, forming up into a proper air-combat formation and driving straight to meet them.
The instant the two forces engaged, the human fighters opened fire while still well outside Rippa weapons range.
Las-cannons and autocannons fired in unison, and Ork Rippas began dropping out of the sky like rain.
What followed was a chaotic, tangled dogfight, twenty human fighters against roughly five hundred Ork Rippas.
Fighters kept getting shot down on both sides, wreckage constantly raining from the sky, until at last, every single Ork fighter had been wiped out.
Of the original twenty human fighters, only five remained, limping unsteadily back toward their airbase.
On the ground, Three-Arm watched the dogfight overhead and let out a wheezing cackle.
"1-to-66 kill ratio, not bad, not bad. My flyin' machines are gettin' better."
And indeed, an absolutely absurd loss ratio like that had Three-Arm genuinely satisfied.
Which, in fairness, made sense. Human aircraft rolled properly off a production line, averaging maybe ten or so units a day.
Ork aircraft, on the other hand, were slapped together out of scrap, and could be churned out in the triple digits, daily.
If human fighters couldn't trade one for dozens, even hundreds, of Ork fighters, humanity really would be finished.
With the skies quiet now and the substation's human defenders dealt with, Three-Arm waved a hand.
"Get da big diggas rollin' in, grab me dose transformers I want!"
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
At his command, four massive vehicles rolled into the substation, moving battlements bristling with guns from top to bottom, each fitted with a huge scoop-blade up front and driven forward on six sets of treads.
Wherever they went, that massive scoop simply plowed through anything in its path.
The four vehicles rolled to the substation's core, hatches at their rear swinging open, and hundreds of Ork Mekboys poured out in small engineering rigs, swarming the transformer units to begin tearing them out.
Dozens of Mekboys clustered around a single transformer, a rubber-clad cylinder standing about human height, bolted into a concrete base, with a mass of cables thick as wash basins feeding into it.
One Mekboy asked, "Oi, wot do we do, is dis thing live? Shouldn't we cut da power first?"
Another Mekboy answered, "I'll just touch it and find out!"
He reached straight out and grabbed the cable. There was a sharp crackling ZZZAP, and the Mekboy was instantly reduced to a smoking pile of black ash by the ultra-high voltage running through it.
The surrounding Mekboys exchanged uneasy glances. Another one spoke up: "I reckon we oughta cut da power first, sever da line before we touch anythin'."
He hoisted a big choppa gun and fired straight at the wash-basin-thick cable.
The bullets tore the cable's insulation apart, and the raging current meant to power the hive, now completely unconstrained, discharged wildly into the open air, coalescing into a ball of crackling lightning.
The ball lightning detonated with tremendous force, vaporizing several hundred Mekboys on the spot, and melting every scrap of metal equipment within fifty meters.
Inside the substation's core control room, Three-Arm had already killed every worker on-site, and following the operating instructions printed on the wall, pulled a main breaker switch.
The next instant, the entire substation went dark, power cut clean across the whole facility.
He stepped out of the control room, spotted the fireball of an explosion still burning in the distance, and swore.
"Wot da hell are you useless gits doin' out there, screamin' and blowin' yerselves up? I'll gut every last one of ya when we get back!"
A Gretchin scavenging nearby happened to wander past, and Three-Arm kicked him clean off his feet without even breaking stride.
"Move it, all of ya! Grab da gear and go, we ain't got all day!"
The substation held numerous pieces of transformer equipment, and swarms of Mekboys dug and dug at them, quickly hauling several units free and loading them onto the massive vehicles.
The Gretchin who'd just been kicked flying watched the Orks hauling off transformer equipment, and his eyes lit up with an idea.
"Dunno wot da third-class Orks want dis stuff for, but whatever da Orks got, Great Gretchin-ism's gotta have it too!"
He immediately started mobilizing, calling over every Gretchin who'd tagged along to the substation with the Orks.
Several thousand Gretchin gathered, tracked down a few remote transformer units the Orks hadn't touched yet, and started digging them out of the concrete using scavenged scrap tools.
Meanwhile, the Orks had already dug out four transformers, along with other valuable equipment, and loaded everything onto the four massive vehicles.
Satisfied with the haul, Three-Arm climbed aboard one of the vehicles and gave the order.
"That's enough, that's enough! Time to scarper!!"
The four massive vehicles turned and rumbled off the way they'd come, leaving behind a handful of Ork Boyz who hadn't wanted to leave, a scattering of confused Snotlings running loose, and a few Gretchin wandering around aimlessly.
The moment the vehicles rolled out of the substation city, they ran straight into a wall of human tanks that had arrived to reinforce the position.
Three-Arm had no interest in a real fight, and gave the order. "Boyz, get in there, kill da human shrimp-tin-cans!"
The Ork tanks and walkers surged forward with a roar, slamming straight into the human armoured column.
Three-Arm himself, meanwhile, quietly slipped away, driving off with the loaded transport vehicles.
☆☆☆
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