Talon III, Low Orbit
The space above Talon III had once been an abyss of cold silence, broken only by the dull glimmer of orbital debris, abandoned monitoring satellites, and the pale reflection of the planet's ice-bound surface.
Now that silence tore open.
A flash of hard white light split the void. Three warships translated into low orbit in tight formation, their hulls shedding residual energy like sparks from cooling metal. For several seconds, their silhouettes hung against the curve of the frozen world below: armored prows, layered weapon decks, and shield vanes still unfolding from transit-lock.
A heartbeat later, the orbital shipyard arrived behind them.
It did not drift into place like an ordinary station. It unfolded. Massive structural spars extended from a compact core, gravitic anchors locking against carefully plotted orbital vectors. Docking arms rotated outward. Fabrication bays opened like steel jaws. Swarms of maintenance drones poured from recessed hatches, each one already moving toward a task assigned before arrival.
Far below, the people of Talon III knew nothing of it.
They lived deep beneath the planet's glacial crust, sealed inside fortified subterranean cities where ice, rock, and armored blast doors stood between fragile civilization and the killing cold above. To them, the surface was a dead place: white storms, broken mountains, pressure-quakes beneath the ice, and old legends of things that moved where no sane human had reason to go.
The fleet did not announce itself to them.
It began work.
Once orbital control was secure and the shipyard's systems stabilized, the landing operation commenced. Teleportarium fields pulsed through the void in timed sequence, each discharge marked by a flicker of light across the planet's atmosphere. Ten regiments, accompanied by a single Knight, were deployed to the southern polar zone. Another ten regiments, with a second Knight at their center, descended upon the northern hemisphere.
Donna and her Knight, Crimson Rose, were assigned to the northern front.
The Crimson Rose stood against the blizzard like a walking fortress painted in red and black. Frost crawled across its armored greaves before being burned away by internal heat exchangers. Its reactor-thrum carried through the ice beneath its feet, a deep vibration Donna felt through the throne-mechanicum and her own bones. Through the Knight's auspex, the world appeared in layers: white storm, blue thermal ghosts, red threat markers, and the sharp metallic signatures of her own forces spreading into position.
While Donna patrolled the frozen wastes, the Legion regiments went immediately to work.
Infantry teams marked defensive lines in the snow. Combat engineers drove heated stakes through the ice and anchored prefabricated trench walls into the permafrost. Leman Russ battle tanks rolled forward on gravitic suspension, their heavy hulls skimming just high enough above the ice to avoid sinking into unstable crust. Automated turret batteries were planted in overlapping rings around the construction zone, their machine-spirits waking with low electric growls as targeting lenses swept the storm.
The wind fought every movement.
It screamed across the open ice, flinging shards of frozen grit hard enough to rattle against armor plates. Men worked with their helmets sealed and their visors rimed in frost. Vox traffic came in clipped bursts: range checks, emplacement reports, power confirmations, warnings about pressure cracks hidden beneath fresh snow. No one wasted words. Talon III punished distraction quickly.
At the same time, hundreds of logistical drones and automated construction machines were transported down from orbit.
They descended in ordered formations, black shapes cutting through the storm with eerie precision. Some carried prefabricated support ribs. Others bore containers of processed alloy, reactor components, armored plating, and compact industrial printers. Heavy construction crawlers settled onto the ice and unfolded stabilizing legs, their thermal drills biting downward until steam hissed from the frozen ground.
The machines began assembling an enormous tower-like structure at the center of the northern landing zone.
The first stage rose from anchored foundations: a ring of black alloy braced deep into the ice. Then came stacked structural bands, each one locked into place by drones that moved with silent efficiency through snow and exhaust fog. Industrial printers extruded reinforcement lattices on-site. Assembly arms welded plates into place. Gravitic lifters positioned components too large for human crews to move.
Whenever material stores ran low, the drones vanished in flashes of teleportation, returned to orbit, reloaded from the shipyard, and reappeared moments later to continue the work without pause.
The spire rose fast.
It pierced the storm-laden sky like a blade driven through the planet's frozen skin, a titanic column of black alloy, armored service decks, antenna vanes, and half-completed energy conduits. Its purpose had not been explained to every soldier on the ground, but no one needed the details to understand that it mattered. Anything the Legion built under this much protection was either a weapon, a shield, or something stranger than both.
Donna continued her patrol at the edge of the perimeter.
Inside the Crimson Rose, the blizzard became information. Wind patterns. Thermal scattering. Ground tremors. Electromagnetic noise. The Knight's spirit translated the frozen world into warnings and possibilities, and Donna read them with the practiced focus of a pilot who knew that arrogance killed faster than fear.
Then movement appeared in the storm.
At first, it was only distortion: dark shapes shifting inside the whiteout, too low and too many to be ice formations. Donna magnified the feed. The Crimson Rose's auspex sharpened the image. Green bodies. Crude metal. Heat signatures packed together in a disorderly mass.
Her hand tightened around the command interface.
"Xenos sighted! Prepare for combat!"
Her warning cracked across the vox-net, sharp, controlled, and instantly obeyed.
The construction site changed in seconds. Labor teams abandoned exposed tasks and fell back into half-dug trenches. Engineers sealed tool rigs and dragged power cables clear of firing lanes. Infantry squads dropped into prepared positions, lasguns braced over frozen parapets. Tank commanders brought their Leman Russes forward, armored hulls forming moving cover for the infantry.
The automated turret batteries around the site snapped fully awake. Red optics burned through the storm. Targeting arrays tracked the approaching movement, corrected for wind speed, visibility loss, and the erratic gait of charging enemies. Artillery drones lifted from the perimeter and settled into firing hover, their stabilizers locking against the gale.
Every soldier steadied his breathing. Gloves tightened around weapon grips. Scopes found the storm. The Legion waited.
Then the white abyss burst open.
"WAAAGGGGHHH!!!"
The Orks came howling through the blizzard.
Thousands of them charged across the ice, brandishing rusted cleavers, crude axes, jagged blades, and slabs of sharpened scrap. They were massive, hunched, green-skinned brutes with corded muscle, heavy jaws, and yellow teeth bared in idiot joy. Their armor was little more than bolted scrap, dented plates, looted metal panels, and glyphs painted in blood, engine grease, and whatever else had been close at hand when the thought occurred to them.
A green tide rolled toward the construction site, loud enough to be heard even through the storm and the sealed armor of the Legion.
For a few seconds, the soldiers watched in silence.
Then the fear began to drain away.
The Orks had no vehicles. No heavy guns. No visible artillery. No ranged support worth marking. They were charging across open ground into prepared guns with nothing but blades and enthusiasm. Against unprepared militia, they would have been a massacre. Against the First Legion, they were targets.
The infantry did not cheer. They did not mock. They simply adjusted firing angles, relaxed shoulders that had gone too tight, and waited for the order to kill. Some engineers, after receiving confirmation that the threat level had dropped, returned to shielding exposed machinery from the storm. The construction work slowed, but did not stop.
Donna felt a faint flicker of irritation through the throne-mechanicum.
The Crimson Rose wanted battle. Its war-spirit strained against restraint, eager to meet the enemy with chainsword and gauntlet. Donna kept it leashed. There was no honor in wasting a Knight's wrath on a mob of poorly armed savages charging into a killing field.
A Leman Russ slid forward from the armored line, its gravitic plates humming as it adjusted position on the ice. Its turret rotated with smooth mechanical confidence until the battle cannon faced the oncoming horde.
A tank commander's voice crackled over the vox.
"Knight-Commander, mind if I deal with this rabble?"
"Not at all," Donna replied. Her voice remained calm, almost bored. "Try not to scratch the ice too deeply."
A few troopers allowed themselves thin smiles.
This was not a battle.
This was pest control.
The Leman Russ opened fire.
The first shell screamed across the frozen plain and detonated inside the front ranks of the horde. Snow, steam, blood, and torn green bodies erupted outward in a dirty blossom. The shockwave punched a hole through the charge, but the Orks behind it only roared louder and trampled over the dead.
Then the automated turrets joined in.
Streams of disciplined fire cut through the storm. Heavy stubber rounds stitched across torsos and skulls. Lasfire burned lines through crude armor. Explosive shells burst among clustered bodies. Artillery drones fired in careful rhythm, dropping munitions into dense patches of movement before correcting to the next formation.
The green tide broke apart long before it reached the trenches.
Orks died in heaps. Some kept running with missing limbs until secondary fire cut them down. Others slipped on blood-slick ice and were crushed beneath their own mob. The blizzard swallowed screams, gunfire, and the stink of cauterized flesh, then threw it all back in gusts across the battlefield.
Not one Ork reached the defensive line.
Within half an hour, the plain was still again.
Frozen corpses lay scattered across the snow, green bodies half-buried by drifting white. Smoke curled from shell craters. Turrets swept the battlefield one more time, found no moving targets larger than cooling meat, and returned to standby.
The first Ork wave had been annihilated.
The wind howled on, indifferent.
....
Two hours passed without another attack.
The tower continued to rise. Trenches deepened. Ammunition sleds moved between firing positions. Maintenance drones cleared frozen gore from the forward sensor stakes because Ork blood, like every other battlefield contaminant, became a logistics problem if ignored for long enough.
Then the storm changed again.
Shapes emerged from the white distance. Slower this time. More orderly.
Donna leaned forward in the command cradle as the Crimson Rose's auspex tried to resolve the image. The first outlines looked wrong. Too straight. Too deliberate. Orks did not usually advance like that. They surged, brawled, raced one another toward the loudest killing. These ones were moving in blocks.
Then the storm thinned.
"Emperor protect us…" Donna murmured. "Are they forming line infantry?"
Across the ice-slick expanse, hundreds of Orks advanced in tight regimental squares. Their usual anarchic mob discipline had been hammered into something uncanny, crude, and deeply offensive to common sense. They wore cobbled-together uniforms stitched from looted flak coats, torn Imperial tunics, curtain cloth, industrial rags, and scraps of hide. Brass buttons, teeth, wires, and bits of armor had been jammed into the garments wherever decoration seemed appropriate.
The result looked like an army parade remembered by a drunk brute after being hit in the skull with a shovel.
At the head of each formation marched a larger Ork wearing squig-hide pelts over a stolen officer's coat. One had a monocle carved from an auspex lens jammed into his brow. Another carried a saber made from welded scrap and waved it with theatrical authority. A third had somehow acquired a peaked cap large enough to sit over one ear and appeared convinced it made him invincible.
Behind the formations came the guns.
Crude scrap-cannons trundled over the ice on iron wheels, hauled by chains of grots. The smaller Orkoids squealed, cursed, and stumbled in the snow while overseers lashed them with burna rods and kicked them forward with spiked boots. The cannons themselves were ugly, primitive, and massive: iron barrels bound in rings of scrap, reinforced with glyph plates, and fed by powder crews who handled ammunition with the reverence of idiots around explosives.
Then the music began.
A line of squigs at the rear started shrieking through metal pipes, their handlers squeezing them like living bellows. Drums made from fuel barrels boomed in uneven rhythm. Horns blared. The sound was awful, warped by wind and Ork enthusiasm until it became something between a funeral march, an artillery malfunction, and a tavern brawl falling down a staircase.
Donna stared.
The Crimson Rose's targeting systems marked the formations, the cannons, the officers, the powder stores, the grots, and several squigs whose sonic output was apparently irritating enough for the machine-spirit to classify them as hostile equipment.
The Orks halted at one thousand meters.
In perfect synchronization, the first rank dropped to one knee and raised their muskets. The second rank remained standing behind them, barrels leveled over the shoulders of the first. Hundreds of crude black powder weapons pointed toward the Legion lines.
A huge Ork officer stomped forward, saber raised high. His voice rolled across the ice in a guttural parody of military authority.
"WAAAGH—FIRE!"
The volley erupted.
Black powder smoke swallowed the front ranks. Lead balls screamed through the storm in a ragged, thunderous wave. Most went wide. Some dropped short. A few struck the Legion's forward barriers, sparked from armor, or buried themselves in frozen trench walls. It should have been ridiculous. It was ridiculous.
Then the cannons fired.
The first iron shot slammed into the Crimson Rose's ion shield and burst into molten fragments, sending ripples across the energy field. A second round punched into the ice beside a Leman Russ and exploded in a plume of snow and shrapnel. A third struck the edge of a trench, collapsing part of the frozen parapet and throwing two soldiers backward before their armor absorbed the worst of the blast.
Donna's amusement vanished.
Primitive did not mean harmless.
The Orks fired again. Muskets boomed. Cannons roared. The smoke thickened until the enemy formations became moving shadows inside their own powder cloud. Explosions rippled across the field. Tank armor rang under heavy impacts. Snow geysered upward. One turret battery lost a sensor mast to a lucky cannonball and compensated with its secondary optics.
The Orks were still Orks. But now they were Orks with discipline, artillery, and enough collective madness to make the joke dangerous.
Donna had seen enough.
The Crimson Rose surged forward.
Its reactor growled. Its stride shook the ice. The Knight's reaper chainsword came alive with a rising metallic scream as adamantium teeth blurred into motion. Its thunderstrike gauntlet crackled with caged lightning, arcs crawling over the knuckles and snapping into the snow.
Donna drove straight through the storm.
The Ork line fired into her advance. Muskets hammered uselessly against the ion shield. Cannonballs struck harder, each impact blooming across the field in shivering distortions of blue-white light. The Crimson Rose pushed through them, shield flaring, armor steaming, chainsword raised.
The Leman Russ tanks advanced alongside her. Their guns spoke in disciplined sequence, battle cannons tearing apart Ork squares before the brutes could reload. Heavy bolters cut down powder crews. Turrets eliminated the scrap-cannons one by one, detonating ammunition carts and scattering grots like thrown rags.
Donna hit the first Ork formation like a falling hab-block.
The chainsword swept low and turned the front rank into meat, cloth, and shattered muskets. The thunder gauntlet came down on an officer in squig-hide finery and drove him into the ice hard enough to crack the permafrost beneath him. She pivoted, crushed a cannon carriage under one foot, and backhanded another Ork officer through his own musicians.
The line formations collapsed.
Some Orks tried to maintain ranks, roaring orders through blood and smoke. Others forgot the performance entirely and charged with bayonets, axes, and fists. A few kept firing until Donna's chainsword reached them. Discipline lasted exactly as long as it took for the Crimson Rose to stand among them.
The second battle ended faster than the first.
For all their strange order and borrowed tactics, the Orks could not withstand the First Legion's firepower or a Knight's direct assault. Their cannons were shattered. Their officers died beneath chainsword, tank shell, and lasfire. The grots fled first, dragging broken chains behind them until turret fire corrected the problem. The squigs, abandoned by their handlers, scattered into the storm and were marked for later extermination if they survived the cold.
When the last organized mob broke, Donna halted the Crimson Rose amid churned snow and Ork corpses. Her Knight's armor was blackened in places, its ion shield still cycling from repeated impacts. She looked across the battlefield and felt no triumph.
This had been a probe.
A strange one. A stupid one. But still a probe.
After that, the Orks did not return.
The northern pole fell silent.
Hours passed. The tower climbed higher. The defensive ring thickened. Engineers repaired damaged trenches and replaced the turret battery's ruined sensor mast. Drones dragged Ork bodies into marked burn pits before spores could become a future infestation. Infantry squads rotated through watch positions, half their number resting while the rest kept weapons trained on the storm.
Night came slowly beneath the polar sky.
The blizzard weakened, leaving a hard black vault overhead and a horizon stained green by auroras. The temperature dropped further. Frost formed along weapon casings and armor joints. Makeshift heat lamps glowed in trench alcoves. Soldiers gathered in small groups around shielded cookers and chemical fires, eating ration blocks with gloved hands while their breath curled white inside the cold.
Someone laughed quietly at the memory of Orks marching in squares. Someone else suggested they might return wearing wigs next. A sergeant told them both to shut up and check their charge packs.
The tension eased, but it did not disappear.
Donna remained inside the Crimson Rose.
Honor demanded vigilance as much as battle. She had seen enough Ork behavior in one day to know that dismissing them as simple beasts was an invitation to die in an embarrassing manner. The Knight's auspex continued to sweep the dark. Ground-penetrating pulses searched beneath the ice. Thermal lenses watched the horizon. Motion trackers listened to the wind.
Nothing.
Only cold. Only darkness. Only the groan of ice shifting under its own ancient weight.
The soldiers began to relax anyway.
They should not have.
Beneath the frozen tundra, countless beady red eyes gleamed in the dark.
Under the snow, inside tunnels chewed, blasted, and clawed through the permafrost, Orks waited. Their crude bodies were packed shoulder to shoulder in freezing crawlspaces, their breath trapped beneath hides, scrap plates, and purple-painted rags. They had not vanished after the second attack. They had gone below.
Near the forward edge of the Legion's defensive perimeter, a smaller Ork lay buried beneath a thin crust of snow. Its armor had been daubed in crude purple paint, because every Ork knew purple was sneaky, and the fact that this belief had somehow carried it past several ordinary sight-lines only made the universe less dignified.
It moved with surprising care.
From a pouch at its belt, it withdrew a severed Gretchin head.
The head had been turned into a clock.
It should not have worked. There were gears shoved through bone, wires threaded through ears, and two mismatched lenses jammed into the skull. A little metal hammer twitched against the Gretchin's remaining teeth. Its tongue flicked in and out, producing a wet, rhythmic sound.
"Lu. Lu. Lu. Lu."
The purple-painted Ork stared at it with intense concentration.
Above, one kilometer in the night sky, an Ork bomber squadron banked into formation.
The aircraft were absurd things: biplane frames reinforced with scrap armor, engines coughing fire, wings painted with glyphs, teeth, and kill marks applied without symmetry or taste. Each bomber carried racks of explosives strapped beneath its belly and, hanging from the cockpit, its own Gretchin-made alarm clock.
The clocks ticked down together.
For one impossible moment, the Ork attack possessed timing.
Then every clock rang.
The bomber pilots howled with delight.
"WAAAAGH!"
They pushed their machines into a dive.
On the ground, deeper within the hidden approach tunnels, a monstrous Ork Warboss tore a Gretchin alarm clock from his belt and hurled it into the snow. He was huge even by Ork standards, his face hidden behind a slab of welded iron plates. A crude grin had been painted across the mask in blood, turning the expression into something both childish and murderous.
Behind him, artillery crews shoved shells into cannons and lobbas. Grots dragged ammunition carts forward. Burna teams checked fuel lines by licking them. Tank crews beat their engines with hammers until the machines coughed awake.
The Warboss raised a massive choppa.
It was time.
At the front line, Ork sappers burst from the snow and fired squig-flares into the sky.
"BOOM∼!"
The flares burst overhead in sickly green light.
The battlefield flashed into view. Every trench. Every turret. Every tank hull. Every half-built wall around the rising spire. The glow painted the Legion's fortifications in hard, unnatural color and threw long shadows across the ice.
Donna's auspex screamed warnings.
Ground movement. Air contacts. Artillery signatures. Heat blooms beneath the snow. Too many. Too close.
Her hand slammed across the command interface.
"Full alert! Enemy assault! All positions, wake up!"
She was one second too late to prevent the opening strike.
The frozen ground erupted.
Orks burst from beneath the snow in a savage tidal wave, smashing through the crust with axes, drills, claws, and explosive charges. Some emerged inside the outer defensive ring. Others poured from concealed tunnels beyond the trenches. They came roaring out of the ice in mobs so dense that the ground itself seemed to turn green.
"WAAAGGGGHHH!!!"
Heavy artillery thundered from the darkness. Shells screamed through the polar night and slammed into the Legion's perimeter. Explosions walked across trench lines, threw snow and metal into the air, and hammered against the automated defenses. Turrets rotated, fired, and were struck by return fire before completing their second sweep.
Overhead, the biplane bombers plunged through flak and lasfire. Their engines shrieked. Bombs tumbled from crude racks and fell toward the construction zone. The first detonations blossomed among outer supply dumps, hurling crates, drones, and burning fragments across the ice. One bomber clipped a turret mast, spun out of control, and crashed into the snow in a rolling ball of flame, its pilot still laughing over an open vox frequency until impact ended the joke.
Then the Ork vehicles arrived.
Makeshift tanks surged through the storm, welded together from scrap plating, looted hab modules, mining crawlers, industrial engines, and desecrated cogitator panels ripped from machinery that had once deserved better. Their cannons fired wildly, but there were enough of them that accuracy became a luxury rather than a requirement. Behind them came more infantry, more artillery crews, more roaring bodies pouring into the green-lit killing field.
The Legion's lines answered.
Leman Russ tanks opened fire at point-blank range. Infantry squads dragged themselves from sleep into combat, helmets half-frosted, weapons already firing. Automated turrets stitched the darkness with red and white lines. Artillery drones lifted through smoke and began dropping fire into the largest clusters of movement. Engineers abandoned tools and seized rifles. Medicae drones screamed through shrapnel toward the first casualties.
Donna drove the Crimson Rose forward, chainsword roaring, thunder gauntlet raised, the Knight's ion shield flaring under overlapping impacts.
This was no scattered raid.
This was no absurd line-infantry performance.
This was the Orks' true assault: underground infiltration, timed air strikes, artillery preparation, armored support, and a green tide large enough to drown the unprepared beneath bodies and noise.
The battlefield erupted into chaos, a maelstrom of explosions, gunfire, burning wreckage, and guttural WAAAGH cries.
This time, it was no skirmish.
The battle had truly begun.