Chapter 54: Meatgrinder
The spore fog had completely swallowed the street. Visibility was under twenty meters. Duvette crouched below the second-floor windowsill, listening to the controlled breathing of the soldiers around him and the engine noise coming from the fog below, rough and chaotic and getting louder.
It sounded like a pack of animals howling.
They were coming.
Every soldier in the building was about to meet the Orks at close range. Duvette looked through the broken window glass at the main street below. Red was beginning to flicker deep in the fog. Then, one after another, a mob of Ork war bikes came punching through the fog bank.
They were crude beyond any reasonable definition of the word. Rough metal plates welded over the frames wherever someone had decided to add them, exhausts belching rolling black smoke, various pieces of salvage and trophies hanging off the handlebars. None of that prevented them from moving at a speed that made the assessment irrelevant. The engines produced a noise that was more assault than sound. Each bike carried at least two Orks, both of them waving blades and ramshackle firearms and screaming "Waaaagh!" at the fog around them.
They hit the improvised barriers Duvette had placed across the road and smashed through without slowing. The air blast from their speed occasionally tore gaps in the fog, briefly exposing the red-painted bikes to the kill lines further back.
No one fired.
Every soldier in the 101st held their breath, fingers resting on trigger guards, and waited for the order.
The Orks had no interest in maintaining any kind of formation. The war bikes collided at irregular intervals, metal screeching against metal, the sound of it harsh and carrying. The Orks on the bikes did not become angry at this. They responded by attacking the offending party with fists, rifle stocks, and in at least one case teeth. Occasionally an Ork was knocked clean off its bike and hit the stone pavement hard.
It would rub its head, scream "Waaaagh!" at the top of its voice, and get up and keep charging.
Then a heavier sound arrived from deep in the fog.
A war truck.
The thing was more than five times the size of the bikes, the body plated in welded metal and spikes, painted in the same aggressive red but applied in much thicker coats. A massive metal battering ram was bolted to the front. The truck's cargo bed was packed solid with Orks, all of them firing weapons in random directions at whatever the fog happened to contain.
The lead war truck noticed something. The Ork behind the wheel widened its eyes. Through the churning fog, at the far end of the road, something was there. A shape. Motionless. Like a silent beast waiting.
"Waaaagh!" The Ork drove the throttle to its stop. The war truck accelerated like a maddened animal, the battering ram aligned on whatever was ahead of it, committed to destroying everything in its path.
The comms channel was completely silent.
Duvette had been watching the Strategic Display throughout. The red contacts were dense across the street grid, the vast majority of the first wave now inside the pre-planned ambush zone. The second wave was flooding through the wall gap behind them.
The moment had arrived.
A cold smile crossed his face.
[Focused Volley -- Activated.]
In the next instant, his voice detonated across every channel simultaneously.
"They're deep inside. Fire!"
The silence was torn apart.
Every soldier of the 101st concealed in the shadows and corners and upper floors of the surrounding buildings opened fire at once. Las beams cut through the fog, leaving burning lines in the dim green air.
The sudden attack froze the Orks for a fraction of a second. Then they erupted into something louder and more frenzied than before.
At the same moment, the war truck finally saw clearly what was waiting at the end of the road.
Three puny little things.
Then the heavy frontal armor of the leading Leman Russ Demolisher variant emerged from the fog, its short, broad-mouthed cannon rising slowly, the muzzle leveling directly at the thing charging toward it.
Distance: under one hundred meters.
The Eisenmark tank commander inside the Demolisher gave his order.
"Fire!"
The cannon mouth produced a light that was not proportionate to anything the street had been built to contain.
The concussive wave from the discharge shattered every piece of glass remaining in every window along the entire block in the same instant. Panes exploded outward like a simultaneous rainfall of fragments cascading down both sides of the street. The round traveled in a line that was nearly flat and struck the war truck in the center of its front face.
For one frame, the impact seemed to freeze.
Then the secondary explosions arrived.
The fuel reservoir, the ammunition racks, and whatever assortment of explosives the Orks had been carrying on their persons all detonated together. An orange-red fireball expanded upward into a mushroom of fire and smoke. The blast wave that came with it was loaded with metal fragments, burning fuel, and pieces of what had been the truck and the things inside it, and it moved through the street like a physical force, sweeping everything it encountered.
Every Ork vehicle ahead of the truck was destroyed outright. Bikes were flipped, torn apart, and in the case of those closest to the blast, reduced to melted scrap. The Orks who had been riding them were not a disposal problem for very long.
The Demolisher's secondary armaments and coaxial weapon opened up immediately, clearing anything in the blast radius that was still moving.
The same scene was playing out at the other junctions. Leman Russ main guns delivering their full destructive output at ranges the narrow streets turned from a limitation into an advantage. Each shot was enough to clear an entire street section. The Hydra tanks had their quad autocannons traversed to ground level, the sustained fire cutting through Ork infantry in dense sweeping bursts.
None of it stopped the Orks.
It made them more excited.
"Waaaagh!!!"
The battle cry coming out of the fog was louder than the guns. The second wave was pouring in, drawn by the sound of firing and the smell of violence, moving through the streets the same way any creature moves when it detects exactly what it was built to seek.
More red contacts were appearing at the edges of the Strategic Display.
The engagement was escalating.
Then, while the 101st soldiers were still directing fire into the streets below, a different sound arrived above them. Engine noise and rotors, both of them too close.
Several crude and improbable flying machines burst out of the fog.
Deffkoptas. Ork rotary aircraft built entirely from salvaged components and the conviction that if enough power was applied to a rotating blade it would eventually produce lift. They were flying at second-floor height, close enough that the off-angle rotors chewed through the concrete of the windowsills as they passed, showering the interiors with stone fragments and dust. One of them passed within half a meter of a 101st machine-gunner's face.
"Ork fliers!" he shouted into the channel. "They're overhead!"
Duvette had the fast-moving red contacts locked on the Strategic Display the moment the call came in. They were flying low, using the fog and the building profiles as cover, finding attack angles that the ground positions could not cover.
"All units, watch for aerial threats!" He drove his voice across the open channel and immediately switched to the Eisenmark frequency. "Colonel Kleist, we need anti-aircraft support. Ork Deffkoptas."
Two bursts of interference came through the channel. Then Kleist's voice, controlled but with an edge of tension in it that had not been there before. "We cannot see them, Commissar. I need precise coordinates."
Duvette read off the contact positions from the Strategic Display. "Altitude fifteen meters, bearing southeast, moving north along Kruger Street. Repeat, altitude fifteen meters..."
He did not finish the sentence.
The distinctive hammering sound of four autocannon barrels cycling in unison reached him before he could.
The Hydra tanks had opened up. The quad autocannons threw their fire into the designated airspace in overlapping bursts, weaving a dense kill net through the fog above the street level. Tracer rounds drew bright arcs through the green murk in every direction, a reversed meteor shower.
The Deffkoptas were hit. They lost whatever passed for controlled flight among Ork aircraft and spun into the building walls around them. Explosions came from windows. One wall face began to come apart from the upper stories downward.
Kleist's voice came through the channel again. A quality had entered it that had not been there in any of their previous exchanges.
"It seems our eyes are indeed reliable after all, Commissar."
"We are not done yet, Colonel," Duvette answered. "I believe we have a full day of this ahead of us still."
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