Six fully armed Catachan Jungle Fighters advanced through the dark corridors of Deck Seventy-Five. Compared to an hour ago, they were no longer remotely the same squad.
An hour ago, they had been six hunters with knives, scraping scraps off the greenskins in the steel jungle through traps and ambushes.
Now every man was loaded down with guns, ammunition, and grenades. Their firepower density had undergone a qualitative leap.
Now this looked proper.
Number One halted at a ventilation-duct junction fifty meters ahead and flashed a standard Catachan silent hand signal.
Enemy. Left front. Unknown numbers.
Through Shared Awareness, Lawson instantly acquired everything Number One was sensing.
In an open chamber about eighty meters off to the left front, seven Ork boyz and more than twenty gretchin were gathered in a noisy circle, squabbling over loot.
He rapidly assessed the battlefield.
The chamber covered roughly four hundred square meters, with a ceiling height of about six meters. It had three entrances.
They were facing the frontal entrance. On the left was a half-collapsed maintenance hatch. On the right was a cargo door mostly blocked by warped metal plating.
The number of greenskins was not large, but it was enough to test the killing power of their new equipment.
"Number One, Number Three, frontal firing positions. Number Two, Number Four, swing around through the left maintenance hatch and take the flank. Number Five comes with me. We push from the front."
Twenty seconds later, everyone was in place.
Lawson counted down in his mind.
"Three... two... one."
"Fire."
Boom! Boom!
Number One and Number Three pulled the triggers on their Locke-pattern boltguns at the same time.
Two .75 caliber mass-reactive rounds tore across the eighty-meter distance at supersonic speed and struck two Ork boyz who still had their heads lowered, rifling through loot.
The kill mechanism of a mass-reactive round was simple: penetrate the target's surface, then expand and detonate inside the body.
The first Ork boy had a hole the size of a fist blown through its entire chest cavity from within. Green blood and shredded organs sprayed nearly three meters behind it.
The second Ork died even worse. That bolt hit a little higher, at the junction between the collarbone and the base of the neck. The explosion tore open its carotid artery and half its shoulder. The huge head lolled to one side, held on only by a strip of thick green skin.
"WAAAAAGH! Ambush! Humies, there's humies..."
The remaining five Ork boyz and more than twenty gretchin exploded into chaos.
But there was a fatal lag between their reactions and the combat-ready Catachans.
Numbers Two and Four, circling in through the left maintenance hatch, opened fire at the same moment.
Two high-energy las-bursts drew glaring red lines through the dim chamber.
A lasgun's single-shot lethality was far below a boltgun's, but at this distance, killing gretchin was effortless.
The system prompts went off as densely as a chain of firecrackers. More than a dozen gretchin dropped in the overlapping fire.
Lawson led Number Five in through the front.
One Ork boy finally reacted and raised the crude oversized cleaver in its hands, charging straight at Lawson.
"WAAAAAGH! I'm gonna..."
It never got to finish the words.
Boom!
A .75 caliber bolt hit the center of its face from less than fifteen meters away.
The effect of a bolt round at point-blank range was on an entirely different scale from what it did at medium distance.
The Ork's whole face was erased in an instant.
Another Ork boy came in from the side.
This one was bulkier than the others, wearing rough armor riveted together from old tires and iron plates, and carrying a massive chain-toothed cleaver too large to grip properly even with both hands.
"Block!"
Number Five stepped in front of Lawson.
As the field generator on the power shield activated, a pale blue translucent energy barrier flared into existence in front of the shield.
The giant chainblade cleaver smashed into the power shield.
BOOM!
The instant the field collided with the physical strike, a blinding blue-white arc burst outward.
Number Five's boots skidded nearly a meter backward across the metal deck, dragging two trails of sparks from the floor.
Lawson flashed out from behind the shield.
The Fang of Catachan was held in reverse grip in his left hand. It stabbed upward with precision into the inner side of the Ork boy's right thigh, straight into the femoral artery region.
Green arterial blood burst out like a pressurized jet.
At the same time, Lawson jammed the muzzle of his bolt pistol under the Ork's jaw.
Boom!
The last two Ork boyz fell one after the other under the concentrated fire of Number One and Number Three's boltguns.
The gretchin had already scattered in all directions, but under the lasgun fire of Number Two and Number Four, fewer than five escaped.
From the moment Lawson gave the order to open fire to the moment the last shot died away, the entire battle had lasted less than forty seconds.
Compared to their earlier fights, which had relied entirely on cold steel and traps, the efficiency increase was more than tenfold.
Lawson swept his eyes across the battlefield.
The corpses of seven Ork boyz lay sprawled across the chamber floor, green blood smeared everywhere.
They had to move fast. In sealed metal corridors, gunfire echoes could carry at least two kilometers.
Orks had an instinctive, almost ecstatic response to the sound of boltguns. More greenskins would probably come running very soon.
"Number Two, Number Four, set traps at the bend in the corridor ahead. Number Three, help move ammunition."
Lawson pulled grenades and melta det-cord from the Armory space.
The grenades were placed in a layered crossfire arrangement at the corridor bend.
One group was buried under metal debris on the floor.
Another was linked in series and fixed to the load-bearing pipes on the ceiling.
The first layer would blast down the front ranks. The second would shred the waves behind them. Standard deep-kill-zone configuration.
Once the trap was set, Lawson chose the firing positions.
About forty meters behind the trap, the corridor split into a Y-shaped fork.
The left branch led into a half-collapsed maintenance passage that could serve as an emergency retreat route.
The right branch offered a clear field of fire, allowing them to shoot through a warped blast-door frame without exposing their bodies.
"Number One, Number Three, establish the main firing position at the right branch. Use that door frame as cover. Number Two, Number Four, establish the second firing line at the duct junction thirty meters behind me. When we fall back to your position, you take over fire. Number Five stays with me. We hold the core position at the Y-split."
The five Deathsworn moved without a sound to carry out the orders.
Lawson holstered the bolt pistol and pulled the heavy bolter from the Armory.
Clack.
A thick curved magazine slammed into the feed port.
Each round in this thing carried nearly twice the charge of a standard bolt. It could blow a football-sized hole through an Ork boy.
They did not have to wait long.
Roughly three minutes later, the increasingly dense sound of footsteps began to roll down the corridor, along with the greenskins' war cries they had already heard countless times.
"WAAAAAAGH! Humies! Humies! I smell humie blood!"
"Gunfire's that way! Big humies are that way! WAAAGH!"
The first things to enter sight were a loose group of gretchin scouts.
Roughly thirty meters behind them, the main force appeared.
More than a dozen Ork boyz, leading over a hundred gretchin, came surging down the corridor in a roaring mass.