Chapter 14 : The Supply Raid
The Ork supply dump burned orange against the dark.
Nash lay flat on a rubble pile three hundred meters from the target, his data-slate balanced on a chunk of ferrocrete, the system painting the landscape in tactical overlay. The dump occupied a collapsed warehouse — crates of crude ammunition, barrels of fungal food-stores, vehicle parts stacked in haphazard piles. A dozen Ork boyz lounged around cook fires, their weapons within arm's reach but their attention focused on an argument about something Nash's rudimentary Low Gothic couldn't parse.
[TACTICAL OVERLAY: ORK SUPPLY DEPOT GAMMA-3]
[HOSTILES: 12 CONFIRMED — ARMED, LOW ALERT STATE]
[SUPPLY VALUE: HIGH — AMMUNITION, FOOD STORES, VEHICLE COMPONENTS]
[MISSION PARAMETERS: DESTROY DEPOT, CAPTURE USABLE SUPPLIES, ZERO FRIENDLY CASUALTIES TARGET]
Three hundred meters. Close enough for the system's analysis. Far enough that Nash couldn't interfere if things went wrong.
Vasquez's voice crackled through the vox — low, barely audible, the hand-held unit pressed against his jaw.
"Alpha team in position. East approach."
"Bravo team in position. West approach." Sergeant Kael's voice. The older soldier had volunteered for the second fireteam, his skepticism about Nash apparently outweighed by his appetite for hitting Orks.
Nash checked the overlay. Ten soldiers in two five-person teams, approaching from converging angles. Vasquez had picked them well — PDF veterans from the first battle, soldiers who'd held the line when the Nob breached the wall. Steady hands. No Geels among them.
"Geel ran and died screaming in Sector 7. Davos ran after him and died trying to save him. I can still see the data-slate splitting under the choppa. Every time I send people into danger, those images surface — my brain's way of reminding me what failure costs."
He keyed the vox. "Execute on my mark."
The system counted Ork positions. Tagged patrol intervals. Measured the gap between the nearest sentry and the approach corridor where Vasquez's team crouched in shadows.
"Three. Two. One. Mark."
Las-fire erupted from two directions. The crossfire pattern was Nash's design, refined through the system's kill zone calculations — the same geometry that had shredded the first Ork wave at the perimeter. Bolts stitched across the camp in lethal X-patterns, catching greenskins in overlapping fire.
Eight dropped in the opening volley. Two more went down scrambling for weapons. The remaining pair charged Vasquez's position — the Ork response to danger was always aggression, always forward — and four concentrated las-bolts put them down before they covered ten meters.
"Depot clear," Vasquez reported. "Twelve hostiles down. Zero friendly casualties."
Nash exhaled. His grip on the data-slate loosened. Clean. Fast.
"On Earth, I managed software deployments. Green light meant the build pushed to production successfully. This is the same feeling — the plan worked, the execution was clean, the team performed. Except the build killed twelve things and the production environment is a war zone."
"Begin recovery. Priority: ammunition, then food stores, then communication equipment. Five minutes, then extract."
"Understood."
Nash watched through the overlay as Vasquez's team swept the depot, loading salvageable supplies onto improvised sleds — sheets of hull plating with ropes attached. Crude but functional. Priscilla had designed them for the return trip, applying the same logistics brain that managed housing allocation to the problem of hauling Ork supplies through rubble-choked streets.
Three minutes in. Clean. Too clean.
[WARNING: ADDITIONAL HOSTILE CONTACTS — 4 — APPROACHING FROM NORTH]
[CLASSIFICATION: ORK NOB BODYGUARD + MEK]
[NOT IN PRE-MISSION INTELLIGENCE — UNEXPECTED CONTACT]
"Vasquez. Four hostiles incoming from the north. Nob bodyguard type with a Mek. They weren't in the scout report."
A beat. Vasquez's voice came back tight. "How close?"
"Sixty meters and closing. You have ninety seconds."
"The scout report was three days old. The Mek must have arrived since then — probably servicing the vehicles. An Ork Mek is a mechanic, an inventor, and an arms dealer rolled into one. They build the vehicles, the weapons, the crude technology that gives Ork warbands their edge. Losing a Mek costs Gorgrim more than losing fifty boyz."
"Bravo, pull to extraction point. Alpha, rig the promethium barrels for detonation. Vasquez — the Mek is the priority target. If you can eliminate it, Gorgrim loses vehicle production capacity."
"Understood. Alpha team, promethium charges on the barrel stack. Sixty-second fuses."
Nash watched the overlay. Vasquez repositioned his team with hand signals — three covering the north approach, two rigging the charges. The Mek appeared at the edge of the system's detection range: hunched, massive, one arm replaced by a whirring contraption of drills and welding torches, flanked by three armored bodyguards.
The bodyguards saw the dead Orks. Bellowed.
Vasquez's three opened fire. The bodyguards charged — same response, always forward — and the las-fire caught them in a concentrated burst. Two went down. The third absorbed four bolts and kept coming, its crude armor deflecting what should have been killing shots.
Kael's team fired from the flank. The third bodyguard staggered, turned toward the new threat, and Vasquez put a round through the gap between its helmet and shoulder plate. It dropped.
The Mek was running. Not toward the fight — away from it, toward the vehicle depot behind the warehouse.
"It's heading for the vehicles," Nash said. "If it reaches them—"
"I see it."
The promethium charges detonated. The barrel stack erupted in a column of orange fire that swallowed the warehouse entrance and sent a pressure wave across the depot. The Mek staggered, its mechanical arm flailing for balance. Debris rained. In the firelight, Vasquez sprinted — actually sprinted, closing distance with the reckless commitment of a man who'd decided this target was worth the risk.
His lasgun fired twice at fifteen meters. Both bolts hit the Mek's torso, burning through its crude armor. It turned, swinging the drill-arm, and Vasquez dropped flat as the whirring mechanism passed over his head close enough to shave hair. He rolled, came up on one knee, and fired three more times into the Mek's face.
The Ork dropped. Its drill-arm sputtered and died.
"Target down," Vasquez panted. "Mek eliminated."
Nash's hands were shaking. Not during the fight — they'd been steady on the data-slate, feeding coordinates and threat data, the cold part of his brain running calculations while the warm part screamed at him for sitting three hundred meters away while Vasquez nearly died. Now, in the silence after, the shaking came.
He pressed his palms flat against the ferrocrete. Breathed.
"Extract. All teams. Move."
The return trip took four hours. Overloaded sleds dragging through ruins, every shadow a potential ambush, Vasquez's team maintaining security while hauling enough supplies to feed the settlement for three additional weeks.
They arrived at the perimeter gates as the first gray light bled across the eastern horizon. The sentries — Volkov's soldiers, the shift was his — opened the gates without challenge. They'd been expecting them.
The haul was better than Nash had projected. Sixty power packs of various caliber — Ork looted, but compatible with Imperial weapons. Four crates of preserved fungal rations that Sigma-9 confirmed were safe for human consumption after processing. A crate of crude but functional grenades. And the prize: an Ork communication array, ripped from the Mek's workshop, crackling with encrypted vox traffic.
Priscilla was waiting with her data-slate. She catalogued each item with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that survival was measured in inventory lines. Food reserves jumped from six days to twenty-two. Ammunition increased by twenty percent. The communication array went directly to Sigma-9's workshop.
The celebration was quiet — not cheering, not triumph, but the collective exhale of four hundred and sixty people who'd just bought themselves another month. Defenders clapped Vasquez's team on the shoulders. Marcus offered a prayer of thanksgiving. Lida — the girl with the power-pack bricks — brought Vasquez a cup of purified water, and the sergeant drank it with the solemn gratitude of a man receiving communion.
Nash watched from the command post doorway, arms folded, the shaking in his hands finally subsided.
"Zero friendly casualties. Clean execution. Successful extraction. By every metric, this was a perfect operation."
"So why does it feel wrong to have watched from three hundred meters away?"
Volkov appeared beside him. The Commissar's greatcoat was buttoned against the pre-dawn chill, his cap squared, his face carrying its default expression of controlled evaluation.
"Impressive," Volkov said. "The tactical approach. The improvisation when the Mek appeared. Your sergeant is competent."
"He is."
"But the Orks will want revenge. Gorgrim doesn't tolerate raids on his supply lines."
"I know."
Volkov looked at him — that long, measuring stare that Nash had learned to endure without flinching. "You sent ten soldiers into Ork territory based on a plan you designed from intelligence data that shouldn't be available to a clerk. They executed a tactical operation that matches Imperial Guard special operations doctrine. And you commanded it remotely, from an overwatch position, adjusting in real-time to unexpected contacts."
"Is there a question, Commissar?"
"Several. But they can wait." Volkov turned toward the barracks. "The Orks won't."
He left. Nash listened to those disciplined boots fade into the compound.
Through the command post doorway, the Ork vox array crackled on Sigma-9's workbench — guttural voices, encrypted but recognizable. Ork command traffic. Gorgrim's network. Sigma-9 was already feeding it through translation protocols, her servo-arms moving in a blur.
Nash sat down at the planning table. Picked up his stylus.
The vox crackled again. Louder. Even through the encryption, the tone carried something that didn't require translation: anger. The guttural bark of an Ork warlord receiving bad news.
Gorgrim had just learned about the raid. And Ork warbosses didn't send memos.
They sent warbands.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]