Chương 77: Volume Two - Chapter Fourteen - Making an Entrance

More orks came, and Alexis found herself ducking down as one of them fired wild shots in her direction. None of them hit, because the orks were firing while running and screaming, but she still felt the whoosh of bullets flying overhead and could clearly hear them ramming into the trees behind her.

"CS-3-2/11, clear them out!" she shouted. Her friendly almost-a-Vorax rose up from the ditch where she had been half-hidden and spooled up her gatling gun for just a moment before opening fire. A shout came from the other side of the road, where Octavia and most of the sisters were waiting. They rushed up the embankment and soon the orks had their attention split as they were taking fire from two directions all at once. Being…

not very intelligent, the orks didn't even try to run for cover or towards the relative safety they might have found in the forest. Instead they stood their ground and shot back. It made it kind of easy to pick them out. Alexis was actually impressed by how many shots it took to bring an ork down. One hit from a bolter just about anywhere would put a man down. An ork?

A hit to the head or upper chest took them down, but they were just a lot tougher than the average man and it took more concentrated fire to bring them down. Not that they weren't being absolutely mulched. The veteran Voidsmen had great aim with their lasrifles and the sisters of battle with their boltguns were plenty deadly. CS-3-2/11's gun spooled down then stopped firing. Alexis reached up and stuck a pinkie in her ear and wiggled it about. She had to start wearing hearing protection…

or better yet, replace her ears with something more functional. She might have the points for it, now. Kills Confirmed: 32x Orks 8x Gretchin New Point Total: 936 Alexis stared at the number for a moment. That was a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Enough to finish most of the upgrades she had planned on her friends, and more than enough to pick up a new servitor friend and bring them up to a nice standard. Ah, but first, the mission.

"Burn the corpses, just in case," Octavaia said. Alexis was happy that she was taking charge, it made it so much easier. Still, she had to do her part as well.

"Does anyone have anything in need of maintenance? How are our ammunition stores?" A quick check revealed that they still have over ninety percent of their munitions. The lasrifles had powerpacks that could be recharged, and they had brought a device specifically designed to do just that. As long as they rotated their powerpacks appropriately, they'd never run out of ammo there. No injuries from this encounter. The worst was a Voidsman who had tripped while they ran into cover and scrapped an arm on the fall.

He was getting ribbed by the others for the mistake. Alexis checked K84-321 over for any injuries, but other than a few bits of scraped-off paint, he was fine. It would take more than getting hit by a truck to take him out. Though she did notice that some of the lines on his pneumatic hands were bent, and there was a slight leak. Something to look into. He had had those since the start, and they weren't of the quality she expected to see from Vyper-made items.

Once they were in a more private location, or at least had some downtime, she would replace those with something better. The original Castellax class battle automata had bolters built into their arms. That would give him some much needed range. With everything repacked and with several fires left behind them, the strikegroup continued onwards. She had her auspex up, looking for anomalies, but so far, nothing showed up. She had to maybe buy a second auspex, one tuned towards spotting orks.

Another thing to add to the wishlist. Overcliff came up ahead of them. They moved around a slight bend in the road, where it started to incline upwards, and then the Voidsmen scouts in the lead gestured for everyone to slow down and get to cover. There was a ferrocrete wall up ahead and the group gathered behind it. On the other side was Overcliff keep, or at least, the open space leading up to it. Alexis had K84-321 lift her up slightly so that she could peek over the wall The keep was built into the cliff.

That meant that it had something like a dozen floors, each one with balconies and overlooks jutting out of the cliffside. The ground level was a large, flat expanse of concrete, with walls all around and several watchtowers. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Old wrecked vehicles were parked there, next to pre-fab hangars and a few smaller buildings. At the far back were several large doors leading directly into the cliffside.

They were tall enough that a knight titan could walk in without having to worry about clearance. The crest of House Kronis was hanging from an old, tattered banner that fluttered faintly in the wind. It was defaced, the shape of a crudely painted ork skull splashed over the crest. That wasn't the only orkish thing around. Alexis counted twenty-three trucks that were styled up in orkish fashion. They were parked in a crooked line off to one side, with heaps of scrap metal behind them.

There were orks with tools fixing or upgrading many of them while gretchin ran around with spare parts or simply ran around chasing after each other. The interior of the hangar was too distant for Alexis to make out anything detailed, but she could tell that the orks had remodeled it as well. There was some massive vehicle that looked more like a mountain of steel and rust than anything proper sitting in the centre. The cliffside, with its many balconies, was properly occupied as well.

They had installed gun emplacements… just about everywhere. There was hardly a single balcony without at least one orkish gun or canon jutting out of it. Alexis dipped back down and surveilled their group. Forty something people. There were probably a hundred orks just on the ground level, and she was pretty sure that the big robotic thing in that hangar was one of those infamous ork gargants. Red-C61734 was reading from a dataslate plugged into one of their scout servo skulls.

"Observation: The keep was turned into a fabrication facility… of some sort."

"Yeah, I noticed the same," Alexis said.

"It looks like they're putting together trucks and smaller vehicles, and they're using the hangar to build bigger things. I don't know if we have the resources to really attack this place." Octavia snorted.

"Not with that attitude," she said.

"There are a lot of guns sticking out of that cliff," Alexis said.

"Sure. And they'll splatter us if we just skip over to it. But we can probably find another way in."

"Sneak in?" Alexis asked. Octavia nodded.

"So, I've got two ideas. One, we deploy smoke and make a run for it."

"It's a long run," Alexis said.

"And they're orks… they'll just shoot into the smoke."

"Right. So we'd need a distraction at the same time. The other option is that we look a little orky about it." Alexis didn't like this plan.

"How? I'm not dressing in green."

"Nah, but do you think you could drive one of those trucks of theirs?" Octavia asked. Alexis hesitated. She might be able to, in theory. They were obviously built using simple Imperial vehicles at their base, just with some orkish upgrades tacked on.

"I… can I say no based on religious exemptions? I think the Omnissiah might not forgive me for driving one of those."

"Bah! Everyone knows that the best way to gain the God Emperor's pardon is to sacrifice for it. And the best sacrifice is the blood of filthy xenos and heretics." Some of the sisters nearby nodded.

"Come on! We just need to ambush the next group and make sure we don't destroy the truck in the process. Can't be that hard. Then we simply drive it into the hangar. Their defences are pointing outwards, not in." Alexis didn't like the plan, for a multitude of reasons, but then, she couldn't think of anything better. Sneaking in was beyond her friends, and rushing in from the front was just suicidal. And it wasn't like they could back down. The orks were alerted to something going on. They weren't that stupid.

Which meant that they couldn't call for reinforcements or expect any sort of extraction to come and pick them up.

"Okay, fine," Alexis said.

"How do we get the orks to come out with a few trucks?" Octavia shrugged.

"Set off a big explosion not too far off, but far enough away that they won't want to walk?" That was so stupid it might work. Alexis was only a few hours into this mess, and she was already tired of all of the 'so stupid it works' plans.