Chapter 483: Sin of the Xenos
Once the officer corps had thrown their lives away, the fifty million Astra Militarum soldiers were wiped out entirely.
Their bodies blanketed every street and trench in the city. On a battlefield saturated with high-energy weaponry like this, the human remains left behind were, almost universally, unrecognizable.
Fifty million troops had held for barely ten days before being completely annihilated by the Ork war-machine, and Ork morale surged to yet another new peak.
The greenskins began sweeping the battlefield, salvaging usable weapons and equipment, while the Mekboys got straight to work forging fresh weaponry and more advanced armaments on-site.
Having just won a massive victory, greenskin morale across the entire planet spiked to its highest point yet, and a steady, unbroken flood of fresh Orks poured in to join the Gargant's battlegroup.
The Gargant itself now stood resting amid a field of shattered skyscraper wreckage, tens of thousands of Mekboys swarming around it, bolting on an endless array of additional weaponry.
Machine-gun mounts stacked on top of machine-gun mounts. Turrets layered over turrets. Rocket pods piled onto rocket pods.
They'd even constructed something resembling a battleship's superstructure island atop the Gargant's head, hung with laser cannons of every conceivable caliber.
At this point, an incoming enemy round wouldn't even reach the Gargant's core plating, since every inch of armour was now buried beneath layers of auxiliary weaponry.
Manning all these bolt-on weapons was a dense swarm of Ork operators, clinging to the massive Gargant's frame like acne on a giant's back, working the guns.
Blackiron, the pilot, hadn't detached from the Gargant even once since first connecting to it.
In fact, so much WAAAGH energy had flooded through him that his flesh had begun proliferating unnaturally, growing and fusing directly into the surrounding cabling and mechanical structures.
Right now, through the Gargant's vox array, Blackiron bellowed:
"I WANNA FIGHT! I WANNA KEEP WAAAGHIN'!! How much longer you small-fry gonna take gettin' ready?!!"
His voice was loud, furious, audible from ten kilometers away.
Inside the Gargant, Three-Arm worked with a screwdriver, repairing internal components as he replied:
"Our armoured boyz are burnin' through fuel too fast. We gotta refuel here in dis human shrimp-tin-can refinery city before we push to da next target."
Blackiron roared: "Then wot's takin' so long?! Get da fuel and let's keep WAAAGHIN'!!"
Three-Arm answered:
"Da shrimp-tin-cans already shipped their fuel outta da city before we got here. I'm workin' on findin' another way to get us some."
Many Ork-built engines didn't actually require conventional fuel at all. Pour cooking oil, water, or practically any other viscous substance into the tank, and, thanks to WAAAGH power backing it up, the engine would often start regardless.
But WAAAGH energy was a precious, finite resource, and Three-Arm didn't want to waste it papering over a basic fuel shortage.
His plan was to properly fuel the force conventionally, so the WAAAGH field wouldn't need to be spent compensating for missing petrol. Instead, all of it could stay concentrated on keeping the Gargant's void shield running permanently, without interruption.
Blackiron roared: "Then hurry it up! I wanna fight! I wanna WAAAGH!!"
Three-Arm tightened a bolt into place.
"Three days. Give me just three days, and I'll have enough fuel stocked for da whole army.
While ya wait, think it over: do we WAAAGH da humans' big hive city next, or do we go WAAAGH dat pyramid full of little metal men?"
With that, he popped open a section of the Gargant's armour and leaned out, shouting down at the Mekboys below.
"Get to work findin' fuel, NOW! Three days, dat's all I'm givin' ya!
Anyone whose ride can't keep up 'cause it's outta fuel gets left behind. Ain't gonna slow down our super-WAAAGH for nobody!"
The Ork Boyz below heard him and sprang into motion immediately, scouring the entire city for fuel.
Refinery City had been Forge World Primo-496a's primary fuel production hub, but the Astra Militarum had already shipped out every reserve before the Orks arrived, and most of the refining infrastructure had been demolished besides. The Orks came up with nothing.
So they turned their attention to the human bodies still scattered across the city.
What followed next was something genuinely, unspeakably horrifying.
Mekboys repaired whatever refining equipment hadn't been completely destroyed, and Ork Boyz began hauling the corpses of fallen Astra Militarum soldiers into the machinery to render fat and oil.
Every corpse, every scrap of food, every organic material anywhere in the city that could conceivably be rendered into oil was gathered up and fed into the refining equipment.
While scavenging for material, some Orks stumbled onto underground bunkers where civilians had taken shelter.
Nearly a million elderly, women, and children sheltering underground were dragged out and hauled toward the smoking refinery equipment.
The old, the weak, the mothers and children screamed, sobbed, begged for mercy.
Some women held their infants up high, hoping the alien invaders might spare their helpless children. What answered them instead was a casual, brutal slash from an Ork's massive blade.
There is no shared emotional register between humans and xenos. The Ork lexicon has no concept of "the elderly, the weak, women and children." Only war potential.
These greenskins, their minds entirely occupied with securing fuel for the Gargant's next WAAAGH, weren't moved by the crying of human infants even slightly. This was a difference rooted at the level of basic physiology.
These people were fed alive into the refining machinery, its smokestacks belching thick black smoke, extracting oil from bodies down to the very marrow of their bones.
One end of the machinery discharged a black, sludge-like waste. The other end produced a yellow-black rendered oil.
The black sludge was discarded like garbage. The oil was carefully collected, treasured, and fed straight into Ork motorcycles and tanks.
Screams, wails of agony, shrieks of pure terror. This horrific spectacle was captured by surviving cameras throughout the city and transmitted directly back to the main hive.
The Governor and his Marshals fell into stunned silence, watching the footage, their eyes burning with an overwhelming, world-consuming fury.
Human beings being slaughtered en masse and rendered into fuel struck at something fundamental, buried at the deepest genetic level of what it meant to be human.
Even history's most depraved, most inhuman murderers, confronted with a scene like this, would have their minds flooded with the same all-consuming hatred.
Humanity was not meant to be degraded like this. Especially not by alien xenos filth.
The Governor spoke:
"From this moment on, we execute the final contingency.
Every nuclear weapon and reactor on this planet enters standby detonation mode. The moment the planetary population drops to 5%, the detonation sequence triggers automatically."
He pointed at the atrocity still playing on the screen.
"Broadcast this footage on every screen, every hologram projector, every electronic device across every hive city, on a continuous loop.
Open every armoury. Distribute every firearm, every explosive, every blade, every length of metal pipe, to every single civilian.
From this point forward, the coming war has no regard for status, rank, class, gender, or age.
The battle ahead belongs to every human being on Forge World Primo-496a!!"
With the order given, every public display, every hologram projector across every hive city, began broadcasting the footage recorded by that surviving camera in Refinery City on continuous loop.
Church district loudspeakers, Arbites propaganda vehicles, and Departmento Munitorum officials alike broadcast the atrocity at Refinery City, over and over.
In one hive's Emperor's Square, tens of thousands of citizens had gathered.
Overhead, several projectors played the massacre footage in perfect synchronization.
The watching crowd erupted into screams of horror and outrage, the gathering rapidly descending into chaos.
Several large military transports pulled up in front of the crowd, their rear hatches swinging open, unloading tens of thousands of aging lasrifles in a clattering pile.
The crowd stared at the mountains of old lasrifles for a long, silent moment.
Until one person stepped forward and picked one up. Then a second. A third. A fourth.
On another street, Arbites officers rolled up in riot-suppression armoured vehicles, distributing stun shotguns and concussion grenades to the local citizenry.
At a nearby pipe-manufacturing plant, workers took two-meter lengths of pipe and cut them diagonally with saws, fashioning crude spears.
The plant could produce tens of thousands of these improvised pipe-spears every minute, and the moment a fresh batch was tossed outside the factory doors, the silent, waiting crowd snatched them up instantly.
Anything that could be turned into a blade became a blade. Anything that could be turned into an explosive became an explosive. Anything that could burn became an incendiary weapon.
All twelve billion people across the main hive threw themselves into arming for war, with everything they had.
They were preparing, in whatever moments remained before their own deaths, to hurl their fury back at the xenos invaders, in defense of what remained of human dignity.
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