Chapter 21: First Foothold
Rosen nudged the massive power cleaver with his boot.
Too heavy for a human to wield. But the power field generator fitted to the blade might be worth examining later. He had Number 2 feed the entire weapon into the Armoury storage for purification and holding.
The Nob's heavy armour was stripped and broken down, all of it absorbed into the Refined Steel reserve.
Post-engagement accounting done, Rosen made a decision that went beyond the next fight.
Since setting foot on this hulk, he had been doing two things: moving and killing. Moving to stay alive. Killing to accumulate resources.
But endless guerrilla operations were not a sustainable approach.
Without a stable rear position, the Death Warriors couldn't rest properly or maintain their equipment. Newly summoned warriors needed time to orient to the environment and find their rhythm with the rest of the squad. Running nomadic combat operations across a hulk one hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter was no different from getting lost in the Catachan jungle — you felt like you were making progress while actually circling the same ground.
He needed an anchor point.
Somewhere he could defend, operate from, and build strength in.
Which meant carving a relatively secure position out of an environment that had none.
"Find somewhere."
He pushed the order through Shared Awareness to all Death Warriors and listed his hard requirements for the location.
No more than three entrances.
At least two independent withdrawal routes.
Enough interior space for twenty or more personnel to operate and rest.
Sufficient buffer distance from the greenskins' primary activity zones.
Nine Death Warriors spread out to search. Rosen reviewed each candidate location as they came through Shared Awareness.
An hour and a half later, Number 4 found what they needed on the eastern side of Deck Seventy-Four.
A medium-sized shipboard maintenance dock, used in the vessel's active service days to service Thunderhawk gunships. Interior area approximately eight hundred square metres. Ceiling nearly ten metres high. Three entrances: a four-metre main entrance at the front, a standard personnel door on the left side, and a maintenance conduit on the right with an opening under one metre across. Two independent withdrawal routes: a two-metre ventilation shaft in the ceiling leading to the deck above, and a drainage pipe on the lower left connecting to the deck below.
Rosen inspected it personally and made the call.
"This is it. Start building."
The Death Warriors moved immediately.
The main entrance got the most attention. Two chest-high metal barriers went up on either side, with firing slits cut into the tops. Between them, a narrow Z-shaped passage forced any attacker to make two turns through the chokepoint, killing their momentum and putting them in full view of crossing fields of fire the entire time. Grenade traps and tripwire devices went in ten metres outside the main entrance.
The left personnel door was reinforced with two heavy metal poles driven horizontally across it, and traps were set in front of it. The right maintenance conduit was too narrow for anything larger than a Gretchin to squeeze through, but Rosen still rigged a wire strung with metal fragments as a noise alarm. Both withdrawal routes were prepared.
The full defensive layout took approximately three hours to complete.
Then he summoned.
[Consuming: 300 Life Points, 3 cubic metres Refined Steel.]
[Summoning: Catachan Jungle Fighter x3.]
Number 10, Number 11, Number 12.
With Number 6 still holding the weapons bay — that solitary garrison post he hadn't left since being assigned there — Rosen now had twelve Death Warriors.
Over the next two days he ran a three-rotation system: one group out hunting, one group on perimeter watch, one group resting and maintaining equipment inside the base. Three fixed hunting routes radiated outward from the base as their centre, coordinated in real time through Shared Awareness with a precision no Imperial communications equipment could match.
The results were immediate. While one team drew greenskins into an ambush corridor, a second team used the Shared Awareness feed to seal off the escape route from the flank, and a third team collected whatever slipped through on the withdrawal passages. The same pattern ran more than a dozen times over two days, each iteration smoother than the last.
Death Warrior strength grew steadily to eighteen over those two days. Refined Steel reserves climbed past three hundred cubic metres. The Ork meat from kills was processed systematically — butchered, cooked with the flamer, part consumed directly and part stored in the Armoury to keep fresh. The Armoury's distance-free transfer function meant even Number 6, alone in the weapons bay two kilometres away, received hot food.
But Rosen hadn't forgotten something.
On the second day, the southern hunting route — Charlie line, the one that ran closest to the deeper decks — came back with a report that put everyone on edge.
At the far end of Charlie line, roughly two and a half kilometres from the base, Number 3 and Number 9 had found something unusual.
Rosen pulled up Number 3's perspective through Shared Awareness.
The floor, walls, and ceiling of the corridor were coated in a semi-transparent, faintly adhesive substance that resembled spider silk.
He recognised it immediately. Genestealer nest-silk.
Not just a territorial marker. A biological sensor network. Every strand connected back to the Patriarch deep in the nest, feeding into its psychic awareness web. Step into a zone covered in nest-silk and you were pressing the doorbell at the Genestealers' front entrance.
Number 3 and Number 9 had already stopped at the edge of it without advancing a step.
Good.
Rosen was in the process of pushing the withdrawal order through Shared Awareness when something moved at the far end of the corridor.
A shadow. Fast.
Fast enough that normal human visual reaction time could only catch a blurred outline — grey-purple, low to the ground, gone before the image resolved.
A Genestealer purestrain.
Four arms. Upper limbs ending in a pair of large, serrated claws. A smooth, earless skull. Above the mouth, a retractable ovipositor.
It was visible at the end of the corridor for under half a second, then it vanished around the corner.
"Everyone withdraw."
"Charlie line terminus is designated a restricted zone. All patrol routes pull back five hundred metres to the north."
Number 3 and Number 9 fell back without a sound and disappeared into the corridor shadows.
Roughly thirty seconds after they left, the purestrain reappeared at the corner.
It tilted its smooth head and examined the empty corridor. All four arms opened slowly and closed again. The ovipositor above its mouth trembled slightly, as though tasting the trace of human scent still hanging in the air.
Then it disappeared as well.
Rosen closed the Charlie line channel in his mind and breathed out.
A purestrain's close-quarters capability was in some respects comparable to an Astartes. And a nest never held just one.
With his current strength, engaging a Genestealer nest would be a straightforward way to get everyone killed.
But another calculation had already started running.
The Genestealer nests were in the southern depths of the hulk. The greenskins' primary territory was the northern and central sections.
The two forces were almost certainly grinding against each other along a continuous front somewhere between them.
If he could locate that contested zone and pick off targets from the flank while both sides were committed to each other, the resource return per engagement would be extremely high.
But that required more Death Warriors and more firepower. When he had more than fifty, that move would be worth considering.
Rosen stood at the top of a half-collapsed gantry crane at the highest point of the base.
One man with a knife. Now eighteen fully armed Catachans and a defended base with three covered approaches.
The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.
His first foothold on the hulk was real.
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