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Da Cybork Menace Chapta 20 | |
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Chapta 20 |
Dok Gutstitch watched from the barge at the rear of the convoy while one of his gretchin piloted it through the water, just as others were doing in the other barges. He and his gretchin had completed the evacuation of his camp in enough time to get away with his entire army before the orbital bombardment had lit up the sky overhead. Unsurprisingly the jets that he had spotted overhead when Stoggi had arrived at the camp with his new dreadnought force had not hung around long enough to witness the evacuation and he had been able to make it all the way around the coast and up the river without seeing a single greenskin along the way. Now, he thought, Kazkal Kromag was likely rushing off to investigate the destroyed camp and see if there was anything left worth taking. While he was gone, Dok Gutstitch planned to take his throne. Of all the barges in the convoy, Dok Gutstitch’s own vessel rode the lowest in the water. All of the others had cargo holds filled with his cybork warriors, well over a hundred in total, while five or six dreadnoughts were loaded onto each of their decks. His vessel carried only two dreadnoughts, but the lower weight that would have caused his barge to ride higher in the water was forgone owing to the greater size of the two mega dreadnoughts and the special nature of the cyborks carried in its hold. The warriors that Dok Gutstitch had selected to accompany him on his own vessel were, in his opinion, his finest creations. Each of the twenty cyborks sitting in the hold of his barge, motionless aside from the swaying caused by the motion of the water in they travelled had not only been augmented with crude ork cybernetics, their bodies had been integrated into suits of mega armour fitted with vicious power claws that could rip apart not only orks, but the most heavily armoured of vehicles and fortifications. With a score of them surrounding him, Dok Gutstitch believed himself unstoppable. Up ahead, still in front of the lead barge, Dok Gutstitch could just about make out the silhouette of the ork city against the night sky, and with no other sources of noise closer to him, he could the usual sounds of an ork settlement at night as its inhabitants marked the ending of another day with eating, drinking and fighting. Dok Gutstitch grinned to himself. With any luck he would be able to march his entire army right up to Kazkal Kromag’s palace without anyone trying to stop him. “Master look!” a gretchin suddenly yelled at him excitedly, and he saw that the gretchin was pointing at a spot on the river bank up ahead where a pair of massive concrete barriers stuck out into the river from each side while further concrete pillars were set into the river sufficiently far apart to allow even ocean going ships enough room to pass between them. The structures were just a few of many left over from the time when the human Imperium controlled this world, and the complicated metal gates that had been mounted between each of the pillars and allowed the rest of the river’s great width to be sealed off had long since been removed and used by the orks to make something more to their tastes, leaving only the concrete sections behind. What purpose the humans had intended the barrier to perform, Dok Gutstitch neither knew nor cared, but he knew exactly what passing it would mean. Beyond it lay the city dockyards. “Signal da other boats,” Gutstitch ordered his gretchin, “tell ‘em we is nearly dare, and dey is to pull into da first empty spot on da docks wot dey find.” The gretchin at the front of Dok Gutstitch’s barge repeated his order to be ready to dock as soon as possible, adding the words ‘pass it on’ at the end so that the order would be carried along to the lead boat in the convoy. Passing through the one of the gaps between the concrete structures, Dok Gutstitch decided that Gork and Mork were smiling on him. Apart from a few small, flimsy rowboats, the nearest pier was empty, and there was no sign of any movement among the boxes piled on the shore. This meant that there would be no guards to raise the alarm while his gretchin unloaded his army from the barges. Dok Gutstitch watched as, the lead barge began to turn towards the pier and the others behind it followed. Then there was a flash from the shore, and a whoosh as a missile shot towards the lead barge and struck it head on. “Get ready,” Hazug said softly as he observed the boat approach through his viewing device. The vessel was simple narrow barge that was common among orks. But what made this one stand out were the dreadnoughts standing on its deck, he counted five of them. Then another barge appeared, also with dreadnoughts standing motionless on it, then a third and a forth. “Dis is it,” Hazug said, putting the viewer away and picking up his rifle. He aimed at the lead barge, lifting the muzzle to take account of the distance between him and the approaching watercraft. Then, just as the barges were turning to face directly towards him, Hazug fired the rocket mounted beneath his rifle. “Let rip!” Hazug shouted as he watched his rocket smash into the barge. Unfortunately it struck its target too high, and the barge continued to approach the pier. There was another flash from beside Hazug as one of Two Head’s orks fired a human built missile launcher towards the barge. The projectile slammed into the dreadnought standing nearest to the barge’s prow. Around Hazug orks cheered as the fighting machine toppled off the barge into the water. “Da boats! Shoot da bloody boats!” Hazug shouted, “Den all da kans’ll sink!” Another pair of missiles shot across the water. One flew straight over the first barge, and instead hit the bank on the far side of the river. The other missile, however, struck the barge just above the waterline and blew a massive hole in it. The barge began to tip towards the hole as water flooded into it. The remaining dreadnoughts standing on it toppled over as the slant of the deck became too much and they followed the first dreadnought into the river. Dok Gutstitch watched in horror as the gretchin crew of the lead barge leapt into the water, abandoning all of the precious cyborks it carried within its hold. As the barge continued to disappear beneath the water, Dok Gutstitch saw more missiles coming from the shore. “Faster! Go faster!” he bellowed, waving his arms in the air, “Get to da shore and get me cyborks off da boats!” There was a crashing sound from ahead as the second barge tried to move past the lead vessel as it disappeared beneath the surface, but succeeded only in striking the sinking vessel as it went under. Now holed beneath the water line this barge also began to take on water as it continued to move forwards and, because the hole in its hull was far larger than the one inflicted on the other barge by the missile attack, it did so at a rate far faster than the first barge. The crew of the third barge reacted quicker, however, and they steered their vessel towards the pier so that the second barge was between them and the shore for as long as possible to provide a shield from attack as it sank. The barge did not completely escape attack though. But when the second barge had sunk enough to allow the third to be engaged from the shore, it was much closer to its destination. While Hazug fit another rocket under his rifle, he saw another two missiles skim across the water and strike a barge that had been forced further away from the pier by the two that were now rapidly disappearing from view. But as the pair of stricken vessels disappeared they revealed another barge that had used them as cover while it moved closer. “Dat one!” Hazug shouted, pointing at the rapidly closing barge, “Shoot dat one!” and he fired his rocket at it. The explosive projectile landed in the water beside the barge before detonating. Aside from a plume of water that drenched the deck, his attack had no effect. Another missile passed above the dreadnoughts standing on the barge’s deck as it closed on the pier, and the fighting machines pivoted to face the direction of attack before returning fire. The volley of rockets, energy blasts and large calibre bullets tore through the stack of empty crates that concealed a pair of Two Heads’ orks and one of the pilots and when the cloud of smoke and debris settled down Hazug saw that they were all dead. “Rokkit!” he shouted to Ratish, and the gretchin handed his master a fresh rocket for his weapon. As Hazug loaded the rocket and prepared to fire again, there was another crash. Hazug ignored the noise at first, such sounds were common in battle, but as he got back into position to attack the nearest barge he saw that its crew had rammed it into the pier and now dreadnoughts were walking off its deck and along the pier, firing as they strode forwards. Hazug saw that one of them was the smaller gretchin-piloted machine that had led the larger ones away from the workshop. Hazug shifted his aim from the barge to the nearest dreadnought and fired. His rocket his the dreadnought just below the vision slit, and the machine collapsed and fell into the water as its pilot was engulfed in the explosion and his body ripped apart by the shrapnel from his machine’s armour platting. Two of his barges had sunk, and a third began burning badly in the centre of the river when the missile attack from the shore was followed up by a storm of green lightning conjured up by a weirdboy that Dok Gutstitch caught sight of when he briefly appeared from his hiding place to channel his collected psychic energy across the water. But in spite of his rapidly increasing losses, Dok Gutstitch’s mood was lifted when he saw that another barge had reached the pier and was unloading its deadly cargo. The barge had rammed the pier and would most likely sink before long, but there would be plenty of time for his cyborks to be disembarked. In spite of his losses, Dok Gutstitch still had half his force remaining, including all of his best troops and dreadnoughts. More than enough to deal with the paltry force that faced him on the shore. The missile fire had ceased for now, evidently the dreadnoughts about to over run whoever was shooting at his barges were of much greater concern. “Go faster!” Gutstitch ordered, he knew that the more troops he got ashore, the lighter his losses were likely to be at this early stage but more importantly he was eager to get in close and witness the deaths of his enemies. “Let rip!” Two Heads yelled in unison when he saw the cyborks begin to clamber off the barge and shamble along the pier towards his position. Those orks that were sharing his hiding place promptly dropped the missile launchers they had been given and instead picked up the rifles they were more used to. Rapidly they brought their guns to bear on the slowly moving cyborks, pulled their fingers back on their triggers and held them there. The cyborks jerked as the bullets impacted on them, but their bodies were reinforced by the cybernetic components that Dok Gutstitch had implanted in them, and they withstood the attack. “Reload and do it again!” Two Heads ordered when the orks’ magazines were emptied. As quickly as they could the orks reloaded their weapons and took aim once more. There was another roar of gunfire as Two Heads and his orks opened fire. Two Heads, remembering how the cybork in the bar had been stopped by hacking off its head, aimed high and he smiled both his mouths when he saw two of the cyborks drop as bullets punched into their skulls and bounced around inside. The fire from the orks with him was more random, though this time it was more effect than the first volley and another three cyborks were brought down as their bionics were damaged and they could no longer keep moving. Flashes of light erupted from Hazug’s hiding place as Rhia and Sophie joined in the attack on the cyborks. Neither of the humans were professional soldiers, but their weapons were better built and inherently more accurate than the orks’ crude firearms, and their shots hit their targets more often than not. Unfortunately, the lasguns they wielded lacked the stopping power to bring down any more of the cyborks and they continued their advance. Most of the orks, meanwhile, were more concerned with the remaining dreadnoughts. Not only were they larger than the cyborks, they were also closer, and like Hazug they fired their next volley of missiles at the approaching war machines. Hazug himself was just getting ready to launch another rocket when he witnessed a volley of missiles from one of the other ork positions pass close by the advancing dreadnoughts. One of the missiles was aimed too low, and it ploughed into the thick timbers of the pier itself, blasting a chunk out of the wood, and Hazug suddenly had an idea. “Shoot da planks!” he yelled as loudly as he could, and he fired his own rocket at the pier in front of the dreadnoughts. With a deep sense of satisfaction Hazug watched as the next volley of missiles was directed at the pier rather than the advancing dreadnoughts. All around him, Stoggi felt the shockwaves of the missile impacts on the pier, but he could tell that every single one of the shots had missed him and the larger dreadnoughts behind him. His first reaction was to grin; then he yelled, “Ha! Ya missed me!” But then he heard something else, a creaking sound. It was quiet at first, but it grew louder and Stoggi realised that it was coming from beneath him. Stoggi bent his dreadnought forwards slightly, and he saw what the missiles had done to the pier. Massive holes had been blasted in the planks, and those that remained were badly damaged. Each time a dreadnought put its foot down the impact caused another split to appear. Stoggi broke into a run, pushing his dreadnought to go as fast as it could. He heard the sound of the pier collapsing, and he expected to hit the river beneath at any moment. He brought his dreadnought to a halt and closed his eyes tightly, waiting for the water to flood into it and drown him. But then he realised that he wasn’t falling and he opened them again. Forgetting for a moment that he was in the midst of a battle, Stoggi turned around to look back down the pier and saw the massive gap where a section had collapsed behind him and sent the larger ork piloted dreadnoughts plummeting into the river and cutting him off from the cyborks. Suddenly the sound of bullets hitting the rear of his dreadnought brought Stoggi back to his senses and he turned around once more. Hazug ducked back behind the barricade to reload his rifle after emptying the magazine into the smaller dreadnought when it foolishly turned its back on him. “Just like a grot,” he said to no one in particular, “always forgettin’ wot dey is doin’.” Hearing this, Sophie looked at Ratish and smirked. Ratish just scowled back at her. Hazug stood up again and fired another full magazine into the dreadnought now heading towards his position, but the thicker frontal armour of the machine was too tough for his relatively puny bullets to do more than scratch. More gunshots rang out as the other orks began to shoot at the dreadnought, and Hazug noticed that none of them were firing their missiles at it. For a moment Hazug considered the possibility that they were conserving their ammunition for the larger dreadnoughts on the remaining barges. But Hazug was the only Blood Axe left in the system, and orks from any of the other clans would have little, if any, understanding of the concept of conserving ammunition. This meant only one thing; they were out of missiles. “Ow many rokkits I got left grot?” Hazug said to Ratish as he ducked down out of sight once more. “None master,” Ratish replied as he stuck his hand into the bag he carried Hazug’s extra ammunition in and rummaged around inside it. Hazug turned to Drazzok instead. “Wot about ya givin’ us an ‘and den?” he asked, “’Ow about another blast?” “Give us a chance,” Drazzok replied, breathing heavily, “I needs some time to rest after dat last one.” “Den dare’s only one other way to do dis,” Hazug said and he leant his rifle up against the crates and drew his pistol and blade. Then he leapt up onto the crates he had been using for cover and he charged straight at the dreadnought screaming. “Waaargh!” Seeing the ork nob charging directly to him, Stoggi aimed his machine gun and fired. From inside his dreadnought, he heard the automatic weapon until there was a sudden ‘click’ as it ran out of ammunition. Caught in the open, Hazug did not even try to avoid the burst of fire from the dreadnought. But while a gretchin’s marksmanship is generally better than that of an ork only one of Stoggi’s bullets hit him, just clipping his arm. Hazug ignored the pain and continued his charge. Stoggi raised his pincer tipped arm to meet Hazug’s charge just as the Blood Axe brought his blade crashing down. There were sparks as the blade scraped against the mechanical limb, and Hazug jumped backwards to avoid the snapping pincer. There was a double cry of “Waaargh!” as Two Heads rushed out from behind his barricade with his rifle held high and rushed to join the fight. Stoggi swung his pincer at the new threat, but as he did so Hazug lunged forwards again and aimed his blade at the control cables clustered near to the elbow of the arm on which the weapon was mounted. Oil spurted from a ruptured tube as Hazug sliced through the vital control lines driving the dreadnought’s close combat weapon. Inside the machine, Stoggi howled in pain as the damage inflicted sent a sudden uncontrolled electrical surge into his body, and he spun the dreadnought around to face Hazug once more. Right as Two Heads reached him. The Evil Sun nob swung his rifle and the combat blade attached to its muzzle scraped across the engine mounted on the dreadnought’s back until it caught on a loose pipe and ripped through it. Stoggi heard his engine start to splutter. He had no control over his dreadnought’s pincer, but its arm was otherwise still just about functional, and he swung it towards Two Heads, pushing the nob to the ground. Hazug swung his own blade again, but without the additional momentum of his charge he did little more than scratch the body of the dreadnought. The blow disorientated Stoggi slightly as the sound of the blade’s impact echoed inside his dreadnought. Coming rapidly to his sense, however, the gretchin simply stepped towards Hazug, and he was likewise pushed over by the bulk of the armoured walking machine. Still lying prone, Two Heads fired his rifle at the exposed rear of the dreadnought, emptying his magazine. There were sparks as the rounds for the most part bounced off the heavy armour platting, but in places it was thin enough for some of the sustained burst to punch through. Inside the dreadnought, Stoggi felt a bullet whiz past him from behind before the now heavily deformed projectile embedded itself in the armour plating in front of him, and he felt the already damaged pincer arm go completely limp and drop to the side of the dreadnought’s body. Stoggi turned the dreadnought around again, and charged towards Two Heads, intending to trample while he still lay on the ground. But the two-headed ork was too quick for him, and he rolled out of the way before he could be crushed. Meanwhile, Hazug had picked himself up, and he ran after the dreadnought and leapt up onto its back. Stoggi tried his best to shake the ork off him, but Hazug had wrapped his arms firmly around the machine and all Stoggi succeeded in doing was forcing Hazug to drop his blade in order to be able to keep hanging on. Doing his best to keep from falling off the dreadnought as Stoggi continued to move about wildly, Hazug pulled himself up onto the roof of the machine. If he had still had his blade he would have tried to prise open the hatch on the roof through which the pilot had been implanted, but without it he had to look for another weak point somewhere else. He found it on the front of the dreadnought, the vision slit through which Stoggi viewed the outside world. Human dreadnoughts used advance sensor systems to provide the pilot with visual data, but orks eschewed such extravagances in favour of a simple opening cut into the front at head height. Pistol in hand, Hazug reached in front of the dreadnought and pressed the muzzle of his gun up against the narrow opening and pulled the trigger. After the shot rang out, he pulled the trigger again, and again, and again. He kept on pulling the trigger until he heard the weapon ‘click’ as the firing pin fell on an empty chamber instead of a bullet. The first bullet just clipped Stoggi’s ear, and the gretchin cried out in pain as he felt the bullet strike him. The next missed him on its first pass, but bounced off the inside of the dreadnoughts armour and struck him near the base of his spine. Normally such an injury would cause a greenskin to fall to the ground, but being implanted into a dreadnought the only immediate effect was the agony of the bullet smashing bone as it entered him and Stoggi cried out even more. The third round had no need to bounce, however, Hazug pulling the trigger just as his pistol swung to point directly at Stoggi’s head, and the bullet hit him between the eyes, silencing his cries immediately and permanently. Suddenly without any control from Stoggi’s brain, the dreadnought lost its balance and fell to the ground, sending Hazug tumbling from on top of it. Gunfire still filled the air as Hazug stood up and looking around he saw that aside from himself and Two Heads, the warband remained behind the barricades they had constructed and were all firing along the pier. Hazug turned around and raised his pistol to point it in the same direction as the warband was firing. There he saw the gap in the pier created by the missiles fired into its timbers and beyond it stood the remaining cyborks. The squig-brained creatures had advanced as far as the gap and then simply halted. The simple brains implanted in the heads of the leading cyborks recognised that they would fall if they advanced any further, and unable to think of a way to bypass the hole they simply stopped and awaited further instructions. The cyborks behind them just advanced as far as those that stood by the gap obstructing their path before they too halted and waited to be told what to do. Meanwhile the warband continued to fire on the tightly packed group of cyborks, emptying whole magazines into them before reloading and firing again. No longer firing at moving targets spaced apart, the warband scored hit after hit. Individually the bullets and lasblasts inflicted little damage on the cybernetically enhanced bodies of the cyborks, but the cumulative effects of the repeated hits took their toll and the cyborks began to fall, plunging from the pier into the water below. As gaps appeared in the front row of cyborks, those standing behind them simply stepped forwards to fill it and were thus exposed to the same gunfire as their fallen comrades. Reloading his pistol, Hazug joined in the shooting, watching with satisfaction as the bullets from his pistol blasted chunks out the cyborks. At least he did until he saw another of the barge sailing up alongside the pier. While the cyborks and dreadnoughts that had already made it ashore had distracted the warband, this other barge had sailed around the pier and past the gap blown in it so that the cargo it would begin unloading at any moment would be on the near side of the gap. Instinctively, Hazug fired at the barge and watched as one of the gretchin crew rushing about to secure the barge to the pier fell into the water with most of his head blown away by the bullet. “Fire in da ‘ole!” Two Heads both yelled in unison as, dropping his rifle to the ground, he plucked one of the stick grenades he carried from his belt. The Evil Sun nob pulled out the pin and hurled the explosive for all he was worth, and Hazug watched as it spun end over end through the air until it landed on the deck of the barge near the steering wheel located at the vessel’s stern. Hazug and Two Heads both averted their gaze just in time as the grenade detonated with a brilliant flash and a dull boom that sent fragments of wood and metal flying in all directions. The rearmost dreadnought on the deck took the brunt of the blast, and the thick cloud of shrapnel severed the exposed cables and oil pipes running along its limbs. Suddenly devoid of the control signals needed for the machine to function it first collapsed in a heap and then rolled off the deck and struck the pier, crushing a gretchin unable to move out of the way fast enough to avoid it. The weight of the dreadnought pushed against the pier, and the barge slipped away from it until the dreadnought was able to drop through the gap between barge and pier and fall into the river below, the impact of the heavy machine on the surface of the water enough to create a wave that rocked the barge. The remaining gretchin crew scrabbled to get the barge back against the pier while they came under fire from Hazug and Two Heads, he having picked his rifle up once more. “Forget da cyborks!” Hazug shouted, “Shoot da grots!” and the rest of the warband turned their fire away from the remaining cyborks standing beyond the gap in the pier and instead also fired at the gretchin trying their best to secure their vessel. Had the warband been able to attack the barge in this manner unopposed then it would have most likely drifted away from the pier and trapped its cargo of cyborks and dreadnoughts onboard it, but one of the crew had other ideas. It was one of Two Heads that caught sight of the creature as it crawled from a hole blasted in the deck by the grenade and made its way to one of the dreadnoughts that still motionless on the deck. Standing beside the walking machine that towered over it, the gretchin waved an arm towards the warband’s hiding place and shouted something that Two Heads didn’t quite hear before he shot the gretchin in the chest. The dreadnought suddenly spun and a jet of fire erupted from one of it four limbs towards the nearest of the barricades. Kaglort and three of the survivors of Maggort’s orks were using that particular barricade as cover, and they screamed as the thick burning liquid launched by the dreadnought flowed around it and stuck to their clothing and flesh. His arms waving wildly, one of the burning orks ran from his hiding place and dove into the river. Cut off from the oxygen it needed, the fire engulfing the ork was extinguished, but its work was already done and the body of the ork, weighed down by its armour, did not come back to the surface. Only one of Maggort’s orks behind the barricade survived the fire, he was fortunate enough to be on the edge of the inferno rather than engulfed by it as the others were. He too ran, the sleeve of his jacket burning until he ripped it away and dropped it to the ground. Unfortunately for him the dreadnought did not settle for using only one of its weapons. In addition to the flamethrower, it also carried a heavy machine gun that promptly began to rake the dockside with automatic fire. Caught in the open, both Hazug and Two Heads dove to the ground and lay flat while the bullets flew overhead, but eh ork who had narrowly survived the fire was nearly cut in half as the rounds tore through his body. Forced to take cover, the warband ceased its fire on the remaining crew of the barge long enough for them to secure it against the side of the pier. There was the sound of gears moving and the dreadnoughts carried by the barge stepped onto the pier while the gretchin crew began to coax the cyborks from its hold. The dreadnoughts began to advance, stepping from the pier onto the dockside, and both Hazug and Two Heads picked themselves up and ran back behind their barricades. “So now wot?” one of Two Heads shouted from his position towards Hazug’s. “Give us a chance to come up with somethin’,” Hazug shouted back, “until den everyone just keep shootin’!” As instructed, the concealed orks stood up behind their barricades and fired on the advancing dreadnoughts. Bullets and lasblasts impacted harmlessly on the thick armour plating that protected the machines, however, and they continued to advance. The first dreadnought, having seen which way Hazug had run, chose to follow him there and, undeterred by the gunfire coming from his position, it was soon looming over it. Rhia and Sophie both screamed as the dreadnought raised both of its close combat arms and brought them swinging downwards. |
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