Katia was learning rather a lot about orks. The information wasn’t bringing her a lot of solace however. By now the defense of pump station Epsilon-Phi Three-Seven was entering its sixth hour. Intermittent rain continued to fall in cloud bursts even as the eastern horizon began to brighten with the coming dawn. The causeway itself was illuminated by powerful floodlights mounted on the pump station. Initially there had been four but bolter fire from the orks had put two of them out of commission.  The surviving two floods painted the causeway well enough. A carpet of green bodies lay across it with other green masses floating in the gently sloshing lake water on either side. Cabel and Vance were down there now, dragging bodies up against the entry port in a grisly barricade. Each cadaver they approached was made sure of with a quick bayonent thrust, a lesson they had learned early on when one of the orks had enough life left in it to bite a chunk out of a troopers leg. They were then added to the pile that lay stinking against the side of the pump station, making it that much harder for the orks to reach the brass entryway.  With a cry of WAAAAAAGGH! A dozen of the orks on the lake shore charged the causeway, brandishing their axes. The Imperials opened fire as Cabel and Vance scrambled back up the ropes by which they had decended. It wasn’t a furious storm of fire, rather a patter of carefully aimed shots. They were running low on powercells, and despite the enginseers best efforts, attempts to recharge spent packs were painfully slow. Katia calculated that they would be completely dry in another hour if things kept up at the current rate. She settled the sights of her las gun at the hip joint of a charging ork, exhaled, held the stasis and squeezed. The weapon cracked and a smoking crater appeared between leg and pelvis. The ork howled in rage as its leg buckled and it tumbled into the water with a mighty splash, the weight of its gear dragging it under the brackish water. Occasionally they were able to drag themselves up, but more frequently not. There was a bright flash on the shore line and Katia looked up to see an ork with a shoulder launched missile tube shiloutted by the back blast of his weapon. The missle streaked towards them for a second before some mechanical failure caused it to veer upwards in a flaming loop which ended as it smashed into another group of orks who had been jeering on the shore with a vast sooty explosion that scattered green bodies and body parts in all directions. The roar of orkish laughter rang out from several places, including the survivors of the abortive missile attack. Learning a lot. Not much of it made her feel any better. Despite the las fire raking them the charging orks were only a dozen yards from the corpse barricade. Prax gave her an urgent look and she nodded. Trooper Klave didn’t wait for an order, he squeezed the trigger and the orkish bolter, ripped out of the capture battle wagon, roared to life. Every time it fired the noise of it took Katia by surprised. Flecks of gravel sparked up through the air and gouts of water sprayed as the weapon hosed the causeway. It was so inaccurate that even at a range of only a few dozen feet, most of the rounds went wide, high, or otherwise failed to hit the target. Katia suspected that the noise of the thing was the point and that any actual damage it did was purely incidental. The orks, staggering and wounded by las fire, jerked and collapsed as bolts detonated, severing arms and pulping internal organs.

“Down!” Katia shouted  and every imperial dropped below the cover of the parapet. Gunfire erupted from the shoreline. Bolt guns, pistols, vehicle mounted auto-cannons, even flame throwers despite the distance all returned fire an instant later. Shells rang off the ferocrete and sparked off the pipework above, gouting steam in whistling shrieks that faded as quickly as they began. As far as Katia could tell the gunfire was instinctive, a desire simply to increase the noise and ‘dakka’ in the air. This time it had the effect of cutting down the last few orks before they reached the barricade. It was puzzling that the orks didn’t use their crude firearms more frequently, in fact if they had they would have taken the human position hours ago, but the glandular desire to rip their enemies apart in close combat had thus far been nothing but an advantage to the eighteen surviving troops of second platoon. That would probably hold true until the ammunition ran out and then the orks would be able to rip to their hearts content. Katia pulled the power pack from her las gun and thumped it several times against the ferocrete, an old guardsman’s trick to coax a few more rounds out of a dying pack, and then reseated it with a click.

 

“Commissar,” one of the Enginseers called as Cabel and Vance threw their lines over and prepared to scale down and savage for ammunition among the bodies. They hadn’t yet tried to use the captured ork hand weapons, Katia was privately skeptical that such a thing was possible given the ridiculous size and recoil of the things, but it helped to be doing anything other than thinking about the fact that their own weapons were about to be useless. Katia stood up, stretching the ache of kneeling at the firing stoop out of her legs and headed to the specialist. His grim face didn’t promise good news.

 

“We finally were able to get through to command,” the Enginseer told her. Katia didn’t understand the techno-theology of it, but they had been trying for several hours to use the pump stations pipework as an antenna to boost the range of their squad comms.

 

“Good news,” Katia said, though there was a question in her tone. The enginseer shook his head glumly.

 

“Most of the landing sites are engaged, they said the soonest anyone could get here is this afternoon,” the trooper reported. And we will never last until this afternoon he didn’t report. Katia nodded. Commisariat training prepared a person for a situation very much like this.

 

“Very well, spread the word that we got through to command and that aid will be forthcoming,” Katia ordered. The enginseer blanched.


“Ma’am I…” Katia cut him off with a sharp look.

“We got through to command and aid will be forthcoming,” she repeated firmly, her hand strayed almost unconsciously to the flap of her pistol holster.

 

“Uh…. Yes Ma’am!” the enginseer stammered. Katia nodded her face solem. She could not afford to let morale collapse now, if they were going to die, let it be on their feet with hope in their hearts.

 

“The Emperor protects specialist,” she assured him.