The sea of stars became a grinding mill of flesh and blood in an instant.
The old captain's pirate fleet, like a pack of mad dogs that had caught the scent of blood, was the first—and the most resolute—to charge at the Tyranid fleet bearing down like a canopy of heaven. Thousands of raider ships of every conceivable shape blasted multicolored exhaust trails, carving chaotic yet determined paths through the void.
"Fire! Fire! Shoot every damn thing that can make a noise!" The old captain's roar echoed across the bridges of every pirate ship through the WAAAGH! field.
Orks had never cared much for tactics or formations in void warfare. They had only one creed—charge in, then pour everything that could be fired toward wherever the enemy was thickest.
Massive I Fink Cannons boomed deafeningly from hulls cobbled together out of scrap metal. They did not fire high-tech energy shells, but enormous, heavy solid chunks of iron filled with Ork ingenuity—some hastily converted from asteroids, others simply entire scrapped tanks launched as ammunition.
Their aim was atrocious beyond belief. But there were so many shells that a few were bound to hit the densely packed Tyranid bio-ships by sheer luck.
A Tyranid bio-ship shaped like a gigantic beetle was unlucky enough to be struck head-on by a rapidly spinning drill-shaped asteroid with a huge goofy face painted on it. Its supposedly indestructible biological carapace was ripped open in an instant like paper before the Orks' pure, unreasonable kinetic weaponry. Countless spores and smaller flying beasts poured frantically from the massive wound like hornets from a smashed nest.
Yet to the Hive Mind, losses on that scale did not even qualify as a nuisance.
Across its thought network spanning the entire galaxy, it did not allocate even the slightest fraction of