The stubborn Black Templars

While the Astartes deployed, the battlefield below had already become a hive of activity.

Compared with conventional ground warfare, combat inside the Space Station suited the Imperial Navy extremely well.

It suited them even better than the regular Astra Militarum.

The Navy's Boarding Action parties excelled at fighting in places filled with passageways like these.

The corridors were narrow, and their objectives were clear.

Each squad formed orderly ranks and blocked the entire corridor, with the soldiers at the front carrying enormous Boarding Shields to protect everyone behind them.

The others fired all manner of small arms furiously at the Orks, whose hulking bodies almost filled the corridors.

Whenever an Ork found its gunfire ineffective and charged in waving a blade, the soldier at the front would silently brace his boarding shotgun on his shield and fire straight at it.

Boarding shotguns were solid-projectile weapons, essentially shotguns, but with denser shot patterns and greater stopping power.

The heavy Boarding Shields could easily withstand the lasers and bullets fired by the Orks.

Compared with the enemies they normally encountered, this batch of Orks was decidedly inferior.

Their weapons were a feeble, disorderly assortment, nowhere near as outrageous as those wielded by other Ork forces rampaging through the Imperium.

Nor did they possess the powerful weapons and agile bodies of Imperial Rebels or Chaos Warbands.

All they had were swarming numbers.

But the Space Station's peculiar terrain made it difficult for these Orks to exploit that advantage.

Only after the fighting had lasted more than two hours did the Imperial Navy, which had relieved the original garrison, suffer its first casualties.

An Ork Tinkerer rummaging through the battlefield rubble dreamed up an exceptionally powerful grenade and successfully blew away a boarding party in one of the corridors.

The grenade shattered the Boarding Shields and blew apart the corridor itself along with them.

The ruptured passage split into two sections, both exposed to space.

Dozens of Imperial Navy personnel and several Orks were abruptly sucked into space, becoming frozen debris.

The Space Station's machine spirit acted in time to seal off some of the corridors.

On the Orks' side, however, a heap of Ork corpses plugged the passage.

It was hard to say what sort of brilliant mind could have conceived of using corpses to plug a breach in a Space Station. Still, corridors barely wider than a person were indeed easily clogged by the much larger bodies of Orks.

Seeing their enemies finally take losses sent an even fiercer wave of excitement surging through the Orks.

After all, nobody could find pleasure in simply taking a beating.

The Orks had not even noticed any difference between the enemies fighting them now and the Astra Militarum troops previously stationed aboard the Space Station.

Or perhaps they had noticed the change, but simply did not care.

Caught up in the frenzy of battle, the Orks kept charging, waving their weapons.

Quite a few Gretchin also took advantage of their small stature to deliver vicious blows to the beleaguered Navy soldiers whenever they could.

Modified grenades and explosives detonated among the troops, and soon the Navy soldiers had no choice but to fall back with the surviving Astra Militarum into more open compartments, where they built barricades and began a pointless war of attrition.

Every hour or two, the Orks' weapons grew a little more sophisticated.

In the occupied areas, Orks fought over the weapons of fallen soldiers. When ordinary Ork Boyz tried pulling the triggers and found that the weapons would not fire, they promptly tossed them aside and scurried off to find another.

A few who had caught on, however, took the weapons back to the Ork Tinkerers.

Most Imperial weapons had gene-locked triggers, and Ork genetic sequences obviously could not activate Imperial equipment.

But for the inventive Ork Tinkerers, this was a simple matter.

They swung hammers and Wrenches, added some scrap, made a few simple modifications, and gave the weapons a good pounding before tossing them back to the Ork Boyz with a final declaration of, "I reckon dis oughta work."

The Ork Boyz who received these weapons quickly mastered them as though born to wield them, becoming proud Shoota Boyz.

These modified weapons, which looked like scrap metal, boasted tremendous power and abysmal accuracy.

But that was already the limit of an ordinary Ork Tinkerer's abilities.

If someone happened to find a slightly more skilled "Big Mek" who happened to be scouring the battlefield for scrap, things became rather more complicated.

Even hammering an ordinary lasgun into an unstable plasma rifle was not out of the question.

As the weapons grew ever more powerful, the already thinly spread Navy troops and the few remaining Astra Militarum soldiers found themselves suffering setback after setback.

At first, the enemy had possessed only overwhelming numbers.

Now they possessed both overwhelming numbers and abundant firepower.

Meanwhile, at the site of the Orks' initial landing, the two Astartes squads fell silent at the scene before them.

When the two Ork Warbosses reappeared in their sights, they were surrounded by a huge mob of Orks arming themselves with help from the Ork Tinkerers, each clutching a rocket launcher or some crude oversized gun of unknown origin and bellowing with wild excitement.

Faced with enemies in such numbers, even Astartes had to plan carefully. After all, these were Orks.

Even without any mechanical assistance, these creatures could follow an Astartes' movements, and their racial traits allowed them to wield weapons in hand-to-hand combat against the battle-brothers.

Mortal armies generally used ranged weapons against these Orks, whose bodies were scarcely smaller than those of Astartes warriors.

Melee Weapons.

Not unless you were some legendary Commissar.

But the minds of Black Templars warriors worked rather differently from everyone else's.

After a brief assessment of the situation below, the Black Templars in both squads arrived at a bold yet glorious idea.

Challenge the enemy Warbosses to a Duel!

The two Dark Angels warriors felt a headache coming on almost simultaneously at the suggestion.

"Brothers, this would be suicide. While I do not deny that some of you might win a Duel, the chances of killing an Ork Warboss under these conditions and surviving are far too slim. This plan is reckless in the extreme."

The Black Templars warriors regarded the two Dark Angels with a hint of disdain.

"We are the Sons of Dorn. We shall bring glory back to the Emperor. Brothers of the Dark Angels, question our decision all you wish, but we will never retreat. The Sons of Dorn need no regrets."

When the Black Templars warriors invoked their Primarch, Rogal Dorn, the Dark Angels had no choice but to respect their decision. After all, they knew perfectly well that the Black Templars were all reckless brutes.

"We will do what we can to assist you in battle. Once those anomalous targets are dead, withdraw immediately. Once we locate their true Warboss, an even harder battle may await us."