The sea of stars became a meat grinder in an instant.
Old Captain's pirate fleet, like a pack of mad dogs that had caught the scent of blood, was the first to charge-and the most utterly committed-at the Tyranid fleet bearing down like a curtain across the heavens. Thousands of differently shaped Raider Ships spat multicolored exhaust flames, tracing chaotic yet resolute paths through the void.
"Fire! Fire! Shoot everythin' we've got that makes a bang!" Old Captain's roar echoed across every pirate ship's bridge through the WAAAGH! field.
Ork void warfare had never bothered with tactics or formations. They had only one creed: charge in, then pour everything they could fire into wherever the enemy was thickest.
Enormous "Ork know-wotz" cannons thundered deafeningly from hulls cobbled together out of scrap metal. What they fired were not high-tech energy shells, but huge, heavy lumps of solid iron brimming with Ork ingenuity. Some were hastily converted asteroids; others were simply entire scrapped tanks fired as shells.
Their accuracy was atrocious. But there were so many shells that a few were bound to strike the densely packed Tyranid Bio-ships by sheer accident.
One Tyranid Bio-ship resembling an enormous beetle had the misfortune to take a direct hit from a rapidly spinning, drill-shaped asteroid with a huge grotesque face painted on it. Before the Orks' pure, utterly unreasonable kinetic weaponry, its supposedly indestructible organic carapace might as well have been paper. An enormous breach tore open in an instant. Countless spores and small flying beasts poured out of the wound in panic, like hornets from a punctured nest.
To the Hive Mind, however, losses on this scale did not even qualify as a nuisance.
Its galaxy-spanning neural network did not devote even the slightest fraction of its processing power to that Bio-ship's demise.