Chapter 40: The Ghana Campaign

Chuck stared at the commission in his hands, a smug smirk spreading across his face. It seemed the Planetary Governor understood well enough that local talent was the only kind one could truly rely on. What did his petty squabbles with Pex matter? The System Command had still seen fit to grant him his commission as General of the Planetary Defence Forces.

His mission was absolute: total authority over all military deployments across the southern hemisphere of Oronia III, tasked with the swift and total eradication of the greenskin monstrosities that had broken surface.

Flushed with unearned confidence, Chuck didn't bother formulating a strategic plan. He immediately ordered all PDF regiments in the vicinity of Ghana to mobilize and march upon the city to purge the Orks.

As for Pex leading the Expeditionary Force into the gray, desolate wastes of Oronia IV, Chuck couldn't care less. In fact, he secretly hoped the System Commander would find his grave on that ash-choked world.

History would soon prove that while Chuck might have possessed the mind of a decent staff officer, theorizing on a slate was a far cry from directing the harsh reality of active theater.

Chuck's operational efficiency was abysmal. By the time his ordered regular forces had finally completed their assembly and advanced to relieve Ghana, Ironklaw had already departed, hauling away a massive trove of loot.

Left behind was a heavily devastated urban landscape, ruins awash with rivers of gore and littered with corpses. Yet, a fraction of the horde remained, deep in the throes of a post-battle revelry; Grots and Ork Boyz hooted and leapt through the shattered masonry.

Witnessing the sheer scale of the greenskins' butchery, Chuck was consumed by rage. He instantly ordered his forces to launch a frontal assault against the xenos elements left inside the city.

Organized by their officers into rigid tactical formations, the soldiers entered the city along several primary thoroughfares, spearheading their advance with battle tanks and armored personnel carriers. The systematic purge of the greenskin monsters had begun.

Initially, the army's advance was smooth and uncontested. Scattered Ork Boyz were utterly no match for the overwhelming firepower of heavy armor. As for the dim-witted Grots, who could do little more than mindlessly trail behind the larger brutes, they were reduced to mere target practice for the guardsmen's lasguns.

Seeing the greenskin monsters collapse so effortlessly under pressure, Chuck immediately transmitted a triumphant vox-packet to Governor Cornwatt:

"Under my supreme command, the Planetary Defence Forces are advancing with unstoppable momentum. Vast numbers of the greenskin monsters have been annihilated. I am currently ordering all units to accelerate their advance, to eliminate the xenos remnants within Ghana with all haste, and to deliver the citizens of the Imperium from peril."

When he transmitted the message, Chuck was ensconced aboard a Valkyrie airborne assault carrier. This bespoke Valkyrie was significantly up-scaled, heavily up-armored, and possessed an interior chassis modified to house a mobile strategic command sanctum.

Seated at the center of the command deck, Chuck watched the battlefield pict-feeds relayed by the frontline troops with immense satisfaction. His heart swelled with arrogance; he simply could not fathom why Pex had been so absurdly cautious around these mindless green brutes.

On the tactical screens, Ork Boyz charging out from the rubble wielding primitive axes were thoroughly ventilated by concentrated las-fire, neutralized before they could pose the slightest threat. Some soldiers had even decapitated the slain xenos, mounting the Orks' severed heads upon the hulls of their Chimera APCs as gruesome trophies of war.

From the progression of the engagement, the Orks appeared to be nothing more than a rabble of savages. They were capable of terrorizing unarmed civilians, perhaps, but against the crushing iron tread of the Imperium's armored columns, they stood absolutely no chance.

As for Pex's grim warnings, Chuck convinced himself they were told with a singular, self-serving purpose: to consolidate more military leverage under his own authority. Once he led his army to wipe out the remaining Orks, he would see how much face the esteemed System Commander had left to save.

"Squad Five and Squad Six are under heavy assault by xenos forces!" The vox-operator's panicked shout shattered Chuck's delusions.

"What is there to panic about?" Chuck replied with dismissive disdain. "If those savages wish to throw themselves into our meatgrinder, it saves us the trouble of digging them out of the ruins one by one."

"Squad Ten requesting immediate fire support! We are surrounded by xenos! They're everywhere! They're—"

In rapid succession, distress signals began flooding in from every sector, the airwaves choked with frantic pleas for reinforcements.

"What is happening?" Chuck's expression shifted drastically as he stared at the tactical hololith. The hostile red runes were multiplying at an exponential rate! The xenos savages seemed to be converging from every conceivable corner of the metropolis.

"How can there be so many of them?! Do these xenos brutes have no concept of fear?"

The live battlefield pict-feed from Squad Ten flickered onto the main screen. Chuck watched in mounting horror as waves of Orks brandishing crude choppas launched a relentless, unbroken charge directly into the defensive grid's overlapping fields of fire. The front rank was cut down, only for the rank behind to step over the corpses. When they fell, the next wave surged forward.

The Ork Boyz used their own flesh to clog the Imperial firing lines, closing the distance of their charge within the span of a few short breaths. One, two, three, more and more Ork Boyz fractured the storm of suppressing fire, burying their heavy choppas into the skulls of the human guardsmen.

Once the engagement dissolved into close-quarters melee, the PDF lost all capacity to resist. They were subjected to the raw brutality of Ork fangs, hacking blades, and absolute slaughter.

In mere moments, Squad Ten was completely submerged under a roiling green tide. Severed limbs and mangled torsos littered the earth, and the crimson lifeblood of human soldiers coalesced into flowing rivers.

The pict-recorder fell to the dirt, a violent splatter of blood painting half the lens a deep crimson. Just as the command staff prepared to avert their eyes, the camera shifted. A massive, bulbous green face forced its way into the frame.

"Ya look at dis," Ork Alpha grunted to Ork Beta.

"Uh, lemme see," Ork Beta grunted, snatching the pict-recorder into his massive, calloused hand. "I dunt know wot dat is, but I seen dat shiny rawnd bit befoor. Da Mekboyz always got dem stuck ta dere 'eads."

"A Mekboy! Dey'ze loaded wiv teef!" Ork Alpha barked, violently ripping the device away. He smashed the chassis against a rock to prize out the optical lens. "Wonder 'ow many teef dis'll get us."

With that, Ork Alpha carefully wiped the lens clean against his grimy hide and stuffed it into his jerkin.

Witnessing the entire exchange, Chuck felt the blood rush violently to his head. A pack of primitive savages wielding stone-age axes had just annihilated a heavily armed detachment of his finest soldiers!

And it wasn't just Squad Ten. Within a brief thirty-minute window, ten of the fifty squads that had entered the urban sector had been completely wiped out. Every single one had met the exact same fate: overwhelmed and swallowed whole by a green tide, utterly paralyzed by the sheer ferocity of the assault.

The Orks had undoubtedly suffered catastrophic casualties during their mad rush, but the xenos didn't care in the slightest. Their guttural laughter and booming roars of Waaagh! echoed through the canyon-like streets of the ruined city, transforming what should have been a grueling war of attrition into a joyous carnival of violence.

Furthermore, by overrunning multiple PDF positions, the Ork Boyz had successfully looted a substantial quantity of Imperial weaponry and hardware.

Initially, the Boyz had no inkling of what these human contraptions were or how they functioned. But as clusters of them gathered around the plunder, arguing and finkin' together, the latent genetic engineering encoded within their very bloodlines began to awaken.

Some picked up wrenches and instinctively began hammering away at fractured components; others grasped lasguns and naturally oriented the barrels toward the enemy. A thoroughly disabled Chimera APC, tinkered with for a few brief moments by an Ork who had only just experienced the sudden spark of becoming a Mekboy, roared back to life after receiving a heavy, booted kick to its engine block.

Very quickly, the remaining forty PDF squads found themselves facing a far more lethal nightmare. The Orks were no longer merely launching mindless, suicidal charges with crude axes.

Interspersed throughout the surging green mass were Dakka-spewing Shoota Boyz, explosion-obsessed Burna and Tankbusta Boyz throwing stick-bombs, and manic Speed Freeks driving heavily modified, greenskin-rigged Chimeras... a chaotic array of specialized Ork adaptations had entered the fray.

The technological superiority the Planetary Defence Forces had relied upon was being rapidly erased, severely fracturing the fragile morale of the mortal soldiers. Several squads began openly defying orders, abandoning their defensive lines to stage unauthorized retreats.

For a mortal army whose grassroots officer corps had not yet been fully tempered in the fires of true war, standing firm against the unbridled ferocity of the xenos was proving to be a demand far beyond their strength.