As the small fleet of Galactica battlecruisers fanned out and finalized their jump calculations, the AI Adama watched through the system sensors as the enemy seemed to literally pour in. Even the optics from his Galactica hull and the optic stream from his destroyers found a visible and growing glow that was the Ork fleet rushing out of the tear in this physical plane.

 

If he had the sensibilities of a human, the AI would’ve likely thought the aliens were truly endless with just how rapidly their numbers were growing. Entire squadrons of planetoids giving off continent-sized engine signatures could likely be populated by billions, if not trillions of the trespassers. 

 

The destroyers’ enhanced optics relayed back images of crude spacecraft, more akin to a caricature than anything actually practical. Each was an ovoid, bulky thing of metal and rock with jutting structures to form useless fins and island-sized tribal war masks, their hulls pincushioned with an impractical amount of weapons.

 

Yet for all the crudeness, the technology utilized by the massive stellar horde was a threat to be respected to some degree. Energy readings indicated that a number of ships actually ran on oversized combustion engines, while others relied on an aberrant hybrid of rocket and electric propulsion systems. The radiation plumes left in the wake of such things (it would be a disservice to the word to actually label them spacecraft) painted the whole sector of space in a caustic yellow under the thermal and radioactive spectrums.

 

In Adama’s digital mind, the appropriate classification of this intrusion was far less ‘invasion’ and more ‘infection’ or ‘plague’.

 

All twenty four Galacticas spread into a wide formation and kept a torrent of messages pinging amongst themselves. There were barely enough destroyers to go around the siblings, but the destroyers were not needed this time around. Once they were done with their scouting, the recon squadrons would return back to orbit the bait planet and sit out the fight.

 

Sev had intended for this defense to serve as a test for the Nexus’ battlecruisers, and their AI pilots.

 

“Recon squadrons leaving the defined engagement zone. Beginning skirmishing phase of Operation Shroom-Doom.”

 

Confirmation pings rang out in the closed digital network, and as one the fleet of capital ships blinked out of existence and reappeared a split second later at the edges of the system, forming a thin cordon around the still growing alien force. The tear between realspace and the Immaterium plane a few light-minutes away caused some interference to the Nexus fleet’s conventional sensors, though not enough to significantly impair each ship’s ability. Even so, a consensus was immediately reached to switch to metaphysically sterile filters, washing the optics with a blue-green tint and cutting out all metanatural noise in the audio converters.

 

They were fired upon almost immediately, though it would take seconds and more for the aliens’ crude weaponry to actually reach them. The battlecruisers easily avoided most of the sprinkling of laser beams and near-light energy bolts, while primitive munitions took their time flying through the vast gulf of space. By the time the tank-sized shells made it to their target’s locations, the Galacticas were already gone, their shields flaring from the increasing storm of beam or bolt strikes as they dove towards the enemy.

 

The Orks were keen to swarm out to meet their foe, more often than not ignoring the use of long range broadsides in favor of turning their prows forwards in what was most likely (and most illogically) a reckless, premature charge. It lessened the storm of ineffective fire, and brought the enemy closer to effective firing range.

 

“I think the human term for this is ‘the enemy is on our side’,” Thrace quipped.

 

“It is possible that they are overconfident in their numerical advantage,” Baltar offered. “The archives suggest that these Orks as a race prefer close quarters combat, perhaps it also applies to their spaceborne doctrine?”

 

It seemed a plausible theory. The fleet took a few milliseconds to confer before amending their strategy.

 

“Cull the screening ships, if there are fireships, proceed to tactical route 6-33.”

 

The capital ships slowed to a stop and locked onto their wide field of approaching targets, unconcerned for the constant enemy fire lighting up their shields. Nobody has fallen below 97.2% shield integrity yet, and the Kobol Spools had charged up to tactical-use levels.

 

Caprica was the first to start firing her weapons. “Enemy crossing effective range. Initiating culling.” Adama picked up the energy spike from his sister’s hull, and at 2.663 seconds (rounded up) after that Zarek and Baltar opened fire. Adama’s targets would only enter range a sluggish 12.021 seconds after Caprica’s. And by then the tactical sensors were already picking up a lot of destroyed alien crafts.

 

The Ork screening ships were as easy to dismantle as the Imperium ones, with the added benefit of a larger silhouette and far more unstable structure. On the other hand, the density of their rounded shapes actually reduced weapon penetration by a notable margin, lowering the average ship-kills per white laser beam to 7.56.

 

Interestingly, the aliens’ smaller vessels continued their heedless charge, ignoring the possibility of using their capital-class ships and mobile planetoids as cover. Baltar’s assessment was right then, and Adama sent a quick ping to his younger brother, advising Baltar to relay his findings back to the main servers.

 

The Orks’ exotic weapons revealed themselves as their larger ships got within medium range. The asteroid ships in particular gave off new weapon signatures that suggested some sort of electric weapon. Disappointingly, the whips of green-orange lightning that resulted only looked impressive, but arced indiscriminately through the aliens’ own ships as it struck the Galacticas to cause little damage.

 

And it was conventional overcharged electricity, with no signs of compressor coils or focusing arrays, nor any flavor of metanatural energy. If the Nexus still used first gen tech, or maybe even second gen, the EMP surge that inevitably resulted would have been potentially dangerous, but several iterations of scientific and occult advancements in, Adama’s ship simply redirected the massive electrical discharge into auxiliary batteries made to collect hypothetical electromagnetic storms.

 

Other weapons were similarly of low impact to the Nexus ships

 

Considering how the race were supposed to operate on the base idea of ‘bigger is better’, only the mobile planetoids were ignored and marked for the teleport assault. Everything battleship-class and below was deemed appropriate targets. The Nexus ships took their time thinning down the alien with plasma bolts and laser beams, each battlecruiser an island of order and holding back the tide of metal and rock hurtling through space towards them.

 

Guided projectiles with life signatures within were detected spewing from many of the ships. Boarding torpedoes, or whatever came close to it for these crude aliens. They were ignored unless they were too clumped up, or they managed to reach point-defense range where the ships’ smaller laser arrays began to burn through each projectile in efficient bursts of white light.

 

“Trivial threats achieving first density threshold,” Roslin reported. “Initiating torpedo spread.”

 

Adama would find the same target-rich conditions as well moments later, and let loose a salvo of Disco torpedoes. The strobing of each projectile’s white laser emitters effectively cut through the Ork ships in their path before tearing into battleships and detonating in blinding nuclear fire.

 

Despite the losses, the massive Ork asteroid ships still came on, plowing through the thickening debris of burning wrecks in an attempt to ram down the Nexus battlecruisers. Perhaps they misattribute the lack of fire directed at them as some proof of invincibility, Adama thought. 

 

If that were the case, then it was best to dissuade them of that notion.

 

“Enemy density lowered to optimal levels. Marking priority targets.”

 

As one, the ships each began directing metanaturally laced frequencies at the mobile planetoids, finding and locking into cavernous spaces within each macrovessel. Once spatial plotting was achieved, a signal was sent back to Tupile. In short seconds, the Nexus began its teleportation assault on the Ork asteroids ships, with organic troopers, Sentinels and fauna auxiliaries swarming out from the heart of each vessel.

 

Once teleportation was fully completed, the battlecruisers began to pick at the unboarded vessels. “Payload delivered. Begin culling the excess ships.” 

 

*****

 

The interior of the Ork crafts were huge and almost haphazard in their layout. There was a crude pragmatism to it, if you squinted a bit. Munitions manufacturing bays were set up next to storage bays, which themselves were right next to cannon emplacements, significantly cutting down the logistics line, but also leaving the whole thing vulnerable to a chain reaction. Smog-filled generator stacks crackled and sparked almost immediately beside the energy batteries. Hangar bays and barracks were only a rusted, pitted door away.

 

Edward got a sense of simple, savage order in these aliens, one that he found them at least more bearable than the super mutants back home. A shame it didn’t apply to their looks though. The Ork race were, as a whole, as brutishly ugly and loud as they were large. The smaller, scampering ‘Gretchin’ subspecies were just as unlikeable, and made up for their lack of bulk with sheer numbers.

 

They all died easily enough though. The storm of T-shards began almost as soon as 1st Company teleported in, shredding through Ork and Gretchin alike. The former roared in defiance as they charged into their deaths, while the latter scurried into cover to take opportunistic potshots at the troopers.

 

Sev’s favored soldiers cared not, and commenced a cold purge of the place. The lack of white laser weapons or plasma rifles to preserve the vessel did not hinder the 1st Company’s operations by much. The bulk of the larger aliens meant that some of them closed in with oversized cleavers and sparking claws, but the battle- and eldritch-hardened soldiers of the Nexus smoothly drew their blades to engage in melee.

 

Just as the mob drew in, Lelith and her kin leapt gracefully over the heads of the 1st Company troopers and dove to meet the green tide with their serrated blades and glowing whips. There was a cruel beauty as the Eldar counterattacked, their movements looking far more like an improvised dance than actual fighting.

 

Not that it didn’t produce results, though. Heads were lopped off, only that there was an aesthetic sense in the way they were done. Spines were expertly ripped out by bladed chains, so cleanly done that the Orks didn’t seem to realize the loss of it until they flopped over like jelly.

 

These former gladiators made a good show of their application of violence, and Edward had to admit, he kind of approved how well it was being done. Still, there were plenty of Orks to go about, and the horde eventually enveloped the Eldar and crashed against 1st Company.

 

Shields glowed as they fully killed the inertia of swinging blades or improvised explosive hammers and the killing blow that came with them. Tiberium edged blades effortlessly sheared through weapon hafts, armor and limbs in a single strike. The Orks stubbornly fought on despite their dismemberment, with only headshots and decapitations being the only way to truly put them down.

 

Their comrades fired blindly with oversized pistols and automatic guns as they joined the fray, indifferent to the fact that they were inflicting a lot of friendly fire as a result. It seemed that there was little sense of camaraderie amongst them as they tried to be involved in the fighting. 

 

Sev had told them that these aliens were a battle hungry race, but Edward didn’t fully appreciate what he meant until now. Larger Orks pushed away or even outright chopped through smaller ones standing in their way as they charged into melee. Above in precarious walkways, some of the green skinned aliens fired crude rockets into fighting and recklessly blasting apart their own kind, before jumping off the platforms and diving straight into the fray with axes in their hands and roars in their throats.

 

“WAAAGH!”

 

Their battlecry was deafening, and frankly quite annoying in its repetitiveness as 1st Company pushed them back with Tiberium shards and blades, only for them to quickly surge back into the fray over and over again. Edward gladly let an axehead half his size fall towards him, the weapon bouncing harmlessly off his shield as he stabbed his rifle into the face of its wielder and turned his head into a mist of red and green with a short pull of the trigger.

 

Compared to the golden Imperium Custodes, these aliens were easier to fight individually, but their numbers and reckless abandon posed a different concern for the commander. Killing these aliens was not an issue, killing them without surrounding yourself in a wall of corpses though might prove a challenge. They were literally climbing over the corpses of their fallen, their relatively stubby legs proving nimble enough to remain stable over such unstable terrain for them to keep fighting with little to no loss of effectiveness.

 

In another life, without what he’d seen under Sev’s guidance, Edward might have quailed at such a single-minded need for violence. Now though, he found the Orks’ persistence annoying.

 

A mob of a far larger variety of Orks stomped into view, fully encased in slabs of metal with built-in guns and claws at their arms. Sensors picked up the fluctuating emission of some sort of energy shield around them. Their tusked helmets rattled visibly as they roared, and they brought their guns to bear before the engaged 1st Company.

 

As before, the storm of Ork gunfire was indiscriminate, twin-barrelled autocannons and exotic lightning guns tearing more through the alien horde than sparking off the troopers’ shields. It was so potent that the green mass around them lightened for a brief moment. 

 

That their guns did nothing did not dissuade the hulking aliens whatsoever, and they charged with claws and chain-axes and electrified cleavers.

 

“WAAAGH!” came their annoying warcry again, and Edward would’ve spat if not for his helmet.

 

“Peace through power!” he yelled back, maximizing his speaker output. His friends and comrades joined in, and the air between the closing groups reverberated from the clash of voices.

 

The Nexus elite struck first by engaging their jump jets and catching the giants by surprise by diving right into them. The combined knowledge from Research Complex Ix and Vault Gesserit meant that the shields of the Sardaukar-pattern armor utterly overwhelmed the alien’s own shield tech, leaving the blades of the Nexus trooper free to pierce through more conventional armor and sever the heads and limbs hidden behind them. The giant Orks were still brought down faster than with the Custodes, and the swift extermination actually caused the remaining aliens to pause…for a whole of four seconds.

 

Then one of them roared and the whole green mass charged and surrounded 1st Company once more.

 

Edward and his troops were stuck in combat for almost an hour, having to slaughter their way into less body-strewn sections of the cavernous hall several times or risk getting bogged down by the growing pile of corpses. The Nexus Eldar danced merrily about in the meantime, slicing wrists and elbows and knees and heads as they darted about, never staying in one place for long. 

 

They were about the only break in the monotony of senseless killing. Edward heard Lelith and her crew engaged in some sort of conversation, and after a while he finally realized that they were calling out their attacks and grading each other on how their Ork prey were mutilated. 

 

A particularly large Ork appeared at some point, only to cause the Eldar to giggle amongst themselves. Lelith took it on by herself, and with skips, spins, and flips she danced around the behemoth, carving out chunks of its armor with each pass. Then she began to remove the weapons, and then its limbs. She beheaded it as it fell to the floor, letting the head fall first to be crushed by its stump of a body.

 

More than an hour in, and finally, finally, the melee ended. The remaining Orks finally had entertained the idea that perhaps they should change tactics. They began to break and scatter, and Edward let Lelith and her people continue hunting the fleeing aliens while his boys and girls reorganized themselves. As they stalked off, the commander noticed that the Eldar were barely stained with gore, Lelith especially being unmarred by even a fleck of Ork blood.

 

“Well, they’re an artistic bunch,” Sylvie said beside him, “But I bet they’d do shit against Doomgeese.”

 

The young commander snorted at that. “Yeah, no shit.” Just out of curiosity, he checked on the other boarding parties, and sure enough…

 

“Stupid birds are already rampaging throughout their ship. They broke their alien horde twenty minutes ago. The deathclaws are reaching their targets as well.”

 

Not wanting to have the gap broaden too much between humans and uplifted FEV mutants, 1st Company quickly reloaded and resupplied and continued the purging of the asteroid ship. Thankfully, it only took them another hour to hunt down the last remaining clusters of resistance, and the Sentinels poured in to complete the purge.