‘Yes I can see that!’ she snarled through the vox. From the edge of Iwazar’s vision I could see energy arcing along the brass dome. But it did not herald the ork ascension to the void. Instead, a scything blast of lightning wracked the sky. I could not say if it was aimed at the spectral Imperial fighters, or at the wayward horde. But a score of orks were torn from the sky, the energy jumping between them. Shard banked sharply, avoiding the blast, and I felt my stomach heave, a momentary reminder of my mortal body. There was a metallic taste in my mouth. Blood? Or some neural overlap from Kikazar? It was a struggle separating one from the other.

‘Intelligence, please!’ Shard’s voice pierced through my fractured consciousness.

‘Plient?’ I grunted. My tongue felt heavy.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ he replied. ‘They seem angry, sir, but they always seem angry.’

‘Plient thinks we have annoyed them.’

‘Oh, I intend to do far more than that.’

Her lascannon flared, carving through the chaos, a single bolt claiming the lives of at least three ork planes. Again it fired, each shot wielded with the precision of a scalpel, severing wings and crippling engines. But their numbers were limitless, and she was but a blade against the swarm. I felt the craft shudder as something struck it, though the armour held.

‘This is a losing battle,’ she grunted over the thud of shells. ‘I can thin them, but I doubt I have the ammo to take out even a third. And they only need one lucky shot.’

‘I am not sure how long I can maintain your reinforcements.’

‘They are barely registering now,’ she tutted. ‘Keep flickering like ghosts. The orks are beginning to realise something is up.’

I lacked her eye for war, but the explosions marring the sky had lessened. Perhaps the sky-fortress had a vox-system and had ordered them to stand down. Or perhaps sufficient grudges had been settled and anger tempered. Our plan had been to cause enough disruption that the orks’ savagery would cause them to turn upon one another, and perhaps the sky-fortress too. But discipline seemed to be restored, the orks falling into line.

‘It looks like they’re powering up again. Any ideas? Because I do not want to experience another ork teleportation.’

I could not think what to do. My strength was fading, and it was getting harder to maintain the connection.

Then a thought struck me.

I had no time to discuss it and even less to focus, scrambling through Kikazar’s pict-files. There was the duel, from which I had forged the ork archetype the greenskins mistook for their god. The second file took a fraction longer. It was one of the earliest. Not my work, but impactful in its own way. I had little time to splice the images, and was struggling to see what I was doing.