Chapter 22: The Mekboy Workshop
Rosen surveyed the entire operation through Shared Awareness.
Thirty Death Warriors.
Six five-man squads.
Two days ago he had been running guerrilla operations with six people. Now he had a precision harvest machine.
A greenskin patrol — three Ork Boyz leading over forty Gretchin — was moving south along a main corridor.
Alpha and Bravo squads had set a fire line directly across the patrol's path. Six boltguns and four lasguns were trained on the corridor from cover positions on both sides.
Charlie squad's five Death Warriors had already worked their way through the overhead ventilation network and were directly behind the greenskin column, lying flat at a duct exit and waiting for the order.
Delta squad was positioned at the exit of a branch corridor on the patrol's right flank, blocking the only viable escape route.
"Close the net."
The moment Rosen gave the order, all four squads opened fire simultaneously.
Alpha and Bravo hit first from the front.
Ten weapons fired at once. Bolts and las-beams wove a solid wall of fire across the corridor.
The two lead Ork Boyz went down within the same second.
The third Ork Boy was slightly faster. It instinctively raised a battered riot shield scavenged from an Imperial soldier's corpse, trying to block the frontal fire.
It forgot about its back.
Charlie squad dropped out of the ventilation duct.
Five Catachan Fangs and two chainswords hit the rear of the greenskin column simultaneously.
The shield-carrying Ork Boy had no time to turn. A chainsword drove down along its spine from behind, top to bottom. The high-speed chain teeth shredded through its cheap iron plate armour, ground through the vertebrae, and opened a deep channel from the back of the neck to the base of the spine.
The Ork Boy pitched forward. The shield hit the deck with a heavy metallic crash.
The Gretchin broke.
"Run! Run!"
"Humies everywhere!"
They stampeded toward the right branch corridor — the one direction that hadn't been covered by fire.
They ran straight into Delta squad.
Delta's five Death Warriors were crouched behind cover on both sides of the branch corridor exit, weapons already levelled at the narrow opening.
When the first Gretchin came screaming through, they were met with a near-perfect crossfire.
None of them made it out.
From the opening shots to the last Gretchin hitting the deck, the engagement had lasted under forty-five seconds.
Three Ork Boyz. Over forty Gretchin.
Complete elimination.
Rosen's brow creased slightly.
Efficiency was dropping.
Not combat efficiency — that was still improving. What was dropping was the frequency of contacts.
In the first two days after the base was established, each hunting route averaged one to two greenskin patrols per hour.
Now it was three or four hours between contacts, and the patrols they were finding were smaller.
The local greenskin density was clearly falling.
His first instinct was suspicion. He had killed enough greenskins by now that the broader population should have noticed the losses in their patrol zones long ago. A three-million-strong Ork tribe could not be indifferent to sustained attrition inside its own territory.
Orks were not humans.
A human military force absorbing continuous losses might choose to contract, reassess the threat, and adjust its dispositions. Orks only had one response: send more Orks.
But that retaliatory surge had never come.
Rosen leaned against one of the gantry crane supports in the base and worked through it until the answer came.
It had been sitting in the intelligence Fezekks provided before it died.
This hulk didn't only have greenskins.
The deeper decks held daemonic entities and Chaos Renegade Space Marines.
The core sections held Genestealer nests.
Three factions in continuous, grinding conflict.
The drop in greenskin density only had one explanation. The main Ork force was committed elsewhere.
They weren't ignoring his kills. They just couldn't spare the numbers.
The patrols he was hunting were stragglers and pickets radiating off the edges of a much larger battle somewhere deeper in the hulk.
Good news and bad news, Rosen thought.
The good news was that he wasn't going to face a full Ork military response any time soon.
The bad news was that his prey pool was shrinking.
And when that main battle eventually resolved — whichever side won, Orks or daemons — the victor would start looking at the rest of the hulk. When that happened, what came his way would not be isolated patrols.
He needed to be substantially stronger before that moment arrived.
Time wasn't waiting.
He needed more targets.
"Expand the hunting range."
Rosen pushed new operational orders through Shared Awareness to all Death Warriors.
Three new routes were added to the existing three, extending outward into unexplored territory to the northeast, northwest, and due west.
Twenty hours later, something came back that made his attention sharpen.
Echo squad's five Death Warriors had pushed approximately four kilometres west along an old internal transport rail line when they found something in a large cargo hub station — a section of the hulk that the greenskins had heavily modified.
A large mechanical compartment, at least two thousand square metres of floor space.
It no longer looked anything like the interior of an Imperial warship.
The ceiling was covered in a dense tangle of wiring, chains, and piping — a chaotic web that some enormous mechanical spider might have woven through a jungle of metal. The floor was stacked with components of every size and shape, alongside piles of machinery parts too heavily modified to identify.
Several crude worktables assembled from miscellaneous metal held weapons and devices in various stages of modification.
A Mekboy workshop.
Rosen's pulse jumped slightly.
Mekboyz were unlike the rest of their kind. They were born with a mechanical intuition that had no rational explanation. Give one a pile of scrap metal for three minutes, let it hammer and wire and rivet, and the pile would genuinely run. Not through physical principles. Through Waaagh energy.
But to Rosen, a Mekboy workshop was first and foremost a repository packed with high-value metals and salvageable equipment.
Through Shared Awareness he swept the workshop interior in detail.
On the left side of the space, several Imperial armoured vehicle engines had been stripped to components and stacked in an arrangement that only a greenskin could consider logical. The Refined Steel content in those engines was substantial. If he could absorb all of it, his Refined Steel reserve would make a significant jump.
On one of the worktables, a standard Imperial lascannon was in the middle of being modified. The Mekboy had welded three additional pipes of varying diameter onto the barrel, giving the weapon the general appearance of a metal octopus that had grown four extra tentacles.
And at the back of the workshop, Rosen saw something that made his eyebrows rise sharply.
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