Chapter 24: Taking Down the Mekboy
The Mekboy's hands hammered across the Sentinel's control panel in a frantic sequence.
In front of Rosen's eyes, the walker began to start up in a manner that had no business working.
Power conduits connected themselves. The power core lit. The two eye-hole observation slits in the grinning Ork face plate blazed with harsh red light.
Not an Imperial standard startup sequence. Not even close.
This was Waaagh energy. Pure, logic-free, propelled entirely by the collective belief of greenskin minds. A Mekboy only needed to believe the machine would start, and it started. The workshop had only one greenskin left in it, but the Waaagh energy concentration in a single Mekboy's head was roughly equivalent to a hundred ordinary Gretchin.
The Sentinel's avian legs struck the metal deck with heavy, deliberate steps.
The large-calibre shipboard autocannon welded onto the operator platform — stripped from a warship's anti-air emplacement — swung around to bear on Alpha squad.
"Everyone scatter."
Rosen's order was still leaving his mouth.
The autocannon opened up.
This was not the wild, inaccurate fire of a standard greenskin shoota. Each round was fist-sized. The trajectory wasn't perfectly stable, but in a sealed compartment, rounds and metal fragments ricocheting off every surface were lethal regardless of aim.
Alpha squad's Death Warriors threw themselves in every direction. One round detonated on the deck less than half a metre from Number 7 and the fragmentation sliced open his right upper arm.
"Number 5."
Number 5 pushed to the front of the squad with the power shield raised.
The force field generator activated. The translucent blue energy barrier shimmered into existence across the face of the shield.
The first round hit the power shield.
Boom.
Number 5's boots dragged back more than half a metre across the deck. The force field barrier flickered violently under the impact, but it held.
Second round.
Boom.
Number 5 was driven back a full step. The blue glow of the force field visibly dimmed. The energy cell indicator jumped from green to orange.
Third round.
Boom.
This time the force field didn't hold.
The translucent blue barrier shattered like glass, breaking apart into countless tiny points of light that scattered and vanished in the air. The round's remaining momentum then hit the unprotected shield face itself — the sixty-centimetre steel disc beneath the field.
A fist-sized depression was punched into the centre. Spider-web cracks spread from the impact point across the edges.
The force of the impact threw Number 5 backward. His back hit a metal support column behind him.
The power shield's mounting straps tore free from his forearm. The shield hit the deck, bounced twice, and broke into three pieces.
Rosen checked Number 5's status through Shared Awareness. Left forearm fractured. Three ribs broken. No fatal injuries.
"Restore."
The broken bones knit under the system's repair function. Number 5 pushed himself off the deck and got back to his feet. But the power shield was beyond salvaging.
The Sentinel's autocannon was already pivoting for a second sweep.
"Charlie squad, Delta squad — flank to the rear of the walker. Your target is not the machine. It's the Mekboy. The one standing on the operator platform. Cut the head off."
Rosen came out from behind his cover position, bolt pistol trained on the Sentinel's right leg joint, and fired three times in quick succession.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three bolt rounds hit the right knee joint assembly.
The walker lurched. It did not go down.
The autocannon barrel swung back toward Rosen.
He rolled behind an overturned worktable.
The autocannon tore the worktable apart. Metal debris rained down across him.
But while the Sentinel's full attention was locked on Alpha and Bravo at the front, Charlie squad and Delta squad had finished their flanking movement.
Number 2 and Number 3 slid silently out of the ceiling ventilation ducts and dropped directly behind the Sentinel.
The operator platform was semi-open. There was no armour coverage on the rear.
The Mekboy had its back to them. Every bit of its attention was on working the shipboard autocannon, its six mechanical arms moving constantly to adjust the barrel's elevation and traverse angle, its mouth running a stream of excited Waaagh sounds and technical terminology that only a greenskin engineer could parse.
Number 2 raised his boltgun and levelled it at the ammunition feed mechanism.
Bang.
The bolt punched through the thin iron casing and went into the feed mechanism.
A round in the process of being chambered cooked off under the impact.
Boom.
The feed mechanism's explosion set off a chain reaction. The remaining twenty-plus rounds in the adjacent ammunition box detonated in rapid succession under the combined effect of heat and shockwave.
A series of concussive blasts tore the operator platform apart.
The Sentinel's upper section was destroyed in the secondary detonations. The shipboard autocannon was reduced to half a barrel of twisted metal.
The Mekboy was blasted off the operator platform by the explosion's pressure wave.
It tumbled twice in the air and hit the deck hard. Its mechanical arms were scattered across the floor around it.
It was still alive.
The Mekboy clawed its way upright. Its body was covered in burn wounds and fragmentation injuries. One leg had been bent to a wrong angle by the blast. Despite all of that, it tried to drag itself toward the nearest worktable. There were more weapons and tools there.
Number 3 didn't give it the chance.
He came up behind the Mekboy, closed his left hand around the back of its skull, and pulled its head back.
The Catachan Fang drew a cold, precise arc in the dim light and opened the Mekboy's exposed throat.
Green blood poured out as though a valve had been opened.
The Mekboy's oversized eyes went wide. Its mouth worked open and shut twice. That disproportionately large head tilted to one side.
Its last movement before it died was to reach out one green claw toward the Sentinel walker it had reduced to scrap.
A craftsman's attachment to the last thing it had been building, cutting across every boundary of species and civilisation.
Then it was dead.
System notification: raw soul energy 30 points, high concentration of Waaagh technical factor detected, 21 Life Points credited after purification.
Lower than the Nob's yield, which matched the Mekboy's actual combat capability. It was not a fighter.
But what it left behind was worth considerably more than Life Points.
Rosen searched the body.
On the Mekboy's belt, inside a tool pouch stitched together from wire and leather, he found a device the size of a hand.
The housing was constructed from multiple layers of metal and an unidentified semi-transparent material. The surface was covered in greenskin scrawl and rune-like markings. At the device's centre, a miniature force field generator had been modified and amplified by the Mekboy in a manner that should not have functioned by any conventional understanding of the technology.
A portable force field generator. Greenskin edition.
The device dissolved into faint blue light and disappeared into the Armoury.
The power shield was gone, but this might replace it. Better to wait for the purification result before drawing conclusions.
Rosen turned to direct the post-engagement sweep.
The stripped vehicle engines, the half-finished weapons, the damaged armour plate, and the two intact legs left over from the Sentinel — all of it was absorbed. The workshop was cleared of every usable piece of metal within half an hour.
[Refined Steel reserve: +89.7 cubic metres.]
Total reserve past four hundred.
Just as the sweep was nearing its end, a signal came through Shared Awareness from Number 4, transmitting from a corner at the back of the workshop.
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