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Where Dere’s da Warp Dere’s a Way – Mike Brooks

About the Author

An Extract from ‘I Am Slaughter’

A Black Library Publication

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Where Dere’s da Warp Dere’s a Way

Mike Brooks

‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go!’

Ufthak Blackhawk, Bad Moon warrior and definite second-biggest in Badgit Snazzhammer’s mob, no matter what that zoggin’ idiot Mogrot thought, raised his voice in the rolling, rollicking war cry as they piled into the ’Ullbreaker. Outside in the cold vacuum of space, Da Meklord’s warfleet was busy crumping the humie ships, but that wasn’t Ufthak’s fight. Blowing stuff up from a long way off was fine in its way, but he preferred getting up close and personal. Let the gunboyz have their fun: Ufthak was on his way to the real fight.

The last few boyz piled in, along with Dok Drozfang and various grots, and then came Da Boffin. A Bad Moon like Ufthak and Da Meklord himself, and one of the warboss’ most trusted meks, Da Boffin had replaced his own legs with a single wheel, powered by a fuel made of concentrated squig dung. Ufthak had never worked out how Da Boffin stayed upright on it, since even warbikes needed at least two wheels, plus either a kickstand or the rider’s leg – or a kickstand made from someone else’s leg – on the few occasions they were stationary. When Ufthak had asked, Da Boffin had just started talking about ‘whirly bitz inside it’, as though that made any sense.

The last hatch slammed shut and the flyboyz in the cockpit whooped, firing up the engines and vaporising anything immediately behind the shuttle. Ufthak had been on boarding missions before, so he knew what to do: grab on to one of the handholds roughly welded into the walls, and hang on like a grot on a warboar.

The flyboy kaptin stamped down on the lever which released the mag-clamp fastening them to the deck of Da Meklord’s Fury, and they were away. Immediately, all the boyz who hadn’t been in an ’Ullbreaker before went flying back to the rear of the ship, where they were crushed into a painful and indignant heap against the metal bulkhead. Ufthak laughed uproariously as they tumbled past him with expressions of confusion plastered across their faces.

’Ullbreakers got up to full speed quickly, and so it was only a few moments before the G-forces subsided enough for the newbies to untangle themselves from each other and start the important process of working out whose gun was whose. It only took a few moments more for fists to start to fly as they began bad-mouthing each other’s shootas.

‘If you gitz don’t settle down den I’m turnin’ dis fing around!’

Boss Snazzhammer stormed down the shuttle, spittle flying from his gob as he kicked boyz out of his way. He was a huge ork, head and shoulders taller than the rest of them, and bedecked in the most ostentatious finery that teef could buy – and, since he was a Bad Moon, he had a lot of teef. There was barely a surface of his armour that wasn’t decorated with loot, whether that was medals taken off the corpses of humie bosses, those little bits of wax and paper from the armour of dead beakies, or even some of the fancy gems the pointy-earz wore. In his right hand he carried the massive weapon that had given him his second name: a metal shaft the height of a humie with its legs still attached, with a hammer on one side of the head and a choppa blade on the other. The entire head could be engulfed in a crackling power field with one flick of Snazzhammer’s clawed thumb, and Ufthak had seen the boss smash right through a humie tank with it.

The boyz ducked their heads, grabbed their own shootas and tried to avoid the boss’ eye. No one wanted to end up like that tank.

‘Dat’s betta,’ Snazzhammer growled. He turned on the spot, addressing the entire ’Ullbreaker. ‘Right, we ain’t da only ’Ullbreaker wot’s flyin’ today…’

Boos and jeers.

‘…but we got da most important job!’ Snazzhammer continued. ‘Da Meklord ’imself told me wot we gots ta do, so you all best listen.’

The mob quietened down, as much as they ever would. If Da Meklord had told them what to do, they’d probably better do it. Da Meklord was no ordinary warboss, if there was such a thing: he was Da Biggest Big Mek, and his gear was legendary. He’d gone toe to toe with rival warboss Oldfang Krumpthunda, and after one hit with Da Meklord’s shokkhamma no one had found any part of the Goff larger than a finger. Da Meklord’s personal force field could shrug off hits from a humie Titan’s cooka kannon. His supa-shoota could cut a Deff Dread in half before you could say ‘Gork and Mork’. He was what any Bad Moon wanted to be: massive, ’ard as nails and carrying enough weapons and armour to kit out a small warband in his own right.

‘Now,’ Snazzhammer declared. ‘Humies don’t got Gork ‘n’ Mork ta guide dem froo da warp, ta take dem to where da next fight is. Dey gotta use some fancy worky bitz wot dey keeps in da middle of dere ships. Wot we gots ta do is get Da Boffin dere, where he’s gonna do some mek stuff. Got it?’

There was a general muttering and nodding of heads, and Snazzhammer beamed. ‘Good. Now den. Who are we?’

‘SNAZZHAMMER’S MOB!’ the assembled mass of orks bellowed, Ufthak amongst them.

‘Are we da biggest?’

‘YES!’

‘Are we da baddest!’

‘YES!’

‘Are we da shootiest?’

‘YES!’ the mob yelled, and everyone waved their shootas, which were almost all kustom jobs with extra dakka. No one pulled their trigger yet, though, which was good: Ufthak had once been in an ’Ullbreaker where some git with a kannon had managed to crack the flyboyz’ seeing-window, and it turned out there was a reason why these things weren’t open-topped.

‘Dat’s what I fort,’ Snazzhammer said with grim satisfaction. He reached up and grabbed a handhold overhead. ‘Now, everyone hold on to sumfing.’

Ufthak had known this was coming, and reached up with his other hand. ’Ullbreakers flew quick.

There was a shudder as the shuttle’s short-range torpedoes all fired at once, concentrating on a small part of the enemy ship’s hull to weaken it. Ufthak began counting down.

Five…

Four…

Free…

Two…

One…

He frowned.

Bit of one…

The ’Ullbreaker smashed into the humie ship, its specially reinforced nose cone taking the brunt of the impact and punching them clean through into the interior. The force of the sudden deceleration lifted Ufthak’s boots from the floor and nearly wrenched his arms from their sockets, but he held firm. Some of the new ladz who hadn’t minded the boss’ words enough went flying the other way down the shuttle. One of them collided with a support strut hard enough to snap his back clean in two, much to the disdain of the other boyz who’d managed to remain upright.

‘Leave ’im!’ Snazzhammer bellowed as a few of them started putting the boot in. ‘We got humies ta paste! Get out dere, and get clobberin’!’ He aimed a kick at the downed ork’s head as he acted on his own words, and his steel toecap hit hard enough to knock it right off. Dark blood sprayed out across the nearby members of the mob, while the flying head caught a lurking grot clean in the chest and knocked it backwards into the wall.

‘WAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!’

Ufthak drew his weapons and surged forwards with the mass of green around him. This was life; this was what it meant to be an ork. Enemies in front of him, ladz around him, ammo in his slugga and a good right arm to swing his choppa. What more could anyone ask for?

The fore hatches burst outwards and the boyz spilled out. Ufthak shouldered his way forwards and forced his way through, looking for something to kill.

They’d busted through into a vast chamber of metal, the ceiling of which arched up overhead into gloomy shadow. The walls looked to consist largely of pipes, cables and contact points, some of which spat blue-white sparks, but Ufthak couldn’t see much of them. That was partly because of the strange humie machines which loomed throughout the chamber – strange even to him, who’d fought a lot of different humies in a lot of different places – and partly because the humies that crewed this ship had decided they wanted to fight.

They were already swarming inwards, like buzzer squigs converging on an intruder into their nest. Ufthak saw the red-robes and the first flashes of gunfire and grunted in recognition: humie mekboyz! No wonder Da Meklord had his eyes on something fancy; humie tek could do some pretty wild stuff so long as you didn’t hit it too hard.

The red-robes slowed, setting themselves to shoot, and Ufthak groaned. Why did humies never want to fight properly? Only beakies ever fancied a real rumble, and they didn’t even taste good once you got them out of their armour. The rest of them got close enough for you to smell ’em, then hung back to shoot like Mork-damned Deathskulls.

They also always seemed to think that da boyz would just stand still.

‘All right, ladz! ’Ave ’em!’ Snazzhammer bellowed, and the mob surged forwards. Ufthak could feel Mork urging him on, and time slowed. His strides seemed to eat up the metal deck beneath him, and the figures in the humie gun line grew larger with each step. He saw an individual barrel track towards him, saw the humie’s finger tighten on the trigger, but he took his next step at an angle and Mork smiled on him, because the bolt of spitting energy flew past his head instead of taking him full in the face. The next shot hit him in the shoulder, a white-cold shock that staggered him for a moment, but Ufthak had taken worse in the past, and the humie had gone for the kill instead of turning to run while it could. Not all of its fellows had done the same; some of them were already fleeing in the face of the unstoppable green tide bearing down on them.

Ufthak bared his fangs, bellowed his war cry and cannoned into the humie line with the rest of the mob.

The humie who’d shot him tried to parry his choppa with its rifle; Ufthak gave it respect for the effort but nothing for the execution, because his heavy blade smashed through the spindly weapon and split its torso from neck down to the middle of its chest. Like most humies, it died after one hit, sagging to the floor as he wrenched his choppa free and fired his shoota into what passed for the face of another, although this one was wearing a lot more metal there than most humies did. The metal didn’t help it: Ufthak’s slugga shots blew its head apart, metal face and all, and it dropped as well.

A humie lunged at him, wielding some sort of spear. The blade buried itself in Ufthak’s chest and he bellowed in pain, then booted the wielder in its stomach. It flew backwards, disappearing with a despairing wail into the rolling maul of bodies around Boss Snazzhammer. Ufthak wrenched the spear out – it turned out to be one of the electro-guns with a knife stuck on the end – and threw it after its owner. There was a roar of anger, and Ufthak grinned as Mogrot Redtoof whirled around and clobbered a humie which had had nothing to do with the fact that there was now a knife in his back.

Next to Ufthak, Deffrow had lost his choppa – probably stuck in the ribcage of a dead humie somewhere – and so was using the next best thing: a stikkbomb. He battered one humie aside into the path of Dok Drozfang, who carved it apart with the power klaw he called Da Surjun, broke the skull of another, then wound up and took a swing at a third–

The world went white, very loud and extremely sharp.

Ufthak realised he was on the floor, along with everyone else within three yards of Deffrow. Deffrow himself was on his back, staring stupidly at the handle clutched in his somewhat shredded fist.

‘Dey go bang, squigbrain!’ Ufthak yelled at him as he got back to his feet. ‘Dat’s why we frow dem!’ Deffrow’s idiocy had left him with a bunch of shrapnel in his right-hand side, but it was nothing he couldn’t deal with later. The humies, on the other hand, hadn’t fared so well. The one Deffrow had hit most recently had taken the brunt of the impact and was now rather red and squishy, and even those further back weren’t in a good way, rolling around, wailing and crying like a grot that had swallowed a fire squig.

‘Seems like a design flaw t’me,’ Deffrow muttered, pushing himself up. He winced and shook his mangled hand, and a finger that had only been attached by a shred of flesh pinwheeled off. ‘Ow, dat smartz…’

‘Now look what you did!’ Ufthak complained at him. ‘Dey’re running away!’ Sure enough, the remaining humies had clearly decided that enough was enough, as they were turning tail and fleeing from the slaughter. Or at least, they were trying to: those of Snazzhammer’s mob who hadn’t still been picking themselves up because their idiotic neighbour had blown everyone up were jumping on the humies from behind and sending them to see their Emprah. Humies liked to yell about their Emprah a lot, but Ufthak had once heard a bunch of really tough beakies in spiky black armour shouting that the Emprah was dead. With worshippers like this, he could see why. He raised his slugga and shot one in the back, but his heart wasn’t in it.

A high-pitched whine grabbed Ufthak’s attention. For a moment he thought it was just the after-effects of Deffrow’s stikkbomb going off, but then he saw a crackle of blue power, and one of the machines lurched into life. It was a big trukk of some sort, with wheels taller than an ork, and if the blue-crackling thing on the top of it wasn’t some sort of gun then he, Ufthak Blackhawk, was a Blood Axe.

‘Oh zog,’ he muttered fervently. ‘Boss! You got ya hammer?’

‘Don’t worry about dat,’ Snazzhammer retorted confidently, spinning his hammer and casually decapitating a stray grot with the backswing. ‘Dat humie stuff breaks if you look at it funny.’

Ufthak had his doubts. Humies might not be much good in a proper scrap, but their guns tended to be the business. The dirty little gitz also had a nasty habit of aiming, instead of pulling the trigger and letting Gork and Mork decide what would land where, as was right and proper.

The big trukk-gun fizzed noisily, and glowed brighter. Ufthak braced himself: he had a feeling this was going to hurt more than a carelessly detonated stikkbomb.

There was a tremendous sound of tortured, tearing metal from behind them, and a huge shape came sliding across the chamber’s floor, careering off humie machines and leaving the wailing red-robes it struck as mere red smears. It collided with the gun trukk, which exploded in a ball of blue fire, and came to a halt. Hatches popped open and boyz emerged, bellowing in anticipation.

‘Told you we wasn’t da only ’Ullbreaker flyin’ today!’ Snazzhammer said with satisfaction. He raised his voice in a mocking shout. ‘What ’appened to you gitz? Got lost?’

The other mob’s boss responded with a rude hand gesture, and Snazzhammer laughed. ‘Right, on wiv da job. Boffin! You know where we’re goin’?’

Through a lot of doors, as it turned out.

‘Beats me how dese humies ever get anywhere,’ Mogrot commented, as Wazzock fired up his burna to cut through yet another sealed hatch.

‘Dey know how to open ’em,’ Ufthak snorted.

‘We know how to open ’em!’ Mogrot protested, pointing at where Wazzock was dragging a white-hot line down the hatch.

‘Open ’em wivout burnas,’ Ufthak said patiently. Mogrot was hot squig dung in a fight, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t what you’d call a thinker. That was why Ufthak was second-in-command, even though they were more or less the same size. ‘Dey’re lockin’ us out, right?’

‘Don’t seem too bovvered we’re here, den,’ Mogrot countered. ‘We ain’t ’ardly ’ad no one to fight since dat scrap when we got out da ’Ullbreaker!’ He nudged a red-robed corpse with his boot, but the mob outnumbered this bunch of humies, and they’d barely been worth the effort.

‘Dere’s a whole buncha ladz on dis ship by now,’ Snazzhammer put in. ‘So da humies don’t twig wot we’re up to. Dey’re what da humies call a “destruction”.’ He raised his weapon and activated the power field. ‘All right, outta da way!’

The ladz parted, and the boss stepped forwards. He swung his hammer and, with a krakka-boom! like thunder, the burna-bisected door caved in as though it were made of sticks. It revealed a long corridor, wide enough for five orks abreast. A few yards down it were another bunch of red-robes, aiming their guns somewhat shakily at the gaping hole where their door had been.

Snazzhammer lunged forwards, swinging his weapon two-handed by the very base of its handle to maximise his reach. The powered head smashed through their squishy humie bodies and killed most of them with a single blow. The other two turned to flee: Snazzhammer let them get a few steps before hurling his hammer after them, decapitating them both, one after another. The mighty weapon skidded to a halt, slippery with red humie blood, and Snazzhammer turned to look at Da Boffin.

‘Def’nitely dis way, right?’

Da Boffin held up a clicking gizmo, and revved the motor of his mono-wheel excitedly. ‘Yup! We got supa-strong warp stuff down da uvver end. Dat’s where we needs ta be.’

‘You heard da ork!’ Snazzhammer bellowed. ‘Get to it!’ He turned back towards his hammer and began to stride down the corridor. Ufthak was just taking his first step after the boss when the door at the other end of the corridor slid open, not thanks to the destructive activities of some other ladz but with the smooth action of a machine operated by someone who knew how to work it properly.

A huge shape stamped into view, blocking out much of the light behind it.

‘Now dat,’ Mogrot said from behind him, ‘looks like a proper fight.’

It was on two legs, but it was no humie. It wasn’t an ork, either. Ufthak reckoned it was twice his height at least, and nearly the same across. It sort of looked a bit like a humie Dread, the kind the beakies sometimes had, but not quite. It had two power klaws, the weird round humie ones instead of a proper pointy klaw like any self-respecting ork would have, and some sort of ’eavy shoota looming over its right shoulder.

‘Tinboy!’ Da Boffin exclaimed with what sounded like real excitement. ‘Always wanted ta see one up-close!’

The ’eavy shoota opened up just as Badgit Snazzhammer broke into a roaring charge. He got three strides before his head exploded in a welter of gore and pulverised bone, and he dropped as dead as a swatted squig.

‘Zoggin’ ’eck!’ Ufthak yelled. ‘Back round da corner, ladz, sharpish!’ The tinboy was tracking its shots towards them, and in the confines of the corridor there was nowhere to take cover. He shouldered Deffrow aside and scrambled back out of the line of fire, and a moment later the rest of the mob joined him, hunkering down on either side of the doorway. More thuds of shoota fire sent gouts of blood spraying across the corridor’s floor and over the threshold of the ruined door, as a couple of stragglers got well and truly crumped. As soon as there were no more orks in view, the tinboy’s gun fell silent.

‘Why’d you run for?!’ Mogrot demanded from the other side of the gap. Ufthak found faces turning towards him, red eyes focusing on him. He’d given a command, and the boyz had followed him. The only problem was, he’d told them all to run away.

That wasn’t going to wash for long, if he wanted to stake his claim as boss. He had to prove himself once and for all as the bigger ork.

‘Dat wasn’t runnin’,’ he declared firmly. ‘Dat was a… strateejik wivdrawal.’

‘If it looks like a squiggoth, an’ it smells like a squiggoth…’ Mogrot began menacingly. He drew himself up, fingering the activation switch on his chain-choppa. ‘I don’t fink you’z proper boss material, Ufthak. Don’t fink you should be givin’ orders.’

‘Yeah?’ Ufthak shot back, making a rude hand gesture. ‘Why don’t you walk over ’ere an’ say dat?’

Mogrot growled, deep in his chest, and took one step…

…then paused, frowning distrustfully at the gap between them. Ufthak tried not to look at the same bit of floor, but it was no good. Even Mogrot’s brain had remembered why they were hiding in the first place.

‘Gimme a grot,’ Mogrot grunted, reaching out behind him. One of the mob’s hangers-on was seized and passed forwards with a squeak of protest, and Mogrot tossed it into the corridor.

The tinboy’s shoota opened up immediately, and the sad, mangled remains of the grot thudded to the floor.

Ufthak cursed inwardly. That would have been hilarious, as well as useful. Nothing for it, then.

‘We need to kill da tinboy,’ he declared, as though Mogrot had never challenged him. ‘An’ we ain’t doin’ dat from here, an’ we can’t get to it ta kill it easy, coz it knows we’z orks, right?’

The ladz nodded. All of that seemed logical.

‘Wot you finkin’?’ Da Boffin asked, scratching one ear and looking at him thoughtfully as he rocked back and forth on his monowheel.

Ufthak beamed.

‘All right, ladz, I’z ’ad a great idea…’

‘’Ello, I’m a humie!’

Humie spaceships, it turned out, had a lot of decent metal sheeting lying around if you had access to a burna to cut it off the walls, so Wazzock had been put to work. Before too long, the mob had several large chunks, to which they’d strapped the more intact of the red-robe corpses they’d made on the way to the door.

‘We’z just humies, walkin’ down dis corridor!’

Ufthak’s plan was proper cunning if he said so himself, which he did, so that was okay. The tinboy must be able to tell humies from orks, or the humies would never let it walk around their spaceship. Therefore, it stood to reason that if it saw humies in front of it, it wouldn’t shoot.

Into the corridor they went, a few boyz behind each metal plate, with dead humies on the front to confuse the tinboy. Simple, but genius.

‘Wot if it don’t work?’ Deffrow hissed.

‘S’gotta work,’ Ufthak argued. ‘I’m talkin’ in humie, ain’t I? An’ makin’ my voice squeaky an’–’

The shoota opened up again. The three boyz behind the foremost plate leaned into the impacts on what had suddenly become a makeshift shield, but the metal sheeting wasn’t designed to stand up to firepower of that magnitude. One of them came apart as a shell punched right through, and Ufthak suddenly had guts over his steel toecaps.

‘Zog it!’ he shouted. ‘Next plan!’

The boyz hadn’t got far down the corridor before the tinboy had rumbled them, but they’d reached Snazzhammer’s body. They dropped their apparently useless humie-shields and opened up, pouring fire into their enemy.

Which stopped short of reaching it, swallowed up and destroyed by some sort of force field.

‘I’ve ’ad enuff of dis,’ Ufthak growled as another ork was blown apart. He reached behind his back and pulled out what he’d decided he’d call a bombstikk. It was basically half the mob’s stikkbombs all taped together courtesy of Da Boffin’s toolbox, and by ‘basically’ he meant ‘exactly’. He took a quick two-step run-up and hurled it overarm.

When that hit the tinboy’s force field it was like Gork himself had stamped on them all.

Ufthak’s vision cleared a moment or so before his ears stopped ringing, and he picked himself up and peered down the corridor.

The Mork-damned thing was only still standing, wasn’t it?

‘Dat woz s’posed ta blow its bloody arms off!’ Mogrot yelled.

‘Nevamind!’ Ufthak shouted. ‘It’s stunned, innit? Scrag da zoggin’ fing!’

He ran forwards, snatching up the Snazzhammer as he passed it. Sure enough, the tinboy was standing wonky, and making confused buzzing noises. Shots began to fly past him from behind, and this time one or two of them raised sparks as they struck home: the force field had been overloaded.

Lenses in the tinboy’s face whirred as the machine suddenly seemed to recover itself, and the ’eavy shoota lowered to target him.

Ufthak threw himself into a slide as the big weapon began kicking out shots again, and he felt the shiver of impacts as they chewed up the floor behind him. The tinboy’s power klaws crackled into life as whatever tek powered it realised that he was getting close, but it was a shade too slow: it lunged for him, looking to crush him, but he was already sliding between its legs and lashing out with the Snazzhammer.

Which bounced clean off with barely a scratch caused, since he hadn’t activated the power field.

‘Mork’s teef!’

The tinboy lurched around to follow him, alarmingly fast for such a big thing. The ’eavy shoota remained steady somehow, pouring shots into the boyz that’d been following him, but the two power klaws were all for Ufthak. It swung at him again, and he barely dodged back from it, then ducked under the counterswing from the other arm. When the tinboy tried to clobber him on the backswing, he set his feet and swung the Snazzhammer to meet it.

He’d activated the power field this time, and it took the tinboy’s arm off at the elbow.

Laughter erupted out of him as the huge thing staggered, its balance thrown off by the sudden lack of weight on one side. The sound of its detached power klaw skittering away across the deck was the sound of his triumph.

Then it punched him in the chest with the other one.

Ufthak had never known such pain, and he’d taken shots from a beakie gun before that had left half his insides hanging out, until Dok Drozfang had stuck them back in and stitched him up once the fighting had calmed down a bit. It was like someone had let buzzer squigs the size of grots loose on his chest, and that was before he flew backwards and hit the wall behind him hard enough to dent it.

He lay there for a moment, vision foggy, as the tinboy turned its attention back to the rest of the boyz. They’d now reached it and were hacking away at it with choppas, blasting it point-blank with their shootas, and were surely going to bring it down any moment now. They didn’t need him to help, he could catch his breath.

Any moment now.

‘Zog it,’ Ufthak muttered, as another boy got pulped by the tinboy’s remaining power klaw. ‘If you want somefing dun right…’ He levered himself back to his feet, ignoring the sensation and indeed the smell of scorched flesh coming from his front, and took up the Snazzhammer again.

‘Oi! I ain’t finished wiv you yet!’

The tinboy didn’t turn around, which was its second mistake, the first having been to not make sure he was properly dead. He ran at its back, crackling Snazzhammer held high, and smashed the axe side into its armour plating.

KRAKKA-BOOM!

The tinboy spasmed and fell forwards, circuits overloading and sparks shooting in all directions. Ufthak forced his own battered body to climb atop it, then raised the Snazzhammer for the killing blow, laughing as he did so. Let Mogrot try to lead the mob after this!

He saw Da Boffin raising one hand in apparent warning just as he brought the weapon down for the final time.

Everything went red.

He was on his back when his brain was actually working well enough again to figure out what was going on. He stared up at the ceiling, which looked to be blackened and scorched as though a massive explosion had washed across it. He could hear the sound of ork boots tramping past him, but no one seemed to be stopping to congratulate him on his kill.

A face appeared in his line of sight. It was Dok Drozfang, who was wearing what Ufthak thought of as his considerin’ face, which was never a sight an ork wanted to see.

‘Dok,’ Ufthak managed, although it was surprisingly hard to speak. ‘I can’t feel me legs.’

‘Well, dere’s a reason for dat,’ the dok shrugged. ‘Look down.’

Ufthak managed to do as Drozfang suggested. For a moment, he couldn’t work out what he was seeing. Then he realised that it was what he wasn’t seeing that was the issue.

‘Where’s me legs?’

‘One’s over dere,’ Drozfang said, pointing out of Ufthak’s view. ‘Not too sure about da uvver one. Or yer arms, ta be honest.’

‘Dat’d explain why dey ain’t hurtin’,’ Ufthak muttered. He frowned. ‘Wot about da hammer?’

‘Mogrot’s got it,’ Drozfang replied. ‘Said ’e’s da boss now, an’ no one argued wiv ’im.’

‘Ungrateful grots,’ Ufthak managed. Air was definitely becoming a problem, which was only to be expected when you looked to be missing the bottom part of your lungs. ‘Well, see us off den, dok. No point waitin’ – may’z we’ll get back ta Gork ‘n’ Mork so dey can put me in anuvver body an’ I can get back ta fightin’ again.’

Drozfang frowned. ‘Yeah, about dat… Wot if I’z got a better idea?’

Ufthak tried not to let his trepidation show. Painboyz were useful to have about if you needed stapling back up, or a new arm sewing on, but some of them could get a bit ‘creative’ at times, especially when the patient wasn’t in a condition to have much say in the matter.

‘Nah, yer all right, dok,’ he said, managing a grin. ‘Nuffin’ ta worry about, is it?’

‘Yeah, well, I ain’t finkin’ Mogrot is da best boss da mob could ’ave,’ Drozfang replied, lowering his voice. ‘I reckon dey could do wiv da sort of ork wot has da smartz ta plan for a tinboy, an’ da gutz ta bring it down. An’ if I could fix dat ork up, he might remember da painboy wot fixed ’im, coz I reckon dat ork might be goin’ places. Know wot I mean?’

‘Wotever you’z finkin’, yer gonna ’ave to do it quick,’ Ufthak told him flatly, as darkness began to encroach on his vision.

‘Fankfully, da raw materials are at ’and,’ Drozfang grinned, and pursed his leathery lips to emit a piercing whistle. High-pitched grunts and swearing heralded the arrival of the dok’s grot ‘disorderlies’, apparently towing something heavy. They stopped next to Ufthak, and he turned his head to look at it.

It was Badgit Snazzhammer’s body. Huge, battle-scarred and untouched apart from the small point of completely lacking a head, thanks to the tinboy.

‘Now,’ Drozfang said, producing an intimidatingly large cleaver and placing it at the base of Ufthak’s neck. ‘Dis may ’urt a bit…’

Ufthak hadn’t really registered the blow given that, percentage-wise, he wasn’t losing much more than he had already. The staples that the dok used to fix his head onto Snazzhammer’s neck – which had been ‘tidied up’ with the same cleaver – only registered as minor pricks of discomfort.

What really hurt was the injection.

‘You’d be lookin’ at a day or so before you’d be up an’ about, normally,’ Drozfang told him matter-of-factly, as burning agony began to spread downwards from what remained of his neck into what had until recently been Snazzhammer’s. The dok tucked his syringe back into his belt. ‘But fanks to Dok Drozfang’s Healin’ Juice, da nerve endin’s will connect right up an’ you’ll ’ave full control in a matter of minutes. Course, dere’s always da side effects,’ he added.

Ufthak tried to swear at him, but he was too busy convulsing.

The tinboy looked to have been the humie’s last real line of defence of their ‘fancy worky bitz’, as Snazzhammer had called them. There were a few bodies scattered here and there on the route to the massive double doors from which an eldritch glow was emerging, but little sign of an organised resistance. The alarms going off suggested that perhaps Da Meklord’s ‘destruction’ techniques had been extremely effective. All Ufthak knew was that they weren’t helping his headache much.

‘’Ere we are, boss,’ Drozfang said with a grin, gesturing at the one open door. ‘Da rest of da ladz should be in dere. Time ta make yer grand entrance.’

Ufthak bared his fangs, squared his – or possibly Snazzhammer’s – shoulders, and strode in as though his neck weren’t still leaking a bit, and his left leg weren’t dragging slightly.

It was a vast space, as big as one of the humie’s buildings which they seemed to put up simply to sit in and have a proper good think about their Emprah. However, whereas those had lots of empty space in, perhaps in order for the thoughts to fly around properly, this one was jam-packed full of… stuff, was the only term Ufthak could come up with. Huge metal pillars which gave off a glow that only partially obscured the runes carved into them. Enormous pistons, crackling with energy. Giant wheels larger than his outstretched arms. And yet, despite how impressive it all looked, there was the distinct impression that this place wasn’t fulfilling its function. It was heavy with potential, an almost palpable heaviness in the air. It was as though the room itself were yearning for something.

Which probably wasn’t Da Boffin and Mogrot Redtoof having a scuffle, but that was what it currently had.

‘Gerroff it!’

‘I’m da boss, I get ta push da button!’

‘Yooz gonna break it, you stoopid–’

‘Gonna break yer face in a minute–’

Mogrot, facing away from Ufthak, reared back with the Snazzhammer in his grip, ready to knock Da Boffin’s lights out with it.

Ufthak grabbed it just under the head and yanked it out of his grip. Mogrot whirled around, fumbling at his belt for his chain-choppa, but pulled up short when he came face-to-chest with Ufthak. His brow creased in uncommon cogitation.

‘Wot da zog…?’

‘Sumfin’ like dat,’ Ufthak agreed, and nutted him.

Mogrot went down. Ufthak winced, and reflected that possibly hadn’t been the smartest thing to do with a stapled-up neck, but what was done was done. He brandished the Snazzhammer over his head.

‘Anyone else wanna be boss?’

There was a distinct lack of volunteers, as the rest of the ladz took a sudden interest in their boots. They weren’t sure if Badgit had got a new head or Ufthak had got a new body, but they weren’t planning to argue with either eventuality.

‘Dat’s settled, den,’ Ufthak said with satisfaction. He could almost feel Dok Drozfang grinning behind him, but that was fine. Fair was fair, and he’d see that the dok got his due. A few extra teef passed his way, the occasional ‘volunteer’ for surjury, that sort of thing.

‘You done ya mek fing yet?’ he asked Da Boffin, who shook his head.

‘Mogrot wanted ta press da button.’

‘Well, get on wiv it,’ Ufthak commanded him. He wasn’t interested in pressing buttons: that sounded like a mek job.

Da Boffin’s device was surprisingly small, and was clamped to what looked like some sort of humie control panel. It had three buttons on it: ‘STOP’, ‘GO’ and ‘MEGA-GO’.

‘Wot is dat, anyway?’ Ufthak asked.

‘Dis,’ Da Boffin said gleefully, ‘is da Warp Dekapitator. You know how humies choose where dey’re gonna fly through da warp?’

‘Yeah?’ said Ufthak, who didn’t.

‘Well, dey leave tracks behind in da warp. Sorta like squig trails, only nuffin’ like dat,’ Da Boffin explained. ‘Dese are humie mekboyz, so dey prob’ly came from a humie mekboy planet, where dere’s loadsa shiny tek Da Meklord can nab.’

‘Right,’ Ufthak nodded. Shiny tek sounded good. Da Meklord would get the best, obviously, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be some left over.

‘So when I turn dis on, it uses da energy of dese warp engines to cause a katastroffic warp implosion!’

Ufthak frowned. ‘Is dat good?’

‘Course it’s good!’ Da Boffin scoffed. ‘S’got a lot of fingies, syllables, innit? Like, “grot” is bad, but “Wazbom Blastajet” is good.’

Ufthak nodded. It was a powerful argument.

‘Dis ship gets sucked into da warp, right back to da startin’ point of da last warp jump it made, and den pops back out again,’ Da Boffin continued. ‘An’ it sucks all da rest of da ships around in wiv it too, includin’ Da Meklord’s fleet. Job’s a good’un!’

He reached out, and pressed the button labelled ‘MEGA-GO’.

The control panel sparked. More alarms started sounding, but these weren’t the high-pitched whiny klaxons that denoted a relatively minor problem like rampaging, murderous orks aboard the ship. These were bone-deep and throbbing, and bore an inherent sense of panic. If a star could have screamed a warning, it would have sounded like that.

All around Ufthak and his mob, the glowing, crackling parts of the room began to move: slowly at first, then faster and faster. Ufthak frowned. He could have sworn that something apparently solid just passed through something else equally apparently solid.

‘Is dat s’posed to ’ap–’

There was a stomach-churning, resonant bloorp! and everything turned inside out.

It took Ufthak a few moments to check that his arms weren’t now five miles long, or that his stomach hadn’t swelled to the size of a planet, both of which felt like they could be viable options. He definitely had an annoying tic in his left eye, but that was less unusual, and he glowered at Da Boffin with it.

‘If dat’s your definition of “good”…’

Da Boffin held his hand up for quiet. Ufthak was about to clobber him for disrespect when he heard it too.

It was the screaming of tortured metal. And that, Ufthak realised, was not fancy words. It was the voice of actual metal, and it was actually screaming, and the whole thing was overlaid with a bubbling, wet giggle. From outside in the corridor came the slithering thump of something malformed dragging its huge bulk along with nothing more than brute strength and an endless malice directed at all living things.

‘Course,’ Da Boffin commented, ‘dere’s always da side effects.’

‘All right, ladz!’ Ufthak barked, laying about him. The boyz hadn’t coped well with the katakrumpic warm diffusion, or whatever it was Da Boffin had said, and most of them were still on their backs or counting their fingers to see if they still had the same amount – which was causing some problems in Deffrow’s case, as he couldn’t now remember how many he’d started with. A few knocks with the haft end of the hammer got them back into it, however. ‘Da entertainment’s comin’! Up ya get!’

The other massive door slammed back, and something made of blood and steel and endless hunger squirmed in, all sharp teeth and barbed tongues, and glistening black talons that reached out hungrily for flesh.

Ufthak grinned at it. Time to see what his new body could do.

‘On me, ladz! One, two, free…’

‘WAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!’

About the Author

Mike Brooks is a speculative fiction author who lives in Nottingham, UK. His work for Black Library includes the Warhammer 40,000 novel Rites of Passage, the Necromunda novella Wanted: Dead, and the short stories ‘The Path Unclear’, ‘A Common Ground’ and ‘Choke Point’. When not writing, he works for a homelessness charity, plays guitar and sings in a punk band, and DJs wherever anyone will tolerate him.

An extract from I Am Slaughter by Dan Abnett
from the anthology The Beast Arises Volume 1.

The Chromes were relatively easy to kill, but they came in ferocious numbers.

Eight walls of Imperial Fists boxed one of their primary family groups into a scrub-sided valley east of the blisternest, and reduced them to burned shells and spattered meat.

Smoke rose off the hill of dead. It was a yellowish air-stain composed of atomised organic particulates and the backwash of fyceline smoke. According to the magos biologis sent to assist the undertaking, sustained bolter and las-fire, together with the chronic impact trauma of blade and close-combat weapons, had effectively aerosolised about seven per cent of the enemy’s collective biomass. The yellow smoke, a cloud twenty kilometres wide and sixty long, drained down the valley like a dawn fog.

The magos biologis told Koorland this as if the fact had some practical application. Koorland, second captain of Daylight Wall Company, shrugged. It was a non-fact to him, like someone saying the shape of a pool of spilled blood resembled a map of Arcturus or Great-Uncle Janier’s profile. Koorland had been sent to Throne-forsaken Ardamantua to kill Chromes. He was used to killing things. He was good at it, like all his company brothers and like every brother of the shield-corps. He was also used to the fact that when things were killed in colossal numbers, it left a mess. Sometimes the mess was smoke, sometimes it was liquid, sometimes it was grease, sometimes it was embers. He didn’t need some Terra-spire expert telling him that he and his brothers had pounded the Chromes so hard and so explosively that they had vaporised part of them.

The magos biologis had a retinue of three hundred acolytes and servitors. They were hooded and diligent, and had decorated the hillside with portable detection equipment and analysis engines. Tubes sniffed the air (this, Koorland understood, was how the magos biologis had arrived at his seven per cent revelation). Picting and imaging devices recorded the anatomies of dead and living Chrome specimens alike. Dissections were underway.

‘The Chromes are not a high-factor hostile species,’ the magos told Koorland.

‘Really?’ Koorland replied through his visor speakers, obliged to listen to the report.

‘Not at all,’ the human said, shaking his head, apparently under the impression that Koorland’s obligation was in fact interest. ‘See for yourself,’ he said, gesturing to a half-flayed specimen spread-eagled on a dissection stand. ‘They are armoured, of course, around the head, neck and back, and their forelimbs are well formed into digital blades–’

‘Or “claws” ,’ said Koorland.

‘Just so,’ the magos went on, ‘especially in sub-adult and adult males. They are not harmless, but they are not a naturally aggressive species.’

Koorland thought about that. The Chromes – so called because of the silvery metallic finish of their chitin armour – were xenosbreed, human-sized bugs with long forelimbs and impressive speed. He thought about the eighteen million of them that had swarmed the valley that afternoon, the sea of silver gleaming in the sunlight, the swish of their bladed limbs, the tek-tek-tek noise they made with their mouthparts, like broken cogitators. He thought of the three brothers he’d lost from his wall during the initial overwhelm, the four taken from Hemispheric Wall, the three from Anterior Six Gate Wall.

Go tell them not naturally aggressive.

The Chromes had numbers, vast numbers. The more they had killed, the more there were to kill. Sustained slaughter was the only operational tactic: keep killing them until they were all dead. The rate at which the Imperial Fists had been required to hit them, the duration, the frenzy – no damn wonder they aerosolised seven per cent of their biomass.

‘Chromes have been encountered on sixty-six other worlds in this sector alone,’ said the magos biologis. ‘Twenty-four of those encounters took place during compliance expeditions at the time of the Great Crusade, the rest since. Chromes have been encountered in large numbers, and have often defended themselves. They have never been known to behave with such proactive hostility before.’

The magos thought about this.

‘They remind me of rats,’ he said. ‘Rad-rats. I remember there was a terrible plague of them down in the basements and sub-basements under the archive block of the Biologis Sanctum at Numis. They were destroying valuable specimens and records, but they were not, individually, in any way harmful or dangerous. We sent in environmental purge teams with flame guns and toxin sprays. We began to exterminate them. They swarmed. Fear, I suppose. They came flooding out of the place and we lost three men and a dozen servitors in the deluge. Unstoppable. Like the sub-hive rats, the Chromes have never behaved this way before.’

‘And they won’t again,’ said Koorland, ‘because when we’re finished here they’ll all be dead.’

‘This is just one of a possible nineteen primary family groups,’ said the magos biologis. He paused. Koorland knew that the magos intended to address him by name, but, like so many humans, he found it difficult to differentiate between the giant, transhuman warriors in their yellow armour. He had to rely on rank pins, insignia and the unit markings on shoulderplates, and that information always took a moment to process.

The magos biologis nodded slightly, as if to apologise for the hesitation.

‘–Captain Koorland of the Second Daylight Wall–’

‘I’m second captain of the Daylight Wall Company,’ Koorland corrected.

‘Ah, of course.’

‘Forget about rank, just try to remember us by our wall-names.’

‘Your what?’

Koorland sighed. This man knew more than seemed healthy about xenosbreeds, but he knew nothing about the warriors built to guard against them.

‘Our wall-names,’ he said. ‘When we are inducted, we forget our given names, our pre-breed names. Our brothers bestow upon each of us a name that suits our bearing or character: a wall-name.’

The magos nodded, politely interested.

Koorland gestured to a Space Marine trudging past them.

‘That’s Firefight,’ he said. ‘That brother over there? He’s Dolorous. Him there? Killshot.’

‘I see,’ said the magos biologis. ‘These are earned names, names within the brotherhood.’

Koorland nodded. He knew that, at some point, he’d been told the magos biologis’ name. He hadn’t forgotten because it was complicated, he just hadn’t cared enough about the human to remember it.

‘What is your name, captain?’ the magos asked brightly. ‘Your wall-name?’

‘My name?’ Koorland replied. ‘I am Slaughter.’

Click here to buy The Beast Arises Volume 1.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 4 in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

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