by Guy Haley
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Chapter 1 – The Red Waaagh!
Chapter 2 – Grukk Face-Eater
Chapter 3 – Mogrok’s Offer
Chapter 4 – Da Drop
Chapter 5 – The Big Scrap
Chapter 6 – After the Big Scrap
Chapter 7 – Frikk in Trouble
Chapter 8 – The Big Burny River Battle
Chapter 9 – Big Mouth Versus Fat Mork
Chapter 10 – Mogrok Comes Clean
About the Author
Legal
eBook license
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
CHAPTER 1
THE RED WAAAGH!
From a dozen brawling orkish domains, the Red Waaagh! gathered: a billion orks pulled in the wake of the rust-ships of Warlord Grukk.
Grukk the Unstoppable, he liked to call himself. Grukk Face-Eater, he was more often called. Grukk the Zogging Maniac, the boyz said.
They did this behind his back. He really was a maniac.
Grukk’s fleet of blunt-nosed kill kroozers smashed across the cosmos, pillaging half a dozen star systems. His followers multiplied with every victory, attracted not by the fact of these conquests, for many a lesser Waaagh! has accounted for more devastation, but by the sheer violent finesse with which Grukk achieved them. By the time the Red Waaagh! dived into the Karasoon Warp Rift en route to Sanctus Reach, its ships filled space as far as the eye could see; the largest Waaagh! for centuries. Members of every clan and faction imaginable had thrown in their lot with the Face-Eater. As a representative sample of ork-kind, it was unsurpassed in recent millennia, the kind of gathering a xenobiologist would have given his eye or tooth to survey. In truth, had any xenobiologist got close enough to accomplish such a study, he would have given a lot more than his tooth in payment for the privilege.
With this cloud of marauding violence travelled the Red Sunz Mob – Uggrim, Snikgob, Bozgat and their Stompa, Fat Mork. From system to system they wandered, following a path of bloodshed and teeth away from the domains of the tau in the galactic east, heading ever corewards.
‘Dunno why,’ said Uggrim, when surly Snikgob asked him why. They were in the hangar of the Evil Sun Rising. (This vessel they had acquired with a small amount of cunning and a large number of teeth from the crazed Pirate Boss Gunmouth Nazog, but that’s a tale for another day.) ‘I just feel it in me bones, ya know? I reckon Mork wants me to go.’ Uggrim jerked his thumb over his shoulder at their war god sleeping soundly.
Uggrim and Snikgob said little more on this matter than that. The meks were clever, but they were orks, and proper boyz are uninterested in philosophy.
From the battlegrounds of Hurdlian to the meteor-wracked plains of Bork’s Mistake, onwards from there through an unfortunate and near-fatal brush with the arsonists of Charadon and the tyranids locked in never-ending war against them. There was a fruitful contract with a flotilla of freebooterz lost and down on their luck, and a sadly short-lived association with the deadly Dread Dok and his Kan Katastrophe Karnival… Fat Mork fought on a hundred battlefields. Sometimes the Red Sunz lingered so long in one place Snikgob thought they’d stay forever, only for Uggrim to stick his nose in the air and sniff the wind like a squighound on the chase. Days after, they’d be gone. However long they stayed, always they headed off eventually, and when they did, always they went to the galactic west.
So it was that Uggrim and the Red Sunz Mob found themselves pulled into the orbit of Grukk’s mighty Red Waaagh!, shortly before it hit Sanctus Reach. Not that Grukk or his followers knew that was what it was called, or would have cared had they known.
It is on one of the Red Waaagh!’s larger ships, the Toof o’ Mork, that we find Boss Mek Uggrim toiling, reduced in station from the Big Mek to a big mek, one among the many hundreds working their strange genius on the behalf of Grukk. Or rather, on behalf of the Bad Moon Big Mek Mogrok, Grukk’s chief adviser and aide. This is how Mogrok styles himself, and for the time being at least, so Grukk believes him to be…
‘Nah, nah, nah!’ Uggrim swung his arm in a broad arc, catching the pointy heads of a brace of gretchin with the back of his hand. He chucked his great spanner down, bringing forth a howl from one of the oilers as it smashed its foot. Uggrim shoved the gretchin out of the way and grabbed at the wires they had been fiddling with. ‘See?’ he said, pointing emphatically. ‘That one goes here, that one goes there! You thick or what?’
The gretchin grinned with great servility at him, and shrank back.
Uggrim growled and gathered himself up to his full, imposing height. He was among the biggest big meks in the Waaagh!, and had once led a small tribe himself, although he’d got rid of them as soon as he could. ‘I’m going for “or what”,’ he said. He dusted his apron off and snorted back a noseful of snot. ‘Just get it right, or it’ll be bad for you, you get it?’
‘Oooh, yes, boss, yes, boss. We geddit.’ The gretchins’ little heads bobbed enthusiastically, and all the while they shoved and pinched at the least of their number like Uggrim couldn’t see them doing it.
Uggrim groaned and ran his hand over his long face. ‘You grots are the worse grots I have ever seen. You don’t buck your ideas up, I’m going to have meself a little barbecue. Now get on with it!’ he roared.
He let them run off, tutting and cursing after them. When he was alone he leaned on railings that looked across a massive metal cavern, deep in the guts of Mogrok’s gargant, carried itself deep within the guts of the Toof o’ Mork. Hundreds of mekboyz of every conceivable subtype laboured away in its steel belly, and a hundred times as many grots. The racket in there was enough to make a boy go deaf. Runtherds bellowed at whimpering runt teams, mekboyz hallooed and shouted at each other. Power tools whined, burnas whooshed, thousands of hammers banged away. They were fitting a belly gun, the biggest belly gun Uggrim had ever seen. This sight ought to have excited him, but somehow it didn’t. Instead Uggrim felt deeply dissatisfied. What was wrong with him he didn’t like to admit, but he knew all right.
Ambition, that was what. It wasn’t his gargant. And that made him mad.
A horny nail tapped on his shoulder. Uggrim looked behind hi
m, ready to roar at the interruption. He turned it into a snarl, curling his lips back over his long fangs at Mek Snikgob, the closest thing Uggrim had to a friend.
‘You all right, Uggs?’ said Snikgob mildly, for he was well used to Uggrim’s rages. His welding mask was flipped up on his head, a greasy smoke stick jammed into the gap between his fang and one of his smaller – although no less sharp – teeth.
‘Yeah,’ said Uggrim grumpily.
‘Don’t look all right.’ Snikgob fished about in a leather shoulder bag hanging at his hip. ‘Here we are.’ He handed over a half-burned morsel with a surprised look on its face. ‘Squig on a stick – that’ll cheer you up, no worries. Lunchtime, ain’t it? I knows you, a right git when you’re hungry.’
Uggrim took the snack and looked at it dubiously.
‘Go on then,’ said Snikgob, ‘chow down.’
Uggrim growled and took a bite. It was surprisingly good, burned on the outside, half raw in the middle – just the way he liked it. He waved the creature around at the cavern, its rubbery limbs flapping with the motion. ‘All this – thought it’d be fun, ya know?’ He chomped and swallowed noisily. ‘Working together and all that, making something real big.’
‘It is fun, ain’t it?’ said Snikgob. ‘Come on, Uggs, this is a Mega-gargant. A Mega-gargant! There’s two in this Waaagh! Two! Now ain’t that something?’
Neither of them are mine, thought Uggrim. ‘Well, yeah, yeah,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s not right. Not right! Too hard, taking too long.’ He sniffed. ‘I blame the staff. These grots are worthless. Always cheekin’.’
‘Get Frikk on it then,’ said Snikgob. ‘Beat him if he don’t sort ’em out.’
‘Don’t you tell me how to beat my grot. I’d give him a right shoeing! Frikk’s guarding Fat Mork. Only one of them little zoggers I trust. Got so many meks wanting to come and look at the little sun, can’t be leaving Fat Mork alone any more.’ Uggrim stared daggers at a bunch of gretchin swinging from a plank some metres below, slopping yellow paint all over everything. They laughed at him and pulled faces. ‘Zogging Bad Moons. Not one of ’em’s got any respect,’ he grumbled, deep in his chest. ‘Ya know, I miss being me own boss sometimes,’ he said more loudly.
Snikgob groaned. ‘Don’t tell me you want those Deathskulls back, mate. I mean, yeah, our own crew, but to tell the truth, since the blue boyz went over to Bluefinga, I’m enjoying knowing me socks will be where I left ’em every morning. Gets mighty tiresome shaking down twenty thieving gits for your grog mug every five minutes.’
‘Huh. Gork’s arse, no. Want them back on Evil Sun Rising? Good riddance to ’em. When I’m a real boss, it’ll be proper orks, not blue faces.’ He gave an involuntary shudder. Perhaps he was remembering the great underpant snatch. It had been a particularly testing time for all the meks. ‘I just want to get out there, feel the stars on me face, sail the void with no big zogger tellin’ us what to do!’ Uggrim finished his squig and tossed the stick over the edge. A grot squeaked somewhere down below.
‘Steady, ye’re sounding like a freebooter.’
Uggrim glared at his friend. ‘Done that. Never again.’
‘Gunmouth,’ said Snikgob knowledgeably.
‘Gunmouth,’ agreed Uggrim. ‘Though the Dok and Happy Basher weren’t no better.’ He drummed his fingers on the railing and sighed. ‘I thought it was bad back on Garbax World, but this is worse! Thought Fat Mork was us hitting the big time, but it weren’t so. And then I thought joining up with this Waaagh! would be it. And you know what? It ain’t either.’
Snikgob grunted. His habitually sour expression became ever so slightly less sour. ‘Ain’t that true?’
‘Politics! Always the politics. Time was, you could just shoot someone in the face and get it all your own way. Not now, oh no.’
‘We’re getting old, is all.’ Snikgob gave him a sympathetic look. ‘You think one day, you play your cards right, you’ll be the biggest zogger. But there’s always, always a bigger zogger, Uggrim. Just the way it goes. You be careful. That Mogrok’s top mek round here. You rile him up, it’ll be trouble for all of us. You want to play at being king, you go ahead, but we need to find us a different Waaagh! if so. It ain’t so bad here. Look at it all. It’s exciting to be a part of.’
‘You changed your tune.’
‘Yeah,’ said Snikgob. ‘Well, pays to keep a positive attitude, don’t it?’
Uggrim frowned, his heavy brows crowding his sunken eyes. Snikgob had just said something positive, and he was never positive. Far from it.
‘Did you go funny when we was in the warp, Sniks?’ said Uggrim. He squinted at his friend suspiciously. ‘Mogrok puts a lot of faith in them shields of his, but I ain’t convinced. Bit rocky that ride. Something might have happened, something… unnatural. You ain’t got nothing unnatural in there with you, have you?’
Snikgob was taken aback. ‘What? Me? Nah! Anyways, it’s been days since we come out! What do you reckon I been doing? Drinking snotling blood down in the drop sump and waiting for me moment to pounce?’
Uggrim shrugged. ‘Weird universe, pal.’
‘Well I ain’t!’ Snikgob scowled. ‘All I is saying is that you can’t be too careful round here. You got a lot of orky know-wots, Uggs, and a lot of smarts. But you also got too much ambition.’ Uggrim’s size told the truth of that. He was bigger than most nobs these days. Good in the fighting pits, good with a spanner, that’s what they said about him. Uggrim was getting a lot of admirers, and that was a bad thing as far as Snikgob was concerned. ‘We got to make the best of what we got. We need to keep a low profile.’ Snikgob stared at his friend for a moment, as if he reckoned Uggrim should shrink a bit in order to keep said low profile. ‘I dunno. Gotta get back to work.’ He put up his hand to flip his welding mask down, but didn’t. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Nearly forgot. Speaking of big zoggers – Mogrok. He wants all the chief meks with him on the Wrath of Gork. Big meet on with the biggest boss. That means you an’ all.’
‘Zogging brilliant,’ said Uggrim. ‘Sneak and snipper in one place together. All I need.’
‘Hey!’ said Snikgob. ‘Remember what I said. Be careful. We ain’t our own operation no more. Too many ears listening. Grots everywhere, most of ’em working for Mogrok. Don’t want your arms snipped off now, do ya?’
Not really, thought Uggrim. He snarled in return.
Snikgob gave a scowl that contained just the hint of a smile. ‘That’s more like it. Proper ork face. Now, off you go.’ Snikgob made shooing motions with his hand.
Uggrim stared at him.
Snikgob curled his lip. ‘Boss,’ he said.
That was more like it.
‘There ya go, there ya go, little fella.’
In the stomach of Fat Mork, Frikk crooned over his latest racing squig – a snuffling, bald sack of flesh with big, big eyes at one end and a flatulent arse at the other. Frikk turned it over gently, inspecting its over-sized rear legs with a practiced eye. ‘Yeah, yeah. You’s gonna earn me all me money back. You’re a right little champ, you are. Yeah, that’s what you are.’
He spoke quietly. Bozgat, the third member of the Red Sunz Mob, snored gently in a hammock. The war machine’s captive evil sun burned brightly in its invisible magnetic bottle, encased by a squat cone of iron. The sun’s ruddy light spilled out into the engine room through the thick glass of the observation window, keeping it nice and cosy, which was why Bozgat liked to sleep there.
Fat Mork was sleeping too. All his systems were off-line. The killy beam-eye of his head was dark and his arms hung limply by his sides. The tiny evil sun fizzed every so often, as the Stompa dreamed cunning Mork-dreams of war and slaughter. Otherwise he was silent and lightless, as still as a spent shell casing, and possessed of as much life.
Frikk tickled his squig. Its tiny forelimbs waved and it chirred with pleasure. Frikk laughed softly.
Absorbed by his pet, he never heard Urdgrub, not until the gretchin was right on top of him.
‘H
ello, Frikk.’
Frikk whirled round to see Urdgrub’s horrid blue face half a handspan from his own. He got the lot – beady, wicked eyes, flaking lucky blue paint and killer breath in one unpleasant instant, and it frightened the life half out of him.
Frikk squealed. Urdgrub slapped his hand over Frikk’s mouth, cutting off the scream. Frikk clutched hard at the squig, which responded by sinking its teeth into his thumb. Frikk howled into Urdgrub’s smelly hand. The squig leapt for its freedom. Claws pattered on metal, and it was gone into the dark.
Both gretchin froze, staring instinctively up at Bozgat. He was short for an ork, but still much bigger than either of the grots and would beat them both to bits if they woke him up. He snorted at the disturbance and rolled over. His hand flopped out of his filthy hammock.
‘Mmmph. Gotta fix them power couplings. Yeah,’ he said sleepily.
The gretchin did not stir until Bozgat was snoring loudly again.
Urdgrub recovered first. He was a head taller than Frikk and far more confident. Somehow he’d escaped the slaughter at Garbax World and had been bothering Frikk ever since. Rather than leaving with the surviving Deathskulls to join their clanboss, Bluefinga, he’d stuck around the Evil Sun Rising when the Red Sunz had come to the Waaagh!, hiding out in its darkest recesses. Worse luck for Frikk. Frikk thought often. Ever since he’d got Urdgrub to perform one little job – one tiny bit of thievery – for his boss, he’d not been able to shake the bigger grot. Urdgrub held up a finger to his lips, shook his head and removed his hand from Frikk’s mouth.
‘You,’ hissed Frikk, his ears going flat under his grubby forage cap.
‘Me,’ said Urdgrub, planting his thumb in the centre of Frikk’s skinny chest. ‘And you,’ he jabbed a finger at Frikk, ‘owe me a fat stack of teeth, runt.’
There were runts in this life, and there were runts. Urdgrub might have been a bigger runt than him, but Frikk couldn’t handle being called so by this riff-raff, whether it was true or not. ‘Oi, oi, oi!’ he said, standing slowly, eyes darting from Urdgrub’s hands to his face. ‘Don’t you come in here calling me runt. You got no boss. One word, just one word from one of the big ’uns and you’re dead.’ Frikk gave a nasty grin, his tongue poking through needle teeth. ‘What ya think about that?’