Chapter 295: The Coward Fleet
Kian eased around the corner.
In the corridor ahead, a Gretchin was hunched over a pipe junction on the wall, listlessly turning a wrench. It yawned. It turned another bolt. It yawned again.
Gretchin were the lowest rung of Ork society: small, big-eared, sharp-nosed, roughly a metre tall, and used primarily as cannon fodder and menial labour. Combat effectiveness approximately zero. Any reasonably fit human could handle large numbers of them without breaking a sweat.
The bioscan showed only the one contact. Kian walked straight toward it.
The Gretchin was so absorbed in its half-hearted maintenance work that it didn't notice anything until Kian's armoured boots rang against the deck plating directly behind it. It shot upright immediately, wrench spinning faster, every muscle suddenly committed to looking industrious. It assumed an Ork boss had arrived. Slacking on the job meant getting eaten.
Then Kian's armoured hand closed around its neck and lifted it off the floor.
It stared at him, completely baffled.
"A human shrimp! A BIG SHRIMP!!"
It began shrieking in what sounded like a heavily corrupted dialect of Low Gothic mixed with something else entirely.
Kian tightened his grip slightly. The Gretchin's eyes bulged.
He studied the small green creature with genuine interest.
"Can you understand me?"
He hadn't expected a yes. Orks developed language through a combination of genetically encoded instinct and environmental absorption: whatever species they fought most frequently, they tended to pick up fragments of that species' language and integrate it into their own. A warband that had fought humans, Tau, and Aeldari across multiple generations might end up speaking something that drew from all three, comprehensible only to themselves.
The Gretchin nodded.
Kian relaxed his grip enough to let it breathe.
"Human shrimp! Big tin-can shrimp!!"
Frightened and excited simultaneously. But understandable.
"Where did you come from? How many Orks are on this ship?"
The Gretchin's eyes shifted. It lifted its chin with sudden defiance.
"Human shrimp is trying to trick Grotnik! Grotnik is hard-bones! Grotnik never betrays the warband!"
Kian smiled inside the helmet.
"Is that right."
He took hold of one of the Gretchin's arms and pulled. The arm came off with a sharp crack.
"AAOW AAOW AAOW IT HURTS IT HURTS!!"
The creature dissolved into tears and snot instantly, and proceeded to tell him everything.
"We come from the iron-ball planet next door! We came here for a big WAAAGH! But our ship stopped moving and now we just wait to die! Only about twenty thousand Boyz left on ship!"
Gretchin operated on a simple emotional algorithm. One moment playing tough, the next a complete informant. Kian pressed further.
"You came from the forge world? Why? Have the Orks taken it?"
His stomach had dropped slightly. A forge world under Ork control would be producing weapons for the greenskins instead of the Imperium. And the logical next target after a forge world was the agricultural world next door.
The Gretchin shook its head vigorously, sniffling.
"No no no! The iron-ball humans are very fierce! Big booms everywhere, blowing up mushrooms! Boyz love big booms! But the Mega-Boss said he owns all the human fights! Only the most WAAAGH Boyz get to fight the iron-ball humans! He said our warband is cowardly-cowards, not proper WAAAGH Boyz! He said get out or he smacks us dead! So we got in the big-flyer and flew here!"
Kian exhaled.
The forge world wasn't fallen. But what the Gretchin described was worse in a different way.
A Warboss had emerged. A big one, by the sound of it, big enough to dominate an entire system's worth of Ork infighting, intelligent enough to ration the fighting to keep it interesting, and strategically minded enough to send excess population elsewhere rather than letting it dilute the quality of his war.
He was playing a long game. He'd expelled the weaker warbands toward Secundus-496b. Ork spores didn't produce warriors overnight: fungal infestations took years or decades to generate significant numbers. This "coward fleet" was advance seeding. By the time the Warboss finished with the forge world and turned his attention this way, there would already be a flourishing Ork ecosystem waiting for him on the agricultural world, pre-grown and ready to absorb into his WAAAGH.
It was, by Ork standards, careful planning.
Kian shook the Gretchin absently, turning the intelligence over.
"You know, you're genuinely impressive in your own way. You just handed classified information to an enemy within thirty seconds. In a warband that's already been called cowards, that makes you the cowardliest coward of the coward fleet."
The Gretchin let out a sound of pure anguish.
"Grotnik is NOT a coward!! GROTNIK IS NOT!!"
Kian pressed on, watching with clinical interest.
"Look at you. No choppa, no shoota. Just a wrench. You know what that means? Nobody wanted to fight with you. The other Gretchin wouldn't even let you join their thieving crews. The Mekboys wouldn't build you a weapon. They handed you a wrench and told you to tighten bolts because no one wanted you anywhere near an actual fight. In the coward fleet, you're the most cowardly."
He took the wrench from the Gretchin's remaining hand and crushed it into a lump of scrap. Tossed it away.
The Gretchin had stopped making words. It was just producing a continuous sound of devastated self-recrimination.
And then it started shrinking.
One metre. Ninety centimetres. Eighty. Seventy.
At seventy centimetres it stopped moving entirely and died, its skeleton softening until the whole body hung from Kian's grip like a wet cloth.
Kian stared at it for a moment.
The WAAAGH-field worked in both directions. Collective belief made Orks larger and stronger. Collective contempt, or an Ork's own complete loss of self-belief, reversed the process. The genetic programming that drove them toward growth and combat could apparently run backwards. An Ork who genuinely believed it was worthless would simply stop being viable.
He filed this information carefully and moved on.
The further he advanced, the more the corridor structure opened up into a network of interconnected chambers. And the chambers were full of mushroom growths: dense clusters of fungal bodies in various stages of development, each cluster a Ork production facility.
Gretchin were managing the mushroom fields everywhere. When they saw him, the screaming started.
He raised his left forearm and let both heavy-barrel lasrifles open up on minimum power, minimum frequency. The beams were narrow and short at this setting, but each one punched a substantial hole through a Gretchin-sized body. He walked forward and they died in front of him and scattered in every direction, shrieking.
He checked the mission counter.
Thirty-plus Gretchin kills: 0.3 progress.
"One hundred Gretchin to one Ork Boy equivalent. Understood."
From a side passage came a Boy: two metres, heavy build, carrying a crude cleaver, apparently woken from sleep by the noise. His starting mood was extremely poor. He looked at the fleeing Gretchin around him, roared, and immediately started hacking at them.
"TRYING TO SLEEP!! WHO'S MAKING NOISE!! GONNA EAT WHOEVER WOKE ME!!"
Kian raised his arm, switched the lasrifles to full power, and put a single beam through the Boy's skull. The head detonated. Various biological materials distributed themselves across a wide area. The Boy dropped.
Mission counter: plus one.
The Gretchin, watching a Boy go down in a single hit, scattered with renewed urgency.
Kian decided guns were wasteful for Gretchin. He holstered everything, picked up speed, and started using his feet.
Full armour load plus his own body weight put him close to a tonne. He hit the Gretchin clusters at a run: left foot, right foot, each impact like a hydraulic press. He swung the Heavy Stubber like a club with his free hand, the barrel connecting with anything in range and separating it comprehensively from its structural integrity.
He was laughing.
"I am every Gretchin's worst nightmare! The terror of small green things! HAHAHAHA!"
"RUN!! THE SHRIMP-KILLER IS HERE!!"
"GET THE BIG BOYZ!! GET THEM NOW!!"
The Gretchin stampeded forward, and their noise finally reached the warship's interior.
Kian rounded a corner and found forty-odd Ork Boys coming the other way at a dead run, weapons drawn. They saw him and their expressions shifted from alarm to delight.
A fight. An actual fight. Something worth hitting.
They raised their cleavers and charged, screaming WAAAGH with everything they had.
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