Chapter 303: The Mekboy
Kian dropped through the hole and grabbed a cable on the way down.
It swung him in a wide arc across the open space and he hit the far wall hard — ceramite construction, covered in carved reliefs. He let go on impact and dropped, landing squarely on top of a statue's head.
He took a moment to register where he was.
A warship chapel. A massive one.
Of course. Imperial Navy vessels were essentially cathedrals that happened to travel faster than light — enormous volumes of interior space given over to shrines, prayer halls, scriptoria, confessionals. The one he'd landed in was a full ship's chapel, tall enough that the ceiling disappeared into shadow, wide enough to hold a regiment at worship.
It should have held statues of the Emperor and the Primarchs around the walls. The Emperor's statue was still there — battered, cracked, half the face missing, but present. The Primarch niches were empty. Stripped out. Presumably melted down for Ork ship components at some point in the last several centuries.
The rest of the chapel had been converted into a rubbish tip.
Towers of salvaged metal junk filled every corner, stacked high between the columns and the empty niches. Scrap heaps rose to half the ceiling height in places, packed in so dense that the original floor tiles were invisible. And crawling over every surface of every pile — dozens of Gretchin, chattering constantly, picking through the debris for useful components.
Kian lay flat on the Emperor's head, perfectly still, and watched. Nobody had noticed him.
One Gretchin, down below, found something in a heap — a straight metal pipe, maybe a metre long, good diameter. He held it up and lost his mind.
"EEEE!! GIVE THIS TO DA MEK!! DA MEK WILL MAKE A GREAT BIG LOUD GUN!!"
He clutched the pipe to his chest and went sprinting toward a walled-off section of the chapel — sheets of corrugated iron nailed together into a rough workshop, from which came the sounds of hammering and sparking.
Inside: a Mekboy.
Left hand holding a saw. Right hand holding a hammer. Power pack on his back, two mechanical arms extending from it over his shoulders to handle additional tasks simultaneously. He was building something with the focused intensity of a craftsman who had been asked to do exactly what he loved most and given unlimited materials.
"I WANNA MAKE A GUN!! I WANNA MAKE A BIG LOUD GUN!!"
The Gretchin ran up and waved the pipe in his face.
The Mekboy looked at the pipe. He looked at it for a good two seconds with the evaluating expression of someone who genuinely understood what they were looking at. Then he grabbed it.
He laid it on the workbench. Grabbed a fistful of wood scraps and metal fragments. Welding torch, saw, hammer — a burst of noise and sparks — and in under ten minutes, he set down a completed Ork slugga. Functional. Armed. Apparently assembled out of pure confidence and debris.
"GIVE IT!! GIVE IT TO ME!!"
The Gretchin was drooling.
The Mekboy looked down at him with an expression of patient, practiced exploitation.
"You did good, little one. But dis ain't enough." He picked up the pistol, loaded a handful of iron nails into the magazine — Kian blinked slowly at this from his elevated position — slapped the magazine in, pointed it at the ceiling, and fired.
DakDakDak!!
It worked. It fired. Iron nails, apparently, counted as ammunition.
The Gretchin stared at the gun with the expression of someone whose entire concept of the possible had just been revised.
The Mekboy kicked him across the workshop floor and pointed at the nearest scrap heap.
"Bring me ten more pipes just like dat one. Den you get your own gun."
And off went the Gretchin, sprinting for the rubbish pile, scrabbling with both hands, working himself half to death chasing a reward he was never, statistically, going to receive.
"Heh. Idiot."
The Mekboy tossed the slugga into a corner and went back to his workbench.
Then a Nob kicked through the workshop wall.
"BOSS SAYS!! HE WANTS A WAAAGH!! A PROPPA WAAAGH!!
YOU GOTTA MAKE 100 GUNS RIGHT NOW!! DA MUSHROOM FIELDS ARE PUSHIN' OUT BOYZ AGAIN!! DEY'RE ALL READY TO CHOP!!"
The Mekboy stopped. Looked up.
"New Boyz? From da mushrooms? Dose fields been dry for a month — no fightin', no spores, nuthin'. How'd dey start up again all sudden-like?"
"HUMIE!! DA SHRIMP TIN-CAN!! ONE HUMIE COME FROM DEEP SPACE AND BROUGHT US A PROPPA FIGHT!!
DA MUSHROOMS WENT MENTAL!! EVERYONE'S BUZZIN'!! DA SHRIMP HID SOMEWHERE BUT WE'RE GONNA FIND HIM AND BASH HIM DEAD!! WE NEED MORE BOYZ, MORE GUNS, MORE EVERYTHING!!"
The Nob left at the same speed he'd arrived.
Kian lay very still on his statue head and thought about this.
He'd gotten maybe forty percent of that — half-Ork, half-Gothic, spoken fast — but the meaning was clear enough.
His arrival had done exactly what he'd been afraid of. A warband on the edge of stagnation, slowly losing cohesion as the WAAAGH-field faded, boring itself to death — and then one human shows up and starts a fight, and the whole system reboots. Spore fields producing new Boyz. Orks getting stronger. Mekboys making weapons faster. The field feeding on the violence and growing.
Down below, the Mekboy was already three guns into his production run. A queue of newly-spawned Orks was forming at the workshop entrance to collect weapons.
The longer this continued, the worse it would get. More Orks, better-equipped, all of them increasingly tuned to fighting him specifically. In the worst case scenario he could picture: every Ork on the hulk in powered armour, shoota in hand, actively hunting for him through the corridors. The WAAAGH-field didn't have a ceiling, not really — the more you provoked it, the more it could do.
"This isn't working," Kian murmured to himself, watching the weapons queue grow. "I can't fight a field that gets stronger every time I kill something. I need a different approach."
He looked around the chapel, thinking.
Time to stop playing their game.
☆☆☆
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