Fezex tilted its head, its lone eye rolling upward as if trying to remember something. On that hideous face, though, the expression looked less like a human recalling a memory and more like a rotting fish trying to make a face.
"You mean those humies in hard shells who charged in from outside a few standard days ago?"
"They're all dead. Every last one."
"When they first came in, they were pretty impressive. Their guns were roaring loud enough, and they turned the first few thousand greenskins into meat paste. But..."
"There are three million greenskins in here. Your hard-shell friends only had a few thousand. A few thousand against three million. Even someone bad at math can work that out."
"And it wasn't just the greenskins that killed them. The Bloodletters crawling up from the deep decks got involved too. They hit a few humie squads from behind in the corridors. As for the Genestealer hybrids, they simply infiltrated one of the humie patrol teams and tore them apart from the inside."
It cocked its head and went on in a tone that suggested it was reminiscing about a fine meal.
"The screams were lovely. Sweet."
Lawson's expression did not change.
He had not held out much hope to begin with. But hearing it confirmed with his own ears that all seven thousand of them had become nameless corpses inside this hulk still sat badly with him.
He forced the feeling down.
"What about the weapons and equipment those Guardsmen left behind?"
He asked his third question.
"The guns, the ammunition, the heavy weapons. A seven-thousand-man assault force wouldn't have come in carrying light."
Fezex curled its lip disdainfully.
"The greenskins took it all. Don't you know them by now? If it shines, if it can be held in the hand, or if it spits fire, they drag it back to their nests. The guns, the ammo, the armor, all of it got hauled back to their camps."
"Where are the Ork camps?"
"Heh heh heh. You're planning to march into the main camp of three million greenskins and rob their armory? Worm, you've either got mushrooms growing in your skull or maggots."
Lawson ignored the sneer.
He truly had no intention of staging an armed raid on a camp holding three million greenskins. He was not some Khornate lunatic whose brain had been split in half with a chainsword.
But he needed weapons.
Urgently.
So Lawson shifted the angle of the question.
"Other than the greenskin camps, is there anywhere else on this hulk where weapons are stored? An armory, a weapons locker, a munitions bay, any place that can reasonably be called a weapons cache."
Fezex's one eye narrowed slightly.
Lawson caught the flicker of hesitation in its expression at once.
That was not the hesitation of something searching for an answer. It was the hesitation of something that already knew the answer and was weighing whether it ought to say it.
The warp imp's nature was at work.
Even with its ability to lie shackled by the true-name oath, it would still instinctively try to preserve leverage through silence.
After all, the oath forbade deception and deliberate omission, but only in response to what had actually been asked.
If the other party had not asked the precise question, that gray zone was where warp imps lived.
Too bad for it, Lawson had asked exactly the question.
And at the same moment, Lawson's fingers tightened.
"Gkkk, wait wait wait!" Fezex writhed violently in the iron grip around its throat, its pitiful little wings flapping madly. "Stop squeezing! Stop! I'll tell you!"
Lawson loosened his grip slightly.
"There is one."
Fezex sounded deeply reluctant.
"Not far from here. Maybe two hundred meters away, along a side maintenance passage on Deck Seventy-Five."
"It used to be a small shipboard weapons reserve from one of the warships that became part of this hulk. It's hidden behind a collapsed corridor. The entrance is covered by rubble and warped metal plating. The greenskins never found it."
"Those mushroom-heads have nothing in their brains except iron slag and dung. They only loot what they can see at a glance. The door to that armory is completely covered by a collapsed section of bulkhead. From the outside, it just looks like a dead wall."
Lawson stared at Fezex for several seconds.
The true-name oath was still active.
If it had spoken falsely, the warp contract sigil would have lashed back at once.
It was telling the truth.
"Lead the way."
Lawson shoved Fezex's neck slightly forward, indicating the direction.
"You're going to carry me around by the throat?" Fezex let out an outraged shriek.
"What else? Put you down and let you walk? Let you slip into a wall and vanish?"
"I swore on my true name! I can't lie!"
"What you swore," Lawson said flatly, "was that whatever you said would be true."
"You did not swear that you would not run the moment I wasn't watching. You chose the wording yourself."
Fezex's expression froze for an instant.
Its lone eye spun rapidly as it replayed the exact phrasing of the oath in its mind, and within a fraction of a second it realized Lawson was completely right.
Its oath only covered the truth of what it said. It placed no restriction on its freedom of action. It absolutely could have slipped into a warp-softened section of wall somewhere and vanished into the seam between realspace and the immaterium.
"You're not like an ordinary humie soldier."
"Move."
Lawson did not answer the probing remark.
Still gripping Fezex by the throat, he led the five Deathsworn out of the wrecked shuttle.
Before crossing the corridor outside, Lawson first confirmed the positions of nearby Ork patrols through Shared Awareness.
Scattered gunfire and distant explosions echoed through the hulk. Most likely one greenskin tribe had started fighting another over loot again.
In greenskin society, aside from fighting enemies, the most popular pastime was fighting each other.
Lawson took advantage of the window.
The six men moved through the corridors in a silent, efficient formation.
Number One scouted ahead. Numbers Four and Five watched the flanks. Numbers Two and Three guarded Lawson in the center. Lawson's left hand remained clamped around Fezex's throat, while his right held the boltgun with its single remaining round.
Though Fezex was being throttled as they moved, it was still a warp-creature, and its awareness of the surroundings far surpassed that of a human.
It could smell the rough, violent scent of Waaagh energy radiating from greenskin souls.
"Don't take the passage on the left," Fezex said suddenly in a low voice.
Lawson stopped at once.
"There's a pack of greenskins over there tearing something apart. More than twenty at least."
Through Shared Awareness, Lawson had Number One verify it. Number One climbed into a vent shaft and peered out toward the left-hand corridor.
Sure enough, in an open compartment roughly forty meters away, a group of Ork boyz and gretchin were noisily dismantling some piece of ancient Imperial equipment into parts.
The warp imp's information was accurate.
So they changed course.
Roughly fifteen minutes later, they reached their destination.
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Oh, you like the story? Wow, who knew. Go ahead, drop a review and throw some power stones maybe I'll be motivated to keep going.