The roar of weapons had increased in volume by now, and I began to pick out the sounds of several different kinds. The unmistakable sibilant bellow of bolter fire I'd already recognised, as I said, but behind and around it was a syncopation of stuttering slug-throwers, and the sharp bark of a shotgun or two. Something about the cacophony struck me as vaguely familiar then, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. There was another sound too, which surrounded and overlaid the others, an inchoate roaring like a deephive sumpfall[126], which I felt sure I ought to be able to identify, but which somehow continued to elude me.
'We seem to be coming to a hold or something,' Jurgen said, and I nodded, surprised. We'd passed through a few open spaces in our erratic progress, but the last really vast chamber we'd seen had been the hangar bay in which the Thunderhawk had docked; and the deeper we'd penetrated into the hulk, the more constricted our way had seemed to become.2 Now, though, the pattern of echoes indicated an open space far larger than any we'd so far come across, and I began to move more cautiously again. The passageway we were following seemed to be coming to an end, a rough rectangle of brighter illumination growing ahead of us, although as yet I had no idea what we'd find when we reached it.
As we did so, the noise, no longer attenuated by distance, battered at us like a physical force. I edged forwards a final pace or two, finding the corridor ended in a vertiginous drop, and glanced down, flattening myself against the last metre or so of the metal wall. My breath seemed to congeal in my chest, and I muttered a few expletives, in a combination I'd only previously heard in a gaming establishment when one of the patrons turned out to be carrying a few of his own cards for luck.
Jurgen was, as always, more succinct. 'Orks,' he said, as though they might somehow have escaped my notice. 'Thousands of 'em.'
TWENTY
AT FIRST GLANCE, which was more than enough for me, my aide's estimation of the greenskins' numbers seemed depressingly accurate. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be more of them. From our vantage point high on its sloping rim, we were able to look down into a vast hollow at the heart of the hulk, hundreds of metres across and almost as many deep, seething with activity. And everywhere my eyes fell there seemed to be more of the creatures, squabbling, hurtling around randomly in ramshackle vehicles, or busying themselves battering metal into new shapes, for purposes which eluded me. There were at least as many gretchin among the larger creatures, of course, scurrying around on errands for whichever ork offered them a measure of protection, being casually swatted out of the way by any others whose progress they impeded, or engaging in vigorous altercations of their own. A pall of smoke drifted over the section where the bustle seemed greatest, where the mekboyz[127] and their stunted servants were busying themselves with the construction of new engines of war; but strain my eyes as I might to penetrate the choking shroud, it and the distance combined to obscure any useful details about what they might be up to.
For a moment or two I found myself wondering how a space this big could exist in such a densely tangled accumulation of derelict ships. Then my eye fell on the ragged edge of the deck plates I was standing on, and the answer came to me, as I registered the unmistakable marks of crudely wielded tools: the orks had created this steel cave themselves, hacking away at the metal surrounding them with all the brute force they were capable of, scavenging the pieces to construct fresh weapons and the other necessities[128] required to support their colonisation of the hulk. Now the reason for the armada which had met us on our arrival at the orkhold became horrifyingly clear. They'd been the stragglers, too late to board the hulk with the others before it returned to the immaterium, impelled by some innate drive deep in the orkish psyche to migrate with the warp tides wherever they led3.
'Holy Throne,' I breathed, as the full implications of this horrifying new development dawned on me. Serendipita wasn't just facing the possibility of stealthy infiltration by the genestealers; as soon as the Spawn of Damnation had drifted close enough, a torrent of orkish invaders would erupt from it like pus from a boil, intent on nothing but bloodshed and destruction. Duque's cordon of SDF boats would never be able to stem such a tide, and unless I found some way to warn them, the planet's defenders would be caught completely by surprise.
I reached for the comm-bead in my ear, then let my hand fall without activating it. There was no one close enough to hear the transmission, except possibly the greenskins, and the longer they remained unaware of our presence the better. I drew back a little further into our refuge, but none of the creatures so much as glanced in our direction, those close enough to have noticed our arrival completely absorbed in the source of the gunfire which had first attracted our attention. As happens so often among orks, a quarrel seemed to have broken out between two of the innumerable factions among the horde, and they'd promptly begun to settle their differences in the usual fashion of their kind. Around a dozen were firing weapons at their rivals, with the general lack of accuracy I'd had plenty of cause to be thankful for during my encounters with them on Perlia, while almost twice as many hacked and belaboured one another with a variety of blades and cudgels, and several hundred of their fellows called out encouragement or insult[129] from the sidelines, heedless of the danger of being felled by a stray round or two.
The opposing leaders were easy enough to pick out, being bigger than any of their compatriots, and brandishing the largest and most destructive weapons in sight. Each wore crude armour, decorated with the barbarous glyphs which the greenskins employ in place of both heraldry and script, and Jurgen nodded sagely. 'Clan leaders,' he said. 'Both used to being warboss[130].'
That made sense. I'd seen on Perlia how different tribes would put aside their enmities in the pursuit of a greater conflict, but the old rivalries would remain simmering beneath the surface, leaving such alliances fragile at best. (A circumstance which had worked strongly in our favour, once I'd inadvertently killed the warboss keeping the others in line, and the whole invasion force had fallen apart as his would-be successors turned their guns on one another instead of the Imperial forces opposing them.) If I knew orks (which I did rather more than I'd have liked since Perlia), neither would be willing or able to back down, for the fear of a potential challenger scenting weakness and attempting to usurp their position, which was fine by me: the longer the battle below kept the greenskins' attention diverted, while Jurgen and I slipped away quietly, the better I liked it.
I took a last look around the echoing steel cave, gauging its extent as best I could, and felt a faint shiver of apprehension. It would take us hours to circumvent, particularly if we did our best to remain at a safe distance from it to minimise the possibility of discovery, and the chances of the Thunderhawk still waiting in the hangar bay by the time we reached it were minimal. Not for the first time I reminded myself that minimal and non-existent were far from synonymous, and that crucial distinction had made all the difference between survival and death often enough by now to ram the lesson home. (Though not nearly as thoroughly as the ensuing decades were to do, as circumstance and ill-luck forced me to apply it over and over again.)
127
A torrent of liquid falling into the sump, or lowest levels, from higher up in a hive; some last for years, or even decades. Given the enclosed nature of an underhive, the echoes they raise can be quite literally deafening if appropriate precautions aren't taken.
128
A consequence of the constituent vessels hairing been brought together by the warp currents, so that their physical structures had become intermingled rather than coterminous; a state of affairs rendered permanent by the hulk's periodic sojourns in the real universe.
129
An orkish word, referring to the greenskins' equivalent of tech-priests, although their rites are as primitive as the rest of their culture. Instead of propitiating the machine-spirits which serve them, in the manner of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the mekboyz appear to terrorise them into acquiescence.