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Translated from Russian using GPT. Errors in meaning and style are inevitable, sorry.

Chapter One. Birth

There is no peace among the stars.

Only endless slaughter and bloodshed,

and the laughter of thirsty gods.

Despair, that is the lot of mortals...

Wait, hold up. Why are you all so cheerful?

What do you mean, "we'll give it a bash in a sec"?!​

Humans are born in blood and to cries of pain. Orcs, on the other hand, sprout peacefully from the mycelium. The process of an orc developing from an embryo is, in many ways, quite similar to that of a human. Orc embryos likewise multiply their cells, grow skin, calcify their bones, tense and relax their muscles, and strengthen their lungs, breathing filtered air inside the birthing zygote. Actually, no, wait. Not that similar after all.

Orcs grow their lungs, heart, muscles, and bones full-sized from the start. Solid, dependable, ready to work. Even before birth, an unborn orc's huge paws, tipped with sharp claws, clench into fists, and that grip is comparable to the grip strength of an adult human. Its maw opens and closes by reflex, though for now it bears only its first, relatively small teeth. Which are already bigger than human ones. A newborn orc's tusks will be no larger than a human thumb.

The moment an orc feels strong enough, this muscular newborn, with tender green skin, an innocent smooth little face, already fully formed and cranky in the way only a baby can be, gnaws and claws its way out of its protective membrane, then gets to its feet.

Its birth is marked by a small cheerful explosion of earth, chunks of the birthing zygote's shell, and shreds of mycelium. The whole process takes no more than a few minutes. Just a moment ago, nothing gave the slightest hint that a new living creature was about to appear, and then a couple of minutes pass, and there he stands in the middle of the little crater: whole, sturdy, full-grown, if freshly born, an orc, squinting his little red eyes at the sun in a way that is almost funny. He sniffs in annoyance, pats at his face, darts a look around, then studies his paws thoughtfully. All of this, the orc is seeing and feeling for the very first time.

The birth of an orc is complete.

And only now comes the turn of cries and blood.

Chapter 2. The Yoof Mob

Orks get stronger the more of them there are. And this is not some smarty-humie guff about "together we are strong." No, literally. An ork can lift more, run farther, and chop deeper when he does it alongside other orks. To an ork, this is natural knowledge, as basic as breathing, yelling, making a choppa, kustomizin' a shoota, and krumpin' assorted weaklings. So from the very moment they are born, orks bunch together.

There is, however, one subtle point: they can't all gather up at once, because then there'd be no chance for a bit of a bash. And if there's no bashin', then what's the point of living?

So the orks that had just hatched out on the wasteland formed up into little mobs and had themselves a small fight.

They had hatched in a strange, empty place. With a bit of imagination, the surrounding landscape could be recognized as an ancient battlefield. Or a "big bash," as a particularly eloquent ork might have called it. Across the lifeless, barren ground... all right, to put it plainly, a solid sheet of sun-cracked clay... there were scattered rusty mounds made of nearly rotted-to-dust iron junk and green patches of ork mycelium. The mycelium spread dark green across the rust-crumble, ran like cheerful green moss through the shade and the cracks, and here and there the seemingly dead wasteland was decorated with sharp thorny shoots reaching upward. These were special growths of the fungal mycelium, conidiophores.

Had orks possessed any inborn tracker's instincts, they would have realized that the wasteland was inhabited. It lacked the mushrooms that usually grew thick wherever the mycelium spread. There were no squigs either, the basis of the ork ecosystem, and no grots, those small semi-sentient orkoids, harbingers of the coming of orks. Most likely somebody had been harvesting here, or grazing their squigs. But alas, that somebody, pitiful weaklings that they obviously were, had fled as far away as possible from this new crop of raging young orks.

And rage they did.

Quite a lot of time passed before the newborn ork became aware of himself. In his mind there spun the word Vazdakka. In Orkish, that could be translated as "Fast Shot," or even "Quickshoota." Then again, orks have no problems with reproduction in principle, so no one would have had any unfortunate associations with such a name.

The young ork wanted to shout his name. To announce himself to the world. He filled his lungs with air, raised his choppa above his head, and threw his face up toward the sky. But the maw, which had never yet spoken a word, betrayed him, producing only a bubbling, hoarse squawk. This sent Vazdakka into a second-long fury, and he punched his stupid mouth with the fist gripping a six-shoota.

That hurt.

He no longer wanted to hit himself.

Vazdakka looked around. Nearby, four other young orks were wandering across the field. These, apparently, were his own lot. At least lately they had been instinctively sticking together, trying not to kill one another. The ones who were "not our lot" had already been bashed and had shamefully fled.

Bashed, all of them.

But not all of them had run.

Some had stayed here forever.

In the form of badly chopped-up corpses.

Or not all that badly. For example, one ork lay sprawled on a rise with a broken-off chunk of choppa buried deep in his skull. Other than the rough, slanted, toothed blade jutting from his head, he had no wounds at all. Though the sun had made his green skin go quite dark.

Not far from Vazdakka, maybe ten yards away, stood Sarf. Vazdakka had no idea how he knew that name. Sarf was intently gnawing on a severed ork head, holding it in both hands like a squirrel with a nut. Presumably, the head belonged to the headless body lying at Sarf's feet. The ork-cannibal wore an expression of pure delight.

Sarf pulled the чужая башку from his maw and inspected it critically. It had been partially scalped, but there was still plenty of meat left on it. By this point Sarf already had three nearly clean ork skulls. He had fastened them to his belt by threading old wires he had found nearby through their eye sockets. When he walked, the skulls clicked amusingly together and clapped their toothless jaws, still held in place by the last remnants of sinew.

Another ork came up to Sarf, grabbed the headless body, dragged it away from him, and started eating it.

This was stupid.

Ork-meat tasted bad.

Vazdakka looked around, found a patch of earth overgrown with greenish ork mycelium, walked over, squatted beside it, set down his six-shoota, scooped up a pawful of dirt veined thick with fungus, and stuffed it straight into his maw.

Mmmm...

Tasty!

The ork who was eating ork looked at Vazdakka strangely.

"I'm Vazdakka!" Vazdakka said proudly, thumping himself in the chest with his fist.

"I'm Morkush!" the ork answered, and tried to copy Vazdakka's gesture, but instead smacked himself in the face with the arm of the corpse he was holding. Apparently by accident, because he immediately snarled in anger, sank his teeth into the dead hand, tore off a finger, and crunched the bones with relish, losing interest in further conversation.

Vazdakka looked around. A little farther off, two orks had dug into one of the rusty mounds. One was thoughtfully rolling a rounded charred thing back and forth. The other was deftly strapping two sheets of rusted iron with ragged holes in them onto himself. Two more were cackling desperately, pointing at the corpse with the chunk of choppa stuck in its head.

The sight was, in itself, exquisitely ironic.

But one of the orks pointed at the corpse and said, "Look, uzbog!"

A human translator might render that as "dark from the sun." But ork thoughts were always more practical, and more brutal. Really, uzbog was closer to "smoked," or maybe "roasted," in the broadest sense. There was a reason orks used human language from time to time. Their own concepts were always deep, sprawling, and without clear boundaries.

"Look, smoked one!" may not strike haughty eldar or intellectual humans as the highest form of humor. But let us not forget, our orks are only a couple of weeks old. They have not even properly learned how to laugh yet. They merely hooted a bit, growled once or twice, poked the "smoked one" with their feet, and moved on.

This must be one of the greatest oversights of non-ork researchers. Orks, without the slightest doubt, whether because of the ease of their existence or in spite of it, and thanks to their considerable resistance to both psychological and physical trauma, are inclined to exist in a state of constant cheer and elevated spirits. And so, perhaps, nearly everything in their culture bears a certain trace of... humor?

Possibly some examples of the madness and apparent illogic of their behavior may be explained by a peculiar ork... irony?

That was, admittedly, a rather bold hypothesis.

Forgive me. I have strayed from the subject of my account.

At this very moment, Vazdakka was thoughtfully examining the nearest rust-red mound. It was as though a lamp lit up in his brain, illuminating a beautiful hook-shaped blade with a predatory scythe-edge.

"Choppa!" it dawned on Vazdakka.

He urgently needed to find a choppa. Or find something that could be made into one.

Vazdakka ran to the most promising-looking heap of rusty earth and began digging with his choppa. He dug quite successfully, burying himself nearly half a pace down in less than a minute. Then he looked carefully at his right hand and discovered a choppa in it.

Vazdakka did not remember where he had got the choppa from, but he was very pleased that he already had one.

"WAAARGH!" roared Vazdakka at his discovery and swung the choppa up in a magnificent arc. Then he brought it down on a badly placed rusty pipe jutting out of the junk heap. The pipe snapped under the mighty blow. Growling with satisfaction, Vazdakka admired the sharp edges of the choppa and the fresh nick on it.

Beautiful.

Then Vazdakka felt that his other hand was missing something.

Shoota!

Vazdakka tore back at a run to the place where he had eaten the tasty dirt. The pistol lay exactly where he had left it. Vazdakka snatched it up.

It was a splendid six-shoota.

For a while Vazdakka simply looked at both weapons, feeling a warm sensation in his chest. Humans might have called it happiness.

What pulled him out of that feeling were the growling shouts nearby.

"Oi, you grot!"

"Maybe you're the grot!"

Apparently at least two orks had started an argument. Vazdakka rushed toward the voices. It took him less than half a minute, but by the time he arrived, there were already three orks shouting.

"Fight, fight, fight!" raced through Vazdakka's mind, and he started dancing in place from impatience, tapping his six-shoota against his choppa.

"I'll zog ya!"

"I'll rip yer teef out!"

"I'll tear ya apart!"

"Yer a grot!"

"I'll zog ya!"

"Zog? I'll knock yer teef out right now!"

It took Vazdakka about half an hour to realize that this was simply a normal ork conversation, and very unlikely to end in anything. Orks drifted in and out, joining the discussion and wandering off again.

Vazdakka got bored and started prowling around. He found a thoroughly rusted heap of wreckage that rose especially high and decided to climb it. The heart of an ork demanded that he stand on top of it and roar, so that all these grots would see how dead hard Vazdakka was.

Vazdakka reached the top easily and looked around.

The landscape was monotonous.

And then suddenly, something under his foot gave way with a crunch.

Vazdakka began toppling backward, but his bare backside came down on a sharp metal splinter, which made him roar even louder than he had intended and leap higher than he had ever leapt in his life. Then he came crashing down the heap of rusted scrap, rolling all the way to the bottom in a cloud of rust and dust.

The crash drew the other orks over.

At the moment when he had reached the highest point of his jump, Vazdakka had managed to glimpse something on the horizon.

"WAAAAAGH!" bellowed Vazdakka, hauling himself out from under the pile of junk and shaking both weapon-filled hands in the air. "I seen big iron ork!"

"Dat's Gork! Or Mork!" Sarf immediately bellowed back, giving a joyful hop. The skulls on his belt clapped their jaws in unison. Sarf tilted his head down toward them, as though listening, then wandered off, having lost interest in Vazdakka's discovery.

Vazdakka, however, saw none of this.

He had already turned toward the place where he had seen the outline of the majestic iron ork and ran toward it, still holding both weapons over his head, either roaring or shouting with delight. He did not yet know what "Gork" and "Mork" were, but he already dimly felt that they were good. No, this could not really be called divine revelation, and in general such complicated notions would have been far too difficult for a newly born ork to grasp...

Then again, for any ork.

But he felt that "Gork" and "Mork" were something fun and interesting. Perhaps there would be shooting there. And chopping. Something like the promise of a huge firework display and a whole heap of tasty treats to a human child. A promise of pure happiness and an ocean of delight.

So Vazdakka, without a second thought, hurled himself in the direction his heart led him, promising happiness.

Vazdakka had run no fewer than a hundred steps before he tripped and fell. He landed on his belly and skidded along the ground. Since he did not let go of either weapon and was still holding his hands over his head, he met the almost completely rusted-through sheet of metal sticking out of the earth directly in his path with his face. The blow caught him on the jaw and tusks, and the scrap failed to withstand the impact, disintegrating into ragged flakes.

Snorting rust-dust from his nose as it settled all over him, Vazdakka suddenly realized that he was more tired than he had ever been in his life.

And so he decided to lie there for a bit.

After some time Morkush came up to him. He was still dragging along the partly eaten ork corpse.

"Wot's over dere?" Morkush asked the prone Vazdakka phlegmatically.

"Ork. Big. Iron. Dat's Gork-Mork!" Vazdakka answered with delight.

"Where?" Morkush asked, a little more interested now.

"Dere!" Vazdakka tried to point with his face, but despite energetic efforts, failed. He had to resort to complex verbal explanation. "Over dere, right 'ere, I mean dere... zog! Where me head's lyin'!"

Vazdakka spent a minute thinking, trying to grasp the complicated speech construction he himself had just produced. Morkush, however, had the better angle from up above and calmly trudged off in the indicated direction. After a while the other orks followed him, drawn along by herd instinct.

Vazdakka rested, got up from the ground, and before following the others, looked back.

He looked over the field, pitted with the faint little hollows left by the hatching orks. A few unlucky corpses. Torn-up junk heaps. Green patches of ork mycelium. Such a familiar landscape.

Perhaps some feelings not unlike human ones flickered through him. After all, he was leaving behind his carefree childhood...

"Oh, dirt!" barked Vazdakka, bent down, and crammed a couple of juicy handfuls of soil threaded with mycelium into his mouth. Crunching the earth on his teeth with relish, he went to catch up with the others. Then he stopped, roared, shook the choppa in his left hand, thumped himself twice in the chest with his right fist, went back for his forgotten pistol, and ran after the others, never once looking back again.

That is why Vazdakka did not see how the ork who had been called "uzbog" suddenly lurched to his feet with a growl, bared his teeth, clenched his fists, and looked around. Not seeing any danger nearby, or any other orkoids... though that was much the same thing... and finding nothing suspicious in the immediate vicinity, meaning nothing alive, Uzbog calmed down a little. Then he spent some time feeling at the shard of sharpened metal jutting out of his head. After which he shuffled along after the departing mob of yoofs, guided more by instinct than by anything else.

Chapter 3. A Little Bash

Walking was boring.

The young orks, or yoofs as orks themselves called them, would definitely have started bashin' each other, but first they were distracted by an angular flying machine passing overhead. Painted yellow, it moved at a respectable height, trailing thick black smoke behind it. Though it kept making sharp, diving maneuvers, overall the thing was flying in much the same direction Vazdakka and the others were going.

"Dat's a flyboy!" Sarf informed everyone cheerfully.

Any grown ork would have pegged him as a proper odd git from flashes of insight like that. The yoofs, though, simply accepted such things as facts. Feeling a fresh surge of strength and interest, they hurried after the "flyboy" for a while, but soon even they realized you could not catch a flyboy on foot. If these had been humans, they would already have stopped to rest three times over, but the orks only now began to feel properly tired. They slowed down little by little. They did not collapse from exhaustion, though, only drifted apart a bit.

Vazdakka began thoughtfully poking at the ground with his choppa. It was awkward, always carrying weapons in his hands, because he kept forgetting them somewhere. He would certainly have lost both his six-shoota and his choppa already, if the others had not been carrying the same sort of weapons around, thus reminding Vazdakka that smacking yourself in the face with a pistol was more effective than doing it with a fist. Sarf, true enough, had hooked his choppa onto a wire at his belt, right next to the "'eads." Very convenient. The others too kept finding one thing or another and turning them into useful contraptions on the move. Vazdakka, though, had not been very lucky so far.

He had a little pouch made from the skin of an ork's leg, peeled off like a stocking, with three teef inside it, but the skin had shrunk, and neither the six-shoota nor the choppa would fit in there. Still, on the way he had found a shiny bit of white metal untouched by rust. Sensing in his gut that the thing might come in useful, Vazdakka had put it in his mouth and kept walking like that.

It was not comfortable.

That was why he had started digging through a heap, hoping to find a coil of wire, or maybe...

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a gunshot.

Someone was shooting very close by.

Vazdakka ran toward the sound. The others followed his example, and soon the whole mob was standing around a little green-skinned body.

"Wot's dat, an ork?!" someone asked in outrage.

"Nah, some kind of grot!" came the entirely reasonable reply.

And indeed, the creature was maybe five times smaller than Vazdakka. Tiny little paws. No, an ork could not possibly be that much of a weakling. The only thing preventing them from settling the matter completely was that the body had no head. A shot from someone's six-shoota had blown half of it away, leaving only the lower jaw with its tongue hanging loose.

Without letting go of the corpse he had been steadily eating over the course of the journey, into which he had conveniently stuck his choppa and six-shoota, and you are better off not knowing exactly where, Morkush reached out a huge paw toward the little dead thing, grabbed it by the upper arm, and yanked sharply.

The arm came off.

Morkush inspected the limb he had acquired. Sniffed it. Then sank his teeth into it. He tore off a chunk, chewed thoughtfully, and rolled his red eyes toward the sky.

"Nah, not an ork," he ruled.

Vazdakka tried cutting some strips of skin off the dead runt to make himself belts. But each time he sliced one free and tested it for strength, the thin skin tore apart. Vazdakka did not give up, each time trying to cut off a thicker strip. He really needed a good, useful belt.

The others watched him fuss with it.

Apparently the sight was entertaining, because the sudden monstrous roar caught them all off guard.

"Wot d'you think you're doin'?! I didn't say you could!"

A couple of the yoofs, though, were sharper than the rest. They had noticed someone approaching. The roar served as a signal. Two from the yoof mob opened fire at once. Fire came back at them too.

To Vazdakka, it seemed to come from every direction at once.

For a moment Vazdakka just stood there, confused. It took him a little while, but eventually he realized this was a fight. About forty yards away stood an unfamiliar big ork, maybe half again as large as Vazdakka or any other yoof in their mob. The ork had a cool spiky klaw and a lot besides. Vazdakka did not stop to look closely. He raised his six-shoota and fired at the big ork.

The bullet went about ten yards to the right and a couple of yards low.

But it would not be fair to say Vazdakka missed.

He hit a runt who had picked the wrong moment to poke his head out from behind a heap, clutching an oversized six-shoota in both hands. The impact of a single blunt-nosed bullet, no bigger than a human's big toe, was fatal. The little body flew backward in a spray of blood.

Vazdakka and Morkush were left alone over the corpse of the first runt. The rest of the yoofs had already scattered. Somewhere to the right, someone was shouting joyfully and chopping a runt apart. Two more on the left were doing the same.

Morkush tossed aside the severed arm of the runt, roared, and charged straight through a pile of scrap while holding the half-eaten ork corpse out in front of him. He smashed into the rusty wreckage in a cloud of dust and plowed right through it, leaving a deep furrow behind him. At the end of his charge he caught a little green runt who had been firing at him in a panic, grabbed him with his free hand, since the other was still holding the corpse as cover from bullets, and bit the runt's face off.

The runt let out a desperate shriek with what remained of it.

Bullets whistled around Vazdakka, but he saw no reason to care. He moved closer to the big ork and fired again. Once more Vazdakka hit something, just not the huge ork. About ten yards from the big ork another runt was running. Vazdakka's bullet caught him as he changed position after a shot and knocked him to the ground, tearing a fine chunk out of his belly. A lump of purple guts spilled onto the dusty earth.

"Hm. Maybe I could make a belt for me choppa outta those," flickered a half-formed thought through Vazdakka's head.

"Dem guts is mine!" shouted Vazdakka.

The other yoofs were shouting too, though. The little grots attacking them shrieked in their thin, squealy voices while blazing away with six-shootas grotesquely oversized against their tiny bodies. In all that racket, it was unlikely anyone heard Vazdakka.

By now the runts were almost all gone, and the other yoofs had started shooting at the big ork too.

Nobody was hitting him.

Morkush roared again, yanked his choppa out of his improvised shield, and charged forward, baring his maw savagely.

And it was him they hit.

A bullet struck him from behind, in the leg just above the knee. Vazdakka was sure it had not been him who shot Morkush. At that exact moment his pistol had nearly fallen apart in his hands and he had been busy fixing it. But one of their own had definitely done it.

Morkush dropped as though chopped down by a choppa.

Still, he had built up a good head of speed, so after he fell his momentum carried him another five yards through the air before he finally buried his face in the boots of the big ork with the klaw and stopped. The headless, armless corpse slipped from Morkush's grip, but did not lag far behind its master, rolling up after him under its own steam.

At that moment, from the right, Sarf hurled himself at the big ork and brought his choppa down with a wild roar. The big ork casually swatted it aside with his bare hand, knocking the yoof's choppa away, and without breaking the motion cracked Sarf across the face with a ringing backhand.

Sarf staggered.

For a second, he was too stunned to move.

He even dropped his choppa.
Вот рабочий перевод второй части. Я держала тот же режим: рассказчик ровный, орки кривые, короткие и довольные жизнью.

Vazdakka, grinning wide, came a little closer and fired again.

He hit.

And this time he hit what he meant to.

Vazdakka's heart was beating hard and steady. He bared his tusks as ragged waves of sharp delight rolled through him at the thunder, the screams of the dying, and the general warm, cozy feeling of a proper fight. And now that feeling of comfort and joy suddenly shot up to the level of pure bliss.

This time Vazdakka had hit!

Only a hive-worlder unexpectedly gifted twelve extra hab-cubes, or a dark eldar who came away from a raid with twelve new slaves, could even begin to understand that bright, hot joy, hot as a lasgun shot, the kind that makes the brain seem to boil with cheerful bubbles.

Vazdakka's blunt-nosed bullet, a little dented and therefore almost square, flew from the slightly crooked barrel of his six-shoota and struck the ork with the iron grabba right in the chest.

Vazdakka snorted with delight and nearly choked on his own spit. He swallowed loudly, and along with the spit swallowed the shiny bit he had still been carrying in his mouth.

He forgot about it at once.

If Vazdakka had been shooting at a human, that thirty-two-gram lump of lead would have punched a hole in the body visible from a good distance away.

The big ork with the toothy grabba looked thoughtfully at the bullet stuck in his hide.

Then he flicked it off, the way humans flick dust from their clothes.

"Awright, enough!" the big ork suddenly barked.

That was enough to make Vazdakka stop yelling, firing, and grinning. He was still too young to resist the instinctive ork urge to obey someone bigger and stronger.

"Okay," said the abruptly calmed-down Vazdakka, lowered his weapons, and went over to the runt he had shot first.

He found lots of interesting things on it. Little bags, little cases full of junk. Some bit of metal he did not understand but very much needed. And a belly-bag sewn from squig-hide, into which all this could be stuffed. Another pistol, too. Not as pretty as Vazdakka's six-shoota, but still a fine find.

What snapped Vazdakka out of his blissful state of lootin' was furious growling.

It was Sarf and Morkush, who for some reason had not calmed down from the big ork's threatening shout at all. The big ork had Morkush's head pinned to the ground under one foot and was holding Sarf by the face with one hand. But both yoofs kept struggling wildly.

At last the big ork put his iron grabbin' klaw to use. He lowered it and seized Morkush in its toothed hydraulic grip. But either he could not see too well from above, or he simply mixed things up, because what he actually grabbed was the headless, armless corpse. Then the corpse started kicking like it was alive, as the klaw hit it with a savage burst of electricity.

"I said enough!" the big ork roared again.

But by now there was no stopping Morkush and Sarf. Howling with fury, they both grabbed hold of the big ork, tensed their young muscles, and actually lifted his huge bulk off the ground. Surprise flickered across the big ork's sullen face. He shoved Sarf away, stepped back, and pulled out a sinister-looking whip that crackled with electrical discharges all along its length.

Vazdakka watched all this in delight, not forgetting to keep lootin' the runt. Using some sharp bits of metal he had found on the same body, he rigged himself a thing made of straps and twisted scraps of dead grot clothing that looked like an ugly parody of some sort of sadist's getup. But now he could strap both pistols securely to his thighs, and his beautiful choppa to his back.

"I'm gonna bash you lot in a sec, zog!" the big ork barked a third time, now in a voice much calmer, and somehow far more frightening.

That finally got through to Morkush and Sarf. They stopped trying to topple the strange ork with the big grabba and backed off.

Then came a very important moment.

The yoofs began dividing the loot.

Vazdakka remembered being very active in the whole business, but somehow, by the end of it, he only had what he had picked up right at the start.

The big ork, meanwhile, was growling something about how they had killed his gretchins, and now he was going to kill them. Or maybe not. Then he turned and started walking off. Sarf hauled up the limping Morkush, Morkush picked up his corpse, and both of them trudged after the big ork. The rest of the yoofs went crowding after Sarf and Morkush. Vazdakka just went along with the rest, following the ork.

"So wot's up? Wot's dere?" he asked the yoof walking beside him.

"Zragmash says we gotta catch 'im a squig," the other answered. He wore a jaunty cone-shaped hat made of shiny sheet metal, the shadow of it falling across his face. He spoke slowly, stretching out his words.

"Wot, are we grots, catchin' squigs fer 'im?!" Vazdakka demanded indignantly.

"Gormash says since we chased off his gretchins, either we do dat or he bashes us dead."

"And who's dis Zragmash, den?" Vazdakka was already about to growl and go bash this Zragmash himself, but decided he ought to clarify first.

"Dat one," said the hatted yoof, pointing straight at the big ork with the grabba-klaw-electro-rippa walking ahead.

"Ah..." Vazdakka thought that catching squigs was probably fun. "I'm Vazdakka! I'm the one who shot all Zragmash's grots!"

"And I'm Gongog. And I bashed... uh..." Gongog hesitated for a second, then held up two fingers to Vazdakka. "Three grots!"

Orks understand many things on an intuitive level. And while, say, the human ability to breathe and yell is not especially impressive, the ork's intuitive grasp of machinery, expressed among other things in their ability to get almost any captured, or as orks say, looted enemy machine working, even machines of other races, is remarkable indeed. And those orks who display exceptional talent, the so-called mekboss, are capable of outright miracles.

The annals of the Imperium are full of reports of how orks, having seized a battlefield strewn with wrecked vehicles, can in a matter of hours transform what any Mechanicum of mankind would classify as scrap metal and send off for smelting into all manner of effective war machines.

Let orks capture any concentration of transport, from a yard full of city buses to a garage full of snowplows, and within a day they will turn that useless junk into some passable thing that could, with great generosity, be described as a light motor brigade. Or even an armored company, if there is enough metal lying around.

Mathematics, however, is another matter.

Orks are fairly confident around numbers.

Up to about five.

If there is more than five of something, then it is usually many.

It is important to understand that the ork concept of many, unlike the human one, is not comparative so much as evaluative. Thus, many may mean either six warbuggies or a hundred, but for warbuggies to become very many, you would need no fewer than two hundred. Orks understand such nuances intuitively, and they are difficult for other races to grasp.

So when Gongog, apparently, named the number three but showed only two fingers, he had likely not miscounted so much as gotten tangled in the reporting. Vazdakka, however, was not looking very closely at Gongog's hand, and so the trick might have gone unnoticed...

Had Vazdakka not sensed in Gongog's words a certain inner contradiction to his own earlier claim that he alone had completely exterminated the enemy.

Sensing this, he looked more suspiciously at Gongog.

And suddenly noticed on Gongog's back a striking and peculiar construction made from rusty lengths of rebar bound together with scraps of wire, hide, and, possibly, guts. The rods were decorated, that was how Vazdakka perceived it, with predatory sharp spikes made from cleverly bent fragments of thick sheet metal. On the spikes hung roughly chopped slabs of ork meat.

Gongog hitched his choppa more comfortably and said angrily, "Wot you starin' at?"

"Waahhggk," said Vazdakka, which in human speech might be translated as "pretty." To make it clearer, he pointed a finger at the construction on Gongog's back.

"Eee..." Gongog grinned in agreement and proudly drew himself up. "Dat's a rygzag!"

An unfamiliar feeling settled in Vazdakka's chest.

His little red eyes kept studying Gongog's rygzag closely. He could see that the rygzag was tragically imperfect. It needed to be bigger. Taller. It needed to be made of thick iron bits. Big hooks and spikes had to be welded onto it. And red things hung from it. Lots of red things. And it needed to be loud.

Vazdakka was getting dangerously close to the concept of drums made from steel plates when he was distracted.

"HAHAHAHA!" Zragmash thundered with laughter, the sound scarcely уступая in volume and clanging force the noises Vazdakka's imagination had just been inventing.

He was pointing at Morkush, laughing, and speaking.

"So you still drag 'im around with ya? And eat 'im too? You're a proper Gutswallow, you are! And you, Bonegnaw!" Zragmash jabbed a finger at Sarf, who had just decided to gnaw a bit of the dried meat still clinging to one of his skulls.

Sarf and Morkush both drew themselves up proudly, plainly pleased to be called that. The other yoofs let out hoarse, broken growls.

It was the first sycophantic laughter of their lives.

“Right, dis is da place,” Zragmash finally declared, and came to a halt.

Dried runt-carcasses hung from hooks riveted straight into his body. Zragmash pulled one off and, without looking, tossed it to the yoofs. Then a second followed. Morkush Gutswallow automatically caught it and stared at it suspiciously, for once not trying it with his teeth. The carcass stank hideously.

Even by ork standards.

“Fluffy’s hidin’ in dere,” Zragmash went on, waving one hand toward the nearby slope, where a suspiciously regular black opening yawned in the earth.

He kept talking.

Most of the yoofs, more or less, listened.

Vazdakka, however, got distracted.

“Ooh, dirt,” Vazdakka mumbled happily, scooping up a patch of fungus growth that looked tasty.

And realized there was loads of it here.

This time he got luckier, grabbing more mushrooms than dirt. In fact, had Vazdakka possessed even the slightest bit more inborn breadth of outlook, a quick look around would have been enough for him to draw several conclusions.

The first thing he might have understood was that the place around them was far wilder than the rusty field where they had hatched. The landscape was full of patches of ground gone green with fungal moss. The surface was speckled all over with small yellow mushrooms capped in red, the sort Vazdakka had never seen before. Logically, one might suppose they simply were not harvested here. Or were harvested far less often, and so had time to grow.

The second thing he would undoubtedly have understood, had it interested him even a little, was that they were standing among ancient ruins. All around lay spoil-heaps of concrete ground down into gravel, and these were nothing less than the traces of old workings. Gretchin or orks had spent years pulverizing the structures that had once stood here, obviously in order to get at the metal rebar inside the concrete. Smooth concrete floors were still visible in places, decorated with multicolored stains and swirls. The lines formed patterns, but it would never have occurred to any ork to clear the floor and see what those patterns depicted. What did catch every yoof’s eye, though, were the mighty steel I-beams jutting from the ground. Evidently they had once been the support girders of some enormous building, too difficult to cut free and carry off, and so a few had survived.

Vazdakka chewed his dirt and mushrooms slowly, discovering that dirt, even dirt threaded through with a dense fine web of mycelium, was not actually as tasty as he had thought.

Compared with mushrooms.

Vazdakka looked around carefully and spotted several more. One of them was rather large.

“Ooh, dirt,” he snorted again, and scooped the mushrooms up in his clumsy paws. Carefully separating one from the rest, a mushroom with a blue-and-yellow cap, he tossed it into his mouth.

Tasty!

After swallowing the others, Vazdakka wandered a little farther and was almost immediately rewarded. In the shade of a large chunk of broken concrete there were three more mushrooms hiding. The biggest he had yet seen in all his life, about the size of a big toe.

An ork big toe.

“Ooooh, dirt!” grinned Vazdakka.

He drifted a little away from the others, and by the time he came back he had already missed the briefing.

Then again, he was an ork.

Had he not missed it, nothing much would probably have changed.

“Right, off you go. You, dat way. ’Im, dat way!” Zragmash was growling, pointing with one gigantic paw. “Sayin’ it again! Don’t go in da hole! Fluffy’ll squash ya in dere! Lure ’im out into da open!”

Morkush and the other lucky git who had gotten one of the stinking grots set off in the indicated directions. They had tied the dried grot carcasses to long poles hastily made from whatever junk they had found, and were waving them about like standard-bearers of some mongol horde.

Vazdakka thought it looked beautiful.

Perhaps if he made himself a pole like that and hung something nice from it... say, Zragmash’s skull...

The thought did not have time to fully form.

Gongog shoved him roughly in the back and, squinting slyly from under his iron hat, growled:

“Wot, too scared to stick yer snout in da hole?”

It was as though someone had doused Vazdakka in boiling oil. He froze for a second, struck by a storm of emotion, then roared, throwing his maw wide open.

“What? Me? I’ll! I’ll zoggin’! WAAAARGH!”

Vazdakka whipped out both pistols and charged straight down the slope, right at the black mouth of the cave. It looked like the remains of some old service tunnel.

“Stand still! All of ya, stay ’ere! Stay put, wait, I said!” Zragmash roared, much louder, much deeper, and far more clearly than Vazdakka ever had.

Vazdakka’s battle-fury vanished like smoke in a high wind. He shoved both six-shootas back into the homemade holsters at his belt and returned to the others.

If anyone had ever taken the trouble to conduct a statistical study, they would surely have discovered that only the greenskins’ inborn need to obey bigger orks saves them from total extinction.

They stood there for quite a while.

Zragmash was talking to Sarf.

“Dese are me ’eads,” Sarf said, patting the skulls on his belt with satisfaction.

“Uh-huh,” Zragmash replied in a hoarse owl-like rasp, his attention clearly more on watching for his beloved squig.

“One ’ead’s better den no ’ead. So lotsa ’eads is better den one!” Sarf continued, developing the thought.

“Yeah, dat’s true enough. Better wiv a ’ead den wivout one, yeah,” Zragmash admitted, appreciating the depth of the observation. Then he immediately tried to produce something equally profound himself. “An’ it’s hard, too!”

Zragmash rapped his own forehead with the knuckles of his enormous paw, producing a sound like a dry branch snapping in two.

Then he yelped.

Not from pain. Orks have a rather high tolerance for pain.

Zragmash snarled:

“Da bridle! I forgot da zoggin’ bridle! Right, all of ya stay right ’ere! I’ll be back! If Fluffy shows up, grab ’im an’ hold ’im till I get back! Got it?!”

Having received a ragged chorus of confirmation, Zragmash strode off quickly behind the nearest pile of scrap.

Naturally, not even two minutes passed before Fluffy appeared.

He was the biggest squig Vazdakka had seen in all his life.

Not only because Vazdakka had never seen any other squigs.

By Imperial classification, Fluffy would have counted as a squig-colossus. He was about twice as tall as any of the yoofs. Four of them could have fit inside his mouth.

And there still would have been room to spare.

Fluffy seemed to rise from the earth itself. Apparently there had been a fold in the ground nearby, or a pit, hiding his enormous bulk until that moment. With a noisy pull through the holes of his nose, Fluffy gave a deep rumbling purr, like a cat the size of an Imperial Titan might have purred.

Then all six of his eyes fixed on Morkush, who had spotted the squig too and was now limping back toward the others as fast as he could.
Fluffy’s massive paws sank their huge claws into the stony ground, and the squig’s body, heavy as three elephants, lurched forward. Too enormous to hit full speed at once, Fluffy built up pace slowly, tearing at the earth with his claws and flinging broken concrete behind him. Each of his feet came down with a dull thud, like someone driving piles into the ground. And that dull, terrible sound kept getting closer, and closer, and faster.

“I found ’im!” Morkush yelled.

This was unnecessary. Even the yoofs could not possibly fail to notice Fluffy. But the shout snapped them out of the mild stupor brought on by the appearance of Zragmash’s riding squig.

“Grab ’im!” Vazdakka bellowed and charged straight forward, right at Fluffy. The rest of the yoofs, without hesitating for so much as a moment, rushed after him.

Only Uzbog stayed where he was.

It is difficult to say exactly when he had managed to attach himself to the mob. One can only state with confidence that the head wound had indeed affected his cognitive functions, since he did not join the others. And since Uzbog did not join the rest in their attack on Fluffy, I find it difficult to say whether the wound affected his cognitive functions for the better or the worse.

Meanwhile Fluffy thundered over the concrete, snorting loudly as he dragged air in. He was still gathering speed, and was clearly moving by the scent of the dried snotling. The very one Morkush was holding. Realizing that strangling Fluffy on his own would be a pain, Morkush ran back toward the others. After his wound, Morkush was still limping badly, and running with a broken leg did not come easily to him. Feeling through the trembling ground that Fluffy was getting closer, he made a surprisingly clever move, for an ork. He threw the stinking dried gretchin carcass one way, and leapt the other way himself.

But by then, that cunning trick was no longer needed.

Fluffy had spotted the yoofs and was running straight at them, paying no attention to Morkush at all.

Faster and faster.

Before he had run even fifty paces, Vazdakka understood that this squig had no intention whatsoever of fleeing from them. On the other hand, he had already built up such speed that if he ran past, they would never catch him.

Right ahead on the ground lay a steel beam. A mighty I-beam, hardly touched by corrosion, as wide as two human palms.

“We gotta stop ’im!” Gongog growled, echoing Vazdakka’s thoughts.

“Grab dis fing!” Vazdakka shouted, and by way of example threw himself at the beam at a run. The other yoofs with him followed suit.

“Heave, waaaah!” roared Vazdakka, giving the order.

The I-beam had to be turned toward the rapidly approaching Fluffy. The green upper arms of the yoofs bulged with straining muscle.

The beam did not move so much as a finger’s width.

Which was hardly surprising, since one end of it went deep into the concrete. Had it been otherwise, it would have been looted long ago.

“Heeeave, WAAAARGH!” Vazdakka snarled, bracing his feet on the concrete and his paws on the stubborn beam.

Fluffy had built up good speed now and was charging toward them in huge leaps that looked deceptively leisurely, each bound kicking up clouds of dust beneath his feet.

“Arrghhh!” the yoofs groaned out of time with one another.

Then, all at once, they roared together and put every ounce of strength they had into it, shouting in unison:

“WAAAAAGH!”

With a monstrously loud screech of metal, the I-beam bent and swung around toward the oncoming giant squig.

It is hard to say whether the yoofs simply got lucky and the beam had already been half-cut through, or whether the ork gods themselves helped their offspring, but at the very moment Fluffy sprang forward with a deep guttural snarl, plainly intending to mash the yoofs flat into the earth, the steel beam was pointing one end straight at him.

The I-beam, which looked like a thin little stick against the scale of the giant squig, slid into the squig’s mouth, full of enormous teeth. Fluffy was wearing something like a muzzle, a crude iron contraption that prevented him from fully closing his jaws. The I-beam slid into the half-open maw and wedged itself there, either against the roof of the monster’s mouth, still crowded with growing teeth, or against the fittings of the “muzzle” itself...

The important part is that Fluffy, despite his enormous mass and fine running start, stopped dead.

And ended up hanging on the I-beam like a fish on a hook.

“Find a chain!” Vazdakka shouted, fully embracing the role of commander.

In the very next second they were hit by a proper dust storm, as Fluffy thrashed on the beam and hurled so much dust and stone into the air. Vazdakka, like the others, conscientiously searched the ground. Knowledge of chains, gears, and other useful junk was stitched into him at the genetic level. What he did not possess was the intelligence required to suppose that finding anything of the kind in the middle of a wasteland looted over and over again was, at best, wildly unlikely.

Then again, neither did the others.

They all kept crawling around on all fours, pawing at the ground and spitting out the dust and little stones kicked up by Fluffy’s claws. He tore at the earth with a fury that was beginning to bear fruit. The I-beam was bending.

Fluffy loomed over the yoofs, who seemed to have forgotten all about him.

And then, at last, Morkush limped onto the scene.

He hurled himself at Fluffy, wrapped both arms around one of the giant beast’s legs, and hung there like a ridiculous ornament, immensely pleased with himself.

“I got ’im!” Morkush yelled.

The yoofs immediately realized that all the fun was happening without them, and threw themselves at Fluffy. Two of them ended up hanging from his snout, trying either to topple Fluffy over or to pin him down to the ground.

Vazdakka, meanwhile, ran upward, straight along the I-beam.

It is difficult to say exactly what he planned to do. Hurl himself down on Fluffy from above and pin him beneath his own weight? Punch the squig in the eye? Then again, Vazdakka had existed in this universe for only about two weeks, and perhaps one should not demand entirely coherent action from him.

In any case, he was not able to run neatly along a beam that was bending and jerking under Fluffy’s struggles. Almost at once he slipped and went rolling straight beneath Fluffy’s earth-raking paws.

But Gork, or Mork, must have been watching over him.

The speed he had built up carried him through the danger zone. Vazdakka rolled under Fluffy’s belly, sprang to his feet, and saw the short, thick tail.

Without thinking, Vazdakka jumped up and hung off it.

“Got ’im!” shouted another yoof, the one who had been luring the squig from the other side with the grot. He had run over to join the fun as well. At that moment he was hanging from Fluffy’s second leg.

“Bring ’im down!”

“Zog!”

“Stun ’im!”

“Zog-zog!”

The yoofs bellowed and tried to do something, anything, but for the most part they simply hung and flapped from the immense body like limp rags.

At last Fluffy snapped the I-beam completely, stood there for a moment growling dully, and then flopped down onto his belly. Most likely he was simply more tired from the run and from fighting the iron than from anything the yoofs had done, but the yoofs took it as a clear victory on their part.

“WAAAAAH!” came the joyful united cry.

“Hold ’im! Hold ’iiiiim!” thundered Zragmash over it. “I’m comin’!”

The old ork arrived just in time. Fluffy shook himself and got back to his feet, but Zragmash was already astride him, and now sat on top, affectionately kicking Fluffy with his boots and hauling hard on the levers of the hideous device he called a “bridle.”

“Wot d’you think, zog?! Runnin’, zog?! I’ll tear ya up, zog!” he crooned lovingly, until at last Fluffy quieted down and calmed.

The yoofs clustered a short way off, watching the reunion of the pair.

Finally, once he was satisfied that Fluffy was entirely under control again, Zragmash turned his attention to them.

“What’re you starin’ at? Shut yer mush-cutters. Now follow me. I’ll take ya to Mektown. Otherwise you’ll croak on the way.”

Without wasting any more words, Zragmash turned Fluffy in the proper direction.

The yoofs straggled after him.

Vazdakka was discovered sitting on Fluffy’s tail. He had stayed there the whole time, and had nearly missed the moment of Fluffy’s taming. The tail, though big, was short. So Vazdakka tried to climb a little higher and settle himself more comfortably. Upon noticing the old ork on Fluffy’s back, Vazdakka chose not to climb any farther. Zragmash inspired a certain amount of caution in him. Besides, his dried grots smelled awful.

Fluffy, apparently, did not notice the extra weight at all.

And so the procession moved on, led by Zragmash, seated splendidly on Fluffy’s back, and Vazdakka, desperately flailing about on the swaying backside of the beast.

It seemed the mob had grown a little. Drawn by the gunfire and the merry roaring from the wasteland, besides Uzbog a few more yoofs had come out. They were not carrying anything one might reasonably bash them for, and so they simply merged into the group without difficulty.

Where they were going, and why, did not occur to the yoofs to ask.

Nor did it occur to the “hunters of Fluffy” to wonder, for example, how it was that Zragmash had so neatly timed his return for the exact moment Fluffy was worn out. No one wondered either just how Zragmash had meant to hold Fluffy with six gretchin. To be fair, he had dropped a remark once or twice that Fluffy fell asleep after he had eaten his fill. And that he especially liked grots, though he did enjoy orks too...

But none of the yoofs ever managed to connect all that together inside their heads.

Very enjoyable read. Well done! It really brings ork to life.

Rational_gamer wrote:
Very enjoyable read. Well done! It really brings ork to life.

Thanks for the comment, bro. I'm keeping going just for you.

**Chapter 5. The Long Road**

It turned out that Mektown, though it loomed on the horizon and the outline of the enormous iron ork could be made out even from a small rise, was in fact much farther away than it looked. The yoofs, led by Zragmash, had already been walking for two days, and the ork city did not seem even a little bit closer.

Vazdakka spent most of the journey on the tail of the giant squig. By ork standards, it was even fairly comfortable up there. The other yoofs, for some reason, kept away from Fluffy. But Vazdakka liked riding far more than walking. The giant squig’s stiff, spike-like fur dug into the young ork’s paws. And sometimes Fluffy would pick up speed, swaying his backside, and Vazdakka got shaken from side to side so hard that his jaws clacked, just like the skulls on Sarf Bonegnaw’s belt. But that pleased Vazdakka too.

He kept trying to secretly yank bits of Fluffy’s “fur” off his back, or anywhere else he could reach. But the bony growths only snapped near the tip. Sometimes they got stuck in his paws. On the other hand, Vazdakka invented piercing. He punched one through his brow and two through his ear. The bone spikes sticking out of them were so enormous that, to a human, they might well have counted as weapons. But Vazdakka barely noticed them. He had simply smacked his face into Fluffy’s bony ridges a couple of times while riding. It hurt at first, but that passed quickly.

In the daytime it was unbelievably hot. Even the young orks, who were far hardier than most humans, grew tired. But Zragmash knew the land. At the worst of the heat, he always led them into shelter formed by rocks or deep gullies. There, in the shade, they waited out the blaze. At night, though, the desert grew distinctly cold.

Zragmash taught the yoofs to gather squig droppings and build fires. He lit this improvised fuel with the aid of a special little squig that spat out a tongue of flame if you squeezed it. First Zragmash would light the fire. Then he would pull an iron smoking pipe from the many cases and pouches hanging from him, pack it with dried mushrooms, light it again with his firesquig, draw the smoke deep into his lungs, and tell the yoofs stories.

Sometimes they even made sense.

But the yoofs listened to all of them, because if you did not listen, Zragmash might get sad. And when Zragmash got sad, he punched somebody in the gob. Sometimes Fluffy. But not always.

That was entertaining in itself, but neither Vazdakka nor the others were eager to become the entertainment.

One night, waiting until Zragmash had fallen asleep, Vazdakka and Gongog “looted” Fluffy. No, they did not steal the squig or turn him into armor. The “lootin’” amounted to sneaking up on the snoring Fluffy and yanking out some relatively thin and flexible bone-spines that grew on the giant squig’s underside. Though to tell the truth, there is no point being coy.

His backside.

If anyone had asked Vazdakka outright whose idea it had been, his or Gongog’s, he would have answered with complete confidence that it had been his. In reality he did not remember. But that it was Vazdakka himself who had been bustling around beneath the giant beast, tugging at the spikes on its arse until he finally caught a sleepy swat from a huge paw and went flying, that much is certain.

Having shared the haul with Gongog, Vazdakka set to mastering it. He was visited by vague visions of armor, spikes, braided cords. Following his instincts, Vazdakka began to create.

Orks create simply by drifting with the current of their own minds, and the current carried Vazdakka and his restless hands to the point where he began weaving Fluffy’s “fur” the way humans weave straw stalks. It went badly. The weaving was hard, Vazdakka lacked patience, and only boredom saved the effort. There was nobody around to bash, no interesting shiny things, so Vazdakka simply sat on Fluffy’s tail and wove.

His creation slowly evolved from a handy bag into a shield, then into a helmet, and eventually turned out to be a hat. Curiously enough, the style of this hat would have seemed familiar to many people on Earth. That was explained less by coincidence than by similar anatomy and purpose. Very similar hats had once been worn by Japanese peasants.

The woven hat smelled distinctly of squig-gak, but Vazdakka was sincerely proud of it. In his eyes it was beautiful. In a sense he was right. It was a kustom bit of kit, as orks called such one-off and unusual creations. And Vazdakka’s hat was unique. Unfortunately, its value approached zero due to its poor combat usefulness, but those were details.

A woven hat on his bald head gave Vazdakka shade and a faint sense of superiority. And it is precisely the feeling of superiority that triggers a whole series of complex processes in ork biology, forcing them to become bigger, stronger, and smarter.

That is to say, to become the boss.

Still, that promised to bear fruit only in the distant future, for as yet they were all yoofs, and were all still growing rapidly at roughly the same rate.

On the second night’s stop, Vazdakka learned how to sleep with an attentive expression on his face and his eyes barely closed. Despite a couple of smacks from Zragmash, he never did manage to learn how to listen. Even so, he retained certain details from Zragmash’s rambling.

By the time they came out over the giant valley called Skid, an ugly enormous scar in the earth, he already knew that it was the mark left by the crash of a “reeeal big flyin’ fing from the sky,” the thing on which the orks had first arrived here. Mektown could be seen in the distance. Oddly enough, since that first day Vazdakka had never again made out in that shapeless mass the clear outline of the great iron ork that had burned itself so brightly into his memory. And now again Mektown rose in the middle of the valley as a huge, formless heap in which no details could be distinguished.

Zragmash, with little concern for his companions, drove Fluffy straight toward the edge. The giant squig, unexpectedly nimble, flopped down onto his belly and slid down, leaving the yoofs standing at the lip of a clearly dangerous and steep descent.

Morkush, being the bravest, simply jumped after him. He immediately went rolling down in a cloud of dust. Sarf, having in turn “listened” to his skulls, nodded and repeated the procedure after Morkush. They did not seem to have broken anything, though they squealed and growled after the fall, and Morkush limped. Then again, he limped anyway. The bullet in his leg was still troubling him. That made the other orks aggressive toward him, and he bared his teeth at anyone who came too close.

Vazdakka loved the sight of orks tumbling down the slope. He hooted and yelled, running along the rim of the drop and waving his hat in excitement. On the one hand, going down like that was plainly fun. On the other, he wanted something more.

Then Vazdakka noticed that Gongog had wired some bits of iron to his “rygzag.” These were the broken remains of two guide-rails from a rocket launcher, had the orks ever bothered to identify their intended purpose. Out of the rygzag and those rails, Gongog had made something that the children of many worlds might, with difficulty, have recognized as a sled. A huge steel sled covered in spikes and lumps of meat, hideous, crooked, and ominous. Gongog growled in satisfaction at the sight of his handiwork, clambered on top, shoved off with his feet, and shot downhill.

Driven by instinct, Vazdakka managed at the last moment to spring up behind Gongog. What happened next was the greatest, finest, brightest moment of Vazdakka’s life. He and Gongog shot down the steep slope in a matter of moments, somehow managing not to overturn. And for Vazdakka it was pure, exalted, transcendent ecstasy.

Humans may experience something vaguely similar on rides such as roller coasters. But human biochemistry is arranged quite differently. Happiness catches up to a human when he realizes that the fear and danger are behind him, and that he has survived. Orks, on the other hand, experience pleasure while they are in mortal peril. They have no need of a self-preservation instinct to preserve their species. After all, they scatter spores all through their lives. They do not need to protect themselves for the sake of offspring, because their offspring will be born strong and viable at once.

Orks are made for danger and war, and very few things compare to the pure delight they feel when they stand one step from death. Vazdakka was lucky enough to taste that incredible sensation and remain alive. He had experienced speed.

And he gave it his loyalty.

Immediately after Vazdakka and Gongog, another yoof burst onto the slope. His name was Bazdug, and until that moment Vazdakka had never found any reason to remember it. Bazdug had found a sheet of iron up top, and was now descending the dangerous slope standing upright on that sheet. Humans with lively imaginations might, in this shrieking muscular monster standing on a piece of plating from an ork armored truck, have glimpsed an allusion to a snowboarder.

But Vazdakka saw only impossible beauty.

“Again!” roared Vazdakka, and started scrambling back up the slope. But climbing was hard. Besides, the rest of the yoofs had by now come down as well, in various ways, mostly like Morkush and Sarf, so Zragmash, who was nearby, barked:

“Stay put! After me, zoggin’ arses!”

And steered Fluffy toward Mektown.

Against expectation, Vazdakka found he could quite easily resist the will of the old ork. What he could not resist was gravity. He tried twice, but never managed to climb back up the slope, slipping each time and rolling back down. It turned out not to be nearly as fun as it had looked from above.

Vazdakka looked around for useful materials and unexpectedly found his hat, which had flown off during the descent. He dusted it off, jammed it back onto his bald head, stared uphill a while longer, and was finally forced to go catch up with the others.

They spent one more night in the desert before reaching Mektown.

Zragmash bared his tusks at the huge orks guarding the entrance to the ork capital. They were smaller than Zragmash, but still opposed him. Vazdakka only understood that there was somebody even mightier who had forbidden Zragmash from entering Mektown. Zragmash, however, did not seem eager to go there anyway. After handing the guards three teef for each yoof he had brought in, he shoved them toward the gate.

“Dat’s it. Yer on yer own now!” said Zragmash in his farewell speech, while at the same time managing to kick the lagging Uzbog, who had drifted away from the mob as usual. The kick gave Uzbog both the proper direction and the necessary acceleration.

The yoofs tumbled into Mektown, gaping wide and turning their heads from side to side.

**Chapter 6. Mektown**

In the end, everything made by intelligent races, for all its variety, is always measured by two standards. Even the most alien mind creates with functionality and aesthetics in view. Aesthetics, the sense of beauty, is often an end in itself. The architecture of the Imperium is either pure functionality without the slightest hint of beauty, or else the embodiment of crushing power, at the expense of technology and practicality. Enormous statues, clumsy plazas, panoramic windows stripped from sinister facades, and uncomfortable observation balconies, all meant to emphasize the greatness of those standing upon them. Sometimes these two extremes merge. A strictly utilitarian, functional object may also be aesthetically beautiful. Such as the exquisitely lovely curve of a blade whose shape has been mathematically refined for optimum killing power. That, perhaps, is perfection.

Without the slightest doubt, orks take the preservation of this balance between extremes very seriously, and in essence strive toward perfection.

It is simply that their aesthetics stand in sharp contrast to what most other races of the galaxy consider beautiful.

To Vazdakka, Mektown was beautiful.

A huge jagged heap of junk bristling with giant sharpened slabs of armor, sudden gun platforms in unexpected places, buildings vaguely resembling ork faces, careless add-ons whose rough edges stood out brightly against the crisp lines of black-and-white checks, the traditional ork pattern, all of it was full of meanin’, all of it carried a statement from its makers.

“We’z orks!” Mektown shouted at everyone who looked upon it. It shouted with every detail, breathed green fury and swagger. Every twisting street with its blood gutters hacked along the edges like wounds slicing through the piled-up mass of tapering buildings, their corners and foundations reinforced with spiked steel plates and firing slits, every smoking chimney of the mekboy workshops pouring multicolored poisonous fumes into the soot-black sky, all of it served a single purpose.

To create a feeling.

And Vazdakka caught the mood of the city. Savage delight settled in his chest and did not leave him for as long as he remained in Mektown, retreating only from time to time before other, more immediate concerns.

Mektown was the best city for an ork.

On this planet.

Driven by instinct, luck, and just a few scraps of memory from Zragmash’s parting advice, the yoofs, pushed along by heat and curiosity, plunged deeper into the cyclopean sprawl.

And found themselves on the trade square.

The trade square of Mektown, or simply the Bazaar as everyone called it, made Vazdakka’s already trembling heart beat even harder. There was so much stuff there.

Loads.

Proper loads.

Loads of dakka, loads of squigs, loads of armor.

Only the presence of huge orks loafing around, somewhat smaller orks, and orks in funny hats selling all this treasure kept the yoofs from instantly scattering in every direction and losing each other forever.

After all, it was the first Bazaar of their lives.

“We oughta kill the biggest one here and loot everyfing,” Vazdakka muttered quietly, voicing a genuinely brilliant idea. The intellectual effort was not easy, and he was unable to think coherently for the next couple of hours. Unfortunately, the others paid no attention to his mumbling.

After a brief squabble, the yoofs surged as a group toward a stall selling armor. The trader, wearing a cap that marked his status, eagerly entered into bargaining. Before long, Sarf became the happy owner of some “proppa flash armor,” in which a human observer, not without effort, might have recognized parts of a refrigerator, a washing machine, and the door of an electric oven.

The trader had all sorts of armor, and no two pieces were alike. Gongog took charge of the negotiations. He did so with a confidence that inspired the others.

“I’ll give ya two teef! For dat one, da tough armor! But dere’s gotta be two of ’em!” bellowed Gongog, crowding the ork merchant in the silly hat, who stood a full head taller than he did. The trader lazily pushed the yoof back and said,

“Nah. Take dese spiky ones instead. Two of ’em. One toof.”

“Two fer one toof?”

“Nah. Tough armor’s two teef. Dese ones is spiky though.”

“Den dese two spiky ones,” Gongog rolled his red eyes toward the sky as he performed agonizing calculations in his mind, then lowered his gaze to his hands and began folding fingers. “Four?”

“Take ’em fer three,” the merchant immediately replied.

“Done!” Gongog roared happily.

And promptly received two spiky sets of armor, parting with three teef.

Vazdakka found it hard to keep up with such complicated juggling of numbers, offers, and counteroffers, so when his turn came he meekly handed over the required two teef and received something assembled from pieces of bald automobile tires. Still, it was reinforced with thick metal plates. And it had large, beautiful shoulder guards. Vazdakka felt it lacked spikes for true comfort, but once he put it on he felt much better anyway.

Vazdakka and the others squatted off in a corner and spent some time “finishing off” their purchases a little. This is the sort of activity that absorbs an ork entirely. Vazdakka did not even notice when the whole mob, himself included, drifted from there toward the weapons market.

“We’ll give ya five six-shootas and five teef! I want three dakka-fings!” shouted Gongog. His first offer, to shoot at each other a bit and let the dakka-fings belong to whoever shot best, was rejected by the merchant, who for some reason cited the “big meks” and waved a paw toward a monstrous bulk glimpsed in the distance. The yoofs did not dare argue with orks like that and were now trying to outdo the merchant in the subtle art of trade.

“Naaaah!” growled the trader, spitting as he did so. “Need lotsa teef for dis!”

Orks rarely use numbers greater than five, and many means more than five. The yoofs did not have that many. Vazdakka had hidden his last toof and was not showing it. Possibly he was not the only one.

“Got any junk maybe?” asked the trader. “Knock a toof off for each bit.”

The yoofs started pulling junk from their hiding places all at once. Vazdakka had two cunning metal bits in which he sensed hidden usefulness. One of them he had found only recently, in his own droppings. How it had gotten there he did not bother to consider. He had simply made a habit of checking the results of his defecation.

“Right, yeah. Dis one’s worth five teef. So, dat’s three... An’ dis one’s five teef too... Good enough. For all dis junk and five six-shootas, I’ll give all of ya dakka-fings, and two shooty-fings!” the trader finally pronounced, sweating from the effort of such serious mathematics.

“No! We give all da junk, five six-shootas, and four teef for five dakka-fings and two shooty-fings!” bellowed Gongog.

“Good enough!” the ork trader bellowed back, even louder and more frightening, and briskly shoved the shooty-fings and dakka-fings into the hands of the abruptly silent yoofs while sweeping up everything else. Vazdakka looked down in surprise and discovered a dakka-fing in his hand.

And it was magnificent.

Some might have called this type of weapon an automatic pistol... but that would be like calling Michelangelo’s David a piece of rock shaped like a man. It fails to reflect the deeper essence.

Vazdakka was seized at once by a fierce itch to try out the new acquisition immediately.

Or perhaps that was the armor, which had grown quite hot in the sun.

But somebody grabbed him roughly by the arm and dragged him onward. This time the collective unconscious led the yoofs to the work post. By now they had grasped that anything could be bought for teef. In the case of orks, truly anything. Even health and happiness. And Zragmash had said that teef were handed out at the work post.

In exchange for work.

On the way they paused briefly by a squig seller. The spicy, rich smell astonished Vazdakka. He saw a crate in which very strange squigs were wriggling. Some were very small, no bigger than a palm. Others were the size of an ork’s head. And not one of them resembled anything else. Vazdakka grabbed the first one to hand, looked up, and found the squig seller looming over him.

The seller said nothing.

He merely looked unfriendly.

“How much?” Vazdakka managed.

“Toof,” said the seller.

“Don’t got one. Can I just take it?” Vazdakka asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” the squig seller replied with confidence, and struck Vazdakka in the jaw with lightning speed. Vazdakka was thrown backward, lost his footing, and landed on his backside. The squig seller deftly scooped up the tooth he had knocked out and growled,

“Settled!”

For a while Vazdakka sat there on the ground, confusedly feeling his jaw. Then he jumped up and ran after the other yoofs, who had already gone on ahead.

“Dat squig’s for blowin’ into!” the squig seller called after him. Then he waved a hand, with something in the gesture that a very optimistic human might perhaps have mistaken for nostalgia. “Ahh, yoofs...”

The work post was, indeed, a post.

It stood in a deep crater whose walls rose upward in enormous tiers. A human might have thought of an amphitheater.

The higher the tiers, the more formidable the orks sitting there became. All of them adorned with the full attributes of strength and success. Toothy squigs, multibarreled shooty-fings, kustom armor, and of course lots, real lots, of dakka...

Somehow it happened naturally that the yoofs, not daring to sit beside any of those occupying the upper levels, drifted lower and lower, looking for lads more or less like themselves. And they descended all the way to the bottom, right to the Work Post itself. A mob of yoofs much like them was milling there.

Well, no. Not quite like them.

These had no armor, and not even six-shootas. Just some not-very-flash gear and some not-very-cool choppas.

The yoofs of Vazdakka’s mob clustered together and began loudly discussing what was going on. The conversation slid toward prices, gotta bash some teef outta someone, I want a burna, touched upon the political arrangements of Mektown, wot’s all dese meks then, eh, and finally returned to the usual question of who here was a grot.

Vazdakka got bored, sat down beneath the Post, and pulled out the squig.

The squig had thin little tubes all over its body. Having studied them carefully, Vazdakka pushed one through a gap in his teeth and blew. The squig let out a hideous squeal. Vazdakka blew into another tube. The squig squealed again, but a little differently.

This became interesting.

The squealing of the squig struck Vazdakka, in a way, as beautiful. He continued experimenting. At one point he even caught a rhythm.

Or so it seemed to him.

A stone landed beside Vazdakka. He paid it no mind and continued his investigations. The next stone went unnoticed as well. But the burst of three bullets that slammed into the ground nearby and threw up little fountains of dust was a much more significant sign from above.

Turning his face toward the gunfire, Vazdakka saw a group of cool lads on the upper tiers with enormous shooty-fings. One of them was aiming at him.

“Awright, enough!” the ork shouted.

The yoofs fell quiet. Everyone sitting between that ork with the proppa flash shoota and Vazdakka hurriedly shifted aside.

“Fine,” said Vazdakka, feeling a certain disappointment, though not anger. He stuffed the squig into his bag and went back to his own lot. It was still boring there. He asked what they were waiting for, but was accused of being a grot. Not feeling in the mood for cheerful conversation, Vazdakka noticed one of the ragged yoofs from below, one of those who had no place on the upper tiers.

Vazdakka stepped closer and asked,

“Oi. Wot we supposed ta do here?”

“Wait till they hand out work,” the other answered in a somewhat strange voice.

Vazdakka felt himself swelling with superiority and contempt toward this ork. It was not just that the voice was too thin for proper Orkish. It was the intonation. Take an ordinary human, drive him into a fit of mad fury, right up to the blood haze, so that he is screaming that he will kill you and your whole family while spraying spit, memorize that tone, and then compare it to the way orks say, for example, calm down or fine to an equal.

You would discover that orks are able to express even agreement or reconciliation with the same degree of savage viciousness.

This yoof clearly lacked that viciousness. Besides, he was plainly smaller than Vazdakka. Vazdakka squared his shoulders and felt a mild desire to stick his choppa into this grot’s belly. But he merely barked, restraining himself from shoving the stranger:

“Wot, zog? Wait?”

“Well, yeah,” the stranger answered, stepping back. “A nob’ll come soon. Pick who he needs. But usually they take lads from higher up...”

“Wot, zog... from up there?” Vazdakka frowned and glanced toward the lad who had shot at him. That one gave him a merry grin from a mouth full of teeth. All whole.

“Well, yeah, ’cause they got all dat... dakka-fings, shooty-fings... fight better. Whoever fights better gets picked...”

At that exact moment the strange yoof was knocked off his feet by a mighty green fist.

It took Vazdakka a second to realize that it was Sarf who had hit him, and that Sarf had apparently come over too. Seeing the puzzled look on Vazdakka’s face, Sarf explained condescendingly:

“Whoever fights better gets picked!”

“Too right!” thought Vazdakka.

“Oi! Wot d’you think you’re doin’? Bashin’ one of ours!” yelled the yoofs from the stranger’s mob. In the same squeaky, irritating voices.

It was as though a bottle of warm mushroom beer had burst inside Vazdakka’s chest. He filled with the sparkling joy of anticipation before a fight.

And he screamed with delight.

**Chapter 7. A Strange Bash**

Because of the sudden outbreak of mutual dislike, the two yoof mobs hurled themselves at one another. This situation is more the rule than the exception. It can happen at almost any moment, including right before orks are about to fight some other race. This creates certain difficulties. For example, the kind of neat battle lines or complicated maneuvers familiar to humanity would inevitably lead to fighting breaking out inside an ork army itself. Small-scale battles inside ork ships, or within an ork WAAAGH!, are a factor every ork warlord is forced to take into account. Only hardened old orks, the so-called nobs, are really capable of keeping their urges on a chain for the sake of the battle plan. But scraps between very green yoofs are common, and almost harmless.

Almost, in the sense that yoofs are not yet strong enough to kill orks efficiently. Six-shootas and homemade dakka-fings rarely kill an ork with a single shot. Choppas can do serious damage, but even with deep hacked wounds an ork may simply drop into a coma, then get up again afterward almost as good as new. Uzbog is vivid proof of that. In general, anything that does not kill an ork on the spot... does not kill him. So while pointless fights between yoofs and bigger lads are frequent, relatively few orks actually die in them.

What they do gain, though, is experience.

Still, had a human happened to be present, this minor quarrel by ork standards might have impressed him greatly.

Of course, these were only half-naked young orks, each weighing no more than a hundred kilos. But the echo of the coming green tide could already be seen in them. Throwing open their, as yet comparatively small, maws, no larger than a field kettle from a human marching kit, the orks yelled, cursed, shouted, and laughed.

Without forgetting to punch, bite, kick, and throw the enemy.

All right, only the yoofs from Vazdakka’s mob were laughing. Their opponents were squealing instead.

But they squealed with real malice and aggression.

At first Vazdakka started swinging his fists. It is hard to say whether he hit anyone, but he himself definitely got smacked in the face a couple of times. Blows like that would have put an unprepared human on the ground, or in hospital. Vazdakka merely got even more worked up. He shook his head and looked around for somebody to belt. But he saw that everyone around him was already scrapin’ away, and he himself had been shoved back behind his own lot. That would not have stopped him from walloping somebody anyway, but then he spotted Gongog beside him, recognizable by the iron rods of the rygzag on his back.

Gongog performed an awkward and unskilled improvised wrestling move, and a squealing enemy crashed down at Vazdakka’s feet. Gongog had simply flung him over himself, then at once turned away and went back to punching faces. Without wasting time, Vazdakka grabbed hold of Gongog’s rygzag like a handrail and began jumping up and down on the fallen foe. It was not easy, but Vazdakka showed stubbornness and gradually tamped the enemy into the ground until he stopped moving altogether. With his characteristic disregard for others, Vazdakka did not even realize that nearly half the mob had been helping him kick the fellow while he was down. It was, in truth, a team victory. Though only a noticeably bigger ork could ever have convinced Vazdakka of that.

Once the enemy lying on the ground stopped twitching entirely and had nearly merged with the landscape, he ceased to be fun or interesting. Vazdakka looked around for his next victim, but there were only familiar brutal mugs all around and not a single unfamiliar face in need of a good smack. And he wanted to hit something so badly his teef itched.

So Vazdakka climbed upward.

And once again Gongog and his rygzag proved very useful. Vazdakka climbed up it as though it were the boarding ladder of an aircraft. Hauling himself onto Gongog’s shoulders, while Gongog zogged irritably beneath him, and pausing for half a second at the top, Vazdakka looked down at the blur of arms and faces below, then jumped into the thick of it with a furious yell.

It should be said that Vazdakka was not the most observant ork in the world, otherwise he might have noticed that some of the lads in the crowd had already begun using choppas in earnest. But neither can it be said that he was the least observant ork. He quickly spotted, beside Gongog, an unfamiliar yoof with a stupid face. The fellow had apparently already taken a beating, because he was waving his arms around uselessly while somebody skillfully pounded him in the mug.

But the enemy was still standing.

“Main fing is ta make a nice entrance,” flashed through Vazdakka’s head, a suspiciously elegant thought, just as he screamed and leapt down, aiming both feet at the stranger’s orkish face.

Alas, ork anatomy differs somewhat from human anatomy. Their legs seem to have been shoved obscenely into their arses by an incompetent sculptor. That is why orks walk with that half-hunched, shuffling gait. In short, Vazdakka hit, but he missed. Since he could not bring his legs together, instead of planting both heels beautifully into the enemy’s face, he came crashing down on him from above and landed astride his shoulders backwards, smashing the lower part of his belly painfully into the ork’s face.

This did not discourage Vazdakka. He wriggled into a more comfortable seat and started hammering his “mount” with both fists while gripping him with his legs.

The ridden yoof mooed a little, twitched, and at last toppled over onto his back. Vazdakka somehow managed to stay on top of him. He settled himself more comfortably on the enemy’s chest and continued pounding his face with his fists. Another ork from the opposing mob came crashing down nearby. He fell strangely, stiffly, stretched out.

Like a dropped mannequin.

Vazdakka glanced at the fallen figure in surprise. But Vazdakka had never seen mannequins in his life, so though he noticed a certain oddness, he had more important matters to attend to. The fallen ork was unknown to him, while the one beneath him was squealing and thrashing, so Vazdakka growled in delight and went right on pounding the enemy under him into the ground.

He did not see how, directly above him, another foe raised a flimsy, ugly, grot-curved choppa over his head. The sneaky enemy hesitated for a second, deciding whom to hack first: Vazdakka, who was enthusiastically punching his mate into paste, or Gongog, who had turned his back at the wrong moment. But even so tiny a hesitation in an ork melee can be enough to make a fighter too late. Into the back of the enemy already drawing back to strike Vazdakka slammed a heavy choppa blade, like a flattened crowbar with sharp fragments of tank armor wired to it.

Then again, not “like.”

That was exactly how the choppa had been made.

The brutal contraption had been hurled with such force that it went clean through the poor bastard, freezing him in place. In a spray of blood and torn gobbets of flesh, the blade punched out through his chest and stopped, quivering and dripping blood, less than half a finger’s breadth above Vazdakka’s head.

Vazdakka noticed none of it.

What he did notice was that his blows were not doing the kind of damage he expected. Vazdakka grunted in confusion and grabbed the enemy’s face. The fellow helplessly flailed his trapped arms and kicked his legs, but could do nothing.

Vazdakka tried to get hold of the enemy’s jaw and simply rip the teef out of it.

But he could not.

His claws slid over the foe’s face without leaving even much of a scratch. That would have made even an ork suspicious, but Vazdakka was being swept away on a wave of endorphins and ignored the wrongness of what was happening.

“Argh... wot da zog?!” Vazdakka got even angrier and doubled his efforts.

All around him the fight had already turned smoothly into a desperate slaughter. And Vazdakka’s mob was clearly winning.

Possibly because they had drawn choppas first, and then dakka-fings. Bazdug, meanwhile, had started spraying everything in sight with a shooty-fing. With some generosity, the shooty-fing might have been classified as a kind of assault rifle.

Only with a caliber more like a shotgun.

Although firing like that was, technically, forbidden in Mektown... but it is not a crime if it is fun. And that kind of behavior was being received with enthusiastic approval from the spectators on the stone “stands.”

Orks growled, shouted, cheered the fighters on, and even fired shots into the air. More and more people began drifting in toward the sounds of merriment.

Possibly the orks charged with keeping order in the city simply took the noise as a sign that somebody was having a particularly good time.

Meanwhile, the ork who had been skewered clean through remained standing there, dejected, choppa still raised over Vazdakka’s head. Morkush ran up to him, grabbed the choppa, and yanked it free with a joyful roar.

“Dat’s mine!”

And at once chopped again at the beautifully stationary target. Since the target still had its own choppa raised overhead, Morkush’s instincts guided his hands into a movement which, with sufficient imagination, some swordmaster from a certain island on ancient Earth might have recognized as Swallow Strikes with Its Tail. The poorly sharpened crowbar, whistling like the detached rotor blade of a helicopter, swept parallel to the ground and smashed into the already-skewered enemy at belly height.

And cut the poor devil in half.

Morkush roared in triumph. Those who saw it, mostly the spectators on the “stands,” roared too. The lower half of the bisected ork, however, remained standing.

Then it squealed.

Because of their generally cheerful, easy, direct nature, orks rarely think overmuch about what is around them. Things fit neatly into simple and roomy categories. If it is alive, can it be bashed? If it is not alive, can you bash someone with it? So it is usually hard to throw an ork into confusion. A squealing severed backside failed to embarrass them either. Morkush simply chopped it again. It split apart, and a gretchin in a red bandanna dropped out of it.

As you may now be starting to suspect, young orks, despite their inborn knowledge, are fairly easy to mislead. Slightly more experienced lads are not much harder to fool. More grown and larger hard lads, even huge nobs, are harder still. But those generally do not care what the yoofs are up to. Which is exactly what the sneaky gretchins exploited, building piloted robots in hopes of gaining work and opportunities. To a human eye, their constructions would have looked extremely suspicious. To ork eyes, they were the right sort of green, and attention to detail has never been one of the stronger points of ork-kind.

Still, one should not take orks for complete imbeciles.

It took only five minutes of fighting for the orks to crack the trick.

“Grots inside ’em!” bellowed a large ork from the “stands.” “Kill ’em!”

Naturally, a stunt like that left the gretchins no hope of survival if the scheme failed. Which altered their prospects in life not at all. The gretchins, however, were slightly better prepared for this turn than one might have expected. The moment they were exposed, they began squealing and leaping out of their piloted robots, scattering in every direction. And the yoofs stopped killing them and started catching them instead, because their instincts told them to bash a grot and put it to work, not kill it on the spot.

“Catch ’em! Bring ’em to me!” came a voice directly above Vazdakka’s head. The voice sounded as though someone had started up a tractor engine with no muffler, and the noise had suddenly begun arranging itself into words. Vazdakka looked up, baffled, and saw beside him an enormous ork clad in thick, solid armor.

“I’z Killa Van Killa! One toof fer every gretchin!” the thunderous monster growled.

Looking down, Killa grabbed Vazdakka with his metal claw and lifted him off the ground to the height of his iron-cased head.

“Oh! You caught two! Good lad!”

With unexpected deftness, Killa fished out two teef with his other hand. Vazdakka did not even understand from where. Killa tossed the teef aside.

Then tossed Vazdakka after them.

The flight came unexpectedly and there was no time to enjoy it. Good thing the yoof managed not to break anything more important than two toes when he landed. Still, he bore no grudge. Killa was big, strong, beautiful, and inspired respect by his voice alone.

How could anyone be angry with a creature like that?

By the time Vazdakka had found the teef and figured out what had happened, he had missed the whole intrigue with the grots, being much too occupied with caving in the faceplate of one of the robots. Killa’s iron hand had already imposed order.

One of Killa Van Killa’s hands really was made of iron. In fact, he looked like a tractor that had suddenly grown limbs, an impression strengthened by the angular machine strapped to his back and belching acrid smoke. And he was an extremely farsighted ork. The captured gretchins, using a brutal manipulator fitted with a built-in blowtorch, Killa immediately clapped into iron collars and riveted to a short chain, whose far end he snapped to his belt. In the course of this procedure only one gretchin escaped injury.

And he was also the only one who died.

Which may be considered a fairly humane result, by gretchin standards.

“Ow, dat hurts, boss!” the gretchins cried, provoking satisfied cackling from the yoofs. “Sorry, boss!”

“You lot, yoofs!” barked Killa. “Come with me! Got work!”

The mob of yoofs surged after Killa Van Killa in a cheerful cluster, chattering excitedly. They left the amphitheater and headed from the Work Post toward the outer perimeter of the city. Killa walked with the calm stride of an ork who knows his own worth, so the yoofs had time to gawp around, shove one another, argue over which of them was a grot, and Uzbog even managed to get into a fight with some random ork.

Or rather, not much of a fight.

He lagged behind a little on the road, then caught up with the others again, only now without tusks. This sent the mob into a fresh fit of delight.

**Chapter 8. Time for a Job**

Mektown kept delighting with its atmosphere and customs. As they stomped along in a mob behind Killa Van Killa, some half-mad gretchin sliced a skull off Sarf’s belt and vanished with it into a narrow hole that stank of squig-gak. Then riders on squigs clad in bone armor thundered past them. The huge riding squigs jerked their heads and stretched their maws toward the yoofs, but their riders, after giving Killa Van Killa an assessing glance, hauled on the reins and forced their mounts onward. At one crossroads, a large ork with a klaw and a whip was making several gretchins dismantle a motorcycle that had embedded itself in a wall. Judging by the legs sticking out from the breach, the biker was no longer in any position to assert his rights to it. The bike’s parts were being stacked into a cart standing beside the driver-ork.

“If I see ya lootin’ and hidin’ bits, I’ll bite yer ears off!” the driver-ork snarled. Judging by the fact that the gretchins working for him had ears already half-chewed into tatters, this threat was carried out from time to time.

Other gretchins, dressed more poorly but still possessing intact ears, kept sneaking up behind the ork toward the cart and stealing parts and chunks of metal from it. The ork noticed none of this, being wholly absorbed in watching “his own” gretchins.

In one place the yoofs startled a little pack of gretchins who were butchering a toothy squig, about the size of a dog, right in the street. Elsewhere, the street they were passing through stood thick with green fog. Though it stung the eyes, made the throat itch, and dried the tongue, the yoofs walked through it happily. Green could not be bad. From all sides came squeals, shouting, metallic crashing, and sometimes the sound of squigpipes.

Vazdakka felt a cozy warmth in his chest. With a happy grin he looked at the walls gone grey with squig droppings, the dangerously swaying iron structures overhead, and the hunched shadows of grots darting through the corners. Vazdakka had fallen in love with this city. You could not describe a thing like that in words. You had to feel it.

Killa Van Killa brought them to his residence. It stood on a cozy two-level street, with parts of a third level, laid out in the shape of a Z, quite close to the outer fortifications. The building, of which Killa’s lair occupied a part, was sunk a little into the ground and made in the shape of a knight’s helmet crumpled by repeated flail-strikes. The structure struck Vazdakka as rather elegant. He would not have minded fighting inside a place like that. Everything in and around the street crawled with unfamiliar boyz, grots, and squigs. Killa led them inside, strode proudly up to a heap of metal on wheels, and shook the gretchins off onto it. Then he freed them simply by ripping the chain apart, leaving fairly hefty pieces of it around each of their necks.

“Fix it,” Killa growled, glaring menacingly at the gretchins.

They immediately sprang into motion. Tools appeared in their paws. Some clambered into the heap of junk, while others scattered in all directions. This did not provoke Killa’s anger, and within a minute it became clear why: the gretchins returned with parts scavenged from piles of scrap in the corners of the room. On the spot they welded together a jack, rolled over a little crane, brought up a wheel, and work boiled over.

After a careful look, and not without help from his genetic memory, Vazdakka identified the heap of junk as a “slightly” battered means of transport. Something like an infantry fighting vehicle, but with the proper ork racial flavor. Or, as orks called such a thing, a **wagun**. Killa lovingly kicked the wagun in the side, leaving yet another deep dent, then turned and declared to the yoofs:

“Listen up. I know a place. Dere’ll be loot dere. Good loot! An engine! A reeeal big one!” Killa looked over the yoofs, already impressed by the surrounding luxury. “I’ve been out dere four times already! An’ I ain’t made it dere once! So it’s a proper sure thing!”

The yoofs stared at Killa thoughtfully. He was hinting at the ancient truth that action gives rise to reaction. Alas, the complex ideas intended by the much-experienced Killa still slipped through the grasp of the yoofs.

“I’m sayin’, it’s a sure thing! Soon as I fix da wagun, we’re off. When we get back, I’ll give each of ya five teef and a place in da crew!”

The yoofs were silent. Killa scraped the armor over his backside with the claws of his non-metal hand, producing a frightful screech, and clarified his offer:

“I’m sayin’, I’ll take ya to a place, tell ya wot to do. Den we drive back here, to Mektown! Get it? Fer dat I’ll give each of ya five teef! An’ after dat we’ll make a battlewagon, an’ I’ll let ya ride inside it!”

Only the last part interested the yoofs.

But it interested them all at once, and completely.

They roared, waved their weapons around, and ran to the wagun, scattering the gretchins in terror. Half the mob swarmed into the cab, while the other half charged the heavy machine gun mounted on the roof. They were not even put off by the fact that part of the wheels were still missing.

“Stand still!” Killa roared. “Right, you lot... oh! Go get fixed up! Dere’s a painboy over dere! Go to da painboy! An’ come straight back! Quick, I said!”

The yoofs, with some encouraging kicks, were shoved back out through the doorway, which had no actual door, that had apparently gone into armor plating for the wagun, and bunched up in the street.

“Why d’we gotta get fixed?” Morkush asked in surprise. He was barely limping now, since he had tied some bone he found along the way to his leg.

With wire.

There was a diagonal chop wound on the left side of Morkush’s head, one ear was a third sliced off, and there was a bullet hole in his chest. He had collected all these injuries in the recent fight. Toward the end the gretchins had started firing their pistols. But those were weak little things. The others had much the same sort of trifling wounds. And none of them were bleeding anymore. So, in effect, it was almost as if the wounds were not there at all. Of course, the bullets still lodged inside were uncomfortable, but if you just endured it for a couple of days they would work their own way out.

“Well... right...” said Sarf, being the most level-headed. “Let’s get yer leg fixed!”

“Fine...” Morkush agreed unexpectedly. Evidently the leg bothered him more than he let on. Possibly not even because of the wound itself, but because of the wire biting into his skin.

“Right then, we gotta get to the painboy! But where is he?” Bazdug asked with surprising consistency. Vazdakka looked at him with a suspicion that had not quite taken full shape. This ork seemed more cunning than strong. Perhaps he ought to be bashed.

“Yeah, where’s the painboy?” Gongog asked too.

No one could answer.

They trudged along the street for a while. Then Gongog spotted two orks about their own size. He blocked their path, filled his chest with air, and growled:

“Oi! Tell us where da painboy is, nice an’ quick!”

Perhaps the gradually accumulating construction on Gongog’s back made him more imposing. Orks feel that kind of thing. Gongog was giving orders more and more often now, and even seemed a little taller than the other yoofs in the mob. Perhaps that was why, instead of immediately settling which of them was the grot, the questioned orks looked slightly flustered. One of them replied, nervously fidgeting with a shoota in his hands:

“I didn’t take it...”

“Den who did?!” Gongog pressed.

“Dunno!” the ork stepped back.

“Can ya prove it?!” Gongog persisted.

Vazdakka watched this for a while. Then suddenly he felt a bright, new sensation.

Jealousy.

He wanted to stand there too, big and impressive and handsome, and yell at someone. Looking around, Vazdakka spotted a gretchin sneaking past with some kind of component in its hands. The little orkoid had apparently been too lazy to go around the orks and had decided to slip by while they were distracted. Vazdakka reached out and snatched the gretchin.

Quite deftly, in fact. He had been using his hands for some time now, and week by week he was getting better at it. Or perhaps the gretchin had only hatched recently and was clumsy.

“Oi, you! Grot!” Vazdakka shouted at once.

“Sorry, boss!” squealed the gretchin, only further irritating those centers of inborn superiority in Vazdakka’s brain.

“Shut up! You! Me! Where am I goin’?!” Vazdakka shouted even more terribly.

“I... I... sorry, boss! I won’t do it again, boss!” the gretchin tried to excuse itself for having been such a gretchin today.

“I’m sayin’... I... dis! To dere! Where?!” Vazdakka growled, heating up more and more. He shoved his face right up close to the gretchin’s little mug and started shaking him, asking in rhythm: “Where?! I’m askin’ ya! Where?! You zog! Wheeere?! Talk!”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, boss,” babbled the gretchin, squeezing its eyes shut and shrinking away.

Vazdakka’s vision filled with a red haze. At the back of his skull rose a sensation of heat, as though somebody had lit a fire inside his head. He wanted to say something else, but could not, only emitting an inarticulate snarl straight into the gretchin’s ear. The gretchin squealed in terror, jerked instinctively, and by bad luck looked straight into Vazdakka’s rage-swollen eyes.

Vazdakka opened his maw and bit the gretchin’s face off.

The foul blood gushing into his mouth sobered him instantly, extinguishing the madness that had covered his mind with red fog. Vazdakka awkwardly tossed the still-twitching little corpse aside, forgetting even to loot it, and fell quiet.

The yoofs soon found the painboy, whose lair turned out to be right next to Killa Van Killa’s own. After a bit of shoving, they stuffed Morkush inside. Along with Uzbog, either as an escort or simply because they could. All of this somehow drifted past Vazdakka, who was in a state close to thoughtfulness. He had discovered something inside himself that did not obey him at all. Something a bit like an erection in humans.

Then again, Vazdakka was an ork, so he did not spend very long reflecting. After a while, not a very long while, when Morkush and Uzbog came out of the painboy’s lair, he was cackling openly along with the others at the expressions on their faces.

“Naaah, I ain’t goin’ in dere again,” said Morkush. His ears had now been trimmed symmetrically into the shape of Gork. All visible holes had been stitched up. And he no longer limped. His face had lost its usual savage look and was now wearing something almost humanly bewildered, which was what triggered such attacks of laughter from the others.

“Cybork,” Uzbog whispered softly. The shard of choppa sticking out of his head was gone now, and the edges of the wound in his skull were held neatly together by metal staples. It was the first word Uzbog had ever spoken in his life.

No one paid any attention.

By the time they returned to Killa, he was already finishing the repairs. He stood bent over the wagun’s engine, poking around inside it and barking clipped orders at the gretchins scurrying around him.

“Right... gimme da zoggin’ zogger,” he said, holding out his non-metal hand to the side, and one of the gretchins placed into his palm a tool unrecognizable to Vazdakka. Killa Van Killa rummaged around in the engine for a bit, then held out his hand again and said:

“Right. Now da zogged zogger.”

The gretchins bustled around, found what he wanted, and handed it over. Meanwhile the yoofs gazed at the wagun in enchantment. During their absence it had acquired a shape.

And, in some sense, even a meaning.

A pair of gretchins carrying buckets of red paint darted over its surface, putting the finishing touches on the paintjob.

“Waaagh,” Vazdakka rumbled softly, expressing the highest degree of admiration.

Killa heard him, but did not stop working. He merely gave a satisfied growl.

Fortunately, Killa finished before the yoofs got bored.

“All right,” he said, and slammed the hood shut. Then he took a couple of steps back and bared his tusks in satisfaction. After that he turned, looked the yoofs over, and grunted with an unreadable expression.

Then he barked:

“Climb inside! Time for a job!”