The Green Tide

Book : Warhammer 40,000

by Mike Brooks

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera; Space Marines; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

A Warhammer 40,000 Anthology

Two novels, two novellas, and four short stories packed with ork action against some of their staunchest enemies. Dig deep into what makes facing the green tide such a daunting prospect.

READ IT BECAUSE

In this epic collection, see all sides of the green tide collide. From the brilliant minds of some of Black Library’s favourite authors come tales of propa kunnin' and a whole lot of Waaagh!

THE STORIES

Even one ork is a terrifying threat – so what happens when there are thousands? Orks are a relentless force that overwhelms planets with their insatiable appetite for a good krumpin’.

Warboss takes us deep into an ork power vacuum as a half-dozen would-be leaders seek to complete a quest ordained by Gork and Mork to determine who will lead the Waaagh!

In Catachan Devil, a planet is all but lost to the green tide, forcing the newly arrived Astra Militarum regiment to go on the offensive in an attempt to take it back.

In Iron Resolve, the Mordian Iron Guard are pitted against a massive horde of feral orks sweeping through their hastily built defences.

Prisoners of Waaagh! tells the tale of a daring prison break as a contingent of Astra Militarum throw down their tools and take up whatever arms they can find to fight off their ork captors.

In Where Dere's Da Warp Dere's a Way, a daring Bad Moon boss sees an opportunity to lead a raid against an Adeptus Mechanicus vessel.

In Painboyz, a group of orks end up in the den of a drukhari haemonculus and nearly lose their hides attempting to escape.

Mad Dok sets the stage for the galaxy-shaking return of Ghazghkull Thraka.

In the short story The Enemy of My Enemy an Astra Militarum regiment considers the unthinkable – allying with a hated ork warboss to repel a tyranid invasion.

CONTENTS

– Warboss (novel) by Mike Brooks
– Catachan Devil (novel) by Justin Woolley
– Iron Resolve (novella) by Steve Lyons
– Prisoners of Waaagh! (novella) by Justin Woolley
– Where Dere's Da Warp Dere's a Way (short story) by Mike Brooks
– Painboyz (short story) by Mike Brooks
– Mad Dok (short story) by Nate Crowley
– The Enemy of My Enemy (short story) by Nate Crowley

Release date: April 7, 2026

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 592

Sample

It was dark.

This was mainly because something was tied over Snaggi Littletoof’s eyes, and therefore he couldn’t see, but that was not a great deal of comfort. He certainly hadn’t tied it there. Nor had he shoved the gag into his mouth, which foiled the efforts of even his needle-pointed teeth to bite through it, and condemned him to drool ceaselessly. He had not been the one to tie his hands behind his back, either, or attach them to something firm. He couldn’t move, and he certainly couldn’t escape. Not for the first time, he wondered what in the names of Gork and Mork a simple grot like him had done to deserve this.

Actually, there was probably quite a long list, now he came to think about it.

His eyes might be covered, but his ears were unstoppered, and he could tell from the acoustics that he was inside something: probably a hut, or maybe part of a wrecked vehicle. He was sitting on dirt, although that didn’t mean that much in these circumstances. He could still hear noises from outside, but it sounded like the fight was over. He wondered who had won. He hoped that it was his side, assuming there was still a side to which he could claim he belonged.

Something whoomped softly, like a hanging swath of cloth being shoved aside, and Snaggi sat up a little straighter, trying not to tremble in fear. His experiences of such things were limited, but he was fairly certain that you didn’t get bound, gagged and blindfolded just to then be offered a hot squig skewer and your pick of the battlefield loot.

His ears told him that someone had come to a halt in front of him, and his nostrils picked up the scents of bang-powder and smoke and shoota grease, but even had they been blocked too, some other sense still hinted at the closeness of another being. A moment later, hands were reaching around to loosen the gag, and it was pulled free.

Snaggi didn’t say anything. If you’d been gagged, and the gag was then loosened, it probably did not mean that you were in a position where shouting for help was going to do you any good. Either help had already loosened the gag, or you were about to get asked some serious questions by those uninclined to help. Besides, who would help him?

Then the blindfold was pulled off, and he found himself staring at another grot.

Hope leaped in his fast-beating heart. They’d found him! One of his ladz had found him, and was about to get him away from all this…

His brain realised that he did not recognise this grot at about the same time that his eyes focused on the hulking shape that loomed further back, in the shadows of what was, he now saw, an ork hut. The hut was a crudely assembled but sturdy affair of looted scrap, fairly unremarkable as such things went, but the ork was something else. It was massive, one of the largest Snaggi had ever seen, and although its armour was painted in the black and yellow of the Bad Moons clan, that armour looked to be primarily composed of beakie bits.

‘Dat fing out dere,’ the grot said, snapping Snaggi’s attention back to him. ‘How’s it work? How’d ya get ’ere, an’ where’d ya come from?’

Snaggi licked his teeth nervously. If he was being asked this, then that implied he had some value: value that might evaporate as soon as he coughed up what information he had. He grinned at his captors, readying his mind for the battle of wits that would ensue.

‘Tell me now, or I crush yer skull,’ the ork rumbled, taking a tectonic step forwards. ‘Ya ain’t da only captive we got, yoo’re just da one I’m askin’ first.’

Orks were not given to idle threats in general, and Snaggi could immediately tell that this one was deathly serious: Snaggi’s death, to be precise. He hastily revised his strategy from ‘bargain for your life’ to ‘tell the scary ork what it wants to know and hope it then forgets about you’.

‘Well,’ he began hastily, ‘dat’s a bit of a long story.’

‘Shorten it,’ the ork suggested, folding its fingers into a fist that was roughly the size of Snaggi’s entire upper body. ‘Or I shorten yoo. By a head.’

‘Yes, boss!’ Snaggi gabbled, the honorific cutting in by reflex, even though he hated himself for it. ‘So, uh…’ 

 

ONE

 

Warboss Gazrot Goresnappa had descended on the Imperial world of Aranua with all his forces and had, in the words of Major Saras, proceeded to give it such a thorough kicking that most of it didn’t know which way was up any more.[2] The northern seas were now in xenos hands, including their promethium-extraction rigs. The main southern continent had been overrun, with neither high mountains, baking deserts, nor humid swamps providing any manner of meaningful defence against the invaders. Hive city after hive city had been taken. The populace either died in the fighting, were killed during the looting, or were enslaved.

Only one sizeable stronghold now remained: Davidia Hive, rising eight miles into the sky out of the blasted grey of Aranua’s industrial heartland. It was a towering edifice of human engineering, and had stood in defiance of everything the galaxy could throw at it for seven millennia. Governor Ama Junier thought she should probably take some heart from that, but the simple fact of the matter was that up until now, the galaxy hadn’t thrown orks.

And now here they were, virtually on her doorstep. She looked out of the window of her quarters. Above her, the sky darkened to a deep, deep blue. She could make out the curvature of the planet from up here. And yet despite the distance, despite the patchy cloud cover beneath her feet, if she looked down she could see the shifting mass of the orkish forces. There were so Throne-damned many of them!

‘I take it there has been no word from the astropaths?’ she asked carefully.

‘No, ma’am,’ Colonel Grozer Sudliff of the Aranuan 25th replied. His voice was level, but Ama could hear the tension within it. He was resentful of her question, because he would of course have informed her had there been any manner of communication to indicate that reinforcements were coming. However, unless she asked such questions, she risked looking like the clueless aristocrat she knew the general suspected her to be.

‘And the tactical situation has not meaningfully altered?’

‘No, ma’am.’

Ama sighed. An Imperial governor was supposed to lead and defend their world, but there was very little she could do in such circumstances. Colonel Sudliff had been in military command, and he had been pushed back and overwhelmed in short order. Not that Ama blamed the man for it: he would have needed to be the rebirth of Macharius himself to have succeeded against such odds, and Sudliff most certainly was not that. He was a solid and unremarkable man, born into an officer family. From there he had taken up a military position, which he held with no great problem until called upon in earnest, at which point he failed in a solid and unremarkable manner. Ama had needed to use every part of her wit and ingenuity to achieve the role of planetary governor when the previous incumbent had passed away, including the discreet assassination of three rivals. At least she’d had to do some thinking in her life.

Their options ranged from laughable to piteous. The might of the orks’ ground forces dictated against any notion of a sortie or counter-attack, despite the fact that the remnants of Sudliff’s troops were now holed up in the lower sections of Davidia, in cramped and unsuitable conditions. They had no Titans, no Knights, no super-heavy tanks: all the ordnance of that scale had either been

destroyed or, to Ama’s great displeasure, captured. Above Ama’s head, the mobile, heavily weaponised agglomerations of scrap and junk that the orks used as warships, which had annihilated all merchant and military shipping that had stuck around to fight them, were patrolling, if ‘patrolling’ was the right term for ‘moving unpredictably and haphazardly’. There were at least two warp-capable ships currently berthed in Davi­dia’s space docks, but even the Tennavar’s Smile, pleasure yacht of rogue trader Priam Huzinka, lacked the armour or weaponry to survive the orks’ attention for long enough to get to the system’s Mandeville point. There would be no escape off-world for Davidia’s nobility, including Aranua’s governor: at least, not unless an unheralded arm of the Indomitus Crusade arrived.

Ama tapped her fingers on the thick crystalflex in front of her. ‘What do you suppose they’re waiting for, colonel? They’ve barely hesitated before attacking a hive city up until now, by all accounts.’

‘Can’t say for sure, ma’am.’

Ama turned to him. Colonel Sudliff was the very image of the Imperial military: his hair was grey but still thick, and his mutton chop sideburns brushed the stiff, gold-embroidered collar of his dress jacket. His epaulettes sparkled, his creases were so sharp that he could have shaved with them, his boots were shined to a mirror finish, and his jacket’s buttons were the maned heads of the animal that gave its name to his regiment, the Golden Lions. It was a shame his tactical wisdom was no match for his sartorial grandeur.

‘Can you say at all?’ she enquired. ‘We await near-certain death at the hands of xenos invaders, colonel. I feel it is not unreasonable to hold some curiosity about what might be staying our execution, at least briefly.’

The colonel cleared his throat, and his usual direct – even impertinent – stare wandered from her face for the first time that she could remember.

‘They seem to be building fires, ma’am. So far as we can understand these creatures, they… Well, if they were human, I’d say they were having a party.’

‘A party.’ Ama turned away from him to stare out of her window once more. Darkness was falling on the ground far below, and she could indeed see the tiny sparks of light that must have been, if one were standing next to them, huge conflagrations. ‘These creatures fall upon my world, they kill my people, and now they mock me by having a party?’

‘If it please you, ma’am,’ Sudliff offered, ‘I doubt they’re mocking you. These are orks – they’re barely more than animals. Nothing that they do here will be considered with us in mind. They’re simply doing it because they want to.’

‘I know,’ Ama murmured. She’d been underestimated, maligned, avoided, and outright threatened in her life, but never had she simply been ignored. ‘If anything, that just makes it worse.'

 

‘Get dose fires nice an’ big! I want all dem humies to know we’z here, an’ I want ’em shakin’ in dere boots!’

Gazrot Goresnappa, also known as Gazrot Da Snakebitten, was without question one of the greatest orks to ever venture out into the galaxy and punch it in its face. A member of the Snakebite clan, he rose to violent prominence early in his life by regularly winning headbutting contests with smasha squigs. He had strangled the seven-headed serpent of Kryyk using one of its own necks, and had gone to the trouble of harvesting its venom glands, not to coat his blade or poison his enemies, but simply to add a bit of kick to his fungus beer. He quickly gained a strong following, based in part on his skill in combat, and in part on his propensity and ability to raise squiggoths of a size rarely seen. When he was slighted by Warboss Kurzan, Gazrot had ridden his herd right over the other ork’s battlewagon, crushing it, and Kurzan inside it, in the process. After that, there had been little doubt in anyone’s mind who should take the old warboss’ place.

What this meant was that when Gazrot Goresnappa, close to ten feet tall in his hulking, fur-draped, smoke-belching mega armour, yelled at you to make a fire nice and big, you zoggin’ well made that fire nice and big.

All around him, orks scurried to do his bidding, and the sight brought a smile to Gazrot’s face. This was what it meant to be an ork! It wasn’t like he was one of those self-important types, like the freebooter kaptins, or the Blood Axes that enjoyed mimicking the humie way of doing things. Gazrot didn’t give himself fancy hats, or medals, or any other frippery. Gazrot just enjoyed a good scrap, and the more orks that followed him and did what he said when he said it, the more scraps he could win.

He’d very nearly won this one, which was why he was taking a moment to enjoy himself. There was one big humie camp left on this entire planet, so far as he could tell, which was the one looming above them all at this very moment. Gazrot would say this for humies: they knew how to build big. The ‘city’, as the humies called it, must have been larger than any of the ships in his fleet, which was impressive in and of itself. It was taller than a mountain, with its summit lost in the clouds; it was practically a mountain in its own right, a gargantuan structure which wasn’t just tall, but wide. Simply being near it would probably be enough to intimidate any normal creature.

Gazrot wasn’t any normal creature. So far as he was concerned, the sheer size of this thing just made it more of an obvious and impressive target. He’d bring it down, just like his ladz had brought down all the others. Then the meks would strip out anything useful, and they’d get some of the fuel that Magzak’s lot were pulling off the humie rigs in the big water to the north, and they’d build a whole bunch of new war engines, repair the ones that had been damaged, wait around a bit for a bunch of new boyz to show up – they always did, sooner or later – and then get back out into the stars in search of the next planet to conquer. That was life as it should be lived; that was the ork way.

In the meantime, though, he wanted to remind every ork exactly who it was that had led them here and crushed the humies. That wasn’t him being self-important, that was just proper and sensible. It made it more likely that they’d do what he said, when he said it. Da Genrul had a

a humie word for that: ‘dissipline’. Gazrot wasn’t buying into any of that humie crap, though.

Da Genrul. Now, that was an ork who needed watching, Gazrot thought. Genrul Uzbrag was a typical Blood Axe, in that he liked the orks under his command to walk in straight lines and hit their heads with their hands when he told them to do something, and a whole load of other stuff he’d picked up from humies, and elsewhere for that matter. It didn’t sit well with Gazrot, borrowing stuff from other species. What was wrong with being an ork, and doing things in the ork way, like Gork and Mork intended? Snakebites were traditionalists at heart, and Uzbrag’s tendency towards innovation rubbed Gazrot up the wrong way. Still, there was no denying that the git was successful. He could clobber an enemy with the best of them, and sometimes his strange inventions and ‘battle plans’ actually worked surprisingly well. There was a reason he was one of Gazrot’s favoured big bosses, but that didn’t mean Gazrot trusted him. Although to be fair, he didn’t trust anyone.

He certainly didn’t trust Mag Dedfist. The massive Goff big boss was yelling at a bunch of his ladz to build the fires higher, which was all well and good, but Dedfist was a dour son of a squig who Gazrot reckoned wouldn’t be content playing second shoota to him for much longer. One day soon, Dedfist would get it into his incredibly thick-skulled head to take a swing for his warboss, with the goal of taking his place. Gazrot had no intention of letting that happen, of course, but it wasn’t like there were many options. He’d thrown Dedfist at the hardest knots of humie resistance, and the big Goff had gone through them without much pause, and certainly without taking any sort of noticeable harm. Dedfist had simply reinforced his own reputation with the boyz under his command, which wasn’t going to do Gazrot any favours. No, when it came to it, he’d have to let Dedfist take his swing and then just stomp him flat into the ground, as tradition dictated.

He also didn’t trust Zagnob Thundaskuzz, the Evil Sunz speedboss, but that was less because Gazrot thought that Thundaskuzz was gunning for him, and more because simply getting any concept into the speedboss’ head was virtually impossible. You couldn’t trust him to do anything other than accelerate off into the distance and kill things while going at an incredibly high speed, which, granted, was sometimes a very useful trait. It wasn’t much good when you were trying to make sure the right bits of a Waaagh! hit the enemy at the right time to cause maximum impact, though. Nonetheless, the Kult of Speed had a sizeable presence in Waaagh! Goresnappa, and Thundaskuzz had a correspondingly high amount of influence. He could neither be conveniently ignored nor disposed of, so Gazrot would just have to make use of him as best he could.

All of those were considerations for another time, though. Right now, the raging infernos that had been built had achieved the desired effect: namely, a whole load of orks were starting to congregate, wondering what was going on, and if there was going to be any food or, preferably, a fight.

Gazrot looked around, then tapped his shouty box to make sure it was working. It responded with a pleasing static squeal, which sounded almost exactly like a grot that had be

been stepped on. Dedfist had been watching him ever since he’d stopped yelling at his boyz to make the fires bigger, but now Gazrot could see the strange peaked hat of Da Genrul approaching in the midst of a big knot of Blood Axes, accompanied by the Killa Kan he called ‘Sarge’, which followed him around with that ridiculous captured humie in a cage on its back. A rumble of engines and the stink of badly refined fuel smoke announced the arrival of Zagnob Thundaskuzz, resplendent on the back of his Deffkilla wartrike, and at the head of a veritable host of bikers.

Good. Let them all come. Let them see the might of the Great Goresnappa, Da Snakebitten, the ork who led them here. Let them be reminded who was in charge, and whose boot would be kicking their arse if anyone thought they fancied being warboss.

His own Snakebites were flooding in now, too: they didn’t outnumber the other clans in his Waaagh!, but they were certainly the most numerous of any one faction. And of course, a truly great warboss didn’t just have one clan behind him, he had many. They were all here, Bad Moons, Deathskulls and all, even a few freebooters hanging around the edges, but this was the main core of his force. Goffs for the really close-in fighting, Evil Sunz for the quick stuff, Blood Axes when you needed a sneaky git, and Snakebites to hold it all together: proper orks; true orks; orks you could rely on not to forget about the old ways, and how Gork and Mork wanted things done.

Still, for all the fact that Snakebites were undoubtedly the best clan, and that the war beasts his particular part of it bred were the biggest and stompiest around, there was something to be said for a bit of teknology now and then. No one had ever before seen a squiggoth the size of Tankbreaka, Gazrot’s personal mount, but even that massive creature was dwarfed by the Mega-Gargant in front of which Gazrot was currently standing – Da Kroolfang. It somehow seemed even bigger than the massive human city, because that was just a thing, and things could be as big as they were: a planet was a thing, and no one would blink at that. The Gargant, however, was a giant effigy of Gork (or possibly Mork), and was shaped accordingly, with huge eyes that could fire energy beams, a gigantic bitey jaw, arms of death-dealing weapons, and a massive body which housed not only the infamous belly gun, but could also transport a whole host of boyz right into the thick of the fight, assuming any enemies were foolish enough to get close to such a gigantic machine of destruction. It was utterly titanic.

Gazrot had no doubt that some orks wouldn’t like to stand directly in front of such a monstrous war machine, in case it made them look small by comparison. Gazrot had no such compunctions. He told the zoggin’ thing what to do, where to go, and what to stomp: that made him the most powerful ork around. So far as he was concerned, the sheer size of the Gargant made him look bigger.

He flicked his shouty box again, and the resulting squeal-edged thud drew everyone’s attention to him.

‘ALRIGHT, LISSEN UP!’ he bellowed, and the shouty box amplified his voice so magnificently that it was as though he were shouting directly into the ear of every ork present: every warboss’ heartfelt desire. ‘Now, I told ya all wot was gonna happen ’ere, right? We was gonna come

down, give all da humies a right good kickin’, and take all dere stuff! An’ we did it, didn’t we?’

His words drew a mighty roar of approval from the assembled orks. Out of the corner of his eye, Gazrot saw the crooked staff of Old Morgrub approaching, belting other orks on the head to get them out of his way. The weirdboy was the Waaagh!’s most senior warphead, at least so far as these things could be determined. He certainly seemed a little more grounded than a lot of the rest, although that was a bit like saying that one trampla squig smelled better than most of the others. Still, Morgrub had enough control over the power that built up within him to not explode too many heads by accident, and although sometimes he made less sense than a squig that had fallen in the fungus beer, he was capable of providing decent advice every now and then. Gazrot knew that his big bosses weren’t fans of Morgrub’s rantings, but that was just further evidence that, unlike Snakebites, they’d forgotten the ways of Gork and Mork.

‘So now we got just one more fing to do,’ Gazrot continued, as Morgrub finally clobbered his way to the front of the packed ranks of orkish faces, all lit up by the roaring flames. ‘One more bunch of humies to stomp, and den all dis planet’s ours!’

That brought some cheers as well, but also some grumbling, because no more humies meant no more fighting. Well, actually it didn’t mean that at all, because any ork could pick a fight with any other ork for just about any reason, including because both of them happened to want a fight, but that was just scrapping. That wasn’t the full-throated bloodlust of the Waaagh!, where the orks all banded together and showed the other species in the galaxy exactly why they were the very best. A scrap was fun, without question, but it wasn’t quite the same thing as charging into battle with the thunder of guns as your heartbeat, your mates beside you, and getting covered in someone else’s blood, or ichor, or whatever turned out to be inside when you hit ’em.

‘Once we’re done ’ere, we’ll get ourselves sorted out an’ back onto da ships, den go an’ find some uvver place to conquer!’ Gazrot bellowed, to reassure his ladz. ‘Dis ain’t da end of the Waaagh!! Dis ain’t even da beginnin’ of da end! It might be da end of da…’

He tailed off, because Old Morgrub was looking upwards with a strangely intent expression on his scarred, leathery face. Normally it took a lot to throw Gazrot off his stride, but there was something about the warphead’s sheer focus that made him uneasy. Still not quite sure why he was doing it, and heedless of the impact such uncertainty would have on his standing amongst his boyz, he too turned and looked upwards to see what Morgrub was staring at.

 

THREE

 

Gork and Mork did not speak loudly to everyone. Many orks lived out their lives without ever really hearing the voices of their gods, save in the background roar of battle. For others – the weirdboyz whose heads exploded, for example – they spoke a bit too loudly. But for some rare orks, like Grand Warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, the voices of the ork gods were their guidance, the fuel that powered the furnace of conquest and violence burning in their hearts, and which was crucial to their success at bringing others under their sway and dominating the galaxy.

Snaggi Littletoof knew in his heart that Gork and Mork were speaking to him, as well. The trouble was, he was a grot, and no one cared.

He’d tried to tell others about it, of course. The thing was, the volume of Gork and Mork speaking to you didn’t seem to be anywhere near as important as how loudly you could talk about it to other orks. And when you weren’t even an ork to begin with, that wasn’t very loud at all. Snaggi was surrounded by hulking green giants, bellowing and roaring and kicking him without thinking – or sometimes thinking about it and then kicking him again, just to be sure – and not one of them was prepared to listen to the words of their own gods, just because they were coming out of the mouth of a grot. It was enough to make you sick. He’d had more than one hiding for ‘bleedin’ cheek’ when he’d mentioned the gods, and he’d learned to keep his mouth shut now. More or less, anyway.

Still, he’d managed to get himself a fairly cushy little number, at least so far as things went for grots. No desperate clutching of an unreliable grot blasta and trying to get close enough to shoot some giant humie in a suit of armour, or a deadly-fast bugeye with four arms and knives for hands for Snaggi Littletoof, oh no. No, he’d managed to blag his way onto the Mega-Gargant known as Da Kroolfang, which was an awful lot of metal between him and anything that might want to kill him.

Of course, he wasn’t a passenger. Snaggi and the rest of his little crew were under the theoretical oversight of Mek Zagblutz, a cantankerous old Deathskull with three eyes (two of them mechanical, but that was meks for you) and expectations of the level of work required from those under his command which were so high that Snaggi sometimes wondered if the old git had missed his proper calling as a stormboy drill boss. Right now they were greasing and polishing a collection of cogs and gears, the purpose of which Snaggi wasn’t quite sure, but might have had something to do with turning the Gargant’s head from side to side so its Gaze of Mork could incinerate whatever its kommander chose.

’Ow long d’ya fink it’ll take to kill dat last humie city?’ Guffink asked, scrubbing at a gear with his shiny-cloth. Guffink was hard-working and industrious, and generally made the rest of them look bad in comparison.

‘Dunno,’ Skrawk replied. The others waited for a moment to see if he was going to qualify that with anything else, such as musings on exactly what might cause a variance in the time taken, but nothing else was forthcoming. Skrawk wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

‘I fink it’s da biggest dere’s been yet,’ Snaggi offered. ‘So it’ll prob’ly take longer.’ He looked around to make sure no one was watching, then took a swig from his oil can. He spat it out hurriedly a moment later, because it tasted foul. It had done every time so far, but he made a point of

trying it once a day, just in case one of the others had come up with a cunning plan to sneak some booze under Zagblutz’s nose by putting it in a can. Snaggi wasn’t going to risk missing out on some good stuff just because he got a mouthful of oil if he was wrong: that would have been cowardly, and that was not the way of Gork and Mork.

‘See, I was finkin’ dat,’ Guffink replied amiably, ‘but den I fort, well, as it’s da last one, none of da ladz are off doin’ anyfing else, are dey? So dere’s a lot more boyz to kill it, an’ dat means it might even be quicker!’

‘“Da ladz”,’ Kruffik chuckled mockingly. Kruffik was big, at least for a grot, and liked to throw what weight he had around. ‘Stop talkin’ like yoo’re one of ’em, Guffink. Any of ’em hears ya talkin’ like dat, dey’ll twist yer head clean off yer neck.’

‘An’ wot’s it to yoo if dey did?’ Guffink demanded, ceasing his polishing and rounding on the bigger grot. ‘Eh? Why’re ya so worried about wot an ork’s gonna fink if he hears me talkin’, Kruffik? Yoo ain’t worried about me, I know dat much!’

Snaggi exchanged glances with Skrawk. This little exchange held the promise of livening up their work a bit.

‘I reckon ya fancy yerself as an ork’s runt,’ Guffink continued, warming to his subject. ‘Does that sound good, eh, Kruffik? Ya wanna do wot a nob says? Ya wanna carry his ammo around? Wanna polish his shoota for ’im? Workin’ on a Gargant’s not good enuff, is it? Ya wanna go pick up after a boss nob, den come back an’ lord it over da rest of us like dat makes you all important?’

Snaggi was expecting Kruffik to belt Guffink round the face, but to his surprise the bigger grot just folded his arms and glowered. ‘Yoo’z a snivellin’ little whiner, Guffink, an’ ya always have been. Yoo’z da one wot finks he’s important – yoo’z as bad as Snaggi dere.’

Snaggi felt his brows rise, as he was unexpectedly drawn into this conflict. ‘Wait a second, Kruffik, wotcha mean by dat?’

‘Wot I mean,’ Kruffik said, squaring up to Snaggi, ‘is dat we’z all heard ya talkin’ about da gods, Snaggi. We’z all heard ya saying dat dere talkin’ to ya, like yoo’z somefing speshul. But ya ain’t.’

Snaggi grinned toothily at him. ‘Dat’s okay, Kruffik. Yoo’re just jealous cos da gods ain’t talkin’ to ya.’

‘Dey ain’t talkin’ to yoo either!’ Kruffik barked, his temper fraying. He reached out with one sharp-nailed finger, and jabbed Snaggi in the chest with it. ‘Yoo’re makin’ it up to try an’ make yerself sound important, so cloth’eads like Guffink ’ere might lissen to ya, an’ do yer work for ya!’

Now, that statement wasn’t born of any concern for Guffink, Snaggi knew. So far as ork kultur went – and grot kultur along with it – if you couldn’t stand up for yourself, you got walked on. That was the way of the galaxy, and no one with any sense had any problem with it. The only reason Kruffik would object would be because he was jealous he hadn’t thought of it himself.

The thing was, cunning plan though it might have been, that wasn’t what Snaggi was doing. He wouldn’t dare invite the wrath of Gork or Mork by claiming to hear their voices

when he didn’t. He knew exactly what he’d heard.

‘Dey’re talkin’ to me right now,’ he told Kruffik. ‘Dey’re tellin’ me just wot to do.’

‘Oh?’ Kruffik’s snort of derision was so forceful that it splattered snot all over his front. ‘An’ wot’s dat?’

‘Dis.’

Snaggi kicked him in the shin as hard as he could, which given he was wearing metal-capped boots, and Kruffik’s shins were completely unprotected was, when everything was taken into account, pretty zoggin’ hard.

Kruffik howled and hopped backwards, clutching his shin in both hands. Snaggi laughed at him, enjoying the other grot’s pain, but Kruffik’s rage quickly overcame it. Kruffik grabbed a wrench, a piece of dirty metal nearly as long as he was tall, and swung it in both hands, screaming as he did so. Snaggi stumbled backwards, fear replacing his amusement just as quickly as Kruffik’s pain had disappeared, and ducked a moment before the wrench could connect with his head. The whoosh of air displacement hinted at exactly how heavy the impact would have been had the blow landed, but the force of the missed swing carried Kruffik around, off balance. Snaggi had no intention of letting him have another go, so he charged and put his shoulder into the other grot’s ribs as hard as he could.

Kruffik let out a great huff of air, and they both went down onto the greasy plates of metal that formed the floor in this part of the Gargant. Guffink and Skrawk were cheering, as was the way of any grot when encountering a fight in which they were not a participant, but they weren’t on anyone’s side: it was just good old-fashioned appreciation of a brawl. Snaggi couldn’t count on any help, even though it had been Guffink squaring up to Kruffik a few moments before, so he grabbed one of Kruffik’s wrists in both hands and bit it as hard as he could. Kruffik howled and relaxed his grip on the wrench, dropping it completely, but Snaggi quickly realised that this was possibly a bad development for him. The wrench was big and clumsy, and although Kruffik would have clung to the weapon instinctively, it wouldn’t have served him well at such close quarters. Now, however, the larger grot had his hands free to claw and strangle, and that wasn’t going to go so well for Snaggi.

Snaggi went for his eyes instead.

Kruffik howled in pain as Snaggi’s nails gouged at his face, but he flailed and thrashed and kicked so vigorously that Snaggi was thrown clean off him and landed hard on the deck again. He staggered up, looking for some sort of weapon of his own, but to no avail: Kruffik was too quick, and was already coming for him with fists balled.

A grot’s punch would barely register to an ork, and even a human would probably shrug it off and swing one back with considerably more force, but they were plenty hard enough to another grot. Snaggi ducked the first and landed a pointy elbow into Kruffik’s ribs, but then the other grot managed to get hold of him by the back of the neck and pulled him up sufficiently to send his next blow, with his other hand, right into Snaggi’s gob.

Pain flowered, and Snaggi staggered backwards as the entire Gargant swayed around him. He spat out a toof, stumbled sideways, and caught at a lever of uncertain provenance in order to hold himself up. The last place he wanted to be was on the floor when his head was swimming, and Kruffik was still coming at him. Then an idea struck him, and he wrenched on the lever, trying to break it loose. Zagblutz’s engineering wasn’t always the most secure, and it would make a handy bludgeon…

The lever moved.

Kruffik stopped as something overhead creaked. It was a deep noise, one that reverberated around the Gargant’s frame like an episode of particularly explosive flatulence in a squiggoth stall. It spoke not of the slight settling of a sturdy metallic superstructure, but of the beginnings of something more, something greater, something decidedly more emphatic than just a creak.

Very, very slowly, the ceiling began to move.

It was almost infinitesimal at first, only the faintest of shifts in shadow and light to suggest that something was happening. Then, as the movement became more obvious, more sounds sprang up. Scraping sounds, groaning sounds, the sounds of bolts and rivets pinging off from their fixings, the sounds of metal flexing in ways it was not supposed to flex, and tearing in ways it most certainly was not supposed to tear.

Snaggi didn’t move. He was frozen in place by the fear that most commonly consumed a grot, which could be divided into two parts: firstly, that he was going to be crushed by something much larger and heavier than him; and secondly, that even if he somehow survived the current peril, he was going to be blamed for it.

‘Oh, zoggin’ ’eck,’ Snaggi muttered weakly, as a thin crack of darkness appeared above him, and rapidly widened. That was the night sky, and one thing Snaggi was pretty certain about was that you weren’t supposed to see outside a Gargant when you were inside a Gargant, unless you were looking through a window that a mek had specifically put there.

‘Da head’s comin’ off!’ Skrawk wailed, showing uncharacteristic perceptiveness and communication. ‘Da zoggin’ head’s comin’ off, ladz! Wot’re we gonna do?!’

There was nothing they could do, of course – at least not to stop the landslide of metal which was even now carrying an untold tonnage of prime scrap, at least two high-power energy weapons, probably several orks, and quite possibly one very angry mekboy, forwards and then suddenly and quite terminally downwards. Snaggi managed to force himself to move and, along with the rest of his krew – hostilities abruptly forgotten – ran forwards to the front edge of the Gargant as the gigantic construction above them scraped onwards.

Snaggi got to the rail of what had been a viewing deck just as the ceiling began to tilt, and the head began to plummet. He looked over the edge and at first, of course, saw nothing but the underside of the Gargant’s head. Then, as it fell and got smaller, he saw the rest of the Waaagh! spread out below, thousands of orks all gathered around blazing fires. They all seemed to be organised – insofar as orks were ever organised – into a loose semicircle around the base of the Mega-Gargant, and they began scrambling backwards as the head fell towards them. None of them were under it, but they’d been looking at something which had been…

‘Oh, Gork’s Green Grin,’ Snaggi breathed, clapping his hand over his mouth. ‘Da zoggin’ warboss is down dere!’

For just a moment, Genrul Uzbrag thought that the enormous visage of Gork (or possibly Mork) falling off the Mega-Gargant was something Gazrot Goresnappa had orchestrated. He was still waiting for a squiggoth head to appear in its place, and Da Snakebitten to announce he’d created the galaxy’s first Squig-Dread, or something equally ridiculous, when he realised that Gazrot’s expression as he looked upwards at the massive hunk of falling metal was not one of triumph or pride, but one of confusion, rapidly overtaken by pissed-off comprehension.

Da Genrul had done enough yellin’ back and forth in loud warzones to have picked up an understanding of what shapes an ork’s mouth made when forming certain words, and so he was quite certain that he did not imagine that Gazrot said ‘Oh zog’ just before the Gargant’s head landed on top of him.

Fire blossomed upwards, accompanied by roiling clouds of black smoke. Shards of metal were flung out, scything through the ranks and cutting down the ones at the front (mainly lower-ranking boyz, since any boss with half a brain kept a few footsloggers between him and Gazrot Goresnappa, just in case Da Snakebitten decided he needed to make an example of someone). A lot of orks cheered on general principle, since something loud and destructive had happened, and that was always worth cheering.[3]

Genrul Uzbrag’s brows lowered, and not just because he was squinting against the cloud of dust and dirt blasted outwards by the impact. The presence of the warboss was the lodestone to which the rest of the Waaagh! was inexorably drawn: an invisible force, sort of like gravity, only not one the mekboyz could duplicate with a trukk full of spare parts, a free afternoon, and a plentiful supply of fungus beer. And now, in some way that Uzbrag could not quite verbalise even within his own head, that pull was gone.

Well, not gone, exactly. It was more…

…inwards.

‘You killed ’im,’ Kruffik said, his tone one of bleak and utter dread. ‘You killed da warboss, Snaggi.’

Snaggi’s first instinct was to deny it. That was what a grot did: if something happened then you denied it, unless you were absolutely sure that the biggest ork paying attention was happy with it, in which case you claimed credit for it. He should deny that the lever had moved, and if it had definitely moved then he should deny being the one to have pulled on it; and if it was impossible to argue that he hadn’t been the one who’d pulled on it then he should definitely blame Kruffik for hitting him so hard that he’d had no option other than to grab at the lever – no, better, that he hadn’t even realised that he’d grabbed at the lever.

But he didn’t feel like denying it. He could hear the great green

voices of the gods, and the gods were telling him that he shouldn’t be trying to hide this. Who could say they’d killed a warboss? Precious few! There were mighty beakies who’d never killed a warboss! There were flashy skrawniez who’d never killed a warboss! There were stompy metal gits with the glowy guns who’d never killed a warboss! So what if Snaggi couldn’t actually prove that pulling on the lever was what had caused the Gargant’s head to fall off? So what if it made no sense for Mek Zagblutz to have set up a lever that would make the head of his pride and joy fall off? Maybe the mek hadn’t done it on purpose: maybe he’d made a mistake. Perhaps this was Snaggi’s destiny.

He liked that.

‘Yeah,’ he said, tasting the word as it passed his needle teeth, relishing the thrill of danger as he admitted – no! Claimed credit for – killing Gazrot Goresnappa. ‘Yeah, I did. I killed da warboss. An’ ya know wot?’ he continued, warming to the rebellious glow in his chest. ‘Ya know zoggin’ wot?’

He rounded on Kruffik and grabbed the horrified grot by the front of his rags.

‘I ain’t finished! I’ve had it wiv bein’ kicked for fings I ain’t done! Or even for fings I have! I’ve had it wiv bein’ yelled at, and fightin’ da squigs for me food! Dere’s more of us dan dere are of dem! It’s time for us grots to rise up, ya hear me? We’re gonna show dese overgrown gits who da real bosses are round ’ere! An’ if any of ’em don’t like it…’ He smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Blam! Dey’re gonna get flattened, just like dat git down dere! Dis is just da beginnin’! Dis is da Revolushun!’

Far below, the orks of what had up until very recently been Waaagh! Gazrot weren’t paying any attention to the tiny, animated figure screaming far above them.

They had suddenly acquired much more pressing concerns. ...