Through Shared Awareness, Lawson looked down over the entire battlefield.
Thirty Deathsworn.
Six five-man squads.
Two days ago, he had been fighting a guerrilla war with six men. Now he held in his hands a finely tuned harvesting machine.
A greenskin patrol made up of three Ork boyz and more than forty gretchin was moving south along a main corridor.
Squads Alpha and Beta had already set up a fireblock directly in front of the patrol.
Six boltguns and four lasguns were aimed into the corridor from cover on both sides.
The five Deathsworn of Squad Gamma had already used the ventilation network overhead to circle behind the greenskin patrol. They were now crouched at the duct exit, waiting for the order.
Squad Delta had sealed off the exit of a side passage on the patrol's right, cutting off the only possible escape route.
"Close the trap."
The instant Lawson gave the command, all four squads opened fire at once.
Alpha and Beta struck first from the front.
Ten guns spat death simultaneously, bolts and las-beams weaving together into an airtight mesh of fire in the corridor.
The first two Ork boyz were dropped almost in the same second.
The third reacted a little faster. Instinctively, it raised the battered blast shield it had stripped from an Imperial soldier's corpse, trying to block the frontal fire.
But it forgot what was behind it.
Squad Gamma dropped out of the ducts.
Five Fangs of Catachan and two chainswords tore into the rear of the greenskin formation at the same time.
Before the shield-bearing Ork boy could even turn around, one chainsword ripped down its spine from above.
The high-speed chain-teeth chewed through its cheap scrap-metal armor, mulched the vertebrae, and carved a horrifying furrow down its back from the nape of the neck to the tailbone.
The Ork pitched forward, and the shield slammed to the floor with a dull metallic boom.
The gretchin broke immediately.
"Run! Run!"
"Humies everywhere!"
They bolted for the only route not blocked by frontal fire, the right-hand side passage.
And ran straight into Squad Delta.
The five Deathsworn of Delta were crouched behind cover on both sides of the side-passage exit, their guns already trained on the narrow opening.
When the first wave of shrieking gretchin burst out of the tunnel, they ran into a near-perfect crossing field of fire.
Not a single one escaped.
From the first shot to the fall of the last gretchin, the entire annihilation took less than forty-five seconds.
Three Ork boyz.
More than forty gretchin.
Wiped out.
Lawson frowned slightly.
Efficiency was dropping.
Not combat efficiency. Combat efficiency was still rising.
What was dropping was the encounter rate with greenskins.
During the first two days after establishing the stronghold, each hunting line had encountered one to two greenskin patrols per hour on average.
Now they were seeing one only every three or four hours, and even those patrols were getting smaller.
The local density of greenskins was clearly decreasing.
Lawson's first reaction had been suspicion. After killing so many greenskins, he should have attracted the attention of the larger hordes by now.
A greenskin force of three million could not possibly ignore continuing losses inside its own territory.
Orks were not human.
A human army that took steady losses might choose to contract strategically, reassess the threat, and redeploy.
Orks only had one response.
Send more Orks to fight.
Yet that retaliatory counteroffensive had never come.
Leaning against one of the support pillars beneath the gantry crane inside the stronghold, Lawson slowly worked it out.
The answer had actually been there all along, in the intelligence Fezex had given him before it died.
This hulk did not belong only to the greenskins.
There were daemonic entities and Chaos Space Marines on the lower decks.
There was a Genestealer nest in the core region.
Three factions were fighting continuously, none willing to give ground.
There was only one explanation for the declining greenskin density.
The main strength of the greenskin horde was fighting somewhere else.
It was not that the Orks did not want to come.
They simply had their hands full.
The small greenskin patrols left roaming the outer zones were just stray fragments thrown off from the main battlefield.
"This is good news and bad news," Lawson analyzed silently.
The good news was that for now, he did not have to face the full force of the greenskin horde.
The bad news was that the prey was thinning out.
And when the battle on the main front finally ended, regardless of whether the greenskins or the daemons won, the victor would inevitably turn its attention to the rest of the hulk.
When that happened, what came pouring toward him would no longer be scattered stragglers.
Lawson needed to develop his strength before that moment arrived.
Time was not on his side.
He needed more prey.
"Expand the hunting radius."
Through Shared Awareness, Lawson issued a new operational order to all Deathsworn.
On top of the three existing hunting lines, he added three more extension routes, pushing deeper into unexplored zones to the northeast, northwest, and due west.
Twenty hours later, they made a discovery that made Lawson's eyes light up.
Squad Kappa, advancing along an ancient internal cargo rail line to the west, had pushed roughly four kilometers when they found a large zone that had clearly been heavily modified by greenskins.
It was a massive mechanical chamber, at least two thousand square meters in area.
But it no longer looked anything like the interior of an Imperial warship.
The ceiling was hung with a dense mess of electric cables, chains, and pipes, as though some giant spider had spun a web of total chaos across a metallic forest.
The floor was piled high with metal components of every shape and size, along with heaps of unidentifiable mechanical scrap.
On several crude workbenches cobbled together out of unknown alloys sat weapons and devices in the middle of being modified.
A greenskin Mekboy workshop.
Lawson's heartbeat quickened.
Mekboyz were anomalies even among greenskins, creatures born with some impossible instinct for machinery.
Give them a pile of scrap, three minutes to stare at it, then a hammer, some wire, and a handful of rivets, and that pile of scrap would somehow start working.
Not because of physics.
Because of Waaagh! energy.
But to Lawson, a Mek workshop was first and foremost a treasure vault packed with high-value metal and salvageable equipment.
Through Shared Awareness, he carefully inspected the inside of the workshop.
On the left side of the chamber, several Imperial vehicle engines that had been disassembled into components were stacked according to a logic only greenskins could possibly understand.
The adamant steel content in those engines was extremely high. If all of them were absorbed, the reserve would make a tremendous leap.
On one of the workbenches, an Imperial standard lascannon was in the middle of being modified.
A Mekboy had welded three extra pipes of varying thickness onto the barrel, making the whole weapon look like a metal octopus with four tentacles.
And in the deepest part of the workshop, Lawson saw something that made his brows jump sharply.
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