Chapter 14: The Imp Takes Me Treasure Hunting
Fezekks tilted its head. The single eye rolled upward, producing an expression that on a human might suggest someone trying to recall something. On that hideously ugly face, the effect was closer to a rotting fish pulling a grimace.
"You mean the hard-shelled humies who came charging in from outside a few standard days ago?"
"All dead. Not one left."
"They made quite an impression when they came through, I'll give them that. Guns blazing, turned a few thousand greenskins up front into paste. But..."
"The greenskins have three million. Your hard-shelled friends had a few thousand. A few thousand against three million, anyone can do that arithmetic."
"And it wasn't only greenskins that killed them. The Bloodletters from the deep decks showed up and hit several of the humie squads from behind in the corridors. Genestealer hybrids managed to slip into one of the humie patrols and tore them apart from the inside."
It tilted its head further, wearing the expression of someone recalling a particularly satisfying meal.
"The screaming was very pleasant. Sweet."
Rosen's expression didn't change.
He hadn't been holding out much hope. But hearing it confirmed aloud, knowing that all seven thousand of them had become nameless corpses somewhere on this hulk, sat heavily regardless.
Rosen pushed that feeling down.
"What about the weapons and equipment those Guardsmen were carrying?" He asked his third question. "Guns, ammunition, heavy weapons. Seven thousand assault troops carried a substantial amount of materiel."
Fezekks curled its lip with contempt.
"Cleaned out by the greenskins, obviously. Don't you know how they work? Anything shiny, anything that fits in a hand, anything that spits fire, they haul it all back to their warrens. The guns, the ammo, the armour, all of it got carried off to their camp."
"Where is the Ork camp?"
"Hee hee hee, you want to go armed robbing in a camp of three million greenskins? Insect, you've either got mushrooms growing in your head or maggots."
Rosen didn't engage with the mockery.
He genuinely wasn't planning to raid a camp of three million Orks. He wasn't a Khorne worshipper with his skull split down the middle.
But he needed weapons.
Urgently.
Rosen shifted the angle of the question.
"Aside from the Ork camp, are there any other locations on this hulk that contain weapons? Armouries, ordnance rooms, ammunition storage bays, anything that could be described as a weapons cache."
Fezekks's single eye narrowed slightly.
Rosen immediately caught the brief hesitation that crossed its expression.
Not the hesitation of someone searching for an answer. The hesitation of someone who already had the answer and was deciding whether to give it.
The Imp's nature was asserting itself.
Even with the true name oath stripping away its ability to lie outright, it was still instinctively trying to preserve leverage by simply not volunteering information.
Because the oath covered not saying things that were false, and not deliberately omitting things it was asked about. But what if the question wasn't specific enough to trigger the omission clause?
That was the grey area Imps operated in most naturally.
Unfortunately for Fezekks, Rosen had asked specifically.
And Rosen's hand had tightened at the same time.
"Gah, wait, wait, wait!" Fezekks thrashed hard in Rosen's iron grip. The two pathetic little wings on its back beat furiously. "Stop squeezing, stop squeezing! I'll talk!"
Rosen loosened his fingers slightly.
"There's one."
Fezekks said it with visible reluctance. "Not far from here. About two hundred metres away, in a maintenance branch corridor off Deck Seventy-Five."
"It's a small shipboard weapons storage bay from one of the original warships that make up this hulk. It's sitting behind a collapsed section of corridor. The entrance is covered by debris and warped plating. The greenskins never found it."
"Those mushroom-heads have nothing in their skulls but iron shavings and dung. They only scavenge what they can see at a glance. The bay's door is completely hidden behind a collapsed section of hull. From the outside it looks like a solid wall."
Rosen held Fezekks's gaze for a few seconds.
The true name oath was still running.
If it was lying, the binding mark would strike back immediately.
It was telling the truth.
"Lead the way."
Rosen gave Fezekks a slight forward push by the neck to indicate the direction.
"You're going to carry me by the throat the entire way?" Fezekks let out an indignant shriek.
"What else? Put you down and let you slip into a wall and disappear?"
"I swore a true name oath! I can't lie!"
"You swore that everything you say would be true."
Rosen said it flatly. "You didn't swear you wouldn't slip away when I wasn't paying attention. You chose the wording of that oath yourself."
Fezekks's expression froze.
The single eye moved rapidly, clearly recalling the exact wording of the oath it had just made, and realising in short order that Rosen was entirely correct.
The oath only covered the truthfulness of what it said. It placed no constraint on its freedom of movement. It could, in theory, reach a section of wall sufficiently eroded by the warp, pass back through, and vanish into the space between realspace and the warp.
"You don't seem like an ordinary humie soldier."
"Move." Rosen didn't respond to the probe.
He carried Fezekks by the throat and led the five Death Warriors out of the shuttle wreckage.
Before crossing the corridor outside, Rosen checked the positions of nearby Ork patrols through Shared Awareness.
In the distance, scattered gunfire and explosions drifted over. Probably one greenskin warband going at another over some piece of salvage.
In greenskin society, second only to fighting enemies in popularity was fighting your own side.
Rosen used the window.
All six moved through the corridor in a tight, efficient, silent formation.
Number 1 on point. Numbers 4 and 5 on the flanks. Numbers 2 and 3 flanking Rosen in the centre. Rosen's left hand kept hold of Fezekks's throat throughout. His right hand held the boltgun, now down to one round.
Fezekks was being carried by the neck, but as a warp entity its environmental awareness extended far beyond what any human could perceive. It could smell the raw, violent Waaagh energy radiating from greenskin souls.
"Don't take the corridor on the left." Fezekks said suddenly in a low voice.
Rosen stopped.
"There's a group of greenskins in there stripping something apart. More than twenty."
Rosen had Number 1 verify it through Shared Awareness. Number 1 climbed into a ventilation pipe and looked out toward the left-side corridor.
Sure enough, in an open compartment roughly forty metres away, a cluster of Ork Boyz and Gretchin were noisily dismantling a piece of Imperial equipment of indeterminate age into components.
The Imp's information was accurate.
They went around.
Approximately fifteen minutes later, they reached their destination.