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Mad Dok – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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MAD DOK

By Nate Crowley

I

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, the Prophet of Gork and Mork, who left worlds ablaze in his boot prints, was dead.

There wasn’t much arguing with that, since his body was hanging in a hundred pieces, on a rusty scaffold as high as a Stompa’s chin. But that was all right, as far as Dok Grotsnik was concerned. In fact, he reckoned the human Blackmane had done him a bit of a favour, by removing Ghazghkull’s head. He’d been asking the boss for permission to remove it himself for years, after all, saying that the best way to fix all his wonky bits would be to just… switch him off for a bit, and get ’em all done at once.

But since Ghazghkull’s counter-offer had always been that he should do the same thing to Grotsnik (without the fixing or the putting back together afterwards, mind), the dok had come to terms with the fact it probably wouldn’t ever happen.

But then along had come Blackmane and his mob of beakies – chop, clang, whirr, splat, thud – and here Grotsnik had found himself, with a blank canvas to work on at last. Letting the corners of a rare grin begin to work across his staple-puckered face, the dok looked up at the jungle of chains which bore the bits of the Prophet, and flexed his talons in anticipation of the work ahead.

They were good hands, these new ones: extra-nimble ones from his private stash, which he’d grafted on fresh that morning. And while they were still a bit fuzzy under the talons from barrel-mould, and itchy where his blood was still finding its way through the dead bits, Grotsnik knew they were ready to work wonders.

And what wonders they would work. He had big plans for the rebuilding of the boss. Plans so big, in fact, that he couldn’t see the whole of ’em at once, just bits here and there. Still, the dok was sure inspiration would show him the way, once he’d started cutting. That was how it had always been, during his truly great works.

It was certainly how it had been on the night of his greatest work, all those years ago: the night when he’d first operated on the ork who would go on to become Ghazghkull Thraka. Under the leaky patchwork of that squighide tent, with just that bucket of third-rate tools to work with, Grotsnik had forced the whole galaxy to reconsider what an ork was capable of.

And now? Well. Now he was going to do it again. But bigger. And better. And with much fancier kit.

Inside the ferrocrete dome he’d claimed as his lab, deep down under the big human kafeedral where the boss had been felled, was enough weird machinery to bring anything back to life. Stacks of generators ringed the edge of the vault, exposed coils alive with sizzling blue discharge sparks, while banks of pumps and bioreaktors chugged and hissed and gurgled with every fluid the dok had been able to get his hands on. That was just the start of it: Grotsnik had spent years hoarding machines that looked like they might do interesting things if you attached living things to ’em, and at last he had an excuse to get the whole lot out to play with. And so, every few minutes, a new pile of crates appeared with a bang and a sizzle of dirty yellow light, as they were tellyported down from the belly of his medikal frigate in orbit.

Then there was all the meat-bits. A row of cages held packs upon packs of all the painboy’s staple squig breeds, from bulbous transfusion squigs to saggy-faced skinlender-squigs, as well as a few mobs of hysterical, shrieking snotlings. Beneath them, a second, worse row of cages held a load of captured beakies, with their eyes and jaws and hands taken off so they couldn’t cause trouble. Grotsnik wasn’t certain what he’d actually do with ’em, since their blood was about as much use as piss in an emergency. But at the very least, they’d give him something to drill holes in while he was thinking.

And there, of course – well, everywhere – was Ghazghkull.

With all the bits of the boss suspended around the dome, Grotsnik was reminded of one of those horrereys the human meks made, in service to their pointless obsession with how fast stuff spun round in space. The bits of armoured gristle were like brooding green planets, he reckoned, orbiting the massive slab in the middle of the dome, where Ghazghkull’s head sat looking way angrier than anything dead should’ve been able to.

The dok hobbled over to the slab then, until his torso was level with the dark green cliff of Ghazghkull’s face. He admired the yellowed jags of his tusks, reflected in the glassy surface of the Prophet’s good eye. Then he poked the eye, just because he could. The head retained its bloodied scowl of fury, but nothing happened.

The boss could be as angry as he liked, Grotsnik figured, letting his grin stretch into a great, giddy leer as realisation dawned. Because right now, the boss was dead. More than that though, he was a patient. And patients never got a say in what happened during surgery. Medikal effix, the humans called that. It was one of their rare good ideas.

Grotsnik ran a talon over the web of rope-thick scars covering the patient’s hide, and as he saw how many had been left by his own blades, he snarled with pride. This was his monster. And how well he had done, under the circumstances. Every bolt he’d hammered into the boss over the years, every bloodpipe he’d stapled to another bloodpipe, he’d had to get permission for, from Ghazghkull himself. He’d had to cheat and sneak his way to every creative flourish. And still, he’d created a masterpiece.

Naturally, all the underbosses would’ve said the boss was the work of Gork and Mork. But Grotsnik had never seen either of ’em show up with a spanner. Ghazghkull might have been the design of the gods, sure. The dok would give them that. But Ghazghkull was Grotsnik’s work. All Gork and Mork had ever contributed to their Prophet, for all their holy clamour and barging, had been a beakie-forged bolter shell to the skull. The dok had been left to figure out the rest, and he’d done mirikals. But it had all just been practice, for the work in front of him now. And in the hours to come, he was finally going to show Gork, and his big idiot twin, just how much room he had found to improve on their work.

What new feats might the boss go on to rack up, Grotsnik dared to wonder, now that his creator was free to flex his art muscles without constraint? How many more planets would he swallow up with war, and make fit for orks to thrive on? The dok looked up past the scaffold to the dome of masonry above, and pictured the stars beyond it turning green one by one. A whole galaxy, claimed for orks by Ghazghkull... and by Grotsnik too, if you thought about it properly.

The dok thought about it very properly, until he found it was too big a thought to keep inside his brain. So, since he was grinning anyway, he vented it all in a big, mad roar of a laugh, which filled the dome just as thoroughly as his authority. At last, if only for a little while, his genius was free to burn out of control. No gods, no warlords: just Grotsnik.

That wasn’t a bad note to get started on, the dok thought. So he fished his oldest scalpel from his belt – the tool he’d made the first cut with, the night Ghazghkull was created – and leaned in to begin the operation.

II

Just as Grotsnik’s blade was about to meet flesh, something heavy and wet smacked into the flagstones next to him. A spatter of small, viscous gobbets followed, coating the left-hand side of his body, and as they began to slither down the grooves of his knobbly musculature, his grin shrivelled into a mean, crooked grimace.

‘It was that one what dropped it,’ a voice squawked down, from the top of the scaffold. But Grotsnik’s immediate interest was in what had been dropped. He looked to the floor where, just as he had expected from the sound of the splat, Ghazghkull’s heart lay in several ragged pieces.

It was going to have been Ghazghkull’s heart, anyway.

Alongside the bits of the Prophet’s original body hung around the dome, there were a lot of bits from other orks too. Some, Grotsnik had been saving for years, putting them on ice whenever he’d found himself operating on a patient too thick to notice the lack of a few ribs or a kidney. Others, to the dok’s amazement, had been donated, as word of Ghazghkull’s fall had spread across the trenches of Krongar.

This had been the route by which he had acquired the heart. A titanic but simple-minded Goff known as Got-So-Angry-He-Tried-To-Fight-Himself, had come to Grotsnik’s lab just days before, ducking under the lintel with an expression that made Grotsnik instinctively reach for his chain-scalpel. He had presumed the giant had come to hurry the work, via traditional Goff motivational methods. Instead, the hulk had simply prised a broad slab of armour from the centre of his chest, before reaching into the shell-wound which the carapace had covered, and tearing free his heart with a rubbery snap. For the boss, he had mumbled as he had handed Grotsnik the organ, before slumping to his knees and passing out.

It had been a first-rate heart, Grotsnik thought, as he watched its ruptured mass quivering on the stone – the kind of organ he’d once have sold half his tools to acquire. Now it was just more meat for the squigs, however, and he supposed he’d have to modify the fuel pump off a truck instead. But before Grotsnik could even register the disappointment he felt, it had transmuted itself into anger, and his gaze had snapped to the gantries high above, scanning them for the likely culprit.

He did not have to look long. Awaiting his gaze were a cluster of grots in stained overalls, all frantically jabbing fingers of mute accusation at each other. Behind them, the winch which had been conveying the heart towards its socket swung to and fro forlornly.

Grotsnik found he did not care which of the snivelling things had dropped the organ. He wanted, very much, to shoot the lot of ’em, if only to dodge the tedium of listening to them blame each other. And any other day, he would have done just that. Indeed, his hand was already reaching for the slugga at his hip to do some killing. But a muted boom from beyond the dome above, and a trickle of dust from its apex, checked his arm before he could level the weapon’s sights. Because this was not any other day.

Ghazghkull might have fallen, but the battle wasn’t over. Up there, beyond the dome, hundreds of thousands of orks were still fighting a vicious defence against Blackmane’s Space Wolves. The beakies’ boss had been thoroughly gutted in the process of getting Ghazghkull’s head off, but rather than calling it evens and moving on, his lads had reacted by getting really, really upset.

The orks weren’t winning.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.

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