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Warboss – Extract

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DA BIT WOT COMES BEFORE DA FING

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…’

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. 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 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 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.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Tazio Bettin.

Warboss © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. Warboss, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80407-287-5

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Thanks to Pidge for help with the tank stuff.

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