Brutal Kunnin, page 9
‘You not comin’ wiv us, boss?’ Wazzock asked.
‘Nah,’ Ufthak said. ‘Me an’ Mogrot, we’re doin’ somefing a bit speshul. Helpin’ out Da Meklord, like.’
As one, his ladz turned their heads to look over at the gargants.
‘Dat’s gonna ’ave to be a proper kunnin’ plan, dat is,’ Deffrow opined.
‘It is,’ Ufthak assured him. ‘Now get movin’!’ His ladz bolted off, heading towards whatever they thought looked most likely to offer up some interesting tek.
‘So wot are we doin’, boss?’ Mogrot asked him.
‘Jus’ stick close to me,’ Ufthak told him. ‘Dis is either gonna be brilliant, or we’re gonna die spektakularly.’
‘Wossat mean?’
‘Means wiv a big explosion an’ dat.’ Ufthak set off towards where the speed freeks were still brawling. ‘Now follow me, an’ be ready to clobber someone if dey need clobberin’.’
‘Sounds good ta me,’ Mogrot said, trailing him with a vicious grin on his face. If an ork was going to meet Gork and Mork, at the very least he wanted to be able to say that he’d died doing something big, loud or otherwise impressive.
The Kult of Speed had degenerated into an utter ruck of vehicles. The first couple of warbikers who’d smartened up to what was in the silo were on their way again, but then others had seen what was going off and had assumed that the fuel must be something super special, so they’d wanted some. The trouble was, other speed freeks had come to the same conclusion and, speed freeks being speed freeks, everyone had wanted to get it done as fast as possible. What this meant was that various drivers and gunners were punching each other to try and get hold of the fuelling hose, while the hose itself was in the hands of a bunch of grots who were sniffing the fumes rising from it, giggling, and falling over backwards.
Ufthak scanned the chaos quickly until he found the vehicle he was after, then ducked, dived and barged his way through the maul towards it. Behind him, he heard Mogrot swatting down anyone who’d taken exception to his method of progress.
‘Oi!’ Ufthak bellowed at an ork on the edge of the big fight. ‘Dis yours?’
The ork looked around, somehow working out that the hail had been directed at him. Beside him, a squig consisting mainly of teeth chased a terrified grot through ork legs and over a buggy.
‘Dat’s right!’ the ork said, grinning the manic grin of a speed freek who’d spent that bit too long chasing the horizon. He wore a narrow strip of something shiny over his eyes that wrapped around half his head and hooked behind his ears, although Ufthak was a left-handed brewboy if he could work out why.
‘Looks fast,’ Ufthak commented conversationally, nodding down at the buggy. It was the shokkjump dragsta he’d seen earlier: bright yellow to indicate the driver’s affiliation with the Bad Moons clan, but with a paint job of red flames licking up the sides because, as everyone knew, red ones went faster.
‘You bet!’ the ork beamed, forgetting about the fuel brawl and coming over to stand proudly next to his machine. He slapped his hand lovingly on the roof of it. ‘Dis bad boy can–’
Ufthak swatted him with the Snazzhammer so hard that his body described an arc up and down which landed him directly in the middle of the fight. Judging by the howls of pain and rage that greeted his arrival, his landing hadn’t made him popular.
‘Ain’t yours no more,’ Ufthak muttered to the air in general. The grot fleeing from the squig ran past him and he scooped it up, one hand around its neck, while its pursuer bayed up at it from the ground. Ufthak brought the grot up in front of his face, and it whimpered.
‘You know how dis fing works?’ Ufthak demanded, nodding down at the dragsta.
‘Yes, boss,’ whimpered the grot. ‘I’m Nizkwik, I shoot da gun, innit?’
‘Good enuff,’ Ufthak told it. ‘We’re takin’ it fer a spin. Mogrot!’ he ordered his second-in-command. ‘Yer drivin’.’
‘Yes, boss!’ Mogrot replied with glee, jumping behind the wheel. Ufthak clambered in on the other side, squeezing his hefty frame into the low-slung vehicle’s passenger seat, Nizkwik still gripped in one fist in case the little git decided to make a run for it. A scrabble of claws behind him let Ufthak know that the squig had jumped up on the dragsta as well, and he turned around and glared at it. For a wonder, instead of pouncing in an attempt to get to the grot in his hand, the beast closed its enormous mouth and hunkered down, cowed.
‘Hold on to yer butts!’ Mogrot cackled, pressing the starter. The engine roared into life, a throaty, throbbing purr that quickly rose to a howl as Mogrot floored the pedal and they accelerated away. A scrabble of claws indicated that the squig had lost its balance, but when Ufthak looked around again he saw that it had clamped its jaws on to one of the go-faster fins and was clinging there with great determination.
‘Dis woz a great plan!’ Mogrot yelled over the rushing wind, and Ufthak sighed.
‘Dere’s more to da plan dan dis!’ he bellowed back. Mogrot looked around at him, his disbelieving eyes watering from the speed they were already going at.
‘Dere’s more?!’
‘Get on dat!’ Ufthak told him, pointing at one of the humie roads that wound up off the ground and onto a raised causeway, like the ones the walkers had come down before Badrukk’s crew had totalled them.
‘Yes, boss!’ Mogrot wrenched the wheel and the dragsta slewed around, then accelerated again. Ufthak had to admit, there was an appeal to tearing over the ground like this rather than slogging on foot. He’d still want to get out afterwards though, to break open some heads the proper way.
‘Da shokkjump,’ he growled at Nizkwik, who was staring over his shoulder at the squig in terror. ‘How does it work?’
‘Well,’ the grot said, tearing its eyes off the squig for long enough to point at a large red button in the middle of the dragsta’s dash. ‘Dat’s da shokka, right? When yoo’z goin’ fast enuff, you hit da shokka, and den da shokkjump happens. Or sometimes it don’t happen,’ it added with as much of a shrug as it could manage with Ufthak’s hand around its neck.
‘Why don’t it happen?’ Ufthak asked.
‘Dat would be a teknical matter, wot I don’t know,’ Nizkwik admitted.
‘An’ how fast is “fast enuff”?’
‘Well… pretty zoggin’ fast, boss,’ Nizkwik said with the sickly smile of a grot who reckons it’s about to get clobbered. ‘But if yoo’z askin’ for an egg-zact figure…’
‘Never mind,’ Ufthak muttered. He elbowed Mogrot in the shoulder as the dragsta screeched around a bend and began to climb, following the road upwards. ‘Take dat turn comin’ up, da one on da right!’
‘Da one dat’s gonna take us towards da gargants, boss?’ Mogrot asked, obediently swerving onto a different concourse.
‘Dat’s it,’ Ufthak told him. Ahead of them, the road rose up a little more and then flattened out into what had, at one point, been a high-rise highway that would have gone on to join up with other similar ones in a huge junction. Now, however, the routes that had stretched through there were abruptly truncated into jagged edges of rockcrete above a significant drop, certainly one that could splat an ork flat. Beyond, Ufthak could make out the head and shoulders of the largest humie gargant, currently battering at the MekaGargant with some sort of rapid-fire kannon the length of a battlewagon.
‘Fast as yer can!’ Ufthak ordered, and Mogrot floored it again. The dragsta leaped forwards, its engine howling and its tyres greedily eating up the road.
‘You shot dis, right?’ Ufthak demanded of Nizkwik, jerking his head at the large, shiny-looking gun fixed in front of where he was sitting.
‘Yes, boss!’ Nizkwik said, happy to have found a question it could answer satisfactorily. ‘Dat’s da shokk rifle! It’s well shooty, it–’
‘It’ll do,’ Ufthak grunted, grabbing it with the hand that wasn’t holding the grot and wrenching the shokk rifle loose with a few sparks and the ping of overstressed bolts. Nizkwik gasped in horror, but nothing exploded, so Ufthak judged that he’d got it right.
‘Now hold on,’ he told the grot. ‘Or don’t – not like I care.’ He let go of its neck and switched the shokk rifle to that hand, and Nizkwik hastily clung on to the dash where the shokk rifle had been, before the wind could tear it out of the car.
‘Boss!’ Mogrot called, and he actually sounded a bit uneasy, which demonstrated a comprehension of possible future events that was more advanced than Ufthak had given him credit for. ‘I fink we might be about to run out of track!’
Sure enough, the end of the causeway was looming up at them. Some way beyond, the huge humie gargant fired some sort of energy weapon at the MekaGargant with a screaming crackle that made Ufthak’s ears feel like they were bleeding.
‘Jus’ keep it floored!’ Ufthak barked at him, and Mogrot obliged. Ufthak flexed his fingers and eyed the rapidly approaching gulf, judging distances.
‘We,’ he added, hoping that Gork and Mork would appreciate his certainty and ensure it was well founded, ‘don’t need it.’
The shokkjump dragsta’s front wheels left the edge of the causeway, and Ufthak hit the shokka.
A rapidly spinning vortex of purple-and-silver light erupted in front of them, which the dragsta immediately plunged into. There was a single moment when Ufthak could have sworn that he was being drawn out in length, his hands accelerating away into the riot of colour and his arms struggling to keep up, before his eyes followed.
There was another moment where everything was very loud and had a lot of teeth.
And then the real world erupted on him again, and the back of his head caught up with the rest of him, and the humie gargant was much, much closer than it had been.
Like, really close.
Ufthak grabbed the Snazzhammer off the floor with his free hand.
CRUNCH!
The shokkjump dragsta collided head-on with the gargant’s enormous shoulder plate. Ufthak was thrown forward by the force of the impact and flew out of the cockpit, bouncing across the gargant’s shoulder armour in an uncontrolled tumble, ending up against one of the huge shoulder guns it carried. The dragsta’s nose crumpled and the back of it flipped up and over, coming down with an ear-splitting crash only a yard or so away from him, but then it began to slide off backwards as the gargant staggered sideways, knocked slightly off balance by the collision.
Ufthak found himself following the dragsta.
‘Zog!’ he bellowed, as the massive war machine lurched beneath him again, taking another step and trying to correct itself. There was only one thing for it: he activated the Snazzhammer’s power field with a flick of his thumb, spun it in his grip, and buried the axe end of it into the red-painted armour plate over which he was sliding. His blade bit deep, and his slide came to an abrupt halt with him on an approximately forty-five-degree angle to the vertical.
‘Arrrgh!’
Nizkwik tumbled past him, flailing wildly. Ufthak aimed a kick at it as it fell, more for the sake of it than anything else, and was thoroughly annoyed to find that the grot was not only not knocked flying in an entertaining manner, but also managed to latch on to his boot and hold on.
‘Fanks, boss!’ it beamed up at him, big eyes bulging over needle teeth. ‘I fort I woz a gonner!’
Ufthak glared at it, but trying to shake it loose might shake him loose too, and that wasn’t going to do anyone any good: specifically, him. He grunted. He could always boot the little git off when he got his feet back under him, if he felt like it.
‘Boss?’ Mogrot’s voice shouted, and he looked up to see his second-
in-command’s head poking over the curve of the armour plate. ‘Yoo alright down dere?’
‘Fine,’ Ufthak replied, hefting the shokk rifle causally in his other hand, just in case Mogrot got it into his head that he could try to send his boss for an unexpected flying lesson and take over as nob.
‘Good!’ Mogrot beamed happily. He held up one hand, from which dangled the squig, suspended by its tail and gnashing furiously at the air beneath it. ‘I caught dis before it fell off! Fort we might need some lunch!’
‘Put it down,’ Ufthak snapped. He braced himself, then hauled upwards as hard as he could on the Snazzhammer’s handle. Even one-armed, he was able to get enough heft to pull himself up to a point where he could get a better grip with his boots – not dislodging Nizkwik, although it wasn’t like he was making an effort not to – and get secure enough that he could pull his weapon out again.
‘So wot’s da plan now?’ Mogrot asked, dropping the squig, which scrabbled at the smooth, gently curving armour plate beneath it with some apprehension. ‘Are we gonna–’
The sky lit up a furious shade of red.
Mogrot jumped, Nizkwik screamed, the squig bayed in alarm, and even Ufthak flinched. The MekaGargant had turned its Gaze of Mork – the massive energy weapon housed in its eyes – on the humie gargant beneath their feet. For a moment Ufthak thought they were about to be burned alive, but then the blast subsided again leaving nothing but a faint shimmering in the air and a sudden stench of ozone.
‘Why ain’t we dead?’ Mogrot asked, his voice full of wonder.
‘Da shields,’ Ufthak replied, gesturing to the shimmering. ‘Da shokkjump took us froo dem.’
‘Zoggin’ ’ell,’ Mogrot said. ‘Dat was a bloody good plan, boss.’
‘Told ya,’ Ufthak smirked. He frowned as smoke began rising from one side of the MekaGargant. The mid-sized humie gargant away to their left was limping, but it looked like they were getting the best of the fight.
That couldn’t be allowed.
‘Right,’ he said, working his finger into the trigger hole of the shokk rifle. ‘Let’s hit dese gits where it hurts.’
It took a bit of edging around the shoulder plate, and a lot of useless shouting when the gargant’s weapons fired again and Ufthak thought his head was going to cave in from the noise, but it was less than a minute later when he, Mogrot, Nizkwik and the squig were perched directly over the gargant’s head, inside which, Ufthak was pretty sure, would be the humies crewing it.
‘An’ you don’t fink dis fing’s got a Gaze of Mork?’ Mogrot asked dubiously, staring down at the front of it. ‘Bein’ burned up ain’t anyfing to brag about.’
‘Nah, dey can’t have a Gaze of Mork, cos dey ain’t got Mork,’ Ufthak pointed out, reasonably enough, he thought. ‘Dey just got dat Emprah, an’ I don’t fink ’e does zog all. Bloody useless god, if ya asks me.’ He took a firmer grip on the Snazzhammer. ‘On free. Ready?’
‘Ready,’ Mogrot nodded. Nizkwik made a vague noise of affirmation too, although what the little git thought it was going to do, Ufthak didn’t know. Even the squig barked, as though it had some idea of what he was talking about.
‘One, two, free!’
They leaped.
Ufthak landed on the very front edge of the humie gargant’s head, planted both his feet, took a two-handed grip on the Snazzhammer, and swung it downwards. The crackling power field of the hammer’s head hit the panels of lenses and spinning gears housed within the machine’s eye slit, and punched through. It took two more swings before there was a hole large enough for them to fit through, but Ufthak could already hear screams and shouts of alarm from within, in those stupid, high-pitched humie voices.
He dropped forward into space, twisting as he did so to catch the upper rim of the gargant’s eye slit, and swinging his boots through the hole he’d just made. The rest of his body followed neatly, barring a flare of pain down his left side as a jagged shard of metal tore at his flesh, and then he was inside the head.
It was a tight, cramped space, which suited Ufthak perfectly. One humie, bleeding red blood on its face from various small wounds inflicted by flying shards of metal, rose up out of its seat, trailing strange cables from the back of its head and its forearms. It was scrabbling at its belt, trying to get its gun out, but it was panicked and far, far too close to him.
Ufthak reached out and engulfed its tiny head in his free hand, then squeezed. The humie screamed, flailing uselessly at his hand with its own. Its companion managed to draw a slugga of some sort, but the puny beam of light it shot into Ufthak’s shoulder was barely more painful than a solitary buzzer squig bite. He swatted it with the Snazzhammer, and its torso disintegrated into a red mist of pulped flesh, intermingled with a few red-slicked shards of gleaming white bone.
Something gave in the head of the humie whose skull he was squeezing, and suddenly his hand was sticky. Ufthak dropped the humie, now a limp corpse, and shook his fingers out. Zoggin’ things leaked everywhere at the slightest provocation…
Something barrelled out of an alcove at the rear of the cockpit, a red-and-midnight-robed apparition of flailing arms and jabbing, serpentine metal tendrils. Ufthak was caught slightly off guard, but Mogrot, following him in, was not. He emptied his slugga into the humie mekboy, who collapsed to the floor and didn’t move again.
‘Well, dat was easy,’ Mogrot commented, looking around. ‘Wow. Dere’s a lot of flashin’ stuff in ’ere, ain’t dere!’
‘Yup,’ Ufthak replied, because there certainly was. It was like the humies had decided that the interior of their gargant needed to be even brighter and flashier than whatever stars they could see from the surface of their planet. He frowned down at the controls, and wondered whether they could work out how to pilot it. There’d only been a couple of humies doing it; if he and Mogrot could control it and turn its guns on the other humie machines, that would end the fight outside pretty sharpish. And then maybe he could keep it, have his own gargant…
‘Boss, wassat?’ Mogrot asked, nudging him. Ufthak turned around to see where his second-in-command was pointing, and frowned.
There was a tank of fluid at the back of the cockpit. Ufthak hadn’t paid any attention to it until now, since it blatantly hadn’t posed any sort of threat, but now he could see that there was a humie body floating inside it. It was rather more grey than any humie he’d seen before – they generally came in variations of brown instead of a good strong green like the boyz – and it was even skinnier and more skeletal than the rest of that frail species. It also seemed to be lacking eyes, or at least it had cables going into its eye sockets, although it was definitely alive. Even as he watched, its mouth moved soundlessly.
