Da Gobbo Rides Again by Rhuairidh James

Author:Rhuairidh James
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science fiction: space opera
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Stimma did not like weirdboyz at all. Their power was dangerous, and not the fun kind of dangerous – it was just odd. It was unpredictable. The raw energy of the Waaagh! wasn’t something you could tear apart and rivet or stitch back together. You couldn’t learn how it worked, it just happened. Right now, though, it was Stimma’s only recourse. The problem was, even if Stimma could stomach mucking around with sorcery, he wasn’t sure he could deal with an encounter with Eadrek.

Stimma had a broad fondness for all ork-kind. Sure, he’d had his share of scraps. He’d plotted, schemed and laid kunnin’ traps for rivals. He’d liked to think he’d probably killed more orks – in brawls, inter-clan battles or just through medikal malpractice – than Old Bale Eye. But, when push came to shove, every ork was his friend and ally. It was him, his mates, and a galaxy of things to smash. You fought on the way, but that was – well, that was what mates were for.

Eadrek, though? Stimma hated him.

Most weirdboyz had the good grace to be terrified of their unruly power. They were, essentially, hand grenades with legs, names and personal preferences; they came and went, and, if you were lucky, went big. Some of the older boyz still spoke about when Sparka had gone up, taking what was – unbeknownst to the orks – an entire astropathic vane with him in a particularly colourful and noisy demise.

Since Sparka, Eadrek had been the weirdboy. And Eadrek’s ’ead had, so far, stubbornly refused to explode. Instead, he’d decided to ‘research’ the psykers of other cultures to see if they had any secrets that could be nicked and repurposed. As far as Stimma could tell, this usually involved cutting off the heads of any such unfortunates that got in Eadrek’s way, and then doing weird things with them. Stimma might have been able to cope with this grotesque mockery of medikal science had Eadrek chosen to live on the orkish encampment’s edges (where weirdboyz belonged, for reasons of safety as much as their lowly social position) instead of in the hut next to Stimma, as if he were a proper oddboy, and not just a bomb with an inflated sense of self-importance.

Stimma had noticed that humies felt much the same about their psykers as orks did, which is to say, they rightly understood them as weapons. Where humans differed was in their tendency to judiciously execute the more wayward ones before they did anything really interesting. Stimma had spent a fruitless week trying to convince Eadrek that getting shot in the head was, in fact, a secret human technique for mastering the power of the Waaagh! to little avail.

Stimma complained endlessly about Eadrek to Goggulz as they made their way back into the thick of the orkish settlement. He did so not just out of hatred; it was a way of drowning out the distant, but definite, sound of colossal footsteps somewhere in the

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