The Grot Prophet of Wrong Physics

Snikkrit kept his ledgers in a language no one else could read, which was - in the great and bloody calculus of Ork society - the only reason he was still alive.

This was not, he would have been the first to admit, because the language was sophisticated. It was barely a language at all. It was a system of scratches on flattened scrap-metal pages, organized by a logic that even Snikkrit could not have articulated if asked, which he never was, because nobody cared how a grot tallyman did his work so long as the result was a number that could be shouted at someone bigger. The scratches represented quantities, locations, states of repair, and - in a small but growing subsection of the ledger that Snikkrit had started keeping after the raid on the debris field, and which he guarded with the feral possessiveness of a creature that had stumbled upon the single most dangerous thing in the galaxy, which is to say a fact - the degree to which a given piece of salvage could be expected to do what it was supposed to do versus what somebody said it was supposed to do.

These two categories, he had noticed, were diverging.

The debris field had been drifting through the outer system for some indeterminate period - Orks did not keep calendars, and would have hit anyone who suggested they should - when Warboss Garagunk’s fleet found it. Or rather, when a scout-squig piloted by three grots in a tin box that was technically too small for two grots and no squig came tumbling back through the fleet’s ragged formation broadcasting excitement on every frequency it could reach, which was two. The debris was unusual. The debris was shiny. The debris did not look like anything the Orks had encountered before, and in a galaxy where Ork salvage crews had, at various points, attempted to loot Aeldari webway gates, Necron tomb-spyders, live Tyranid bioships, and on one occasion a small star, this was saying something.

Snikkrit was aboard the salvage hulk Dat’s Mine Now when the scavenging parties went out, because the salvage hulk was where he lived, and where he lived was where his ledger was, and where his ledger was constituted the entirety of his domain in the universe. He was small - runtish even by grot standards, which was a designation that carried with it something of the same pathos as being called the least venomous snake in a pit. He had yellowish-green skin, an oversized head that wobbled on his neck like a fruit considering whether to fall, and three fingers on his left hand where there should have been four, the fourth having been bitten off by a squig when Snikkrit was young enough that the distinction between “pet” and “predator” had not yet fully resolved itself in his cognitive apparatus.

He survived by counting things. He had always survived by counting things. In the howling, magnificent, perpetually concussed civilization of the Orks, where status accrued to the largest, loudest, and most enthusiastically violent, there existed - down in the gaps between the floorplates, metaphorically and often literally - a need for creatures who could keep track of how much stuff there was. Ork Meks needed to know how many gubbinz were in the bitz pile. Warbosses needed to know how many boyz could be mustered. Nobz needed to know - although “needed” was perhaps generous, “intermittently tolerated being told” was closer - how many teef they had collected. All of these functions were fulfilled by grots, because grots were small enough to be ignored and frightened enough to be accurate, and Snikkrit was, by local consensus, the most accurate counter in Garagunk’s warband.

He was not loved for this. He was not even liked. He was kept, in the way that a useful tool is kept: sharpened occasionally, stored carelessly, and blamed when it didn’t work.

The salvage from the debris field was wrong.

Snikkrit knew this within hours of the first haul being dragged into Dat’s Mine Now’s cavernous belly, and he knew it in the way that a creature who has spent his entire life cataloguing the behaviour of objects knows when objects are misbehaving - not through theory, which he did not possess, or instruments, which he could not have operated, but through the accumulated weight of observation that is the only science available to the very small and very frightened.

The components looked like technology. They had the shapes of technology - housings, conduits, plating, connectors, things that slotted together with the implicit promise that the assembled whole would perform some function. Several of the salvage parties had reported that the debris hummed, although they disagreed about the pitch, and one Mek had come back from a retrieval run with the unsettling claim that a piece of wreckage had talked to him, briefly and in a language he didn’t understand, before going quiet in a way he described as “sulky.” This last detail was dismissed by the other Meks on the grounds that talking wreckage was clearly Gork’s domain and therefore none of their business, a theological ruling that satisfied everyone except Snikkrit, who wrote it down.

The wrongness was this: the components did not behave consistently.

A power coupling, ripped from some larger assembly and crudely soldered into a shoota’s firing mechanism by a Mek called Grotsmasha, worked perfectly for six shots, then stopped. Grotsmasha hit it, which was standard repair procedure. It worked for two more shots. He hit it harder. Nothing. He declared it rubbish, tore it out, threw it across the workshop. A different Mek, Zogwort, picked it up, examined it, declared it “right proppa” in a tone of conviction that brooked no argument, soldered it into an entirely different weapon, and fired it forty times without a single misfire.

Same component. Same function. Different Mek. Different result.

Snikkrit wrote this down too.

Over the following days - he measured time by the rhythm of meals, fights, and explosions, which in Ork society provided a reasonably fine-grained temporal resolution - he accumulated more observations. A hull plate that bent when Nob Skullkrak tried to shape it but held rigid for Mek Gizzard, who wanted it rigid. An engine component that produced power in proportion not to fuel input but to the volume at which its operator addressed it. A navigation device of uncertain provenance that pointed consistently toward whatever the person holding it most wanted to find, which in the case of most Orks was a fight, and in the case of Snikkrit, who held it once, briefly, when no one was looking, was the exit.

He began to organize his observations into categories. This was not a scientific process. Snikkrit had no framework for the scientific method and would not have recognized one if it had been explained to him, which no one would have bothered to do. What he had was something older and in certain respects more powerful: a talent for pattern-recognition that operated below the level of articulation, in the murky neural substrate where grot cognition lived - a place of fast reflexes, paranoid alertness, and the hard-won ability to predict which Ork was about to kick you before the Ork had finished deciding to do it.

The pattern was this: the debris-field technology worked when the user believed it would, and failed when the user doubted it.

Not metaphorically. Not approximately. Precisely. The correlation in Snikkrit’s ledger, tallied across forty-seven individual components tracked over what he estimated was eleven days, was exact. Conviction produced function. Doubt produced failure. And the technology seemed entirely indifferent to what the conviction was about - a Mek who believed a power coupling should make his shoota fire faster got a faster-firing shoota, while a different Mek who believed the same coupling should make his trukk louder got a louder trukk, and both results were achieved by the same piece of salvage, which, to the best of Snikkrit’s observational ability, had not changed in any measurable way between installations.

This was, Snikkrit understood dimly, not how things were supposed to work.

He had lived his entire life among Ork technology, which was already - by the standards of any other civilization in the galaxy - insane. Ork machines worked because Orks believed they worked, powered by a psychic field that no Ork acknowledged and no Ork understood, a collective emanation of will so powerful that it could make a combustion engine run without fuel, a void-ship hold atmosphere without seals, and a weapon fire projectiles that were, on close inspection, the wrong size for the barrel. This was simply reality, for Orks. The sky was up, the ground was down, and machines did what you told them to, provided you told them loudly enough and hit them when they didn’t.

But the debris-field technology was different. It was more receptive. Where a standard Ork shoota required a baseline of physical functionality - a barrel, a trigger, some approximation of ammunition - augmented and perfected by the ambient psychic field, the debris-field components seemed to require almost no physical functionality at all. They were, in a sense that Snikkrit could feel but not express, listening. Waiting to be told what to be. And once told, with sufficient conviction, they became it.

The implications were terrifying. Snikkrit wrote them down anyway.

He was, of course, found out.

Not because anyone read his ledger - literacy among Orks was rare, and among those who possessed it, the interest in a grot’s scrap-metal notebook was nonexistent - but because Snikkrit made the fundamental error of being right in public.

The incident involved Mek Grotsmasha, a trukk, and a theological dispute.

Grotsmasha had built a trukk from debris-field components. It was, by any objective standard, magnificent: low-slung, red-painted (because red ones go faster, this being not a superstition but an observed physical law within the Ork psychic field’s area of effect), bristling with guns that appeared to have been soldered on by someone in the grip of a creative frenzy, and powered by an engine that, when Snikkrit examined it surreptitiously, contained no moving parts. The engine was a metal box. Inside the metal box was another, smaller metal box. Inside the smaller metal box was a piece of debris-field salvage that glowed faintly and hummed at a frequency that made Snikkrit’s back teeth itch.

The trukk should not have worked.

The trukk worked beautifully, right up until the moment Grotsmasha took it out for its first proper run and drove it directly into Nob Skullkrak’s favourite squig-pen, demolishing the structure, liberating forty-three attack squigs into the general population, and precipitating a brief but eventful period during which the entire aft section of Dat’s Mine Now became, in effect, a free-fire squig-hunting zone.

In the aftermath - Skullkrak’s fury was volcanic, Grotsmasha’s contrition was nonexistent, and the surviving squigs had established a provisional settlement in the ventilation ducts - the question of why the trukk had turned left when Grotsmasha had clearly intended to go straight became a matter of intense and increasingly violent debate.

Grotsmasha maintained that the steering was faulty. Skullkrak maintained that the driver was stupid. Several bystanders offered the compromise position that both the steering and the driver were stupid, which satisfied no one. And Snikkrit, who had been crouching behind a coolant pipe hoping to avoid notice, said - quietly, reflexively, in the way that a creature who has been keeping meticulous records says things that it knows are true before the survival-oriented portion of its brain can intervene - “Da steerin’ works fine if ya fink about goin’ straight instead of finkin’ about not hittin’ fings.”

The workshop went silent.

Forty Ork faces turned toward him. Forty Ork faces, ranging in expression from confusion to curiosity to the bright, anticipatory delight of someone who has just been given a reason to hit something small.

Grotsmasha was the first to speak. “Wot,” he said, in a tone that carried the freight of a simple monosyllable across a remarkable emotional distance, from bewilderment through suspicion to the dawning possibility that a grot might have just said something that was both comprehensible and correct, which in Ork culture was an event of approximately the same probability as a squig composing a sonnet.

Snikkrit considered running. He considered hiding. He considered the brief, bright career of saying nothing and hoping the moment would pass, as so many dangerous moments had passed before, carried away by the Ork attention span’s merciful brevity. But the survival-oriented portion of his brain had already lost the argument with the other portion - the small, stubborn, reckless portion that had been keeping the ledger - and so instead of running he said, “Da weird bitz. From da wreck. Dey do wot ya fink, not wot ya build. If ya fink ‘go straight,’ dey go straight. If ya fink ‘don’t crash,’ dey hear ‘crash’ an’ do dat instead.”

A longer silence. Ork cognitive processes, while not slow, tended to operate on a sequential rather than parallel basis, and the concept Snikkrit had just articulated required each listener to hold two ideas in mind simultaneously, which was, for some of them, a personal best.

Mek Zogwort, who was slightly cleverer than the average and therefore slightly more dangerous, narrowed his eyes. “Prove it,” he said.

The proving took three hours, two trukks, a deffkopta, and Snikkrit’s last reserves of courage.

He demonstrated, using Grotsmasha’s own trukk and a series of obstacles improvised from scrap metal, that a driver who thought “go between the posts” navigated cleanly, while a driver who thought “don’t hit the posts” struck them every time. He demonstrated that a shoota loaded with debris-field components fired accurately when the wielder visualized the target being hit, and fired wildly when the wielder worried about missing. He demonstrated - this was the coup, the moment that transformed him from runt with a theory into something altogether more problematic - that a deffkopta whose engine had been entirely replaced with debris-field salvage could fly at twice its normal speed if the pilot was sufficiently angry about something, and would stall and crash if the pilot felt even momentary contentment.

(This last demonstration had been unplanned. The pilot, an Evil Sunz speed-freak called Blitznoggin, had been shouting joyful obscenities at maximum volume while pushing the deffkopta through a series of increasingly reckless manoeuvres, right up until the moment he looked down, saw the entire workshop watching him with something approaching awe, and experienced a brief, fatal flush of satisfaction. The deffkopta fell like a dropped brick. Blitznoggin survived, because Orks generally did, but his pride did not, and he spent the rest of the day hitting things that couldn’t hit back.)

By the time Snikkrit finished, he was shaking so badly that his ledger rattled against his leg. The workshop was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before - not the silence of inattention or absence, but the loaded, pressurized silence of several dozen Ork minds arriving simultaneously at the conclusion that the small green creature standing in front of them had just described something important.

Grotsmasha spoke first. “So it’s all about da finkin’?”

“Yeah,” Snikkrit said.

“An’ you can tell which fings need finkin’ an’ which fings is just normal?”

“Yeah.” He held up the ledger. “It’s all in ’ere.”

Grotsmasha looked at the ledger. He looked at Snikkrit. He looked at Mek Zogwort, who looked back with an expression that communicated, across the vast and largely non-verbal Ork emotional spectrum, something very close to I know.

“Right,” Grotsmasha said. He reached down, picked Snikkrit up by the scruff of his neck, and carried him across the workshop to the high bench where the senior Meks did their most important work. He set Snikkrit down on the bench, which put the grot, for the first time in his life, at eye level with the surrounding Orks.

“You,” Grotsmasha said, jabbing a finger the size of Snikkrit’s forearm at the grot’s chest, “are gonna tell us how ta fink right.”

Snikkrit looked out across the workshop. Forty faces looked back. Some curious. Some hostile. All of them, in one way or another, expectant.

He was promoted. Sort of. In the same way that a useful rock is promoted when someone picks it up and starts hitting things with it.

The weeks that followed were the most extraordinary and the most exhausting of Snikkrit’s life, which - given that his life had included being used as ammunition in a grot-cannon (the cannon had misfired, which in context meant that it had fired in the correct direction, and Snikkrit had landed in a scrap-heap rather than the void, and had counted himself lucky, which by grot standards he was), being conscripted as a taste-tester for a Painboy’s experimental fungus beer (he had survived; his sense of smell had not), and once being traded to a rival warband for a bag of unusually good rivets, only to be traded back the following day when the rivets turned out to be adequate rather than exceptional - was a high bar.

He was dragged from workshop to workshop, from Mek to Mek, from one end of Dat’s Mine Now to the other and then aboard the fleet’s other vessels, wherever the debris-field salvage had been distributed. His role - assigned without consultation, defined without precision, enforced without mercy - was to adjudicate. To declare, with the authority that his demonstrations had accidentally given him, whether a given component required conventional engineering (hit it until it works), psychic engineering (believe at it until it works), or some combination of the two (hit it while believing, which was for most Orks the default state anyway but now carried a veneer of doctrinal respectability).

The questions came fast, in the brute shorthand of Ork technical discourse:

“Dis shoota - red paint or more dakka?”

“More dakka, but ya gotta want da dakka. Not just fink about it. Want it.”

“Wot about da armour on my trukk?”

“Paint it yellow. Bitz dat are yellow is tougher.”

“Says who?”

“Says da bitz.”

“Dat don’t make no sense.”

“Does it work?”

A pause. The sound of knuckles cracking. “…Yeah.”

“Den it makes sense.”

This was, Snikkrit reflected during one of his rare moments of solitude - wedged between two coolant pipes in a maintenance duct where no Ork could reach him, eating a stolen fungus roll and trembling with the particular combination of terror and exhilaration that had become his baseline emotional state - the fundamental problem. It did work. Everything he told them worked. The shoota fired faster. The armour held. The trukks went where you told them to go, provided you told them correctly. His rules - which were not rules at all, merely observations dressed in imperative clothing - produced results. Measurable, repeatable, undeniable results.

And the more they worked, the more they worked.

This was the part that frightened him. Not the individual effects - he had accepted those, catalogued them, learned their grammar - but the way they compounded. Each success seemed to enlarge the space in which success was possible. A workshop that had seen three debris-field components perform as predicted became a workshop where the fourth performed even better, as though the accumulated weight of belief had thickened the air, made the local reality more yielding, more willing to be told what it was. The ambient field - the great, diffuse, inarticulate psychic emanation that Orks generated simply by existing in sufficient numbers and with sufficient enthusiasm - was focusing. Condensing. Becoming, in the immediate vicinity of his pronouncements, denser.

Machines that had no business functioning began to function. Not just the debris-field salvage - that had always responded to conviction - but ordinary machines. Standard Ork technology. A shoota that had been misfiring for weeks suddenly began grouping its shots with an accuracy that would have made an Imperial marksman suspicious. An engine that had been leaking promethium stopped leaking. A grot-prod that had been shorting out started working perfectly, which was bad news for grots in general but which Snikkrit noted with the dispassionate precision of someone recording a data point rather than experiencing a threat.

He was changing the local physics. Not deliberately. Not by any mechanism he understood. But his presence - or rather, the authority his presence carried, the accumulated credibility of correct predictions - was acting as a kind of lens, focusing the ambient psychic field into a coherent beam that reshaped machinery the way gravity reshaped water: not by force, but by providing a gradient down which things naturally flowed.

Snikkrit understood none of this in these terms. What he understood was simpler, and worse.

He was getting too important to be safe.

The crisis came, as crises in Ork society generally did, in the form of a loud argument about violence.

Warboss Garagunk controlled the fleet. This was not in dispute. What was in dispute - and had been in dispute since before Snikkrit was born, and would be in dispute until one or both parties were dead, which in Ork politics represented the standard resolution mechanism - was whether Garagunk’s authority extended to the workshop decks, which were the domain of Big Mek Badzappa, who was slightly smaller than Garagunk but considerably more creative in the application of force, owning as he did a power klaw of his own manufacture that could, according to witnesses, cut through bulkhead plating “like it wasn’t even there, which, knowing Badzappa’s stuff, it might not have been.”

The dispute had been stable for years, maintained in the productive equilibrium that Ork society achieved when two roughly equal powers glared at each other across a boundary that neither could cross without unacceptable losses. Garagunk had the boyz. Badzappa had the Meks. The boyz needed the Meks to build their weapons. The Meks needed the boyz to field-test their inventions. Neither side could destroy the other without destroying itself.

Snikkrit changed the equation.

The problem was simple, brutal, and quintessentially Ork: whoever controlled Snikkrit controlled the debris-field technology, and the debris-field technology was the most significant military advantage to emerge in the warband’s collective memory, which - while not long - was emphatic on the subject of military advantages and the desirability of having them.

Garagunk sent a Nob to collect Snikkrit. Badzappa sent a Mek to retain him. The Nob and the Mek met in a corridor. The corridor did not survive the meeting, and neither did two adjacent compartments and a load-bearing wall, but both the Nob and the Mek did, which meant the dispute escalated rather than resolved, and within hours the fleet was dividing itself along lines of loyalty that had been dormant for years and were now, thanks to Snikkrit’s accidental theology, critically active.

Snikkrit watched this from his maintenance duct and thought, with the clarity that only mortal terror can provide: I am going to die.

Not a novel thought, for a grot. Grots thought this several times a day, usually with good reason. But this was different. This was not the routine, background awareness of mortality that accompanied grot existence the way engine noise accompanied shipboard life - always present, occasionally alarming, fundamentally ignorable. This was specific. This was imminent. Snikkrit was going to die because he had made himself too valuable to be left alone, too useful to be allowed to exist in the interstitial spaces where grots survived, and too small to defend the territory that his knowledge had inadvertently staked out.

He needed a plan.

Grot plans were, by necessity, exercises in misdirection. A grot could not out-fight an Ork. A grot could not out-shout an Ork. A grot could, on very rare occasions, out-think an Ork, but this advantage was fragile, temporary, and - if detected - likely to result in the kind of corrective violence that Ork society applied to any subordinate who displayed uncomfortable signs of cunning. The only reliable grot strategy was to arrange circumstances such that the dangerous parties destroyed each other, and to be somewhere else when it happened.

Snikkrit, crouching in his duct, listening to the rising sounds of confrontation echoing through the hull, opened his ledger to a fresh page and began to scratch.

The Grand Adjudication - as it came to be known afterward, by the survivors, in tones that mixed reverence and bewilderment in roughly equal proportions - took place in the main salvage bay of Dat’s Mine Now, which was the only space in the fleet large enough to accommodate both Garagunk’s retinue and Badzappa’s workshop entourage without immediate violence. The word “without” was doing significant load-bearing work in that sentence; violence was not absent so much as deferred, held in suspension by the collective understanding that it would be deployed shortly and with enthusiasm, and that the brief delay was merely the indrawn breath before the scream.

Snikkrit stood on the high bench. He had asked to stand on the high bench. This was unprecedented - grots did not ask for things, they received things, usually unwanted things, usually at speed - but the request had been granted, partly because both sides wanted him visible and partly because the novelty of a grot making demands had produced a brief, shared moment of amused curiosity that served, for a few critical seconds, as a ceasefire.

Garagunk stood on one side of the bay, surrounded by his Nobz, each of whom was armed with the casual extravagance of beings who considered weapons a form of self-expression. Badzappa stood on the other side, flanked by his Meks, each of whom was augmented with machinery that blurred the line between person and arsenal. Between them, on the bench, stood Snikkrit, who was armed with a ledger and the cold, exhilarating certainty that he was about to do the cleverest thing any grot had ever done, or the stupidest, and that the distinction between the two was, in this instance, academic.

“Right,” Snikkrit said. His voice, naturally high and reedy, carried across the bay with a clarity that surprised even him. The ambient field was helping. He could feel it - a pressure behind his eyes, a thickness in the air, the accumulated psychic weight of several hundred Orks paying attention simultaneously. “I been studyin’ da weird bitz. I been testin’ ’em. I know how dey work.”

This was true, and everyone present knew it was true, which was why they were here rather than settling the matter in the traditional manner, which would have been quicker but which carried the disadvantage of potentially destroying the very resource they were fighting over.

“Da bitz work on belief,” Snikkrit continued. “Ya gotta believe da right fing, da right way, or dey don’t do nuffin’. And ’ere’s da part wot matters -” He paused. The bay was perfectly silent. Even the background hum of the ship’s engines seemed to have lowered its voice. “Da belief’s gotta be tested.”

He let that word hang.

“Wot’s dat mean?” Garagunk said, his voice like a rockslide in a metal room.

“It means,” Snikkrit said, and here he consulted his ledger with a theatrical gravity that would have been absurd if the stakes had been lower, “dat Gork - or possibly Mork, da theology’s a bit fuzzy - don’t just want ya to say ya believe. ‘E wants ya to prove it. In a fight.”

The bay processed this.

“Da weird bitz,” Snikkrit said, pressing forward into the silence while it lasted, “dey get stronger when dere’s a proper scrap. I got da numbers. When two Orks fight over a gubbinz, an’ one of ’em wins, da gubbinz works better for da winner after. Not a bit better. Much better. Like da fight proved somefink, an’ da proof made da bitz pay attention.”

This was, technically, a lie. Or rather, it was a creative extrapolation from data that did not quite support the conclusion Snikkrit was drawing from it. He had observed that debris-field components performed better in high-energy environments - near fights, near engines at full burn, near any concentration of Ork excitement - but he had not established a causal link between combat outcomes and component performance. What he had established, through careful observation and a grot’s native understanding of Ork psychology, was that the sentence “fight over it and the winner gets a better version” was precisely calibrated to appeal to every instinct an Ork possessed.

Badzappa, whose intelligence operated at a level that made him dangerous even by Mek standards, narrowed his eyes. “So you’re sayin’…”

“I’m sayin’,” Snikkrit said, “dat da only way ta figure out who gets ta use da weird bitz proper-like is a proper fight. Not a little scrap. A real one. Da bitz’ll know. Dey always know.”

Silence. Then a rumble that might have been Garagunk laughing, or possibly the ship’s hull protesting a gravitational anomaly, or possibly both.

“An’ you know dis how?” Garagunk said.

Snikkrit held up the ledger. “It’s all in ’ere, boss. Every test. Every time. Da bitz don’t lie.”

A longer pause. Then Garagunk grinned - a vast, tectonic expression that rearranged his face around its central feature, which was an enthusiasm for violence so pure it approached the devotional. He looked across the bay at Badzappa. Badzappa looked back. Something passed between them - not agreement, exactly, but recognition. The recognition that two large, powerful, well-armed beings share when presented with a legitimate excuse to do what they have both wanted to do for years.

“WAAAGH!” said Garagunk.

“WAAAGH!” said Badzappa.

“WAAAGH!” said everyone.

Snikkrit slipped off the bench and ran.

The battle consumed the fleet for the better part of a day.

It was fought in corridors and cargo bays, on hull surfaces and in docking cradles, with choppas and shootas and power klaws and Mek contraptions of astonishing ingenuity and dubious structural integrity. It was fought with the joyful, whole-hearted commitment that Orks brought to all violence, which is to say that it was simultaneously the most destructive and the most sincere activity the warband had engaged in since its founding. Allies changed sides. Sides changed composition. Individual combatants, caught in the fluid dynamics of Ork loyalty, fought for both factions in the same hour, sometimes in the same fight, occasionally while unclear which faction they were currently representing, a confusion they resolved by hitting whoever was closest, which was always, in an Ork battle, the correct tactical decision.

The debris-field components, scattered throughout both sides’ arsenals, performed magnificently. Shootas fired with unprecedented accuracy. Power klaws bit through armour that should have stopped them. Trukks raced through corridors at speeds that their structural engineering could not possibly have sustained, sustained them anyway, and occasionally exceeded the carrying capacity of the corridor itself, producing results that were spectacular in the literal sense of the word. The ambient psychic field, charged by the battle’s intensity, blazed like a furnace, and within that furnace the debris-field technology burned brightest of all, resonating with the concentrated belief of hundreds of Orks who were, in the purest and most undiluted way possible, believing in what they were doing.

Snikkrit, who was not present for any of this, heard about it later from other grots who had survived by the standard grot method of being underneath things.

He had been moving since the moment the first “WAAAGH!” sounded, threading through maintenance ducts and service crawlways with the economical urgency of a creature that had been mentally rehearsing its escape route for three days. He had with him: his ledger, one stolen fungus roll, a small cutting tool he had taken from an unattended Mek station, and a comprehensive knowledge of Dat’s Mine Now’s internal geography that, if it had been transposed into the architecture of any Imperial hive-city, would have made him the most successful burglar in sector history.

His destination was the aft launch bay, where the grot-pods were stored. Grot-pods were emergency escape vehicles in the way that a barrel rolling off a cliff was an emergency descent vehicle - they were sealed metal containers equipped with minimal life support, no navigation, and a single-use thruster that could, with optimistic engineering, put the pod a few hundred kilometres from the ship before running out of fuel. They were intended for jettisoning waste and occasionally grots, the two categories being interchangeable in Ork logistics. Nobody would miss one. Nobody would look for one. And nobody - this was the critical calculation - would notice one drifting away from the fleet during a battle, because during a battle, debris was everywhere, and a grot-pod looked exactly like debris.

He reached the launch bay in forty minutes. The bay was empty; every Ork was fighting, every grot was hiding, and the automated systems that should have been managing launch operations had long since degraded to the point where “automated” meant “will probably respond to being kicked.” Snikkrit kicked the launch system. It responded. He loaded himself and his ledger into a grot-pod, sealed the hatch, and triggered the thruster.

The pod lurched, scraped through the launch tube with a sound like a small animal being fed through a large machine, and emerged into the void.

Behind him, Dat’s Mine Now blazed. He could see it through the pod’s single viewport - a tiny, scratched circle of armourglass that offered a view of the ship as it receded: lights flickering across its hull in the staccato Morse of weapons fire, small explosions blooming like luminous fungi along its dorsal surface, the whole vast structure seeming to shudder with the contained fury of its inhabitants. Two other ships in the fleet were also fighting, either because the battle had spread or because they had decided independently that a fleet-wide brawl was too good an opportunity to miss, which was a decision that roughly one hundred percent of all Orks in history had reached when presented with the same opportunity.

It was, Snikkrit had to admit, beautiful. In the same way that a star going nova was beautiful, or a planet breaking apart along its fault lines, or any other large-scale destruction viewed from sufficient distance by someone who was no longer involved.

The pod drifted. The fleet shrank. The battle’s light faded from white to amber to a faint, intermittent flicker, and then to nothing.

Snikkrit sat in the dark. Around him, the pod’s life support hummed - a thin, reedy sound, uncertain of itself, like a small creature whistling to prove it wasn’t afraid. The air was cold. The fungus roll was gone. The ledger sat on his lap, its metal pages warm from his body heat.

He opened it to the last page. In the dim glow of the pod’s single emergency light, he read his own scratches - the accumulated observations of a creature too small to be noticed and too careful to stop watching. The data. The patterns. The rules that weren’t rules. The engineering that wasn’t engineering. The physics that worked backward, that started from conclusion and built toward premise, that didn’t care about mechanism as long as the meaning held.

Wrong physics.

He didn’t know what it was worth. He didn’t know if anyone, anywhere, would want what he had recorded - the fumbling, painstaking, grot-scratched documentation of a phenomenon that the greatest minds in the galaxy had not yet named, let alone understood. He didn’t know if the pod’s thruster had enough residual charge to reach anything habitable, or if its life support would last long enough for “habitable” to matter, or if the void was going to swallow him the way it swallowed everything that was small and alone and too far from anything that cared.

He closed the ledger. He held it against his chest.

The pod drifted on, a speck of metal in the vast, indifferent dark, carrying the first field notes on semiotic engineering ever compiled, written in a language no one else could read, by a creature that the galaxy had not yet decided to remember.

Behind him, very far away now, the fleet was still fighting.

They would fight for hours yet. Garagunk would win, because Garagunk was bigger, but the winning would cost him half his Nobz and a third of his ships and the entirety of the debris-field salvage, which would be destroyed in the fighting, every last component overloaded by the very psychic intensity that had made it valuable, burning out in a cascade of belief-powered self-destruction that the survivors would later describe, with Ork precision, as “a right good bang.”

Badzappa would survive, because Meks always survived - they built things, including escape routes, and the instinct for self-preservation that made them builders also made them, when the structural mathematics of a fight turned against them, pragmatists. He would retreat to a secondary hull with his best Meks and his best inventions and a grudge that would fuel his engineering for years.

Neither of them would look for Snikkrit.

Grots, after all, were replaceable.

This was, from Snikkrit’s perspective, the most useful thing about being one.