Chapter Text
Five more human heads rolled into the bunker. “And dat’s enough for a mega-dakka” announced the green hulk that followed them through the doorway. Stealin Lad sighed and opened up the metal crate. He flinched as the new arrival scooped up as many guns and grenades as it could carry and staggered out of the door again, scattering random shooty gear in its wake. Stealin stepped out from behind the counter and kicked a few of the squibs into action. They rolled the decapitated heads over the edge of the crater that had obliterated half of the Planetary Defence Force bunker. Twisted edges of plastisteel bore witness to the orbital bombardment the ork fleet had rained down upon Lapitus III before landing. Outside the orky fly bois scorched across the sky leaving trails of choking black smoke in their wake. Stealin Lad saw them circle and descend upon a human Titan, harrying it like a cloud of hornets as it tried to batter and blast them out of the skies.
The same huge ork as before ran back into the bunker. “Geez, it’s time for another krumpgrade,” he demanded as he slapped a small sack onto the counter. “Get your fakkin arse out of here” retorted Stealin. “Dakka is for heads, dat’s the rool.” He was still proud of the rule. Orks already knew that the strongest ork should lead, and should be allowed to wear the most bostin suits and gizmos. The trouble was that often you only knew who the strongest ork was when he had already killed the second-strongest ork. Stealin had always been about scrounging up the most kit, the most scrap and making sure he and his gang had the best dakka. Hence the name. But without arms to wield the dakka it wasn’t much use. Even the strongest battle boi could only shoot one missile launcher at a time. Ok, two at a time if he was Big Bastard Threefang, but Fangy had ended up going into orbit that one time. It was funny, but it was also wasteful. As a smaller ork ever since he had crawled out of the fungus spawning pit Stealin had been alert to maximise his every advantage. Now he had convinced Warboss Gungeous that the entire waaauughh would be that more atrocious if the band of bois could use their own resources a bit better. And that meant having as many living green arms to carry as many missile launchers as possible.
Thus, Heads for Dakka had been born. Stealin was forced to smash quite a few heads in before the other orks understood and respected the new rule. All lootin was to be turned in to the lad and his squibs. Then the orks who could deliver the most heads would get the best shooty irons. The best enemy heads, he had to remind them, after one large ork with a rapidly shrinking squad of underlings thought he had discovered a loophole. But what was this? Another loophole? Green hulk was delivering some kind of sloppy pouch to the bunker, and there were no heads in sight.
“It’s as good as ‘eads” declared the ork proudly. He let go of the cloth ends and it collapsed on the counter. From the sodden blue synthicloth of a PDF officer’s uniform a pile of gory human ears rolled out. “Easier to carry than ‘eads,” it added. Instead of five heads like before, there was dozens of ears. “Well” said Stealin Lad doubtfully. Heads meant ‘eads. That was the rool. But really, the rule was about more dakka for the most killy ork. This made sense.
“Right geeze dat’s...48 ears. Means same as two duzz ‘eads. Take a tank from the pool.” He threw the large ork a set of human keys modified with added iron plates to fit into orky hands. The keys bounced off the bemused ork’s head as he stared back at Stealin.
“Two duzz? That’s…LESS than 48. Do you fink I’m STOOPID?” The large ork unsheathed a chainsword from behind his back and advanced on Stealin’. Despite the tall metallic platform shoes the Lad always wore the greenie towered over him.
It grasped the small ork by the front of his chain mail webbing and pulled him up to his face. Stealin stretched his feet against the huge ork’s chest and tried to break free. It was like trying to push a mountain with a team of starving grox. He sighed, again, and not for the last time that day, and activated the shaped charges in his shoes. The head of the hulking green ork bounced wetly on the bloody plasticrete floor as it fell past the place where the ork’s chest had once been. Stealin rode the blast wave, made a backflip and landed behind the desk. He signalled one of his squibs to fetch him his second-best pair of shoes. Maybe he would need to teach the other orks to count better. Or to count worse.
The only reason Stealin could count, multiply, subtract and all was because he had been trying to get a new suit of power armour to work. It was far too big for him, but it would have made a diamond geezer gift for the upcoming warboss and helped cement his position as Dealer of Dakka to the Discerning Guvnor. The Khornate cultist who had been wearing the armour was pulp. A series of concussion mines that Stealin had set up in a cave complex had resonated through the hallowed ceramics of the armour and shaken the Chaos Marine into a chaos smoothie. It was like a hydrated pink version of the dust inhabiting the armour of the Thousand Sons. Stealin had been scrubbing the armour out, with the help of his first three squibs when he realised the marine had not been alone. Another suit of armour was lying in the mouth of the cave, half-covered by the rockfall that had also been concussed by the blast.
The armour seemed to have flesh. Or maybe the flesh had armour. Tube and sockets connected skin to shield and plate to guts so Stealin couldn’t see where one started and the other ended. And the armour was healing just like flesh. The crumpled figure had left behind one leg and one arm under the blast, but new fingers were growing out of the shattered shoulder and the cracks in the armoured plate were sealing over. Healin’ over?
The young ork placed one of his massive metallic shoes on the face of the fallen figure. He leaned over. “Aright geez? Make my armour wake up.”
It was only months later the ork understood how the technical priesthood of the Sherden Pact made the armour wake up. He had to learn to feed it using skulls and blood. Not only that, but it needed to be steered by shouting at it. Shouting at it in silence, like. With marks on parchment and paint on metal. Stealin fixed the final unholy seals onto the armour exactly 17 days after the cave ambush. He had shuddered. It still looked like a Spiky Boy standing there even though he had painted it green and also touched up the red with his own max dakka shade. The armour was by then even bigger, even bulkier, since its plates were fixed on moving frames of raw iron designed to fit around the stupendous frame of a well-fed Warboss. There had been so much to learn! Not only numbers, but other symbols. After a while Stealin realised the numbers actually meant real things. He was able to keep track of how many hours they spent in the cave, how many new rivets he needed for the iron frame, how many squigs he could force out of spores from the refuse pile he generated himself. When he spent an hour scraping up dead grox from a herd slaughter near the cave complex he had enough for three more sqiigs. 1(grox shit)=3(squigs). It felt like learning a new kind of power. Of course, he didn’t allow the Chaos Church technician to write any of the symbols itself. Fink I’m stoopid? The hybrid creature was forced to stay in the dark, whispering advice through its damaged vox and occasionally drawing a shape in the dust, that Stealin Lad quickly rubbed out as soon as he had memorised it. Stealin visited that cave secretly for the next seven years, growing more and more powerful.
The warboss had krumped the armour on sight, unfortunately.
“NO MORE SPIKY SHITE.”
But by that time Stealin had learned so much that losing one suit of armour didn’t matter. Just being able to know how much grox makes a squig turned him into the champion sporekeeper of the band. With all those extra helping hands, as well as a way of keeping accurate records of dakka in and dakka out he soon rose to become the quartermaster of the Gungeous Horde. Dakka entry dakkeeping he called it.
The metal and flesh creature slowly wasted away. Stealin scuffed out the last symbols written in the dust just before he set off the charges that brought down the entire mountain. If he had been able to read, he would have seen they said “Khorne cares not from where the blood flows.”
Back on Lapitus III Stealin was eating the supplies taken from the big green ork and writing out today’s takings on the wall. He stepped back and looked at the numbers. Then pulled out his roll of parchment. All through the last three WAARRGHHS he had kept score. Dakka in, dakka out. Now it started to form before his eyes as a pattern. At the start of the waarrghh the boiz had loadsa dakka, but no heads had come in. Then as the waarrghhh progressed the amount of heads rose, but the dakka was expended. His eyebrows rose. The supply of heads would exceed the demand for dakka! But at the mid-point of a waarrgghh new sources of dakka were accumulated through scroungin and scrappin. His third sigh of the day escaped his lips. Then he kicked a squig in frustration. By the end of a WAARRGGHH the supply of DAKKA was so high, and the incoming heads were so high, but the avilable orky arms to wield the dakka was starting to be lakkin. That was what caused a waarrgghh to end! He looked up and saw two human bodies hanging half in, half-out of the bunker. What had they shouted before he cut them down? They were fighting for the honour of the CONTRA-DEF section of the PDF of Lapitus III. Well ‘umies, congratulation for the honour. Stealin’ Lad decided he would call this new secret of how ork wars unfolded, the theory of CONTRA-DEF WAAARRGGHs.