Aside from scrap metal, Number One had also picked up a few things of greater value.
Beneath a smashed-to-pieces Imperial control console, he found a pile of miscellaneous weapon parts.
Several adamant-steel daggers with chipped edges, and a tactical visor with half its casing broken off.
What relieved Lawson most was this: beside the half-devoured remains of an Astra Militarum trooper, little more than half a skeleton by now, Number One had found a standard M-G short-pattern lasgun. In a bloodstained ammo satchel nearby, he had also scavenged three usable charge packs, enough for roughly sixty to seventy shots by capacitor count.
This weapon, commonly mocked as a "flashlight," was nowhere near as powerful as the Locke-pattern boltgun in Lawson's hands. But against unarmored greenskin gretchin, or fired into the soft eyes and throat of an Ork boy, it was still lethal.
And for Number One, who was currently empty-handed, having a gun was far better than trying to fight a greenskin choppa with nothing but a short knife.
Lawson had to move.
At the moment, he only had one Deathsworn under his command. No matter how he looked at it, this was no time to sit back and act like an idle commander.
More importantly, inside a space hulk, there was no such thing as a safe zone in any physical sense.
Every shadow might conceal packs of greenskins. Every corner might hide a nest of Genestealers. And in the deepest holds of those ancient wrecked ships, some nameless warp-spawned horror might still be sleeping.
He advanced swiftly through the corridor, following the coordinates from Shared Awareness, and soon linked up with Number One at a four-way junction on Deck Seventy-Six.
Number One immediately offered over the lasgun and its spare charge packs.
Lawson waved it back.
"You keep it. Use it for covering fire. I'll use the boltgun."
The two of them moved at once, making use of whatever was on hand to set up one deadly trap after another around the junction and along the surrounding corridors.
For a true Catachan Jungle Fighter, the deadliest weapon was not in his hands.
It was the brain that had survived the brutal culling of a death world, and the ability to turn any environment into a killing ground.
The booby traps and frag grenades Lawson had been carrying were already gone, spent dealing with that earlier pack of Ork boyz. They no longer had any chemical explosives at all.
That did not stop them.
They simply adapted, using the complicated structure of the space hulk to build mechanical traps powered by gravity and stored potential energy.
"See that row of suspended backup condenser pipes overhead? The ones with the broken, spear-sharp mouths?"
Lawson pointed to more than ten rusted steel pipes mounted six meters above on a load-bearing beam.
Number One immediately scrambled up like an agile ape and forcibly loosened several of the huge bolts securing the rack, leaving only a single stress point in place.
Below, Lawson used the remaining monofilament line he had salvaged, wrapping it tightly around the critical locking catch, then threading the other end through the cracks of a ventilation shaft and into the ceiling crawlspace.
At the right moment, one savage pull would tear the locking catch free, and that whole rack of steel pipes, their broken ends sharp as spears, would come crashing down under gravity like a storm of iron rain.
It was the oldest falling-rock trap in the Catachan jungle, now wearing a suit of steel.
But that alone was not enough.
On the opposite side of the corridor, Number One gathered a heap of jagged metal fragments, each edge serrated and razor-sharp.
Using several broken high-voltage cables that still leaked weak currents, Lawson fashioned those fragments into a crude spring-loaded garrote trap and concealed it behind a half-open bulkhead door.
Thud... thud... thud...
"WAAAAAGH!!!"
"Find 'im! Find dat damned humie! Rip out 'is guts!"
"I smell blood! Over dere!"
The disturbance Lawson had caused on Deck Seventy-Seven earlier had been far too great. It had drawn every nearby greenskin mob straight to them.
Judging by the dense footfalls and the constant overlapping war cries, the number of greenskins rushing this way was not dozens.
It was hundreds.
Lawson was not stupid enough to stand in an open corridor and try to fight several hundred enraged orks head-on.
An entire eight thousand-strong Astra Militarum assault force, armed to the teeth, had already died aboard this space hulk.
That alone proved the greenskin population here had reached a scale so vast it bordered on despair.
"Fall back."
Lawson made the call immediately.
Catachans worshiped the highest efficiency of survival and killing.
Guerrilla warfare was king.
And the maze of ventilation ducts and maintenance crawlspaces inside the space hulk, spreading like a spiderweb into every corner, gave them the perfect arena.
Lawson looked up and fixed on a vent in the corner of the ceiling, its grate already half-rotted away.
He seized the edge with both hands, his arm strength exploding, and hauled himself straight inside.
Number One followed close behind. Before climbing in, he professionally used a rag to quickly smear and confuse the footprints they had left at the scene, then caught the main trap trigger-line Lawson tossed back to him.
In less than twenty seconds, a blinding green flood surged into the junction below.
Running at the front were, as always, the gretchin used as cannon fodder and living scouting hounds.
They shrieked as they ran, driven forward by the brutal kicks of the much larger Ork boyz behind them.
"Move, ya idiot! Stop blockin' my way!"
One Ork boy swung the rusted choppa in his hand and smashed the flat of the blade into the head of a lagging gretchin, knocking the little greenskin cold on the spot.
The packed mob jostled and shoved one another, fighting for space in the corridor.
Then the first five gretchin came stumbling noisily into the center of the trap's kill zone.
"Fresh green blood up ahead! Must be dis way! Charge!"
Hidden in the darkness of the ventilation shaft, Number One gave the line in his hand a savage yank.
The moment the locking catch tore free, more than ten heavy steel pipes dropped from the six-meter-high ceiling all at once.
CLANG! CLANG CLANG CLANG!
The metallic impact rang so violently it made the whole chamber shake.
Dust, rust, and green blood mist exploded upward together, blotting out most of the view below.
When the cloud settled slightly, the original shapes of those five gretchin were no longer recognizable.
Driven by the horrifying acceleration of gravity, the falling pipes struck like giant siege bolts.
One of them, descending at the nastiest possible angle, plunged almost straight down through the first two gretchin in line and pinned them hard into the metal deck below, turning them into a grotesque greenskin kebab.
The other three were skewered, crushed, and broken by the remaining pipes, their noisy little lives ending in a variety of miserable poses.
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
In the middle of the chaos, Lawson and Number One opened fire from concealment at the Ork boyz they had already selected.
The range was too close, and they had chosen their targets in advance.
Every shot was a headshot.
System notifications flashed one after another. After purification, the soul energy of three Ork boyz provided Lawson with a substantial amount of Life Points.