For the next half day, they kept moving.
In this tangled skeleton of metal, it was not hard to find a temporarily safe place to hole up. The hard part was the route between one safe point and the next.
Lawson had the six men maintain a strict marching formation.
Number One scouted in front.
Numbers Four and Five watched the flanks.
Numbers Two and Three held the center.
Lawson brought up the rear, controlling the pace of the whole formation.
They did not run into any more large groups of Orks.
The adamant steel reserve continued to rise steadily. Over the course of that half day's movement, all kinds of scrap metal were absorbed one after another:
One broken hydraulic drive shaft, +0.18 cubic meters.
Half of a damaged pressure door, +0.31 cubic meters.
Two armor fragments torn from the hull of some unknown warship, +0.44 cubic meters.
Half an axle from an Imperial fighting vehicle, +0.27 cubic meters.
The adamant steel total on the system interface had already reached a number Lawson found broadly satisfying:
[Adamant Steel Reserve: 53.4 cubic meters]
If he wanted to, he could exchange for fifty-three Deathsworn right now. Adding the five he already had, that would give him a squad of fifty-eight men.
Of course, he did not have enough Life Points.
Along the way, they also found a pile of miscellaneous items.
A half-used roll of waterproof tape.
Several empty fuel rods.
A damaged Imperial blast shield.
There was even a man-portable flamer that could still barely ignite, with about a quarter tank of promethium left in it.
Then, through the consciousness channel, a signal came in that caught him off guard.
A status marker appeared on Number One's panel that Lawson had never seen before.
He stared at it for two seconds.
[Hunger]
They had been active aboard this space hulk for quite a while now. Aside from the brick-hard military ration Lawson had on him, none of them had eaten anything.
Lawson looked down and checked his own condition. Sure enough, his stomach had also begun protesting in a manner that was not particularly polite.
He pulled out the ration block and squeezed it.
It was hard enough to pass for construction material.
If he split it between six men, each would get about a child-sized bite.
Lawson put it away again.
He thought for a moment, then made a decision that, under ordinary Imperial military doctrine, would probably be classified as a serious violation punishable by flogging and transfer to the Judge Advocate for sentencing.
"Number One, go back to that ventilation shaft we passed ten minutes ago and cut the thigh off the greenskin corpse that got skewered by the trap."
Number One carried out the order without hesitation.
But eating greenskin flesh was explicitly forbidden by the Imperium.
Not for moral reasons.
For practical ones.
Greenskins were an extremely unusual lifeform. Their spores were the core mechanism of their reproduction and spread, and their flesh and blood were likewise saturated with huge quantities of dormant spores, along with the warp-tainted residue known as Waaagh! energy.
The best outcome for an Imperial soldier who ate greenskin meat was shitting out something blackish-green and spending the next few days burning with fever.
A worse outcome was the hatching of spores somewhere in the digestive tract, requiring surgical removal.
And worse than that...
Imperial records did contain examples, but those records were generally not made available to ordinary troops.
That was why any soldier caught eating greenskin flesh without authorization would be dragged before a military tribunal.
But...
Lawson thought about the problem for a while and remembered a detail that had surfaced during his earlier review of the battle.
When the system refined greenskin Life Points, it stripped out the contaminated energy, the so-called frenzy-inducing Chaos factor, and stored it separately in the Scrap Yard. What it gave him were purified Life Points.
That meant the Orks they had killed had their life energy extracted and purified at the moment of death.
At the same time, the source of that Waaagh! contamination had been removed from the soul level.
So if an Ork corpse had already been drained of its Chaos-pollution factor, was the Waaagh! energy still present in the flesh?
The spores were physical. The system did not affect the physical layer, so those should still be there.
But high heat could kill most spores. Catachans had used fire to process things even nastier than this in the jungle.
As for Waaagh! energy, the kind of Chaos-tainted radiation that seeped down to the cellular level, if the system had already stripped the contamination source away at the soul level, then what remained in the flesh should only be decaying residue.
In theory, it was workable.
But the distance between theory and practice was, sometimes, exactly one life.
Lawson decided to use Number One as a test subject.
Number One returned quickly, carrying an Ork thigh.
Its circumference was roughly equal to the waist of an ordinary human. It did not inspire any appetite whatsoever.
Lawson took out the flamer.
"Roast it."
Number One accepted the weapon, found a relatively open patch of floor, and set the Ork thigh alight.
The instant the orange flame touched it, the whole area filled with a smell Lawson could not have described even with his entire combat career's worth of experience. It was somewhere between burning rubber and damp fungus bursting under high heat.
Number One expressionlessly turned the leg several times.
The outside charred.
The inside was still half raw.
Ork flesh was far denser than ordinary meat, closer to some kind of hardened organic material. Heat penetrated it with excruciating slowness.
Lawson watched for a moment.
"Cut off a piece. Eat."
Using the Fang of Catachan, Number One carved off a chunk about the size of an adult man's fist.
Lawson watched intently.
When Number One bit into it, the hardness of the meat made the chewing sound more like metal cutting through machine stock than anything edible.
Crunch... crunch crunch.
Lawson watched him chew with extreme seriousness. Thirty seconds passed.
No abnormal warning appeared on the system interface.
Number One's health did not decrease.
The Hunger indicator on his panel shifted from red to a somewhat less vivid orange.
He had swallowed it.
And apparently it did not even taste that bad?
At least judging from Number One's expression, it seemed nothing like as horrifying as the smell.
Lawson waved to the others behind him.
"You can eat it. All of you."
Number One cut apart the rest of the leg and distributed the remaining meat to Numbers Two, Three, Four, and Five. Then he sliced off another piece, turned, and offered it to Lawson.
Lawson looked at the steaming slab of Ork thigh.
He politely pushed it back.
"No thank you."
Then another thought occurred to him.
Orks reproduced through spores.
They grew from the soil.
Strictly speaking, they belonged to the fungal category of life. Some Imperial biologists even described greenskin civilization as different manifestations of one giant race-wide mushroom.
So then...
Did eating greenskin flesh count as eating meat, or eating vegetables?
The question slowly unfolded in his mind, unfolded further, and then stopped in a place where he could not reach a conclusion.
It was the first time since arriving in the Warhammer universe that he had been hit by a completely meaningless philosophical dilemma unrelated to tactics.
And it was about dietary classification.
Number One stuffed the piece of meat into his mouth.
Crunch crunch.
Five Deathsworn squatted on a pile of scrap metal, using the Fangs of Catachan as table knives while gnawing on a seven-tenths-cooked Ork thigh.
Lawson opened the Imperial compressed ration, bit off a piece, and found it hard, dry, and possessed of a very special flavor best described as brick plus starch.
He chewed slowly while watching the five Deathsworn eat in silence around him.
Meat, or vegetables?
The answer had still not appeared when green skin turned the corner.
A large mob of Orks rounded the bend. At the front were six powerfully built Ork boyz. Behind them came a gretchin crowd too numerous to count at a glance, at least forty or fifty of them, all jammed together, shouting and shoving and not yet aware of the scene they had just walked into.
Then they saw it.
One human and five other humans squatting on the floor, knives in hand, calmly sharing an Ork thigh.
The Ork boyz stopped.
The gretchin stopped too.
Lawson stopped chewing and swallowed the last bite of ration.
In the silence, the crunch crunch of the five Deathsworn chewing was especially clear.