Chapter 9: Does Eating Ork Count as Meat or Vegetables?
The next half day, they kept moving.
Finding a temporary safe point in this labyrinth of metal was not the hard part. The hard part was the ground between one safe point and the next.
Rosen kept the six of them in a strict movement formation.
Number 1 on point.
Numbers 4 and 5 watching the flanks.
Numbers 2 and 3 in the centre, with Rosen at the rear controlling the overall pace.
They didn't run into any large greenskin concentrations.
Refined Steel reserves kept climbing steadily. Throughout the half day of movement, scrap metal of every size and shape was absorbed along the way.
A snapped hydraulic drive shaft: +0.18 cubic metres.
Half a damaged pressure door: +0.31 cubic metres.
Two sections of outer hull plating broken off some unidentified warship: +0.44 cubic metres.
Half an axle from an Imperial tank: +0.27 cubic metres.
The Refined Steel readout on the system interface had reached a number that left Rosen reasonably satisfied.
[Refined Steel Reserves: 53.4 cubic metres]
If he chose to spend it all right now, he could exchange for fifty-three more Death Warriors. Combined with the five he already had, that would put him at fifty-eight.
He didn't have nearly enough Life Points, of course.
During the same stretch, they also picked up a scattered assortment of other items.
A half-used roll of waterproof adhesive tape, several spent fuel rods, a damaged Imperial riot shield, and even a single-man flamer with roughly a quarter canister of promethium fuel left and an igniter that still worked, barely.
Then an unexpected signal came through on the awareness channel.
A status marker had appeared on Number 1's panel. One Rosen hadn't seen before.
He stared at it for two seconds.
[Hungry]
They had been operating on the hulk for a considerable stretch of time now. Aside from Rosen's block of military rations, hard as masonry, nobody had eaten anything.
Rosen checked his own status and confirmed that his stomach had begun lodging its own complaint in a similarly impolite manner.
He took out the ration block and squeezed it. It had the structural properties of a building material.
Divided between six people, each person would get roughly one child-sized bite.
He put it back.
He thought for a moment and arrived at a decision that, under standard Imperial military doctrine, would probably be classified as a serious infraction warranting flogging followed by a referral to the Commissar.
"Number 1, go back to that ventilation pipe we passed ten minutes ago. Cut the thigh off the greenskin the trap pinned."
Number 1 executed the order without a moment's hesitation.
The problem was that consuming greenskin flesh was explicitly prohibited under Imperial military regulations.
Not for moral reasons. For practical ones.
Greenskins were an extraordinarily unusual form of life. Their spores were the core mechanism of their reproduction and spread, and their flesh and blood were saturated with unhatched spores, along with residual Waaagh energy, the Chaos-adjacent radiation that seeped in from the warp.
An Imperial soldier who ate greenskin flesh could expect, at best, to produce something dark green for several days and run a sustained fever.
Worse outcomes involved spore germination in the digestive tract requiring surgical removal. Even worse than that was documented in Imperial records, though those records were generally not made available to ordinary soldiers.
That was why Commissars sent troops who ate greenskin flesh to a military tribunal.
But.
Rosen turned the problem over for a moment and landed on a detail that had surfaced during his post-combat review earlier.
When the system purified Life Points from greenskins, it stripped out what it labelled as the Chaos frenzy contaminant and stored it separately in the Scrapyard. What it gave him was the clean remainder.
Which meant that in the instant of death, the system had drawn out and purified the life energy of every Ork they had killed.
And in doing so, it had also cleared the Waaagh energy contamination from those souls at the source.
So in a greenskin corpse that had been drained of its Chaos contaminant at the soul level, was the Waaagh energy in the flesh still present?
Spores were a physical thing. The system didn't operate on the physical level. Those were probably still in there.
But high heat killed most spores. Catachan soldiers had dealt with worse things in the jungle using fire.
As for Waaagh energy, the kind of Chaos radiation that penetrated down to the cellular level, if the system had already pulled the contamination source out at the soul level, what remained in the flesh should only be a decayed residual trace.
Theoretically workable. But the distance between theory and practice was sometimes measured in lives.
Rosen decided to use Number 1 as the test.
Number 1 went and came back quickly, carrying an Ork thigh on his shoulder.
The circumference of the thigh was roughly comparable to an average human's waistline. It did not inspire any particular sense of culinary anticipation.
Rosen got out the flamer.
"Cook it."
Number 1 took the flamer, found a relatively open space on the deck, and lit it up.
The instant the orange flame touched the Ork flesh, the entire area filled with a smell that Rosen's entire combat career had left him completely unprepared to describe. It was somewhere between burning rubber and moisture-saturated fungus rupturing under intense heat.
Number 1 rotated the leg several times with an expressionless face.
The outside was charred. The inside was still half raw.
Ork flesh was far denser than ordinary meat, closer in texture to some kind of hard organic material. Heat penetration was extremely slow.
Rosen watched for a moment. "Cut a piece. Eat it."
Number 1 cut a chunk roughly the size of an adult fist from the leg with his Catachan Fang.
Rosen watched carefully.
When Number 1's teeth came down on it, the density of the meat produced a sound during chewing that normally only came from metal cutting tools working through solid stock.
Crunch. Crunch crunch.
Rosen watched Number 1 chew with an expression of complete seriousness for a full thirty seconds. No abnormal alerts appeared in the system interface. Number 1's health readout showed no decline. The hunger indicator shifted from red to a less vivid orange.
He had swallowed it.
And apparently it wasn't that bad.
At least judging by Number 1's face, the taste was not as desperate as the smell had suggested.
Rosen waved to the others.
"It's safe. Everyone eat."
Number 1 cut up the remaining portion and distributed the meat from the leg among Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5, then cut off one more piece and turned to offer it to Rosen.
Rosen looked at the piece of Ork thigh still steaming in front of him.
He politely pushed it back.
"I'm fine, thanks."
Then something occurred to him.
Orks reproduced via spores. They grew out of the soil.
Technically, they were a fungal life form. Some Imperial biologists had described greenskin civilisation as an entire species that was essentially one enormous mushroom expressing itself in different forms.
So then.
Did eating greenskin flesh count as eating meat, or eating vegetables?
The question unfolded slowly in his mind, kept unfolding, and then stopped at the point where no answer was forthcoming.
It was the first time since arriving in the Warhammer universe that he had generated a completely purposeless philosophical question outside of tactical thinking, and it was about dietary classification.
Number 1 put another piece in his mouth. Crunch crunch.
Five Death Warriors squatted on a pile of scrap iron, using Catachan Fangs as cutlery, gnawing on a three-quarters-cooked Ork thigh.
Rosen opened his Imperial compressed ration block and took a bite. Hard, dry, with an indescribable specific flavour that could perhaps be described as powdered brick mixed with starch.
He chewed slowly and watched the five Death Warriors eat in silence around him.
Meat, or vegetables?
The answer still hadn't arrived when something green appeared at the corner of the corridor.
A large group of Orks came around the bend. Out in front were six heavily built Ork Boyz. Behind them came a Gretchin mob too numerous to count at a glance, at least forty or fifty of them, packed together, shoving each other and jabbering away, not yet aware of what they had just walked into.
Until they saw it.
Rosen and his five Death Warriors crouched on the deck, knives in hand, carving up an Ork thigh between them.
The Ork Boyz stopped. The Gretchin stopped.
Rosen stopped chewing and swallowed the last bite of his ration block.
The quiet crunching of several Death Warriors' jaws carried clearly through the silence.