As the airtight door closed, it shut out the suffocating heat.
Rovi took the sealed box but did not open it right away.
Instead, he examined the sample inside through the observation window.
A chunk of dark red solidified fat, mixed with fibrous impurities.
"Alpha, run a burn test."
The Priest extended a mechanical arm, took a small piece of the sample from the box, and placed it in the combustion chamber of the vehicle's onboard lab.
"Whoosh!"
The moment it ignited, the fingernail-sized sample began burning rapidly.
Its orange-red flame was remarkably steady, and it released an astonishing amount of heat.
The values on the onboard analyzer's screen jumped wildly.
"High-density lipid polymer, with a very high carbon content. Its calorific value is equivalent to 65% of standard Promethium Fuel!" Priest Alpha exclaimed.
Rovi rarely smiled, but now he did.
The Ninth Agricultural War Zone had once been Fertility II's largest corpse-processing center.
Millions of corpses shipped in from other Hive Cities had been ground up and squeezed here.
The high-calorie fats that could not be converted into starch hadn't disappeared.
On the contrary, under Nurgle's influence, they had combined with underground fungi, settled, and polymerized, eventually forming the "carpet" covering the entire hall.
Of course, this wasn't unique.
In the lower levels of some Hive Cities on Holy Terra, this stuff was known as "Corpse Wax Coal."
Rovi preferred to call it "free solid fuel."
Though this fuel contained too many impurities to be added to the precision engines of a Chimera or fed to those delicate generator units,
Granary Seven still had more than a dozen old corpse incinerators and steam boilers.
Those clunkers would burn just about anything.
If they could haul this entire "carpet" back, it would be enough to replace at least thirty percent