"But we can crush them with numbers, just as we did in the void—drowning the Imperial fleet in vast amounts of Degraded flotsam. The Imperium will not deploy those vehicles you mentioned on every battlefield, but we can provide every force with Degraded Titans."
"Damn it all!" Drau cursed again. "It sounds like we're no different from those damned Tyranids and swarming Orks!"
Though he spoke with bravado and contempt, Drau knew that the enormous numbers of Degraded Ones had indeed made an outstanding contribution during the Battle of Cadia. These servants without souls or flesh had become the favorite tools of many warbands.
The fact that Degraded Ones required neither maintenance nor logistics already put them far beyond mortal servants of Chaos, not to mention that their combat capabilities greatly surpassed those of an equal number of mortal troops. So long as they could overcome their inner obsession with Astartes Supremacism and did not mind their warships and bases becoming lifeless and deathly still, many were eager to request more Degraded One support from the Dark Mechanicum.
There was no such thing as a free lunch. By selling armies of Degraded Ones, the Dark Mechanicum demanded astonishing numbers of living people from the Chaos warbands.
Those gearheads, whose minds were filled with nothing but technology and metal, had recently become remarkably interested in living people. It made Drau feel as though the Dark Mechanicum's upper ranks were a pack of Emperor's Children expecting slaves to wait on them.
The second thing that interested the Dark Mechanicum was Blackstone. Abaddon was quite interested in that stuff as well. Sometimes, Drau suspected that Abaddon had secured the Dark Mechanicum's full support only because he had secretly handed over half of Cadia's Blackstone mining rights.
That was also the task of Drau,