by Dan Abnett
"Worna? Worna!" bum-face yelled into the link.
There was no response.
"Worna?"
Plyton ploughed into them both from behind. Lucic fell and hit his head against a fuel drum. Burn-face tried to turn, but she slammed her fist into the side of his head repeatedly.
They landed hard. The bounty hunter's carbine hit the decking and slithered out of reach. He rolled, tucked his legs up and savagely kicked her in the torso with both feet.
Winded, gasping, Plyton flew backwards through the air. She smashed into some of the dangling chains and managed to grab one.
She was still travelling. Momentum turned her into a pendulum. Hanging from the chain, she soared out over the pool. Thrashing ice water sloshed ten metres below her.
Plyton clung on. The chain swung her back over the dock. Burn-face had rolled onto his knees, and she kicked out at him, but missed, as she swung past. He was reaching for the fallen carbine.
She swung back, missing him again, dangling out above the churning pool at the extremity of her backswing. Her hands had locked up, turned to aching numbness by the touch of the chain loops.
She swung in for a second time. Burn-face had risen, dodging her sweeping form as it came in. He rolled hard and came up with her Tronsvasse in his hands as she swept back again.
He grinned as he fired it at her. The weapon dry clicked. He hadn't reloaded it since stripping it down.
She swung past him, her momentum diminishing. Then the House staggered again and wrenched her around furiously, jerking her up over the pool with such violence her chain became slack for a second.
Burn-face rolled again, diving for the fallen carbine. She sailed down at him and struck him hard. Plyton viced her dangling legs around him and carried him on with her.
Burn-face smashed head-first into an oil drum.
He fell away from her, his neck snapped, and slammed onto the dock.
Plyton let go of the chain and fell hard.
Dazed, she rose and glanced around. Burn-face's corpse lay face down on the grilled deck. Lucic had vanished. She stumbled forward and picked up the bounty hunter's lascarbine.
The House shook again. It listed badly to one side and she fell onto the sloping deck. With a gunshot bang, one of the chains mooring the underboat broke. Its prow swung around in the frothing pool.
"Lucic?" she yelled.
Lucic had run down the service tunnel into the drum chamber. The cargo hoist was still up. He gathered Plyton's shotgun to his chest. Weird echoes rang down the riser shaft. Was that gunfire? Shouting?
Lucic strode towards the spiral staircase, coping with the relentless, sickening roll and shift of the deck.
He started up the stairs and reached the roof hatch. He pulled the inset handle and it swung down. He looked up into the dark shaft above.
The creature lunged at Kys. She met it with her kine-force, and hurled it away from her along the walkway.
That took effort. The creature was strong, vital, bristling with energy, and its chitinous structure was as hard as steel. It landed in an ungainly sprawl, powerful hind limbs skidding and scrabbling for purchase. It sprang up again, undeterred, and charged back towards her. Kys turned and leapt across the gaping walkway section that the acid had removed. She landed beside the dead bounty hunter, held out her hand, and his fallen carbine flew from the deck into her grasp. She turned back and blew the bounding creature in half.
The whole chamber was on fire. The House shuddered and realigned, wounded and dying. Predatory shapes, tails-high, leapt through the smoke and flames, dismembering the last of Worna's troop.
"Harlon?" she yelled. "Harlon?"
"He ain't here," Lucius Worna said. He stood in front of her, aiming a bolt pistol at her heart. Part of his face was eaten away to the bone by acid, and his carapace armour was covered in fresh, deep gouges. "He ain't here, you witch. Toss the carbine."
She obeyed. Covering her, he raised his link. Kys glanced up, and saw a pair of predators on the platform rail above, rocking as they prepared to pounce on him.
"Siskind!" Worna yelled into his link. "Teleport me! Now!"
Lucius Worna smiled at her, fired his pistol, and vanished. A cyclonic blur of pink light sucked him away. With a pop of decompression, the teleport cone removed Worna, his weapon and his smile.
All it left behind as it faded was the bolt round, ripping towards her.
Kys caught it. It took all of her telekinetic strength. She stopped the blistering round in mid-air a metre from her body and held it dead, at bay. She fought, her mind bending with the effort. The bolt round, stationary, began to deform and melt against the mind-wall her kine force had thrown up. It thrust against her will, half a metre away, gouging through her telekinetic defence.
She could see it clearly, spinning in space, metal sweating off it in slow, blobby droplets as it superheated.
With a gasp, Kys threw herself down. Released, the bolt round tore over her head and hit the wall behind her with an explosive crump.
Kys rose, the smoke making her choke. The two creatures perched on the rail bounced down onto the walkway ahead of her and began to advance.
They yapped and chattered.
She had no mind-strength left anymore, nothing to keep them at bay.
They leapt.
They burst in splashes of ichor.
Gun pods blazing, Ravenor's chair swept out of the doorway. It was horribly gouged and dented. Suspension fluid trickled out of deep cut scars.
Ravenor turned slowly, raking the walkway with sustained pod fire. Skipping, jinking predators exploded and died.
+Patience!+
+Throne, you're alive!+
+Help me!+
He was in pain. He was hurt. Kys scrambled up the steps onto the upper platform.
"The Wych House is finished," she yelled over the roar of the flames. "We have to leave."
+Help me, Patience.+
Bleeding from an awful leg wound, Ballack stumbled out of the doorway behind Ravenor. He was carrying Thonius, who was limp and lifeless.
"What happened?" Kys yelled.
+No time to explain. Get them clear, Patience. That's all I ask.+
Kys ran to Ballack and grabbed hold of him. His eyes were blank. He was being puppetted by Ravenor.
"I've got him!" she cried.
Ravenor let Ballack go, and he slumped. Thonius looked dead. He was covered with blood. The House shuddered again, and slipped. The deck pitched wildly.
+Gideon!+
Something detonated above them. The House rocked.
+Get them clear, Patience! Get them to the underboat while there's still a chance!+
Kys sucked in her breath and took hold of Ballack and Thonius. She carried them, more with her tired mind than with her arms, down the steps onto the walkway, and then down again into the burning hell of the chamber's floor space.
+Please come with me!+ she sent back.
+I'll follow. Angharad is still through there. I'm waring her. I can get her out.+
Up on the top platform, Ravenor swung around to face the doorway.
+Come on. Come on.+
A black and white form pounced at his chair. He blew it apart with his cannons.
Kys reached the hoist and dropped Ballack and Thonius onto its platform. She reached for the lever.
+Gideon!+
+Go, Patience! I'll be right after you!+
Kys threw the lever. The hoist began to descend.
Kys heard a scuttering, scrabbling sound. She looked up.
Five of the glossy black and white monsters were racing down the sheer walls of the riser shaft after her, limbs rippling as they tore down the soot-black sides of the drop.
Shotgun raised, Lucic took another step up the spiral staircase. The House shook again, violently. That was bad, and he knew it. The House was reaching the end of its existence.
Lucic aimed his shotgun up into the darkness of the stair shaft. He was sure he'd heard something above hi
m, something descending.
He couldn't see anything. He lowered his gun. Reaching into his back pocket, he took out his stablight and flicked it on. He shone the narrow beam up into the gloom.
Nothing. Except... teeth.
Something above him yapped.
Hiram Lucic made a frantic grab for his shotgun.
Kys grabbed Ballack's laspistol and fired it up at the monsters scurrying down the shaft after them.
It snapped dead. It was spent. She reached frantically into his pockets for a fresh clip.
The hoist was descending too slowly, far slower than the scurrying monsters.
Carbine raised in one hand, lamp in the other, Plyton stepped into the drum chamber. She could hear the hoist trundling down.
A loud, rattling crash came from the direction of the spiral staircase. She stepped closer to investigate. It was her shotgun. Her shotgun had just fallen down the spiral staircase onto the deck. The last time she'd seen, it had been in Lucie's possession.
With slow, nauseating horror, Plyton realised that an astonishingly copious amount of blood was streaming down out of the roof hatch.
Swallowing hard, Plyton cinched the carbine over her shoulder and picked up her shotgun. She backed away from the staircase towards the base plate of the hoist, keeping her shotgun steady. She tried to watch both: the staircase and the hoist, as soon as it appeared.
The hoist dropped into view. Kys was crouching at the centre of the platform, with Ballack and Thonius sprawled on either side of her.
"Maud! Maud! Shoot!" Kys screamed, pointing up the shaft. Plyton leapt up onto the hoist platform between Kys and the unconscious men. She fired upwards, blindly pumping shot after shot up into the dark. Kys dragged Ballack and Thonius off the hoist behind her.
Kys looked back. She had a prickling feeling that Plyton had hit something. Kys reached out and jerked Plyton backwards off the hoist with her telekinesis the instant before three ruptured, flopping bodies crashed down onto it out of the shaft.
Plyton got up, staring at the dead things. "What the hell are those?" she asked in total revulsion.
"We've got to get back to the boat." Kys barked, ignoring the question.
"Where's Ravenor?"
"He's coming." Kys hurried forward to throw the lever and send the hoist back up, but it was dead. Noxious bio-acid leaking from the burst throat sacs of one of the dead things had reduced the motor to metal goo.
"How is he coming?" asked Plyton. "What about Nayl and swordgirl?"
"He'll use his psi," Kys replied. +Gideon, the hoist is out of action. Gideon?+
There was no answer. Kys dragged Ballack to his feet. He was coming around, groggy. She threw Thonius' limp body over her shoulder.
"Come on!" She started off towards the service tunnel, dragging Ballack after her, stumbling and confused. Plyton fell in behind her, moving backwards, shotgun raised. Something black and white scuttled down the spiral staircase, and smiled. She blasted it apart.
The deck had twisted to a sharper angle, and the House was rattling with a constant shudder. Metal groaned and protested. In the docking pool, the water was boiling up through the wharf decking, a mass of froth and pressure. The underboat, still anchored by one sea chain, was bucking and thumping violently against the dockside fenders in the immense swell.
Using telekinesis, Kys shoved Thonius' body unceremoniously across and in through the side hatch. Then she jumped across with Ballack. They nearly slipped off into the surging water, but she braced them with her mind and they scrambled in through the hatch.
The pilot servitor had already closed the top hatch.
"We have to leave. Right now," he told Kys.
"We're not all here," she replied, moving back to the side hatch.
"If the House goes," the servitor replied, "it'll take us with it. We won't have clearance to exit the dock pool. Cut the chain loose."
"We're not all here yet!" Kys yelled at him. "Get to the helm and get ready!"
The pilot servitor scurried forward. She heard the fans start up and test-rev. She got to the hatch and looked out. Plyton had remained on the dock side, and was standing with her back to the pool, watching the approach from the service tunnel.
"Maud?"
"No sign!" Plyton yelled back over the roaring water and squealing metal.
+Gideon?+
Nothing.
Plyton was suddenly shooting. The gritty boom of her shotgun rang out again and again. Over a dozen of the creatures were scurrying out of the service tunnel towards her. She killed two of them.
"Maud!"
There was a sudden, stomach-flipping lurch and the House tilted even more sharply, throwing Plyton down. A curious, deep moaning sound began. It was coming from the pool. It was the sound of water, stirring in vast quantities. The house had dipped so steeply, the air bell of the docking pool had lost its integrity, and oceanic water was surging up into the pool bay with shocking speed and fury. The docking pool was flooding.
"Maud!"
Plyton rose on the sharply inclined decking and leapt. She hit the side of the see-sawing underboat and Kys dragged her in through the hatch. Scrambling, slipping, half-falling, the chattering things came after her.
Kys slammed the hatch shut and heard hooks clang and scrape against the outer hull.
"The sea chain!" the pilot servitor shouted at her. "What about the sea chain?"
The colossal power of the ocean answered him. The force of the flood lifted the underboat, slammed it against the metal dock, and then yanked it away. Black and white bodies tumbled away into the boiling water. The remaining sea chain caught, strained, and parted with an explosive crack.
Released, the underboat rolled, righted, and fought the rising, crushing energy of the sea. The pilot blew air ballast and gunned his cavitation drive and attitude fans.
"What are you doing?" Kys screamed.
"We have to get out!" the pilot servitor yelled back.
She lunged forward, but stopped herself. What could she do? Force him to stay? Kill him?
Even if they stayed, what could they accomplish? The House was flooding, and was minutes, maybe seconds, from losing its foothold forever.
Patience Kys was a supremely capable, confident woman. She could do many things, against almost any odds.
But she couldn't beat this. She was helpless. They were helpless. The ones they'd left behind, if they weren't dead already, were doomed.
+Gideon!+ She sent with such anguished force Plyton and Ballack winced.
There was no answer. There would never be again.
FOUR
Nayl woke to find himself in hell.
He was sprawled in the bottom floor space of the theatre chamber. The deck was at an almost forty degree slope. His head pounded and his throat hurt. He remembered Worna grabbing him.
He rose, swaying. The area around him was alive with leaping flames. His coat was on fire. He took it off and threw it aside.
He made his way over to the hoist, but it was gone, and the black riser shaft stared up at him.
There were bodies on the ground, two of Worna's hired guns. They looked as if they had been snipped clumsily into pieces by giant scissors. He helped himself to the shotgun one of them had dropped.
Something moved in the flames nearby. A dead-eyed horror with a rictus smile leapt out of the dancing fire to kill him.
No hesitation. His newly acquired shotgun barked, and punched it back where it had come from in a drizzle of purple fluid.
Fighting the sloping deck, he reached the lower steps and got onto the walkway. There was no one around, no one alive, anyway. He saw four more dead from Worna's band, the corpses of two housekeepers rent limb from limb, and the crumpled forms of three more things like the one he had just wasted.
"What in Throne's name are these things?" he muttered.
Nayl clambered around the walkway, leaping over a missing section of deck that looked as if it had been burned away by acid. He made it to the up
per steps. Serious-sounding explosions thumped somewhere outside the ruined chamber. The whole place was on fire.
He crawled up onto the sloping upper platform. The roof dome above was a riotous inferno, and flames from below were searing up around the metal disk of the platform. The doorframe was still standing, the door open and swinging, the red light of somewhere else shining through it.
Ravenor's chair sat facing the door. It was scratched and battered, punctured in places. Clear fluid was dripping out of it.
"Ravenor?"
"Is that you, Harlon?"
Nayl staggered over to reach him.
"What the hell is going on?"
"I'm sorry." Ravenor replied, his voxponded voice frail and thready, as if the system were damaged. Or as if he were damaged. "I'm very sorry. We're not getting out of here."
"Where are the others?"
"Kys has made her way out. She took Carl and Ballack with her. I hope they made it to the underboat. I pray they did. I keep calling, but I'm very tired. My mind is weak. I can't reach Kys."
"What about Plyton?" Nayl asked.
Ravenor sighed.
"What about Angharad?" Nayl said more firmly.
"I'm still trying. She's there, I can feel her. But..."
"Gideon? For Throne's sake, is she still in there?"
"I'm waring her. She... she kept them at bay. She's still fighting them. I don't know how much longer she can last. She's an amazing woman, that Arianhrod."
"You mean Angharad."
"What?"
"You mean Angharad."
"Yes, of course."
Another explosion rocked the chamber. Nayl stepped towards the door. "Angharad!" he yelled into the red light. "Angharad!"
"Wait, Harlon." Ravenor whispered. "Wait, she's..."
Something moved on the other side of the door. Backlit by the red glow, a figure limped into view.
Angharad. She was covered in blood and smears of purple ichor. Her leather armour was torn, and hanging off her in places. Her long steel smoked. She walked slowly out of the doorway onto the platform, leading the housekeeper guide behind her by the hand, like a child.
