Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  So the mad ones, or the sane ones, depending on which way you looked at it, came below to fight.

  The Goliaths were the diametric opposite of the Escher—a bunch of steroid-fed half-wits who relied on brute force and ignorance to get the job done. This was what the Escher had told her. These Goliaths were outlaws, gang scum who couldn’t abide by the coarse rules of the Underhive and had earned a bounty on their heads. The Escher gang’s leader, Tessera, had cut a deal with a nearby settlement called Two Tunnels to wipe out the Goliath gang or at least drive them far enough from the settlement to stop harassing anyone who travelled there.

  There were only supposed to be half a dozen outlaw Goliaths holed up in the manufactoria, and the Escher were to outnumber them almost two to one. It didn’t feel like that at all at the moment. D’onne was alone with the enemy all about her, as evinced by the occasional rattle of stone or clink of metal in the shadows. She had also stayed in the comforting but illusory shelter of the beam for too long—whole stale seconds too long in the midst of a minutes-long firefight.

  She started to move. A hail of bullets sprayed across the beam, kicking up tiny explosions of dust all around her as she hastily ducked back out of sight. The bullets kept coming, angrily buzz-sawing chunks out of the beam in a seemingly endless stream. When the fusillade stopped, the momentary silence seemed unreal and disorientating to D’onne after the chaos of being under such heavy fire. In the distance she heard the click of a magazine being ejected and that familiar drum-drum-drum of running boots.

  Something about Tola’s words earlier came back to her and she knelt suddenly upright with her pistol in hand.

  Pow! Pow!

  A Goliath stood not five metres away from her. He was tall, but massive pectorals and biceps made him seem squat and troll-like. Chrome spikes and rings prominently pierced his nipples, face, arms, and crotch. He had a heavy cylinder-fed slug gun in one hand and a steel bar in the other. The Goliath was looking down, dumbly surprised at the two smoking holes D’onne had put through his meaty chest. He looked about as old as Tola.

  D’onne saw the second Goliath right behind him, and amazingly he was even bigger and definitely more ugly and scarred than the other one. He was grinning nastily at D’onne while slapping a fresh clip into his autopistol. As he did so, the corpse of his fellow ganger dropped neatly out of his line of fire. She gaped in astonishment at the realisation that he had used the younger Goliath to draw her out, how he had callously sent him to an almost certain death to get her to come of out of cover. He saw the shocked expression on her face and laughed out loud, a deep booming sound like rocks falling down a shaft.

  “Nevuhr mind girly-girl,” he said, levelling the autopistol at her. “If yer quick yer’ll catch ’im.”

  Donna’s eyes were already closed and she flinched as shots hammered out, her body tensing involuntarily at the last instant before giving up her life. After a second she opened them to find she still lived, and instead the Goliath was sprawled in a bloody heap. He seemed shrunken now that hot lead had torn through muscles, organs and bones. D’onne couldn’t get the confused idea out of her head that somehow the autopistol had misfired and he hit himself, lots of times, or something.

  “That’s the last of them,” Tessera’s firm voice called out.

  Footsteps scrunched all around D’onne as the Escher appeared from the shadows one by one. Big Faer with her heavy stubber still smoking from the deadly burst which had killed the last Goliath. Little Tola smeared with dirt and covered in bruises, looking like the child she was. Avignon and Sirce were up in the roof supports with their rifles. Jen, Alli and Sara were on the ground with pistols. Crazy Kristi had cuts all over her body and a lot of blood on her long, slender sword that wasn’t her own. They carried out the other juve, Veshla, who had a gut wound that probably wouldn’t heal before it killed her.

  D’onne realised that she had never been alone and that there had always been allies within reach of her. She also realised that Tessera had used her and Tola as bait, just like the Goliath but with a bit more sophistication. That simply reinforced a lesson she already knew, one she had learned at bitter cost in the Spire.

  Number one always comes first.

  Tola came up to her afterwards and said, loud enough for the whole gang to hear, “Watcha go a-runnin’ off on your own like that for? You’re mad, Donna!”

  2: CLIFF WALL

  Mad Donna stared up at a vast, curving cloud approaching her as she tramped across the White Wastes. Twinkling stars strung its upper reaches and hung down like looping garlands across black lightning bolts frozen in the act of splitting the smooth face asunder.

  Cliff Wall. Her mouth felt dry at the prospect. Or maybe it was the dehydrating salts of the White Wastes, it was hard to be sure.

  The route from Glory Hole was high up to the left from this perspective, climbing a succession of ruined buildings and fallen roadways along the dome wall to come up level with the cliff top. The right hand end of the cliff top road led out of the White Wastes and into the ominous Looming Halls. A ratskin had once told her there were evil spirits there, and truly the rows of towering machinery rusted into solid heaps but not yet completely quiescent were disturbing.

  The chalk-white dust of the wastes gave way grudgingly to cracked slabs in a pipe-choked channel near the base of the cliff. Donna went cautiously, testing each step before advancing. The finest dust from the White Wastes could flow like water and would often pool in pits or crevices on its periphery. Usually this was just inconvenient and meant stumbling in unseen potholes, but the base of Cliff Wall was rife with cracks deep enough to swallow a man, or woman, whole. Even a solid-looking slab or pipe might be resting at the edge of an unseen precipice and just waiting to tumble an unwary traveller to their doom.

  She stopped, squinting between the pipes and trying to see what had caught her attention. There, a scatter of small bones and chitin. She reappraised the thick tangle of fallen wires hanging above the spot. Tiny, subtle movements made it look like the wires were swaying in a breeze, but there was no breeze to be felt. Wire weed. Doubtless a chunk had fallen from a toll-block at the top and survived down here by catching rats and spiders. Donna counted herself lucky. Larger thickets would have hidden the evidence of their kills better. The first inkling she might have had about the weed would be when it was looping tendrils around her pretty neck. She had heard stories of wire weed that had learned to lurk under dust or sand, or even behind walls, and burst out on its prey from hiding. Suddenly the floor of the channel seemed a less safe place to be.

  She went up, climbing creaking pipes and corroded stanchions, steering well clear of the weed she had spotted. Now that she was alert to it, she spotted a few other clumps dotted around. Nasty as it was, wire weed was a lurker, and as such it was a fair bet that it would be lurking near well-used trails. The weed patches seemed to be spread evenly around a bank of six-metre high outflow pipes, and that would make it likely that they connected to the turbine chambers beneath Cliff Wall.

  By the time she got level with the outflow she was dripping with sweat, and the jagged metal she’d climbed had torn her gloves. She clung to a section of gantry and eyed the rockrete apron in front of the pipes dubiously as she caught her breath. There was no sign of what she’d expected to find—the fine grey sensor hairs sticking out of cracks and crevices that denoted the presence of lashworms. It was easy to see why. Every crack or crevice around the outflow pipes had been meticulously broken open and there was obscene rat-graffiti everywhere. Looked like rats had eaten all the lashworms.

  Donna hated rats. She started contemplating other directions to try instead of the outflow. A las-bolt whipped past her face without warning, close enough for her to feel the furnace breath of its passage. The bolt struck sparks of molten steel from the metal gantry and the whole thing suddenly shifted beneath her.

  Most people get shot in situations like this because their immediate response is to stop and look around for who’s
shooting at them. If they were really lucky they’d get to see their attacker just in time to get themselves killed dead, dead, dead. Gang fighters, especially ones of Donna’s calibre, knew better. Cover first, then worry about who’s shooting. The decision isn’t a decision at all, it’s an instant response in a world where death is only ever a trigger-pull away.

  Donna pitched herself over onto the rockrete apron. A second bolt clipped shards off the edge as she wiggled over it. The gantry swayed alarmingly as her weight left it for firmer ground. Donna lay flat for a moment and glared around wildly. No shapes moved in the outflow tunnels, and no more shots came from above. Whoever was shooting at her was below at the base of the cliff.

  The practical solution would be to get going before they decided to start lobbing frag grenades up at her, but Donna was consumed with curiosity. She slithered along the edge for a few metres and slipped out a specially polished throwing blade she kept in her boot top. Easing it over the edge allowed her to see a view down the wall with the blade’s mirrored surface, which her assailants were unlikely to spot in the dim light. Donna had often considered getting some kind of remote for her bionic eye for times like this but Tessera, her old mentor, had been derisive. “A gadget will always fail you,” she had sneered. “Only rely on things that can’t go wrong!” She had accepted only grudgingly that Donna needed to replace her eye at all.

  There. A figure with a shouldered rifle. It was scanning around the outflow area. She shrank back in case the figure had a scope sight. He had been standing on a slab close to where Donna had started to climb, with another figure just behind it, a darker blur in the gloom. She edged along a little further and put her little blade over the edge to see if there were more of them.

  She caught sight of movement and turned the blade to catch a small group of maybe three or four marching up to the slab, obviously allies of the sniper. The figure at the head of the group looked to be dressed in white clothes or armour, and the rest were shadowy blobs that looked like they were cloaked and hooded. The figure in white dashed the rifle out of the sniper’s hands and some kind of argument broke out, fragments of angry imprecations floating up the wall from below. Donna smiled nastily. They wanted her alive, so they were bounty hunters. Not Shallej and Kell Bak, but some other posse, fresh out of Glory Hole no doubt.

  All attention was being drawn to the argument so Donna risked poking her head over for a better look.

  The figure in white (armour she realised, a full-body suit of shaped ceramite pieces by the look of it) stood with his legs spread pointing down imperiously at the fallen lasrifle. Skulking just in front of it was an Underhive gun-scummer, the kind of trash for hire you can find buzzing like flies around any of the settlements. It looked like he had a gun-scum buddy hovering between backing him up and slinking away.

  The two remaining members of the group looked rather, well, weird. They were heavily cloaked in dark robes but that couldn’t disguise the fact that one was short and round, the other tall and rail thin. The tall one scarcely moved at all, and the short one seemed to be constantly swaying as if in time to unheard music. Neither carried any visible weapons.

  Things were hotting up on the slab. The scummer was shaking his head and White Armour kept jabbing his finger at the lasrifle again and again. The scummer looked surly, his hand flexing closer to his holster. Just when it looked like violence would erupt at any moment, another figure moved fluidly into view. It was low and lean like a hunting hound, all polished chrome and brushed steel. It was in fact an enforcer hound; a standard enforcer cyborg occasionally seen in the Underhive indentured to guilders, watchmen or bounty hunters.

  The fire went out of the scummer as soon as he saw the mastiff and he hastily picked up the rifle. Donna cursed inwardly and wished she had a few frag grenades to drop on them. It was too far for a decent pistol shot, and trying would get her in a gun battle with men with rifles—a definably bad idea.

  The thought gave her another idea, however, and after some searching she found a hands-breadth section of pipe that would serve her purpose. Coming to a crouch at the edge, she popped up for a second fully exposed to those below. One of the cloaked figures, the short one, seemed to sense her first and pointed. The others were caught flat-footed, clumsily swinging around to look for their forgotten prey.

  “Eat frag, you scummers!” Donna yelled and threw the pipe into their midst before ducking out of sight. Alarmed yells could be heard, and Donna imagined them all diving for cover from the so-called frag grenade she had thrown.

  As she entered the outflow pipe she heard the first screams floating up from below as the wire weed feasted on its unexpected bounty. She smiled a full, cruel smile.

  The first couple of hundred metres of pipe ran straight, and then it went through a slow left corkscrew and rose perhaps ten metres before debouching into a large chamber. That was where Donna found the rats.

  Two-dozen pairs of glinting, narrowed eyes were studying her as she exited the pipe. As four sets of eyes moved closer, her bionic saw their long sinuous forms sidling insouciantly to surround her, their worm-tails dragging in the dirt. She stood her ground; running or even backing off now would most likely bring the whole pack down on her in an instant.

  Necromundan giant rats were the stuff of nightmares, over a metre long with scabrous, oily pelts, naked wormlike tails, taloned claws, piercing, red eyes that glitter with malign intelligence and a jaw full of jagged, disease-ridden fangs. Mutations are so common it’s unusual to see a rat without bloated tumours, or two heads, or poisonous spines, or drooling acidic green foam. They’d long since learned not to fear humans and there are many parts of the Underhive that belong more to rats than men.

  Donna thumbed Seventy-one to life and menaced them with it, the malicious whine of its whirling teeth oscillating as she swung it in a casual figure-of-eight.

  “You want some, boys? Want a little rat fricassee? Come on. Donna’s waiting and she doesn’t have all day.”

  The rats stopped when they heard Seventy-one’s keening challenge, but hunger or maybe her talking back needled them into advancing again. One skeletal specimen with bony horns on its head hunched its shoulders to jump, but Donna burned it down with her laspistol as it sprang. The distraction gave the other three the opening they wanted, prompting two of them to leap at her face while the third went for her belly.

  Her chainblade whipping up in a tight arc, Donna took the head off one rat in a spray of gore and gouged bloody chunks from the other, making it squeal as it was hurled aside. Donna spun with the momentum, twisting desperately to avoid the slavering fangs of the third as its leap carried it past. The wounded one landed near her feet and snapped furiously at her but she kicked it away, levelling her pistol and popping off a shot at the one she’d dodged as it tensed to jump again. The rat skittered away from the las-shot with almost preternatural speed and then started to slowly edge away, chittering and glaring at her menacingly.

  Donna stood poised, her heart hammering in her chest. She had passed the test for the present. The other rats began preening disinterestedly or nosed around, pointedly ignoring her. Several of them ambled casually after the wounded one, lapping at the crimson trail it left as it desperately tried to crawl away.

  Others trotted over to the rats she had killed and started gnawing on them with shameless cannibalistic gusto.

  Donna strode forward through the chamber displaying more confidence than she felt, boot heels scrunching on scattered bones. Two large, square tunnels were visible in the far wall so she headed towards them, trying to cover every angle at once and not run. As she got closer she could see more rats watching her from the left tunnel and steered to the right.

  The rats might be trying to trick her by sending her deeper into their nest but it was unlikely. Having tested her mettle they would be content to follow her now, waiting until she was hurt by something else, sleeping, or off-guard before they came for her again. Or, as the burst of agonised squeaking behind her un
derlined, they would finish off anything else that crossed her path but limped away from the encounter. Rats were nothing if not supreme opportunists. For now her only hope was to push on and stay ahead of the bounty hunters. They were the real peril.

  The tunnel was streaked with crusted patches of old slime and little puddles of moisture winked up at her from the floor. These were good signs that the route connected to the dank turbine chambers. Sure enough, after twenty metres the tunnel ended at a set of corroded, gap-toothed rungs set into the wall. Looking up Donna could see a tangle of rusted metal partially blocking the lip of a shaft perhaps three metres above.

  There was an old Underhive adage that said, “Never trust a rung when you can make the jump,” but then another stated, “Never make a jump when you can make the climb.” Donna opted for the former this time. She backed up a couple of paces, turned to blow a kiss to the glittering rat-eyes in the shadows behind, sheathed her weapons, and leapt. She caught at the lip of the shaft with both hands but her torn gloves made her hands slip and one skidded off. Flailing around she caught the topmost rung and it tore straight out of the crumbling ferrocrete. Disgusted, she tossed it away and made another grab at the lip. This time her grip held and with some unladylike grunts and scrabbling she hauled herself over the edge.

  As she did so the pile of rusting scrap creaked ominously. A twisted turbine blade was dislodged and spun lazily down the shaft with a horrendous clattering noise. She gingerly wormed out from under the mass of machinery as it teetered further and settled towards the edge. Donna held her breath.