Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  Down Town was the deepest permanent settlement below The Wall. It stood in the lowest portion of the Underhive, at the bottom of the ancient effluent-worn shaft men call the Abyss. Common wisdom held that it was positioned at the deepest habitable point in the Underhive, although the scavvies would doubtless argue about that, if anybody gave a damn about what muties thought. In truth, it lay even beyond the region of domes and tunnels that comprise the Underhive itself, positioned as it was upon the shores of the toxic sump lake that lay at the very bottom of the hive.

  Sometimes, things crawled forth from their holes in the foundation layer, slithering up from the blackness to feed, driven by their hunger for soft, untainted flesh and warm blood. They could be glimpsed from the watchtowers of Down Town, moving through the spoil heaps as they hunted the mutant rats that feed on the refuse there. Their luminous eyes could be seen glimmering amongst the ruins as they studied the progress of a slave train, watching for stragglers and wounded. Their whimpering and snarling could be heard throughout Down Town in the dark hours of lights-out, always close by but always unseen, a sound to haunt the sleep of men.

  Once in a while a hunter or prospector would bring the pelt of some strange bestial thing to Down Town. Some of them were men, or used to be men, with scabrous rotting skin and talon-like nails, eyes turned to vestigial pits covered by pallid membranes or black and staring with no visible irises. Others had only the sham of human form, scaly and vile things with dripping mouths and long red tongues. Over the far wall of the Down Town Trade Hole were nailed the skins of many such beasts, hundreds and hundreds of them. Some of the hides were rotted and eaten away by time or infestation, whereas others gleamed with green and golden scales or purple and black chitin, miraculously unmarked by chemical fogs or necrotic fungi. A few of the skins were those of savages and outlaws brought in for bounty, but most were of hunters that had become prey, a warning to the rest to stay away. Mostly they did, except when the poison fogs rolled in off the sump and the people of Down Town had to fasten their doors tight.

  Few descended as far as Down Town, and fewer still stayed there deliberately to make a living, although plenty end up staying unintentionally and permanently.

  The journey down from Dust Falls was long and arduous to say the least, and getting down the more commonly used paths was often a battle in its own right, with rivals, outlaws, scavvies and worse things to contend with en route. The surrounding domes through the hive foundations were crushed and compacted, riddled with narrow crawl holes and infested with evil things ready to feed on the weak and unwary.

  But some of the hardiest and most desperate still went, attracted by the sump lake itself and by the things that dwell in it. In the hard land of the Underhive, there was no tougher work than that which could be found in Down Town, but there was also none more likely to get you really wealthy or really dead. Most people that went to Down Town thought they were going to get wealthy, most of them were dead wrong.

  The strongest and the quickest gang fighters went to hunt the monstrous, legendary sump-spiders on the toxic lake, the great spider mares and their kin: White Skaters, Black Leviathans, Scarlet Jennies, Orange Knees, Blue Knees, Red Knees, Tippers and Runners.

  Beautiful, huge and deadly, Necromundan spiders were renowned across the stars. Their faceted eyes were as hard as diamonds and greatly prized by the jewellers of a thousand worlds for their scintillating iridescence and undying lustre. The blood spilled to gain such prizes only added to their value, with nobles and merchants vying to show how many lost lives they could display in a single trinket or ornament.

  With an equal share in a successful spider hunt, a man might win two fist-sized stones or more, enough to live like a prince for a year in the Underhive, if you could avoid getting killed for long enough to enjoy it. The truth was that for every successful hunt three or more failed, and even in a successful hunt motor-skiffs were overturned and men were killed with shocking regularity. Often hunts failed to return at all, and often the skiff pilots questioned just who was hunting whom out on the slick black swells of the sump lake.

  Other travellers sensibly set their sights lower and came to feed off the spoils of the hunt, to bid for the carcasses. They would haggle over tough spider pelts and chitin, boil down the beasts’ nutritious fat and extract their deadly venom to sell on; no part of the spider was wasted from its fangs to its spinnerets. There were a hundred petty industries thriving upon the spiders and the lesser creatures of the lake: the skimmers, sharks, slime spawn and the other nameless beasts of the deeps. Many things lived in the sump that lived nowhere else in the Underhive, probably nowhere else in the universe, a unique collection of life forms that had somehow adapted to living on the toxic lake surface or beneath it.

  Many of the Ratskin colonies believed that the sump itself was the living embodiment of what they called the hive spirits. To them it was heaven, hell and perdition all rolled into one, and it was where their spirits would go when they died before they got reborn; a hell of a lot of them hoped to come back as sump spiders, which tells you something.

  The surface of the sump lake constantly roiled with a consistency that could vary from light machine-oil to molasses and back again within a hundred yards. The gases it emitted were often volatile or corrosive and methane fires and sulphur fogs chased each other across its surface.

  Falling into the sump itself would be a death sentence—you’d be lucky if the poisons killed you before the corrosives melted the flesh from your bones. Either way, screaming agony for the rest of your doubtlessly short existence would be assured.

  In places around the sump, huge stalagmites and stalactites of coagulated industrial waste had formed over millennia, creating organically grown cathedrals of accumulated foulness and squalor. The layers upon layers of waste mingled and accreted into insane chemical ores that were valuable but too highly corrosive or poisonous in their own right to even approach safely without the right protective gear. Many overconfident prospectors died trying to harvest these ores, and their bones were merged into growing piles that spread millimetre by millimetre, year after year, to create macabre frescoes in their curving walls.

  Donna knew all of this, all the hoary old tales of Down Town, but as they approached Hive Bottom the thing she was most impressed by was the stink.

  They were holed up on a ledge overlooking Down Town. They had to kick some milliasaurs out of the way to get in when they arrived but no one else seemed to have noticed. When Donna and the Escher showed up the creatures stormed out of their holes to bite them without a second’s thought. Dumb little friks. Bullets and las-bolts blew them apart before they even got to use their much-feared venom. Rats would at least have waited until the humans’ backs were turned, but that’s the way in the Underhive—it takes all sorts. Now Donna and the Escher were watching and waiting, getting their first good look at Down Town.

  Questing fingers of fog rolled in off the sump to probe down the narrow alleyways below. Yellow lights showed from slit windows in the high watchtowers that seemed to be on every building, and the trading hole was closed up tight. A line of pillars jutted out like broken teeth into the lake, each one a mooring point for a shoal of flat little motor-skiffs for spider hunting. There was also the odd sump drifter nestling here and there among the skiffs, like a fat sow among piglets, an image complimented by the bobbing motion imparted to them by the lake’s swells.

  One shape sitting on the lake dwarfed both the skiffs and the drifters. It squatted off to the right a little, just outside the walls of Down Town at its own mooring. The roiling mist on the sump made it blurry, but Donna’s crystal eye saw all. It was a fat, teardrop-shaped craft almost two-hundred metres in length with an incongruous set of stub-wings projecting out for about a third of the way along its length.

  At first she had taken it for some kind of atmospheric shuttle, but it had open decks on top and a definite keel below, so whatever it was, it had been designed to travel through a fluid medium, altho
ugh probably not the sump lake. It didn’t look like this particular example had travelled anywhere in a long time. The wing she could see looked pitted and crumpled, the hull was rust-streaked and peeling and the whole thing was listing over slightly at its mooring. There were skeletons of similarly sized craft dotted about, their oil-streaked ribs protruding from the sump around the moorings like giant fingers. This one looked to be the last of its kind. It was Relli’s manse.

  “Watcha looking at?” Tola asked.

  Donna stretched out a little where she lay on the ledge before replying, but she kept her gaze focussed on Relli’s place.

  “Wire weed around the mooring piers, a gun tower on the shore, two more guns on deck with at least one more I can’t see. I think I’m looking at about twenty guards of which up to six are Goliaths and the rest pit slaves; it’s hard to be sure. I think I’m looking at maybe a dozen more people on the boat-thing: guests, staff, flunkies and all, plus one fat merchant who’s the only frikkin’ person that I actually want to see when I’m onboard. What are you looking at?”

  “Carrion bats eating half a rat while its front half tries to crawl away. Ooh, they spotted him! Go Halfsie! Awww, they got him after all.”

  Donna looked around at Tola. The girl had borrowed (probably stolen) a scope sight from one of the other gangers and was avidly watching the life and death struggles taking place all over the refuse heaps below. The rats had taken advantage of Halfsie’s distraction to pull down an incautious carrion bat in return. Behold the circle of frikkin’ life, Donna thought.

  “Ask one of the juves,” Tessera had said. Tola wasn’t a juve any more, but she remained so girlish that Donna often wondered if she were brain damaged in some way—between environmental poisoning and gang fight injuries it was pretty likely. She was an ideal candidate for the direct approach.

  “Tola, why did Tessera tell the gang you were coming down here?”

  “She didn’t tell us anything.” Tola looked a little confused by the idea.

  “Didn’t anyone complain about going down the Abyss?”

  It was another unwritten piece of Underhive lore that whenever The Abyss was mentioned someone would refuse to go, quoting the hoary old tales of Down Town and predicting doom for all who did. It was just like juves being irresistibly drawn to trouble, older gangers were irresistibly drawn to avoiding it.

  “Ohhh.” Tola’s face brightened and she grinned. “You want to know what Tessera told us to make us come down the Abyss after you!”

  Donna swallowed an urge to slap her.

  “Yes, Tola!” she said brightly instead.

  “Oh, Tessera didn’t ask us to come and find you.”

  Donna was so surprised that she forgot to be angry. Tessera ruled her gang like a dowager empress, so her next question was born out of pure incredulity.

  “Well, who did then?”

  “No one.”

  “So let me get this right, Tola. Tessera and the gang just happened past? ‘Let’s swing by the abandoned sewage pipes and see if anyone’s down there being hunted by monsters and Delaque? Could be someone we know!” Was that it? A chance meeting as they say?”

  Tola now looked thoroughly confused and Donna had run out of venom. She thought about starting over but the very idea exhausted her.

  “Never mind, Tola,” Donna said, half to herself.

  Tola grinned. “They decided it,” she said. “The whole gang decided to come, after me and Avvie told them about the fight at the warehouse. We musta told them a good story.”

  Donna looked around at the rest of the gang sitting or lying around on the ledge. Some were observing the settlement like her and Tola, others were resting or playing cards. She recognised maybe half of them from her early days—Tessera, Tola, Avignon, Jen and Sara. The rest were new juves and gangers Tessera must have recruited down the years. They were a hard-bitten looking crew. One of the new gangers she didn’t know caught her eye as she was looking around and called out to her.

  “How soon do we go in, Donna? What’s the plan?” Expectant faces turned towards her.

  Donna was taken aback again. “I’m sneaking in on my own. That’s the plan. You lot aren’t ‘going in’ anywhere,” she retorted quickly.

  There was a ripple of discontent from the gang. At first she thought they were getting angry or sullen but, looking around at their faces again, she concluded they were mostly disappointed.

  “There’s no point in you all getting chopped up by Relli’s guns. A frontal rush would be suicide,” she explained. For all their bravado they knew that was true, they had seen the manse defences as well.

  “But we can’t just frikkin’ sit up here while you go alone!” Jen, one of the old school gang, stood up and faced the others. “We all voted to come, we can’t turn back because Relli has a few frikkin’ muscleboys guarding his house.”

  There were giggles and calls of assent from the gang, and Donna felt the whole situation spiralling out of her control. Where the hell was Tessera? The Escher had come spoiling for a fight and weren’t about to be denied one. And what was worse, they seemed to think they were here to help her!

  “Look, Jen, you’re only here because you and Tessera feel duty bound to look out for me because you brought me down to the Underhive all those years ago. The same goes for Tola and Avignon and Sara, too. When you brought me down from Hive City I left my old family behind and I found a new one with you.”

  That made them start listening to Donna again, which was a good start. Now to put the meat in the sandwich.

  “But I left the gang because I drew too much fire. Bounty hunters knew just where to come looking for me. That’s how Kristi got killed and Faer lost her arm, in stupid fights we didn’t need to have, which happened because of me.”

  That changed things. The new gang members were looking differently at the old guard now. Donna hoped they were thinking about the realities of bleeding out from a torn artery like Kristi, or being burned like Faer. They were also looking at Donna a bit differently, too.

  “Now, I’m here to chase a vendetta, another stupid fight that’s no one else’s but mine. It means something to me, but it means nothing to you. I’ll not have more deaths on my conscience. There’re enough there already and, despite rumours to the contrary, I do have a conscience.”

  The finishing joke was a bit subtle, but most of the older gangers caught it and smiled. Job done: she’d communicated her perspective to them and made them relax a little. They weren’t ready to rush into a fight any more.

  Donna turned and walked away along the ledge towards Down Town. No one followed her.

  Donna had got maybe a hundred metres along the ledge and was just starting to think about milliasaurs when she heard grating stones behind her. She whipped around with a drawn laspistol to find Jen coming along the ledge after her. Reliable, dumb Jen couldn’t take a hint. Donna ignored the vagrant part of her brain that said, “Just shoot her,” and waited.

  Jen came and stood beside Donna, her burly tattooed shoulders making her look petite and demure by comparison.

  “Nice try, Mad Donna,” Jen said. She grinned at Donna and flung an arm around her that made her tense at the unaccustomed contact. The only times Donna usually got this close to someone was when she was killing them. “But you’re wrong t’ think your fights mean nothing to us. You’re a frikkin’ legend, girl.”

  Donna shrugged to get free of Jen’s bear-like grip. “No no no. I’m just a frik-up, Jen, an aberration, not anybody’s frikkin’ legend,” she snarled. The embrace suddenly tightened, pinning her closer.

  “Now listen up, Donna, and listen frikkin’ good,” Jen hissed low and murderously in her ear. Jen looked big and threatening close up, but old habits ensured that Donna didn’t flinch.

  The words came tumbling out of Jen like she’d been thinking about them for a long time. Maybe she had. She never had been a great orator but her low, urgent voice held such passion it certainly came from the heart.

  “Y
ou are a frikkin’ legend,” she hissed, “and I’ll tell you why. People come down here because they want a new start, because they think that Hive City is frikked up and they want to be free of it and there’s nowhere else to frikkin’ go.

  “But there’s a lot more who dream of it but never make it—they’re too frightened of losing their pict feed or their shower, or their two meals a day, or their friends on the line or their precious frikkin’ routine.

  “But now… now they’ve got you, a frikkin’ noblewoman from the frikkin’ Spire who made the choice to come down to the Underhive and survived. You turned your back on all those comforts, and more privilege than a frikkin’ prole in the city can even dream about, but you’re still here. So now a lot of people have got to thinking that if you can make it in the Underhive then so can they.”

  “I didn’t have any choice—” Donna managed to interject but it sounded weak even in her ears. Jen pounced on the statement with almost feral glee.

  “Yeah, you did! Yes you so frikkin’ had a choice! You coulda stayed in the frikkin’ Spire an’ your da would’ve covered things up. In fact, he did as best he could from what you’ve said. You woulda been forgiven an’ ya know it, and I reckon that’s half o’ why you never looked back. You didn’t want to go back even if they’d frikkin’ let you. You made the brave choice, the one with pride, to go it frikkin’ alone. Besides which, I swear there’s not a man in Hive Primus who doesn’t treat women better because of what you did up there in the Spire. I’ll bet even frikkin’ Helmawr is nicer.” Jen grinned happily and punched Donna on the shoulder. It hurt.