Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  “So, sorry girl, but you’re it, and no one gives a flying, fridge-arsed frik why it happened in the first place. That’s all part of the… you’re like one of those frikkin’ logos in church, y’know, a picture that means something because it’s a bit of a story.”

  “An… an icon?” Donna managed to stammer.

  “Yeah that’s it. You’re a frikkin’ icon. And we aren’t going to stand around with our frikkin’ thumbs up our butts while someone friks with our icon.”

  She would always remember that morning. Every detail of it stood out vividly, no matter how hard she tried to forget them.

  It was the morning of her first meeting with her husband-to-be and D’onne was as tense as a strung bow. Sleep had been elusive and she had spent much of the night studying the hereditary rolls of House Ko’iron. They revealed a house that was not exactly the brightest star in the Necromundan firmament, maintaining its position in the Spire courtesy of ownership of several ramshackle Hive City manufactoria districts and a few choice off-world charters.

  Sylvanus had proudly informed her that Ko’iron had offered a magnificent bride price, fully three times that anticipated. All D’onne could think was that they must be desperate. A direct tie to house Ulanti meant family contracts and favourable supply rates, so Ko’iron could not help but prosper by it. But they must have virtually bankrupted themselves winning Sylvanus’ approval. Did they really believe that their fortunes would be won through her betrothal? D’onne had realised then that she knew Sylvanus better than them, and that his plan was to swallow up their remaining assets and turn them into his puppets. She was bait.

  How would he close the trap on them? A succession of loans offered to tide them over? Sureties taken with the promise that they would never be realised? Perhaps he would use a quick and aggressive acquisition of their properties while their stock was unexpectedly weak. All ably assisted by his own spy in their camp, the seemingly demure little D’onne. Sylvanus might decide to secure the reigns of power using the old ways, the ways of blade and poison, and D’onne had trained herself for that eventuality too.

  Her gown had been delivered the night before. The morning was spent with servitors jabbing her with blunt needles as they tailored it to her nubile body. It was a fantastic creation of elegantly spun metal and chromium mesh, fit for an industrial queen. It split at the small of her back to reach over her breasts and up to a high collar. Ladder-panels traced the curves of her hips before plunging down her legs to show creamy glimpses of calf and thigh. A fantastic froth of silver tracery was caught at her throat, bust and hem. The metal chimed softly when she walked or talked, adding ethereal music to her every movement.

  It was also heavy, chafing, hot where it covered her flesh and cold where it left her back, shoulders and arms uncovered. D’onne hated it before thirty minutes were up.

  She had found picts of Marneus Ko’iron, eldest son the house—Count Ko’iron to give him the correct honorific. He had chiselled, granite-like features that looked to have been weathered beneath strange off world suns. His craggy nose and jaw were emphasised rather than softened by his moustache. He looked old to D’onne, although the records showed him as only four decades her senior. Kadotti’s Testimonial listed his interests as hunting, metallurgical antiquaria and Saljuk breeding (an offworld ruminant, apparently).

  He sounded exactly as D’onne would have expected the first son of a noble house to be. He sounded proud, pompous and stuffy, like all Spire nobility in fact. She struggled not to let her preconceptions colour her preparations for their first meeting, now only a few hours away. According to formal Spire etiquette, when the suitor and his would-be fiancée were first introduced (with the approval of both families of course) it could be at either a public function or a private one. Some scandalous public episodes in the past had influenced most noble houses towards private meetings as the first chance for both participants in a forthcoming union to get the measure of each other. So, with faux-casualness, Count Ko’iron was to come calling for dinner with D’onne Ulanti at the tower where she had dwelled alone for over a decade. Who said that romance was dead?

  She had selected a light menu that she had hoped he might appreciate, all of it imported foodstuffs free of the chemical tang of local Necromundan fare. She fretted over which perfumes to wear as nimble-fingered servitors wove her hair into a dazzling cascade of gold hung with beads of blood-red ruby, topaz and yellow cats-eye agate. The art of mixing perfumes for the correct occasion had long been acknowledged as one of the finer social graces of the Spire. She desperately wanted the count to know she had studied and practiced it as adroitly as any noblewoman. D’onne chose a simple trinary arrangement in the end: dianthe as a base to give an underlying scent of freshness and sweetness; a cinnamon medium to hint at spice and sexuality; an amarylis catalyst for sophistication.

  As the hour approached, she ensured that the table was correctly laid, then swept to the lock in all her finery, awaiting the count’s arrival there and trying to remain calm. The appointed hour came, and then went, with no sign of the count. D’onne paced up and down fretting helplessly, but she had no way to know what might have happened to him. An accident perhaps? Or unexpected business? She waited on tenterhooks, not knowing what else to do.

  Over an hour after the appointed time the lock slid open.

  “Count Ko’iron,” the tower announced laconically.

  D’onne’s sense of grateful release instantly dissipated as the count exited the lock. He was not alone. Two hulking bodyguards entered the tower with him, still laughing raucously at some jest the count had just made. The first bodyguard insolently eyed D’onne in all her finery and made some crude comment to his compatriot. Ko’iron didn’t even bother to look at her.

  She curtsied. “Count Ko’iron, I am honoured by your presence. Thank you for coming.”

  The count deigned to notice her for the first time when she spoke. His cold eyes measured her up like a saljuk that he was considering purchasing.

  “Indeed, D’onne, the pleasure is all yours,” he slurred. The two lackeys sniggered. D’onne realised the count was drunk.

  She fought the urge to scream at him to leave, or to run and lock herself away from this intruder. But Sylvanus had trained her too well for that; she knew she could win this oaf around and a part of her relished the prospect of doing so. So instead of fleeing she smiled and steered the count to the dining chamber with gestures and touches of his elbow.

  “I’ve heard all about this place,” he sneered as they passed along the companionway. “Haunted they say.” He kicked the wall with an elegantly tooled boot. “Hoi Spirits! Avaunt!” The bodyguards laughed obediently with him, but D’onne’s guts froze. Was he attempting to be as crass as possible? Or was the man himself really so boorish?

  They reached the chamber and she ushered him inside. When the two bodyguards moved to follow, it was a measure of her anger that she stood bodily in the doorway to stop them and said, “Gentlemen, you forget yourselves! This is an engagement for us to acquaint ourselves privately and discreetly, not a drinking club!”

  They were surly but wouldn’t meet her furious gaze. They retreated outside and D’onne closed the door with a snap. The count was already poking at the sweetmeats on the table with a frown. She crossed to his side in a few quick strides, struggling to control her anger.

  “What kind of muck is this?” he muttered petulantly.

  “Why, my dear Count, as well travelled as you are I had hoped you might appreciate a taste from distant stars.” She tried to sound seductive and coquettish but had the uncomfortable feeling her anger edged her voice with too much sarcasm for that. The count appeared not to notice.

  “I have learnt only that foreign muck is always foreign muck,” he grunted obstinately.

  D’onne took a deep breath and seated herself. Hearing raucous laughter outside the door, she fretted for a moment at what the guards were doing. In truth it was only a welcome distraction from her immediate
issues. Count Ko’iron was now sprawled in a chair and brazenly staring at her breasts.

  “Not bad,” he muttered, “not bad at all.”

  D’onne’s heart scrunched up a little bit tighter, more so than she had thought possible even when Sylvanus was tormenting her. She had never felt as trapped and desperate as she did now. She tried talking to the count more, exploring his views, his personality. Each opening gambit was ruthlessly crushed, her opinions derided or dismissed on principle. Unless the count considered himself a complete authority on the subject (which he did about many things with little qualification) it was deemed an irrelevance. D’onne was to be his adornment for social functions, to fawn her appreciation of the great man he apparently thought himself to be. She was a piece of meat that would be used to breed a Ko’iron heir.

  It occurred to D’onne that the count had been raised to be nothing other than her polar opposite. Where she had been taught to be cunning and manipulative, he had been trained to be obstinate and stupid. Where she knew only how to woo and persuade, he had learned only how to dismiss and belittle. She saw their life together spanning out into the future, a life filled with eternal battles for supremacy, of infidelity and lies and hate.

  Donna’s memories lapsed there. There were only shreds of reminiscences left, fragments wedged so deep inside her mind that she couldn’t shed them entirely. She remembered playfully sitting in his lap and picking at food with a fork. She remembered his hands on her and the hot flash of anger she hid as she turned to him. But the rest was a merciful blank.

  The next thing she clearly remembered was standing in the companionway with a laspistol in her hands, looking back to see the dining chamber carpeted with the sprawled bodies of the count and his two guards. The lock cycled open beside her, making her jump, but, for the first time she could remember, no one was inside it. She ran inside without another backward glance, and a moment later she tasted a freedom she had not known since she was a little girl.

  Rumour had it that she dug out Ko’iron’s eyes with a fish fork. Donna herself didn’t know if that was true, but she had certainly attacked him—that much she could be sure of. However, if her memories of that day were true, as she always assured herself that they were, then the bastard most definitely deserved it.

  8: THIRTY MINUTES

  “Oh, poor old man your Mare will die,

  And we say so, and we know so,

  Oh, poor old man your Mare will die,

  Oh, poor, poor old man,

  We’ll hoist her up to the main yardarm,

  We’ll hoist her up to the main yardarm,

  Say I old man your Mare will die,

  Say I old man your Mare will die,

  We’ll drop her down to the depths,

  And down, down she’ll go,

  We’ll drop her down to the bottom,

  And down, down she’ll go,

  We’ll sing her down with a long, long roll,

  Where the sharks’ll have her body and the

  devil have her soul.”

  “The Dead Mare Shanty”

  Still waters run deep. Donna looked at the slick, roiling surface of the sump and felt a moment of sick sensation at realising that something goes much, much deeper than you thought was possible. Jen’s words were still ringing in her ears: “You’re a frikkin’ icon, Donna.” Here she was at the absolute bottom, both literally and figuratively, a millimetre away from the accumulated waste of a million billion trillion hivers over many, many centuries and she still couldn’t escape her rep. Instead she was paddling towards a boat full of armed men with only the vaguest idea of a plan. No wonder they called her mad.

  Paddling the flat little skiff she’d stolen was hard work. The peeling flank of Relli’s manse was some way off still. Sometimes the sump clung tenaciously to her keel, at others she glided silkily across the poisoned waters. The effort was making her sweat. Acid mist tingled at her skin and the rebreather mask she was wearing struggled to filter out something breathable from the air.

  She’d swung out onto the lake at first, gambling that the guards would be watching the shoreline and that any denizens of the deep wouldn’t be swimming this close to the settlement. But it was slow going, and time wasn’t on her side. Jen’s parting words had been unequivocal.

  “Thirty minutes, and then we’re comin’ to get ya out. Thirty minutes to do ye business quiet, an’ then it’ll get loud.”

  She inched across the surface towards the bloated behemoth with agonising slowness. If Donna got spotted at this point she was well and truly screwed, caught in the open with no way to advance or retreat.

  The boat-thing looked even bigger when you got close up to it. Whatever Relli’s other shortcomings, he’d obviously commanded plenty of credit at some time. Not that he would have bought deeds to this place or anything, but being able to occupy it meant having enough muscle and business sense to keep away rivals.

  Right now it looked virtually abandoned, only a few portholes showing any light. It could probably house a hundred times as many people as were aboard it right now, although doubtless a lot of space was given over to cargo storage and defunct machinery.

  An eternity of maybe ten minutes brought her beneath the curve of the prow. Her theory, plus what she’d observed from the ledge, seemed to hold true. Those guards who were covering that massive area thought that the sump was impassable so they barely gave it a second glance.

  Now came the real fun part.

  Tendrils of wire weed were starting to quest at the skiffs low gunwales; she didn’t have much time. Donna unwound a hook and line, spun it three times and looped it up to the deck high above. It caught fast first try. Only speed and dumb luck would stop her being spotted now, but there was no other way on board.

  Donna was still shimmying up the line when a broad, ugly face sporting an orange Mohican peered down at her over the rail and cursed. The wide bore of a gun swiftly followed the ugly face.

  “Come a’board girly, yo’re expected,” the Goliath guard called jovially. “Jest keep it nice an’ slow nah.”

  While hanging on the line there wasn’t much Donna could do. It was just too fine to grip one-handed and try shooting it out. She heard a disconsolate plopping sound from below her as wire weed pulled the stolen skiff beneath the surface of the sump. No way out there either.

  “Ok, ok,” she said quickly, and rather shakily climbed the rest of the way up. She heard the Goliath call other guards from further along the deck. Donna couldn’t fathom how she had so badly underestimated their alertness. While she had been watching from the ledge, the guards had idly wandered about on occasion but mostly stayed below decks. There was only one likely explanation, and it was an ugly one.

  One of the Escher had sold her out.

  Just why had Tessera really been missing earlier? Surely not? Donna’s stomach flip-flopped at the thought.

  The Goliath took a step back to let her get on the deck. Out of the corner of Donna’s eye she could see pit slaves and another Goliath heading towards them. She was changing hands to grip the railing and vault over when her boot slipped suddenly and sent her teetering backwards over the hideous drop into the sump. The Goliath lunged forward with surprising speed for his muscled bulk and grabbed at her arm to save her from a painful and corrosive demise.

  He seemed genuinely shocked when Donna seized his nose ring and used it to haul him over the railing. The Goliath made a piteous shriek before hitting the sump, where he was reduced to hideous gobbling noises as toxic sludge rushed into his open mouth. He was still trying to scream when the wire weed pulled him under.

  Donna snorted derisively and vaulted over the railing without a backward glance. The other Goliath started spraying lead at her, the bullets striking sparks and ricocheting wildly along the deck. Donna replied with plasma. She was well past the point of screwing around any more.

  The Goliath saw the white lightning gather about the Pig’s muzzle and dived aside but the pit slaves were not so lucky, t
heir smoking cybernetics and charred flesh hissing into the sump in a molten cascade, as a survivor fled screaming. The Goliath pounced out of cover to catch Donna defenceless with the Pig discharged and still smoking in her hand. She shot him in the eye with the laspistol in her other hand.

  “Where’s Relli?!” she yelled. “We have some business to discuss!” No point in being subtle now. She found herself laughing wildly.

  It was an act of mad bravado. She could hear boot heels ringing on the decking all about her. She jumped up and caught the railing to a higher deck tier, intending to swing up to it and gain some height advantage. A hammer swung down at her with piston-driven force—she ducked aside and it crumpled the heavy railing instead of her skull. The transferred shock alone was enough to numb her hand and make her drop back down. There were people waiting for her.

  “Alive!” she heard someone shout as they rushed her.

  Donna grinned happily. That one got them killed every time. She disappeared beneath a rush of sweaty bodies and grinding bionic limbs for a moment and rolled clear a second later, leaving one dead and two injured behind her. She darted off through an open hatchway while her attackers struggled to disentangle themselves.

  Rusting corridor panels flashed past her as she ran along the narrow space beyond the hatch. She came to a ladder and fired off two shots behind her to discourage pursuit before sliding down it. At the bottom she found more narrow corridor, with doors banging and sounds of pursuit all around and closing in. Not enough time for choices and nowhere to hide, so Donna kept running blindly through the guts of the boat.

  Inside it was like a maze, a run-down labyrinth of peeling bulkheads and stained floors. Shots splattered the corners as she ran; she was only a turn or two ahead of her pursuers at best. She was fleet of foot but they knew their ground better and kept corralling her into an ever-tighter area, drawing their numbers in around her like a noose.