Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  Then there was Ko’iron’s entourage, “talented individuals” Relli had called them. Doubtless they were hungry for revenge too but probably more concerned about how to get the noble Julius back up through The Wall, living or dead.

  And then there was Shallej and his posse of Delaque. He could be trying to kill off Relli, Lars and Donna individually or just working on a way to sink the whole damn ekranoplan with all of them still aboard. The explosions she had felt didn’t seem big enough to be demolition charges, so they were probably grenades from the Escher. Donna prayed that however much of a fool Relli was, he hadn’t shown Shallej the self-destruct button or the plug or whatever else would send the craft and its contents to the bottom of the sump quickly and easily. The fact she was still alive told her that he probably hadn’t.

  A shadow moved in the doorway. Donna fired her las through the gap and charged. Someone cursed and Donna saw the silhouetted head and shoulders of a man appear before being dazzled by a muzzle flash from something in his hands. An autogun chattered wildly, firing wide of her and smashing one of Relli’s holo shutters into a cloud of tinkling shards.

  Donna heard the clip run dry on the Dog Soldier’s autogun at the same instant she cannoned into the door and sent him staggering back from the threshold. Seventy-six swept down with a hungry snarl but the Goliath blocked it with his gun. The rotating teeth seemed to scream in frustration as they scrabbled at the metal barrier between them and soft flesh. Donna flicked her wrist and sent the chain blade skipping down the gun at the Dog Soldier’s fingers. He desperately threw the weapon at her and took his chance to jump backwards as she batted it aside.

  Donna heard shouts from down below on the floor of the atrium, followed by a shot. The Goliath flinched back as a chunk of railing vapourised beside him.

  “Oi! Watchit ya numbties!” he yelled. Donna risked a sideways glance to see whom he was shouting at.

  Two pit slaves were crouching in the lower doorway with stub guns drawn. Two more stub rounds clipped the railing marginally closer to Donna than the Goliath. The little frikkers didn’t care who they hit, she concluded. Apparently reaching the same conclusion, the Dog Soldier jumped as far back from the railing as he could. She put a las-shot into him and clipped his shoulder, barely slowing him as he pulled out an autopistol.

  Donna dived down the stairs just as he let rip. The Goliath swung a crescent of hot lead around himself with no aim whatsoever, spraying bullet-pocked arcs across the atrium and various objets d’art with raucous abandon. Donna snapped off a las-shot in return but had her own problems as she fought to keep from going headlong down the stairs and breaking her neck. Another couple of stub rounds smacked into the wall near her, almost unnoticeable in the chatter of autofire but quite distinct because they were vaguely accurate.

  Donna snapped off a couple more shots at the doorway and sent the pit slaves scurrying for cover. The autofire stopped and she heard the Dog Soldier changing clips. He was out of sight from her now. Donna decided it was time to start the revolution early.

  “Why the hell are you shooting at me you pricks! Relli is dead! You’re free!” She shouted to the pit slaves. Okay one little white lie—Relli wasn’t dead, yet.

  “Thass bullshit, don lissen boys!” The Goliath’s angry bellow came over the balcony. At least she had an idea of where he was standing now, and he seemed a bit too quick to respond to be sure about pit slaves’ loyalties.

  “Like we should believe you, Dog Soldier!” one of the slaves was plucky enough to shout back. “What if she’s right?”

  “Yous little frikas!” the Dog Soldier snarled. “Gerrout an’ fight or I’ll kills you mehself!”

  “Yes, what if I’m right?” Donna taunted. “No more free dinners, fatboy!” She creased the balcony with a couple more las-shots.

  That was all it took to push the Goliath into a murderous rage. He appeared at the balcony and sprayed the doorway with bullets. One of the pit slaves screamed in pain. The other one ducked back out of sight again. Donna bounced up and unleashed a fusillade of shots at the Goliath. Chunks of railing disintegrated under her volley and the Goliath retreated. Her angle was bad here, but going back up on the balcony gave the Dog Soldier an odds-on chance of turning her into a sieve.

  Stub gun rounds snapped out from the doorway. Not at her, bless, but at the Goliath. She used the distraction to run back up the stairs and onto the balcony. Auto rounds whipped past her head the instant she came in view. Donna dived and rolled, blasting shots back almost at random. One of her las-bolts caught the Goliath in the thigh, spinning him around. He clung onto the shot-scarred railing for support and levelled his autopistol at her. She put two shots just past his ear and then had to run for cover, still cursing at her inaccuracy as he opened fire again. Bullets pelted around her, ricocheting wildly. Something hit her heel and made her stagger. She spun and snapped off a shot at the towering Goliath—another clean miss. He was struggling upright and pulling out a knife with his offhand, the giant cousin of the one she had tried to use earlier.

  A huge red splotch suddenly masked half the Goliath’s face, the autopistol dropped from his nerveless fingers and he toppled slowly over the railing to hit the floor of the atrium with a wet thud. A stub round had taken him in the back of the head, a hundred-to-one shot at least—score one for the revolution.

  She ran down to the doorway below before the pit slaves got a chance to change their minds. She found both of them still there, one cradling the head of the other as his life leaked out of the holes stitched across his chest by an autopistol burst. There was something tragic and pathetic about the slaves. The crude amputations and mismatched bionics couldn’t disguise their very human suffering. Donna had intended to waste them both to make sure they couldn’t shoot her when her back was turned. Pity stayed her hand.

  “You should get out of here,” she told the survivor softly. He looked up at her desolately.

  “Frikking guilders. Friking Hive City. Friking planet.” There were tears in the slave’s eyes. The ownership stud in his forehead winked in silent mockery of his pain. “Why do we have to frik things up all the time?”

  Donna shrugged. “It’s the natural order of things. Frikked up. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “The guilder’s not really dead, is he?”

  “Soon,” Donna crooned soothingly. “Soon.”

  Donna left the slave to his misery and ran along the maze of narrow corridors. They had caught her here before, but now it was quiet except for gunfire echoing eerily down from the deck above. She came across a freshly bullet-scarred corner—it had been hit when she had been chased through earlier. Looking about her, she found a trail of destruction left by the pursuit and used it to find her way back to the outer hatch through which she had entered. She edged it open carefully and peered out onto the deck.

  Flames and strobing muzzle flashes lit the dark surface of the sump outside. Hard black shadows flickered and danced across the deck in time to bursts. Donna could see little of the deck but it looked empty beyond the hatch. With her heart in her mouth she slipped out onto the deck, but no salvo of bullets crashed out from a waiting ambush. Everyone was too busy watching the massacre on the dock.

  The deck she stood on was the lowest and ran in a U-shape around the stern of the ekranoplan. The next highest deck lay between the arms of the U and carried the quad-stubber and another deck gun separated by a big tailfin or funnel of some kind. She had seen stairs from there up onto a still higher deck at the front of the craft, up where its stub-wings projected out, presumably making it the location of the bridge or control room. Donna would lay odds that would be where Relli had run to—it was the castle’s keep of his little kingdom after all.

  She sheathed her weapons, jumped up and caught the railing of the next deck up. She pulled herself up and dropped into crouch. The gun in front of her was a smoking ruin, two pit slaves lay dead around it and the corpse of a Dog Soldier was grotesquely pinned into the wreckage. The r
oar of the quad-stubber suddenly cut off with a sighing exhalation and Donna got the weird feeling that she was chasing ghosts. She cast a wary look up to the bridge but it was out of sight.

  There were gunshots from the deck below her and behind the tailplane ahead. They sounded leisurely, well-aimed, like an audience keeping itself amused while they waited for the big performance to start again. She heard grunts as heavy bullet belts were slotted in place and then she suddenly understood. They had stopped firing the stubber to reload; the audible sigh had come from coolant hissing on the hot barrels. She drew her weapons and crept around the tailplane to get closer.

  Another quad-stubber squatted on the deck before her, identical to the one behind her that was now twisted wreckage. Two pit slaves were reloading it and a Dog Soldier sat in a central cage with two of the long guns mounted on each side of it. He was cursing at the slaves to load faster. From here Donna could see more pit slaves at the railing and some on the lower deck close to the rear of the craft, all taking occasional pot shots at the shore.

  The gun tower on the dock was in flames. There were bodies scattered at the bottom of the gangplank with bloody drag marks leading off behind a stretch of broken wall nearby. From up here she could easily reconstruct what had happened. The Escher must have knocked out the deck gun and the tower in the first moments of the attack, with a grenade launcher presumably, and some very well calculated shots. They rushed the gang plank then, and cut down the guards at the bottom. Before they could get to the top, the Dog Soldiers got the other quad-stubber firing and drove them back.

  The wall at edge of the dock was extensively etched with fresh bullet holes. Donna was guessing that the Escher were still pinned down behind it. She couldn’t see how they could escape with the quad-stubber covering them. It had a perfect field of fire. Anyone that tried to run would be cut to pieces within three paces. That was once it was reloaded, of course, and that was something to which Donna decided she was categorically opposed.

  Donna waited patiently until they had threaded the last belt in place, listening to the other slaves laugh and shoot while they waited too and hating them for taking pleasure in it. Only then, just as they were about to open fire, did she step out into plain view.

  “Hey, Dog Soldier!” she called. “You’re the last one! All your brothers are dead! Come out and face me!”

  The Goliath’s head snapped round at her challenge and the quad-stubber started turning towards her. For a split second it was lined up with the other pit slaves at the railing, who were also turning in surprise—this wasn’t part of the evening’s scheduled events for them. She picked that moment to fire the Pig.

  The plasma discharge flashed across the deck with blinding fury. It tore voraciously into the stubber’s ammo hoppers and cooked off the freshly laid belts of ammunition inside in an instant. The results were nothing short of spectacular.

  The quad stubber coughed out streams of bullets that went hosing wildly across the deck and transfixed those poor unfortunates standing at the railing. Then more ammo popped and metal went scything outwards in all directions. Even Donna was taken aback by the violence and darted behind the tailplane for cover.

  Impacts and ricochets rang all around her for what seemed a painfully long time. She peered cautiously around the corner as they died away. She saw a fist, and then stars, and then her head cracked on the deck. A crushing weight fell on top of her, pinning her down.

  “Yo’re gonna die nah bitch!” The Dog Soldier spat in her face.

  He was hideously burned all down his left side and one arm had been shrivelled into a twisted stick. Sooty flakes of immolated flesh were dropping on Donna as they struggled. He was trying to get his remaining hand around her throat. Donna flailed desperately but the Goliath was too heavy to dislodge. He clamped his knees tighter and her ribs screamed in protest. Another punch made her see stars, and his big, calloused hand locked around her ivory throat and squeezed.

  Donna’s vision darkened and she felt neck bones grating ominously. She could only kick and flail feebly. Her flapping hands encountered something on the deck—it was familiar and it was comforting. Her oxygen-starved brain struggled to make sense of what it was. A number; Seventy-six.

  She swung the chainblade into the Goliath’s arm below the elbow and it chewed into flesh and muscle. The weak blow couldn’t do more than cut him. He grunted angrily and kept squeezing. Donna grabbed Seventy-six behind the blade guard with her other hand and pushed it deeper with all her might, sawing it back and forth. The Dog Soldier roared in pain and tried to rear back, as he did so his arm severed and dropped away in a cascade of crimson. Donna took Seventy-six and rammed it into his crotch. She kept pushing upwards until the chain blade protruded between his shoulder blades, just to be sure.

  Donna crawled out from beneath the carcass and spat blood out of her mouth. She was starting to remember why she despised Dog Soldiers. They just didn’t know when to lie down and quit. Pain and fatigue pulsed through her body as she fought with an almost overwhelming temptation to lie down and rest for a while.

  Shots struck sparks from the deck beside her with shocking violence. She was suddenly wide awake and rolling into cover behind the wrecked stubber on nothing more than instincts and adrenaline. Her wits were scattered, but she finally realised that the shots were from somewhere near the bridge. She risked a glance out and almost got her face sawn off by auto-guns. There were at least two shooters and they most definitely had her in their sights.

  The Pig lay where she’d dropped it, in plain view on the deck not two metres away, but Donna knew that she would never be able to even get a hand on it before she would be cut down. That left her with the noble laspistol, but a simple laspistol just didn’t give her enough firepower to go up against riflemen in good positions. A couple more bursts of autofire ricocheted off the wreckage. Donna realised they weren’t interested in hitting her, they were just keeping her head down. But what for? Someone sneaking around for a grenade throw or head-shot? Neither prospect made Donna inclined to stay behind the stubber wreckage to find out.

  She waited until she reckoned at least one of them was reloading and then sprinted for the edge of the deck. It was a calculated risk, she told herself. She had no way of knowing what she would be dropping into on the deck below, so it was a bit mad, but it had two things in its favour: one, she would be closer to the Escher; and two, it was better than staying where she was. Bullets chased her all the way, whickering through the railing as she vaulted over it.

  The lower deck was a vision of chaos lit by the flames of the burning tower. The Escher had come storming up the gangplank as soon as the stubber blew. They were fighting the surviving pit slaves hand-to-hand; the Escher’s slender blades clashed against a crude array of hammers, saws, drills and claws. The deck was slick with blood and bodies lay everywhere.

  She took all this in during the quarter second it took for her to drop down. Seventy-six was out and slashing even before her feet hit the deck. A pit slave went down with his skull split in two, the twin hemispheres of his brain displayed as neatly as if in a coroner’s autopsy. She sheared muscle and sinew from a brawny arm next, then blocked a swinging saw-blade before impaling its owner.

  Donna felt no pity or mercy for her opponents now. These were the most vicious slaves in Relli’s employ, keen to fight or they would have quit their posts and fled long ago. More than that, these patchwork mannequins of steel and flesh weren’t just trying to kill her, they were trying to kill her friends too. A lot of the Escher were people she had never even met but they came to help her anyway. All because for some messed up reason they thought “Mad Donna” was worth something. She was an icon.

  Through a gap in the crush of flailing bodies, she saw an Escher juve go down with her head pulped by a hammer. Jen’s face flashed into view with one eye covered in blood. She grinned at Donna and was gone again. Donna felt a surge of hate well up inside her: hatred for Jen, for taking D’onne’s misery and making it in
to a cause for martyrdom; for Tessera for bringing her down here; for Relli, Ko’iron, her father; for all causes, and all manipulators, everywhere.

  The one thing she could do was ensure that the Escher didn’t have to die for her.

  Her hate was unstoppable. She raged through the lumpen pit slaves with blade and pistol and made them howl. The toughest or stupidest came at her first, thinking to prove their worth by taking her down in close combat. She killed them most cruelly of all, with shorn limbs and torn faces that howled out their agony long after they should have been stilled.

  The smart ones came next. They would usually try to put a bullet in her before coming within reach of her blade. They found out that Mad Donna’s aim was as deadly as her blade, and the laspistol infinitely quicker. She shot them down where they stood.

  The losers were last, too stupid to realise they needed to run until it was too late, and too weak fight. She killed them with contempt verging on boredom.

  There was a sudden silence after the clangor and screams of combat. The stench was overpowering: burning, blood, spilt viscera. Donna almost retched when she realised her boot heels were sunk in the soft entrails of a dying pit slave. She looked around wildly. Her first impression was that there was no one left standing at all, that she was alone on a ship of damned. Then she caught sight of the Escher rallying around a triumphant looking Jen. There were half a dozen of them left. Donna’s heart froze at the sight of someone she knew among the injured to whom they were tending. Bright arterial blood leaked from her midriff and she was in a bad way.

  It was Tessera.