Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  It was hard to make headway against the wind. Headwind slapped at her, trying to force her back at every footstep. Donna tried not to think about what would happen if she lost her footing altogether and was swept off the top of the wing. She stayed inside the groove to the observation blister and it afforded some shelter. The white armoured figure of the count remained stock-still, gazing forward across the lake while his argent cloak billowed and snapped like a banner behind him.

  You could tell from his very stance that Julius Ko’iron was just such a mock-warrior noble. He embraced the fantasy of the heroic hereditary warrior, those who since ancient times had selflessly protected (read: tyrannised) their people (read: unwilling subjects) in return for their support (read: money) against threats internal and external (read: rebellious subjects and rapacious relatives). He had exterminated vermin in the Underhive and thought himself a man, a great hunter. Well, Donna thought, now the great hunter was going to meet a great predator. She had already taken his eye and now she was coming back for the rest of him.

  She was getting tired of fighting against the headwind and trying for stealth. It was making her whole body hurt but most especially her ribs. She had a sneaking suspicion that the count knew she was there anyway, but that he was choosing to prove his superiority by ignoring her until the last possible moment.

  “Ahh, there you are Julius,” she called out playfully. “How’s the eye?”

  He turned then, and as the argent cloak whipped aside she realised what had become of the medicae unit. It clung to his back like a parasitic child, thin legs clamped around his chest. One steel hand was at his neck and another on his face where it covered the eye she had gouged like a squatting metallic spider. Its dull-eyed face swiveled as Ko’iron turned; it had been watching her all along.

  “D’onne Astride Ge’Slyvanus Ulanti,” he yelled over the noise. “I knew we weren’t finished with each other yet.”

  “Still thinking you can take me home to do my duty?” Donna’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

  Ko’iron’s face flushed crimson at her insolence as he screamed back at her. “You stupid, ignorant woman! I didn’t come down here to take you back to the Spire. I came down here to erase a mistake, an embarrassment to not just one but two, two houses of the blood. You—”

  Donna was laughing. “Oh Julius, you are quite the charmer, so like your brother in so many ways. You try to make it sound as if Ulanti and Ko’iron were equals. We both know different, Julius, so you can drop the act with me.”

  Ko’iron’s jaw worked ineffectually as Donna swept on.

  “There’s no scandal like an old scandal that just doesn’t go away, is there Julius? So you decided to uphold your family’s honour, huh? I don’t buy that. Nobility is great for talking about honour until their skins are on the line. My father put you up to this, and he sent you down here for a reckoning. I’m guessing he told you that he would write off some of the bride debt you owed, I’d bet—”

  “You couldn’t just die and sink into obscurity, could you! You had to become a gang fighter! You had to gain notoriety and a name! All because D’onne Ulanti is more important than her family, or her father’s promise! You disgust me! Alliances fractured, deals broken. Have you any conception of the mess you’ve made?”

  “That’s all crap, Julius. If there’s one thing I’ve learned down here it’s that in the Spire alliances and deals are just another way of screwing each other over, all the while dreaming that something can be had for nothing. The families use people as playing pieces in the same old games to try and win more of the pot, which is wasting even while they squabble over it. Know your place, do your part. Words to turn generations into automata while the few decide amongst themselves how to divide what is made by the many.”

  “What? That’s swing shift heresy! Is there no depth you won’t plumb, woman? I don’t know what Old ‘Sly’vanus thought he was doing with you but it must have been a total failure. How could he have spawned such a heretical prole for a daughter?”

  “You should thank me really,” she shouted into the wind. “There’d be no House Ko’iron left if father had had his way—you’d all be serving drinks and cleaning boots in House Ulanti by now if I hadn’t objected so strenuously to the match I was presented with.” That was a bit of a stretch, but the idea seemed to upset Julius a lot.

  “Bitch!” he shouted.

  Ko’iron’s hands came up and Donna dived into cover before she even saw what he was holding.

  There was a roar and a miniature meteor howled past, a second and third following it in quick succession. A fourth one clipped the observation blister and exploded, throwing metal and glass outward in a spinning corona of fragments that hissed venomously and rattled off the wing.

  He had a bolt gun, a rare sight in the Underhive thanks to their expensive ammo and temperamental reputation. Bounty hunters, gun-scummers, watchman types like Hanno often used the pistol version if they could get their hands on one. The miniature rockets that bolt weapons fired, the ‘bolts’, could blow off limbs or eviscerate a body with a single hit, or even cripple with a near miss. They were so deadly only plasma gave more chance of a one-shot kill.

  Another volley of bolts howled past, tearing shrapnel out of the wing behind her. The ekranoplan lurched slightly, probably coincidence but it did make Donna wonder how long it could survive Julius throwing around mass-reactive bolts near its engines.

  Julius started stamping around to get a better angle at her, and Donna rolled up to put a shot into him with her laspistol. He made a big, obvious target in his white armour and fluttering cloak, but when she pulled the trigger, nothing happened. She jerked the trigger again and the pistol’s grip suddenly pulsed red-hot. She dropped the gun with a curse. Julius laughed.

  “Thought you could shoot me with my brother’s own gun did you?” he shouted. “Ha! It remembers its place better than you think.”

  He raised the bolt gun and let fly. Donna ducked down into the narrow groove and huddled deeper as bolts rained about her. She felt the impacts of the rockets tearing into the wing above, saw the blinding flashes and heard the hiss of shrapnel over her head. Donna’s flesh shrank instinctively from the storm of violence and she wished that she could worm deeper into the metal floor for shelter.

  Through the strobing flashes of bolter fire, she glimpsed her laspistol. No, she corrected herself, that was Ko’iron’s laspistol winking up at her from nearby. She wondered what other in-built protocols it might have that she didn’t know about. It could obviously sense somehow if a target was of Ko’iron blood and punish the user if they repeatedly tried to fire on them.

  Such technology was difficult, but not impossible, to achieve. Donna had heard of weapons keyed so that only certain individuals could use them and this was some bizarre twist on that arrangement. It was probably intended to prevent Ko’iron siblings from shooting each other in the back. She wondered if it now remembered her as “bad” and would punish her if she tried to use it again. She eyed the treacherous yet seductive pistol dubiously.

  The firing stopped, creating a brief illusion of silence until the roar of the engines and the rush of the wind reasserted itself. Julius shouted something, but Donna’s ears were still ringing from the barrage and missed it. She gripped Seventy-six and waited, expecting him to rush to the edge of the trench and sweep it with explosive bolts. In the background, the engine noise of the ekranoplan was getting rougher. One of them stuttered and died away, making the whole wing shudder briefly. The other engines howled louder as they struggled to compensate and keep the craft skimming. Julius did not appear.

  “Are you deaf? Come out and take what’s coming to you, stop hiding like some miserable prole.”

  He must be running low on ammunition, and was trying to needle her pride to make her give away her position. Attacking a noble’s pride might work in his world but this was the Underhive and Donna had been taunted by professionals. She kept quiet.

  “Or maybe you’re hu
rt, and just lying there slowly bleeding to death, hmmm?”

  Yes, indulge your fantasies Julius. Go ahead and think you’ve already won. She wondered briefly if Tessera was already dead, whether she was even still aboard the ekranoplan—it was almost certain that the Escher would have taken her off if they could when the engines started. If so, she had come on this murder hunt for nothing, and was liable to meet her death at the hands of an over-privileged retard with a big weapons’ budget in pursuit of a truly lost cause.

  A lead weight of determination settled on Donna’s soul. Even if she was going to die, Julius Ko’iron could not be allowed to live. She forced her bruised and battered body to move. On a mad whim, she reached out for the laspistol, and fought down the instinctive flinch she felt as her hand closed around it. There was no pulse of heat, the pistol grip felt perfectly cool and smooth through her torn glove.

  Time for the oldest trick in the book—Jen had reliably informed her this one was in use before Necromunda was settled and probably even before that. She took out her filter can and tossed it to the other end of the narrow trench, near the steps. The flick of movement and the tinny clatter it made was all it took to get Julius firing again. Bolts rained down like a meteor swarm, raking the top of the stairs with an inescapable web of shrapnel—inescapable, assuming you were actually under it, of course.

  Julius was happily blazing away at shadows, so Donna had plenty of time to peek out, take aim, and unleash an accurate volley of shots at her target. Julius saw the flash of her shots and instinctively flinched back for a second before he started pouring fire on her. He didn’t see what she’d hit, and didn’t even think about why she’d shot at all until a fraction of a second later. That was when the first engine exploded.

  Donna didn’t know much about engines, especially not the kind of weird jets mounted on the ekranoplan. But, she reasoned, like most things in life, an engine will stop working if you shoot it often enough in the right places. She hadn’t expected the results to be so spectacular.

  The innermost engine she’d hit belched flame and then exploded outwards into a ball of red-hot metal shards. Its two brethren gulped down some of the debris and were pierced by more of it, each exploding in turn and ripping off pieces of the stub wing they were attached to. The rest of the wing and bits of engine disappeared aft, trailing smoke and flames, all in the twinkling of an eye.

  The ekranoplan shuddered and lurched like a dying animal as its motive power was shorn away on one side. It started wallowing over into a sharply banked turn that pushed Donna against the side of the trench she was hiding in. Stalactite-mountains dipped overhead in mock salute as the ekranoplan tipped over towards the surface of the sump lake. She imagined that she heard Julius scream amidst the tumult of howling engines, but that was probably just wishful thinking.

  Splash down. The crippled ekranoplan kissed the pitch-black surface of the sump, bouncing off and skipping across it for a dozen metres before digging in again. This time the ekranoplan gave up its remaining momentum in a spray of effluents and toxins that choked the last of its engines. The craft spun through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and rose almost vertically before slamming down into the lake.

  Donna clung on with every ounce of her strength as the world whirled about her. The heart-stopping fear of being flung overboard into the toxic sump gave her muscles strength like iron, though in her frightened mind they felt like water. The awful, sickening g-force of the crash dragged at her, tried to suck her out of her haven wedged into the trench. At the last moment the ekranoplan seemed determined to tip her out, or to flip over completely and crush her beneath its vast bulk. Then finally, grudgingly, the craft splashed back down and slewed to a halt.

  It felt like it took a long time for Donna to realise the motion had stopped, or at least slowed to a drift. She was shaking as she disentangled herself from the now twisted trench. The ekranoplan was lying at an angle with the tip of its remaining, intact stub wing dipped into the sump and the wrecked one held high above the surface like a smoking torch.

  The crash must have torn a hole in the ekranoplan’s hull because the glistening surface of the lake was creeping higher with each passing moment. Methane fires skated and whirled around the wreck like sylphs. Further off, Donna could see v-shaped wakes patiently circling as the local wildlife tried to decide whether this intruder in their realm was predator or prey. It was certainly crippled and sinking, she sourly concluded, so the ekranoplan couldn’t help acting just like prey right now.

  No matter which way she looked she couldn’t catch sight of the lights of Down Town, the oily expanse of the sump was the only thing visible. She craned to see the rear of the craft, where she had left Tessera, but a pall of smoke and fumes hung about the tilted stern. It was hard to imagine Tessera could have clung on through the crash even if she had been conscious, so Donna had probably killed her too. She couldn’t see Ko’iron anywhere either, much as she half-expected to find him clinging to some piece of flotsam and shouting imprecations as he died a horrible death in the sump. That would have been nice.

  Thump. Something hit the submerged wing tip. Donna raised her pistol and looked over in time to see a white-bodied, multi-limbed apparition haul itself up onto an engine casing. Black slurry rolled off its jointed legs, silver glittered on its back. But it was all wrong—those were not the sleek limbs of a spider-mare, this was something more twisted, and more familiar.

  Count Julius Ko’iron crawled up the wing like some newly metamorphosed insect. The tattered and sodden cloak, once so magnificent, now dragged behind the count like a discarded cocoon. His hair was gone, his exposed skin was red, pockmarked and still bubbling in places. The pristine white armour was cracked and stained, missing parts that had been sloughed away in the crash. The medicae unit on his back looked worse: what little flesh it had before had peeled back like old paper to show the bone, staples and circuitry beneath. It was half-dinging to Ko’iron, half dragging him along, and the count’s head was lolling back and forth grotesquely.

  It was the servitor’s ravaged face that stared back fixedly at Donna. Something in its gaze convinced her that it was the count looking out through its eyes, dragging his slack body forward with the help of the servitor’s limbs as some hideous composite being. It struggled fully upright as its jaws worked and some gargling, monstrous attempt at speech came out. Donna had already seen enough.

  “What ever it is, I don’t need to hear it. You want revenge, meat puppet? Come and give me your best shot. You want help?” She thumbed Seventy-six into life and it purred in anticipation. Then I’ll give you all the help Donna’s got to give, the only kind of help she knows about.”

  Seventy-six sang as she swung her arm in an experimental arc. All the pain and weakness she had felt was gone. She felt good.

  “I will help you die,” she told him.

  Ko’iron wanted revenge. Revenge had driven him into the Underhive, and now his thirst for vengeance had consumed him utterly. His once-white armoured arms rose into a fighter’s stance and his gnarled red hands twisted themselves into fists. As they did so, his forearms grew blades, wicked hooks that extruded smoothly from hidden sheaths in the armour.

  Donna cocked her head and smiled. “Oh goody.”

  He lurched at her, his butcher’s-blades swinging. She parried one and whirled away from the other, disturbed by the glassy-sounding crack she heard when the two blades connected. Seventy-six’s whine had a stutter to it now. She backed up the wing a couple of steps, Ko’iron shambling after her on all eight limbs. His blades bit into the engine casing like butter as he hauled himself forward.

  She cut at him and he swayed back, trying to hook her chainblade. She countered almost absent-mindedly, flipping the tip of her sword around in a half-circle to cut at his upper arm. The teeth scrabbled at his armour ineffectually so, as an afterthought, she thrust it into the medicae unit on his back. Ko’iron mewled and staggered back a pace.

  “Mono-blades, my dear count?�
� Donna was disparaging. “Those nasty one molecule cutting edges would mess up Seventy-six a treat if I let you keep hacking at me. I think we won’t be having that, oh no.”

  She aimed the laspistol at him. Ko’iron tensed, then relaxed as he recognised it. He stood up taller, daring her to try and shoot him with it. She smiled and pointed it at the medicae unit’s face. She waited for half a second for the shock to register in Ko’iron’s mind, and then she shot it in the eye.

  The servitor’s head exploded in a shower of flash-fried brains and gore. The rest of its exoskeleton fell back sparking and twitching, slithering off Ko’iron’s back. The count himself collapsed onto his knees. Donna didn’t give him time to recover hacking off one of his arms at the elbow. She took the other arm off at the shoulder, although Seventy-six screeched in protest at having to carve through his thick shoulder plates.

  “Just a little longer baby, then you can rest,” she told Seventy-six. It crooned happily again in response.

  Julius had fallen down. His legs were still moving, and his head was twisting back and forth. But now he had no eyes left (the sump had burned out his last real one) and he didn’t know which way to crawl, even if he could crawl, which he couldn’t really. Donna looked around. The sump was inching its way past the outermost engine now, but there was still plenty of time. She put her foot on his chest and looked down at him for a moment. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

  “You… if you had just left it alone, it wouldn’t have to be like this. If you could have just…” She shook her head. Her voice was hard when she spoke again.

  “I’ve killed a lot of deserving bastards in my time, Julius, but believe me you’ve made it to the top of the heap, and in record time too. You were a star, count. I feel better about killing you than anyone I ever met before. Now… go to hell.”