She set Seventy-six chewing at his groin and looked in his face as she shoved it deeper inside, through intestines and organs and up to his foul heart, but he was long gone. Crimson tears leaked from the white armour as she methodically churned his insides into soup.
It was peaceful.
Donna sat with her knees drawn up beneath her chin, watching the surface of the sump get closer. The ekranoplan was settling gradually, its internal spaces filling up one by one as the corrosive effluent seeped in. She watched the methane fires dancing, saw the circling wakes disperse and be replaced by the stilt-legged silhouettes of spider-mares that now skated warily in the distance. She gazed in wonder at the hanging spires overhead with their swirling patterns of metamorphosis and decay.
The sump wasn’t even black, she realised, but just like oil it was rainbow hued across its restless surface. In places she saw twisting threads of ochre, vermillion and ultramarine streaking its surface, currents of different substances unable to break down into the general entropic mass.
It was quiet too. It was probably the quietest place she had ever been. Here the silence was broken only by the occasional drip or sigh and hiss of the wind-born flame. No engines, no machines, no air pumps, no filters, no power grids, no talk, no screaming, no gunfire—it was peaceful.
Donna smiled at the irony. She had finally found somewhere she could be at peace because nobody could live here. The very bottom of the hive, the place where the most unwanted waste was dumped had become a place where man couldn’t survive, and it had become beautiful because of it. Paradise created by toxicity. That made her laugh.
She was ready for the end. She had climbed up to the tip of the ruined wing and now patiently waited for the sump to get to her. She had every confidence it would, and admired the thorough way the ekranoplan was not only sinking but being corroded and absorbed, piece by piece in the lake.
The count’s armour split open like the petals of a flower and floated on the surface briefly before being consumed. It would be her turn soon enough, but she had the laspistol in hand in case it hurt too much. It seemed fitting that it should end like this. She and it had been together since the start.
Something was nagging at her. She came out of a half-dazed reverie, staring at the swirling colours on the surface of the sump. There it was again. A sound, something breaking into her circle of perfect quiet and solitude.
“D’onne!”
Donna blinked. She had been called that once, a long time ago in another life. She felt affronted by the reference.
“D’onne!”
There was a youngish-looking man calling to her from the spreading stain where Ko’iron had been. She blinked again, half expecting the apparition to disappear. Instead it resolved itself into a man in a chequered coat standing close by on a motor-skiff. He looked terrified.
“D’onne, get onboard! Quickly!”
“Why the frik would I want to do that, Lars?”
“Because you’ll die if you don’t!”
She noticed the spider-mares were a good deal closer than before, obviously interested in the motor-skiff. Lars was looking too, but he turned back to her quickly.
“Because I’ll die if you don’t!”
“Well get going now, before the spider-mares decide you look tasty.”
“But then you’ll die.”
“Gold star, Lars, I want to die. Now piss off.”
“D’onne, I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I’m sorry I came down to the Underhive. I’m sorry for it all but please… there’s more to life than this.”
“Hate and death is all there is, Lars, and I’m the queen of hate and the mother of death. I’ve had enough of both.”
“No! You’re more than that, D’onne. I remember the girl I met by the fountain—”
“That was a romantic fantasy, Lars. I was half out of my mind with fear and I needed to escape—all you did was play-act a role,” Donna snapped. Lars looked hurt and fell silent. Spider-mares skated a little closer. Much against her better judgment, she felt there was something she had to ask Lars.
“What happened to Tessera?”
“What?”
“Tessera. Hell, you don’t even know. What happened to the Escher, did they get away?”
“Yes, I think so. I wasn’t really looking once I heard the engines start. I saw Bak and his men make off in skiffs like this, so I stole one, I’m afraid, and came after the ekranoplan.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you were still onboard and I was right.”
“You wanted to ride in on your white charger and save me?”
“I’ve always wanted to ride in on my white charger and save you. I’m not a strong man or a proud man, D’onne, but since I first laid eyes on you that has always been true.”
“You flatter yourself.”
“Well, that would be a shame because I’m aiming to flatter you.” Lars glanced at the spider mares again and wet his lips. “D’onne, I just want you to hear me out for a moment, and if you still want me to go then I’ll go… Not because I’m afraid for my life, which I am by the way, but because it’s what you want me to do.”
“Enough with the damn preamble, Lars. Spit it out and then go, nothing you can say will change my mind. This is the end.”
“Well you see I have a theory that I think is pretty sound, and that’s that you aren’t going to let yourself die.” Donna glared at him but Lars ploughed on. “It goes like this: if your own self-loathing and hatred was so great, your disgust powerful enough to make you self-destructive, why didn’t you die years ago?”
“What?”
“You came down here and ran with the gangs, D’onne. You’ve taken all the Underhive could throw at you and lived through it. One misstep here or a hesitation there would have killed you a hundred times over. If you had even the slightest doubt in your mind that you wanted to live you would have died. But you didn’t. You lived through it all. I just saw this ekranoplan crash into the sump and yet there was no doubt in my mind that when I got here you would be sitting on the wreckage.
“And what that means, D’onne, is that at some point, maybe not now but soon, you’ll want to live again. Perhaps when you’re half burned by the sump, maybe earlier, and don’t look at that pistol, D’onne—again, if you were going to shoot yourself you wouldn’t have waited until now to do it.”
“I hate you, Lars. I ought to kill you.”
“But killing me won’t help you survive, and I respect your survival instincts, D’onne. I think you should too.”
He was right. Deep down, a chill at Donna’s core told her she would be struggling to survive long before she was even halfway submerged. The thought of agonised thrashing consumed her. And, as for the pistol, well it had seemed possible before but now she just couldn’t imagine using it on herself. Lars had ruined it all; when he gave her a chance for escape her inner serenity had vanished like smoke. Damn him!
“D’onne, also consider this: if you die now, then your father has won, Ko’iron achieved his mission and everything carries on as if nothing happened. Do you want that?”
There was long pause as Donna ruminated. “You say there’s enough generation potential in Dead Man’s Hole to upset the markets?”
“I think so, it wouldn’t take much.”
“But enough to hurt the Spire?”
“What are you thinking, D’onne?”
Donna straightened up, ran down the wing and leapt lightly onto the motor skiff. She kissed Lars, who was so surprised he stopped looking terrified for a moment.
“I think I may have found a prospect worth living for,” she told him. Lars beamed happily. “I want to be around to see your untimely death.”
Lars looked hurt again, and Donna laughed.
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al Instinct
Necromunda - Survival Instinct Page 21
