by Various
‘How long?’ Brielle said into her vox pick-up, the sound of Quag’s atmosphere fusion-blasting the shuttle’s outer skin making normal conversation impossible.
‘We’ll be through the upper cloud layer momentarily, mistress,’ Ganna replied, the faintly mechanical edge to his voice betraying the latest of the machine augments he had recently been fitted with, at his own instigation. ‘Stand by…’
Brielle gripped the handles beneath the armoured glass dome and raised herself upwards to look out. As she did so, the flames licking the shuttle’s outer skin wisped away, and the scene opened up before her. The surface of the world below lurched upwards as Ganna brought the shuttle onto a new heading, the landscape resolving itself from the swirling mists.
‘What a dump,’ Brielle sneered, flicking her head back sharply as a stray plait fell across her face. ‘Where’s the settlement?’
‘Just over the horizon, mistress,’ Ganna replied. ‘And if I might say so, I agree. It is a dump.’
‘Hmm,’ Brielle replied, settling in to watch the final approach, even if it was the final approach to an absolute festering boil of planet. As the shuttle gradually shed velocity and altitude, the landscape came into focus, not that Brielle paid it much attention. The surface of Quag was, as its name suggested, dominated by endless tracts of swamps, bogs, marshes and pretty much every variation on the theme of stinking, bubbling foulness. The planet’s shallow seas were only distinguishable from its landmasses by the relative lack of trees, and even on the so-called land, these were twisted, stunted things that resembled skeletal limbs grasping for the wan skies. It wasn’t pretty, and the humidity made her hair curl.
As the shuttle descended still lower, bucking sharply as it ploughed through the occasional pocket of atmospheric disturbance, Brielle caught sight of several small clusters of lights, out in the swamps and none closer to its neighbour than a hundred kilometres. The grin returned to Brielle’s lips as she regarded the lonely, twinkling pinpricks. She knew exactly what they represented, though she would save that information for later.
At the exact moment that a burst of machine chatter spewed through the vox-net, Brielle located the shuttle’s destination. Quagtown, some of the locals called it, while other preferred the settlement. Brielle’s word for it wasn’t fit to be expressed near those locals, though most would secretly agree with her general view of the badland town that even now was hoving into view. If the planet of Quag was a dump, then its only major settlement was the sump below it.
‘Three minutes, mistress,’ Ganna announced. ‘Transmitting key now.’
As machine code blurted harshly in the background, Brielle watched Quagtown grow nearer. The first thing she saw was the towering rock column on which it was perched, a natural formation that looked anything but. The column was the only feature of its type on the entire world, resembling a flat-topped stalagmite rearing a kilometre into the air. At the summit was clustered the settlement itself, its oldest quarters built on the cap and the later ones clinging precariously to its sides. From this distance, the town looked like so many layers of festering metallic junk piled randomly on top of one another, and to be honest, it didn’t look much different close up.
Both Brielle and Ganna remained silent as the machine chatter burbled away, and Brielle fancied she could discern the to and fro of electronic conversation in the atonal stream. After a minute or so, during which the shuttle continued its approach on the ramshackle town, the chatter ceased, to be replaced by a solid, grating tone.
‘Did they go for it?’ said Brielle, her gaze fixed on the command terminal before her. A small data relay slate showed a line of text, but while Brielle was relatively conversant in such things, the code was unknown to her.
‘I believe they did, mistress,’ Ganna replied, his cranial feed allowing him to read the data faster than it could be deciphered and relayed through a command terminal. ‘Stand by… confirmed. Sector three nine zero high,’ he said, and Brielle saw him nod towards the rapidly closing settlement.
Following his directions and gesture, Brielle saw what her pilot was indicating, for the shuttle was now only a kilometre or so out from the top of the column and Ganna was bringing it around on a wide, lazy turn. A guttering fire had been lit at the summit of a thin, precarious looking tower constructed from a jumble of metal stanchions from which protruded numerous aerials and revolving scanner dishes. As the distance closed still further, she could make out numerous small figures clinging to the framework, many of which had scanning devices raised to their eyes. They were all clearly heavily armed.
As the shuttle banked, Brielle saw movement at the base of the tower, and just for a moment, the breath caught in her throat. What looked like a multi-launch missile system was tracking the shuttle as it approached, at least a dozen snub-nosed projectiles nestled in an oversized hopper just ready to shoot her down and really ruin her day.
But, Brielle realised, that was Ganna’s point. If the missile launcher was going to fire it would have done so by now. Letting out the breath she had been holding, she scanned the bulk of the ugly settlement as the shuttle completed its turn and fired its manoeuvring jets for landing. Close in, the details of its construction were revealed, and it was a miracle that had nothing to do with the God-Emperor of Mankind that the place stayed together at all. Quagtown was constructed from a bizarre mix of junk, much of it evidently scavenged from small space craft and surface vehicles by the haphazard surface detail. These disparate elements were supported and conjoined by a twisted mass of wood harvested from the trees in the swamps far below, and the whole lot was lashed together by what must have been hundreds of thousands of metres of vine, again, gathered from the lands all around.
And atop this confused, impossible mess of uncivil engineering was a vaguely circular landing platform roughly fifty metres in diameter. The pitted, blast-scorched surface was made from hundreds of deck plates welded crudely together and held up by a forest of wood and metal struts. It was crossed by dozens of snaking feed conduits and fuel lines, and numerous cargo crates were piled haphazardly at its edges. Guidance lumens set into the surface flashed a seemingly random pattern, no two of them the same colour, and Ganna fine-tuned the shuttle’s approach, firing its landing jets as the vessel slowed to a halt above what Brielle assumed was its assigned berth.
From her vantage point in the astrodome Brielle was afforded a view of the entire landing platform, and she could see that three other vessels were already docked. One was a battered old Arvus lighter, and it was clear to Brielle’s practised eye that it had once belonged to the defence fleet of a system spinward of Quag. Its new owner had made a very amateur attempt at painting over the livery of the vessel he had no doubt acquired via less than legitimate channels, and the spectacle brought a wry grin to Brielle’s lips.
A second vessel was of a pattern Brielle had never actually seen in the flesh, though she had certainly seen it depicted in the Arcadius clan’s archives held at the Zealandia Hab. In form it resembled some massively oversized insect, its domed, multi-faceted eyes forming its cockpit. Its wings were currently swept back into a stowed position, but Brielle knew they were fitted with an anti-grav array that granted the small ship such agility and grace it was no wonder its type was highly sought after by all manner of unusual or downright dangerous characters. Whether this was owned by an underworld lord, a powerful bounty hunter or even another rogue trader like herself Brielle could not say, though she silently resolved to be watchful.
The third vessel sat upon the uneven surface of the landing deck was a squat, armoured brick of a shuttle, and it was being tended by an indentured service crew, who were themselves being closely watched by a gang of heavily augmented, and no doubt combat-glanded thugs. This was evidence of two primary facts. The first was that it had only recently arrived at Quagtown, its owner having paid for an immediate, quick turnaround service to ensure it was ready for an expeditious depar
ture. The second fact that presented itself to Brielle was that the individual who she had come to this festering dump of a town to meet with had arrived ahead of her, exactly as she had anticipated he would.
‘Set us down, Ganna,’ Brielle ordered, a thrill of danger and expectation fluttering through her belly. ‘Let’s do what we came here to do…’
The instant Brielle and Ganna climbed out of the Aquila shuttle and took a breath of the air she halted.
‘Damn it,’ she cursed as the stale air filled her lungs. ‘Forgot my filtration plugs, this place stinks like an ork’s…’
‘Take my rebreather, mistress,’ Ganna interrupted her unladylike outburst, unhooking his breathing mask from about his neck and passing to Brielle.
But Brielle was already walking away from the shuttle, waving the offer away dismissively. ‘Make sure the cargo’s unloaded,’ she called back as she stalked away across the deck.
Caught between his concern for his mistress and the need to fulfil her order, Ganna muttered beneath his breath as he turned hurriedly towards the open passenger compartment. At the head of the short ramp stood two burly figures, each as much metallic machine as biological flesh. The biomechanical, mind-scrubbed servitors carried between them a heavy, armoured chest, the expressions on their hybrid metal/flesh faces dead-eyed and blank.
‘Imperative meta-nine,’ Ganna barked at the servitors, the code phrase causing them to stir as they recognised and acknowledged the words of a duly authorised superior. ‘Heeding signal zero zero actual,’ he ordered, and stood aside as the mindless automatons marched down the short ramp in perfect lock step and headed off after Brielle. With a final glance at the shuttle, Ganna punched a glowing rune plate mounted by the hatch, cycling the passenger bay to its sealed state, and followed after his mistress.
The metallic surface rang beneath the tread of Brielle’s heavy, knee-high boots, and it took Ganna only seconds to catch up with her. The air was hot in the vicinity of the idling shuttles and scented by a nauseous mixture of fuel, filth and sin. Knowing that if anything untoward happened to Brielle, her father would hunt him down and feed him to the sump-rats in his cruiser’s sub-decks, he determined to stay as close to her as it was possible to do, though he knew from experience that would really get on her nerves.
‘Hey there!’ Brielle called out to a cluster of ground crew struggling to affix a large feed-line to the intake on the armoured shuttle sharing the landing pad with her own Aquilla. When the men seemed to ignore her, choosing instead to concentrate on their duty, she raised an eyebrow and planted her fists firmly on her hips.
Just as Ganna stepped up beside her, Brielle started forward towards the ground crew, and at that very moment a pair of towering guards stepped in from nearby to bar her path. Obviously brothers, the pair were clearly in the employ of the local underworld, for they were heavily augmented as well as covered in the tattooed sigils that proclaimed the complex web of patronage commanding their loyalty. Brielle read it in a glance, and knew instantly that the pair belonged to one of the lowlife flesh brokers that dealt out of Quagtown.
Casting a seemingly casual glance over the bulk of the armoured shuttle the men were tending, Brielle craned her neck to look up into the face of the nearest thug. By the saints, they breed them homely around these parts, she thought to herself.
‘Listen, boys,’ she said sweetly, drawing a look of scepticism from both men. ‘I need my lander overwatched while I’m doing business in town. What’s the local scrip?’
Brielle knew full well what form of currency the locals would prefer, and how much of it they would demand, but she didn’t want to play that card, not yet at least. After a moment of thinking hard on the matter, one thug replied, ‘How much overwatch you need?’
‘All of it,’ Brielle replied on a whim, drawing a raised eyebrow from Ganna. In truth, it didn’t matter what and how much she laid out for local security, not in the big picture, but she needed to make an impression in the right quarters.
‘Half the crew’re busy on this job,’ the more talkative of the brothers replied, jerking the thumb of a mechanical hand towards the armoured shuttle.
‘I’ll pay double whatever they’re on,’ Brielle replied mischievously. ‘In clan-bonded deaths-heads.’
The two thugs glanced at one another with eyes alight with greed, seeming to reach an unspoken agreement within seconds.
‘Half now,’ she interjected before either could reply, producing a single coin worth more than both men would normally earn in a month and holding it up where both could see. ‘Half later, if you make me happy.’
‘Done,’ they said as one, clearly believing that Brielle had been.
‘Then I’ll leave it to you,’ Brielle said, dropping the coin into the open hand of the nearest of the pair. She watched the two heavies pull their fellows off of the duty they were on and muster them to guard her own vessel. As the pair walked away, the two servitors close behind, the landing deck rang to the sound of the local hired muscle spreading the word that a sweet job was in the offing. Knowing it was unseemly to mock the hard of thinking, Brielle suppressed a sly grin and set off into Quagtown.
‘Holy Terra,’ Brielle muttered as the four turned into what passed as the town’s main thoroughfare. ‘It actually looks more of a dump than they say…’
The thoroughfare couldn’t really be called a street, because it was more a valley between ramshackle buildings and travel along it was not in a straight, flat line, but up, down and across the numerous gantries, platforms, ledges and walkways that connected each building to the next. The buildings themselves were a tumbledown mess of sheet metals and unidentifiable machine components, with all manner of shipping containers providing the most desirable real estate. The numerous walkways were in many cases little more than parallel lengths of spar or rotted timber, with tread plate or mesh lashed crudely between with great lengths of dried vine.
But worst of all was the population. Every available space along the walkways and gantries was filled by the scum of Quagtown. Rag-clad beggars panhandled from the gutters while those afflicted by a variety of chemical addictions shivered and sweated in the shadows. Thieves and blaggers eyed Brielle and her party lasciviously, while meat-headed bullies and scarred mercs looked them over for hidden threats. The wealthy, a relative term in such frontier hell holes for the truly rich would pay to be anywhere else, promenaded along the gantries displaying what portable wealth their guards could be trusted to protect, while painted doxies fluttered their lashes from half-open doorways.
Brielle’s eyes narrowed as she saw a number of mutants in amongst the press, individuals whose bodies were twisted and malformed and whose faces were more akin to those of beasts. Several of them sported skin and hair of garish hues; though it was possible the effect was artificial as numerous subcultures across the Imperium pursued the most outlandish of fashions. Several had additional limbs, an effect which only the wealthiest could, or indeed would, pay for, for it required the services of the most skilled of flesh-crafters to carry out well. Clearly, these were true mutants, born into their genetic heresy.
On many of the million and more worlds of the Imperium, such debased individuals would be ruthlessly controlled or even culled. They might be allowed to repent their sin of impurity by toiling their short, bitter lives away in the lathes and foundries of some brutal labour-prison, but rarely were they allowed to show their malformed faces in such a public manner. Only on or beyond the frontier was it possible for such creatures to walk about openly, unchallenged by the authorities.
If the presence of the mutants was a rare sight on a human world, that of the creature stalking along the uppermost gantry was an outright spectacle. A spindly being, its body vaguely humanoid but its overlong, stilt-like arms employed as an additional pair of legs, was progressing with something akin to grace from one building to the next. Its skin was dusty grey with mottled, darker patc
hes down its back, and instead of clothing it wore what could only be a combat rig, a form of webbing with numerous pouches and packs attached all over. Its head was long and aquiline, sporting three pairs of eyes along its sides, while its mouth was a tiny, leechlike opening at the end of its proboscis snout. Brielle was fascinated, for she had never before encountered its species nor read of it in all of her education.
A crude, grunting shout from another walkway made Brielle instantly aware of another type or alien, and one that she had encountered on numerous worlds. Indeed, the barbarous, green-skinned orks plagued the known galaxy, their anarchic empires forming great lesions of war and disturbance that meant that no Imperial sector was ever safe from their incessant invasions and migrations. A group of the hulking xenos was making its way along a walkway clinging precariously to the side of a building constructed from a huge, cylindrical fuel transport, shouldering people aside and growling at passers-by. Brielle’s lip curled in disgust, for these beasts truly were the scum of the universe, and it was rare for them to be tolerated even in such recidivist sumps as Quagtown. The place got even lower in her estimation.
Brielle halted at a relatively open gallery, standing aside as a party of drunken lay-techs staggered by, and scanned the buildings and walkways before her. Reaching into a pocket, she drew out a small data-slate, aware of the numerous eyes amongst the passers by that followed the motion while trying to look as if they weren’t. With a flick of an activation rune, she awoke the slumbering machine, a rough schematic of the town appearing on its green-glowing surface.
