by Various
‘You can’t even pronounce how much I’m worth,’ Brielle replied, her voice low and dangerous. This idiot was really starting to annoy her now.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Gussy. ‘I’m told the trade routes on the far eastern fringe have been drying up for a few years now. They say there’s a shadow out there, and that worlds are just falling silent, one system at a time.’
Brielle said nothing. Eyes open, mouth shut.
‘Remind me,’ said Gussy. ‘Where does the Arcadius derive most of its wealth…?’
‘You don’t know half what you think you do, baron,’ Brielle all but growled, though in truth it surprised her just how much knowledge of her family’s business he had. It was true that something was stirring out beyond the eastern fringe and that it was affecting the trade routes the Clan Arcadius had relied upon for generations, but that was far from the whole picture.
‘I know enough,’ he snapped. ‘Enough to know that your father might be keen shed certain, peripheral assets to have you returned safely to him.’
‘Peripheral assets?’ said Brielle. ‘What are you…’
‘I know the Arcadius owns half of Zealandia. How about that for an opening offer, hmm?’
Brielle was stunned. How this petty underworld crimelord thought he could get away with wresting ownership of a significant Terran conurbation was beyond her. Clearly, the man’s ego outmatched his ability by some degree.
‘Enough,’ she said, waving a hand dismissively and leaning back once more. With a sudden motion, she swung her legs up and planted her booted feet on the low table, sending the priceless xenos ring pattering across the stained carpet. Gussy tried as hard as he could to look unconcerned, but his mismatched eyes tracked the ring as it rolled to a halt, then they switched back to Brielle. ‘I’m offering you this one chance to play nice, Baron Gussy, then things get messy. Understood?’
The baron’s lips twisted into a mocking sneer. Messy it is then.
Flicking her head back in a gesture that some might have taken for arrogance, Brielle caused one of her intricately plaited braids of dark hair to drop down across her face. She made to reach up and hook the errant strand away, but as finger and thumb closed about the braid, she squeezed, triggering the small, jokaero-built device secreted within.
‘This,’ she said to the baron, ‘is a ground to orbit transmitter.’
‘Nonsense,’ he replied, though he licked his lips with evident nervousness. ‘There’s no way you’d have got it through the scanner.’
‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have, if your goon had had his mind on his duty, and not my…’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘My light cruiser is, right now, holding geosynchronous orbit overhead. My spies have passed on the locations of a number of your holdings out in the swamps, and even as we speak, several macro-scale bombardment batteries are trained in each. If I’m not back soon, with the icon, those holdings are getting bombed right back to the Dark Age.’
‘Got it?’
‘You’re bluffing,’ he repeated, before standing as if to intimidate her.
Her gaze fixed unblinkingly on his, Brielle brought the lock of hair to her mouth, squeezed, and said, ‘Fairlight, target alpha, now.’
A bead of sweat appeared on one of the sections of flesh on Baron Gussy’s forehead and he flexed his velvet-gloved hands as he stood over the reclining Brielle. The moment stretched on for what seemed an age, and then a ghost of a smirk appeared at the baron’s lips as he evidently decided that Brielle was, as he had hoped, bluffing.
But she wasn’t. His smile vanished as a sound like distant thunder rolled over Quagtown, a low, growling tremor passing up trough the rock, transmitted through the metal and timber construction and causing the flickering chandelier to shake ever so slightly, yet ominously.
Gussy was the first to break the impasse, and he turned sharply to the house stubjack standing in the archway. ‘Find out what that was, now!’
‘That was your safe house twenty kilometres due south taking a direct hit from an orbital bombardment,’ she said, not trying particularly hard not to smirk.
‘What…? he stammered. ‘How did you…?’
‘And that,’ she said as a second, far stronger rumble brought a wave of panicked shouts from the crowd in the main part of the palace, ‘was your secret clearing house on the ridgeline seventy east.’
‘You spoiled little harpy!’ the baron spat, his rage exploding as several of his guards pressed into the archway with concern and confusion writ large on their faces. Brielle simply smiled and remained outwardly nonchalant, though she knew the moment of truth was at hand.
‘Give me the icon,’ she said flatly, and your little pleasure lodge on the coast doesn’t get flattened.’
His eyes wide with dumb horror, the baron reached up to the icon at this throat and grasped it in a fist. ‘You’re mad! I’m not giving you a…’
In the blink of an eye, Brielle was up off of the cushioned sofa, propelling herself through the air in a cat-like leap that brought her into contact with the stunned baron. The two went down in a confused tangle, and when they came up again, the guards pressing in with pistols raised, Brielle had Gussy by the neck. One hand was twisted about the thong on which the eldar icon hung, constricting his neck and cutting off his breathing. Even now, each segment of his patchwork face was going a different shade of purple. The other hand was reaching under the upturned table, retrieving something mislaid but a moment before.
‘Back, meatheads!’ Brielle shouted, putting as much authority as she could into the order. ‘Ganna! Are you there, Ganna?’ she shouted as the guards took a step back, clearly not knowing what the hell to do.
‘Here, mistress!’ the pilot’s strained voice sounded from somewhere behind the wall of hired muscle. ‘I’m a little…’
‘Let him go or your boss gets it,’ Brielle demanded, one had twisting the thong still more and causing the baron to squeal in sudden panic while the other deposited a small object in voluminous coat pocket.
‘Do it!’ he managed, his voice high-pitched and breathless. ‘Do as she says!’
There was a moment of tense, uncertain silence, before the guards lowered their pistols and started backing out of the alcove, though they moved slowly and were obviously ready to react to any sudden movement.
Brielle jerked on the thong and shoved Gussy forward, using his stumbling body as a shield should any of the goons open fire. It was a somewhat hollow threat, she knew, and one that relied on them being more concerned that their boss lived than that she died, but it seemed to be having the desired effect. Within seconds, the goons had all backed out of the alcove, revealing Ganna and the servitors, the formers concern etched across his face, the latter as blank-eyed and vacant as ever.
‘Time we were leaving,’ said Brielle, moving backwards towards the entrance. Ganna voiced a word of command and he and the two servitors set off after her, the already spooked crowd scattering at the sight of so many drawn weapons.
Just then, one of the guards made the worst move of his career. Raising a knock-off Arbites-issue stubber, he shouted, ‘Let him go or I’ll shoot your damn head clean off your…’
The idiot never got to complete his sentence, a shockingly loud blast filling the air and turning his entire chest cavity into a smoking, ragged mess even as he looked down with incomprehension. A moment later, the guard crashed backwards to the deck, revealing Ganna, his concealed, forearm mounted bolt pistol ready to fire at anyone else that fancied early retirement.
‘Now its time we were leaving…’ said Brielle, dragging the squirming Baron Gussy by the neck as she reached the hatch.
The flight back to the landing pad took far longer than Brielle had planned, for the entire town was in uproar. It wasn’t the panic at the Quagtown Palace that Brielle had unleashed that had got the population so stir
red up, but the continuous stream of fire lancing down through the murky clouds to strike death and destruction at seemingly random points out in the swamplands surrounding the settlement. Though the target of every bombardment was in fact one of Baron Gussy’s holdings, the rest of the criminal fraternity weren’t to know that. Every petty crime lord in the town thought he was the target of the attacks, and that they were being mounted by some bitter rival suddenly possessed of an overwhelming weight of orbital firepower.
At length however, Brielle and her prisoner, who was by now being carried between the two servitors, and Ganna, reached the head of the ramshackle iron stairway leading up to the landing pad. The deck was a riot of activity as the ground crew fought to get craft ready for a hasty departure, but Brielle’s shuttle was, fortunately, still present, and intact. The guards she had employed to watch over the shuttle, largely as a means of announcing her presence to the local crime scene, were milling nearby, more interested in the distant, blossoming explosions than doing their job.
Knowing her small party had but seconds before they were noticed, Brielle rounded on the baron and gripped the alien icon hung about his neck. ‘Mine, I think,’ she said, before tearing it free with a savage twist.
‘The shuttle!’ Brielle yelled to her pilot. ‘Run!’
Ganna and Brielle powered forward, but the servitors were left behind, the struggling Baron Gussy still held firmly between them in their vice like, biomechanical grip. In seconds, the pair had reached the shuttle and the access ramp was lowering on screaming hydraulics. The baron started screaming at the guards to apprehend Brielle and her pilot.
In a moment the pair were at the shuttle and Ganna had activated the ramp, which seemed to Brielle to be lowering far slower than it ever had. The roar of a handgun split the air and a hard round spanged off the hull right by Brielle’s head, forcing her to duck down as Ganna tracked the firer with his concealed weapon.
A burst of stubber fire from off to the left told the pair that a stand up fight wasn’t a great proposition, and an instant later the hull where Brielle had been standing just a moment before was peppered with rounds, sending up a riot of angry sparks.
Fortunately, the ramp was now lowered enough for Brielle to throw herself inside, and within seconds Ganna was in too, scrambling for the cockpit even as Brielle threw the hatch into reverse and hard rounds continued to ricochet from the hull.
At the sound of the engines powering up to full output, Brielle collapsed onto the deck, her head spinning with a potent mix of adrenaline and relief. Those, and something more, she thought as she collapsed in a fit of dirty giggles.
It took Baron Gussy’s minions almost an hour to prise the mind-locked servitors’s grip off of his arms, and by the time they had, he was beyond furious. Stalking back to the Quagtown Palace, his guards barging the panicked locals out of his path, he raged at this turn of events. He had sought to take advantage of a rumour that the fortunes of the Arcadius were on the wane thanks to a decline in trade from the Eastern Fringe, but he was lucky to have come away with his life. Lucien Gerrit’s daughter was a she-devil, he saw, but she had made one crucial mistake. She had left him alive, an enemy at her back. That thought fired him with a curious mix of dread and desire. How he longed to break the Arcadius, he thought, and how he’d like to…
Before he realised it, the baron was back at the palace, its main hall now empty of patrons and the floors strewn with the detritus of panic. Drinking vessels were scattered or smashed across the ground and tables and chairs were upturned. His mouth twisting into a nasty sneer, Gussy made for his alcove, determined at least to recover the ring Brielle had offered in exchange for the eldar icon.
It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t, he thought. That harpy must have snatched it up in the confusion of her escape, and left him with nothing at all to show for his attempted double cross.
He could really use a drink, but it looked like the serving staff had all fled, along with the stampeding patrons. Resolving to fetch his own, he looked about for a discarded bottle, but instead, his eyes settled on the stasis crate Brielle’s two servitors had carried into the palace. They had set it down by the alcove, he realised as his eyes narrowed in suspicion, at her word…
‘No…’ he breathed as his eyes darted nervously about the dark, empty hall. Several of the stitched-together segments of skin on his forehead began to sweat, and one of his mismatched eyes started to twitch involuntarily. ‘No, no, no,’ he stammered as he closed on the box, his gaze fixating on the status panel on its side, a red tell-tale indicating that the stasis field had just deactivated. ‘There’s no way you…’
But she had. Three seconds after the blinking light turned solid, the overloaded core of the plasma charge that had been placed in stasis an instant before it went critical, detonated. Baron Gussy saw his fate an instant before it overtook him, the second to last thing to enter his mind a curse on the Arcadius and all their daughters. The very last thing to enter his mind was the ravening nucleonic fires of the plasma charge as its core went into melt down, the discreet blast wave expanding to neatly and utterly destroy the shabby interior of the Quagtown Palace whilst leaving its exterior with barely a scratch. To the denizens of Quagtown, the bass roar was yet more evidence of their impending doom, touching off a stampede as hundreds fled to be anywhere but in the centre of their tumbledown settlement.
For many months after, only the toughest of mutants would be able to survive the radiation within that ramshackle shell. By that time, Brielle Gerrit would be light years away, perhaps visiting the golden shores of a paradise world that had recently come into her possession…
The Relic
Jonathan Green
The horde spread across the unsullied blue-white wilderness of the ice fields like an oily black stain. Filthy clouds of greasy smoke rose from the exhausts of fossil fuel-guzzling machines, sending sooty trails into the frozen air to mark their passing. Every warbike and cobbled-together trukk left a petrochemical smear across both land and sky behind it, marking the horde’s progress across the polar wilderness as another region of the planet fell to the furious predations of the alien invaders.
An unstoppable tide of savage, growling machinery poured out across the riven glacier. Before it, still a league or more away, the stalwart line of armour that the Emperor’s chosen had decreed would not be breached approached. Today – at this time and in this place, amidst the desolate ice fields of the Dead Lands of Armageddon – the Astartes would make their stand against the green tide.
Warbike outriders gunned their throttles excitedly, while those boyz clinging to the sides of guntrukks, wartrakks and battlewagons cannibalised from captured vehicles of Imperial design fired off round after round from their heavy calibre shootas in their overeagerness to engage with the enemy.
The drop pod fell from heaven like the wrath of the Emperor Himself. The force of its landing sent shuddering tremors through the iron-hard ice sheet, a network of treacherous crevasses fracturing outwards from the point of impact.
The echoing gunshot retort of the pod’s landing still rumbling across the fractured face of the glacier, the armoured landing craft opened and from it emerged the instrument of the Emperor’s holy vengeance.
Autoloaders clattered into operation as the barrels of an assault cannon noisily cycled up to speed. The four blunt digits of a huge robotic fist, easily large enough to crush an ork’s skull, flexed and whirred, servo-motors in each finger giving it a crushing force equal to that exerted by a crawling glacier.
With heavy, pistoning steps, the revered Dreadnought emerged from the cocoon of its drop pod, some monstrous metal beetle birthing from its adamantium shell, roused and ready for war.
Bio-linked sensors scanned the rapidly-advancing line of greenskin vehicles, the Dreadnought’s machine-spirit-merged sentience processing the constant stream of information – everything from average velocities to weapon
capabilities to wind shear – and waited. Experience won on a thousand battlefields across a hundred worlds – including this Emperor-forsaken rock in particular – came into play, recalled from the depths of mind-linked implants. The orks weren’t going anywhere. He could afford to be patient. Revenge was a dish served best cold, after all.
Heavy munitions fire chewed the frozen ground in front of him. The foul xenos had seen him fall from the heavens on wings of fire like some avenging angel and now that he was in their sights they were directing everything in their crude arsenal directly at him.
Shells threw chips of ice the size of Predator shells from the bullet-pitted surface of the glacier, many raining back down to strike against the Dreadnought’s ancient adamantium armour. It had stood up to much worse over the centuries. The ice shards shattered harmlessly against its hull, some exploding into powder.
As the orks drew closer still and their haphazard targeting devices found their range at last, the greenskins let fly with rockets, high calibre shells and even smoky flamethrowers in their eagerness to engage with the ancient.
The Dreadnought disappeared amidst clouds of sooty smoke and roiling flames, the glacier reverberating now to the explosions and impacts of the orks’ weapons which were, in general, noisy and heavy on the pyrotechnics, but not all that accurate or effective.
And all the time the ork line surged forwards, steadily closing on the Dreadnought’s position.
Preceded by a torrent of cannon and bolter fire, the Dreadnought stepped from the smoke of its supposed destruction, swivelling about its waist axis, raking the hurtling ork vehicles with its arm-mounted weapons. The standard that hung from its banner-pole was scorched black and still smouldering at the edges, the halo of iron spikes surmounting its armoured body glowing orange in the oily flames lapping at its pockmarked hull.
Three times the height of a man, larger than many of the ork machines and as heavy as a warbuggy, armoured with adamantium plates and carrying an arsenal that rivalled the firepower of a battlewagon, it would take more than that to halt this juggernaut’s advance.
