Katerin moved in, launching his own explosives ahead of him to clear a path. Those muties who weren’t already running from the area turned and advanced on him. He caved in the face of the first with a single blow from his hydraulic-powered punch. Ahead, the transport flew back over the horde, dropping waves of frag grenades on the enemy army.
He back-handed one coming at him from the side, cracking numerous ribs and sending the poor wretch flying into the side of the dune, where he lay in a crumpled pile. A third and fourth beat on Katerin’s armour with chunks of metal. He grabbed the two attackers around the necks, raised them off the ground, and slammed their heads together before dropping them. He stepped on their still forms as he moved forward, pressing them down into the ash.
Katerin glanced up just as Mageson flew out of the transport. She immediately went into stealth mode. Katerin smiled and turned back to his various assailants. The rag-clad, club-wielding mutants posed no threat to him in his spyrer rig. He slapped a couple away that tried to skewer him with rusty swords. He thought they looked like walking zombies with their spindly arms and sunken faces. Their stomachs were distended and their leathery skin had a horrible pallor from the toxic air they were forced to breathe.
But they didn’t scare Katerin. He dispatched several more with a sweeping roundhouse punch. He’d never believed in monsters. Five more came at him and he calmly launched a bolt into the one in the middle. When it exploded, the concussion and flying bone fragments took down the other four. What Katerin believed in was the power of an army; an army with guns.
‘Ready on our end,’ said Stein over the com. ‘Meet you in the middle.’
Let’s hope we find more than muties, thought Katerin, or else we’re in the wrong place.
Almost in response, the mutant horde thinned ahead of him as more and more of the degenerates ran off or turned on their own dead for an easy meal. As the muties dissipated, Katerin saw the mercenaries at the centre of it all. He’d known this was no mutie attack. There was just no way those savages could have brought down a transport.
The question was, how much heavy munitions did the mercenaries have left? Only one way to find out. Katerin launched two explosive bolts towards the mercenaries. They immediately scattered, returning fire as they dived for cover. Several laser blasts splayed across the force field surrounding Katerin’s armour. ‘Okay,’ he said, a small smile creeping over his face. ‘Now this is more like it.’
His bolts exploded right where the mercenaries had been standing. He wasn’t sure, but he thought one or two of them got caught in the blast radius. He moved in as the barrage of laser fire continued to pelt his armour. He launched two more bolts at the closest mercenaries. They didn’t have time to get out of the way and the blasts ripped through the exposed flesh around their armour.
Unfortunately, his bolt launchers were almost depleted, and he wanted to reserve at least one in each arm for an emergency. So, it was time for close quarters. As he lumbered forward, one of the laser blasts finally found its way through the force field, hitting his power unit. He watched as the shimmering field surrounding him disappeared.
‘Oh scav,’ he said. The big problem with the Orrus rig was its slow speed. He simply couldn’t cover the remaining distance quickly.
Twin streaks of red light descended from the sky, burning through two more of the mercenaries. Katerin saw Mageson’s smile as she flew over. He could almost feel the adrenaline dripping off her.
Half of the scummers turned their weapons on Mageson in her Yeld rig. With their attention now divided, Katerin launched his last bolts into the group and advanced in behind his shots. The explosions helped cover his charge and he reached the first scummer before he could get another shot off. He grabbed the man’s head in both hands and squeezed with all his hydraulic-powered might, crushing the man’s skull in seconds.
He dropped the body in the ash and moved on. A few laser blasts impacted his rig, but the armour held. Although it was starting to get warm inside as the metal heated up around him. Only five remained, and none had fired anything more than lasguns. Katerin hoped they’d used up their heavy weapons bringing down the first transport.
Two more laser beams from above thinned the scummer group to three. Katerin struck one with his gore-covered hand, spraying the man’s face with blood as he caved in his nose. A second blow from his other hand went right through the man’s armour and chest, lifting him off the ground as Katerin’s fist impaled him.
After the impressive punch, Katerin’s arm was wedged inside the scummer’s chest, held in place by the sundered armour. He turned to see the last two advancing on him. Both had dropped their lasguns and pulled out shotguns. One had an empty rocket launcher strapped to his back.
‘Your force field is down,’ said the one with the rocket launcher. A smile spread across his face. ‘And I don’t think I can miss your face from here.’
He pumped a shell into the chamber, aimed, and fired the shotgun. Katerin swung the impaled scummer around in front of him. The shotgun blast slammed into the back of the dead man, dislodging it. The bloody body slipped off his arm into the ash. ‘I think you missed,’ said Katerin.
He advanced on what he now assumed was the leader. The other scummer pumped his shotgun and aimed. Before the man could fire, an explosion burst over his back, ripping through his armour and sending him sprawling, face-first into the ash.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Stein, adding, ‘I almost missed the fun.’
He raised his arm towards the scummer leader and fired just as Katerin yelled, ‘No!’
The leader smiled and tried to salute as the bolt hit his armour. His arm only made it half way to his forehead before the explosion tore through his body.
‘Damn,’ said Katerin. He looked around at the carnage. While at one level, it was gratifying to tear through an enemy force with such precision, he knew their mission hadn’t been simply to kill everything.
‘Stein, Mageson,’ he said. ‘Start checking these mercenaries to see if any of them are still alive. I don’t see the package. And if the package is not here, we need someone to interrogate.’
4: THE LIVING DEAD
Kal picked his way back towards Valtin’s office. After figuring out how to use the holo projector, Kal had slipped it into his own pocket and moved away from the grisly scene. Being practically invisible at least made him feel a little safer. Of course, he wondered how the assassin had made it into the royal estate in the first place, and why Valtin hadn’t assigned him any guards yet. These were two questions he planned to ask while sitting on his nephew’s chest.
He looked down where his legs should be and was gratified that all he could see was a slight shimmer. Then Kal smiled as he thought of the fun he could have with Cait before surprising Valtin in his office.
When Kal reached Cait’s office, she wasn’t there and he heard voices coming from behind Valtin’s door. He moved to the doorway and listened. One voice was Valtin’s and the other sounded familiar: one of the other advisors he’d met on his last trip to the Spire. There was also a third voice that sounded tinny, like it was coming through a speaker.
Valtin said, ‘So you don’t have the package?’
‘There’s no sign of it,’ said the tinny voice. ‘It appears to have been removed from the transport by force.’
‘And none of the mercenaries had it?’ asked the second voice in the room, which had a clipped, staccato cadence as if each word had to be definitively completed before the next one could start.
‘We are still searching, but it appears to have disappeared.’
‘So you let it slip through your fingers?’ asked the staccato voice. The accusation hung in the air.
Before the tinny voice could respond, Valtin cut in. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We do not have time for this. Katerin, go find that package. Do whatever it takes. Tear the Underhive apart if you have to, but
do not return without it. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Lord Chamberlain,’ said Katerin. ‘We will sweep through and find the thief.’
There was a soft click and Kal noticed the absence of a hissing sound that had accompanied the tinny voice.
Valtin continued talking to the other man in the office. ‘There is still the problem of Kal Jerico.’
Kal leaned in at the mention of his name.
‘I have a man coming in to help with that, Lord Chamberlain,’ said staccato. ‘He will have very explicit instructions on how to deal with the problem.’
‘Good,’ said Valtin. ‘I don’t know how long I can keep Kal in the dark. He can be very persistent when it comes to protecting his, shall we say, assets.’
‘Do not worry, Lord Chamberlain,’ said staccato. Kal thought he heard just a little extra emphasis placed on Valtin’s title each time the man said it, as if it was painful for him to say. ‘I shall handle the situation before Kal Jerico knows what you’re doing to him.’
‘Good,’ said Valtin. ‘Make sure you do.’
The conversation seemed to have ended because Kal heard one of the men walking towards the door. He decided it was time to leave and slipped out of Cait’s office back into the corridor. There was more going on here than he knew, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to get any information from Valtin. His nephew had already lied to him twice – once under threat. So, now it was time for Kal to learn the truth on his own.
Scabbs woke up in the dark with a horrible headache. He had trouble remembering where he was and what had happened. His arms and legs burned and itched as if they had been scraped raw, and not by his own scratching. A sliver of light above him beckoned to him and, as he climbed, the last few hours began playing back in his mind: Kal’s disappearance, Sonny, the ratskin thief, and then his sudden descent into the hole at the back of the abandoned warehouse.
As he scrambled up the ever steeper slope, Scabbs called out, ‘Yolanda? Yolanda? Where are you?’ He waited a few moments for a response, not really expecting one, and then, once he was certain she wasn’t around to hear, Scabbs yelled, ‘You scavving Escher. I hope you’re up to your hips in ash and muties by now!’
If this had been the first time that one of his two bounty hunter partners had left him lying unconscious in a hole, Scabbs might have been even more upset, but it was a common enough occurrence when running around with Kal and Yolanda. He didn’t really blame them. In the Underhive, the first rule is to look out for yourself. Everyone else is secondary. He tried not to feel too abandoned and concentrated on getting himself out of the tunnel. Then maybe he could go back to the Sump Hole and drink something to take care of his headache.
After a few minutes, he reached the top of the slope. He could see the dim warehouse above him as light from Hive City filtered through gaps in the walls and ceilings. The lip of the hole in the floor was at least ten feet over his head. He felt around on the wall of the hole, trying to find some handholds. What he found instead was a ladder.
A few seconds later, Scabbs sat on the floor at the back of the warehouse holding his throbbing head. He wondered if he should follow Yolanda, but wasn’t sure if she had continued down the hole or not. Plus, she had the only light beam. His half-ratskin eyes were better than a human’s in the dark, but not good enough for poking around in uncharted areas between domes. You never knew when you might come across a chasm caused by a hivequake.
Scabbs had just decided that the best course of action really was to head back to the Sump Hole for a drink when he heard someone scrambling up towards the ladder beneath him. Before he could call out for Yolanda, though, he heard a low-pitched grunt from below.
‘Unnh,’ he heard. And then, ‘Helmawr’s rump, I hate this part.’
Now, Yolanda had a fairly husky voice, but this person was quite definitely male and, from the volume and resonance, Scabbs thought it was quite a large male. In fact, the voice sounded oddly familiar and gave him a sudden chill running up his back to the nape of his neck.
Scabbs then did what Scabbs did best – he hid. He scanned the warehouse for something he could duck behind, but it really had been abandoned. He couldn’t see anything nearby except the walls and some poles that supported the roof. The corners were quite dark, though, and if whoever came out went straight for the door, he might have a chance huddled in the shadows.
As the intruder climbed the ladder, Scabbs tiptoed to the furthest corner and curled up in a ball, keeping his arm over his forehead to keep the light from reflecting off his eyes.
A large head surrounded by shoulder armour peeked up through the floor, just barely fitting through the hole. In the dim light, Scabbs could see something else encircling the head, but wasn’t sure what it was. The next thing out of the hole was a massive arm that definitely did not look human.
Scabbs gulped down a gasp, suddenly aware that Underhive monsters often had excellent dark vision. But the next hand and arm out of the hole looked normal, man-sized. Scabbs wondered if it might be a spyrer, and now worried about photo-contacts. He put a hand on the butt of his laspistol, knowing full well it would be next to worthless against a spyrer.
The rest of the hulking figure exited the hole, and the terrible truth of who now had Scabbs quite literally cornered dawned on the little half-ratskin. ‘But you’re supposed to be dead,’ said Scabbs to himself as he gazed in pure terror at Vandal Feg.
He must have moved or made a sound at the surprise of seeing Feg because the giant man with the mechanical arm who had sworn vengeance upon both Kal and Scabbs with what was supposed to be his dying breath turned and looked into the corner.
Scabbs closed his eyes and prayed to the ratskin ancestors, to the undying emperor and even to Kal Jerico.
By the time Wotan hit the street, he’d lost Bobo in the crowd, even though most of the people outside Madam Noritake’s rushed away from the mastiff when he crashed back through the door. Of course, from Wotan’s perspective, everyone looked tall, even the short spy in the plain, grey clothes.
The mastiff rarely relied on sight for tracking anyway. The air analyzers built into his torso had been state of the art when they’d been scavenged for his creation, and were still far better than just about anything in the hive. As nondescript as Bobo might be to the human eye, he couldn’t escape Wotan’s nose. The combination of cigar smoke, cheap perfume off that girl upstairs and a certain oily musk the analyzers couldn’t quite place made Bobo shine like a beacon of malodorous light.
Wotan padded off down the street, following Bobo’s heavy scent. People moved out of his way wherever he went, but the streets were so crowded that he was like a bubble of soap in the basin of grease that was Hive City. The pocket of space that opened in front of Wotan closed up behind him just as quickly.
He followed Bobo as the little spy meandered back and forth through Hive City. Even though the trail seemed haphazard to Wotan’s visual sensors, his altimeter detected a near-constant increase in altitude as Bobo led him through dome after dome. In fact, one tunnel connecting domes contained a spiralling, thirty-degree ramp curved around itself at least ten times before opening back up into the next dome. If the mastiff had been a flesh and blood dog, it would have been panting and huffing by the time Bobo came to a stop at an enormous wall.
The wall was so massive Wotan saw it several minutes before he finally noticed where Bobo had halted. The little man stood at the back of a large queue of people who all seemed to have some odd interest in the enormous wall ahead of them.
The giant wall reached up at least a hundred metres. As Wotan stared at the massive barrier, he discerned something interesting – it was a huge door. To each side, one metre-diameter hinges corkscrewed their way up the wall, running nearly to the top. Far above him, the outer edges of the doors curved towards each other, meeting in a triangle far up the side of the dome.
An intricate spiral patt
ern inlayed into both doors had grown dingy and encrusted with greasy dirt, grime, rust and worse effluvia over many centuries, but Wotan’s enhanced visual cortex could reconstruct most of the design. The symbols were meaningless to the mastiff’s memory core, though, so it simply stored the information away.
Of more interest were the ranks of guards on patrol, walking up and down the lines of people. He could discern no pattern to their movements or to those people they pulled out of line to subject to a wide array of dehumanizing procedures.
Most were allowed back in line, at the back of course, but some were hauled off to one of several buildings to the side of the huge wall. For as long as Wotan stood there, tongue hanging out while his mechanical canine brain attempted to sort out the procedure for getting through the doors, none of the people taken into the side buildings ever exited.
People who reached the front of each line handed over papers to another set of guards, who asked them questions, sometimes for many long minutes, while looking at the submitted papers. After a while, Wotan cocked his head and the servos in his face made a metallic eyelid raise slightly. None of the people at the front of the line ever got to go through the wall. Many of them wandered away from the great wall, but quite a few simply got into another line.
As Bobo neared the front of the line, Wotan moved forward, ready to spring into action should the door finally open. Bobo handed over a piece of paper, which the guard looked at for a few moments as he asked questions. Then he called over one of the other guards, who came and looked at the paper over the first guard’s shoulder. That guard called another and soon, all of the lines had stopped moving as the guards took turns looking at Bobo’s paper.
Wotan sat down, getting bored with the entire process. Somewhere deep down in his brain, he felt the urge to scratch his back, but there were no neural pathways for that particular command from his memory core to his legs, so he simply ignored the urge.
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