Scabbs dropped to the ground as laser blasts sizzled over his head. He was pretty certain his life couldn’t get any worse. However, as he rolled to his feet, his leg slipped off the stone pier and Scabbs found out just how wrong that assumption had been.
He and Yolanda had come to Acid Hole to find the leader of the New Redeemers gang. The entire gang had bounties on their heads, but the leader was worth five hundred creds. Any other heads would just add to their take. Seemed like an easy job. Redemptionists were a pain in the rear, but they weren’t known for their fighting skills. They spent most of their time preaching, not fighting for territory.
This gang must not have understood the Redemptionist manifesto. They had a lot of weapons, and they knew how to use them. Another barrage of las blasts erupted around Scabbs as he pulled his sizzling foot out of the acid pool. Stone dust and acid spray filled the air around him as the blasts pulverized bits of the pier and sliced into the acid pools, turning pockets of the liquid waste into geysers.
Scabbs looked down and screamed. His boot was completely gone and his normally scabby foot had been burned clean of dead skin and turned into a raw, red appendage. He ripped yet another strip of cloth from his ever-diminishing shirt and wrapped it around his bright red foot, and started running again.
‘Did you want to start shooting sometime soon?’ asked Yolanda. She’d stopped at the next intersection on the pier and fired several shots over Scabbs’s head at the approaching New Redeemers.
Scabbs pulled out his own laspistol as he limped forward. He turned and fired, but his shots all went wide of the mark. Yolanda unleashed several more blasts. As usual she shot for their heads, which at this distance were pretty small targets. But Yolanda was deadly accurate. Her blasts went in a tight arc right through the middle of the pursuing gang. She gave one a glancing shot to the ear, which made him yelp and tumble to the side, his blue cloak flailing around him as he fell.
He toppled into one of his comrades and both lost their footing on the narrow stone path. The splash from their combined plunge into the acid forced the other Redeemers to pull back or get drenched by the potent liquid.
Nobody knew where the acid had come from. There were plenty of theories and stories, but it didn’t really matter. It was here to stay and, even though the pools of acid in Acid Hole were slowly eating away at the settlement and were so strong they could devour a man whole in a matter of minutes, that didn’t stop people from trying to farm the stuff.
The pools were criss-crossed with stone paths – the pier, they called it – made from the crumbling remains of buildings the acid had destroyed by eating away at their foundations. Scabbs and Yolanda had been told the leader, a Redemptionist by the name of Faloway, was holed up in a cave at the far end of the pools.
The information had been entirely correct. Scabbs just wished their informant had bothered to mention the huge stash of weapons the New Redeemers had stowed away for emergencies.
‘Come on,’ yelled Yolanda. ‘Now’s our chance to get that bounty.’
Scabbs was thinking it was a better time for getting the scav out of there, but he was so used to following his partners into stupid peril that he hardly even had time for a good ‘Helmawr’s rump’ before following Yolanda back along the stone pier.
‘We’ve got them on the run,’ cried Yolanda. She shot at several of the fleeing Redeemers, but they ducked and her shots flew over their heads. She ran on past the spot where the two gangers had fallen into the acid.
Scabbs glanced down as he passed but all he could see was the roiling mass of acid churning around the metal slag remains of their weapons. He shuddered and ran on, keenly aware that his right foot had no protection from the acid should he slip again.
As they chased after them, the Redeemers began to split up. Several turned off at each intersection of the branching, stone pier. ‘Which way?’ yelled Scabbs.
‘I’m on Faloway,’ said Yolanda. She continued running forward, through the first two intersections.
That was when Scabbs started to get a bad feeling. He looked left and right, but didn’t see the fleeing Redeemers running into the distance. Instead, they had stopped and turned around. Then, up ahead, Yolanda skidded to a halt. Scabbs had no choice but to run into her. Any other option sent him into an acid pool.
They tumbled to the ground, arms and legs tangled up in each other. Yolanda’s dreadlocks whipped Scabbs in the face, which made him flinch, and her knee slammed into his groin, which made him gulp and groan and curl into a ball.
They came to a stop at the edge of the pool, in the middle of a four-way intersection. Scabbs looked up through squinted eyes and saw New Redeemers coming at them from all four directions. He was, quite literally, in no shape to help. He was certain he’d be dead before he could uncurl or even speak clearly.
‘I’d drop the weapon if I were you,’ said one of the Redeemers.
Through his squinted eyes and haze of pain, Scabbs thought it was Faloway speaking.
‘You could shoot me,’ he continued. ‘You might even kill me, but then I’d be on my way to Redemption at the right hand of the almighty, all-knowing Emperor, while you would just be a melted pile of slag. Your choice, really.’
Yolanda spat at the Redeemer, but she also dropped her laspistol on the ground.
‘Good choice,’ said Faloway. ‘Better for me, as it turns out, because the dear Cardinal Crimson will most certainly reward me greatly for bringing him such fine specimens of heresy and evil.’
Scabbs groaned, partly from the pain emanating out from his groin across all parts of his body, but also partly from what he knew was coming next.
‘Yolanda and Scabbs,’ said Faloway. ‘My, my, my. What a prize, indeed.’ He chuckled and looked around at his fellow Redeemers. ‘You know, we might all get to sit at the side of the great cardinal if only we could deliver the heretic Kal Jerico along with these two.’
He looked back at Yolanda and Scabbs. ‘Now, where do you think Kal Jerico might be?’
Twin explosions rocked the pier behind Faloway. Scabbs couldn’t see what had happened, but he heard screams and a lot of splashing followed by the unmistakable sound of las blasts all around him.
‘Right here, you arrogant, self-righteous son of a bitch,’ said Kal Jerico.
Several more explosions erupted on the piers to either side of Scabbs. This time he got to watch the devastation from his prone position as several frag grenades exploded in the midst of the Redeemers flanking them. Their bodies flew into the air as shrapnel shredded their blue cloaks and orange body armour. But it wasn’t the explosion that killed them. It was landing in the acid.
Next to him, Yolanda dropped and retrieved her laspistol. She started firing in all directions, adding her las blasts to Kal’s. Scabbs uncurled enough to pull out his own weapon and looked around for a target. Kal’s grenades had left gaping holes in the piers on three sides, and those Redeemers lucky enough to be on the far side of the breaches were running for their lives. Faloway cowered at the edge of the hole, trapped between Kal and the acid.
Scabbs pushed himself to his hands and knees as Kal walked up behind them. He felt two hands grab him by the shoulders and pull him to his feet. Scabbs looked up at Kal, who somehow had found the one spot in Acid Hole with a working light in the dome. It illuminated his head with an angelic aura.
Kal smiled and clapped Scabbs on the back, and then looked at his hand and wiped it off on Scabbs’s ripped and dirty shirt. He strode forward towards Faloway, whipping out both guns and pointing them at the Redeemer’s head.
‘The way I see it,’ said Kal. ‘You got two choices – dead or alive. What’s it going to be?’
Faloway looked at the vast empty field of acid around him. His gang had all fled or died. The pier behind him had a gaping hole and the bounty hunters he thought he’d ambushed now had him in their gun sights.
Scabbs knew what he would do in a situation like this, but then, he wasn’t a Redemptionist.
Faloway turned and ran towards the gaping hole in the stone pier, screaming ‘Redemption now! Redemption now!’
Kal and Yolanda both fired at the same time. Faloway’s body lurched as multiple las blasts hit him in the back. He stumbled forward, smoke rising into the air from the blackened holes in his fluttering, blue cape. He staggered two more steps before dropping onto the pier. As he hit, a small splash of acid leapt into the air just past his shoulders.
‘Oh, scav!’ said Kal.
He and Yolanda rushed forward. Scabbs limped along behind. When he got there, Scabbs saw the problem. Faloway had fallen right at the edge of the hole in the pier and his head had dropped into the acid. There was now nothing left above his shoulders but a short stump of neck. The acid spat and hissed as blood drained out of his body into the pool.
Kal pulled the body away from the acid and sat down next to it. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a bounty on his body is there?’ he asked.
Yolanda looked at Kal, huffed, and walked back along the pier.
‘You’re welcome,’ he called after her and then smiled.
7: SOUGHT AND DESTROYED
Captain Katerin felt dirty, and not just because of the masonry dust caked on his face and head, although that was really starting to itch. No, in forty years of service to House Helmawr, he’d never once disobeyed an order.
As he continued to dig his way to freedom, he thought about what he was doing. Sure, he’d bent the rules now and then, even stretched an order to the breaking point when he thought the reason was just and true; his current rank as head of House Helmawr security proved that he’d been right more often than wrong.
He grabbed an I-beam in two armoured hands and heaved it out of the way. The rig’s hydraulics barely even hissed at the enormous weight. As he grabbed another beam, a wave of anger spread through him. Whoever had set off this explosion had tried to kill him, but worse, they’d made him disobey an order.
‘Emperor damn this place!’ he screamed. He swung the beam around, slamming it into the pile of rubble behind him. At the impact, a large chunk of rock sailed off the pile and smashed against the far wall. The resulting rumbling shook the entire chamber he’d been trapped inside for hours now.
He’d dug an exit back towards the docks for Mageson in fifteen minutes, but the way forward had gotten the bulk of the debris from the original explosion. Every time he felt he’d made some headway, a tremor would dislodge more rockrete and beams. He’d been partially buried twice since Mageson left.
The current tremor, precipitated by his angry outburst, subsided and he breathed a sigh of relief. It was frustration, that’s what it was. He had promised to return the medicine and now, when he’d gotten so close, the rug had been pulled out from under him. Trapped in a hole and ordered home by a stylus-pushing bureaucrat, he felt like bashing something… or someone.
This was what Captain Aldous Katerin did. He fought battles, even if it was against stupid masonry. He knew he was no advisor to the Lord of the Hive. He was a fighting man and, dammit, this was his fight. He knew he was right. Perhaps releasing the docks was the right thing to do, but recalling him when he was so close had been ludicrous. He would show Valtin Schemko. He would show them all. This was his fight and he planned to see it through to the end.
‘But I have to get out of this scavving hole first!’ he screamed at the walls.
Sweat streamed down his bald head. He could feel the lines of sweat creating little rivers in the caked dust on his face. He didn’t even want to know what his beard looked like at this point. He couldn’t do anything about it while encased in the Spyrer rig. The massive fingers of his armoured gloves were made for punching, not wiping down his face.
After several hours work, he didn’t seem to be any closer to digging his way through to the other side of the rubble. Katerin made a decision – a calculated risk actually. He raised both hands, curled his armoured hands into fists and launched two explosive bolts from his wrists.
He’d tried this earlier, and ended up buried to the waste in debris from the resulting quake. But, other than the small tremor after the I-beam incident a few minutes ago, the chamber had been stable since.
As soon as the bolts impacted the wall of rubble, Katerin moved forward. They exploded one after the other, creating a huge dust cloud, but no rumbling. Katerin fired two more and listened as he moved forward. There was a definite delay before they hit and detonated. He was making headway. He moved into the cloud and launched two more.
These exploded farther down the tunnel. Afterwards, the dust in the tunnel began to move. Instead of billowing up and around him, the dust was being pulled away. He’d broken through! Somewhere a circulation fan was drawing air through the tunnel. Katerin wasted no time with self-congratulation. He simply moved forward, following the escaping air.
Before he got to the far end of the dust cloud, he heard and felt the rumbling start behind him. He tried to run, but the Orrus rig was not built for speed. At best, he could get it up to a fast walk. More and more dust billowed around him, getting sucked down the tunnel by the awaiting fan. The rumble turned into a roar as the chamber behind him collapsed.
A chunk of rock smacked into his back and a scrap of metal nearly sliced through the armour on his thigh. Katerin kept moving. He chanced a glance back over his shoulder and then wished he hadn’t. A wall of rock and rubble, pipes and beams, and a lot of dust billowed towards him.
The mass of debris hit him in the legs, tipping him over backwards and then propelling him forward. Katerin might have enjoyed the ride if it weren’t for the fact that the mass wasn’t so much a wall as a chaotic vortex constantly eating the outer layer and remaking itself as it moved forward.
He felt his feet getting sucked into the roiling mass behind him and struggled to keep the rest of his body from getting pulled inside. He was quickly losing ground and didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep his head above the mass.
‘Stupid Jerico, messing up my bounty and then taking all the credit,’ mumbled Yolanda as she trudged through the tunnel outside Acid Hole. ‘Thinks he can just disappear for a day and then reappear and take all the glory. We were doing just fine without him. Just fine.’
Yolanda grumbled her way through the uneven tunnel that linked Acid Hole to the next settlement, barely looking where she was going. For anyone else, walking through the Underhive without watching where you were going would be suicidal. Yolanda had spent much of her life in the Wildcats, an Escher gang full of large warrior women who lived and died by their wits and their swords.
She’d developed a sixth sense; perhaps it was just a heightened sense of perception, perhaps she had a bit of the witch-wyrd in her. That might explain why she never felt like she belonged in Spire society. She was different. All she wanted was to be appreciated for who she was, not to be moulded into some princess for her daddy, and definitely not pigeon-holed as Kal Jerico’s sidekick.
She was Yolanda. Nothing less. Something more than most saw. She’d had it once. As leader of the Wildcats, she had been everything she’d wanted to be. Now, she was something else. Perhaps that was the whole problem. She hadn’t yet figured out who she was in the post-Wildcats era of Yolanda.
She blamed it all on Jerico, and continued grumbling about his shortcomings as she sidestepped the edge of a hive quake chasm that intruded halfway into the tunnel. ‘Stupid Jerico, thinks he’s such a lovable vagabond, but he’d turn in his own mother for a bounty.’
Around the next corner was a sludge fall where some pipes between domes had cracked, letting raw waste seep into the void. Beneath her consciousness, her senses picked up on the clues – the rhythmic drip, the faint smell of rotten eggs, the rising moisture content in the air – which all came together to remind her of its presence. She moved to the other side of th
e tunnel and prepared to jump over the sludge that welled up on the floor.
As she hopped over the sludge pool without even a glance, Yolanda’s senses flared in her head. Something was amiss. Strange scents mingled with the rotten egg smell, almost completely masked by the foul sludge behind her. The tunnel ahead seemed darker than normal, as if shadows lurked in the shadows. And there was a slight rustling of fabric against fabric.
That sound she recognized. She’d heard it often enough while waiting to ambush a bounty. It was the sound of someone shifting their weight to relieve the pressure on their knees and ankles.
Yolanda put one hand on her laspistol and the other on the hilt of her sword. She’d stopped grumbling, but kept shuffling forward, trying to appear unaware of the ambush. How many were there? She counted at least four shapes skulking in the shadows.
Redeemers? Doubtful. Feg or Nemo? Nah. She’d given them no reason to come after her. But then, who?
As she walked past the first set of shadows, Yolanda whipped out her weapons. She fired and stabbed into the darkness to either side, connecting with both weapons. In the flare of the las blast she saw a man-sized shape take a hit in the shoulder, which spun him around and slammed him into the wall. While, on the other side, she felt the sword bite into flesh and possibly even skip off something harder like bone or rib.
She didn’t wait to see which one. After making both attacks, Yolanda sheathed her weapons and jumped back. Pivoting on one foot, she turned and ran. At least that’s what she wanted her attackers to think. As soon as she reached the sludge pool, Yolanda sidestepped, stopped and dropped into a crouch.
As expected, her attackers pursued. The first one came running hard, and Yolanda leaned her shoulder in for the impact. As the attacker reached her, Yolanda grabbed him around the knees and lifted. Using his own momentum against him, she dumped him over her shoulder into the pool of sludge.
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