Blood Royal

by Will McDermott

  ‘Alright,’ said Kal. ‘With Yolanda watching for Svend, this is a good time to go over the plan one last time. According to Derindi, our Orlock bandit has been hiding out in an old hole out in the White Wastes. But he’s supposed to come into the settlement today to get supplies from Derindi.’

  ‘What if Derindi was lying just to get us to let him go?’ asked Yolanda. She had crouched at the edge of the air duct, well away from the crack to watch the road.

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Kal. ‘But I don’t think Derindi was smart enough to lie to us. And, if he did, well he wasn’t that hard to find the first time.’ Jerico pulled out his lasgun and used the barrel to draw a map in the dust. ‘Now, Svend will have to pass this crossroads right beneath us on his way to meet Derindi. When he walks into the intersection, I drop down in front of him, while Yolanda drops down behind him… ’

  ‘Where do I go?’ asked Scabbs. He leaned down to get a better look at the map, and his stench hit Kal like a hot blast of wind from the air duct.

  ‘Helmawr’s rump,’ said Jerico. ‘Get downwind. How can you track anything when you smell that bad?’ he shooed the half-breed ratskin back a pace with his pistol before continuing. ‘As I was about to say, you, Scabbs, will drop down on this side of Svend. With us blocking three of his exits, Svend will be forced to run down this street, which we have already blocked up, so he’ll be trapped. With any luck, he’ll come peacefully and we can get the full bounty.’

  ‘Here he comes!’ said Yolanda. She dropped the goggles and drew her sword.

  ‘Remember,’ said Kal, ‘the bounty on Svend is tripled alive, so if he tries to fight his way out of the trap, shoot to wound.’ He pushed himself back to his feet. ‘Okay, Scabbs, Yolanda – get into position.’

  ‘Um, Kal?’ said Scabbs.

  Kal dusted himself down, before looking up. ‘What is it, Scabbs?’

  ‘Don’t shoot me, but Yolanda’s already gone.’

  Kal looked at the empty spot where the buxom but deadly ex-ganger had crouched moments ago, just as he heard the distinctive ‘skrak’ of a laspistol shot from below.

  ‘Crap,’ said Kal. He pulled out his second pistol and jumped off the ductwork. ‘I guess we go with plan W as usual.’

  At the opposite end of Glory Hole, Beddy Bor’Wick ran along a rooftop in a slight crouch, her pulse rifle cradled in her arms. She was following a trail of fresh blood. Intermittent spatters steamed on the cold, concrete roof. The vampire couldn’t have gone far. She scanned the adjoining buildings, the barrel of the rifle following her eyes. But she saw no movement nor any sign of recent visitors beyond the regular vermin.

  Beddy glanced up as she ran, worried the vampire might swoop down on her, but there was nothing but cables, ducts and conduits running along the dome above her. Her black boot felt the edge of a hole, and Beddy instinctively jumped. She’d nearly fallen through an old blast hole in the roof. As it was, the small, wiry but fairly buxom bounty hunter lost her footing when a chunk of concrete fell away as she landed.

  Her momentum pitched Beddy forward as she fell through the roof. Her knees scraped against the edge of the hole before her pelvis slammed into the roof, knocking the wind out of her and sending her rifle flying from her hands. She began to slip backward into the hole, scrabbling with her legs and arms against the dusty concrete for purchase.

  Beddy winced in pain as she got a knee up against the ragged side of the hole. She knew there was more fresh blood waiting for her when she finally climbed out of this hole. Both knees burned and she could feel a warm trickle of liquid running down her legs into her boots. She gritted her teeth through the pain and climbed out of the hole, rolling over on her back to keep her knees elevated for the moment.

  As she lay there, taking deep breaths and working through the pain shooting down her legs, Beddy noticed for the first time that all of the cables, ducts and conduits running along the top of the dome in this section of Glory Hole seemed to converge on a nearly vertical shaft above her. Forgetting her aching knees for a moment, Beddy pulled herself over toward her rifle, keeping an eye on the shaft as she moved.

  With rifle in hand once again, Beddy took a moment to check her knees. The shredded skin looked like something a butcher had run through a grinder. Blood and pus oozed from the six-centimetre wounds. She pulled a canister of spray adhesive from a pouch on her belt and administered a bounty hunter’s field patch. It would have to do until she could get to a surgeon, because now she had a vampire to kill.

  She stood and looked around. The trail of blood definitely ended on the far side of the blast hole. The vampire could have dropped into the building through the hole but, remembering how she and Skreed had found Bester, Beddy was betting on the shaft. As far as she knew, there was no bounty on a vampire, but it had already killed and drained Bester, and probably at least one more victim, so somebody would pay for this waste-spawned monster’s death.

  Beddy unhooked a grapnel shooter from her belt and took aim at the side of the shaft up as far as she could see. When she fired, the magnetic grapnel rocketed toward the shaft, trailing a thin strand of monofilament from a spool attached to her belt. The wire cable was as light as string, but as strong as steel. The grapnel was good for getting into hard-to-reach places, and the cable could also be used as a garrotte. Its versatility made the grapnel Beddy’s favourite piece of equipment.

  As soon as the grapnel attached, a winch within the spool began to reel it back in, pulling Beddy up into the shaft. When she got to the end of the line, the bounty hunter wedged her feet in between several pipes to hold her body in place, and looked up into the shaft. It was pitch black beyond the meagre light that streamed in from the noonday streetlamps in the dome below. Beddy took a moment to don a nightvision visor, pulling it down past her tightly-curled, wiry, black hair. The shaft continued on into the darkness, well past the limits of her visor.

  ‘Nothing for it but to keep going,’ muttered Beddy as she lined up another shot with the grapnel. The line whizzed out past the edge of her sight before the grapnel clanged into metal and held. The winch began pulling her up farther into the shaft.

  When she released her feet from their holds, Beddy felt like she was falling, but only for a moment before she began to rise up into the shaft. She held her rifle in one hand and used the other to steady herself during the ascent. She had to concentrate on the walls to keep from banging into the pipes and conduits that snaked their way up through the shaft.

  As she reached what should be the end of the line, Beddy glanced up, but instead of seeing the grapnel attached to a wall, it was held out over the shaft by some dark form lurking in a side tunnel. She raised her rifle to shoot, but the figure jerked the line, and whipped a loop around Beddy’s neck. The loop snapped tight, slicing through leather, skin and bone like scissors through paper.

  In the distance, the rats heard the clang, clang, clang, thud of a falling object, and scurried over the concrete roof to see what treasure they might find.

  By the time Jerico hit the street, Yolanda was chasing Svend the wrong way, away from the dead end. Even worse, they were both heading toward him, and Yolanda was shooting wildly. The Orlock’s leather vest flapped open as he ran, showing a bolero decked out with frag grenades hanging over his dirty white shirt. Kal pointed his own lasgun at Svend, but had to dive to the side as a stream of Yolanda’s lasblasts sizzled the air, right where his head had been.

  Kal rolled to the ground and tried to kick Svend in the knees as he ran past. The ganger’s metal-clad boots slammed into Kal’s leather-protected shins with a crack, spinning the bounty hunter around and leaving him face-down at the edge of a sewer grate. ‘Crap! That stinks worse than Scabbs,’ he groaned.

  A moment later, Yolanda charged through, her hair whipping across her face and her chest heaving and straining at her cotton shirt. The buxom bounty hunter nearly kicked Jerico in the ribs as she vaulted over him. She let loose with several more blasts at the retreating Svend as he weaved b
ack and forth across the street. Her last shot singed the ganger’s ponytail. She was shooting at his head!

  ‘Alive!’ yelled Kal. ‘Yolanda, alive! Don’t you listen to me?’

  ‘What?’ screamed Yolanda. She turned to look back at the prone Kal. At that moment, the fleeing Svend tossed a grenade over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh crap!’ muttered Jerico. He rolled away from the bouncing grenade as he screamed. ‘Never mind! Run! Grenade!’

  Jerico heard the grenade clinking as it bounced ever closer. He knew there was no way he could roll out of the blast radius. He also knew that by the time he stood up, it would be too late anyway. So he rolled and hoped his luck and good looks would save him once again. A pair of boots and a distinctive odour flashed past Jerico. A moment later he heard a dull thunk, followed by a deafening explosion.

  The shockwave turned Jerico’s roll into an out-of-control tumble. Shrapnel rained down around him, some of it biting through his leather coat into his flesh. But the explosion had sounded too far away and the fragments seemed sparse and weak. What in the Spire had Scabbs done?

  Kal tumbled to a stop and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. Scabbs lay sprawled on the ground down the street, one leg sticking straight up in the air. His already tattered clothes had been shredded by flying fragments, and Kal could see blood soaking through his shirt in numerous spots.

  The building next to Scabbs had a new entrance on the third floor. A charred hole between two windows bore witness to the power of pyrotechnics. A pile of new rubble littered the street beneath the hole. Somehow the grenade had exploded against the side of the building, three storeys up. Kal stood and glanced back and forth between the blast hole and the bleeding Scabbs.

  ‘You son of a ratskin!’ he exclaimed as he ran over to his partner’s side. ‘You kicked the grenade. Of all the scav-minded, dumb things to do. You could have blown your foot off.’

  Scabbs groaned as he finally lowered his leg. He tried to sit up and groaned again. ‘A little help, Kal?’ he asked in a pitiful, small voice.

  ‘Quit yer whining,’ said Kal as he kicked Scabbs in the rump. ‘I’m not done yelling at you for being stupid.’

  ‘I was saving your life,’ protested Scabbs. Kal couldn’t help but notice that the half-breed’s voice was stronger and clearer all of a sudden.

  ‘That was your first mistake.’ Jerico leaned down and offered a hand to his friend, surreptitiously checking the little man’s injuries as he helped him to his feet. Amazingly, all the cuts seemed superficial. The bloodstains had grown no larger while they talked. ‘I take that back,’ said Kal, with a smirk. ‘Your first mistake was being born.’

  ‘Uh, boys?’ asked Yolanda, appearing from behind a doorway across the street. She was completely unharmed, and seemed to have had time to comb her wayward hair before returning.

  ‘Or perhaps teaming up with someone even more reckless than me.’

  ‘Boys?’ asked Yolanda again.

  ‘What?’ they both yelled together.

  Yolanda sauntered over, a smug look on her face. One eyebrow arched, giving the tattoo on her forehead several more lines. ‘While you’ve been gabbing, did either of you think to look for our quarry?’

  ‘Helmawr’s rump,’ said Scabbs. ‘He must have gotten away in the confusion of the explosion.’

  ‘Unless the blast got him, or one of Yolanda’s shots put a hole through his head,’ said Kal as he scanned the street. ‘Yolanda, don’t you realise that “dead or alive” means we can bring some of them in alive? They’re worth even more that way.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re more trouble that way, too,’ said Yolanda. She put her hands on her hips and stared hard at Kal. ‘Frag ’em all and sort out the heads later. That’s what I always say.’

  ‘But we had a plan,’ said Kal with a pout. ‘I drew a map and everything.’

  ‘It’s called “Plan W”,’ added Scabbs.

  ‘No, that’s something dif–’ Kal stopped. He looked at the debris from the bombed building. There was something sticking out from beneath the concrete rubble. It looked like a steel-wrapped boot. Jerico smacked Scabbs on the back of the head and pointed out the buried remains of their bounty to his partners. ‘Damn, Scabbs. You killed him. There goes two-thirds of our bounty.’

  He walked over to the pile and began pulling chunks of concrete off of the body. ‘Don’t just stand there,’ he called back to Yolanda and Scabbs. ‘Your share is under here, too.’

  Later as Scabbs rolled a block out of the way, he asked, ‘Kal? What is “Plan W”?’

  Kal sighed, thinking about all the bounty that had disappeared with a bang. ‘The W stands for wing it, Scabbs.’

  ‘Then why do we use it so often?’

  Kal looked at the crushed remains of Svend Gunderson. ‘Because nothing else works quite so well.’

  In just a few hours, Nemo the Faceless, self-appointed Spymaster of Hive Primus, had collected a dizzying amount of information concerning the current affairs of one Kal Jerico. He knew that his old nemesis had met with a snitch named Derindi in the Sump Hole. He knew that Jerico and his crew had travelled to Glory Hole tracking a rogue Orlock ganger named Svend Gunderson. In fact, Nemo was currently enjoying the antics of the swarthy bounty hunter and his filthy comrades via a remote camera as they dug through rubble to unearth Gunderson’s body. Most importantly, Nemo knew the identity of Jerico’s next assignment and employer, even though the bounty hunter had no idea what fun his immediate future held.

  Nemo looked up from his control console and noticed that the balding little snitch was still standing in his office. How long had he been there? Nemo didn’t actually care. At least he’s been quiet, like a mouse or, yes, a weasel. In fact, Nemo had to admit that Derindi really did look like a rodent as he stood in the dark, wringing his hands. Is a weasel a rodent? Nemo pondered. Ah well, probably some ratskin blood in him. They do make the best informants, though. Be a shame to lose Derindi.

  The Kal Jerico show went on the road on the small screen to Nemo’s left. It was time to get back to work, so time for Derindi to be elsewhere. Nemo touched a control on one of the many panels arrayed around him. A moment later a door slid open quite noiselessly behind Derindi. Meagre light entered the chamber along with two of Nemo’s henchmen – Orlock twins named Brynn and Riyl wearing matching but colour-coded clothing. One always dressed in indigo while the other always wore crimson. The only problem was that nobody could ever remember which one wore which colour.

  ‘Sir,’ said Brynn and Riyl in unison as they came to attention behind Derindi. The snitch jumped a foot into the air.

  The twins – and only Nemo could call them that as they despised being considered a pair, even though they were never apart – liked to call themselves Seek and Destroy. They looked tough enough with their black leather vests over red and blue sleeveless shirts, bandanna-covered shaved heads and dark sunglasses, which they wore even in Nemo’s shadowy office. In reality, though, Brynn and Riyl were little more than errand boys that Nemo used for small tasks, like taking care of rats.

  ‘Hello, boys,’ he said. The twins winced, but remained silent. They had learned not to correct the boss. Nemo smiled behind his mirrored, black mask. He enjoyed their constant displeasure at his use of collective pronouns. ‘My business with Mr Derindi is completed. Show him out, and make sure he gets what he is owed for his services.’

  Panic streaked across Derindi’s face as the twins grabbed him under both arms and hoisted him up off the ground. ‘I swear I didn’t know Svend was in your employ, Mr Nemo, sir. I woulda let Jerico kill me before giving him up if I’d known I was crossing you.’

  The little weasel was shaking so hard, Nemo thought he might slip right out of the twins’ grasp. ‘Not to worry, Derindi,’ he said. ‘Your particular services are far more valuable to me than even a hundred Svends.’

  Derindi’s shaking transformed into vibrations as his head began bobbing up and down like a jackhammer. ‘That’s true, Mr Nemo,
sir. We both deal in information. We’re information brokers, you might say.’

  ‘Well, I am a broker, Derindi,’ said Nemo. ‘Actually, the broker. And you are nothing more than a small-time gossip collector. But I see your point.’ As he talked, Nemo triggered several more controls on a few different panels, but he didn’t like what he saw. Kal Jerico’s face, larger than life, filled one of Nemo’s screens. The view kept tilting and twisting, and he could see fingertips at the edge of the screen. The damn bounty hunter had spotted the tail Nemo had placed on him earlier that day!

  ‘Mr Nemo, sir?’ Derindi’s whining voice floated across the chamber. Nemo snapped his fingers and the snitch stayed quiet.

  When Nemo looked back at the screen, the view had shifted. He could now see a Delaque agent – his agent – held off the ground with Yolanda’s hands around his neck. A moment later, Nemo saw the ground rush up at the camera and then the screen went black. Nemo sat and seethed. He needed to stay close to Jerico, but the bounty hunter was too suspicious, especially of the Delaque.

  A soft whimper from the twice-forgotten Derindi made Nemo twist his faceless head around toward the weasel. It was well past time for the snitch to die. Even through all the platitudes, Nemo had always intended to kill the snitch. He just enjoyed torturing them with hope first. But now, as he looked at the offensively inoffensive little man, a thought occurred to the spymaster.

  ‘Yes boys,’ he said to the twins. ‘Pay Mr Derindi for his trouble and give him some gear. Derindi, I have an assignment for you.’

  ‘What in the Spire was that thing?’ asked Scabbs. He kneeled down next to Kal and looked at the broken remains of Nemo’s spy camera strewn on the ground. Before Kal smashed the device, it had looked like a weapon of some sort, except with a glass lens stuck in the end of the barrel. Scabbs had thought it might be a new type of laspistol.

  Scabbs picked through pieces on the ground. The casing had cracked open, revealing circuit boards, miniaturized motors and gears, and two curved pieces of glass that apparently once moved up and down the barrel. On the back end, above the handle, was what looked like the smashed remnants of a tiny pict screen.