Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  NECROMUNDA

  SURVIVAL INSTINCT

  Andy Chambers

  In order to even begin to understand the blasted world of Necromunda you must first understand the hive cities. These man-made mountains of plasteel, ceramite and rockrete have accreted over centuries to protect their inhabitants from a hostile environment, so very much like the termite mounds they resemble. The Necromundan hive cities have populations in the billions and are intensely industrialised, each one commanding the manufacturing potential of an entire planet or colony system compacted into a few hundred square kilometres.

  The internal stratification of the hive cities is also illuminating to observe. The entire hive structure replicates the social status of its inhabitants in a vertical plane. At the top are the nobility, below them are the workers, and below the workers are dregs of society, the outcasts. Hive Primus, seat of the planetary governor Lord Helmawr of Necromunda, illustrates this in the starkest terms. The nobles—Houses Helmawr, Cattalus, Ty, Ulanti, Greim, Ran Lo and Ko’iron—live in “The Spire”, and seldom set foot below “The Wall” that exists between themselves and the great forges and hab zones of the hive city proper.

  Below the hive city is the “Underhive”, foundation layers of habitation domes, industrial zones and tunnels which have been abandoned in prior generations, only to be re-occupied by those with nowhere else to go.

  But… humans are not insects. They do not hive together well. Necessity may force it, but the hive cities of Necromunda remain internally divided to the point of brutalisation and outright violence being an everyday fact of life. The Underhive, meanwhile, is a thoroughly lawless place, beset by gangs and renegades, where only the strongest or the most cunning survive. The Goliaths who believe firmly that might is right; the matriarchal, man-hating Escher; the industrial Orlocks; the technologically minded Van Saar; the Delaque whose very existence depends on their espionage network; the firey zealots of the Cawdor. All striving for the advantage that will elevate them, no matter how briefly, above the other houses and gangs of the Underhive.

  Most fascinating of all is when individuals attempt to cross the monumental physical and social divides of the hive to start new lives. Given social conditions, ascension through the hive is nigh on impossible, but descent is an altogether easier, albeit altogether less appealing, possibility.

  excerpted from Xonariarius the Younger’s

  Nobilite Pax Imperator—the Triumph

  of Aristocracy over Democracy.

  1: GLORY HOLE

  Talk. Some say Underhivers do nothing but talk, that they chatter like reprieved convicts coming out of solitary. Fact is, to them, talking is all about survival: where the lashworms have taken root, where the waste spills are toxic, who’s top dog, where to find trade or scav, who’s new in town. It’s an unwritten law that nothing is taboo down here. A refusal to answer just about any question is a tacit invitation for a fight, not that it’s uncommon to see it used as such.

  So it is that the drinking holes and slop shops are always filled with a hubbub of gossip that hangs in heavy clouds like the twisting obscura smoke and the greasy fumes of tallow candles.

  So when she walked into Hagen’s place, everyone, and I mean everyone, already knew that Mad Donna was in the settlement of Glory Hole.

  It wasn’t like in the pict-shows; the music didn’t stop, everyone didn’t shut up and stop what they were doing to stare. But there was a discernable dip in the noise and a dozen subtle shifts in body postures betrayed curiosity or fear or bravado or guardedness in the crowd. She gazed brazenly at the inhabitants of the shadowy bar with her brilliant blue eye, zapping them with a billion volts of bad attitude. You get a tough crowd in Hagen’s place, but few were brave enough to meet her gaze and no one was about to challenge her right to be there.

  Outlaw. Psycho bitch. Renegade noble. With a multiple choice of reasons like that to choose from, it was easy to hate or fear Mad Donna. Her gory reputation had spread through Badzones like a twenty-kay rad-cloud in the five cycles she had been below. She was easy on the eye with a dancer’s long legs and a set of bewitching curves more flaunted than obscured by her body-casque. Her face would have been beautiful if it wasn’t etched by hard lines of cruelty and despair. Legend had it that she’d torn her own eye out years before when a barkeep had told her she was pretty, and now one socket was covered by a glittering, unblinking bionic. Truly there was more softness and compassion in that metal eye than the remaining real one. She carried well-worn weapons on her curving hips, two pistols and a slender chainsword she called “Seventy-one” for the number of fingers and toes it had chopped off in its time. A dozen pairs of eyes in Hagen’s place quickly found other places to be.

  She ordered Wildsnake and was greeted by two Escher gangers—Tola and Avignon—emerging from a side booth looking like they didn’t really want to be there. The three had obvious deal-talk to conduct: Tola was speaking fast and waving her hands, Avignon chiming in, Donna nodding occasionally. No doubt they wanted to hire Donna’s renowned fighting skills as insurance for some scav-run, gang fight or turf war.

  Meanwhile tongues were wagging amongst the assembled Underhivers and fighters, telling and retelling the old stories about Mad Donna. There was the one of how she had murdered her noble husband in the Spire.

  “With a silver fish fork no less,” Akas Fishbelly had added knowingly. “Gouged out ’is eyes.”

  Then how she had fled to down-hive to escape her father’s wrath, somehow staying one step ahead of the enforcers and bounty hunters all the way. How she had even ghosted through the impenetrable mass of security at The Wall to get from the Spire into Hive City. How she had killed her own sister, how she had skinned a Goliath who crossed her once, how she had carved out a killer reputation in half a decade of gang fights and craziness.

  Gradually thoughts turned to other things and cups rose, dice rattled and chips fell once again. That was when it happened. A new voice was heard above the murmur of talk in the bar, and what it said produced that immediate black hole of silence so beloved of storytellers.

  “D’onne Ulanti?”

  The speaker found himself with Mad Donna’s laspistol pressed between his eyes in an uncoiling blur that was almost too fast too see. She spoke in a husky, murderous burr.

  “No one has dared use that name around me for five years, so you’d better have a damn good reason for using it now.”

  The man at the edge of death was a scrawny young pit slave. A Merchants Guild ownership stud in his forehead winked nervously a millimetre above the laspistol’s hungry muzzle.

  “I-I have a message from Guilder Theodus Relli for D’onne Ulanti,” he bleated. “Please don’t kill me.”

  Donna scanned around the bar without moving the gun and wondered which sack of pus had named her to this hapless rube. Many faces flinched away at her icy glare, but none revealed themselves as the potential sump-stirrer. She holstered the pistol and pointedly turned her back, opening her gloved hand palm-up in front of the slave’s nose. After a moment’s hesitation a grimy scroll was pressed into her hand and the slave fled.

  “What the frik?” said Tola, gazing at the authentic-looking guilder seal embossed in metallic inks on the pale roll of hide.

  “Someone wants your attention,” observed Avignon wisely, an effect she ruined only marginally by dripping Wildsnake over her chin as she swigged back another shot.

  “Someone is asking for a kicking,” said Mad Donna and dropped the message on the slop-pooled bar top.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” asked Tola.

  Mad Donna shook her head. “No, I’m going to finish this bottle and then find Guild
er Theodus frikkin’ Relli and break it over his no doubt fat and balding head.” Her gaze was distant. “No one has messages for D’onne Ulanti to hear. She’s long dead.”

  “Can I read it?” Tola was nothing if not impetuous, little more than a juve really, an effect enhanced by her close-cropped, dirty-blonde hair.

  Donna gazed at her evenly for a moment. “Sure.”

  Avignon gave Tola a long-suffering “I-can’t-believe-you-just-did-that” look but Tola was too busy breaking the seal and unrolling the scroll to notice. Her lips moved unconsciously as she read the words. Avignon impatiently snatched the scroll out of Tola’s hands and laid it out on the bar for them all to see.

  It was handwritten. The practiced pen strokes of a scribe were now growing soft-edged like patches of mould as the pale hide drank up puddles of cheap alcohol, but it had been nicely written. It read:

  To the esteemed nobledam D’onne Astride Ge’Sylvanus of the House of Ulanti,

  Please forgive this unwarranted intrusion but a matter has come to my attention regarding your past that I felt you should be apprised of with immediacy. I feel it would be unwise to communicate the matter in a simple letter, but I feel sure that such knowledge could be conveyed in person for a suitable consideration. I can be contacted via Strakan’s warehouse on the third tier should you wish to pursue this matter further.

  Yours in faith,

  Theodus Relli

  Of the Merchants Guild

  “Trap,” belched Avignon.

  “No, blackmail. He wants to get a payoff,” said Tola. “What he’s saying is ‘pay me off or I’ll tell someone else about it and they’ll pay me off instead’.”

  “Could be either, or both,” said Donna. “Most likely the worm has already sold me out and wants to double his money.” Her blue eye was hard and bright with interest. “It’s been tried by bounty hunters before, but never by a guilder.”

  The Merchant Guild formed the tenuous threads that stitched the scattered settlements of the Underhive together, moving from place to place trading their wares. They were powerful enough to enjoy as much of a protected status as anyone could claim in the Hive Bottom, the sole supplier of essentials and comforts that were unobtainable otherwise: flak cloth, lumebulbs, protein supplements, data slates, pict slugs, power packs, air filters, fuel rods. They had their fingers in lots of pies and it didn’t bode well to make an enemy of one. Guilders had a habit of sticking together and could swing enough credits to put out a bounty so big it would mean a death sentence for just about anybody. Common wisdom was that when guilders took an interest it meant bad things were right around the corner.

  “You gonna go?” Tola asked.

  Donna shook her head. “I’d have to be crazy to fall for it.” She wadded up the letter and threw it at Hagen. “More snake! And make it good or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  And that was that.

  The settlement of Glory Hole was called that because it was a hole: a fungus-like outcropping of trade posts, hovels, workshops, rickety gantries, palisades and trailing cables clustered around a sixty-storey drop between two half-collapsed domes. Centuries ago neglect and unimaginable loads from Hive City above had caused this part of the Underhive to splinter and crack like old bones. A hab-dome that was once half a mile high and six across had been crushed down to a quarter of that size, and the falling debris opened a hole to a larger, older dome beneath that had been previously sealed off by an unbreakable floor of thick ferrocrete.

  Underhivers are great survivors by nature; those that aren’t get killed off too quickly to find out why. After pulling themselves out of the wreckage they soon investigated the giant hole. The freshly opened dome turned out to be a cornucopia of scav and scrap buried in a vast sea of dust and detritus that was dubbed the White Wastes. People came from all over to try their hand at plumbing the depths, so the settlement of Glory Hole sprang into existence to supply their needs and relieve them of their newly found wealth. Some of the boldest fortune hunters came back with archeotech hoards big enough to buy a place in the Spire, or so the stories went, and some didn’t come back at all.

  The White Wastes below had long since been tapped out by Donna’s day, but the settlement of Glory Hole hung on just because it was there. Most of the gambling holes and flesh joints had closed down, but enough people stayed around to make it a community. Fungus farmers and rat herders brought their produce there, guilders took their cut, gangs and hired guns generally passed right on through and the authorities generally stayed away. That’s just the way the Underhivers liked things.

  Mad Donna made her way unsteadily across the second tier, its rusty patchwork of metal plates and mesh grilles creaking every step of the way. She was contemplating the fact that a little less Wildsnake and bravado earlier on would have made things a lot easier for her now, but she was definitely intrigued. It had taken a while for it to settle in but it was there now and nagging like a loose tooth.

  What she hadn’t told Tola and Avignon were the two things that stood out in Relli’s letter. Firstly, it had followed the correct uphive forms of address for herself as a spyrer: nobledam was an old term that just emphasised that nagging fact. Then there was the big one. Relli had used her full name—D’onne Astride Ge’Sylvanus Ulanti, that is, D’onne the divinely beautiful daughter of Patriarch Sylvanus of the House Ulanti. The very name brought back bad memories and a surprisingly hot flush of anger. That name was not commonly known in the Underhive. D’onne Ulanti, for sure, but her full name hadn’t even been used on the bounty flyers. That, more than anything else, pointed to the genuine involvement of another noble, quite possibly even a family member.

  Donna approached the edge of the tier, where it was unfenced and ragged before the yawning drop. It was quiet in this section, far from the nearest toll-lift. She picked out a sturdy looking cable and carefully wrapped her legs around it before sliding herself over the edge. A cool, foetid breeze blew up from the depths and ruffled her long hair with ghostly fingers as she swarmed down the cable. The floodlit warehouses of the next tier looked doll-sized and distant below, further down than she had thought. The indirect approach of sneaking down onto the third tier without being seen had seemed the smart thing to do. Dangling above a dizzying drop on a rusted old cable made it seem a lot less smart.

  “Nobledam,” she hissed to herself. “Ge’Sylvanus,” she spat. Gripping the cable suddenly seemed a lot easier when she could envisage it as her father’s throat.

  Strakan’s warehouse had the trappings of a typical guilder place: three-metre fence rigged with booby traps, a main gate that could stop a tank, guard towers, wall guns. Donna squatted on a nearby roof and contemplated her options. She counted two armed pit slaves making the rounds inside the compound and three more in the towers. Jumping the fence was just about possible if she got it right. She had thought about just going up to the gate and demanding to see Relli but even Mad Donna wasn’t that crazy.

  It started to rain, a fine drizzle of condensation falling from the upper layers and bringing a smell of wet ash sharpened by a tang of ammonia. The two slaves in the compound hurried for cover, obviously frightened of acid rain. Stupid green hivers, Donna thought to herself as she dropped from the roof. The kind of effluvia from above which could strip flesh from bones smelled of rotten fruit. This rain produced only a mild prickling burn and was actually good for getting rid of lice and other parasites.

  She ran, fast and limber, towards the fence with its ominous hanging fruit of booby trap frag grenades and scatter shells. At the last instant she leapt forward and up, kicking her legs high and arching her body to clear the top of the fence. Wildsnake and the wet surface conspired to screw up her landing, so she turned it into a shoulder roll and came up next to a pile of crates.

  No alarms sounded from the slaves in their little towers. All good. A sort of covered veranda ran around the outside of the warehouse, cloaked with invitingly deep shadows. She moved cautiously towards it, resisting the urge to run
and staying in cover. The two pit slaves on patrol rounded the corner and she froze as they went by. They were tough-looking characters for all their obvious inexperience. Like most pit slaves, their owner had modified them with crude bionics to suit their function better. One’s arm ended in a circular buzz-saw blade and his legs in metal claw feet that rang on the veranda as he approached. The other sported a piston-powered set of shears on one forearm and a half-skull of metal. Both were carrying big bore stub pistols and a bandolier of cartridges.

  The modified pair was making more noise than a Goliath gang at a line dance and passed Donna obliviously. As they rounded the corner out of sight she got up and started across the few metres of open space to the veranda. Then it happened.

  A door opened and Donna made out a figure emerging. She was then blinded by a row of floodlights kicking on along the edge of the building, bathed in a harsh sea of light totally unfamiliar to someone used to the natural gloom of the Underhive. As she tensed to spring back, a hotshot las-blast scored the plates at her feet in a glowing, spitting question mark. Avignon had been right. It was a trap and Donna was well and truly friked.

  “D’onne Ulanti aka Mad Donna, by the authority of Lord Helmawr I arrest you on warrants outstanding in the Spire.” She recognised the harsh, whispering voice. It was Shallej Bak, an ex-Delaque gang fighter turned bounty hunter. If he was here, the puke with the hotshot was probably his cousin, Kell Bak. Like so much else in the Underhive, bounty hunting was a family business.

  “Drop your weapons.”

  “Come and get them, Shallej, if you’ve got enough fingers left to try.”

  Another hotshot sizzled into the plating close enough to make her involuntarily skip sidewise.

  This was hopeless. She could hear the two pit slaves coming back but she could barely make out either them or Shallej in the glare. She raised her hands and closed her bright blue eye.