Necromunda - Survival Instinct

by Andy Chambers - (ebook by Undead)

  One thing most people forgot when it came to bionics was that good ones could have distinct advantages over the fleshy original. Donna’s artificial eye was a top-range Van Saar model. Among several useful quirks it featured an automatic photosensitive glare filter.

  Shallej, a bald, bulky figure in a long flak coat, was standing a little to the left of the door, covering Donna with the red dot of a bolt pistol targeter.

  Buzz-saw and Shears were approaching from the right. Shears had his pistol holstered and was carrying a jangling set of manacles. Donna reckoned Kell was in a tower also off to the right.

  Shears grinned confidently and stepped forward to toss the manacles to her. As he did so, he momentarily blocked Shallej’s line of fire. That moment was all Donna needed. She bounded forward and grabbed Shears in an arm lock. Buzz-saw’s stub pistol boomed off a round but fired wide and Kell’s shot was a fraction of a second slow as the hotshot’s power pack struggled to build up a fresh charge. Shears howled when Donna bit off his remaining ear and spat it in his face. Shallej cursed.

  Blinded by the hot, sticky blood covering his bionic thermal sensor and reeling off balance, Shears was in trouble and he knew it. He panicked and tried to use his piston-enhanced strength to throw the snarling, laughing woman off, but Donna spun him by the elbow and rammed his cumbersome bionic blades into Buzz-saw’s guts. It was unfortunate for the bloody pit slave that Shallej’s bolt round caught Shears just above the eye at that same moment. The .75 mass reactive gyro-jet pulped his head like a ripe melon being hit by a truck. His death-reflex jerked his shears shut and messily eviscerated Buzz-saw into the bargain.

  Donna was still moving while the pit slaves swayed in their gore-slicked embrace of death. Shallej expected her to run for cover, diving left or right, but she came straight at him instead, ripping out Seventy-one and thumbing the chainblade to life. Her shoulder blades itched with the expectation of a hotshot at any moment but Kell was obviously off-form and no shot came.

  Shallej didn’t raise his pistol to shoot at Donna since that had cost him three fingers last time they met and he’d learned from the experience. Instead he ducked out into the yard where he could count on support from his cousin. Donna’s screeching chain-blade tore at Shallej’s coat as she made a backhanded slash but she kept going, diving through the open door and into the warehouse.

  Donna rolled to her feet and kicked the door shut, pumping a couple of las-shots through it at chest and groin height to dissuade pursuers. She turned and sprinted off between the rows of crates and bales, sword and pistol ready.

  Nothing rose to bar her path. She could hear shouting outside, and then a volley of shots before the door banged open behind her. By that time she had already found what she was looking for: two heavy trapdoors in the floor with a girder-work, a frame and winch assembly over them. No guilder would pay the lift-tolls to have their goods brought up Glory Hole, so each warehouse had their own hoist to the tier below. It was the ideal escape route out of the bounty hunter’s trap, or it would have been if the trapdoors weren’t secured by heavyweight tungsten mag-locks.

  The bounty hunters became stalking shapes behind the rows of chipped plastic crates and overstuffed bales. The distinctive rising whine of Donna’s plasma pistol about to discharge sent them ducking back like jackals before a lion. The warehouse was sharply lit by an actinic blaze as the pistol fired, a thunderclap report and wash of ozone sending hard black shadows leaping to the corners.

  Bounty hunters knew their guns and a plasma weapon took precious seconds to recharge. They moved quickly to encircle their cornered prize, emerging at the skeletal A-frame hoist in a coordinated rush.

  They found the trapdoors melted through, their edges still glowing cherry red from the fearsome heat of a plasma blast. Of Mad Donna there was no sign.

  Donna swore long and loud as she applied a stinger mould poultice to her burned shoulder. A drip of molten steel had caught her as she clung to the bracing beneath Strakan’s warehouse, listening to the Bak brothers bitching and planning their next move. They hadn’t mentioned Relli so it didn’t sound like he was in Glory Hole. She’d almost bitten through her lip but hadn’t uttered a sound.

  She was “holed up”, as Underhivers say, in a broken pipe halfway up the wall of the dome below Glory Hole. She had a dew-sheet stretched out and a small fire going with a couple of cat-sized rats roasting on spits, the dribbling grease hissing and popping in the flames. She kept an eye out in case any other scavengers were drawn to the smell, but most Underhive creatures instinctively steered clear of fire and smoke, except those on two legs of course. Looking out into the gloom Donna could see white ash dunes and mesas of fallen rockrete topped with twisted forests of girders. The only thing moving was a distant string of lights, probably the lanterns of some guilder caravan. It wasn’t safe here but it was quiet and it gave her some time to think.

  No matter how far she ran or how deep she buried herself she could never outdistance her past. The Underhive was a haven for criminals and renegades of all sorts, and for hivers desperate enough to gamble everything on starting a new life at the very fringes of civilisation. Most were running from something, but most were safely forgotten and ignored once they were in the Underhive—it received both outcasts and hopefuls to its dark bosom with equanimity. Not so for D’onne Ulanti.

  Being a feared and hunted outlaw sounded exciting and romantic but the reality was a grim, sometimes desperate, existence dogged by the ghosts of the past. Donna’s previous life in the Spire was a half-remembered dream which at moments like this her mind would treacherously patch together as a mosaic of her best memories, pushing her further down the spiral road of regret and despair. Donna occasionally convinced herself it had all happened to someone else. In truth she had become someone else now—Mad Donna had replaced D’onne Ulanti even though she wore her stolen flesh. She had fallen so far and lost so much of the comfort and security guaranteed by life in the Spire. Sometimes she wondered why she kept going at all; it would be so much easier just to put a pistol to her head and end it for good.

  To end up in the Underhive was the worst thing that could happen to someone from the Spire. Suspicion was the best you could hope for, since half of those you meet would be happy to kill you just for having an uphiver accent. If the Underhivers didn’t kill you, then there were a hundred other hideous deathmongers close at hand; spiders, scorpions, snakes, rats, milliasaurs, carrion bats, ripper jacks, face-eaters, sludge jellies, lash whips, wire weed, brain leaves, gas spores, zombies, cannibals, mutants. The list went on and on, and there were plenty of other things even the Underhivers didn’t have names for. There were also the toxic spills, the sludge pits, the acid rain, the gas pockets, the carcinogens in the dust, the food, the water, the air, the hive quakes, flash floods, electrical discharges or the simple expedient of a long drop onto something unforgiving. It was not a gentle land.

  And now Donna must walk that land and find some answers, find out how Relli had found her and, more importantly, why. In the Underhive, notoriety was like body odour—everyone had it. Actually finding someone specific instead of a bunch of rumours took persistence and no little skill. If she was going to avoid being caught, Mad Donna needed to know a lot more about her hunters. She knew that the best places to find news on guilders were the settlements of Dust Falls and Two Tunnels, both of which see more guilder caravans than anywhere else because of their locations. The only alternative would be to keep running in the Badzones between settlements until the hunters caught up with her again, and next time she might not be so lucky. And why not simply end it all, simply stop running and lie down to die? Because then it would all have been for nothing, and she would have given in to her innermost daemons, the ones with her father’s voice that said it would have been better if she had never been born at all.

  Trekking to Dust Falls from Glory Hole usually meant a roundabout journey across the White Wastes up to the rusting gantries over Cliff Wall. From there the commones
t paths went through the Looming Halls and down the interweaving tunnels of The Lesser Trunk. There were other ways, quicker ones even, but that was the easiest and safest one. Because of that there was always a good chance that gangers, outlaws or both (and it’s often hard to tell the difference) would be roving in parts of the Looming Halls, taxing or murdering travellers as took their fancy. Enterprising gangs often put up toll-blocks on Cliff Wall too, or fought vicious battles for possession of them.

  The alternative was to strike out straight across the wastes to the foot of Cliff Wall, go across the rotting pipes at its base and into a confusing tangle of ancient turbine chambers. If you then could find a way through the sludge pits and collapsed areas you would emerge, perhaps, into the generatoria dome at the bottom of The Lesser Trunk, and would only be a march away from Dust Falls and the edge of The Abyss.

  Going the roundabout route was simply not an option. There was too much of a chance of being recognised on the way and word getting back to the bounty hunters. They would have thrown out a web of informers around Glory Hole within an hour of losing her, hundreds of ears sharp for any news. Time was also an issue. If she kept ahead of any reports reaching Relli she would have an edge. She desperately needed one.

  Flexing her shoulder experimentally, Donna found it surprisingly free of pain. The poultice was doing its work. She realised that her injury would not hinder her and she was pleased since the lower route was sure to be physically demanding. She checked her weapons too, as the sludge pits were supposed to be rife with vermin.

  Seventy-one was as close to full charge as it could be, its ceramite teeth sharp and moving freely. She found some torn scraps of Shallej’s coat caught between the teeth and braided them amid the other trinkets in her unkempt hair as a memento. Her laspistol was an exquisitely made spyrer pattern that she had carried for as long as she had been in the Underhive. In all that time she had never had to replace the power cell or even recharge it, nor once clean the muzzle lens, yet it remained ever ready to inflict harm. She loved and hated the elegant pistol, and had almost thrown it away or sold it dozens of times over the years. The gun didn’t care and continued to serve her as faithfully as a hunting hound.

  Her plasma pistol was a different story; a heavy, crudely made and pug-ugly looking Underhive piece. She had cut it out of the dead, nerveless hand of an outlaw called Kapo Barra after a fight outside Two Tunnels. Kapo and his gang had ceased to exist when Mad Donna and Tessera’s Escher had caught them in an ambush. The bounty fee from the grateful hivers of Two Tunnels had not been as great as promised, but the loot was excellent.

  Donna had kept the cumbersome plasma pistol because it was such a great equaliser. No matter how tough an opponent was, a blast of incandescent plasma would seriously wound or kill them and they knew it. Even the sound of it about to discharge would make most foes duck for cover, and as the escape from the warehouse had proven, its ability to annihilate obstacles was more useful still. It was on a three-quarter charge, the power-hungry pig that it was, and firing it would have to remain a last resort until she was near a viable power source. Finding a replacement plasma flask for it would be harder still where she was going.

  Smoked rat meat plus water from the dew-sheet and filter can would be her food and drink for the journey. What she needed to do now was rest and save her strength for a few hours before setting out. She settled herself into the pipe and flipped her bionic eye to its alarm mode. If anything bigger than a fly approached her hiding place, a motion-sensor would instantly wake her. She slept fitfully.

  The firing stuttered and died away into echoes.

  D’onne stuck her head out to see what was going on and a stub round smacked into the pillar right beside her the instant her head was visible. Tola pulled her back in sharply. “Don’t be stupid, Donna. They knows we’re still here.”

  Another shot and a ricochet whined past as if to underline the point.

  “So what do we do now, Tola?” D’onne tried to sound sarcastic instead of frightened while pushing her blonde plaits out of her eyes. She felt unable to quite believe that she was being lectured by an Underhive brat, five years her junior, who couldn’t even get her name right. Tola didn’t even seem to notice her fantastically withering glare.

  “Well, if we waits a while they’ll start a-sneakin’ and a-creeeepin up here,” she sang quietly, eyes wild with the rush of the firefight. “We could pop out then. Pow! Pow! Mebbe take a couple, but then they’d shoot us down like rats! She scowled dramatically. “Not good.”

  Having a child talk to you as if you were another, younger child is, D’onne concluded, one of the most excruciating things that can ever happen to a person. She was just glad there was no one else around to hear it. If Tola kept this up she’d rather get shot than stay behind the pillar with her.

  “And then…” she prompted.

  “Then we could try’n a-sneakin away ourselves, find a spot and wait for them to come nosin’ around our old post and then Pumph!” D’onne clapped her hand over Tola’s mouth to stifle her from saying “Pow! Pow!” again. Her eyes were bright with fearful intensity.

  “Shut it, Tola. I hear them!” D’onne hissed.

  And here they came, the jingle and squeak of gun harnesses a chilling counterpoint to the heavy clump of running boots. It was an incredibly menacing sound: the sound of people running to kill you.

  D’onne and Tola were in some kind of manufactoria, and it was as dry and dusty as old bones. Most of it seemed to be filled with rusting iron-plated tubs three times the height of a man, and D’onne surmised that they were big silos or mixing vats of some sort.

  D’onne had given up trying to tell what the places used to do where the gang went. What was important is what they did now, and that was serve as a battle ground for the gangs.

  D’onne was trying to learn but it was hard to look at things in a different way than you had been taught for your whole life, to look at a scene for the tactical instead of the aesthetic. But she was learning.

  Once she would have looked around the old building and appreciated the fractal chaos of its disintegrating roof panels, and the coy glimpses they offered of the gantry-garlanded ceiling of the city dome the building stood inside. She would have enjoyed the subtle irony of factories growing old and having to retire and going to pieces just like the workers inside, but how this happened simply over a longer span of time. She might have written a poem about it, or painted a picture in charcoal to get those shadows right.

  Now D’onne looked for cover, and for somewhere she could run to before an enemy could draw a bead. She looked for what would stop a bullet or a las-blast, and what would only hide you, where the shadows lay, where the sniper nests might be. She was learning, oh yes.

  D’onne let Tola go and the little brat just sprinted off without a word. D’onne followed a second later, skipping backwards for a couple of steps to cover their backs. Then she turned and ran after Tola as if a pack of murderers were on her heels.

  Which they were.

  Tola jumped down a rubble embankment, slithering down broken chunks of rockrete and kicking off a cascade of smaller bits and pieces that rattled and clattered explosively. It made enough noise to attract the attention of their pursuers and shots boomed out. D’onne stifled a little shriek as rounds cracked past her. She weaved and ran in a different direction, diving behind a fallen beam and dropping flat.

  Tola was out of sight and D’onne was suddenly very much alone. She lay as quietly as she could and tried not to pant loudly. After a breathless moment she crawled on her belly towards the other end of the beam and stopped to listen.

  The running noises had stopped. Everything had gone quiet again. D’onne hated it: the fear, the feeling of impotence while everyone around her fought out a deadly battle, the fact that she hadn’t had the faintest clue what was going on, where her side was, where the bad guys were or what they were trying to achieve. Juves like her and Tola were a liability in a gang battle, D’onne knew,
because the experienced gangers told her so loudly and so often. No one wanted to risk a juve getting in their way or drawing attention to them in a firefight. So juves were abandoned in a fight to sink or swim on their own. It was a form of Underhive natural selection that was brutally efficient at creating live, competent Underhive gang fighters or very dead wannabes.

  In some ways it was no different to the Spire; it was all about looking out for number one.

  Gunfire cut through the silence, flashes lit the shadows and made them jump, and a man screamed. D’onne smiled at that since her gang—the gang—was all female, like all those from House Escher. The other gang was all male, like all gangs from House Goliath. Whoever had just screamed was an enemy.

  Back in her other life (hazy and distant now, but was it only a few weeks ago she had still been living it?), she had learned about the Industrial Houses of Hive City: the Goliaths, the Escher, the Delaque, the Van Soar, the Orlocks, the Cawdor. They weren’t like the noble houses of the Spire; there was no pair-bonding or guardianship of the bloodlines. Her tutors had taught her that they were mongrel partitions of the proletariat with little more integrity than common labour guilds. Reality, of course, was very different.

  These Industrial Houses occupied well-defended enclaves within the city and dealt with one another only in conditions of utmost suspicion and secrecy. Each jealously guarded its own traditions and attitudes and old enmities like rival nations. The noble houses frowned on anarchy and disorder in Hive City, so members of the Industrial Houses descended beneath Hive City to fight over the hundreds of square miles of abandoned hab domes, transitways and other crumbling strata of previous industrious generations. The Escher told her they came to get more resources for their sisters in Hive City, where every mouthful of food or cup of recycled water was treasured. D’onne had a strong feeling they did it because they were sick of Hive City and just wanted to fight. She couldn’t blame them. Just a few hours in Hive City had made her understand the desire to give violent release to the unbearable tension she’d felt. To live every day cheek by jowl with a billion angry people in a polluted maze shut away from the skies… D’onne was amazed they didn’t all go mad, or perhaps they did and that was how they could stand it.