J’ustene watched her fall. Corundra turned towards D’onne and laid one perfectly manicured index finger against her lips to warn her to silence. At that moment, D’onne’s world had spun and turned black.
When she awoke she was in the tower.
5: PENUMBRA
A depth, a breadth,
A place so steep, a hole so deep.
Beyond edge of sight, tipped into night.
Down.
Down.
To velvet lake of phosphor shrouds,
Of twisting heat, of burning clouds.
To where the spider mares abound,
Down to where my dreams are found.
Excerpt from Abyssa Obscura and Other Visions,
the collected works of Scelerus Greim,
the spyrer artist, poet and anarchist.
In the last frozen heartbeat between life and death, Kell’s snarling blade was narrowing towards Donna’s breast.
Seventy-one was a blur in Donna’s hand as it came smashing down on the thrusting blade with stunning force. Both chainswords shrieked defiantly as their spinning teeth struck, binding together for a fraction of a second before being flung violently apart. Donna recovered her guard position with a practiced flick of the wrist. Kell’s heavier blade swung wildly and gouged a bloody furrow across his thigh. The bounty hunter shrieked a curse and staggered backwards. The crowd roared its approval at the unexpected comeback.
Donna straightened up from the bar and let Seventy-one idle quietly for a moment. The watching gangers all fell silent, enrapt by the unfolding drama.
“Y’know, Kell,” she spat through gritted teeth. “Poisons are funny things. Not four shifts ago, I was stung by sludge jellies, in the sword arm no less, and it feels just fine now. I guess it’s been poisoned enough already.”
That was a lie. Donna’s forearm felt afire as if it had been dipped in bowl of biting insects, but it certainly wasn’t paralysed.
Kell was trying to clamp the flow of blood from his thigh with one hand while keeping his blade up with the other. The more he bled out the weaker he would get, so now it was Donna’s turn to gloat and let the shock set in for a moment. Besides, Donna had a lot of frustrations to exorcise and she wanted to savour the moment. She stalked towards the bounty hunter with a murderous gleam in her beautiful blue eye.
“I’ve had bounty scum like you on my ass ever since I came down here.”
“And what a great ass!” some wag shouted from the audience. Normally she would have maimed whoever said that on principle, but right now she barely even noticed it.
“And if there’s one thing I hate about all of you,” she continued, “it’s that you’re not in it for money, like you claim, or for justice or protecting hivers.”
She fired up Seventy-one again, its low snarl accentuating her words.
“No, you do it for the glory. You do it so you can strut around and pretend you’re better than the scum you’re hunting. You do it so you can hurt people and claim you had to do it, that you had no choice. Well, we all get to make choices. You made yours, and now I’m going to show you mine.”
Donna advanced with her sword held loosely at a low guard.
“I’m going to leave your arms and face until last, Kell, so you can keep fighting for as long as you feel like,” she told him, and took a lazy cut that forced him to limp backwards. She circled like a merciless predator.
“Trying to ambush me in Glory Hole was enough reason to kill you on its own, but the crap you’ve been spouting tonight…” She shook her head and her long dreadlocks swayed with the motion. Her voice became a husky tocsin of utter menace. “For that I’m going to carve you up first.”
Donna leapt into the fray, bellowing a murderous shriek and whirling Seventy-one like a dervish. Kell presented a parry but Donna’s first move was only a feint. She whirled around him at the last instant, making a straight-armed cut at his backside.
Her chainblade struck home, ripping through the heavy material of Kell’s flak coat and its lining of mesh armour like paper. The bounty hunter howled as the relentless teeth chewed off a meaty slice of haunch and upper thigh before glancing off his hipbone. The blade splattered crimson rain across the bar and the spectators cheered again with bloodlust. Kell slid awkwardly onto one knee in a spreading pool of his own gore.
Donna was still moving, slamming Seventy-one down like a guillotine on Kell’s exposed foot. The chainsword Donna called Seventy-one became Seventy-six in that instant, tearing through boot, tarsi and metatarsi to send Kell’s five toes rolling away like fat, wriggling maggots.
Donna spun away with a pretty dancing step she had been taught when she was six. She pirouetted around her prey, forcing Kell to drag his mangled foot over hard-packed dirt and broken glass to keep facing her.
Kell alternated between blubbering incoherently and screeching as Donna dodged in with her blade biting again and again. He tried to lunge at her, so she took an ear and left it dangling by a scrap of scalp.
Donna laid open her opponent’s shoulder so that the glistening bone of his scapula could be seen peeking out. She carved through ribs and into a lung to make a wound that blew out pink froth in time with Kell’s ragged breathing. A dozen other nicks and gouges marked his quivering body as she teased and caressed it lovingly with Seventy-six.
She was making Kell into her fetish doll, venting her pent-up anger and frustration on his wretched form. She spun round faster, wilder. Even hardened gangers blanched and turned away as she stripped Kell’s flesh from his bones. He could barely stay upright now, swaying and gurgling as his life-blood leaked out of torn flesh. The blade clattered from his nerveless hand.
Somewhere in Kell’s wrecked body a spark of defiance still burned. He clawed at his holster, painstakingly dragging out his bolt pistol.
Donna laughed. “Come on Kell, last chance!” She stopped and posed for a moment, letting him raise a shaking arm to take aim. Gangers scattered from the line of fire behind her. Kell pulled the trigger and sent a bolt round roaring off to explode against the bar. Naturally, Donna was no longer there.
A flesh girl started screaming shrilly. Donna leapt behind Kell and jammed her own gun against the back of his bald skull. Another bolt round roared off from his pistol, this time exploding in flesh with an obscene smacking sound.
Donna felt an almost orgasmic sense of release as she pulled the trigger, spreading Kell’s brains out across the dirt floor of the UnWeLcoMinN. The shot was a shout of ecstasy in her ears; the bolt was her incandescent euphoria as it burned his hated skull to ash.
In the momentary warm afterglow, Donna looked down and found to her surprise that she had shot him with the Pig. There wasn’t much of Kell left that wasn’t charred and smoking.
The whole bar erupted with gunfire. For a split second Donna thought they were saluting her somehow. Bullets came zipping past close enough for her to feel. No. They were shooting at each other. As she dived out of the firing line she found that they were shooting at her, too. Autopistol rounds tracked holes in the bar next to her as she ran, and a shotgun blast kicked up an eruption of dirt at her feet. Bodies were dropping everywhere, arms jerking and flailing as they were hit.
Donna ran for an exit amidst scenes of unmitigated mayhem. Gangers flipped tables into barricades and went at it even as their friends and enemies got blasted into meat puppets around their ears. Vicious hand-to-hand brawling and point-blank shooting was quickly defining three groups—the Orlocks were congregating at one end of the bar, the Cawdor at the other, the Goliaths (and Donna) in the middle and a lot of twitching corpses in between.
Donna had no hesitation running for cover with the leather-clad Orlocks. They whooped and waved her on, putting down a creditable covering fire. It was an easy choice for her to make, since the Goliaths would have skinned her in an instant and the Cawdor would no doubt burn her for being a she-harlot or something. Orlocks, on the other hand, hated Delaque like Kell with a passion, and also they just liked to hav
e a good time. She cracked a Goliath’s shaven skull as she ran towards them to return the compliment.
“Thanks, boys!” she cried, bounding behind a table.
It was quite intimate in there, with about twenty Orlocks wedged in behind five tables. They were grinning happily and blazing away. Hot, jingling shell-casings rained everywhere. The mad release of tension Donna had felt seemed to be contagious; the Orlocks were working out their frustrations with firepower too. The Orlock nearest her turned and shouted something but Donna couldn’t hear a word of it over the constant rattle of auto-fire. He nodded at the door. Donna saw that the Orlocks were moving off, dragging their wounded out the exit first.
Donna checked the Pig. It was out of juice just as she’d feared. Holstering it, she unsheathed her laspistol and stood, snapping off a couple of shots. She only half aimed since the shots were meant to keep the Orlocks sweet than actually do any damage. The first shot, however, took a Cawdor smack in the forehead, putting a smoking third eye through his penitent hood and straight into his brain. The second hit was equally miraculous, taking down a Goliath with a solid body hit at the other end of the bar. The Orlocks whooped and yelled even louder, battering her with comradely punches as she ducked back down.
A frag grenade went off in the bar as Donna was crawling for the door, and the indiscriminately scything shrapnel signalled a general exodus for all parties. The Cawdor poured out of the other exit and the Goliaths forced their own way out through a wall in typically brutal fashion. The pitched battle inside turned into a running battle through the twisting alleyways outside. Every door and corner seemed to be lit with gunflashes. Gangers darted everywhere, loosing off shots at half-seen shapes in the darkness, and smoke and flames billowing out of the bar gave the scene a ruddy, hellish quality. Anarchy was running naked through the streets of Dust Falls with all guns blazing.
Donna and a pack of maybe a dozen Orlocks from different gangs rallied in a nearby street. The Orlocks seemed to have latched onto Donna as a lucky charm in the confusion. Her height and swinging mass of stained, blonde dreadlocks made her nice and easy to spot in the dark too, she thought ruefully. She was still wondering how to get rid of the Orlocks when Hanno arrived on the scene.
Even in the dark, and from the other end of the street, Donna could see that Hanno was about ready to burst a blood vessel. He had a gang of watchmen with him, all armed to the teeth, and a trailing crowd of Escher, Van Saar and Delaque from the other slop shop. Hanno spotted Donna and started striding forward with a face like thunder.
At that moment a group of Goliaths appeared out of another alley and let fly at the Orlocks, who retaliated in kind. The watchmen intervened, loosing off scatter rounds at both gangs. All sides went diving for cover and another gun battle erupted in earnest. More gangers were drawn to the noise and the fight soon crackled up in intensity like a flash fire.
Donna saw Hanno leading the watchmen forward by bounds, determinedly trying to force apart the warring factions with shotgun blasts and gun butts. She certainly didn’t want to be around by the time he reached her vicinity.
“Time to go, boys. It’s been real fun,” Donna called to the Orlocks, and then ran off down the street.
To her dismay, the Orlocks took this as a piece of sage tactical advice and ran straight after her. The Goliaths chased the Orlocks, the watchmen chased both groups, and the gangers followed the watchmen. Donna had no clue where the Cawdor had gone until she reached the stockade and found the gate was wide open.
The zealous bigots of House Cawdor had decided to go out and start their own ugly little war with the scavvies. They hadn’t gotten far. The rubble outside was littered with Cawdor and scavvy bodies. A knot of diehard hood-heads was making a last stand in the lee of a large slab out in the waste zone. They were surrounded by at least ten times their number of scavvies and going down fast. It sounded like they were singing psalms.
Donna, the Orlocks, the Goliaths, the watchmen, and then everybody else careered out of the gate and into the fight with all the subtlety and tactical acumen of a blinded milliasaur. They hit the back of the scavvies and killed a score of them before the ragged horde realised it was being attacked from two sides at once. The Cawdor immediately rallied and started forging a path through the scavvies with fanatical fervour. The anarchic battle that had started inside Dust Falls now engulfed the waste zone outside, and shots flew like hail.
Donna was never sure how she survived the encounter. The scavvies were a threat to all but beyond that it was every gang for themselves. There were over two hundred fighters around her, duking it out with everything from sharp rocks to plasma cannons. It became one of the larger gunfights in Underhive history and it certainly was the biggest, most chaotic brawl Donna had ever seen.
She weaved through the fight, loosing off shots at the scavvies and slashing at them in her path. She needed a way out—any way out—but all around her were brawling gangers and darting mutants. Bullets whined about her and las-rounds hissed back and forth in a deadly crescendo underscored by the throaty bark of bolter rounds and the wild rattling of auto-guns. There was no shelter. Every rubble pile or shallow trench was fiercely fought over with its own knot of besiegers and besieged.
It was a measure of Donna’s desperation that she found the safest place to be was actually fighting the scavvies in hand-to-hand combat. If she was being shot at, the scavvies were just as likely to hit her opponents as herself. She kept ducking and diving, trying to work her way towards the Abyss through the seething ebb and flow of battle.
That was working fine until she ran up against the scavvy giant.
Who knows what Badzone rad-hole spawned that monstrosity, or what random mix of chemicals and poisons conspired to throw up a chance mutation like that? But life always found a way to survive and thrive, no matter how ugly the results were.
This was the stuff of childhood nightmares. Its bullet-shaped head and slab-muscled shoulders towered above Mad Donna. Spade-like claws and a thickly scaled hide completed its inhuman appearance. Incongruously human-looking mismatched eyes, one green and one blue, were the only things betraying its true parentage.
It looked far from human when it tossed aside the broken body of a ganger and lumbered towards Donna, its slit mouth bellowing a wordless challenge. Ducking under a reaching claw, she slashed at a wrist thicker than her thigh, but Seventy-six skidded off its iron-hard scales. The giant chuckled as it sent her reeling with a casual backhand.
Donna’s ears were left ringing by the glancing blow. The giant was slow but one hit was all it needed to snap her bones and incapacitate her. She could see more scavvies closing in out of the corner of her eye, taking confidence from the fearsome presence of their bigger brother. Donna desperately needed an edge to even the odds, but the Pig was already out of juice and it was her only weapon capable of taking down something so big.
Scurrying backward over the treacherous rubble, she saw that she was being forced closer to the edge of the Abyss. She made a snap decision and ran straight for a spar jutting over the dizzying gulf with the scaly giant lumbering right at her heels.
Flakes of rust and chunks of rubble fell from the rotting spar as she ran out onto it, and the whole thing vibrated alarmingly in time with her footsteps. Donna sheathed Seventy-six, turned, and faced her foe with the inky void at her feet.
The gigantic mutant hesitated at the brink with almost comic uncertainty written on its bestial face. Donna felt a brief flash of hope that it might just give up and go find someone else to eviscerate. No such luck. It carefully placed one broad foot on the spar and stretched out to seize her with its ape-like arms. The metal creaked in protest under its weight.
Donna ducked beneath its scaly arms and desperately fired her laspistol into its face. The shot only singed, but that was enough to make the giant rear back, its arms wind-milling for balance. She hung on for dear life as the rusting beam shook wildly, and then aimed a vicious kick at the creature’s ankle.
&nbs
p; Her thick boot heel struck bone with a satisfying crunch. The giant grunted in surprise and teetered past the fatal point of no return, gathering speed like a falling pillar as it pitched sidewise into the Abyss with a disconsolate wail. Donna almost fell off, too, trying to watch him disappear into the darkness below.
Scavvies were skulking on nearby heaps of rubble. They had long muskets and bullets zinged off metal and rocks near Donna but nothing came even close to hitting her. Generally speaking, scavvies were the most appalling shots and had poor weaponry to go with it, but they compensated by making sure numbers were most definitely on their side. There was no going back that way, not for a while at least. Donna holstered her laspistol and hung off the spar with both hands so she could swing along beneath it and get some cover. As she did so, she spotted a cracked half-pipe jutting out below the edge of the dome floor nearby. It was hard to ignore the vast, hungry gulf at her back as she clambered over to the pipe, but Donna didn’t freeze and made it across before her strength gave out.
A rank stench and an ooze of old slurry flowing from the pipe told her it was for waste disposal, but she wasn’t fussy. It was this or go back into battle, and Donna reckoned she had seen her fill of fighting for this shift. She decided that she definitely would rather crawl away down a pipe full of effluent.
A crackling sound and a shower of sparks over on the roadway caught her attention and distracted her from the earnest Enforcer Hanno. At first she thought there had been some kind of accident among the lines of moving vehicles, but then she looked more closely at the roadway and realised she was mistaken. It wasn’t a solid road at all. It was a wide, grid-like mesh of thick rails that fizzled and spluttered with vagrant electricity in the cloying mist. A vehicle breaking away from the steadily moving traffic stream had caused the sparks. It had jumped onto different rails that curved over to the walkway where she and Hanno stood.
Necromunda - Survival Instinct Page 9