But it was Valtin who began to laugh. ‘Poor Kal,’ he said. ‘You have no idea why you are here, do you?’
Kal had had enough. He grabbed Valtin by the shoulders, pulled him to his feet and kneed him in the groin. As Valtin Schemko, Lord Chamberlain of the most powerful House on all Necromunda, doubled over in pain, Kal Jerico, ticked off Underhive bounty hunter, picked him up at the waist and tossed him across the room onto the bed.
Brandi and Candi, who’d apparently sat up during the commotion, bounced off the bed to either side as Valtin fell between them. They both screamed and ran from the room.
Kal crossed to the bed, stepped up onto the mattress and sat on top of Valtin’s chest. ‘We used to be friends,’ he said, looking down into his nephew’s frightened eyes. ‘And that’s why you’re still alive. But if you treat me like one of your Spire lackeys again, I will kill you.’
Valtin raised his hands up to his face in surrender. ‘I’m sorry, Kal,’ he said. ‘It’s so hard to turn it off. I have to watch my back all the time up here.’
‘It’s no different downhive,’ snarled Kal.
‘But at least you can see your enemies coming,’ said Valtin. ‘I never know if I’m talking to an ally or an adversary, so I must guard my words and speak in half-truths to make sure valuable information doesn’t make it into the wrong hands.’
Kal considered letting Valtin back up. He wasn’t such a bad guy, but he knew how the game was played. If he let up too soon, he’d lose control again. ‘At least if you mess up, nobody dies,’ said Kal.
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said Valtin. ‘Look, I’ll tell you everything, but it’s getting kind of hard to breathe, and I think the girls would probably like us to leave.’
‘Will they be here when I get back?’ asked Kal.
‘If you’d like them to be,’ said Valtin.
‘Then you have a deal,’ said Kal. He stood, making sure to put just a little extra pressure on his nephew’s chest before stepping off the bed. He wanted Valtin to have a constant reminder of who was truly in charge in this room.
Kal pointed at the door, which he noticed Valtin had closed and locked behind him when he entered. ‘Lead the way, nephew,’ said Kal.
Valtin stood up with a twinge and then rubbed his palm against his sternum. He looked at Kal. ‘Shouldn’t you finish dressing first?’ he asked.
‘Right,’ said Kal. ‘Where are my weapons?’
‘There he goes,’ yelled Scabbs. He pointed up towards a catwalk running between two huge vent fans. The force of the air blew dead pieces of skin from his arm into his face. ‘Don’t shoot him in the head!’ he added.
It was too late. A bolt from Yolanda’s laspistol ripped through the air towards their quarry, a surprisingly fast ratskin who’d been scavenging around Glory Hole recently. He’d apparently looted the wrong person – a guilder by the name of Tritus – earning him a bounty on his head. The ratskin had broken the first rule of stealing: never steal from a guilder.
Amazingly, Yolanda’s shot missed its mark, burning a hole through the grating behind the ratskin as he ran towards the far fan.
‘Scavving ratskin,’ she said. ‘He swerved when he should have veered.’
Scabbs never understood more than half of what Yolanda said, but he knew she’d been shooting to kill. ‘He’s hardly worth anything dead, Yolanda,’ he said. ‘Try to aim low.’
The ratskin thief had almost made it to the other fan. Scabbs had no idea what their quarry was up to. The catwalk didn’t go past the fan housing, and the blades would rip him apart if he tried to make it into the ductwork behind them.
Yolanda shot again as the ratskin reached the fan. The blast hit the metal housing just above the thief’s head, sending a cloud of sparks into the air around their quarry. When it dissipated, the ratskin was nowhere to be seen.
Scabbs and Yolanda looked at each other. She broke the silence first. ‘Well, go after him, Scabbs,’ she said. ‘You’re a half-ratskin tracker. He’s a ratskin thief. So track. How hard can it be?’
Scabbs was about to argue, but knew from long experience the futility of it all. ‘Just make sure you shoot the right ratskin, okay?’
Scabbs scampered up the ladder. When he reached the top, the force of the air from the first fan blew a huge cloud of dead skin from his arms and face that slowly filtered towards the ground. He glanced down at the ground through the cloud, hoping for a reprieve. Yolanda pointed her gun at him and motioned him on, so he shrugged and trotted off towards the other fan.
When Scabbs got to the other end of the catwalk he began to laugh.
‘What’s so scavving funny?’ yelled Yolanda from below.
Scabbs looked over the railing at his partner. ‘Well, you got him… sort of,’ he said. ‘Come up here. I need help getting him out.’
‘What?’
Scabbs just motioned for Yolanda to join him and turned back to their squirming quarry.
The side of the fan housing had a gash where someone had pulled back the plasteel plating. It was an escape hatch that led into the ductwork just past the fan blades. Their bounty had obviously been planning to use it to get away.
Yolanda’s shot must have hit the housing just as their quarry tried to squeeze through, and the blast had either melted the metal or the impact had jammed it closed a little, making the hole just too small for the ratskin. He had one leg up to his groin and one arm up past the shoulder through the narrow opening. His head kept banging into the top of the crack as he twisted back and forth trying to get out.
Scabbs laughed again.
Kal sat in a comfortable chair with his boots resting on the edge of Valtin’s desk. He’d pushed the chair around to the side to avoid looking into the sun behind his nephew. As they talked, Kal idly drew a laspistol and aimed it at various pieces of art hanging on the walls and the statues on Valtin’s bookshelves. Periodically, Valtin would cringe and Kal made mental notes of which objects were the most valuable to his nephew. It felt good to have his weapons back, and his trousers.
‘So, Helmawr’s dead and you need me to track down his killer, right?’ said Kal. He mentally shot a painting of his father taking on an entire ratskin clan with his bare hands. In reality, the old man had probably been wearing his patriarch power armour and ripped the defenceless ratskins apart with his power claws, if it, or anything remotely like it, had ever happened at all.
‘Not exactly,’ said Valtin. When Kal’s laspistol strayed over towards him he raised his hands. ‘Let me continue,’ he said. ‘We have others working to uncover the assassins. Your role is more vital than that.’
Kal waved the barrel of his laspistol in a circle around Valtin’s face. ‘Get to the point, nephew.’
‘I want you to assume the throne,’ said Valtin. He ducked under his desk. After a moment, he peeked his head over the top and looked at Kal.
‘You want my ass to do what?’ asked Kal.
‘Take the throne,’ said Valtin. He crawled back into his chair, but kept low. ‘Lead the house, with my help, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Kal.
Valtin stood and faced Kal with his hands raised, palms forward to show he had nothing to hide. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘The house needs a strong leader and I need someone I can trust on the throne.’
‘You mean someone you can control,’ said Kal.
‘Not at all,’ said Valtin. ‘I had that with Gerontius. He was getting so senile some days he would order skull chips with tea.’
Kal laughed despite himself.
‘No, what we need right now is someone strong enough to hold the house together before it tears itself apart in sibling rivalry.’
‘The other heirs won’t mind me stepping in?’ asked Kal. He’d gone back to taking mental pot shots at the various art objects in the room.
‘Oh, they’ll mind,’ said Valti
n. ‘They just won’t do anything about it. Not openly anyway. You see, they’re all afraid of you.’
Kal smiled. He liked the sound of that. ‘Bunch of prissy Spire nobles afraid of the downhiver?’
Valtin shook his head. ‘No, many of them are quite accomplished fighters…’
‘Especially in their spyrer rigs,’ said Kal, returning to the painting of Gerontius and the ratskins.
‘True,’ said Valtin. He sat down again. Kal could tell he was trying not to watch where the laspistol was pointing. ‘They can hold their own, but all of them were terrified of Armand…’
‘And I killed Armand,’ said Kal. ‘I get it.’
‘Exactly,’ said Valtin. ‘He’d never been bested, and you killed him while he was wearing his rig.’
‘It wasn’t exactly working at the time,’ said Kal. He holstered his laspistol.
Valtin laughed. ‘Funny, I always seem to forget that part when I tell the story. The point is that everyone assumed Armand would inherit the throne, so with him gone, you are the logical choice that should quash any House civil wars, which we can ill afford at a time when we are under attack.’
Kal stood and stretched. This meeting had lasted too long and he needed a drink. ‘So that wedding invitation was a ruse to get me into the Spire without arousing suspicion, huh? Not a bad idea.’
‘No,’ said Valtin. ‘The wedding is real. You may be able to control the heirs with just your good looks and reputation, but the other houses won’t follow the lead of a bastard child from the depths of the hive. So, we need to shore up your power base before you take the throne.’
‘Through marriage?’ asked Kal. Both laspistols had somehow found their way back into his hands. ‘That’s just not going to happen. You’ll have to put a lasgun to my head to get me to walk down the aisle.’
‘Can’t be helped,’ said Valtin. ‘To make this work, we need allies outside the house, especially in House Catallus. With them on your side, we can easily control the rest.’
Kal moved towards the door. ‘No scavving way,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lead the house and I definitely don’t want to get married.’
Valtin came around the desk. ‘It would be a marriage in name only;’ he said, ‘and I promise it won’t last long. Once we root out the assassin and get through this critical time, you can abdicate. Until then, you can live with Candi, Brandi and Sandi – or have a different girl every night if you want. Plus the house treasury would be at your disposal, within certain limits, of course.’
Kal kicked the chair over towards him and sat down again. ‘Keep talking,’ he said.
‘Look what we have here,’ said Yolanda as she came up beside Scabbs on the catwalk, ‘A rat caught in a trap.’
The ratskin had made it halfway through a small crack in the ductwork. He turned his bulbous head towards her as he struggled to get through. His large, fleshy ears twitched, as did the whiskers beneath his snout-like nose. If he had a tail, it was caught on the other side of the opening. Yolanda decided she didn’t really want to know.
He stopped struggling long enough to spit at Yolanda. She grabbed Scabbs and pulled him into the path of the soggy projectile. ‘Very funny,’ said the trapped thief. ‘I’ve never heard that one before.’
His words were oddly clipped as if making the consonant sounds took extra effort with all that mouth to work with. Yolanda pushed past Scabbs, who was busy wiping spit off his face. ‘Listen, rat,’ said Yolanda.
‘My name is Sonny,’ said the ratskin.
‘Original,’ said Yolanda. ‘Do you have a sister named Girlie, too?’ She thumped Sonny on the forehead. ‘Listen, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to give your arm a good yank. Either you come unstuck and I take you in for the bounty on your head, or you don’t and I shoot your head off and plop it into my sack.’
‘His arm could come off,’ said Scabbs.
Yolanda shot a glare back at her partner.
‘I’m just saying,’ said Scabbs as he wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘That’s a third option. His arm could come off. Depends on how stuck he is and how hard you pull.’
When Yolanda turned back to their bounty, she saw Sonny had renewed his efforts to push past the opening. He was now trying to duck his head down and get it through to the other side, and out of Yolanda’s line of sight.
Yolanda spat on her hands and rubbed them together. Bracing her foot against the side of the air duct, she grabbed Sonny’s flailing arm and gave a hard yank. Something definitely popped up around the ratskin’s shoulder.
‘Hey!’ yelled Sonny. ‘That scavving hurt.’
‘At least your arm stayed on,’ said Scabbs.
Yolanda let go of Sonny’s arm and pulled out her laspistol and aimed it just below his chin.
‘Wait,’ said Sonny. ‘I can tell you about another score worth far more than the bounty on my head.’
Yolanda kept her weapon trained on the ratskin, but didn’t pull the trigger. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘I was working up near the Fresh Air Saloon last week,’ said Sonny.
‘Helping patrons with their wallets, no doubt?’
Sonny nodded, making his ears flop up and down. ‘Anyway, some Orlock gangers went up to this huge guy drinking by himself and began asking him questions. At first he just told them to go away, but they got persistent, like Orlocks do, and they got louder and louder, until everyone in the bar could hear the conversation…’
Yolanda pushed the barrel of her laspistol into the folds of Sonny’s ear. ‘Get to the point,’ she said.
‘They kept asking him about a big score outside the hive, some royal transport coming in with valuable Spire artefacts or something. Sounded like he was planning to bring it down and rob it. At least, these gangers thought he’d been looking for scummers.’
‘Nobody can take down a royal transport,’ said Scabbs. ‘Shoot him, Yolanda. He’s giving ratskins a bad name with that crazy story.’
‘That’s what I thought, too,’ said Sonny. ‘But this morning I was by the docks liberating some cargo, and I heard some guards talking about a royal transport coming in for an emergency landing, only no transport ever came in.’
Yolanda pulled her gun out of Sonny’s ear. ‘Who was this big guy in the bar?’ she asked.
‘I never saw his face,’ said Sonny. ‘He wore a cloak that covered his entire body. It looked like a tent it was so huge. But when the lead Orlock got up in his face demanding a piece of the action, the big guy swiped out with something under his cloak and ripped the ganger’s chest open. I left right after that as I’m not too popular with the enforcers.’
Sonny looked back and forth between Yolanda and Scabbs. ‘So is that information worth my life?’ he asked.
‘Possibly,’ said Yolanda ‘If it’s true.’
‘And if we can get the artefact away from that big brute and his mercenaries,’ added Scabbs.
‘I’ll help,’ said Sonny. ‘And look, I’ll let you have half of my stash.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of jewellery and coins. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from back at my lair.’
Yolanda took one look at the stash in Sonny’s hand and then raised her gun and shot twice in succession. Sonny fell limp, still stuck in the cramped opening, with two round, smoking holes in his forehead. Yolanda reached out and grabbed the loot from his hand before it fell through the catwalk grating.
‘Why’d you do that?’ asked Scabbs. ‘I thought his plan sounded pretty good.’
‘It did,’ said Yolanda. She pulled a pair of loop earrings from the pile of Sonny’s loot. ‘But these are mine. Scavving runt must have stolen them from me last week.’
After pocketing the rest of the loot, Yolanda put her earrings back on. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘I thought Jerico’s stupid dog had eaten them.’
‘Oh
scav,’ said Scabbs.
‘What?’ asked Yolanda. She pulled out her sword and looked for an angle to get at Sonny’s neck.
‘I totally forgot about Wotan,’ said Scabbs. ‘We left him back in the Sump Hole.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Yolanda. ‘It can’t get into too much trouble there.’
Wotan stopped running. It wasn’t that he was tired. That could never happen. At least not during the thousand year half-life of his power core. No, he stopped to let his processors deal with all the extra scents being drawn into his body.
He’d followed Kal’s trail to the Hive City docks. It was a smelly place. Not that Wotan could differentiate between pleasant and foul smells. To him everything from the backside of a human to a hunk of mystery meat smelled the same – and in the Underhive that wasn’t far from the truth.
But the docks held far too many scents for Wotan’s analyzers to handle quickly. So he stopped and waited. As he sat, the metal mastiff looked around the area. To the left, the docks extended out to the edge of the dome. Ships and men and goods all moved around in a chaotic weave. To his right stood a row of buildings in various stages of repair. The one at the end sparked something somewhere deep in Wotan’s memory core.
The mastiff released a short series of tinny barks that roughly translated in his software as, ‘Jerico! Jerico! Jerico! Jerico!’
He ran off and bounded towards the building opposite the docks. As he crashed through the door, ripping a huge hole in the lower quarter panel, the name above the door made its way through the circuits towards his memory core: Madam Noritake’s House of Fun.
Hermod Kauderer pressed a hidden switch that opened the door to the darkened room and stepped through. Only Kauderer could access the room. In fact, nobody else in the Spire even knew of its existence; nobody left alive anyway. It was tucked away in a windowless corner of the Helmawr estate with only the one door, which opened onto Kauderer’s personal maze of secret passages.
He had always believed there were certain tasks best left to the experts, and as he was the resident expert on extracting information, he left this task to himself. Kauderer didn’t particularly enjoy this part of his job. He felt that resorting to torture meant someone somewhere hadn’t done their job properly. In his business, there were many ways of obtaining information; most of which didn’t leave the informant bloody and beaten and requiring of disposal.
Lasgun Wedding Page 5