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Once a Killer – Extract

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Captives

The sky above the Dredge was a shard of dull crimson, crowded out by the needle-peak spires of the city. It looked like an old wound, the edges ragged, damage stubbornly refusing to heal. On another world, it might have felt like a bad omen. On Alecto, it was just another day.

I was in the front seat of my patrol groundcar, by the open air refectoria on Heroes Prospekt, doing my best to enjoy the flavour of warmed-over recaff, triple strength to keep me awake, when the alert came in over my helmet vox.

‘Bastion HQ to Rampart patrol five-nine-omega-nine.’ The voice hissed with static. ‘Gunfire reported, Zaranghast Commercia. Advise status.’

I knew the location. Zaranghast Commercia was a down-at-heel collection of food stalls, tonsurists, apothecaries and other tabernae of various stripes, set under the communal roof of a cathedral-sized indoor trading space, situated on the western side of the district.

I threw away the recaff and gunned the engine.

‘Five-nine-omega-nine receiving, Bastion. Sanctioner Kirian Malenko responding. Estimate arrival at eight minutes.’

I made it in seven, the early-morning traffic scattering like frightened birds at the sight of the Rampart groundcar and its insignia.

Once at the alert destination, I parked beside the front entrance and drew my sidearm. The weapon was a Zev Arms semi-automatic stub pistol in .55 calibre, the Penitent model. A portable hand-cannon, it was proof positive of a common adage in Varangantua – downclave, there was no such thing as too much gun.

Weapon at the ready, I proceeded into the commercia.

It didn’t take any great genius to locate the source of the alert. A man’s body lay halfway down a parade of storefronts, his life bled out onto the tiled floor of the inner courtyard. The blood trail led back to the doorway of a nearby provisioner’s.

‘Bastion, this is five-nine-omega-nine. One body found at Zaranghast. Suspected homicide. Offender at large.’

‘Affirmed, omega-nine. Do you need backup?’

‘Negative. I’ll handle it. Send a meat wagon for the body. I’ll let you know whether one’s needed for the offender.’

There’s an art to moving quietly in body armour. Most sanctioners never learn it. It’s not just the bulk of the standard uniform, with its full-face helmet, oversized boots and layers of flak armour, all designed to be as intimidating as possible. As the uniformed branch of Alecto’s enforcers, we’re supposed to be the visible presence of the Lex – whether it’s on the streets or in the nightmares of criminals. For the most part, that involves kicking down doors and making arrests with no time for stealth or any other kind of subtlety.

I work patrol, though. There, things are different. Don’t get me wrong. I can kick down doors with the best of them. But on patrol, sometimes you need a few more tools than are kept in the standard sanctioner’s toolbox. Not every problem needs a hammer. Not unless you’ve got a nail waiting to be hit.

In this case, with a body down and no sign of fleeing civilians in the vicinity, I had to wonder whether I was dealing with plain murder or a hostage situation.

I took a sideways route towards the provisioner’s, careful to stay out of sight of anyone who might be watching through the big display window in front. As I passed the audio emporium next door, I saw a nervous commercia worker with blue face tats peer over the stacks of reel-slugs towards me.

I gestured to him to stay down. The safety off on my stub pistol, I eased to the edge of the provisioner’s, planning on snatching a fast look through the glass.

There were hostages all right. As I drew closer, I could hear some of them crying. My first glimpse confirmed one offender inside, a scrawny, jumpy scuzz-stain waving an autopistol around with menace as he stood in the middle of one of the aisles. He had grabbed a young woman as a shield, the crook of his arm tight around her throat as he threatened the other hostages with the pistol. He was screaming so loud his words were audible, even through the glass.

‘It ain’t my fault!’ His voice was petulant. ‘You saw it – all of you! If he’d just opened the strongbox like I told him, he wouldn’t have got himself hurt!’

I counted six captives inside, including the woman whose neck he was holding. One of them, a balding, middle-aged man in an apron marked with the provisioner’s sigil, stood ahead of the rest, his hands raised as he tried to placate the gunman.

‘He didn’t have the code. Please! Only the owner can open the strongbox, and she’s not here!’

‘You’re lying!’ the scuzzer yelled, pointing the autopistol at him. ‘I already told you! Keep lying to me, it’ll be your fault what happens!’

Even from a distance, I could see he was a stimm-head. He had the telltale signs – skin flushed, profusely sweating and, most incriminating of all, twitchy, spasmodic movements like he had a live wire hidden somewhere, giving him the occasional jolt.

Most stimms were legal, with the right slate, but there was a thriving shadow trade in super-concentrated, toxic-level mega-stimms with names like Crystal Emperor or Heisengrad Blue. I couldn’t know for sure, but I assumed one of them was the killer’s habit of choice. He’d probably decided to rob the provisioner’s to get the slate to buy more drugs.

I was tempted to take the shot from where I was. Put him down before he hurt anyone else. But the window presented a problem.

I could detect a slight distortion in the view through the glass. It was a magnification layer, intended to make the goods on sale appear larger and more attractive to people passing by. I could try to compensate when I took the shot, but any misjudgement and I’d hit the hostage. The stimm-head’s constant involuntary movements didn’t make it any easier.

I would have to get inside.

Moving while the scuzzer was distracted, I eased the door open. The gunman was oblivious, too busy arguing with his hostages to notice the presence of a sanctioner even as I advanced into the premises. I aimed my gun, waiting for his next twitch to lift his head far enough away from the woman for a clean kill shot.

If I had learnt one thing in Varangantua, it was never bet against the Imperial citizenry to do the most stupid thing imaginable while picking the worst possible moment to do it.

‘A sanctioner?’ The balding man looked at me in relief. ‘Thank the Holy Throne!’

Alerted, the stimm-head jerked around to face me, bringing his human shield with him.

So much for stealth.

‘Drop your weapon!’ I commanded. ‘You are under arrest in the name of the Emperor!’

That works more often than you’d think. Most people are so scared of sanctioners they’ll do anything you tell them as long as it’s said with conviction, and/or you are pointing a gun at them. Scuzzhead, though, was made of sterner stuff. Or, more likely, he was so wired on stimms he wasn’t afraid of anything.

‘No, you’re lying!’ He squinted like I was out of focus. ‘The Emperor didn’t send you. If He did, He would have told me. I’m His messenger. I am the Chosen One, come to redeem the city of its sins.’

I made a mental note to add blasphemy under the influence of a proscribed substance to the other charges he was facing.

He still had the woman, and I didn’t have a clear shot. I know some sanctioners would have fired anyway, shooting through the hostage if needed. They’d argue losing one civilian when another five lives were at stake wasn’t too bad. Me? I’d like to think I’m not that much of a bastard.

‘What’s the message?’ I asked.

The question caught him off guard. ‘What?’

‘The message. You said you were a messenger. That means there must be a message.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded in understanding. ‘Yes. The Emperor told me where we went wrong. Varangantua is cruel. Ugly. But it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t be that way. We should be beautiful. Golden. Instead, we let our souls become trapped in these vile bodies. That’s what causes the corruption.’

‘Corruption, right.’ I tried to sound persuaded. ‘And you decided to start here with your message? Inside a provisioner’s?’

‘What? No!’ He scowled like I was stupid. ‘The Emperor only talks to me when I take the pills, the blue miracles. That’s why I came here. I need slate to buy more.’

‘Right. You want in on the strongbox. But these people don’t know the code–’

‘That’s what they say!’ Anger flared in his features, the poison coursing through his brain making him volatile. ‘But they’re lying! This city is full of liars. That’s why the Emperor says I have to clean it! Make it beautiful again!’

Filled with sudden zeal, he pulled the woman closer and pressed the pistol to her temple.

‘Do you want to see the beauty? I can open this vessel – show you her soul!’

‘Wait!’

I lifted the muzzle of my gun, flipping the weapon around in my hand to present the grip end towards him.

‘Wait! You’ve convinced me.’

I inched forward to narrow the distance between us, drifting towards the shelves on the side of the aisle closest to him.

‘I can see you’re telling the truth. I want to join you. Become your first disciple. Here, let me give you my gun so you can see I’m with you.’

He removed the autopistol from the woman’s head and jabbed it towards me.

‘This is some kind of trick.’

‘No trick. Look, I’ll put my gun down.’

I took another step closer. It seemed the staff had been in the middle of restocking when the gunman entered. The metal shelves on one side of the aisle were empty, with a selection of goods stacked in neat rows on the floor nearby, ready to fill the gaps.

Each movement careful and deliberate, I laid the pistol on the shelf nearest to me.

‘I’ll slide it to you,’ I said. ‘That way, you’ll have all the guns. You’ll be in charge. Then, you’ll know I’m not lying.’

It was breaking half a dozen regs to surrender my weapon. If things went wrong, I could end up on a charge. Then again, if things went wrong, getting punished for breaking regs would be the least of my sorrows. Odds were, I’d be dead.

Either way, I knew it was a dumb move. Blame the woman he held as a hostage. She had long blonde hair, with her head shaved on one side, and eyes so blue they might almost have been shining pieces of cobalt ore.

Guess maybe she reminded me of someone. It was the only reason I had for taking the chance I did.

I pushed the stub gun away from me, sliding it down the shelf towards the stimm-head. He reached to pick it up, only to realise both his hands were already full. After a moment’s indecision, he transferred the autopistol to his other hand, awkwardly attempting to keep me covered while maintaining his grip on the hostage.

Eyes wide, he stretched his now free hand towards the weapon on the shelf. No doubt he couldn’t believe the turn his day was taking. A sanctioner giving up his gun and offering to be his disciple? The Emperor really was on his side.

The scuzzhead’s fingers closed around the body of the stub gun.

Contact.

All the while I was offering up my gun and sliding it to him, my own free hand had been busy working behind me. I had lifted the shock maul out of its loop on my belt, thumb hovering over the activator that powered the weapon. I touched the maul to the shelf behind my back, triggering it to send Emperor alone knew how many volts surging through the metal.

His hand in contact with both the stub gun and the shelf, the stimm-head began twitching for a different reason. Mouth clenched in a rictus grin that showed missing teeth, he jerked and convulsed, the autopistol falling from nerveless fingers to clatter harmlessly to the floor.

‘Down!’

I yelled at the woman, only to see she had caught some volts by virtue of her connection with her captor. Electricity streaming through her, she joined him in the same shuddering, jittering dance.

Already moving, I closed the distance and pushed her out of the way. Protected from the juice by the insulation in my gloves, I lifted the shock maul from the shelf, sweeping it in a rising arc straight into the side of the scuzzer’s head.

He went down like a cold sack of dreck. I don’t care what kind of stimms he was on, there aren’t many can take a headshot from a shock maul and stay conscious.

In case it didn’t last, I worked fast. A swift kick propelled the autopistol out of his reach before I turned him onto his front and manacled his wrists behind him.

Once the restraints were on, I retrieved my gun. Nearby, the other hostages had gathered around the blonde to check she was all right.

Rendering assistance to shaken civilians wasn’t part of my job, not when there was an offender to be dealt with. I secured the autopistol, tucking it into the back of my equipment belt.

The Bastion maintains a drop-off for confiscated guns. The weapons are examined to check whether they’ve been used in any unsolved cases before being recycled. The good-quality ones end up with the Defence Corps, to see better service doing the Emperor’s work. The dreck – and the ones from downclave are mostly dreck, as likely to kill the user as whatever they are aimed at – get melted into slag. Only to be turned into new guns in the forges later, some of which end up on the streets via the black market, starting the cycle all over again.

With the offender subdued and arrested, public order was restored. My work there was done.

In a few hours, a probator would be along to take statements from the provisioner’s staff. The Bastion might even send a verispex to go over the forensics, but it was unlikely. The local justicius probably wouldn’t even read the report.

It was an open-and-shut case. The only question was sentencing. The justicius would decide whether to send the offender to the penal legion, condemn him to the prison colony on Sacc-5 or let the Ecclesiarchy have him on account of the blasphemy charge. That last would be the harshest option – the Ecclesiarchy had its own ways of punishing miscreants.

Sometimes, the local news-sheets carried details of the verdicts, but mostly I didn’t follow the cases. Not any more. I didn’t care what happened once my part was done.

I had started to drag the dead weight of the stimm-head out of the provisioner’s when I heard the vox in my helmet crackle back into life.

‘Bastion to Rampart five-nine-omega-nine. Advise status.’

‘Bastion, this is omega-nine. Status is clean. Offender arrested and awaiting transport.’

‘Affirmed, omega-nine. I’ll put your prisoner on the list for pickup. There’s a new alert in your patrol area. Male fugitive spotted fleeing scene of a suspected homicide, Valdov Office Plexus. Can you respond?’

I glanced down at the prisoner, still unconscious. He wasn’t going anywhere. I fastened his manacles to one of the lumen-poles outside, ready for the pickup wagon.

‘Affirmed, Bastion. Show me responding.’

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WARHAMMER CRIME

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

‘Grit in The Wheels’ first published in White Dwarf 467 in 2021.
‘Chains’, ‘Slate Run’ and ‘Clear as Glass’ first published digitally in 2022.
‘Once a Killer, Always a Killer’ first published digitally in 2022 as ‘Once a Killer…Part 1’ and ‘Once a Killer…Part 2’.
‘Habeas Corpus’ first published in White Dwarf 479 in 2022..
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Jamie Gibson.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-475-6

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