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Once a Stimm Queen – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Once a Stimm Queen

Robbie MacNiven

Don’t run.

That was what Jannix had told Sy and the younger gangers before they’d gone in. Unless the word to break was given, do not run. You wouldn’t make it out in two pieces, let alone one. As the oldest of the Stimm Queen juves, Jannix had seen it all before, or so she told them. If they wanted to make it through their first bust-up, they had to do what she said.

But Sy ran. It was when the shooting stopped and the booming voice of the enforcer on the hailer vox had gone quiet. It was her only chance, she was certain. They were all going to die here, amidst the sump drains, picked off by the sharpshooters up on the top of the recyc units, or cut to pieces when the lawmen finally made the push to the edge of the drainworks. She could see Karil was already wounded, her shoulder ripped by a grazing man-stopper, crying into her hands while knee deep in raw, stinking Hive Primus effluvium. The rest of the juves, Sy included, were little better off – young, wide-eyed girls with just one electro-tat between them, holding lasrifles and autoguns too big for them, pinned in a shootout during what was supposed to be an easy stimm run.

Necromunda was one bastard of a place to grow up in.

‘You’ll be fine if you stay down,’ Jannix had said, her voice surreally calm. Her expression didn’t quite manage to match the words – Sy could see from her darting eyes and the whiteness of her knuckles that the older juve was faking it. She was as scared as the rest of them. That realisation alone was probably the worst thing about the whole predicament. Sy had looked up to Jannix for as long as she could remember, ever more so after she’d sworn the Escher oath and drawn first blood in the name of the House. The older girl had always seemed so sure, so brazen. Nothing from the underhive to the spires could possibly ever touch her. She always said it was because she never hesitated, that to do so in a place like Necromunda was fatal.

Don’t hesitate. Just do.

Those were the words raging through Sy’s mind as the enforcer’s guns fell silent. Ducking beneath one of the corroded, mould-blotched sump pipes, she wormed her starved body past a coolant vent, then bolted through the noxious, stinking slurry, east towards the Deadzone.

‘Sy, stop!’

Voices screamed, and she heard feet in the sump behind her. She threw a panicky half-glance back – one of the older girls, Cinth, was coming after her.

The older juve didn’t get far. There was a crack, and part of Cinth’s head disintegrated, her purple mohawk turned suddenly red. She hit the side of the duct with a hideous thump and splashed down into the ooze, disappearing like she’d never existed. Sy ran on, her heart racing, tears stinging her eyes. She wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t.

A routine stimm-run for the Goliaths, a task simple enough for juves, but none of the Stimm Queens had expected a dispersal force of blackplates to be waiting at the handover point. There were no coincidences in Hive Primus, that was another of Jannix’s sayings. Just what that meant in this particular case, Sy had no idea. Nobody told them anything. It didn’t matter anymore. She was out, and she wasn’t going back.

Sy slipped under another coolant pipe and was forced onto her hands and knees to work her way through a waste duct. She was barely able to keep her head above the filth, pressed up against the fungus-clogged rockcrete of the duct’s top. As centuries worth of polluted filth from billions of hivers lapped against her, she kept her mouth sealed, only drawing breath when she burst from the far side of the pipeline. The inhalation nearly choked her, the stink and urge to gag overpowering.

Still she went on. The memory of Cinth’s brain matter exploding flashed behind her eyes, and she half stumbled, a few hanging cables narrowly arresting her fall. If she went down amidst the hive sump, she knew it wouldn’t allow her to re-emerge again.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Once a Stimm Queen © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Once a Stimm Queen, Necromunda, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-929-4

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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Find out more about the underworld of Necromunda at
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