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Terminal Overkill – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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I

MEANDER’S GATE

My mother’s name was Red Tori.

She had high, genuine rat skin boots, rockcrete-hard legs, a half-shaved head and a shock of auburn hair that she spiked into a knife’s-edge mohawk. She lived by a simple code. Kill or be killed. The hive itself was her teacher and she was in a state of constant learning.

She was not the soft, gentle, mothering kind you hear about in uphive tales. You know the type – the kindly noblewoman in her seventh cycle of rejuvenat who finally gives birth to her first and only child; a loved and cherished infant who is raised with kind words, an indulgent nanny and a gang of smart nursery servitors, kitted out in the finest spider silk harlequin outfits, to order around and play with.

No. None of that crap.

My mother had no softness. No pity. She was an Escher gang leader and she was as gentle and soothing as a necklace of razor wire. She passed on her experience with snappy lines. ‘Got a problem, get a gun.’

Or, ‘When you have no enemies, you’re dead.’

Or, ‘Shit doesn’t arrive with a bell about its neck.’

Or, ‘Come on. It’s only pain.’

Or, ‘Never met a dead Goliath I didn’t like.’

But her favourite saying was what she shouted to her gangers when they were sprinting into battle: ‘Be bold, scummers! Life is short. And it’s getting shorter.’

There were hushed rumours about what had driven my mother down this low, to Meander’s Gate. She’d murdered a guilder. Poisoned her gang leader. Fallen foul of the Heavy Flamer Crusade on one of their fanatical purges.

I never dared ask.

When one juve did, a nondescript woman named Torlith, my mother went from standing still to a roundhouse kick in a thrilling blur. Her boot connected with the juve’s jaw before Torlith knew what was coming.

Bam! It was magnificent. The stupid girl was still spitting out blood and teeth as my mother turned and strode back to the ganghall. ‘Frekking idiot,’ she muttered.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ one of the other gangers said to her when they got inside.

My mother’s cat-yellow eyes flayed the women with contempt. She couldn’t stand whining. ‘Get over it. This hive isn’t fair.’

Whatever crime had driven my mother downhive turned out to be a blessing. She’d prospered in the deadly, treacherous world of shifting no-man’s-lands, and fought her way up to form her own gang. She named them the Wild Hydras.

All her gangers came from a vast distillery named Femdrake Pits. I pieced together a view of it from the stories they told. A cyclopean dome with heavy rockcrete buttresses, stacked habs alongside crude stills, condensing pipes and steaming holding vats. A place where a misstep could drop you into a tank of mandrake concentrate, necrosis gel, neural-block, hemolysis syrup or slab-vat hormones. That was the stuff that was sold to the Goliaths. It was a powerful solution, used in minute quantities for each batch of Goliath mewlings.

Blackeye had many stories about that place. She told me, ‘My sister fell in. It went through her skin. Her mouth. Her nose. We dragged her out. She was crying and moaning. Her body was growing and swelling. Her skin started to stretch. It was as taut as a bladder-wrack. Then she started to tear, like a snake shedding its pelt. Her skin split and her body oozed out. She was howling like a mutant. I used a blade to open up an artery, just to stop her screaming. Even when she was dead her muscles kept growing. I could hardly watch. Last time I saw her remains she was as big as a hab.’

I stood open-mouthed listening to it all. You could imagine the horror of it from the look on Blackeye’s face.

‘When it was done there was nothing human left. My sister was all lumps of accelerator-grown muscle slab and vat-meat. That night I packed all my possessions and the next day I got the hell out of there.’

‘Is that true?’ I asked.

Clete slapped me around the head. ‘Of course it is!’

All the Wild Hydras had similar tales. All had fled downhive. All of them bore their scars. The tox-plants of House Escher were a deadly breeding ground. That much time spent around poisons exacted a heavy toll. My mother took them in. Being in a gang gave them new hope. A new purpose. A new edge. Femdrake survivors made good fighters, she liked to say. They were all cut from similar cloth. They held the same grudges and had the same attitudes.

‘I’m their mother,’ she said, without warmth or tenderness, though she was more like a strict master. ‘But they do not give me as much trouble as you two.’

‘What trouble?’ I demanded.

She fixed me with her yellow eyes. ‘Making sure that no one kills me…’ she said, the end of her sentence hanging in the air, ‘…until you’re old enough to take revenge.’ She tapped her razor-nails onto the hammered tin tabletop for emphasis – a sound like the rattle of wild gunfire.

When I was young I thought the Wild Hydras were an impossibly glamorous band of gunslingers and big-talkers with their huge hair and high boots and swirling blue gang tattoos. They were the meanest bunch of women this side of Lightshaft 9.

We lived in the DimZone – a borderland between the settled reaches and the underhive. Above us trillions of tons of rockcrete and people reached up into the clouds. Whatever they were.

‘Clouds are like water,’ Clete said, but that sounded daft. ‘Think of steam,’ she said, but it was clear that she was just repeating things other people had told her.

‘Clouds are like pollution,’ Blackeye said, and I believed her. She had that matter-of-fact confidence. And we knew all about pollution. DimZone was the dump into which it all fell and flowed.

I lay imagining uphive sometimes. It seemed an extraordinary place. Millennia of design and expansion, collapse and repair.

Higher up, I heard, the hive was lit with lightshafts and the Necromundan sun. There were domes so vast that they contained mountain ranges of compacted trash, their summits so high that they were lost in darkness; seething rivers of bubbling effluent; deltas of tox-swamps where skiffs of sumpkroc skin skimmed off by-products; and dense forests of fungus. They would take weeks to cross. So boundless that they had their own microclimates and species of flora and fauna, their own stories and myths that made sense of their world. Reaching slabs of stacked-habs set one by the other, the narrow canyons in-between whipping up dirt and debris with each downdraught. Suspended cities of spherical steel-pods, hundreds of them hanging from great chains linked with swing-wires, gantries and stressed-cable bridges.

That was what people said.

But none of us had ever been so high. DimZone was a buffer. A compressed series of strata where the rockcrete domes were broken and crumbling. Where tunnels had collapsed into perilous squeezes, sump pools, sinks and tunnel-siphons. Where the desperate clung on as their feet dangled over the edge. Below was the underhive – and nothing good came from there.

We all wanted to get the hell out of there, but despite that we were fiercely proud to live in the DimZone. We were better than those beneath us, and by Throne, one day, we vowed, we’d get back up to the more civilised areas, and we’d do it the hard way.

We lived on scraps brought down from the city above. We wore fourth-hand clothes. Lived in habs built of old flakboard panels of pressed mushroom starch or rusting sheet metal. All detritus discarded from above. Brought down to our level by the dumpload in heavy cargo lifters of rusting steel. Unloaded by hydraulic claw-arms, and dragged about the tunnels by sweating haulage servitors, their lobotomised bodies embedded in the cart-yokes, their unwashed flesh stinking with years of toil and filth.

The DimZone got its name because the few functioning lightshafts directed only a thin dusk-light down to us. And we were too deep to tap into the working energy cablings that powered the hive’s factorums above. We ran our lumens with an ad hoc mix of wheezing methayne generators, effluent-electric turbines, dams and, of course, the Lightning Farm – a colossal external structure flung out into the void around the outer-spire that channelled raw electric power from the atmospheric turbulence. It was the main source of power for the lower courses of the Western Districts. We all relied on it for our water siphons, the air pumps and scrubbers. It was an erratic energy source. When the weather was extreme the lights would flicker and spark, and the water-stills would run on double speed. When there was a lull, there came the dull rumble of the Chem Falls hydro plant whining into action. The only time the power died was when the gangs who owned it started squabbling.

There were no vast domes near us. Not the kind that featured in stories of uphive. They had been here, I was told, but they’d all collapsed as the hive grew over our heads. All that had survived was a confused and tangled web of small domes, service tunnels, excavated halls, pipes and chasms. It was a compressed zone, being slowly crushed and repaired with each hive quake season, each time a little tighter than before.

Lower down was a slum of lawless wilderness that stretched into the very roots of our world. A foul, foetid, stinking, desperate place, home to mutants and creeping creatures of scales and slime and fangs and bestial hungers. A place that offered escape, flight, deliverance, evasion, forgetting. A place for the shunned. The insane. The absconders. The redeemed. The excluded. The hunted. The damned.

‘But,’ Blackeye said with a wink, ‘it offers certain opportunities.’

Deep, deep down, in the forgotten depths of mines and shafts and chasms, were the scattered remains of the very first settlements upon the planet. It was said that fabulous treasures of art and archeotech were there for the finding.

That wasn’t a trade we dabbled in. There was too much bargaining and bartering for my mother. She liked danger and risk and the kind of problems that could be fixed with the knuckle or the gun. The Wild Hydras were warriors and they guarded the caravan route that went down to the underhive through a maze of tunnels known as Meander’s Guts. It was a perilous descent, prone to hive quakes and floods and all manner of dangers. When an immense rift opened up at the bottom of the Guts, our dome suddenly became an important hub. It was named Quake Chasm, and the Wild Hydras made a fortune keeping the approach tunnels clear of all the dreadful underhive monsters. The gangers brought back trophies of skulls and pelts and fangs and claws. Things that had names, and those that were unique creations of the tox-pools below, and which crept upwards in search of human blood.

We made a fortune charging tithes on each hiver heading to the Quake Chasm. Some went game hunting with cherished hotshot and long-las rifles slung over their shoulders. Others needed to escape, and fast. Others still were simply adventurers. Brave, heedless, desperate: they paid their credits and passed downwards with big hopes, big words and big guns. Most never came back. The underhive consumed them. Kept their bones and their names hidden deep in its bowels. Let nothing return.

Once news of the first discoveries started to appear then it didn’t take long for the guilders to hear. The Merchant Guild. In a world of murder, felony, bloodshed and lynching, they were the untouchables. The power brokers of the hives. The grease that kept us all working. Or so they told us. And if you crossed them then they used their massive financial muscle to squash you like a spitting-roach slammed with a power hammer.

Killing a guilder would bring swift and brutal retribution. It was a terrible crime that was spoken of in hushed voices, and the faces of the guilty were daubed all over the Western Districts – hoardings plastered inches thick with placards, posters and signboards bearing sketched mugshots, and the familiar stencilled words, Wanted: Dead. It was an easy way for the insane to make a name for themselves. They got their fifteen minutes of infamy.

So when news came that the guilders were on their way, my mother was edgy. It was both a threat and an opportunity. Which way the credit fell was up to her.

She prepared herself as she did for a battle. Spiked hair, vivid make-up, guns and knives loaded, oiled and honed.

The guilder emissary came on a grav-palanquin with a guard of quadrupedal servitor bodyguards, their human torsos grey and festering, faces blank behind opaque masks. The curtains parted as he stepped out.

He said his name was Uriah Kuttle. He was a hooded male with augmetic eyes, and the lower half of his face was a grid of plain metal air-grilles that wheezed with each pump of his asthmatic lung-bellows. He did not use a ladder to descend from the palanquin, but floated out, and fell to the ground as slowly as a feather.

I was amazed but Blackeye was unimpressed. ‘Grav-inhibitor,’ she said in a tone that stated that this was a cheap trick, good for astonishing civilians, but not gangers like her.

Uriah’s token of office was a heavy skull icon that hung from a golden chain about his neck. It was set with seven blue crystals and bore seals of authority. A scroll of parchment hung from the skull’s open mouth like a lolling tongue. There were words there, but I’d never bothered much with letters. Letters were for tox-distillery workers, not warriors. I held them in contempt. My lessons were all in guns, fists and staying alive.

Uriah floated forward. ‘Ganger. I have brought gifts,’ he rasped and nodded towards his thrall-servant. The thrall stepped quickly forward and presented a metal tray. It rattled with gaudy stuff. Beads. Trinkets. Cheap-pressed knives. A few recycled powercells.

My mother laughed at his offerings. ‘Think I’m impressed, grille-face?’ She put her hand to her pistol.

Uriah’s eyes narrowed. They were tiny red beads of light that glowed with contempt. His breath whistled through his steel vents. ‘Take your hand from your gun, ganger. Keep your threats for the low-lifes. The Guild does not accept dissenters. Only servants. But for that we shall pay you generously.’

She nodded towards the thrall-servant. ‘That’s generous?’ she sneered.

Uriah’s arm moved suddenly and my mother went for her own gun. But he was faster on the draw. A pistol appeared in his outstretched hand and my mother aborted a kick and dived desperately to the side. Too late, I thought.

But Uriah flipped the gun about and presented it to her, grip first, standing stock-still. The guilder wheezed. There was amusement in his voice. ‘I could have taken your life, ganger. Life is one of the gifts I return to you. But comply and I shall also give you this.’

There was a moment of hush then. You could have heard a droplet fall from the dome above and land with a miniature explosion of moisture against a rusting tin roof. Everyone exhaled, assessed and relaxed. My mother slammed her pistol back into its holster, and took the proffered weapon.

It was a long-barrelled duelling pistol, worked with inlaid silver. There was an ornate ‘A’ inset into one side of the smooth rosewood handle, and a pair of crossed swords on the other. It must have come from an uphive noble family. You never saw such quality of workmanship this low down. It made me hungry.

And more than that, it was enhanced with a hotshot power accelerator. My mother’s eyes went wide. She had once used a neuro-whip, but the circuitry was unreliable, and now she left it hanging on the ganghall wall. This was more than a replacement. It was perfection. My mouth was dry. Our guns would never survive a hotshot. They’d blow or melt or back-fire. And a hotshot could go straight through an inch of guilder steel. Maybe two.

‘Yours,’ Uriah stated. ‘Upon one condition.’

‘What?’

‘Quake Chasm is Terra Prohibitus. No one enters except me.’

My mother weighed the pistol in her hand. She was smitten. She didn’t bother bargaining. ‘No one goes in and nothing comes out.’

‘That includes the Wild Hydras,’ Uriah stated.

My mother paused then. She looked as if she were going to give the pistol back. She spun it in her hand. ‘Tell me first. What is so special about Quake Chasm?’

There was a whirr of bionics from inside his hood. ‘Terra Prohibitus,’ he stated. He said nothing else. He did not bargain.

Red Tori weighed the gun in her hand. I thought for a moment that she was going to give it back. I felt a pang of loss at the thought. In a world of pressed-steel knives, backstreet rifled guns and refurbished powercells that gun was just so beautiful.

I could see her holding it and feeling its balance, its craftsmanship, its sublime and deadly artistry.

At last she said, ‘Deal.’

Just that. Deal. And I let out the long-held breath and my stomach rumbled.

My mother put out a hand to shake on the deal, low-hive style and the emissary’s cowled head lowered as he looked at the proffered welcome, then put a hand across his body. ‘Forgive me. I do not touch women.’

‘I am Red Tori of House Escher,’ my mother declared.

His eyes flickered as the metal grille turned to regard her. ‘You are Escher, and Escher are women. But worse. You’re women with a cursed bloodline.’

There were angry shouts from the juves. My mother’s face turned furious under her warpaint. ‘Cursed?’ she snapped and nodded towards us. ‘Look. Have you seen my son?’

The red beads of light turned in our direction. The augmetics narrowed as they focused on us both. The light trained first on me and then my brother. ‘Which one is male?’ the guilder demanded.

My brother stepped forward.

The guilder paused, metallic lenses clicking as he regarded us. His voice was a monotone as he observed, ‘He does not look simple. Nor imbecilic.’

‘He’s not,’ my mother said.

The red lights focused back on her. There was a rough croak that I realised was laughter. ‘Are you sure he’s yours?’

My mother drove her razor-nails into the flesh of her palms. Blood gathered in the creases and dripped to the floor. ‘I’ve killed for less,’ she snarled.

The emissary laughed once more. A croaking, metallic sound. ‘So have I. Keep your threats for the low-lifes. The Guild does not accept dissenters. Only servants. And for that I have paid you well.’

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