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Underhive Apex – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Underhive Apex

By Will McDermott

‘There he is, Dog,’ hissed D’onne. ‘Looks like the information we beat out of that drunken, crap-for-brains hunter in Kal’s Town panned out.’

She flipped the eyepatch covering her cybernetic eye onto her forehead to get a closer look through its telescopic lens. She counted seven idol-carrying Cawdor gangers on the manufactorum floor. She didn’t relish the encounter. It was hardly a fair fight and would not be any fun at all. The Cawdor were all dressed in robes and armed with a motley mess of scavenged autoguns and blunderbusses. The only danger they presented was if their clothes got caught in D’onne’s chainblade as she cut them apart.

But they had her quarry – Lumpy Nox – sequestered in their midst like one of the idols they loved so much. She needed Lumpy for herself, so the Cawdor had to go.

Lumpy was, perhaps, the only underhive bounty hunter crazier than D’onne, and his story was not dissimilar to her own. As Grub Targeson, he’d been an upstanding merchant guilder, a member of one of the privileged classes. But when the mutated lump growing on his shoulder became too big to hide – and then spoke to him – Targeson’s life of privilege and wealth came to an end. He was forced to flee into the underhive and become Lumpy Nox.

‘I knew Targeson was crazy,’ D’onne said as she squatted on a metal walkway above the factory floor, ‘but I never thought he was crazy enough to run with the Cawdor. They smell worse than he does, and Lumpy drinks enough Second Best that he smells like a Skull Marsh chem vat.

‘Head down the back door, Dog.’ D’onne turned to her huge ogryn bodyguard, who stood just outside the hole she’d crawled through to watch the Cawdor gang. ‘I’ll drive them towards you down there.’

She pointed at the doorway behind the gang and then held five fingers in front of the dumb brute’s face. He nodded and smiled but didn’t move. D’onne sighed and pulled her hand back to slap the ogryn, but then, for once, thought better of it. The noise might alert the gang.

‘Go!’ she hissed, pointing at the door two storeys down again. She expected Dog would just leap to the ground outside, but instead he shoved his way through the door, dislodging several hunks of rockcrete, and clomped away from her around the interior of the building. As if the falling masonry wasn’t a big enough clue to their presence, his huge feet clanged against the metal walkway, which echoed through the entire mile-long structure.

‘Dammit!’ yelled D’onne. Below her, the Cawdor scattered, finding defensive positions behind machines. ‘This is why I never plan.’

She darted through the now larger hole to reassess her next move but stopped halfway through when her cybernetic eye caught some movement past the tangle of pipes below her. She switched to infrared to get a better look through the conduits and she nearly giggled in utter delight at what she saw.

Through the bramble of broken pipes, girders and tubes that had once supplied energy and canned air, and disposed of toxic and human waste, D’onne spotted about a dozen large heat signatures lumbering towards the factory entrance below.

‘Goliaths!’ she cackled. ‘Come to join the fun. My-my, Lumpy is one popular little mutie. This should be fun!’

D’onne clapped her hands together silently in front of her face as she considered the chaos this new entry in the Lumpy Lottery would cause. She ducked back through the hole and grabbed the hilt of Pig, her trusty plasma pistol. The Cawdor gangers had crept from their cover and were scanning the catwalk for her, attention firmly away from where the Goliaths were about to breach. This was getting more interesting by the second.

The Goliaths swept into the manufactorum. The first two tossed smoke grenades into the middle of the machines, which belched clouds of acrid fumes. The next Goliath, a mountain of a beast with a grenade launcher riveted to his arm, propelled several more smoke grenades farther out, seemingly in a single salvo.

With almost the entire Cawdor gang coughing and blinded, the rest of the Goliaths streamed through the doorway and encircled the smoke-filled centre. Several hulking gangers with stub guns and combat shotguns held there, while the two largest brutes walked confidently into the smoke, each backed by a lone bruiser. The largest of these hoisted a two-handed axe with four-inch rotating blades, a renderizer. The other huge brute carried a variation that added a second set of serrated knives below the rotating blades. The two bruisers kept well behind the leaders, lest those spinning blades sweep through them.

A moment after the foursome entered the billowing clouds, D’onne heard the screeching whine of the spinning blades, followed by a series of guttural screams. Gouts of blood and bits of bone, muscle and brain spouted into the air above the smoke as the Goliaths moved through the battle zone.

A few Cawdor tried to run, but they were cut down as soon as they emerged from the smoke. The first took a blast from a combat shotgun, which shredded the poor Cawdor’s flak armour as well as his chest cavity. He dropped to the floor, a gaping hole where his torso had been.

The second runner met a barrage from two stub guns held by the smoke-grenade throwers, which riddled his body. He bled out on the rockcrete floor. The third veered off from the other two and sprinted for the doorway D’onne had told Dog to guard.

Before the Cawdor made it halfway there, though, a dull boom echoed around the chamber followed by the high-pitched whistle of a speeding projectile. The shell hit the female Cawdor in the back, lodged in her spine and exploded, ripping her body in twain.

A moment later, the four Goliaths who had entered the smoke emerged unscathed. The largest of the behemoths, apparently the leader, held Lumpy in the air by his hump. Donna swore she heard two voices screaming, one of which was slightly muted, but extremely upset.

‘You work for us, now!’ Garg, the Goliath leader, said to Lumpy. He held the scummer’s grizzled and bearded face close to better gauge his response. Lumpy flinched as spittle sprayed across his face and into his wild hair. He managed a weak smile and an even weaker nod of his head.

‘We work for you,’ he squeaked.

Garg stared at Lumpy, looking for any indication of guile or cunning behind the terror in his eyes. For added effect, Garg squeezed on the hump, eliciting twin moans of pain from his captive.

‘You know where things are. You lead us to the salvage the Cawdor were looking for,’ Garg grunted at his captive. ‘You find, you live… and you get paid.’ Garg patted the bloody renderizer slung to his hip, making sure Lumpy’s eyes followed his motion. ‘Otherwise, you get the blade.’

After Lumpy nodded again, Garg released his grasp and let the scummer drop to the floor, where he crumpled in a heap.

‘Now, where’s the nearest archeotech stash?’ growled Garg.

Lumpy cowered at Garg’s feet, his eyes darting from the floor to Garg and up towards the ceiling before returning to the floor again. Garg’s nostrils flared as this went on and on. He grabbed his renderizer and lifted it over his head.

‘You want the blade?’ Garg roared. ‘Speak!’

Lumpy seemed to make a decision at Garg’s feet. ‘What if I gave you something more valuable?’ he hissed, his voice barely audible. He motioned Garg to come closer.

The leader of the Forge Brutes wasn’t born yesterday. He lowered the bladed axe head of his renderizer to Lumpy’s hump before leaning in closer.

‘You have an audience,’ Lumpy whispered. Keeping his hand low and hidden, the hive scum pointed towards the wall behind him. ‘One with a huge bounty on her head.’

Garg glanced up and saw a female clad in leather crouched on the metal catwalk above them, and instantly recognised the wide, pink-and-blonde wig encircling her head like a crazy, glazed torus treat from a hive city sweet shop.

‘Mad Donna,’ Garg hissed. He patted Lumpy’s hump with the flat of his axe blade. ‘Help us take her down and you might just live, scummer!’

Garg stood and, trying hard to not stare at his new quarry, formulated a plan. Donna was wanted dead or alive, and as far as Garg was concerned, dead was better.

‘Rat!’ he called to the newest member of his team. ‘Your time has come!’

Rat ran out from behind the bruisers, lugging two energy tanks on his back and carrying a huge weapon in both hands. The barrel ended in long, metal prongs past a metal plate that offered the wielder zero protection if things went wrong.

Garg had taken the storm welder – and the original prospect who wielded it – from one of the foundries on a whim. The weapons were a rite of passage. Garg had lost a lot of gangers to the volatile welder in the past, but when it worked, everything in the welder’s path died. That was what Garg wanted here.

Garg outlined what he wanted from Rat: stride forward. Aim high. Shoot the wall. Rat grinned and trotted off. Garg waved to the rest of the Forge Brutes. Those who had seen the storm welder in action were already moving, fanning out.

A moment later, a loud peal of thunder cracked and echoed through the manufactorum as the air between Rat and the wall filled with long tendrils of lightning. The energy from the welder tore through the wall, the plasteel catwalk, and a section of rockcrete ceiling.

Shards sprayed towards the prospect as chunks of ceiling fell around him, but somehow Rat remained unscathed. As the lightning shower ended and the echoes of thunder receded, the prospect backed towards Garg, his grin larger than ever.

‘I think I got her!’ he exclaimed.

‘You got everything!’ Garg responded. As he watched, the cracks in the wall and ceiling lengthened and spiderwebbed out from the line of impact. Garg ran for the doorway, grabbing Lumpy by his pauldrons and dragging him along behind.

‘Forge Brutes!’ Garg yelled. ‘Outside. Now!’

D’onne started moving even before the young Goliath carrying the strange weapon started towards her. The moment Lumpy and the Goliath leader huddled up, she knew their attention had turned to her, no matter how much they tried to conceal it.

‘Scav me!’ D’onne spat as she turned and dived back through the hole in the wall.

Behind her, the wall cracked and crackled as bolts of lightning lit up the catwalk. Tendrils of electricity darted and weaved, tearing through rockcrete, plasteel and everything else in its path.

D’onne sprinted down the plasteel bridge suspended above the jungle of conduits, but she couldn’t outrun the electricity, which snaked along the metal mesh walkway searching for a grounding point.

The speeding tendrils reached her feet and, despite the hard soles of her boots, jolted her entire body. All D’onne’s muscles spasmed at once, and the next thing she knew she was falling through the horizontal forest of pipes and conduits, banging from one to another all the way down the two-storey drop from the bridge to the cavern floor.

D’onne must have lost consciousness for a moment, because when she could think again, she lay on her back on bare rockcrete, staring up at the utility pipes. Blood – her own blood – dripped from the lowest tube onto her cheek and neck. On the upside, she was alone, so chances were good she hadn’t been out long.

‘Ow!’ she muttered as she flexed her muscles to check for injuries, causing pain to lance through her left knee and elbow. In addition, a dull ache had penetrated the space behind her eyes. She had no time to worry about any of that, though. Those Goliaths would emerge from the manufactorum soon to collect their bounty – her. D’onne had to move. Now.

Luckily, she knew just where to go.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover art by: Neil Roberts

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