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Underhive Apex – Will McDermott

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Kal Jerico: Sinner’s Bounty’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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.

Garg reached the doorway just as a giant slab of rockcrete from the crumbling ceiling ripped through the plasteel walkway above him. At that moment, something barrelled into him, sending him sprawling through the opening onto the cavern floor outside. Lumpy fell with him, slamming his warty, hairy face into Garg’s back.

Garg rolled over and pushed Lumpy off to see what had happened. Zak and Yak, his twin stimmers, held the plasteel walkway above their heads on either side of the doorway, their necks bulging around their active frenzon collars, which made their biceps expand from the stimulants coursing through their bodies.

‘Everybody! Move!’ Garg bellowed.

The gang poured through the opening as the frenzon-boosted stimmers kept the rubble-filled walkway from crashing down on them all.

After the other Forge Brutes had cleared the building, Zak, the elder by nine minutes, turned to his brother. ‘On three,’ he said, flexing his arm muscles. Yak smiled and flexed his arms in return.

‘Three!’ they yelled together and drove their arms up and back as one. Long lengths of twisted girders and tons of crumbling rockcrete fell behind them as the brothers squeezed through the opening and emerged from the collapsing manufactorum.

Garg stood and nodded at the brothers before glaring down at Lumpy.

‘Don’t look at us,’ Lumpy protested. ‘All we did was point out the target. You’re the one who dropped a building on her!’

‘Did she survive?’ Garg asked.

Lumpy shrugged. ‘How should we know?’

‘You’re a witch!’ Garg said, pointing the gore-soaked blades of his renderizer at the hive scum again. ‘You better witch up some idea of where she went. And fast!’

Many emotions played across Lumpy’s ugly face, although Garg only recognised the fear, which was fine by him. After a long moment, though, it was obvious the tracker had no information. But then, Lumpy turned his head towards the hump on his shoulder and talked in low whispers.

Garg grew impatient after the one-sided – as far as he could tell – conversation went on for a full minute. He flipped the switch that made the blade begin spinning on the end of the renderizer.

‘Well?’

Lumpy gulped as the spinning axe blade inched towards his neck. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘My, um, that is, we might have seen Donna dive through a hole before the ceiling collapsed.’

‘Can you track her?’ Garg asked, his renderizer never wavering. ‘You will track her.’

‘We can,’ Lumpy replied. ‘We will.’ He scooted back from the blade and then stood after Garg showed no sign of pressing his advantage. ‘Follow me. We think we see a blood trail.’

Garg followed Lumpy along the path to a spot where blood dripped off the pipes. Dots of brownish-red marked an almost perfectly straight line down the way ahead of them.

‘Anyone could follow that trail,’ Lumpy said. ‘You hardly even need us.’

Garg thrust his renderizer at the hive scum.

‘You lead,’ Garg stated, pointing at the blood-spattered path.

D’onne took stock of her injuries as she limped towards the edge of cavern. She had dislocated her elbow and likely torn something in her knee, which turned every step into an all-too-familiar adventure in searing pain. A deep gash in her forehead was still bleeding, seeping into her left eye and blurring her vision.

‘I missed this,’ D’onne said with a grin. She grabbed her pack, looted the previous day after a particularly successful hunt, wondering if the dead ganger had scored any meds. She hadn’t thought to check at the time, but now she found one stimm injector and some wound adhesive. No bandages. After jabbing the stimm injector into her knee to dull the pain, and slamming her elbow against a vertical pipe to pop it – mostly – back into place, D’onne ripped the eyepatch from her head and spread adhesive on it. It would do to staunch the bleeding, she figured.

By this point D’onne had reached the end of the path. The tunnel that had once connected this cavern to the next had caved in decades earlier. With nothing to pay for the equipment needed or buy the worker contracts for enough labour to open the passage, the house controlling the manufactorum had abandoned it instead.

Over the years, scavengers had opened other passages to plunder the raw materials left behind. Most gangs used the service tunnels through which all the conduits ran. Beside her, the entire mass of pipes descended and plunged through the floor into the maze below. A hatch nearby allowed access. D’onne walked to the hatch and set her eyepatch-bandage on the ground before turning the giant wheel on top. She grunted as she lifted the circular plasteel door up on its hinges.

She looked into the darkness for a moment, allowing her bloody forehead to drip onto the hatch, the ground around the opening and the rungs of the ladder leading into the darkness. Then she wiped the wound with one of her pink braids and slapped the eyepatch over it.

She then headed for another entrance she was fairly certain only she knew about, mostly because she had killed the man who had found it and showed it to her.

‘She went down there?’ asked Garg, looking at the open hatch.

Lumpy shrugged. ‘Where else?’ he asked. ‘The blood trail ends here, and the hatch is open.’

Garg didn’t like it. The opening would be a tight squeeze, and his gangers would have to hand their gear through separately. Cramped quarters were not ideal Goliath terrain, and this access tunnel was tight even for normal-sized gangers, let alone the Forge Brutes. It was tough to swing a renderizer while stooping to avoid the ceiling and surrounded by pipes.

‘What do you think, Morn?’ Garg asked his forge boss.

The second-in-command of the Forge Brutes stepped forward, combat shotgun in hand, and scanned the area.

‘Lots of blood, Garg,’ he said, pointing down at a puddle on the ground. ‘More than before. She weak. We strong. Kill while killing good.’

As if to punctuate his decisive thinking, Morn grabbed Lumpy by the collar and dropped him through the hatch. He then bent down and lowered himself onto the ladder.

‘I scout ahead with tracker,’ he grunted before climbing down. The head of the forge boss’ chainaxe caught on the lip of the hole for a moment, but Morn shook it free and slipped out of sight.

‘Slag, Dross!’ yelled Garg at his two bullies. ‘Follow Morn. Watch his back!’

The two juves rushed to the hole and threw elbows at one another as they jostled for position. They almost came to blows as they vied for the glory of going first.

‘Now!’ shouted Garg. Dross pulled back, fear creasing his forehead, and waited for Slag to climb out of sight before entering the hole.

Garg sighed, but knew competition made Goliaths stronger, so was inwardly pleased at the juves’ antics.

A moment later, Garg heard Morn call from below. ‘All clear!’ he yelled.

Garg motioned for Rat, the prospect with the storm welder, and Larg, one of his bruisers, to help the stimmer brothers get their big weapons – an assault grenade launcher and a paired pulverizer – through the narrow hatch.

‘Jakk and Tazz,’ he said, turning to the two bruisers, ‘help Rat with the storm welder and watch our backs. Come down last.’

With that, Garg unslung his renderizer and dropped it through the hole into the waiting arms of Morn, before squeezing his enormous body through the hatch.

D’onne hung upside down inside the vertical air shaft that ran alongside the other pipes and conduits. The ductwork that once pumped oxygen into the manufactorum had been prised open by an enterprising scummer who wanted a way to bypass the normal comings and goings of the various gangs who fought and scavenged inside the cavern.

Grag or Crag or Frag – whatever his dumb, monosyllabic, Goliath name was – had even welded plasteel rungs inside to make climbing the shaft easier. D’onne hung from one of those now as she peered through a crack in the cover she had scurried through moments before the Goliaths arrived.

After the leader, Garg, disappeared through the hatch, D’onne watched the two stimmers unsling their bulky weapons and hand them down to Larg before sliding down the ladder one by one.

That left the one called Rat, who was having a hell of a time removing the energy tanks strapped to his back, while the two-pronged, two-handed weapon dangled by the cords on the ground next to him.

‘Move it!’ shouted one of the bruisers as he poked the younger Goliath with the butt of his brute cleaver. ‘We don’t got all day!’

Finally, Rat got the tanks off his back and lumbered all of it over to the edge of the hole. As he neared the access hatch, the two bruisers turned to watch and jeer at the prospect.

With her foes distracted, D’onne unslung her feet from the rung and pushed off the shaft with her falling legs as she released her hold on the plasteel panel, erupting from the ducting in an arc that took her halfway to the access hatch.

As she flew, she ducked her head and pitched her body forward, hitting the ground in a roll and popping back to her feet in a dead run. She unsheathed Countless, her trusty chainsword, and thumbed the switch to set the razor-sharp chains in motion.

The whine of the whirring blades caught the attention of the three Goliaths, but it was already too late for the one who had poked Rat. Before he could turn and bring his cleaver to bear, D’onne had run past him, Countless held out to her side. The spinning blades sliced through the Goliath’s midsection without a snag and the bruiser slumped with a satisfying look of surprise on his face.

D’onne pivoted at the edge of the access hole, kicking off the hatch to reverse her course without losing momentum. The hatch closed with a clang as D’onne launched herself at the other bruiser. He raised a boltgun and tried to shoot, but D’onne closed the distance too fast. She sliced his weapon arm off at the elbow. The boltgun hit the ground and fired, discharging an explosive shot that barely missed both of them

The bolt exploded in the mass of pipes behind the bruiser, splitting his attention between that and screaming at his missing arm. D’onne took advantage of the Goliath’s lack of focus. Following her previous downward attack, she bent low at the waist and kicked her legs up and around in an arcing cartwheel to land behind the bruiser.

With his body twisted around and blood gushing from his arm, the bruiser was helpless. She’d hoped for better. An upward slice from D’onne’s chainsword between his legs cut through his abdomen and exited his body at the juncture between his neck and shoulder, completely avoiding every piece of the Goliath’s forge plate armour.

D’onne turned towards Rat, the last one standing, who had pulled out his lone weapon. An axe. The young prospect took one look at Countless and dropped the axe before raising his hands over his head.

‘Ugh,’ D’onne stated flatly. ‘Really? That’s it?’

She was about to advance on the young Goliath and end him, when the access hatch began to open behind Rat. With no time to waste, D’onne dropped, grabbing the bolter next to the severed arm beside her, and fired.

The explosive shell hit Rat in the stomach and burst, sending pieces of him in every direction. The force slammed the hatch back down, and D’onne swore she heard a distant thud from below.

She ran to the hatch and spun the wheel to lock it shut. She took a moment to collect herself, and admire her handiwork. The carnage gave her an idea. With a smile, she gathered up the pieces of enemy gear she needed for her plan.

‘What was that?’ Zak asked.

Garg glanced at the stimmer standing at the bottom of the ladder, bathed in the pool of light from the hatch.

‘What?’ Garg asked the older brother.

‘A chainsword!’ Yak replied, pointing up the ladder.

The plasteel hatch slammed shut above them with a loud clang, plunging the gang into darkness.

‘Check it out,’ commanded Garg. ‘Move!’

He could hear the ganger clamber up the rungs, his powerful, stimm-boosted legs slapping the steps at super speed.

The light returned for a moment as Zak shoved the hatch up, but then an explosion rocked the tunnel floor. The hatch slammed shut again and Zak fell, clanging on the rungs and thudding when he hit the tunnel floor.

‘Someone light a torch!’ Garg yelled.

Morn ignited the lamp attached to his shotgun, which sent a narrow shaft of light down the tunnel.

Garg saw Zak crumpled on the floor beneath the ladder. His younger brother, Yak, ran to his side and helped Zak to his feet, but the elder stimmer limped badly.

‘Slag, Dross,’ Garg shouted. ‘Take care of Zak.’

The two bullies grabbed the stimmer by the arms and led him back away from the ladder. They set him down on the tunnel floor beneath Morn’s light and wrapped a makeshift splint around his injured leg, using the handle from Slag’s axe for support.

Garg turned and glanced at the closed hatch. ‘We need to know what is going on,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else.

Yak must have taken that to mean he should go look, because he immediately sprung up the ladder.

Before Garg could yell at the younger stimmer to wait, Yak slammed open the hatch and pulled himself halfway through the opening.

A giant, double explosion laced with fire and lightning tore cross the hatch opening and down the ladder. Garg turned and ran, pushing past Slag, Dross and the prone Zak – and following the already retreating Morn and Lumpy – as billowing clouds of electricity-infused flames followed behind him.

After the eruption subsided, Garg turned to inspect the damage.

Slag and Dross, their backs blackened and burned, huddled over Zak, who seemed to have been protected from the brunt of it by the two bullies. Beyond them, though, the carnage was complete. Larg, his last bruiser, lay dead near the bottom of the ladder, spud jacker smouldering atop the blackened remains of his body, which was little more than an ash-covered skeleton.

What was left of Yak’s body detached from the slagged remains of the hatch and fell to the floor. His head and torso were gone, incinerated in the explosion. All that remained were his hips and legs, which disintegrated into sludge and bits of bone when they hit the floor.

‘What the slag was that?’ asked Morn.

‘That was your prey declaring herself predator,’ Lumpy said from the darkness.

D’onne watched the hatch from the air duct after setting one of the dead bruiser’s incendiary charges on top of the storm welder’s energy tanks so it would trigger when the hatch opened. She was facing Goliaths. She didn’t expect to wait long. You hit one, they all came roaring back at you – heedless of any obstacle, army or trap standing in their way. It was comforting how much she could depend on that.

The explosion incinerated the top half of the emerging Goliath in a split second. D’onne grinned in glee at the carnage she had wrought, but that smile was cut short as she watched the electricity-licked ball of flames expand towards her.

‘What kind of fuel was in those tanks?’ D’onne yelled.

She yanked the plate shut as the lightning-filled fireball reached the air duct. The plasteel protected her from instant incineration, but the metal plating quickly became too hot to bear, forcing her to slide down the shaft.

All would have been fine for D’onne at that point if a single bolt of lightning hadn’t impacted the air duct directly. Electricity coursed through the shaft, stunning her and causing her to lose her hold. She fell ten metres before hitting a bend in the shaft with a loud clang and bursting through the plating into the pitch-black service tunnel.

Dazed from the fall – and from being electrocuted a second time – D’onne still had the presence of mind to slip around to the far side of the pipes rising around her. She could hear the remnants of the Goliath gang not twenty metres away, shuffling and whispering in the darkness.

D’onne switched her cybernetic eye to night vision to assess the situation. Garg, the leader, had obviously heard her crash to the floor, and had motioned for his gangers to spread out and investigate as he held Lumpy firmly with his other hand.

She considered drawing Pig and taking Garg, but the crafty leader held Lumpy too close. At this distance, in the dark, she was too likely to kill her quarry as well.

Back to hit-and-run, she thought, fighting down the glee.

D’onne moved away from the pipes as quietly as she could. Unfortunately, she could feel the effects of the stimm wearing off. She needed to end this before her knee seized up.

The last four gang members had split into two groups, with a smaller Goliath leading each of the two larger and better-equipped gangers. D’onne knew if she used Pig the light of the plasma stream would give away her location, relinquishing the advantage she had from her cyber eye.

Fortunately, the veteran holding the huge polearm with serrated blades was limping. Whatever that weapon was, D’onne knew the Goliath wouldn’t be able to swing it effectively down here. His limp made him fall behind the juve leading the way.

D’onne skirted around the pipes to approach the duo from behind, sliding Countless from its sheath as quietly as she could. When the young Goliath got within range, D’onne swung the chainsword down, towards the juve’s weapon arm. At the last minute, she flipped the activation rune, sending the deadly chain spinning around the end of the blade.

The young Goliath screamed as Countless sliced through his shoulder, sending his weapon clattering to the floor, still gripped by his hand. At full extension, with the tip of the blade just starting to bite into the juve’s ribs, D’onne twisted her hands and yanked the blade diagonally down across his torso, slicing a giant wedge out of the Goliath’s hip and cutting his leg clean off.

As the Goliath fell to the tunnel floor, D’onne skipped over his bloody body, doing a pirouette as she swung Countless around just below the low ceiling in an arcing swath. The larger Goliath, who had twirled his strange polearm around upon hearing the juve scream, stepped right into the path of Countless, which lopped his head clean off.

D’onne shut off the whining chain and slipped to the side of the attack, counting on the bouncing echoes of her blade to confuse her enemies long enough for her to fade into the darkness and await her next opportunity.

Garg wasn’t about to wait for Donna to attack again. Tossing Lumpy behind him, the huge Goliath stooped down to grab Zak’s grenade launcher, which the stimmer had dropped through the hatch a few minutes earlier.

His mind engulfed by a burning fury, Garg pulled the trigger and launched a series of grenades into the darkness. As the grenades flew, he remembered that Zak’s autofire grenade launcher had been filled with smoke grenades for the manufactorum assault.

If the launcher had been loaded with incendiary charges, Garg may well have killed Mad Donna. However, in the close confines of the service tunnel, he would have incinerated himself and his gang as well – although, as he listened to the sound of her echoing chainsword, he reflected that end might be preferable to becoming another notch on her long belt.

The darkened tunnel filled with choking fumes. Behind him, Lumpy scampered up the ladder to escape the cloud of smoke. Garg decided that was a wise course of action and followed.

‘Morn, Slag,’ Garg yelled as climbed. ‘Regroup up top. Move! Now!’

Above him, Lumpy banged into the hatch, which didn’t budge, causing Garg to slap his head into Lumpy’s boots.

‘What the scavving hell?’ Garg roared. ‘Move.’

‘It’s stuck,’ replied Lumpy, his voice pitched high in terror. ‘I think it melted shut.’

‘Out of the way!’ roared Garg. He grabbed Lumpy by the boot and tore him off the ladder. Lumpy dropped unceremoniously to the bottom, where he landed with a wet splat.

With the way clear, Garg pulled out his combi-pistol. Ignoring the stub gun, he fired a stream of plasma at the melted-shut hatch from the plasma pistol chamber. A gout of swirling, purple energy cut through the plasteel. Garg continued firing until he burned away the entire door, mindless of the molten slag that dripped on his shoulders and chest.

A moment later, Garg emerged from the hatch, his skin blackened in blotches and streaks. Clouds of grey smoke spewed forth from the hole after him. Once clear, he stuck his head into the smoke and called down the hole.

‘Morn,’ he shouted. ‘Grab the tracker and follow! Slag, cover Morn!’

Garg had no idea if the last two members of his gang were alive or dead – or would even follow him back into battle at this point – so he moved to a safer distance and kept his combi-pistol aimed at the centre of the growing cloud of smoke.

The flashes from the end of the grenade launcher blinded D’onne’s cybernetic eye for a moment. With grenades streaking through the air, she dived to the ground and rolled away from the barrage. Her hand landed on a valve wheel, which she frantically pulled on to haul herself between two large pipes as a grenade bounced off the pipe above her and skittered into the darkness.

Luckily, none of the grenades impacted her directly, and those that came close turned out to be harmless smoke bombs. Of course, now she had new problems. The smoke obscured her eye’s night vision and infrared lenses, leaving her as blind as her enemies, and the billowing smoke filling the narrow tunnel put her in real danger of choking to death.

As the Goliath leader yelled at Lumpy, D’onne backed away from the smoke, deciding she should retreat and reassess her attack plans. She changed her mind, though, when she heard the crack of a plasma weapon discharging, smelled the burning ozone, and saw light begin streaming through the liquifying hatch.

Mad Donna did not run. She did not plan. She reacted to life-and-death situations by charging into battle and trusting her skill and luck to carry her past death to the slimmest chance of life beyond.

D’onne ripped the eyepatch from the wound on her forehead and placed it over her nose. She then yanked the long, pink braid from her wig to tie the patch down onto her face. She stormed through the smoke towards the glow of light coming through the hatch above, Pig in hand.

As D’onne neared the pool of light beneath the ladder, a dark shape loomed before her in the smoke. She raised Pig and fired, just as a bullet whipped past her ear and ripped through the bouncing braids of her wig. A stream of glowing plasma shot from Pig’s barrel and burned through the smoke towards the shrouded target.

The plasma hit the young Goliath square in the face, burning off the smoke surrounding the juve’s head as it melted through his scalp, skull and brains. Unfortunately, the plasma-cauterised wound prevented blood from spouting from his neck through the hatch above.

That would have been cool, she thought. Like a fountain of sludge bursting from a main.

D’onne skidded to a halt beneath the hatch and peered through the smoke at the bright entrance. She saw a shadow move away as she arrived, leaving no target visible from the dark. As smoke continued to swirl around her, D’onne shrugged, grinned and grabbed a rung.

Garg watched Lumpy stumble out of the mushrooming cloud of smoke in front of Morn, who held a clump of the scummer’s jacket clutched in his hand as he pushed him forward.

‘Where’s Slag?’ Garg asked. His answer came when he heard the report of the bully’s stub gun, followed by the crack of a plasma pistol and then silence. ‘Dammit!’ he roared.

Garg grabbed Lumpy and held the scummer in front of him as he faced the cloud, aiming his own combi-plasma pistol at the centre of it. Beside him, Morn levelled his combat shotgun at the cloud as well.

‘This won’t end well for you,’ Lumpy stated flatly.

‘Shut your mouth, shield!’ Garg replied with a grunt.

Both were tense, ready to fire at the slightest provocation, when two plasma pistol shots burned through the smoke. The first swirling bolt hit Garg’s combi-pistol, which melted in his hand. The second slagged the barrel of Morn’s combat shotgun, turning his returning fire into dots of molten buckshot. Mad Donna strolled out of the smoke, spinning her plasma pistol in her hand, cybernetic eye glinting.

‘That’s more like it,’ Donna said as she came to a halt outside the range of Garg’s renderizer. A huge smile spread across her face. ‘Now we can end this proper.’

Mad Donna sheathed her plasma pistol and drew her chainsword, which roared to life in her hands.

‘Come on, boys,’ she taunted as she weaved around in front of them. ‘This has been fun, but not a challenge. Subpar, at best. Let’s see if you fare any better up here on level terms. What do you say? Feeling lucky?’

She seems confident, thought Garg. And why shouldn’t she? However, he noticed the crazy bounty hunter favoured her left leg. The limp was barely noticeable but might provide an opening. Garg tossed Lumpy aside – as if the large scummer was nothing more than a bag of rats – and drew his renderizer.

‘Stay, Lumpy,’ he commanded.

‘Yes,’ replied Donna. ‘Stay. We will have words after I kill these two idiots.’

Her smile widened even further, but Garg refused to let her goad him into doing something stupid. Sadly, Morn didn’t feel the same way. The forge boss charged, his chainaxe held over his head, blades spinning.

Donna stood her ground for a moment, but then stepped forward as Morn swung the axe towards her head, moving inside his reach. The forge boss tried to sidestep and change the angle of his swing to catch Donna in the legs, but she was too fast.

She leapt into the air, over the spinning blades arcing beneath her feet, and swung her chainsword wide as she flew past Morn, allowing the momentum of the blade to twist her body in flight. Donna’s blade slid along the plate armour protecting Morn’s abdomen before biting into a section of exposed ribs.

A gout of blood and bone erupted from the Goliath’s chest as Donna’s chainsword sliced free of his body. Morn stumbled forward but managed to turn and raise his axe into a defensive position before Donna pressed her attack. The two chainbladed weapons churned against one another, bouncing the mad woman back a step.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Donna, heaving and staring at the wounded Goliath. ‘You’re dead already.’

‘Might be. Might be… dead,’ Morn grunted as he fell to one knee, gasping as blood streamed down his bare chest and pooled on the ground at his feet. A sudden calm and peace spread across the Goliath’s face that could have been mistaken for resignation, before with the urgency of a dying man he yanked a stimm-slug free from his belt and jabbed it into his neck.

‘But you will die with me.’

The stimms coursing through Morn’s body bolstered the gravely wounded Goliath’s sagging strength and increased his aggression off the charts, forcing D’onne to fight more defensively. It was only a temporary fix, as D’onne well knew – her weakened knee ached as her own stimms wore off – but his unfettered attacks could prove fatal as she fought a pitched battle on two fronts with a leg that might buckle at any moment.

She twisted her stance, grimacing in pain, to see Garg charging from the side, blades screaming around the head of his renderizer. Has the Goliath leader noticed my limp? she wondered. His attack seemed intended to force her to move towards Morn or try her luck pushing off with her bad leg to dodge to the right. Neither option was ideal.

Standing her ground seemed no better, though. The massive Goliath would drive her to the floor if she tried to parry his huge weapon. D’onne considered that she may have underestimated this opponent, and silently chided herself for sheathing Pig.

All these thoughts ran through D’onne’s mind in the span of one of Garg’s long strides, such was the speed at which her combat brain worked. Unfortunately, her quick deliberations left her with no clear options, so she opted for the craziest idea, again.

Pushing off with her strong right leg, D’onne rushed towards Morn, who held his chainaxe at the ready in one hand, while he kept his other arm folded against the gash in his chest to staunch the flow of blood.

As she ran towards Morn, D’onne’s eyes darted to her right to give the Goliath the impression that she intended to sweep past on his left side, as she had done before.

Behind her, Garg followed, his renderizer screaming as he waved it around in anticipation of swinging it through her flesh. D’onne stumbled slightly on her weak leg, and Garg gained a step on her.

Almost within Morn’s reach, D’onne dropped her left shoulder slightly and turned her upper body to that side as well, as if she intended to, again, push off with her good right leg.

Before her, Morn began a high, one-handed swipe of his chainaxe to meet D’onne as she passed him on the left. Behind her, she heard the whoosh of the whining renderizer blades as Garg swung the weapon forward through the air.

Summoning the remnants of her stimm-aided strength and adrenaline, D’onne planted her left leg into the rockcrete floor of the cavern and pushed off as hard as she could to drive her body to the right. With her second step, she pitched forward and dived to the ground – off to the side and well below Morn’s attack.

As D’onne rolled forward, she heard twin, wet thwacks from the chainaxe and renderizer as they cut deep into flesh. She continued rolling a few metres farther before popping up into a crouch, her chainsword at the ready in front of her, as she bit back a scream from the pain in her bent left knee.

She relaxed almost immediately, though, and fell back to the ground, dropping her stilled chainsword so she could massage her knee. The two leaders of the Goliath gang stood side by side, the spinning blades of their respective weapons churning their way through each other’s chests. Blood sprayed for a few moments longer before sputtering out to a slow seep as their hearts stopped pumping.

‘Bastard!’ D’onne spat as she stood there, heaving, and scanned the cavern for Lumpy Nox. The scabby hive scum had disappeared while she’d fought the last two Goliaths.

She hobbled over to the dead gangers, whose spinning blades had locked them together into a grotesque statue to stupidity. She pulled a stimm from Morn’s belt pouch and jabbed it into her thigh. After stretching her leg experimentally to make sure she could walk, she wandered back towards the ruined hatch. Most of the smoke had dissipated, but it was still pitch-black. D’onne stuck her head through the hole and switched her eye to infrared and then night vision, but saw no sign of her quarry.

‘Well this was a complete bust,’ she muttered as she straightened up. ‘Better go find Dog. That worthless piece of sump tar missed the entire battle. If he’s not dead or dying right now, he’ll wish he was!’

As D’onne walked back towards the ruins of the manufactorum, she wondered if Dog might be buried beneath all that rubble, which made her even more ticked-off at the worthless bodyguard. But then she caught sight of him walking towards her down the path.

‘Where in the hive have you been?’ she scolded him from afar, but then her tone softened as she saw him dragging Lumpy Nox behind him. ‘Good Dog,’ she called.

A giant smile spread across the ogryn’s face as he held up his prize in one hand, like a pet showing off a rodent it had just caught. He dropped Lumpy at D’onne’s feet.

D’onne drew Pig and held it to Lumpy’s forehead. ‘Let’s talk, you and I,’ she said. ‘I know the Cawdor hired you to hunt someone down for them. You’re going to tell me where to find them instead.’

Lumpy looked up at D’onne, dispassionately, as if he had not a care in the world, even with the barrel of a plasma pistol planted between his eyes.

D’onne slid Pig off Lumpy’s head and pressed it against the hump beneath the shoulder of his soiled jacket. ‘Let’s try this again,’ she said, staring hard at his fear-widened eyes.

About the Author

Will McDermott is a fantasy and science fiction writer who has written three Necromunda novels for Black Library featuring the bounty hunter Kal Jerico: Cardinal Crimson, Lasgun Wedding and Blood Royal, co-written with Gordon Rennie. He lives and works in Bothell, Washington with his family.

An extract from Kal Jerico: Sinner’s Bounty.

‘Oh, scav.’

Kal Jerico was already dropping into a crouch as the exclamation left his mouth. The axe was little more than a rusty fan blade lashed to a length of bone, and it cut the air with a thin whistle. With no Kal to stop it, the makeshift weapon continued its arc unimpeded, burying itself in a steam pipe. A boiling fug gushed, filling the causeway corridor.

Kal cursed again and fired one of his laspistols in the general direction of the axe-wielding mutie. He threw himself aside as a second cannibal erupted from a side corridor opposite him, autogun blazing. The newcomer wasn’t aiming, just shooting. A fine old underhive tradition – fill the air with enough lead, you were bound to hit something.

‘Scabbs,’ Kal snarled. Then, ‘Yolanda!’ The only answer he received was more shooting. No sign of his partners anywhere. Slugs perforated support struts, and the causeway gave an audible groan. It only remained aloft thanks to centuries of rust and a bit of luck.

Kal shoved himself across the floor, returning fire with more enthusiasm than accuracy. No time to worry about where the others were now. Not when he could hear the whoops and howls of his attackers, as they raced up creaking gantry stairs or shimmied down through broken transit shafts. He needed to be elsewhere, and quickly.

The fug began to thin, leaving a greasy residue on the air. The mutie with the axe was down, having caught a slug meant for Kal. But the other one was still standing, curses dripping from his blistered lips as he struggled to clear a jam in the autogun’s firing chamber. Kal rose to his feet, laspistol extended. The mutie froze, staring.

Kal winked, and shot him.

A moment later, he was running down the causeway, the rest of the cannibals in pursuit. Kal fired in his wake without looking. At worst, the volley would slow the fastest ones down. At best, he might kill one or two, and the rest would stop to eat them.

The causeway was a long stretch of rusty iron and sodden ferrocrete – one of a dozen extending across the upper reaches of the ruined hab-dome. Phosphorescent flora climbed the struts and girders that held the causeway in place, and slow drifts of glimmering pollen hung heavy on the air. The causeway was crumbling in places. Wide gaps made the path treacherous, but Kal was an old hand at running for his life in difficult terrain.

Even so, he was soon forced to holster his weapons. He needed his hands free to haul his lean frame along the more unstable sections of the causeway. But however cautious he was, he didn’t slacken his pace. The muties were hot on his heels, and they were hungry, by the sounds of it. Then, they were always hungry.

Of course, they also weren’t supposed to be this far south of Pipefall. Even as he ran, he wondered what had drawn them to this badzone. If the mutie tribes were moving south, that meant they were heading up from hive bottom, and that was bad for everyone. Bad, but also profitable. Mutie scalps were worth five credits apiece in Steelgate. Too bad there was no time to stop and collect a few.

He bounded over a chunk of rubble, his sword clanking against his legs, and saw that the path fell away into darkness ahead. Without slowing, he holstered his laspistols and darted out across a broken girder that extended partially over the gap. A tumble of torn hoses and conduits dangled over the empty space and as he reached the end of the girder, he leapt.

His intention, formed in the half-second before his leap, was to swing across the gap and land adroitly on the opposite side. Unfortunately, his weight pulled many of the artificial vines loose from their corroded housings. He found himself clinging desperately to a single length of electrical conduit, his momentum lost in his momentary flailing.

As he swung out over the gap, he glimpsed a forest of glowing flora below, and the polluted streams cutting through it. The lower levels of the hab-dome had collapsed under the weight of strange growths, and he could smell the sickly-sweet stink of toxic fumes. He heard a giggle, and saw that the muties had caught up with him.

They stared at him from the edge of the gap, eyeing him the way a rat eyed a hunk of meat. At least a dozen, maybe more. Starveling-thin, or bloated with cancerous tumours, they shifted and murmured, following him with their eyes as he swung gently from side to side. A few might have been licking their lips, but it was hard to tell, given the malformation of their faces. One of them looked down, picked up a length of pipe and jabbed at him.

‘Stop it,’ Kal said, kicking ineffectually at the pipe. The effort sent him in a slow circle. This seemed to amuse them, and more jabbing followed until he managed to kick the pipe out of the mutie’s grip. It clattered away into the dark below. They watched it fall, and then looked back up at him. Kal stared back at them.

Muties were the worst of the worst. The flotsam and jetsam of hive bottom, scraped out and churned up. Inbred, gripped by disease and malnutrition, they murdered, robbed and ate anyone they could catch. In Kal’s professional opinion, life in the underhive would have been vastly improved if every mutie was dead and their corpses safely incinerated.

Nonetheless, he tried an ingratiating smile. ‘So… what’s the cost of safe passage, these days? I’m all out of credits, but I’m always up for a bit of bartering.’

‘Nice boots,’ one of them grunted.

‘Nice coat,’ another wheezed.

‘Looks like he tastes nice, too,’ a third said, smacking her lips in a manner that was decidedly not lascivious. Heads nodded, and grunts of assent followed this assertion. Kal shook his head.

‘I warn you, I’m fairly certain I’m mostly gristle.’

‘Soft,’ a mutie crooned. ‘Soft uphiver. Smells so sweet.’

Kal began to regret taking his weekly bath so recently. It was just that a man wanted to look his best before going on a job. He had a reputation to maintain, after all. He was glad there was no one to witness him dangling here.

At the thought, he looked around, hoping to spot the familiar forms of his partners. They’d got separated when the muties had sprung their ambush. It was every man – or woman – for themselves in such situations, and Scabbs and Yolanda were experienced enough to look after themselves. Unfortunately, the muties had followed Kal, rather than the others.

‘Go find Scabbs,’ he said. ‘He’s slow and I’m sure that unsightly dermatitis of his will make him easy to chew.’ The muties, unfortunately, didn’t seem inclined to follow his advice. ‘No one ever listens to me,’ Kal muttered, as he spun slowly around and around. ‘I’m doomed to be unappreciated in my own time. Or eaten. Or both.’

He looked down, trying to gauge the distance to the bottom of the hab. Or even just to the glowing canopy of flora. But it was too far, even for someone with his luck. He looked up. The conduit wasn’t going to hold forever. There was no telling if it would last long enough for him to try and climb it. He was stuck, good and proper.

‘I admit, this is not a good day for the underhive’s greatest bounty hunter,’ he said, out loud. A mutie laughed and Kal made an obscene gesture. ‘Who asked you, you blister-faced sump-rat?’

One of them tossed a chunk of stone at him, and he drew a laspistol. Those closest drew back. Others levelled their own weapons.

‘Not the wisest option,’ Kal called out. ‘Shoot me and that’s your dinner gone.’ He gestured downwards meaningfully. ‘Wouldn’t want that, would you?’

The muties paused. Jaundiced gazes flickered back and forth, and they began to murmur among themselves. It soon took a heated turn. An exchange of blows swiftly followed. They were clearly at odds over the best course of action.

Kal used the opportunity to take stock of his surroundings. Experience had taught him that there was always a way out, if you had the wit to see it. He twisted about, looking for anything that might be of help.

The causeways stretched like a web of ferrocrete across the upper reaches of the dome. After centuries of neglect, toxic rains and hive quakes, most were little more than sections of skeletal struts and support beams. The cavernous slopes of the dome’s interior were a latticework of rotting walkways and abandoned transit shafts. Thousands of pipes jutted from among the ferrous escarpments, spilling sump-water down into the dark below. Hot slurry gushed ceaselessly through broken aqueducts, joining the rest of the spillage in torrential rivers of chemical toxicity.

In the distance, hidden by the steamy fug that rose from those slurry rivers, ancient mechanisms the size of battleships loomed like mountains of rusting slag. He’d heard stories to the effect that mutie tribes sometimes worshipped the primeval machines, but he’d never seen any evidence of it.

‘Picturesque, but unhelpful in the short term,’ Kal muttered as he blew a blond plait out of his face and turned his attentions to his immediate surroundings. As he’d expected, no sign of Scabbs or Yolanda. Not even any sign of Wotan, his loyal cyber-mastiff. Then, something had been a bit off about Wotan since he’d got his sprockets jangled during the… thing, the last time Kal had had the bad fortune to journey spirewards.

Thinking about the… thing made Kal even more desperate to escape. ‘You’ve been in worse situations, man,’ he said, out loud. ‘I mean, is this honestly worse than being – gah – married to Yolanda Catallus?’

Yolanda was an ideal partner in crime – most of the time – but as a partner in matrimony? He felt a shudder run through him at the thought. Yolanda was beautiful, in the same way that a Phyrr cat was beautiful – all the colours and general slinkiness hid a murderous temper. He’d once seen her beat a man to death with another, slightly smaller man. Then there were all the times she’d tried to kill him, either to collect one of the occasional bounties on his head or just because she’d been in a bad mood at the time.

And yet, there was something about her. A gutter-sheets poet of his acquaintance had once described her as Our Lady of the Underhive, in an ode to her fierce beauty. The poet had claimed that Yolanda was the underhive manifest – all its good points and bad, wrapped up in one tattooed package. Of course, when she’d heard about it, Yolanda had fed the poor bastard to a sumpkrok. Some people weren’t good with compliments.

But still, the thought lingered. Until he remembered where he was, and that now was definitely not the time to be thinking about Yolanda bloody Catallus. ‘Steady on, Kal,’ he muttered. ‘One problem at a time.’

The muties were still brawling. No one had started shooting yet, but it was only a matter of time. He spotted the girder he’d leapt from. He could just about reach it with his foot. He swung himself closer. If he could use it to boost himself, he might gain the momentum to swing to the other side.

But as his boot touched the girder, a mutie turned. Eyes wide, the mutant gabbled something unintelligible and swung a crude billhook out, trying to catch Kal’s ankle. Kal shot him, and swung backwards as the rest of the muties set up an ear-splitting caterwaul.

‘Backup would be nice,’ he shouted, hoping that someone might hear. ‘Anyone? No? Well scav you both!’ As he swung back towards the gathering muties, he fired again, not bothering to aim. The cannibals were so densely packed that he couldn’t fail to hit a few of them. But even as the wounded fell, the others pressed forwards, grabbing awkwardly for his legs or the edge of his coat.

‘Hands off the material, this is prime off-world leather,’ Kal snarled, as he lashed out with a boot and sent rotten teeth tumbling from a blistered mouth. He spun on his cable, swinging back out over the gap. The muties howled in frustration. Kal stretched out a foot, trying to hook a piece of broken pipe extending from the far side. He just missed it, and the motion sent him drifting back towards the muties. Another howl, this time of jubilation, stabbed at his ears. He spun in mid-air, his stomach lurching.

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ He fired his laspistol again and again. ‘Slither back into your holes, because today isn’t your day, sump-scum. No one eats Kal Jerico.’ Leprous hands clawed at his trousers, and he thrashed his feet. ‘I said… back off!’ His grip on the conduit began to slip, and he quickly holstered his weapon. He looked up, wondering if he could reach the top before the conduit gave way. ‘Got to risk it. If the old plan doesn’t work, come up with a new one.’

He started to haul himself up, but the muties weren’t giving up so easily. He needed to get out of range of grabbing hands. He shifted his weight slightly, and the conduit swung away once more, out of easy reach.

A mutie held on a moment too long, and was dragged along with Kal as he swung back towards the opposite side. The mutant wailed in panic, mouldering paws clutching desperately at Kal’s legs. The creature was stick-thin, and wrapped in filthy bandages and rags that might once have been a cheap hazard suit. A ragged cowl covered his – her? – head, but for a mouth full of splintered, yellowing fangs.

Kal swatted at the mutant, trying to dislodge him. The conduit wouldn’t hold both of them, not for long. The mutie snarled and jerked a knife from his rags. They spun in an awkward gavotte as Kal caught the mutant’s bony wrist, narrowly preventing the knife from opening his belly. Dust and pollen sifted down from above, as the rubber casing of the conduit began to stretch and tear. Kal looked up.

‘Oh, scav me.’

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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.

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