Once a Stimm Queen, page 2
‘Permanently reassigned from the Quinspirus Cluster two months ago,’ Sy said. ‘This was meant to be my first solo command. Just a sting on a mid-level stimm savlar dump. We weren’t expecting serious trouble. You weren’t meant to be here.’
‘Neither were you,’ Jannix responded, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘This was going to be neutral turf. The stimm war between the Overlords and the Stimm Queens was set to end tonight.’
‘Looks like that’s not going to happen then,’ Sy said. ‘Hell of a coincidence.’
‘There are no coincidences in Hive Primus,’ Jannix said quietly.
Sy didn’t seem to hear her – her eyes were elsewhere, and Jannix caught the click of her vox-bead as a transmission came through.
‘Affirmative, stand by,’ Sy said into her mic, then spoke to the Escher once more. ‘Another coincidence. Three truckloads of Goliaths inbound, two from the south and one from the west. They’ll be arriving in five minutes.’
‘Strux is late,’ Jannix said. ‘Too late by half.’
‘If they open fire the way your girls did, they’ll receive the same backlash. There are two good enforcers dead downstairs.’
‘It doesn’t need to come to that,’ Jannix said, smashing the butt of her pistol into Sy’s bare face.
Jannix watched from the first-floor balcony as the Overlords entered Madam Almora’s. From communications, she knew one truckload of the meatnecks had surrounded the den, while another entered through the main doors, covered by a krumper rivet cannon and a heavy stubber. Even for Goliaths, she could see that they were armed to their metal-capped teeth. A single glance at their dilated pupils and the sweat glistening from their throbbing musculature told her that most were already high on combat stimms. Brute cleavers, fighting knives and spud-jackers were brandished alongside heavy sluggers, shotguns and stub pistols.
‘You’re late,’ she called down to them. Not one of the brutes replied as they spread out through the ruined foyer. They didn’t train their weapons on the Escher, but still, a scent of menace lingered in the air.
Most of it was directed at the enforcers – the blackplates had been disarmed and were being corralled in the entrance room’s centre, just back from the booking desks. Their dead lay heaped in the corner by the stairwell, six black-armoured corpses splattered with drying blood. Shena, Nils and Zara stood over them, lasrifles and autoguns aimed at the prisoners. The rest of the Stimm Queens occupied the upstairs, scowling down on the Goliaths with ill-concealed contempt.
‘Well ain’t this just a sweet surprise,’ said a new voice. A fresh horde of Overlords entered the building. In their midst was the largest meatneck Jannix had ever seen – despite half a dozen encounters with the brute, it was difficult not to be shocked by the sheer bulk of Boss Strux.
‘Brought us a bargaining gift have you, Jan?’ the Goliath asked as he stopped just inside the doors, surveying the enforcers on their knees before him. ‘You always were a charmer.’
He moved round the splintered remains of the foyer counters to inspect the prisoners. His pace was the slow, heavy tread of someone supremely confident in his own abilities, relaxed when the nerves of all around him rested on a knife-edge. Unlike the rest of his mob, he hadn’t drawn any weapons. His brutal power hammer remained slung across his broad back, while four stub cannon pistols were jammed in the belt and the braces of his shoulder rig. His bare muscles gleamed with oil grease and fresh sweat, his huge frame grotesquely swollen by the growth chems and stimm enhancements he was clearly addicted to.
‘You knew they were going to sting us,’ Jannix snarled. Fighting her urge to withdraw her pistol, both her hands gripped the balcony’s railings as she addressed the Goliaths below. ‘You set us up, Strux.’
He let out a bark of laughter, his eyes still on the enforcers as he spoke.
‘Nothing personal, Jan.’ He bent down to inspect one of the manacled lawmen. The blackplate was wise enough to avoid meeting his eye. ‘It wasn’t really for your benefit anyway. There’s a troublemaker in among this lot. Someone high up in the precinct wanted her dealt with. We both agreed this would be a… unique opportunity.’
‘To have us and the lawmen kill each other off,’ Jannix said darkly.
‘It seemed convenient,’ Strux said, moving on to the next enforcer. Sy. ‘Ah, sergeant’s chevrons. Here she is!’
The brute snatched her short hair in one fist and yanked her head back. She glared up at him, one eye swollen and bruising an ugly shade of purple.
‘Looks like you’ve taken a real knock, sweetie,’ the Goliath sneered. ‘Good news is, your suffering is over. The Overlords are here. We’re going to take care of the little problem you pose to Chief Harle and the precinct.’
‘Boss,’ called one of the Goliaths. He’d approached the heap of dead enforcers and had turned one over with his boot. ‘This ain’t no blackplate. I know this boy. He’s a regular stimm-head, runs the manufactorum lines up Girder Falls way.’
Distracted by the cyber mastiff lying prone and deactivated at Sy’s side, Strux appeared not to have heard his underling.
‘What’s this then?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got yourself a cog hound, have you?’
‘Its systems failed,’ Jannix called down from the balcony. ‘It’s scrap now.’
‘Don’t know about that,’ Strux said, placing one meaty hand on its head and rapping its cranium plate. ‘I know a couple of tech-riggers in Greasetown that could fix him right up.’
He leaned closer, peering into the machine’s lifeless eye-sensors, admiring the blood crusting over the slack metal fangs.
‘What’s his name, girl?’ he asked, looking at Sy. The enforcer held his gaze and, despite her battered face, smiled.
‘Lex,’ she said. The mastiff’s head twitched. Strux stared at it, as though not believing his eyes. He was still staring when Sy spoke the second word.
‘Kill.’
The hound leapt, a blur of sudden motion and snapping fangs. The mastiff twisted his head as he launched into Strux face-first, clamping his vice-jaws either side of the Goliath’s skull. The Overlord had time to scream before the steel fangs tore open his temple and cheeks. A hideous crunch was followed by a soft, wet squelch, heralding the cracking of his skull and rupturing of his brain. Lex shook his head again, ripping away most of the Goliath’s cranium. An eyeball flew through the air and struck Sy’s shoulder guard. As blood drenched the floor and the silver workings of the mastiff, the Overlords just stared.
From outside, the sound of gunfire savaged the silence, finally eliciting a response from the two gangs. The Escher were faster though – in an instant, slaughter had returned to Madam Almora’s as bullets and lasfire whipped back and forth between the two factions.
Jannix took careful aim with her stub pistol. She used a two-handed brace, relishing the familiar brutality of the weapon’s violent recoil as she unleashed a spread of man-stoppers into the broad chest of the Goliath nearest to Sy. The man went down. His dying convulsions released a burst of las that punched dust and plaster from the ceiling.
The enforcers threw themselves to the ground, Sy desperately disengaging her manacles. Jannix watched as she fumbled for the pistols concealed beneath the mattresses scattered across the floor. Outside, the sound of gunfire intensified as more of the enforcer sting team struck.
‘More blackplates!’ Jannix could hear them bellowing, and more demanding to know where the sudden ambush had come from.
‘Whole thing’s a set up!’ the meathead who’d uncovered the stimmer among the supposed enforcer corpses shouted. ‘Dressed their corpses like enforcers. They’re working with the law!’
Jannix headed downstairs. The enforcers scattered to cover, but Strux lay where he had fallen, his huge body still spasming as his stimm-slugs pumped anabolic-altering doses into him. His face was a bloody, cracked mess. Jannix strode through the gunfire to him and, despite ducking to avoid the bullets and las-bolts whipping by, she paused briefly to gaze down at the remains of the man who had so nearly ruined the Stimm Queens. Then, lip curled in disgust, she put a single round through the remains of the Goliath’s head, splattering what little was left of his cranial matter across her face and Madam Almora’s floorboards.
A las-bolt thumped into her chestplate, spinning her half around and scarring the neon-yellow flak a singed black. She grunted and dropped into a crouch, reloading as she did so. While Strux may have been reduced to twitching meat, his gang were far from dead. Even as Jannix refocused on the firefight, she saw Lilen be struck by the rivet cannon on the balcony overhead, her flesh and bone pulverised by nails nearly as long as Jannix’s own forearm. Her gory remains were pinned back against the wall behind her. To her left, Nils was dancing in close combat with two of the Goliaths. Her stiletto knife took the eyes and then the throat of one, but Jannix saw the dying brute snatch Nils and restrain her long enough for his gang mate’s industrial cleaver to annihilate her left arm.
The two gangs were tearing each other to pieces. Despite it all, Jannix found herself laughing as she opened fire on a burly silhouette cannoning towards her from the gun-smoke. Blood blossomed in the cloying air. Strux was dead, she lived, and there was nothing left to do but revel in the slaughter.
A las-riddled mattress near the reception island caught alight, the flames leaping almost instantly to the splintered remains of the counters. Choking black smoke began to broil through the multi-storey room, and it wasn’t long before the bared rafters overhead started to combust too. Jannix unleashed a burst of shots into a Goliath who was trying to flee past the fire towards the front doors, relishing the way the heavy slugs ripped apart his muscled back. He tumbled forward into the mounting inferno with an agonised scream. She could already feel the heat radiating from the centre of the room, making her skin itch and her eyes sting.
‘Enforcers, move!’ she heard Sy’s rallying cry to her team amongst the smog, and the snarling and snapping of her blood-streaked hound as they headed for the rear of the building. Gradually, the gunfire throughout the structure was beginning to lessen as both sides disengaged, driven apart by the mounting fury of the flames.
Madam Almora was going to be due a hefty compensation package.
‘Stimm Queens, we’re done here!’ Jannix shouted, straining to be heard over the roar of the flames. She signalled to those Escher she could still see through the smoke, tearing a strip from her loincloth and holding it to her nose as she made a dash for the back door. Zara and Saddie were with her, the latter carrying an injured juve across her broad shoulders. They raced by the stairwell and down a rear service corridor, vaulting a burning beam that had collapsed in their path, the fire licking at their slender forms. It was almost impossible to see anything anymore – the stimm den immolating in a conflagration that would have warmed the heart of the most pyre-crazed Redemptionist.
There was no time to find more survivors. No time to hesitate. Jannix followed Zara and Saddie out into the neon-streaked shadows of the street.
Despite her instincts, she hesitated. Saddie glanced back, but she didn’t look at her. Her eyes were on the door. The few seconds felt like an age, her heart pounding, the heat making her skin prickle. Then she caught what she’d silently been praying for – movement. She kept her pistol lowered as Sy emerged from Madam Almora’s, her cyber hound limping at her side.
The two women faced each other beyond the door, the heat still at their backs, both wary. Lex let out a grating growl, but remained still.
‘You’d best make yourself scarce,’ Jannix said, glancing from the enforcer to the dog and then up the street after her retreating gangers. ‘There’ll be all sorts of scum swarming the sector over the next few hours. Fires mean salvage.’
‘Backup is inbound,’ Sy replied. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘Took them long enough.’
‘I know.’
Jannix could sense the thoughts passing through the enforcer’s mind – Strux’s gloating had revealed more than a few issues back at the precinct. For once, the thought of the law turning on itself didn’t thrill the leader of the Stimm Queens.
‘You’re going to go back?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Sy said, iron in her voice. ‘I lost three good enforcers back there, and it’s all one bastard’s doing.’
‘You do realise you can’t just walk straight in there and ram a lasgun down his throat? You need to fight smart, girl.’
‘I know. It won’t be today, and it probably won’t be tomorrow, but at some point Chief Harle is going to face a reckoning. Either in the court-dungeons or in a back alleyway, I don’t care.’
‘Once a Stimm Queen, always a Stimm Queen, right?’ Jannix said, smiling.
Sy shook her head fiercely. ‘No.’ The words coincided with the blare of enforcer sirens in the streets round about. ‘Never again.’
Jannix glanced up, then back to the ex-juve. ‘So, it’ll be business as usual from now on? You’re the new law in this sector of town?’
‘Something like that,’ Sy said, making to move off down the street, Lex clacking at her heels. ‘Keep your nose out of the stimms, Jannix.’
‘Hey, Sy,’ Jannix called after her. The enforcer hesitated, glancing back.
‘I’m glad you got out,’ Jannix said, offering her a smile.
After a moment, Sy smiled back. ‘So am I. Until next time, sister.’
About the Author
Robbie MacNiven is a highland-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels The Last Hunt, Carcharodons: Red Tithe and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ for Black Library. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.
In the underhives of Necromunda, many bounty hunters ply their trade – but none are as successful or infamous as Kal Jerico. This edition collects together three novels in one action-packed omnibus taking you into the darkest depths of the Underhive.
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.
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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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