I do not own the rights to any character, setting or story line in the following submission.
intimidate, demoralize, emasculate, subjugate
Axtyl crept slowly, treads crunching over rock and bone, squelching in the mud between the ruined buildings. Grenade concussions exploded off in the distance, but deep inside the fog, it was hard to tell if it was twenty miles or twenty metres. Inside the hold of the MkIIc Rhino ten brothers of the Luna Scorpions held their bolt pistols and their breaths. Even the usually chittering gargoyles on his hull were quiet. Axtyl swept the heavy bolter back and forth in front of him, peering into the mist and smoke, and around corners for the enemy, Imperial Guardsmen. Their black and gray uniforms blending into the debris of buildings, mud and charred hulks. They would hide, but not from him.
Yaniman Axtyl closed the door behind the visitor separating the two of them from his boss. He never said a word as he escorted the most recent visitor down the hall, though all the while he was barraged by questions. "What did he mean?" "What's going to happen?" "Is he going to kill me?" The first two questions were irrelevant to Axtyl. But he was pretty sure he knew the answer to the last one. However, Axtyl did not presume to second-guess his boss. Instead, he kept his largely scarred and battered four fingered right hand (his third finger lost as an act of contrition) on the shoulder of the visitor and ushered his squeaking burden to the front door.
"Please, you have to tell me," he fell to his knees after being shoved through the front door. Axtyl drew his autopistol and placed it on the visitor's forehead, "Thank you for your visit today. Do have a nice day." He withdrew the pistol and closed the front door to the apartment.
Axtyl walked back to his boss' room at the end of the hall. The apartment was at one time like any other in the hive. Metal and synthetics, cold, wet and dark; as it was now under an unnatural layer of luxury. Plush carpets softened his footfalls, holo-picts on the wall, expensive cabinets filled with more expensive liquors. But no matter how much his boss added to the place it still looked, smelled and felt like a low-level hive rat hole.
He pushed through to his boss' room. Here was even more false opulence. Everything from the lights over the antique desk at which the king rat himself sat to the inlaid mosaic floor, was fashioned to give the frequent visitors an understanding that he was used to getting his money and his way.
"Yaniman," the boss said looking up from the pile on his desk. The boss always referred to people by their first name. Sometimes it was part of a concerted effort to put the other person into a subjective nature. Psychology, the boss claimed, was the best weapon. Axtyl grudgingly agreed. Most of the visitors to his boss left this room like the last one, a quivering, spineless mass of tears and pleas and snot. Axtyl felt almost soiled having to touch them. He could at least respect the ones that pretended they were not frightened. But never did Axtyl see what he wanted to see, what he would have done had he been confronted by the boss. No one ever attacked the boss. Nope they all just ran away. Mice running away from the rat king.
"Yes, sir." The boss was allowed to call everyone by first name, but few dared use anything but sir when addressing the boss. Axtyl always used sir when talking to the boss for two reasons. The first was it kept him from saying what sometimes came to mind when he looked at the boss. The boss was extremely fat, and even in the cold dampness that often crept into the boss' warren, his dark skin was shiny with sweat. The rat king looked nothing so much like a big black slug. The second reason was simple; he was the boss.
"Yaniman, I can trust you, yes?"
He hated the insult. Axtyl held up his right hand with the missing digit by way of answer.
"Commit this to memory."
Axtyl slid down in between piles of trash and discarded slabs of ferrocrete until he found a spot to strike out without being seen. Alone he would wait until his prey crossed his path. Not that he had to work alone, or even liked it. However, he had tasked Boxer, Szet, Whisper and Esaka with the second part of the boss' request. He would meet them when he was done here.
Normal response for a visitor to the boss was to run, and today's visitor was no different. He came down the pathway, splashing as he ran. There was only a few ways into and out of the boss' place, and Axtyl was pretty good at figuring which one the visitor would take. Once in a while they got away, but Axtyl just hired a hunter and would catch him or her eventually. This one, on the other hand, was predictable to a fault. Axtyl watched the figure in the darkness moving towards him, the light filtered in from one of the levels above, highlighting the visitor for a moment, then shadowing him, then highlighting again.
In the shadow of his blind, Axtyl drew a black knife from his boot and wrapped three fingers and a thumb tightly around its haft. He waited until the visitor was right in front of his hole before springing. He leapt with three tasks in his mind. As his boot sole connected with the visitor's kneecap and gave with a satisfying grinding crunch, the visitor was brought to a stop and down on his remaining good knee. Axtyl dropped out of his leap behind the visitor, wrapping his left arm around and under the visitor's neck, then plunged his blackened blade into the visitor's right lung, effectively preventing the visitor from screaming.
Two of the three tasks had been accomplished. Axtyl pulled the knife from the victim's back and pulled his body close. Frothing blood pumped onto their bodies, squelching as Axtyl muscled his bulk around, brought his left hand up along side the victim's face and twisted softly exposing the full of the victim's right side of his neck. Axtyl leaned in close to the victim's ear and placed the point of his knife in the hollow of his clavicle. Slowly he pushed the knife into the flesh. Blood flowed around the blade, down the victim's chest, back, arms, onto Axtyl, finally pooling on the ground.
"I will see that your sister is spared from your sins." A moment of comfort for the victim. Third task completed. Axtyl let go of the body only after it had stopped bleeding.
He moved in the shadows. Even this low in the hive, he could not just walk about drenched in another's blood. He slinked between deserted alleys, abandoned hab-units and other derelict buildings, buried under dozens of levels of the city above.
Turning down a vacant alley, he jogged quietly all the way to the back, left hand trailing on the side of building walls, slipped through the door, stepped in and then on the corpse of Szet.
"Well, what do we have here?" came a precise, but rather nasally, voice from deeper inside the room. An Arbiter stepped out from a darkened corner. He held his shotgun at his hip, but still pointing at Axtyl. His black polished armour reflected the light coming in from behind the doorway where Axtyl stood. Their armour clattered as six more Arbiters surrounded him, their lamps slung under their shotguns illuminated him. "You seem to be covered in a lot of blood. Explain." A different voice, someone was still in the darkness.
"Cut myself shaving." Axtyl squinted into the lights surrounding him. It was suicide to pull his autopistol, but the thought crossed his mind anyway. He contemplated how much he owed his boss. He glanced around at the slew of bodies on the floor. He didn't see the body of Whisper. The sniper may have found a point to pick off the squad of Arbiters. On the other hand, he could be mixed in with the unidentified corpses; or he could have fled at the sign of trouble. Even if Whisper had managed to find a good sniping position, Axtyl would not make it out of that firefight alive. Self preservation won out, he put his empty hands over his head.
The Arbiter that had addressed him before walked around Axtyl and removed the autopistol from its holster at his back. He heard the crackling of a stun baton just before he was knocked unconscious.
"Secure this one, and place him with the others going to the penal legion," came the voice from the shadows again.
He had been awake for a few minutes before he realized it. He tried to reach up to wipe his eyes but could not make his arms work. Instead, he focused his attention on prying his eyelids open. Finally successful, Axtyl found himself inside a brightly lit and very large room. He was sitting on a metal plank and was cold. His boots had been removed, bare feet on cold metal plating. His legs had been shackled at the ankles to a metal loop bolted to the floor, and evidently so were his wrists behind his back. The blood soaked clothes had not been removed, and they were crusted to his torso.
Axtyl kept his head down, but strained his eyes to their extreme peripherals. He was not the only one strapped to the metal plank. There was at least one other plank in front of him with six men that he could see on it. They too, were shackled and evidently asleep. To his right and left, one or more each.
There was a soft humming coming up from the floor that seemed to vibrate through Axtyl's bare feet and travel up to his teeth. With it came a faint sense of propulsion, of disjointed gravity. He was on a ship of some kind. For the first time in his life, he was off the planet he was born on. For that matter, first time out of the hive. He wondered if that was why he felt nauseous, fuzzy headed. Or if the stun baton had done more damage than it was supposed to. Perhaps everyone felt that way on his first flight off world.
Axtyl took a chance and pivoted his head to the sides. There was a dozen rows of hunched over men in the front of him as well as on both sides. Evidently, the Arbiters had turned him over to be press ganged into working for the Imperial Navy. Or, as he looked to the right at the baldhead of the man next to him, and the scar tattoos of some gang he was not familiar with, it was more likely he was on his way to an Imperial Guard penal legion. The ganger was snoring softly. He stared at the incapacitated man for a long time, trying to tell if he came from his hive, a different one, or possibly from some other planet.
He looked behind. There were hundreds of men like him in the room.
Around the room was a walkway two stories above what Axtyl thought of as the ground level. Stationary Guardsmen watched the room of convicts, many of the soldiers held lasguns or shotguns at the ready. Others slung them over their shoulders and walked their patrols. On the same level as Axtyl were other Guardsmen carrying stun batons. In the corner of the room stood a slender individual. He was draped in a long black greatcoat and held a peaked cap under his arm. An Imperial Commissar, no doubt, thought Axtyl. The Commissar surveyed the sleeping and still convicts. His eyes met Axtyl's, and momentarily fixed on him. Then slowly drifted on to size up the others.
Axtyl drifted off into unconsciousness again.
Some time must have passed when Axtyl opened his eyes again. He remembered a vision of a beast, white skinned full of sharp talons and teeth, but it was fading leaving only an acidy feeling in his stomach. Seemingly nothing had changed. Not the lights. Not the guards. Not even the Commissar seemed to have moved. His eyes closed again.
More time passed, Axtyl opened his eyes. One of Guardsmen on the ground level, a few rows in front of where he sat, was swinging his stun baton repeatedly. In a swift arc, like he was chopping wood with an axe, he brought the weapon down again and again on the head one of the convicts. Apparently he had been doing so for some time. The convict's head was a pulpy mess with an obvious indentation where the baton had been striking. One of his fellow Guardsmen attempted to restrain him. The psychotic jailer whipped his stun baton up and connected with his nose, a shower of blood as the second Guardsmen's feet flew out from under him and slammed to the floor. A shot rang out, another rain of blood. The crazed Guardsmen fell down, a las bolt hole in punched straight through his head.
The Commissar holstered his pistol. "You will not fail me now. We have only a little further to go in the warp. Remember your Emperor, and He will save you. Or I will."
His eyes closed. His mind drifted. Axtyl dreamed. The white beast returned and whispered in his ear something that he would not remember when he woke up. Then he was awake, and everything was different. He did not feel like they were moving anymore, but they were definitely not on solid ground. The dizzy nauseous feeling was gone, as well. Axtyl looked over to see if the Commissar was still in the same position, but he was gone from the room. The Guardsmen jailers were still there, and they still looked tense at the convicts, but most shouldered their weapons rather than pointing them at the shackled prisoners. Even the light was different, brighter or clearer. Cleaner, was what Axtyl thought.
His body was stiff from sitting for so long, shackled to the floor and the bench. He tried to stretch, and rocked side to side to get his blood circulating again. All he got for his pains, however, were pins and needles throughout his arms and legs and some irritated looks from his jailers.
Axtyl looked around again. The ganger next to him was awake, but just sat there, looking down at his own bare feet. His lips were moving, but Axtyl could not make out what he was whispering. For all he knew, the ganger could have been reciting a prayer to the Emperor. The convict on Axtyl's left side was also awake. An opposite of Axtyl was this one. Old, overweight and short, his legs barely touched the floor. He had a black mohawk and gold piercings all over his face. Axtyl had heard of humans that lived on high-gravity worlds that had over generations become squat, muscular little people. That's what this guy looked like, crossed with a pug faced dog Axtyl had as a boy. He was looking at Axtyl, smiling and apparently had been doing so for some time.
Axtyl held his gaze for another minute.
"What?" whispered Axtyl to the dog-faced dwarf. The dwarf stopped smiling and looked back down at his own misshapen feet. Axtyl turned away in time to see two Guardsmen approaching him. The first reached him and without a word, slapped him across the face with his stun baton. Axtyl's unconscious body slumped over.