Business As Usual
She sits in the darkness, waiting.
The walls and floor of her enclosure hum and vibrate; the transport sways, bumps, rocks. Accompanied by the muted growl of the vehicle's engine, the effect would, in other circumstances, be soporific. She is so very tired. It would be easy to imagine herself in the arms of a giant metal mother rocking her beloved child to sleep.
Were it not for the ache of her tormented muscles. Or the stinging scratches on her pale, bare skin. Or the memories that scrape her mind red raw.
She remembers the humiliation of the 'processing': the stripping, the beating, the… inspection.
From somewhere in the darkness, a voice cries out, solitary, desperate. No one answers it. No one offers reassurance or comfort. They all know there is none to be had here.
She runs her tongue along her teeth. One of them – a molar near the back of her lower left jaw – is loose. She probes it carefully and it loosens a little more.
It has been a harrowing two days. She tries not to think about the others, some no more than children, shivering and sobbing in this metal-walled cavern. She tries not to notice the ammoniac stink of waste and refuse and human despair.
All she has to do, she thinks to herself in the softly-breathing dark, is endure.
Queer Zak shifted up a gear as they entered The Fume, the speed of the crawler increasing by slow, remorseless increments. Beside him, Nico glanced across at the ganger, nodding his approval. It paid to be careful when entering this most benighted section of the Underhive.
Nico resumed his vigil, staring out of the grimy armaglas window as a motley collection of ramshackle huts and crumbling tenement blocks, some set into the gigantic support columns of the hive itself, scrolled by like a jumpy, flickering vid-cast of urban desolation. He tightened his grip on his shotgun, when he saw a group of narc-jackers twitching and jerking outside a mesh-windowed storefront. The clip in the gun carried six rounds of high-explosive, armour-piercing ammunition. If things went right tonight, this shipment would be one of the biggest scores of the last twelve months. Nico Salaki was determined that nothing would threaten his hard-earned profits. But, the gun and its fearsome ammunition would not be needed, he saw. One or two of them raised heads to watch the crawler pass, but that was all. He caught a glimpse of their faces, slack and vacant under tribal tattoos.
"I hate this place," he muttered.
Queer Zak grunted, turning the mismatched eyes that had given him his nickname on Nico briefly. "It's good for business, though. No regulators, no Arbites."
"Yeah. Throne, yeah." He glanced at his wrist-chron. "We're going to be early. Clan Harvane'll be impressed."
Queer Zak snorted. "Maybe. Maybe not. Some nice merchandise this trip."
Nodding, Nico fell silent. The 'merchandise' in the crawler's belly had been the usual mish-mash of low quality dreck and more durable items that would fetch a reasonable price when the Clan Harvane negotiators examined them at the rendezvous. But there had also been a number of promising higher-class pieces, in which Nico had, as befitted his status in the operation, taken a personal interest. The girl in five-nineteen, noble-born and possessed of a haughty, ethereal beauty, had probably been the highlight of the shipment – before he'd broken her. But that was alright. What was that phrase the rogue trader always used? 'Acceptable losses'.
Nico Salaki grinned and gazed once more out of the side window, but he wasn't seeing the dreary slums of The Fume anymore. He was seeing a future in which he wasn't just a link in a supply chain transporting girls from the hiveworld of Admenajar III to the flesh dens on the outer rim. It was a future in which he had power and wealth and luxury; it was a future in which people like Valdemar Harvane showed him deference and respect. It was a future that glittered and spun in his mind like a gaudy bauble.
The girl closest to her is screaming again. It is a naked, primal sound. It is the sound of a hurt so vast that it has obliterated the self, subsumed it into a quivering void of outraged terror, of violation.
Shivering in the dark, she listens. She holds the molar between her thumb and forefinger, turning it over and over.
The girl is screaming and, all around her, a ripple of sobbing and whimpering and moaning spreads. The oil of human misery on the dark's cold water.
With a sudden flick of her wrist, she launches the tooth away from her and thrusts her head between her knees.
It is, she has decided, time.
The crawler bucked underneath them and, for a sickening terrifying moment, the wheel leapt out of Queer Zak's hands. Nico lurched instinctively towards it, but he was thrown forward and his fingers jammed against the crawler's dash.
"Frakkitfrakkitfrakkit!"
With a screaming, scraping bellow, the crawler slewed across the roadway, its blocky rear end smashing through shop fronts and corrugated tin huts. Queer Zak wrestled with the wheel, but the crawler's machine spirit was shrieking in outrage and control eluded him.
"We're frakked!" yelled the driver, the tattooed bloodhawk feathers standing out like fresh wounds on his pale face.
The rear end of the crawler hit a ten-metre wide support pillar and shuddered to a halt. With a loud crack, Nico's head struck the crawler's dash. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the exploded windscreen on the driver's side and the foot-long shard of armaglas protruding from Queer Zak's blood-drenched neck...
Shakily, she staggers from the wreckage of the crawler. The other girls move behind her in the darkness of the slave transport's interior, screaming, whimpering, sobbing. Not one of them follows her out into the gloom of the underhive. She wonders briefly if any of them will.
With a determination born of her Imperial conditioning, she forces her body to stand straight and reaches out with her talent to the front of the wrecked vehicle.
Where before there were two minds in the armoured cab, now there is only one. She can sense its slumbering dreams – bright ephemeral things, fluttering in his unconscious mind like slow-moving butterflies. They are grand, these dreams, beautiful and majestic – dreams the colour of glory, rich with the urgent desire for respect and power. Nico Salaki, she knows, wants to be a player. She is tempted to be amused by that, but her training, her devotion to the God-Emperor of Mankind and her treatment at the hands of Salaki and his associates make that temptation far too brief to indulge. Salaki is not a player but a piece on a Regicide board of baffling near impenetrable complexity. He is a piece whose value lies only in the fact that it is about to be taken.
She casts about her for a weapon. There are plenty to choose from and she selects, after a brief moment of consideration, a length of steel piping, part of the cagework that had protected the rear of the crawler.
In the ruined cab, the dreams of Nico Salaki flare brightly and noisily. Moving gracefully and silently, the Imperial Assassin hefts the piping in her hand and goes to snuff them out.