Hive Primus - Level 2223
Patroller Daro Munds pulled his nose filters out with a faint sigh. Stuffing them carelessly into an outer pocket of his fog coat he leaned against the guard rail and breathed in the putrid reek of the industrial cavern. The dank chem-fogs pressed in close as he fished a cig-stick out of his fogcoat's deep pockets and his beat-partner-cum-protégé made a tch of disapproval. "One of those days you're going to lean on the wrong rail."
"Perk of experience." Daro retorted. The cig stick flicked alive and his words hissed out with greasy black smoke. "I know every single rail from Hightower to the Edge itself. This one won't pop for another hundred years."
This rail, the one on 2223 was a good rail. It overlooked the stepped mesa of the levels below it, on days when the ventilators did their jobs properly you could even catch a glimpse of the far down waste-lake, with its deadly-beautiful rainbow shimmered oil. After a minute, Patroller Keller cautiously joined him. She leaned tentatively on the thick rail, ready to spring back from a moment's notice of shifting gravity. It kind of rendered the relaxation of leaning mute, but on the other hand, that deep-rooted caution would probably ensure she at least reached Daro's elderly years of fifty-six.
They looked out together at the levels below them, and then Keller frowned. "Daro. Look."
A light was winking far below them, a steady pattern. All the patrollers had vox-beads but the damn things were static half the time. Lights were more reliable and anyone could memorize the basic two short, one long repeat. Daro sighed. If he turned his head just a little, the signal light disappeared from his periphery.
Trouble was, a shiner like that meant someone was trying to relay a message up to the patroller outpost on 2240, and since their vox-beads weren't crackling it meant that once again someone was asleep at the observation port or smoking a cig out back instead. Daro checked his chrono and frowned. There were only three-quarters of an hour left on the patrol. This was usually the point where they turned around and began the long climb back up to the barracks on 2240 to sign in their vox-beads and fog coats. But if they'd seen it there was a chance other patrollers had seen it too and if someone bothered to check they'd wonder why Darro and Keller hadn't investigated and that'd be a whole shitload of annoyance.
No help for it. Daro scowled. "Keller, one day, those sharp eyes are going to see something they shouldn't," he grumped, "And then I'll have to find myself a new lackey."
Keller spared him a quick flash of mostly white teeth from a coffee-color skin that was starting to gray without sunlight. She was short, features plain, unadorned save for a slight bump on her nose.
Maybe if he'd been ten years younger…Daro smiled to himself. Twenty years younger, and a lot less jaded. He dragged on the cig, relishing the dryness as the smoke cleared out the wetness in his lungs, then Daro carefully pinched the cig out with his singed glove and tucked it back deep under the fogcoat. It was a promise to himself that there'd be a later to smoke it in, and it was a luck-gesture Daro never failed to follow anytime he had to venture close to the Edge.
"Feck, let's get this over with."He hissed out the last plume of smoke and screwed his nose-plugs back in, inhaling sharply on the gummy masses to fit the foam tightly to his nostrils. They descended the stairs to quadruple-two. The rocky slabs were thick, pitted with age, patinaed with corrosives from the fogs that rolled in whenever the ventilators kacked up.
The lights of the Plunge grew closer. Neon fogs and glaring halogen slashes mingled with lurid swirls of dim lights and deep shadows. Figures passed them, marked only by the muffled echos of boots or bare feet on the concrete. Some moved quickly, darting from lamp-light to lamp-light, others lurked in doorways or curled up for protection under flimsy sheets of plastek.
Pop-pop-crack-pop.
"Stubbers," Keller murmured absently. Daro nodded, he heard it too, but the staccato pops were small, faraway arguments, just drifting across the chasm from the network of metal islands and cable that made up the scraptown Clog in the middle of the Plunge. They both ignored it.
The fog thickened. It swirled from their feet up to their thighs. Then their waists. Its wet vapors tingled Daro's bare skin and Keller strapped her collar up, forming a leather bulwark that encircled past her nose, left only her goggled eyes visible under the brim of her cap. Daro drew his lumen rod into his left hand. On a fog night like this the light would just backscatter but the casing was nice and thick and it'd cracked the skulls of plenty of muckers looking for a mark and figuring hiding in a foggy alley was a good way to get the drop.
Keller, Daro was amused to note, had finally "misplaced" her laspistol. Daro didn't know whose bright idea it'd been to assign lasweapons to patrollers doing foot-beats in the underspire levels of the hive. The most prevalent theory was some long ago Adminstratum typo that'd never been corrected and overtime come to be regarded as holy-writ.
Sure laspistols were supposed to be reliable, but reliable didn't have a fair chance down here in the shadow of the Plunge. Millions of tons of waste-water poured out of the manufactorums above their heads. The humid vapors traveled for hundreds of miles up and laced everything with their corrosive taint, metals and glass especially. A laspistol out of its holster for an entire patrol was a laspistol that needed to be field-stripped and checked for corrosion lest the next time you pull the trigger it did nothing but flash like a glorified flashlight with a pistol-grip.
There was a mucker out on the Clog who made knock-offs of Imperial Naval autopistols out of his back-alley forge. His pieces were big and blocky, but they were also reliable and didn't have focusing lenses that would cloud up under the persistent corrosive tainted mists.
The rush of the falls grew louder. The smooth rockcrete wall began to sprout pipes and ceramic tubes as they neared one of the outlets and the pattern lights flashed. Daro pressed into the alcove offered by a vertical stack of pipes. He felt the faint vibration of thousands of gallons of liquid thrusting through its hollow interior and he peered carefully into the gloom.
The light flashed again and this time Daro could make out the shiner. A dredger was crouched by the top of a corrugated stairwell like a gas-mask scarecrow swaddled in an ill-fitting tarnished yellow chem-coat. He – Daro assumed it was a he – jerked back, posture flinching. as the two patrollers materialized out of the fog. Unlike the dredger, the patrollers were practically invisible in their gray fogcoats on a night like this.
Something unintelligible whistled out through the dredger's gas mask. The figure paused, smacked his tubes a few times, freeing some organic particulates and rust, and tried again. "Got a floater." His voice crackled out through the corroded filter and Daro recognized it.
"Shew you reek-bastard, don't tell me you hauled us down here for another work-serf got himself flushed." It was an all too common occurrence. The manufactorums above the Plunge were always double-shifting. With a tithe coming up, accidents were a bored tragedy a second.
"No." Shew said. His rubber mask with the insect lenses wobbled and shook, "No, no."
"Then what is it? Manufactorum administrator take a plunge? Some Guard recruiter bastard got himself thrown out of the wrong sog-den? What?"
"Don't know, couldn't peek. Falg peeked-got pale, rapped out go up and shiner some boots." The light was jittering from his signal-lamp. His hands were shaking.
Daro eyed Shew carefully. Dredgers spent most their lives in the cramped tunnels, un-clogging waste pipes and exhaust channels. Lot of them found the open vast void of the cavern downright terrifying. It could be Shew was just on edge because he was outside. Or it could be some ganger fresh off the Clog looking to lure some patrollers and they squeezed Shew to be the baiter.
Daro exchanged a glance with Keller. Only one way to find out. He squeezed the grip on his autopistol tighter and nodded, "Show us what you got then."
Shew didn't need any further prompting. One hand slapped the signal lamp onto its harness clip the other grabbed up a shortened auto-delver, and the third grabbed a rail and swung the abhuman out of sight. Shew was dredger stock. His ancestors had been dredgers too. Like most people who spent days working the thickly toxic brew of the waste tunnels, human abnormality was common and expected.
Vertical stacks of stairs studded the outside walls, thick, patched, rusted iron that creaked and groaned under three pairs of tromping boots. Nobody liked taking the Iron Steps, but they were quicker than traversing the entire length of each level before reaching the solid rockcrete slabs down to the next level and the dredger took them quickly down.
After several turns, Shew led them away from the outside edge and led the way deeper into a narrow service corridor cut into the rockface. Claustrophobia replaced agoraphobia as the two enforcers bent and contorted their way through the tangle of pipes that sprouted along the walls and ceiling. In places the rockcrete floor gave way to thick metal grilles and Daro could hear the rush of the water thundering inches below his boots. Faded yellow and white paint signs warned them they were entering the wetworks proper and needed to be properly equipped.
Keller paused and strapped on her filter mask. Daro didn't bother. Those things might've kept the lungs cleanish, and in her case, the chances of making baby Shews with third arms or quadruple eyes low, but they obstructed your sight and your hearing, and the thick rubber did nothing to stop a bullet you didn't see because your vision had been reduced to a small fish-eye view right in front of your face.
The smell of wet oil got stronger and mixed with that suffocating reek of decomposing organic matter. Daro jammed his nose-filters tighter into his nostrils as they came out into a narrow concrete walkway. To their left, the tunnel was a massive curve of piping, hosing a river of water-diluted waste down to the Big Plunge. Lumin lights flickered weakly on the overhead ceiling like dying stars. The line of railing bordering the left side of the walkway broke up ahead, making way for a narrow metal ladder. There was another yellow cloaked figure up ahead. A taller dredger, standing nervous sentry with an auto-delver gripped like a spear.
Shew rushed ahead and swung down the ladder. Daro slowed, peering carefully over the lip. The ladder extended down ten feet to a concrete landing set inches above the raging river torrent. A collection of filth-stained yellow coats marked the rest of the dredgers. They were gathered over a four-limbed lump spread out on a tattered tarp like mourners at a funeral.
Or buzzards over carrion, the patroller thought. One of the dredgers had their mask off. Falg's acid-misted face turned back to regard Daro. He was chewing a fresh blister into his fat lip and his tense expression didn't set right on such a big broad face. "Daro." The dredger leader said.
"Falg." Daro grunted.
Pleasantries exchanged, Falg jerked his head. "The floater's this way."
Daro sighed heavily, "Let's see it then."
Daro climbed down the rusted ladder. Keller stayed up top and leaned onto the rail with a clank that drew attention to the big autopistol held casually in her hand and just as casually just how vivid a target those yellow-coats made the dredger. Daro hid another smile. She was learning all right. Feeling a little more reassured he turned his attention to the sorry bastard on the sheet.
The body was male…ish. It was hard to tell based more on the width of the hips and the breadth of the shoulders, corrosives had eaten away at the face, rinsing away flesh and muscle. One eye remained in the socket, a cloudy blue. The body wore a form-fitting body suit. The suit hung limp now but a quick eyeballing of its size suggested someone lithe, tightly compacted. There was a hole in the front and back. High caliber shot to have punched through.
Daro grunted and leaned in closer.
On closer inspection, the remaining eye was faintly whorled with etched metal circuits. Wires instead of nerves anchored it to what fleshy gray matter remained while micro-staples kept it sutured to the discolored skull, a bionic implant.
And the suit itself, a matte-black bodyglove, unremarkable looking, could have been worn by midspire citizen. However, the fact that the clothing was still recognizable, still mostly intact said it was high-quality, ultra high quality to be able to stand up to a wash through the waste-pipes. And that in turn said that whatever had made a mess of the suit's gut was far beyond a banger special loaded with glass and shrap. Even with a hole in it the size of his fist, a tough-woven suit like that would be high-cred to the hired guns and gangers of Downspire, even people in Midspire. Same for the bionic, and there were plenty of sealed zip-heads criss-crossing the body suit that suggested micro-pockets loaded with all sorts of high tech goodies.
"Well Falg, I'd say you've fished a fortune." There weren't many perks to dredging, but one law went unspoken. What dredgers dislodged in the cold darkness of the pipes, they kept. "Looks like some high-spyre adrenaline addict got himself in over his head."
"We didn't know Daro. We didn't know who he was. There was no way we could've known." Falq looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Like the mention of profiting off the corpse had just triggered his deepest darkest nightmare because he was emphatically shaking his head no so hard Daro was surprised it was still attached.
"Known what?" Daro growled.
Falg took something out of his pocket. It was a shape swathed heavily in tarp-rags. He handed it to Daro like a man turning in the warrant for his own execution. "We didn't touch a thing after we found it in his pocket. Put everything back. Swear on the Throne."
Starting to get scared, Daro took it reluctantly. He flipped back the rags.
"Oh."
Light reflected off its surface, splashed his face with ruby hues. It was beautiful as a shimmerscale viper coiling around your leg. Daro wanted to turn around, wind his arm, and pitch it as far into the dark river as he could. Even if hours of swirling raging, battering currents of dissolving liquid hadn't scratched it, anything that went over the edge and into the Big Plunge could safely be considered lost forever.
Daro didn't throw it over the edge. For the same reason that Falg hadn't tossed it back in the murk, the same reason his crew had willingly given up a ten-year fortune in salvage. Fear. Fear powerful enough to overcome greed. Fear instilled by years of propaganda voxes, and whispered stories in the late hours at dim sog-dens.
"Daro?" Keller's voice echoed down, "You alright there?"
"Keller…get-" the words choked in his mouth, wet clogs. Daro paused, carefully fished out his cig and lit it. He took a breath, another. "Get this…get it on the horn to the precinct, delegation…" Throne, did they even have a delegation code in the book for this? "Feck, forget the precinct. High Spire, Crimson-Black."
"The Arbites?"
She wasn't slow, just wanted confirmation.
"Yeah…make it the Arbites' problem."
Keller pulled the vox-muffs off her head, whacked them a few times, and strapped it back on.
"Vox-operator's throwing regs at me. Crimson-Black's too high a code to send to the Arbites with having the local enforcement provost approve it first. And local provost Danik is currently indisposed."
"Who's on the wire?"
"Stryger."
"You tell that lazy sack of shit that he'll forget the regs just like I forgot who misfiled the nine kilos of obscura from that chem-pit we busted two spins back. You tell him that."
More muffled static, more stern whispers. After a moment she came back around and towards him.
"He said to tell you you're a fecking heartless bastard and he hopes Danik throws you into the Big Plunge." Keller grabbed the ladder and slid down it, landing with a muffled thump on the decking. "So, now's as I've pissed off the mucker responsible for calling in backup if I get in trouble, mind telling me what this is all-" Keller's voice froze. When it worked again, she blurted out "Holy fecking Throne."
Daro stared down at the icon heavy in his hand. The surface was faintly clouded, the only hint of hours or days spent in the acid-bath of the river. The shape remained unmarred, precision sharp angles forming a symbol instantly recognized, instantly feared by any sane man or woman in the Imperium.
A gothic I, bisected by three bars.