After another five minutes of crawling - chafing his shoulders, elbows and knees in the process - the pipe made a turn to the left and from beyond came a faint, shimmering light. With renewed effort, Parcivale increased his speed, feeling relieved. Ripper and Janina must have noticed his disappearance and must have waited for him. Pushing himself around the bend, he wanted to call out to them, reassuring them that he was on his way, but he managed to restrain himself. Attracting attention from the Widowers now, was exactly the opposite of what they needed. So he clenched his jaws and persevered. Only ten metres to go. Five. Three. He deactivated his photo visor. The light was blinding and Parcivale didn't really understand why they hadn't doused it as soon as they had seen him coming round the bend. 'Perhaps they are as scared as I am.' he thought as he closed the final distance. He grabbed the stablight and flinched. Nobody was holding it. It just lay on the bottom of the pipe and it had been rocking from left to right beause of the tremors Parcivale had sent through the pipe as he crawled forwards. There was no trace of Janina, nor from Ripper. Parcivale turned the torch around and shone the light down the pipe, which revealed an opening upwards another metre ahead. Although the sense of relief had been swept away by the disappearance of the other two gangers, the worst of the fear was behind him as he climbed out of the pipe. Within the close confines of the pipe Parcivale had had only one option: moving forwards. He couldn't defend himself, nor could he retreat. Now, even as the chances of encountering enemy gangers grew larger, he felt like he could make his own decisions.

As he climbed up, pressing his knees, elbows and hands against the sides of the vertical pipe, he realized that Ripper must have left the stablight down below to make sure Parcivale would take the right exit. He just needed to catch up with them. Soon enough, he came at the end of the pipe. The manhole cover had been pushed open and he pulled himself out of the pipe. He rolled onto the floor and immediately pulled his autopistol, just before checking his surroundings. The room he found himself in, was small and cramped with rockcrete walls. Numerous pipes and tubes entered it from the ceiling and the walls, although the one he had just climbed out of, was easily the biggest one in the room. 'A maintenance room for the hab.' Parcivale thought, 'But where are those two jokers?' His photovisor only revealed one possibility. A rusty, steel door stood half open and seemed to lead to a straight and narrow corridor. Before leaving the relative safety of the room, Parcivale found his silencer, strapped to the holster of his autopistol, and attached it to his gun. Then, he continued his search for Janina and Ripper, walking softly with his gun at the ready.

The hallway he passed through wasn't lit, but his visor showed him that the rockcrete walls were covered in tags. The floor was dirty and was littered with trash. Parcivale had to tiptoe around broken glass, beer bottles and ration wraps to avoid making any more noise. As he continued, he passed door after door, each one standing across the other, but they were all closed, so Parcivale assumed that Ripper and Janina had left them alone and had walked on. Some of the doors showed the symbol of the Widow, but Parcivale now knew better than to look too closely at them. Finally, he came at a plain metal staircase and without having found any trace of the other two gangers, Parcivale decided to ascend to the next level of the habblock.

The stairwell led to another hallway, although here the rockcrete walls were covered in cheap, ugly flakboard. They had been painted in a faint khaki colour once, but now they were covered in red and brownish gang tags, each and every one intertwined with another. And contrary to the basement level, the place positively reeked of blood. Parcivale felt the bile rising in his aesophagus, but managed to swallow it back. Everywhere he looked the oppressive tags sprung to his eyes and he nearly tore off his photovisor to be free of the sight. He needed them to find his comrades though. He took a second to get his bearings and at the same time he realized that it was eerily quiet around here. He should be hearing the cries of wounded gangers from the fight with the Raptors. These hallways should have been bustling with Widowers getting ready to replace the losses at the front lines. But instead there was nothing. Except... Parcivale could hear someone breathing, ragged and wild. He started to walk towards the noise, each step looking to the floor first to avoid a slip, his autopistol gripped in his right hand. He stopped at a door, perhaps a dozen feet from the stairwell he had climbed. The noise came unmistakenly from the room behind it. Parcivale pushed it open ever so gently, hoping that whoever was inside wouldn't notice his presence. But immediately that became idle hope. He was greeted by an icy scream, and Parcivale dropped all caution and stormed inside, covering the room with his gun.

The screaming intensified and something scrambled from the right corner of the room behind a worn out sofa. It was a good thing Parcivale was a decent shooter. Most of his fellow gangers would have just opened fire, but even with the grainy green picture of the room from the photo visor, Parcivale had recognized the lithe form of Janina. As soon as she was out of sight, she stopped screaming. And Parcivale closed the door behind him. Without moving, he whispered. "Jay. It's me, Hammer." The girl didn't answer. "Do you understand? It's me. Come out and tell me what happened. The girl remained still, hidden behind the sofa and Parcivale started to wonder what had happened to her in earnest. She seemed completely unnerved, perhaps no longer conscient that she was on enemy terrain.

The room was quite small, so with three large steps, Parcivale stood at the side of the sofa, looking down upon Janina. She was shivering uncontrollably and her chest went up and down in a rhytm which made the ganger suspect that she was about to have a heart attack. He kneeled down and took of his visor, grabbing the stablight and putting it on. The girl flinched, but didn't start to scream. He looked Janina in the eyes and saw raw panic. Her pupils were dilated to the extremes and she was positively trembling. Gently, he grabbed her hands and wondered what might have happened to her in the short time they had been separated. He didn't have a lot of hope that the girl would be able to tell him much. He was lucky already that she didn't make a run for it.

"Jay," he started, "Jay. What happened?" No answer. "Where is Ripper, Jay? Did he move on?" Still no answer. He stood back up, lifting the torch and passing over Janina's body. He noticed how Janina followed his every moment. He looked back, but still she was unable to offer him any answers. His eye fell on her shoes and the knees of the bodyglove she carried beneath the guard flak vest. They were coloured red, and this time there was no mistaking what it actually was. "Were you in a fight, Jay?" The girl remained unresponsive. Parcivale sighed and wondered what to do next. At that point, Janina raised her finger, pointing behind him. Panic hit him and he immediately rolled to his right, rotating around so he could cover whatever was behind him with both his gun and his stablight. In the dancing light, he saw someone, arms wide. This time, he didn't hesitate and pulled the trigger. His eyes registred a direct hit, right in the chest, but somehow his opponent remained standing. In fact, he didn't move at all.

Parcivale focused the light beam of his torch on the body and then it hit him. The man was nailed to the wall and had been dead for quite some time. His eyes were snatched out of their sockets and his mouth was sewn shut. The nose was cut off and someone had etched in each of the man's cheeks an ugly symbol. When Parcivale diverted the light from the man's head to his body, he could see that his clothes had been torn off and that his chest was one big bloody hole. The ribcage was cracked open wide and the white bones resembled the curled up legs of a dead spider. Behind him, Parcivale could hear how Janina started to sob. Parcivale couldn't blame her. This was worse than anything he had ever seen, and that was saying something in this dark underhive where most of the gangs took ears, noses or other body parts as trophies. But there wasn't anything Parcivale could do except going through with his job. And maybe that would also put an end to this awful business.

He went back to Janina, who was still sitting on the floor, her hands before her eyes, mumbling softly. He grabbed her by the wrists and tried to pull her up, but the girl kept her legs limb so all he managed to do was pull her against his own firm body. "No. No. No." she sobbed. "Leave me be. I can't go on." Parcivale let go of her wrists and kneeled before her, this time taking her face in his two hands, gently. He softened his voice and whispered. "You can't stay here, Jay. If the Widowers find you... who knows what they'll do." The girl just shook her head. He didn't seem to get through to her. "Look... I need you to come with me Jay. If we want to get out of here with our lives, I'll need your skills. I'll keep you safe." Parcivale hugged her. And lied. "I promise."

It was a promise he knew he might not be able to keep. And in all honesty, he would let the girl die any day of the week if it would save his hide. She was new in the gang, and even though Nowak's eye had fell on her, he knew there would be other youngsters ready to join the ranks of the Jesters. But he needed to finish the task Nowak had given him. Otherwise, there would be no turning back. It wasn't like Nowak would kill him for disobeying. The man wasn't a monster or he wouldn't have been able to keep on top of his gang for all these years, but he'd definitely fall from grace. And that meant that he would be drawing the short stick eventually, getting assigned to a risky drive-by or just plain old racketeer business where you could never exclude the possibility that a new face on the block would put a slug between your teeth.

Apparently, Janina couldn't tell he lied and she stood up, grabbing his outstretched arm to pull herself up. "There is..." she said and then she fell silent again as if she had trouble finding the words to describe whatever she had seen. Parcivale tried to supress his impatience, biting his tongue. "There is..." she tried again, "There were bodies, lots of bodies. All... slaughtered. Butchered. Hacked and blown to pieces. It was unlike... unlike anything I have ever seen." Parcivale nodded thoughtfully, supressing the urge to shake the girl back and forth. "Why did you run?" he asked cautiously. She averted her eyes, perhaps not willing to tell. Parcivale held her hands and pinched them softly. She looked back up at him with her eyes wide open, her panic still simmering right beneath the surface. "Hammer. I couldn't... It was too much. Ripper just ploughed through it. Like he didn't see what he was walking into. There was blood everywhere. There were pools of it. He just stepped through it. He didn't see..." Now that she talked, she really blurted out the words, perhaps feeling some relief that someone listened. Parcivale let go of her hands and instead put his arms around her. He shushed her. This was a critical moment. He knew instictively that he needed to consolidate her support there and then. If not, she wouldn't fall for any other lies he might tell her later.

"Ok. You're safe now," he told her again, "But you need to show we where Ripper went. We'll stay together. I'll lead and you're staying right behind me. Ok? You think you can do that?" The girl stared at him and for a moment Parcivale thought that he'd just have to find Ripper's trail on his own. But then she nodded once and pushed herself up. "Ok, Hammer. I think I can do that." she said with a trembling voice and Parcivale could see that she was furiously blinking her eyes to avoid crying. All in all, it didn't really raise his confidence in the girl, but he would take what he could get. And he had to admit to himself that he was unnerved too. "Good... Good Jay." he said and the girl actually managed a weak smile. "You're using my name." He smiled back at her. "Anyone who makes it inside the den of the Widow deserves that much respect." The girl shook her head in disbelief and started walking to the door, keeping her eyes averted of the form nailed against the wall. Parcivale followed her example and doused the stablight. Coming at the door, they switched places. Janina whispered to go right and Parcivale gently opened the door again. He kept his head down and tried to ignore the writing on the wall as he moved on.

Janina guided him through the habblock, until they came at the central hall which was dominated by a single column which contained five elevator shafts. The pentagonal column sported five statues, nothing too fancy, that represented Imperial virtues: faith, duty, courage... They had been clad with obscene words and here and there they were damaged, missing fingers or their chests being dented. But they couldn't distract the two gangers from the scene of absolute carnage on the floor. Janina hadn't lied. There were body parts everywhere, some cut from their torsos, others seemed to be blown up. When Parcivale walked in, he heard the soft splashing sound of his shoes on the wet floor. He looked back at Janina whose face had lost all colour again, but she seemed to keep it together. 'For now.' Parcivale thought as he kneeled at one of the bodies to study the damage. These weren't the wounds inflicted by handcannons or autopistols. Nor were these bodies cut up with switchblades or even chainswords. The cuts were straight and the wounds seemed to have been cauterized instantly. Parcivale didn't know any weapon that would cause such a thing. And when he studied the bodies that had been blown up, his initial hypothesis of a frag grenade could be dismissed as well. There wasn't any shrapnel in the wounds. But these wounds he recognized. He'd seen them inflicted once on a fellow ganger. That day they had crossed the path of an Adeptus Arbites kill squad - something most gangers only encountered once in their lifetime - and he remembered the formidable firepower they had brought to the fore: boltguns.

"No one has this kind of fire power down here." Parcivale muttered, half to himself, half to Janina. "And definitely not the Raptors." The girl approached him, still looking like a deer that might run at any moment. She whispered, afraid to break the silence. "Where are the bodies of the attackers? These are all Widowers." Parcivale frowned and looked around again. It was hard to identify the corpses that were laying around, what with all the loose body parts anyway, but after some checking, he came to the same conclusion. There wasn't a single casualty of the other party. And it wasn't that the Widowers had started a fight amongst themselves. They only carried the usual weaponry. No bolt weapons. "Good catch, Jay." Parcivale commented the girl. "Now where did Ripper go?" Janina looked around, trying to get her bearings. Then she pointed at a small door next to one of the elevators, probably leading to a service ladder. "Ok, let's..." Parcivale started, but he forgot what he was about to say when his eye fell on something. Janina saw how the Jester started prodding the corpse laying next to him. "Hammer?" she asked but Parcivale didn't reply and instead crept closer to the abdomen of the ganger. "Hammer, what the flip are you doing?" He ignored her and pushed away a flap of muscle and fat of the female Widower. He made sure that he blocked Janina's view as he pulled at something lodged inside the body. It felt hard, boney, but it had a polished black colour. With an effort, he managed to pull it free of the confines of the corpse. Immediately he let it fall to the floor where it landed with a wet thud. "Mutants." he whispered, revulsion dripping from the word. Behind him, he heard Janina asking what he had found. "Nothing" he answered bluntly and he kicked the thing away wildly. "Nothing" he repeated, but he sounded less than convinced. Parcivale had recognized the thing as a small human baby, only it had sported two considerably large, black horns on its skull. The sight would remain imprinted in his memory until his death.

He felt no need to share that with the girl behind him. Instead he turned around and walked to the service entry, grabbing Janina by the shoulder and pulling her with him. He had just opened the small iron plasteel door when she returned the favour. "Look," she said pointing at the floor before the elevator, "someone passed by". Hammer looked down and then stepped in closer to investigate. Before the elevator doors he could see footprints, painted on the floor in blood, but what struck him was that they were all the same but in different sizes. As if a few enforcers had stood here, all in riot gear with heavy combat boots. He looked at the needle above the elevator doors. It pointed at a small High gothic styled, copper 19, one floor below the top of the building. "Ripper will probably be there as well. Let's go Jay." The girl seemed to respond well to her name, so Parcivale used it consequently, hoping that it would help her to keep it together. Not feeling too confident about it, he led the way.