At the Garter Club Bordello, two days to go…
Jimny came to find him. He was one of the few people that had known where Corgan was staying. It was a good thing the kid was street-smart.
'They took 'em all in, boss… Luci, Old Petra, even Dusty Piet…. I couldn't do anything so I came to find you…'
The kid was red in the face after running all the way to the Garter Club from the Greasy Spoon. He was too tired even to gawp at the ladies as he usually did. Flower wrapped him up in her busty embrace, cooing over his distress and somehow the red in his cheeks deepened a shade.
'Slow down, Jimny. Start from the beginning, what happened?'
'Arbites showed up this morning, boss. Came into town throwing their weight around… I slipped into the crawl-space when they came into the spoon. I heard everything. Said they were looking for a fugitive that shot up some cops on the edge of town last night. Luci told them to go to hell and that if it was the same cops that came sniffing around yesterday they had it coming to them. She's been in a foul temper since yesterday…
'Keep to the point,' Corgan chastened him, casting an irritable glance at Flower in response to her I-told-you-so pout.
'They arrested her on the spot. They took everyone that was in the Spoon and ransacked the place. They're scouring the settlement for the guy that killed those men.'
'You did the right thing coming to tell me, Jimny. Now do me a favour. Go round up Teli and Salvo. Tell them I'll meet them up at dog-leg creek in an hour.'
'Sure thing, boss.' Jimny darted out the door.
'You sure you can trust those creeps?' asked Jewel.
'I don't trust anyone but you, Jewel, surely you know that by now,' he smiled. 'When those lawmen come calling, tell them I was here. Tell them I talked about heading out to the dog-leg to hire some muscle.'
'But, you are... I don't get it…'
'Don't sweat it. I can run twenty Arbites ragged all day up in the badlands and I'll only have to do that if they take you seriously, which they won't. They'll send a couple of bravos, maybe a Castigator squad, but no more then that. I'll be back when the heat dies down.'
'Take it easy, sugar.'
Guildsman Rake sauntered into Frag Hole Rock like he owned the place. For all intents and purposes he did. His coterie of hard-knock scum surrounded him, walking with the easy grace of wild animals at home in their natural habitat.
Chastener Brydon had been assigned to follow up a lead that put their target out of town. He felt confident that Escabar Corgan had turned tail after last night's debacle. Rake was ready to make his move.
It seemed so out of character for Corgan to have made such a fundamental error as to murder Adeptus Arbites on his home turf. He supposed the man was human after all. The rumours would have you believe he was a daemon wearing flesh like a mantle. Hubris was worrying about nothing.
The Arbiter had worried that Corgan was more of a liability than the current situation suggested. Obviously the man had contacts within the Adeptus, which concerned Rake not at all, but he had tried to make out that while Corgan lived, Rake could never seat easy in Frag Hole. The Guildsman was prepared to accept that as a possibility, but he would not become complacent as he had before. Corgan wouldn't get a look in.
No, Rake got the impression that Hubris was after the bigger fish, and Corgan's hot-headed violence had deprived him of a valuable decoy. The ruse he had planned would only have been possible with Corgan sitting pretty in the middle of his web of influence. He was forced to set more complicated gambits in motion to get the Catachans to bite.
Rake was circumspect about what the future held for him. He had all but achieved his primary goal, but Hubris had offered him full control over Tower Head when the Catachans were brought down. He'd be well and truly back in with the big boys if he could offer that prize to Old Sott.
He lived in interesting times.
'Jendo. Carry a message for me.' He handed the kid a crypto-sealed datapad that he had used to record Jamma's distinctive vocal tones. Jendo would only be able to unlock the pad when he stood before the Punisher's leader and asked him to speak into the mic.
The boy ran back to his jet-bike and revved the engines, speeding off into the dusty wastelands between Frag Hole and Tower Head.
Things were about to become even more interesting, Rake mused as he headed for the Greasy Spoon. He didn't notice the furtive shadow of a young boy stealing back into the shadows across the street.
Out in the badlands…
Teli and Salvo waited, warming their hands at a blazing canister-fire. Dog-Leg Creek was a sludge-spill ravine deep in the barren slag-hills south of Frag Hole. They were close to the domes outer reaches. The concave expanse of pitted iron and skeletal adamantium stretched up into undefinable spaces above them. Ancient, long-disused structures marched down from this cyclopean wall in serried ranks of rust and decay, coming to an abrupt terminus less than a mile away and giving way to this open prairie land. No one but ratskins and scavvies lived out there. The rimward regions of the Low Domes were even more lawless than the settled regions hubward. But that was part of the reason that Frag Hole Rock was valuable to the Guild.
The ratskin tribes were said to guard treasure troves of priceless archeotech that was worth more than its weight in gold to the Imperium. Frag Hole was the last outpost of civilisation and a base of operations for prospective forays into the badlands. Without it the Guild was forced to take the longer, more dangerous route through the scavvie infested wastes that formed an invisible wall around the ratskin's tribal lands.
Teli and Salvo were nervous enough about being out here, without Corgan being over an hour late.
'Where is he?' Teli muttered, rubbing his tingling hands together as they warmed up. It was cold in this part of the hive, colder than its aridity suggested.
'I'll give him five more minutes, then I'm going,' Salvo replied, limbering his pistol in its holster.
They started at the sound of shale skittering down the slope above them, pulling their irons and zoning in on whatever had caused the disturbance. Seven heavily armed and armoured Arbites crested the rise, combat shotguns primed.
'What the…'
'This is the law, toss your weapons and lie face down with your hands behind your heads!' The loud-hailer cast echoes around the narrow gorge as it bellowed down at them. Teli and Salvo flung their pistols and removed their other weapons before diving to the ground obediently.
Two of the Arbites stayed put while the other five scrambled down the slope. The leader sent one man scouting out to either side to watch the slopes opposite, taking no chances on the possibility of an ambush. The other three approached the prone men, weapons trained.
'Cuff 'em,' the leader grunted. The others slung their shotguns and knelt, shoving armoured knee-caps into the small of each man's back while they reached for their cuffs.
The officer watching the left flank dropped to the ground with a sound like shattering glass. Blood gouted from his visor. The leader swore and shouted a warning, too late for the man watching the other flank, whose armour wasn't proof against the high powered las-round that passed through his collarbone and dissolved a section of his spine.
The Chastener bolted, looking for cover but finding none and reasoning that a moving target would be harder to hit.
'Get up there and find him!' he bellowed at the other two Arbites with him. Up on the slope behind him the rearguard were peppering the opposite slope with solid slugs. They hadn't marked up any targets as yet and it didn't seem to be causing the shooter any problems.
Another man dropped to the ground, his life blood pouring from rent armour, his shotgun still in its sling. The Chastener and his last remaining foot-soldier dived to the ground at the foot of the hostile slope, hoping that the shooter wouldn't be able to draw a bead on them.
Instead, the sniper targeted the rearguard, both of whom had realised their folly in standing in the open and dropped back behind the crest of the ridge. He winged one of them and shattered the top of the other's helmet, dissuading him from sticking his head above the horizon.
The Chastener keyed his vox.
'This is Chastener Brydon to HQ. Have come under hostile fire. Three men down. We are pinned and unable to deal with the offender. Request backup A.S.A.P! Repeat, send backup now!'
Brydon and his cohorts huddled on the ground, Teli and Salvo completely forgotten in the heat of the panic. Teli had a pair of electro-cuffs fastened to his left wrist, but his hands were still free. Salvo's assailant hadn't even got that far in restraining him.
Teli slid the shotgun from the dead Arbites' sling, careful not to make too much sound as he rolled and drew a bead on one of the survivors huddling a few metres away. After swiftly racking the slide he peppered them with buckshot which bounced harmlessly from their carapace armoured forms but gave them something else to worry about.
The Chastener stayed put but the other man stood to bring his shotgun around on this new threat. His head exploded as the sniper locked zoned in on this newly visible target. The Chastener swore as Teli selected solid-shot rounds and racked the slide again.
'Drop the piece, copper!' he cried, 'If you don't wanna be next on the fatalities list…'
Half an hour later an Adeptus Arbites task force crested the same rise as their compatriots and found the three survivors cuffed together in such a way as to make it impossible for them to disentangle themselves from each other. The story was recited for many years afterward in the Low Domes Precincts and never failed to evince laughter in those that heard it.
One day to go…
Corgan had got back to the Bordello later that day and spent the night there, briefing his erstwhile goons on what he was going to do next.
Teli and Salvo were locals. They hired themselves out as muscle throughout the Low Domes region, but they'd always known better than to play rough with Corgan. They'd seen what he'd done to Helmut Wulfenska back in the day. They accepted his rulership over Frag Hole Rock as something that had benefited their extended family, whose business in livestock was thriving now that they weren't contracted to the Sott & Co Guildhouse.
He'd only used them a couple of times himself, usually when it was prudent not to be seen stooping to the level of a lowly scummer. They did small-time, occasional jobs for him and in return he made sure they had a safe bolt-hole for when things turned bad. They had a vested interest in maintaining Corgan's autonomy and keeping the Guild out and as such, he trusted them to work alongside him in this. Normally he wouldn't have trusted them as far as he could spit.
He'd spent a few creds to make their night at the bordello a comfortable one and told them to be ready for anything the next day. Then he called for Jimny.
The kid had told him about the heavies holed up in the Greasy Spoon, confirming Corgan's suspicion that this was a concerted effort to re-install the Guild in Frag Hole Rock. He was resolved to deal with them hard and fast before the Arbites realised he'd slipped back into town. Once done, he'd broker a deal with the lawmen through his contacts at the precinct. Eventually they'd see reason, stubborn though they may be.
When morning had come he'd broken out the heavy guns. Jewel hefted the custom las-rifle he'd used the day before. It was a high-powered sniper variant machined in the factories of House Orlock for the Imperial Guard. He'd lifted it from a rogue hit-man that had tried to kill him a few months before, a man carrying a fistful of credits stamped with the Sott & Co charter-mark. The madam had used lasguns before and the weapon rested easily in her cradling arms.
Teli carried a hefty grenade launcher and had looped two bandoliers of grenades over his shoulders. He also exchanged his battered laspistol for a compact Korsch 50 machine pistol. Salvo grinned with unconcealed delight as he hefted the 20 calibre stubber he'd liberated from the Bordello's armoury.
Jimny gazed longingly at the weapons, desperate to join the men and Jewel in the fight. Corgan shook his head.
'But I wanna come with, boss! You're gonna need a few extra arms if you're heading back to the Spoon.'
Corgan weighed the risks. Jimny was just a kid. Then again, he was no younger than Corgan himself had been when he first ran away from the convent. He would feel bad if the kid bought it, but the sooner he started to toughen up the better he would fare in this cut-and-thrust world. He couldn't have had a better teacher in Corgan.
In the end Teli decided the issue by giving him his discarded laspistol and showing him how to use it.
The fledgling gang took to the streets armed to the teeth, with Maxi loping ahead of them. Their destination, the Greasy Spoon.
'You're sure there was no one else in there when they arrived?'
Jimny shook his head.
'Can't be sure, they got here before me. Good thing too else I'd have been trapped inside.'
'Well, it's tough for them if there was. Run back and tell Teli to put a couple of grenades through the door. Keep your head down and wait until I give the word. They'll be coming out shooting and I intend to take as many of 'em down as I can before I need you. Got it?'
'I'm like a sponge, boss…'
'Get moving.' Jimny sped off. Corgan turned to Maxi and shooed him off into the recesses of the run-down hab complex opposite the spoon. The canid wasn't stupid. He could sense the danger and knew his own strengths and weaknesses. He hadn't survived as long as he had in the Underhive by standing in the way of armed gunmen. No doubt Corgan would see him later, if he survived.
The whump-whump of Teli's grenade-launcher broke the silence. Both grenades dropped through the saloon doors of the Spoon and were followed by twin explosions. The windows and door exploded outward in smoke and flame, hurling two or three bodies into the street. Seconds later two more dazed shooters staggered out, coughing and bleeding, but still firing their weapons as they came.
Corgan met them in the street. His navy revolver took the first man's arm off while the other was immolated by the blue flames of his plasma pistol.
The orchestral tinkling of breaking glass gave Corgan enough warning to roll to one side as another shooter opened up from the Spoon's upstairs window, tearing up the hard-packed earth in a full-auto torrent of las.
The window collapsed outward. Jewel had spread the man's brains across the walls of the room and his corpse landed heavily in the street.
The man that had lost his arm rose with a roar of pain and rage. He was pumped so full of stims that even his debilitating injuries hadn't stopped him. Corgan took a glancing shot to his shoulder, tearing his jacket and drawing a line of blood across the outer tip of his collar bone. Unlucky for him, Corgan thought as two more hollow-tipped rounds exploded the man's lungs out the back of his rib-cage. Even then it took a long time for the man to drown in his own blood.
The fight wasn't done yet. Corgan leapt through the door into the Spoon's ravaged interior. Flames still licked at the ruins of several tables and the bar, but the damage was mostly concussive. The place was smashed and so were the six men that had been caught in the blast.
One of these had managed to prop himself up against the bar. He shot at Corgan with some kind of pistol but missed by a long mile, his head still spinning with the shock. Corgan blasted him in the face with his revolver. With two rounds left in that tumbler, he switched it over to the fresh one and quickly reloaded while he had the chance. He counted twelve men down, including those outside.
A furtive scuffing reached his ears, coming from the stairs. He holstered the plasma pistol and primed his revolver, gripping it two-handed and creeping towards the stairs on cat-like feet. He stopped to one side of the door and put his back to the wall. It was still warm from the fyceline blast-wash.
He kicked a ruined stool out across the doorway, flinching back as five panicked shots blew it to even smaller splinters.
If the guy was toting a six-shooter, and it sounded like he was, then he only had one shot left. The chances of him carrying a seven or even ten round weapon were high, but that was a risk Corgan was willing to take.
He moved out and round into the stairway, blasting away into the shadows with his pistol. A sixth shot rang out and he felt the bullet crease his left thigh, sending him staggering on the stairs. A flick of his wrist put the second tumbler into position and the rest of his load followed the first batch.
As the smoke cleared Corgan was relieved to find the bravo lying in bloodied rags. He slung his revolver and took out the Korsch 90's. At the top of the stairs he hesitated again, this time slipping a twist of burnished steel from his jacket pocket and using it to peek around the corner. He would have used it at the bottom of the stairwell except that it was useless in the dark. The corridor above had a window at the other end that made it more useful here.
He caught a glimpse of a boot pulling back into the second room down. There was at least one man still alive up here. The room at the end of the corridor was the one the shooter had fallen from, though he may have been replaced by now. He'd have to trust Jewel to cover that angle. That left one other mystery door.
He slipped a smoke canister from his belt, pulling the pin and rolling it down the corridor. He had a pair of infra-goggles around his neck which he pulled up into position over his eyes. The stairway turned green and the shadows inverted. A respirator came out of a pocket and went to cover his mouth and nose.
He waited for the canister to start belching acrid fumes and for the flurry of panic fire that tore up the wall in front of him. When the sound of coughing and spluttering finally reached him to confirm that they hadn't had time to fix their own respirators he emerged onto the landing, weapons held ready in from of him.
The first door was ajar and the room empty. The second door had swung back to reveal a man coughing his guts up on the floor. A salvo of autopistol slugs spread his guts in a more literal sense.
That left just one bright halo of light to indicate a living body within the room. The silhouette of a man with his hands held high.
'Please, don't shoot… I'm worth a hefty ransom to you if you only spare my life…'
'Keep your hands high,' Corgan replied, his voice muffled somewhat by the respirator unit. 'Step out onto the landing and head downstairs. I've got a gun aimed at your head and I'll shoot if you give me the slightest reason to.'
Outside, Corgan removed his head gear with one hand while Jewel and Jimny covered the survivor. He didn't look familiar, but there was an aristo cast to his features that marked him as a Guilder without question.
Teli and Salvo emerged from the buildings, their weapons held ready. Jewel stayed in position, watching for any that had escaped their attention so far.
'That's Rake,' Teli elaborated. 'He used to run this town before you and Wulfi kicked the Enforcers out.'
'Well, he's about to go crawling back to his boss with his tail between his legs,' Corgan replied. 'He's got a message to deliver.'
The Guildsman wept with relief, such had been his terror at the thought of being executed. He sank down on hands and knees in the dirt, surrounded by the corpses of his bravos.
Corgan took out his slim-line pistol and casually shot Rake through the back of each hand in quick succession. The Guilder howled in shock and pain. Teli and Salvo stepped back at this show of callous cruelty.
'Stand him up,' said Corgan. The two reached down to haul Rake to his feet, which Corgan then shot through in the same manner, sending Rake tumbling back down to the ground, rolling around on his back. Two more rounds destroyed the man's kneecaps.
'That's just to make sure that his crawl is as comfortable as I want it to be,' he told the others, with the cold light of uncaring in his ice-chip eyes.'
If either of the men standing before him had ever had any illusions that Corgan was in any way human underneath the cold, hard exterior he displayed, then they were melted mercilessly away under that gaze.
He looked down at Jimny and the moment passed away.
'I need you to do something for me, kid. You're the only one that can come through for me. If you do it right, then Jewel and the girls will be safe and maybe even Luci and Petra will be able to come home. If you can't do it then everybody dies…'
'Name it, boss,' said the kid, the light of eternal loyalty shining from him. If Corgan had of told him to shoot himself through the head he wouldn't even have hesitated in doing so.
'You're not going to like it…'
'I'll do anything!' Jimny asserted.
Corgan took a deep breath. He'd set things in motion now that he doubted could be brought to any kind of satisfactory conclusion while he was still around. Frag Hole had had a good run, but it was coming to an end.
'I need you to wait here until the Arbites come back into town. I need you to tell them I did this. And I need you to tell them where I'm going.'
'But, boss…'
'It's the only way, Jimny. Luci's depending on you doing what I tell you to do. I can't break her out of the Precinct jail, not even if Teli and Salvo helped me, which they wouldn't. The only thing that'll let them off the hook is if the Arbites can lay their hands on me. I intend to give them what they want, but not before I've got what I want from them first. Do you understand?'
'No!'
Corgan sighed. The kid was crying now, head bowed, tears coursing down his cheeks, snot smearing the back of his sleeve.
'You don't have to understand. You just have to do it. Will you do it, Jimny?'
The kid nodded without looking up, utterly distraught that he was never going to see his hero again.
'I knew I could depend on you, Jimny. You've always been my number two!'
He turned to the others.
'I'm going after Jamma. He's behind this whole affair, I just know he is. He couldn't take me down head on and neither could the Guild. They've been gunning for me since I arrived in this Emperor-forsaken backwater. If I'm going down, they're coming with me. I'll understand if you don't want in on it.'
They looked hesitant. They hadn't signed up for this.
'Sorry, man, but stupid we ain't. No one goes toe-to-toe with Jamma if they value their hides.'
Corgan nodded.
'Then there's just one more job I need you to do.'
They dumped Rake on the ground some fifteen minutes crawling distance from the nearest Sott & Co Trading Post and melted into the surrounding terrain. They'd bandaged the man's debilitating wounds and told him where they were dropping him off. The Guildsman's survival instinct overcame the agony he must have experienced during that tortuous crawl from the brush outside the settlement of Fillipsvil.
The watchmen spotted him and sallied out to pick him up, recognising who it was that lay mutilated before the gates. They took him inside as Teli and Salvo made good their departure having fulfilled Corgan's last contract.