Once Again I am stealing a few moments to write something in less than ideal conditions. I'll honestly try to come back later and edit the worst of it.
Ciaphas Cain the Crime Lord - Fake it till you make it
"Ugh..."
Ciaphas couldn't help but sigh at the mess around him.
"Old Man Cain used to say that sighs were happiness leaving tou Cy."
Ciaphas looked at Grey, then the bodies of two different groups of gangers then back at Grey and sigued louder.
"Uuugh!"
Grey let out a chuckle and despite his little size easily hauled one body over his shoulder.
Grey and the other 5 oldest urchins, those that were around 10 years old, were doing their best to put the bodies in a trolley that was starting to look really small.
The trolley and other useful items along with rare pieces of tech were the regular payments Line did to ensure he had Ciaphas and the Tigers' support.
Line, who turned out to be one of the richest men in the level which baffled Ciaphas because someone should already have killed him and taken all his stuff for themselves.
Line and it seemd the entire underhive was under the misconception that there were a lot more Tigers than just Ciaphas.
Maybe the number of gangers that came looking to kill him and never returned was the origin of that mistake.
From context clues the Tigers used to be a powerful gang that controlled various levels but a raid of the Judges and the other gangs killed all of them.
Ciaphas tried his best to sound misterious plus him constantly trading for lots of food made people think the Tigers were in hiding and he was the chosen face of the gang.
The Tigers old rivals had objections of course so they sent small groups to finish the job but luckily for Ciaphas they would often find each other and start fights from which only one or two will survive... until Ciaphas and the Urchins who had watched from a safe distance took the survivors too.
Having so many people looking for him meant he rarely got to use his new coat but trading the bodies for... recycling ensured that the Urchins... maybe he should start calling them Cubs? The kids had enough food for the first time in their short lives.
Just then Clive, the only older kid not lifting bodies came running around an alley out of breath and I feel my stomach drop.
"Clive, what is it?"
Grey and Eris came quickly to hear what made the ratling boy, we all started calling Martian due to Old Man Cain's stories about the mages of tech, force himself to any kind of physical excretion.
It took a minute for Clive to get his breath under control.
"Erl and Rol saw a large group of gangers heading to the Rat's Tail! Or rather four small groups! They said the gangers weren't fighting and that in front of each group there were guys with important tech!"
It was obvious this last detail was the most important to Clive since he was the one who managed to repair a handful of tech doodas Line brough us and even managed to rig the batteries into half a dozen kind of electric grenades that allowed Ciaphas to deal with the second group of gangers that tried to off him a couple of weeks ago.
"The Rat's Tail? That is out of our territory, what were they doing there?"
"Never mind that Cy" interrupted Grey and Ciaphas immediately knew he had put them up to something "we have a meeting to catch!"
The sad part is that the little troublemaker was right.
...
In what generously could be called a bar, empied for the afternoon, four groups of five persons meet under truce to discuss the problems they had on these levels, especially during the recent weeks.
Not every gang in the Underhive sent representatives only the ones fighting for the Tigers' old territory.
Leaving the four bodyguards behind each representative approaches a big, mostly clean table.
The biggest man was shirtless showing his muscles and a robotic arm much smaller than his fleshy one, he also had a mechanical eye that didn't let him see anything but was rigged to glow red and make mechanical noises when it pointed at something.
Se sat heavily and put his metal arm on top of the table and started to tap his metal fingers on the metal surface.
A figure in blood stained robes that hinted at a femenine figure sat in fron of him and from the robes a metal arm emerged but this one was much more delicate looking and more importantly each finger ended in a needle and when she tapped her fingers on the table from each needle fell a drop of liquids of different colors including a yellow one that started to burn the metal table.
The third was a small woman wearing a blue jacket with a wolf design in the back and put a chainsword on the table while the last was a nervous looking string of a man that had trouble putting a large and weird gun on top of the table.
Ciaphas and Grey, looking through a few holes in the roof felt ill at ease watching the weird gun start to glow blue.
...
Ciaphas made a few gestures at Gray and the boy nodded before scurrying off to tell everyone to get some distance away.
Ciaphas decided that some of he urchins liked being in a gang more than others and more importantly some had talent for it.
Others not so much.
Take the three oldest, Grey, Eris and Clive.
According to Old Man Cain the three were children of offworlder soldiers that came and had some fun with the local girls.
The soldiers had then disappeared when investigating something outside the Hive. Why would anyone go out there was beyond Ciaphas but if that was what soldiers were supposed to do then he was fine never joining.
Eris was supposed to be the daughter of a big guy from... Chatatan or something like that. She was also the strongest by far, she may even be physically stronger than Ciaphas but she lacked any kind of discipline, more often than not using fists and teeth where a word would be enough.
She was also terrifying in a way Ciaphas couldn't quite explain but being around her always felt like being at the edge of an bottomless pit, slipping and about to fall.
Grey is quite the opposite. He is a brain fighter and never enters a fight he can't win but his real skill is talking to people, even Eris always does what he tells her.
It wasn't always like that tough, when he first met her he peed himself and spent days catatonic. It took him a year to be able to talk to her and it was after five years that Eris started to listen to anything he said.
Eris seems to think that just because Gray knows how to read he is a genius.
Then there is Clive. The little ratling boy had real talent for tech. Ciaphas gave the urchins some of the Tech he got and Clive managed to fix some kind of voice recorder in no time.
After that he managed to get a few things qorking again but sadly nothing that could help in a fight.
Except the electric grenades. Ciaphas still had three left and as he armed them or did what Clive told hin so they would overload and shower the surroundings with elecricity and started to drop them from the holes on the roof.
With luck each gang will think the others are betraying them and start a fight.
But when the last grenade dropped right on the central table it fell on the glowing gun and all of a sudden a great explosion shook the bar.
Ciaphas suddenly was unavle to hear anything and for a few moments he felt like he was flying.
Then lady gravity asserted herself and he fell through a hole in the roof into a room with a lot of dead people and melted tech.
He scurried away from the center of the room where there was still a red hot crater and looked around himself.
"Ugh... this is going to be a thing now right?"