‘I’m out!’ Ballack shrieks. Angharad leaps to defend him, decapitating two of the creatures and kicking another aside. The bodies are piling up. Ballack cowers behind her, trying to slam home a fresh clip.
He’s too slow. A scything limb catches Angharad across the forehead and knocks her down. A glancing blow, not enough to kill.
But she’s dead anyway.
Unless–
I keep the chair’s cannons firing. I reach out, and ’ware Angharad, snatching her up before she hits the ground. Evisorex is a purring monster in my hands. It knows what it has to do. I let it drive into the enemy, remembering my blade schooling – from dear, lost Arianhrod long ago – and allowing Angharad’s training to leak from her unconscious mind to inform my movements. I cut them apart, monster after monster after leaping, pouncing monster.
Ballack has reloaded. He stands up, blasting into the endless wave. He kills every single thing charging at him except one. A gouging hook tears into his thigh. He falls, passing out in pain-shock.
I ’ware him too, dragging him back into the fight, making him shoot again. His gun roars.
+Carl! I need you!+
Thonius has also reloaded. He fires his pistol point-blank into the wall of jabbing, black, chitinous snouts and sees braincases burst with each pump of his trigger.
He has only a few shots left.
+Carl!+
Carl Thonius goes down. I see it happen. I see his frail body, limbs cartwheeeling, carried over by the pouring wave of creatures. I try to reach out, but I can’t ’ware him too. I’m stretched too far with Ballack, Angharad, and my own chair. The chair is still valiantly pumping cannon shots into the endless legion of monsters.
They land on me, clawing and clacking. They push me back, despite the holes I blast in them. The chittering monsters explode and topple away, but there are always more pouring in behind.
They weigh me down. They overturn me. This is the end. Their abominable hooks screech and tear at my chair. Internal system alarms sound as they puncture my armour. Too many, way too many.
This is the end. Gregor, I’m so sorry. I–
The world, red already, goes blood-red.
I am blinded by blood. I feel their blades dig into me.
I try one last time to–
Red, red, red, a flare of insulted rage–
Lucius Worna looked up at the door sharply.
‘What the hell?’ he muttered.
The door was rocking in its frame, pounding. Red light, like the issue of a dying sun, seeped through the gaps between the door and its frame, and shafted into the Wych House.
‘Something’s coming back,’ Nayl said. As Worna looked back around at him, Nayl flicked the smouldering butt of his lho-stick into Worna’s left eye. Worna snarled in pain and recoiled, clutching his face. Nayl lunged forward with the blade Worna had given him, but there was suddenly no time to finish the job. No time at all.
Up on the highest platform, the door shuddered. It flexed in its frame, the wood bulging, and blew open on its hinges. A huge, pressurised gout of scouring fire and boiling red energy vomited out of the doorway.
The fire-cloud was filthy and red. It seared out through the door’s frame in a great, concussive belch that shook the platform and the room itself. Everyone in the theatre chamber was knocked to the floor. All the candles and lamps around the edge of the platform flew off and smashed in the lower floor space. Spilled lamp oil ignited. The expanding fireball from the doorway rolled up into the dome overhead. Several electrical systems, overcooked, exploded in showers of sparks.
Another belch of flame gusted out of the open door, as fierce as the first. The chamber shook again. Fires caught and began to blaze in the girdered vault of the theatre’s dome. Something, a photo-lumin lamp perhaps, exploded with a volatile report and spat debris across the chamber.
The Wych House lurched, as if wounded or stung. It staggered. Those who had managed to get on their feet fell back down again. The chamber was lit amber by the spreading, cracking fires and the eerie red glow pouring through the open door.
Nayl struggled to rise, but Worna was already standing. He grabbed Nayl by the throat, lifted him off the walkway with one hand, and threw him like a doll. Nayl hit the rail, tumbled over it, and disappeared down onto the lower deck where the lamp oil fires were raging. Worna turned, gazing at the wide open door and the red sunlight streaming through it.
More flames, weaker now, billowed out of the open doorway, followed by a shimmer of alien dust. Then silence.
‘On your frigging feet!’ Worna yelled at his men. He drew his chainsword, moving towards the steps that led up to the top platform. Dazed and bewildered, his men hurried to follow him, all except the two watching Kys. The hooded housekeepers remained in a cowering huddle.
Something quick and jerky moved, fleetingly, inside the red glare of the doorway. Two gleaming silhouettes leapt forwards together, and hung for a moment, perching on the sides of the door frame with their nimble, clawed feet, like birds. Then they bounced down onto the platform into view. Tails high and straight, they stepped forward slowly, their hook claws scraping the deck.
The organisms chattered back and forth, snouts clacking, stabbing tongues flicking out between needle teeth, as they advanced carefully into this new, unknown location. The smell of them was rank and sickening. Crouching against the wall on the walkway ring behind the men guarding her, Kys stared up at the prowling creatures in disgust and involuntary fear. Some of the bounty hunters around Worna began backing away. Even Worna had come to a halt, halfway up the steps.
‘Doren, Kixo,’ Worna hissed. ‘Get up there and take those ugly sons of bitches down.’
The two men chosen advanced nervously up the steps onto the upper platform, carbines raised. The creatures stopped in their tracks and seemed to observe the slowly approaching men with curiosity.
‘Got a clean kill shot on the first,’ one of the cautious bounty hunters muttered, aiming his carbine from the shoulder. ‘Get ready to take the oth–’
The nearest of the monsters turned, regarded him with a tilt of its head, and pounced with an abrupt, effortless spring of its hind legs. The bounty hunter was brought down under its weight, his carbine firing uselessly into the roof. It had him pinned for an instant, face up, on the deck. He began to scream. Its four hook limbs flicked out and snapped down like shears, quartering him like a portioned game bird.
The entire kill had taken barely a second. With an anguished howl, the other man opened fire, blasting the predator off his colleague’s messy corpse. The shots blew its torso open in a spatter of purple, sticky sap, and knocked it clean off the platform. The second monster yapped like a feral dog and sprang at the shooter.
All of the other bounty hunters opened fire instinctively, shooting from their positions on the raised walkway and the upper steps. The broadside of frantic shots shredded the thing in mid-air. They also slew its intended prey. The bounty hunter toppled forward in a mist of blood.
‘Cease fire!’ Worna yelled. ‘Cease fire, you dumb friggers! You just wasted Kixo!’ His spooked men were no longer listening to him. A few were backing towards the exits. The rest were training their weapons at the open door.
Horned black snouts came snuffling out of the red light. Drooling teeth chittered. A dozen more of the black and white things sprang through the doorway into the chamber, then a dozen more, bouncing and jumping.
All hell broke loose.
Worna’s men began blasting indiscriminately. The red glow of the burning chamber lit up with a shower of bright white las-bolts. Gleaming alien bodies ruptured and fell, thrashing in death agonies, but there were too many of them. The chittering predators, agile and shockingly fast, ploughed forwards into the men, cutting them apart. The shooting turned to screaming. Those of Worna’s men that could, broke and ran.
‘Stand your frigging ground!’ Worna bellowed from the upper steps. He turned in time to see one of the black and white horrors launchin
g itself at him. Lucius Worna didn’t flinch. He met its attack with his chainsword and cut it in half. It was not a clean kill. The creature’s limbs were still flailing and stabbing wildly and it crashed into him, throwing him backwards down the steps.
The men guarding Kys had fled. She rose, fighting the urge to follow them. She had to find Nayl. She had to see if Ravenor would return, although if these things were gathered on the far side of the door, she didn’t hold out much hope of that happening.
She ran towards the huddled, moaning housekeepers. Behind her, Worna’s men were blasting and dying.
‘Move!’ she yelled at the housekeepers. ‘Get out of here!’
None of them stirred. They rocked and mumbled.
‘You idiots!’ she cried. Something slammed her into the wall. One of Worna’s bruisers had shoved her aside in his effort to escape.
A black and white shape landed directly on his back. He grunted as he was flattened, face down, beneath it. It quickly snipped off his arms and head.
Kys heard and smelled the torrent of human blood emptying down through the grilled walkway decking from the butchered corpse. She rose slowly into a crouch, edging her kineblades out. The long metal blades came free from her bodice and floated up on either side of her face, pointing forward, suspended by her telekinetic impulse.
The monster calmly bent down and nipped meat from the corpse with a delicate snap of its teeth. She saw the glossy blackness of its upper armour, scribbled with lines of old scars, the waxy whiteness of its lower body, where patches of thread-worm parasites clustered. She could smell the metallic hormone stench of it, and feel its presence scratching against her mind. It raised its head slowly and turned its horned snout towards Kys. Its eyes were awful, lifeless slits above a rictus grin. Rivulets of bright human blood dribbled down its gleaming, bone-white chin and dripped onto the walkway.
It chittered, its mouth snapping and chattering, tongue stabbing. Tasting, sensing, smelling, all at once. Throat sacs under its chin pulsed and swelled.
Its powerful legs tensed, and it sprang towards her.
Kys rolled furiously. Her paired kineblades met the pouncing thing in mid-air, punching clean through it like high velocity rounds. She’d aimed for the throat sacs, the softest, least armoured part of it. The sacs burst as the blades punctured them, and yellow fluid sprayed out. Chitinous dorsal plates cracked a nanosecond later, as the exiting blades blew out of the monster’s back in foggy sprays. The kinetic shock stopped it short, mid-pounce, and dropped it onto the walkway beside her. It writhed, snapping at her, tail curling and flopping, its hook limbs thrashing. Then the entire walkway section it lay on fell away, eaten to pulp by the bio-acid that had poured out of its throat sacs. It crashed down onto the theatre floor space below.
Kys leapt to her feet, summoning her kineblades back. There was nothing left of them. They had been reduced to spurs of dissolving metal by the corrosive contents of the throat sacs.
Kys let them fall. The hairs on her neck rose. She turned, very, very slowly.
Head down, yapping softly, another of the things stepped towards her along the walkway.
Three
The House shook and staggered. There was an echoing boom from above them, and then another. Plyton was thrown off her perch. She landed hard on the dock’s decking and rolled several times. She almost pitched off into the water.
‘What the hell was that?’ Lucic was demanding, ripping out his link. Burn-face had been thrown onto the deck too. He got up, angry.
‘Give me that!’ he snarled.
Her arms shaking, Plyton pulled herself up. Down in the dock pool, the water was slopping feverishly. The underboat was straining at its chains, bucking in the icy froth. The chains creaked and pulled. The House shook again – a deep, ugly lurch – and the boat bucked more furiously. The hanging chains swished and shook. Ice crackled down into the washing swell.
‘Worna? Worna!’ burn-face yelled into the link.
There was no response.
‘Worna?’
Plyton ploughed into them both from behind. Lucic fell and hit his head against a fuel drum. Burn-face tried to turn, but she slammed her fist into the side of his head repeatedly.
They landed hard. The bounty hunter’s carbine hit the decking and slithered out of reach. He rolled, tucked his legs up and savagely kicked her in the torso with both feet.
Winded, gasping, Plyton flew backwards through the air. She smashed into some of the dangling chains and managed to grab one.
She was still travelling. Momentum turned her into a pendulum. Hanging from the chain, she soared out over the pool. Thrashing ice water sloshed ten metres below her.
Plyton clung on. The chain swung her back over the dock. Burn-face had rolled onto his knees, and she kicked out at him, but missed, as she swung past. He was reaching for the fallen carbine.
She swung back, missing him again, dangling out above the churning pool at the extremity of her backswing. Her hands had locked up, turned to aching numbness by the touch of the chain loops.
She swung in for a second time. Burn-face had risen, dodging her sweeping form as it came in. He rolled hard and came up with her Tronsvasse in his hands as she swept back again.
He grinned as he fired it at her. The weapon dry clicked. He hadn’t reloaded it since stripping it down.
She swung past him, her momentum diminishing. Then the House staggered again and wrenched her around furiously, jerking her up over the pool with such violence her chain became slack for a second.
Burn-face rolled again, diving for the fallen carbine. She sailed down at him and struck him hard. Plyton viced her dangling legs around him and carried him on with her.
Burn-face smashed head-first into an oil drum.
He fell away from her, his neck snapped, and slammed onto the dock.
Plyton let go of the chain and fell hard.
Dazed, she rose and glanced around. Burn-face’s corpse lay face down on the grilled deck. Lucic had vanished. She stumbled forward and picked up the bounty hunter’s lascarbine.
The House shook again. It listed badly to one side and she fell onto the sloping deck. With a gunshot bang, one of the chains mooring the underboat broke. Its prow swung around in the frothing pool.
‘Lucic?’ she yelled.
Lucic had run down the service tunnel into the drum chamber. The cargo hoist was still up. He gathered Plyton’s shotgun to his chest. Weird echoes rang down the riser shaft. Was that gunfire? Shouting?
Lucic strode towards the spiral staircase, coping with the relentless, sickening roll and shift of the deck.
He started up the stairs and reached the roof hatch.
He pulled the inset handle and it swung down. He looked up into the dark shaft above.
The creature lunged at Kys. She met it with her kine-force, and hurled it away from her along the walkway.
That took effort. The creature was strong, vital, bristling with energy, and its chitinous structure was as hard as steel. It landed in an ungainly sprawl, powerful hind limbs skidding and scrabbling for purchase. It sprang up again, undeterred, and charged back towards her. Kys turned and leapt across the gaping walkway section that the acid had removed. She landed beside the dead bounty hunter, held out her hand, and his fallen carbine flew from the deck into her grasp. She turned back and blew the bounding creature in half.
The whole chamber was on fire. The House shuddered and realigned, wounded and dying. Predatory shapes, tails-high, leapt through the smoke and flames, dismembering the last of Worna’s troop.
‘Harlon?’ she yelled. ‘Harlon?’
‘He ain’t here,’ Lucius Worna said. He stood in front of her, aiming a bolt pistol at her heart. Part of his face was eaten away to the bone by acid, and his carapace armour was covered in fresh, deep gouges. ‘He ain’t here, you witch. Toss the carbine.’
She obeyed. Covering her, he raised his link. Kys glanced up, and saw a pair of predators on the platform rail above, rocking as th
ey prepared to pounce on him.
‘Siskind!’ Worna yelled into his link. ‘Teleport me! Now!’
Lucius Worna smiled at her, fired his pistol, and vanished. A cyclonic blur of pink light sucked him away. With a pop of decompression, the teleport cone removed Worna, his weapon and his smile.
All it left behind as it faded was the bolt round, ripping towards her.
Kys caught it. It took all of her telekinetic strength. She stopped the blistering round in mid-air a metre from her body and held it dead, at bay. She fought, her mind bending with the effort. The bolt round, stationary, began to deform and melt against the mind-wall her kine force had thrown up. It thrust against her will, half a metre away, gouging through her telekinetic defence.
She could see it clearly, spinning in space, metal sweating off it in slow, blobby droplets as it superheated.
With a gasp, Kys threw herself down. Released, the bolt round tore over her head and hit the wall behind her with an explosive crump.
Kys rose, the smoke making her choke. The two creatures perched on the rail bounced down onto the walkway ahead of her and began to advance.
They yapped and chattered.
She had no mind-strength left any more, nothing to keep them at bay.
They leapt.
They burst in splashes of ichor.
Gun pods blazing, Ravenor’s chair swept out of the doorway. It was horribly gouged and dented. Suspension fluid trickled out of deep cut scars.
Ravenor turned slowly, raking the walkway with sustained pod fire. Skipping, jinking predators exploded and died.
+Patience!+
+Throne, you’re alive!+
+Help me!+
He was in pain. He was hurt. Kys scrambled up the steps onto the upper platform.
‘The Wych House is finished,’ she yelled over the roar of the flames. ‘We have to leave.’
+Help me, Patience.+
Bleeding from an awful leg wound, Ballack stumbled out of the doorway behind Ravenor. He was carrying Thonius, who was limp and lifeless.
‘What happened?’ Kys yelled.