The Beast Arises

Jangling lightly across chain walkways and descending into a much older morass of crushed habitations and reinforced underpassages, Allegra led Commander Tyrhone and his Elites to the centre of Desolation Point: a high-rise aggregation of obscura dens, infusion houses and bordellos. At the captain’s confirmation of such, Commander Tyrhone produced a tracking-auspex to scan for munitions signatures. After a moment, the auspex told him that there were indeed munitions in reasonable quantities matching the old Imperial Army signatures of the depot cache, but they were deep below.

‘This goes down?’ Tyrhone queried.

‘A number of sub-levels,’ Allegra recalled.

At the haven centre, the greenskins were absent in any number. The same could not be said for raiders and marauders. Desolation Point was the closest thing any of them had to a home. They were not going to give it up to the newly arrived alien invader. Nor the enemy of old, the Undine security forces.

‘Get them snappers on the deck,’ a voice called from above. The accent was thick and guttural.

The Elites tensed, their eyes down the lengths of their lascarbines, barrels aimed up and down the length and height of the street. A number of marauder gunhands were making their way down a mesh stairwell, holding high-powered autorifles and working bolt actions with grim menace. There were others on balcony walkways and patchwork roofs. Most had heavy-duty sights, but one or two even sported cracked scopes on their scuffed plas-stock rifles.

‘I said get ‘em down in the rust,’ the voice came again. Their skipper stepped out onto the street. Like his men he was all tattoos and dreadlocks, but indulged the extravagance of a grand hat and coat. His coarse hand rested on the grip of a fat stub revolver that nestled in his thick belt.

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Commander Tyrhone told Allegra.

‘What do you want me to do?’ the captain said absently. It seemed, improbably, that her attention was elsewhere.

‘They are the Brethren. They are your people,’ the commander pressed, his lascarbine moving between the skipper and the two shotgun-wielding bodyguards that had walked out casually to flank him.

‘Do you think we have a secret handshake or something?’

‘That’s exactly what I thought.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, commander,’ Allegra said, her eyes travelling up beyond the death-trap balconies and mesh catwalks. ‘These men are Brethren, that’s true. But they’re also stone cold killers. They’ll try to end us, whatever we do. Words will just antagonise them further.’

‘I’m gonna count to three,’ the skipper spat. His men trained their weapons on the Marineers. The Elites trained their lascarbines back. Allegra returned her eyes to the narrow strip of sky visible up through the chainwalks, meshing and steep-sided accretions. She had been watching something above them. ‘One.’

‘When the signal is given,’ the captain said to the Marineers, ‘make your way swiftly down through the sub-levels.’

‘What’s the signal?’ the commander wanted to know.

‘Two.’

‘You’ll know it when you hear it,’ Allegra replied.

‘Three,’ the Brethren skipper snarled. Allegra saw him go for his stub gun. He would have got to it too, if it hadn’t been for the impact.

With so many crash-capsules and rocks smacking into the surrounding ocean, it was only a matter of time before one actually struck the island colony itself. Allegra had been tracking the oily smear of the rock’s descent, watching it grow bigger and more imminent. By the captain’s estimation it hit somewhere on the eastern side of Desolation Point, but it had been a hard landing: rock on rock. The impact was ear-splitting. The immediate shockwave was enough to violently tremble through balconies, walkways and accretion structures.

As the skipper and his pirate gunhands became preoccupied with the instability of their surroundings, Commander Tyrhone and his Elite Marineers did as they were ordered. They dropped down through cutways and ladderwells onto the sub-level below with their captain. As Allegra led them down through the dank meshways and underpasses, the soldiers could hear the howl of the impact gales above, whipping through the insanity of the architecture. This was followed swiftly by the cacophonous boom and excruciating moan of metalwork twisting and buckling. Buildings were toppling against and through one another as the shockwave rippled out from its impact point.

As the Marineers dropped, scrambled and skidded down though the rotting and rusted sub-levels, with passages and reinforced chambers collapsing about them, Allegra and Commander Tyrhone corrected their course. Allegra had a natural feel for the underhive environs of her youth, whereas Tyrhone used as his guiding star the signature traces recorded by his hand-held auspex.