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BLOODLINES
An Agusto Zidarov novel by Chris Wraight

NO GOOD MEN
A Warhammer Crime anthology by various authors (August 2020)

FLESH AND STEEL
A Noctis and Lux novel by Guy Haley (September 2020)

DREDGE RUNNERS
A Baggit and Clodde audio drama by Alec Worley

Warhammer Crime

It is the 41st millennium, and far from the battlefields of distant stars there is a city. A sprawling and rotting metropolis of ancient hives, where corruption is rife and murder a way of life.

This is Varangantua, a decaying urban hellscape, full of fading grandeur and ripe with squalor. Countless districts run like warrens throughout its cancerous expanse, from greasy dockyards and factorums to gaudy spires, decrepit slums and slaughterhouses. And looming over all, the ironclad bastions of the Enforcers, the upholders of the Lex and all that stands between the city and lawless oblivion.

To be a citizen in this grim place is to know privation and fear, where most can only eke out a meagre existence, their efforts bent to feeding an endless war in the void they know nothing about. A few, the gilded and the merchant-barons, know wealth, but they are hollow and heartless creatures who profit from suffering.

Violence is inescapable on these benighted streets, where you are either a victim or a perpetrator. Whatever justice exists can only be found through brutality, and the weak do not survive for long. For this is Varangantua, where only the ruthless prosper.

Chapter One

Chapter One

Down, down below, down under the flyovers and the transit arches, down to where the lumens floated on wheezing suspensors and the windows were steamed with condensation. People packed in on all sides, some high on topaz, some exhausted, all smelling of euphoria.

She breathed it in. She let her fingers graze along the rockcrete of the close wall, feeling its coldness against the wet heat of the night. She looked up, and saw the smear-glow of private club entrances, vivid in neon. She heard the rumble of turbine traffic overhead, and the hiss of groundcars on damp asphalt.

She’d taken it. Topaz. It was as good as she’d hoped – she was giddy, enjoying the freedom. Every face she looked at was one of a friend, smiling back at her, rouged, whitened, darkened, flared with photoreactive pigments, glittering with augmetic baubles. Music thumped away, spilling from the open doorways of the sanctioned haze dens, threatening to drag her in, smother her in the heat and the noise.

She could have walked along that street forever, just drinking it in. She liked the smells, overlapping one another, competing like jostling suitors for her attention. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her overcoat, pushed her shoulders back, slipped through the crowds.

She didn’t know what time it was. The deep of the night, for sure, a few hours before dawn. It didn’t matter. Not any more. That was the point of freedom – make your decisions, stupid ones, good ones, get out, do your own thing.

A man lurched into her way, grinning and drunk. He shoved up against her, and she smelled his breath.

‘Hello, young fish,’ he slurred at her, swaying. ‘Come to swim with me?’

He had plastek-looking hair, too clean, too sculpted. She kept on going, sliding past him, out into the middle of the street. The press of people swept him away, giving her more faces to gawp at. Fireworks went off in the sky, dazzling, smelling of chems, picking out high arches overhead engraved with skull-clusters and fleur-de-lys finials. Commercia chameleon-screens flashed and whirled, spinning pixelated images one after the other – a woman smiling, a man gazing at an altar, a Navy drop-ship wheeling across a starfield, troops in uniform marching under a crimson sky on another world.

For the first time, she felt a spike of danger. She had walked a long way, away from the friends she had come with. She had almost forgotten about them entirely, and had very little idea where she was.

She looked back and saw the plastek-hair man following her. He was with others, and they had latched on to her.

Damn.

She picked up the pace, skipping on her heels, darting to the street’s edge, to where the grand avenue, scarred with twin steel ground-tracks, met another one, cobbled and glinting, that ran steeply downwards.

If she hadn’t taken topaz, she’d have stayed, by instinct, with the crowds, where the press of bodies provided its mute kind of safety. But it got darker quickly, and the lumens faded to red, and the old cobblestones underfoot got slippery. The beat of the music felt harder – dull, like the military dirges they transmitted every evening over the communal prop-sets.

Down, down, down.

She felt a bit sick. She shot a glance back and saw that they were still coming, only jogging now, four of them, all drunk on jeneza or rezi or slatov. They all had those sharp, fake haircuts, smart dress, clean boots. Defence-corps trainees, maybe – officer-class, full of entitlement, untouchable. She’d come across the type so many times before. Hadn’t expected to find them down here – perhaps they liked to slum it from time to time as well, to skirt against the grime for fun, see whether it stuck to their uniforms.

Just as she began to worry, someone grabbed her by the arm. She pulled back, only to see a girl smiling at her, a girl her age, pale emerald skin, orange hair, a metal serpent-head stud in her cheek.

‘Come on,’ the girl said, her irises glittering. ‘I saw them too.’

She followed her. She went down a narrow passageway between two big hab-blocks built of dark, crumbling prefab slabs. It soon smelled of urine and old sweat, of drains and discarded carb-bars. As she wound further down the alley, the noise of the men’s footfalls, their laughter, faded. Perhaps they’d gone straight on past. Perhaps they’d never really been that close.

It got hotter. She felt the boom of the music well up from under her, around her, as if the walls themselves were vox-emitters. She needed a drink. For some reason she was very thirsty.

The girl brought her to a door – a heavyset door in a blockwork wall, one with a slide panel in the centre. She activated a summon-chime, and the slide opened, throwing out greenish light from within.

‘Elev in?’ the girl asked.

‘He is,’ came a man’s voice.

The door clunked open. Warm air billowed out, and music came after it, heavy, thumping music. She felt it move through her body, make her want to get going, to get back to that place she’d managed to reach a while back, where everything was forgotten save for the movement, the heat, the heartbeat of escape.

The girl pushed her inside. They were at the head of a long flight of plastek-topped stairs. The walls were bare cinder blocks, the floor sticky with spilled drinks. It was hard to hear anything at all over the music, which seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

‘Down,’ said the girl, smiling at her again, encouragingly.

They went together. Soon they were in a bigger chamber, one full of bodies moving, throwing shadows against lumen-scatter walls. What had this place once been? An assembly chamber? A chapel, even? Not now. The light was lurid, vivid, pulsing in time to the heavy smack of the music. She smelled sweat fighting with commercial fragrances. She smelled the acrid tang of rezi. There was a high stage with murals half-hidden in a haze of coloured smoke, men and women dancing on platforms surrounded by kaleidoscopic lumen flares. The floor was jammed, crushed with damp bodies in motion. It was hard to breathe.

‘Just keep moving,’ said the girl, taking her by the hand.

They somehow threaded through the crowds. A drink was passed to her and she took it. That made her feel better. She started to look for the source of the music. Faces swelled up out of the dark, flustered and glowing, all grinning at her. They were nice, those faces, and interesting, with their slim metal exo-frames and their holo-halos that waved and flashed like prisms. Where had they all come from? Did they work in the manufactories she had heard about, during the drab day? Or were they all the sons and daughters of the gilded, writhing down here until they collapsed into narc-induced sleep? They were like exotic beasts, feathered, horned, wrapped in silks and sequins, coming in and out of the flickering shadows, fragments of strange bedtime stories, moving in unison under old gothic arches.

She danced for a while. The girl seemed to have gone, but that was fine. She thought back to the past, to the rules that had kept her in her chamber every hour, all the hours, at her studies, learning the catechisms and the rotes, and wanted to scream out loud for the joy of being free of it. Her limbs moved, clumsily, because she had never been able to do this before, but she learned fast, and the topaz made it easier.

They pressed around her, the others – reaching out for her hair, her arms. She lost track of time. More drinks appeared, and she took them again.

And then, much later, the girl came back. She led her from the chamber of lights and heat, and down some more narrow, slippery stairs. That was a relief, for she was getting tired. It would be good to rest, just for a moment. Away from the music, it was cooler, and she felt the sweat patches on her shirt stick to her skin.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, and was surprised to hear how the words slurred.

‘Time out,’ said the girl. ‘I think you need it.’

It was hard to follow where they went. Some stairs went down, some went up. At one point she thought they’d gone outside, and then in again, but she was getting very tired and her head had started to hurt.

‘Do you have any water?’ she asked.

‘That’s where we’re going,’ came the reply. ‘To get some.’

And then they were through another heavy door. She had the impression of more people around her, though it was very dark, and increasingly cold. They went down yet more stairs, a well so tight that it scraped against her bare arms, even though she wanted to stop now, just sit on the floor, clear her head.

Eventually they ended up in a narrow, empty room with bright overhead lumens that hurt her eyes. She really wanted a drink.

A man was there, one with sallow skin, a tight black body­suit and collarless shirt, a knotwork tattoo just visible at the base of his neck.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, pleasantly enough.

‘Ianne,’ she replied.

‘Ianne. That’s unusual. I like it. Are you having a good time?’

‘I could use a drink.’

‘Fine. Come with me, then. We’ll get you something.’

By then, the girl seemed to have gone. She felt hands on her arms, and she was heading down again. The lumens were turned down low, and she struggled to make anything out.

She had the vague sense of being surrounded by people again. She heard a noise like breathing, in and out. She shook her head to clear it, and saw metal shelves, many of them, all with glass canisters on them. She saw tubes, and she saw machines that had bellows and ampoules and loops of cabling. She saw the padded couches, in rows, running back into the dark, and it looked like people were sitting on them.

She felt a lurch of worry. There was no music. It was quiet, and cold, and she didn’t know the way back out.

‘Where am I?’ she asked.

They found a chair for her. It was a recliner, but it was hard and uncomfortable. She thought she should struggle then, but it became hard to think about anything clearly. She felt something wrap around her wrists.

‘Where am I?’ she asked again, more urgently, suddenly thinking of all those catechisms, and the rules, and home, and its certainties.

A face loomed up out of the shadows. She didn’t recognise this one. It was a hard face, with hollow cheeks, and the smile it gave her made her feel suddenly panicky.

‘You’re Ianne? Just relax. You’re in the right place.’

She tried to kick out, but something had tied her ankles down. She looked up, and saw a collection of needles hanging over her, glinting in the cold light. Fear welled up fast, as if she would drown in it.

‘Get me out.’

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ said the man soothingly, reaching up for one of the needles. It was connected to a slender tube, which looped down from a bag of clear fluid. ‘It’ll all be fine.’

‘I want to get out!’ she cried, starting to struggle.

‘Why would you want that?’ the man asked, tapping the needle and preparing to insert it. He looked up and down the rows on either side of her. Her eyes had adjusted. She could see that the other couches were all occupied. No one lying on them was moving. ‘You’ll do so much good here.’

He set one of the machines running. The device beside her started to whirr, with a thud-tick-thud that sounded like some monstrous heartbeat.

‘Wh– what are you doing?’ she asked, her throat choking up with a thick sense of horror.

‘Just relax,’ he said, reaching over her. ‘I say the same thing every time. This is a place of dreams. So I’m going to give you something now. Something good. And after that – believe me when I say this – you’re going to live forever.’

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Agusto Zidarov crept along the metal walkway, keeping his body low, his Tzarina autopistol held out straight ahead of him. Sweat pricked under his flak jacket. It was hot. It was dark. All things considered, he really didn’t want to be there.

‘How close?’ he breathed into the comm.

Brecht took a while to answer. ‘Backup incoming. Ten minutes.’

Too long. Zidarov blinked an enhancement to his augmetic iris’ visual filters. The view ahead shifted fractionally – from dirt black, to near dirt black.

The walkway was elevated, threaded through and around huge machines. He could feel the power terminal’s heat convertors working underfoot, the filtration units straining overhead. High up, in the gantries and the pipework, amid the rust and the stench of oils, the valves and the processor coils, there were just too many places to hide, too many places to die. Every other corner had a burst seal pushing steam into your face, or a clatter­ing heat vent making your eyes water.

He clutched the grip of his pistol, narrowed his eyes, kept moving.

‘I don’t have a fix on you,’ Zidarov said.

‘I’ve got one on you,’ Brecht replied. ‘I’m coming your way.’

‘Hurry up, then.’

Brecht didn’t move fast often. Zidarov hoped he would this time. It was the least he could do, in the circumstances.

He reached an intersection. The walkway branched into two, one left, one right. Below him, glimpsed through the thin metal grid, he could see ironwork devices belch and grind. Beyond that was a rat’s paradise of tubes and conduits. A few lumens blinked down there – tiny red points amid hissing clots of darkness.

Something moved, and he whirled to face it. Just a spinner valve discharging. Zidarov felt his heart beating quickly. He was breathing too hard. This was sanctioners’ work – they had the armour, the weapons. He had his sidearm, basic flak-cover, a probator’s holo-seal. That counted for something, a lot of the time. Right now, it felt like not much worth having.

He checked his iris. The subdermal ocular implant – a combined dataveil-link and tactical retinal display – cycled and clicked, giving him an updated estimate of the target’s trajectory. It was based on heat patterns only, and down here they weren’t exactly reliable.

By rights, he shouldn’t even have been there. He’d responded to the call from Brecht, whose case this was, as a favour. They both should have waited for a sanctioner squad, but Brecht didn’t want to lose the target. That decision felt like a bad one. Almost as bad as splitting up, trying to cover the exits, before realising just how many of them there were in a huge place like this.

He took the right turn, edging along the fragile railing, ignoring the long drop on either side. Up ahead, he could see a bulkhead with a rusted cog-and-skull etched on it. Beyond that was a heavy iron hatch-plate with a misted-up viewport. The hatch was open, and a faint light bled through the gap.

‘I think I’ve got him,’ Zidarov breathed. ‘How close?’

‘One level up. Believe me, I’m running.’

Zidarov crouched down, edging carefully towards the door. He could hear something from the far side – more than one pair of boots. Brecht’s quarry was close now: Yuri Glav, a mid-league gunrunner, an unstable narc user who’d eaten up the sparse goodwill of both the enforcers and his customers and whose productive career in Urgeyena, one way or another, was coming to an end. Clearly he still had a few people willing to work with him.

Zidarov heard another hatch clang open. The faint light flickered out, and he heard bootfalls running down an enclosed corridor. They were making a break for it, trying to reach the far side of the machine chambers, get to a mag-train or a ground transport.

He shuffled forward, shouldered the hatch open and swung into the chamber beyond, tracking with his autopistol. The cramped space was empty, but the portal on the far side was open. Zidarov ran for it, ducking down as he plunged into the corridor beyond. The lumens were strobing in there, and it all smelled like burned metal. He could hear clear movement up ahead now, echoing down the shafts. They were running, going for broke.

He ran after them, ducking through another hatch before breaking out again. A big chamber opened up, its far end exposed to the night air and whistling with gusts of hot, dusty wind. Lines of struts marched along on either side, holding up a cross-hatched roof of heavy girders and pipework. Tracked loader-vehicles stood in their berths. The deck was high up, and the exposed vantage revealed the distant outline of massive cooling towers, backlit by flares from the gas nozzles. Everything smelled of ash, dust and chems.

At the chamber’s far end, a fuel tanker waited in a loading bay, cab doors open and engines already gunning, poised to trundle off down a long ramp towards an elevated viaduct. A transit-servitor, its back broken, lay in a pile by the wheels. Glav, a scrawny man dressed in a loose red jerkin, had already jumped down from the footplate to unscrew the tanker’s fuel line. Two more figures – big bodyguards, torsos bulked with stimms, one carrying a crackling electro-maul, the other a short-barrelled shotgun – lumbered towards Zidarov. The shotgun cracked out, and Zidarov scrambled for cover. He skidded behind the heavy body of a goods lifter, wrenching his shoulder against a jutting door handle, hearing the bullets ping and clang from the steel.

He swivelled back to his knees, shoved the Tzarina through a gap in the lifter’s segmented tracks, and fired back. Four rounds went straight into the shooter’s chest, puffing out plumes of blood as the man jerked and reeled. Zidarov jumped to his feet as the second bodyguard rushed him, swinging the maul in heavy lunges. More shots hit, winging him in the shoulder, then knocking him back, sending the maul bouncing over the lattice floor.

Zidarov slid fully out of cover, trying to draw a bead on Glav. By then the skinny gunrunner had disconnected the fuel line, spraying promethium all across the deck, and was sprinting back to the cab. Zidarov shot twice, sending both rounds wide and kicking sparks along the tanker’s hold.

‘Probator, Bastion-U!’ he roared. ‘Stand down, citizen!’

Glav leapt for the cab, getting one boot back on the footplate. Zidarov fired again, hitting him in the back. Instead of a wet impact, though, the bullet tinged off a hard armour-piece hidden under the jerkin. Glav staggered forward, missing his handhold and tumbling to the floor. As he did so, he managed to squirm round, bringing his own gun to bear. For a hideous split second Zidarov saw it aimed squarely at him.

Then Glav’s head exploded in a mist of red, followed immediately by the report of another gun firing. The gunrunner’s body slumped to the deck, twitched, then didn’t move again.

Brecht edged out of the open access hatch, his autopistol held two-handed, a look of studied concentration on his face.

Zidarov exhaled. ‘Holy Throne,’ he swore. ‘You really did run.’

The tanker’s engine was still growling. The discarded fuel line was still pumping, swilling the deck with liquid prometh­ium. Brecht stowed his weapon, splashed over to the valve and wrenched it closed. He was panting hard, his jowly cheeks flushed. He was a big man, dark-skinned, with a receding hairline and a frame that was a fair bit more substantial than it had been when he’d joined the enforcers. The flak jacket made him look even bulkier.

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