Servalen had been pushing the lord provost marshal to authorise an op against Vayne for months. Indeed, if Vayne had been the average gang leader, she’d have been raided long ago – Servalen posing for pict-capture behind a table stacked high with weapons and banded credits. Another win for her special task force to pin up on the basement wall of Precinct Triple-Six.

  But big cartels like the Promethium Queens were different. The fact was, when a gang got to a certain size the whole thing became political. Vayne’s organisation were less extortionists, and more quasi-official security for the Promethium Guild. And their massive profits insulated them. See, Vayne kicked a tithe upstairs to House Escher, who kicked a tithe to the Hive Lord, who kicked one to Lord Helmawr. If Vayne stopped earning, so would everyone else.

  On Necromunda you could traffic narcotics, run rackets and kill thousands in turf wars provided that whatever dirty credits you made ran to the top. And, of course, provided you didn’t step over the line. Upset the balance. Gain too much power and disturb the Pax Helmawr.

  And Vayne was finally about to cross that line – so Servalen had her op.

  But she was way out on a rusty gantry, here. The lord provost marshal was no friend, and resented the semi-autonomy Helmawr had given his favourite investigator.

  Servalen couldn’t help but wonder if this was a political snare, that he’d given the op his signet-stamp because if things went sideways, it would blow Servalen’s career spire-high.

  After all, no one particularly liked Servalen. Not if they spent time with her. There was something unnerving in her dark eyes and severe features that made her a peerless interrogator. Before she’d made her bones as a scrutinator, she’d been shuttled from assignment to assignment. Even her own special task force spent little time with her, their work coordi­nated remotely via vox and dataslate, paired with ad hoc briefings whenever she dropped into their headquarters at the Triple-Six.

  But Servalen had survived every attempt to push her out, because she’d learned to live by the Plasteel Rule: always be useful.

  If you were useful, they wouldn’t get rid of you. No matter how much people disliked you. Useful people stuck around.

  It was how she’d recruited her task force. Found the outsiders, the oddballs that excelled in specialist roles but couldn’t play politics. She wanted the weird ones that didn’t fit in. Those who, like her, preferred to work alone and could be trusted to largely manage themselves. And when the lord provost marshal started calling them ‘Servalen’s Circus’?

  They just rolled with it.

  ‘Ringmaster,’ buzzed the micro-bead in her ear. ‘Your relay unit is checking out. Proceed towards the docks and take up position.’

  ‘Confirmed, Circus,’ she whispered. ‘Moving.’

  Thekla’s contamination-phobia worked in their favour. With everyone wearing masks, no one noticed Servalen’s hushed words into the rubber cup of the rebreather.

  To anyone with a wandering eye, she was just some tank-scrubber from the Promethium District. Grey industrial bodyglove, baggy enough to conceal the custom-milled autopistol holstered at her back and double-barrelled stub-compact on her ankle. Tattered black coat with shock knuckles in the pocket. Bulky auditory augmetic – tank-scrubbers often went deaf due to the cleaning solvents – hiding her high-grade cranial plug and the micro-bead linked to her throat-mic.

  Probably just a stimm-junkie trying out the hot new thing. Indeed, she’d made sure to visit six times in the past few weeks, scoring uppers laced with Abyssal. That way no one got alarmed when they saw a new face on the day Arsonia Vayne was scheduled to meet the Thekla Dockers, and take control of the district.

  Servalen walked downhill, past a food stand. The old woman behind the simmering pot hauled a wire basket full of proteyn-balls out of the boil and speared them on a stick before handing them to her first customer. He moved immediately to the side, let the next woman order. No pleasantries. No please or thank you. With so many people living so close together, efficiency was the highest form of courtesy.

  You kept the queue moving. Didn’t gum things up with false sentiment.

  Servalen loved that about the underhive. No one got close enough, for long enough, to notice anything amiss. On her previous trips, she’d loved acting normal. Playing normal. Pretending she belonged with these people.

  She hated what Vayne’s gang war with the Orlocks and local Docker gangs had done to this district. Firefights in the street. Burned corpses dumped on doorsteps with threatening signs around their necks.

  That made her think of Rink Scavino.

  What was left of Rink sat in a refrigerated drawer at the medicae mortis facility. She’d been there a year, and was now crusted with ice crystals and freezer burn. They were lucky. After Vayne had torched Scavino and dumped her from a thirty-storey refinery stack, she’d hit a balcony ten storeys down. The half that stayed on the balcony remained relatively intact. And that’s how they knew it hadn’t been a flamer that lit her up.

  Rink Scavino had burned from the inside out. Warpcraft. Pyromancy.

  Scavino had been an Escher juve. Servalen recruited the girl by popping her on a weapons charge and giving her the choice between a penal detail or informant work. Rink had a taste for danger and a talent for tradecraft. Servalen had trained her personally. It had been Scavino who’d told them that Vayne was moving on St Thekla.

  Then she’d missed her check-in. Now she was in a drawer.

  That was the first big push Servalen had made to take Vayne out. She played the wych card. Used Scavino’s remains to argue that Vayne had crossed the line by running a wyrd. She leaned on every Escher she could find, grilled them in interrogation rooms until they howled and clawed at the door. No one knew anything about Vayne’s psyker. Worse, bureaucratic appetite wasn’t there for a sting.

  You lost a criminal informant? Get another one. Put someone undercover. Risk another life.

  That had taken some effort, but she had – Acrobat. And Acrobat was about to be inside the peace meeting between Vayne and the Dockers. Miss this, and Vayne wouldn’t emerge for another year, maybe two.

  ‘Approaching Point Alpha,’ Servalen said into her mask.

  ‘Roger, Ringmaster,’ said Tellic over the link. ‘When you get to Alpha, turn on the relay unit and hold tight. Eyes are reporting an incoming convoy. Probably Vayne.’

  Servalen looked up, saw small heads leaning out of hab windows. Children. One had a hand-vox pressed to his cheek, clearly working for the local Docker gang. ‘Must be Vayne. I have child spotters scanning the street.’

  ‘If one reports you, maybe they’ll promote him to juve,’ Tellic joked. ‘I’m detecting increased signals traffic. Big beautiful spike. Military-grade sets. Some are scanning for enforcer signal bands. Vayne’s being careful.’

  Tellic was sitting in the comms centre a block inland – the closest they’d dared get for fear of being noticed. He’d spent the last week living in a converted cargo container, kitted out as a surveillance suite. An undercover team dressed as longshoremen had placed it over a manhole cover. He climbed in and out through a sewer pipe. Servalen had been there between forays into the market, but mostly he was alone.

  Mostly.

  ‘How’s my pup?’

  ‘Terrifying. Missing you.’

  Servalen could imagine. KB-88 was programmed to stay by her side, and when commanded to stay its machine-spirit became agitated. Servalen could visualise the cyber-mastiff lying down, facing the container doors with its boxy snout resting between steel paws. Static growling in its vox-augmented throat.

  That was in the small container. In the bigger one next door, fifty members of an insurgence subdual were sitting in armoured ram-vehicles. They were heavies, half of them subjugators, loaded out with combat shotguns, bolters, assault shields and shock batons. Grenade launchers for crowd control and a heavy concussion ram that could punch a plasteel door off its hinges. Their sergeant, a bulldog-faced man whose shock stave was topped with a chrome skull, had not liked working with Servalen’s oddball team.

  Still, they were on board.

  All Servalen had to do was confirm Vayne’s presence, signal ‘Execute’, and they’d be inbound. Ten to fifteen minutes, depending on traffic.

  But before that happened, Acrobat had to signal that Vayne was at the meet. They needed proof she was taking over the Abyssal trade, evidence to keep House Escher and the Promethium Guild off their back when they brought her down.

  Proof the Promethium Queen had overreached.

  Abyssal was the purest source of precursor chemicals on Necromunda. The substances in the rotting marine organs could create ultra-potent stimms and gene-hancing mods. Merely lacing an existing drug with Abyssal kicked up its effectiveness.

  Within a fortnight of sale, the neon sludge would be separated into its components via centrifuge, dried, cut with liquid pharms, and loaded into some Goliath’s stimm-slug unit.

  Abyssal sold at sixty credits a brick.

  It was fine if Vayne wanted to be the Promethium Queen, but to be the Promethium Queen and purveyor of the hive’s most potent and lucrative stimms? That was leverage. Enough leverage to skew the market’s numbers. Pick winners and losers in the narco-gangs. Play favourites with the guilds. Withhold stock to control price or flood the market to put competitors out of business. Maybe not to completely upset things, but to create a blip – or better yet, threaten to create a blip.

  And then there was the power.

  Sixty credits a brick bought a lot of power.

  Enough to brand even Vayne a recidivist.

  Servalen squeezed through the crowd. Walked by a block of bubbling street aquariums and watched the fish shy away as she passed, pressing their heads against the back of their tanks and beating their tails as if they had somewhere to flee. She watched as a steel-gauntleted vendor reached into a bucket of blind eels, confused at why the creatures had begun to writhe and snap at each other in panic.

  She was close to the wharfs now, the canyon of hab-block towers falling away so she could see the low clouds collecting in the upper reaches of the dome, the great concave scoop of it barely visible on the horizon. Warm air off-gassing from the main hive created the humid clouds, while the cooler air hit the curve of the dome and washed back towards St Thekla, giving the illusion of a sea breeze.

  Small one- and two-man fishing junks crowded the nearshore water, tied together in flotillas, outfitted with light rigs used to bait pelagic low-light dwellers to the surface. It wasn’t so much a fishing fleet as a floating village. Marine clans who sailed through the sea gates in the dome each night, following the currents downhive towards Sump City – or at least through the parts that were still navigable, between the trash gyres and coagulation-burgs. That was St Thekla, filled with desperate people doing a nasty job. Those too poor even to afford habs.

  The whole place had been abandoned sixty years before, its fishing industry unviable due to the contamination. A rusting cannery still sat, squat and deteriorating, at the edge of the district. Not even people who lived on corpse-starch wanted to eat fish caught in Runoff Bay.

  But then they discovered the toxins. And the families who’d never left the empty wharfs of St Thekla – who’d been too poor to leave, and stayed to scratch out a living on the bay – now controlled the burgeoning trade. They became the Dockers, a closed upper echelon of society with their own dialect and customs, ruling over the desperate outsiders who came to serve on the fishing fleet.

  Some Dockers had done very well. A collection of pleasure yachts idled offshore, anchored together in their own ­parody of the floating village.

  ‘Ringmaster,’ her micro-bead pipped. ‘Convoy incoming.’

  ‘In position.’ She stopped and lit a lho-stick. An excuse to linger on a block corner.

  Down the street to her left, Servalen saw the convoy approaching. Heavy cargo-8s with bike outriders leapfrogging the transports to stop cross traffic. The outriders wore hardened flak armour – enforcer-issue.

  ‘Outriders. Enforcer gear. Subjugators need to pick targets carefully when they go in.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ said Tellic. ‘Ident?’

  ‘Precinct Nine-Nine-Seven.’

  ‘They lost a patrol a few months back. No bodies.’

  Servalen watched the convoy pass through the smoke of her lho-stick. It would’ve been too suspicious not to. One of the fake enforcers stopped her bike a few feet from Servalen, held out a hand to warn her back as the cargo-8s rumbled by.

  The fake patrolwoman wore only a half-helm, the rebreather removed and buckled to her belt. Not used to it, Servalen guessed. Enforcer helms had heavy-duty filters, which made breathing difficult for those without proper training. One of the biggest washout days at the Palanite Academy was the first full-helm formation run. Half the cadets routinely passed out.

  You’re out of uniform, arsehole, she thought, and keyed the vox-relay live.

  ‘–nce we get to the cannery, nobody talks but the boss, savvy?’ A voice cut into her micro-bead. It was tinny, echoing, but there. ‘We’re here to show the flag. Keep the Queen secure. Weapons in hands, but always pointed down. You juves, do not chamber a round. I swear to the God-Empress, if one of you lets a hammer fall and frags this up I’ll gut you like one of these fish.’

  ‘We’re recording,’ said Tellic. ‘Reading clear, she did it.’

  Acrobat was in. The undercover had made it onto the convoy.

  Now they just had to wait for her signal – the confirmation Vayne was there, keyed via a transmitter implant in the undercover’s molar.

  It was happening.

  But that’s when Servalen saw the small boats ripple in the harbour, rising and falling on a wave. Which was impossible. No wave sets penetrated the hive shell.

  It wasn’t a wave, it was a bow wake. A massive triple-decked yacht had pulled anchor and was moving towards the cannery dock.

  It was a bluff. The task force had all the land routes blocked off, and Arsonia Vayne was coming by sea.

  Arsonia Vayne stood at the prow of the yacht like a reaver-captain from the old sump ballads. The craft’s bow waves glistened in rainbow hues, a product of the fuel oil that coated the bay’s surface.

  She was every inch as opulent as her craft. Dressed for maximum intimidation. Hair dyed in the hues of a candle flame. Her uphive raiment – from its bell-shaped bustle skirt to chin-high collar – inlaid with overlapping carbon-weave armour plates in the shape of a rising inferno. Filigreed vambraces clasped her wrists, each fitted with a discreet hand flamer.

  It made her smell pleasantly of promethium.

  ‘They look impressed,’ Vayne said, nodding at the small party waiting on the cannery dock. ‘Told you it was a business expense.’

  Lilly Base-Eight grunted and consulted figures on a dataslate. ‘These fisher folk are hardscrabble, a ship half this fancy would’ve done the trick.’

  ‘Yeah, but it ain’t just transport.’ Vayne grinned, slapped the rail. ‘Big engines. Lots of cargo space. We’re gonna run serious stimm in this stately lady.’

  ‘And naturally we also needed the staterooms, the boil-pool, the wine cellar?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Vayne. ‘A queen’s gotta keep up appearances.’

  ‘A queen needs some treasure in her treasury,’ replied Base-Eight.

  That was how it had always been, ever since they were coming up as obscura-pushers, slinging smokes and clipping rivals down in Dust Falls. Vayne brought the ideas and the violence, Lilly Base-Eight kept the numbers square. A lot of gangers with potential ended up stuck as small-time hustlers because they lacked the vision to make big scores, or the financial planning to capitalise on them.

  It hadn’t been easy, climbing the ladder. Lilly earned the name ‘Base-Eight’ when a stub-round clipped off two of her fingers. Arsonia took maybe more stimms than were good for her. And they’d had to isolate themselves for the past year, after that Rink Scavino thing. Make sure that neither of them got too close to anyone and only talked business between themselves.

  But all that was a worthy trade-off. They headed a syndicate. Soon a multi-district narco-syndicate. And they had a big-arse boat.

  ‘You remember our position?’ Base-Eight asked.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘No more than twenty per cent per brick.’

  ‘What’d I just say?’

  ‘The Orlocks offered the matriarch twelve, start there.’

  ‘I swear, Lil.’ Vayne raised a regal hand, waved at the Docker welcoming party on the wharf. ‘I swear if you ever talk to me like this in front of anyone, I’ll crisp you where you stand.’

  ‘I’m too smart for that,’ said Base-Eight, her voice flat.

  ‘Good,’ said Vayne, still waving. ‘Just remember what Rink Scavino smelled like when she went up.’

  Base-Eight folded her arms over the slate. ‘You have a mean sense of humour, ’Sonia.’

  ‘And that isn’t where the mean stops,’ Vayne said, stepping down the gangplank.

  The Docker welcoming party gave little bows when Vayne stepped onto the quay. She gave a respectful nod back. Base-Eight had told her the protocol.

  Toxin peddlers don’t shake hands.

  The cannery was a corroded mass, rusting layers of ugly on top of more ugly. Like a rotting wedding cake. Her Docker escort guided her into its bulk, her entourage flanking her at a respectful distance, autoguns pointed at the deck.

  All of St Thekla stank. Gutted fish. Human waste. The acid tang of the chemical bay. But the smell inside was different, concentrated. A humid fug of old fish oil that permeated every surface.