Deck 100
Saturio is a deck runner, smuggling small goods between segregated populations in the depths a space port. His one light is Caelonia, and together the discover corruption in the heart of their home
In dark corners of the frigid void between pinpricks of nuclear fire, the currents of ions and eddies of solar winds flow through the lightless void, an unimaginably vast sea of stellar particles and pitiless vacuum. Hanging where the unseen pulls of gravity clash and the Aether scrape close, floats Sacarium Stellarium, the Sanctum of Stars. A name that evokes images far more grandiose than what had been a six-dock stellar repair port. Now, two decaying cruiser hulks sit at two of them, slowly being absorbed into the mass of decks that made the lower two hundred decks lying under the spires of the lords of trade.
For over three thousand Terran years, the Fortunato trade clan has expanded a network between solar systems on the edges of four major systems. Family lines have lived and died, never setting a foot off a world of steel ground and air shipped in from living worlds. The Fortunatos have expanded their vast wealth and influence on the blood and broken lives of generations in the Stellarium’s body. Now, the lines of power and greed spread beyond the sacred space of the Imperium of Man and into the domain of the Tau Xenos and their poisonous lies.
Among other, far darker, influences festering in the shadows of the Lower Decks.
****
His breath was already fogging in front of him this close to the outer hull, and Saturio pulled his patchwork synth leather coat tighter as he jogged along the rattling walkway. He kept his face covered with a scarf over the rebreather he’d plucked from a scrap vendor’s cart while he sold the ancient woman power cells for her welding kit. If there were an actual hull breach out here, not even the upper spire tech would keep him alive. It might give him time to get away from a micro meteorite hole, or a rogue cloud of carbon monoxide and argon up from the industrial decks. The runner he’d inherited this route from hadn’t worn one, went hypoxic, and gone over the ledge. ‘Least that’s what it looked like had happened to Saturio when he’d found the body.
Either way, he hadn’t looked back; the other deck runner had routes, credits, and a stash of genuine Necromunda-grade Obscura that had Saturio traded for freedom from Tycho’s 86th Deck gang. You either bought your way out of a gang or killed your way out, and Saturio wasn’t quite the killer for that. Not yet anyway.
He sprinted, then hopped over a gap in the walkway where a maintenance servitor moved on rails along the outer hull. Saturio didn’t look down at the vast gulf of emptiness that vanished below him. Rumour said that all artificial gravity had a point where it would swap, and if you fell into that spot, you’d slow and float, suspended in the thin, false atmosphere of the station. Others said deck runners past had fallen into the gravity well and been stuck, unable to move, that their skeletons could be found floating in the void outside water reclamation.
Always a lot of rumours in the lower decks, few he cared to test.
Rumours like the opulence of the Upper Spires, where all the trash chutes worked, food was real, and water filters weren’t a generational career. Supposedly, there were two hundred decks of living space, hydroponics, industrial areas, and a mass of humanity living, toiling, and dying in service to the Fortunato family. And the Emperor of course. Saturio had been told that’s who gave the Fortunatos and Enforcers authority to do all that they did.
They were just as mythical as a sky and sea to a mid-deck orphan like Saturio. He had no idea what a planet looked like, what it would be like to look up and see stars instead of the next deck up, to see a horizon and a sun instead of the open chasm of the outer hull, and the bulging, smoking, writhing blob that was the centre hub of Fortunato station, Saturio’s home. A flare of light outside the armor-crys window shifted Saturio’s hazel eyes to the harsh chill of the void outside. Three ships, sleek Imperial Navy cruisers and a blocky utilitarian model Saturio knew was a transport ship were gliding towards the station.
More Imperial Guard meant most things were going to be in short supply, however long they were here, but that meant profit for someone who didn’t much care for what was and wasn’t supposed to find its way to the Docks. There were two ways goods moved between the scrubbed-clean, gilded polish of the upper decks and the stinking, toxic cloud of the lower decks. Writs of trade given out by the representatives of the Fortunato Trade family, or independent smugglers who were too short on time and isolated to be on the auspex of the Enforcers, Deck Runners. The first was expensive, laden with forms, fees, and foolishness. The second kept the station, well, it wasn’t smooth, but it was running. So Saturio was a Deck Runner now. A smuggler moving high-quality food and water, cannisters of purified air from the Spires, unauthorized tech mods, Black Trade xenos trinkets, and every kind of chemical feel-good that could be smoked, drank, inhaled, or injected.
He was a lean young man, artificial-light-pale, grease and soot-stained skin, and reflexes born and honed to razor’s edge on the streets. A matronly merchant had called him comely, near beautiful, but he’d never been so hungry as to take the deal the old man offered. Saturio had a good head for orientation, having grown up in an orphanage on an upper deck, guided pickpockets and shop-stall snatch-and-grabs away from Enforcers or furious sellers without ever getting close to being caught. So now he was a free man, free as he could be anyway. He ran all day, his grey and brown canvas clothes stayed cleaner than usual, and he earned enough credits and goods to keep a flop with a locking door. The last meant he went to sleep with a full belly and got a complete rest more often than not. All of that was better than the gang life, but it wasn’t what kept him happy.
She was.
Her laugh was music, echoing along the edge of the station hull, like crystals in a chime, drawing him forward through void-chilled air. Caelonia was another Deck Runner, a willowy Void-Born woman; she moved like a dancer, had hair like the streaks of a comet through a red gas nebula, and star-light skin that never seemed to stain, unlike his and everyone else’s. He rounded the curve of the outer hull and saw her.
Another orphan from an upper-deck orphanage, the daughter of a tithed Guard father and a minor noble mother, whatever money her family once possessed, she had parlayed into contacts. She was seated on the handrail, her back to the empty void of the outer hull, one knee, her high-booted foot, lazily hooked to a vertical strut, the other casually swinging, almost playfully. Her pants and top were made of an advanced fabric that clung to her svelte form, giving glimpses under her heavy armoured coat that sparked the imagination. Saturio could see the way she moved and gestured, a grace and fluidity that told a story far more polished than the lower deck toughs she was talking to now. He’d never seen her with a weapon, though that meant little down here.
The hulking men were from Baetus’ crew, Deck 84 chem-dealers. Saturio didn’t like them, but they had always dealt fairly with Caelonia; that was good enough. Her eyes set on him before any of the others, it always seemed like she knew more than the others around her. The woman’s smile didn’t change, lips curling up like smoke from a dream pipe, part invitation, part mocking rebuke, but when she saw him, something happened in her eyes that made every trip worth it.
“There’s my favourite runner! Any problems?” She sang out. Saturio couldn’t help but wipe a smudge of grease off his face with his sleeve but tried to stay calm in front of the other men. With a shake of his head, he slid the straps of his backpack off his shoulders and pulled two fabric-wrapped canisters from it.
“Not for me. Someone hit the dealers from water treatment in Smoketown down on 86 where I normally get this, but they had already left it for me, and whoever is taking over didn’t know the drop point. They got the Enforcer quad too, too; it must be a big player. I got in, got the merch, and got out.” He hid the shiver he felt thinking about the two scenes. Blood smeared with grime and rust, along the upper parts of the walls, a harsh chemical cleaner burning his nose, and not a single body or body part. Whoever had hit both locations had done so fast, quietly, and unless someone was used to walking along the underside of the decks like Saturio was, they wouldn’t have seen the leftovers. Enforcers getting killed or a new gang moving in wasn’t unusual, but someone that methodical and clean, that was.
“Any idea who it was?” One of Baetus’s knee breakers asked.
“Any evidence?” The other said, unnervingly similar in tone. They didn’t look related; both were made up of bulk-iron muscle under a day’s crust of grease, dirt, and probably some blood behind glowering scarred faces and too often broken noses. But they sounded like twins. Saturio almost mentioned the chemical cleaners, how no one outside the industrial water plant had noticed anything, and everyone was conspicuously not looking at the Enforcer station. A warning twist in his guts kept his mouth in check long enough to shape a neutral response.
“Nothing weird, probably someone new moving in, I’ll head back in a couple of cycles, contact the new owners. Whoever the Enforcers pissed off will lie low until replacements break some heads for revenge anyway.” Saturio said casually, taking his pack in one hand in case he had to use it as a weapon. One of the leather armoured toughs scooped up the cannisters. Both turned, again giving Saturio an uncanny impression of twins.
“She has your payment. We’ll be in contact when we need more.” One of them said without looking back. Or was it both? Saturio felt a chill shudder through his whipcord body. He felt a hand, warm through his thick coat, and was gently pulled to look at Caelonia’s artful, extended features, not alien, not xenos, just different. Saturio stared at her wide-eyed, all pretence of composure bleeding out of him like a neck shot.
“Don’t look back at them, keep your eyes on me.” She whispered. Saturio would have done that for as long as she let him, he realized. Then he saw something under the careful smile, a tension oozed from her like smoke, and there was something in her glittering eyes, something he couldn’t get the auspex on.
“I got another pass for you; you can get up past 50 now!” The woman said loudly, keeping the retreating pair in her vision, he realized. Caelonia kept him in front of her, and her lips moved, not saying anything but providing a fascinating display that-
“Five, six, seven, at the least, maybe more. They weren’t part of the gang last week, now they move before the gangers tell them to.” She said softly, her bright eyes drinking in information. A smile pulled up on her curved lips, and suddenly her gaze flicked back to him.
“We’re flirting,” Caelonia whispered, reaching out for him, the words sending a shiver from his ear down his spine. Then he was being spun around, and her lithe, surprisingly strong body was pulling him to her. He craned his neck to look back at her, then saw that Caelonia’s face was angled toward him, but her eyes were locked on the departing pair of thugs. “What do you see, Saturio?”
He followed her gaze out of the corner of his vision and saw what she meant. “Seen gangs before, none move like them, definitely not Baetus’ people. Folks who I know’d never deal with a gang aren’t looking twice at ‘em. And... did one of them just hand off the package to a water tech?”
Her hands tightened, sending a surge of warmth through him. “Can you get to water reclamation? Some path most don’t know?”
Saturio nodded, feeling her breath on his neck and delighting at the slight hum of satisfaction that Caelonia made. “Something’s happening, and it’s not good for any of us. I need to get some things, keep doing your run, meet me at Stairwell Alpha in four hours.”
And then she was sliding forward, around him, and jogging lightly away, giving him a winking goodbye over her shoulder with a swirl of braided hair. He stood stock still for a moment, watching her vanish into the bustle of the crowd. Then shook himself, then shouldered his pack and jogged in the opposite direction for his next delivery, until excitement drove him to run.
Three and a half hours, and several kilometres of jogging later, he was waiting and sucking down a tube of cold nutri-stew and lounging in an alley against a trash chute. This was one of the three levels that weren’t jammed and overflowing with filth and the stench of rot. Four had been plugged before Saturio was born, the “Out of Order” warning signs coated in decades of grime and graffiti. He watched the morass of humanity that made up the Deck 86 market with the rare moment of introspection, a pouch of coins, and a relatively full belly bought.
His pack was empty save for a spool of rope and some water; a large, intimidating knife hung on his belt, but the double-edged blade he had actually used nestled in a shoulder sheath under the front of his coat. Something about what Caelonia had said left him unsettled, and that, along with the odd synchronized movement of Baetus’ gang, had him ready for trouble.
He wasn’t ready for a chrome badge Enforcer officer in a starched pressed uniform to emerge from the elevator next to Caelonia. They were too far away for him to hear anything over the low roar of the market; if he hadn’t been at an angle, he could have spotted both the stairway and the elevator; he wouldn’t have seen it at all. But they were talking and gesturing with short, restrained intensity, amplifying the tension Saturio had felt in the woman before. The Enforcer was shaking his head more emphatically and went to grab Caelonia’s arm. She slid around him like a wisp of smoke, flicking her hand to knock his helmet over his eyes before sliding into the crowd towards the stairwell, an impish smirk on her lips. Saturio peeled himself away from the shadows of the trash chute and navigated the crowd to arrive at the heavy metal door just as Caelonia did.
She smiled, a quick flash of teeth whiter than any Saturio saw in his world of the Low Decks, and distractingly, he saw that she carried a backpack like his, dull green canvas fabric. Likely a cast-off from one of the thousands of Astra Militarum units that cycled through Fortunato station to wage the Imperium’s wars.
“I tried to get the Enforcers to send someone with us, the noxious pig refused, orders from higher, he said,” Caelonia said, her whisper severing the hum around them cleanly. She shook her head and began to wrap coal coloured fabric around her red and silver-streaked hair. “Normally, I like it when they’re useless, figures when we might need them, they won’t move.”
“First lesson, the other kids taught me. Life above, ignore below. Upper Spires don’t like to see us down here, ‘cept you, you see m- eh, see us.” Saturio blurted out, his tongue staging an unsuccessful rebellion against what he meant to say. A smirking wink made the young man flush again, then she slid close and shouldered her pack.
“Well then, let’s find something else to see. This stairwell will lead us down to water reclamation, yes?” She asked. Saturio found his head nodding before he recovered and shook his head. He turned away and started towards an alley, finding it much easier to think clearly when he wasn’t lost in her eyes.
“Does, but you wanted to get there on the quiet, yeah? Water Rec is on Deck 100; where the centre of the grav plates are. They pull the waste down from the Upper Spires and up from the Dockyards at the bottom. That’s what the old guy on Deck 89 says, said he used to be a smuggler from Dock 120, and he’d use the power conduits and the grav effects to move heavy stuff around the servitors.” He looked over her shoulder and felt confident enough to grin. “Works a treat, do it meself, ‘s how I get you the best stuff and still got legs to work the rest o’ the day.”
The returned grin from the woman behind him made Saturio’s steps lighter. He found the power maintenance shaft and worked the hatch out of the housing. The old smuggler was more than willing to pass on his secrets if Saturio kept the man stocked with the proper chems to keep away whatever physical and emotional injuries had forced the elder to retire. And just like he had been told, Saturio waited until Caelonia slid next to him in the dusty shadow and worked the hatch back in place. Thick electrical cabling crowded the walls, humming with a voltage that would cook them instantly if the insulation had worn thin at any point.
He took the lead then, letting experience and touch guide him in the pitch darkness, painfully aware suddenly that he smelled of sweat and burned rubber while she was something far sweeter. Eventually, a red-orange glow tremulously worked its way up to his eyes, and he smiled a gape-mouthed smirk of satisfaction. He worked down to a worn metal ladder in the wall, the sound of clanking servitors and rushing water around them. The Lower Decks were constantly humming with voices of generations of space-born humanity, around Saturio and Caelonia, now only machines spoke. He saw the tension in her form wind even tighter than when they had been dealing with the eerie pair of thugs and spoke low, his voice lost in the din of the station’s forgotten guts.
“Know it’s loud, don’t much like it here either, but no one’s here most times. See those grey pipes with the yellow an’ green? That’s waste from the Upper, we follow them, leave the servitors be, an we’ll be in Water Rec quick as you please.” Caelonia wrinkled her delicate nose and glanced at him.
“We don’t have to go in there, do we?” She asked, pointing at the indicated pipes. Saturio laughed once.
“Be more an’ just human waste in there, run off from the manufactorum gets mixed in too, was just starting out when I saw a gang get in a shootout next to one. Few stray rounds and the whole pipe burst, flooded the bay they was in. Lucky ones got their necks broke, unlucky ones survived long enough to watch their skin melt.” The memory made Saturio shudder and his stomach lurch. His eyes widened in horror, and he looked up at Caelonia sharply. “Oh! ‘M sorry, didn’ mean to upset you, miss-”
She silenced him with a musical laugh and the touch of a finger on his nose. “I’m not so delicate I wilt at some nasty tale, Saturio. I’m a runner too, I see all the polish in the Upper Levels, the filth under it all just makes it more vile. Let’s go.”
He led them along the labyrinth of shuddering walkways and ladders, watching as magnetic-locked servitors lumbered through the workings of electricity and water. Some sealed leaks with a shower of sparking, molten metal; others carried empty containers from one point to another, then moved them back again, their forgotten function lost to time, doomed to play out until they collapsed.
Time lost meaning as they descended into the station’s twisting innards of conduit nerves, arterial piping, and orange phos-lamp air. Saturio knew they were getting closer when a chemical tang filtered up through the air, and he heard foul-smelling steam jetting from one of the outer purifiers before they emerged into a cavernous open space.
The pair crouched on a walkway barely wide enough for one of them and looked out over the disquieting lambent glow of flickering lamps. Saturio pointed at a grimy and mold-covered painted number.
“91, yeah, this is the top level of Water Rec, goes down five, normally I’m running stims and painkills to the lot.” He stopped for a moment, realization clattering into place. “Orders dried up a week ago, ‘bout the same time the Enforcers got wiped on 86.”
Caelonia frowned, her almost almond eyes narrowing in thought. She canted her head and spoke. “Either they’ve all gone clean.”
They both rolled their eyes at that, then she continued. “Or something strange is happening here.”
A chill slithered down Saturio’s spine at her words. Food was always scarce, but the Fortunato family made sure there was always just enough calories flowing to keep the lower decks from rioting. The Uppers had real food flown from agri-worlds or grown in great hydroponic gardens, while Saturio had known nutrient-starch stew and, on a good day, harvested rat skewers. But all of them needed water; if the flow of drinking water were to stop... Saturio couldn’t begin to imagine how awful it would get. He’d seen scavengers tear each other to shreds for the last scrape of obscura from a used syringe. What would people do to each other if the taps stopped flowing?
Another waft of sulphur mixed with who knew what else nearly made him gag, and he noticed that whatever dark place her mind was, the smell was getting to Caelonia as well, as she silently fought retching. He pulled his rebreather over his nose, fished around his pack, pulled another one, and offered it. Caelonia’s eyes lit up, and she eagerly fastened it to her face. A long, savouring breath in through the filters later, and her eyes rolled up in relief. Caelonia fixed him with her bright eyes a moment later.
“This can’t have been cheap, Saturio.” She said with gentle accusation muffled behind the filters. He coloured under the mask and kept his hands busy by fixing his pack back in place.
“Just did a couple extra runs today, weren’t nothing. You shouldn’t have to smell this rubbish.” Then her hand was scooping around the back of his neck, and she pulled him in close, their foreheads touching.
“Thank you, I got you something too.” She said. Without another word, the lithe woman unslung her pack and opened it, revealing a matte-black holster holding the blocky lines of an Enforcer laspistol. Saturio’s eyes nearly bugged from his skull.
“I... never used one before!” He stammered weakly. Caelonia’s eyes lit up in amusement, and she reached around him to strap it under his shoulder, coming teasingly close to embracing the mortified young man. After she strapped one of her own on, Caelonia slid her waistcoat back over sleekly muscled shoulders and winked at him.
“Well, if you need to pop that cherry, better to have one close to hand then hm?” Even under the mask, he could hear the teasing flirtation in her voice and felt his skin flush from scalp to feet. Hurriedly, he turned and started working his way down the precarious walkway, past the barriers that sectioned off the upper levels of the heart of Fortunato station.
Moments later, he froze because the din of pumps, generators, and servitors was layered with a lower-pitched sound. After a moment, the sound resolved itself. Footsteps. Dozens of them. Not quite the unending din of hallways near the docks, but more than Saturio could count. Something else made his guts twist, and the chill along his spine grabbed his heart. Not a sound, but a lack of one.
The Water Rec crew had been boisterous and cheerful, though how much of that was honest and how much of it was the particular mix of chems Saturio had brought to hand, neither knew nor cared. Now, instead of working songs, laughing, or cursing, there were only footsteps and machinery. Saturio forced himself not to look down, terrified of what awful sight waited for him, until he found a shadowed platform with a solid floor that he and Caelonia could shelter in.
Forcing his breath to slow, hearing blood pound in his ears, the young man looked over the edge of the raised, sheet metal guardrail, and felt his heart skip. Water technicians worked alongside gangers and dock workers, men, women, and even children barely old enough to walk, gliding around each other in an eerily graceful coordination. Saturio had heard tell of insects, like cockroaches, but smaller, that lived and died as one vast swarm of life. The crews who had set foot on real planets had called them ants, and that same alien connection that had made Saturio’s skin crawl with how wrong it seemed, radiated from the scene below.
Caelonia tugged his sleeve and wordlessly pointed where there should have been grated flooring separating the decks of Water Reclamation. Now, there are only narrow walkways, forming a web over the vast cauldrons that purified the slurry of toxins and filth from the water of the station. She pointed him to ten brightly shining, pressurized tanks, clearly new additions. A twisting array of piping led to clear tubes, filled with something bubbling and vaguely purple.
He stole a glance at her, eyes wide with fear and shock. They huddled close together, barely whispering through the filters.
“Whas, goin’ on? Mutants? Heretics? What’re they doin?” Saturio breathed, unable to keep a tremor from his voice and hands. Caelonia shook her head short and sharp.
“Not mutants, some kind of... Xenos taint, and that stuff is, hm, well, nothing good.” The woman responded, and nausea rose in Saturio’s throat as he tried to remember the prayers they had taught him in the orphanage.
“We need to get the Enforcers down here! They could-” He stopped, because now he could hear something, like a low whispered chant, and... yelling. The pair peeked over their scant shelter and saw that motion had stopped, the workers were swaying and whispering something, the faint individual susurration melding into a bowel-clenching hymn of terror. Then the voices became clearer.
“Let off! You’ve no right-”
“I am a licensed escort; you brutes have no idea who my clients are!” Four Enforcers, their uniforms in disarray but their motions in the exact uncanny lockstep that had so disquieted Saturio in the gang members. Caelonia’s lips pressed together in a suppressed snarl of frustration. Whatever foul infection was happening here, some of the Enforcers were part of it. And they were bodily hauling a man and a woman, brothel workers from above Deck 50 by the clothes they, sort of, were wearing. Whatever protests the two had been making died as the couple took in the dread whispering of the entranced workers. Caelonia’s hand found his, and he gripped it, just to try and still the shaking of his own body.
The whisper rose in volume until finally Saturio could make out the strange accent in common Gothic.
Emperor of Stars, Emperor of Stars, four arms of freedom!” And seconds after that, a shadowed abomination crawled up from behind a tank, and seemingly from beyond Saturio’s most horrifying nightmares. It was a foul thing of purple carapace over pale grey, grub-like flesh. It was made of claws and serrated teeth set in an almost humanoid face, looking at the captured joytoys with a chill malice that Saturio had only felt when looking into the vacuum between stars. The pair began screaming, thrashing, and tearing skin from their knees as they flailed against the Enforcer’s steely grip.
Saturio watched, revulsion threatening to overwhelm him, as the purple and grey monstrosity crawled down the shining tanks on four disgustingly malformed, taloned arms that sprouted from its body. The utter wrongness of how smooth it moved, how dreadfully void-silent its claws were on metal. Certain that he was about to watch the brothel workers be ripped to bloody shreds, Saturio dry heaved slightly when it stopped, and a tendril emerged from its tongue, sliding over the captured young man’s thigh as he screamed for the Emperor’s protection until words descended into mindless terror.
The tongue decided on a spot near the captured joytoy’s lower rib and sank in effortlessly. The young man thrashed and frothed at the mouth for a moment, then went still, a drugged, placid smile spreading over his face. Caelonia ripped Saturio away from the edge of their hiding spot as the woman’s screams redoubled.
“We can’t tell who in Enforcers is part of this!” She hissed with far more calm than Saturio thought was reasonable. “It’s up to us! They’re spreading, if they corrupt the water of the station...”
The scale of the horror that statement unfurled in Saturio’s mind was so vast, so incomprehensible, it threatened to bury him further into his shocked trance. He shook, breathing fast under his filter, his life flashing before his eyes. It wasn’t much, but he appreciated it, the joy of running, Caelonia’s smile, the gleam of ships coming in to dock-
“Ships...the ships, the Guard!” Memory collided with terrorized inspiration. He looked up at Caelonia’s baffled expression, eyes wide with panic-tinged hope. “I saw a transport docking right before I met you, today, a Guard ship! If we can let them know-”
Caelonia grabbed his head with both hands, eyes alight again. “Yes! Almost yes, but if we make this their problem, the soldiers can deal with the infection!”
Saturio nodded frantically, then froze. The chanting had stopped, and he couldn’t hear the synchronized thump of workboots. Caelonia rose first, looking over the edge cautiously, then scrambling back and pointing down the walkway they had come from. The two knee-breakers from the morning were scaling a ladder leading from the vast cavern of water treatment towards their alcove. Saturio grabbed his companion and scrambled over the ledge, hopping down to land unstably on a vast sewage pipe.
Caelonia joined him, far more elegantly, but once they were moving, Saturio’s experience in traversing unusual paths kept him sure-footed. Quick and quiet, they sprinted away from the thugs, deeper into the complex. The main elevator shafts ran along the central shaft of the station, if they could make it there-
They almost did.
A howl of inhuman hunger rose from below them, a sound no human could make, and without thinking, Saturio’s eyes snapped down to meet the infinite malice of the four-armed nightmare’s gaze. He nearly stumbled from the sheer mind-numbing horror he felt looking at the thing, but Caelonia grabbed him and shoved him forward.
“Go, go!” She snarled. Saturio went. He caught glimpses of things in the corner of his vision, the crowd of people swarming around the dazed courtesans effortlessly, men and women lifting the Enforcers up on their shoulders wordlessly so the armed men could hunt the fleeing pair. Saturio could see the door that led back into the maintenance corridors, scant safety, but at least a goal. Before a thickset man, purple-tinged muscles distending and bulging monstrously, bounced from a lower pipe to directly in front of Saturio, his jaw gaping and stretching, a second set of predator teeth emerging behind his human facade. His knees gave out in panic, and Saturio nearly tumbled into the throng of uplifted hands of the chanting mutations below him.
Wordlessly, Caelonia vaulted over Saturio’s body, pulling her laspistol and a gloss black serrated dagger from under her coat and putting a snapshot lasbolt into the cultist’s hip. The malformed man dropped awkwardly around the pipe, scrabbling to keep hold of the smooth metal, and the lithe woman slashed the blade across his face and cleared his flailing limbs as he fell into the mass of bodies below.
Recovering just enough to get his body to move, Saturio panted through his rebreather desperately, sucking in air, trying to get his muscles to move. He heard the heavy stomp of boots behind him, and in desperation drew the pistol Caelonia had given him. Without looking back, he tried to catch up to the woman, blind firing wildly, killing nothing but clammy air. Caelonia reached the door and let out a shriek of indignation, finding it locked.
“Slow them down!” The woman nearest snarled at him, and Saturio spun, his hands trembling, firing at the hulking thugs who were almost on him. Sheer volume of fire found him catching the lead cultist in the knee and sent him stumbling. Saturio instinctively tried aiming lower to decapitate the massive man but missed.
Instead blasting a hole in the pressurized sewage pipe the cultists were standing on. Brown and green filth erupted from the pipe and slammed into the cultist’s scarred face, flipping him to his back. Caelonia laughed in vindication as the door swung open. Just in time for Saturio to see the purple chitin of the abomination leap soundlessly to the same wall their door was on, then surge along the horizontal surface effortlessly. He snapped off two more useless shots before slamming through the door and locking it behind him, then shooting the access panel on instinct.
For a precious second, he stared helplessly at the door, relief and terror causing his body to freeze while he sweated. Strong hands grabbed his head and turned him to face Caelonia.
“Saturio! I need you. Focus. We need to get to the docks where the soldiers are, which way!” He blinked, lost in her impossibly bright eyes, then shook himself. Turning, he grabbed her hand and tugged her towards the central freight elevator shaft. They were in an elevator maintenance section of the deck, ill-lit save by failing orange phos-lamps and silent as a funeral shrine after the din of Water Rec. Saturio almost winced as his boots thumped on the metal-grated hall.
“Come on! Gravity switches midway, but it’s the fastest transport to the troop dock!” They snapped around a corner just as they heard the door shear of its hinges. Saturio’s breath was momentarily too scared to move through his lungs, but he rolled to the balls of his feet to move more quietly, hoping to buy just a few seconds before that thing was after them again. Another sharp corner and they saw the signage for the cargo elevator, and he panted out a breath, hot with dread and hope in equal measure. His calves burning, Saturio had stopped his stealthy tread, and his boots scuffed for a brief second before he got to the panel and hit the activator rune.
He turned to check on Caelonia, suddenly realizing he hadn’t heard her once during the panicked sprint. She was behind, still wearing her mask, eyes lit with excitement as she pointed her laspistol down the hall, far steadier than his own hands had been. Saturio heard the whine of cables and gears behind him and watched as the floor runes crept towards them, then snapped back to the hallway corner, where a faint scrape of a hard boot against metal sounded.
A woman rounded the corner, lank, stained blonde hair tied back in a worker’s bun, overalls, and hard features now seeming a nightmarish rusty-red from the mix of purple stain and orange light. Her blank eyes swung towards them, and before her mouth could elongate into the nightmare Saturio had seen before, a single lasbolt cratered her skull.
“They’ll be coming, get ready!” Caelonia whispered. He was about to ask why when the young man heard the sickeningly wordless thump of boots on metal as more of the cult crashed towards them. The orange lights flickered, then died, plunging them into darkness before Saturio frantically pulled a stablight from his pack and flicked it on, almost instantly wishing he hadn’t.
Green reflecting eyes set in human faces surged around the corner, running, crawling on all fours, mouth wide and slavering. Saturio’s throat closed off the scream he wanted to let out, and he began firing, the density of the cult making his lack of accuracy irrelevant. Blood and other fluids splashed the walls, Caelonia felling the infected workers with manic skill, accompanied by short, insane giggles. Icy fingers clamped around his guts as his finger tightened and his laspistol merely clicked on an empty power pack. The swarm of cultists swarmed toward him.
The elevator chimed, and Saturio threw himself back into the welcome light, Caelonia a breath behind him.
A breath too late.
A disgustingly jointed arm lanced from the shadows of the ceiling and hooked into her backpack, arresting her normally sleek movement, and the hideous xenos leered into view as it whipped its tongue towards her neck. Fury at someone so beautiful in the grasp of something so hideous killed his terror. Saturio unsheathed his knife and hurled it with every ounce of fury and skill he had.
The monster snapped its head out of the way almost idly. Moving with eye-watering speed Caelonia caught the hilt of the knife and jammed it into one of the monstrous black eyes. Green ichor sprayed out, and it howled, flailing gleaming talons at them both.
The Emperor’s grace saved Saturio, as his unsteady legs collapsed, grabbing and pulling Caelonia down at the same time, her pack shredding. She twisted like a dancer and blasted the monstrosity point-blank in the neck, sending it reeling back. The freight elevator door shut as the car began to drop, sending them scrambling to grab loose straps that usually secured cargo to the floor or ceiling, depending on the car’s direction. Saturio let out a panting breath, pulling his rebreather down, shaking with too many surges of fear and relief. He stole a glance at Caelonia, wondering if he could say anything to comfort-
She had pulled her mask off as well. And was grinning madly.
Before the young man could react, he felt his stomach begin to shift as they passed into deck 100, the gravitational centre of the station. With a screaming protest of tortured metal, the car slammed to a halt and sent the pair crashing against the wall, only their grip on the cargo straps preventing their inertia from sprawling them against the floor. They stared at each other in shock, wondering what had happened, when something landed on the car’s “roof” with a thud. Purple claws punched effortlessly through the metal roof.
Caelonia fired through the roof as Saturio scrambled for the maintenance panel at the bottom, wondering how long it would take the creature to realize there was one on the roof as well. He desperately worked the panel open just as his question was answered, the roof panel was ripped away violently. Saturio frantically crawled out, his stomach now flipping from null-gravity vertigo as well as fear. He heard Caelonia spit out an unrecognizable word, though the tone said quite enough as she slipped out the hatch, dropping her empty laspistol as she did.
The central freight elevator was dizzyingly tall, the air frigid and thin. They heard the whine of other cables as other cars moved, muted in the sparse air. Balanced on one hand, Saturio instinctively pulled his rebreather up to his face, noticing that Caelonia didn’t bother, the centre gravity of the station letting him hold himself in place easily. They both looked around, doing their best not to look down, working their way towards the rungs of a ladder running parallel with the elevator car.
The abomination’s clawed arms levered through the same opening they had come through. Its remaining eyes, now gleaming in the metallic light, with sheer hate focused on the woman, Saturio’s knife still hilt-deep in its face. Panic, along with the sight of Caelonia’s laspistol drifting lazily next to him, fuelled inspiration. He grabbed her and pushed off the elevator car into the empty, cavernous space of the shaft.
Inertia carried them into the field of null-gravity. They drifted towards the opposite side of the shaft, rotating lazily, adrenaline drawing the moment out like time had slowed to a crawl. The monster looked at them, tilting its hideous visage in confusion as Saturio pulled the grapple and rope from his pack. Growling in effort, Saturio flung the grapple toward the rungs on the service ladder opposite them, snapping it in place with a practiced jerk. He heard Caelonia suck in the thin air and looked over to see the monstrosity crouch and explode toward them.
Saturio heaved with all his might, his mind still slowing the moments out to hours, seeing the razor talons reach for them, fanged maw open, tongue writhing nauseatingly. Then an expression like shock registered on the thing’s face as the station’s gravity betrayed its momentum.
Caelonia pushed the arm he had around her away; then she pushed off, sending him down and herself up and over the monster. Its scything arms missing her hair by fractions of a millimetre, then one of her outstretched hands caught Saturio’s firmly lodged knife. Her own, black-polished blade appeared in her other hand. She pulled herself down, with eye-watering speed, and drove the knife hard into the abomination’s neck. Her arm stabbed forward over and over like a sewing machine, then she pushed off it. She sailed through the minimal gravity back towards Saturio. At the same time, the thing drifted down, trailing globs of ichor. The cantered gravity of the station centre leaving the writhing body in the path of a fast-rising cargo elevator.
If she hadn’t killed it, the impact of the cargo elevator gears slamming into the purple chitin, chewing it into a spray of green and grey-green gobbets, certainly did. Holding onto the rope with a death grip, Saturio reached out and caught Caelonia’s outstretched hand, pulled her to him, and felt the momentum knock them towards the service ladder. She pressed her forehead to his and smiled wide, eyes alight with glee.
For a long, gently spinning moment, Saturio stared into her too beautiful face, lost in eyes that had no place in this world of corridors, metal, and recycled air.
Still panting, his sense of time finally moving at a normal pace, Saturio led the way to a servitor door and worked it open. They tumbled into the hallway in a heap, lying still and listening for cultists or monsters. When none descended on them, Saturio spotted a comset in the wall and scrabbled toward it. He lifted the set and froze, now unsure of what to say.
Caelonia snatched it from him and put a finger to his lips and winked. The voice that came from her was only roundly recognizable as hers.
“Oi! We got cultists ‘ere! In Water Rec! Some bleedin’ Xenos filth just tried to bugger the lift goin’ to the Guard on the docks!” She dropped the set and grabbed Saturio’s coat with both hands, pulling him in tight, holding him for a second that could have stretched into eternity if he’d had say in it. She pulled his mask off and breathed in deep, eyes fluttering slightly, pressing her forehead against his, then shook as if returning to her senses.
“The pass I gave you will bring you to level 46, Hab block Epsilon 34. We need to separate. Meet me there, call first!” Then she was sprinting, lightly and silently away, leaving Saturio stunned, until the sound of alarm claxons shook him from his stupor.
It took weeks for the Guard to massacre their way through the cells of the Xenos infection. Saturio spent most of the time as an aide to a hard-edged Guardsman in scarred green armour. They’d taken samples of his blood, then paid him good credits to guide patrols through ducts and pathways, gunning down a surprising number of gangers and Enforcers, as well as most of the Water Reclamation crew.
Then they’d gone, leaving the people of the lower decks to incinerate the bodies, including a surprising amount of Upper Spire fancies. Saturio hadn’t much cared about it all; the pass Caelonia had given him was in a chain around his neck and kept against his skin, never out of reach. He spent some of the credits the Guard had paid him to get a real shower, made off with two real apples from deck 48’s garden, and a bit more on clothes that weren’t taken from a body.
He’d tried to call, but in truth didn’t really know how, so he’d just rolled the dice and made his way nervously but carefully through the legitimate gates to deck 46. The air smelled off, empty, there was a lack of crowds and street vendors, and enough new Enforcers that he was a touch anxious, despite the fact he’d trod through the gate proper-like. Saturio found her door and hesitated, nerves he hadn’t felt guiding the Guardsmen locking him in place. Then he heard a muted sound, Caelonia’s laugh. Longing defeated anxiety and his knuckles wrapped on the door.
The door slid open, showing a room so dark he couldn’t see a thing but odd pink and green glows, but Caelonia’s hand burst from the shadow and latched onto him, pulling him into the hab with shocking force. Stumbling Saturio found himself pushed onto a soft couch, sinking into the cushion. Before his eyes could adapt he felt her legs around his, her weight on him, pinning him. As his eyes adapted her face swam into view, half-light by the soft lighting.
Saturio’s guts twisted, his breath sucking in, capturing her scent, strange and exotic. But not as exotic as she looked now. Caelonia’s features were different, more, and beautifully, terrifyingly wrong. Inhuman. She shook her head, gleaming eyes fixed on him. He felt the chill of her strange, gloss-black knife touch his throat.
“Oh, Saturio, I told you to call first! I’m not,” She sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. “Ready for company.”
A shocked sound, between whimper and gasp, escaped his lips, and Caelonia leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his, the gesture now feeling intimately threatening. She shushed him, her nose brushing his as her free hand searched him, finding the apples.
“Ah, so sweet, I was going to save you for my personal enjoyment when the time came. When this place’s swarm of meaningless lives would finally be put to proper use. But those… things, those insects take away that use. No pain, no pleasure, no purpose, just hunger.” She whispered her voice a caress that turned his blood to ice. “We had to deal with them, and you helped! So, I was going to savour you…”
The blade at his neck, the mix of lust and fear left Saturio frozen, scarce able to breathe as Caelonia delicately took a crunching bite out of the apple, sharp white canines gleaming in the wan light. She inhaled as she slowly chewed. Juice trailed down her milky skin, as Caelonia’s elongated, shimmering eyes drank in his desire and horror.
“Despair is so much sweeter when it has been infused with hope. Don’t worry, this will last, I have plans for you, such things for us to share…”