“Bliss, what the hell are you—”
“What? Thinking? I’m thinking I’m doing my duty to the Throne. My life and body are of no consequence to ensuring the continued wellbeing of the Imperium. And I’ll remind you that I am not Bliss on this world,” Carmichael snapped to Harr when the group returned to safe territory.
“As amusing an idea as it is to see you sell yourself off into what is likely some weird sex thing in House Gronheim, is there some reality where you can justify what you just said without making you appear like the fodder you said we weren’t?” Jethro asked her. She paused for a moment to think through his run-on sentence.
Hager, betraying the brutish, dull look he had donned in Skardak Tertium, followed along more quickly and answered for Carmichael. “The difference, grunts, is that this is her choice. And as she is your superior for this op, you will surrender to that choice or be reprimanded for insubordination. If Selaina Poison decides to roll in the mud with Scodd Gronheim, then she will, and none of you will have anything to say about it,” Hager explained. He then turned to her and furrowed his brow. “Even if this reeks of a bad frigging idea.”
“Your concern is noted,” Carmichael growled, arms crossed. “I’ll be sure to be equally concerned when each of you set up a date.”
“This is a little more dangerous than—” Elraad started.
“I know! Throne, overbearing and literal, the lot of you,” Carmichael sighed, tossing her hands to the air in flustered exasperation.
“Do you want to vox up?” Hager asked her, still focusing on moving the mission forward.
Carmichael shook her head. “No. I don’t imagine clothes will be long for my body, and an exposed vox link will do us all in. Really, the only conversation we should be having is what all of you are going to be up to while I’m gone. I’ll be able to look after myself.”
“Is keeping watch on this…Wyveria, as Gronheim called it, out of the question?” Harr asked.
“Why, want a view, choir boy?” Carmichael grinned, winking to him.
“No, I meant—”
“Sure!” Jethro interjected.
“I know what you meant,” Carmichael laughed, ignoring the Ratling. “If you want to hang back and watch the scene to make sure nothing funny happens or to see me make it out alive, by all means. But just hang back. I’m sure Gronheim expects some of you to tail me to the Wyveria, but don’t give him anything to go on,” she explained.
“We’ll keep our distance,” Hager nodded confidently.
“I’m sure you’ll try. Listen, if things go south, leave me behind. Take what we know to the boss—it will have to be enough and he’ll be able to break all of House Gronheim in half if he needs anything more. My survival is of little consequence to the mission, but if I can survive Gronheim’s plans, I will,” Carmichael told the group. Harr did not know how to reply to that, much as he wanted to. But his wants, unverbalized as they were, were ignored, and Carmichael’s plan to seduce the young Gronheim heir into turning up more intel about Amnes Minoris went underway. Even in that regard, he had little input into Carmichael’s plan of approach; instead, he was again tithed toward leaning on his former Guardsman role, with much of the team focusing on securing a sniper position for Jethro to keep as much of an eye on things as he could.
Jethro, at least, was excited for his role.
***
“Anything?”
“Just like the last dozen times, Godel, no,” Jethro’s voice crackled and popped through the small speaker in Harr’s ear.
“And just like the last dozen times, vox chatter minimum,” Hager snarled, his low growl coming across choppily through the vox. “Duration 1.8, confirm.”
“Check,” Harr reported, looking at his holobracer. Hager was confirming the group was awake enough to tell whether they had been waiting around the Wyveria for 1.8 hours. A handful of ‘check’s from the others in the group followed.
The Wyveria had been a hotel, once upon a time, but was now repurposed into a small fortress for House Gronheim’s presence in the Underhive. It was carved into the abdomen of a titanic stone statue of some long-ago Terran noble; Harr did not know which, save for the initials G.V., which were splayed across the statue. It seemed, to Harr, that this statue was dedicated to a rather unsavory fellow, as it had also been the site of enough graffiti to paint a small Ecclesiarchical chapel, and the statue’s eyes had been stricken from its head. Maybe, Harr wondered, that was where Scodd got his idea of eye-plucking as a threat.
The Wyveria, being midway up (or down, depending on the point of view) the height of the statue, was a tremendous height off the ground. That meant reaching the Wyveria required taking one of many catwalks that formed an incoherent maze suspended in the air across a vast abyss over the rest of the Underhive. Jethro was positioned somewhere across from the Wyveria, far away enough to get a good view of the scene with his sniper. Everyone was relatively far away, scattered throughout the airborne maze. Dim blue clouds of smog rolled under the catwalks, obscuring the ground from view; as far as Harr was concerned, there may not have been any ground down there at all, and a fall may simply last forever. Harr himself was at least on a catwalk that led to the Wyveria, but even then, the walking distance would still have taken him about five minutes in a sprint just to make it to the front door.
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There were a few moments of silence following Hager’s call for a time check. Then, another Guardsmen Harr only knew from this op—they went by Scurryscar for their mission here, but did not possess a scar to Harr’s knowledge—voxxed in, “I just heard footsteps.”
“Repeat, Scurryscar?” Hager called back.
“I heard a crowd of…people. But there’s no one here,” Scurryscar replied.
“No visual,” Jethro added.
“Should I investigate?”
“Negative, keep your post. Confirm, over,” Hager replied, waiting for a response of confirmation. None came. “Scurryscar, confirm, over.” Nothing. “Scurryscar, what’s your status?” Hager demanded. He finally got a response, even if it was not the one he was expecting, nor was it intelligible. A crunching, smacking sound, followed by a chunky pitter-patter.
The sound of someone all but exploding upon contact with the ground from a great fall.
And then all hell broke loose. Hager knew from the horrific fate that came through the vox that they were under attack, and began to give an order. “All units, report to—” but he never quite managed to finish, as his line instead went quiet after a brief roaring from an autogun. Harr’s head flicked to where he thought Hager was, across the vast myriad of catwalks suspended in the air. Hager was too far for Harr to see much of anything, but when Harr looked in his direction, the rapid popping of autogun fire at last reached him, physically. Lights flickered in the distance, their sounds taking about five seconds to reach Harr. It seemed like Hager was putting up a fight, though.
At that thought, Harr heard footsteps of his own from behind him, and spun on his heels to see a pair of carapace-armored individuals in a defaced red and black paintjob hop onto his catwalk from one above. “Maulers!” Harr yelled into his vox, though most of everyone probably knew that by then. The flickering of lights and the popping of gunfire was coming from all directions at that point. Harr slid behind what little cover he could find, in the form of a collapsed construction rigging that had been erected around a now-completed but burnt-out lamppost on his catwalk. He also readied his lasrifle during his slide, and trained it down the length of his catwalk, toward the two Maulers coming his way. One had a combat shotgun, the other an autogun.
Harr laid down suppressive fire just to keep the Maulers at bay, but they were not reluctant to return fire likewise. They unloaded into Harr’s cover, torn rockcrete blasting around Harr’s head. Harr prayed to the Throne that his cover could last until they needed to reload, and luckily, it seemed the Throne answered his prayers. For a precious moment, a lull presented itself in the autoweapon fire that had been assaulting Harr’s position, and he wasted no time in engaging his assailants more actively. He was aided in this endeavor, too; the moment he peered over his shredded cover, a flash of light streaked through the neck of the shotgun-wielding Mauler from an angle above, and the ganger fell sideways into the railing at his right, limp and motionless. The autogun-wielding Mauler was briefly stunned by the sudden slaying of his ally, leaving him momentarily vulnerable to Harr’s lasrifle. Harr seized his chance to unleash the Throne’s fury, and lit his assailant up from head to toe, not quite shredding the carapace-armored ex-Enforcer, but killing him all the same.
Harr was grateful for Jethro’s aid but did not have the time to waste in voicing so over vox. Instead, he fought a battle of internal conflict in the brief moments to himself he regained after lasing a Mauler up and down. Should he fight his way to Bliss? Could he? Hager’s orders were sounding like he wanted the group to report to the Scion’s position, but that was merely an assumption. But it was not an assumption that Bliss had wanted the team to abandon her if things went sideways, which they absolutely had. And more important than Bliss’s wants was her reasoning: that getting their information to their Inquisitor was of the utmost import. Harr did not then know how to go about that on his own, but he knew he could never have managed it if he was dead. Even so, Bliss had stuck her neck out for him…
The mired internal conflict was externally solved for Jack Harr when the front doors of the Wyveria flung open and a patrol of Gronheim gangers flooded out. Gronheim’s goons took a moment to assess the situation after emerging from the Wyveria, and then opened fire. On Harr and the others, of course—the decision was obvious, to Harr, who had pieced together the goings’ on based on his knowledge of the Underhive’s gangs. Scodd Gronheim had fallen for Bliss’s act, but wanted her for himself, permanently, ever as avaricious as a noble heir could be. So he undoubtedly made the decision to strike the aspiring gang Bliss came from out from the Underhive, keeping Bliss and the totality of his flect operation intact, and had called upon the Maulers to ‘police’ the situation. It is what they were (once) made for, after all.
Motive or cause aside, the catwalks erupted into a display of lasfire and autogun blasts. Some catwalks fell into the cloudy abyss below, severed by intense las impacts or too dilapidated to otherwise support the weight of combat. Jethro’s covering fire persisted for a time, the crackshot Ratling picking off dangerous targets all throughout the shooting gallery of the open air, but even his fire ended eventually. There was no telling whether that meant he was alive or dead. In his ensuing travels, Harr did not hear or see any others of his team, though he knew that gunfire was still originating from and focused on areas of the scene that were not his own, so it was a safe assumption that parts of his team still existed even still. That, or Gronheim and the Maulers decided to blast each other to bits when no one else was looking. Harr hoped for the former.
Harr fled from Gronheim’s goons, ultimately being pressed toward more Maulers as he navigated the winding walkways suspended in the air. The thought occurred to him that Gronheim’s gang, being as they did not possess the Maulers’ carapace armor, would have been easier to fight through, but it was still a losing battle all the same. Rather than run toward that one, Harr decided to fight into the battle that had already been dropped in his lap and try to pierce through it to the other side of Maulers’ lines. For a time, it seemed as though he may succeed, that he might escape and manage to roam free. Such aspirations were denied, however, upon the arrival of a piercing and grimy barking that echoed across the whole of the lasfire-filled scene. The shooting stopped and knowing heads raised warily to the sound of the doglike growling before the bodies carrying those heads turned in flight.
Gronheim’s gang fled back toward the Wyveria, and the Maulers fled whichever way they could, running from no physical object save for the scene itself. Harr questioned whether he should shoot his recent-assailants in the back, but decided the Throne would have frowned upon wanton civil bloodshed of the sort. Plus he did not want to draw further attention to himself from the barking, which, further lasfire or not, was growing louder. Louder and closer. Harr chose to kneel in patient anticipation for whatever was coming, catching his breath and tending to his lasgun. He had no idea what sort of mechanical barking could so command the forces of Underhive gangs to flee, but whatever it was, it was something very real and very close.
When the cyber-mastiffs landed on Harr’s catwalk and scanned him over with their sensorium visors, it dawned on him that perhaps joining the Maulers in flight would have been a better idea than gathering his breath.