When they rolled up to the mineshaft, Jim had stopped the convoy and pulled Mark aside, pointing at the site.
“My daddy always said that where there’s a mine, there’s riches,” Jim said. “You haven’t exactly covered yourself in glory since we got out here, before the storm hit or after. Why don’t you take Bruno, Johnny, and the Meat Loaf and see if you can’t make it up to us by finding something worthwhile in there?”
It took Mark a second to shake off the shock.
“Saint Katherine’s tits, Jimmy, if you want me dead, just shoot me here. Johnny’s lucky and all, idiot he may be, but Bruno and the Loaf… you might as well chain them to me and push me down a well.”
“Don’t give me ideas, Mark. Just tell me you’re volunteering for the assignment.”
“Is this a volunteering kind of assignment?”
“You’re either volunteering for this or to test target priority next time we get in a scrap.”
“Then I guess I’m your man, boss.”
“Glad to hear it. We’ll circle back in a couple of days. Make me proud, will ya? For once?”
Mark and his little gang stumbled down the dark mineshaft, Johnny leading Loafy by the arm as the latter asked dumb questions.
“Hey Marky?” Meat Loaf asked, his voice just a little too loud. But then the bastard only had one good ear.
“What’s up, Loaf?” Mark answered, swinging his torch from side to side.
“I don’t think this gang life is for me, man, you know?”
“Yeah?” asked Mark. “So you’d rather be worked to death in some mine or stripping parts for their scrap twenty hours a day?”
“I mean, what are the retirement benefits?”
“You work until you can’t anymore, Loaf, and then they shoot you in the head. Best case scenario, the people who worked around you pay to have your body recycled so they can eat what’s left of you and maybe scratch a dedication to you in the wall next to where you used to work.”
The gang paused for a moment, letting it sink in. The silence was broken by Meat Loaf.
“You gotta admit,” he said. “That kind of certainty, I can see now why my mom discouraged me from becoming a ganger. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”
“Sure, Loaf. I guess that’s definitely one way of looking at it.”
The whole group was injured and tired when they reached a wide spot in the mine. It was a wide spot but also a place that looked to fall endlessly into nowhere. There was only one way to anywhere that they could see, an old elevator. Unfortunately, at the very edge of darkness, the walls rippled with movement. The White Dogs, or at least the White Dogs B-Team, weren’t alone.
“That lift ain’t gonna move, boss,” Bruno said to Mark. “At least not without accessing that access panel first.”
He pointed to a control room on the same level they’d descended to but down a long gangway and then ninety-degrees down another equally as long. The active cogitator screen glowed a faint green in the darkness.
“We have all the luck, don’t we?” said Mark with more than a little sarcasm. The others looked to him with concern coloring their eyes and Mark cleared his throat in response. “There’s something out there and I figure we’ve got one shot at this, yeah? Activate that damned lift and then get the hell out.”
“I’ll go anywhere you go, boss,” Bruno said.
“Funny you say that,” Mark responded.
Bruno ran down the gangway alone, his autorifle pointed forward, loosing shots into the darkness but not hitting anything as far as anyone could tell. Then he knelt by a pillar, pausing to reload. As he ejected one magazine and seated another, a figure came screaming out of the darkness. He started but couldn’t react before the shotgun he was staring down unloaded a peppering of shot. It caught him full in the face and Bruno fell, already weakened thanks to the bounty hunters and, not made any better with a face full of lead.
“That could’ve gone better,” Mark said.
“What should we do now, boss?” asked Lucky Johnny.
Johnny charged down the metal plank, his autopistol roaring as he neared the stranger that had just felled Bruno. The stranger had a purple tint to their skin, disconcerting bumps on their forehead, and a tongue that made him uncomfortable at an atavistic level. He solved this problem by filling the purple face with so many bullets he wouldn’t have to think about it any longer.
Behind him, Meat Loaf, deaf and dumb, limped down and around on a mission for the cogitator.
“You know where you’re going?” Johnny asked.
“What?” Meat Loaf asked, rounding the corner.
“Do. You. Know. Where. You’re. Going?”
“I’m following the hum of the cogitator, brother!”
“The Emperor protects small children and retards who join Orlock gangs, I guess,” Johnny said under his breath, rolling his fresh kill off the platform and into the darkness below.
“What?” Meat Loaf asked, pausing.
“Just go hack the fucking terminal!” Johnny and Mark screamed as a chorus across the mineshaft.
“And you feel okay?” Mark asked Bruno. “Because it looked like you really were down for the count.”
“No, Marky, seriously,” Bruno said. “I’m A-Okay. In fact, I haven’t felt this good in a long time. It’s like I finally got the nap I needed.”
“You were shotgunned in the face.”
“Best thing that could’ve happened to me, I mean it.”
“If you say so, brother.”
Mark had dragged Bruno’s limp body onto the lift once the Meat Loaf figured out the command terminal and, at some point as they sank deeper into the shaft, Bruno awoke in a great mood. Since the lift hit the bottom level and they were stuck wandering the tunnels in near darkness, Bruno hadn’t been able to shut up about how positive the experience had been. At least until they made a final corner and found themselves inside what seemed to be an abandoned lab.
“Hey, Loafy,” Mark said. “I’m wondering if maybe you weren’t right about being a mine slave after all.”
The lab was dark except for the harsh green glow of cogitator screens and a window into a large holding room that emanated a soft purple radiance that pulsated like a slow beat of a heart. The boys peered through the half-meter thick window, thick enough to be a view port on an Imperial cruiser, and mouths fell agape as they witnessed a horror that would change their lives forever.
In Cinderak City, when loaded up on whiskey and debating the merits of Imperial policy as if the High Lords might one day ask them their opinion, the subject of xenos would come up from time to time. The Galaxy was a big place. Life came in myriad forms. Hell, they shared the wastes with Squats, didn’t they? Conceptually, they knew that xenos existed. But that was radically different from seeing something so foreign. So… alien.
In the center of the containment room–that was the only thing that place could be–sat a monster of indescribable proportions, hunched onto some kind of plinth. It appeared to be dormant or resting, its limbs pulled tight around itself, its body moving in and out with the same rhythm as the glow though it didn’t appear to be the source of the light.
Mark studied the console in front of him. Four lights glowed green. He pulled the cheap plastic label off the console next to one of the lights and read its stamped text: “Stasis Pylon”. Next to the lights was a remote console for a maintenance ambot, probably used for servicing the pylons. Mark couldn’t blame whoever built the lab from wanting to keep their distance.
*The sleeper calls its children*
“You say something?” Mark asked, looking at Bruno.
“Was going to ask you the same thing.”
*The sleeper calls all to give their lives*
“I’M READY TO GO HOME NOW!” Meat Loaf shouted.
“It’s in our minds,” Mark said.
“You sure?” Bruno asked.
Mark hooked a thumb toward the unluckiest of the gangers. “If Loafy can hear it…? Yeah, it’s in our fucking heads.”
The creature raised its chitinous skull and, though it lacked eyes, it seemed to stare right through Mark.
*Will you serve the sleeper?*
“Oh. Fuck. That,” Mark said.
It was as if an alarm sounded, so loud that it deafened them while bending them over in physical pain. And, yet, the lab remained as silent as it had been a minute ago. A psychic shriek from the creature in the containment room.
After long seconds, it ceased and the boys glanced around. It was Lucky Johnny who spoke first.
“That can’t be good.”
“Thanks, genius.”
Mark grabbed his boys by their collars, hauling them up and pushing them toward a massive steel hatch that would not have been out of place on a star fortress or the Eye of Selene. He shoved them through the opening and then put his back into swinging the heavy door shut. Its hinges groaned from years of inertia.
“You guys have one job,” he said, grunting. “No matter what comes, you stop it from getting to me.”
“And what are you going to do?” Johnny whined.
“I’m going to try to kill the son of a bitch,” he said, the last word punctuated with the ominous metallic reverb of metal slamming into metal. And then the maglock sealed the hatch shut.
The abberant had knocked Bruno clear away from the door, opening the path for more cultists to follow in behind him. And then, once they’d finished the job, there was nothing stopping them from going after Mark. It was all over.
Except it wasn’t.
Meat Loaf, that blind, deaf, bastard, leapt in front of the door and took on the aberrant himself even though it made no sense. The greenhorn had neither the skills nor the training, and yet the idiot wrestled with the xeno monstrosity, his autopistol firing when he could squeeze off a shot, his knife flashing ineffectively against the mutant’s skin. It was so ridiculous, Mark almost laughed. And he would have were the situation not so desperate.
Through another door, Mark could see more cultists about to come through. Then, out of nowhere, Johnny leapt over him and, with a strength Mark didn’t know the kid possessed, he slammed the hatch shut, engaging the maglock. Bruno was on his back watching a cripple go toe to toe with a monster but, for half a second, it felt like the tide was turning.
And then Loafy ran out of ammo.
The abberant made quick work of the kid, putting him down and in the most brutal of ways. Johnny’s closing of the door didn’t last long and, a second later, it swung open and the cultists swarmed the other juve, screams from the kid, sounding as if he were being fed into a meat grinder. A second later, another abberant began slamming his enormous hammer into the hatch that separated Mark from the melee. It survived one hit, then two. But the door started to give on the third hit when Bruno’s lights went out, a hammer crashing down on his own head.
Jim Beaver, the road captain of the White Dogs, lit his lho stick and exhaled as four figures emerged over the horizon, hunched over and–though it was hard to tell for certain with the heat distortions between them–it seemed, pantless. As they got closer he could see that it was Mark and his splinter group and that they’d had a hard couple of days. Meat Loaf, the greenhorn, had aged considerably but that could also have been because he didn’t have any eyes.
Poor kid. The girls always loved his eyes.
“Well,” he said as the group got near. “Looks like you’ve seen a thing or two. Find anything good?”
“You know how we always like to sit around and talk about the open road and freedom from the hive?” Marked responded.
“Ain’t nothing like it, is there?”
“Boss,” Mark said. “There’s a reason people built them hives. And, if I’m being honest, going back and being a slave is sounding pretty fucking good to some of us right about now.”
The images in this post were generated using GPT Image 2 from tableaus built by the author using his own miniatures or miniatures borrowed for this purpose.
