Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The upper levels of a hive city were the pleasure grounds of the powerful and the high-ranking administrators, while the midhive was home to the commoners who scraped a living off the hive's industry. And beneath the industrial and manufactorum layers—the lower hive—where these commoners dwelt lay the very bottom of a hive city: the underhive.

Most of the inhabitants here were mutants the hive would not accept, or criminals fleeing pursuit. Some of these criminals had banded together to form gangs large and small, each controlling its own territory within the underhive.

Every resident of the underhive had to survive amid the rules of the gangs and their gunfights, and so here, might made right.

Yet the upper hive did not entirely ignore the underhive. So long as a hive city still needed to mine resources from its world, routing them up through the underhive was the most convenient path.

Though the hive nobility cared nothing for whether the underhive lived or died, the quantity of resources bore upon their pleasures and the collection of the Imperial tithe, so they would prop up or intimidate the underhive gangs to keep the flow of resources unobstructed.

On most worlds of the Imperium, this game of terror—built upon the ties between hive nobles and underhive gangs—was an unspoken rule taken for granted. But when the nobles of Port Sanctus fled Port Sanctus one after another, this deformed yet effective system collapsed with a crash.

The old black terror gave way to a truly anarchic riot.

The gangs seized for themselves the resources once shipped to the upper hive, selling them off through their own channels to trade for weapons—expanding their power and claiming ever more resources.

The gunfire that had never once ceased now became unending warfare. Less than a month after the full withdrawal of the Imperial forces, nearly half the underhive had been reduced by their clashes to desolate ruins with scarcely a soul in sight.

"Lasguns, Astra Militarum standard-issue bolters, even Hellguns that only the Tempestus Scions carry."

Lin picked and sorted through the corpses of the slain gangers. "These underhive dregs are utterly unsurprising in the most surprising of places. I suspect that Planetary Governor came down here to peddle these himself."

"That's rather unlikely." Thorne shrugged, glancing at the Planetary Defence Force troops the Governor had dispatched to their side. "Their weapons are nothing more than ordinary lasguns."

"That only proves this Planetary Governor's grip is far too weak."

The Planetary Defence Force was the private army under the Planetary Governor's command. Had the Governor possessed any decent equipment, he would surely have armed his own private soldiers with it first.

But the truth was that these gangers had all gotten hold of the advanced weapons found only in Astra Militarum armouries, while the Planetary Defence Force was still using low-powered junk.

No wonder the Planetary Governor needed to invoke the greater cause to lean on the Astartes—the scant strength at his disposal was truly no match for the underhive.

Incompetent as he was, this actually eased somewhat the suspicion hanging over the silver-tongued Planetary Governor.

It was now the third day since Lin had led his team into the underhive. Given the Inquisitor's intelligence and the Felyne's findings, Lin had not scattered the Astartes to sweep the underhive, but instead concentrated their strength to seize the resource transport line directly.

This move directly enraged the underground gangs.

To cut off a man's livelihood was as to slay his parents, and these men who licked blood from the blade's edge were no pious devotees of the Emperor. Holding not the slightest reverence for the Emperor's angels, they at once snatched up the gear they had smuggled through from the midhive and took up armed resistance against the Astartes.

But the Astartes had never earned the title of the Emperor's angels through anyone else's faith.

The Hellgun—a las-weapon capable of threatening Astartes power armour—was indeed a major upgrade for gangers whose strongest firepower had once been the logging gun. But no matter how they upgraded their weapons, men with no tactical training were nothing but earthen chickens and clay dogs before the Astartes.

At the cost of only a few light wounds, Lin and his men repelled the assault of the largest gang in the underhive.

The enemy fled in haste after leaving behind several thousand corpses, only to be intercepted midway by the squad Admidel led. Kurande led his team straight into the gang's lair, and before long, this—one of the largest gangs in the underhive—had been declared shattered.

Lin sent word to report this news to the Planetary Governor and, citing the small number of Astartes, demanded that he dispatch his own forces to garrison this stretch of the resource transport line the Astartes had retaken.

Taking the hint, the Governor dispatched several Planetary Defence Force regiments that had originally guarded the upper hive down to the underhive, to assist the Astartes in their defence.

If the Governor harboured any schemes, he ought to be concentrating the forces loyal to him. But Inquisitor Vladilena confirmed that he had indeed sent what little garrison strength remained in the hive down to the underhive as Lin had demanded, and she had detected nothing abnormal in the process.

Lin would not set aside his suspicion of the Governor over this, but for now, he first had to focus his energies on the situation in the underhive.

He dissected a ganger's corpse on the spot, carefully examining the state of the body.

The bodies of these rats, struggling to survive amid the industrial fumes and wastewater discharged down from the midhive, were naturally in no good condition. With but a cursory glance, Lin could find over several dozen pathological changes within him.

But as his instruments inserted into the body for further analysis, Lin was surprised to discover that these dozen-odd pathologies had actually reached a delicate coexistence within the man.

Even though the host was already dead, these diseases maintained a flourishing vitality upon his body.

This underhive was truly brimming with talent.

Lin rose to his feet and signalled the Astartes beside him to burn these corpses clean with a Promethium Flamer. He disinfected himself, then nodded to Thorne, whom Kurande had assigned to stand guard and protect him here: "Let's go find Kurande."

They passed through the twisted metal and shattered concrete of the passage and entered the gang's headquarters, now nothing but ruins. Amid the scorched black marks covering the ground and the mangled corpses torn apart by bolt rounds, Kurande held the gang's leader aloft.

Lin walked to his side and saw the leader hoisted up by Kurande's fingers clamped around his throat, his whole body suspended in midair, his feet twitching ceaselessly.

The cold sweat seeping from the leader's forehead ran down mingled with blood, leaving winding trails across his face. His eyeballs bulged with utter terror, his tongue lolled out uncontrollably, and his trouser legs were already soaked with urine, giving off a foul stench.

A man like this had dared order an attack on the Astartes?

Lin found it rather amusing. "Ease up, Kurande, don't choke him to death."

Kurande instead tightened his grip. "If he's willing to confess honestly, then of course I won't."

"I'll... please... I'll talk..."

The leader forced out a few words with difficulty, his voice hoarse and broken. His teeth chattered without cease, his speech never forming complete sentences. Each time the Astartes' thumb tightened even slightly, he let out a whimper of pain.

Kurande loosened his fingers a fraction, and the leader immediately gulped air like a man clutching at a lifeline. But this was no pardon—Lin took over his interrogation.

"My strength is nowhere near an Astartes', but I am well versed in human medicine."

A syringe of lucidity serum gleamed on the mechanical arm behind Lin's back. "If I find so much as half a false word in what you say next, you will watch, in perfect lucidity, exactly how I turn you into a Servitor. Understood?"

The gang leader nodded frantically, and Lin was quite satisfied with this attitude. He released the leader. "First—why did you attack the Emperor's angels?"

"My lord, I had no choice, my lord!" The leader wept as he spoke. "The whole gang—tens of thousands of mouths—all live off this stretch of transport line we hold. If we lose it, every last one of us will starve to death!"

Lin aimed the needle tip at the leader's arm, making as if to inject him, and the leader immediately shrieked like a slaughtered pig. "I'm not lying! My lord, I'm not lying!"

"The things in your camp tell me otherwise. Or were those two contraptions just for show?"

Lin pursed his lips, gesturing for the leader to look at the Corpse-starch production machine and the water-recycling purifier he'd scraped every last coin together to obtain. "Don't tell me your moral standards are simply too high—that you're unwilling to make Corpse-starch out of the bodies on the battlefield."

"That thing... never again!"

At the mention of this, the leader gnashed his teeth. Lin brought the needle an inch closer, and the leader spilled everything like beans pouring from a jar.

"I can't make starch from my own men's bodies—that would shake the gang's morale! But other bodies won't do either. Ever since that Life Cult rose in the underhive, the moment even one of their followers' corpses gets mixed into the raw material, everyone who eats that batch of Corpse-starch comes down with all manner of bizarre diseases!"

"The Life Cult?"

"Yes! It's a gang that supposedly lets you eat your fill just by joining! Though it only recently appeared, their banner drew in most of the underhive's residents at once! They say their high-ranking devotees can already live without eating at all! Even in my own gang, quite a few have defected to join them!"

To eat one's fill was mankind's most basic need. To the underhivers who never knew where their next meal would come from, such a slogan held an extraordinary allure indeed.

"How do they manage to live without eating?" Lin pressed.

"I don't know. That cult rarely shows its inner members to outsiders. They never start gunfights with anyone, yet every small gang that dared attack them was swallowed up. I sent a few of my own men in to investigate too, but none ever came back..."

"You'd best demonstrate your worth again—don't use your own incompetence as an excuse to fob me off."

"I truly don't know any more, my lord! I'd been hoarding munitions for ages precisely to unite with several other gangs and root out that eerie cult—I never expected to run into you lords before that. If I could do it over, I would sooner die than dare stand against you lords!"

"You hoarded so many weapons just to fight the Life Cult?" Lin sneered. "A pack of bullies who fear the strong and prey on the weak, fixated on gnawing at a hard bone? Why not besiege the underhive's settlements and drag out the civilians inside for rations?"

At these words, a trace of fear surfaced in the leader's eyes. Compared to his earlier wretchedness, his voice now even carried the despairing sob of a broken man:

"It's not that I never did, my lord... but I couldn't! Such an order simply cannot be carried out! Every time we finished besieging a settlement, some of those who took part would be flayed and stripped of flesh and bone, and the skinned corpses would be hung up around the gang. In the end, no one dared besiege the settlements anymore!"

Skinned corpses?

Lin's expression turned grave. He thought of the photographs the Felyne had taken earlier, and exchanged glances with the sons of Dorn around him. He found they had all clearly thought of the same thing.

Lin hauled the leader up. "Where are the bodies? Take us to see them."

Trembling, the leader walked ahead, leading everyone into a warehouse within the gang's grounds where corpses were gathered. As Admidel shoved open the warehouse's iron door, a thick reek of rot mingled with the rusty tang of blood assaulted everyone's senses.

Bare white skeletons lay strewn haphazardly across the warehouse floor, each missing the most crucial part—its skin.

A little rotten flesh still clung to the surface of the bones, but most had dried out, taking on a sickly grey hue. The pools of blood on the ground had congealed into dark red blotches, and putrefying viscera lay scattered among them, glistening with an oily sheen in the gloom.

The shattered skulls stared wide-eyed, and within their hollow sockets a silent flame seemed still to burn.

Some skeletons held the posture of running, others knelt prostrate on the ground as if begging for mercy. None of the dead had any skin; their identities, sexes, and ages had become forever unsolvable riddles.

At the sight of these corpses, the leader trembled all over, as if recalling anew the bone-deep terror of first laying eyes on them. The Astartes, meanwhile, pressed deeper into the warehouse with furrowed brows, examining these malicious works of art in an attempt to uncover some faint clue.

"The bodies are too badly decayed, and the brains have been destroyed as well. Our detection-nerves cannot possibly extract any useful information from them."

So said Admidel. Their gene in this regard was more developed than that of other Space Marines; if even he could obtain no useful information, then learning anything from these corpses was already an impossibility.

Still, obtaining information did not necessarily have to begin with the corpses.

"Where were these bodies originally found?" Lin interrogated.

The leader's voice had almost dissolved into pleading. "Please, no, I don't want to go back there..."

"You know the way." Lin raised his Plasma Pistol. "Death was never a multiple-choice question."

Driven by a greater fear, the leader led them back to the scene of the crime. Although the bodies had been grudgingly cleared away to keep the terror from spreading, the gangers—scared out of their wits by the corpses—clearly hadn't the courage to scrub the scene entirely clean.

Lin was fortunate enough to find, on one wall, a marking daubed in fresh blood.

He could not read the marking, but his knowledge told him that such regular characters ought to form a phrase of special meaning.

But no one present could make out just what the phrase meant. Only Thorne, a veteran of the Great Heresy, looked and looked, and after a long while, said uncertainly:

"I seem to have seen these words on the first traitors to scale the walls of Terra."

And so this string of blood-red, mysterious symbols became a string of meaningful expression; its meaning came alive, comprehensible to Lin.

Ave Dominus Nox!

Hail, Lord of Night!

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