[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
at them in her path. She needed a way out any way out but all around her were
brawling gangers and darting mutants. Bullets whined about her and las-rounds
hissed back and forth in a deadly crescendo underscored by the throaty bark of
bolter rounds and the wild rattling of auto-guns. There was no shelter. Every
rubble pile or shallow trench was fiercely fought over with its own knot of
besiegers and besieged.
It was a measure of Donna s desperation that she found the safest place to be
was actually fighting the scavvies in hand-to-hand combat. If she was being
shot at, the scavvies were just as likely to hit her opponents as herself. She
kept ducking and diving, trying to work her way towards the Abyss through the
seething ebb and flow of battle.
That was working fine until she ran up against the scavvy giant.
Who knows what Badzone rad-hole spawned that monstrosity, or what random mix
of chemicals and poisons conspired to throw up a chance mutation like that?
But life always found a way to survive and thrive, no matter how ugly the
results were.
This was the stuff of childhood nightmares. Its bullet-shaped head and
slab-muscled shoulders towered above Mad Donna. Spade-like claws and a thickly
scaled hide completed its inhuman appearance. Incongruously human-looking
mismatched eyes, one green and one blue, were the only things betraying its
true parentage.
It looked far from human when it tossed aside the broken body of a ganger and
lumbered towards Donna, its slit mouth bellowing a wordless challenge. Ducking
under a reaching claw, she slashed at a wrist thicker than her thigh, but
Seventy-six skidded off its iron-hard scales. The giant chuckled as it sent
her reeling with a casual backhand.
Donna s ears were left ringing by the glancing blow. The giant was slow but
one hit was all it needed to snap her bones and incapacitate her. She could
see more scavvies closing in out of the corner of her eye, taking confidence
from the fearsome presence of their bigger brother. Donna desperately needed
an edge to even the odds, but the Pig was already out of juice and it was her
only weapon capable of taking down something so big.
Scurrying backward over the treacherous rubble, she saw that she was being
forced closer to the edge of the Abyss. She made a snap decision and ran
straight for a spar jutting over the dizzying gulf with the scaly giant
lumbering right at her heels.
Flakes of rust and chunks of rubble fell from the rotting spar as she ran out
onto it, and the whole thing vibrated alarmingly in time with her footsteps.
Donna sheathed Seventy-six, turned, and faced her foe with the inky void at
her feet.
The gigantic mutant hesitated at the brink with almost comic uncertainty
written on its bestial face. Donna felt a brief flash of hope that it might
just give up and go find someone else to eviscerate. No such luck. It
carefully placed one broad foot on the spar and stretched out to seize her
with its ape-like arms. The metal creaked in protest under its weight.
Donna ducked beneath its scaly arms and desperately fired her laspistol into
its face. The shot only singed, but that was enough to make the giant rear
back, its arms wind-milling for balance. She hung on for dear life as the
rusting beam shook wildly, and then aimed a vicious kick at the creature s
ankle.
Page 42
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Her thick boot heel struck bone with a satisfying crunch. The giant grunted in
surprise and teetered past the fatal point of no return, gathering speed like
a falling pillar as it pitched sidewise into the Abyss with a disconsolate
wail. Donna almost fell off, too, trying to watch him disappear into the
darkness below.
Scavvies were skulking on nearby heaps of rubble. They had long muskets and
bullets zinged off metal and rocks near Donna but nothing came even close to
hitting her. Generally speaking, scavvies were the most appalling shots and
had poor weaponry to go with it, but they compensated by making sure numbers
were most definitely on their side. There was no going back that way, not for
a while at least. Donna holstered her laspistol and hung off the spar with
both hands so she could swing along beneath it and get some cover. As she did
so, she spotted a cracked half-pipe jutting out below the edge of the dome
floor nearby. It was hard to ignore the vast, hungry gulf at her back as she
clambered over to the pipe, but Donna didn t freeze and made it across before
her strength gave out.
A rank stench and an ooze of old slurry flowing from the pipe told her it was
for waste disposal, but she wasn t fussy. It was this or go back into battle,
and Donna reckoned she had seen her fill of fighting for this shift. She
decided that she definitely would rather crawl away down a pipe full of
effluent.
A crackling sound and a shower of sparks over on the roadway caught her
attention and distracted her from the earnest Enforcer Hanno. At first she
thought there had been some kind of accident among the lines of moving
vehicles, but then she looked more closely at the roadway and realised she was
mistaken. It wasn t a solid road at all. It was a wide, grid-like mesh of
thick rails that fizzled and spluttered with vagrant electricity in the
cloying mist. A vehicle breaking away from the steadily moving traffic stream
had caused the sparks. It had jumped onto different rails that curved over to
the walkway where she and Hanno stood.
As the vehicle drew closer, Donna saw a blank-eyed servitor at the controls.
It was severed at the waist and attached to a turntable at the prow. A long,
narrow hull covered by a grimy plastiglas cabin stretched back behind it,
large enough to carry perhaps twelve. At the rear of the felucca, a larger
turntable bore what looked like a huge crab claw, but instead of gripping the
rails it only touched them with its two points, seeming to stick there and
carry the whole weight of the craft. The arcane sciences of electromagnetism
were at work.
D onne waited for Hanno to open the door for her before going onboard first,
intending to turn at the threshold and send him away. She was so shocked at
what she saw inside, however, she completely forgot about him for a moment.
The narrow bench seats inside the felucca showed that it was intended for
transporting at least forty or fifty people, with overhead rails for others to
steady themselves while standing. D onne was mortified at the idea of so many
people crushing themselves into the filthy vehicle and was glad that the nose
plugs kept out the stink of the unwashed. Although the felucca was only half
full at most, D onne stood and gripped a rail; she couldn t face sitting on
one of the hard plastic benches amid the filth.
Hanno stepped neatly aboard behind her and slid the door shut. Without further
delay the felucca swung on its turntable and started picking up speed in the
direction of the main traffic flows.
D onne suddenly saw that the streams of vehicles hung both above and below the
rails. Weaving, splitting and rejoining, their head and tail lamps made
knotwork traceries in the mist. Buildings swirled past: great slabs like
tombstones pierced by roads at different levels, skeletal towers covered in
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]