Chapter 65; The Dark Side
Kadaeux
Delta Imperator
- Location
- Vortice between realities
Chapter 65;
The Dark Side
The YT-1200 descended towards the city of Emperor Resplendent and Washburne watched the cityscape with something approaching awe, he had joined a convoy of nearly two hundred vehicles that had been granted a limited authority to visit the capital and engage in trade. The fact he had a few sneaky souls on board who intended to go off the chaperoned route and make some quiet trades was very much not of consequence. One of those souls was sitting in the seat behind him as they descended, they watched the city grow larger as they maintained the distance from the orbital elevator reaching from its peak. The city sprawled for almost six hundred kilometres in every direction and was nearly a hundred kilometres at its peak. A heat haze surrounded the city as the excess heat generated was vented through heat exchangers out another eight hundred kilometres before being sunk into the planet.
"Fragging hell..." Dorian said as he leaned on the back of the pilots chair, "Washburne, look at that..." Dorian pointed and Washburne really really did not want to look at that. A massive turret rested on a colossal tower half a kilometre wide, the mouth of the weapon was aimed in the direction of the convoy, and his sensors, and the protocol droid they had along as translator, could actually read the liturgy for violence that graced the weapon. Starting with the phrase, 'Abandon hope all ye who would trespass on the Emperor's Domain. The Emperor's hand can find you.' "What you think it is?"
Washburne cocked his head and sighed, "Looks like one of those big kriffing energy projector cannon they use. Doesn't matter though."
"Doesn't matter!?" Dorian said disbelieving.
Washburne shrugged. "Whether its a massive energy cannon with a barrel wider than my ship or a heavy turbolaser the outcome as far as we're sitting is the same. Strap in."
The remainder of the descent towards their nominated spaceport was uneventful beyond sightseeing, and noticing that any building over certain heights had at least one anti-air or anti-space battery on its top. Every single turret with line of sight tracking the convoy to its landing zone.
Washburne looked back to Dorian. "Dor, I need you to get this really well understood before we touch down, you and your men have the hidden holds contents, take the kriffing lot, and after that, if you're caught, I haven't heard of you, and will never have heard of you. If it all goes well and good I'll be expecting my cut for transporting you and your product. Just remember, you get caught, we don't know each other."
"Yeah yeah I know the drill. That bloke who said he could find us buyers in their underworld gave us directions."
And with that the vessel set down lightly on a pad intended for craft a hundred times its size, though it shared it with a dozen other craft. What Washburne had not expected as he began to head down the ramp was the sheer volume of security present. Black armoured figures with weapons he wasn't familiar with flanked men in uniforms bearing a handheld device. He mentally prayed that Dorian and his crew had slipped down the fore left landing gear towards the hatch their contact told them would be unsecured.
One of the uniformed men with his security detachment came over studying the device in his hands. "Empeorr Resplendent Customs. Your consignment?" He hadn't even looked up.
"Washburne, of the Wind Leaf out of Corellia, I have a cargo of exotic foodstuffs and various entertainment systems." He explained passing over the manifest. The man took it and looked at it.
"The entertainment will be subject to examination prior to being authorised for distribution. Foodstuffs will be subject to auspex scanning and testing." The Customs man said looking up for the first time. "You'll show me to your cargo hold, or cargo holds." Washburne found himself being forced up the ramp to his ship as the customs man preceded him and immediately turned right. That was alarming, it meant the man had some experience with YT series vessels, but not so alarming as to be a problem. It was rare that YT series lasted in any kind of stock configuration.
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Dorian had taken the packs indicated and descended the landing gear, racing over to the hatchway they had been instructed to look for, as they had been told it was no longer secured, and sitting high a few centimetres allowing them to lift it and quickly dive through into the underside of the landing platform, following the light blue paint markings. It was almost a hundred feet to the edge and their courage was tested then and there. The maintenance ladder the markings instructed them to descend was actually on the outer surface of a spire and descended for nearly a kilometre as far as he could see, he was less certain as the smog layer of the cities external side obscured any further observation. He slipped on the breathing mask and began to climb, the sound of his own breathing impossibly loud in his ears.
The sight was eerie, there was none of the familiar air traffic that might have otherwise spotted him only the relentless sight of weapon towers on other buildings searching the skies constantly, never unmanned. The stink of ozone reached him as the last of the convoy reached its destination and with a sound like cracking thunder the void shields over the city came to full life and the certainty of exfil began to fade. Had they been discovered? Was this a standard procedure? But they continued on unmolested as they descended the ladder, the expensive narcotics packages they were carrying weighing them down. Sweat built up in thick volumees and were it not for the gloves they wore, one or more of them would have almost certainly made a much faster descent. But another quarter kilometre below the fog layer they came to the maintenance hatch they had been told to expect, and freeing it up they opened it and climbed within.
Two men and a woman were waiting there. Something was wrong with one of the men, his left arm didn't move right. The other man spoke, an Elucidator on his belt translating. "Ok, you five need to keep your yappers shut, you don't sound like us at all. And put these on or you'll stick out like an orks ass." There were uniforms for them and they, uncomfortably, changed in front of the three gangsters of the Imperium. "And you, leave that rifle."
"I ain't leaving my rifle!" One of Dorian's men cried.
The ganger stepped up to the large criminal Dorian had hired as his heavier support. "Look here neighbour. You're in our hood now, and while your pistols will probably escape notice, and not be anything particularly special, that rifle will have the enforces climbing our asses like a Slaaneshi cultist on speed, and i'd like to keep my pucker free of a shotgun enema. You catch me? Or do you want a kinetic lesson in avoiding the law?"
"Can we trust that if its left here it will be safe?" Dorian asked plainly looking the leader in the eyes.
The Ganger shrugged. "Odds are it is fine, not certain though. Some hive rat might come in here to hide and find the shiny. Leave it, or stay with it. Either way, I am not baiting an enforcer squad with your shoot me sign." Dorian nodded and the gunner snarled and stuffed his rifle under a nearby bench. "Now, like I said, no talking, and stoop like you've never seen sunlight."
"Like we've never seen sunlight?" Another asked.
The Ganger looked towards the hatch for a moment, flinched away and turned his gaze further towards the floor. "Nobody you're doing business with today have seen any light not brought by a lumen globe. And some of us don't see light anymore... don't talk to them, they've got strange appetites."
"H...how do we tell them?"
"You will know." The ganger answered, "Follow, follow close and don't you dare get lost."
---
They moved quickly, but as if they had no need or desire to be anywhere quickly, transferring from one massive elevator going down to another, and then three more. Each one taking an hour or more to complete their descent with the sceduled stations. On each of them, to their surprise, thousands were getting on or off of each. The crowds were creating a feeling of claustrophobia and only the three gangers they had met seemed to prevent something less sociable going down, with one would-be thief losing a hand as their guide cut off the pickpockets offending limb. "The Copperheads Give Assurances." He snarled at the thief who scrambled into the crowd without even collecting his lost limb.
But Dorian didn't dare ask. The crowds dropped off, the elevators became smaller, and for the last two hours of their descent, they no longer used elevators, but ladders and debris from fallen or collapsed sections of the city. And the people no longer swarmed, but were scarce hiding in doorways, closing windows as they passed with whispered curses at the passing party. The people were mostly normal, but began to look wrong as they dropped further.
"We're here." Their guided hissed as his two accomplices moved forwards and knocked a complicated series of strokes against a metal wall. A moment latter it rolled across on hidden casters and they were admitted into what looked like nothing less than a worse Mos Eisley Cantina. All music ceased as they entered and Dorian locked eyes with a woman behind the bar, but she had far far FAR too many eyes. He counted nine of them, and the disgusting series of eyes and eyelids appeared to continue deep down past her neckline. A man came out from the back. And except for his prodigious size he appeared to be entirely normal, and when he spoke, he surprisingly used basic.
"Welcome to the Copperheads nest, well one of them anyway. I've gone to great lengths to get a few feelers off-world. To secure new product." And the feeling of the man being normal disappeared completely. His teeth were metal and filed to points.
Dorian nodded. "Echani Stimulants, Balmorran Adrenals, Spice, a fair selection but... not a large volume. A tasters banquet. I was lead to believe that if we can come to an arrangement that you might have the means to facilitate sneaking larger shipments?"
The massive man nodded. "I am Lord Htaed, and you were lead to believe correctly. House Hydraxius is virtually airtight, but other houses do have their own landing facilities and authorisation to allow for landings. With enough legitimate product smuggling in what we like, and smuggling out what you want, should prove simple enough. The matter of trade is more practical."
"An exchange rate." Dorian nodded.
The massive man, Htaed, nodded back. "Right now I would like to engage in a straight swap. Kilogram for kilogram. So how much you have?"
"Fifty kilograms between the five of us, that ladder made it... challenging to say the least." The gangster looked confused, as if wondering why such a weight would be a trouble, but shrugged it off.
Htaed nodded and flicked a finger. A pair of... Dorian realised these weren't aliens. They were humans. Mutated humans. They brought out a series of cases. "We have our own selections of stimms and combat drugs, hallucinogens and other more... enjoyable... substances. Be careful with the pink musk, there's a small cult that makes it, supercharged pheremones of some sort, would drive the staunchest monk into a sex delerium with just half a sniff from a snuff box."
"How much of that can we take?" Dorian asked.
"One phial, one hundred grams. Enough to turn an entire amphitheatre into an orgy, not a huge amphitheatre mind you, but dumped into the air con a couple thousand folk would easily succumb." The potency of it stunned Dorian, it was far more potent than anything he offered. He realised that it might be the real taster that gets them coming back. "Pruning that cult to manageable numbers is our most reliable source to obtain it."
Everywhere Dorian looked he saw states of malnutrition and maltreatment. And then he saw one of those who could no longer see the sun. They had no eyes, their mutations had removed the sockets, which wouldn't have been terribly bad, he'd seen the Miraluka before without their veils. But the Miraluka didn't have something glowing behind the flesh that made him less than easy. "Ok, I understand, a premium product. Can we count on more contact, more trade?"
"We will contact you through the same channels if we are happy. Now go, you need to get back before the culling, and they begin sending your people back off-world." Htaed turned and moved towards the back of the room as Dorian picked up his crates.
None of them had uttered the usual homilies about the Emperor protecting. There were no aquilas in sight. No signs of religious observance. And then he noticed that the business going on wasn't idle. They were packing everything of value. "What's this purge you mentioned?"
Htaed turned to face him. "You don't want to be here when the enforcers come. As they like to say. 'Suffer not the mutant to live.'" The massive man spat on the deck. "The Emperor condemns us for being... unfortunate... in the genetic lottery. Go now, before you are caught in the crossfire. We'll contact you again, if we like the product."
The Dark Side
The YT-1200 descended towards the city of Emperor Resplendent and Washburne watched the cityscape with something approaching awe, he had joined a convoy of nearly two hundred vehicles that had been granted a limited authority to visit the capital and engage in trade. The fact he had a few sneaky souls on board who intended to go off the chaperoned route and make some quiet trades was very much not of consequence. One of those souls was sitting in the seat behind him as they descended, they watched the city grow larger as they maintained the distance from the orbital elevator reaching from its peak. The city sprawled for almost six hundred kilometres in every direction and was nearly a hundred kilometres at its peak. A heat haze surrounded the city as the excess heat generated was vented through heat exchangers out another eight hundred kilometres before being sunk into the planet.
"Fragging hell..." Dorian said as he leaned on the back of the pilots chair, "Washburne, look at that..." Dorian pointed and Washburne really really did not want to look at that. A massive turret rested on a colossal tower half a kilometre wide, the mouth of the weapon was aimed in the direction of the convoy, and his sensors, and the protocol droid they had along as translator, could actually read the liturgy for violence that graced the weapon. Starting with the phrase, 'Abandon hope all ye who would trespass on the Emperor's Domain. The Emperor's hand can find you.' "What you think it is?"
Washburne cocked his head and sighed, "Looks like one of those big kriffing energy projector cannon they use. Doesn't matter though."
"Doesn't matter!?" Dorian said disbelieving.
Washburne shrugged. "Whether its a massive energy cannon with a barrel wider than my ship or a heavy turbolaser the outcome as far as we're sitting is the same. Strap in."
The remainder of the descent towards their nominated spaceport was uneventful beyond sightseeing, and noticing that any building over certain heights had at least one anti-air or anti-space battery on its top. Every single turret with line of sight tracking the convoy to its landing zone.
Washburne looked back to Dorian. "Dor, I need you to get this really well understood before we touch down, you and your men have the hidden holds contents, take the kriffing lot, and after that, if you're caught, I haven't heard of you, and will never have heard of you. If it all goes well and good I'll be expecting my cut for transporting you and your product. Just remember, you get caught, we don't know each other."
"Yeah yeah I know the drill. That bloke who said he could find us buyers in their underworld gave us directions."
And with that the vessel set down lightly on a pad intended for craft a hundred times its size, though it shared it with a dozen other craft. What Washburne had not expected as he began to head down the ramp was the sheer volume of security present. Black armoured figures with weapons he wasn't familiar with flanked men in uniforms bearing a handheld device. He mentally prayed that Dorian and his crew had slipped down the fore left landing gear towards the hatch their contact told them would be unsecured.
One of the uniformed men with his security detachment came over studying the device in his hands. "Empeorr Resplendent Customs. Your consignment?" He hadn't even looked up.
"Washburne, of the Wind Leaf out of Corellia, I have a cargo of exotic foodstuffs and various entertainment systems." He explained passing over the manifest. The man took it and looked at it.
"The entertainment will be subject to examination prior to being authorised for distribution. Foodstuffs will be subject to auspex scanning and testing." The Customs man said looking up for the first time. "You'll show me to your cargo hold, or cargo holds." Washburne found himself being forced up the ramp to his ship as the customs man preceded him and immediately turned right. That was alarming, it meant the man had some experience with YT series vessels, but not so alarming as to be a problem. It was rare that YT series lasted in any kind of stock configuration.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dorian had taken the packs indicated and descended the landing gear, racing over to the hatchway they had been instructed to look for, as they had been told it was no longer secured, and sitting high a few centimetres allowing them to lift it and quickly dive through into the underside of the landing platform, following the light blue paint markings. It was almost a hundred feet to the edge and their courage was tested then and there. The maintenance ladder the markings instructed them to descend was actually on the outer surface of a spire and descended for nearly a kilometre as far as he could see, he was less certain as the smog layer of the cities external side obscured any further observation. He slipped on the breathing mask and began to climb, the sound of his own breathing impossibly loud in his ears.
The sight was eerie, there was none of the familiar air traffic that might have otherwise spotted him only the relentless sight of weapon towers on other buildings searching the skies constantly, never unmanned. The stink of ozone reached him as the last of the convoy reached its destination and with a sound like cracking thunder the void shields over the city came to full life and the certainty of exfil began to fade. Had they been discovered? Was this a standard procedure? But they continued on unmolested as they descended the ladder, the expensive narcotics packages they were carrying weighing them down. Sweat built up in thick volumees and were it not for the gloves they wore, one or more of them would have almost certainly made a much faster descent. But another quarter kilometre below the fog layer they came to the maintenance hatch they had been told to expect, and freeing it up they opened it and climbed within.
Two men and a woman were waiting there. Something was wrong with one of the men, his left arm didn't move right. The other man spoke, an Elucidator on his belt translating. "Ok, you five need to keep your yappers shut, you don't sound like us at all. And put these on or you'll stick out like an orks ass." There were uniforms for them and they, uncomfortably, changed in front of the three gangsters of the Imperium. "And you, leave that rifle."
"I ain't leaving my rifle!" One of Dorian's men cried.
The ganger stepped up to the large criminal Dorian had hired as his heavier support. "Look here neighbour. You're in our hood now, and while your pistols will probably escape notice, and not be anything particularly special, that rifle will have the enforces climbing our asses like a Slaaneshi cultist on speed, and i'd like to keep my pucker free of a shotgun enema. You catch me? Or do you want a kinetic lesson in avoiding the law?"
"Can we trust that if its left here it will be safe?" Dorian asked plainly looking the leader in the eyes.
The Ganger shrugged. "Odds are it is fine, not certain though. Some hive rat might come in here to hide and find the shiny. Leave it, or stay with it. Either way, I am not baiting an enforcer squad with your shoot me sign." Dorian nodded and the gunner snarled and stuffed his rifle under a nearby bench. "Now, like I said, no talking, and stoop like you've never seen sunlight."
"Like we've never seen sunlight?" Another asked.
The Ganger looked towards the hatch for a moment, flinched away and turned his gaze further towards the floor. "Nobody you're doing business with today have seen any light not brought by a lumen globe. And some of us don't see light anymore... don't talk to them, they've got strange appetites."
"H...how do we tell them?"
"You will know." The ganger answered, "Follow, follow close and don't you dare get lost."
---
They moved quickly, but as if they had no need or desire to be anywhere quickly, transferring from one massive elevator going down to another, and then three more. Each one taking an hour or more to complete their descent with the sceduled stations. On each of them, to their surprise, thousands were getting on or off of each. The crowds were creating a feeling of claustrophobia and only the three gangers they had met seemed to prevent something less sociable going down, with one would-be thief losing a hand as their guide cut off the pickpockets offending limb. "The Copperheads Give Assurances." He snarled at the thief who scrambled into the crowd without even collecting his lost limb.
But Dorian didn't dare ask. The crowds dropped off, the elevators became smaller, and for the last two hours of their descent, they no longer used elevators, but ladders and debris from fallen or collapsed sections of the city. And the people no longer swarmed, but were scarce hiding in doorways, closing windows as they passed with whispered curses at the passing party. The people were mostly normal, but began to look wrong as they dropped further.
"We're here." Their guided hissed as his two accomplices moved forwards and knocked a complicated series of strokes against a metal wall. A moment latter it rolled across on hidden casters and they were admitted into what looked like nothing less than a worse Mos Eisley Cantina. All music ceased as they entered and Dorian locked eyes with a woman behind the bar, but she had far far FAR too many eyes. He counted nine of them, and the disgusting series of eyes and eyelids appeared to continue deep down past her neckline. A man came out from the back. And except for his prodigious size he appeared to be entirely normal, and when he spoke, he surprisingly used basic.
"Welcome to the Copperheads nest, well one of them anyway. I've gone to great lengths to get a few feelers off-world. To secure new product." And the feeling of the man being normal disappeared completely. His teeth were metal and filed to points.
Dorian nodded. "Echani Stimulants, Balmorran Adrenals, Spice, a fair selection but... not a large volume. A tasters banquet. I was lead to believe that if we can come to an arrangement that you might have the means to facilitate sneaking larger shipments?"
The massive man nodded. "I am Lord Htaed, and you were lead to believe correctly. House Hydraxius is virtually airtight, but other houses do have their own landing facilities and authorisation to allow for landings. With enough legitimate product smuggling in what we like, and smuggling out what you want, should prove simple enough. The matter of trade is more practical."
"An exchange rate." Dorian nodded.
The massive man, Htaed, nodded back. "Right now I would like to engage in a straight swap. Kilogram for kilogram. So how much you have?"
"Fifty kilograms between the five of us, that ladder made it... challenging to say the least." The gangster looked confused, as if wondering why such a weight would be a trouble, but shrugged it off.
Htaed nodded and flicked a finger. A pair of... Dorian realised these weren't aliens. They were humans. Mutated humans. They brought out a series of cases. "We have our own selections of stimms and combat drugs, hallucinogens and other more... enjoyable... substances. Be careful with the pink musk, there's a small cult that makes it, supercharged pheremones of some sort, would drive the staunchest monk into a sex delerium with just half a sniff from a snuff box."
"How much of that can we take?" Dorian asked.
"One phial, one hundred grams. Enough to turn an entire amphitheatre into an orgy, not a huge amphitheatre mind you, but dumped into the air con a couple thousand folk would easily succumb." The potency of it stunned Dorian, it was far more potent than anything he offered. He realised that it might be the real taster that gets them coming back. "Pruning that cult to manageable numbers is our most reliable source to obtain it."
Everywhere Dorian looked he saw states of malnutrition and maltreatment. And then he saw one of those who could no longer see the sun. They had no eyes, their mutations had removed the sockets, which wouldn't have been terribly bad, he'd seen the Miraluka before without their veils. But the Miraluka didn't have something glowing behind the flesh that made him less than easy. "Ok, I understand, a premium product. Can we count on more contact, more trade?"
"We will contact you through the same channels if we are happy. Now go, you need to get back before the culling, and they begin sending your people back off-world." Htaed turned and moved towards the back of the room as Dorian picked up his crates.
None of them had uttered the usual homilies about the Emperor protecting. There were no aquilas in sight. No signs of religious observance. And then he noticed that the business going on wasn't idle. They were packing everything of value. "What's this purge you mentioned?"
Htaed turned to face him. "You don't want to be here when the enforcers come. As they like to say. 'Suffer not the mutant to live.'" The massive man spat on the deck. "The Emperor condemns us for being... unfortunate... in the genetic lottery. Go now, before you are caught in the crossfire. We'll contact you again, if we like the product."