WH40K: “Kal Jerico, Sinner’s Bounty” (part seven)

Warham! Battlebacon! Fightpork! Let's scratch off a couple more chapters.

Chapter 14: Downtown​

In the Hive Primus underground, "Downtown" apparently refers to a specific town built around the foundations of the central spires. It's a "coastal" place, bordering the sump on at least one side, and seemingly much bigger than any of the towns described thus far. More of a small city. It has newly built fortifications now, and has developed its harbor somewhat since Kal last visited the place. New management, perhaps? Anyway, it takes a couple hours for their damaged ship to get inside of the harbor and dock, and the team splits up before disembarking in case one of their enemies has infiltrated the local port security.

There's some more great, evocative imagery here. Downtown is built around the main effluent pipes coming down from the habitation towers of downtown Hive Primus, and therefore at the source of much of water and waste itself. There's an entire "fishing" fleet of ships trawling the influx as it flows out into the sump for garbage that could be recycled for materials, and of course the human waste mixed in also means a high nutrient bloom that attracts a lot of life (though the high inorganic toxin content ensures that it's only the more resistant species). Clouds of little helicoptor or quadrotor vehicles fly all around, looking for anything shiny as it flows out of the pipes and across the turbid sumpwater, or keeping their guns ready for signs of sea monsters or pirate ships. Downtown is a major trade hub, sitting at an underhive crossroads and having first pick of recyclables, but also having a huge demand for potable water; this brings water-sellers from the further edges of the sump, where the waste has had time to settle and/or decompose and leave the water much easier to distill. The people who live in downtown must either have short lives or have developed some incredibly powerful immune systems, given how bacterial the central sumpwaters must be, but it's also the first place so far to not be described as especially bad even by underhive standards.

Again, this kind of thing is where Warhammer 40K really shines. An entire city built in a megacity's sewers, with complex trade relations and resource interdependence with smaller sewer towns. Obviously, the environment here is total nonsense; there's no reason Hive Primus would have this much contiguous open space in its sewer system, even if said sewer system is what used to be an older neighborhood of Hive Primus. But if you take that nonsensical architecture on faith and suspend your disbelief as far as the physics concerns go, the story actually understands what it's saying with this kind of scale. It's not just a village of mutants in the scifi metropolis' sewers. It's an entire civilization, with varying levels of mutation depending on where and how the underhivers have been living for the last couple thousand years, complete with its own ethnography. The underhive is as old for these characters as the city of Rome is for us (if not older), and the writers get what that should mean for them. And then you remember that all of this, everyone and everything in the story so far, is just the equivalent of a few starving beggars in one ramshackle little alley of Hive Primus. A few hundred meters upward, you have clustered apartments, factories, cultural centers, shopping areas, etc for hundreds of millions more people - many hundreds of them for every individual in the underhive - going about their boring middle or lower class lives, largely heedless of the entire world that's been created under their feet.

And there are other hive cities on Necromunda, only marginally smaller. And other planets with hive cities, many of them, scattered all across WH40K's galactic empire.

Very rarely does a work convey the notion of a human's smallness and insignificance as effectively as this. And, of course, when the incomprehensibly huge force of "nature" in the setting is just a very old and very overgrown human-built civilization that simply does not care about the creatures it was ostensibly made for and by, it becomes pretty effective social commentary as well. Absurd and cartoonish, but effective.

Anyway, they disembark their vessel and set out into the Downtown dock district. Kal suspects that Desolation Zoom is probably still in this city, somewhere, given how much damage his war rig is supposed to have taken in its recent battles. Most likely he's going to finish repairing it here before leaving by bridge or ship to his ultimate destination.

A fair bet, but not a certain one IMO. Zoom and his crew may also have decided to just ditch the war rig and continue with a less flashy vehicle, or just on foot like Team Jerico is doing. Given that Downtown seems to be centrally located in the underhive, it may also be that this is his destination. If it turns out that the thing he stole is actually a nuclear bomb or something and he's planning to bring down Hive Primus for its wickedness or something like that, this would be the place. Given his religious affiliations and apparent age and deathwish, a suicide bombing is actually pretty likely.

For now, they're just going to chase after rumors and also keep their eyes out for more competition. Particularly those Goliath tweakers who started shit on the ferry; one or more of them might have survived the kraken attack. They carefully descend the ramp. Carefully because there are so many passengers disembarking with such maniacal energy that there's a real risk of being trampled or pushed off, and Yolanda has to beat a few people out of their way to prevent this. This doesn't really make sense, given how many people they lost to the kraken, but, well, you know. Thanks to the nutriated harbor water, fungus is constantly growing up over the edge of the wharfs, and people are hunting and trapping weird creatures that crawl up from the sump in between the market stalls and artisans' shops. The gang regroups after disembarking in pairs, and then go poking around some redemptionist-leaning shrines looking for signs of Zoom. The combination dive bar/Cawdor shrine they try to visit is guarded by a little gnome-like man who just disagrees with everything Kal says, and he has to use Labyrinth-esque reverse psychology to get in. No explanation. Kinda makes it better. Inside, they find a person who Kal was hoping to find, an old priestess-ish-person who goes by Piety. In exchange for buying a few drinks, she's willing to grouchily provide a little intel.

Kal buys some points for himself by toasting the legendary Caw, the sainted founder of the Cawdor organization. Good move, Kal.

Anyway, it turns out that Zoom didn't stay long in Downtown after all, assuming that Piety knows what she's talking about and isn't lying. He headed south from here just a day or so ago, and she's heard rumors that he survived yet another ambush attempt at a place called Lickety Slick, along the way to the better known town of Spore Falls. She's also heard, though she's not at all sure, that Zoom's destination is a newly built Cawdor base called Perdition, located somewhere along the southern outer fringe of the hive. Unfortunately, collecting information on Perdition gets some of the Cawdorites sitting around the place pissed, and they get up to start menacing Kal and Scabs (who came in with him, but hasn't been saying anything until now so I forgot he was there). Then the little gnomish guy who gave Kal shit when they were trying to get in appears in the entrance, seated on a little howdah on the back of a big posthuman brute.

...it's Master Blaster.

So far we've got Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean II, Mad Max 3, and...fuck, I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of others at this point. I can just see the players groaning and throwing empty chip bags at the DM as he cowers behind the screen.

The battle over who really runs Bartertown commences. Scabs vanishes somehow, somewhere. Kal calls for Piety's help here, and she complies by telling them to just take their stupid fight outside. Master doesn't want to comply, but Kal manages to cut his howdah free and send him falling to the floor, leaving Blaster confused and directionless long enough for Kal to get out of the place as requested. Outside, they regroup with Yolanda and prepare for the onslaught emerging after them. Not sure where Amenute is, but I suspect she'll show up again soon. End chapter.


Man. I really thought this was going to be another fight scene-less chapter. Foolish, I was, to forget that there is only war in the grim darkness of the forty-first millennium. War, and gratuitous pop culture references. Well, let's do one more.

Chapter 15: Hunter Cadre​

We're back to Beatram for this one. They rode a high speed tram or something along a sparking track to...wherever they're planning to head off Zoom. He and Belladonna enjoyed the ride. The Goliaths did not. Their roid abuse doesn't seem to have strengthened their stomachs, sadly for them. They've arrived at what looks like an abandoned supercomputer facility now given over to mold.

Beatram and Belladonna have some weird, passive-aggressive flirting. They have better chemistry than Kal and Yolanda, but that's not saying much.

The conversation turns to more business-y subjects after a bit. Belladonna, when asked, clarifies that she's not really in Nemo's employ as it looked before. She's still an independent bounty hunter, but there's something she needs from him, and her participation in this mission is her payment to him. Well, that does seem to be how Nemo operates, so sure. They find Goethe and a team of his Cawdor troops waiting for them, hiding in the fog of a broken steam pipe. Beatram and Belladonna both get turned on by watching each other use their cybernetic eyes to pick out the targets amid their concealment. No need for shooting though, as Nemo gave them a password to tell him, and he accepts it, in his pretentious, faux-pious way. Goethe's mysterious other contact who was hinted at back in his chapter is Nemo, it turns out, and Goethe has been persuaded to win Desolation Zoom's trust and then betray him to Beatram's party. Zoom isn't officially affiliated with Cawdor, after all, even if some of its leaders are sympathetic to him, and the reward Nemo offered Goethe will be enough to improve his diocese considerably. Or expand it, more likely. Beatram is glad for the assistance, especially as it sounds like he won't be having to split the pay. The Goliath and Cawdor mooks posture at each other, but their respective leaders shut them up before it can come to blows.

The Goliaths don't want to listen to Beatram anymore, at this point, but he's able to threaten them back into compliance by reminding them that he's just as happy to ditch them and just work with the Cawdors from this point on, which means it'll be nine against two.

Granted, Beatram is going to have to ditch or kill these two eventually. Either that, or somehow make the Golden Sack disappear out from under their noses without them realizing.

Speaking of which, he uses this opportunity to grill the Goliaths for more information about what Zoom stole. Even under threat of death, they tell him that as far as they know Zoom just emptied a warehouse full of weaponry. Goethe, meanwhile, explains that Perdition is a staging base for Cawdor's mutant extermination project. So, it looks like Zoom just stole some weapons and is trying to bring them to Perdition to save it from the big mutant counterattack that's coming. Beatram finds that reassuring. If Zoom really just wanted high grade weaponry and just took the Golden Sack unknowingly while emptying the warehouse, then that should make this simpler. If that's NOT actually the truth, he's more likely to have hidden it or something.

I'm not sure I find this story convincing myself. If this was really just about saving Perdition from the mutants, it wouldn't make sense to bring a shipment of weapons stolen in a high profile raid that angered powerful people there. That would just buy Perdition all of a few weeks before someone picked up the trail and the Guild destroys the place themselves. So yeah, Beatram isn't thinking this through nearly as well as he thinks he is.

They move on along on the road to Perdition, the Goliaths unhappily as you would imagine. Beatram and Belladonna passive aggressive flirt some more. She tells him that she's working for Nemo right now in exchange for information that will enable her revenge.

Revenge on whom, for what? Well, the "whom" is what she's hoping to learn. The "what" is this:

Literally. This is Belladonna's actual backstory.

Also, it's starting to strike me as weird that at least two thirds of the underhive bounty hunters we've met so far are fallen aristocracy. I'm not sure if this is meant to be a parody of speshul snowflake mary sue characters in ostensibly harsh settings, or the result of one too many unironic examples having accumulated in previous books.

Anyway. Former corporate princess, turned underhive mercenary in her attempts to find out who mailed her and her newlywed husband an angry cybug as a wedding present. This is also how she came to need prosthetic limbs and eyes. She in turn asks Beatram what he's in this for. Beatram explains that he wants Kal Jerico, and quickly clarifies that this is not a sexual desire when she looks bemused at this. Since Nemo doesn't want Jerico hurt, Beatram explains, he just wants to humiliate him. Maybe capture him and sell him back into the royal family's possession. He doubts that Lord Helmawr will be able to keep his prodigal son contained for any longer than last time, but still, he might pay for it, and it'll piss Kal off something fierce, which is enough for Beatram.

The chit chat is interrupted when Goethe recognizes some mutant territory markers. Given the Cawdor campaign against the axchuck-wielders, Goethe has had plenty of opportunity to learn this stuff. These markers are very fresh, and there are cannibalized human corpses nearby with fresh mold on them, so the mutants are definitely still in the area. They'll have to either hurry on through and hope the mutants don't catch up to them, or find a defensible location and wait for the attack; its most likely that the mutants have already sensed them.

Also, Beatram has competition for Belladonna. One of the Goliaths has a crush on her too (as the otherwise inarticulate brute puts it, he has "an acknowledged physiological attraction to cybernetically augmented females"). Dawww, I ship it.


End chapter. I'm starting to enjoy the Beatram chapters more, now that his own little gang are coming into their own as characters. Beatram is hateable, but he's a fun sort of hateable as opposed to Kal Jerico's blandness, and Beladonna and the Goliaths (now that they're starting to show some personality) are more fun than Scabs and Yolanda. Anyway, that's all for now.