A Question of Taste by Denny Flowers

Author:Denny Flowers [Flowers, Denny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781789992434
Published: 2019-10-31T13:52:11+00:00

About the Author

Denny Flowers is the author of the Necromunda short story ‘The Hand of Harrow’ and novella Low Lives, featuring the characters of Caleb and Iktomi. He lives in Kent with his wife and son.

An extract from Terminal Overkill.

My mother’s name was Red Tori.

She had high, genuine rat skin boots, rockcrete-hard legs, a half-shaved head and a shock of auburn hair that she spiked into a knife’s-edge mohawk. She lived by a simple code. Kill or be killed. The hive itself was her teacher and she was in a state of constant learning.

She was not the soft, gentle, mothering kind you hear about in uphive tales. You know the type – the kindly noblewoman in her seventh cycle of rejuvenat who finally gives birth to her first and only child; a loved and cherished infant who is raised with kind words, an indulgent nanny and a gang of smart nursery servitors, kitted out in the finest spider silk harlequin outfits, to order around and play with.

No. None of that crap.

My mother had no softness. No pity. She was an Escher gang leader and she was as gentle and soothing as a necklace of razor wire. She passed on her experience with snappy lines. ‘Got a problem, get a gun.’

Or, ‘When you have no enemies, you’re dead.’

Or, ‘Shit doesn’t arrive with a bell about its neck.’

Or, ‘Come on. It’s only pain.’

Or, ‘Never met a dead Goliath I didn’t like.’

But her favourite saying was what she shouted to her gangers when they were sprinting into battle: ‘Be bold, scummers! Life is short. And it’s getting shorter.’

There were hushed rumours about what had driven my mother down this low, to Meander’s Gate. She’d murdered a guilder. Poisoned her gang leader. Fallen foul of the Heavy Flamer Crusade on one of their fanatical purges.

I never dared ask.

When one juve did, a nondescript woman named Torlith, my mother went from standing still to a roundhouse kick in a thrilling blur. Her boot connected with the juve’s jaw before Torlith knew what was coming.

Bam! It was magnificent. The stupid girl was still spitting out blood and teeth as my mother turned and strode back to the ganghall. ‘Frekking idiot,’ she muttered.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ one of the other gangers said to her when they got inside.

My mother’s cat-yellow eyes flayed the women with contempt. She couldn’t stand whining. ‘Get over it. This hive isn’t fair.’

Whatever crime had driven my mother downhive turned out to be a blessing. She’d prospered in the deadly, treacherous world of shifting no-man’s-lands, and fought her way up to form her own gang. She named them the Wild Hydras.

All her gangers came from a vast distillery named Femdrake Pits. I pieced together a view of it from the stories they told. A cyclopean dome with heavy rockcrete buttresses, stacked habs alongside crude stills, condensing pipes and steaming holding vats. A place where a misstep could drop you into a tank of mandrake concentrate, necrosis gel, neural-block, hemolysis syrup or slab-vat hormones. That was the stuff that was sold to the Goliaths.

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