Mama's Boys



The sump-edge was where things went when the hive had finished with them.

Wastewater. Soot. Secrets. Bodies with their pockets turned out. Broken machinery with the maker’s mark filed off. If a thing still had value, it did not stay by the sump for long. What remained was what no one wanted, what no one claimed, and what no one dared look at too closely.

Porrig Duff had known finer places. Not many, and not for long, but enough to know just how low he had fallen.

Their camp clung to a narrow shelf of riveted iron and patched plastek above the black-green heave of the sump. The filth below breathed up its chemical stink in slow, wet gusts. Two dented cookpots sat over promethium burners. Milo had a stew going in one of them—something brown, oily and stringy that would have been unfit for an officer’s dog and was presently the finest thing Porrig had smelled all week.

Norrie lay prone behind a cracked slab of ferrocrete, long-las cradled in his forearms, trying hard to look like a man already worthy of a story. Barley sat by the stacked packs and scavenged tins, stub gun across his knees, upright as a parade-ground recruit and twice as miserable. Milo watched from higher up in the shell of an old conveyor housing, half hidden in rust and shadow, spending no effort at all on looking dangerous.

Porrig himself sat on an upturned crate and cleaned his long rifle with the calm care of a man determined to appear well above his circumstances.

“They’re back,” Milo called down, not raising his voice. He never did.

Porrig slid the bolt home and rose. “Aye. I’d begun to think the sump had eaten them.”

“They smell worse than the sump,” Barley muttered.

“No one smells worse than the sump,” said Milo.

“That one does,” Norrie said, peering down his sights. “The lively one.”

Porrig crossed to the edge of the camp and looked through a gap in the hanging sheets of corrugated metal.

There they were again.

Four Ogryns, huge as hab-doors, moving along the lip of the sump like wreck-haulers hunting chain and scrap. Scarred. Augmented. Ugly with work. Not born ugly, Porrig thought. Made that way. The hive had a talent for it.

The female led them.

He had been watching her for two days now and had reached three conclusions.

First: she was no ordinary Ogryn. That had been plain from the start. Ogryns did not usually move with stillness. They moved with appetite, confusion, momentum, simple purpose. This one carried all the same size and force as the others, yet held it in reserve like a weapon she had not yet chosen to draw.

Second: she and her boys were hungry enough to risk something stupid.

Third: she had not yet let them become stupid.

She was a formidable sight even by underhive standards. Her right augmetic arm was grotesquely large, industrial and overbuilt, more loading rig than limb, bigger even than the left, which was no flesh arm either. Her clothes sat where they could over a broad, heavy body that had no shame in its own size. Her stomach pressed easy over her belt. Her breasts strained the top of her shirt with the same unbothered pride. Tattoos crossed every scrap of visible skin—old ink, prison ink, gang ink, memory ink—making a ledger of triumph and hurt. Her red hair was piled back in a style that had no business surviving this close to the sump and yet somehow did. It looked absurd. It looked magnificent. It looked like defiance.

Behind her came the others.

One had an arc welder bonded where an arm ought to have been, fixed to him so brutally it looked as much punishment as tool. He kept glancing at doors, pipe-runs, joints and anchor points, with the bright, sidelong look of a man who noticed more than he was ever expected to understand.

Another was broad and patient-faced, though the patience in him looked fragile with hunger. Bruv, the others had called him. Porrig had heard why. The fellow seemed to call everyone bruv with such wholehearted regularity that eventually the word had stuck to him like a second hide.

The last was trouble with legs. He carried his temper like a live charge. Too quick in the eyes, too quick in the breath, twitching at every shift of shadow. Red Rumm. A daft sort of name, and somehow exactly right.

The female stopped thirty yards short of the camp. Her boys stopped with her.

Good, thought Porrig. She’s still got hold of them.

“Up,” he called mildly.

The Ratlings rose into view with rifles ready.

Norrie made a little performance of it. Milo did not. Barley’s hands shook only slightly.

Red Rumm bared his teeth and took half a step forward.

“Rumm,” said the female.

That was all. Not loud. Not harsh. Just his name.

He froze.

The one with the welder gave a crooked little grin.

Porrig stepped out where they could see him properly, boots on the cook-platform, rifle resting easy in the crook of his arm. He spread his free hand in welcome, as though receiving callers in a respectable hab and not on a scrap ledge over poisoned sludge.

“Well now,” he said. “You have either grown much braver than is sensible, or much hungrier than is healthy.”

The female Ogryn’s eyes flicked to the cookpot. Then to the rifles. Then back to him.

“Both,” she said.

Honest. Porrig liked that.

“What you want?” she asked.

There it was again. Not dullness. Not emptiness. Economy.

Porrig had heard enough officers mistake silence for stupidity to know the difference.

He gave her a small, courtly nod. “Name’s Porrig Duff. Formerly a decorated servant of the God-Emperor’s innumerable wars. Presently a man of reduced means and exquisite taste.”

The female did not smile.

“You run,” she said.

Porrig spread his hands. “I survived. There’s an art to that.”

The welder-armed Ogryn barked a laugh. He checked himself when she glanced at him.

“And you?” Porrig asked.

The woman looked at the stew again. Then at the rifles. Then finally at him.

“Suriah.”

A simple answer. Not a simple one.

Below them, the sump shifted and breathed. Somewhere in the dark water, something large broke the surface with a wet, sluggish gulp.

Then Suriah said, “My boys hungry.”

Not my crew. Not my Ogryns.

My boys.

Porrig let his gaze run along her line. Red Rumm looked ready to leap the whole distance and tear someone apart. Bruv stared openly at the pot. The clever one—Grint, if Porrig had the names straight—watched everything with quick, measuring eyes.

“My boys too,” said Porrig.

That got him the slightest narrowing of Suriah’s eyes.

She shifted her weight. Only a little. Enough for the guttering stove-light to catch the crude brutality of both augmetic arms. The larger one looked less like a limb and more like a piece of manufactorum equipment that had developed a grievance.

“Folks don’t see your boys,” she said.

Porrig said nothing.

Suriah tipped her head towards Milo, then Norrie, then Barley with his rigid little soldier’s posture and both hands tight on the stub gun.

“Too little. Too easy pass over. Easy laugh at. Easy forget.”

Norrie bristled. Barley coloured. Milo, above them, remained a statue with a rifle.

Then Suriah tapped two thick fingers against the broad metal plate of her own chest.

“Folks see mine. They see us first.”

Her voice was warm, almost gentle. Underneath it was iron.

“They see size. They see chain-marks. They see what hurt ’em if we get close.” She jerked her chin at Bruv and Red Rumm. “They see trouble. They see fear. But they don’t listen none. Don’t think. Don’t ask. Just shoot, or run, or put a price on our heads.”

Porrig felt his smile coming back despite himself.

She had him. Not with charm. With truth.

“You little men got eyes,” Suriah said. “Got hands what know rifles. Got patience. My boys ain’t got patience. Not much.” She gave Red Rumm a sidelong look. “Ain’t got enough words neither.”

Grint folded his arms and said nothing, though the flicker in his expression suggested he had thoughts on that subject.

Suriah went on. “But my boys got weight. Got thunder. Ain’t a backward step in ’em.”

That was a line worth remembering.

“You hide down here with guns and stew,” she said. “Still folks look past you. We stomp any place else, folks see us a mile off, but we cain’t hold ground, cain’t eat regular, cain’t sleep easy. You got belly. We got brawn.”

She shrugged those immense shoulders.

“Sounds like a bargain.”

This time it was Milo, high above them, who spoke first.

“Does to me.”

Barley looked up sharply. “Milo—”

“Hush,” said Milo.

Porrig stepped down from the cook-platform and took one careful pace forward. Then another. Enough to show respect. Not enough to be foolish.

“A very fine bargain,” he said softly. “You bring presence, force, and the kind of violence that changes a room’s mind. We bring eyes, rifles, and just enough good sense to stop all four of you lads charging the first thing that annoys them.”

“Three,” said Suriah.

Porrig blinked. “Sorry?”

She hitched a thumb at herself. “Three lads. Then me.”

For the first time, he saw her smile. Not broad. Not soft. But it changed her face all the same, making her look no gentler, only more dangerous.

Porrig laughed.

“Well then,” he said, “that is better still.”

He held out his hand.

Suriah looked at it. Then at him.

“You feed my boys,” she said. “You don’t point guns at ’em lessen I say. You don’t talk down at ’em neither. They mine.”

Porrig put a hand over his heart. “Madam, I would never dream of it.”

“Mm.”

She took his hand in the smaller augmetic fist. It could have crushed every bone in him to meal. Instead it squeezed just hard enough to make the point and let it settle.

Behind her, Bruv’s face split into a dopey grin.

“Big Mama got us food, bruv,” he rumbled.

Red Rumm, still staring murder at the Ratlings, said, “Mama always get us food.”

Grint said nothing, but there was a clever, sidelong look in his eyes, as though he were already measuring what four Ratlings, a sump-edge camp and one good bargain might become.

Porrig looked from one huge face to the next, then up at Milo, Norrie and Barley. Four little men with rifles. Four escaped slave Ogryns with nowhere else to stand. One broad woman at the centre of them all, all swagger and scars and impossible stillness, red hair set just so above a body built for labour and turned, through long cruelty and longer patience, into something no one sensible would ever try to own again.

The words came to him then, half joke and half revelation.

“Well,” Porrig said, “looks as though we’re Mama’s boys now.”

Barley gave a startled bark of laughter. Norrie grinned despite himself.

But it was Suriah who made it law.

She let go of Porrig’s hand, swept her great augmetic arm to gather all seven of them in, and said, warm as a cookstove and hard as a pit door:

“Damn right.