Ivan's voice came out as a guttural croak, a clear sign of his ill mood. "Where is she?"
"Dunno boss," Mul'thon said in reply. Ivan Ionfist was a menacing fellow at the best of times--one couldn't be the regional warboss of the Bloody Tusks if they had a sunny disposition. The only light in the barren apartment room where they'd come to meet Calista was the streetlights outside, filtering through the blinds. That, and the dull blue plasma oscillating in Ivan's chrome hand.
"If that thin-horned whore doesn't have something good," the warboss muttered, "I'm gonna break her scrawny neck."
Mul'thon grinned. "You oughta do that anyway," he suggested, "Even if she does know who Neon Justice is." Ivan chuckled darkly in response.
"I just might," he mused. "We'll call it a sacrifice to the new dominion." His foul mood hadn't gone away--it had merely turned towards a violent desire, as it often did. Ivan's violent desires had taken Mul'thon pretty far in the last year and a half. From street-pusher to right hand of the warboss... And who knew where next?
"She ought to be here by now," one of the others grunted from beside the windows. "But ain't nothin' on the street 'cept that car that was here last time I looked."
Mul'thon and Ivan looked up at the same time. "What car?" the warboss questioned. There had been no cars on the street when they'd shown up! They scrambled up to their feet, Ionfist doing so with such force that the couch he'd been seated on flipped backwards to the floor. The warboss used his ordinary hand to adjust the dial beside the window, turning the blinds entirely horizontal and granting a mostly unrestricted view of the street down below.
Parked across the road was a sleek black car. And then as if it had been waiting for them to notice it the gull-wing doors opened up and a cacophony of sound spilled out, so loud that it made the windows rattle in their frames.
"Everyone's watchin'... to see what you will do! Everyone's lookin', at you... Oh!!"
"She set me up!" Ivan shouted. Mul'thon could barely hear him over the horrible noise blaring on the street. "She's dead! Dead!" His notorious fist came up and smashed into the plate-glass window, a casual half-hearted motion that nevertheless put a crater into the material, grievous cracks and fissures surrounding the point of impact.
Beneath the noise there were sirens as Lone Star cruisers tore onto the avenue in front of the apartment building.
"Everyone's wonderin', will you come out tonight? Everyone's tryin' to get it right... Get it right!"
Ivan screamed some command but Mul'thon couldn't hear him over the racket. Bloody Tusks didn't need to be told to grab their weapons and the half dozen other orks in the room did so then, axes and harpoons finding their way into hands. Mul'thon's club--fashioned from a bumper torn off a looted big rig--came out of its crude holster on his back. The warboss pointed at the at the door to the apartment and began to bellow.
Before anyone could make sense of what Ivan was saying, the metal door burst inward, instantly wrenching free the crossbar they'd set over it when they arrived. In the frame left behind was a figure in jet black combat armor holding the pneumatic battering ram that had just turned a barricade into a breach.
Dropping it, she drew from a holster on her side the biggest hand cannon Mul'thon had ever seen.
"Everybody's workin' for the weekend! Everybody wants a new romance!"
From outside someone on a bull horn started shouting, briefly overlapping the music and further drowning out whatever Ivan was howling. "This is the police! We have you surrounded, surrender immediately!"
"Everybody's goin' off the deep end! Everybody needs a second chance... oh!"
Ivan's cybernetic fist flared as he launched into a charge across the apartment, roaring loud enough to compete with the sirens and the noise. The cop took aim with her handgun at Ivan and pulled the trigger.
"You want a piece of my heart?!"
A steel rod nearly a foot in length flew from the barrel, moving far faster than Ivan himself. It struck the ork in his shoulder but he was a monster of a metahuman and the projectile barely caused him to stumble. The cop ducked gracefully under his wide and reckless swing and his fist vaporized the concrete beside the doorway. Ivan's arm went through it and out in the hallway.
"You better start from the start!"
The warboss was screaming something as he sought to wrench his arm back out of the wall but Mul'thon couldn't make out the words. His default course of action had always been to violence and it had gotten him this far so he set off in Ivan's footsteps, adding his cry to the barely-audible chorus that the others had thrown up.
"You want to be in the show?"
Over the course of ten seconds the breaching cop laid waste to the inner circle. Mul'thon registered someone hitting their axe against the hardened neck-shield before a point-blank shot from the revolver sent him flying backwards into the bathroom. He arrived a moment later and struck downward with his club but she caught it in one hand, spun around and used the ork's own momentum to drive his upper body towards the floor. An armored elbow hit him hard in the side of the head and he staggered to one knee. A second later there was another fhumph from the hand-cannon and Mul'thon screamed at a terrible pain in his right leg, which thereafter collapsed under his weight. She'd shot him and broke the limb with blunt force.
"Come on baby, lets go!"
Others tried and fared no better. She was like a valkyrie, an angel of war that Mul'thon could only marvel at while he clutched his shattered leg with both hands. When Ivan ripped his arm free of the wall he swung at her furiously with his deadly limb but she avoided his blows seemingly without effort.
"Everyone's lookin'... To see if it was you! Everyone wants you, to come through!"
She loosed a shot from two feet out that struck Ivan right in the jaw and sent him staggering backwards across the room. When he'd regained his bearings he put his normal hand on his wrist and spun the bracer that turned his chrome into a shock emitter. He'd bragged once that it ran at 10,000 volts. They'd all be riding the lightning today.
"Everyone's hopin', it'll all work out! Everyone's waitin' to hold you out!"
As it was powering up, the breach cop spun a dial on the side of her revolver, then pointed it at the warboss and pulled the trigger. A red-hot rod flew forth like the wrath of an angry deity, hissing as it cut the air and then right through Ivan's outstretched arm, right above the wrist. It continued over his shoulder and thudded into the wall to his right; his dreaded cybernetic fist dropped to the ground, molten hot on one side and dark as the night sky on the other.
"Everybody's workin' for the weekend! Everybody wants a new romance, hey yeeaa!"
The ork looked at his hand for a few moments, and then seemed to lose his footing. When he fell it was to his left, right through the damaged plate glass which gave instantly. And over the edge went Ivan Ionfist, down three stories to the waiting asphalt below.
