No matter how many times Maddie made the crossing, Hadrian South still scared the shit out of her.

She tugged her heavy black coat tighter around her spindly frame as their barge listed towards the derelict dock. Dark buildings rose up in front of them like a wall of broken teeth, ghostly lights of residual code sparking through broken windows.

Shapes moved there. Shadows slick with grime and rust, and the long years of decay.

"Gimme fourteen degrees starboard," she said quietly. "Let's not get any more attention tonight than we have to."

At the front of the ship, the woman at the helm cabin raised a hand in acknowledgement. The barge turned, the vicious water of the Hadrian River slapping at its reinforced plating. She knew the ship only had a few more trips across the water left in it before she would need to fork out for a fresh coating of galvanised armour. If they didn't make good on this run, they'd be risking the river eating its way clean through the hull.

Maddie did not relish that thought. A swim in the Hadrian would kill you as surely as a bullet to the brain.

She paced slowly back and forth across the deck, one hand resting against the reassuring bulk of her heavy revolver. It was an old-fashioned BoarNorth Armouries model, but it kicked just as hard as any of the shiny new, nickel-plated, piss-barrels that the corps cranked out these days. She liked its weight and simplicity.

"You sure on the score this time?" Skater muttered, standing behind her at the railing. He patted his hands together gently, his breath misting in the winter air.

"Of course I'm sure."

"I'm just askin'. You know, last time-,"

"I know what happened last time." She shot him an irate glance. He was a portly, grease-haired man with a spine made out of jelly, but he was the best hacker in her crew. That bought him a ticket on this little venture.

Dangerous? Sometimes. Lucrative? Always.

"I checked the intel three times," Maddie continued. "It's good. A Linkchain bio-factory – all the black-market cybers we could want." She fixed him with an accusing stare. "I hope you've done your homework, Skater."

"Yeah, I did it. I'm set." He tapped the thin steel-grey square embedded in his temple, bringing a translucent visor to life across his eyes. She could see the lines of code whirring along it as he rechecked some minute portion of his brute algorithms. "Just get me to the door without us gettin' chopped for parts."

"I'll do my best." Turning her attention back to Hadrian South, she crammed a few errant strands of dirty-blond hair back beneath her beanie and huffed out a breath, watching the steam disappear into the night. She didn't need to look back to know what was behind her. She could feel the vomit of light from Hadrian North, the neon skyline casting a never-ending glare out over the docks.

They closed in on her chosen landing place. The slipway was just passed one of the old docks, where massive loading cranes and conveyors had been left to rot and rust with the ages. This close to the water, most of them had long-since been gutted by salvagers – the safest and easiest to access. She'd carved up a few of them herself.

No, her prize required going a little deeper into the city.

The slipway spanned barely ten meters across, little more than a run off area for sewage, fuel discharge and the launch of tugboats. It was a dark little slice of nothing that suited her just fine. Maddie crept forward, until she reached the helm station, leaning in over the shoulder of her navigator.

"Slow and easy," she whispered. "And for fuck sake watch the sonar. Last thing we need is to ring a bloody gong that someone's left behind."

"I got it, I got it," the woman replied, tapping the silently spinning sonar screen that had been spliced into the barge's control console. "We're good. Nothing in the water high enough to touch us."

Maddie clapped her on the shoulder, then turned around, signalling to the rest of her crew with a raised hand, clenching and unclenching her fist twice. Several dark-coated men and woman immediately set to work, swinging on gravity assisted salvage packs, loading guns and distributing overclocked shock-rods.

Then they gathered at the gangway, right as the barge nosed its way into position, swinging its narrow bulk side on to the narrow ramp. She felt the tug as the magnetic anchor engaged, blissfully silent as it latched the vessel onto the nearest hunks of metal to keep them steady.

"Follow me," she said as the rails parted, letting the single person boarding ramp extend outwards. It touched the sluiceway, gentle as could be, but the resulting scrape of metal on stone still made her grimace.

Shrugging off the sensation, she mounted the ramp, crouching and scurrying beetle-like down it until she cleared the lapping poisonous water and set her feet on the dead world of Hadrian South. Maddie turned, catching Skater by his jacket and helping him dismount with an undignified hop.

The others disembarked close behind, moving quick and quiet. They wore soft-soled trainers, not as protective as heavy boots, but light on the feet. The trick, she had learned over the years, was to not draw any attention to yourself. In Hadrian South, being quiet was better protection than the thickest armour.

She tapped her own visor, the black-market tech casting a pale grey overlay over her vision. The software quickly picked out the path ahead, using the inloaded maps she'd bootlegged of this stretch of the forbidden city. Corps didn't want anybody coming back here. Of course, they'd say it was for your own safety, but she knew Hadrian's corporations couldn't give a fuck about human life.

Their proprietary tech was another matter entirely.

"This way," Maddie said beckoning her crew forwards. They moved up the sluiceway and onto the broad expanse of the dockyards, surrounded by the shadows of half-collapsed warehouses, canneries and repair yards. Ahead of them, through a small crossroads, was an abandoned algae plant, its silos climbing fifty feet against the night, and she headed towards it.

Dark and quiet, they slunk forward, and Maddie let her thoughts flicker briefly to the crypts they could bring in from this little venture. Laws be damned, Hadrian's black market would always have room for illegal cybernetics. They could be dismantled for parts, exported to less restrictive cities to the north and south, or fitted to anyone with the money and the stones to try it.

This could set them up for a long time.

Those pleasant thoughts evaporated in an instant, however, when they got close to the algae plant. Long dead, its expanse of silos offered the most direct route to the Linkchain factory deeper into the city. An arched gateway yawned open before them, ripped open by either the Schism, or some scavenger.

A dark figure stepped into view beyond the threshold.

Stopped.

She stopped too, hand falling to her gun. In the gloom of Hadrian South's ravaged cityscape she couldn't see much – just a vaguely human shape, but with two searing red eyes, glaring out towards her like a demon.

"What's that?" Skater whispered shrilly.

Maddie waved him into silence, siding her revolver from its holster as she scanned the darkness. Her jaw worked from side to side as she peered deeper into Hadrian's gloom than she ever wanted to.

She tried to pick out more detail. The thing lurked in the shadowy archway, standing in exactly the place she needed to go. At this distance she couldn't see too much, except for those weird-ass eyes. They were deep, angry crimson, and she first thought they might be simple LED lenses – some other scrapper out to spook the competition. As she looked closer, however, she could see something odd about them. The crimson light bled out like veins, making it distorted and difficult to focus on. She blinked, feeling her own eyes start to ache.

Motioning the others to stay back, raised her head and took another step forward. She didn't speak, watching and waiting. Maddie had no intention of announcing their presence to the things that roamed the docks.

"Hello," the figure said simply.

The voice sent tremors up her spine. It was almost human, but grinding like the gears of a dock crane. Maddie levelled her gun, fighting to keep her hands from shaking.

"Who the fuck are you?" she challenged, keeping her voice at a low hiss. "This is our patch."

"Is it?"

She tried to get a better look, risking a half-step forward, but the speaker lurked in the gloom, only giving her a vague outline. Male, averagely built, and she could see the shine of metal on his left arm, glinting in the gloom of Hadrian South. An augment – illegal. Beyond that, all she could see was the roundness of a hood pulled forward to shade his face, and those red, red eyes.

Maddie's shoulders tensed and around her the guns of her crew rose.

"Get out of here, scrap-station," she growled.

"After I waited so long for you to come here?"

"This is our salvage patch. Now fuck off, before you set every wraith in the damn city on us."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that." The augment let out a horrible, grinding, coughing noise.

She realised, with a disgusted jolt, that the thing was laughing.

"Well, what I should say is, I wouldn't worry about it," he continued. "You, on the other hand, should worry quite a lot."

"Mads!" The man to her right gasped. "They're all around us!"

"What?" Maddie stepped back, her gun rising as she looked left and right. For a moment she wasn't sure what he was talking about, but then she noticed the hunched, black shapes, almost as though they were growing into being like mould.

Where a moment ago there had been nothing, she saw doors creaking open; dark alleys and cracked walls disgorging nightmare creatures from the Schism itself. A jolt of terror hit her and she edged backwards, feeling the men and women of her crew instinctively drawing together away from the things.

She'd tangled with the creatures of this place before, but only in small numbers – ones and twos. From where she stood she could count at least twenty assorted devils from the past. There were hunch-backed codewraiths, their bodies bristling with blades and mindless, home-made additions. She saw dog-bots – hairless metal quadrupeds with blunt heads scenting the air – alongside half-human mistakes, their flesh mangled into walker frames and loading equipment. And scattered among them were a handful of augment cyborgs, where they'd kept their human shape, but not much else.

"Thank you for coming," the dark figure said, and she caught a faint glimpse of shining, metal teeth as it grinned. "Such a task finding transport these days."

The red eyes flared, and the hoard of machine creatures exploded into motion. Codescreams ripped through the air, the enraged binary stinging Maddie's ears as she swivelled and took aim.

Her first shot took the closest wraith in the skull as it came racing down a ramp towards her, blasting a hole clean through the metal and sending the machine reeling. Maddie twisted in the opposite direction and squeezed off two more rounds at a fast-moving dog-bot. The first missed, blowing a chunk out of the concrete. The second clipped the hind leg and sent the machine into a crashing roll, spraying metal in all directions.

Skater tried to run, but he barely made it ten feet before one of the hybrid augments impaled him with a length of jagged piping, hurled like a javelin. It crunched through his chest, killing him instantly and he slumped to the ground with blood pooling around his stocky frame.

Maddie couldn't spare a busted fuse to care about it. Carnage erupted all around her and she just started shooting.

Gunfire erupted as the crew followed her example. Bullets spat in all directions, ripping into the metal bodies. Some fell; others marched through the storm. All the while more of the things kept pouring out of the darkness.

"Mads, we gotta go!"

"Yeah, no fucking shit! Everybody stay close!" She started edging back towards the docks, still shooting.

But she had criminals around her, not soldiers. It wasn't long before fear overwhelmed them and, as though a dam had broken, they suddenly turned to flee back towards the barge. The break in gunfire allowed the machines to surge forward, and half of them were cut to pieces in a matter of seconds.

Blood and body parts splattered across the concrete. Maddie ducked another pipe-javelin, only for the weapon to punch straight through the man standing behind her, leaving him to spin drunkenly and collapse to the ground in a limp heap. A woman nearby was ripped clean in half by one of the hulking wraiths; another was torn to shreds by an augment wielding some kind of industrial claw.

Then she heard a scream from behind her. A scream too far away to be a part of the fighting. Eyes widening in realisation, she spun around in time to see the helmswoman's body go toppling over the side into the acrid waters of the Hadrian.

The woman's head followed a moment later.

On the deck of the barge more hunched, animal shapes now crawled. Two more bodies of the crew left on board went slapping into the shallows, and she heard the engines sputter into life. In the melee they'd gotten behind them.

Cut them off.

And boarded her ship.

Her hands strangled the grip of her gun as she edged forward, but a wall of machines and cyborgs barred her path, keeping her from the sluiceway. The boarding ramp smacked into the river, the sound echoing out agonizingly through the dark riverbank. It was then that she noticed the abrupt quiet. No more screaming, no more gunfire.

She risked a glance around her, and found she was all alone, surrounded by corpses and metal monsters.

Sweat glistened on Maddie's cheeks despite the cold, her heart clanging off her ribs like a caged bird. She looked past the hunched shapes, and saw the figure – the ambusher – strolling nonchalantly across the deck of her barge to lean on the rail. She still couldn't see much of him beyond those fucking eyes, his hood pulled forward to shadow the rest of his face. There was the hint of a smile in that shadow though, a bleak, dead smile that she wished she'd never seen.

"Thanks for the ship," the dark figure called in his mangled half-voice, waving lazily with his cybernetic arm. "Goodbye now. I promise it'll be quick."

Maddie let out a faint whimper of horror as she watched the barge edge away from the dock. Her knees trembled violently as she looked around and saw a more than dozen abominations closing in on her from all sides. A pack of killers taunting their prey. One of the hulking cyborgs carelessly stepped on Skater's head as it advanced, crushing his skull like a walnut.

Ripping her eyes away, she began frantically sliding fresh rounds into her gun. Several bullets skittered across the floor, slipping from her shaking fingers, but she managed to fill all twelve chambers. Snapping the drum shut, she looked up again and took aim.

Maddie had survived a lot of things in twenty-five years of being alive, but when she looked at the advancing band of machine creatures, and the receding shape of her barge, she knew in her gut that this wouldn't be one of them.

Terror gripped her and she felt her stomach turning. She didn't want to die. With a shrill, wordless snarl she started shooting, moving from target to target. The heavy rounds slammed into their marks. At this range, even with her whole body juddering with terror, she couldn't miss.

One cyborg went head-over-heels backwards, a shot striking its skull. Three blasted through a codewraith; a second lost a leg with two more. A hunched, feral-looking dog-bot went crashing over to one side as she blew out its flank.

She swept in a full circle, blazing away at the murderous denizens of Hadrian South until the drum clicked empty. She kept squeezing the trigger, unable to stop. The blades and metallic jaws closed in and she let out a strangled sob, hurling the gun at the nearest machine.

She tried to run.

Pain ripped through her right ankle and she fell, shock surging through her as she rolled onto her back, only to find blood fountaining out onto the ground from where her foot had been severed at the joint. Shadows loomed over her, and Maddie looked up.

There was no-one left in Hadrian South to hear her screams.

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