“Location?” asked the worried voice of the coordinator, back at the Yae clan compound.
“The Red Lanes!” he replied. “Wipe it off the map!”
“Lord, are you not in that area?”
“Do it now!” It was the only way to be certain of killing the Culexus. He had no other option open to him.
IN THE RUINED apartment, Kell held his breath and listened. Over the disarray in the street below them, his spy mask’s audial sensors had detected the sound of gravity-resist motors. “Vanus,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
“Gunships,” said Tariel, studying his hololiths. “Cyclone-class. I read an attack formation.”
Kell’s face twisted in a grimace, and he ejected the magazine from his weapon, quickly reloading it with a different kind of ammunition.
CROSSING THE COURTYARD, the warlord looked up into the rainy night as the first salvo of rockets slammed into the buildings surrounding the square. A massive fist of orange fire and black smoke engulfed the tallest of the shanty-towers, and curls of flame spun away, lighting new infernos wherever they landed.
His guardian was behind him, blinded by a roaring headache, barely able to stagger in a straight line, and with a monumental effort, the psyker bodyguard hauled himself to the groundcar parked near the gates. Dead bodies lay in a circle around the vehicle, shocked to death by the vehicle’s autonomic security system. Recognising him, the car’s driver-servitor opened the gull wing doors to allow the guardian and the warlord inside. Another strike hit home nearby, blasting tiles off the brothel’s roof, sending them down to shatter harmlessly against the vehicle’s armoured skin.
“Get me out of here,” demanded Jun. “Stop for nothing.”
The guardian, half in and half out of the door, coughed suddenly and blood spluttered from his mouth. He turned, the pain in his skull burning like cold fire, as a figure in glistening black fell the distance from the roof to the courtyard floor. A ring of invisible force radiated out from it, causing a halo of rain to vaporise into mist.
“Kill her!” shouted the warlord, his voice high and filled with terror. “Kill her!”
The psyker took a foot in the spine and Jun shoved him out of the safety of the car, onto his knees. The gull wing door slammed shut and sealed tight.
The Culexus assassin stepped forwards as the guardian got up again, catching sight of the rain rolling down the contours of her skull-helm, dripping from the orbit of the single ruby eye as if she were weeping. The guardian reached inside himself and went deep, past the blazing pain, past the horrific wave of nothingness that threatened to drown him. He found a breath of fire and released it.
The pyrokinetic pulse chugged into existence, streaming from his twitching fingertips. The blast hit the Culexus dead on, and she backed away, shaking her distended steel head; but the tiny flare of hope the guardian experienced died a second later as the fire ebbed, almost as if it had been pulled into the ribbing of the assassin’s sinister garb.
He was aware of the car moving forwards in fits and starts, but his attention could not stray from the grinning, angular skull. The sapphire eye-clutch shimmered and the punishing gaze of the weapon known as the animus speculum was turned upon him.
Power, raw and inchoate, sucked in from the fabric of the warp and from the guardian’s abortive attack, drawn in like light from the event horizon of a singularity, was now unleashed. A pulse of energy flashed from the psychic cannon and blasted the warlord’s bodyguard backward, slamming him into the wall of the courtyard. As he tumbled to the ground, he combusted from within, the fire consuming his flesh and his screams.
JUN YAE JUN was shouting incoherently at his driver-servitor as it used the bull-bars on the groundcar’s prow to shoulder pedestrians out of the way. The vehicle made it onto the street as fresh salvos of rocket fire tore the Red Lanes into rubble. The servitor gunned the engine and aimed the car towards the bridge that led back towards the Yae compound.
A black blur fluttered in the light of an explosion and the armoured windscreen cracked and crazed as indigo fire lashed across it. Great gobs of polymer glass denatured and collapsed, smothering the servitor in a suffocating blanket of superheated plastic. The car spun out and collided with a bollard.
Jun pulled wildly at the door’s locking handle, then stabbed it with the push-dagger. He was operating on blind panic.
Taking her time, the Culexus clambered in through the destroyed window and disarmed him, almost as an afterthought. The warlord soiled himself as the skull came closer. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—”
“Kiss me,” she said, her voice devoid of all emotion.
Jun’s lips were pressed to the cold steel of the mask, and agony spiked through him. He fell back, and spat dust. Raw pain boiled at his extremities as his flesh blackened and became thick ash, crumbling before his eyes until those too rotted in their sockets and shrivelled to nothing. Jun Yae Jun’s very energy of life was drawn from him, leached into the force matrix webbing the assassin’s stealthsuit, until there was nothing left of him but a slurry of indeterminate matter.
IOTA LEFT THE target’s vehicle and the area around her was suddenly drenched in brilliant white light. The downdraught from a gravity drive beat at the ground, stirring up debris and what remained of the warlord. The sensor suite inside her helm registered a gunship’s weapons grid locking on to her silhouette, and she paused, wondering if it were possible for her to die.
In the next moment, she saw a line of light across the infrared spectrum as a single high-impact bullet passed through the armoured canopy of the gunship, beheading both the pilot and the gunner. Suddenly unguided, the Cyclone’s autoflight system kicked in and brought it down to a soft landing.
Presently two men, one in the operations gear of the Vindicare clade and another in a more basic stealth rig, emerged from one of the smouldering buildings. Iota glanced at them, then went back to watching the spreading fires.
As the sniper tipped the corpses from the flyer’s cockpit, the other man warily approached her. “Iota?” he asked. “Protiphage, Clade Culexus?”
“Of course it’s her,” said the Vindicare. “Don’t be obtuse, Tariel.”
“You have to come with us,” said the one called Tariel. He indicated the gunship as the sniper took the controls.
Iota ran a finger over the grinning teeth of her skull-mask. “Will you kiss me too?” The man went pale. “Perhaps later?”
FIVE
Fears
Release
Innocence
“HUSBAND?”
Renia’s hand on Yosef’s shoulder shocked him out of the dreamless doze he had fallen into at the kitchen table; so much so that he almost knocked over the glass of black tea by his hand. Before it could tip, he snatched it back upright without spilling a drop.
He gave her a weak smile. “Heh. Quicker this time.”
Yosef’s wife gathered her thick housecoat around her and took the seat across from him. It was late, deep into the evening, and the house was unlit except for a single lume over the table. It had a sharp-edged shade around it that forced the cast light into a cone, reducing everything beyond it to vague shapes in the shadows.
“Is Ivak up as well?”
“No. He’s still asleep, and I’m pleased to see it. With everything that’s been going on, he’s had a lot of bad dreams.”
“Has he?” Yosef asked the question and immediately felt a flicker of guilt. “I’ve been absent a lot recently…”
“Ivak understands,” Renia said, cutting him off. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she noted.
Yosef nodded and resisted the urge to yawn. “You and the boy had already turned in. I didn’t want to wake you, so I made tea…” He sipped at the glass and found the contents had gone cold.
“And fell asleep in the chair?” She tutted quietly. “You’re doing this too often these days,” Yosef Renia brushed some stray threads of copper-coloured hair out of her eyes.
He
nodded. “I’m sorry. It’s the investigation.” Yosef sighed. “It’s… troubling.”
“I’ve heard,” she said. “The watch-wire was running stories about it for a while, before the news from Dagonet came in. Now that is all anyone is talking about.”
Yosef blinked. “Dagonet?” he repeated. The planet was a trading partner with Iesta Veracrux, a few light years distant down the spine of the Taebian Sector’s mercantile routes, in a system orbiting a pale yellow sun. By the interstellar scales of the Imperium of Man, Dagonet was practically a neighbour. He asked his wife to explain; Yosef and Daig had both been buried in research on the serial murders all day long, fruitlessly looking for information about Erno Sigg, and neither of them had seen anything that wasn’t a case file or medical report.
For the first time since she had broken his dozing, Yosef realised that Renia was hiding something, and as she talked it became clear. She was worried.
“Some ships came into the system from Dagonet,” Renia began. “The Planetary Defence Force monitors couldn’t catch them all, there were so many.”
Yosef felt a peculiar thrill of fear in his chest. “Warships?”
She shook her head. “Transports, liners, that sort of thing. All Dagoneti ships. Some of them barely made it out of the warp in one piece. They were all overloaded with people. The ships were full of refugees, Yosef.”
“Why did they come here?” Even as he asked the question, he knew what the answer was most likely to be. Ever since stories of the galactic insurrection had broken out across the sector, Dagonet’s government had been noticeably reticent to commit on the subject.
“They were running. Apparently, there’s an uprising going on out there. The population are split over their… loyalty.” She said the word as if it was foreign to her, as if the idea of being disloyal to Terra was a totally alien concept. “It’s a revolt.”
Yosef frowned. “The Governor on Dagonet won’t let things run out of control. The noble clans won’t let the planet fall into anarchy. If the Imperial Army or the Astartes have to intervene there—”
Renia shook her head and touched his hand. “You don’t understand. It’s the Dagoneti clans who started the uprising. The Governor issued a formal statement of support for the Warmaster. The nobles have declared in favour of Horus and rejected the rule of Terra.”
“What?” Yosef felt suddenly giddy, as if he had stood up too quickly.
“The common people are the ones fighting back. They say there is blood in the streets of the capital. Soldiers fighting soldiers, militia fighting clan guards. Those who could flee filled every ship they could get their hands on.”
He sat quietly, letting this sink in. There was, he had to admit, a certain logic to the chain of events. Yosef had visited Dagonet in his youth and he recalled that Horus Lupercal was second only to the Emperor in being celebrated by the people of the planet; statues in the Warmaster’s honour were everywhere, and the Dagoneti spoke of him as “the Liberator”. As the historic record went, in the early years of the Great Crusade to reunite the lost colonies of humanity, Dagonet languished under the heel of a corrupt and venal priest-king who ruled the planet through fear and superstition. Horus, at the head of his Luna Wolves Legion, had come to Dagonet and freed a world – accomplishing the deed with only one round of ammunition expended, the single shot he fired that dispatched the tyrant. The victory was one of the Warmaster’s most celebrated triumphs, and it ensured he would be revered forever as Dagonet’s saviour.
Small wonder then, that the aristocratic clans who now ruled the planet would give their banners to him instead of a distant Emperor who had never set foot on their world. Yosef’s brow creased in a frown. “If they follow Horus…”
“Will Iesta follow suit?” said Renia, completing his question for him. “Terra is a long way from here, Yosef, and our Governor is no stronger-willed than the rulers of Dagonet. And if the rumours are true, the Warmaster may be closer than we know.” His wife reached out again and took both his hands, and this time he noticed that she was trembling. “They say that the Sons of Horus are already on their way to Dagonet, to take control of the entire sector.”
He tried to summon a fraction of his firm, steady voice, the manner he had been trained to display as a reeve when the citizens looked to him in time of danger. “That won’t happen. We have nothing to be afraid of.”
Renia’s expression – her love for him for trying to protect her there, but intermingled with stark fear – told him that for all his efforts, he did not succeed.
THE CHEMICAL SNOWS of the Aktick Zone, thick feathery clumps tainted a sickly yellow from thousands of years of atmospheric contaminants, beat at the canopy of the aircraft. Out beyond the bullet-shaped nose of the transport, there was only a featureless cowl of grey sky and the whirling storm. Eristede Kell gave it a glance and then turned away, stepping back from the raised cockpit deck to the small cabin area behind it.
“How much longer?” said Tariel, who sat strapped into a thrust couch, a half-finished logica puzzle in his soft, thin fingers.
“Not long,” Kell told him, deliberately giving him a vague answer.
The Vanus’ face pinched in irritation, and he fiddled with the complex knot of the logica without really paying attention to it. “The sooner we get there, the happier I will be.”
“Nervous passenger?” the sniper asked, with mild amusement.
Tariel heard it in his voice and fired him an acid look. “The last aircraft I was in got shot down over the desert. That hasn’t exactly made me well-disposed to the whole experience.” He discarded the logica – which, to his surprise, Kell realised the Vanus had completed without apparent effort – and pulled up his sleeve to minister to his cogitator gauntlet. “I still don’t understand why I am needed here. I should have returned with Valdor.”
“The Captain-General has duties of his own to attend to,” said Kell. “For now on, we’re on our own.”
“So it would seem.” Tariel threw a wary look to the far end of the cabin, where the girl Iota was sitting. Tariel had placed himself as far away from her as it was possible to get and still be inside the aircraft’s crew compartment.
For her part, the Culexus appeared wholly occupied with the pattern of the rivets on the far bulkhead, running her long fingers over the surface of them, back and forth. She seemed lost in the repeated, almost autistic actions.
“Operational security,” said Kell. “Valdor’s orders were quite clear. We assemble the team he wants, and no one must learn of it.”
Tariel paused, and then leaned closer. “You know what she is, don’t you?”
“A pariah,” sniffed the Vindicare. “Yes, I know what that means.”
But the Vanus was shaking his head. “Iota is designated as a protiphage. She’s not human, Kell, not like you or I. The girl is a replicae.”
“A clone?” The sniper looked back at the silent Culexus. “I would not think it beyond the works of her clade to create such a thing.” Still, he wondered how the genomasters would have gone about it. Kell knew that the Emperor’s biologians were greatly skilled and possessed of incredible knowledge – but to make a living person, whole and real, from cells in a test tube…
“Exactly!” insisted Tariel. “A being without a soul. She’s closer to the xenos than to us.”
A smile pulled briefly at Kell’s lips. “You’re afraid of her.”
The infocyte looked away. “In all honesty, Vindicare, I am afraid of most things. It’s the equilibrium of my life.”
Kell accepted this with a nod. “Tell me, have you ever been face to face with one of the Eversor?”
Tariel’s face went ashen, the tone of his cheeks paling to match the polar snows outside the flyer’s viewports. “No,” he husked.
“When that happens,” Kell went on, “then you’ll truly have something to be afraid of.”
“That’s where we’re going,” offered Iota. Both of them had thought the girl to be wrapped up in whatever priv
ate reality existed inside her mind, but now she turned away from the bulkhead and spoke as if she had been a part of the conversation all along. “To fetch the one they call the Garantine.”
Kell’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that name?” He had not spoken of the next assassin on Valdor’s list.
“Vanus are not the only ones who know things.” She cocked her head to stare at Tariel. “I’ve seen them. Eversor.” Iota’s hand strayed to her skull-helm, where it rested nearby on a vacant passenger couch. “Like and like.” She smiled at the infocyte. “They are rage distilled. Pure.”
Tariel glared at the sniper. “That’s why we’re out here in this icy wilderness? To get one of them?” He shuddered. “A primed cyclonic warhead would be safer!”
Kell ignored him. “You know the Garantine’s name,” he said to Iota. “What else do you know?”
“Pieces of the puzzle,” she replied. “I’ve seen what he left behind. The tracks of blood and broken meat, the spoor of the vengeance killer.” She pointed at Tariel. “The infocyte is right, you know. More than any one of us, the Garantine is a weapon of terror.”
The matter-of-fact way she said the words made Kell hesitate; ever since Valdor had appeared out there in the deserts with his commands and his authority handed down from the Master of Assassins himself, the Vindicare’s sense of unease had grown greater by the day, and now Iota cut to the heart of it. They were lone killers, all of them in their own ways. This gathering together sat wrongly with him; it was not the way in which things were to be done. And somewhere, deep in the back of his thoughts, Eristede Kell found he was also afraid of what such orders boded.
“Vindicare!” He turned as the transport pilot called out – his clade’s name. “Approach control doesn’t answer. Something is wrong!”
Tariel muttered something about his cursed luck and Kell brushed past him, back into the cockpit. The pilot was already pushing the transport into a steep turn. Below them, distinguished only by a slight change in the tone of the chem-snow, he spotted the mottled lifeless landscape of the Aktick ranges through the spin and whirl of the blizzard-borne ice.
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