Nemesis

by James Swallow

  Iota spun to a halt in front of a large oval exterior hatchway, as Tariel’s voice reached her once more. “Is he there?” came the urgent question. “I… I am having difficulty reading the location of the Garantine…”

  She nodded to herself. Among the many implants beneath the flesh of an Eversor were passive sensing baffles that could confuse the detector heads of many conventional scanners. “Oh, he’s here,” Iota told him. “He will murder me in less than one hundred and ten seconds.” The prediction was based on observing the other kills the Garantine had made.

  “Working,” said the infocyte, a new urgency in his words.

  “Take your time,” she replied.

  The Eversor halted and cocked his head, considering her. Iota took a breath and drew in on herself. She let the force matrix built into the structure of her stealth-suit come alive, allowing it to reach its web of influence beyond the real and into the etherium of the warp; but the process was slow. Had she been fighting a psyker, she could have drained them dry in a moment, siphoned off their power for herself. But here and now, there was nothing but the commonplace energy of air and heat and life. She felt the eye of the animus speculum slowly iris open – but even as it did she knew it would not be ready in time.

  The other assassin grunted out a laugh and stooped to rip a short stanchion pole from a support pillar, tearing it off in a flutter of sparks. He brandished the steel rod like a club and went for her.

  At once, the hatch at Iota’s back groaned on heavy hydraulics and fanned open with a clatter of fracturing ice. A blast of polar air and windborne snow thundered in around her from outside. For a moment, the snowstorm whirled into the corridor, filling the space with whiteness.

  The energy inside the animus was approaching readiness, but as she had predicted, the Garantine killer had her range and he did not hesitate again.

  Before Iota could release even a fraction of the psy-weapon’s potential he slammed the bar into her chest with such force that she flew backwards, out into the snow-filled courtyard. Iota noted the snapping of several of her ribs with a disconnected understanding. She landed badly in a shallow drift of white and coughed up a stream of bloody spittle into her helmet. The fact she wasn’t dead made it clear he wanted to toy with her first.

  They called him the Garantine because it was said he hailed from the Garant Span, an Oort cloud collective on the near side of the Perseus Null. A natural psychotic, he had killed everyone on his home asteroid, and all this as a child barely able to read. It was no wonder the Clade Eversor had been delighted to take ownership of him.

  Iota struggled to get up, and through the optics of her skull-helm she looked to see another grinning rictus come into view. The Garantine grabbed her by the ankle and effortlessly threw her across the courtyard. This time the impact was lessened by a deep snow bank, but still the shock vibrated through her. She let out a tiny cry of pain. In her ear, the Vanus was jabbering something about closing the hatch, but that had no consequence to her. Iota focussed on bringing the animus to a firing state. If their plan failed, she would have to be the one to kill him, crashing his fevered mind with a blast of pure warp energy.

  The Eversor bounded towards her, laughing, and at the last moment he leapt into the air. Time seemed to thicken and slow, the hazy man-shape falling down towards her; then she was distantly aware of a heavy report and suddenly the Garantine’s fall was deflected.

  He jerked away at a right angle, as if pulled on an invisible cord.

  Iota saw the steaming wound in the rage-killer’s chest as he stumbled back to his clawed feet, shaking off the strike. Her head swimming, the Culexus searched and then found the source of the attack. A shimmering white figure stood up atop one of the nearby blockhouses, a longrifle in his grip. The white colouration faded into ink-black as the Vindicare deliberately reset his cameoline cloak to a null mode, allowing the Eversor to see him clearly. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as the rage-killer roared at him, and for the moment Iota was apparently forgotten.

  The Eversor charged again, and the rifle shouted. The first shot had been a kinetic impact round, the kind of bullet that could shatter the engine block of a hover track or reduce an unarmoured man to meat; that had been enough to attract the Garantine’s attention. The next shot whistled through the frigid air, blurring as it impacted the Eversor’s chest. The round was a heavy dart, fashioned from high-density glassaic. It contained a reservoir of gel within, pressure-injected into the target’s flesh on impact; but it was not a drug or philtre. An Eversor’s body was a chemical hell of dozens of interacting combat medicines, and no poison, no sedative could have been enough to slow it. The gel-matter in the rounds was a myofluid with a very different function; when exposed to oxygen it created a powerful bioelectric charge, a single hit strong enough to stun an ogryn.

  It was a non-lethal attack, and the Garantine seemed incensed by that, as if he were insulted that so trivial a weapon was being used on him. He tore out the dart and came on. Kell fired again, flawlessly striking the same spot, and then again, and then a third time. The Eversor did not falter, even as crackles of blue sparks erupted from the weeping wound in his chest.

  For one moment, Iota felt a rare stab of fear. How many rounds did the Vindicare have in the magazine of his longrifle? Would it be enough? She ignored the Vanus shouting in her ear and watched, as the crash of shot after shot was swallowed up by the hush of the falling snows.

  The Eversor leapt up to where the Vindicare stood and swung a taloned hand at him, but his balance faltered, the warshot of a dozen darts pinning his flesh. The blow smashed Kell’s rifle in two and sent the pieces spinning. Iota was on her feet, aiming the animus; if she fired now, the Vindicare would be caught in the nimbus of the psi-blast.

  But then the fight ebbed from the Eversor assassin, and the Garantine staggered backward, finally succumbing to all the hits he had taken. He made a last swipe at Kell and missed, the force of the blow carrying him back off the roof of the blockhouse and down into the courtyard.

  Iota approached him carefully, loping low across the ground. She was not convinced. Behind her, the marksman came in to survey his work.

  “Is he down,” she heard Tariel ask.

  “For our sake,” Kell muttered, “I bloody hope so.”

  DAIG HALTED THE groundcar at the foot of the hill and killed the engine. “We walk from here,” he said, the weak pre-dawn light giving his face a ghostly cast.

  Yosef studied him. “Tell me again how you came across this lead?” he said. “Tell me again why you had to drag me out of my bed – a bed I’ve hardly had leave to be in these last few days, mind – to come out to a derelict vineyard while the rest of the city is sleeping?”

  “I told you,” Daig said, with uncharacteristic terseness, “a source. Come on. We couldn’t risk coming in by flyer in case Sigg gets spooked… and he may not even be here.”

  Yosef followed him out into the cold air, pausing a moment to check the magazine in his pistol. He looked up the low hill. On the other side of heavy iron gates, what had once been the Blasko Wine Lodge was now a tumbledown husk of its former self. Gutted by fire a full three seasons ago, the site on the southerly ridges had yet to be reopened, and it stood empty and barren. In the dampness of the dawn air, the tang of fire-damaged wood could still be scented, drawn out by the moisture. “If you think Sigg is in there,” Yosef went on, “we should at least have some support.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Daig replied.

  “Not an overly reliable source, then,” said Yosef. That earned him a sullen look. “You know what will happen if I breathe a word of this at the precinct. Laimner would be all over it like a blight.”

  He couldn’t disagree with that; and if Laimner was involved and Daig’s tip came to nothing, it would be the two reeves who would suffer for it. “Fine. But don’t keep me in the dark.”

  When Daig looked at him again, he was almost imploring him. “Yosef. I don’t ask much of you, but I’m as
king now. Just trust me here, and don’t question it. All right?” He nodded at length. “All right.”

  They got into the vineyard through a broken stand of fencing, and followed the driveway up to the main building. Small branches and drifts of wet leaves dotted the ground. Yosef glanced to his right and saw where unkempt, blackened ground ranged away down the steep terraces. Before the fire, those spaces had been thick with greenery, but now they were little more than snarls of wild growth. Yosef frowned; he still had a ten-year bottle of Blasko caskinport at home. It had been a good brand.

  “In here,” whispered Daig, motioning him towards an outbuilding.

  Yosef hesitated, his eyes adjusted to the dimness now, and his sight picking out what did not fit. Here and there he saw signs of recent motion, places where dirt had been disturbed by human movement. Looking up from the gates, an observer would have seen nothing, but here, close up, there was evidence. Yosef thought about the Norte and Latigue murders, and he reached into the pocket of his coat for the butt of his gun, comforting himself with the steady presence of the firearm.

  “We take him alive,” he hissed back.

  Daig shot him a look as he drew a thermal register unit from inside his jacket, panning it around to scan for a heat return. “Of course.”

  They found their suspect asleep inside the cooper’s shack, lying in the curve of a half-built barrel. He heard their approach and bolted to his feet in a panic. Yosef put the brilliant white glare of his hand lantern on him and took careful aim with the pistol.

  “Erno Sigg!” he snapped, “We are reeves of the Sentine, and you are bound by law. Stand where you are and do not move.”

  The man almost collapsed, so great was his terror. Sigg flailed and stumbled, falling against the side of his makeshift shelter, before catching himself with an obvious physical effort. He held up his shaking hands, in the right gripping the handle of an elderly fuel-lamp. “H-have you come to kill me?” he asked.

  It wasn’t the question Yosef had expected. He had faced killers of men before, more often than he might have liked, but Sigg’s manner was unlike any of them. Dread came off him in waves, like heat from a naked flame. Yosef had once rescued a young boy held prisoner for weeks in a wine cellar; the look on the boy’s face as he saw light for the first time was mirrored now in Erno Sigg’s expression. The man looked like a victim.

  “You are suspected of a high crime,” Daig told him. “You’re to come with us.”

  “I paid for what I did!” he retorted. “I’ve done nothing else since!” Sigg looked in Daig’s direction. “How did you find me? I hid well enough so even he couldn’t know where I was!”

  Yosef wondered who he might be as Daig answered. “Don’t be afraid. If you are innocent, we will prove it.”

  “Will you?” The question was weak and fearful, like the words of a child.

  Then Daig said something that seemed out of place in the moment, and yet the words were like a calmative, immediately easing the tension in Sigg’s taut frame. Daig said, “The Emperor protects.”

  When Yosef looked back to Sigg, the man was staring directly at him. “I’ve done many things I’m not proud of,” he told him. “But no longer. And not those things the wire accuses me of. I’ve never taken a man’s life.”

  “I believe you, Erno,” said Yosef, the words leaving his mouth before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts; and the strangeness of it was, he did believe him, with a totality that surprised the reeve with its strength. On some instinctual level, he knew that Erno Sigg was telling the truth. The fact that Yosef could not fathom where this abrupt conviction had come from troubled him deeply; but he did not have time to dwell upon it.

  The roof of the cooper’s shack was a shell of corrugated metal and glass, some of it warped or shattered by the passage of the old inferno. From nowhere, as the dawn wind changed direction, the musty air was suddenly full of noise. Yosef recognised the rattling hum of coleopter rotors a split-second before harsh sodium light drenched the floor with white, the glare from spotlamps blazing down through the smoke-dirty glass and the holes in the roof. An amplified voice echoed Yosef’s original challenge to Sigg, and then there was movement.

  The reeve looked up, shielding his eyes, and made out the blurs of jagers dropping from the hovering flyers, heavy guns in their grips at they fell on descender lines.

  He looked back and saw pure fury on Sigg’s face. “Bastards!” he spat venomously, “I would have come! But you lied! You lied!”

  Daig was reaching out to him. “No, wait!” he cried out. “I didn’t bring them! We came alone—”

  Sigg cursed them once again and threw the fuel-lamp in his hand with a savage jerk. The lantern hit the ground and split in a crash of glass and fire, even as overhead the intact portions of the roof were breached by the jagers. As pieces of the roof rained down from above, the lamp’s burning oils kissed the soiled matter and old spills on the floor and a pulse of smoky flame erupted. Yosef pushed Daig aside as the new blaze rolled out, chewing on the piles of rotting wood and discarded sacks all around them.

  Daig tried to go after Sigg, but the fire had already built a wall between them, and the droning throb of the coleopter blades fed it, raising it high. Sigg vanished into the heat and the smoke.

  The jagers were disentangling themselves from their ropes as Yosef stormed over to them; one was already on the wireless for a firefighter unit. The reeve saw Skelta’s face among the men and grabbed him by his collar.

  “Who ordered you in?” he shouted, over the sound of the rotors. “Who’s the shit who ruined this?” But he knew the answer before he heard it.

  SIX

  Ultio

  Lies and Murder

  The Death of Kings and Queens

  THE OFFICIO PRESENTED the ship to them without ceremony. Like those it served, the vessel had a fluid identity; at the present moment, as it made its way towards the orbit of Jupiter, its pennants and beacons declared it to be the Hallis Faye, an oxygen tanker out of Ceres registered to a Belter Coalition habitat. Its codename, revealed to Kell and the others as they boarded, was Ultio.

  Outwardly, the Ultio resembled the class of light bulk transport ships that travelled a thousand different sub-light intrasystem space lanes across the Imperium. It was a design so commonplace that it became almost invisible in its ubiquity; a perfect blind for a craft in service to the Officio Assassinorum. Small by the standards of the mammoth starcruisers that comprised the fleets of the Imperial Navy and the rogue trader baronage, the Ultio was every inch a lie. A stubby trident, the shaft of the main hull – what appeared to be space for cargo – was in fact filled with the mechanisms and power train for an advanced design of interstellar warp motor. The craft had been constructed around the old engine, the origins of which were lost to time, and it was only the forward arrowhead-shaped section of the ship that was actually given over to cabins and compartments. This module, swept back and curved like an aerodyne, was capable of detaching itself from the massive drives to make planetfall like a guncutter. Inside, the crew sections of the Ultio were cramped and narrow, with sleeping quarters no larger than prison cells, hexagonal corridors and a flight deck configured with advanced gravity simulators so that every square centimetre of surface area could be utilised.

  The ship had three permanent crewmembers, in addition to the growing numbers of the Execution Force, but none of them were what could be considered wholly human. As Kell walked towards the stern, he was aware that beneath his feet the ship’s astropath lay sleeping inside a null chamber, having deliberately shocked itself into a somnambulant state; similarly, the Ultio’s Navigator, who habitually remained far back among the systemry of the drive section, had also opted to drop into sense-dep slumber inside a similar contrapsychic chamber. Both of them had expressed grave displeasure at Iota’s arrival on board, but their requests that she be sequestered or drugged into stasis were denied. Kell could only guess at how the delicate psionic senses of the warp navigato
r and the astro-telepath would be perturbed by the ghostly negative aura cast by the Culexus; even he, without a taint of the psyker about him, found it profoundly unsettling to be around the pariah girl for too long. She had agreed to wear her dampener tore for the duration, but even that device could not block the eerie air that followed Iota wherever she went.

  The third member of the Ultio’s crew was the least human of them all. Kell could still see the strange look of mingled horror and fascination on Tariel’s face as they had met the starship’s pilot. There was no body to the pilot, not anymore; like the venerable dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes, a being that had once been a man many centuries ago was now only a few pieces of flesh interred inside a body of iron and steel. Somewhere deep inside the block of computational hardware that filled the rear section of the crew deck, parts of a brain and preserved skeins of nerve ganglia were all that remained. Now he was the Ultio, and the Ultio was him, the hull his skin, the fires of the fusion core his beating heart. Kell tried to comprehend what it might be like to surrender one’s self to the embrace of a machine, but he could not. He was, on some base level, appalled by the very idea of such a merging; but what he thought counted for nothing. The pilot, the Navigator, the astropath and all the rest of them, they were here to serve the interest of the Assassinorum – to do, and not to question.

  He halted outside a hatchway, his boots ringing on the metal-grilled deck. “Ultio,” he asked the air, “Is the Garantine awake?”

  “Confirmed.” The pilot-cyborg’s voice came from a speaker grille above his head. It had the flat tonality of a synthetic vocoder.

  “Open it,” he ordered.

  “Complying,” came the reply. “Hazard warning. Increased gravity field ahead. Do not enter.”

  The hatch fell into the deck, and a waft of stale air, reeking of chemical sweat, wandered into the corridor. Inside, the Eversor sat uncomfortably on the floor, his breathing laboured. With visible effort, the rage-killer lifted his head and glared at Kell. “When I get out of here,” he said, forcing the words from his mouth, “I am going to rip you apart.”