Nemesis

by James Swallow

  Under the aegis of this, the invited nobles alternated between praising the opera and discussing the matters of the moment; and the latter meant discussion of the rebellion and of the pressures upon Jupiter and her shipyards. The wounds opened by the incident at Thule had not been healed, despite assurances from the Council of Terra, despite the quiet purges and the laying of blame. But accusations still crossed back and forth, some decrying the Warmaster for such perfidy and base criminality, others – those who spoke in hushed tones – wondering if the Emperor had let this thing occur just so he might tighten his grip on the Jovians. Every heartbeat of their forges was now turned to the construction of a military machine designed to break the turncoat advance, but many felt it was bleeding Jupiter white. Those who questioned this questioned other things as well; they asked exactly how it was that a force of Mechanicum Adepts and Astartes with traitorous intentions had been able to build a warship of the scope of the Furious Abyss, without alerting anyone to their duplicity.

  Was it possible that Jupiter harboured rebel sympathisers? It had happened with the Mechanicum of Mars, and so some whispered, even among the warlords of Earth’s supposedly united nation-states. The questions turned and turned, but they faded when Gergerra Rei entered the room.

  Resplendent in the circuit-laced robes of a Mech-Lord, Rei’s high status as master of Kapekan Sect of the Legio Cybernetica was known to all. Two full cohorts of combat mechanoids were under his personal command, and they had fought in many battles of note during the Great Crusade alongside the Luna Wolves and the Warmaster.

  Like many of the Cybernetica, Rei eschewed the gross cyborg augmentations of his colleagues in the Mechanicum in favour of subtle enhancements that did not disfigure or dilute his outwardly human aspect; but those who knew Rei knew that whatever humanity he did show was rare and fleeting.

  Behind him, moving with fluidity, his bodyguards were a three-unit maniple of modified Crusader-class robots. Painted as works of art, each insect-like machine was a stripped-down variant of its battlefield standard, armed with a discreetly sheathed power-rapier and a lasgun. A fourth mechanical, this one custom-built to resemble a female form rendered in polished chrome, walked at his side and served as his aide.

  No one asked questions about loyalty when Rei was nearby. His machines could hear a whisper among a roaring crowd, and those who dared to suggest aloud that Rei was anything less than the Emperor’s obedient servant lived to regret it.

  THE MECH-LORD TOOK a schooner of an indifferent Vegan brandy and pecked at a few small sweetmeats from ornamental serving trays offered by menials, allowing his mechanoid aide to delicately sniff at each before he ingested it; the robot’s head was filled with sensing gear capable of picking up any particulate trace of poison. The machine shook its head each time, and so he ate and drank but none of the rich foodstuffs sated the real hunger in him. Rei engaged in a moment or two of small talk with the director of the opera house, but it was a perfunctory and hollow exchange. Neither of them wanted to spend time with one another – Rei was simply uninterested and the director was doubtless wracked with worry over the reason why the Kapekan general had decided to take up his long-ignored invite – but both of them had to fake the genial nothings of greeting, for the sake of propriety.

  “My Lord Rei?” He turned as a servant approached, a young man in the Saros livery with a wary cast to his face. He nervously side-stepped the Crusaders and offered a card to the Mech-Lord; and that was his error. The servant did not wait to be addressed, but instead proffered the card before it was acknowledged.

  Rei’s aide stepped in to meet him with a faint hiss of hydraulics, and in one fluid motion took the hand holding the card and broke it at the wrist. The bone cracked wetly and the servant went white with shock, staggering. He would likely have fallen if the machine had not been holding him up.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  The servant spoke through gritted teeth. “A… A message for you, sir…” He gasped and gave him a pleading look. “Please, I only did as the lady asked me to…”

  “The lady?” Rei’s heart thumped in his chest. “Give it to me.”

  His aide took the card and held it to her chromium lips. She licked it with a disconcertingly human-looking tongue, paused, then handed it on to her master. Had there been any contact toxins on the surface, she would have destroyed it.

  The Mech-Lord fought off a tremor in his hands as he read the languid, flowing script written across the white card. It was a single word: “Come”. He turned it over and saw it listed a location in the apartments reserved for the opera house’s performers.

  “Is something amiss?” said the director, his face pinched in concern.

  Rei pressed his half-empty brandy glass into the man’s hand and walked away. His robots followed, and behind them the servant staggered down to his knees, clutching at his ruined wrist.

  THE APARTMENTS WERE a short pneu-car ride up three levels to Saros Station’s most exclusive residential decks. Rei had his own orbital out by Callisto and did not keep rooms here, but he had visited the chambers in the past during one of his many affairs and so he knew where to go. The presence of his maniple made sure that no one dared to waylay him, and presently he reached the room. His aide knocked on the door and it opened on silent servos.

  From within came that silken voice. “Come,” she said.

  Rei took a step – and then hesitated. He pulse was racing like that of a giddy youth in the first blush of infatuation, and he had to admit, as much as he was enjoying the sensation of it, he was still the man he was. Still distrustful of everything on some deep level. His enemies had tried to use women as weapons against him before, and he had buried them; could this be one more attempt to do the same? His throat went dry; he hoped it would not be so. The strange, ephemeral connection he felt with the actress seemed so very real, and the thought that it might be a thing brought into existence just to hurt him cut deeply.

  For a long moment, he wavered on the threshold, contemplating turning about and leaving, taking the pneu-car back to the docks and his yacht, leaving and never coming back.

  Just making the thought felt like razors in his gut; and then she spoke again; “My lord?” He heard the mirror of his own questions and fears in her words.

  His aide walked in ahead of him and Rei went to follow, but again he hesitated. Even if what he hoped for would come about in this glorious evening, he could not afford to lose sight of the realities of his life. He turned to the Crusaders and spoke a string of command words. The robots immediately took up sentry positions around the door to the apartment, weapons ready, bowing their mantis-like heads low so that they would not damage the lamps hanging from the ceiling above.

  Rei entered the room and became overcome by a vision.

  His first thought was; she is not dead! But of course that was true. It had only been a play, and yet it had seemed so real to him. The woman stood, still dressed in her queenly costume, the sweep of her lithe and flawless skin visible through the diaphanous silver of the dress. Metallic glitter accented her cheekbones and the almond curves of her dark eyes. She bowed to him and looked away shyly. “My lord Rei. I feared you would not visit me. I feared I might have presumed too much…”

  “Oh no,” Rei said, dry-throated. “No. It is my honour…” He managed a smile. “My queen.”

  She looked up at him, smiling too, and it was magnificent. “Will you call me that, my lord? May I be your Jocasta?” She toyed with a thin drape of silk that curtained off one section of the apartments from another.

  He was drawn to her, crossing the white pile of the anteroom’s rich carpeting. “I would like that very much,” he husked.

  The woman – his Jocasta – threw a look towards his mechanoid. “And will she be joining us?”

  The open invitation in her reply made Rei blink. “Uh. No.” He turned and spoke tersely to the robot. “Wait here.”

  His Jocasta smiled again and vanished into the room beyond
. Grinning, Rei paused and unbuttoned his tunic. Glancing around, he saw a spray of fresh Saturnine roses still in their delivery wrappings; he tossed his jacket down next to them and then followed her into the bedchamber.

  JOCASTA DID NOT weep as Gergerra Rei went to his death.

  The queen enveloped him in long, firm arms as he stepped in, bringing her body up to meet his, pressing her breasts to his chest, moulding herself to him. The Mech-Lord’s dizzy smile was shaky and he gasped for air. His reactions were perfect; his flawless new love for Jocasta – for that was what it was, the most pure and exact rendition of neurochemical release – was the final product of weeks of carefully tailored pheromone bombardment. Tiny amounts of meta-dopamine and serotonin analogues had been introduced to Rei over time, the dosages light enough that even the ultra-sensitive scanners of his machine-aide would not detect them. The cumulative amounts had pushed him into something approaching obsession; and combined with a physiological template based on his taste in female bed partners, the trap had been set and laden with honey.

  Jocasta bent Rei’s head down to meet hers and pressed her lips to his. He shuddered as she did it, surrendering to her. It was so easy.

  Gergerra Rei had been involved in the creation of the Furious Abyss. Not in a way that could be proven without doubt in a court of law, not in a way that connected him through any direct means, but enough that the guardians of the Imperium were certain of it. Whatever his crime, perhaps the transfer of certain bribes, the diversion of materials and manpower, the granting of passage to ships that should have been denied, the Kapekan Mech-Lord had done the bidding of the traitor Horus Lupercal.

  The small weapon concealed between Jocasta’s tongue and the base of her mouth was pushed up, held in place by clenched teeth. A lick of the trigger plate was all that was needed to fire the kissgun. The needle-sized round penetrated the roof of Rei’s mouth and fragmented, allowing the threads of molecule-thin wire to explode outward. The threads whirled through the meat of his nasal cavity and up into his forebrain, shredding everything they touched. He lurched backwards and fell to the bed, blood and brain matter drooling from his lips and nostrils. Rei sank into the silken sheets, his corpse dragging them awry, revealing beneath the body of the actress whose face he had loved so ardently.

  His killer moved quickly, shrugging off the illusion of the dead woman even as the target’s corpse began to cool.

  Flesh shifted in small ways, the Jocasta-face slipping to become less defined, more like a sketch upon paper. The killer spat out the kissgun and discarded it, then drew sharp nails along the inside of a muscular thigh. A seam in the skin parted to allow a wet pocket to open, and long fingers drew out a spool and handle affair from within. The killer gently shook the device and padded towards the silk curtains. Rei had died silently but the machine-aide was clever enough to run a passive scan for heartbeats every few seconds; and if it detected one instead of two…

  The spool unwound into a thin taper of metal, which rolled out to the length of a metre. Once fully extended, the weapon became rigid; it was known as a memory sword, the alloy that comprised the blade capable of softening and hardening at the touch of a control.

  Koyne liked the memory sword, liked the gossamer weight of it. Koyne liked what it could do, as well. With a savage slash, the blade sliced down the thin silk curtain and the motion alerted the mechanoid – but not quickly enough. Koyne thrust the point into the aide’s chromium chest and through the armour casing around the biocortex module that served as the robot’s brain. It gave a faint squeal and became a rigid statue.

  Leaving the sword in place, Koyne took a moment to prepare for the next template. Koyne knew Gergerra Rei as well as the actress who played Queen Jocasta, and would adopt him just as easily. The Callidus despised the term “mimicry”. It was a poor word that could not encompass the wholeness with which a Callidus would become their disguises. To mimic something was to ape it, to pretend. Koyne became the disguise; Koyne inhabited each identity, even if it was for a short while.

  The Callidus was a sculpture that carved itself. Bio-implants and heavy doses of the shapeshifter drug polymorphine made skin, bone and muscle become supple and motile. Those who could not control the freedom it gave would collapse and turn into monstrosities, things like molten waxworks that were little more than heaps of bone and organs. Those with the gift of the self, though, those like Koyne, they could become anyone.

  Concentrating, Koyne shifted to neutrality, a grey, sexless form that was smooth and almost without features. The Callidus did not recall any birth-gender; that data was irrelevant when it was possible to be man or woman, young or old, even human or xenos if the will was there.

  It was then Koyne saw the flowers. They had been delivered by courier shortly before Rei had arrived. The assassin picked at the plants and noted the colour and number of the petals on the roses. Something like irritation crossed the killer’s no-face and Koyne paused at the vox-comm alcove in the far wall, inputting the correct sequence of encoding that the flower arrangement signified.

  The reply was almost immediate, meaning that there was a ship nearby. “Koyne?” A male voice, gruff with it.

  The Callidus immediately copied the tonality and replied. “You have broken my silent protocol.”

  “We’re here to help you conclude your mission as quickly as possible. You have new orders.”

  “I have no idea who you fools are, or what authority you may think you have. But you are compromising my operation and getting in my way.” Koyne grimaced. It was an ugly expression on the grey face. “I don’t require any help from you. Don’t interrupt me again.” The Callidus cut the channel and turned away. Such behaviour was totally unprofessional. The clade knew that once committed, an assassin’s cover should not be compromised except in the direst of circumstances – and someone’s impatience was certainly not reason enough.

  Koyne sat and concentrated on Gergerra Rei, on his voice, his gait, the full sense of the man. Skin puckered and moved, thickening. Implants slowly expanded to add mass and dimension. Moment by moment, the killer changed.

  But the task was still incomplete when the three Crusaders crashed in through the doorway, searching for a target.

  KELL GLARED AT the vox pickup before him. “Well. That was discourteous,” he muttered.

  “Arrogance is a noted character trait of many of the Clade Callidus,” Iota offered.

  The Garantine looked at Kell from across the Ultio’s cramped bridge. “What are we supposed to do? Take in a show? Have a little dinner?” The hulking killer growled in irritation. “Put me down on the station. I’ll bring the slippery changer freak back here in pieces.”

  Before Kell could reply, a sensor telltale on one of the consoles began to blink. Tariel motioned at the hololiths around his gauntlet and his expression grew grave. “The ship reads energy weapon discharges close to Koyne’s location.” He looked up, out past the nose of the ship to where the hull of Saros Station drifted nearby. “The Callidus may be in trouble.”

  “We should assist,” said Iota.

  “Koyne didn’t want any help,” Kell replied. “Made that very clear.”

  Tariel gestured at his display. “Auspex magno-scan shows multiple mechanoid units in the area. War robots, Vindicare. If the Callidus becomes trapped—”

  Kell held up a hand to silence him. “The Master of Assassins chose this one for good reason. Let’s consider this escape a test of skill, shall we? We’ll see how good this Koyne is.”

  The Garantine gave a rough snort of amusement.

  KOYNE MADE IT into the enclosed avenue outside the apartments with only minor injuries. The Callidus had been able to recover the memory sword from the steel corpse of the aide, realising far too late that there had to have been a failsafe backup biocortex inside the machine, one that broadcast an alert to the rest of Rei’s bodyguard maniple. Koyne did not doubt that other robots were likely vectoring to this location from the Mech-Lord’s ship, operating on a kill
-switch protocol that activated with the death of their master. The core directive would be simple – seek and destroy Gergerra Rei’s murderer.

  If only there had been more time. If Koyne could have completed the change into Rei, then it would have been enough to fool the auto-senses of the machines, long enough to reach the extraction point and exfiltrate. Rei and the actress would have been found days later, along with all the evidence that Koyne had prepared to set the scene for a murder-suicide shared by a pair of doomed lovers. It had a neatly theatrical tone that would have played well to Saros Station’s intelligentsia.

  All that was wasted now, though. Koyne limped away, pain burning from a glancing laser burn in the leg. The Callidus looked like an unfinished model in pinkish-grey clay, caught halfway between the neutral self-template and the form of the Mech-Lord.

  There was a cluster of revellers coming the other way, and Koyne made for them, fixing the nearest with a hard gaze and imagining their identity as the assassin’s own. The Callidus heard the heavy stomp of the spindly Crusader robots as they scrambled in pursuit, chattering to one another in machine code.

  The small crowd reacted to the new arrival, the merriment of the group dipping for a moment in collective confusion. Koyne pressed every grain of mental control into adopting the face of the civilian – or at least something like it – and swung into the mass of the group.

  The robots stood firm and blocked the avenue, guns up, the faceted eyes of their sensor modules sweeping the crowd. The revellers lost some of their good humour as the threat inherent in the maniple of machines became clear.

  Koyne knew what would happen next; it was inevitable, but at least the hesitation would buy the assassin time. The Callidus searched for and found a side corridor that led towards an observation cupola, and began pushing through the people towards it.

  This was the moment when the machines opened fire on the crowd. Unable to positively identify their target among the group of people, yet certain that their master’s murderer was in that mass, the Crusaders made the logical choice. Kill them all and leave no doubt.