Nemesis

by James Swallow

  There were tents arranged along the side of the old vessel, each lit from within by lamplight. “The people here are all from Dagonet?”

  “And other worlds on the axis,” said the man. “Some of them were here on pilgrimages in secret. Got trapped when the clanner nobles tipped everything up.”

  “Pilgrimage?” she repeated. “For what reason?” Tros just nodded again. “You’ll see.” He opened a heavy steel hatch for her and she went, inside.

  THE OLD SHIP had once been a freighter, perhaps a civic transport belonging to some branch of the colonial Administratum; now all that stood was the gutted shell, the sandblasted hull and the corroded metal frames of the decks. Inside, the skeleton of the vessel had been repurposed with new walls made of dry stone or steel from the hulls of cargo containers. The door closed with a solid thump behind Soalm and took the brunt of the wind with it. Only a tendril of chill air reached through to paw at the small drifts of sand in the entryway.

  “Child.” Sinope approached, and she had tears in her eyes. “Oh, child, you came. Throne bless you.”

  “I… owed it,” said the Venenum. “I had to.”

  Sinope smiled briefly. “I never doubted you would. And I know I have asked a lot from you to do this. I have put you at risk.”

  “I was on a mission I did not believe in,” she replied. “You asked me to take up another, for something I do believe in. It was no choice at all.”

  The noblewoman took her hand. “Your comrades will not see it the same way. They may disown you.”

  “Likely,” Soalm replied. “But I lost what I thought of as my family a long time ago. Since then, the only kinship I have had has been with others who know the God-Emperor as we do.”

  “We are your family now,” said Sinope. “All of us.” Soalm nodded at the tightness of the old woman’s words, and she felt lifted. “Yes, you are.” But then the moment of brightness faded as her thoughts returned to the content of the voclocket message. She retrieved the device and pressed it back into Sinope’s thin, wrinkled hands. “How can I help you?”

  “Come.” She was beckoned deeper into the shadowed wreck. “Things will become clearer.”

  The beached ship, like the camp beyond it, was filled with people, and Soalm saw the same expression in all of them; a peculiar mingling of fear and hope. With slow alarm, she began to understand that it was directed towards her.

  “Tros said you have refugees from all over Dagonet here. And from other worlds as well.”

  Sinope nodded as she walked. “I hope… I pray that there are other gatherings hiding in the wilds. It would be so sad to admit that we are all that is left.”

  “But there must be hundreds of people here alone.”

  Another nod. “Four hundred sixteen, at last count. Mostly Dagoneti, but a handful of visitors from other worlds in the Taebian Stars.” She sighed. “They came so far and sacrificed so much… And now they will never return home.”

  “Help is coming.” Soalm had said the lie so many times over the past few weeks that it had become automatic.

  The noblewoman stopped and gave her a look that cut right through the falsehood. “We both know that is not true. The God-Emperor is embattled and His continued existence is far more important than any one of us.” She gestured around. “If we must perish so that He may save the galaxy, that is a price we will gladly pay. We will meet again at His right hand.”

  Sinope’s quiet zeal washed over her. Soalm took a second to find her voice again. “How long has the… the Theoge been here?”

  “Before I was born, generations before,” said the old woman, continuing on. “Before the age of the Great Crusade, even. It is said that when the God-Emperor walked the turbulent Earth, even then there were those who secretly worshipped Him. When He came to the stars, that belief came with Him. And then there was the Lectitio Divinitatus, the book that gave form to those beliefs. The holy word!”

  “Is it true that it was written by one of the God-Emperor’s own sons?”

  “I do not know, child. All we can be sure of is that it is the Imperial truth.” She smiled again. “I grew up with that knowledge. For a long time, we and others like us lived isolated lives, ignored at best, decried at worst. We who believed were thought to be deluded fools.”

  Soalm looked around. “These people don’t look like fools to me.”

  “Indeed. Our numbers have started to swell, and not just here. Groups of believers all across the galaxy are coming together. Our faith knows no boundaries, from the lowliest hiver child to men who walk the palaces of Terra itself.” She paused, thinking. “The darkness sown by the Warmaster has brought many to our fold. In the wake of his insurrection there have been horrors and miracles alike. This is our time of testing, of that I have no doubt. Our creed is in the ascendant, dear child. The day will come when all the stars bend their knee to Holy Terra and the God-Emperor’s glory.”

  “But not yet,” she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice. “Not today.”

  Sinope touched her arm. “Have faith. We are part of something larger than ourselves. As long as our belief survives, then we do also.”

  “The people from the other worlds,” Soalm pressed. “Tros said they were here on a pilgrimage. I don’t understand that.”

  Sinope did not reply. They followed a patched metal staircase into the lower levels of the old ship, treading with care to avoid broken spars and fallen stanchions. Down here the stink of rust and dry earth was heavy and cloying. After a few metres, they came to a thickly walled compartment, armoured with layers of steel and ceramite. Four men, each armed with heavy-calibre weapons, were crowded around the only hatchway that led inside. They had hard eyes and the solid, dense builds of humans from heavy-gravity worlds. The assassin knew immediately that they were, to a man, career soldiers of long and lethal experience.

  Each of them gave a respectful bow as Sinope came into the light cast from the lumes overhead, doffing their caps to the old woman. Soalm watched her go to each in turn and talk with them as if they were old friends. She seemed tiny and fragile next to the soldiers, and yet it was clear that they hung on her every word and gesture, like a troupe of devoted sons. Her smiles became theirs. Sinope gestured to her. “Gentlemen, this is Jenniker.”

  “She’s the one?” said the tallest of the four, a heavy stubber at rest in his hands.

  Sinope nodded. “You have all served the Theoge so selflessly,” she told them, “and your duty is almost done. Jenniker will take this great burden from you.”

  The tall man gave a regretful nod and then snapped his fingers at another of the four. The second soldier worked the thick wheel in the centre of the hatch, and with a squeal of rusted metal, he opened the door to the cargo compartment.

  Sinope advanced inside and Soalm followed warily behind her. It was gloomy and warm, and there was a peculiar stillness in the air that prickled her bare skin. The hatch closed with a crunch.

  “Dagonet is going to fall,” said the noblewoman, soft and sorrowful. “Death is close at hand. The God-Emperor’s love will preserve our souls but the ending of our flesh has already been written. He cannot save us.”

  Soalm wanted to say something, to give out a denial, but nothing would come.

  “He knows this. That is why, in His infinite wisdom, the Master of Mankind had you brought to us in His stead, Jenniker Soalm.”

  “No,” she managed, her heart racing. “I am here in service to a lie! To perish for a meaningless cause! I have not even been spared the grace to have a truth to die for!”

  Sinope came to her and embraced the assassin. “Oh, dear child. You are mistaken. He sent you to us because you are the only one who can do what we cannot. The God-Emperor turned your destiny to cross my path. You are here to protect something most precious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The noblewoman stepped away and moved to a small metal chest. She worked a control pad on the surface – a combination of bio-sensor bloodlocks and security lay
ers – and Soalm stepped closer to get a better look. She knew the design; the chest was of advanced Martian manufacture, a highly secure transport capsule fitted with its own internal support fields, capable of long-term survival in a vacuum, even atmospheric re-entry. It was very much out of place here.

  The chest opened in a gust of gas, and inside Soalm saw the shimmer of a stasis envelope. Within the ephemeral sphere of slowed time was a book of the most ornate, fantastic design, and it seemed to radiate the very power of history from its open pages.

  “See,” said Sinope, bowing deeply to the tome. “Look, child, and see the touch of His hand.”

  Soalm’s gaze misted as tears pricked her eyes. Before her, gold and silver and purple illuminated a stark page of vellum. On it, the portrait of the angelic might of the God-Emperor standing over a kneeling man in the finery of a rogue trader. In the trader’s hands this book; and falling from his Master’s palm, the shimmering droplet of crimson vitae that rested on the recto page. The scarlet liquid glittered like a flawless ruby, frozen in that distant past, as bright and as new as it had been the second it fell.

  “Emperor’s blood…” she whispered.

  Jenniker Soalm sank to her knees in unrestrained awe, bowing her head to the Warrant of Trade of the Clan Eurotas.

  FOURTEEN

  Arrival

  Let Me See You

  Kill Shot

  THE DAWN WAS close as the Dove-class shuttle dropped from the cold, black sky on its extended aerofoils. The craft made an elongated S-turn and came in from over the wastelands to make a running touchdown on the only runway that was still intact. The landing wheels kicked up spurts of rock dust and sparks as the Yelene’s auxiliary slowed to a shuddering halt, the wings angling to catch the air and bleed off its momentum.

  The shuttle was the only source of illumination out among the shadows of Dagonet’s star-port, the running lights casting a pool of white across the cracked, ash-smeared ferrocrete. The surroundings had a slick sheen to them; the rains had only ceased a few hours ago.

  No one came out from the dark, lightless buildings to examine the new arrivals; if anyone was still in there, then they were staying silent, hoping that the world would ignore them.

  In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. Following the operative’s orders, they had made no attempt to contact Dagonet port control on their way down, but both men had expected to be challenged by the local PDF at least once for entering their airspace unannounced.

  There had been nothing. When the Yelene slipped into orbit, no voices had been raised to them. The skies over Dagonet were choked with debris and the remnants of recent conflict. It had tested the skills of the cutter’s bridge crew to keep the vessel from colliding with some of the larger fragments, the husks of gutted space stations or the hulls of dead system cruisers still burning with plasma fires. What craft they had spotted that were intact, the operative ordered them to give a wide berth.

  Yelene came as close as she dared to Dagonet and then released the shuttle. On the way down the flight crew saw the devastation. Places where the map-logs said there should have been cities were smoke-wreathed craters glowing with the aftershock of nuclear detonations; other settlements had simply been abandoned. Even here, just over the ridge from the capital itself, the planet was silent, as if it were holding its breath.

  “You saw the destruction,” said the pilot, watching his colleague skim across the vox channels. “All that dust and ash in the atmosphere could attenuate signal traffic. Either that or they’ve shut down all broadcast communications planetwide.”

  The other man nodded absently. “Wired comm is more secure. They could be using telegraphies instead.”

  Before the pilot could answer, the hatch behind them opened and the man called Hyssos filled the doorway. “Douse the lights,” he ordered. “Don’t draw more attention than we need to.”

  “Aye, sir.” The co-pilot did as he was told, and the illumination outside died.

  The pilot studied the operative. He had heard the stories about Hyssos. They had said he was a hard man, hard but fair, not a martinet like some commanders the pilot had served with. He found it difficult to square that description with his passenger, though. All through the voyage from the Eurotas flotilla to the planet, Hyssos had been withdrawn and frosty, terse and unforgiving when he did take the time to bother speaking to someone. “How do you wish to proceed, operative?”

  “Drop the cargo lift,” came the reply.

  Again, the co-pilot did this with a nod. The elevator-hatch in the belly of the shuttle extended down to the runway; cradled on it was a swift jetbike, fuelled and ready to fly.

  “A question,” said Hyssos, as he turned this way and that, studying the interior of the shuttle cockpit. “This craft has a cogitator core aboard. Is it capable of taking us to orbit on its own?”

  “Aye,” said the pilot, uncertain of where the question was leading. “It’s not recommended, but it can be done in an emergency.”

  “What sort of emergency?”

  “Well,” began the co-pilot, looking up, “if the crew are incapacitated, or—”

  “Dead?”

  Hyssos’ hands shot out, the fingers coming together to form points, each one piercing the soft flesh of the men’s necks. Neither had the chance to scream; instead they made awkward gasping gurgles as their throats were penetrated.

  Blood ran in thick streams from their wounds, and Hyssos grimaced, turning their heads away so the fluid would not mark his tunic. Both men died watching their own vitae spurt across the control panels and the inside of the canopy windows.

  SPEAR STOOD FOR a while with his hands inside the meat of the men’s throats, feeling the tingle of the tiny mouths formed at the ends of his fingertips by the daemonskin, as they lapped at the rich bounty of blood. The proxy flesh absorbed the liquid, the rest of it dribbling out across the grating of the deck plates beneath the crew chairs.

  Then, convinced that the daemonskin was in quietus once more, Spear moved to a fresher cubicle to clean himself off before venturing down to the open cargo bay. He decided not to bother with a breather mask or goggles, and eased himself into the jetbike’s saddle. The small flyer was a thickset, heavy block of machined steel, spiked with winglets and stabilators that jutted out at every angle. It responded to his weight by triggering the drive turbine, running it up to idle.

  Spear leaned forward, glancing down at a cowled display pane that showed a map of the local zone. A string of waypoint indicators led from the star-port out into the wastelands, following the line of what was once a shipping canal but now a dry bed of dusty earth. The secret destination the Void Baron had given him blinked blue at the end of the line; an old waystation dock abandoned after the last round of climate shifts. The Warrant was there, held in trust.

  The murderer laughed at the pulse of anticipation in his limbs, and grasped the throttle bar, sending the turbine howling.

  HE HAD TO give credit to the infocyte; the location that Tariel had selected for the hide was a good one, high up inside an empty water tower on the roof of a tenement block a kilometre and a half from the plaza. It was for this very reason that Kell rejected it and sought out another. Not because he did not trust the Vanus, but because two men knowing where he would fire from was a geometrically larger risk than one man knowing. If Tariel was captured and interrogated, he could not reveal what he had not been told.

  And then there was the matter of professional pride. The water tower was too obvious a locale to make the hide. It was too… easy, and if Kell thought so, then any officer of the PDF down in the plaza might think the same, make a judgement and have counter-snipers put in place.

  The dawn was coming up as the Vindicare found his spot. Another tenement block, but this one was removed half the distance again from the marble mall outside the Governor’s halls. From what Kell could determine, it seemed as if the building had been struck two-thirds of the way up by a plummeting aerofighter. The upper floo
rs of the narrow tower were blackened from the fires that had broken out in the wake of the impact, and on the way up, Kell had to navigate past blockades of fallen masonry mixed with wing sections and ragged chunks of fuselage. He came across the tail of the aircraft embedded in an elevator shaft, like the feathers of a thrown dart buried in a target.

  Where it had impacted, a chunk of walls and floors was missing, as if something had taken a bite out of the building. Kell skirted the yawning gap that opened out to a drop of some fifty or more storeys and continued his climb. The fire-damaged levels stank of seared plastic and burned flesh, but the thick, sticky ash that coated every surface was dull and non-reflective – an ideal backdrop to deaden Kell’s sensor profile still further. He found the best spot in a room that had once been a communal laundry, and arranged his cameoline cloak between the heat-distorted frames of two chairs. Combined with the deadening qualities of his synskin stealthsuit, the marksman would be virtually invisible.

  He tapped a pad on the palm of his glove with his thumb. An encrypted burst transmitter in his gear vest sent a signal lasting less than a picosecond. After a moment, he got a similar message in return that highlighted the first of a series of icons on his visor. Tariel was reporting in, standing by at his kill-point somewhere out in the towers of the western business district. This was followed by a ready-sign from Koyne, and then another from the Garantine.

  The two remaining icons stayed dark. Without Iota, they had to do without telepathic cover; if the Sons of Horus decided to deploy a psyker, they would have no warning of it… but then the Warmaster’s Legion had never relied on such things before and the Assassinorum had no intelligence they would do so today. It was a risk Kell was willing to take.

  And Soalm… Jenniker. The purpose of a Venenum poisoner was as part of the original exit strategy for the Execution Force. The detonation of several short-duration hypertoxin charges would sow confusion among the human populace of the city and clog the highways with panicking civilians, restricting the movements of the Astartes. But now they would do without that – and Kell felt conflicted about it. He was almost pleased she was not here to be a part of this, that she would not be at risk if something went wrong.