Nemesis

by James Swallow

  The only sound is the fall of the headless corpse as it crashes to the ground, blood jetting across the white marble and the Warmaster’s shining mantle.

  FIFTEEN

  Rapture

  Aftershock

  Retribution

  THERE WAS SOMETHING exhilarating about taking kills in this fashion.

  The many murders that lay at Spear’s feet were usually silent, intimate affairs. Just the killer and the victim, together in a dance that connected them both in a way far more real, far more honest than any other relationship. No one was really naked until the moment of their death.

  But this; Spear had never killed more than three people at once because the need had never arisen. Now he was giddy with the blood-rush, wondering why he had never done this before. The joy of the frenzy was all-consuming and it was glorious.

  Throwing off all pretence at stealth and subterfuge was liberating in its own way. He was being truthful, baring himself for everyone to see; and they ran screaming when they witnessed it.

  Through the low howl of the sandstorm, the refugees were crying out and scattering. He sprinted after them, hooting with laughter.

  He had never been so open. Even as a child, he had hidden himself away, afraid of what he was. And then when the women in gold and silver came for him aboard their Black Ship, he concealed himself still deeper. Even the men with eyes of metal and glass who had cut upon him, plumbing the depths of his anomalous, deviant mind, even they had not seen this face of him.

  Spear was a whirling torrent of claws and talons, teeth and horns, the daemonskin blurring as it shifted and reformed itself to end the life of each victim in a new and brutal way. Gasping mouths opened up all over him where vitae spattered his bare flesh, drinking it in.

  The last of the soldiers was shooting at him, and he felt bursts of burning pain as thick, high-calibre shots impacted his back and legs. The daemonskin screeched as it shunted away the majority of the impact force, preventing the rounds from ever penetrating Spear’s actual flesh. He spun on his heel, pivoting like a dancer, flipping over though the air. The other soldiers were lying in pools of their own fluids, the sand drinking in their last where heads had been torn open, hearts crashed. Spear skipped over the soldier’s comrades and ignored the burn of a shot that caressed his face. He came close and angled on one leg, bringing his other foot up in a speeding black arc. Talons flicked out and the impact point was the man’s nasal cavity. Bone splintered with a wet crunch, jagged fragments entering his brain like daggers.

  How many dead was that? In the race and chase of it, the murderer had lost count.

  Then he saw the witch hiding her face behind a steel skull and he didn’t care about that anymore. The thin, wiry female shot a fan of needles at him and he dodged most of them, a handful biting into the daemonflesh before the skin puckered and vomited them back out into the dust. This was just a delaying tactic, though. He felt the tremor moving through the warp, the alien monster sheathing his body shivering and reacting in disgust at the proximity of her.

  Ill light gathered around the assassin’s aura, sucked into the void within her through the fabric of her stealthsuit. The wind seemed to die off around the waif, as if she were generating a globe of nothingness that sound itself could not enter. The construct of lenses and spines emerging from the side of the grinning steel skull-helm crackled with power, and the perturbed air bowed like water ripples.

  A black stream of negative energy cascaded from the weapon and seared Spear as he threw up his hands to block it. The impact was immense, and he screamed with a pain unlike any he had ever felt before. The daemonskin was actually burning in places, weeping yellowish rivulets of pus where it blistered.

  All his amusement perished in that second; this was no game. The psyker girl was more deadly than he had given her credit for. More than just a pariah, she was… She was in a small way like him. But where Spear’s abilities were inherent to the twisted, warp-changed structure of his soul, the girl was only a pale copy, a half-measure. She needed the augmentation of the helmet-weapon just to come close to his perfection.

  Spear felt affronted by the idea that something could approach the power of his murdergift through mechanical means. He would kill the girl for her pretence.

  The daemonskin wanted him to fall back, to retreat and take vital moments to heal; he ignored the moaning of it and did the opposite. Spear launched himself at the psyker, even as he fell into the nimbus of soul-shrivelling cold all about her. He immediately felt his own power being dragged out of him, the pain so bright and shining it was as if she were tearing the arteries from his flesh.

  For a brief moment, Spear realised he was experiencing some degree of what it was like for a psyker to die at his hand; this must have been what Perrig had felt as she transformed into ashes.

  He lashed out before the undertow could pull him in. Claws like razors split the air in a shimmering arc and sliced across the armoured fabric and the flesh of the waif girl’s throat. It was not enough to immediately kill her, but it was enough to open a vein.

  She clapped a hand to the wound to staunch it, but not quick enough to stop an arc of liquid red jetting into the air. Spear opened his mouth and caught it in the face, laughing again as she stumbled away, choking.

  INSIDE IOTA’S HELMET, blood was pooling around her mouth and neck, issuing in streams from her ears, her nostrils. Her vision was swimming in crimson as tiny capillaries burst open inside her eyes, and she wept red.

  The animus speculum worked to recharge itself for a second blast of power. Iota had made a mistake and fired the first discharge too soon, without letting it build to maximum lethality. Her error had been to underestimate the potentiality of this… thing.

  She had no frame of reference for what she was facing. At first thought she had imagined he was another assassin, sent against her in some power play to undo the works of the Execution Force. She could not see the logic in such a thing, but then the clades had often pursued strange vendettas against one another to assuage trivial slights and insults; these things happened as long as there was no evidence of them and more importantly, no ill-effects to the greater mission of the Officio Assassinorum.

  But this killer was something beyond her experience. That much was certain. At the very least, the glancing hit from the animus’ beam should have crippled him. Iota turned the readings of her aura-sensor across him and what she saw there was shocking.

  Impossibly, his psionic signature was changing, transforming. The sinuous nimbus of ghost colours spilled from the peculiar flesh-matter shrouding his body, and with a sudden leap of understanding, Iota realised she was seeing into a hazy mirror of the warp itself; this being was not one life but two, and between them gossamer threads of telepathic energy sewed them both into the inchoate power of the immaterium. Suddenly, she understood how he had been able to resist the animus blast. The energy, so lethal in the real world, was no more than a drop of water in a vast ocean within the realms of warp space. This killer was connected to the ethereal in a way that she could never be, bleeding out the impact of the blast into the warp where it could dissipate harmlessly.

  The shifting aura darkened and became ink black. This Iota had seen before; it was the shape of her own psychic imprint. He was mirroring her, and even as she watched it happen, Iota felt the gravitational drag on her own power as it was drawn inexorably towards the shifting, changing murderer.

  He was like her, and unlike as well. Where the clever mechanisms of the animus speculum sucked in psionic potentiality and returned it as lethal discharge, this man… this freakish aberration… he could do the same alone.

  It was the blood that let him do it. Her blood, ingested, subsumed, absorbed.

  Iota screamed; for the first time in her life, she really, truly screamed, knowing the blackest depths of terror. The fires in her mind churned, and she released them. He laughed as they rolled off him and reverberated back across space-time.

  Iota’s mouth fill
ed with ash, and her cries were silenced.

  THE MOMENT SEEMED to stretch on into infinity; there was no noise across Liberation Plaza, not even the sound of an indrawn breath. It was as if a sudden vacuum had drawn all energy and emotion from the space. It was the sheer unwillingness to believe what had just occurred that made all of Dagonet pause.

  In the next second, the brittle instant shattered like glass and the crowds were in turmoil, the twin flood-heads of sorrow and fury breaking open at once. Chaos exploded as the people at the front of the crowd barriers surged forwards and collapsed the metal panels, moving in a slow wave towards the ragged line of shocked clanner soldiers. Some of the troops had their guns drawn; others let themselves be swallowed up by the oncoming swell, deadened by the trauma of what they had witnessed.

  On an impulse the Callidus could not quantify, Koyne leapt from the base of the pillar and ran behind the line of crackling force-wall emitters. No one blocked the way. The shock was palpable here, thick in the air like smoke.

  The hulking Astartes were in a combat wheel around the corpse of their commander, weapons panning right and left, looking for a target. Their discipline was admirable, Koyne thought. Lesser beings, ordinary men, would have given in to the anger they had to be feeling without pause – but the Callidus did not doubt that would soon come.

  One of them shoved another of his number out of the way, tearing off his helmet with a twist of his hand. For a fraction of a second Koyne saw real emotion in the warrior’s flinty aspect, pain and anguish so deep that it could only come from a brother, a kinsman. The Astartes had a scarred face, and this close to him, the assassin could see he bore the rank insignia of a brother-sergeant of the 13th Company.

  That seemed wrong; according to intelligence on the Sons of Horus, their primarch always travelled with an honour guard of officers, a group known as the Mournival.

  “Dead,” said one of the other Astartes, his voice tense and distant. “Killed by cowards…”

  Koyne came as close as the Callidus dared, standing near a pair of worried-looking PDF majors who couldn’t decide if they should go to the side of Nicran and the other nobles, or wait for the Astartes to give them orders.

  The sergeant bent down over the corpse and did something Koyne could not see. When he stood up once more, he was holding a gauntlet in his hand; but not a gauntlet, no. It was a master-crafted augmetic, a machine replacement for a forearm lost in battle. He had removed it from the corpse, claiming it as a relic.

  But Horus does not—

  “My captain,” rumbled the sergeant, hefting his bolt-gun with a sorrowful nod. “My captain…”

  Koyne’s heart turned to a cold stone in his chest, and movement caught his eye as Governor Nicran pushed away from the rest of the nobles and started down the stairs towards the Astartes. The noise of the crowd was getting louder, and the Callidus had to strain to hear as the sergeant spoke into the vox pickup in the neck ring of his breast plate.

  “This is Korda,” he snarled, his ire building. “Location is not, repeat not secure. We have been fired upon. Brother-Captain Sedirae… has been killed.”

  Sedirae. The Callidus knew the name, the commander of the 13th Company. But that was impossible. The warrior Kell had shot wore the mantle, the unique robe belonging to the primarch himself…

  “Horus?” Nicran was calling, tears running down his face as he came closer. “Oh, for the Stars, no! Not the Warmaster, please!”

  “Orders?” said Korda, ignoring the babbling nobleman. Koyne could not hear the reply transmitted to the sergeant’s ear-bead, but the shift in set of the Space Marine’s jaw told the tale of exactly what had been said. With a jolt of fear, the Callidus turned and broke away, sprinting down the steps towards the crowds.

  Koyne heard the peal of Nicran’s voice over the rush of the mob and turned in mid-run. The Governor was shaking his hands, wracked with sobs in front of the impassive, grey-armoured Astartes. His words were lost, but he was doubtless begging or pleading to Korda, vainly making justifications.

  With a small movement, the warrior raised the barrel of his bolter and shot the Governor at point-blank range, blasting his body apart. As one, Korda’s men followed his example, turning their guns towards the nobles and executing them.

  Over the bass chatter of bolt-fire, the Astartes roared out an order, and it cut through the bedlam like a knife.

  “Burn this city!” he shouted.

  SOALM STUMBLED THROUGH the butchery clutching the bact-gun and dragging the chest behind her. Sinope was with her, trying to support the other end of the container as best she could. The noblewoman’s men were all gone.

  The dust-filled air was heavy with the sound of weapons-fire and pain, and there seemed nowhere they could turn that took them away from it.

  Soalm stumbled against a shack just as a wave of ephemeral terror radiated out and caught her in its wake. The air turned thick and greasy with the spoor of psionic discharge – and then she heard Iota’s echoing screams, amplified through the vocoder of the Culexus’ helmet.

  “Holy Terra…” whispered the old woman, It could only have been Iota’s death-cry; no other voice could carry such dreadful emotion in it.

  Soalm turned towards the sound and saw the ending of her happen. Particles of sickly energy were liberated from Iota’s twitching body in a rush of light and noise, and then her stealthsuit collapsed, the silver-steel helmet falling away. Clogged puffs of grey cinders spilled from the black uniform as it crumpled into a heap, the body that had filled it disintegrated in a heartbeat. The skull-faced helmet rolled to a halt, spilling more dark ash into the churning winds.

  “Jenniker!” Sinope cried out her name as a shape blurred towards them. The Venenum felt a massive impact against her and she was thrown aside, losing her grip on the chest. She managed to fire two quick bursts from the bact-gun as she tumbled, rewarded with the pop and hiss of acids striking flesh.

  Iota’s killer loomed out of the buzzing sands, back-lit by the harsh light of the sunrise. She was reaching for a toxin corde as he punched her savagely, disarming her with the force of the blow. The bact-gun tumbled away and was lost. Soalm felt a jagged slash of pain in her chest as her ribs snapped. Falling to the ground, she tried to retch, and found herself in a damp patch of earth, mud formed from sand and spilled arterial blood. A clawed foot swept in and struck her where she had fallen, and another bone snapped. Soalm looked up, hearing laughter.

  The writhing shadow loomed, bending towards her; then a length of iron pipe came from nowhere and slammed into the killer’s spine, drawing an explosive hiss of fury. Soalm moved, agony racing through her, trying desperately to retreat.

  Sinope, her face lit with righteous fury, drew back her improvised weapon and hit him again, the old woman putting every moment of force she could muster into the blow. “For the God-Emperor!” she bellowed.

  The killer did not allow her a third strike, however. He arrested the fall of the iron pipe and held it in place, his other hand snapping out to grasp Sinope’s thin, bird-like neck and pull her off her feet. With a vicious shove, he twisted his grip on the pipe and used it to run the noblewoman through; then he discarded her and strode away.

  He came upon the chest where it had fallen, and Soalm gave a weak cry as the murderer’s inky, liquid flesh streamed into the locking mechanism and broke it open from within. The ancient book fell into the sand, and Soalm saw the stasis shell around it sputter out and die.

  “No,” she croaked. “You cannot… You cannot take it…”

  The killer crouched and picked up the Warrant, flipping through the aged pages with careless speed, the paper fracturing and tearing. “No?” he said, without turning to her. “Who is going to stop me?”

  He reached the last page and released a booming, hateful laugh. Soalm felt a lash of sympathetic pain as he ripped the leaf from the binding of the priceless Eurotas relic and cupped the yellowed vellum in his hand. For a moment, she thought she saw the shimmer of liquid on th
e page, catching the rays of the sunlight.

  Then, as if it were some delicacy he was sampling at a banquet, the killer tipped back his head and opened his mouth, his forked jaws opening like an obscene blossom. A dozen more tiny fanged maws opened across his cheeks and neck as he tipped up the paper and swallowed the blood of the God-Emperor:

  He began to scream and howl, and the riot of malformation in his flesh became a storm of writhing fronds, tenticular forms, gnashing mouths. His body lost control over itself, the red-black skin warping and distending into shapes that were nauseating and vile.

  Weeping in her agony and her failure, Soalm dragged herself away towards Tros’ skimmer, desperate to flee before the killer’s rapture came to its end.

  KELL WAS ALREADY on his way out even as the echo of his gunshot died around him. He drew up the cameoline cloak across his shoulders, pulling the Exitus longrifle over one arm. He set the timers on the emplaced explosives to ignite once he was clear. The Vindicare paused to add an extra krak charge to a support pillar in the middle of the laundry room; when it detonated, it would collapse the ceiling above and with luck, obliterate what remained intact of the hab-tower’s gutted upper levels. He had left no trace behind him, but it paid to be thorough.

  Kell heard the sounds rising up from the streets as he dropped down to the tier below, moving towards his exit point. Disorder would spread like wildfire in the wake of the assassination; the Execution Force had to get beyond the city perimeter before the pandemonium caught up to them.

  He went to the edge of the shattered flooring and looked out. He could see people beneath him, the tiny dots of figures running in the avenues. Kell kicked aside a piece of fallen masonry and recovered his descent gear.

  The vox link in his spy mask crackled as the seldom-used general channel was keyed.

  Kell froze. Only the members of the team knew the frequency, and all of them knew that the channel was a mechanism of last resort. Even though it was heavily encrypted, it lacked the untraceable facility of the burst transmitters; the fact that one of the team was using it now meant something had gone very, very wrong.