Nemesis

by James Swallow

  And there was much fear on Iesta Veracrux these days. Here out in the ranges of the Ultima Segmentum, across the span of the galaxy from the Throne of Terra, the planet and its people felt distant and unprotected while wars were being fought, lines of battle drawn over maps their home world was too insignificant to grace. The Emperor and his council seemed so far away, and the oncoming storm of the insurrection churning sightless and unseen in the nearby stars laid a pall of creeping apprehension over everything. In every shadowed corner, people saw the ghosts of the unknown.

  They were afraid; and people who were afraid easily became people who were angry, directing their terror outwards against any slight, real or imagined. Today’s killing was only the newest of many that had rolled across Iesta Veracrux in recent months; murders spawned from trivialities, suicides, panicked attacks on illusory threats. While life went on as it ever did, beneath the surface there lay a black mood infecting the whole populace, even as they pretended it did not exist. Had Jaared Norte become a victim of this as well? Yosef thought it likely.

  They moved around a tall corner of containers and into a small courtyard formed by lines of crates. Overhead, another cargo ballute drifted slowly past, for a moment casting a broad oval shadow across the proceedings. A handful of other jagers were at work conducting fingertip sweeps of the location, a couple from the documentary office working complex forensic picters and sense-nets, another talking into a bulky wireless with a tall whip antenna. Skelta exchanged looks with one of the docos, and she gave him a rueful nod in return. Behind them all, there was a narrow but high storage shed with its doors splayed wide open. The reeve immediately spotted the patches of brown staining the metal doors.

  He frowned, looking around at the identical rust-coloured greatcoats and peaked caps of the Sentine officers. “The Arbites are inside?” Yosef nodded towards the shed.

  Skelta gave a derisive sniff. “The Arbites are not here, sir. Called it in, as per the regulations. Lord Marshal’s office was unavailable. Asked to be kept informed, though.”

  “I’ll bet they did.” Yosef grimaced. For all the grand words and high ideals spouted by the Adeptus Arbites, at least on Iesta Veracrux that particular branch of the Adeptus Terra was less interested in the policing of the planet than they were in being seen to be interested in it. The officers of the Sentine had been the lawmen and wardens of the Iestan system since the days of the colony’s founding in the First Establishment, and the installation of an office of the Arbites here during the Great Crusade had done little to change that state of affairs. The Lord Marshal and his staff seemed more than happy to remain in their imposing tower and allow the Sentine to function as they always had, handling all the “local” matters. Quite what the Arbites considered to be other than local had never, in twenty years of service, been made clear to Yosef Sabrat. The politics of the whole thing seemed to orbit at a level far beyond the reeve’s understanding.

  He glanced at Skelta. “Do you have a read on the murder weapon?”

  Skelta glanced at the doco officer again, as if asking permission. “Not exactly. Bladed weapon, probably. For starters. There might have been, uh, other tools used.” What little colour there was on the jager’s face seemed to ebb away and he swallowed hard.

  Yosef stopped on the threshold of the shed. A slaughterhouse stink of blood and faeces hit him hard and his nostrils twitched. “Witnesses?” he added.

  Skelta pointed upwards, towards a spotlight tower. “There are security imagers on the lighting stands, but they didn’t get anything. Angle was too shallow for the optics to pick up a likeness.”

  The reeve filed that information away; whoever had made the kill knew the layout of the airdocks, then. “Canvass every other imager in a half-kilometre radius, pull the memory coils and have some of the recruits sift them. We might get lucky.” He took a long inhalation, careful to breathe through his mouth. “Let’s see this, then.”

  He went in, and Skelta hesitantly followed a few steps behind. Inside, the shed was gloomy, lit only by patches of watery sunshine coming in by degrees through low windows and the hard-edged glares of humming portable arc lamps. On splayed tripod legs, a quad of gangly field emitters stood at the corners of an ill-defined square, a faint yellow glow connecting each to its neighbours. The permeable energy membrane allowed objects above a certain mass or kinetic energy to pass through unhindered, but kept particulates and other micro-scale matter in situ to aid with on-site forensics.

  Yosef’s brow creased in a frown as he approached the field; the area of open, shadowed floor between the emitters seemed at first glance to be empty. He stepped through the barrier and the stench in the air intensified. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Skelta had not followed him through, instead remaining outside the line at stiff attention, his gaze directed anywhere but at the scene of the crime.

  The stone floor was awash in dark arterial blood, and there were fleshy shapes scattered randomly in the shallow little sea of rippling crimson. Ropes of what had to be intestine, shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid. An array of butcher slab remnants, discarded not in haste but with disinterest.

  The reeve felt disgust and confusion in equal measure, but he reined them in and let his sharp eye take the lead. He looked for patterns and impressions. It had been done with care and precision, this. No crime of passion, no murder of opportunity. Cool, calm and without fear of discovery. Yosef peered into the shadows, the first questions forming in his mind.

  How had this been done and kept silent enough that no one had heard it? With so much blood shed, had the killer been tainted, left a trace? And where…? Where was…?

  Yosef stopped short and blinked. The pool of blood was in gentle motion, small swells crossing it back and forth. He heard tiny hollow splashes here and there. “The remains…” he began, glancing back at Skelta. “There’s not enough for a corpse. Where’s Norte’s body?”

  The jager had one hand to his mouth, and with the other he gingerly pointed upwards. Yosef raised his eyes to the roof and there he found the rest of Jaared Norte.

  The drivesman’s body had been opened in a manner that the reeve had only seen in use by morticians – or rather, in a manner that was an extreme variation on the cuts used for a post-mortem examination. Iron impact rods, the kind of heavy bolts used by building labourers to secure construction work to sheer cliff sides, had been used to nail Norte to the ceiling of the shed. One through each ankle, another through the meat of the forearms, the limbs splayed out in an X-shaped stance. Then, slices across the torso at oblique angles had enabled the killer to peel back the epidermis of the torso, the neck and face. These cuts created pennants of skin that each came to a point; one to the right and to the left, another down across the groin and the last torn up over the bloody grinning mess of the skull to rise over the dead man’s head. Four more impact rods secured the tips of these wet rags of meat in place. From the opened confines of the man’s body, loops of dislodged muscle and broken spars of bone pointed down towards the blood pool, weeping fluid.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” managed Skelta, his voice thick with revulsion. “It’s horrific.”

  Yosef’s first thought was of a sculpture, of an artwork. Against the dark metal plates of the shed’s roof, the drivesman had been made into a star with eight points.

  “I don’t know,” whispered the reeve.

  TWO

  The Shrouds

  Masked

  A Common Blade

  THE IMPERIAL PALACE was more city than stronghold, vast and ornate in the majesty of its sprawling scope, towers, pinnacles and great monoliths of stone and gold that swept from horizon to jagged horizon. Landscapes that in millennia past had been a patchwork of nation-states and sovereignties were now buried beneath the grand unity of the Empire of Humanity, and its greatest monument. The dominions of the palace encompassed whole settlements and satellite townships, from the confines of t
he Petitioner’s City to the ranges of the Elysium Domes, across the largest star-port in the Sol system and down to the awesome spectacle of the Eternity Gate. Millions toiled within its outer walls in service to the Imperium, many living their lives without ever leaving the silver arcology ziggurats where they were born, served, and died.

  This was the shining, beating heart of all human endeavour, the throne and the birthplace of a species that stood astride the galaxy, its splendour and dignity vast enough that no one voice could ever hope to encompass them with mere words. Terra and her greatness were the jewel in the Imperial crown, bright and endless.

  And yet; within a metropolis that masqueraded as a continent, there were a myriad of ghost rooms and secret places. There were corners where the light did not fall – some of them created for just that purpose.

  There was a chamber known as the Shrouds. Inside the confines of the Inner Palace, if one could have gazed upon the schematics of those bold artisans who laid the first stones of the gargantuan city-state, no trace of the room or its entrances would have been apparent. To all intents and purposes, this place did not exist, and even those who had need to know of its reality could not have pinpointed it on a map. If one could not find the Shrouds, then one was not meant to.

  There were many ways to the chamber, and those who met there might know of one or two – hidden passageways concealed in the tromp I’oeil artworks of the Arc Galleries; a shaft behind the captured waterfall at the Annapurna Gate; the blind corridor near the Great Orrery; the Solomon Folly and the ghost switch in the sapphire elevator at the Western Vantage; these and others, some unused for centuries. Those summoned to the Shrouds would emerge into a labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors that defied all attempts to map them, guided by a mech-intellect that would navigate them to the room and never twice by the same route. All that could be certain was that the chamber was atop a tower, one of thousands ranged in sentry rows across the inner bulwarks of the Palace, and even that was a supposition, based on the weak patina of daylight allowed to penetrate the sailcloth-thick blinds that forever curtained the great oval windows about the room. Some suspected that the light might be a deception, a falsehood filtered through trick glass or even totally simulated. Perhaps the chamber was deep underground, or perhaps there were more than one of them, a suite of dozens of identical rooms so exacting in similarity that to tell them apart would be impossible.

  And once within, there was no place on Earth more secure, save for the Emperor’s Throne Room itself. None could listen in upon words spoken in a place that did not exist, that could not be found. The walls of the chamber, dark mahogany panels adorned with minimalist artworks and a few lume-globes, concealed layers of instrumentality that rendered the room and everything in it completely dead to the eyes and ears of any possible surveillance. There were counter-measures that fogged radiation detection frequencies, devices that swallowed sound and heat and light, working alongside slivers of living neural matter broadcasting the telepathic equivalent of white noise across all psychic spectra. There was even a rumour that the chamber was cloaked by a field of disruption that actually dislocated local space-time by several fractions of a second, allowing the room to exist a heartbeat into the future and out of reach of the rest of the universe.

  In the Shrouds there was a table, a long octagon of polished rosewood, and upon it a simple hololithic projector casting a cool glow over the assembled men and women gathered there. In deep, comfortable seats, six of them clustered around one end of the table, while a seventh sat alone at the head. The eighth did not sit, but instead stood just beyond the range of the light, content to be little more than a tall shape made up of shadows and angles.

  The seven at the table had faces of porcelain and precious metals. Masks covered their countenances from brow-line to neck, and like the room they were in, these outer concealments were far more than they appeared. Each mask was loaded with advanced technologies, data-libraries, sensoria, even microweapons, and each had a different aspect that was the mirror of its wearer; only the man at the head of the table wore a face with no affectation. His mask was simple and silver, as if it had been carved from polished steel, with only the vaguest impression of a brow, eyes, a nose and mouth. Reflected in its sheen, the panes of information shown by the hololith turned slowly, allowing everyone in the room to read them.

  What was written there was damning and disappointing in equal measure.

  “Then he is dead,” said a woman’s voice, the tone filtered through a fractal baffle that rendered her vocal pattern untraceable. Her mask was black and it fit skin-close, almost like a hood made of silk; only the large oval rubies that were her eyes broke the illusion. “The report here makes that clear.”

  “Quick to judge, as ever,” came a throaty whisper, similarly filtered, from a motionless mask that resembled a distended, hydrocephalic skull. “We should hold for certainty, Siress Callidus.”

  The ruby eyes glared across the table. “My esteemed Sire Culexus,” came the terse reply. “How long would you have us wait? Until the revolt reaches our door?” She turned her jewelled gaze on the only other woman seated at the table, a figure whose face was hidden behind an elegant velvet visor of green and gold, vaned with lines of droplet pearls and dark emeralds. “Our sister’s agent has failed. As I said he would.”

  The woman in the green mask stiffened, and leaned back in her chair, distancing herself from the ire of Callidus. Her reply was frosty and brittle. “I would note that none of you have yet been able to place an operative so close to the Warmaster as Clade Venenum did. Tobeld was one of my finest students, equal to the task he was set upon—”

  That drew a derisive grunt from a hulking male behind a grinning, fang-toothed rictus made of bone and gunmetal. “If he was equal to it, then why isn’t the turncoat dead? All that time wasted and for what? To give the traitors a fresh corpse at Horus’ doorstep?” He made a spitting sound.

  Siress Venenum’s eyes narrowed behind their disguise. “However little you think of my clade, dear Eversor, your record to date gives you no cause to preen.” She drew herself up. “What have you contributed to this mission other than a few messy and explosive deaths?”

  The fanged mask regarded her, anger radiating out from the man behind it. “My agents have brought fear!” he spat. “Each kill has severed the head of a key insurrectionist element!”

  “Not to mention countless collaterals,” offered a dry, dour voice. The comment emerged from behind a standard-issue spy mask, no different from the kind issued to every one of the sniper operatives of Clade Vindicare. “We need a surgeon’s touch to excise the Archtraitor. A scalpel, not a firebomb.”

  Sire Eversor let out a low growl. “When the day comes that someone invents a rifle you can fire from the safety of your chair and still hit Horus half a galaxy away, you can save us all. But until then, hide behind your gun sight and stay silent!”

  The sixth figure at the far end of the table cleared his throat, cocking his head. His mask, a thing made of glassy layers that reflected granulated, randomised images, flickered in the dimness. “If I might address Sire Culexus and Siress Callidus?” said Sire Vanus. “My clade’s predictive engines and our most diligent info-cytes have concluded, based on all available data and prognostic simulations, that the probability of Tobeld’s survival to complete his mission was zero point two percent. Margin of error negligible. However, it did represent an improvement in proximity-to-target over all Officio Assassinorum operations to date.”

  “A mile or an inch,” hissed Culexus, “it doesn’t matter if the kill was lost.”

  Siress Callidus looked up the table towards the man in the silver mask. “I want to activate a new operative,” she began. “Her name is M’Shen, she is one of the best of my clade and I—”

  “Tobeld was the best of the Venenum!” snapped Sire Vindicare, with sudden annoyance. “Just as Hoswalt was the best of mine, just as Eversor sent his best and so on and so on! But we’re throwing our m
ost gifted students into a meat-grinder, sending them in blind and half-prepared! Every strike against Horus breaks, and he shrugs it off without notice!” He shook his head grimly. “Is this what we have been reduced to? Every time we meet, listening to a catalogue of each other’s failures?” The masked man spread his arms, taking in his five cohorts. “We all remember that day on Mount Vengeance. The pact we made in the shadow of the Great Crusade, the oath that breathed life into the Officio Assassinorum. For decades we have hunted down the enemies of our Emperor through stealth and subterfuge. We have shown them there is no safe place to hide.” Sire Vindicare shot a look at Sire Vanus. “What did he say that day?”

  Vanus answered immediately, his mask shimmering. “No world shall be beyond my rule. No enemy shall be beyond my wrath.”

  Sire Culexus nodded solemnly. “No enemy…” he repeated. “No enemy but Horus, so it seems.”

  “No!” snarled Callidus. “I can kill him.” The man in the silver mask remained silent and she went on, imploring. “I will kill him, if only you will give me leave to do so!”

  “You will fail as well!” snarled Eversor. “My clade is the only one capable of the deed! The only one ruthless enough to end the Warmaster’s life!”

  At once, it seemed as if every one of the masters and mistresses were about to launch into the same tirade, but before they could begin, the silver mask resonated with a single word of command. “Silence.”

  The chamber became quiet, and the Master of Assassins took a breath before speaking again. “This rivalry and bickering serves no purpose,” he began, his voice level and firm. “In all the history of this group, there has never been a target whose retirement required more than one mission to prosecute. To date, the Horus problem has claimed eight Officio operatives across all six of the primary clades. Each of you are the first of your clade, the founders… And yet you sit here and jostle for supremacy over one another instead of giving me the kill we so desperately want! I demand a solution to rid us of the Emperor’s turbulent and wayward son.”