Nemesis

by James Swallow

  “Good,” said Kell. “Now find me a way to contact her before she gets killed.”

  AND SO IOTA found herself in the room after opening her eyes. She had wondered if it would still be there when she looked again, and it was. This confirmed her earlier hypothesis, that the sensations she was experiencing were not hallucinatory but actually real. On some level, that was troubling to accept; perhaps, if she had understood her state more correctly, Iota would not have allowed some of the liberties that had been taken with her physical form to occur. But then again, they had been necessary to secure her cover in the Red Lanes. She remembered those activities distantly, like a half-recalled dream. The persona-implants that had been used to bolster the cover identity were crumbling like sand, and recollection of any particular point of them was difficult.

  It wasn’t important. The false overlay was drifting away, and beneath was revealed her real self; such as it was. Iota was not a blank slate, as those who did not fully understand the works of her clade might think. No. She was a fluid in the bottle of herself, a shape without definition, a form needing direction, a space to fill.

  She surveyed the crimson room, the walls covered with rich velvet hangings sketched with erotic detail in gold threads, the great oval bed emerging from the deep carpeting. Floating lume-globes provided sultry lighting, with a shuttered window the only entrance for any natural illumination.

  The men who ran the doxy-house seemed caught in some peculiar kind of attract-repel balance with her. Iota’s gift made them uncomfortable without them ever knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was the hollow distance in her dark eyes, or the silence that was her habitual mien. However the gift manifested, it was enough to unsettle them. Some liked that, taking pleasure from the thrill of it as they might the tread of a scorpion across their naked flesh; most avoided her, though. She scared them without ever giving form to their fear.

  Iota touched the ornamental tore around the dusky flesh of her throat. If only they knew how little of her they really sensed. Without the dampener device concealed in the necklet, the icy void inside her would have spread wide.

  She sniffed the perfumed air. Iota felt odd to be out of her suit, but then she always did. The silken shift dress that covered her body was gossamer-thin, and she continually forgot that she was wearing it. Of its own accord, her right hand – her killing hand – reached up and buried itself in the tight cornrows of her shiny black hair. The hand toyed absently with the plaits dangling off her scalp, and she wondered how long it would be until the murder came. Her eyes wandered to the wooden box on the bed, and that was when she had her answer.

  The other woman came into the room striding like a man, and around the back of her scalp she wore an emitter crown, the delicate filigree of crystalline psyber-circuits and implant tech glowing with soft light. She towered over the diminutive Iota, nearly two metres tall in elevated boots of shiny blue leather, a full and well-shaped body showing through a bustier-affair outfit that could only have been a few strips of hide if taken off and laid end to end. She carried a device that resembled a bulbous tonfa in one hand, one end of it bladed, the other crackling with energy.

  The woman sneered at Iota. The expression was ugly and ill-fitting on her face, and Iota saw the small twitches of the nerves around her lips and nostrils as the crown worked on her. “You’re new,” said the woman. The words were slightly slurred.

  Iota nodded, remaining downcast and passive.

  “They tell me there’s something odd about you,” she said, reaching for Iota’s hand. “Different.” The ugly sneer widened. “I do enjoy things that are different.”

  Then she knew for certain. There was a small chance it wasn’t going to be him, but the clade had invested too much time and effort into inserting Iota into the right place at the right time for a mistake to happen at this late stage. The voice belonged to the woman, but the words – and the personality animating her at this moment – belonged to Jun Yae Jun, scion of one of the Nine Families of the Yndenisc Bloc and warlord-general. He was also, as intelligence had proven, a deceiver who was disloyal to the Imperial Throne, in violation of the Nikaea Edict, and suspected of involvement in a counter-secular cult.

  “We will play.” Jun made the woman say the words. He was on the other end of the emitter crown, somewhere nearby, his body in repose while he forced his consciousness onto the flesh of the proxy. It was a game the warlord-general liked a great deal, working a meat-puppet in order to slake his desires. Iota was aware that many of her guardians back at her clade’s holdfast viewed what Jun did with disgust, but she only felt a vague curiosity about him, the same clinical detachment that coloured almost all her interactions with other humans.

  Iota wondered if the woman Jun controlled was conscious during the activities, and dispassionately considered the psychological effects that might have; but such thoughts were trivia. She had a murder to focus on. “Wait,” she said. “I have something for you,” Iota nodded at the box. “A gift.”

  “Give it to me,” came the demand.

  Iota let the shift dress fall from her shoulders, and with Jun’s second-hand gaze all over her, she picked up the box and brought it closer. Bloodlock sensors released the latches and she presented it, holding it up with one hand like a server offering a tray of food. The killing hand went to the tore and unfastened it.

  “What is this?” A clumsy echo of Jun’s confusion crossed the woman’s face. “A mask?”

  The lume light fell over the shape of a metallic skull. One eye was a glittering ruby, but the other was a cluster of lenses made from milky sapphire, spiked with stubby vanes and strange antennae. “Of a sort,” Iota explained.

  The tore released with a delicate click and Iota felt a sudden rush of cold move through her, as if a floodgate inside her had opened. At least for the moment, she no longer needed to hold it all in, to keep the emptiness inside her bottled up.

  Jun made a strange noise through the woman that was half-cry, half-yelp, and then the psychoactive matrix of the crown began to fizz and pop, the tonfa falling from the proxy’s nerveless fingers. With a disordered, tinkling peal, the psionic crystals in the headdress began to shatter and the woman tottered on her spiked heels, stumbling over herself to fall upon the bed. She made moaning, weeping sounds.

  Iota cocked her head to listen; the same chorus of wailing was coming from room after room down the corridor of the change-brothel, as the nulling effect of her raw self spread out.

  Before the link could fully die, she sprang onto the bed and brought her face to the anguished woman’s, staring into her eyes. “I want to kiss you,” she told Jun.

  Through the window, across the companionway from the brothel building, the doors of a nondescript residential slum block had broken open and a tide of panicked figures was spilling onto the street, all of them half-dressed in clothes that marked them too rich to be locals.

  Iota nimbly leapt back to the floor and unfurled the stealthsuit lying beneath the skull-helm, stepping into it with careless ease. The mask went on last, and it soothed her as it did so.

  The weeping woman coughed out a last, stuttered word as Jun’s hold on her finally disintegrated. “Cuh. Cuh. Culexus.”

  But Iota did not wait to hear it; instead she threw herself through the window in a crash of glass and wood, spinning towards the other building.

  WHILE THEY WAITED for Gorospe, Yosef glanced around the landing pad’s surroundings. The fountains, which were usually gushing with coloured water, were silent; and when he looked closer, he noted that the well-tended gardens seemed, if anything, considerably unkempt. There were even dead patches in the otherwise flawless lawns; the Consortium appeared to be slacking on matters of minor maintenance. He wondered what that small detail could mean in the greater scheme of things.

  Daig had made an attempt to engage one of the security men in conversation, resorting to his usual gambit of complaining about the weather, but the guard had been disinterested in talking. “Nice outfits they
have,” he opined, wandering back to the parked coleopter. “Do you think they have to buy their own uniforms?”

  “Considering a career change, then?”

  Daig shrugged. “Or maybe a sabbatical. A very long one, to somewhere quiet.” He glanced up into the sky, then away again.

  Yosef sensed something in his cohort and found himself asking the question that had been preying on his mind for a time. “Do you think he will come here?”

  “The Warmaster?”

  “Who else?” The air around them seemed suddenly still.

  “The Arbites say the situation will be dealt with by the Astartes.” Daig’s manner made it clear he didn’t believe that.

  Yosef frowned. Now he had asked the question, he found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I still find it hard to grasp. The idea of one of the Emperor’s sons plotting a rebellion against him.” The concept seemed unreal, like the rain rebelling against the clouds.

  “Laimner says there is no mutiny at all. He says it’s a disinformation ploy by the Adeptus Terra to keep the planets out in the deeps off-balance, keep them loyal to the Throneworld. After all, a fearful populace is a compliant one.”

  “Our esteemed Reeve Warden is a fool.”

  “I won’t argue that point,” Daig nodded. “But then, is that any more shocking than the idea that the Warmaster would turn against his own father? What possible reason could he have to do that, unless he has some sort of sickness of the mind?”

  Yosef felt a chill move through him, as if a shadow had passed over the sun. “It’s not a matter of lunacy,” he said, uncertain as to where the words were coming from. “And fathers can be fallible, after all.”

  He caught a flash of irritation on Daig’s face. “You’re talking about ordinary men. The Emperor is far more than that.”

  Yosef considered an answer, but then his attention was drawn away by the return of the Gorospe woman. Her carefully prepared expression of superior neutrality had been replaced by a severe aspect, concern and irritation there in equal measure. He had to wonder what she had found to instigate so profound a shift in her manner. She held the data-slate in her hand, along with a page of vinepaper. “You have something for us?” he asked.

  Gorospe hesitated, then tersely dismissed the two security men. When it was just the three of them, she gave the lawmen a firm stare. “Before we go any further, there are a number of assurances that I must have from you. No information will be forthcoming if you refuse any of the following conditions, is that understood?”

  “I’m listening,” said Yosef.

  She ticked off the stipulations on her long, elegantly manicured fingers. “This meeting did not occur; any attempt to suggest it did at a later date will be denied and may be considered an attempt at slander. Under no account are you to refer to the method in which this information was brought to you in any official records of investigation, now or at a later date in any legal setting. And finally, and most importantly, the name of the Eurotas Trade Consortium will in no way be connected to the suspect of your investigation.”

  The two men exchanged glances. “I suppose I have no choice but to agree,” said Yosef.

  “Both of you,” she insisted.

  “Aye, then,” said Daig, with a wary nod.

  Gorospe handed back the data-slate and unfolded the vinepaper. On it, Yosef saw file text and an image of a thuggish man with heavy stubble and deep-set eyes. “There was a match between the blood trace you provided and a single subject listed in our biomedical records. His name is Erno Sigg, and he is known to be at large on Iesta Veracrux.”

  Yosef reached for the paper, but she held it away. “He was a passenger on one of your ships?”

  When the woman didn’t answer straight away, Daig made the connection. “That’s a bondsman’s record you have there, isn’t it? Sigg isn’t a passenger. He works for you.”

  “Ah,” nodded Yosef, suddenly understanding. “Well, that clears the mist, doesn’t it? The last thing the Void Baron would want is the good name of his clan being connected to a murderous psychotic.”

  “Erno Sigg is not an employee of the Consortium,” Gorospe insisted. “He has not been a member of our staff for the last four lunars. His bond and his shares were cancelled in perpetuity with the clan, following an… incident.”

  “Go on.”

  The woman glanced at the paper. “Sigg was cashiered after a violent episode on one of the Consortium’s deep space trading stations.”

  “He stabbed someone.” Yosef tossed out the guess and the widening of her eyes told him he was right. “Killed them?”

  Gorospe shook her head. “There was no fatality. But a… a weapon was used.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We have no record of that.”

  Daig’s lip curled. “So you decided to throw him out, just dump a violent offender on our planet without so much as a warning to the local law enforcement? I think I could find a judiciary who would classify that irresponsible endangerment.”

  “You misunderstand. Sigg was released after a period of detention commensurate with the severity of his misbehaviour.” Gorospe looked at the paper again. “According to notations made by our security staff, he was genuinely remorseful. He voluntarily went into the custody of a charitable rehabilitation group here on Iesta Veracrux. That’s why he asked to be released on this planet.”

  “What group?” said Daig.

  “The file notes it was part of an informal organisation called the Theoge.”

  Yosef swore under his breath and snatched the paper from the woman’s hand. “Give me that. We’ll take this from here.”

  “Remember our arrangement!” she insisted, her cheeks colouring; but the reeve was already stalking away towards the coleopter.

  THE WARLORD JUN Yae Jun bolted upright from the ornate couch where he lay, his robe falling open, scattering the attendants from his sides. He spluttered and snarled, tearing at the web of golden mechadendrites that were wrapped about his head, winding into his ear canals, nostrils and mouth. “Get these things off me!” he bellowed, flailing around, knocking over a hookah and table piled with wine goblets and ampoules.

  With an agonised wrench he finally freed himself and glared around, looking for his guardian. Jun could hear the sounds of violence and panic in the halls beyond the room. Something had gone very wrong, and a tide of terror was welling up inside him. He turned it into fury as he found the guardian on his hands and knees, staring into a pool of vomit.

  Jun gave him a violent kick. “What are you doing down there? Get up! Get up and protect me, you worthless wretch!”

  The guardian stood, as shaky as a drunkard. “There is darkness,” he muttered. “Black curtains falling.” The man choked and coughed up bile.

  Jun kicked him again. “You were supposed to protect me! Why did you fail me?” His face was crimson with anger. In defiance of Imperial law, without grant or sanction from the Adeptus Terra, the warlord had secured himself a guardian who not only had combatant skills, but was also possessed of a measure of psychic ability. For months, his pet killer had been his most closely-guarded confidence, but now it seemed that his secret was out. “There’s a Culexus here! Do you know what that means?”

  The guardian nodded. “I know.”

  When he had first heard the name of the assassin clade spoken, when the story of what the word meant had been told to him, the warlord did not believe it. He understood psykers, the humans gifted – some said cursed – by the touch of the warp. A psyker’s essence burned bright in the realm of the immaterium, forever connecting the world of flesh with the world of the ethereal; but if psykers reflected the far extreme of a spectrum, and ordinary men and women the brief candles of life in the middle ground, then what could represent the opposite end of that balance? The darkness?

  They were called pariahs. Chance births, less than one in a billion, children born, so it was said, without a soul. Where a psyker burned sun-bright, they were a black hole. They we
re antithesis, made manifest. Ice to the fire, darkness to the light.

  And as with so many things, the Imperium of Man had found a use for such aberrations. The Clade Culexus harvested pariahs wherever they were found, and rumour suggested that they might even grow them wholesale from synthesis tanks in some secret fleshworks in the wilds of Terra. Jun Yae Jun had never believed in them until this moment, dismissed the very idea as a fiction created to instill fear in the kings and regents who ruled under the aegis of the Emperor. He knew fear now, though, and truth with it.

  Jun stumbled towards the doorway, and hands pulled at his robes. “Warlord, please,” said the attendant. The spindly man was speaking rapidly. “Stop! The game has not been completed. There is the letting of fluids to be gathered, the sacrament!”

  The warlord turned and glared at the attendant. Like all the others who ran this sordid diversion for the masters of the Red Lanes, he was draped in strips of silk and painted with bright inks. He had numerous daubs across his skin, repeating the shape of a disc, a rod and opposed crescents. The design was meaningless to Jun. He tried to shove the man away, but he would not let go.

  “You must not leave!” snarled the attendant. “Not yet!” He gripped the warlord’s arm and held on tightly.

  Jun spat and produced a push-dagger from a pocket. “Get off me!” he roared, and stabbed the man in the throat with three quick moves. Leaving him to die, the warlord forced his way out into the corridor. The guardian stayed with him, his face pale and sweaty. He was mumbling to himself with every step. “Vox!” shouted Jun. “Give me your vox!”

  The guardian obeyed. A line of blood was seeping from his right eye, like red tears.

  Barging his way through the change-brothel’s other clients, slashing a path with the push-dagger, the warlord barked a command string into the mouthpiece of the communicator. “Air Guard,” he shouted. “Deploy mobiles for zone strike, now now now!”