Nemesis

by James Swallow

  There, beneath the craft, was a low blockhouse of heavy ferrocrete, distinguishable only by stripes of weather-faded crimson outlining the edges of it, and the steady blink of locator beacons. But where there should have been the hex-shape of a landing silo, there was only a maw belching black smoke and flickers of fire.

  Kell caught the tinny sound of panicked voices coming through the pilot’s vox-bead, and as they banked, he thought he saw the blink of weapons discharges down inside the silo proper. His jaw stiffened; this was no chance accident. He knew exactly what had happened.

  “Oh. They woke him,” said Iota, from behind, giving voice to his thoughts. “That was a mistake.”

  “Take us in,” Kell snapped.

  The pilot’s eyes widened behind his flight goggles. “The silo is on fire and there’s nowhere else to set down! We have to abort!”

  The Vindicare shook his head. “Land us on the ice!”

  “If I put this craft down there, it might never lift again,” said the pilot, “and if—”

  Kell silenced him with a look. “If we don’t deal with this right now, by sunrise tomorrow every settlement within a hundred kilometre radius will be a slaughterhouse!” He pointed at the snow fields. “Land this thing, now!”

  INSTEAD OF RETURNING home to the small apartment cluster where he lived alone, out near the western edge of the radial park, Daig Segan took a public conveyor to the old market district. At this time of night, none of the stalls were open to make sales but they were still hives of activity; men and women loaded produce and prepared for the dawn shift, moving crates on dollies this way and that across shiny tiled floors that were slick with sluice-water.

  Daig crossed the covered market to the other conveyor halt and took the first ride that came in, irrespective of its destination. As the monorail moved along the line embedded in the cobbled street bed, he gave the carriage a long, careful sweep, running over the faces of the other passengers with a policeman’s wary eye. There were only a handful of people. Three teenagers in loader’s hoods, tired and serious-looking. An old couple, bound for home. Men and women in work-cloaks. None of them spoke. They either stared into the middle distance, or looked blankly out the windows of the conveyor. Daig could sense the tension in them, the unfocussed fear. It manifested in short tempers and hollow gazes, brittle silences and morose sighs. All these people and everyone like them, all were looking to a horizon lit by the distant fires of war, and they wondered – when will it reach us? It seemed as if Iesta Veracrux was holding its collective breath as the shadow of the rebellion drew ever closer. Daig looked away and watched the streets roll by.

  He rode for three stops before disembarking once more. He took another conveyor back the way he came, this time stepping off the running board just as it pulled away from the halt before the market. The reeve jogged across the road, throwing a glance over his shoulder to be certain he had not been followed. Then, his toque pulled low to his brow line, Daig vanished into an ill-lit alleyway and found his way to an unmarked metal door.

  A shutter opened in the door and a round, florid face peered out at him. Recognition split the face in a broad smile. “Daig. We haven’t seen you in a good while.”

  “Hello, Noust.” He nodded distractedly. “Can I come in?”

  The door creaked open in reply and he stepped through.

  Inside it was warm, and Daig blinked a few times, his eyes watering as the chilled skin of his face thawed a little. Noust handed him a tin cup with a measure of mulled wine in it and the reeve followed the other man down a steel staircase. A breath of gentle music wafted up on the warm air as they descended.

  “I wondered if you might have changed your mind,” said Noust. “Sometimes that happens. People question things after they take on the belief. It’s like buyer’s remorse.” He gave a dry chuckle.

  “It’s not that,” said Daig. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to get here. It’s the work.” He sighed. “I have to be careful.”

  Noust shot him a look over his shoulder. “Of course you do. We all do, especially in the current climate. He understands.”

  Daig sighed, feeling guilty. “I hope so.”

  The staircase deposited them in a cellar with a low ceiling. Lumes had been glued to the walls along the long axis of the chamber, and in rough rows there were a collection of seats – some plastiformed things pilfered from office plexes, others threadbare sofas from lost homes, a few little more than artfully cut packing crates – all of them arranged in a semi-circle around a cloth-covered table. Red-printed leaflets lay on some of the chairs.

  High-Reeve Kata Telemach would have given much to find this place. It was one of a handful, each concealed in plain sight across Iesta Veracrux. There was no identifying symbol to show it was here, no secret passwords to be spoken or special sign that would grant access. It was simply that those who were called to know these places found them of their own accord, or else they were brought here by the like-minded; and despite what the High-Reeve insisted, despite all the hearsay and foolish gossip that was spread about what took place in such cellars and hidden spaces, there were no horrors, no murderous blood rites or dark ceremonies. There were only ordinary souls that made up the membership of the Theoge, that and nothing more. He thought on this as he rubbed his thumb over the smoothed gold of the aquila talisman about his wrist.

  On the table, there was an elderly holographic projector that flickered and hummed; a blue-tinted image of Terra floated above it, a time-lapse loop of the planet’s day-night cycle. At the side of the projector was a book, open at a page of dense text. The book was made of common-quality vinepaper and it had been bound without a cover; Daig understood that a friend of Noust’s who worked the nightshift at an inkworks had used cast-offs from other jobs and downtime between the print runs of paying customers to run out multiple copies of the document.

  The pages were careworn from many sets of hands upon them, and he wanted to pick them up and leaf through them, draw comfort from the writings. Daig knew that he only had to ask, and Noust would give him a copy of his own to keep, but to have the book in his home, somewhere it could be discovered by mistake or worse, used to incriminate him by people who didn’t understand the true meaning contained in it… He couldn’t take the risk.

  Noust was at his side. “You timed it well. We were just about to have a reading. You’ll join us, yes?”

  Daig looked up. There were only a few other people in the cellar, some of whom he knew, others not so familiar. He spotted a new face and recognised him as a jager from the precinct; the man returned a wary look, but Daig gave him a nod that communicated a shared confidence. “Of course,” he said to Noust.

  A youth with a bandaged hand picked up the book and handed it to Daig’s friend. On the front was the only element of adornment on the otherwise Spartan document.

  Picked out in red ink, the words Lectitio Divinitatus.

  IF THE GARANTINE had once possessed a true name, that time was long ago and of little consequence. The entire concept of a past and a future, these were strange abstracted notions to the Eversor. They were things that – if he had been able to stop to dwell on them – would have only brought tics of confusion; and as with all things about him, rage.

  The Eversor existed only in a permanent state of the furious now and matters of before and after were limited to the most transitory of elements. Before, just heartbeats earlier, he had beheaded a guard attempting to down him with some kind of heavy webber cannon. In a moment more, he would leap the distance across the open space where the handling gantry for the flyers did not reach, in order to land among the group of technicians who were fleeing towards a doorway. In these small ways, the Garantine allowed himself to comprehend the nature of past and future, but to go beyond that was pointless.

  It was the manner of his life that he existed in the thick of the killing. He had a dim understanding of the other times, the times when he would lie in the baths of amnio-fluids as the patient machine
s of his clade healed his wounds or upgraded the stimjectors and drug glands throughout his body. The times when, in the dreamless no-sleep between missions, hypnogoge data streams would unfold in his head like blossoms of information, target profiles linked to mood-triggers that would give him bursts of elation for every kill, jolts of pleasure for each waypoint reached, jerks of pain if he deviated off-programme.

  These things had not happened here, though. He reflected on that as he completed his leap, his augmented muscles relaxing to take the impact of landing, the sheer force of his arrival killing one of the fleeing technicians immediately. As he spun about, the knife-claws on his hands and feet opening veins, the grinning rictus of his steel skull-mask steaming with splashes of blood, he searched for a programme, for a set of victory conditions.

  There was none. Digging deeper, he reached for his stunted past. He remembered back as far as he could – an hour, perhaps? He replayed the moment. A sudden awakening. The transit cocoon that held him in its silent, womb-like space, where he could wait out the non-time until his next glorious release, suddenly broken. An error, or something else? Enemy action? That assumption was the Garantine’s default setting, after all. He reasoned – as much as he was able – that surely if he had been awakened for any other reason, the hypnogoges would have ensured he knew why.

  But there was nothing. No parameters, only wakefulness. And for an Eversor, to be awake was to be in the glory of killing. A cocktail of stimulants and battle drugs boiled through his bloodstream, heavy doses of Fury, Spur and Psychon synthesised to order by the compact biofac implants in his abdomen. Under normal circumstances, the Garantine would have been armed with more than just his skinplanted offensive weapons and helm-mask; he would have been sheathed in armour and arrayed with a suite of servo-systems. That he did not have these only served to modify the killer’s approach to his targets. He had taken and employed several light stubber guns, using each until the ammo dram ran dry, then making the weapons into clubs he used to beat his kills to the floor; but the stubbers were only good for a few hits before his violence broke them across the frame and he was forced to discard them.

  He punched a man with enough energy that it shattered his skull, and then he vaulted a makeshift barricade, moving faster than the men hiding behind it could aim. He killed them with their own guns and ran on, deeper through the complex.

  Parts of the building might have looked familiar to him, if the Garantine had been able to stop the racing pace of his thoughts, if he had been able to slow his kill-need for just a moment; but he could do neither.

  In the absence of orders, with no target to aim for, the Eversor did what he was trained to do; and he would go on, killing here and then moving on to the next set of targets, and the next and the next, forever in the moment.

  AFTERWARDS, DAIG FELT refreshed by his experience, but he had not come to the meeting for personal reasons. While some of the others talked amongst themselves, the reeve took Noust to one side and the two men shared cups of the warm wine, and questions.

  Noust listened in silence to Daig’s explanation of his caseload, and at length, he gave a nod. “I know Erno Sigg. I guessed that might be why you’d come to see me. His face was on the public watch-wire. Said that he was sought after to assist in your ‘enquiries’.”

  Daig suppressed a wince. Laimner, on Telemach’s orders, had deliberately leaked Sigg’s image to the media in a ham-fisted attempt to flush him into the open; but if anything, it appeared to have driven the man deeper into hiding.

  Noust continued. “He’s a troubled fellow, to be certain. Someone without a compass, you could say. But that’s where the Theoge can be of help to a man. He learned of the text while he was incarcerated, from a ship-hand. Erno found another path with us.” He looked away. “At least, for a time he did.”

  Daig leaned in. “What do you mean?”

  Noust eyed him. “Is that you asking, Daig Segan? Or is it the Sentine?”

  “Both,” he replied. “This is important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”

  “Aye, that’s so.” Noust sighed. “Here’s the thing. For a while, Erno was a regular fixture here, and he was trying to make something of himself. He wanted to make amends. Erno was working to become a better man than the angry, frustrated thug he’d left out there in space. It’s a long road, but he knew that. But then he started to come around less often.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A few demilunars ago. Two, maybe. When I did see him, he was twitchy. He said that he was going to have to pay for what he had done.” Noust paused, sorting through his thoughts. “I got the impression that someone was… I don’t know, following him? He was irritable, paranoid. All the old, bad traits coming back to the fore.”

  Daig rubbed his chin. “He may have killed people.”

  Noust gave the reeve a shocked look. “No. Never. Maybe once upon a time, but not now. He’s not capable of that, not anymore. I’d swear that to the God-Emperor himself.”

  “I need to find Erno,” said Daig. “If he’s innocent, we need to prove it. We… I need to protect all this.” He gestured around. “I found my path here. I can’t lose it.” Daig imagined what might happen if Telemach or Laimner got hold of Sigg, broke him in interrogation and then found the door to this place. In their secular, clinical world there was no place for the revelation of the Imperial Truth, the undeniable reality of the Emperor’s shining divinity. The church, such as it was, and all the others like it would be torn down, burned away, and the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus that had so transformed Daig Segan when he read them would be erased and left unheard. They would use Sigg and the crimes to excuse them as they put a torch to it all.

  “The Emperor protects,” said Noust.

  “And I’ll help Him do it, if you give me the chance,” insisted the reeve. “Just tell me where Erno Sigg is hiding.”

  Noust finished his drink. “All right, brother.”

  BEHIND HER, SHE heard the clattering thunder of auto-fire and more screams. Iota skidded to a halt on the cold metal floor and cocked her head, letting her skull-helm’s autosenses take readings and pass the analysis back to her. He was very close; she had attracted his interest by appearing in the middle of a companionway, letting him see her clearly, and then breaking into a run. The Eversor knew another assassin when he saw one, and she was without doubt the most serious threat vector the rage-killer had encountered since his awakening. He was coming for her, but that didn’t stop him from pausing along the way to dispatch any of the facility’s staff who were unlucky enough to cross his path. The murderers of the Clade Eversor were like that; for all their bloody violence and instinct-driven brutality, they were still methodical. They left no witnesses, nothing but corpses.

  Iota waited, rocking on her heels, ready to break into a run the moment he spotted her again. From what the infocyte had managed to piece together from the base’s cogitators, it seemed that there had been a catastrophic accident during the retrieval of the Garantine from one of the deep cold iso-stores beneath the mantle of the Aktick ice. The cryopod containing the assassin in his dormant state had cracked a fluid line; the burst conduit sprayed super-chilled methalon across the handlers, flash-freezing them all in an instant. By the time another team had made it down to the transfer area, the pod had drained and the Garantine was already awake. Even in his semi-dormant, unarmed state, they were easily cut down by him.

  The clade’s technologians made the fatal mistake of addressing the problem of the coolant leak first – an easy choice to understand, given that this particular facility housed another nine Eversor field operatives down in the iso-stores. Left unchecked, the Garantine’s brethren would have eventually followed him into wakefulness. But the time spent stabilising the storage compartments had allowed the Garantine to fully thaw and begin the business of terminating every living being in the facility.

  “Culexus? Where are you?” said Tariel, his voice a hiss in her helmet vox.

&nb
sp; “Area eight, tier one, facing west,” she replied. “Waiting.”

  “I’ve accessed the main systems library,” he told her, clearly impressed with his own achievement. “I’m closing the pressure hatches behind him as he moves.”

  Iota glanced down at the multi-barrelled combi-needler fixed to her right wrist, considering it. “He’s not an animal, Vanus. He’ll know if you’re trying to herd him.”

  “Just keep him reactive,” came the reply.

  She didn’t say any more, because at that moment the Garantine came storming around the bend in the corridor, his thickset, densely-muscled body rippling with exertion. Chugs of white vapour puffed into the cold air from behind his metal mask, and as he moved, Iota saw the places where his bare skin showed and the shapes of implants beneath. The Garantine was covered from head to toe with daubs of human blood. He halted, rumbling like an engine, and eyed her with a low chuckle. In one hand he had a stubber carbine, liquid dripping from the blunt maw of the barrel.

  She thought for a fleeting instant about attempting to reason with him, then dismissed the idea just as quickly. There were rumours that every Eversor had an abeyance meme encoded into their brains, a nonsense string of words that would lull them into inaction, or even send them into neuro-death if spoken aloud; but if this were so, Iota was sure that the rage-killer would have made certain any technologians in the base who knew the code were no longer able to voice it.

  The Garantine pointed the broken gun at her. “You,” he said thickly. “Quick.”

  Perhaps it was a threat – a promise that he was going to end her swiftly – or perhaps it was a compliment on her agility, acknowledging Iota as the first real challenge he had come across since awakening. It mattered little; in the next second he was coming at her, charging like an enraged grox.

  She fired a blast of glassaic needles at him, describing a seamless back flip to open the distance between them. The glittering shots clattered across the Eversor’s torso, burying themselves in the meat of his chest, but the rage-killer only grunted and batted them away.