Nemesis

by James Swallow

  After a minute or so, the Eversor dropped to the floor, still shaking with the aftershock of his chemical frenzy. “Ss-so…” he began, struggling to speak clearly, forcing himself to slow down with each panting gulp of breath. “Th-this is how it feels to k-kill one of them…” He grinned widely behind the fanged mask. “I like it.”

  The Callidus stood up. “We need to move, before more of his brethren arrive.”

  “Aren’t you… aren’t you going to th-thank me for saving your life, s-shape-changer?”

  Without warning, the Astartes suddenly lurched forwards, gauntlets snapping open, savage anger fuelling a final surge of killing fury. Koyne’s neural shredder was at hand and the assassin fired a full-power discharge into the skull of the Son of Horus; the blast disintegrated tissue in an instant wave of brain-death.

  The warrior lurched and fell again. Koyne gave the Garantine a sideways look. “Thank you.”

  SIXTEEN

  Collision

  The Choice

  Forgiveness

  A BOMBARDMENT HAD begun, and the people of Dagonet’s capital feared it was the end of the world.

  They knew so little of the reality of things, however. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel’s most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster’s flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet’s crust cracked, the continents sliced open. Perhaps those things would happen, soon enough – but for now it was sufficient for the Thanato to hurl inert kinetic kill-rods down through the atmosphere, the sky-splitting shriek of their passage climaxed by a lowing thunder as the warshots obliterated power stations, military compounds and the vast mansion-houses of the noble clans. From the ground it seemed like wanton destruction; from orbit, it was a shrewd and surgical pattern of attack.

  KOYNE AND THE Garantine stayed off the main avenues and boulevards, avoiding the roadways where processions of frightened citizens streamed towards the city limits. Hours had passed now since the killing in the plaza, and the people had lost the will to ran, numbed by their own terror. Now they stumbled, silently for the most part, some pushing carts piled high with whatever they could loot or carry, others clinging to overloaded ground vehicles. When people did speak, they did so in whispers, as if they were afraid the Adeptus Astartes would hear the sound of a voice at normal pitch from across the city.

  Listening from the shadows of an alleyway across from a shuttered monorail halt, the Callidus heard people talking about the Sons of Horus. Some said they had set up a staging point in Liberation Plaza, that there were hordes of Stormbirds parked there disgorging more Astartes with each passing moment. Others mentioned seeing armoured vehicles in the streets, even Battle Titans and monstrous war creatures.

  The only truth Koyne could determine from what he gleaned was that the Sons of Horus were intent on fulfilling the orders of Devram Korda to the fullest; Dagonet City would be little more than a smouldering funeral pyre by nightfall.

  The assassin looked up to where a massive streetscreen hung at a canted angle from the front of the station building. The display was cracked and fizzing with patchy static; text declaring that the metropolitan rail network was temporarily suspended was still visible, the pixels frozen in place. Koyne eyed the device warily. The public screens all had arrays of vid-picters arranged around them, connected to the municipal monitoring network. The Callidus had a spy’s healthy disdain for being caught on camera.

  As if it had sensed the shade’s train of thought, Koyne saw very clearly as one of the picters jerked on its gimbal, stuttering around to face the line of refugees. The assassin retreated back into the shadows, unsure if the monitor had caught sight.

  A few metres down the alley, the Garantine was sitting atop a waste container, shivering with the come-down from his reflex-boosters, working with a field kit to close up the various wounds the Son of Horus had inflicted on him during the earlier melee. Koyne grimaced at the chewing sound of a dermal stapler as it knitted flesh back to flesh.

  The Garantine looked up; his mask was off, and one of his eyes was torn and damaged, weeping clear fluids. He grinned, showing bloodstained teeth. “Be with you in a trice, freak.”

  Koyne ignored the insult, shrugging off the ragged remains of the PDF troop commander tunic and replacing it with a brocade jacket stolen from a fallen shop-window dummy. “May not have that long.”

  The Callidus shrank back against the wall and let the face of the portly PDF officer slip away. It was painful to make a change like this, without proper meditation and time spent, but the circumstances demanded it. Koyne’s aspect flowed to resemble that of a young man, a boyish face under the same unruly mop of thin hair.

  “Do you remember what you used to look like?” said the Eversor, disgust thick in his tone.

  Koyne gave the other assassin a sideways look, making a point of gazing at the topography of scarification and the countless implants both atop and beneath his epidermis. “Do you?”

  The Garantine chuckled. “We’re both so pretty in our own ways.” He went back to his wounds. “Any sign of more Astartes?”

  The Callidus made a negative noise. “But they’ll be coming. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. They march through a city, putting the torch to everything they pass, daring anyone to stop them.”

  “Let them come,” he grunted, tying the last field dressing around his thick thigh.

  “There will be more than one next time.”

  “Don’t doubt it.” The Eversor’s hands were still twitching. “The poisoner girl was right. We’re all going to die here.”

  That drew a harsh look from the Callidus. “I have no intention of ending my life on this backwater world.”

  He chuckled. “Act like you have a choice.” The Garantine made a metronome motion with his fingers. “Ticky-tocky. Odds are against us. Someone must’ve talked.”

  That made the other assassin fall silent. Koyne had not wanted to dwell on the possibility, but the Garantine was right to suspect that their mission had been compromised. It seemed a logical deduction, given what had happened in the plaza.

  The sharp cry of an animal drew Koyne’s attention away from such troubling thoughts and the assassin looked up to see a raptor bird flutter past the end of the alleyway, pivoting on a wing to glide in their direction.

  There was a flurry of movement and the Eversor had his Executor aimed upward, the sensor mast of his Sentinel gear drawing a bead; the combi-weapon’s needler made a snapping sound and the bird died in mid-turn, falling to the ground like a stone.

  Koyne went to the animal’s body; there had been something odd about it, a flicker of sunlight off metal…

  “Hungry, are you?” The Garantine lurched along behind, limping slightly.

  “Idiot.” Koyne held up the bird’s corpse; a single needle-dart bisected its bloody torso. The raptor had numerous augmetic implants in its skull and pinions. “This is a psyber eagle. It belongs to the infocyte. He’s looking for us.” Koyne glanced up at the streetscreen once more, and the imagers beneath it.

  “Maybe it was him who talked,” muttered the Eversor. “Maybe you.”

  The image on the streetscreen flickered and changed; now it was an aerial view of the street, then shots of the alleyway, then a confused tumble of motion. Koyne suddenly understood the display was showing a replay of the visual feed from the eagle’s auto-senses.

  Some of the refugee stragglers saw the same thing and stopped to watch the loop of footage. Koyne tossed the dead bird aside and stepped out into the street. Immediately, all the imagers along the bottom of the streetscreen whirred, moving to capture a look at the Callidus.

  For a moment nothing happened; if Koyne was right, if it was Tariel watching through those lenses, the Vanus would be confused. Koyne’s face was differen
t from the last one the infocyte had seen. But then the Garantine shuffled out into the open and all doubt was removed.

  The refugees saw the hulking rage-killer and backed away in fear, as if suddenly becoming aware of a wild animal in their midst. In that, Koyne reflected, they were almost correct. The Garantine leered at them, showing his teeth.

  A hooter sounded from the monorail halt, and in juddering fits and starts, the heavy metal gate closing off the station from the street began to draw open on automated mechanisms. The screen above flickered again, and this time the text displayed there announced that the rail system was now in operation.

  Koyne smiled slightly. “I think we have some transport.” The Callidus took a step, but a clawed hand grabbed the assassin’s arm.

  “Could be a trap,” hissed the Garantine.

  In the distance, another orbital strike screamed into the earth and sent a tremor through the ground beneath their feet. “Only one way to find out.”

  ON THE ELEVATED platform above the street level a single train was active. The web of monorail lines had been inert ever since the start of the insurrection against Terra, first shut down by the clanner troops as a way of imposing order by restricting the movement of the commoners through the city, and later forced to stay idle because of the mass breakout at the Terminus. But some lines were still connected to what remained of the capital’s rapidly-dying power grid, and the autonomic control systems that governed the operation of the trains and lines and points were simplistic devices; they were no match for someone with the skills of a Vanus.

  Another psyber eagle roosted on the prow of the train and it called out a strident caw as Koyne and the Garantine sprinted on to the platform. The Callidus threw a glance down the wide stairwell; some of the bolder refugees were venturing inside the station after them.

  “Quickly,” Koyne found an open carriage door and climbed inside. The train was a cargo carrier, partitioned off inside by pens suitable for livestock. The air within was thick with the stink of animal sweat and faeces.

  As the Garantine climbed in, the eagle took wing and the train shunted forwards with a grinding clatter, sending sparks flying from the drive wheels gripping the rail. Ozone crackled and the carriages lurched away from the station, picking up momentum.

  The train rattled along, a dull impact resonating off the metalwork as it shouldered a piece of fallen masonry off the rails. Koyne drew the neural shredder and moved back through the cargo wagon, kicking open the hatch to the next carriage, and then the two more beyond that. In the rear car the shade found the corpses of groxes, the bovines lying where they had fallen on the gridded metal flooring. They were still tethered to anchoring rings on the walls, doubtless forgotten and left to starve in this reeking metal box after the fighting had begun.

  Satisfied they were alone, the Callidus walked back the length of the train to find the Garantine in the stubby engine car, watching the chattering cogitator-driver. Through the broken glass of the engine compartment canopy, the elevated track was visible ahead, dropping away down to the level of one of the main boulevards, paralleling the radial highway’s course.

  “If we’re lucky, we can ride this heap all the way out of the city,” said Koyne, absently examining the charge glyph on the neural weapon.

  The Eversor had his fang-mask back on, and he was growling softly with each breath, peering into the distance like a predator smelling the wind. “We’re not lucky,” he retorted. “Do you see?” The Garantine pointed a metal-taloned finger ahead of the train.

  Koyne pulled a pair of compact magnoculars from a belt clip and peered through them. A fuzzy image swam into focus; grey blobs became the distinct shapes of Adeptus Astartes in Maximus-pattern armour, moving to block the path of the monorail. As the Callidus watched, they dragged the husks of burned-out vehicles across the line, assembling a makeshift barricade.

  “I told you this was a trap,” rumbled the Garantine. “The Vanus is delivering us to the Astartes!”

  Koyne gave a shake of the head. “If that was so, then why aren’t we slowing down?” If anything, the train’s velocity was increasing, and warning indicators began to blink on the cogitator panel as the carriages exceeded their safety limits.

  The wheels screeched as the train raced down the incline from the elevated rails to the ground level crossing, and metal flashed off metal as the Sons of Horus began to open fire on the leading carriage, pacing bolt shells into the hull from the cover of their obstruction.

  The Garantine blind-fired a burst of full-auto fire through the broken window and then followed Koyne back through the wagons at a sprint. Shots punched through the walls of the cargo cars, rods of sunlight stabbing through the impact holes into the musty interior. The decking rocked beneath their feet and it was hard to stay upright as the train continued to gather speed.

  They made it to the rearmost wagon as the engine car slammed into the barricade and crashed through it. The husks of a groundcar and a flatbed GEV spun away across the boulevard, throwing two Astartes aside with the force of the collision. Metal fractured, red-hot and stressed beyond its limits, and the guide wheels broke away from the axle. Instantly freed from the monorail, the train lurched up and twisted over on to its side. The carriages crashed down to the blacktop and scored a gouge down the length of the street, spitting cascades of asphalt and gravel.

  In the rear car, the assassins were thrown into the grox carcasses, the impact absorbed by the foetid meat of the dead animals. Screeching and vomiting clouds of bright orange sparks, the derailed cargo train finally slowed to a shuddering halt.

  Koyne lost awareness for what seemed like long, long minutes. Then the Callidus was aware of being dragged upwards and then propelled through a tear in what had once been the wagon’s roof. The shade took several shaky steps out on to the roadway, smelling hot tar and the tang of burned metal. Koyne blinked in the sunlight, feeling for the neural shredder. The weapon was still there, mercifully.

  The Garantine lurched past, reloading his Executor. “I think we upset them,” he shouted, pointing past Koyne’s shoulder.

  Turning, the assassin saw armoured giants running down the road towards them, firing from the hip.

  Bolt-rounds cracked into the ground and the shattered train with heavy blares of concussion. Koyne drew the neural weapon and hesitated; the pistol had a finite range and was better suited to a close-in kill. Instead, the Callidus retreated behind part of the cargo wagon. Perhaps a lucky shot might take down one of the Sons of Horus, even hobble two of them… but that was a tactical squad back there, bearing down on the pair of them.

  “We’re not lucky,” the assassin muttered, considering the possibility that this backwater would indeed be the place that claimed the life of Koyne of the Callidus. A ricochet careened off the roadway and the Garantine staggered back into cover. Koyne smelled the thick, resinous odour of bio-fluids; there was a deep purple-black gouge in the Eversor’s back. “You’re wounded.”

  “Am I? Oh.” The other assassin seemed distracted, clearing a fouled cartridge from the breech of his gun. A metal canister rattled off the wagon and landed near their feet; without hesitation, the Garantine scooped up the krak grenade and threw it back in the direction it had come. Koyne could see that his every movement was an effort, as more thick, chemical-laced blood seeped from the injury.

  The Eversor let out a low, ululating gasp as injectors discharged, nullifying his pain. He glared back at Koyne and his pupils were pinpricks. “Something’s coming. Hear it?”

  Koyne was about to speak, but a sudden roar of jet wash smothered every other noise. From between the towers lining one of the side streets came a blunt-prowed flyer, the boxy fuselage suspended between two sets of wings that ended in vertical thruster pods; it was painted in bright stripes of white and green, the livery of the city’s firefighting brigade. There was a man in a black stealthsuit at an open hatch, a longrifle in his grip. A shot snapped from the gun muzzle and further down the road a car exploded.<
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  Koyne pulled at the Garantine’s arm as the aircraft dropped towards the street. “Time to go,” the Callidus shouted.

  The Eversor’s muscles were bunched hard like bales of steel cable, and he was vibrating with wild energy. “He said he killed one of them, before.” The Garantine was glaring at the oncoming Astartes. “That’s two now, if he’s to be believed.”

  The flyer was spinning about, trying to find a place to settle as the Sons of Horus split their fire between the assassins and the aircraft. “Garantine,” said Koyne. “We have to move.”

  The rage-killer twitched and a palsy came over him. “I don’t like you,” he said, slurring the words. “You realise that?”

  “The feeling is mutual.” Koyne had to yell to be heard over the noise of the thrusters. The flyer was hovering less than a metre from the roadway. Tariel was at the canopy, beckoning frantically.

  “Good. I don’t want you to confuse my motives.” And then the Eversor surged into a loping run, his legs blurring as he hurtled out of cover and straight into the lines of the Astartes. Shell casings cascaded out behind him in a stream of brass, falling from the ejection port of his combi-weapon.

  The Callidus swore and sprinted in the opposite direction towards the flyer. Kell was in half-cover by the open hatch, the Exitus rifle bucking in his grip as he fired Turbo-Penetrator rounds into the enemy squad. Koyne leapt up and scrambled into the crew compartment of the aircraft.

  Tariel was cowering behind a panel, pale and sweaty. He appeared to be puppeting the aircraft’s pilot-servitor through the interface of his cogitator gauntlet. The infocyte looked up. “Where’s the Garantine?” he yelled.

  “He’s made his choice,” said Koyne, slumping to the deck.

  THE EVERSOR RAN screaming into the cluster of rebel Astartes, blasting the first he found off his feet with a screeching salvo of rounds from the Executor. He collided with the next and the two of them went down in a crash of ceramite and metal. The Garantine felt the boiling churn of energy racing through his veins, his mech-enhanced heart beating at such incredible speed the sound it made in his ears was one long continuous roar. The stimm-pods in the cavities of his abdomen broke their regulator settings and flooded him with doses of Psychon and Barrage pumped directly into his organs, while atomiser grilles in the frame of his fang-mask puffed raw, undiluted anger-inducers and neuro-triggers into his nostrils.