Nemesis

by James Swallow

  “Will it be that simple?” Soalm snapped back. “A city full of people is being put to the sword out there because we killed a single Astartes. Do you think if the Warmaster dies, every rebel will fall to his knees and be crippled by grief? It will be anarchy! Destruction and chaos!”

  “I am mission commander,” Kell’s voice cut through the air. “I have authority here.” He glared at Soalm. “I will not be disobeyed again. The decision is mine alone.”

  “We can’t kill them both,” said Tariel.

  “Get us airborne,” said the Vindicare, reaching for his rifle.

  THERE WAS A ragged group of men on the perimeter wall of the star-port, some of them soldiers, some of them not, all with looted firearms and the aura of hot fear about them. They saw the jetbike hurtling in from across the desert and they fired on it without hesitation. Everything had been trying to kill them since the shock of the dawn broke, and they did not wait to find out if this vehicle was friend or foe. Insanity and terror ruled Dagonet now, as men turned on men in their panic to flee the doomed city.

  The stubby aerodyne had a single, medium-wattage lascannon mounted along the line of the fuselage, and Spear aimed it with twists of the jetbike’s steering handles, lashing along the battlement of the wall with lances of yellow fire. Bodies exploded in blasts of superheated blood-steam as shots meant to knock down aircraft eradicated men with each hit. Those who didn’t die in the initial volley were killed as they ran when Spear came around in a tight loop to strafe them off the line of the wall.

  Threads of sinew and knots of transformed tissue flared out behind the killer’s head in a fan. Fronds from the daemonskin fluttered, sucking the mist of blood from the air as the bike passed over the wall and skimmed the runway towards the parked shuttle.

  The Eurotas ship was untouched, although Spear noted two corpses off by the prow. The autonomic guns in the shuttle’s chin barbette had locked onto the pair of opportunists, who had clearly thought they could claim the craft to escape. The little turret turned to track the jetbike as Spear came in but it did not fire; the sensors saw nothing when they looked at him, only a jumble of conflicting readings the primitive machine-brain could not decipher.

  He abandoned the flyer and sprinted towards the shuttle. Spear was electric; his every neuron sang with bubbling power and giddy anticipation. The tiny droplet of blood he had consumed was like the sweetest nectar. It bubbled through his consciousness like potent, heady wine; he had a flash of Yosef Sabrat’s memory, a sense-taste of drinking an elderly vintage with Daig Segan, savouring the perfection of it. This was a far greater experience. He had dared to sip from the cup of a being more powerful than any other, and even that slightest of tastes made him feel like the king of all creation. If this were an echo of it, he thought, what glory the Emperor must feel to simply be.

  Spear released a deep, booming laugh to the clouded skies. He was a loaded gun, now. Infinitely lethal. Ready to commit the greatest murder in history.

  He just needed to be close…

  Under the starboard wing, he glimpsed a small drum-shaped vehicle on fat tyres; it was a mechanised fuel bowser, governed by simple automata. The device was one of many such systems in the star-port, machines that could do the jobs of men by loading, unloading or servicing the ships that passed through the facility; but like so many things on Dagonet, in the disorder that had engulfed the planet no one had thought to stand down the robots, and so they went on at their programmed tasks, ignorant of the fact that buildings had collapsed around them, unaware that their human masters were most likely dead in the rubble.

  The automaton had dutifully done its job, and refuelled the shuttle with fresh promethium. Spear hesitated on the cockpit ladder and his ebullient mood wavered.

  Overhead, red light and thunder rolled in across the runway from the burning city, and Spear’s fanged mouth twisted in something like a scowl. In truth, he had not expected the Sons of Horus to be so close behind him to Dagonet. He had hoped he might have a day, perhaps two – but the tides of the warp were capricious. He wondered if some intelligence had been at work to bring all these players to the same place at the same time. To what end, though?

  Spear shook the thought away. He was so set on leaving this place behind he had not stopped to think that his means of escape might no longer be in place. It was likely that if the Warmaster’s fleet was here, then the cutter Yelene was either in their possession or smashed to fragments.

  “I must get to Terra…” He said the words aloud, the need burning in him; and then he sensed a distant taint upon his perception. A powerful, sinister presence. Unbidden, Spear looked up again, into the storm.

  Yes. The master was up there, looking down on Dagonet, searching for him. The killer could see the dark, piercing gaze of Erebus in the patterns of the clouds. The master was waiting for him. Watching to see what he would do next, like a patient teacher with a prized student.

  Spear dropped off the ladder and moved back to the front of the shuttle. It was all falling into place. With the blood taken, he needed only to ride to his target and perform his kill. Erebus was here to help him; the master would give him the ship he needed. It would be his final act as a mentor.

  The killer took one of the bodies on the runway and dragged it into the lee of the wing, under cover from the thick gobbets of black rain that were falling. Spear remembered the rituals of communication that Erebus had seared into his memory. It would only take a moment to arrange. He dipped his fingers into a deep wound on the man’s torso and cupped a handful of thickening blood; then, quickly, Spear used it to draw glyphs of statement on the cracked ferrocrete surface. He made the circles and crosses, building the shape of an eightfold star line by line. Once complete, it would be visible to Erebus like a flare on a moonless night. The master would see it and know. He would understand.

  The wind changed direction for an instant, blowing the smell of the corpse and the tang of promethium across the sensing pits in Spear’s fanged maw; and, too, it brought him the skirl of humming turbines.

  His head snapped up, catching sight of a white-and-green shape dropping down through the mist. Something flashed in the open hatch and Spear jerked away on reflex.

  A bullet creased the surface of his daemonflesh face like a razor blade, opening a ragged gouge that spat out a fan of ebon fluid; the tainted blood spattered over the half-drawn glyphs, ruining the pattern. Spear stumbled. A fraction of a second slower and the bullet would have struck him between the fathomless black pits of his eyes.

  Tightening the muscles in his arms, Spear put up his palms with a snap of the wrist, and the daemonflesh grew new orifices. Long spars of sharp bone clattered into the air in a puff of pinkish discharge.

  “WATCH OUT!” TARIEL called, stabbing at controls to throw the flyer into a half-roll that showed the belly of the aircraft to their target.

  Kell staggered, losing his balance for a second as he clung on to his rifle. Koyne, surprisingly strong for wearing a body that seemed insubstantial, grabbed him and held him up. Nearby, Soalm hung on for dear life, shivering in the cold draught billowing through the open hatch.

  Bone shards peppered the hull of the flyer and punched through the metal fuselage. Kell flinched as several impacted his chest and buried themselves in the armour there. Koyne cried out and as the aircraft righted itself, the Callidus fell backwards, a circle of bright crimson blossoming through the material across the shade’s thigh.

  Kell swept a hand over his chest, flicking the shards away. As they fell to the deck they denatured, becoming soft and pliant. To the Vindicare’s disgust, the shards began to writhe like blind worms. He stamped them into patches of white pus and brought the Exitus up to his shoulder. “Tariel! Bring us around!”

  The flyer had come in upwind, their approach masked by the clouds and the thunder from the shelling of the capital. Now they were circling the parked shuttle, the livery of the Eurotas Consortium clear as day across the hull. What Kell saw through his targeti
ng scope was disturbing; he had faced humans of every stripe, mutant creatures, even xenos. Spear was unlike any of them. Even from this distance, it exuded a tainted menace that sickened him to look at.

  “It’s making for the cockpit,” Tariel called out. “Kell!”

  The marksman saw the blur of the assassin-creature as it ran; the thing hazed the air around it like waves of heat rising from a searing desert, making it hard to draw a bead. His finger tensed on the trigger. There was a high-velocity Splinter round in the chamber – on impact with an organic target it would fracture into millions of tiny hair-like fragments, each a charged piece of molly-wire. The wires would expand in a sphere and rip through flesh and bone like a tornado of blades.

  It would do this, if he hit his target. But Kell had missed with the first shot. Even from a moving platform, through rain, against a partly-occluded target, he should have found the mark.

  The Vindicare made a snap decision and worked the slide of the rifle, ejecting the unspent Splinter bullet, in one swift motion thumbing a red-tipped round from a pocket on his arm into the open chamber.

  “What are you waiting for?” Koyne shouted. “Kill it!”

  The breech of the Exitus closed on the Ignis bullet and Kell swung the longrifle away from the target. He ignored Koyne’s cries and his scope filled with the shape of the fuel bowser.

  The incendiary compound in his next shot hit the main promethium tank and combusted. A fist of orange fire flipped the shuttle over and engulfed it in flames. Shockwaves of damp air struck the flyer and the aircraft was forced down hard, the impact of the landing snapping off the undercarriage.

  Kell got up as bits of hull metal clattered out of the sky, bouncing off the runway. For a moment, all he saw was the jumping, twisting shapes of the flames; but then something red and smoking tore itself out of the wreckage and began to run for the star-port terminal building.

  The Vindicare snarled and raised the rifle, but the weight of the gun told him the magazine was empty. He swore, slamming a new clip into place, knowing as he did that it would not matter. When he peered back through the scope, Spear had vanished. “He’s gone for cover,” he began, turning. “We need to—”

  “Eristede?” His sister’s voice stopped him dead. She lay on the deck, and her face was waxy and dull. There was blood on her lips, and when she moved her hands he saw a jagged length of bone protruding from her chest.

  He let the rifle fall and ran to her, dropping into a crouch. Old emotions, strong and long-buried, erupted inside him. “Jenniker, no…”

  “Did you kill it?”

  He felt the colour drain from him. “Not yet.”

  “You must. But not out of fury, do you understand?”

  The cold, familiar rage that had always sustained him welled up in Kell’s thoughts. It was the same burning, icy power that had spurred him on ever since that day in the schola, since the moment the woman in the Vindicare robes had told him they knew the name of the man who had killed his parents. It was his undying fuel, the bottomless wellspring of dark emotion that made him such a superlative killer.

  His sister’s fingertips touched his cheek. “No,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “Please don’t show me that face again. Not the revenge. There is no end to that, Eristede. It goes on and on and on and it will consume you. There will be nothing left.”

  Kell felt hollow inside, an empty vessel. “There’s nothing now,” he said. “You took it all when you broke away. The last connection I had.” He looked down at his hands. “This is all I have left.”

  Jenniker shook her head. “You’re wrong. And so was I. I let you go that night. I should have made you stay. We could have lived another life. Instead we doomed ourselves.”

  She was fading now, and he could see it. A surge of raw panic washed over him. His sister was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “He is watching. The God-Emperor waits for me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Hush.” She put a finger on his lips, trembling with her agony. “One day.” Jenniker pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. “Save His life, Eristede. He will draw me to His right hand, to be with mother and father. I’ll wait for you there. We will wait for you.”

  “Jenniker…” He tried to find the right words to say to her. To ask her to forgive him. To understand; but her eyes were all the answer he needed. He saw such certainty there, such absence of doubt.

  With difficulty she pulled a slim toxin corde from her pocket. “Do this, my brother,” she told him, her pain rising. “But not for revenge. For the God-Emperor.”

  Before he could stop her, she touched the tip of the needle-like weapon to her palm and pierced the flesh. Kell cried out as her eyes fluttered closed, and she became slack in his hands.

  The rains drummed on the canopy and the flames hissed; then he became aware of a presence at his side. Koyne stood there, holding his longrifle. “Vindicare,” said the shade. “What are your orders?”

  Kell opened his fingers and saw a gold aquila there, stained with dots of red.

  “In the Emperor’s name,” he said, rising to his feet and taking the weapon, “follow me.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Confrontation

  Duel

  Termination

  KELL LOOKED UP as Koyne emerged from the hangar where the Ultio was hidden and his expression stiffened. The boyish face, the pretence at the shape of a human aspect, these were all gone now. Instead, the Callidus had stripped down to what existed in the core of the shade’s persona. An androgynous figure in the matt black overall of a stealthsuit similar to that worn by Kell and Tariel, but with a hood that clung to every contour of the other assassin’s face. The only expression, if it could be said to be such a thing, was from the emerald ovals that were the eyes of the mask. Cold focus glittered there, and little else. Kell was reminded of an artist’s wooden manikin, something without emotion or animation from within.

  Koyne’s head cocked. “There’s still time to reconsider this.” The voice, like the figure, was neutral and colourless. Without someone else’s face to speak from, the Callidus seemed to lose all effect.

  He ignored the statement, rechecking the fresh clips of ammunition he had taken from the ship for the paired Exitus longrifle and pistol. “Remember the plan,” said the Vindicare. “We’ve all seen what it can do. There’s just the three of us now.”

  “You saw it,” Tariel said, in a small voice. “We all saw it. On the memory coil, and out there… It’s not human.”

  Koyne gave a reluctant nod. “And not xenos. Not alien in that way.”

  “It’s a target, that’s all that matters,” Kell retorted.

  The Callidus scowled. “When you have been where I have been and seen what I have seen, you come to understand that there are living things out there that go beyond such easy categorisation. Things that defy reason… even sanity. Have you ever peered into the warp, Vindicare? What lives there—”

  “This is not the warp!” grated Kell. “This is the real world! And what lives here, we can end with a bullet!”

  “But what if we can’t kill the fiend?” said Tariel, a long ballistic coat pulled tight over him. Congregating under the shadows near his boots, Kell saw rodentlike forms sheltering from the rain.

  “I wounded it,” said the Vindicare. “So we will kill it.”

  Tariel gave a slow nod. Overhead, a crackling roar crossed the sky as something burning crimson-purple passed above them, obscured by the low, dirty clouds. Seconds later, impact tremors made the runway quiver all around them, and the winds brought the long, drawn-out ramble of buildings collapsing. The city was entering its death-throes, and when it was finally smothered, Kell doubted the fury of the Sons of Horus would be sated.

  Tariel looked up. “Vox communications will be sporadic, if they even work at all,” he said. “The radioactives and ionisation in the atmosphere are blanketing the whole a
rea.”

  Kell nodded as he walked away. “If one of us finds the target, we’ll all know quickly enough.”

  THE PAIN ACROSS his back was a forest of needles.

  Spear ran on, skirting around the rings of broken ferrocrete that had been sections of the control tower, now fallen in a line across the landing pads and maintenance pits. He could feel the daemonskin working against the myriad fragments of metal that were embedded in him, deposited there by the explosion of the shuttle. One by one, the pieces of shrapnel were being expunged from his torso, the living flesh puckering to spit them out in puffs of black blood.

  The burn from the blast was torture, and with every footfall jags of sharp agony raced up Spear’s changed limbs and tightened around his chest. When the fuel bowser had detonated, the concussion had caught him first and thrown him clear. The shuttle took the brunt of the explosion, and it was lost to him now. He would need to find another way off Dagonet. Another way to signal the master.

  He slowed, clambering over a pile of rubble sloughed from the front of the terminal building, dragging himself up on spars of twisted rebar over drifts of shattered blue glass.

  At the apex he dared to pause and throw a glance back through the filthy downpour. The shuttle wreckage was still burning, bright orange flames shimmering where the wet runway reflected them like a dark mirror. Spear’s segmented jaws parted in a low growl. He had allowed himself to become distracted; he was so enraptured by his own success at taking the Warrant he had not stopped to consider the meaning of the witch-girl’s company with the cultists of the Theoge.

  Her appearance there had not been happenstance. At first he thought she was merely some defender, a palace guard put in place as a last line of defence by Eurotas’ fanatic cohorts; now it was becoming clearer. He was facing assassins, killers of his own stripe with their own weapons of murder.