Nemesis

Delicately, so the action would not upset the positioning of the weapon by so much as a millimetre, he thumbed the action selector switch from the safe position to the armed setting. Indicator runes running vertically down the scope’s display informed him that the weapon was now ready to commit to a kill. All that Kell required now was his target.

He resisted the urge to look up into the sky. His quarry would be here soon enough.

10

A kilometre to the west, Tariel licked dry lips and tapped his hand over the curved keypad on his forearm, acutely aware of how sweaty his palms were. His breathing was ragged, and he had to work to calm himself to the point where he was no longer twitching with unspent adrenaline.

He took a long, slow breath, tasting dust and ozone. In the corridors of the office tower, drifts of paper spilled from files discarded in panic lay everywhere, among lines and lines of abandoned cubicle workspaces left empty after the first shots of rebellion had been fired. No one had come up here since the nobles had forced the Governor to renounce the rule of Terra; the men and women who had toiled in this place had either gone to ground, embraced the new order or been executed. At first, the dead, empty halls had seemed to echo with the sound of them, but eventually Tariel had accepted that the tower was just as much an empty vessel as so many other Imperial installations on Dagonet. Gutted and forsaken in the rush to eschew the Emperor and embrace his errant son.

The Vanus crouched by the side of the Lance, and laid a finger on the side of its cylindrical cowling. The device was almost as long as the footprint of the tower, and it had been difficult to reassemble it in secret. But eventually the components from Ultio’s cargo bay had done as their designers in the Mechanicum promised. Now it was ready, and through the cowling Tariel could feel the subtle vibration of the power core cycling through its ready sequence. Content that the device was in good health, Tariel dropped into a low crouch and made his way to the far windows, which looked down into the valley of the capital and Liberation Plaza. The infocyte was careful to be certain that he would not be seen by patrol drones or ground-based PDF spotters.

He took a moment to check the tolerances and positioning of the hyperdense sentainium-armourglass mirrors for the tenth time in as many minutes. It was difficult for him to leave the mechanism alone; now that he had set a nest of alarm beams and sonic screamers on the lower levels to deal with any interlopers, he had little to do but watch the Lance and make sure it performed as it should. In an emergency, he could take direct control of it, but he hoped it would not come to that. It was a responsibility he wasn’t sure he wanted to shoulder.

Each time he checked the mirrors, he became convinced that in the action of checking them he had put them out of true, and so he would check them again, step away, retreat… and then the cycle of doubt would start once more. Tariel tightened his hands into fists and chewed on his lower lip; his behaviour was verging on obsessive-compulsive.

Forcing himself, he turned his back on the Lance’s tip and retreated into the dusty gloom of the building, finding the place he had chosen for himself as his shelter for when the moment came. He sat and brought up his cogitator gauntlet, glaring into the hololithic display. It told Tariel that the device was ready to perform its function. All was well.

A minute later he was back at the mirrors, cursing himself as he ran through the checks once again.

11

Koyne strode across the edge of the marble square, as near as was safe to the lines of metal crowd barriers. The shade scanned the faces of the Dagoneti on the other side of them, the adults and the children, the youthful and the old, all seeing past and through the figure in the PDF uniform as they fixed their eyes on the same place; the centre of Liberation Plaza, where the mosaic of an opened eye spread out rays of colour to every point of the compass. The design was in echo of the personal sigil of the Warmaster, and the Callidus wondered if it was meant to signify that he was always watching.

Such notions were dangerously close to idolatry, beyond the level of veneration that a primarch of the Adeptus Astartes should expect. One only had to count the statues and artworks of the Warmaster that appeared throughout the city; the Emperor had more of them, that much was certain, but not many more. And now all the towering sculptures of the Master of Mankind were torn down. Koyne had heard from one of the other PDF officers that squads of clanner troops trained in demolitions had been scouring the city during the night, with orders to make sure nothing celebrating the Emperor’s name still stood unscathed. The assassin grimaced; there was something almost… heretical about such behaviour.