Nemesis

He reached the last page and released a booming, hateful laugh. Soalm felt a lash of sympathetic pain as he ripped the leaf from the binding of the priceless Eurotas relic and cupped the yellowed vellum in his hand. For a moment, she thought she saw the shimmer of liquid on the page, catching the rays of the sunlight.

Then, as if it were some delicacy he was sampling at a banquet, the killer tipped back his head and opened his mouth, his forked jaws opening like an obscene blossom. A dozen more tiny fanged maws opened across his cheeks and neck as he tipped up the paper and swallowed the blood of the God-Emperor.

He began to scream and howl, and the riot of malformation in his flesh became a storm of writhing fronds, tenticular forms, gnashing mouths. His body lost control over itself, the red-black skin warping and distending into shapes that were nauseating and vile.

Weeping in her agony and her failure, Soalm dragged herself away towards Tros’s skimmer, desperate to flee before the killer’s rapture came to its end.

5

Kell was already on his way out even as the echo of his gunshot died around him. He drew up the cameoline cloak across his shoulders, pulling the Exitus longrifle over one arm. He set the timers on the emplaced explosives to ignite once he was clear. The Vindicare paused to add an extra krak charge to a support pillar in the middle of the laundry room; when it detonated, it would collapse the ceiling above and with luck, obliterate what remained intact of the hab-tower’s gutted upper levels. He had left no trace behind him, but it paid to be thorough.

Kell heard the sounds rising up from the streets as he dropped down to the tier below, moving towards his exit point. Disorder would spread like wildfire in the wake of the assassination; the Execution Force had to get beyond the city perimeter before the pandemonium caught up to them.

He went to the edge of the shattered flooring and looked out. He could see people beneath him, the tiny dots of figures running in the avenues. Kell kicked aside a piece of fallen masonry and recovered his descent gear.

The vox link in his spy mask crackled as the seldom-used general channel was keyed.

Kell froze. Only the members of the team knew the frequency, and all of them knew that the channel was a mechanism of last resort. Even though it was heavily encrypted, it lacked the untraceable facility of the burst transmitters; the fact that one of the team was using it now meant something had gone very, very wrong.

The next sound he heard was the voice of the Callidus. Every word said was being simultaneously transmitted to Tariel and the Garantine. ‘Mission fail,’ said Koyne, panting with the exertion of running. He could hear bolter shots and screaming in the background. ‘Confirming mission fail.’

Kell was shaking his head. That could not be true; the last thing he had seen through the Exitus’s scope was the flash of radiation as the Lance ended the target’s life. Horus Lupercal was dead…

‘Broken Mirror,’ said Koyne. ‘I repeat, Broken Mirror.’

The code phrase hit Kell like a physical blow and he sagged against the crumbling wall. The words had only one meaning – a surrogate, a sacrificial proxy had replaced their target.

A storm of questions rushed through his thoughts; how could Horus have known they would be waiting for them? Had the mission been compromised from the very start? Had they been betrayed?

The warrior Kell had placed between his crosshairs could only have been the Warmaster! Only Horus, the liberator of Dagonet clad in his mantle, would have made his grand gesture of the single shot into the sky… It could not be true! It could not be…

The moment of doubt and uncertainty flared bright, and then faded. Now was not the time to dwell on this turn of events. The first, most important directive was to exfiltrate the strike zone and regroup. To re-evaluate. Kell nodded to himself. He would do that, he decided. He would extract his team from this mess and then determine a new course of action. As long as a single Officio Assassinorum operative was still alive, the mission could still be completed.

And if along the way, a traitor came to light… He shrugged off the thought. First things first. The Vindicare keyed the general channel. ‘Acknowledged,’ he said. ‘Extraction sites are now to be considered compromised. Proceed to city perimeter and await contact.’

Kell secured the longrifle and fixed his descent pack to his back. ‘Go dark,’ he ordered, ending the final command with the tap of a switch that deactivated his vox gear.