Nemesis

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.