Nemesis

Kell hesitated; and then with deliberate care, he replaced the anti-infective agent with a stimulant. ‘You’re right.’

‘That could kill her,’ Tariel warned. ‘She’s very weak.’

‘No,’ Kell replied, placing the nozzle of the injector at her pale neck, ‘she’s not.’ He pressed the stud and the drug load discharged.

Soalm reacted with a hollow gasp, her back arching, eyes opening wide with shock. In the next moment, she fell back against the deck, wheezing. ‘You…’ she managed, her gaze finding Kell where he stood over her.

‘Listen to me,’ said the Vindicare, that curious unquantifiable expression on his face once again. ‘The Garantine is dead. The mission was a failure. Horus sent a proxy in his place. Now his Astartes are punishing the city for what we have done.’

Soalm’s eyes lost focus for a moment as she took this in. ‘A killer…’ she whispered. ‘An assassin… hiding behind the identity of a rogue trader’s agent.’ She looked up. ‘I saw what it did to Iota. The others it just murdered, but her… And then the blood…’ The woman started to weep. ‘Oh, God-Emperor, the blood…’

‘What did she just say?’ Koyne asked. ‘Idolatry is outlawed! Of all the–’

‘Be quiet!’ Tariel snapped. The infocyte leaned forward. ‘Soalm. There is another assassin here? It killed Iota, yes?’

She gave a shaky nod. ‘Tried to end me… Murdered Sinope and the others in the sanctuary. And then the book…’ She sobbed.

Kell extended a hand and laid it on her shoulder as she wept.

‘I can show it,’ said Tariel. Koyne turned to see the Vanus grasping Iota’s helmet in his hands. ‘What happened, I mean. There’s a memory coil built into the mechanism of the animus speculum. A mission recorder.’

‘Do it,’ said Kell, without looking up.

In short order, Tariel used his mechadendrites to prise open panels along the back of the metal skull, and connected cords of bright brass and copper between the hidden ports on the device and the hololith projector built into his cogitator.

Images flickered and jumped. Fractured moments of conversation blurred and sputtered in the air as the infocyte plumbed the depths of the memory unit, cutting though layers of encryption; and then it began.

Soalm looked away; she did not want to witness it a second time.

7

Tariel watched Iota die through her own eyes.

He saw the man in the Eurotas uniform transform into the thing that called itself ‘Spear’; he saw the perplexing readouts on the aura scans that matched nothing the psyker had encountered before; and he saw the horrific act of the taking of her blood.

‘It tasted her…’ Soalm muttered. ‘Do you see? In the moment before the kill.’

‘Why?’ Koyne was sickened.

‘A genetic lock,’ Tariel said, nodding to himself. ‘Powerful psionic rituals require the use of an organic component as an initiator.’

‘A blood rite?’ Koyne shot him a look. ‘That’s primitive superstition.’

‘It might appear so to a certain point of view.’

Iota died again, the audio replay catching the raw terror in her death-scream, and Tariel looked away, his gorge rising. The peculiar waif-like psyker had not deserved to perish in so monstrous a way as this.

No one spoke for a long time after the playback ended. They sat in silence, the images of the daemonic abomination embedded in their thoughts, the revolting spectacle of the girl’s murder echoing in the howling winds outside.

‘Sorcery,’ said Kell, at length. His voice was cold and hard. ‘The rumours about Horus’s sinister plans are true. He is in league with allies from beyond the pale.’

‘The ruinous powers…’ muttered Soalm.

‘It is not magick,’ Tariel insisted. ‘Call it what it is. Science, but the darkest science. Like Iota herself, a creation of intellects unfettered by morals or boundaries.’

‘What are you saying, that this witchling Spear is like her?’ Koyne’s eyes narrowed. ‘The girl was something bred in a laboratory, deliberately tainted by the touch of the warp.’

‘I know what it… what he is,’ said Tariel, yanking out the cables from the gauntlet and dousing the hologram’s deathly images. ‘I have heard the name of this creature.’

‘Explain,’ demanded Kell.

‘This must never be repeated.’ The infocyte sighed. ‘The Vanus watch all. Our stacks are filled with information on all the clades. It is how we maintain our position.’

Koyne nodded. ‘You blackmail everyone.’

‘Indeed. We know that the Culexus seek to improve upon their psychic abilities through experimentation. They gather subjects from the care of the Silent Sisterhood. Those they do not induct into their ranks, they spirit away for… other reasons.’

‘This Spear was one of ours?’ Koyne was incredulous.

‘It is possible,’ Tariel went on. ‘There was a project… it was declared null by Sire Culexus himself… they called it the Black Pariah. A living weapon capable of turning a target’s psionic force back upon it, without the aid of an animus device. The ultimate counter-psyker.’

‘What became of it?’ said Kell.