Nemesis

‘Get out!’ Spear screamed the words as loud as he could, the amalgam of his once-human flesh thrashing turbulently against the embedded sheath of the daemonskin symbiont that cloaked him. Skin and skin flexed, tearing and shredding. Black fluids bubbled from new, self-inflicted wounds, staining the broken stonework. He swung his head down and battered it against the rubble, hearing bone snap wetly. Real, physical agony was like a tonic after the impossible, enveloping pain from the cloud-weapon. It shook the grip of the ghost-voices before they could form.

NO NO NO

‘NNNNNnnnnoooo!’ Spear bellowed, so wracked with his suffering he could do nothing but ride it out to the bitter end.

The pale-skinned man was coming closer. He had what could have been a weapon.

5

Tariel opened his hand and the emitter cone for the pulse generator grew out of the gauntlet’s palm, tiny blue sparks clustering around the nib of the device. He was shaking, and the infocyte grabbed his wrist with his other hand to hold it steady, trying to aim at the writhing, horrible mass that lay on the stones, screaming and bleeding.

The psy-disruptor grenades had only been an experiment. He hadn’t really expected them to work; at best, Tariel thought he might be able to flee under the cover of the discharge, that it might blind Horus’s monstrous assassin long enough for him to escape.

Instead, the thing was howling like a soul being dragged into the abyss. It tore at itself in anguish, ripping out divots of its own flesh. Tariel hesitated, grotesquely fascinated by it; he could not look away from the twitching spectacle.

Faces grew out of the creature’s torso and abdomen. The quivering red skin bowed outwards and became the distinct shape of a male aspect, repeated over and over. It was silently mouthing something to him, but the words were corrupted and blurred. The expression was clear, however. The faces were begging him, imploring him.

The fizzing wash of static issuing from his vox broke for a moment and Tariel heard Koyne’s flat, emotionless drone in his ear. ‘Do not engage it, Vanus,’ said the static-riddled voice. ‘We’re coming to you–’

Then the signal was swallowed up again by interference as somewhere off in the distant city, a new slew of warheads were detonated.

The killer’s spasms of pain were calming, and Tariel came as close as he dared. He hesitated, the question spinning in his thoughts, the pulse generator humming and ready. Attack or flee? Flee or attack?

The faces faded, melting back into the crimson-hued flesh, and suddenly those black, abyssal eyes were staring into him, clear as nightfall.

Tariel triggered the blast of focussed electromagnetic force, but it was too late. Spear moved at the speed of hate, diving into him with his hands aimed forwards in a fan of unfolding claws, knocking his arms away. Wicked talons punctured the Vanus’s torso and tore through dermal flex-armour and meat, down into bone and organs; then the hands split apart and ripped Tariel’s ribcage open, emptying him on to the wet stones.

6

The slaughterhouse stink of Fon Tariel’s bloody demise reached Koyne as the shade bolted from the broken-ended skywalk spanning the main terminal atrium. The Callidus skidded to a halt and spat in annoyance as what was left of the infocyte was shrugged off his killer’s claws and pooled at the feet of the red-fleshed thing.

Koyne saw the shoals of mouths emerging all over the surface of the monstrosity, as they licked and lapped at the steaming remains of the Vanus. A furious surge of censure ran through the assassin’s mind; Tariel had been a poor choice for this mission from the start. If Koyne had been given command of the operation, as would have been the more sensible choice, then the Callidus would have made sure the Vanus never left the Ultio. Tariel’s kind were simply incapable of the instincts needed to operate in the field. There was a reason the Officio Assassinorum kept them at their scrying stations, and now this wasteful death had proven it. This was all the Vindicare’s fault; the entire mission was breaking apart, collapsing all around them.

But it was too late to abort now. The killer, the Spear-creature, was looking up, sensing the Callidus’s presence – and now Koyne’s options had fallen to one.

With a flexion of the wrist, the haft of a memory sword fell into Koyne’s right hand and the Callidus leapt from the suspended walkway; in the left the shade had the neural shredder, and the assassin pulled the trigger, sending an expanding wave of exotic energy cascading towards Spear.

The red-skinned freak skirted the luminal edge of the neural blast and dodged backwards, performing balletic flips that sent Spear spinning through pools of dark shadow and shafts of grey, watery sunlight.