Nemesis

Kell muttered into the mastoid vox pickup affixed to his jawbone, subvocalising his words into the humming reader in the arm of the couch. As the words spilled out of him, he breathed hard and worked on attending to his injuries. The pilot had reconfigured the gravity field in the cockpit to off-set the g-force effects of their headlong flight, but Kell could still feel the pressure upon him. But he was thankful for small mercies – had he not been so protected, the lift-off acceleration from the port would have crushed him into a blackout, perhaps even punctured a lung with one of his cracked ribs.

It remained an effort to speak, though, but he did it because he knew he was duty bound to give his report. Even now, the Ultio’s clever subordinate machine-brains were uploading and encoding the contents of the memory spool from Iota’s skull-helm, and the pages of overly analytical logs Tariel had kept in his cogitator gauntlet. When they were done, that compiled nugget of dense data would be transmitted via burst-signal to the ship’s drive unit, still hiding in orbit, within the wreckage of a dead space station.

But not without his voice to join them, Kell decided. He was mission commander. At the end, the lay of the choices were his responsibility and he would not shirk that.

Finally, he ran out of words and bowed his head. Tapping the controls of the reader, he pressed the playback switch to ensure his final entry had been embedded.

‘My name is Eristede Kell,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Assassin-at-Marque of the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan. And I have defied my orders.’

Nodding, he silenced himself, discarding the mastoid patch. Kell’s voice seemed strange and distant to him; it was less a report he had made and more of a confession.

Confession. The loaded connotations of that word made him glance down, to where he had secured Jenniker’s golden aquila about the wrist of his glove. He searched himself, trying to find a meaning, a definition for the emotion clouding his thoughts. But there was nothing he could grasp.

Kell pressed another switch and sent the vox recording to join the rest of the data packet. Outside, the glowing sky had darkened through blue to purple to black, taking the rush of air with it. Ultio was beyond the atmosphere now, and still climbing.

Each breath he took felt tainted and metallic. Thick fluids congested at his throat and he swallowed them back with a grimace. The smell in his nostrils was no one’s blood but his own, and while the painkillers he had injected into his neck had gone some way towards keeping him upright, they were wearing thinner by the moment.

An indicator rune on the control console flared green; Ultio had been sent a line-of-sight signal from the drive unit. Out there in the wreckage-strewn orbits, the drive module was awakening, stealthily turning power to its warp engine and sublight drives. In moments, the astropath and Navigator on board would be roused from their sense-dep slumber. The Ultio’s descent module needed only to cross the space to the other section of the ship and dock; then, reunited, the vessel could run for the void and the escape of the immaterium.

Kell leaned forwards to stare out of the canopy. The only flaw in that otherwise simple plan was the gathering of warships between the guncutter and the drive module.

An armada barred his way. Starships the size of a metropolis crested with great knife-shaped bows, blocks of hideously beweaponed metal like the heads of god-hammers, each one detailed in shining steel and gold. Each with the device of an opened, baleful eye about them, glaring ready hate into the dark.

At the centre of the fleet, a behemoth. Kell recognised the lines of a uniquely lethal vessel. A battle-barge of magnificent, gargantuan proportions haloed by clouds of fighter escorts; the Vengeful Spirit, flagship of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.

‘Pilot,’ he said, his voice husky with the pain, ‘put us on an intercept heading with the command ship. Put all available power to the aura cloak.’

The cyborg helmsman clicked and whirred. ‘Increased aura cloak use will result in loss of void shield potentiality.’

He glared at the visible parts of the pilot’s near-human face, peering from the command podium. ‘If they can’t see us, they can’t hit us.’

‘They will hit us,’ it replied flatly. ‘Intercept vector places Ultio in high-threat quadrant. Multiple enemy weapon arcs.’

‘Just do as I say!’ Kell shouted, and he winced at the jag of pain it caused him. ‘And open a link to the Navigator.’