Nemesis

‘Complying.’ The Vindicare thought he heard a note of grievance in the reply as the guncutter turned, putting its bow on the Vengeful Spirit. The sensors were showing the first curious returns from the picket ships in Horus’s fleet. They were sweeping the area for a trace, uncertain if their scry-sensors had seen something; but the Ultio’s aura cloak was generations ahead of common Naval technology. They would be inside the fleet’s inner perimeter before anyone on the picket vessels could properly interpret what they had seen.

Another rune on the console glowed; a vox channel was open between the forward module and the drive section. Kell spoke quickly, fearful that the transmission would undo all the work of the cloak if left active a second too long. ‘This is Kell. Stand by to receive encoded burst transmission. Release only on Omnis Octal authority.’ He took a shaky breath. ‘New orders supersede all prior commands. Protocol Perditus. Expedite immediate. Repeat, go to Protocol Perditus.’

It seemed like long, long seconds before the Navigator’s whispering, papery voice returned through the speaker grille. ‘This will be difficult,’ it said, ‘but the attempt will be made.’ Kell reached for the panel to cut the channel just as the Navigator spoke again. ‘Good luck, assassin.’

The rune went dark, and Kell’s hand dropped.

Beyond the canopy, laser fire probed the sky around the ship, and ahead the battle-barge grew to blot out the darkness.

2

Close-range lascannons on the hull of the drive module blew apart the paper-thin sheath of metals hiding the aft section of the ship, and the Ultio’s drive section blasted free of the station wreck in a pulse of detonation. Fusion motors unleashed the tiny suns at their cores and pushed the craft away, climbing the acceleration curve in a glitter of void shields and displaced energy. In moments, the vessel was rising towards one-quarter lightspeed.

Picket ships on the far side of the Warmaster’s fleet, ex-Imperial Navy frigates and destroyers crewed only by human officers, saw it running and opened fire. Most of the ships belonging to the Dagoneti had been obliterated over the past few hours, and the stragglers had either been forced down to the surface or cut in two by their beam lances.

Targeting solutions on the odd craft that had suddenly appeared on their holoscopes behaved unexpectedly, however. Weapon locks drifted off it, unable to find a true. Scans gave conflicting readings; the ship was monstrously over-powered for something of its tonnage; it seemed unmanned, and then it seemed not. And strangest of all, the glimmer of a building warp signature built up around its flanks the further it strayed away from the gravity shadow of the planet, racing for the jump point.

Warships dropped out of formation and powered after it, following the unidentified craft up and out of the plane of the Dagonet system’s ecliptic. They would never catch it.

Alone now on their headless beast of a vessel, the Ultio’s Navigator and astropath communed with one another in a manner most uncommon for their respective kinds; with words.

And what they shared was an understanding of mutual purpose. Protocol Perditus. A coded command string known to them both, to which there was only one response. They were to leave their area of operation on immediate receipt of such an order and follow a pre-set series of warp space translations. They would not stop until they lay under the light of Sol. The mission was over, abandoned.

Weapons fire haloed the space around the ship as it plunged towards the onset of critical momentum, the first vestiges of a warp gate forming in the void ahead.

3

The blood continued to stream from Erebus’s nostrils as he shoved his way out of the elevator car and through the cluster of helots waiting on the command deck. The fluid matted his beard and he grimaced, drawing a rough hand across his face. The psychic shock was fading, mercifully, but for a brief while it had felt as if it would cut him open.

There, in his chambers aboard the flagship, meditating in the gloom over his spodomancy and mambila divination, he attempted to find an answer. The eightfold paths were confused, and he could not see their endpoints. Almost from the moment they had arrived in the Dagonet system, Erebus had been certain that something was awry.

His careful plans, the works he had conceived under the guidance of the Great Ones, normally so clear to him, were fouled by a shadow he could not source. It perturbed him, and to a degree undeserving of such emotion. This was only a small eddy in the long scheme, after all. This planet, this action, a minor diversion from the pre-ordained works of the great theatre.