Nemesis

‘For those that defy the Imperium, only the Emperor can judge your crimes.

Only in death can you receive the Emperor’s Judgement.’

– maxim of the Officio Assassinorum

‘The monster boasted of what he would do once he conquered the home of the god-king, little knowing that Nemesis heard his words and took note of them.’

– excerpted from texts of the ancient Terran poet Nonnus

‘We live in peace and pretend at it. But in truth there are always wars, thundering unseen around us, just beyond the curve of our sight. The greatest foolishness is that no man wishes to know the truth. He is happy to live his life as silent guns cut the sky above his head.’

– attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy

ONE Object Lesson / Tactics of Deceit / The Star

1

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember. Around the encampment, porous black rock ranged away under a cowl of low mist, the haze itself the remains of cities pounded into radio-active dust by countless bombardments from orbit. Arsenals of nuclear munitions had been emptied to bring the planet to the executioner’s block, and now the cooling corpse of the world lay swaddled in its own death-shroud, a virulent and silent pall of radiation that smothered everything.

Here, in the canyon where the invaders had made their planetfall, high walls of shield rock did their best to cut the fiery winds from the shattered landscape. Men, such as the soldiers that had crisped and burned like paper in the onslaught, would have died for the sake of living an hour outside in this nightmare, had any of them survived this long. The invaders had no such weaknesses, however.

The lethality they laid over Gyges Prime was to them a minor irritant. Once they were done in this place, they would return to their warcraft high above and clean the stink of the dead planet from their robes and armour as one might wash dried mud from a soiled boot. They would do this and think nothing of it. They would not stop to consider that the air now passing into their lungs was laced with the particulate remains of every man, woman and child that had called Gyges Prime home.

The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and wind-pulled fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of defiance. Lesson learned.

The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing. Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.