Nemesis

Latigue’s reason fled from him. Rather than seek escape, he forced himself into the corner formed by the couch and the far side of the aeronef’s cabin, the window at his back. The head turned to him, drawn by the motion. The skin-camouflage of the velvet walls faded into a tanned, rich crimson that looked like stained leather or perhaps flayed flesh: as the figure pulled itself free of the wall with spindly legs, its head came up to show a patterned skull pointed into a snout, with a peculiar, plough-shaped lower jaw. Teeth made of silver angled back in long, layered rows. There were no eyes in the sockets above, only dark pits.

Latigue coughed as a smell like blood and sulphur enveloped him, emanating from the apparition. He vomited explosively and began to cry like a child. ‘What do you want?’ he begged, abruptly finding his voice. ‘Who are you?’

The reply was husky, distant, and strangely toned, as if it had been dragged up from a great depth. ‘I… am Spear.’ It seemed more like a question than an answer.

The creature took a first step towards him, and in one hand it had a curved blade.

3

The transport rumbled through the thermals rising from the surface of the Atalantic Plain, and inside the aircraft’s cargo bay, the bare ribs of the walls creaked and flexed under the heavy power of the thruster pods. Beneath the transport’s belly, a blur of featureless desert raced past, torrents of windborne rust-sand reaching up from the dusty ground to snatch at it. In the distant past, thousands of years gone, this region would have been deep beneath the surface of a vast ocean, one of many that stretched across the surface of Terra; all that was left now were a few minor inland seas that barely deserved the name, little more than shrinking lakes of mud ringed by caravan townships. Much of the vast plainslands had been absorbed by the masses of the Throneworld’s city-sprawls, but there were still great swathes of it that were unclaimed and lawless, broken with foothills sculpted by the long-forgotten seas and canyons choked with the wrecks of ancient ships. There were precious few places on Terra that could still truly be considered a wilderness, but this was one of them.

The flyer’s pilot was deft; isolated in the cockpit pod at the prow, she lay wired into a flight couch that translated her nerve impulses into the minute flexions of the transport’s winglets and the outputs of the engine bells. The aircraft’s course was swift and true, crossing the barren zone on a heading towards the distant city-cluster crowded around the peaks of the Ayzor Ridge; she was following a well-traced course familiar to many of the more daring pilots. Those who played it safe flew at much higher altitudes, in the officially-sanctioned sky corridors governed by the agents of the Ministorum and the Adeptus Terra – but that cost fuel and time, and for fringer pilots working on tight margins, sometimes the riskier choice was the better one. The hazards came from the rust storms and the winds – but also from more human sources as well. The vast erg of the Atalantic was also home to bandit packs and savage clans of junkhunters.

At first glance, the cargo being carried by the flyer was nothing remarkable – but one who looked closer would have understood it was only a make-weight, there to bulk out the transport’s flimsy flight plan. The real load aboard the craft was the two passengers, and they were men so unlike to one another, it could hardly be believed they had both been dispatched by the same agency.

Constantin Valdor sat in a gap between two cube-containers of purified water, cross-legged on the deck of the cargo bay. His bulk was hidden beneath the ill-defined layers of a sandcloak which concealed an articulated suit of ablative armour. It was by no means a relative to the elaborate and majestic Custodian wargear that was his normal garb; the armour was unsophisticated, scarred and heavily pitted with use. Over Valdor’s dense form it strained to maintain its shape, almost as if it were trying to hold him in. At his side was a careworn long-las inscribed with Technomad tribal runes and an explorer’s pack containing survival gear and supplies, the latter for show. With his enhanced physiology, Valdor would have been able to live for weeks on the plains on drops of moisture he sucked from the dirt or the sparse meat of insects. The rifle he could use, though. Everything about Valdor’s disguise was there to tell a vague fiction, not enough to hide from a deep analysis but enough to allow him to go on his way without arousing too much suspicion. The Custodian had done this many times before, in blood games and on missions of other import. This was no different, he reflected.