Nemesis

They were here to see Tisely, a rail-thin woman with hair the colour of straw, who served as the senior liaison between the mortuarium and the Sentine. She threw them a glance as they approached and gave a glum nod. An accomplished doctor and a superlative pathlogia investigator, Tisely was nevertheless one of the most joyless people Yosef Sabrat had ever met. He struggled to remember a single moment where she had expressed any mood to him but negativity.

‘Reeves,’ she said, by way of greeting, and immediately kept to form. ‘I’m surprised you made it in today. The traffic was very dense this morning.’

‘It’s the weather,’ offered Daig, equally downbeat. ‘Cold as space.’

Tisely nodded solemnly. ‘Oh yes.’ She tapped one of the suspensor tubes. ‘We’ll be filling more of these with those who can’t buy fuel for the winter.’

‘Governor ought to lower the tithe,’ Daig went on, matching her tone. ‘It’s not fair to the elderly.’

The clinician was going to follow on, but before the two of them could enter into a mutually-supporting spiral of circular complaining about the weather, the government, the harvest or whatever subject would come next, Yosef interrupted. ‘You have another body for us?’

Tisely nodded again and changed conversational gears seamlessly. ‘Cirsun Latigue, male, fifty years Terran reckoning. Gutted like a cliffgull.’

‘He died of that?’ Yosef asked, examining the face behind the glass. ‘The cutting?’

‘Eventually.’ Tisely sniffed. ‘It was done slowly, by a single blade, like the others.’

‘And he was laid out like the Norte case? In the star-shape?’

‘Across a very expensive chaise longue, in an aeronef gondola. Not nailed down this time, though.’ She reported the horrific murder in exactly the same tone she had used to complain about the traffic. ‘Quite a troubling one, this.’

Yosef chewed his lip. He’d gone over the abstract of the crime scene report on the way to the valetudinarium. The victim’s wife, who was now somewhere several floors above them in a drugged sleep after suffering a hysterical breakdown, had returned home the previous evening to find the flyer parked on the lawn of their home, the machine-brain pilot diligently waiting for a return-to-hangar command that had never come. Inside the aeronef’s cabin, every square metre of the walls, floor and ceiling was daubed with Latigue’s blood. The eight-point star was repeated everywhere, over and over, drawn in the dead man’s vitae.

Daig was looking at the data-slate, fingering his wrist chain. ‘Latigue had rank, for a civilian. Important, but not too much so. He worked for Eurotas.’

‘Which complicates matters somewhat,’ said Tisely.

She made it sound like a minor impediment, but in fact the matter of Cirsun Latigue’s employer had the potential to send Yosef’s serial murder investigation spiralling out of control. He had hoped that the sketchy report made by the jager on the scene might have been in error, even as some part of him knew that it was not. My luck is never that good, he told himself. Bad enough that the High-Reeve had put her measure into the bottle for all this, but with this latest victim now revealed as a ranking member of the Eurotas Consortium, a whole new layer of problems was opening up for the investigators.

Latigue and all those like him were on the planetside staff of an interstellar nobleman, who was quite possibly the richest man for several light years in any direction. His Honour the Void Baron Merriksun Eurotas was the master of a rogue trader flotilla that plied the spaceways across the systems surrounding Iesta Veracrux. Holding considerable capital and trading concerns on many planets, his consortium essentially controlled all local system-to-system commerce and most interplanetary transportation into the bargain. Eurotas counted high admirals, scions of the Navis Nobilite and even one of the Lords of Terra among his circle of friends; his business clan could trace its roots back to the time of Old Night, and it was said that the hereditary Warrant of Trade held by his family had been personally ratified by the Emperor himself. Such was his high regard that the man served the Adeptus Terra as an Agentia Nuntius, the Imperial Court’s attaché for every human colony in the Taebian Sector.

‘Tisely,’ Yosef lowered his voice and stepped closer, becoming conspiratorial. ‘If we could keep the identity of this victim under wraps, just for a few days, it would help–’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘We tried to keep the information secure, but…’ The clinician paused. ‘Well. People talk. Latigue’s staff saw it all.’

Yosef’s heart sank. ‘So the Consortium know.’

‘It’s worse than that, actually,’ she told him. ‘They’ve reclaimed the aeronef directly from evidentiary after using some pull with the Landgrave.’

‘They can’t do that…’ said Daig, with a grimace.