Nemesis

The second thing was Fon Tariel, his face a mess of blood and bruises, on his knees in front of one of the walkers, with the muzzle of a junkhunter’s rifle pressed to his back.

‘Hah,’ he heard the infocyte say, labouring the words up past his injuries. ‘You’re all going to be sorry now.’

Valdor frowned, and continued to glance around, ignoring the gang and looking off in all directions, squinting towards the near horizon. It was difficult through the low sheen of rust-sand in the air, but his eyes were gene-altered for acuity.

‘Put up your hands,’ buzzed the junkhunter with the plasma gun. Valdor had guessed possession of the powerful weapon made that one the leader, and this confirmed it. He ignored the command, still looking away. ‘Are you deaf, freak?’

In the distance, perhaps a kilometre away, maybe more, the Custodian thought he saw something brief and bright. A glint off a metallic object atop a low butte. He resisted the urge to smile and turned back to the junkhunters, casually positioning himself in such a way that he could see both the flat-topped hill and the bandit crew. ‘I hear you,’ he told the gang leader.

‘He’s a big one,’ ventured one of the riflemen. ‘Some kinda aberrant?’

‘Could be,’ said the leader. ‘That what you are, freak?’

Tariel shouted at him, his voice high with fright. ‘What are you waiting for, man? Help me!’

‘Yeah, help him,’ mocked the GEV gunner. ‘I dare you.’

‘You’ve made a very serious error,’ Valdor began, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘I had hoped we could make a landing in the erg, scout you out for ourselves. But you took the initiative, and I must admire that. You saw prey and you attacked.’ Looking again, the Custodian could see a second, unmanned weapon mount on the rear of the hover-truck. Untended, it pointed the mouth of a surface-to-air missile tube skyward. ‘Lucky shot.’

‘Nothing lucky about it,’ said the leader. ‘You’re not the first. Won’t be the last.’

‘I beg to differ,’ Valdor told him. ‘As I said, you made an error. You’ve drawn the attention of the Emperor.’

The use of the name sent a ripple of fear through the group, but the gang leader stamped on it quickly. ‘Rust and shit, you’re some kind of liar, freak. No one cares what goes on out here, not a one, not a man, not the bloody Emperor hisself. If he cared, he’d come here and share a little of that glory of his with us.’

‘Let’s just kill them,’ said the gunner.

‘Valdor!’ Tariel blurted out his name in fear. ‘Please!’

Unseen by everyone else, the glimmer from the distant hill blinked once, then twice. ‘Let me tell you who I am,’ said the Custodian. ‘My name is Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes, and I hold the power of the Emperor’s displeasure in my hands.’

The gang leader snorted with cold amusement. ‘Your brain is broke, that’s what you have!’

‘I will prove it to you.’ Valdor raised his arm and pointed a finger at the gunner behind the multilaser. ‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, his tone calm and conversational, ‘death.’

A heartbeat later, the gunner’s upper torso exploded into chunks of meat on a blast of pink fluids.

The fear that the Emperor’s name had briefly conjured returned tenfold. Valdor pointed to the rifleman standing over Tariel. ‘And death,’ he went on. The junkhunter’s body bifurcated at the spine with a wet chug, collapsing to the sand. ‘And death, and death, and death…’ The Custodian let his arm fall, and stood still as three more of the gang were torn apart where they stood.

Tariel dived into the dirt and the rest of the junkhunters broke apart in a terrified scramble, some of them racing towards a vehicle, others desperately trying to find cover. Valdor saw one of them leap into a dunerider and gun the engine, the vehicle surging away. The windscreen shattered in a red blink of blood and the rover bounded into a shallow gulley, crashing to a halt. The others died as they ran.

A furious snarl drew Valdor’s attention back and he looked up as the gang leader came speeding towards him – too fast for a normal human, quite clearly nerve-jacked as he had first suspected. The junkhunter had the plasma gun aimed at the Custodian’s chest; at this close a range, a blast from it would be a mortal wound.

Valdor did nothing, stood his ground. Then, like the work of an invisible trickster god, the gun was ripped from the gang leader’s hand and it spun away into the air, the mechanism torn open and spitting great licks of blue-white sparks.

Only then did Valdor step in and break the man’s neck with a short chopping motion to his throat. The last of the junkhunter band dropped and was still.

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