Nemesis

After a moment, Daig glanced at his cohort. ‘When Laimner finds out you brought us here without authorisation, the first thing he’s going to do is rip you down to foot patrol in the slums.’

‘No,’ said Yosef, ‘the first thing he’s going to do is cover his ample backside with Telemach so she won’t blame him for any fallout. But he won’t be able to pull out anything about jurisdiction if we bring him some actual evidence.’

Daig watched Gorospe vanish into the main house. ‘There is a large chance that she may not have anything we can use, you know.’

Yosef shot him a glare. ‘Well, in that case, our careers are over.’

Daig nodded grimly. ‘Just so we’re both clear on that.’

3

The night air was as warm as blood, and humid with it. It was still and oppressive, almost a palpable thing surrounding and pressing down on Fon Tariel. He sighed and used a micropore kerchief to dab at his head before returning to the nested layers of hololith panes floating above his cogitator gauntlet.

Across the sparse room, in a pool of shadow at the far window, the sniper sat cross-legged, his longrifle resting across the crook of his arm. Without turning, Kell spoke to him. ‘Are you really in so much discomfort that you cannot sit still for more than a moment? Or is that twitching something common to all Vanus?’

Tariel scowled at the Vindicare. ‘The heat,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I feel… soiled by it.’ He glanced around; judging by the detritus scattered all about them, the room had once been the central space of a small domicile, before what appeared to be a combination of fire and structural collapse had ruined it. There were great holes in the roof allowing in the light, tepid rain from the low clouds overhead, and other rents in the floor that emitted smells Tariel’s augmetic scent-sensors classified as human effluent, burned rodent meat and contaminated fusel oils. The building was deep in the ghetto shanties of the Yndenisc Bloc, where low-caste citizens were piled atop one another like rats in a nest.

‘I’m guessing you don’t leave your clade’s sanctum very often,’ said Kell.

‘There hasn’t been the need,’ Tariel said defensively. He and his fellow infocytes and cryptocrats had taken part in many operations, all of them conducted through telepresent means directly from the sanctum, or from aboard an Officio-sanctioned starship. The thought of actually physically deploying into the field was almost an impossibility. ‘This is my, uh, second sortie.’

‘The first being when Valdor brought you looking for me?’

‘Yes.’

Kell gave a sarcastic grunt. ‘What wild stories you’ll have to tell when you go home to your hive, little bee.’

Tariel’s grimace hardened. ‘Don’t mock me. I’m only here because you need me. You won’t find the girl without my assistance.’

The sniper still refused to look his way, eyes locked on the sights of his longrifle. ‘That’s true,’ he offered. ‘I’m just wondering why you have to be here with me to do it.’

Tariel had been asking himself the same thing ever since Captain-General Valdor had given mission command to the Vindicare and ordered them out to the tropics. As far as he could be certain, it seemed that operational confidence for this mission was of such paramount importance that detection of any live in-theatre signals transmitted from the Yndenisc Bloc to the Vanus sanctum could not be risked. He wondered what kind of foe could threaten to defeat the finest information security in the Imperium and found he had no answer; and the fact that such a threat could even exist troubled him in no small degree. ‘The quicker we get it done, then, the quicker we can leave this place and each other’s company,’ he said, with genuine feeling.

‘It will take as long as it takes,’ Kell replied. ‘Wait for the target to come to you.’

The infocyte disagreed but did not voice it. Instead, he returned to the hololiths, leafing through them as if they were pages made of glass hanging suspended in the air. Anyone watching him would have only seen the motions of his hands and nothing else; Tariel had tuned the images to a visual frequency only readable by his enhancile retinal lenses.

The penetration of the local sensor web had presented him with a minor impediment, but nothing that he would have considered challenging. The infocyte sent a small swarm of organic-metal netfly automata out to chew into any opti-cables they found, and parse what rich data flows they located back to him. Each fly was by itself a relatively unsophisticated device, but networked en masse, the information the swarm returned could be cohered into a dense picture of what was happening in the surrounding area. Tariel had already assembled maps of the nearby structures, the flows of foot and vehicular traffic, and he was currently worming his way into the encoding of several hundred monitor beads scattered throughout the zone.