Nemesis

Tariel heard it in his voice and fired him an acid look. ‘The last aircraft I was in got shot down over the desert. That hasn’t exactly made me well-disposed to the whole experience.’ He discarded the logica – which, to his surprise, Kell realised the Vanus had completed without apparent effort – and pulled up his sleeve to minister to his cogitator gauntlet. ‘I still don’t understand why I am needed here. I should have returned with Valdor.’

‘The Captain-General has duties of his own to attend to,’ said Kell. ‘For now on, we’re on our own.’

‘So it would seem.’ Tariel threw a wary look to the far end of the cabin, where the girl Iota was sitting. Tariel had placed himself as far away from her as it was possible to get and still be inside the aircraft’s crew compartment.

For her part, the Culexus appeared wholly occupied with the pattern of the rivets on the far bulkhead, running her long fingers over the surface of them, back and forth. She seemed lost in the repeated, almost autistic actions.

‘Operational security,’ said Kell. ‘Valdor’s orders were quite clear. We assemble the team he wants, and no one must learn of it.’

Tariel paused, and then leaned closer. ‘You know what she is, don’t you?’

‘A pariah,’ sniffed the Vindicare. ‘Yes, I know what that means.’

But the Vanus was shaking his head. ‘Iota is designated as a protiphage. She’s not human, Kell, not like you or I. The girl is a replicae.’

‘A clone?’ The sniper looked back at the silent Culexus. ‘I would not think it beyond the works of her clade to create such a thing.’ Still, he wondered how the genomasters would have gone about it. Kell knew that the Emperor’s biologians were greatly skilled and possessed of incredible knowledge – but to make a living person, whole and real, from cells in a test tube…

‘Exactly!’ insisted Tariel. ‘A being without a soul. She’s closer to the xenos than to us.’

A smile pulled briefly at Kell’s lips. ‘You’re afraid of her.’

The infocyte looked away. ‘In all honesty, Vindicare, I am afraid of most things. It’s the equilibrium of my life.’

Kell accepted this with a nod. ‘Tell me, have you ever been face to face with one of the Eversor?’

Tariel’s face went ashen, the tone of his cheeks paling to match the polar snows outside the flyer’s viewports. ‘No,’ he husked.

‘When that happens,’ Kell went on, ‘then you’ll truly have something to be afraid of.’

‘That’s where we’re going,’ offered Iota. Both of them had thought the girl to be wrapped up in whatever private reality existed inside her mind, but now she turned away from the bulkhead and spoke as if she had been a part of the conversation all along. ‘To fetch the one they call the Garantine.’

Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that name?’ He had not spoken of the next assassin on Valdor’s list.

‘Vanus are not the only ones who know things.’ She cocked her head to stare at Tariel. ‘I’ve seen them. Eversor.’ Iota’s hand strayed to her skull-helm, where it rested nearby on a vacant passenger couch. ‘Like and like.’ She smiled at the infocyte. ‘They are rage distilled. Pure.’

Tariel glared at the sniper. ‘That’s why we’re out here in this icy wilderness? To get one of them?’ He shuddered. ‘A primed cyclonic warhead would be safer!’

Kell ignored him. ‘You know the Garantine’s name,’ he said to Iota. ‘What else do you know?’

‘Pieces of the puzzle,’ she replied. ‘I’ve seen what he left behind. The tracks of blood and broken meat, the spoor of the vengeance killer.’ She pointed at Tariel. ‘The infocyte is right, you know. More than any one of us, the Garantine is a weapon of terror.’

The matter-of-fact way she said the words made Kell hesitate; ever since Valdor had appeared out there in the deserts with his commands and his authority handed down from the Master of Assassins himself, the Vindicare’s sense of unease had grown greater by the day, and now Iota cut to the heart of it. They were lone killers, all of them in their own ways. This gathering together sat wrongly with him; it was not the way in which things were to be done. And somewhere, deep in the back of his thoughts, Eristede Kell found he was also afraid of what such orders boded.

‘Vindicare!’ He turned as the transport pilot called out his clade’s name. ‘Approach control doesn’t answer. Something is wrong!’

Tariel muttered something about his cursed luck and Kell brushed past him, back into the cockpit. The pilot was already pushing the transport into a steep turn. Below them, distinguished only by a slight change in the tone of the chem-snow, he spotted the mottled lifeless landscape of the Aktick ranges through the spin and whirl of the blizzard-borne ice. There, beneath the craft, was a low blockhouse of heavy ferrocrete, distinguishable only by stripes of weather-faded crimson outlining the edges of it, and the steady blink of locator beacons. But where there should have been the hex-shape of a landing silo, there was only a maw belching black smoke and flickers of fire.