Nemesis

Perhaps it was a threat – a promise that he was going to end her swiftly – or perhaps it was a compliment on her agility, acknowledging Iota as the first real challenge he had come across since awakening. It mattered little; in the next second he was coming at her, charging like an enraged grox.

She fired a blast of glassaic needles at him, describing a seamless back flip to open the distance between them. The glittering shots clattered across the Eversor’s torso, burying themselves in the meat of his chest, but the rage-killer only grunted and batted them away.

Iota spun to a halt in front of a large oval exterior hatchway, as Tariel’s voice reached her once more. ‘Is he there?’ came the urgent question. ‘I… I am having difficulty reading the location of the Garantine…’

She nodded to herself. Among the many implants beneath the flesh of an Eversor were passive sensing baffles that could confuse the detector heads of many conventional scanners. ‘Oh, he’s here,’ Iota told him. ‘He will murder me in less than one hundred and ten seconds.’ The prediction was based on observing the other kills the Garantine had made.

‘Working,’ said the infocyte, a new urgency in his words.

‘Take your time,’ she replied.

The Eversor halted and cocked his head, considering her. Iota took a breath and drew in on herself. She let the force matrix built into the structure of her stealthsuit come alive, allowing it to reach its web of influence beyond the real and into the etherium of the warp; but the process was slow. Had she been fighting a psyker, she could have drained them dry in a moment, siphoned off their power for herself. But here and now, there was nothing but the commonplace energy of air and heat and life. She felt the eye of the animus speculum slowly iris open – but even as it did she knew it would not be ready in time.

The other assassin grunted out a laugh and stooped to rip a short stanchion pole from a support pillar, tearing it off in a flutter of sparks. He brandished the steel rod like a club and went for her.

At once, the hatch at Iota’s back groaned on heavy hydraulics and fanned open with a clatter of fracturing ice. A blast of polar air and windborne snow thundered in around her from outside. For a moment, the snowstorm whirled into the corridor, filling the space with whiteness.

The energy inside the animus was approaching readiness, but as she had predicted, the Garantine killer had her range and he did not hesitate again. Before Iota could release even a fraction of the psy-weapon’s potential, he slammed the bar into her chest with such force that she flew backwards, out into the snow-filled courtyard. Iota noted the snapping of several of her ribs with a disconnected understanding. She landed badly in a shallow drift of white and coughed up a stream of bloody spittle into her helmet. The fact she wasn’t dead made it clear he wanted to toy with her first.

They called him the Garantine because it was said he hailed from the Garant Span, an Oort cloud collective on the near side of the Perseus Null. A natural psychotic, he had killed everyone on his home asteroid, and all this as a child barely able to read. It was no wonder the Clade Eversor had been delighted to take ownership of him.

Iota struggled to get up, and through the optics of her skull-helm she looked to see another grinning rictus come into view. The Garantine grabbed her by the ankle and effortlessly threw her across the courtyard. This time the impact was lessened by a deep snow bank, but still the shock vibrated through her. She let out a tiny cry of pain. In her ear, the Vanus was jabbering something about closing the hatch, but that had no consequence to her. Iota focussed on bringing the animus to a firing state. If their plan failed, she would have to be the one to kill him, crushing his fevered mind with a blast of pure warp energy.

The Eversor bounded towards her, laughing, and at the last moment he leapt into the air. Time seemed to thicken and slow, the hazy man-shape falling down towards her; then she was distantly aware of a heavy report and suddenly the Garantine’s fall was deflected. He jerked away at a right angle, as if pulled on an invisible cord.

Iota saw the steaming wound in the rage-killer’s chest as he stumbled back to his clawed feet, shaking off the strike. Her head swimming, the Culexus searched and then found the source of the attack. A shimmering white figure stood up atop one of the nearby blockhouses, a longrifle in his grip. The white colouration faded into ink-black as the Vindicare deliberately reset his cameoline cloak to a null mode, allowing the Eversor to see him clearly. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as the rage-killer roared at him, and for the moment Iota was apparently forgotten.