Nemesis

‘Who ordered you in?’ he shouted, over the sound of the rotors. ‘Who’s the shit who ruined this?’

But he knew the answer before he heard it.

SIX Ultio / Lies and Murder / The Death of Kings and Queens

1

The Officio presented the ship to them without ceremony. Like those it served, the vessel had a fluid identity; at the present moment, as it made its way towards the orbit of Jupiter, its pennants and beacons declared it to be the Hallis Faye, an oxygen tanker out of Ceres registered to a Belter Coalition habitat. Its codename, revealed to Kell and the others as they boarded, was Ultio.

Outwardly, the Ultio resembled the class of light bulk transport ships that travelled a thousand different sublight intrasystem space lanes across the Imperium. It was a design so commonplace that it became almost invisible in its ubiquity; a perfect blind for a craft in service to the Officio Assassinorum. Small by the standards of the mammoth starcruisers that comprised the fleets of the Imperial Navy and the rogue trader baronage, the Ultio was every inch a lie. A stubby trident, the shaft of the main hull – what appeared to be space for cargo – was in fact filled with the mechanisms and power train for an advanced design of interstellar warp motor. The craft had been constructed around the old engine, the origins of which were lost to time, and it was only the forward arrowhead-shaped section of the ship that was actually given over to cabins and compartments. This module, swept back and curved like an aerodyne, was capable of detaching itself from the massive drives to make planetfall like a guncutter. Inside, the crew sections of the Ultio were cramped and narrow, with sleeping quarters no larger than prison cells, hexagonal corridors and a flight deck configured with advanced gravity simulators so that every square centimetre of surface area could be utilised.

The ship had three permanent crewmembers, in addition to the growing numbers of the Execution Force, but none of them were what could be considered wholly human. As Kell walked towards the stern, he was aware that beneath his feet the ship’s astropath lay sleeping inside a null chamber, having deliberately shocked itself into a somnambulant state; similarly, the Ultio’s Navigator, who habitually remained far back among the systemry of the drive section, had also opted to drop into sense-dep slumber inside a similar contrapsychic chamber. Both of them had expressed grave displeasure at Iota’s arrival on board, but their requests that she be sequestered or drugged into stasis were denied. Kell could only guess at how the delicate psionic senses of the warp navigator and the astro-telepath would be perturbed by the ghostly negative aura cast by the Culexus; even he, without a taint of the psyker about him, found it profoundly unsettling to be around the pariah girl for too long. She had agreed to wear her dampener torc for the duration, but even that device could not block the eerie air that followed Iota wherever she went.

The third member of the Ultio’s crew was the least human of them all. Kell could still see the strange look of mingled horror and fascination on Tariel’s face as they had met the starship’s pilot. There was no body to the pilot, not any more; like the venerable dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes, a being that had once been a man many centuries ago was now only a few pieces of flesh interred inside a body of iron and steel. Somewhere deep inside the block of computational hardware that filled the rear section of the crew deck, parts of a brain and preserved skeins of nerve ganglia were all that remained. Now he was the Ultio, and the Ultio was him, the hull his skin, the fires of the fusion core his beating heart. Kell tried to comprehend what it might be like to surrender one’s self to the embrace of a machine, but he could not. He was, on some base level, appalled by the very idea of such a merging; but what he thought counted for nothing. The pilot, the Navigator, the astropath and all the rest of them, they were here to serve the interest of the Assassinorum – to do, and not to question.

He halted outside a hatchway, his boots ringing on the metal-grilled deck. ‘Ultio,’ he asked the air, ‘Is the Garantine awake?’

‘Confirmed.’ The pilot-cyborg’s voice came from a speaker grille above his head. It had the flat tonality of a synthetic vocoder.

‘Open it,’ he ordered.

‘Complying,’ came the reply. ‘Hazard warning. Increased gravity field ahead. Do not enter.’

The hatch fell into the deck, and a waft of stale air, reeking of chemical sweat, wandered into the corridor. Inside, the Eversor sat uncomfortably on the floor, his breathing laboured. With visible effort, the rage-killer lifted his head and glared at Kell. ‘When I get out of here,’ he said, forcing the words from his mouth, ‘I am going to rip you apart.’