Nemesis

His aide walked in ahead of him and Rei went to follow, but again he hesitated. Even if what he hoped for would come about in this glorious evening, he could not afford to lose sight of the realities of his life. He turned to the Crusaders and spoke a string of command words. The robots immediately took up sentry positions around the door to the apartment, weapons ready, bowing their mantis-like heads low so that they would not damage the lamps hanging from the ceiling above.

Rei entered the room and became overcome by a vision.

His first thought was; she is not dead! But of course that was true. It had only been a play, and yet it had seemed so real to him. The woman stood, still dressed in her queenly costume, the sweep of her lithe and flawless skin visible through the diaphanous silver of the dress. Metallic glitter accented her cheekbones and the almond curves of her dark eyes. She bowed to him and looked away shyly. ‘My lord Rei. I feared you would not visit me. I feared I might have presumed too much…’

‘Oh no,’ Rei said, dry-throated. ‘No. It is my honour…’ He managed a smile. ‘My queen.’

She looked up at him, smiling too, and it was magnificent. ‘Will you call me that, my lord? May I be your Jocasta?’ She toyed with a thin drape of silk that curtained off one section of the apartments from another.

He was drawn to her, crossing the white pile of the anteroom’s rich carpeting. ‘I would like that very much,’ he husked.

The woman – his Jocasta – threw a look towards his mechanoid. ‘And will she be joining us?’

The open invitation in her reply made Rei blink. ‘Uh. No.’ He turned and spoke tersely to the robot. ‘Wait here.’

His Jocasta smiled again and vanished into the room beyond. Grinning, Rei paused and unbuttoned his tunic. Glancing around, he saw a spray of fresh Saturnine roses still in their delivery wrappings; he tossed his jacket down next to them and then followed her into the bedchamber.

9

Jocasta did not weep as Gergerra Rei went to his death.

The queen enveloped him in long, firm arms as he stepped in, bringing her body up to meet his, pressing her breasts to his chest, moulding herself to him. The Mech-Lord’s dizzy smile was shaky and he gasped for air. His reactions were perfect; his flawless new love for Jocasta – for that was what it was, the most pure and exact rendition of neurochemical release – was the final product of weeks of carefully tailored pheromone bombardment. Tiny amounts of metadopamine and serotonin analogues had been introduced to Rei over time, the dosages light enough that even the ultra-sensitive scanners of his machine-aide would not detect them. The cumulative amounts had pushed him into something approaching obsession; and combined with a physiological template based on his taste in female bed partners, the trap had been set and laden with honey.

Jocasta bent Rei’s head down to meet hers and pressed her lips to his. He shuddered as she did it, surrendering to her. It was so easy.

Gergerra Rei had been involved in the creation of the Furious Abyss. Not in a way that could be proven without doubt in a court of law, not in a way that connected him through any direct means, but enough that the guardians of the Imperium were certain of it. Whatever his crime, perhaps the transfer of certain bribes, the diversion of materials and manpower, the granting of passage to ships that should have been denied, the Kapekan Mech-Lord had done the bidding of the traitor Horus Lupercal.

The small weapon concealed between Jocasta’s tongue and the base of her mouth was pushed up, held in place by clenched teeth. A lick of the trigger plate was all that was needed to fire the kissgun. The needle-sized round penetrated the roof of Rei’s mouth and fragmented, allowing the threads of molecule-thin wire to explode outward. The threads whirled through the meat of his nasal cavity and up into his forebrain, shredding everything they touched. He lurched backwards and fell to the bed, blood and brain matter drooling from his lips and nostrils. Rei sank into the silken sheets, his corpse dragging them awry, revealing beneath the body of the actress whose face he had loved so ardently.

His killer moved quickly, shrugging off the illusion of the dead woman even as the target’s corpse began to cool.

Flesh shifted in small ways, the Jocasta-face slipping to become less defined, more like a sketch upon paper. The killer spat out the kissgun and discarded it, then drew sharp nails along the inside of a muscular thigh. A seam in the skin parted to allow a wet pocket to open, and long fingers drew out a spool and handle affair from within. The killer gently shook the device and padded towards the silk curtains. Rei had died silently but the machine-aide was clever enough to run a passive scan for heartbeats every few seconds; and if it detected one instead of two…