Nemesis

What the others called the ‘staging area’ was really little more than a converted storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference. The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission, thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could almost have been kin.

The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encouraging the arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.

She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it; then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it could still walk without them.

Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The Vanus’s mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat. The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened metal – the remains of a tool, she believed – dancing the makeshift blade across his thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the Callidus’s smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The Callidus’s skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the support beams of the low ceiling.

‘We’re all here,’ said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. ‘The mission begins now.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.

Kell nodded to Tariel. ‘It’s time to find out.’

The infocyte activated a code-key sequence on the projector unit and a haze of holographic pixels shimmered into false solidity in the middle of the chamber. They formed into the shape of a tall, muscular man in nondescript robes. He had a scarred face and a queue of close-cut hair over an otherwise bare skull, and if the image was an accurate representation, then he was easily bigger than the Garantine. The hologram crackled and wavered, and Iota recognised the tell-tale patterns of high-level encoding threading through it. This was a real-time transmission, which meant it could only be coming from another ship in orbit, or from Terra itself.

Kell nodded to the man. ‘Captain-General Valdor. We are ready to be briefed, at the Master’s discretion.’

Valdor returned the gesture. ‘The Master of Assassins has charged me with that task. Given the… unique nature of this operation, it seems only right that there be oversight from an outside party.’ The Custodian surveyed all of them with a measuring stare; at his end of the communication, Iota imagined he was standing among a hololithic representation of the room and everyone in it.

‘You want us to kill him, don’t you?’ the Garantine said without preamble, burying his makeshift knife in the bulkhead beside his head. ‘Let’s not be precious about it. We all know, even if we haven’t had the will to say it aloud.’

‘Your insight does you credit, Eversor,’ said Valdor, his tone making it clear his compliment was anything but that. ‘Your target is the former Warmaster of the Adeptus Astartes, Primarch of the Luna Wolves, the Archtraitor Horus Lupercal.’

‘They are the Sons of Horus now,’ muttered Tariel, disbelief sharp in his words. ‘Throne’s sake. It’s true, then…’

The Venenum woman made a negative noise in the back of her throat. ‘If it pleases my lord Custodes, I must question this.’