Nemesis

It was a Black Pariah; the ultimate expression of negative psychic force. Perrig had believed such things were only conjecture, the mad nightmare creations of wild theorists and sorcerous madmen – yet here it stood, watching her, breathing the same air as she wept blood before it.

And then Spear reached out with fingers made of knives and took Perrig’s hand. She howled as burning pain lanced through her nerves; the killer severed her right thumb with insolent ease and drew it up and away, toying with its prize. Perrig gripped her injured hand, vitae gushing from the wound.

Spear took the severed flesh and rolled it into its fanged maw, crunching down the bone and meat as if it were a rare delicacy. Perrig sank back to the blood-spattered floor, her head swimming as she caught the edges of the sudden psionic shift running through the killer.

The black voids of its eyes glared down at her and they became smoky mirrors. In them she saw her own mind reflected back at her, the power of her own psionic talents bubbling and rippling, copied and enhanced a thousandfold. Spear had tasted her blood, the living gene-code of her being – and now it knew her. It had her imprint.

She scrambled backwards, feeling the humming chorus of her mind and that of the killer coming into shuddering synchrony, the orbits of their powers moving towards alignment. Perrig cried out and begged it to stop, but Spear only cocked its head and let the power build.

It had not killed in this manner for a long time, she realised. The other deaths had been mundane and unremarkable. It wanted to do this just to be sure it was still capable, as a soldier might release a clip of ammunition to test the accuracy of a firearm. Belatedly Perrig understood that she was the only thing for light years around that could have been any kind of threat to it; but now, too late.

And then, they met in the non-space between them. Beyond her ability to stop it, Perrig’s psionic ability unchained itself and thundered against Spear’s waiting, open arms. The killer took it all in, every last morsel, and did so with the ease of breathing.

In stillness, Spear released its burden and reflected back all that Perrig was, the force of her preternatural power returning, magnified into a silent, furious hurricane.

The woman became ashes and broke apart.

2

Through the coruscating, unquenchable fires of the immaterium, the Ultio raced on, passing through the corridors of the warp and onwards beyond the borders of the Segmentum Solar. The ship’s sight-blind Navigator took it through the routes that were little known, the barely-charted passages that the upper echelons of the Imperial government kept off the maps given to the common admiralty. These were swift routes but treacherous ones, causeways through the atemporal realm that larger ships would never have been able to take, the soul-light glitter of their massive crews bright enough that they would attract the living storms that wheeled and turned, while Ultio passed by unnoticed. The phantom-ship was barely there; its Geller fields had such finely-tuned opacity and it engines such speed that the lumbering, predatory intelligences that existed inside warp space noted it only by the wake it left behind. As days turned and clocks spun back on Terra, Ultio flew towards Dagonet; by some reckonings, it was already there.

On board, the Execution Force gathered once more, this time in a compartment off the spinal corridor that ran the length of the starship’s massive drives.

3

Kell watched, as he always did.

The Garantine was still toying with his makeshift blade. He had continued to craft it into a wicked shiv that was easily the length of a man’s forearm. ‘What do you want, Vanus?’ he asked.

Tariel gave a nervous smile and indicated a large cargo module that replaced one whole wall of the long, low compartment. ‘Uh, thank you for coming.’ He glanced around at Kell, Iota and the others. ‘As we are now mission-committed, I have leave to continue with the next stage of my orders.’

‘Explain,’ said Koyne.

The infocyte rubbed his hands together. ‘I was given a directive by the Master of Assassins himself to present these materials to you only after the group had been completely assembled and only after the Ultio had left the Sol system.’ He moved to a keypad on the cargo module and tapped in a string of symbols. ‘I am to address the matter of your equipment.’

The Eversor assassin’s head snapped up, his mood instantly changing from insolence to laser-like intensity. ‘Weapons?’ he asked, almost salivating.

Tariel nodded. ‘Among other things. This unit contains the hardware for our mission ahead.’

‘Did you know about this?’ demanded the Garantine, glaring at Kell. ‘Here I am playing with scraps and there’s a war-load right here on board with me?’

Kell shook his head. ‘I assumed we’d be equipped on site.’