Nemesis

‘Ah, good,’ said the Eversor, rubbing his clawed hands together. ‘Exercise.’

‘Are you sure two will be enough?’ Soalm went on.

Kell ignored her and moved closer to Koyne. ‘Keep them alive, understand?’

Koyne made a thoughtful face. ‘We’re all lone wolves, Vindicare. If the enemy come knocking, my first instinct might be to run and leave them.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Then consider that order a test of your oath over your instincts.’

2

Sabrat’s longcoat whirled as the horror coiled, leaping into the air towards Hyssos. The operative heard it snapping like sailcloth in a stiff breeze and recoiled, firing shots that should have struck centre-mass but instead hit nothing but air.

The thing that called itself Spear landed close to him and he took a heavy blow that threw him off his feet. Hyssos slammed into a tall pile of Balthazar bottles that tumbled away with the impact, rolling this way and that. Pain raced up his spine as he twisted and tried to regain his footing.

Spear tossed the coat away and then, with care that seemed strange for something so abhorrent in appearance, deftly unbuttoned the white shirt beneath and set it aside. Bare from the waist up, Hyssos could see that the creature’s flesh was writhing and changing, cherry-red like tanned leather. He saw what looked like hands pressing out from inside the cage of the monster’s chest, and the profile of a screaming face. Yosef Sabrat’s face.

The bare arms distended and grew large, their proportions ballooning. Fingers merged into flat mittens of meat, grew stiff and glassy. Hands became bone blades, pennants of pinkish-black nerve tissue dangling from them.

Hyssos aimed the gun and fired at the place where a man’s heart would have been, but down came the arms and the shot was deflected away. He smelled a slaughterhouse stink coming off the creature, saw the sizzling pit in the limb from the impact as it filled with ooze and knit itself shut.

The body of the thing was in chaos. It writhed and throbbed and pulsed in disgusting ways, and the operative was struck by the conviction that something was inside the meat of it, trying to get out.

As the eyeless face glared into him, the distended jaws opening wide to let droplets of spittle fall free, Hyssos found his voice. ‘You killed them all.’

‘Yes.’ The reply was a gurgling chug of noise.

‘Why?’ he demanded, retreating back until he was trapped against the fallen bottles. ‘What in Terra’s name are you?’

‘There is no Terra,’ it bubbled, horrible amusement shading the words. ‘Only terror.’

Hyssos saw the shape of the face again, this time pressing from the meat of Spear’s bloated shoulders. He was sure it was crying out to him, imploring him. Run, it mouthed, run run run run–

He raised the gun, shaking, his blood turning to ice. Hands tightening on the grip, aiming for the head. In his time, Hyssos had seen many things that defied easy explanation – strange forms of alien life, the impossible vistas of warp space, the darkest potentials of the human character – and this creature was first among them. If hell was a place, then this was something that had been torn out of that infernal realm and thrust into the real world.

Spear raised its sword-arms and rattled their hard surfaces off one another. ‘One more,’ it intoned. ‘One step closer.’

‘To what?’ The question was a gasp. It came at him again, and Hyssos shot it in the face.

Spear shrugged it off. The first downward slash cut away Hyssos’s right hand across the forearm, the gun falling with it. The second stabbing motion pierced skin, ribcage and lung before emerging from his back in a splatter of dark arterial crimson.

Hyssos was not quite dead as Spear began to cut him into pieces. His last awareness was of the sound of his own flesh being eaten.

3

Shots and cries of pain sounded distantly as they drew closer to the engagement. The crackling drone of an emplaced autocannon sounded every few moments from down in the open plaza.

They had found plenty of dead along the way, and to begin with the Eversor paused at the sight of each clash, looking around to see if any of the combatants had perished carrying weapons of any particular note. But he found nothing he wanted to salvage, all of it basic Nire-pattern stubbers and the occasional lasgun. The Garantine didn’t like lasers; too fragile, too lightweight, too prone to malfunction when worked hard. He liked the heavy certainty of a ballistic gun, the comforting shock of recoil when it fired, the deep bass note of the shells crashing from the muzzle or the whickering sizzle of needle rounds. The bulky combi-weapon in his mailed fist was a perfect fit; it was his intention rendered in gunmetal.