Nemesis

Yosef sensed the fear in the other man’s words. Murder was not an uncommon crime on Iesta Veracrux; they were a relatively prosperous world that was built on the industry of wine, after all, and men who drank – or who coveted money – were often given to mistakes that led to bloodletting. The reeve had seen many deaths, some brutal, many of them sordid, each in their own way tragic; but all of them he had understood. Yosef knew crime for what it was – a weakness of self – and he knew the triggers that would bring that flaw to light. Jealousy, madness, sorrow… But fear was the worst.

And there was much fear on Iesta Veracrux these days. Here out in the ranges of the Ultima Segmentum, across the span of the galaxy from the Throne of Terra, the planet and its people felt distant and unprotected while wars were being fought, lines of battle drawn over maps their home world was too insignificant to grace. The Emperor and his council seemed so far away, and the oncoming storm of the insurrection churning sightless and unseen in the nearby stars laid a pall of creeping apprehension over everything. In every shadowed corner, people saw the ghosts of the unknown.

They were afraid; and people who were afraid easily became people who were angry, directing their terror outwards against any slight, real or imagined. Today’s killing was only the newest of many that had rolled across Iesta Veracrux in recent months; murders spawned from trivialities, suicides, panicked attacks on illusory threats. While life went on as it ever did, beneath the surface there lay a black mood infecting the whole populace, even as they pretended it did not exist. Had Jaared Norte become a victim of this as well? Yosef thought it likely.

They moved around a tall corner of containers and into a small courtyard formed by lines of crates. Overhead, another cargo ballute drifted slowly past, for a moment casting a broad oval shadow across the proceedings. A handful of other jagers were at work conducting fingertip sweeps of the location, a couple from the documentary office working complex forensic picters and sense-nets, another talking into a bulky wireless with a tall whip antenna. Skelta exchanged looks with one of the docos, and she gave him a rueful nod in return. Behind them all, there was a narrow but high storage shed with its doors splayed wide open. The reeve immediately spotted the patches of brown staining the metal doors.

He frowned, looking around at the identical rust-coloured greatcoats and peaked caps of the Sentine officers. ‘The Arbites are inside?’ Yosef nodded towards the shed.

Skelta gave a derisive sniff. ‘The Arbites are not here, sir. Called it in, as per the regulations. Lord Marshal’s office was unavailable. Asked to be kept informed, though.’

‘I’ll bet they did.’ Yosef grimaced. For all the grand words and high ideals spouted by the Adeptus Arbites, at least on Iesta Veracrux that particular branch of the Adeptus Terra was less interested in the policing of the planet than they were in being seen to be interested in it. The officers of the Sentine had been the lawmen and wardens of the Iestan system since the days of the colony’s founding in the First Establishment, and the installation of an office of the Arbites here during the Great Crusade had done little to change that state of affairs. The Lord Marshal and his staff seemed more than happy to remain in their imposing tower and allow the Sentine to function as they always had, handling all the ‘local’ matters. Quite what the Arbites considered to be other than local had never, in twenty years of service, been made clear to Yosef Sabrat. The politics of the whole thing seemed to orbit at a level far beyond the reeve’s understanding.

He glanced at Skelta. ‘Do you have a read on the murder weapon?’

Skelta glanced at the doco officer again, as if asking permission. ‘Not exactly. Bladed weapon, probably. For starters. There might have been, uh, other tools used.’ What little colour there was on the jager’s face seemed to ebb away and he swallowed hard.

Yosef stopped on the threshold of the shed. A slaughterhouse stink of blood and faeces hit him hard and his nostrils twitched. ‘Witnesses?’ he added.

Skelta pointed upwards, towards a spotlight tower. ‘There are security imagers on the lighting stands, but they didn’t get anything. Angle was too shallow for the optics to pick up a likeness.’

The reeve filed that information away; whoever had made the kill knew the layout of the airdocks, then. ‘Canvass every other imager in a half-kilometre radius, pull the memory coils and have some of the recruits sift them. We might get lucky.’ He took a long inhalation, careful to breathe through his mouth. ‘Let’s see this, then.’