Nemesis

“Well,” began the co-pilot, looking up, “if the crew are incapacitated, or—”

“Dead?”

Hyssos’ hands shot out, the fingers coming together to form points, each one

piercing the soft flesh of the men’s necks. Neither had the chance to scream; instead

they made awkward gasping gurgles as their throats were penetrated.

Blood ran in thick streams from their wounds, and Hyssos grimaced, turning their

heads away so the fluid would not mark his tunic. Both men died watching their own

vitae spurt across the control panels and the inside of the canopy windows.

Spear stood for a while with his hands inside the meat of the men’s throats, feeling

the tingle of the tiny mouths formed at the ends of his fingertips by the daemonskin,

as they lapped at the rich bounty of blood. The proxy flesh absorbed the liquid, the

rest of it dribbling out across the grating of the deck plates beneath the crew chairs.

Then, convinced that the daemonskin was in quietus once more, Spear moved to

a fresher cubicle to clean himself off before venturing down to the open cargo bay.

He decided not to bother with a breather mask or goggles, and eased himself into the

jetbike’s saddle. The small flyer was a thickset, heavy block of machined steel,

spiked with winglets and stabilators that jutted out at every angle. It responded to his

weight by triggering the drive turbine, running it up to idle.

Spear leaned forward, glancing down at a cowled display pane that showed a map

of the local zone. A string of waypoint indicators led from the star-port out into the

wastelands, following the line of what was once a shipping canal but now a dry bed

of dusty earth. The secret destination the Void Baron had given him blinked blue at

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the end of the line; an old waystation dock abandoned after the last round of climate

shifts. The Warrant was there, held in trust.

The murderer laughed at the pulse of anticipation in his limbs, and grasped the

throttle bar, sending the turbine howling.

He had to give credit to the infocyte; the location that Tariel had selected for the hide

was a good one, high up inside an empty water tower on the roof of a tenement block

a kilometre and a half from the plaza. It was for this very reason that Kell rejected it

and sought out another. Not because he did not trust the Vanus, but because two men

knowing where he would fire from was a geometrically larger risk than one man

knowing. If Tariel was captured and interrogated, he could not reveal what he had not

been told.

And then there was the matter of professional pride. The water tower was too

obvious a locale to make the hide. It was too… easy, and if Kell thought so, then any

officer of the PDF down in the plaza might think the same, make a judgement and

have counter-snipers put in place.

The dawn was coming up as the Vindicare found his spot. Another tenement

block, but this one was removed half the distance again from the marble mall outside

the Governor’s halls. From what Kell could determine, it seemed as if the building

had been struck two-thirds of the way up by a plummeting aerofighter. The upper

floors of the narrow tower were blackened from the fires that had broken out in the

wake of the impact, and on the way up, Kell had to navigate past blockades of fallen

masonry mixed with wing sections and ragged chunks of fuselage. He came across

the tail of the aircraft embedded in an elevator shaft, like the feathers of a thrown dart

buried in a target.

Where it had impacted, a chunk of walls and floors was missing, as if something

had taken a bite out of the building. Kell skirted the yawning gap that opened out to a

drop of some fifty or more storeys and continued his climb. The fire-damaged levels

stank of seared plastic and burned flesh, but the thick, sticky ash that coated every

surface was dull and non-reflective—an ideal backdrop to deaden Kell’s sensor

profile still further. He found the best spot in a room that had once been a communal

laundry, and arranged his cameoline cloak between the heat-distorted frames of two

chairs. Combined with the deadening qualities of his synskin stealthsuit, the

marksman would be virtually invisible.

He tapped a pad on the palm of his glove with his thumb. An encrypted burst

transmitter in his gear vest sent a signal lasting less than a picosecond. After a

moment, he got a similar message in return that highlighted the first of a series of

icons on his visor. Tariel was reporting in, standing by at his kill-point somewhere

out in the towers of the western business district. This was followed by a ready-sign

from Koyne, and then another from the Garantine.

The two remaining icons stayed dark. Without Iota, they had to do without

telepathic cover; if the Sons of Horus decided to deploy a psyker, they would have no

warning of it… but then the Warmaster’s Legion had never relied on such things

before and the Assassinorum had no intelligence they would do so today. It was a

risk Kell was willing to take.

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