Nemesis

shunted away the majority of the impact force, preventing the rounds from ever

penetrating Spear’s actual flesh. He spun on his heel, pivoting like a dancer, flipping

over though the air. The other soldiers were lying in pools of their own fluids, the

sand drinking in their last where heads had been torn open, hearts crashed. Spear

skipped over the soldier’s comrades and ignored the burn of a shot that caressed his

face. He came close and angled on one leg, bringing his other foot up in a speeding

black arc. Talons flicked out and the impact point was the man’s nasal cavity. Bone

splintered with a wet crunch, jagged fragments entering his brain like daggers.

How many dead was that? In the race and chase of it, the murderer had lost count.

197

Then he saw the witch hiding her face behind a steel skull and he didn’t care

about that anymore. The thin, wiry female shot a fan of needles at him and he dodged

most of them, a handful biting into the daemonflesh before the skin puckered and

vomited them back out into the dust. This was just a delaying tactic, though. He felt

the tremor moving through the warp, the alien monster sheathing his body shivering

and reacting in disgust at the proximity of her.

Ill light gathered around the assassin’s aura, sucked into the void within her

through the fabric of her stealthsuit. The wind seemed to die off around the waif, as if

she were generating a globe of nothingness that sound itself could not enter. The

construct of lenses and spines emerging from the side of the grinning steel skull-helm

crackled with power, and the perturbed air bowed like water ripples.

A black stream of negative energy cascaded from the weapon and seared Spear as

he threw up his hands to block it. The impact was immense, and he screamed with a

pain unlike any he had ever felt before. The daemonskin was actually burning in

places, weeping yellowish rivulets of pus where it blistered.

All his amusement perished in that second; this was no game. The psyker girl was

more deadly than he had given her credit for. More than just a pariah, she was… She

was in a small way like him. But where Spear’s abilities were inherent to the twisted,

warp-changed structure of his soul, the girl was only a pale copy, a half-measure. She

needed the augmentation of the helmet-weapon just to come close to his perfection.

Spear felt affronted by the idea that something could approach the power of his

murdergift through mechanical means. He would kill the girl for her pretence.

The daemonskin wanted him to fall back, to retreat and take vital moments to

heal; he ignored the moaning of it and did the opposite. Spear launched himself at the

psyker, even as he fell into the nimbus of soul-shrivelling cold all about her. He

immediately felt his own power being dragged out of him, the pain so bright and

shining it was as if she were tearing the arteries from his flesh.

For a brief moment, Spear realised he was experiencing some degree of what it

was like for a psyker to die at his hand; this must have been what Perrig had felt as

she transformed into ashes.

He lashed out before the undertow could pull him in. Claws like razors split the

air in a shimmering arc and sliced across the armoured fabric and the flesh of the

waif girl’s throat. It was not enough to immediately kill her, but it was enough to

open a vein.

She clapped a hand to the wound to staunch it, but not quick enough to stop an

arc of liquid red jetting into the air. Spear opened his mouth and caught it in the face,

laughing again as she stumbled away, choking.

Inside Iota’s helmet, blood was pooling around her mouth and neck, issuing in

streams from her ears, her nostrils. Her vision was swimming in crimson as tiny

capillaries burst open inside her eyes, and she wept red.

The animus speculum worked to recharge itself for a second blast of power. Iota

had made a mistake and fired the first discharge too soon, without letting it build to

maximum lethality. Her error had been to underestimate the potentiality of this…

thing.

198

She had no frame of reference for what she was facing. At first thought she had

imagined he was another assassin, sent against her in some power play to undo the

works of the Execution Force. She could not see the logic in such a thing, but then

the clades had often pursued strange vendettas against one another to assuage trivial

slights and insults; these things happened as long as there was no evidence of them

and more importantly, no ill-effects to the greater mission of the Officio

Assassinorum.

But this killer was something beyond her experience. That much was certain. At

the very least, the glancing hit from the animus’ beam should have crippled him. Iota

turned the readings of her aura-sensor across him and what she saw there was

shocking.

Impossibly, his psionic signature was changing, transforming. The sinuous

nimbus of ghost colours spilled from the peculiar flesh-matter shrouding his body,