Nemesis

well—as fundamentally belonging to him. If it was there, he had to have it. And it

always had its uses, as this moment proved.

Working quickly, he allowed the new scans filtering in from the rats and the

eagles to update the maps, blocking out the zones where civil war, rebel attack and

careless Astartes bombardments had damaged the building. But the data took too

many picoseconds to update; the vox interference was strong enough to be causing

problems with his data bursts as well. If matters became worse, he might be forced to

resort to deploying actual physical connections.

And there was more disappointment to come. The swarm of netflys he had

released on entering the building were reporting in sporadically. The infrastructure of

the star-port was so badly damaged that all its internal scrying systems and vidpicters

were inert. Tariel would be forced to rely on secondary sensing.

He held his breath, listening to the susurrus of the contaminated rainfall on the

broken glass skylights overhead, and the spatter of the runoff on the broken

stonework; and then, very distinctly, Tariel heard the sound of a piece of rubble

falling, disturbed by a misplaced footstep.

Immediately, a datum-feed from one of the eyerats out in the corridor ceased and

the other rodents scrambled for cover, their adrenaline reads peaking.

The infocyte was on his feet before he could stop himself. The lost rat had

reported its position as only a few hundred metres from where he now stood.

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I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me. Tariel’s skin went

clammy as his words to Kell returned to him, damning the Vanus with his foolish

arrogance. He moved as quickly as he dared, abandoning his makeshift hide and

ducking out through a rent in the fallen wall. He heard the psyber eagles take wing

above as he moved.

Tariel flinched as he passed through a stream of stale-smelling water dripping

down from above, dropping from ledge to ledge until he was in the atrium. He

glanced around quickly; the chamber was modelled on a courtyard design. There

were galleries and balconies, some ornamental, some not. Through the eyes of one of

the birds, he saw a spot that had strong walls to the back and three distinct lines of

approach and escape. Pulling his coat tighter, he moved towards it in the shadows,

quick and swift, as he had been taught.

As he ran he tabbed the start-up sequence for the pulse generator and sent dozens

of test signals to his implanted vox bead; only static answered him. Now, for the first

time, he felt alone, even as the feeds from the implanted micropicters in the skulls of

his animals followed him in his run. The tiny images clustered around his forearm,

hovering in the hololithic miasma.

He was almost across the span of the courtyard when Spear fell silently out of the

dimness above him and landed in a crouch on top of an overturned stone bench. The

face of red flesh, silver fangs and black eyes looked up and found him.

Tariel was so shocked he jumped back a step, every muscle in his body shaking

with surprise.

“What is this?” muttered the killer. Those blank, sightless eyes cut into him. The

voice was almost human, though, and it had a quizzical edge, as if the monstrosity

didn’t know what to make of the trembling, thin man in front of him.

And now the fear came, heavy and leaden, threatening to drag Tariel down; and

with it there was an understanding that lanced through the infocyte like a bullet. He

had fatally exposed himself, not through the deception of a superior enemy, but

because he had made a beginner’s mistake. The falling stone, the lost signal—those

had been nothing. Happenstance. Coincidence. But the infocyte had still ran. He had

committed the cardinal sin that no Vanus could ever be absolved of; he had

misinterpreted the data.

Why? Because he had allowed himself to think that he could do this. The past

days spent in the company of the Vindicare, the Callidus and Culexus, the Eversor

and Venenum, they had convinced him that he could operate in the field as well as he

had from his clade’s secret sanctums. But all Fon Tariel had done was to delude

himself. He was the most intelligent person in the Execution Force, so why had he

been so monumentally foolish? Tariel’s mind railed at him. What could have

possibly made him think he was ready for a mission like this? How could his mentors

and directors have abandoned him to this fate, spent his precious skills so cheaply?

He had revealed himself. Shown his weakness before the battle had begun. Spear

made a noise in its throat—a growl, perhaps—and took a step forward.

The eyerats leapt from the rabble all around the red-skinned freak, claws and

fangs bared, and from above in a flutter of metal-trimmed wings, the two psyber

eagles dived on the killer with talons out. The slave-animals had picked up on the

fear signals bleeding down Tariel’s mechadendrites and reacted in kind.

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