Nemesis

Perrig — Indentured Psyker, Eurotas Trade Consortium

Capra — Citizen of Dagonet

Terrik Grohl — Citizen of Dagonet

Liya Beye — Citizen of Dagonet

Lady Astrid Sinope — Citizen of Dagonet

5

“For those that defy the Imperium, only the Emperor can judge your crimes.

Only in death can you receive the Emperor’s judgement!”

—maxim of the Officio Assassinorum

“The monster boasted of what he would do once he conquered the home of the godking,

little knowing that Nemesis heard his words and took note of them.”

—excerpted from texts of the ancient Terran poet Nonnus

“We live in peace and pretend at it. But in truth there are always wars, thundering

unseen around us, just beyond the curve of our sight. The greatest foolishness is that

no man wishes to know the truth. He is happy to live his life as silent guns cut the sky

above his head!”

—attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy

6

PART ONE

EXECUTION

ONE

Object Lesson

Tactics of Deceit

The Star

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember. Around the

encampment, porous black rock ranged away under a cowl of low mist, the haze

itself the remains of cities pounded into radioactive dust by countless bombardments

from orbit. Arsenals of nuclear munitions had been emptied to bring the planet to the

executioner’s block, and now the cooling corpse of the world lay swaddled in its own

death-shroud, a virulent and silent pall of radiation that smothered everything.

Here, in the canyon where the invaders had made their planetfall, high walls of

shield rock did their best to cut the fiery winds from the shattered landscape. Men,

such as the soldiers that had crisped and burned like paper in the onslaught, would

have died for the sake of living an hour outside in this nightmare, had any of them

survived this long. The invaders had no such weaknesses, however.

The lethality they laid over Gyges Prime was to them a minor irritant. Once they

were done in this place, they would return to their warcraft high above and clean the

stink of the dead planet from their robes and armour as one might wash dried mud

from a soiled boot. They would do this and think nothing of it. They would not stop

to consider that the air now passing into their lungs was laced with the particulate

remains of every man, woman and child that had called Gyges Prime home.

The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other

colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than

this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool

and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first

asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary

pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of

conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and windpulled

fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other

7

worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve

planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of

defiance. Lesson learned.

The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing.

Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the

war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the

architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was

merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way

across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the

blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for

any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this

small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.

Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his

face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The

radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the

other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs