Nemesis

low couch. Confused and sickened, suddenly all he wanted was to be down on the

ground. The interior of the gondola was hot and stifling, and Latigue felt sweat

gathering around the high collar of his brocade jacket.

He was still trying to process what had just happened when one of the cabin walls

began to move. The velvet patterning, the rich claret-red and spun gold of the

adornment, flowed and shifted as oil moved on water. Something was extruding itself

out of the side of the cabin, making its shape more definite and firm with each

passing instant.

Latigue saw a head and a torso emerging, saw hands ending in long-fingered

digits. In the places where the shape-thing grew out of the walls, there was a strange

boiling effect, and the light caught what appeared to be something like lizard-skin,

rippling and throbbing.

Latigue’s reason fled from him. Rather than seek escape, he forced himself into

the corner formed by the couch and the far side of the aeronef’s cabin, the window at

his back. The head turned to him, drawn by the motion. The skin-camouflage of the

velvet walls faded into a tanned, rich crimson that looked like stained leather or

perhaps flayed flesh: as the figure pulled itself free of the wall with spindly legs, its

head came up to show a patterned skull pointed into a snout, with a peculiar, ploughshaped

lower jaw. Teeth made of silver angled back in long, layered rows. There

were no eyes in the sockets above, only dark pits.

Latigue coughed as a smell like blood and sulphur enveloped him, emanating

from the apparition. He vomited explosively and began to cry like a child. “What do

you want?” he begged, abruptly finding his voice. “Who are you?”

The reply was husky, distant, and strangely toned, as if it had been dragged up

from a great depth. “I… am Spear.” It seemed more like a question than an answer.

The creature took a first step towards him, and in one hand it had a curved blade.

The transport rumbled through the thermals rising from the surface of the Atalantic

Plain, and inside the aircraft’s cargo bay, the bare ribs of the walls creaked and flexed

37

under the heavy power of the thruster pods. Beneath the transport’s belly, a blur of

featureless desert raced past, torrents of windborne rust-sand reaching up from the

dusty ground to snatch at it. In the distant past, thousands of years gone, this region

would have been deep beneath the surface of a vast ocean, one of many that stretched

across the surface of Terra; all that was left now were a few minor inland seas that

barely deserved the name, little more than shrinking lakes of mud ringed by caravan

townships. Much of the vast plainslands had been absorbed by the masses of the

Throneworld’s city-sprawls, but there were still great swathes of it that were

unclaimed and lawless, broken with foothills sculpted by the long-forgotten seas and

canyons choked with the wrecks of ancient ships. There were precious few places on

Terra that could still truly be considered a wilderness, but this was one of them.

The flyer’s pilot was deft; isolated in the cockpit pod at the prow, she lay wired

into a flight couch that translated her nerve impulses into the minute flexions of the

transport’s winglets and the outputs of the engine bells. The aircraft’s course was

swift and true, crossing the barren zone on a heading towards the distant city-cluster

crowded around the peaks of the Ayzor Ridge; she was following a well-traced

course familiar to many of the more daring pilots. Those who played it safe flew at

much higher altitudes, in the officially-sanctioned sky corridors governed by the

agents of the Ministorum and the Adeptus Terra—but that cost fuel and time, and for

fringer pilots working on tight margins, sometimes the riskier choice was the better

one. The hazards came from the rust storms and the winds—but also from more

human sources as well. The vast erg of the Atalantic was also home to bandit packs

and savage clans of junkhunters.

At first glance, the cargo being carried by the flyer was nothing remarkable—but

one who looked closer would have understood it was only a make-weight, there to

bulk out the transport’s flimsy flight plan. The real load aboard the craft was the two

passengers, and they were men so unlike to one another, it could hardly be believed

they had both been dispatched by the same agency.

Constantin Valdor sat in a gap between two cube-containers of purified water,

cross-legged on the deck of the cargo bay. His bulk was hidden beneath the illdefined

layers of a sandcloak which concealed an articulated suit of ablative armour.

It was by no means a relative to the elaborate and majestic Custodian wargear that

was his normal garb; the armour was unsophisticated, scarred and heavily pitted with

use. Over Valdor’s dense form it strained to maintain its shape, almost as if it were

trying to hold him in. At his side was a careworn long-las inscribed with Techno-mad