Nemesis

free to be released so that their families could perform final rites of enrichment.

Daig took off his hat as they crossed the chamber, weaving in between the

medicae servitors and subordinate clinicians, and Yosef followed suit, tucking his

brown woollen toque under an epaulette.

They were here to see Tisely, a rail-thin woman with hair the colour of straw,

who served as the senior liaison between the mortuarium and the Sentine. She threw

them a glance as they approached and gave a glum nod. An accomplished doctor and

a superlative pathlogia investigator, Tisely was nevertheless one of the most joyless

people Yosef Sabrat had ever met. He struggled to remember a single moment where

she had expressed any mood to him but negativity.

“Reeves,” she said, by way of greeting, and immediately kept to form. “I’m

surprised you made it in today. The traffic was very dense this morning.”

41

“It’s the weather,” offered Daig, equally downbeat. “Cold as space.”

Tisely nodded solemnly. “Oh yes.” She tapped one of the suspensor tubes. “We’ll

be filling more of these with those who can’t buy fuel for the winter.”

“Governor ought to lower the tithe,” Daig went on, matching her tone. “It’s not

fair to the elderly.”

The clinician was going to follow on, but before the two of them could enter into

a mutually-supporting spiral of circular complaining about the weather, the

government, the harvest or whatever subject would come next, Yosef interrupted.

“You have another body for us?”

Tisely nodded again and changed conversational gears seamlessly. “Cirsun

Latigue, male, fifty years Terran reckoning. Gutted like a cliffgull.”

“He died of that?” Yosef asked, examining the face behind the glass. “The

cutting?”

“Eventually,” Tisely sniffed. “It was done slowly, by a single blade, like the

others.”

“And he was laid out like the Norte case? In the star-shape?”

“Across a very expensive chaise longue, in an aeronef gondola. Not nailed down

this time, though.” She reported the horrific murder in exactly the same tone she had

used to complain about the traffic. “Quite a troubling one, this.”

Yosef chewed his lip. He’d gone over the abstract of the crime scene report on

the way to the valetudinarium. The victim’s wife, who was now somewhere several

floors above them in a drugged sleep after suffering a hysterical breakdown, had

returned home the previous evening to find the flyer parked on the lawn of their

home, the machine-brain pilot diligently waiting for a return-to-hangar command that

had never come. Inside the aeronef’s cabin, every square metre of the walls, floor and

ceiling was daubed with Latigue’s blood. The eight-point star was repeated

everywhere, over and over, drawn in the dead man’s vitae.

Daig was looking at the data-slate, fingering his wrist chain. “Latigue had rank,

for a civilian. Important, but not too much so. He worked for Eurotas.”

“Which complicates matters somewhat,” said Tisely.

She made it sound like a minor impediment, but in fact the matter of Cirsun

Latigue’s employer had the potential to send Yosef’s serial murder investigation

spiralling out of control. He had hoped that the sketchy report made by the jager on

the scene might have been in error, even as some part of him knew that it was not.

My luck is never that good, he told himself. Bad enough that the High-Reeve had put

her measure into the bottle for all this, but with this latest victim now revealed as a

ranking member of the Eurotas Consortium, a whole new layer of problems was

opening up for the investigators.

Latigue and all those like him were on the planetside staff of an interstellar

nobleman, who was quite possibly the richest man for several light years in any

direction. His Honour the Void Baron Merriksun Eurotas was the master of a rogue

trader flotilla that plied the spaceways across the systems surrounding Iesta Veracrux.

Holding considerable capital and trading concerns on many planets, his consortium

essentially controlled all local system-to-system commerce and most interplanetary

transportation into the bargain. Eurotas counted high admirals, scions of the Navis

Nobilite and even one of the Lords of Terra among his circle of friends; his business

42

clan could trace its roots back to the time of Old Night, and it was said that the

hereditary Warrant of Trade held by his family had been personally ratified by the

Emperor himself. Such was his high regard that the man served the Adeptus Terra as

an Agenda Nuntius, the Imperial Court’s attachй for every human colony in the

Taebian Sector.

“Tisely,” Yosef lowered his voice and stepped closer, becoming conspiratorial.

“If we could keep the identity of this victim under wraps, just for a few days, it

would help—”

But she was already shaking her head. “We tried to keep the information secure,

but…” The clinician paused. “Well. People talk. Latigue’s staff saw it all.”